But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs Ramsay, taking her
place at the head of the table, and looking at all the plates making white
circles on it. "William, sit by me," she said. "Lily," she said, wearily, "over
there." They had that—Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle—she, only this—an
infinitely long table and plates and knives. At the far end was her husband,
sitting down, all in a heap, frowning. What at? She did not know.
She did not mind. She could not understand how she had ever felt any
emotion or affection for him. She had a sense of being past everything,
through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there
was an eddy—there— and one could be in it, or one could be out of it,
and she was out of it. It's all come to an end, she thought, while they
came in one after another, Charles Tansley—"Sit there, please," she
said—Augustus Carmichael—and sat down. And meanwhile she
waited, passively, for some one to answer her, for something to happen.
But this is not a thing, she thought, ladling out soup, that one says.
Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy—that was what she was
thinking, this was what she was doing—ladling out soup—she felt, more
and more strongly, outside that eddy; or as if a shade had fallen, and,
robbed of colour, she saw things truly. The room (she looked round it)
was very shabby. There was no beauty anywhere. She forebore to look at
Mr Tansley. Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And
the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on
her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if
she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving herself a little shake
that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began
beating, as the watch begins ticking—one, two, three, one, two, three.
And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering
the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a newspaper.
And so then, she concluded, addressing herself by bending silently
in his direction to William Bankes—poor man! who had no wife,
and no children and dined alone in lodgings except for tonight; and in
pity for him, life being now strong enough to bear her on again, she
70
began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind
fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the
ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on
the floor of the sea.
"Did you find your letters? I told them to put them in the hall for you," she said to William Bankes.
Lily Briscoe watched her drifting into that strange no-man's land
where to follow people is impossible and yet their going inflicts such a
chill on those who watch them that they always try at least to follow
them with their eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have
sunk beneath the horizon.
How old she looks, how worn she looks, Lily thought, and how remote.
Then when she turned to William Bankes, smiling, it was as if the
ship had turned and the sun had struck its sails again, and Lily thought
with some amusement because she was relieved, Why does she pity
him? For that was the impression she gave, when she told him that his
letters were in the hall. Poor William Bankes, she seemed to be saying, as
if her own weariness had been partly pitying people, and the life in her,
her resolve to live again, had been stirred by pity. And it was not true,
Lily thought; it was one of those misjudgments of hers that seemed to be
instinctive and to arise from some need of her own rather than of other
people's. He is not in the least pitiable. He has his work, Lily said to herself.
She remembered, all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure, that
she had her work. In a flash she saw her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall
put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space.
That's what I shall do. That's what has been puzzling me. She took up
the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower pattern in the tablecloth,
so as to remind herself to move the tree.
