Of course, she said to herself, coming into the room, she had to come
here to get something she wanted. First she wanted to sit down in a particular
chair under a particular lamp. But she wanted something more,
though she did not know, could not think what it was that she wanted.
She looked at her husband (taking up her stocking and beginning to
knit), and saw that he did not want to be interrupted— that was clear.
He was reading something that moved him very much. He was half
smiling and then she knew he was controlling his emotion. He was tossing
the pages over. He was acting it—perhaps he was thinking himself
the person in the book. She wondered what book it was. Oh, it was one
of old Sir Walter's she saw, adjusting the shade of her lamp so that the
light fell on her knitting. For Charles Tansley had been saying (she
looked up as if she expected to hear the crash of books on the floor
above), had been saying that people don't read Scott any more. Then her
husband thought, "That's what they'll say of me;" so he went and got one
of those books. And if he came to the conclusion "That's true" what
Charles Tansley said, he would accept it about Scott. (She could see that
he was weighing, considering, putting this with that as he read.) But not
about himself. He was always uneasy about himself. That troubled her.
He would always be worrying about his own books—will they be read,
are they good, why aren't they better, what do people think of me? Not
liking to think of him so, and wondering if they had guessed at dinner
why he suddenly became irritable when they talked about fame and
books lasting, wondering if the children were laughing at that, she
twitched the stockings out, and all the fine gravings came drawn with
steel instruments about her lips and forehead, and she grew still like a
tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze
falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet.
It didn't matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book,
fame—who could tell? She knew nothing about it. But it was his way
with him, his truthfulness—for instance at dinner she had been thinking
quite instinctively, If only he would speak! She had complete trust in
95
him. And dismissing all this, as one passes in diving now a weed, now a
straw, now a bubble, she felt again, sinking deeper, as she had felt in the
hall when the others were talking, There is something I
want—something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper
without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed. And she
waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly rose those words they
had said at dinner, "the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the
honey bee," began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically,
and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue,
one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their
perches up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be echoed;
so she turned and felt on the table beside her for a book.
And all the lives we ever lived
And all the lives to be,
Are full of trees and changing leaves,
she murmured, sticking her needles into the stocking. And she opened
the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so,
she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up
under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or
this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all.
Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners
she read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way
and that, from one line to another as from one branch to another, from
one red and white flower to another, until a little sound roused her—her
husband slapping his thighs. Their eyes met for a second; but they did
not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something
seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the life, it was the
power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew, that made him
slap his thighs. Don't interrupt me, he seemed to be saying, don't say
anything; just sit there. And he went on reading. His lips twitched. It
filled him. It fortified him. He clean forgot all the little rubs and digs of
the evening, and how it bored him unutterably to sit still while people
ate and drank interminably, and his being so irritable with his wife and
so touchy and minding when they passed his books over as if they didn't
exist at all. But now, he felt, it didn't matter a damn who reached Z (if
thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach it—if
not he, then another. This man's strength and sanity, his feeling for
straight forward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed
creature in Mucklebackit's cottage made him feel so vigorous, so relieved
of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke
96
back his tears. Raising the book a little to hide his face, he let them fall
and shook his head from side to side and forgot himself completely (but
not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and English
novels and Scott's hands being tied but his view perhaps being as true as
the other view), forgot his own bothers and failures completely in poor
Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's sorrow (that was Scott at his best)
and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him.
