But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness
dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint
green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night,
however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and
deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen;
they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness.
The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags
kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on
marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far
away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight,
in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour,
and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the
shore.
It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine
goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single,
distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which, did we
deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching
the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his
treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it
seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should
ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered
pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse
only; our toil respite only.
The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and
bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with
them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter
damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any
sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts,
a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself
to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine
promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making
the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his
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hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless
in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and
why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an
answer.
[Mr Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched
his arms out, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before,
his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]]
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