So they're gone, she thought, sighing with relief and disappointment.
Her sympathy seemed to be cast back on her, like a bramble sprung
across her face. She felt curiously divided, as if one part of her were
drawn out there—it was a still day, hazy; the Lighthouse looked this
morning at an immense distance; the other had fixed itself doggedly,
solidly, here on the lawn. She saw her canvas as if it had floated up and
placed itself white and uncompromising directly before her. It seemed to
rebuke her with its cold stare for all this hurry and agitation; this folly
and waste of emotion; it drastically recalled her and spread through her
mind first a peace, as her disorderly sensations (he had gone and she had
been so sorry for him and she had said nothing) trooped off the field;
and then, emptiness. She looked blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising
white stare; from the canvas to the garden. There was
something (she stood screwing up her little Chinese eyes in her small
puckered face), something she remembered in the relations of those lines
cutting across, slicing down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green
cave of blues and browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied
a knot in her mind so that at odds and ends of time, involuntarily, as she
walked along the Brompton Road, as she brushed her hair, she found
herself painting that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the
knot in imagination. But there was all the difference in the world
between this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking
her brush and making the first mark.
She had taken the wrong brush in her agitation at Mr Ramsay's presence,
and her easel, rammed into the earth so nervously, was at the
wrong angle. And now that she had ut that right, and in so doing had
subdued the impertinences and irrelevances that plucked her attention
and made her remember how she was such and such a person, had such
and such relations to people, she took her hand and raised her brush. For
a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air.
Where to begin?—that was the question at what point to make the first
mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable
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risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed
simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape
themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among
them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must
be run; the mark made.
With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at
the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive
stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it
left a running mark. A second time she did it—a third time. And so
pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement,
as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and
all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored
her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner
settled there than they enclosed ( she felt it looming out at her) a space.
Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering higher
and higher above her. For what could be more formidable than that
space? Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it,
drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into
the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing,
this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark
at the back of appearances and commanded her attention. She was half
unwilling, half reluctant. Why always be drawn out and haled away?
Why not left in peace, to talk to Mr Carmichael on the lawn? It was an
exacting form of intercourse anyhow. Other worshipful objects were content
with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this
form, were it only the shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a wicker
table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which
one was bound to be worsted. Always (it was in her nature, or in her sex,
she did not know which) before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the
concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she
seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some
windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of
doubt. Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored
with running lines. It would be hung in the servants' bedrooms. It would
be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it
then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she
couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents
in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats
words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them.
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