Yes, that is their boat, Lily Briscoe decided, standing on the edge of the
lawn. It was the boat with greyish-brown sails, which she saw now flatten
itself upon the water and shoot off across the bay. There he sits, she
thought, and the children are quite silent still. And she could not reach
him either. The sympathy she had not given him weighed her down. It
made it difficult for her to paint.
She had always found him difficult. She never had been able to praise
him to his face, she remembered. And that reduced their relationship to
something neutral, without that element of sex in it which made his
manner to Minta so gallant, almost gay. He would pick a flower for her,
lend her his books. But could he believe that Minta read them? She
dragged them about the garden, sticking in leaves to mark the place.
"D'you remember, Mr Carmichael?" she was inclined to ask, looking at
the old man. But he had pulled his hat half over his forehead; he was
asleep, or he was dreaming, or he was lying there catching words, she
supposed.
"D'you remember?" she felt inclined to ask him as she passed him,
thinking again of Mrs Ramsay on the beach; the cask bobbing up and
down; and the pages flying. Why, after all these years had that survived,
ringed round, lit up, visible to the last detail, with all before it blank and
all after it blank, for miles and miles?
"Is it a boat? Is it a cork?" she would say, Lily repeated, turning back,
reluctantly again, to her canvas. Heaven be praised for it, the problem of
space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her.
The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful
and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour
melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath
the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be
a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge
with a team of horses. And she began to lay on a red, a grey, and
she began to model her way into the hollow there. At the same time, she
seemed to be sitting beside Mrs Ramsay on the beach.
143
"Is it a boat? Is it a cask?" Mrs Ramsay said. And she began hunting
round for her spectacles. And she sat, having found them, silent, looking
out to sea. And Lily, painting steadily, felt as if a door had opened, and
one went in and stood gazing silently about in a high cathedral-like
place, very dark, very solemn. Shouts came from a world far away.
Steamers vanished in stalks of smoke on the horizon. Charles threw
stones and sent them skipping.
Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence,
uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships.
Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the
moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs
Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence
by her side) by saying them? Aren't we more expressive thus? The
moment at least seemed extraordinarily fertile. She rammed a little hole
in the sand and covered it up, by way of burying in it the perfection of
the moment. It was like a drop of silver in which one dipped and illumined
the darkness of the past.
Lily stepped back to get her canvas—so—into perspective. It was an
odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further,
until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over
the sea. And as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the
past there. Now Mrs Ramsay got up, she remembered. It was time to go
back to the house—time for luncheon. And they all walked up from the
beach together, she walking behind with William Bankes, and there was
Minta in front of them with a hole in her stocking. How that little round
hole of pink heel seemed to flaunt itself before them! How William
Bankes deplored it, without, so far as she could remember, saying anything
about it! It meant to him the annihilation of womanhood, and dirt
and disorder, and servants leaving and beds not made at mid-day—all
the things he most abhorred. He had a way of shuddering and spreading
his fingers out as if to cover an unsightly object which he did
now—holding his hand in front of him. And Minta walked on ahead,
and presumably Paul met her and she went off with Paul in the garden.
