"Mrs Ramsay!" Lily cried, "Mrs Ramsay!" But nothing happened. The
pain increased. That anguish could reduce one to such a pitch of imbecility,
she thought! Anyhow the old man had not heard her. He remained
benignant, calm—if one chose to think it, sublime. Heaven be praised, no
one had heard her cry that ignominious cry, stop pain, stop! She had not
obviously taken leave of her senses. No one had seen her step off her
strip of board into the waters of annihilation. She remained a skimpy old
maid, holding a paint-brush.
And now slowly the pain of the want, and the bitter anger (to be called
back, just as she thought she would never feel sorrow for Mrs Ramsay
again. Had she missed her among the coffee cups at breakfast? not in the
least) lessened; and of their anguish left, as antidote, a relief that was
balm in itself, and also, but more mysteriously, a sense of some one
there, of Mrs Ramsay, relieved for a moment of the weight that the world
had put on her, staying lightly by her side and then (for this was Mrs
Ramsay in all her beauty) raising to her forehead a wreath of white
flowers with which she went. Lily squeezed her tubes again. She attacked
that problem of the hedge. It was strange how clearly she saw
her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose folds,
purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinth or lilies, she vanished.
It was some trick of the painter's eye. For days after she had heard of her
death she had seen her thus, putting her wreath to her forehead and going
unquestioningly with her companion, a shade across the fields. The
sight, the phrase, had its power to console. Wherever she happened to
be, painting, here, in the country or in London, the vision would come to
her, and her eyes, half closing, sought something to base her vision on.
She looked down the railway carriage, the omnibus; took a line from
shoulder or cheek; looked at the windows opposite; at Piccadilly, lampstrung
in the evening. All had been part of the fields of death. But always
something—it might be a face, a voice, a paper boy crying STANDARD,
NEWS—thrust through, snubbed her, waked her, required and got in the
end an effort of attention, so that the vision must be perpetually remade.
152
Now again, moved as she was by some instinctive need of distance and
blue, she looked at the bay beneath her, making hillocks of the blue bars
of the waves, and stony fields of the purpler spaces, again she was
roused as usual by something incongruous. There was a brown spot in
the middle of the bay. It was a boat. Yes, she realised that after a second.
But whose boat? Mr Ramsay's boat, she replied. Mr Ramsay; the man
who had marched past her, with his hand raised, aloof, at the head of a
procession, in his beautiful boots, asking her for sympathy, which she
had refused. The boat was now half way across the bay.
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that
the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the
sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. A steamer far out at
sea had drawn in the air a great scroll of smoke which stayed there
curving and circling decoratively, as if the air were a fine gauze which
held things and kept them softly in its mesh, only gently swaying them
this way and that. And as happens sometimes when the weather is very
fine, the cliffs looked as if they were conscious of the ships, and the ships
looked as if they were conscious of the cliffs, as if they signalled to each
other some message of their own. For sometimes quite close to the shore,
the Lighthouse looked this morning in the haze an enormous distance
away.
"Where are they now?" Lily thought, looking out to sea. Where was he,
that very old man who had gone past her silently, holding a brown paper
parcel under his arm? The boat was in the middle of the bay.
153
