They don't feel a thing there, Cam thought, looking at the shore, which,
rising and falling, became steadily more distant and more peaceful. Her
hand cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made the green swirls and streaks
into patterns and, numbed and shrouded, wandered in imagination in
that underworld of waters where the pearls stuck in clusters to white
sprays, where in the green light a change came over one's entire mind
and one's body shone half transparent enveloped in a green cloak.
Then the eddy slackened round her hand. The rush of the water
ceased; the world became full of little creaking and squeaking sounds.
One heard the waves breaking and flapping against the side of the boat
as if they were anchored in harbour. Everything became very close to
one. For the sail, upon which James had his eyes fixed until it had become
to him like a person whom he knew, sagged entirely; there they
came to a stop, flapping about waiting for a breeze, in the hot sun, miles
from shore, miles from the Lighthouse. Everything in the whole world
seemed to stand still. The Lighthouse became immovable, and the line of
the distant shore became fixed. The sun grew hotter and everybody
seemed to come very close together and to feel each other's presence,
which they had almost forgotten. Macalister's fishing line went plumb
down into the sea. But Mr Ramsay went on reading with his legs curled
under him.
He was reading a little shiny book with covers mottled like a plover's
egg. Now and again, as they hung about in that horrid calm, he turned a
page. And James felt that each page was turned with a peculiar gesture
aimed at him; now assertively, now commandingly; now with the intention
of making people pity him; and all the time, as his father read and
turned one after another of those little pages, James kept dreading the
moment when he would look up and speak sharply to him about
something or other. Why were they lagging about here? he would demand,
or something quite unreasonable like that. And if he does, James
thought, then I shall take a knife and strike him to the heart.
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He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his
father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his
father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom
he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended on him—without
his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its
talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he
could feel the beak on his bare legs, where it had struck when he was a
child) and then made off, and there he was again, an old man, very sad,
reading his book. That he would kill, that he would strike to the heart.
Whatever he did—(and he might do anything, he felt, looking at the
Lighthouse and the distant shore) whether he was in a business, in a
bank, a barrister, a man at the head of some enterprise, that he would
fight, that he would track down and stamp out—tyranny, despotism, he
called it—making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off
their right to speak. How could any of them say, But I won't, when he
said, Come to the Lighthouse. Do this. Fetch me that. The black wings
spread, and the hard beak tore. And then next moment, there he sat
reading his book; and he might look up—one never knew—quite reasonably.
He might talk to the Macalisters. He might be pressing a sovereign
into some frozen old woman's hand in the street, James thought, and he
might be shouting out at some fisherman's sports; he might be waving
his arms in the air with excitement. Or he might sit at the head of the
table dead silent from one end of dinner to the other. Yes, thought James,
while the boat slapped and dawdled there in the hot sun; there was a
waste of snow and rock very lonely and austere; and there he had come
to feel, quite often lately, when his father said something or did
something which surprised the others, there were two pairs of footprints
only; his own and his father's. They alone knew each other. What then
was this terror, this hatred? Turning back among the many leaves which
the past had folded in him, peering into the heart of that forest where
light and shade so chequer each other that all shape is distorted, and one
blunders, now with the sun in one's eyes, now with a dark shadow, he
sought an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete
shape. Suppose then that as a child sitting helpless in a perambulator,
or on some one's knee, he had seen a waggon crush ignorantly and
innocently, some one's foot? Suppose he had seen the foot first, in the
grass, smooth, and whole; then the wheel; and the same foot, purple,
crushed. But the wheel was innocent. So now, when his father came
striding down the passage knocking them up early in the morning to go
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to the Lighthouse down it came over his foot, over Cam's foot, over
anybody's foot. One sat and watched it.
But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what garden did all this
happen? For one had settings for these scenes; trees that grew there;
flowers; a certain light; a few figures. Everything tended to set itself in a
garden where there was none of this gloom. None of this throwing of
hands about; people spoke in an ordinary tone of voice. They went in
and out all day long. There was an old woman gossiping in the kitchen;
and the blinds were sucked in and out by the breeze; all was blowing, all
was growing; and over all those plates and bowls and tall brandishing
red and yellow flowers a very thin yellow veil would be drawn, like a
vine leaf, at night. Things became stiller and darker at night. But the leaflike
veil was so fine, that lights lifted it, voices crinkled it; he could see
through it a figure stooping, hear, coming close, going away, some dress
rustling, some chain tinkling.
It was in this world that the wheel went over the person's foot. Something,
he remembered, stayed flourished up in the air, something arid
and sharp descended even there, like a blade, a scimitar, smiting through
the leaves and flowers even of that happy world and making it shrivel
and fall.
"It will rain," he remembered his father saying. "You won't be able to
go to the Lighthouse."
The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow
eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now—
James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks;
the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black
and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread
on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?
No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one
thing. The other Lighthouse was true too. It was sometimes hardly to be
seen across the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw the eye opening
and shutting and the light seemed to reach them in that airy sunny
garden where they sat.
But he pulled himself up. Whenever he said "they" or "a person," and
then began hearing the rustle of some one coming, the tinkle of some one
going, he became extremely sensitive to the presence of whoever might
be in the room. It was his father now. The strain was acute. For in one
moment if there was no breeze, his father would slap the covers of his
book together, and say: "What's happening now? What are we dawdling
about here for, eh?" as, once before he had brought his blade down
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among them on the terrace and she had gone stiff all over, and if there
had been an axe handy, a knife, or anything with a sharp point he would
have seized it and struck his father through the heart. She had gone stiff
all over, and then, her arm slackening, so that he felt she listened to him
no longer, she had risen somehow and gone away and left him there, impotent,
ridiculous, sitting on the floor grasping a pair of scissors.
Not a breath of wind blew. The water chuckled and gurgled in the bottom
of the boat where three or four mackerel beat their tails up and
down in a pool of water not deep enough to cover them. At any moment
Mr Ramsay (he scarcely dared look at him) might rouse himself, shut his
book, and say something sharp; but for the moment he was reading, so
that James stealthily, as if he were stealing downstairs on bare feet,
afraid of waking a watchdog by a creaking board, went on thinking what
was she like, where did she go that day? He began following her from
room to room and at last they came to a room where in a blue light, as if
the reflection came from many china dishes, she talked to somebody; he
listened to her talking. She talked to a servant, saying simply whatever
came into her head. She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he
speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps;
she was a person to whom one could say what came into one's
head. But all the time he thought of her, he was conscious of his father
following his thought, surveying it, making it shiver and falter. At last he
ceased to think.
There he sat with his hand on the tiller in the sun, staring at the Lighthouse,
powerless to move, powerless to flick off these grains of misery
which settled on his mind one after another. A rope seemed to bind him
there, and his father had knotted it and he could only escape by taking a
knife and plunging it… But at that moment the sail swung slowly round,
filled slowly out, the boat seemed to shake herself, and then to move off
half conscious in her sleep, and then she woke and shot through the
waves. The relief was extraordinary. They all seemed to fall away from
each other again and to be at their ease, and the fishing-lines slanted taut
across the side of the boat. But his father did not rouse himself. He only
raised his right hand mysteriously high in the air, and let it fall upon his
knee again as if he were conducting some secret symphony.
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