So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which
had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the clouds
seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance:
whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling for Mr Ramsay
changed as he sailed further and further across the bay. It seemed to be
elongated, stretched out; he seemed to become more and more remote.
He and his children seemed to be swallowed up in that blue, that distance;
but here, on the lawn, close at hand, Mr Carmichael suddenly
grunted. She laughed. He clawed his book up from the grass. He settled
into his chair again puffing and blowing like some sea monster. That was
different altogether, because he was so near. And now again all was
quiet. They must be out of bed by this time, she supposed, looking at the
house, but nothing appeared there. But then, she remembered, they had
always made off directly a meal was over, on business of their own. It
was all in keeping with this silence, this emptiness, and the unreality of
the early morning hour. It was a way things had sometimes, she thought,
lingering for a moment and looking at the long glittering windows and
the plume of blue smoke: they became illness, before habits had spun
themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so
startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be
at one's ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawn
to greet old Mrs Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner to
sit in, "Oh, good-morning, Mrs Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are you going
to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper's hidden the chairs. Do let me
find you one!" and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need not speak at
all. One glided, one shook one's sails (there was a good deal of movement
in the bay, boats were starting off) between things, beyond things.
Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up to
the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these
waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives.
The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things
besides. A washer-woman with her basket; a rook, a red-hot poker; the
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purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling which held
the whole together.
It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten years
ago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she
must be in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There might
be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place
them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of
some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of
those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love
plays.
Her eyes rested on the brown speck of Mr Ramsay's sailing boat. They
would be at the Lighthouse by lunch time she supposed. But the wind
had freshened, and, as the sky changed slightly and the sea changed
slightly and the boats altered their positions, the view, which a moment
before had seemed miraculously fixed, was now unsatisfactory. The
wind had blown the trail of smoke about; there was something displeasing
about the placing of the ships.
The disproportion there seemed to upset some harmony in her own
mind. She felt an obscure distress. It was confirmed when she turned to
her picture. She had been wasting her morning. For whatever reason she
could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite
forces; Mr Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary. There was
something perhaps wrong with the design? Was it, she wondered, that
the line of the wall wanted breaking, was it that the mass of the trees was
too heavy? She smiled ironically; for had she not thought, when she
began, that she had solved her problem?
What was the problem then? She must try to get hold of something tht
evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs Ramsay; it evaded
her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came.
Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of
was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made
anything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said desperately,
pitching herself firmly again before her easel. It was a miserable
machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for
painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment;
heroically, one must force it on. She stared, frowning. There was the
hedge, sure enough. But one got nothing by soliciting urgently. One got
only a glare in the eye from looking at the line of the wall, or from thinking—
she wore a grey hat. She was astonishingly beautiful. Let it come,
she thought, if it will come. For there are moments when one can neither
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think nor feel. And if one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where
is one?
