Mr Ramsay had almost done reading. One hand hovered over the page
as if to be in readiness to turn it the very instant he had finished it. He sat
there bareheaded with the wind blowing his hair about, extraordinarily
exposed to everything. He looked very old. He looked, James thought,
getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of
waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the
sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the
back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them
the truth about things.
He was reading very quickly, as if he were eager to get to the end.
Indeed they were very close to the Lighthouse now. There it loomed up,
stark and straight, glaring white and black, and one could see the waves
breaking in white splinters like smashed glass upon the rocks. One could
see lines and creases in the rocks. One could see the windows clearly; a
dab of white on one of them, and a little tuft of green on the rock. A man
had come out and looked at them through a glass and gone in again. So
it was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one had seen across the
bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock. It satisfied him. It
confirmed some obscure feeling of his about his own character. The old
ladies, he thought, thinking of the garden at home, went dragging their
chairs about on the lawn. Old Mrs Beckwith, for example, was always
saying how nice it was and how sweet it was and how they ought to be
so proud and they ought to be so happy, but as a matter of fact, James
thought, looking at the Lighthouse stood there on its rock, it's like that.
He looked at his father reading fiercely with his legs curled tight. They
shared that knowledge. "We are driving before a gale—we must sink," he
began saying to himself, half aloud, exactly as his father said it.
Nobody seemed to have spoken for an age. Cam was tired of looking
at the sea. Little bits of black cork had floated past; the fish were dead in
the bottom of the boat. Still her father read, and James looked at him and
she looked at him, and they vowed that they would fight tyranny to the
death, and he went on reading quite unconscious of what they thought.
171
It was thus that he escaped, she thought. Yes, with his great forehead
and his great nose, holding his little mottled book firmly in front of him,
he escaped. You might try to lay hands on him, but then like a bird, he
spread his wings, he floated off to settle out of your reach somewhere far
away on some desolate stump. She gazed at the immense expanse of the
sea. The island had grown so small that it scarcely looked like a leaf any
longer. It looked like the top of a rock which some wave bigger than the
rest would cover. Yet in its frailty were all those paths, those terraces,
those bedrooms— all those innumberable things. But as, just before
sleep, things simplify themselves so that only one of all the myriad details
has power to assert itself, so, she felt, looking drowsily at the island,
all those paths and terraces and bedrooms were fading and disappearing,
and nothing was left but a pale blue censer swinging rhythmically
this way and that across her mind. It was a hanging garden; it was a valley,
full of birds, and flowers, and antelopes… She was falling asleep.
"Come now," said Mr Ramsay, suddenly shutting his book.
Come where? To what extraordinary adventure? She woke with a
start. To land somewhere, to climb somewhere? Where was he leading
them? For after his immense silence the words startled them. But it was
absurd. He was hungry, he said. It was time for lunch. Besides, look, he
said. "There's the Lighthouse. We're almost there."
"He's doing very well," said Macalister, praising James. "He's keeping
her very steady."
But his father never praised him, James thought grimly.
Mr Ramsay opened the parcel and shared out the sandwiches among
them. Now he was happy, eating bread and cheese with these fishermen.
He would have liked to live in a cottage and lounge about in the harbour
spitting with the other old men, James thought, watching him slice his
cheese into thin yellow sheets with his penknife.
