Virginia Woolf

“ Margaret's languished, he thought, She has been ill, and the sound expressed languor and suffering. It was her heart, he remembered; and the sudden loudness of the final stroke tolled for death that surprised in the midst of life, Clarissa falling where she stood, in her drawing-room. No! No! he cried. She is not dead! I am not old, he cried, and marched up Whitehall, as if there rolled down to him, vigorous, unending, his future. ”

“ The world, he assured himself, since Katharine Hilbery was now half an hour behind her time, offers no happiness, no rest from struggle, no certainty. In a scheme of things utterly bad from the start the only unpardonable folly is that of hope. Raising his eyes for a moment from the face of his watch, he rested them upon the opposite bank, reflectively and not without a certain wistfulness, as if the sternness of their gaze were still capable of mitigation. ”

“ Since the day when he had heard from Katharine’s lips of her engagement, he had refrained from investing his dream of her with the details of real life. But the light of the late afternoon glowed green behind the straight trees, and became a symbol of her. The light seemed to expand his heart. She brooded over the grey fields, and was with him now in the railway carriage, thoughtful, silent, and infinitely tender; but the vision pressed too close, and must be dismissed, for the train was slackening. ”

“ He had seen that the fire burnt well; jam-pots were on the table, tin covers shone in the fender, and the shabby comfort of the room was extreme. He was dressed in his old crimson dressing-gown, which was faded irregularly, and had bright new patches on it, like the paler grass which one finds on lifting a stone. He made the tea, and Katharine drew off her gloves, and crossed her legs with a gesture that was rather masculine in its ease. ”

“ He glanced about him with bewilderment at finding himself among her chairs and tables; they were solid, for he grasped the back of the chair in which Katharine had sat; and yet they were unreal; the atmosphere was that of a dream. He summoned all the faculties of his spirit to seize what the minutes had to give him; and from the depths of his mind there rose unchecked a joyful recognition of the truth that human nature surpasses, in its beauty, all that our wildest dreams bring us hints of. ”

“ It’s all over, Katharine. It was a dream—an hallucination. We were both equally to blame, but no harm’s done if you believe how truly I care for you. Say you believe me!”
He stood over her, as if in readiness to seize the first sign of her assent. Precisely at that moment, owing, perhaps, to her vicissitudes of feeling, all sense of love left her, as in a moment a mist lifts from the earth. And when the mist departed a skeleton world and blankness alone remained—a terrible prospect for the eyes of the living to behold. ”

“ One feels sorry for them, yes, and it is probable that Virginia Woolf herself loves them, but we feel that they are all shut away in a world which is far from ours. Over and over again we find ourselves enveloped in a Jane Austenish atmosphere, partly induced, no doubt, by the extreme deliberation of the writer. Virginia Woolf is in no hurry to arrive at any conclusion. Perhaps it is a virtue in her that we feel that reason will always triumph over the heart in these people. ”

“ As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said to himself; feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within. Clarissa refused me, he thought. He stood there thinking, Clarissa refused me.
Ah, said St. Margaret's, like a hostess who comes into her drawing-room on the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there already. I am not late. No, it is precisely half-past eleven, she says. ”

“ He brushed off his face any trace that might remain of that unseemly exhibition of emotion. But he was more troubled by Katharine’s appearance, as she sat rapt in thought upon the ground, than by his own; there was something improper to him in her self-forgetfulness. A man naturally alive to the conventions of society, he was strictly conventional where women were concerned, and especially if the women happened to be in any way connected with him. He noticed with distress the long strand of dark hair touching her shoulder and two or three dead beech-leaves attached to her dress ”

“ In the eyes of every single person she detected a flame; as if a spark in the brain ignited spontaneously at contact with the things they met and drove them on. The young women looking into the milliners’ windows had that look in their eyes; and elderly men turning over books in the second-hand bookshops, and eagerly waiting to hear what the price was—the very lowest price—they had it too. But she cared nothing at all for clothes or for money either. Books she shrank from, for they were connected too closely with Ralph. ”

“ And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when—oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!
"Dear, those motor cars," said Miss Pym, going to the window to look, and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all her fault. ”

“ Nothing’s been touched,” said Katharine. “Everything’s exactly the same.” But as she said this, with a decision which seemed to make it imply that more than the sofa was unchanged, she held out a cup into which she had forgotten to pour any tea. Being told of her forgetfulness, she frowned with annoyance, and said that Cassandra was demoralizing her. The glance she cast upon them, and the resolute way in which she plunged them into speech, made William and Cassandra feel like children who had been caught prying. ”

“ Her soliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emerging suddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when she had to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or to choose a turning. “To know the truth—to accept without bitterness”—those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no one could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in front of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford, save that the name of Ralph occurred frequently in very strange connections, as if, having spoken it, she wished, superstitiously, to cancel it by adding some other word that robbed the sentence with his name in it of any meaning. ”

“ She repressed her impulse to speak aloud, and rose and wandered about rather aimlessly among the statues until she found herself in another gallery devoted to engraved obelisks and winged Assyrian bulls, and her emotion took another turn. She began to picture herself traveling with Ralph in a land where these monsters were couchant in the sand. “For,” she thought to herself, as she gazed fixedly at some information printed behind a piece of glass, “the wonderful thing about you is that you’re ready for anything; you’re not in the least conventional, like most clever men.” ”

“ William persisted. “Why did you say that just now about my behaviour to animals?” As he spoke he rattled his stick against the bars of the cage, which gave his words an accompaniment peculiarly exasperating to Katharine’s nerves.
“Because it’s true. You never see what any one feels,” she said. “You think of no one but yourself.”
“That is not true,” said William. By his determined rattling he had now collected the animated attention of some half-dozen apes. Either to propitiate them, or to show his consideration for their feelings, he proceeded to offer them the apple which he held. ”

“ The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hemlock plants, looking up suddenly, sees the giant figure at the end of the ride. ”

“ She was a remarkable-looking woman, well advanced in the sixties, but owing to the lightness of her frame and the brightness of her eyes she seemed to have been wafted over the surface of the years without taking much harm in the passage. Her face was shrunken and aquiline, but any hint of sharpness was dispelled by the large blue eyes, at once sagacious and innocent, which seemed to regard the world with an enormous desire that it should behave itself nobly, and an entire confidence that it could do so, if it would only take the pains. ”

“ We know absolutely nothing about each other—and yet—I feel as if I did know you!"
"You have children—your husband was in Parliament?"
"You've never been to school, and you live—?"
"With my aunts at Richmond."
"Richmond?"
"You see, my aunts like the Park. They like the quiet."
"And you don't! I understand!" Clarissa laughed.
"I like walking in the Park alone; but not—with the dogs," she finished.
"No; and some people are dogs; aren't they?" said Clarissa, as if she had guessed a secret. "But not every one—oh no, not every one."
"Not every one," said Rachel, and stopped. ”

“ His words, and the queer strained voice in which he spoke them, made it appear as if he addressed some person who was not the woman beside him, but some one far away.
“And now things have come to such a pass that, unless I can speak to you openly, I believe I shall go mad. I think of you as the most beautiful, the truest thing in the world,” he continued, filled with a sense of exaltation, and feeling that he had no need now to choose his words with pedantic accuracy, for what he wanted to say was suddenly become plain to him. ”

“ Mary cried, turning and pinching his sleeve. “What have you been doing with yourself? Moping? Working? Despising the world, as usual?”
As he merely shook his head, and filled his pipe, she went on:
“It’s a bit of a pose, isn’t it?”
“Not more than most things,” he said.
“Well,” Mary remarked, “I’ve a great deal to say to you, but I must go on—we have a committee.” She rose, but hesitated, looking down upon him rather gravely. “You don’t look happy, Ralph,” she said. “Is it anything, or is it nothing?”
He did not immediately answer her, but rose, too, and walked with her towards the gate. ”

“ To every one’s surprise she rose, stretched out her hand, and said:
“You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with—you've been always———” but here her voice died away, and the tears forced themselves into her eyes, and ran down her cheeks, while William, equally moved, seized her hand and pressed it to his lips. No one perceived that the drawing-room door had opened itself sufficiently to admit at least half the person of Mr. Hilbery, or saw him gaze at the scene round the tea-table with an expression of the utmost disgust and expostulation. ”

“ Like the rats who followed the piper, heads instantly appeared in the doorway. There was another flourish; and then the trio dashed spontaneously into the triumphant swing of the waltz. It was as though the room were instantly flowed with water. After a moment's hesitation first one couple, then another, leapt into mid-stream, and went round and round in the eddies. The rhythmic swish of the dancers sounded like a swirling pool. By degrees the room grew perceptibly hotter. The smell of kid gloves mingled with the strong scent of flowers. ”

“ Katharine thereupon went on with the statement of her case.
“I don’t care much whether I ever get to know anything—but I want to work out something in figures—something that hasn’t got to do with human beings. I don’t want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I’m a humbug—I mean, I’m not what you all take me for. I’m not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really. And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants.” ”

“ Look, there’s a bird for you! Oh, you’ve brought glasses, have you? Edward and Christopher mean to make you shoot. Can you shoot? I shouldn’t think so——”
“Look here, you must explain,” said Ralph. “Who are these young men? Where am I staying?”
“You are staying with us, of course,’ she said boldly. “Of course, you’re staying with us—you don’t mind coming, do you?”
“If I had, I shouldn’t have come,” he said sturdily. They walked on in silence; Mary took care not to break it for a time. She wished Ralph to feel, as she thought he would, all the fresh delights of the earth and air. ”

“ Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; or seen it between people’s shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window. ”