wing in the air. It was September after all, the middle of September, and past six in the evening. So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge.
They came there regularly every evening. The pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it.
They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity. William Bankes was looking at the far sand hills. He thought of Ramsay, he thought of a road in Westmorland. William Bankes remembered a hen with its little chicks. It seemed to him that their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay married and something important went out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained his affection for Ramsay.
He was anxious to clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of dryness. Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes was childless and a widower.
Yes. That was it. He turned from the view. And Mr. Bankes felt aged and saddened. He has dried indeed.
The Ramsays were not rich. It was a wonder how they managed to contrive it all[6]. Eight children! To feed eight children! And the education was very expensive (true, Mrs. Ramsay had something of her own perhaps). And those fellows, angular, ruthless youngsters, required clothes. He called them after the Kings and Queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless, Andrew the Just, Prue the Fair. Prue must be beautiful, he thought, and Andrew must have brains.
While he walked up the drive and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments (for she was in love with them all), he commiserated Ramsay, envied him. But what, for example, did this Lily Briscoe think?
“Oh, but,” said Lily, “think of his work!”
Whenever she “thought of his work” she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew’s. She asked him what his father’s books were about.
“Subject and object and the nature of reality,” Andrew said.
She said,
“Oh, I don’t understand what that means”.
“Think of a kitchen table then,” he told her, “when you’re not there.”
So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table.
Mr. Bankes was glad that she had asked him “to think of his work.” He had thought of it, often and often.
“Ramsay is one of those men who do their best work before they are forty.”
He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty. But the number of men who make a definite contribution to anything whatsoever is very small, he said.
How to judge people, how to think of them? She was standing by the pear tree. You have greatness, but Mr. Ramsay has none of it. He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical. He is spoilt; he is a tyrant. But he has what you (she addressed Mr. Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles. He loves dogs and his children. He has eight. Mr. Bankes has none.
5
“And even if it isn’t fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay, glancing at William Bankes and Lily Briscoe as they passed, “it will be another day. And now, James, stand up, and let me measure your leg,”
William and Lily must marry – she took the stocking, and measured it against James’s leg.
“My dear, stand still,” she said.
She looked up and saw the room, saw the chairs. They were fearfully shabby. But what was the point, she asked, of buying good chairs? The rent was low; the children loved the house. It is very good for her husband to be three hundred miles from his libraries and his lectures and his disciples; and there was room for visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables; and a photograph or two, and books. She never had time to read them. Alas! She sighed and saw the whole room from floor to ceiling, as she held the stocking against James’s leg. Things got shabbier and shabbier summer after summer. The mat was fading; the wall-paper was flapping. You can’t tell anymore that those were roses on it.
But it was the doors that annoyed her; every door was left open. She listened. The drawing-room door was open; the hall door was open. It sounded as if the bedroom doors were open. Certainly the window was open. That windows must be open, and doors shut – it’s simple. Can’t they remember it?
She had a spasm of irritation, and spoke sharply to James:
“Stand still. Don’t be tiresome.”
He knew instantly that her severity was real. He straightened his leg and she measured it.
The stocking was too short. It was the stocking for Sorley’s little boy, and he was less well grown than James.
“It’s too short,” she said.
Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black. A tear formed; a tear fell. Never did anybody look so sad.
Mrs. Ramsay smoothed out her harsh manner, raised his head, and kissed her little boy on the forehead.
“Let us find another picture to cut out,” she said.
6
But what happened?
Someone made a mistake.
She fixed her short-sighted[7] eyes upon her husband. She gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to her that something had happened.
He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own splendour, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well. He quivered; he shivered.
She realised, from the familiar signs, that he needed privacy to regain his equilibrium, that he was outraged and anguished. She stroked James’s head; she transferred to him what she felt for her husband. Her husband passed her. She was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled; domesticity triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm. At the window he bent quizzically and whimsically to tickle James’s bare calf with a sprig of something. She twitted him that he had dispatched “that poor young man,” Charles Tansley.
“Tansley had to write his dissertation,” he said. “James will have to write his dissertation one of these days,” he added ironically.
She was trying to finish these tiresome stockings to send them to Sorley’s little boy tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay.
“There isn’t the slightest possible chance that we can go to the Lighthouse tomorrow,” Mr. Ramsay said irascibly.
“How do you know?” she asked. “The wind often changes”.
The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. He stamped his foot on the stone step.
“Damn you,” he said.
But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.
Such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings was to her so horrible that she bent her head. There was nothing to say.
He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said,
“I will ask the Coastguards if you like”.
There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him.
Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands, Mr. Ramsay sheepishly prodded his son’s bare legs, and then he dived into the evening air.
He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his pipe. He looked once at his wife and son in the window. Who will blame him?
7
But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them. He hated him for interrupting