magnificence of his head. He hated him for his exactingness and egotism.
He looked at the page. He pointed his finger at a word, and he hoped to recall his mother’s attention, which, he knew angrily, wavered instantly. But, no. Nothing will make Mr. Ramsay move on. There he stood. He was demanding sympathy.
Mrs. Ramsay was folding her son in her arm. She braced herself, and raised herself with an effort. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure, he said. Mrs. Ramsay flashed her needles.
“Charles Tansley…” she said.
But it was sympathy he wanted. He wanted to be assured of his genius.
Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said. But he must have sympathy. She laughed, she knitted.
He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.
He was filled with her words, like a child. At last, he looked at her with humble gratitude and went away.
Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another. She felt the rapture of successful creation. Every throb of this pulse enclosed her and her husband, and gave to each some solace.
A shadow was on the page; she looked up. It was Augustus Carmichael’s shadow. Mr. Carmichael was in his yellow slippers. She asked,
“Going indoors Mr. Carmichael?”
8
He said nothing. He took opium. The children said he had stained his beard yellow with it. Perhaps. What was obvious to her was that the poor man was unhappy. He came to them every year as an escape. Every year she felt the same thing; he did not trust her. She said,
“I am going to the town. Shall I get you stamps, paper, tobacco?”
And she felt him wince. He did not trust her. It was because of his wife. She remembered that iniquity of his wife’s towards him. He was unkempt; he dropped things on his coat. He had the tiresomeness of an old man. His wife said, in her odious way,
“Now, Mrs. Ramsay and I want to have a little talk together.”
Mrs. Ramsay could see the innumerable miseries of his life. Had he money enough to buy tobacco? Did he have to ask her for it? She made him suffer.
And always now he shrank from her. He never told her anything. But what more can she do? He has a sunny room. The children are good to him. It injured her that he shrinks. Everybody loved her. Everybody needed her. How could he not? When Mr. Carmichael just nodded to her question, with a book beneath his arm, she felt that all this desire of hers to give, to help, was vanity. For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, “O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay… Mrs. Ramsay, of course!” and need her and send for her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she wanted, and therefore when Mr. Carmichael shrank away from her, as he did at this moment, making off to some corner where he did acrostics endlessly, she did not feel merely snubbed back in her instinct, but made aware of the pettiness of some part of her, and of human relations, how flawed they are, how despicable, how self-seeking, at their best.
Anyway, she should better devote her mind to the story of the Fisherman and his Wife and calm down her son James (none of her children was as sensitive as he was).
“The man’s heart grew heavy,” she read aloud, “and he did not want to go. He said to himself, ‘It is not right,’ and yet he went. And when he came to the sea the water was quite purple and dark blue, and grey and thick, and no longer so green and yellow, but it was still quiet. And he stood there and said…”
“The father of eight children has no choice.”
He muttered these words, turned, sighed, raised his eyes, saw the figure of his wife. She was reading stories to his little boy. He filled his pipe. He found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. It was true; he was for the most part happy. He had his wife; he had his children. He had promised in six weeks’ time to talk “some nonsense” to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley[8], and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it he had to deprecate and conceal under the phrase “talking nonsense.” It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings. He could not say, “This is what I like – this is what I am”. It was rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe. Lily wondered why such concealments were necessary; why he needed praise. She wondered why so brave a man in thought was so timid in life. He was strangely venerable and laughable at the same time.
Teaching and preaching is beyond human power, Lily suspected.
Mrs. Ramsay gave him what he asked too easily. Then the change must be so upsetting, Lily said. He comes in from his books and finds us all playing games and talking nonsense. Imagine what a change from the things he thinks about, she said.
9
“Yes,” Mr. Bankes said. “It is pity. It is pity that Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people.”
For he liked Lily Briscoe; he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly. It was for that reason, he said, that the young people don’t read Carlyle. A crusty old grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold. Why will he preach to us?
Lily was ashamed to say that she had not read Carlyle since she was at school. But she liked Mr. Ramsay. He asked you quite openly to flatter him, to admire him. His little dodges deceived nobody. It was not THAT she minded. What she disliked was his narrowness, his blindness.
“A hypocrite?” Mr. Bankes suggested.
He looked at Mr. Ramsay’s back. He rather wished Lily to agree that Ramsay was, as he said, “a hypocrite.”
Lily Briscoe was putting away her brushes. She was looking up, looking down. Looking up, there he was – Mr. Ramsay was advancing towards them. He was swinging, careless, oblivious, remote. “A hypocrite?” she repeated. Oh, no – the most sincere of men, the truest, the best. But he is absorbed in himself. He is tyrannical, he is unjust.
Mr. Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say something about Mrs. Ramsay, how she was alarming, but then she saw the rapture with which Mr. Bankes looked at Mrs. Ramsay and the look on his face made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak. Lily felt that this rapture was equivalent to the loves of dozens of young men. Perhaps Mrs. Ramsay had never excited the loves of dozens of young men. It was distilled and filtered love; love that never attempted to clutch its object. This love was spread over the world and became part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world shared it.
Such a rapture made Lily Briscoe forget entirely what she wanted to say. It was nothing of importance; something about Mrs. Ramsay. It paled beside this “rapture”, this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude. Nothing so solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift.
People can love like this. She wiped one brush after another upon a piece of old rag. Then she looked at her picture.
She nearly wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! Nobody will look at it, nobody will