after all, will one be born there? One is born helpless, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight. One is born at the toes of the Giants. The trees are like men and women. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark. And they are intersected by thick stalks, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim pinks and blues. They will, as time goes on, become more definite. They will become…—I don’t know what.
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance. Such as a small rose leaf. I am not a very vigilant housekeeper. Look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example. The dust which, so they say, buried Troy. Only fragments of pots utterly refuse annihilation, as one can believe.
The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane. I want to think quietly. I want to think calmly. I want to think spaciously. I want to slip easily from one thing to another. I want to slip without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface. To steady myself, let me catch the first idea.
Shakespeare. Well, he will do[16] as well as another. A man in an arm-chair who looked into the fire, so. A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down. Through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand. People were looking in through the open door. It was a summer’s evening. But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn’t interest me at all.
“And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said I saw a flower on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed saw the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?” I asked.
But I don’t remember the answer. Tall flowers with purple tassels. And so on. All the time I create the figure of myself in my own mind. It was lovingly, stealthily. It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry. It is very important.
The looking-glass smashes. The image disappears. The romantic figure with the green of forest depths disappears. We see only that shell of a person. It is an airless, shallow, bald, prominent shell. We face each other in omnibuses and underground railways. We are looking into the mirror. The novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections. Of course there is not one reflection. There is an almost infinite number. They will explore the depths. They will pursue the phantoms. Let us follow the example of the Greeks did and Shakespeare. But these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls articles and cabinet ministers.
Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons. People sat all together in one room until a certain hour,. And nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was like this: they were made of tapestry with little yellow compartments upon them. Like the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking! How wonderful it was to discover that these real things were not entirely real. Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths. They were indeed half phantoms. The damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder? Men perhaps. The masculine point of view governs our lives. It sets the standard. It established Whitaker’s Table of Precedency[17], the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints[18], Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth. They leave us all with a sense of illegitimate freedom. If freedom exists, of course.
In certain lights that mark on the wall seems volumetric. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it cast a perceptible shadow. I run my finger down that strip of the wall. It will mount and descend. A smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are either tombs or camps. Of the two I prefer the tombs, like most English people. There must be some book about it. Some antiquary dug up those bones. He gave them a name.
What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part[19], I daresay. They examine clods of earth and stone. They get into correspondence with the clergy. The Colonel himself feels philosophic. He accumulates evidence. He finally believes in the camp. Suddenly a stroke kills him. His last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child. His last conscious thoughts are of the camp and that arrow-head there. It is now at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and Nelson’s wineglass.
No, no, nothing is proved. Nothing is known. I get up at this very moment. I ascertain that the mark on the wall is really the head of a gigantic old nail. But what shall I gain? Knowledge?
And what is knowledge? Our learned men are the descendants of witches and hermits. They crouched in caves. They interrogated shrew-mice. They wrote down the language of the stars.
Yes, we can imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers. How peaceful it is down here! How peaceful it is in the centre of the world!
I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is. A nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?
This thought is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality. Who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Lord High Chancellor[20] follows the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop of York follows the Lord High Chancellor. Everybody follows somebody. Such is the philosophy of Whitaker. The great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows. Let that comfort you.
I understand Nature’s game. I take action to end any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, our slight contempt for men of action comes. Men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, I want to stop the disagreeable thoughts.
I feel a satisfying sense of reality. It turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite. Here is something real. Thus, one wakes from a midnight dream of horror. One hastily turns on the light. One lies quiescent. One worships the chest of drawers[21]. One worships solidity. One worships reality. One worships the impersonal world. The world is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of[22].
Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree. Trees grow. We don’t know how they grow. For years and years they grow. They grow in meadows, in forests. They grow by the side of rivers.
The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons. They paint rivers green. I like to think of the fish. I like to think of water-beetles. I like to think of the tree itself. The slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June.
One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth. Then the last storm comes. The high branches drive deep into the ground. Even so, life isn’t done with[23]. There are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree. They are all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement. They are in lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea. This tree is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts. I want to take each one separately.
Where was I? What was it? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker’s Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can’t remember anything.
Everything is moving. Everything is falling. Everything is slipping. Everything is vanishing. Someone is standing over me. Someone is saying:
“I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”
“Yes?”
“Though why buy newspapers? Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war! I don’t see why we have a snail on our wall.”
Ah,