10 Through the disused graveyard in the parish of St. Pancras, Fanny Elmer strayed between the white tombs which lean against the wall, crossing the grass to read a name, hurrying on when the gravekeeper approached, hurrying into the street, pausing now by a window with blue china, now quickly making up for lost time, abruptly entering a baker's shop, buying rolls, adding cakes, going on again so that any one wishing to follow might fairly trot. She was not drably shabby, though. She wore silk stockings and silver-buckled shoes. Only the red feather in her hat drooped, and the clasp of her bag was weak, for out fell a copy of Madame Tussaud's program as she walked. She had the ankles of a stag. Her face was hidden. Of course in this dusk rapid movements, quick glances, and soaring hopes came naturally enough. She passed right beneath Jacob's window. The house was flat, dark, and silent. Jacob was at home, engaged upon a chess-problem, the board being on a stool between his knees.  He slowly brought it forward and raised the white queen from her square, then put her down again on the same spot. He filled his pipe, ruminated, moved two ponds, advanced the white knight, then ruminated with one finger upon the bishop. Now Fanny Elmer passed beneath the window. She was on her way to sit with Nick Bromham, the painter. She sat in a flowered Spanish shawl, holding in her hand a yellow novel.  His head might have been the work of a sculptor who had squared the forehead, stretched the mouth, and left marks of his thumbs and streaks from his fingers in the clay. But the eyes had never been shut. They were rather prominent and rather bloodshot, as if from staring and staring, and when he spoke they looked for a second disturbed, but went on staring. An unshaded electric light hung above her head. As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never constant to a single wave. They all have it. They all lose it. Now she is dull and thick as bacon, now transparent as a hanging glass. The fixed faces are the dull ones. Here comes Lady Venice, displayed like a monument for admiration, but carved in alabaster, to be set on the mantelpiece and never dusted. A dapper brunette, complete from head to foot, serves only as an illustration to lie upon the drawing-room table.  Then at a top floor window, leaning out, looking down, you see beauty itself, or in the corner of an omnibus, are squatted in a ditch, beauty glowing, suddenly expressive, withdrawn the moment after. No one can count on it, or seize it, or have it wrapped in paper. Nothing is to be won from the shops, and heaven knows it would be better to sit at home than haunt the plate-glass windows in the hope of lifting the shining green, the glowing ruby out of them alive. Sea-glass in a saucer loses its luster no sooner than silks do. Thus, if you talk of a beautiful woman, you mean only something flying fast, which for a second uses the eyes, lips, or cheeks of Fanny Elmer, for example, to glow through.  She was a thin girl, with brilliant cheeks and dark hair, sulky just now, or stiff with sitting. In Bromham snapped his stick of charcoal she started. Bromham was out of temper. He squatted before the gas-fire warming his hands. Meanwhile, she looked at his drawing. He grunted. Fanny threw on a dressing-gown and boiled a kettle. By God it's bad, said Bromham. Fanny dropped onto the floor, clasped her hands round her knees and looked at him, her beautiful eyes, yes, beauty, flying through the room, shown there for a second. Fanny's eyes seemed to question, to commiserate, to be, for a second, love itself. But she exaggerated. Bromham noticed nothing, and when the kettle boiled up she scrambled more like a colt or a puppy than a loving woman. Now Jacob walked over to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. Mr. Springich, opposite, came out, looked at his shop window and went in again. The children drifted past, eyeing the pink sticks of sweet stuff. Pickford's van swung down the street. A small boy twirled from a rope. Jacob turned away. Two minutes later he opened the front door and walked off in the direction of Holburn. Fanny Elmer took down her cloak from the hook. Nick Bromham unpinned his drawing and rolled it under his arm. They turned out the lights and set off down the street, holding on their way through all the people, motorcars, omnibuses, carts, until they reached Lester Square five minutes before Jacob reached it. For his way was slightly longer, and he had been stopped by a block in Holburn waiting to see the king drive by, so that Nick and Fanny were already leaning over the barrier in the promenade at the empire, when Jacob pushed through the swing doors and took his place beside them. Hello. Never noticed you, said Nick, five minutes later. Bloody rot, said Jacob. Miss Elmer, said Nick. Jacob took his pipe out of his mouth very awkwardly. Very awkward he was, and when they sat upon a plush sofa and let the smoke go up between them in the stage and heard far off the high-pitched voices and the jolly orchestra breaking in opportunely, he was still awkward. Only Fanny thought, what a beautiful voice. She thought how little he said, yet how firm it was. She thought how young men are dignified and aloof, and how unconscious they are, and how quietly one might sit beside Jacob and look at him. And how childlike he would be come in tired of an evening, she thought, and how majestic, a little overbearing perhaps. But I wouldn't give way, she thought. He got up and leaned over the barrier. The smoke hung about him. And forever the beauty of young men seems to be set in smoke. However lustily they chase foot-balls or drive cricket-balls, dance, run, or stride along roads. Possibly they are soon to lose it. Possibly they look into the eyes of faraway heroes and take their station among us half contemptuously, she thought, vibrating like a fiddle string, to be played on and snapped. Anyhow they love silence and speak beautifully, each word falling like a disc you cut, not a Hubble bubble of small, smooth coins such as girls use. And they move decidedly, as if they knew how long to stay and when to go. Oh, but Mr. Flanders was only gone to get a program. The dancers come right at the end, he said, coming back to them. And isn't it pleasant, Fanny went on thinking, how young men bring out lots of silver coins from their trouser pockets and look at them, instead of having just so many in a purse. Then there she was herself, whirling across the stage in white flounces, and the music was the dance and fling of her own soul, and the whole machinery, rock and gear of the world, was spun smoothly into those swift eddies and falls, she felt, as she stood rigid, leaning over the barrier two feet from Jacob Flanders. Her screwed-up black glove dropped to the floor. When Jacob gave it her, she started angrily, for never was there a more irrational passion, and Jacob was afraid of her for a moment, so violent, so dangerous is it when young women stand rigid, grasp the barrier, fall in love. It was the middle of February. The roofs of Hamstead Garden suburb lay in a tremulous haze. It was too hot to walk. A dog barked, barked, barked down in the hollow. The liquid shadows went over the plain. The body, after long illness, is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it. The tears well and fall, as the dog barks in the hollow. The children skim after hoops. The country darkens and brightens, beyond a veil, it seems. Ah! But draw the veil thicker, lest I faint with sweetness, fanny Elmer side, as she sat on a bench in Judges Walk, looking at Hamstead Garden suburb. But the dog went on barking. The motor-cars hooted on the road. She heard a faraway rush and humming. Agitation was at her heart. Up she got and walked. The grass was freshly green, the sun hot. All round the pond children were stooping to launch little boats, or were drawn back screaming by their nurses. At midday young women walk out into the air. All the men are busy in the town. They stand by the edge of the blue pond. The fresh wind scatters the children's voices all about. My children, thought Fanny Elmer. The women stand round the pond, beating off great, prancing, shaggy dogs. Gently, the baby is rocked in the perambulator.  They gently nod, instead of answering, when the little boys tug at their skirts, begging them to move on. Fanny moved, hearing some cry, a workman's whistle, perhaps, high in mid-air. Now among the trees it was the thrush thrilling out into the warm air, a flutter of jubilation. But fear seemed to spur him, Fanny thought, as if he too were anxious with such joy at his heart, as if he were watched as he sang, and pressed by tumult to sing. There! Restless he flew to the next tree. She heard his song more faintly. Beyond it was the humming of the wheels and the wind rushing. She spent ten pence on lunch. Dear Miss, she's left her umbrella, grumbled the modelled woman in the glass box near the door at the Express Dairy Company's shop. Perhaps I'll catch her, answered Millie Edwards, the waitress with the pale plates of hair, and she dashed through the door. No good, she said, coming back a moment later with Fanny's cheap umbrella. She put her hand to her plates. Oh, that door, grumbled the cashier! Her hands were cased in black mittens, and the finger chips that drew in the paper slips were swollen as sausages. Pie and greens for one, large coffee and crumpets, eggs on toast, two fruit-cakes. Thus the sharp voices of the waitresses snapped. The luncheers heard their orders repeated with approval, saw the next table served with anticipation. Their own eggs on toast were at last delivered. Their eyes strayed no more. Damp cubes of pastry fell into mouths, opened like triangular bags. Nelly Jenkinson, the typist, crumbled her cake indifferently enough. Every time the door opened she looked up. What did she expect to see? The cold merchant read the telegraph without stopping. Just the saucer, and feeling abstractedly, put the cup down on the tablecloth. Did you ever hear the like of that for impertence? Mrs. Parsons wound up brushing the crumbs from her furs. Hot milk and scone for one, pot of tea, rollin' butter, cried the waitresses. The door opened and shut. Such is the life of the elderly. It is curious, lying in a boat, to watch the waves. There are three coming regularly, one after another, all much of a size. Then hurrying after them comes a fourth, very large and menacing. It lifts the boat, on it goes, somehow merges without accomplishing anything, flattens itself out with the rest. What can be more violent than the fling of a boughs and a gale, the tree yielding itself all up the trunk to the very tip of the branch, streaming and shuddering the way the wind blows, yet never flying and dishevelment away. The corn squirms and abases itself, as if preparing to tug itself free from the roots, and yet is tied down. Why from the very windows even in the dusk you see a swelling run through the street and aspiration, as with arms outstretched, eyes desiring, mouths agape, and then we peaceably subside. For if the exultation lasted, we should be blown like foam into the air. The stars would shine through us. We should go down the gale in salt drops as sometimes happens, for the impetuous spirits will have none of this cradling. Never any swaying or aimlessly lawling for them. Never any making-believe, or lying cosily, or genially supposing that one is much like another. Firewarm, wine-pleasant, extravagance, a sin. People are so nice, won't you know them? I couldn't think ill of her, one must remember. But Nick, perhaps, or Fanny Elmer, believing implicitly in the truth of the moment, fling off, sting the cheek, are gone like sharp hail. Oh! said Fanny, bursting into the studio three-quarters of an hour late, because she had been hanging about the neighborhood of the Foundling Hospital, merely for the chance of seeing Jacob walk down the street, take out his latch-key, and open the door. I'm afraid I'm late. Upon which Nick said nothing, and Fanny grew defiant. I'll never come again, she cried at length. Don't, then, Nick replied, and off she ran, without so much as good-night. How exquisite it was, that dress in Evelina's shop off Shaftesbury Avenue. It was four o'clock on a fine day early in April, and was Fanny the one to spend four o'clock on a fine day indoors? Other girls in that very street sat over ledgers, or drew long threads virally between silk and gauze, or festooned with ribbons in swan and edgars, rapidly added up pence and farthings on the back of the bill, and twisted the yard in three-quarters in tissue paper and asked, Your pleasure, of the next comer. In Evelina's shop off Shaftesbury Avenue, the parts of a woman were shown separate. In the left hand was her skirt, twining round a pole in the middle was a feather boa. Ranged like the heads of malifactors on Temple Bar were hats, emerald and white, lightly wreathed or drooping beneath deep-dyed feathers, and on the carpet were her feet, pointed gold or patent leather slashed with scarlet. Feasted upon by the eyes of women the clothes by four o'clock were fly-blown like sugar-cakes in a baker's window. Fanny eyed them, too. But coming along Gerard Street was a tall man in a shabby coat. A shadow fell across Evelina's window, Jacob's shadow, though it was not Jacob, and Fanny turned and walked along Gerard Street and wished that she had read books. Nick never read books, never talked of Ireland or the House of Lords, and asked for his fingernails. She would learn Latin and read Virgil. She had been a great reader. She had read Scott. She had read Dumas. At the Slade no one read. But no one knew Fanny at the Slade, or guessed how empty it seemed to her. The passion for earrings, for dances, for tongs and steer, when it was only the French who could paint, Jacob said, for the moderns were futile, painting the least respectable of the arts. And why read anything but Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jacob said, fielding, if you must read novels. Fielding, said Fanny, when the man in Charing Cross Road asked her what book she wanted. She bought Tom Jones. At ten o'clock in the morning, in a room which she shared with a schoolteacher, Fanny Elmer read Tom Jones, that mystic book. For this dull stuff, Fanny thought, about people with odd names, is what Jacob likes. Good people like it. Many women who don't mind how they cross their legs read Tom Jones, a mystic book. For there is something, Fanny thought, about books which if I had been educated I could have liked. Much better than earrings and flowers, she sighed, thinking of the corridors at the Slade and the fancy dress dance next week. She had nothing to wear. They are real, thought Fanny Elmer, setting her feet on the mantelpiece. Some people are.  And women never. Except Miss Sargent. But she went off at lunchtime and gave herself airs. There they sat quietly of a night reading, she thought, not going to music halls, not looking in at shop windows, not wearing each other's clothes, like Robertson who had worn her shawl, and she had worn his waistcoat, which Jacob could do only very awkwardly, for he liked Tom Jones. There it lay on her lap in double columns, price three and sixpence, the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet. In perfect prose, Jacob said. For he never read modern novels. He liked Tom Jones. I do like Tom Jones, said Fanny, at five-thirty that same day early in April, when Jacob took out his pipe in the armchair opposite. Alas, women lie. But not Clara Durant, a flawless mind, a candid nature, a virgin chained to a rock somewhere off-lounder square, eternally pouring out tea for old men in white wskets, blue-eyed, looking you straight in the face, playing Bach. Of all women, Jacob honored her most. But to sit at a table with bread and butter, with dowagers and velvet, and never say more to Clara Durant than Benson said to the parrot, when old Miss Perry poured out tea, was an insufferable outrage upon the liberties and decencies of human nature, or words to that effect, for Jacob said nothing. Only he glanced at the fire. Fanny laid down Tom Jones. She stitched or knitted. What's that? asked Jacob. For the dance at the Slade. And she fetched her head-dress, her trousers, her shoes with red tassels. What should she wear? I shall be in Paris, said Jacob. And what is the point of fancy dress dances, thought Fanny? You meet the same people. You wear the same clothes. Mangan gets drunk. Florenda sits on his knee. She flirts outrageously with Nick Bromham just now. In Paris, said Fanny, on my way to Greece, he replied. For he said there is nothing so detestable as London in May. He would forget her. A sparrow flew past the window trailing a straw, a straw from a stack stood by a barn in a farmyard. The old brown spaniel snuffs at the base for a rat. Already the upper branches of the elm trees are blotted with nests. The chestnuts have flirted their fans, and the butterflies are flaunting across the rides in the forest. Perhaps the Purple Emperor is feasting, as Morris says, upon a mass of putrid carrion at the base of an oak tree. Fanny thought it all came from Tom Jones. He could go alone with a book in his pocket and watch the badgers. He would take a train at eight-thirty and walk all night. He saw fireflies and brought back glow-worms and pill-boxes. He would hunt with the new forest stag hounds. It all came from Tom Jones, and he would go to Greece with a book in his pocket and forget her. She fetched her hand-glass. There was her face. And suppose one reads Jacob in a turban. There was his face. She lit the lamp, but as the daylight came through the window only half was lit up by the lamp. And though he looked terrible and magnificent, and would chuck the forest, he said, and come to the Slade and be a Turkish knight or a Roman emperor, and he let her blacken his lips and clenched his teeth and scowled in the glass. Still there lay Tom Jones. CHAPTER XI. Here, said Mrs. Flanders, with that tenderness which mothers so often display towards their eldest sons, will be a Gibraltar tomorrow. The post for which she was waiting, strolling up Dodds Hill while the random church bells swung a hymn tune about her head, the clock striking forth straight through the circling notes, the glass purpling under a storm cloud, and the two dozen houses of the village cowering, infinitely humble, in company under a leaf of shadow. The post, with all its variety of messages, envelopes addressed in bold hands, in slanting hands, stamped now with English stamps, again with colonial stamps, or sometimes hastily dabbled with the yellow bar, the post was about to scatter a myriad of messages over the world. Whether we gain or not by this habit of profuse communication is not for us to say, but that letter writing is practiced mendaciously nowadays, particularly by young men travelling in foreign parts. It seems likely enough. For example, take this scene. Here was Jacob Flanders gone abroad and staying to break his journey in Paris. Old Miss Burbeck, his mother's cousin, had died last June and left him a hundred pounds.  The little bald painter who was sitting at a marvell table, splashed with coffee and ringed with wine, talking very fast, and undoubtedly more than a little drunk. Well, Flanders, finished writing to your lady, said Crutenden, as Jacob came and took his seat beside them, holding in his hand an envelope addressed to Mrs. Flanders, near Scarborough, England. Do you uphold Velazquez, said Crutenden? My God, he does, said Malenson. He always gets like this, said Crutenden, near its ability. Jacob looked at Malenson with excessive composure. I'll tell you the three greatest things that were ever written in the whole of literature, Crutenden burst out. Hang there like fruit my soul, he began. Don't listen to a man who don't like Velazquez, said Malenson. Adolf, don't give Mr. Malenson any more wine, said Crutenden. Fair play, fair play, said Jacob judicially. Let a man get drunk if he likes. That's Shakespeare, Crutenden. I'm with you there. Shakespeare had more guts than all these damned frogs put together. Hang there like fruit my soul, he began quoting, at a musical rhetorical voice flourishing his wine glass.  Hang there like fruit my soul. Crutenden and Jacob both began again at the same moment, and both burst out laughing. Curse these flies, said Malenson, flicking at his bald head. What do they take me for? Something sweet smelling, said Crutenden.  The fellow has no manners, he explained to Malenson very politely.  Look here, I want grilled bone. What's the French for grilled bone? Grilled bone, Adolf. Now you juggins, don't you understand? And I'll tell you, Flanders, the second most beautiful thing in the whole of literature, said Crutenden, bringing his feet down onto the floor, and leaning right across the table so that his face almost touched Jacob's face. Hey, little diddle, the cat and the fiddle, Malenson interrupted, strumming his fingers on the table. The most exquisitely beautiful thing in the whole of literature.  Well, not a word of this was ever told to Mrs. Flanders, nor what happened when they paid the bill and left the restaurant and walked along the boulevard Raspai. Then here is another scrap of conversation, the time about 11 in the morning, the scene, a studio, and the day, Sunday. I tell you, Flanders, said Crutenden, I'd as soon have one of Malenson's little pictures as a chardin, and when I say that, he squeezed the tail of an emaciated tube. Chardin was a great swell. He sells them to pay his dinner now, but wait till the dealers get hold of him, a great swell, oh, a very great swell. It's an awfully pleasant life, said Jacob, messing away up here.  He wandered off across the room. There's this man, Pierre Loy now. He took up a book. Now my good sir, you're going to settle down, said Crutenden. That's a solid piece of work, said Jacob, standing a canvas on a chair. Oh, I did that ages ago, said Crutenden, looking over his shoulder. You're a pretty competent painter in my opinion, said Jacob after a time. Now if you'd like to see what I'm after at the present moment, said Crutenden, putting a canvas before Jacob, there, that's it. That's more like it. That's, he squirmed his thumb in a circle around the lamp globe painted white. A pretty solid piece of work, said Jacob, straddling his legs in front of it. But what I wish you'd explain, Miss Ginny Cars Lake, pale, freckled, morbid, came into the room. Oh, Ginny, here's a friend, Flanders, an Englishman, wealthy, highly connected. Go on, Flanders. Jacob said nothing. It's that, that's not right, said Ginny Cars Lake. No, said Crutenden decidedly, can't be done. He took the canvas off the chair and stood it on the floor with its back to them. Sit down, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Cars Lake comes from your part of the world, Flanders, from Devonshire. Oh, I thought you said Devonshire. Very well, she's a daughter of the church too. The black sheep of the family.  I say, have you one about you? It's generally Sundays they come. Sort of church bed effect, you know. Have you met all the painter men, said Ginny. Was Mannington drunk?  I say, Teddy. Half a gif, said Crutenden. What's the season of the year? He looked out of the window. We take a day off on Sundays, Flanders. Will he, said Ginny, looking at Jacob, you? Yes, he'll come with us, said Crutenden. And then here is Versailles. Ginny stood on the stone rim and lent over the pond, clasped by Crutenden's arms, or she would have fallen in. There, there, she cried, right up to the top. Some sluggish, sloping, shouldered fish had floated up from the depths to nip her crumbs. You look, she said, jumping down. And then the dazzling white water, rough and throttled, shot up into the air. The fountain spread itself. Through it came the sound of military music far away. All the water was puckered with drops. A blue air ball gently bumped the surface. Howl, the nurses and children and old men and young, crowded to the edge, lent over and waved their sticks. The little girl ran, stretching her arms towards her air ball, but it sank beneath the fountain. Edward Crutenden, Ginny Carslake, and Jacob Flanders walked in a row along the yellow gravel path, got onto the grass, so past under the trees, and came out at the summer house where Marie Antoinette used to drink chocolate. In went Edward and Ginny, but Jacob waited outside, sitting on the handle of his walking stick. Out they came again. Well, said Crutenden, smiling at Jacob, Ginny waited, Edward waited, and both looked at Jacob. Well, said Jacob, smiling and pressing both hands on his stick. Come along, he decided, and started off. The others followed him, smiling, and then they went to the little cafe in the by street where people sit drinking coffee, watching the soldiers, meditatively knocking ashes into trays. But he's quite different, said Ginny, folding her hands over the top of her glass. I don't suppose you know what Ted means when he says a thing like that, she said, looking at Jacob. But I do, sometimes I could kill myself. Sometimes he lies in bed all day long, just lies there. I don't want you right on the table. She waved her hands, swollen, iridescent pigeons were waddling around their feet. Look at that woman's hat, said Crutenden. How do they come to think of it? No, Flanders, I don't think I could live like you. When one walks down that street, opposite the British Museum, what's it called? That's what I mean, it's all like that.  Everybody feeds them, said Ginny, waving the pigeons away.  Well, I don't know, said Jacob, smoking his cigarette. There's St. Paul's. I mean going to an office, said Crutenden. Hang it all, Jacob expostulated. But you don't count, said Ginny, looking at Crutenden. You're mad, I mean you just think of painting. Yes, I know, I can't help it. I say, will King George give way about the piers? He'll trolly well have to, said Jacob. There, said Ginny, he really knows. You see, I would if I could, said Crutenden, but I simply can't. I think I could, said Ginny. Only it's all the people one dislikes who do it. At home, I mean. They talk of nothing else, even people like my mother. Now, if I came and lived here, said Jacob, what's my share, Crutenden? Oh, very well, have it your own way. Those silly birds, directly one wants them, they've flown away. And finally, under the arc lamps in the Garde's Invalide, with one of those queer movements which are so slight, yet so definite, which may wound or pass unnoticed, but generally inflict a good deal of discomfort, Ginny and Crutenden drew together. Jacob stood apart, they had to separate. Something must be said, nothing was said. A man wheeled a trolley past Jacob's legs so near that he almost grazed them. When Jacob recovered his balance, the other two were turning away, though Ginny looked over her shoulder, and Crutenden, waving his hand, disappeared like the very great genius that he was. No, Mrs. Flanders was told none of this, though Jacob felt, it is safe to say, that nothing in the world was of greater importance. And as for Crutenden and Ginny, he thought them the most remarkable people he had ever met, being, of course, unable to foresee how it fell out in the course of time that Crutenden took to painting orchards. Had, therefore, to live in Kent, and must, one would think, see through apple blossom by this time, since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with a novelist. But no, Crutenden still paints orchards savagely in solitude. Then Ginny Carslake, after her fairward Liffano, the American painter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her in pensions in Italy, cherishing a little jeweler's box containing ordinary pebbles picked off the road. But if you look at them steadily, she says, multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life, though it does not prevent her from following the macaroni as it goes round the table, and sometimes on spring nights, she makes the strangest confidences to shy young Englishmen. Jacob had nothing to hide from his mother. It was only that he could make no sense himself of his extraordinary excitement, and as for writing it down, Jacob's letters are so like him, said Mrs. Jarvis folding the sheet. Indeed, he seems to be having, said Miss Flanders, and paused for she was cutting out a dress and had to straighten the pattern.  At her back, the window was open, for it was a mild night, a calm night, when the moon seemed muffled and the apple trees stood perfectly still. I never pity the dead, said Mrs. Jarvis, shifting the cushion at her back and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did not hear, for her scissors made so much noise on the table. They are at rest, said Mrs. Jarvis, and we spend our days doing foolish, unnecessary things without knowing why. Mrs. Jarvis was not liked in the village. You never walk at this time of night? She asked Mrs. Flanders. It is certainly wonderfully mild, said Mrs. Flanders. Yes, it was years since she had opened the orchard gate and gone out on Dodds Hill after dinner.  I shan't go far, said Betty Flanders. Yes, Jacob will leave Paris on Wednesday. Jacob was always my friend of the three, said Mrs. Jarvis. Now my dear, I'm going no further, said Mrs. Flanders. They had climbed the dark hill and reached the Roman camp. The rampart rose at their feet, the smooth circle surrounding the camp or the grave, how many needles Betty Flanders had lost there and her garnet brooch. It is much clearer than this sometimes, said Mrs. Jarvis, standing upon the ridge. There were no clouds and yet there was a haze over the sea and over the moors. The lights of Scarborough flashed as if a woman wearing a diamond necklace turned her head this way and that. How quiet it is, said Mrs. Jarvis. Mrs. Flanders rubbed the turf with her toe, thinking of her garnet brooch. Mrs. Jarvis found it difficult to think of herself tonight. It was so calm, there was no wind, nothing racing, flying, escaping. Black shadows stood still over the silver moors. The furs bushes stood perfectly still. Neither did Mrs. Jarvis think of God. There was a church behind them, of course. The church clock struck 10. Did the strokes reach the furs bush or did the thorn tree hear them? Mrs. Flanders was stooping down to pick up a pebble. Sometimes people do find things, Mrs. Jarvis thought, and yet in this hazy moonlight it was impossible to see anything except bones and little pieces of chalk. Jake abhorred it with his own money, and then I brought Mr. Parker up to see the view, and it must have dropped, Mrs. Flanders murmured. Did the bones stir or the rusty swords? Was Mrs. Flanders' tuppany-hape-ny brooch forever part of the rich accumulation? And if all the ghosts flocked, thick and rubbed shoulders with Mrs. Flanders in the circle, would she not have seemed perfectly in her place? A live English matron growing stout? The clock struck the quarter. The frail waves of sound broke among the stiff course, and the hawthorn twigs, as the church clock divided time into quarters. Motionless and broad-backed, the moors received the statement, "'It is 15 minutes past the hour,' but made no answer, unless a bramble stirred. Yet even in this light, the legends on the tombstones could be read, brief voices saying, "'I am Bertha Ruck. I am Tom Gage.' And they say which day of the year they died, and the New Testament says something for them, very proud, very emphatic, or consoling. The moors accept all that too. The moonlight falls like a pale page upon the church wall, and illumines the kneeling family in the niche, and the tablet set up in 1780 to the square of the parish, who relieved the poor and believed in God. So the measured voice goes on down the marble scroll, as though it could impose itself upon time and the open air. Now a fox steals out from behind the gorse bushes. Often, even a few minutes later, the moors, who had left the house, have been left to the moon, and the little girl was left behind. The moon light falls like a pale page upon the church wall, and illumines the kneeling family in the niche, and the tablet set up in 1780 to the square of the parish, who relieved the poor and believed in God. So the measured voice goes on down the marble scroll, the gorse bushes. Often, even at night, the church seems full of people, the pews are worn and greasy, and the cassocks in place, and the hymn books on the ledges. It is a ship with all its crew aboard, the timbers strained to hold the dead and the living, the plowmen, the carpenters, the fox hunting gentlemen, and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join together in silibbing the sharp-cut words, which forever slice asunder time and the broad-backed moors, plaintened belief and elegy, despair and triumph, but for the most part good sense and jolly indifference go trampling out of the windows any time these five hundred years. Still, as Mrs Jarvis said, stepping out onto the moors, how quiet it is, quiet at midday, except when the hunt scatters across it, quiet in the afternoon, save for the drifting sheep, but at night the moor is perfectly quiet. A garnet brooch has dropped into its grass, a fox pad stealthily, a leaf turns on its edge, Mrs Jarvis, who is fifty years of age, reposes in the camp in the hazy moonlight, and, said Mrs Flanders, straightening her back, I never cared for Mr Parker. Neither did I, said Mrs Jarvis. They began to walk home, but their voices floated for a little above the camp. The moonlight destroyed nothing, the moor accepted everything. Tom Gage cries aloud so long as his tombstone endures. The Roman skeletons are in safe keeping. Betty Flanders' darning needles are safe too, and her garnet brooch, and sometimes at midday, in the sunshine, the moor seems to haunt these little treasures like a nurse, but at midnight, when no one speaks or gallops, and the thorn tree is perfectly still, it would be foolish to vex the moor with questions. What, and why? The church-clock, however, strikes twelve. End of CHAPTER XI. Reading by David Abbott.  The train ran out into a steep green meadow, and Jacob saw striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy. A motor-car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept up with the train, raising dust behind it. There were trees laced together with vines, as Virgil said. Here was a station, and a tremendous leaf-taking going on, with women and high yellow boots, and odd-pale boys in ringed socks. Virgil's bees had gone about the plains of Lombardi. It was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Then at Milan there were sharp-winged hawks of a bright brown, cutting figures over the roofs. These Italian carriages get damnably hot with the afternoon sun on them, and the chances are that before the engine has pulled to the top of the gorge, the clanking chain will have broken.  Every peak is covered with sharp trees, and amazing white villages are crowded on ledges. There is always a white tower on the very summit, flat, red-friiled roofs, and a sheer drop beneath. It is not a country in which one walks after tea. For one thing there is no grass. A whole hillside will be ruled with olive trees. Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust between them. And there are neither stiles nor footpaths, nor lanes checkered with the shadows of leaves, nor eighteenth-century ends with bow windows where one eats ham and eggs. Oh no! Italy is all fierceness, bareness, exposure, and black priests shuffling along the roads. It is strange, too, how you never get away from villas. Still to be travelling on one's own with a hundred pounds to spend is a fine affair. And if his money gave out, as it probably would, he would go on foot. He could live on bread and wine, the wine and straw bottles, for after doing Greece he was going to knock off Rome. The Roman civilization was a very inferior affair, no doubt. But Bonomy talked a lot of rot all the same. You ought to have been in Athens, he would say to Bonomy when he got back. Standing on the Parthenon, he would say. Or the ruins of the Colosseum suggest some fairly sublime reflections, which he would write out at length in letters. It might turn to an essay upon civilization, a comparison between the ancients and moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr. Asquith, something in the style of Gibbon. A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in, dusty, baggy, slung with gold chains, and Jacob, regretting that he did not come of the Latin race, looked out the window. It is a strange reflection that by travelling two days and nights you are in the heart of Italy. Accidental villas among olive trees appear, and men servants watering the cactuses. Black Victorias drive in between the pompous pillars with plaster shields stuck to them. It is at once momentary, and astonishingly intimate, to be displayed before the eyes of a foreigner. And there is a lonely hilltop where no one ever comes, and yet it is seen by me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an omnibus. And what I should like would be to get out among the fields, sit down and hear the grass-hoppers, and take up a handful of earth, Italian earth, as this is Italian dust upon my shoes. Jacob heard them crying strange names at railway stations through the night. The train stopped, and he heard frogs croaking close by, and he wrinkled back the blind cautiously, and saw a vast strange marsh all white in the moonlight. The carriage was thick with cigar smoke, which floated round the globe with the green shade on it. The Italian gentleman lay snoring with his boots off and his waistcoat unbuttoned. And all this business of going to Greece seemed to Jacob an intolerable weariness, sitting in hotels by oneself and looking at monuments. He'd have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durant. Oh! Jacob protested, as the darkness began breaking in front of him and the light showed through, but the man was reaching across him to get something.  So Jacob sat up and saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun walking down the road in the early morning light, and the whole idea of the Parthenon came upon him in a clap. By Jove, he thought, we must be nearly there!  It is highly exasperating that twenty-five people of your acquaintance should be able to say straight off something very much to the point about being in Greece, while for yourself there is a stopper upon all emotions whatsoever. For after washing at the hotel at Patras, Jacob had followed the tram lines a mile or so out, and followed them a mile or so back. He had met several droves of turkeys, several strings of donkeys, had got lost in back streets, had read advertisements of corsets and of Maggi's consomme, children had trodden on his toes, the place smelt of bad cheese, and he was glad to find himself suddenly come out opposite his hotel. There was an old copy of the Daily Mail lying among coffee cups, which he read. But what could he do after dinner? No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion. At the age of twelve or so, having given up dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much more probably Italy, and India almost for a certainly, draws the superfluous imagination. One's aunts have been to Rome, and everyone has an uncle who was last heard of, poor man, in Rangoon. He will never come back any more. But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth. Look at that forehead, they say. Nose, you see, straight as a dart. Curls, eyebrows, everything appropriate to manly beauty, while his legs and arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of development. The Greeks caring for the body as much as for the face. And the Greeks could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it. First you read Xenophon, then Euripides. One day, that was an occasion by God, what people have said appears to have sense in it. The Greek spirit. The Greek this, that, and the other. Though it is absurd, by the way, to say that any Greek comes near Shakespeare. The point is, however, that we have been brought up in an illusion. Jacob no doubt thought something in this fashion the daily mail crumpled in his hand, his legs extended, the very picture of boredom. But it's the way we're brought up, he went on. And it all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done about it. And from being moderately depressed, he became like a man about to be executed. Clara Durant had left him at a party to talk with an American called Pilchard. And he had come all the way to Greece and left her. They wore evening dresses and talked nonsense. What damned nonsense! And he put out his hand for the Globetrotter, an international magazine which is supplied free of charge to the proprietors of hotels. In spite of its ramshackle condition, modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel's sitting-room, the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang, imperiously, to get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge beneath the windows. The whole of civilization was being condemned. The waiter was quite indifferent to that, too. Aristotle, a dirty man carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest, now occupying the only armchair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down, put something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there. I shall want to be called early to-morrow, said Jacob over his shoulder. I am going to Olympia. This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention. Perhaps, as Crutondon said, we do not believe enough. Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish, so have we, for the matter of that thought Jacob, crumpling the daily mail in his hand? He would go into Parliament and make fine speeches. But what use are fine speeches in Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters? Indeed, there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins, of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability, and evening parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Grey's Inn, something solid, immovable and grotesque, is at the back of it, Jacob thought, probable. But then there was the British Empire which was beginning to puzzle him. Nor was he altogether in favor of giving home rule to Ireland. What did the daily mail have to say about that? For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things. As indeed the chambermaid emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys, studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids, strewn on the dressing-table, was aware. That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florenda knew, as she knew everything, by instinct. And Betty Flanders even now suspected it, as she read his letter posted at Milan. Telling me, she complained to Mrs. Jarvis, really nothing that I want to know. But she brooded over it. Fanny Elmer felt it to desperation. For he would take his stick in his hat and would walk to the window and look perfectly absent-minded and very stern, too, she thought. I am going, he would say, to catch a meal of Bonomy. Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Timbs, Fanny cried, as she hurried past the Foundling Hospital. But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted, Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed so profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him at any moment, which was odd in a man who enjoyed things so, was not much given to analysis, but was horribly romantic, of course, Bonomy thought, in his rooms in Lincoln's Inn. He will fall in love, thought Bonomy, some Greek woman with a straight nose. It was to Bonomy that Jacob wrote from Patras to Bonomy who couldn't love a woman, and never read a foolish book. There are very few good books, after all, for we can't count profuse histories, travels in mule-carts to discover the sources of the Nile or the volubility of fiction. I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge, though armies cross them. I like words to be hard, such were Bonomy's views. And they want him the hostility of those whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up the window and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can't forbear a shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature. That was not Bonomy's way at all. That his taste in literature affected his friendships, and made him silent, secretive, fastidious, and only quieted his ease with one or two young men of his own way of thinking was the charge against him. But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking. Far from it, Bonomy sighed. Laying the thin sheets of note-paper on the table, he layed the thin sheets of note-paper on the table, and falling into thought about Jacob's character, not for the first time. The trouble was this romantic vein in him. But mixed with the stupidity which leads him into these absurd predicaments, thought Bonomy, there is something, something, he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob than of anyone in the world. Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There he saw three Greeks in kilts, the masts of ships, idle or busy people of the lower classes, strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him was not the cause of his gloom, but some more profound conviction. It was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are. Yet next day as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia, the Greek peasant women were out among the vines. The old Greek men were sitting at the stations, sipping sweet wine. And though Jacob remained gloomy, he had never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be alone, out of England, on one's own, cut off from the whole thing. There are very sharp bare hills on the way to Olympia. And between them blew sea in triangular spaces. A little like the Cornish Coast. Well, now, to go walking by oneself all day, to get onto that track and follow it up between the bushes, or are they small trees, to the top of that mountain from which one can see half the nations of antiquity. Yes, said Jacob, for his carriage was empty. Let's look at the map. Blame it, or praise it. There is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately, fall on the sand tired out, to feel the earth spin, to have positively a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang. There is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often. The evening air slightly moved the dirty curtains in the hotel window at Olympia. I am full of love for everyone, thought Mrs. Wentworth Williams, for the poor most of all, for the peasants coming back in the evening with their burdens, and everything is soft and vague and very sad. It is sad. It is sad. But everything has meaning, thought Sandra Wentworth Williams, raising her head a little and looking very beautiful, tragic, and exalted. One must love everything. She held in her hand a little book convenient for traveling, stories by Chekhov, as she stood veiled in white in the window of the hotel at Olympia. How beautiful the evening was, and her beauty was its beauty. The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high souls, the inevitable compromise. She seemed to have grasped something. She would write it down. And moving to the table where her husband sat reading, she leaned her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it down. Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish, when he shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup which were being placed before them. Only his brooding blood-hound eyes, and his heavy, sallow cheeks, expressed his melancholy tolerance. His conviction that though forced to live with circumspection and deliberation, he could never possibly achieve any of those objects which, as he knew, are the only ones worth pursuing. His consideration was flawless, his silence unbroken. Everything seems to mean so much, said Sandra. But with the sound of her own voice the spell was broken. She forgot the peasants. Only there remained with her a sense of her own beauty, and in front, luckily, there was a looking glass. I am very beautiful, she thought. She shifted her hat slightly. Her husband saw her looking in the glass, and agreed that beauty is important. It is an inheritance. One cannot ignore it. But it is a barrier. It is, in fact, rather a bore. So he drank his soup, and kept his eyes fixed upon the window. Quails, said Mrs. Wentworth-Williams languidly. And then goat, I suppose. And then? Caramel custard, presumably, said her husband, in the same cadence, with his toothpick out already. She laid her spoon upon her plate, and her soup was taken away half finished. Never did she do anything without dignity. For hers was the English type, which is so Greek, save that villagers have touched their hats to it. The vicarage reveres it. And upper gardeners, and under gardeners respectfully straighten their backs, as she comes down the broad terrace on Sunday morning, dallying at the stone urns with the Prime Minister to pick a rose. Which perhaps she was trying to forget, as her eye wandered round the dining-room of the inn at Olympia, seeking the window where her book lay, where a few minutes ago she had discovered something, something very profound it had been. About love, and sadness, and the peasants. But it was Evan who sighed, not in despair, nor indeed in rebellion. But being the most ambitious of men, and temperamentally the most sluggish, he had accomplished nothing, had the political history of England at his finger ends, and living much in company with Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and Charles James Fox could not help contrasting himself and his age with them and theirs. Yet there never was a time when great men are more needed, he was in the habit of saying to himself with a sigh. Here he was, picking his teeth in an inn at Olympia. He had done. But Sandra's eyes wandered. Those pink melons are sure to be dangerous, he said gloomily, and as he spoke the door opened, an inn came a young man in a gray Czech suit. Beautiful, but dangerous, said Sandra, immediately talking to her husband in the presence of a third person. Ah, an English boy on tour, she thought to herself. And Evan knew all that too. Yes, he knew all that, and he admired her. Very pleasant, he thought, to have affairs. But for himself, what with his height, Napoleon was five feet four, he remembered, his bulk, his inability to impose his own personality, and yet great men are needed more than ever now, he sighed. It was useless. He threw away his cigar, went up to Jacob, and asked him with a simple sort of sincerity which Jacob liked, whether he had come straight out from England. End of Chapter 12 Part 1 Chapter 12 Part 2 of Jacob's Room This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Herndon Bell. Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf Chapter 12 Part 2 How very English Sandra laughed when the waiter told them next morning that the young gentleman had left at five to climb the mountain. I'm sure he asked you for a bath, at which the waiter shook his head and said that he would ask the manager. You do not understand, laughed Sandra. Never mind. Stretched on the top of the mountain quite alone, Jacob enjoyed himself immensely. Probably he had never been so happy in the whole of his life. But at dinner that night Mr. Williams asked him whether he would like to see the paper. Then Mrs. Williams asked him, as they strolled on the terrace smoking, and how could he refuse that man's cigar, whether he'd seen the theatre by moonlight, whether he knew Everard Cherborn, whether he read Greek, and whether, Evan rose silently and went in, if he had to sacrifice one it would be the French literature or the Russian. And now, wrote Jacob in his letter to Bonomy, I shall have to read her cursed book. Her check-off, he meant, for she had lent it to him. Though the opinion is unpopular, it seems likely enough that Bear Places feels too thick with stones to be plowed, tossing sea meadows halfway between England and America suit us better than cities. There is something absolute in us which despises qualification. It is this which is teased and twisted in society. People come together in a room, so delighted, says somebody, to meet you. And that is a lie. And then I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older, for women are always, always, always talking about what one feels, and if they say, as one gets older, they mean you to reply with something quite off the point. Jacob sat himself down in the quarry where the Greeks had cut marble for the theatre. It is hot work walking up Greek hills at midday. The wild red cyclamen was out. He had seen the little tortoises hobbling from clump to clump. The air smelled strong and suddenly sweet, and the sun striking on jagged splinters of marble was very dazzling to the eyes. Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored, with an august kind of boredom, there he sat, smoking his pipe. Bonomy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made him uneasy when Jacob got into the doldrums, looked like a Margate fisherman out of a job, or a British admiral. You couldn't make him understand a thing when he was in a mood like that. One had better leave him alone. He was dull. He was apt to be grumpy. He was up very early, looking at the statues with his betaker. Sandra Wentworth Williams, ranging the world before breakfast in quest of adventure, or a point of view, all in white, not so very tall perhaps, but uncommonly upright. Sandra Williams got Jacob's head exactly on the level with the head of the Hermes of Praxitalies. The comparison was all in his favour. But before she could say a single word, he had gone out of the museum and left her. Still, a lady of fashion travels with more than one dress, and if white suits the morning hour, perhaps sandy yellow with purple spots on it, a black hat and a volume of ballsack suit the evening. Thus she was arranged on the terrace when Jacob came in. Very beautiful, she looked. With her hands folded she mused, seemed to listen to her husband, seemed to watch the peasants coming down with brushwood on their backs, seemed to notice how the hill changed from blue to black, seemed to discriminate between truth and falsehood, Jacob thought, and crossed his legs, suddenly observing the extreme shabbiness of his trousers. But he is very distinguished looking, Sandra decided, and Evan Williams, lying back in his chair with the paper on his knees, envied them. The best thing he could do would be to publish with Macmillan's, his monograph upon the foreign policy of Chatham. But Conn found, as chewing, queasy feeling, this restlessness, swelling and heat, it was jealousy, jealousy, jealousy, which he had sworn never to feel again. Come with us to Corinth, Flanders. He said with more than his usual energy stopping by Jacob's chair. He was relieved by Jacob's reply, or rather by the solid, direct, if shy manner, in which he said that he would like very much to come with him to Corinth. Here is a fellow, thought Evan Williams, who might do very well in politics. I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live, Jacob wrote to Bonomy. It is the only chance I can see of protecting myself from civilization. Goodness knows what he means by that, Bonomy sighed, for as he never said a clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob's made him feel apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the definite, the concrete, and the rational. Nothing could be much simpler than what Sandra said as she descended the Acre Corinth, keeping to the little path while Jacob strode over rougher ground by her side. She had been left motherless at the age of four, and the park was vast. One never seemed able to get out of it, she laughed. Of course there was the library, and dear Mr. Jones, and notions about things. I used to stray into the kitchen and sit upon the butler's knees, she laughed, sadly though. Jacob thought that if he had been there he would have saved her, for she had been exposed to great dangers, he felt, and he thought to himself, people wouldn't understand a woman talking as she talks. She made little of the roughness of the hill, and wore breeches, he saw, under her short skirts. Women, like Fanny Elmer, don't, he thought. What's her name? Cars Lake, didn't. Yet they pretend. Mrs. Williams said things straight out. He was surprised by his own knowledge of the rules of behaviour, how much more can be said than one thought, how open one can be with a woman, and how little he had known himself before. Evan joined them on the road, and as they drove along, uphill and downhill, for Greece is in a state of effervescence, yet astonishingly clean cut, a treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades, each hill cut and shaped and outlined as often as not against sparkling deep blue waters, islands white as sand floating on the horizon, occasional groves of palm trees standing in the valleys, which are scattered with black goats, spotted with little olive trees, and sometimes have white hollows raided and crisscrossed in their flanks. As they drove uphill and down, he scowled in the corner of the carriage, with his paw so tightly closed that the skin was stretched between the knuckles, and the little hairs stood upright. Sandra rode opposite, dominant, like a victory prepared to fling into the air. Heartless, thought Evan, which was untrue. Brainless, he suspected, and that was not true either. Still, he envied her. When bedtime came, the difficulty was to write to Bonomy, Jacob found. Yet he had seen Salamis and Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonomy. No, there was something queer about it. He could not write to Bonomy. I shall go to Athens all the same, he resolved, looking very set, with this hook dragging in his side. The Williamses had already been to Athens. Athens is still quite capable of striking a young man as the oddest combination, the most incongruous assortment. Now it is suburban. Now immortal. Now cheap continental jewelry is laid upon plush trays. Now the stately woman stands naked, safe for a wave of drapery above the knee. No form can he set on his sensations, as he strolls one blazing afternoon along the Parisian boulevard, and skips out of the way of the royal landow, which looking indescribably ramshackle, rattles along the pitted roadway, saluted by citizens of both sexes, cheaply dressed in bowler hats and continental costumes. Though a shepherd in kilt, cap and gators, very nearly drives his herd of goats between the royal wheels. And all the time the acropolis surges into the air, raises itself above the town like a large immobile wave with the yellow columns of the Parthenon firmly planted upon it. The yellow columns of the Parthenon are to be seen at all hours of the day firmly planted upon the acropolis. Though at sunset, when the ships in the Piraeus fire their guns, a bell rings, a man in uniform, the wesket unbuttoned, appears. And the women roll up the black stockings which they are knitting in the shadow of the columns, call to the children, and troop off down the hill back to their houses. There they are again, the pillars, the pediment, the temple of victory, and the Eric Theum, set on a tawny rock cleft with shadows, directly you unlatch your shutters in the morning, and leaning out, hear the clatter, the clamor, the whip-cracking in the street below. There they are. The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficiently humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud, memories, abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions. The Parthenon is separate from all that. And if you consider how it has stood out all night for centuries, you begin to connect the blaze. At midday the glare is dazzling and the freeze almost invisible, with the idea that perhaps it is beauty alone that is immortal. Added to this, compared with the blistered stucco, the new love songs rasp out to the strum of guitar and gramophone, and the mobile yet insignificant faces of the street, the Parthenon is really astonishing in its silent composure, which is so vigorous that far from being decayed, the Parthenon appears, on the contrary, likely to outlast the entire world. And the Greeks, like sensible men, never bothered to finish the backs of their statues, said Jacob, shading his eyes and observing that the side of the figure which is turned away from view is left in the rough. He noted the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which the artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy he read in his guidebook. He stood on the exact spot where the great statue of Athena used to stand and identified the more famous landmarks of the scene beneath. In short, he was accurate and diligent, but profoundly morose. Moreover, he was pestered by guides. This was on Monday. But on Wednesday he wrote a telegram to Bonomy telling him to come at once, and then he crumpled it in his hand and threw it in the gutter. For one thing he wouldn't come, he thought.  This sort of thing, being that uneasy, painful feeling, something like selfishness, one wishes almost that the thing would stop. It is getting more and more beyond what is possible. If it goes on much longer, I shan't be able to cope with it. But if someone else were seeing it at the same time, Bonomy is stuffed in his room and linkens in. Oh, I say. Damn it all, I say. The sight of Hymetis, Pentelicus, Lycobetis, on one side, and the sea on the other as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky pink feathered, the plain all colors, the marble tawny in one's eyes, is thus oppressive. Luckily Jacob had little sense of personal association. He seldom thought of Plato or Socrates in the flesh. On the other hand, his feeling for architecture was very strong. He preferred statues to pictures, and he was beginning to think a great deal about the problems of civilization, which were solved, of course, so very remarkably by the ancient Greeks, though their solution is no help to us. Then the hook gave a great tug in his side as he lay in bed on Wednesday night, and he turned over with a desperate sort of tumble, remembering Sandra Wentworth Williams with whom he was in love. Next day he climbed Pentelicus. The day after he went to the Acropolis. The hour was early, the place almost deserted, and possibly there was thunder in the air, but the sun struck full upon the Acropolis. Jacob's intention was to sit down and read, and finding a drum of marble conveniently placed from which Marathon could be seen, and yet it was in the shade while the Eric Theum blazed white in front of him. There he sat. And after reading a page he put his thumb in his book. Why not rule countries in the way they should be ruled? And he read again. No doubt his position there overlooking Marathon somehow raised his spirits, or it may have been that a slow capacious brain has these moments of flowering, or he had, insensibly while he was abroad, got into the way of thinking about politics. And then looking up and seeing the sharp outline, his meditations were given an extraordinary edge. Greece was over. The Parthenon in ruins. Yet there he was. Ladies with green and white umbrellas passed through the courtyard, French ladies on their way to join their husbands in Constantinople. Jacob read on again, and laying the book on the ground he began, as if inspired by what he had read, to write a note upon the importance of history, upon democracy, one of those scribbles upon which the work of a lifetime may be based. Or again, it falls out of a book twenty years later and one can't remember a word of it. It is a little painful. It had better be burnt. Jacob wrote, began to draw a straight nose, when all the French ladies opening and shutting their umbrellas just beneath him, exclaimed, looking at the sky, that one did not know what to expect, rain or fine weather. Jacob got up and strolled across to the Erychtheum. There are still several women standing there holding the roof on their heads. Jacob straightened himself slightly, for stability and balance affect the body first. These statues indulged things so. He stared at them, then turned, and there was Madame Lucien Grave perched on a block of marble with her Kodak pointed at his head. Of course she jumped down, in spite of her age, her figure and her tight boots, having, now that her daughter was married, lapsed with a luxurious abandonment, grand enough in its way, into the fleshy grotesque. She jumped down, but not before Jacob had seen her.  How they spoil things, he murmured, leaning against one of the pillars pressing his book tight between his arm and his side. As for the weather, no doubt the storm would break soon, Athens was under cloud. It is those damned women, said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness, but rather with sadness and disappointment, that what might have been should never be. This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become fathers of families and directors of banks. Then, making sure that the French women had gone and looking cautiously round him, Jacob strolled over to the Eric Theum and looked rather furtively at the goddess on the left-hand side holding the roof on her head. He reminded him of Sandra Wentworth Williams. He looked at her, then looked away. He looked at her, then looked away. He was extraordinarily moved, and with a battered Greek nose in his head, with Sandra in his head, with all sorts of things in his head, off he started to walk right up to the top of Mount Imedus alone in the heat. That very afternoon Bonomy went expressly to talk about Jacob's to tea with Clara Durant in the square behind Sloan Street, where, on hot spring days, there are striped blinds over the front windows, single horses pawing the macadam outside the doors, and elderly gentlemen in yellow wskets ringing bells and stepping in very politely when the maid humorally replies that Mrs. Durant is at home. Bonomy sat with Clara in the sunny front room with a barrel organ piping sweetly outside. The water cart going slowly along, spraying the pavement, the carriages jingling, and all the silver and chints, brown and blue rugs and vases filled with green bowels striped with trembling yellow bars. The insipidity of what was said needs no illustration. Bonomy kept on gently returning quiet answers and accumulating amazement at an existence squeezed and emasculated within a white satin shoe. Mrs. Durant, meanwhile, enunciated strident politics with Sir Somebody in the back room, until the virginity of Clara's soul appeared to him candid, the depths unknown, and he would have brought out Jacob's name had he not begun to feel positively certain that Clara loved him and could do nothing whatever. Nothing whatever, he exclaimed, as the door shut, and for a man of his temperament got a very queer feeling as he walked through the park of carriages irresistibly driven, of flowerbeds uncompromisingly geometrical, a force rushing round geometrical patterns in the most senseless way in the world. With Clara, he thought, pausing to watch the boys bathing in the serpentine, the silent woman, would Jacob marry her? But in Athens in the sunshine, in Athens where it is almost impossible to get afternoon tea, and elderly gentlemen who talk politics talk them all the other way round, in Athens, sat Sandra Wentworth Williams, veiled in white. Her legs stretched in front of her, one elbow on the arm of the bamboo chair, blue clouds wavering and drifting from her cigarette. The orange trees which flourished in the square of the Constitution, the band, the dragging of feet, the sky, the houses, lemon and rose colored, all this became so significant to Mrs. Wentworth Williams, after her second cup of coffee, that she began dramatizing the story of the noble and impulsive English woman who had offered a seat in her carriage to the old American lady at Mycenae, Mrs. Dugan. Not altogether a false story, though it said nothing of Evan, standing first on one foot, then on the other, waiting for the women to stop chattering. I am putting the life of Father Damien into reverse, Mrs. Dugan had said. She had lost everything, everything in the world, husband and child and everything, but faith remained. Sandra, floating from the particular to the universal, lay back in a trance. The flight of time which hurries us so tragically along, the eternal drudge and drone now bursting into fiery flame like those brief balls of yellow among green leaves, she was looking at orange trees, kisses on lips that are to die, the world turning, turning in mazes of heat and sound, though to be sure there is the quiet evening with its lovely power. For I am sensitive to every side of it, Sandra thought, and Mrs. Dugan will write to me for ever, and I shall answer her letters. Now the royal band marching by with the national flag stirred wider rings of emotion, and life became something that the courageous mount and ride out to see on, the hair blown back, so she envisioned it, and the breeze stirred slightly among the orange trees, and she herself was emerging from silver spray, when she saw Jacob. He was standing in the square with a book under his arm, looking vacantly about him. That he was heavily built and might become stout in time was a fact.  There is that young man, she said, peevishly, throwing away her cigarette. That Mr. Flanders. Where, said Evan, I don't see him. Oh, walking away, behind the trees now. No, you can't see him. But we are sure to run into him, which, of course, they did. But how far was he a mere bumpkin?  It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done. Some, it is true, take ineffasible impressions of character at once, others dally, loiter, and get blown this way and that. Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say. But then Mrs. Whitehorn, Jacob's landlady, loathed cats. There is also the highly respectable opinion that character mongering is much overdone nowadays. After all, what does it matter that Fanny Elmer is all sentiment and sensation, and Mrs. Durant hard as iron? That Clara, owing, so the character monger said, largely to her mother's influence, never yet had the chance to do anything off her own bat, and only to very observant eyes display deeps of feeling which were positively alarming, and would certainly throw herself away upon someone unworthy of her one of these days, unless, so the character monger said, she had a spark of her mother's spirit in her, was somehow heroic. But what a term to apply to Clara Durant. Simple to a degree others thought her. And that is the very reason, so they said, why she attracts dichbonomy, the young man with a welling to nose. Now he's a dark horse, if you like. And there these gossips would suddenly pause. Obviously they meant to hint at his peculiar disposition, long rumored among them. But sometimes it is precisely a woman like Clara that men of that temperament need, Miss Julia Elliot would hint. Well, Mr. Bowley would reply, it may be so. For however long these gossips sit, and however they stuff out their victim's characters till they are swollen and tender as the livers of geese exposed to a hot fire, they never come to a decision. That young man, Jacob Flanders, they would say, so distinguished looking, and yet so awkward. Then they would apply themselves to Jacob and vacillate eternally between the two extremes. He rode to Hounds after a fashion, for he hasn't a penny. Did you ever hear who his father was, asked Julia Elliot? His mother, they say, is somehow connected with the Rocksbuyers, replied Mr. Bowley. He doesn't overwork himself anyhow. His friends are very fond of him.  No, I didn't mean that. It's evidently the other way with Jacob. He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life. Oh, Mr. Bowley, said Mrs. Durant, sweeping down upon them in her imperious manner. You remember Mrs. Adams. Well, this is her niece. And Mr. Bowley, getting up, bowed politely, and fetched strawberries. So we are driven back to see what the other side means. The men in clubs and cabinets, when they say that character drawing is a frivolous fireside art, a matter of pins and needles, exquisite outlines enclosing vacancy, flourishes, and mere scrawls. End of Chapter 12 Part 2 Chapter 12 Part 3 of Jacob's Room This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Herndon Bell. Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf. Chapter 12 Part 3 The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their stations accurately apart. At a given signal all the guns are trained on a target, which, the master gunner counts the seconds, watching hand, at the sixth he looks up, flames into splinters. With equal nonchalance, a dozen young men in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths of the sea. And there, impassively, though with perfect mastery of machinery, suffocate uncomplainingly together. Like blocks of ten soldiers the army covers the cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops real slightly this way and that, and falls flat. Save, that through field-glasses, it can be seen that one or two pieces still agitate up and down, like fragments of broken matchstick. These actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancelories, and houses of business, are the strokes which oar the world forward, they say. And they are dealt by men as smoothly sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. But you will observe that far from being padded to rotundity, his face is stiff from force of will, and lean from the efforts of keeping it so. When his right arm rises, all the force in his veins flows straight from shoulder to fingertips, not an ounce is diverted into sudden impulses, sentimental regrets, wire-drawn distinctions. The buses punctually stop. It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unceasable force. They say that the novelists never catch it, that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we live by, this unceasable force. Where are the men? said old General Gibbons looking round the drawing-room, full as usual on Sunday afternoons of well-dressed people. Where are the guns? Mrs. Durant looked too. Clara, thinking that her mother wanted her, came in, then went out again. They were talking about Germany at the Durants, and Jacob, driven by this unceasable force, walked rapidly down Hermes Street and ran straight into the Williamses. Oh! cried Sandra, with a cordiality which she suddenly felt, and Evan added, What luck! The dinner which they gave him in the hotel, which looked on to the square of the Constitution, was excellent. Plated baskets contained fresh rolls, there was real butter, and the meat scarcely needed the disguise of innumerable little red and green vegetables glazed in sauce. It was strange, though. There were the little tables set out at intervals on the scarlet floor with the Greek king's monogram wrought in yellow. Sandra dined in her hat, veiled, as usual. Evan looked this way and that over his shoulder, imperturbable yet supple, and sometimes sighed. It was strange. For they were English people come together in Athens on a May evening. Jacob, helping himself to this and that, answered intelligently, yet with a ring in his voice. The Williamses were going to Constantinople early next morning, they said. Before you are up, said Sandra. They would leave Jacob alone then. Turning very slightly, Evan ordered something, a bottle of wine, from which he helped Jacob with a kind of solicitude, with a kind of paternal solicitude, if that were possible. To be left alone, that was good for a young fellow. Never was there a time when the country had more need of men. He sighed. And you have been to the Acropolis? asked Sandra. Yes, said Jacob. And they moved off to the window together, while Evan spoke to the head waiter about calling them early. It is astonishing, said Jacob, in a gruff voice. Sandra opened her eyes very slightly. Possibly her nostrils expanded a little too. At half past six then, said Evan coming towards them, looking as if he faced something in facing his wife and Jacob standing with their backs to the window. Sandra smiled at him. And as he went to the window and had nothing to say, she added, in broken half sentences, Well, but how lovely! Wouldn't it be? The Acropolis, Evan, or are you too tired? At that Evan looked at them, or since Jacob was staring ahead of him, at his wife, surly, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress, not that she would pity him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love for anything he could do cease its tortures. They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out onto the square of the Constitution. Evan is happier alone, said Sandra. We have been separated from the newspapers. Well, it is better that people should have what they want. You have seen all these wonderful things since we met. What impression! I think that you are changed. You want to go to the Acropolis, said Jacob. Up there, then. One will remember it all one's life, said Sandra. Yes, said Jacob. I wish you could have come in the daytime. This is more wonderful, said Sandra, waving her hand. Jacob looked vaguely. But you should see the Parthenon in the daytime, he said. You couldn't come to-morrow. It would be too early. You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself? There were some awful women this morning, said Jacob. Awful women, Sandra echoed. French women. But something very wonderful has happened, said Sandra. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour. That was all the time before her. Yes, he said. When one is your age, when one is young, what will you do? You will fall in love. Oh, yes. But don't be in too great a hurry. I am so much older. She was brushed off the pavement by parading men. Shall we go on, Jacob asked? Let us go on, she insisted. For she could not stop until she had told him, or heard him say, or was it some action on his part that she required? Far away on the horizon she discerned it and could not rest. You'd never get English people to sit out like this, he said. Never, no. When you get back to England you won't forget this. Or come with us to Constantinople, she cried suddenly. But then, Sandra sighed. You must go to Delphi, of course, she said. But, she asked herself, what do I want from him? Perhaps it is something that I have missed. You will get there about six in the evening, she said. You will see the Eagles. Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner, and yet composed. He was suffering, perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there was something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life. Perhaps if one strobe hard enough to reach the top of the hill, it need not come to him, this disillusionment from women in middle life. The hotel is awful, she said.  There is always that, she laughed. The people one meets are beastly, Jacob said. His excitement was clear enough. Right, and tell me about it, she said. And tell me what you feel and what you think. Tell me everything. The night was dark. The acropolis was a jagged mound. I should like to awfully, he said. When we get back to London we shall meet. Yes. I suppose they leave the gates open, he asked. We could climb them, she answered wildly. Obscuring the moon, and altogether darkening the acropolis, the clouds passed from east to west. The clouds solidified. The vapours thickened. The trailing veils stayed and accumulated. It was dark now over Athens, except for gauzy red streaks where the streets ran, and the front of the palace was cavernous from electric light. At sea the pier stood out, marked by separate dots, the waves being invisible, and promontories and islands were dark humps with a few lights. I'd love to bring my brother, if I may, Jacob murmured. And then, when your mother comes to London, said Sander, The mainland of Greece was dark, and somewhere off Ubia a cloud must have touched the waves and spattered them, the dolphins circling deeper and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the sea of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy. In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey the wind scours the sand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses standing stiff by the turbant tombstones of Muhamedin's, Creek and Bristle. Sandra's veils were swirled about her. I will give you my copy, said Jacob. Here, will you keep it? The book was the poems of Dunn. Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark. Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns, Paris, Constantinople, London, were black as strewn rocks. Waterways might be distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps in some southern wood, an old man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled. The sheep coughed, one flower bent slightly towards another. The English sky is softer, milkier than the eastern. Something gentle has passed into it from the grass-rounded hills, something damp.  But to return to Jacob and Sandra. They had vanished. There was the Acropolis, but had they reached it. The columns and the temple remain. The emotion of the living breaks fresh on them year after year. And of that what remains. As for reaching the Acropolis, who shall say that we ever do it, or that when Jacob woke next morning he found something hard and durable to keep forever? Still, he went with them to Constantinople. Sandra Wentworth Williams certainly woke to find a copy of Dunn's poems upon her dressing table. And the book would be stood on the shelf in the English country-house, Chris Allie Dugan's Life of Father Damian in verse would join it one of these days. There were ten or twelve little volumes already. Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and her eyes would brighten, but not at the print.  Or, for some time she was restless, she would pull out book after book, and swing across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. She had had her moments. Meanwhile the great clock on the landing ticked, and Sandra would hear time accumulating and ask herself, What for? What for? What for? What for? Sandra would say, putting the book back and strolling to the looking glass and pressing her hair. And Miss Edwards would be startled at dinner as she opened her mouth to admit roast mutton, by Sandra's sudden solicitude. Are you happy, Miss Edwards? A thing Sissy Edwards hadn't thought of for years. What for? What for? Jacob never asked himself any such questions, to judge by the way he laced his boots, shaved himself, to judge by the depth of his sleep that night, with the wind fidgeting at the shutters, and half a dozen mosquitoes singing in his ears. He was young, a man. And then Sandra was right when she judged him to be credulous as yet. At forty it might be a different matter. Already he had marked the things he liked and done, and they were savage enough. However, you might place beside them passages of the purest poetry in Shakespeare. But the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens, rolling it, one might suppose, with a sort of trampling energy of mood, which forbids too close an analysis of the feelings of any single person, or inspection of features. All faces, Greek, Levantine, Turkish, English, would have looked much the same in the darkness. At length the columns and the temples whiten, yellow, turn rows, and the pyramids and St. Peter's arise, and at last sluggish St. Paul's looms up. The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their interpretation of the day's meaning. Then, less melodiously, the centres of different sects issue a contankerous immigration. The steamers resounding like gigantic cuning forks state the old, old fact, how there is a sea coldly, greenly, swaying outside. But nowadays it is the thin voice of duty piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel that collects the largest multitudes, and night is nothing but a long drawn sigh between hammer strokes, a deep breath, you can hear it from an open window even in the heart of London. But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some craig above the multitudes, see things thus in skeleton outline bear a flesh. In Serbitten the skeleton is wrapped in flesh. The kettle never boils so well on a sunny morning, says Mrs. Grandage glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. Then the gray Persian cat stretches itself on the window-seat, and buffets a moth with soft round paws. And before breakfast is half over, they were late to-day, a baby is deposited in her lap, and she must guard the sugar-basin while Tom Grandage reads the golfing article in The Times, sips his coffee, wipes his moustaches, and is off to the office, where he is the greatest authority upon the foreign exchanges and march for promotion. The skeleton is well wrapped in flesh. Even this dark night when the wind rolls the darkness through Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square, it stirs, since it is summer time in the height of the season, plain trees spangled with electric light and curtains still preserving the room from the dawn. People still murmur over the last word set on the staircase or strain all through their dreams for the voice of the alarm clock. So when the wind roams through a forest, innumerable twigs stir, hives are brushed, insects sway on grass-blades, the spider runs rapidly up a crease in the bark, and the whole air is tremulous with breathing, elastic with filaments. Only here, in Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square, each insect carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of the forest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business, and honey is treasure of one sort and another, and the stir in the air is the indescribable agitation of life. But color returns, runs up the stalks of the grass, blows out into tulips and crocuses, solidly stripes the tree-trunks, and fills the gauze of the air and the grasses and pools. The Bank of England emerges, and the monument with its bristling head of golden hair, the dreahorses crossing London Bridge show gray and strawberry and iron-colored. There is a horror of wings as the suburban trains rush into the terminus, and the light mounts over the faces of all the tall-blind houses, slides through a chink, and paints the lustrous belly in crimson curtains, the green wine-glasses, the coffee-cups, and the chairs standing askew. Sunlight strikes in upon shaving-glasses, and gleaming brass cans, upon all the jolly trappings of the day, the bright, inquisitive, armored, resplendent summer's day, which has long since vanished chaos, which has dried the melancholy medieval mists, drained the swamp, and stood glass and stone upon it, and equipped our brains and bodies with such an armory of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs engaged in the conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant of armies drawn out in battle-ray upon the plain.