The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

First published in 1931.

This ebook edition was created and published by Global Grey on the 27th October
2021.
The artwork used for the cover is ‘On the Beach’
painted by Eugen Dücker.
This book can be found on the site here:
globalgreyebooks.com/waves-ebook.html
©Global Grey 2021
globalgreyebooks.com
 1

The Waves

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the
sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a
dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became
barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each
other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of
white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a
sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the
horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass
green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the
arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white,
green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her
lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green
surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars
from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one
incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it
to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay
rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm
that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible;
an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.
The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then
another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The
sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind
and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The
blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their
blank melody outside.
‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’
‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.’
‘I see a globe,’ said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some
hill.’
‘I see a crimson tassel,’ said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’
‘I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and
stamps, and stamps.’
‘Look at the spider’s web on the corner of the balcony,’ said Bernard. ‘It has beads of
water on it, drops of white light.’
‘The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears,’ said Susan.
‘A shadow falls on the path,’ said Louis, ‘like an elbow bent.’
 2

‘Islands of light are swimming on the grass,’ said Rhoda. ‘They have fallen through the
trees.’
‘The birds’ eyes are bright in the tunnels between the leaves,’ said Neville.
‘The stalks are covered with harsh, short hairs,’ said Jinny, ‘and drops of water have
stuck to them.’
‘A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,’ said Susan, ‘notched with blunt feet.’
‘The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him,’ said
Rhoda.
‘And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out on the grasses,’ said Louis.
‘Stones are cold to my feet,’ said Neville. ‘I feel each one, round or pointed, separately.’
‘The back of my hand burns,’ said Jinny, ‘but the palm is clammy and damp with dew.’
‘Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white tide,’ said Bernard.
‘Birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us,’ said Susan.
‘The beast stamps; the elephant with its foot chained; the great brute on the beach
stamps,’ said Louis.
‘Look at the house,’ said Jinny, ‘with all its windows white with blinds.’
‘Cold water begins to run from the scullery tap,’ said Rhoda, ‘over the mackerel in the
bowl.’
‘The walls are cracked with gold cracks,’ said Bernard, ‘and there are blue, finger-
shaped shadows of leaves beneath the windows.’
‘Now Mrs Constable pulls up her thick black stockings,’ said Susan.
‘When the smoke rises, sleep curls off the roof like a mist,’ said Louis.
‘The birds sang in chorus first,’ said Rhoda. ‘Now the scullery door is unbarred. Off they
fly. Off they fly like a fling of seed. But one sings by the bedroom window alone.’
‘Bubbles form on the floor of the saucepan,’ said Jinny. ‘Then they rise, quicker and
quicker, in a silver chain to the top.’
‘Now Billy scrapes the fish-scales with a jagged knife on to a wooden board,’ said
Neville.
‘The dining-room window is dark blue now,’ said Bernard, ‘and the air ripples above the
chimneys.’
‘A swallow is perched on the lightning-conductor,’ said Susan. ‘And Biddy has smacked
down the bucket on the kitchen flags.’
‘That is the first stroke of the church bell,’ said Louis. ‘Then the others follow; one, two;
one, two; one, two.’
‘Look at the table-cloth, flying white along the table,’ said Rhoda. ‘Now there are rounds
of white china, and silver streaks beside each plate.’
‘Suddenly a bee booms in my ear,’ said Neville. ‘It is here; it is past.’
‘I burn, I shiver,’ said Jinny, ‘out of this sun, into this shadow.’
 3

‘Now they have all gone,’ said Louis. ‘I am alone. They have gone into the house for
breakfast, and I am left standing by the wall among the flowers. It is very early, before
lessons. Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are
harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made
of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots
go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth,
through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of
the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. I am a boy
in grey flannels with a belt fastened by a brass snake up here. Down there my eyes are
the lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile. I see women passing with red
pitchers to the river; I see camels swaying and men in turbans. I hear tramplings,
tremblings, stirrings round me.
‘Up here Bernard, Neville, Jinny and Susan (but not Rhoda) skim the flower-beds with
their nets. They skim the butterflies from the nodding tops of the flowers. They brush
the surface of the world. Their nets are full of fluttering wings. “Louis! Louis! Louis!”
they shout. But they cannot see me. I am on the other side of the hedge. There are only
little eye-holes among the leaves. Oh Lord, let them pass. Lord, let them lay their
butterflies on a pocket- handkerchief on the gravel. Let them count out their tortoise-
shells, their red admirals and cabbage whites. But let me be unseen. I am green as a yew
tree in the shade of the hedge. My hair is made of leaves. I am rooted to the middle of
the earth. My body is a stalk. I press the stalk. A drop oozes from the hole at the mouth
and slowly, thickly, grows larger and larger. Now something pink passes the eyehole.
Now an eye-beam is slid through the chink. Its beam strikes me. I am a boy in a grey
flannel suit. She has found me. I am struck on the nape of the neck. She has kissed me.
All is shattered.’
‘I was running,’ said Jinny, ‘after breakfast. I saw leaves moving in a hole in the hedge. I
thought “That is a bird on its nest.” I parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a
nest. The leaves went on moving. I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and
Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What
moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you
green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. “Is he dead?” I
thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves,
which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them. Now I smell geraniums; I
smell earth mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie
quivering flung over you.’
‘Through the chink in the hedge,’ said Susan, ‘I saw her kiss him. I raised my head from
my flower-pot and looked through a chink in the hedge. I saw her kiss him. I saw them,
Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It
shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will
not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my
anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it
between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the
brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water
from ditches and die there.’
‘Susan has passed us,’ said Bernard. ‘She has passed the tool- house door with her
handkerchief screwed into a ball. She was not crying, but her eyes, which are so
beautiful, were narrow as cats’ eyes before they spring. I shall follow her, Neville. I shall
 4

go gently behind her, to be at hand, with my curiosity, to comfort her when she bursts
out in a rage and thinks, “I am alone.”
‘Now she walks across the field with a swing, nonchalantly, to deceive us. Then she
comes to the dip; she thinks she is unseen; she begins to run with her fists clenched in
front of her. Her nails meet in the ball of her pocket-handkerchief. She is making for the
beech woods out of the light. She spreads her arms as she comes to them and takes to
the shade like a swimmer. But she is blind after the light and trips and flings herself
down on the roots under the trees, where the light seems to pant in and out, in and out.
The branches heave up and down. There is agitation and trouble here. There is gloom.
The light is fitful. There is anguish here. The roots make a skeleton on the ground, with
dead leaves heaped in the angles. Susan has spread her anguish out. Her pocket-
handkerchief is laid on the roots of the beech trees and she sobs, sitting crumpled where
she has fallen.’
‘I saw her kiss him,’ said Susan. ‘I looked between the leaves and saw her. She danced in
flecked with diamonds light as dust. And I am squat, Bernard, I am short. I have eyes
that look close to the ground and see insects in the grass. The yellow warmth in my side
turned to stone when I saw Jinny kiss Louis. I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the
brown water where dead leaves have rotted.’
‘I saw you go,’ said Bernard. ‘As you passed the door of the tool- house I heard you cry “I
am unhappy.” I put down my knife. I was making boats out of firewood with Neville. And
my hair is untidy, because when Mrs Constable told me to brush it there was a fly in a
web, and I asked, “Shall I free the fly? Shall I let the fly be eaten?” So I am late always. My
hair is unbrushed and these chips of wood stick in it. When I heard you cry I followed
you, and saw you put down your handkerchief, screwed up, with its rage, with its hate,
knotted in it. But soon that will cease. Our bodies are close now. You hear me breathe.
You see the beetle too carrying off a leaf on its back. It runs this way, then that way, so
that even your desire while you watch the beetle, to possess one single thing (it is Louis
now) must waver, like the light in and out of the beech leaves; and then words, moving
darkly, in the depths of your mind will break up this knot of hardness, screwed in your
pocket-handkerchief.’
‘I love,’ said Susan, ‘and I hate. I desire one thing only. My eyes are hard. Jinny’s eyes
break into a thousand lights. Rhoda’s are like those pale flowers to which moths come in
the evening. Yours grow full and brim and never break. But I am already set on my
pursuit. I see insects in the grass. Though my mother still knits white socks for me and
hems pinafores and I am a child, I love and I hate.’
‘But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases.
We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’
‘I see the beetle,’ said Susan. ‘It is black, I see; it is green, I see; I am tied down with
single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and
words in phrases.’
‘Now,’ said Bernard, ‘let us explore. There is the white house lying among the trees. It
lies down there ever so far beneath us. We shall sink like swimmers just touching the
ground with the tips of their toes. We shall sink through the green air of the leaves,
Susan. We sink as we run. The waves close over us, the beech leaves meet above our
heads. There is the stable clock with its gilt hands shining. Those are the flats and
 5

heights of the roofs of the great house. There is the stable-boy clattering in the yard in
rubber boots. That is Elvedon.
‘Now we have fallen through the tree-tops to the earth. The air no longer rolls its long,
unhappy, purple waves over us. We touch earth; we tread ground. That is the close-
clipped hedge of the ladies’ garden. There they walk at noon, with scissors, clipping
roses. Now we are in the ringed wood with the wall round it. This is Elvedon. I have
seen signposts at the cross-roads with one arm pointing “To Elvedon”. No one has been
there. The ferns smell very strong, and there are red funguses growing beneath them.
Now we wake the sleeping daws who have never seen a human form; now we tread on
rotten oak apples, red with age and slippery. There is a ring of wall round this wood;
nobody comes here. Listen! That is the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is
the patter of some primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns.
‘Put your foot on this brick. Look over the wall. That is Elvedon. The lady sits between
the two long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms. We
are the first to come here. We are the discoverers of an unknown land. Do not stir; if the
gardeners saw us they would shoot us. We should be nailed like stoats to the stable
door. Look! Do not move. Grasp the ferns tight on the top of the wall.’
‘I see the lady writing. I see the gardeners sweeping,’ said Susan. ‘If we died here,
nobody would bury us.’
‘Run!’ said Bernard. ‘Run! The gardener with the black beard has seen us! We shall be
shot! We shall be shot like jays and pinned to the wall! We are in a hostile country. We
must escape to the beech wood. We must hide under the trees. I turned a twig as we
came. There is a secret path. Bend as low as you can. Follow without looking back. They
will think we are foxes. Run!
‘Now we are safe. Now we can stand upright again. Now we can stretch our arms in this
high canopy, in this vast wood. I hear nothing. That is only the murmur of the waves in
the air. That is a wood-pigeon breaking cover in the tops of the beech trees. The pigeon
beats the air; the pigeon beats the air with wooden wings.’
‘Now you trail away,’ said Susan, ‘making phrases. Now you mount like an air-ball’s
string, higher and higher through the layers of the leaves, out of reach. Now you lag.
Now you tug at my skirts, looking back, making phrases. You have escaped me. Here is
the garden. Here is the hedge. Here is Rhoda on the path rocking petals to and fro in her
brown basin.’
‘All my ships are white,’ said Rhoda. ‘I do not want red petals of hollyhocks or geranium.
I want white petals that float when I tip the basin up. I have a fleet now swimming from
shore to shore. I will drop a twig in as a raft for a drowning sailor. I will drop a stone in
and see bubbles rise from the depths of the sea. Neville has gone and Susan has gone;
Jinny is in the kitchen garden picking currants with Louis perhaps. I have a short time
alone, while Miss Hudson spreads our copy-books on the schoolroom table. I have a
short space of freedom. I have picked all the fallen petals and made them swim. I have
put raindrops in some. I will plant a lighthouse here, a head of Sweet Alice. And I will
now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some
will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my
ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green
chains. The waves rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have
 6

scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship, which mounts the wave and sweeps
before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and the creepers. ..’
‘Where is Bernard?’ said Neville. ‘He has my knife. We were in the tool-shed making
boats, and Susan came past the door. And Bernard dropped his boat and went after her
taking my knife, the sharp one that cuts the keel. He is like a dangling wire, a broken
bell-pull, always twangling. He is like the seaweed hung outside the window, damp now,
now dry. He leaves me in the lurch; he follows Susan; and if Susan cries he will take my
knife and tell her stories. The big blade is an emperor; the broken blade a Negro. I hate
dangling things; I hate dampish things. I hate wandering and mixing things together.
Now the bell rings and we shall be late. Now we must drop our toys. Now we must go in
together. The copy-books are laid out side by side on the green baize table.’
‘I will not conjugate the verb,’ said Louis, ‘until Bernard has said it. My father is a banker
in Brisbane and I speak with an Australian accent. I will wait and copy Bernard. He is
English. They are all English. Susan’s father is a clergyman. Rhoda has no father.
Bernard and Neville are the sons of gentlemen. Jinny lives with her grandmother in
London. Now they suck their pens. Now they twist their copy-books, and, looking
sideways at Miss Hudson, count the purple buttons on her bodice. Bernard has a chip in
his hair. Susan has a red look in her eyes. Both are flushed. But I am pale; I am neat, and
my knickerbockers are drawn together by a belt with a brass snake. I know the lesson
by heart. I know more than they will ever know. I knew my cases and my genders; I
could know everything in the world if I wished. But I do not wish to come to the top and
say my lesson. My roots are threaded, like fibres in a flower-pot, round and round about
the world. I do not wish to come to the top and live in the light of this great clock,
yellow-faced, which ticks and ticks. Jinny and Susan, Bernard and Neville bind
themselves into a thong with which to lash me. They laugh at my neatness, at my
Australian accent. I will now try to imitate Bernard softly lisping Latin.’
‘Those are white words,’ said Susan, ‘like stones one picks up by the seashore.’
‘They flick their tails right and left as I speak them,’ said Bernard. ‘They wag their tails;
they flick their tails; they move through the air in flocks, now this way, now that way,
moving all together, now dividing, now coming together.’
‘Those are yellow words, those are fiery words,’ said Jinny. ‘I should like a fiery dress, a
yellow dress, a fulvous dress to wear in the evening.’
‘Each tense,’ said Neville, ‘means differently. There is an order in this world; there are
distinctions, there are differences in this world, upon whose verge I step. For this is only
a beginning.’
‘Now Miss Hudson,’ said Rhoda, ‘has shut the book. Now the terror is beginning. Now
taking her lump of chalk she draws figures, six, seven, eight, and then a cross and then a
line on the blackboard. What is the answer? The others look; they look with
understanding. Louis writes; Susan writes; Neville writes; Jinny writes; even Bernard
has now begun to write. But I cannot write. I see only figures. The others are handing in
their answers, one by one. Now it is my turn. But I have no answer. The others are
allowed to go. They slam the door. Miss Hudson goes. I am left alone to find an answer.
The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone. The clock ticks. The two hands are
convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases.
The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other, painfully stumbles among
hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert. The kitchen door slams. Wild dogs bark
 7

far away. Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in
it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the
loop; which I now join — so — and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire, and I
am outside of it, crying, “Oh save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of
time!”’
‘There Rhoda sits staring at the blackboard,’ said Louis, ‘in the schoolroom, while we
ramble off, picking here a bit of thyme, pinching here a leaf of southernwood while
Bernard tells a story. Her shoulder-blades meet across her back like the wings of a small
butterfly. And as she stares at the chalk figures, her mind lodges in those white circles, it
steps through those white loops into emptiness, alone. They have no meaning for her.
She has no answer for them. She has no body as the others have. And I, who speak with
an Australian accent, whose father is a banker in Brisbane, do not fear her as I fear the
others.’
‘Let us now crawl,’ said Bernard, ‘under the canopy of the currant leaves, and tell
stories. Let us inhabit the underworld. Let us take possession of our secret territory,
which is lit by pendant currants like candelabra, shining red on one side, black on the
other. Here, Jinny, if we curl up close, we can sit under the canopy of the currant leaves
and watch the censers swing. This is our universe. The others pass down the carriage-
drive. The skirts of Miss Hudson and Miss Curry sweep by like candle extinguishers.
Those are Susan’s white socks. Those are Louis’ neat sand-shoes firmly printing the
gravel. Here come warm gusts of decomposing leaves, of rotting vegetation. We are in a
swamp now; in a malarial jungle. There is an elephant white with maggots, killed by an
arrow shot dead in its eye. The bright eyes of hopping birds — eagles, vultures — are
apparent. They take us for fallen trees. They pick at a worm — that is a hooded cobra —
and leave it with a festering brown scar to be mauled by lions. This is our world, lit with
crescents and stars of light; and great petals half transparent block the openings like
purple windows. Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of
flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are
giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.’
‘This is here,’ said Jinny, ‘this is now. But soon we shall go. Soon Miss Curry will blow
her whistle. We shall walk. We shall part. You will go to school. You will have masters
wearing crosses with white ties. I shall have a mistress in a school on the East Coast who
sits under a portrait of Queen Alexandra. That is where I am going, and Susan and
Rhoda. This is only here; this is only now. Now we lie under the currant bushes and
every time the breeze stirs we are mottled all over. My hand is like a snake’s skin. My
knees are pink floating islands. Your face is like an apple tree netted under.’
‘The heat is going,’ said Bernard, ‘from the Jungle. The leaves flap black wings over us.
Miss Curry has blown her whistle on the terrace. We must creep out from the awning of
the currant leaves and stand upright. There are twigs in your hair, Jinny. There is a
green caterpillar on your neck. We must form, two by two. Miss Curry is taking us for a
brisk walk, while Miss Hudson sits at her desk settling her accounts.’
‘It is dull,’ said Jinny, ‘walking along the high road with no windows to look at, with no
bleared eyes of blue glass let into the pavement.’
‘We must form into pairs,’ said Susan, ‘and walk in order, not shuffling our feet, not
lagging, with Louis going first to lead us, because Louis is alert and not a wool-gatherer.’
 8

‘Since I am supposed,’ said Neville, ‘to be too delicate to go with them, since I get so
easily tired and then am sick, I will use this hour of solitude, this reprieve from
conversation, to coast round the purlieus of the house and recover, if I can, by standing
on the same stair half-way up the landing, what I felt when I heard about the dead man
through the swing-door last night when cook was shoving in and out the dampers. He
was found with his throat cut. The apple-tree leaves became fixed in the sky; the moon
glared; I was unable to lift my foot up the stair. He was found in the gutter. His blood
gurgled down the gutter. His jowl was white as a dead codfish. I shall call this stricture,
this rigidity, “death among the apple trees” for ever. There were the floating, pale- grey
clouds; and the immitigable tree; the implacable tree with its greaved silver bark. The
ripple of my life was unavailing. I was unable to pass by. There was an obstacle. “I
cannot surmount this unintelligible obstacle,” I said. And the others passed on. But we
are doomed, all of us, by the apple trees, by the immitigable tree which we cannot pass.
‘Now the stricture and rigidity are over; and I will continue to make my survey of the
purlieus of the house in the late afternoon, in the sunset, when the sun makes
oleaginous spots on the linoleum, and a crack of light kneels on the wall, making the
chair legs look broken.’
‘I saw Florrie in the kitchen garden,’ said Susan, ‘as we came back from our walk, with
the washing blown out round her, the pyjamas, the drawers, the night-gowns blown
tight. And Ernest kissed her. He was in his green baize apron, cleaning silver; and his
mouth was sucked like a purse in wrinkles and he seized her with the pyjamas blown
out hard between them. He was blind as a bull, and she swooned in anguish, only little
veins streaking her white cheeks red. Now though they pass plates of bread and butter
and cups of milk at tea-time I see a crack in the earth and hot steam hisses up; and the
urn roars as Ernest roared, and I am blown out hard like the pyjamas, even while my
teeth meet in the soft bread and butter, and I lap the sweet milk. I am not afraid of heat,
nor of the frozen winter. Rhoda dreams, sucking a crust soaked in milk; Louis regards
the wall opposite with snail-green eyes; Bernard moulds his bread into pellets and calls
them “people”. Neville with his clean and decisive ways has finished. He has rolled his
napkin and slipped it through the silver ring. Jinny spins her fingers on the table-cloth,
as if they were dancing in the sunshine, pirouetting. But I am not afraid of the heat or of
the frozen winter.’
‘Now,’ said Louis, ‘we all rise; we all stand up. Miss Curry spreads wide the black book
on the harmonium. It is difficult not to weep as we sing, as we pray that God may keep
us safe while we sleep, calling ourselves little children. When we are sad and trembling
with apprehension it is sweet to sing together, leaning slightly, I towards Susan, Susan
towards Bernard, clasping hands, afraid of much, I of my accent, Rhoda of figures; yet
resolute to conquer.’
‘We troop upstairs like ponies,’ said Bernard, ‘stamping, clattering one behind another
to take our turns in the bathroom. We buffet, we tussle, we spring up and down on the
hard, white beds. My turn has come. I come now.
‘Mrs Constable, girt in a bath-towel, takes her lemon-coloured sponge and soaks it in
water; it turns chocolate-brown; it drips; and, holding it high above me, shivering
beneath her, she squeezes it. Water pours down the runnel of my spine. Bright arrows
of sensation shoot on either side. I am covered with warm flesh. My dry crannies are
wetted; my cold body is warmed; it is sluiced and gleaming. Water descends and sheets
me like an eel. Now hot towels envelop me, and their roughness, as I rub my back,
 9

makes my blood purr. Rich and heavy sensations form on the roof of my mind; down
showers the day — the woods; and Elvedon; Susan and the pigeon. Pouring down the
walls of my mind, running together, the day falls copious, resplendent. Now I tie my
pyjamas loosely round me, and lie under this thin sheet afloat in the shallow light which
is like a film of water drawn over my eyes by a wave. I hear through it far off, far away,
faint and far, the chorus beginning; wheels; dogs; men shouting; church bells; the chorus
beginning.’
‘As I fold up my frock and my chemise,’ said Rhoda, ‘so I put off my hopeless desire to be
Susan, to be Jinny. But I will stretch my toes so that they touch the rail at the end of the
bed; I will assure myself, touching the rail, of something hard. Now I cannot sink; cannot
altogether fall through the thin sheet now. Now I spread my body on this frail mattress
and hang suspended. I am above the earth now. I am no longer upright, to be knocked
against and damaged. All is soft, and bending. Walls and cupboards whiten and bend
their yellow squares on top of which a pale glass gleams. Out of me now my mind can
pour. I can think of my Armadas sailing on the high waves. I am relieved of hard
contacts and collisions. I sail on alone under the white cliffs. Oh, but I sink, I fall! That is
the corner of the cupboard; that is the nursery looking- glass. But they stretch, they
elongate. I sink down on the black plumes of sleep; its thick wings are pressed to my
eyes. Travelling through darkness I see the stretched flower-beds, and Mrs Constable
runs from behind the corner of the pampas-grass to say my aunt has come to fetch me in
a carriage. I mount; I escape; I rise on spring-heeled boots over the tree-tops. But I am
now fallen into the carriage at the hall door, where she sits nodding yellow plumes with
eyes hard like glazed marbles. Oh, to awake from dreaming! Look, there is the chest of
drawers. Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; they
sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched,
among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing,
pursuing.’
The sun rose higher. Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan over the beach, circling
the spike of sea-holly and leaving shallow pools of light here and there on the sand. A
faint black rim was left behind them. The rocks which had been misty and soft hardened
and were marked with red clefts.
Sharp stripes of shadow lay on the grass, and the dew dancing on the tips of the flowers
and leaves made the garden like a mosaic of single sparks not yet formed into one
whole. The birds, whose breasts were specked canary and rose, now sang a strain or
two together, wildly, like skaters rollicking arm-in-arm, and were suddenly silent,
breaking asunder.
The sun laid broader blades upon the house. The light touched something green in the
window corner and made it a lump of emerald, a cave of pure green like stoneless fruit.
It sharpened the edges of chairs and tables and stitched white table-cloths with fine gold
wires. As the light increased a bud here and there split asunder and shook out flowers,
green veined and quivering, as if the effort of opening had set them rocking, and pealing
a faint carillon as they beat their frail clappers against their white walls. Everything
became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife
were liquid. Meanwhile the concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds,
like logs falling, on the shore.
‘Now,’ said Bernard, ‘the time has come. The day has come. The cab is at the door. My
huge box bends George’s bandy-legs even wider. The horrible ceremony is over, the tips,
 10

and the good-byes in the hall. Now there is this gulping ceremony with my mother, this
hand-shaking ceremony with my father; now I must go on waving, I must go on waving,
till we turn the corner. Now that ceremony is over. Heaven be praised, all ceremonies
are over. I am alone; I am going to school for the first time.
‘Everybody seems to be doing things for this moment only; and never again. Never
again. The urgency of it all is fearful. Everybody knows I am going to school, going to
school for the first time. “That boy is going to school for the first time,” says the
housemaid, cleaning the steps. I must not cry. I must behold them indifferently. Now the
awful portals of the station gape; “the moon-faced clock regards me.” I must make
phrases and phrases and so interpose something hard between myself and the stare of
housemaids, the stare of clocks, staring faces, indifferent faces, or I shall cry. There is
Louis, there is Neville, in long coats, carrying handbags, by the booking-office. They are
composed. But they look different.’
‘Here is Bernard,’ said Louis. ‘He is composed; he is easy. He swings his bag as he walks.
I will follow Bernard, because he is not afraid. We are drawn through the booking-office
on to the platform as a stream draws twigs and straws round the piers of a bridge.
There is the very powerful, bottle-green engine without a neck, all back and thighs,
breathing steam. The guard blows his whistle; the flag is dipped; without an effort, of its
own momentum, like an avalanche started by a gentle push, we start forward. Bernard
spreads a rug and plays knuckle-bones. Neville reads. London crumbles. London heaves
and surges. There is a bristling of chimneys and towers. There a white church; there a
mast among the spires. There a canal. Now there are open spaces with asphalt paths
upon which it is strange that people should now be walking. There is a hill striped with
red houses. A man crosses a bridge with a dog at his heels. Now the red boy begins firing
at a pheasant. The blue boy shoves him aside. “My uncle is the best shot in England. My
cousin is Master of Foxhounds.” Boasting begins. And I cannot boast, for my father is a
banker in Brisbane, and I speak with an Australian accent.’
‘After all this hubbub,’ said Neville, ‘all this scuffling and hubbub, we have arrived. This
is indeed a moment — this is indeed a solemn moment. I come, like a lord to his halls
appointed. That is our founder; our illustrious founder, standing in the courtyard with
one foot raised. I salute our founder. A noble Roman air hangs over these austere
quadrangles. Already the lights are lit in the form rooms. Those are laboratories
perhaps; and that a library, where I shall explore the exactitude of the Latin language,
and step firmly upon the well-laid sentences, and pronounce the explicit, the sonorous
hexameters of Virgil, of Lucretius; and chant with a passion that is never obscure or
formless the loves of Catullus, reading from a big book, a quarto with margins. I shall lie,
too, in the fields among the tickling grasses. I shall lie with my friends under the
towering elm trees.
‘Behold, the Headmaster. Alas, that he should excite my ridicule. He is too sleek, he is
altogether too shiny and black, like some statue in a public garden. And on the left side
of his waistcoat, his taut, his drum-like waistcoat, hangs a crucifix.’
‘Old Crane,’ said Bernard, ‘now rises to address us. Old Crane, the Headmaster, has a
nose like a mountain at sunset, and a blue cleft in his chin, like a wooded ravine, which
some tripper has fired; like a wooded ravine seen from the train window. He sways
slightly, mouthing out his tremendous and sonorous words. I love tremendous and
sonorous words. But his words are too hearty to be true. Yet he is by this time
convinced of their truth. And when he leaves the room, lurching rather heavily from
 11

side to side, and hurls his way through the swing-doors, all the masters, lurching rather
heavily from side to side, hurl themselves also through the swing-doors. This is our first
night at school, apart from our sisters.’
‘This is my first night at school,’ said Susan, ‘away from my father, away from my home.
My eyes swell; my eyes prick with tears. I hate the smell of pine and linoleum. I hate the
wind- bitten shrubs and the sanitary tiles. I hate the cheerful jokes and the glazed look
of everyone. I left my squirrel and my doves for the boy to look after. The kitchen door
slams, and shot patters among the leaves when Percy fires at the rooks. All here is false;
all is meretricious. Rhoda and Jinny sit far off in brown serge, and look at Miss Lambert
who sits under a picture of Queen Alexandra reading from a book before her. There is
also a blue scroll of needlework embroidered by some old girl. If I do not purse my lips,
if I do not screw my handkerchief, I shall cry.’
‘The purple light,’ said Rhoda, ‘in Miss Lambert’s ring passes to and fro across the black
stain on the white page of the Prayer Book. It is a vinous, it is an amorous light. Now that
our boxes are unpacked in the dormitories, we sit herded together under maps of the
entire world. There are desks with wells for the ink. We shall write our exercises in ink
here. But here I am nobody. I have no face. This great company, all dressed in brown
serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended. I will seek out a face,
a composed, a monumental face, and will endow it with omniscience, and wear it under
my dress like a talisman and then (I promise this) I will find some dingle in a wood
where I can display my assortment of curious treasures. I promise myself this. So I will
not cry.’
‘That dark woman,’ said Jinny, ‘with high cheek-bones, has a shiny dress, like a shell,
veined, for wearing in the evening. That is nice for summer, but for winter I should like a
thin dress shot with red threads that would gleam in the firelight. Then when the lamps
were lit, I should put on my red dress and it would be thin as a veil, and would wind
about my body, and billow out as I came into the room, pirouetting. It would make a
flower shape as I sank down, in the middle of the room, on a gilt chair. But Miss Lambert
wears an opaque dress, that falls in a cascade from her snow-white ruffle as she sits
under a picture of Queen Alexandra pressing one white finger firmly on the page. And
we pray.’
‘Now we march, two by two,’ said Louis, ‘orderly, processional, into chapel. I like the
dimness that falls as we enter the sacred building. I like the orderly progress. We file in;
we seat ourselves. We put off our distinctions as we enter. I like it now, when, lurching
slightly, but only from his momentum, Dr Crane mounts the pulpit and reads the lesson
from a Bible spread on the back of the brass eagle. I rejoice; my heart expands in his
bulk, in his authority. He lays the whirling dust clouds in my tremulous, my
ignominiously agitated mind — how we danced round the Christmas tree and handing
parcels they forgot me, and the fat woman said, “This little boy has no present,” and
gave me a shiny Union Jack from the top of the tree, and I cried with fury — to be
remembered with pity. Now all is laid by his authority, his crucifix, and I feel come over
me the sense of the earth under me, and my roots going down and down till they wrap
themselves round some hardness at the centre. I recover my continuity, as he reads. I
become a figure in the procession, a spoke in the huge wheel that turning, at last erects
me, here and now. I have been in the dark; I have been hidden; but when the wheel
turns (as he reads) I rise into this dim light where I just perceive, but scarcely, kneeling
boys, pillars and memorial brasses. There is no crudity here, no sudden kisses.’
 12

‘The brute menaces my liberty,’ said Neville, ‘when he prays. Unwarmed by imagination,
his words fall cold on my head like paving-stones, while the gilt cross heaves on his
waistcoat. The words of authority are corrupted by those who speak them. I gibe and
mock at this sad religion, at these tremulous, grief-stricken figures advancing,
cadaverous and wounded, down a white road shadowed by fig trees where boys sprawl
in the dust — naked boys; and goatskins distended with wine hang at the tavern door. I
was in Rome travelling with my father at Easter; and the trembling figure of Christ’s
mother was borne niddle-noddling along the streets; there went by also the stricken
figure of Christ in a glass case.
‘Now I will lean sideways as if to scratch my thigh. So I shall see Percival. There he sits,
upright among the smaller fry. He breathes through his straight nose rather heavily. His
blue and oddly inexpressive eyes are fixed with pagan indifference upon the pillar
opposite. He would make an admirable churchwarden. He should have a birch and beat
little boys for misdemeanours. He is allied with the Latin phrases on the memorial
brasses. He sees nothing; he hears nothing. He is remote from us all in a pagan universe.
But look — he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls
hopelessly in love for a lifetime. Dalton, Jones, Edgar and Bateman flick their hands to
the back of their necks likewise. But they do not succeed.’
‘At last,’ said Bernard, ‘the growl ceases. The sermon ends. He has minced the dance of
the white butterflies at the door to powder. His rough and hairy voice is like an
unshaven chin. Now he lurches back to his seat like a drunken sailor. It is an action that
all the other masters will try to imitate; but, being flimsy, being floppy, wearing grey
trousers, they will only succeed in making themselves ridiculous. I do not despise them.
Their antics seem pitiable in my eyes. I note the fact for future reference with many
others in my notebook. When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook — a fat book with
many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases. Under B shall come
“Butterfly powder”. If, in my novel, I describe the sun on the window-sill, I shall look
under B and find butterfly powder. That will be useful. The tree “shades the window
with green fingers”. That will be useful. But alas! I am so soon distracted — by a hair like
twisted candy, by Celia’s Prayer Book, ivory covered. Louis’ can contemplate nature,
unwinking, by the hour. Soon I fail, unless talked to. “The lake of my mind, unbroken by
oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.” That will be useful.’
‘Now we move out of this cool temple, into the yellow playing- fields,’ said Louis. ‘And,
as it is a half-holiday (the Duke’s birthday) we will settle among the long grasses, while
they play cricket. Could I be “they” I would choose it; I would buckle on my pads and
stride across the playing-field at the head of the batsmen. Look now, how everybody
follows Percival. He is heavy. He walks clumsily down the field, through the long grass,
to where the great elm trees stand. His magnificence is that of some mediaeval
commander. A wake of light seems to lie on the grass behind him. Look at us trooping
after him, his faithful servants, to be shot like sheep, for he will certainly attempt some
forlorn enterprise and die in battle. My heart turns rough; it abrades my side like a file
with two edges: one, that I adore his magnificence; the other I despise his slovenly
accents — I who am so much his superior — and am jealous.’
‘And now,’ said Neville, ‘let Bernard begin. Let him burble on, telling us stories, while we
lie recumbent. Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence.
Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story. Louis is a story. There is the story of
the boot-boy, the story of the man with one eye, the story of the woman who sells
 13

winkles. Let him burble on with his story while I lie back and regard the stiff-legged
figures of the padded batsmen through the trembling grasses. It seems as if the whole
world were flowing and curving — on the earth the trees, in the sky the clouds. I look
up, through the trees, into the sky. The match seems to be played up there. Faintly
among the soft, white clouds I hear the cry “Run”, I hear the cry “How’s that?” The
clouds lose tufts of whiteness as the breeze dishevels them. If that blue could stay for
ever; if that hole could remain for ever; if this moment could stay for ever —
‘But Bernard goes on talking. Up they bubble — images. “Like a camel,” . . . “a vulture.”
The camel is a vulture; the vulture a camel; for Bernard is a dangling wire, loose, but
seductive. Yes, for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a lightness
comes over one. One floats, too, as if one were that bubble; one is freed; I have escaped,
one feels. Even the chubby little boys (Dalton, Larpent and Baker) feel the same
abandonment. They like this better than the cricket. They catch the phrases as they
bubble. They let the feathery grasses tickle their noses. And then we all feel Percival
lying heavy among us. His curious guffaw seems to sanction our laughter. But now he
has rolled himself over in the long grass. He is, I think, chewing a stalk between his
teeth. He feels bored; I too feel bored. Bernard at once perceives that we are bored. I
detect a certain effort, an extravagance in his phrase, as if he said “Look!” but Percival
says “No.” For he is always the first to detect insincerity; and is brutal in the extreme.
The sentence tails off feebly. Yes, the appalling moment has come when Bernard’s
power fails him and there is no longer any sequence and he sags and twiddles a bit of
string and falls silent, gaping as if about to burst into tears. Among the tortures and
devastations of life is this then — our friends are not able to finish their stories.’
‘Now let me try,’ said Louis, ‘before we rise, before we go to tea, to fix the moment in one
effort of supreme endeavour. This shall endure. We are parting; some to tea; some to
the nets; I to show my essay to Mr Barker. This will endure. From discord, from hatred
(I despise dabblers in imagery — I resent the power of Percival intensely) my shattered
mind is pieced together by some sudden perception. I take the trees, the clouds, to be
witnesses of my complete integration. I, Louis, I, who shall walk the earth these seventy
years, am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord. Here on this ring of grass we have
sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees
wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. We
shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as one sensation strikes and then
another. Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of
despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.
‘Now grass and trees, the travelling air blowing empty spaces in the blue which they
then recover, shaking the leaves which then replace themselves, and our ring here,
sitting, with our arms binding our knees, hint at some other order, and better, which
makes a reason everlastingly. This I see for a second, and shall try tonight to fix in
words, to forge in a ring of steel, though Percival destroys it, as he blunders off, crushing
the grasses, with the small fry trotting subservient after him. Yet it is Percival I need; for
it is Percival who inspires poetry.’
‘For how many months,’ said Susan, ‘for how many years, have I run up these stairs, in
the dismal days of winter, in the chilly days of spring? Now it is midsummer. We go
upstairs to change into white frocks to play tennis — Jinny and I with Rhoda following
after. I count each step as I mount, counting each step something done with. So each
night I tear off the old day from the calendar, and screw it tight into a ball. I do this
 14

vindictively, while Betty and Clara are on their knees. I do not pray. I revenge myself
upon the day. I wreak my spite upon its image. You are dead now, I say, school day,
hated day. They have made all the days of June — this is the twenty-fifth — shiny and
orderly, with gongs, with lessons, with orders to wash, to change, to work, to eat. We
listen to missionaries from China. We drive off in brakes along the asphalt pavement, to
attend concerts in halls. We are shown galleries and pictures.
‘At home the hay waves over the meadows. My father leans upon the stile, smoking. In
the house one door bangs and then another, as the summer air puffs along the empty
passages. Some old picture perhaps swings on the wall. A petal drops from the rose in
the jar. The farm wagons strew the hedges with tufts of hay. All this I see, I always see,
as I pass the looking-glass on the landing, with Jinny in front and Rhoda lagging behind.
Jinny dances. Jinny always dances in the hall on the ugly, the encaustic tiles; she turns
cartwheels in the playground; she picks some flower forbiddenly, and sticks it behind
her ear so that Miss Perry’s dark eyes smoulder with admiration, for Jinny, not me. Miss
Perry loves Jinny; and I could have loved her, but now love no one, except my father, my
doves and the squirrel whom I left in the cage at home for the boy to look after.’
‘I hate the small looking-glass on the stairs,’ said Jinny. ‘It shows our heads only; it cuts
off our heads. And my lips are too wide, and my eyes are too close together; I show my
gums too much when I laugh. Susan’s head, with its fell look, with its grass- green eyes
which poets will love, Bernard said, because they fall upon close white stitching, put
mine out; even Rhoda’s face, mooning, vacant, is completed, like those white petals she
used to swim in her bowl. So I skip up the stairs past them, to the next landing, where
the long glass hangs and I see myself entire. I see my body and head in one now; for
even in this serge frock they are one, my body and my head. Look, when I move my head
I ripple all down my narrow body; even my thin legs ripple like a stalk in the wind. I
flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda’s vagueness; I leap like one of those
flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move, I dance; I never cease to move
and to dance. I move like the leaf that moved in the hedge as a child and frightened me. I
dance over these streaked, these impersonal, distempered walls with their yellow
skirting as firelight dances over teapots. I catch fire even from women’s cold eyes. When
I read, a purple rim runs round the black edge of the textbook. Yet I cannot follow any
word through its changes. I cannot follow any thought from present to past. I do not
stand lost, like Susan, with tears in my eyes remembering home; or lie, like Rhoda,
crumpled among the ferns, staining my pink cotton green, while I dream of plants that
flower under the sea, and rocks through which the fish swim slowly. I do not dream.
‘Now let us be quick. Now let me be the first to pull off these coarse clothes. Here are my
clean white stockings. Here are my new shoes. I bind my hair with a white ribbon, so
that when I leap across the court the ribbon will stream out in a flash, yet curl round my
neck, perfectly in its place. Not a hair shall be untidy.’
‘That is my face,’ said Rhoda, ‘in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder — that face is
my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other
people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real
world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and
change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them
without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh
really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when
they have done it.
 15

‘See now with what extraordinary certainty Jinny pulls on her stockings, simply to play
tennis. That I admire. But I like Susan’s way better, for she is more resolute, and less
ambitious of distinction than Jinny. Both despise me for copying what they do; but
Susan sometimes teaches me, for instance, how to tie a bow, while Jinny has her own
knowledge but keeps it to herself. They have friends to sit by. They have things to say
privately in corners. But I attach myself only to names and faces; and hoard them like
amulets against disaster. I choose out across the hall some unknown face and can hardly
drink my tea when she whose name I do not know sits opposite. I choke. I am rocked
from side to side by the violence of my emotion. I imagine these nameless, these
immaculate people, watching me from behind bushes. I leap high to excite their
admiration. At night, in bed, I excite their complete wonder. I often die pierced with
arrows to win their tears. If they should say, or I should see from a label on their boxes,
that they were in Scarborough last holidays, the whole town runs gold, the whole
pavement is illuminated. Therefore I hate looking- glasses which show me my real face.
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall
off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard
door to call myself back to the body.’
‘We are late,’ said Susan. We must wait our turn to play. We will pitch here in the long
grass and pretend to watch Jinny and Clara, Betty and Mavis. But we will not watch
them. I hate watching other people play games. I will make images of all the things I hate
most and bury them in the ground. This shiny pebble is Madame Carlo, and I will bury
her deep because of her fawning and ingratiating manners, because of the sixpence she
gave me for keeping my knuckles flat when I played my scales. I buried her sixpence. I
would bury the whole school: the gymnasium; the classroom; the dining-room that
always smells of meat; and the chapel. I would bury the red-brown tiles and the oily
portraits of old men — benefactors, founders of schools. There are some trees I like; the
cherry tree with lumps of clear gum on the bark; and one view from the attic towards
some far hills. Save for these, I would bury it all as I bury these ugly stones that are
always scattered about this briny coast, with its piers and its trippers. At home, the
waves are mile long. On winter nights we hear them booming. Last Christmas a man was
drowned sitting alone in his cart.’
‘When Miss Lambert passes,’ said Rhoda, ‘talking to the clergyman, the others laugh and
imitate her hunch behind her back; yet everything changes and becomes luminous.
Jinny leaps higher too when Miss Lambert passes. Suppose she saw that daisy, it would
change. Wherever she goes, things are changed under her eyes; and yet when she has
gone is not the thing the same again? Miss Lambert is taking the clergyman through the
wicket-gate to her private garden; and when she comes to the pond, she sees a frog on a
leaf, and that will change. All is solemn, all is pale where she stands, like a statue in a
grove. She lets her tasselled silken cloak slip down, and only her purple ring still glows,
her vinous, her amethystine ring. There is this mystery about people when they leave
us. When they leave us I can companion them to the pond and make them stately. When
Miss Lambert passes, she makes the daisy change; and everything runs like streaks of
fire when she carves the beef. Month by month things are losing their hardness; even
my body now lets the light through; my spine is soft like wax near the flame of the
candle. I dream; I dream.’
‘I have won the game,’ said Jinny. ‘Now it is your turn. I must throw myself on the
ground and pant. I am out of breath with running, with triumph. Everything in my body
seems thinned out with running and triumph. My blood must be bright red, whipped up,
 16

slapping against my ribs. My soles tingle, as if wire rings opened and shut in my feet. I
see every blade of grass very clear. But the pulse drums so in my forehead, behind my
eyes, that everything dances — the net, the grass; your faces leap like butterflies; the
trees seem to jump up and down. There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this
universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph. Only, when I have
lain alone on the hard ground, watching you play your game, I begin to feel the wish to
be singled out; to be summoned, to be called away by one person who comes to find me,
who is attracted towards me, who cannot keep himself from me, but comes to where I
sit on my gilt chair, with my frock billowing round me like a flower. And withdrawing
into an alcove, sitting alone on a balcony we talk together.
‘Now the tide sinks. Now the trees come to earth; the brisk waves that slap my ribs rock
more gently, and my heart rides at anchor, like a sailing-boat whose sails slide slowly
down on to the white deck. The game is over. We must go to tea now.’
‘The boasting boys,’ said Louis, ‘have gone now in a vast team to play cricket. They have
driven off in their great brake, singing in chorus. All their heads turn simultaneously at
the corner by the laurel bushes. Now they are boasting. Larpent’s brother played
football for Oxford; Smith’s father made a century at Lords. Archie and Hugh; Parker
and Dalton; Larpent and Smith; then again Archie and Hugh; Parker and Dalton; Larpent
and Smith — the names repeat themselves; the names are the same always. They are
the volunteers; they are the cricketers; they are the officers of the Natural History
Society. They are always forming into fours and marching in troops with badges on their
caps; they salute simultaneously passing the figure of their general. How majestic is
their order, how beautiful is their obedience! If I could follow, if I could be with them, I
would sacrifice all I know. But they also leave butterflies trembling with their wings
pinched off; they throw dirty pocket-handkerchiefs clotted with blood screwed up into
corners. They make little boys sob in dark passages. They have big red ears that stand
out under their caps. Yet that is what we wish to be, Neville and I. I watch them go with
envy. Peeping from behind a curtain, I note the simultaneity of their movements with
delight. If my legs were reinforced by theirs, how they would run! If I had been with
them and won matches and rowed in great races, and galloped all day, how I should
thunder out songs at midnight! In what a torrent the words would rush from my throat!’
‘Percival has gone now,’ said Neville. ‘He is thinking of nothing but the match. He never
waved his hand as the brake turned the corner by the laurel bush. He despises me for
being too weak to play (yet he is always kind to my weakness). He despises me for not
caring if they win or lose except that he cares. He takes my devotion; he accepts my
tremulous, no doubt abject offering, mixed with contempt as it is for his mind. For he
cannot read. Yet when I read Shakespeare or Catullus, lying in the long grass, he
understands more than Louis. Not the words — but what are words? Do I not know
already how to rhyme, how to imitate Pope, Dryden, even Shakespeare? But I cannot
stand all day in the sun with my eyes on the ball; I cannot feel the flight of the ball
through my body and think only of the ball. I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words
all my life. Yet I could not live with him and suffer his stupidity. He will coarsen and
snore. He will marry and there will be scenes of tenderness at breakfast. But now he is
young. Not a thread, not a sheet of paper lies between him and the sun, between him
and the rain, between him and the moon as he lies naked, tumbled, hot, on his bed. Now
as they drive along the high road in their brake his face is mottled red and yellow. He
will throw off his coat and stand with his legs apart, with his hands ready, watching the
 17

wicket. And he will pray, “Lord let us win”; he will think of one thing only, that they
should win.
‘How could I go with them in a brake to play cricket? Only Bernard could go with them,
but Bernard is too late to go with them. He is always too late. He is prevented by his
incorrigible moodiness from going with them. He stops, when he washes his hands, to
say, “There is a fly in that web. Shall I rescue that fly; shall I let the spider eat it?” He is
shaded with innumerable perplexities, or he would go with them to play cricket, and
would lie in the grass, watching the sky, and would start when the ball was hit. But they
would forgive him; for he would tell them a story.’
‘They have bowled off,’ said Bernard, ‘and I am too late to go with them. The horrid little
boys, who are also so beautiful, whom you and Louis, Neville, envy so deeply, have
bowled off with their heads all turned the same way. But I am unaware of these
profound distinctions. My fingers slip over the keyboard without knowing which is
black and which white. Archie makes easily a hundred; I by a fluke make sometimes
fifteen. But what is the difference between us? Wait though, Neville; let me talk. The
bubbles are rising like the silver bubbles from the floor of a saucepan; image on top of
image. I cannot sit down to my book, like Louis, with ferocious tenacity. I must open the
little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together whatever
happens, so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly
joining one thing to another. I will tell you the story of the doctor.
‘When Dr Crane lurches through the swing-doors after prayers he is convinced, it seems,
of his immense superiority; and indeed Neville, we cannot deny that his departure
leaves us not only with a sense of relief, but also with a sense of something removed,
like a tooth. Now let us follow him as he heaves through the swing-door to his own
apartments. Let us imagine him in his private room over the stables undressing. He
unfastens his sock suspenders (let us be trivial, let us be intimate). Then with a
characteristic gesture (it is difficult to avoid these ready-made phrases, and they are, in
his case, somehow appropriate) he takes the silver, he takes the coppers from his
trouser pockets and places them there, and there, on his dressing-table. With both arms
stretched on the arms of his chair he reflects (this is his private moment; it is here we
must try to catch him): shall he cross the pink bridge into his bedroom or shall he not
cross it? The two rooms are united by a bridge of rosy light from the lamp at the bedside
where Mrs Crane lies with her hair on the pillow reading a French memoir. As she reads,
she sweeps her hand with an abandoned and despairing gesture over her forehead, and
sighs, “Is this all?” comparing herself with some French duchess. Now, says the doctor,
in two years I shall retire. I shall clip yew hedges in a west country garden. An admiral I
might have been; or a judge; not a schoolmaster. What forces, he asks, staring at the gas-
fire with his shoulders hunched up more hugely than we know them (he is in his shirt-
sleeves remember), have brought me to this? What vast forces? he thinks, getting into
the stride of his majestic phrases as he looks over his shoulder at the window. It is a
stormy night; the branches of the chestnut trees are ploughing up and down. Stars flash
between them. What vast forces of good and evil have brought me here? he asks, and
sees with sorrow that his chair has worn a little hole in the pile of the purple carpet. So
there he sits, swinging his braces. But stories that follow people into their private rooms
are difficult. I cannot go on with this story. I twiddle a piece of string; I turn over four or
five coins in my trouser pocket.’
 18

‘Bernard’s stories amuse me,’ said Neville, ‘at the start. But when they tail off absurdly
and he gapes, twiddling a bit of string, I feel my own solitude. He sees everyone with
blurred edges. Hence I cannot talk to him of Percival. I cannot expose my absurd and
violent passion to his sympathetic understanding. It too would make a “story”. I need
someone whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of absurdity is
sublime, and a shoe-string adorable. To whom I can expose the urgency of my own
passion? Louis is too cold, too universal. There is nobody here among these grey arches,
and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully
organized to prevent feeling alone. Yet I am struck still as I walk by sudden
premonitions of what is to come. Yesterday, passing the open door leading into the
private garden, I saw Fenwick with his mallet raised. The steam from the tea-urn rose in
the middle of the lawn. There were banks of blue flowers. Then suddenly descended
upon me the obscure, the mystic sense of adoration, of completeness that triumphed
over chaos. Nobody saw my poised and intent figure as I stood at the open door. Nobody
guessed the need I had to offer my being to one god; and perish, and disappear. His
mallet descended; the vision broke.
‘Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the
broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under
beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in
the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and
vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of
one person.’
‘I begin to wish,’ said Louis, ‘for night to come. As I stand here with my hand on the
grained oak panel of Mr Wickham’s door I think myself the friend of Richelieu, or the
Duke of St Simon holding out a snuff-box to the King himself. It is my privilege. My
witticisms “run like wildfire through the court”. Duchesses tear emeralds from their
earrings out of admiration — but these rockets rise best in darkness, in my cubicle at
night. I am now a boy only with a colonial accent holding my knuckles against Mr
Wickham’s grained oak door. The day has been full of ignominies and triumphs
concealed from fear of laughter. I am the best scholar in the school. But when darkness
comes I put off this unenviable body — my large nose, my thin lips, my colonial accent
— and inhabit space. I am then Virgil’s companion, and Plato’s. I am then the last scion
of one of the great houses of France. But I am also one who will force himself to desert
these windy and moonlit territories, these midnight wanderings, and confront grained
oak doors. I will achieve in my life — Heaven grant that it be not long — some gigantic
amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my
suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.’
‘I have torn off the whole of May and June,’ said Susan, ‘and twenty days of July. I have
torn them off and screwed them up so that they no longer exist, save as a weight in my
side. They have been crippled days, like moths with shrivelled wings unable to fly. There
are only eight days left. In eight days’ time I shall get out of the train and stand on the
platform at six twenty five. Then my freedom will unfurl, and all these restrictions that
wrinkle and shrivel — hours and order and discipline, and being here and there exactly
at the right moment — will crack asunder. Out the day will spring, as I open the
carriage-door and see my father in his old hat and gaiters. I shall tremble. I shall burst
into tears. Then next morning I shall get up at dawn. I shall let myself out by the kitchen
door. I shall walk on the moor. The great horses of the phantom riders will thunder
behind me and stop suddenly. I shall see the swallow skim the grass. I shall throw
 19

myself on a bank by the river and watch the fish slip in and out among the reeds. The
palms of my hands will be printed with pine- needles. I shall there unfold and take out
whatever it is I have made here; something hard. For something has grown in me here,
through the winters and summers, on staircases, in bedrooms. I do not want, as Jinny
wants, to be admired. I do not want people, when I come in, to look up with admiration.
I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.
‘Then I shall come back through the trembling lanes under the arches of the nut leaves. I
shall pass an old woman wheeling a perambulator full of sticks; and the shepherd. But
we shall not speak. I shall come back through the kitchen garden, and see the curved
leaves of the cabbages pebbled with dew, and the house in the garden, blind with
curtained windows. I shall go upstairs to my room, and turn over my own things, locked
carefully in the wardrobe: my shells; my eggs; my curious grasses. I shall feed my doves
and my squirrel. I shall go to the kennel and comb my spaniel. So gradually I shall turn
over the hard thing that has grown here in my side. But here bells ring; feet shuffle
perpetually.’
‘I hate darkness and sleep and night,’ said Jinny, ‘and lie longing for the day to come. I
long that the week should be all one day without divisions. When I wake early — and
the birds wake me — I lie and watch the brass handles on the cupboard grow clear; then
the basin; then the towel-horse. As each thing in the bedroom grows clear, my heart
beats quicker. I feel my body harden, and become pink, yellow, brown. My hands pass
over my legs and body. I feel its slopes, its thinness. I love to hear the gong roar through
the house and the stir begin — here a thud, there a patter. Doors slam; water rushes.
Here is another day, here is another day, I cry, as my feet touch the floor. It may be a
bruised day, an imperfect day. I am often scolded. I am often in disgrace for idleness, for
laughing; but even as Miss Matthews grumbles at my feather-headed carelessness, I
catch sight of something moving — a speck of sun perhaps on a picture, or the donkey
drawing the mowing-machine across the lawn; or a sail that passes between the laurel
leaves, so that I am never cast down. I cannot be prevented from pirouetting behind
Miss Matthews into prayers.
‘Now, too, the time is coming when we shall leave school and wear long skirts. I shall
wear necklaces and a white dress without sleeves at night. There will be parties in
brilliant rooms; and one man will single me out and will tell me what he has told no
other person. He will like me better than Susan or Rhoda. He will find in me some
quality, some peculiar thing. But I shall not let myself be attached to one person only. I
do not want to be fixed, to be pinioned. I tremble, I quiver, like the leaf in the hedge, as I
sit dangling my feet, on the edge of the bed, with a new day to break open. I have fifty
years, I have sixty years to spend. I have not yet broken into my hoard. This is the
beginning.’
‘There are hours and hours,’ said Rhoda, ‘before I can put out the light and lie suspended
on my bed above the world, before I can let the day drop down, before I can let my tree
grow, quivering in green pavilions above my head. Here I cannot let it grow. Somebody
knocks through it. They ask questions, they interrupt, they throw it down.
‘Now I will go to the bathroom and take off my shoes and wash; but as I wash, as I bend
my head down over the basin, I will let the Russian Empress’s veil flow about my
shoulders. The diamonds of the Imperial crown blaze on my forehead. I hear the roar of
the hostile mob as I step out on to the balcony. Now I dry my hands, vigorously, so that
 20

Miss, whose name I forget, cannot suspect that I am waving my fist at an infuriated mob.
“I am your Empress, people.” My attitude is one of defiance. I am fearless. I conquer.
‘But this is a thin dream. This is a papery tree. Miss Lambert blows it down. Even the
sight of her vanishing down the corridor blows it to atoms. It is not solid; it gives me no
satisfaction — this Empress dream. It leaves me, now that it has fallen, here in the
passage rather shivering. Things seem paler. I will go now into the library and take out
some book, and read and look; and read again and look. Here is a poem about a hedge. I
will wander down it and pick flowers, green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May,
wild roses and ivy serpentine. I will clasp them in my hands and lay them on the desk’s
shiny surface. I will sit by the river’s trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad
and bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with moonlight beams of their
own watery light. I will pick flowers; I will bind flowers in one garland and clasp them
and present them — Oh! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep
stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh,
this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am
incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilizing, opening the shut, forcing
the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from
my warm, my porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them — Oh! to whom?
‘Sailors loiter on the parade, and amorous couples; the omnibuses rattle along the sea
front to the town. I will give; I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty. I will
bind my flowers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched will present
them — Oh! to whom?’
‘Now we have received,’ said Louis, ‘for this is the last day of the last term — Neville’s
and Bernard’s and my last day — whatever our masters have had to give us. The
introduction has been made; the world presented. They stay, we depart. The great
Doctor, whom of all men I most revere, swaying a little from side to side among the
tables, the bound volumes, has dealt out Horace, Tennyson, the complete works of Keats
and Matthew Arnold, suitably inscribed. I respect the hand which gave them. He speaks
with complete conviction. To him his words are true, though not to us. Speaking in the
gruff voice of deep emotion, fiercely, tenderly, he has told us that we are about to go. He
has bid us “quit ourselves like men”. (On his lips quotations from the Bible, from The
Times, seem equally magnificent.) Some will do this; others that. Some will not meet
again. Neville, Bernard and I shall not meet here again. Life will divide us. But we have
formed certain ties. Our boyish, our irresponsible years are over. But we have forged
certain links. Above all, we have inherited traditions. These stone flags have been worn
for six hundred years. On these walls are inscribed the names of men of war, of
statesmen, of some unhappy poets (mine shall be among them). Blessings be on all
traditions, on all safeguards and circumscriptions! I am most grateful to you men in
black gowns, and you, dead, for your leading, for your guardianship; yet after all, the
problem remains. The differences are not yet solved. Flowers toss their heads outside
the window. I see wild birds, and impulses wilder than the wildest birds strike from my
wild heart. My eyes are wild; my lips tight pressed. The bird flies; the flower dances; but
I hear always the sullen thud of the waves; and the chained beast stamps on the beach.
It stamps and stamps.’
‘This is the final ceremony,’ said Bernard. This is the last of all our ceremonies. We are
overcome by strange feelings. The guard holding his flag is about to blow his whistle;
the train breathing steam in another moment is about to start. One wants to say
 21

something, to feel something, absolutely appropriate to the occasion. One’s mind is

primed; one’s lips are pursed. And then a bee drifts in and hums round the flowers in
the bouquet which Lady Hampton, the wife of the General, keeps smelling to show her
appreciation of the compliment. If the bee were to sting her nose? We are all deeply
moved; yet irreverent; yet penitent; yet anxious to get it over; yet reluctant to part. The
bee distracts us; its casual flight seems to deride our intensity. Humming vaguely,
skimming widely, it is settled now on the carnation. Many of us will not meet again. We
shall not enjoy certain pleasures again, when we are free to go to bed, or to sit up, when
I need no longer smuggle in bits of candle-ends and immoral literature. The bee now
hums round the head of the great Doctor. Larpent, John, Archie, Percival, Baker and
Smith — I have liked them enormously. I have known one mad boy only. I have hated
one mean boy only. I enjoy in retrospect my terribly awkward breakfasts at the
Headmaster’s table with toast and marmalade. He alone does not notice the bee. If it
were to settle on his nose he would flick it off with one magnificent gesture. Now he has
made his joke; now his voice has almost broken but not quite. Now we are dismissed —
Louis, Neville and I for ever. We take our highly polished books, scholastically inscribed
in a little crabbed hand. We rise, we disperse; the pressure is removed. The bee has
become an insignificant, a disregarded insect, flown through the open window into
obscurity. Tomorrow we go.’
‘We are about to part,’ said Neville. ‘Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is
Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about
among guns and dogs unanswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply
with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose meeting —
under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait, and he will not come. It is for that that I
love him. Oblivious, almost entirely ignorant, he will pass from my life. And I shall pass,
incredible as it seems, into other lives; this is only an escapade perhaps, a prelude only. I
feel already, though I cannot endure the Doctor’s pompous mummery and faked
emotions, that things we have only dimly perceived draw near. I shall be free to enter
the garden where Fenwick raises his mallet. Those who have despised me shall
acknowledge my sovereignty. But by some inscrutable law of my being sovereignty and
the possession of power will not be enough; I shall always push through curtains to
privacy, and want some whispered words alone. Therefore I go, dubious, but elate;
apprehensive of intolerable pain; yet I think bound in my adventuring to conquer after
huge suffering, bound, surely, to discover my desire in the end. There, for the last time, I
see the statue of our pious founder with the doves about his head. They will wheel for
ever about his head, whitening it, while the organ moans in the chapel. So I take my seat;
and, when I have found my place in the comer of our reserved compartment, I will
shade my eyes with a book to hide one tear; I will shade my eyes to observe; to peep at
one face. It is the first day of the summer holidays.’
‘It is the first day of the summer holidays,’ said Susan. ‘But the day is still rolled up. I will
not examine it until I step out on to the platform in the evening. I will not let myself even
smell it until I smell the cold green air off the fields. But already these are not school
fields; these are not school hedges; the men in these fields are doing real things; they fill
carts with real hay; and those are real cows, not school cows. But the carbolic smell of
corridors and the chalky smell of schoolrooms is still in my nostrils. The glazed, shiny
look of matchboard is still in my eyes. I must wait for fields and hedges, and woods and
fields, and steep railway cuttings, sprinkled with gorse bushes, and trucks in sidings,
and tunnels and suburban gardens with women hanging out washing, and then fields
 22

again and children swinging on gates, to cover it over, to bury it deep, this school that I
have hated.
‘I will not send my children to school nor spend a night all my life in London. Here in
this vast station everything echoes and booms hollowly. The light is like the yellow light
under an awning. Jinny lives here. Jinny takes her dog for walks on these pavements.
People here shoot through the streets silently. They look at nothing but shop-windows.
Their heads bob up and down all at about the same height. The streets are laced
together with telegraph wires. The houses are all glass, all festoons and glitter; now all
front doors and lace curtains, all pillars and white steps. But now I pass on, out of
London again; the fields begin again; and the houses, and women hanging washing, and
trees and fields. London is now veiled, now vanished, now crumbled, now fallen. The
carbolic and the pitch-pine begin to lose their savour. I smell corn and turnips. I undo a
paper packet tied with a piece of white cotton. The egg shells slide into the cleft between
my knees. Now we stop at station after station, rolling out milk cans. Now women kiss
each other and help with baskets. Now I will let myself lean out of the window. The air
rushes down my nose and throat — the cold air, the salt air with the smell of turnip
fields in it. And there is my father, with his back turned, talking to a farmer. I tremble, I
cry. There is my father in gaiters. There is my father.’
‘I sit snug in my own corner going North,’ said Jinny, ‘in this roaring express which is yet
so smooth that it flattens hedges, lengthens hills. We flash past signal-boxes; we make
the earth rock slightly from side to side. The distance closes for ever in a point; and we
for ever open the distance wide again. The telegraph poles bob up incessantly; one is
felled, another rises. Now we roar and swing into a tunnel. The gentleman pulls up the
window. I see reflections on the shining glass which lines the tunnel. I see him lower his
paper. He smiles at my reflection in the tunnel. My body instantly of its own accord puts
forth a frill under his gaze. My body lives a life of its own. Now the black window glass is
green again. We are out of the tunnel. He reads his paper. But we have exchanged the
approval of our bodies. There is then a great society of bodies, and mine is introduced;
mine has come into the room where the gilt chairs are. Look — all the windows of the
villas and their white-tented curtains dance; and the men sitting in the hedges in the
cornfields with knotted blue handkerchiefs are aware too, as I am aware, of heat and
rapture. One waves as we pass him. There are bowers and arbours in these villa gardens
and young men in shirt-sleeves on ladders trimming roses. A man on a horse canters
over the field. His horse plunges as we pass. And the rider turns to look at us. We roar
again through blackness. And I lie back; I give myself up to rapture; I think that at the
end of the tunnel I enter a lamp-lit room with chairs, into one of which I sink, much
admired, my dress billowing round me. But behold, looking up, I meet the eyes of a sour
woman, who suspects me of rapture. My body shuts in her face, impertinently, like a
parasol. I open my body, I shut my body at my will. Life is beginning. I now break into
my hoard of life.’
‘It is the first day of the summer holidays,’ said Rhoda. ‘And now, as the train passes by
these red rocks, by this blue sea, the term, done with, forms itself into one shape behind
me. I see its colour. June was white. I see the fields white with daisies, and white with
dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent
thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star,
“Consume me.” That was at midsummer, after the garden party and my humiliation at
the garden party. Wind and storm coloured July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful,
lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a
 23

message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I
said, and fell. I was blown like a feather, I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly,
I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully,
drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is
life then to which I am committed.
‘So I detach the summer term. With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger,
life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. It is to this we are attached; it is to this
we are bound, as bodies to wild horses. And yet we have invented devices for filling up
the crevices and disguising these fissures. Here is the ticket collector. Here are two men;
three women; there is a cat in a basket; myself with my elbow on the window-sill — this
is here and now. We draw on, we make off, through whispering fields of golden corn.
Women in the fields are surprised to be left behind there, hoeing. The train now stamps
heavily, breathes stertorously, as it climbs up and up. At last we are on the top of the
moor. Only a few wild sheep live here; a few shaggy ponies; yet we are provided with
every comfort; with tables to hold our newspapers, with rings to hold our tumblers. We
come carrying these appliances with us over the top of the moor. Now we are on the
summit. Silence will close behind us. If I look back over that bald head, I can see silence
already closing and the shadows of clouds chasing each other over the empty moor;
silence closes over our transient passage. This I say is the present moment; this is the
first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are
attached.’
‘Now we are off,’ said Louis. ‘Now I hang suspended without attachments. We are
nowhere. We are passing through England in a train. England slips by the window,
always changing from hill to wood, from rivers and willows to towns again. And I have
no firm ground to which I go. Bernard and Neville, Percival, Archie, Larpent and Baker
go to Oxford or Cambridge, to Edinburgh, Rome, Paris, Berlin, or to some American
University. I go vaguely, to make money vaguely. Therefore a poignant shadow, a keen
accent, falls on these golden bristles, on these poppy-red fields, this flowing corn that
never overflows its boundaries; but runs rippling to the edge. This is the first day of a
new life, another spoke of the rising wheel. But my body passes vagrant as a bird’s
shadow. I should be transient as the shadow on the meadow, soon fading, soon
darkening and dying there where it meets the wood, were it not that I coerce my brain
to form in my forehead; I force myself to state, if only in one line of unwritten poetry,
this moment; to mark this inch in the long, long history that began in Egypt, in the time
of the Pharaohs, when women carried red pitchers to the Nile. I seem already to have
lived many thousand years. But if I now shut my eyes, if I fail to realize the meeting-
place of past and present, that I sit in a third-class railway carriage full of boys going
home for the holidays, human history is defrauded of a moment’s vision. Its eye, that
would see through me, shuts — if I sleep now, through slovenliness, or cowardice,
burying myself in the past, in the dark; or acquiesce, as Bernard acquiesces, telling
stories; or boast, as Percival, Archie, John, Walter, Lathom, Larpent, Roper, Smith boast
— the names are the same always, the names of the boasting boys. They are all boasting,
all talking, except Neville, who slips a look occasionally over the edge of a French novel,
and so will always slip into cushioned firelit rooms, with many books and one friend,
while I tilt on an office chair behind a counter. Then I shall grow bitter and mock at
them. I shall envy them their continuance down the safe traditional ways under the
shade of old yew trees while I consort with cockneys and clerks, and tap the pavements
of the city.
 24

‘But now disembodied, passing over fields without lodgment —(there is a river; a man
fishes; there is a spire, there is the village street with its bow-windowed inn)— all is
dreamlike and dim to me. These hard thoughts, this envy, this bitterness, make no
lodgment in me. I am the ghost of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, in whose mind dreams
have power, and garden sounds when in the early morning petals float on fathomless
depths and the birds sing. I dash and sprinkle myself with the bright waters of
childhood. Its thin veil quivers. But the chained beast stamps and stamps on the shore.’
‘Louis and Neville,’ said Bernard, ‘both sit silent. Both are absorbed. Both feel the
presence of other people as a separating wall. But if I find myself in company with other
people, words at once make smoke rings — see how phrases at once begin to wreathe
off my lips. It seems that a match is set to a fire; something burns. An elderly and
apparently prosperous man, a traveller, now gets in. And I at once wish to approach
him; I instinctively dislike the sense of his presence, cold, unassimilated, among us. I do
not believe in separation. We are not single. Also I wish to add to my collection of
valuable observations upon the true nature of human life. My book will certainly run to
many volumes, embracing every known variety of man and woman. I fill my mind with
whatever happens to be the contents of a room or a railway carriage as one fills a
fountain-pen in an inkpot. I have a steady unquenchable thirst. Now I feel by
imperceptible signs, which I cannot yet interpret but will later, that his defiance is about
to thaw. His solitude shows signs of cracking. He has passed a remark about a country
house. A smoke ring issues from my lips (about crops) and circles him, bringing him into
contact. The human voice has a disarming quality —(we are not single, we are one). As
we exchange these few but amiable remarks about country houses, I furbish him up and
make him concrete. He is indulgent as a husband but not faithful; a small builder who
employs a few men. In local society he is important; is already a councillor, and perhaps
in time will be mayor. He wears a large ornament, like a double tooth torn up by the
roots, made of coral, hanging at his watch-chain. Walter J. Trumble is the sort of name
that would fit him. He has been in America, on a business trip with his wife, and a
double room in a smallish hotel cost him a whole month’s wages. His front tooth is
stopped with gold.
‘The fact is that I have little aptitude for reflection. I require the concrete in everything.
It is so only that I lay hands upon the world. A good phrase, however, seems to me to
have an independent existence. Yet I think it is likely that the best are made in solitude.
They require some final refrigeration which I cannot give them, dabbling always in
warm soluble words. My method, nevertheless, has certain advantages over theirs.
Neville is repelled by the grossness of Trumble. Louis, glancing, tripping with the high
step of a disdainful crane, picks up words as if in sugar-tongs. It is true that his eyes —
wild, laughing, yet desperate — express something that we have not gauged. There is
about both Neville and Louis a precision, an exactitude, that I admire and shall never
possess. Now I begin to be aware that action is demanded. We approach a junction; at a
junction I have to change. I have to board a train for Edinburgh. I cannot precisely lay
fingers on this fact — it lodges loosely among my thoughts like a button, like a small
coin. Here is the jolly old boy who collects tickets. I had one — I had one certainly. But it
does not matter. Either I shall find it, or I shall not find it. I examine my note-case. I look
in all my pockets. These are the things that for ever interrupt the process upon which I
am eternally engaged of finding some perfect phrase that fits this very moment exactly.’
‘Bernard has gone,’ said Neville, ‘without a ticket. He has escaped us, making a phrase,
waving his hand. He talked as easily to the horse-breeder or to the plumber as to us. The
 25

plumber accepted him with devotion. “If he had a son like that,” he was thinking, “he
would manage to send him to Oxford.” But what did Bernard feel for the plumber? Did
he not only wish to continue the sequence of the story which he never stops telling
himself? He began it when he rolled his bread into pellets as a child. One pellet was a
man, one was a woman. We are all pellets. We are all phrases in Bernard’s story, things
he writes down in his notebook under A or under B. He tells our story with
extraordinary understanding, except of what we most feel. For he does not need us. He
is never at our mercy. There he is, waving his arms on the platform. The train has gone
without him. He has missed his connection. He has lost his ticket. But that does not
matter. He will talk to the barmaid about the nature of human destiny. We are off; he
has forgotten us already; we pass out of his view; we go on, filled with lingering
sensations, half bitter, half sweet, for he is somehow to be pitied, breasting the world
with half-finished phrases, having lost his ticket: he is also to be loved.
‘Now I pretend again to read. I raise my book, till it almost covers my eyes. But I cannot
read in the presence of horse-dealers and plumbers. I have no power of ingratiating
myself. I do not admire that man; he does not admire me. Let me at least be honest. Let
me denounce this piffling, trifling, self-satisfied world; these horse-hair seats; these
coloured photographs of piers and parades. I could shriek aloud at the smug self-
satisfaction, at the mediocrity of this world, which breeds horse-dealers with coral
ornaments hanging from their watch-chains. There is that in me which will consume
them entirely. My laughter shall make them twist in their seats; shall drive them
howling before me. No; they are immortal. They triumph. They will make it impossible
for me always to read Catullus in a third-class railway carriage. They will drive me in
October to take refuge in one of the universities, where I shall become a don; and go
with schoolmasters to Greece; and lecture on the ruins of the Parthenon. It would be
better to breed horses and live in one of those red villas than to run in and out of the
skulls of Sophocles and Euripides like a maggot, with a high-minded wife, one of those
University women. That, however, will be my fate. I shall suffer. I am already at eighteen
capable of such contempt that horse-breeders hate me. That is my triumph; I do not
compromise. I am not timid; I have no accent. I do not finick about fearing what people
think of “my father a banker at Brisbane” like Louis.
‘Now we draw near the centre of the civilized world. There are the familiar gasometers.
There are the public gardens intersected by asphalt paths. There are the lovers lying
shamelessly mouth to mouth on the burnt grass. Percival is now almost in Scotland; his
train draws through the red moors; he sees the long line of the Border hills and the
Roman wall. He reads a detective novel, yet understands everything.
The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws
out too, in fear, in exultation. I am about to meet — what? What extraordinary
adventure waits me, among these mail vans, these porters, these swarms of people
calling taxis? I feel insignificant, lost, but exultant. With a soft shock we stop. I will let
the others get out before me. I will sit still one moment before I emerge into that chaos,
that tumult. I will not anticipate what is to come. The huge uproar is in my ears. It
sounds and resounds, under this glass roof like the surge of a sea. We are cast down on
the platform with our handbags. We are whirled asunder. My sense of self almost
perishes; my contempt. I become drawn in, tossed down, thrown sky-high. I step out on
to the platform, grasping tightly all that I possess — one bag.’
 26

The sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding the ribs of the eaten-out
boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel. Light almost
pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach. The girl who had
shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured
jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened
eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves. Their quivering mackerel sparkling was
darkened; they massed themselves; their green hollows deepened and darkened and
might be traversed by shoals of wandering fish. As they splashed and drew back they
left a black rim of twigs and cork on the shore and straws and sticks of wood, as if some
light shallop had foundered and burst its sides and the sailor had swum to land and
bounded up the cliff and left his frail cargo to be washed ashore.
In the garden the birds that had sung erratically and spasmodically in the dawn on that
tree, on that bush, now sang together in chorus, shrill and sharp; now together, as if
conscious of companionship, now alone as if to the pale blue sky. They swerved, all in
one flight, when the black cat moved among the bushes, when the cook threw cinders on
the ash heap and startled them. Fear was in their song, and apprehension of pain, and
joy to be snatched quickly now at this instant. Also they sang emulously in the clear
morning air, swerving high over the elm tree, singing together as they chased each
other, escaping, pursuing, pecking each other as they turned high in the air. And then
tiring of pursuit and flight, lovelily they came descending, delicately declining, dropped
down and sat silent on the tree, on the wall, with their bright eyes glancing, and their
heads turned this way, that way; aware, awake; intensely conscious of one thing, one
object in particular.
Perhaps it was a snail shell, rising in the grass like a grey cathedral, a swelling building
burnt with dark rings and shadowed green by the grass. Or perhaps they saw the
splendour of the flowers making a light of flowing purple over the beds, through which
dark tunnels of purple shade were driven between the stalks. Or they fixed their gaze on
the small bright apple leaves, dancing yet withheld, stiffly sparkling among the pink-
tipped blossoms. Or they saw the rain drop on the hedge, pendent but not falling, with a
whole house bent in it, and towering elms; or, gazing straight at the sun, their eyes
became gold beads.
Now glancing this side, that side, they looked deeper, beneath the flowers, down the
dark avenues into the unlit world where the leaf rots and the flower has fallen. Then one
of them, beautifully darting, accurately alighting, spiked the soft, monstrous body of the
defenceless worm, pecked again and yet again, and left it to fester. Down there among
the roots where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were wafted; drops formed
on the bloated sides of swollen things. The skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter oozed
too thick to run. Yellow excretions were exuded by slugs, and now and again an
amorphous body with a head at either end swayed slowly from side to side. The gold-
eyed birds darting in between the leaves observed that purulence, that wetness,
quizzically. Now and then they plunged the tips of their beaks savagely into the sticky
mixture.
Now, too, the rising sun came in at the window, touching the red- edged curtain, and
began to bring out circles and lines. Now in the growing light its whiteness settled in the
plate; the blade condensed its gleam. Chairs and cupboards loomed behind so that
though each was separate they seemed inextricably involved. The looking-glass
whitened its pool upon the wall. The real flower on the window-sill was attended by a
 27

phantom flower. Yet the phantom was part of the flower, for when a bud broke free the
paler flower in the glass opened a bud too.
The wind rose. The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriors, like turbaned
men with poisoned assegais who, whirling their arms on high, advance upon the feeding
flocks, the white sheep.
‘The complexity of things becomes more close,’ said Bernard, ‘here at college, where the
stir and pressure of life are so extreme, where the excitement of mere living becomes
daily more urgent. Every hour something new is unburied in the great bran pie. What
am I? I ask. This? No, I am that. Especially now, when I have left a room, and people
talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon
rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel — then it becomes clear that I
am not one and simple, but complex and many. Bernard, in public, bubbles; in private, is
secretive. That is what they do not understand, for they are now undoubtedly discussing
me, saying I escape them, am evasive. They do not understand that I have to effect
different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of several different men who
alternately act their parts as Bernard. I am abnormally aware of circumstances. I can
never read a book in a railway carriage without asking, Is he a builder? Is she unhappy?
I was aware today acutely that poor Simes, with his pimple, was feeling, how bitterly,
that his chance of making a good impression upon Billy Jackson was remote. Feeling this
painfully, I invited him to dinner with ardour. This he will attribute to an admiration
which is not mine. That is true. But “joined to the sensibility of a woman” (I am here
quoting my own biographer) “Bernard possessed the logical sobriety of a man.” Now
people who make a single impression, and that, in the main, a good one (for there seems
to be a virtue in simplicity), are those who keep their equilibrium in mid-stream. (I
instantly see fish with their noses one way, the stream rushing past another.) Canon,
Lycett, Peters, Hawkins, Larpent, Neville — all fish in mid-stream. But you understand,
YOU, my self, who always comes at a call (that would be a harrowing experience to call
and for no one to come; that would make the midnight hollow, and explains the
expression of old men in clubs — they have given up calling for a self who does not
come), you understand that I am only superficially represented by what I was saying
tonight. Underneath, and, at the moment when I am most disparate, I am also
integrated. I sympathize effusively; I also sit, like a toad in a hole, receiving with perfect
coldness whatever comes. Very few of you who are now discussing me have the double
capacity to feel, to reason. Lycett, you see, believes in running after hares; Hawkins has
spent a most industrious afternoon in the library. Peters has his young lady at the
circulating library. You are all engaged, involved, drawn in, and absolutely energized to
the top of your bent — all save Neville, whose mind is far too complex to be roused by
any single activity. I also am too complex. In my case something remains floating,
unattached.
‘Now, as a proof of my susceptibility to atmosphere, here, as I come into my room, and
turn on the light, and see the sheet of paper, the table, my gown lying negligently over
the back of the chair, I feel that I am that dashing yet reflective man, that bold and
deleterious figure, who, lightly throwing off his cloak, seizes his pen and at once flings
off the following letter to the girl with whom he is passionately in love.
‘Yes, all is propitious. I am now in the mood. I can write the letter straight off which I
have begun ever so many times. I have just come in; I have flung down my hat and my
stick; I am writing the first thing that comes into my head without troubling to put the
 28

paper straight. It is going to be a brilliant sketch which, she must think, was written
without a pause, without an erasure. Look how unformed the letters are — there is a
careless blot. All must be sacrificed to speed and carelessness. I will write a quick,
running, small hand, exaggerating the down stroke of the “y” and crossing the “t” thus —
with a dash. The date shall be only Tuesday, the 17th, and then a question mark. But
also I must give her the impression that though he — for this is not myself — is writing
in such an off-hand, such a slap-dash way, there is some subtle suggestion of intimacy
and respect. I must allude to talks we have had together — bring back some
remembered scene. But I must seem to her (this is very important) to be passing from
thing to thing with the greatest ease in the world. I shall pass from the service for the
man who was drowned (I have a phrase for that) to Mrs Moffat and her sayings (I have a
note of them), and so to some reflections apparently casual but full of profundity
(profound criticism is often written casually) about some book I have been reading,
some out-of-the-way book. I want her to say as she brushes her hair or puts out the
candle, “Where did I read that? Oh, in Bernard’s letter.” It is the speed, the hot, molten
effect, the laval flow of sentence into sentence that I need. Who am I thinking of? Byron
of course. I am, in some ways, like Byron. Perhaps a sip of Byron will help to put me in
the vein. Let me read a page. No; this is dull; this is scrappy. This is rather too formal.
Now I am getting the hang of it. Now I am getting his beat into my brain (the rhythm is
the main thing in writing). Now, without pausing I will begin, on the very lilt of the
stroke —.
‘Yet it falls flat. It peters out. I cannot get up steam enough to carry me over the
transition. My true self breaks off from my assumed. And if I begin to re-write it, she will
feel “Bernard is posing as a literary man; Bernard is thinking of his biographer” (which
is true). No, I will write the letter tomorrow directly after breakfast.
‘Now let me fill my mind with imaginary pictures. Let me suppose that I am asked to
stay at Restover, King’s Laughton, Station Langley three miles. I arrive in the dusk. In the
courtyard of this shabby but distinguished house there are two or three dogs, slinking,
long-legged. There are faded rugs in the hall; a military gentleman smokes a pipe as he
paces the terrace. The note is of distinguished poverty and military connections. A
hunter’s hoof on the writing table — a favourite horse. “Do you ride?” “Yes, sir, I love
riding.” “My daughter expects us in the drawing- room.” My heart pounds against my
ribs. She is standing at a low table; she has been hunting; she munches sandwiches like a
tomboy. I make a fairly good impression on the Colonel. I am not too clever, he thinks; I
am not too raw. Also I play billiards. Then the nice maid who has been with the family
thirty years comes in. The pattern on the plates is of Oriental long-tailed birds. Her
mother’s portrait in muslin hangs over the fireplace. I can sketch the surroundings up to
a point with extraordinary ease. But can I make it work? Can I hear her voice — the
precise tone with which, when we are alone, she says “Bernard”? And then what next?
‘The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to
see the thin places in my own stories. The real novelist, the perfectly simple human
being, could go on, indefinitely, imagining. He would not integrate, as I do. He would not
have this devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out grate. Some blind flaps in my
eyes. Everything becomes impervious. I cease to invent.
‘Let me recollect. It has been on the whole a good day. The drop that forms on the roof
of the soul in the evening is round, many- coloured. There was the morning, fine; there
was the afternoon, walking. I like views of spires across grey fields. I like glimpses
 29

between people’s shoulders. Things kept popping into my head. I was imaginative,
subtle. After dinner, I was dramatic. I put into concrete form many things that we had
dimly observed about our common friends. I made my transitions easily. But now let me
ask myself the final question, as I sit over this grey fire, with its naked promontories of
black coal, which of these people am I? It depends so much upon the room. When I say
to myself, “Bernard”, who comes? A faithful, sardonic man, disillusioned, but not
embittered. A man of no particular age or calling. Myself, merely. It is he who now takes
the poker and rattles the cinders so that they fall in showers through the grate. “Lord,”
he says to himself, watching them fall, “what a pother!” and then he adds, lugubriously,
but with some sense of consolation, “Mrs Moffat will come and sweep it all up —” I fancy
I shall often repeat to myself that phrase, as I rattle and bang through life, hitting first
this side of the carriage, then the other, “Oh, yes, Mrs Moffat will come and sweep it all
up.” And so to bed.’
‘In a world which contains the present moment,’ said Neville, ‘why discriminate?
Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it. Let it exist, this bank, this
beauty, and I, for one instant, steeped in pleasure. The sun is hot. I see the river. I see
trees specked and burnt in the autumn sunlight. Boats float past, through the red,
through the green. Far away a bell tolls, but not for death. There are bells that ring for
life. A leaf falls, from joy. Oh, I am in love with life! Look how the willow shoots its fine
sprays into the air! Look how through them a boat passes, filled with indolent, with
unconscious, with powerful young men. They are listening to the gramophone; they are
eating fruit out of paper bags. They are tossing the skins of bananas, which then sink
eel-like, into the river. All they do is beautiful. There are cruets behind them and
ornaments; their rooms are full of oars and oleographs but they have turned all to
beauty. That boat passes under the bridge. Another comes. Then another. That is
Percival, lounging on the cushions, monolithic, in giant repose. No, it is only one of his
satellites, imitating his monolithic, his giant repose. He alone is unconscious of their
tricks, and when he catches them at it he buffets them good-humouredly with a blow of
his paw. They, too, have passed under the bridge through ‘the fountains of the pendant
trees’, through its fine strokes of yellow and plum colour. The breeze stirs; the curtain
quivers; I see behind the leaves the grave, yet eternally joyous buildings, which seem
porous, not gravid; light, though set so immemorially on the ancient turf. Now begins to
rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their
crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
Boats and youth passing and distant trees, “the falling fountains of the pendant trees”. I
see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this, I lash my
frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and
words, how they gallop — how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in
me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and
string bags. There is some flaw in me — some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over,
turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet. What did I
write last night if it was not good poetry? Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do
not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that
make me what I am.
‘Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming,
and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by
the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform
when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self
 30

adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself
but Neville mixed with somebody — with whom? — with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard,
and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?’
‘How strange,’ said Bernard, ‘the willow looks seen together. I was Byron, and the tree
was Byron’s tree, lachrymose, down- showering, lamenting. Now that we look at the
tree together, it has a combined look, each branch distinct, and I will tell you what I feel,
under the compulsion of your clarity.
‘I feel your disapproval, I feel your force. I become, with you, an untidy, an impulsive
human being whose bandanna handkerchief is for ever stained with the grease of
crumpets. Yes, I hold Gray’s Elegy in one hand; with the other I scoop out the bottom
crumpet, that has absorbed all the butter and sticks to the bottom of the plate. This
offends you; I feel your distress acutely. Inspired by it and anxious to regain your good
opinion, I proceed to tell you how I have just pulled Percival out of bed; I describe his
slippers, his table, his guttered candle; his surly and complaining accents as I pull the
blankets off his feet; he burrowing like some vast cocoon meanwhile. I describe all this
in such a way that, centred as you are upon some private sorrow (for a hooded shape
presides over our encounter), you give way, you laugh and delight in me. My charm and
flow of language, unexpected and spontaneous as it is, delights me too. I am astonished,
as I draw the veil off things with words, how much, how infinitely more than I can say, I
have observed. More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images. This,
I say to myself, is what I need; why, I ask, can I not finish the letter that I am writing? For
my room is always scattered with unfinished letters. I begin to suspect, when I am with
you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with
potency, with the sense of what is to come. Blundering, but fervid, I see myself buzzing
round flowers, humming down scarlet cups, making blue funnels resound with my
prodigious booming. How richly I shall enjoy my youth (you make me feel). And London.
And freedom. But stop. You are not listening. You are making some protest, as you slide,
with an inexpressibly familiar gesture, your hand along your knee. By such signs we
diagnose our friends’ diseases. “Do not, in your affluence and plenty,” you seem to say,
“pass me by.” “Stop,” you say. “Ask me what I suffer.”
‘Let me then create you. (You have done as much for me.) You lie on this hot bank, in
this lovely, this fading, this still bright October day, watching boat after boat float
through the combed-out twigs of the willow tree. And you wish to be a poet; and you
wish to be a lover. But the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and the remorseless
honesty of your intellect (these Latin words I owe you; these qualities of yours make me
shift a little uneasily and see the faded patches, the thin strands in my own equipment)
bring you to a halt. You indulge in no mystifications. You do not fog yourself with rosy
clouds, or yellow.
‘Am I right? Have I read the little gesture of your left hand correctly? If so, give me your
poems; hand over the sheets you wrote last night in such a fervour of inspiration that
you now feel a little sheepish. For you distrust inspiration, yours or mine. Let us go back
together, over the bridge, under the elm trees, to my room, where, with walls round us
and red serge curtains drawn, we can shut out these distracting voices, scents and
savours of lime trees, and other lives; these pert shop-girls, disdainfully tripping, these
shuffling, heavy-laden old women; these furtive glimpses of some vague and vanishing
figure — it might be Jinny, it might be Susan, or was that Rhoda disappearing down the
avenue? Again, from some slight twitch I guess your feeling; I have escaped you; I have
 31

gone buzzing like a swarm of bees, endlessly vagrant, with none of your power of fixing
remorselessly upon a single object. But I will return.’
‘When there are buildings like these,’ said Neville, ‘I cannot endure that there should be
shop-girls. Their titter, their gossip, offends me; breaks into my stillness, and nudges
me, in moments of purest exultation, to remember our degradation.
‘But now we have regained our territory after that brief brush with the bicycles and the
lime scent and the vanishing figures in the distracted street. Here we are masters of
tranquillity and order; inheritors of proud tradition. The lights are beginning to make
yellow slits across the square. Mists from the river are filling these ancient spaces. They
cling, gently, to the hoary stone. The leaves now are thick in country lanes, sheep cough
in the damp fields; but here in your room we are dry. We talk privately. The fire leaps
and sinks, making some knob bright.
‘You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to
approve of your own character. I find marks against all those sentences which seem to
express a sardonic yet passionate nature; a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against
hard glass. You thought, as you drew your pencil there, “I too throw off my cloak like
that. I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny.” Yet Byron never made tea as you do,
who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool
on the table — it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily,
with your pocket-handkerchief. You then stuff your handkerchief back into your pocket
— that is not Byron; that is you; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty
years’ time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene:
and if you are dead, I shall weep. Once you were Tolstoi’s young man; now you are
Byron’s young man; perhaps you will be Meredith’s young man; then you will visit Paris
in the Easter vacation and come back wearing a black tie, some detestable Frenchman
whom nobody has ever heard of. Then I shall drop you.
‘I am one person — myself. I do not impersonate Catullus, whom I adore. I am the most
slavish of students, with here a dictionary, there a notebook in which I enter curious
uses of the past participle. But one cannot go on for ever cutting these ancient
inscriptions clearer with a knife. Shall I always draw the red serge curtain close and see
my book, laid like a block of marble, pale under the lamp? That would be a glorious life,
to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might
lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor
always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.
‘But I am too nervous to end my sentence properly. I speak quickly, as I pace up and
down, to conceal my agitation. I hate your greasy handkerchiefs — you will stain your
copy of Don Juan. You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And
while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret told to
nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your
hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?
‘I stand with my back to you fidgeting. No, my hands are now perfectly still. Precisely,
opening a space in the bookcase, I insert Don Juan; there. I would rather be loved, I
would rather be famous than follow perfection through the sand. But am I doomed to
cause disgust? Am I a poet? Take it. The desire which is loaded behind my lips, cold as
lead, fell as a bullet, the thing I aim at shop-girls, women, the pretence, the vulgarity of
life (because I love it) shoots at you as I throw — catch it — my poem.’
 32

‘He has shot like an arrow from the room,’ said Bernard. ‘He has left me his poem. O
friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare’s sonnets! O
friendship, how piercing are your darts — there, there, again there. He looked at me,
turning to face me; he gave me his poem. All mists curl off the roof of my being. That
confidence I shall keep to my dying day. Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he
went over me, his devastating presence — dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on
the shore of my soul. It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones. All semblances
were rolled up. “You are not Byron; you are your self.” To be contracted by another
person into a single being — how strange.
‘How strange to feel the line that is spun from us lengthening its fine filament across the
misty spaces of the intervening world. He is gone; I stand here, holding his poem.
Between us is this line. But now, how comfortable, how reassuring to feel that alien
presence removed, that scrutiny darkened and hooded over! How grateful to draw the
blinds, and admit no other presence; to feel returning from the dark corners in which
they took refuge, those shabby inmates, those familiars, whom, with his superior force,
he drove into hiding. The mocking, the observant spirits who, even in the crisis and stab
of the moment, watched on my behalf now come flocking home again. With their
addition, I am Bernard; I am Byron; I am this, that and the other. They darken the air
and enrich me, as of old, with their antics, their comments, and cloud the fine simplicity
of my moment of emotion. For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple
as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.
‘Now they have returned, my inmates, my familiars. Now the stab, the rent in my
defences that Neville made with his astonishing fine rapier, is repaired. I am almost
whole now; and see how jubilant I am, bringing into play all that Neville ignores in me. I
feel, as I look from the window, parting the curtains, “That would give him no pleasure;
but it rejoices me.” (We use our friends to measure our own stature.) My scope
embraces what Neville never reaches. They are shouting hunting-songs over the way.
They are celebrating some run with the beagles. The, little boys in caps who always
turned at the same moment when the brake went round the corner are clapping each
other on the shoulder and boasting. But Neville, delicately avoiding interference,
stealthily, like a conspirator, hastens back to his room. I see him sunk in his low chair
gazing at the fire which has assumed for the moment an architectural solidity. If life, he
thinks, could wear that permanence, if life could have that order — for above all he
desires order, and detests my Byronic untidiness; and so draws his curtain; and bolts
his door. His eyes (for he is in love; the sinister figure of love presided at our encounter)
fill with longing; fill with tears. He snatches the poker and with one blow destroys that
momentary appearance of solidity in the burning coals. All changes. And youth and love.
The boat has floated through the arch of the willows and is now under the bridge.
Percival, Tony, Archie, or another, will go to India. We shall not meet again. Then he
stretches his hand for his copy-book — a neat volume bound in mottled paper — and
writes feverishly long lines of poetry, in the manner of whomever he admires most at
the moment.
‘But I want to linger; to lean from the window; to listen. There again comes that
rollicking chorus. They are now smashing china — that also is the convention. The
chorus, like a torrent jumping rocks, brutally assaulting old trees, pours with splendid
abandonment headlong over precipices. On they roll; on they gallop, after hounds, after
footballs; they pump up and down attached to oars like sacks of flour. All divisions are
merged — they act like one man. The gusty October wind blows the uproar in bursts of
 33

sound and silence across the court. Now again they are smashing the china — that is the
convention. An old, unsteady woman carrying a bag trots home under the fire-red
windows. She is half afraid that they will fall on her and tumble her into the gutter. Yet
she pauses as if to warm her knobbed, her rheumaticky hands at the bonfire which
flares away with streams of sparks and bits of blown paper. The old woman pauses
against the lit window. A contrast. That I see and Neville does not see; that I feel and
Neville does not feel. Hence he will reach perfection and I shall fail and shall leave
nothing behind me but imperfect phrases littered with sand.
‘I think of Louis now. What malevolent yet searching light would Louis throw upon this
dwindling autumn evening, upon this china- smashing and trolling of hunting-songs,
upon Neville, Byron and our life here? His thin lips are somewhat pursed; his cheeks are
pale; he pores in an office over some obscure commercial document. “My father, a
banker at Brisbane”— being ashamed of him he always talks of him — failed. So he sits
in an office, Louis the best scholar in the school. But I seeking contrasts often feel his eye
on us, his laughing eye, his wild eye, adding us up like insignificant items in some grand
total which he is for ever pursuing in his office. And one day, taking a fine pen and
dipping it in red ink, the addition will be complete; our total will be known; but it will
not be enough.
‘Bang! They have thrown a chair now against the wall. We are damned then. My case is
dubious too. Am I not indulging in unwarranted emotions? Yes, as I lean out of the
window and drop my cigarette so that it twirls lightly to the ground, I feel Louis
watching even my cigarette. And Louis says, “That means something. But what?”’
‘People go on passing,’ said Louis. They pass the window of this eating-shop incessantly.
Motor-cars, vans, motor-omnibuses; and again motor-omnibuses, vans, motor-cars —
they pass the window. In the background I perceive shops and houses; also the grey
spires of a city church. In the foreground are glass shelves set with plates of buns and
ham sandwiches. All is somewhat obscured by steam from a tea-urn. A meaty, vapourish
smell of beef and mutton, sausages and mash, hangs down like a damp net in the middle
of the eating- house. I prop my book against a bottle of Worcester sauce and try to look
like the rest.
‘Yet I cannot. (They go on passing, they go on passing in disorderly procession.) I cannot
read my book, or order my beef, with conviction. I repeat, “I am an average Englishman;
I am an average clerk”, yet I look at the little men at the next table to be sure that I do
what they do. Supple-faced, with rippling skins, that are always twitching with the
multiplicity of their sensations, prehensile like monkeys, greased to this particular
moment, they are discussing with all the right gestures the sale of a piano. It blocks up
the hall; so he would take a Tenner. People go on passing; they go on passing against the
spires of the church and the plates of ham sandwiches. The streamers of my
consciousness waver out and are perpetually torn and distressed by their disorder. I
cannot therefore concentrate on my dinner. “I would take a tenner. The case is
handsome; but it blocks up the hall.” They dive and plunge like guillemots whose
feathers are slippery with oil. All excesses beyond that norm are vanity. That is the
mean; that is the average. Meanwhile the hats bob up and down; the door perpetually
shuts and opens. I am conscious of flux, of disorder; of annihilation and despair. If this is
all, this is worthless. Yet I feel, too, the rhythm of the eating- house. It is like a waltz
tune, eddying in and out, round and round. The waitresses, balancing trays, swing in
and out, round and round, dealing plates of greens, of apricot and custard, dealing them
 34

at the right time, to the right customers. The average men, including her rhythm in their
rhythm (“I would take a tenner; for it blocks up the hall”) take their greens, take their
apricots and custard. Where then is the break in this continuity? What the fissure
through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is
the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then
expand again. Yet I am not included. If I speak, imitating their accent, they prick their
ears, waiting for me to speak again, in order that they may place me — if I come from
Canada or Australia, I, who desire above all things to be taken to the arms with love, am
alien, external. I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves of the
ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon; am aware of hats bobbing up
and down in perpetual disorder. To me is addressed the plaint of the wandering and
distracted spirit (a woman with bad teeth falters at the counter), “Bring us back to the
fold, we who pass so disjectedly, bobbing up and down, past windows with plates of
ham sandwiches in the foreground.” Yes; I will reduce you to order.
‘I will read in the book that is propped against the bottle of Worcester sauce. It contains
some forged rings, some perfect statements, a few words, but poetry. You, all of you,
ignore it. What the dead poet said, you have forgotten. And I cannot translate it to you so
that its binding power ropes you in, and makes it clear to you that you are aimless; and
the rhythm is cheap and worthless; and so remove that degradation which, if you are
unaware of your aimlessness, pervades you, making you senile, even while you are
young. To translate that poem so that it is easily read is to be my endeavour. I, the
companion of Plato, of Virgil, will knock at the grained oak door. I oppose to what is
passing this ramrod of beaten steel. I will not submit to this aimless passing of billycock
hats and Homburg hats and all the plumed and variegated head-dresses of women.
(Susan, whom I respect, would wear a plain straw hat on a summer’s day.) And the
grinding and the steam that runs in unequal drops down the window pane; and the
stopping and the starting with a jerk of motor-omnibuses; and the hesitations at
counters; and the words that trail drearily without human meaning; I will reduce you to
order.
‘My roots go down through veins of lead and silver, through damp, marshy places that
exhale odours, to a knot made of oak roots bound together in the centre. Sealed and
blind, with earth stopping my ears, I have yet heard rumours of wars; and the
nightingale; have felt the hurrying of many troops of men flocking hither and thither in
quest of civilization like flocks of birds migrating seeking the summer; I have seen
women carrying red pitchers to the banks of the Nile. I woke in a garden, with a blow on
the nape of my neck, a hot kiss, Jinny’s; remembering all this as one remembers
confused cries and toppling pillars and shafts of red and black in some nocturnal
conflagration. I am for ever sleeping and waking. Now I sleep; now I wake. I see the
gleaming tea-urn; the glass cases full of pale-yellow sandwiches; the men in round coats
perched on stools at the counter; and also behind them, eternity. It is a stigma burnt on
my quivering flesh by a cowled man with a red-hot iron. I see this eating-shop against
the packed and fluttering birds’ wings, many feathered, folded, of the past. Hence my
pursed lips, my sickly pallor; my distasteful and uninviting aspect as I turn my face with
hatred and bitterness upon Bernard and Neville, who saunter under yew trees; who
inherit armchairs; and draw their curtains close, so that lamplight falls on their books.
‘Susan, I respect; because she sits stitching. She sews under a quiet lamp in a house
where the corn sighs close to the window and gives me safety. For I am the weakest, the
youngest of them all. I am a child looking at his feet and the little runnels that the stream
 35

has made in the gravel. That is a snail, I say; that is a leaf. I delight in the snails; I delight
in the leaf, I am always the youngest, the most innocent, the most trustful. You are all
protected. I am naked. When the waitress with the plaited wreaths of hair swings past,
she deals you your apricots and custard unhesitatingly, like a sister. You are her
brothers. But when I get up, brushing the crumbs from my waistcoat, I slip too large a
tip, a shilling, under the edge of my plate, so that she may not find it till I am gone, and
her scorn, as she picks it up with laughter, may not strike on me till I am past the swing-
doors.’
‘Now the wind lifts the blind,’ said Susan, ‘jars, bowls, matting and the shabby arm-chair
with the hole in it are now become distinct. The usual faded ribbons sprinkle the
wallpaper. The bird chorus is over, only one bird now sings close to the bedroom
window. I will pull on my stockings and go quietly past the bedroom doors, and down
through the kitchen, out through the garden past the greenhouse into the field. It is still
early morning. The mist is on the marshes. The day is stark and stiff as a linen shroud.
But it will soften; it will warm. At this hour, this still early hour, I think I am the field, I
am the barn, I am the trees; mine are the flocks of birds, and this young hare who leaps,
at the last moment when I step almost on him. Mine is the heron that stretches its vast
wings lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes one foot before another munching;
and the wild, swooping swallow; and the faint red in the sky, and the green when the
red fades; the silence and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart- horses from the
fields — all are mine.
‘I cannot be divided, or kept apart. I was sent to school; I was sent to Switzerland to
finish my education. I hate linoleum; I hate fir trees and mountains. Let me now fling
myself on this flat ground under a pale sky where the clouds pace slowly. The cart
grows gradually larger as it comes along the road. The sheep gather in the middle of the
field. The birds gather in the middle of the road — they need not fly yet. The wood
smoke rises. The starkness of the dawn is going out of it. Now the day stirs. Colour
returns. The day waves yellow with all its crops. The earth hangs heavy beneath me.
‘But who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a circle? I think
sometimes (I am not twenty yet) I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate,
on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud,
the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people.
Yet now, leaning here till the gate prints my arm, I feel the weight that has formed itself
in my side. Something has formed, at school, in Switzerland, some hard thing. Not sighs
and laughter, not circling and ingenious phrases; not Rhoda’s strange communications
when she looks past us, over our shoulders; nor Jinny’s pirouetting, all of a piece, limbs
and body. What I give is fell. I cannot float gently, mixing with other people. I like best
the stare of shepherds met in the road; the stare of gipsy women beside a cart in a ditch
suckling their children as I shall suckle my children. For soon in the hot midday when
the bees hum round the hollyhocks my lover will come. He will stand under the cedar
tree. To his one word I shall answer my one word. What has formed in me I shall give
him. I shall have children; I shall have maids in aprons; men with pitchforks; a kitchen
where they bring the ailing lambs to warm in baskets, where the hams hang and the
onions glisten. I shall be like my mother, silent in a blue apron locking up the cupboards.
‘Now I am hungry. I will call my setter. I think of crusts and bread and butter and white
plates in a sunny room. I will go back across the fields. I will walk along this grass path
with strong, even strides, now swerving to avoid the puddle, now leaping lightly to a
 36

clump. Beads of wet form on my rough skirt; my shoes become supple and dark. The
stiffness has gone from the day; it is shaded with grey, green and umber. The birds no
longer settle on the high road.
‘I return, like a cat or fox returning, whose fur is grey with rime, whose pads are
hardened by the coarse earth. I push through the cabbages, making their leaves squeak
and their drops spill. I sit waiting for my father’s footsteps as he shuffles down the
passage pinching some herb between his fingers. I pour out cup after cup while the
unopened flowers hold themselves erect on the table among the pots of jam, the loaves
and the butter. We are silent.
‘I go then to the cupboard, and take the damp bags of rich sultanas; I lift the heavy flour
on to the clean scrubbed kitchen table. I knead; I stretch; I pull, plunging my hands in
the warm inwards of the dough. I let the cold water stream fanwise through my fingers.
The fire roars; the flies buzz in a circle. All my currants and rices, the silver bags and the
blue bags, are locked again in the cupboard. The meat is stood in the oven; the bread
rises in a soft dome under the clean towel. I walk in the afternoon down to the river. All
the world is breeding. The flies are going from grass to grass. The flowers are thick with
pollen. The swans ride the stream in order. The clouds, warm now, sun- spotted, sweep
over the hills, leaving gold in the water, and gold on the necks of the swans. Pushing one
foot before the other, the cows munch their way across the field. I feel through the grass
for the white-domed mushroom; and break its stalk and pick the purple orchid that
grows beside it and lay the orchid by the mushroom with the earth at its root, and so
home to make the kettle boil for my father among the just reddened roses on the tea-
table.
‘But evening comes and the lamps are lit. And when evening comes and the lamps are lit
they make a yellow fire in the ivy. I sit with my sewing by the table. I think of Jinny; of
Rhoda; and hear the rattle of wheels on the pavement as the farm horses plod home; I
hear traffic roaring in the evening wind. I look at the quivering leaves in the dark garden
and think “They dance in London. Jinny kisses Louis”.’
‘How strange,’ said Jinny, ‘that people should sleep, that people should put out the lights
and go upstairs. They have taken off their dresses, they have put on white nightgowns.
There are no lights in any of these houses. There is a line of chimney-pots against the
sky; and a street lamp or two burning, as lamps burn when nobody needs them. The
only people in the streets are poor people hurrying. There is no one coming or going in
this street; the day is over. A few policemen stand at the corners. Yet night is beginning.
I feel myself shining in the dark. Silk is on my knee. My silk legs rub smoothly together.
The stones of a necklace lie cold on my throat. My feet feel the pinch of shoes. I sit bolt
upright so that my hair may not touch the back of the seat. I am arrayed, I am prepared.
This is the momentary pause; the dark moment. The fiddlers have lifted their bows.
‘Now the car slides to a stop. A strip of pavement is lighted. The door is opening and
shutting. People are arriving; they do not speak; they hasten in. There is the swishing
sound of cloaks falling in the hall. This is the prelude, this is the beginning. I glance, I
peep, I powder. All is exact, prepared. My hair is swept in one curve. My lips are
precisely red. I am ready now to join men and women on the stairs, my peers. I pass
them, exposed to their gaze, as they are to mine. Like lightning we look but do not soften
or show signs of recognition. Our bodies communicate. This is my calling. This is my
world. All is decided and ready; the servants, standing here, and again here, take my
name, my fresh, my unknown name, and toss it before me. I enter.
 37

‘Here are gilt chairs in the empty, the expectant rooms, and flowers, stiller, statelier,
than flowers that grow, spread green, spread white, against the walls. And on one small
table is one bound book. This is what I have dreamt; this is what I have foretold. I am
native here. I tread naturally on thick carpets. I slide easily on smooth-polished floors, I
now begin to unfurl, in this scent, in this radiance, as a fern when its curled leaves
unfurl. I stop. I take stock of this world. I look among the groups of unknown people.
Among the lustrous green, pink, pearl- grey women stand upright the bodies of men.
They are black and white; they are grooved beneath their clothes with deep rills. I feel
again the reflection in the window of the tunnel; it moves. The black-and-white figures
of unknown men look at me as I lean forward; as I turn aside to look at a picture, they
turn too. Their hands go fluttering to their ties. They touch their waistcoats, their
pocket-handkerchiefs. They are very young. They are anxious to make a good
impression. I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid,
melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way, I say to this one,
“Come.” Rippling black, I say to that one, “No.” One breaks off from his station under the
glass cabinet. He approaches. He makes towards me. This is the most exciting moment I
have ever known. I flutter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in the river, flowing this way,
flowing that way, but rooted, so that he may come to me. “Come,” I say, “come.” Pale,
with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent
and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here; he stands at my side.
‘Now with a little jerk, like a limpet broken from a rock, I am broken off: I fall with him; I
am carried off. We yield to this slow flood. We go in and out of this hesitating music.
Rocks break the current of the dance; it jars, it shivers. In and out, we are swept now
into this large figure; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its
hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard, mine flowing,
are pressed together within its body; it holds us together; and then lengthening out, in
smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on. Suddenly the music breaks. My
blood runs on but my body stands still. The room reels past my eyes. It stops.
‘Come, then, let us wander whirling to the gilt chairs. The body is stronger than I
thought. I am dizzier than I supposed. I do not care for anything in the world. I do not
care for anybody save this man whose name I do not know. Are we not acceptable,
moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white? My
peers may look at me now. I look straight back at you, men and women. I am one of you.
This is my world. Now I take this thin-stemmed glass and sip. Wine has a drastic, an
astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Scent and flowers, radiance and heat,
are distilled here to a fiery, to a yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry
thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture; this is
relief. The bar at the back of my throat lowers itself. Words crowd and cluster and push
forth one on top of another. It does not matter which. They jostle and mount on each
other’s shoulders. The single and the solitary mate, tumble and become many. It does
not matter what I say. Crowding, like a fluttering bird, one sentence crosses the empty
space between us. It settles on his lips. I fill my glass again. I drink. The veil drops
between us. I am admitted to the warmth and privacy of another soul. We are together,
high up, on some Alpine pass. He stands melancholy on the crest of the road. I stoop. I
pick a blue flower and fix it, standing on tiptoe to reach him, in his coat. There! That is
my moment of ecstasy. Now it is over.
‘Now slackness and indifference invade us. Other people brush past. We have lost
consciousness of our bodies uniting under the table. I also like fair-haired men with blue
 38

eyes. The door opens. The door goes on opening. Now I think, next time it opens the
whole of my life will be changed. Who comes? But it is only a servant, bringing glasses.
That is an old man — I should be a child with him. That is a great lady — with her I
should dissemble. There are girls of my own age, for whom I feel the drawn swords of
an honourable antagonism. For these are my peers. I am a native of this world. Here is
my risk, here is my adventure. The door opens. O come, I say to this one, rippling gold
from head to heels. “Come,” and he comes towards me.’
‘I shall edge behind them,’ said Rhoda, ‘as if I saw someone I know. But I know no one. I
shall twitch the curtain and look at the moon. Draughts of oblivion shall quench my
agitation. The door opens; the tiger leaps. The door opens; terror rushes in; terror upon
terror, pursuing me. Let me visit furtively the treasures I have laid apart. Pools lie on the
other side of the world reflecting marble columns. The swallow dips her wing in dark
pools. But here the door opens and people come; they come towards me. Throwing faint
smiles to mask their cruelty, their indifference, they seize me. The swallow dips her
wings; the moon rides through the blue seas alone. I must take his hand; I must answer.
But what answer shall I give? I am thrust back to stand burning in this clumsy, this ill-
fitting body, to receive the shafts of his indifference and his scorn, I who long for marble
columns and pools on the other side of the world where the swallow dips her wings.
‘Night has wheeled a little further over the chimney-pots. I see out of the window over
his shoulder some unembarrassed cat, not drowned in light, not trapped in silk, free to
pause, to stretch, and to move again. I hate all details of the individual life. But I am fixed
here to listen. An immense pressure is on me. I cannot move without dislodging the
weight of centuries. A million arrows pierce me. Scorn and ridicule pierce me. I, who
could beat my breast against the storm and let the hail choke me joyfully, am pinned
down here; am exposed. The tiger leaps. Tongues with their whips are upon me. Mobile,
incessant, they flicker over me. I must prevaricate and fence them off with lies. What
amulet is there against this disaster? What face can I summon to lay cool upon this heat?
I think of names on boxes; of mothers from whose wide knees skirts descend; of glades
where the many-backed steep hills come down. Hide me, I cry, protect me, for I am the
youngest, the most naked of you all. Jinny rides like a gull on the wave, dealing her looks
adroitly here and there, saying this, saying that, with truth. But I lie; I prevaricate.
‘Alone, I rock my basins; I am mistress of my fleet of ships. But here, twisting the tassels
of this brocaded curtain in my hostess’s window, I am broken into separate pieces; I am
no longer one. What then is the knowledge that Jinny has as she dances; the assurance
that Susan has as, stooping quietly beneath the lamplight, she draws the white cotton
through the eye of her needle? They say, Yes; they say, No; they bring their fists down
with a bang on the table. But I doubt; I tremble; I see the wild thorn tree shake its
shadow in the desert.
‘Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view, across the room, to the balcony under the
awning. I see the sky, softly feathered with its sudden effulgence of moon. I also see the
railings of the square, and two people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky.
There is, then, a world immune from change. When I have passed through this drawing-
room flickering with tongues that cut me like knives, making me stammer, making me
lie, I find faces rid of features, robed in beauty. The lovers crouch under the plane tree.
The policeman stands sentinel at the corner. A man passes. There is, then, a world
immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of
fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger,
 39

to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door
opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided
all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their
twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of
weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the
uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.’
The sun, risen, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fitful glance through
watery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over the waves. They fell with a regular
thud. They fell with the concussion of horses’ hooves on the turf. Their spray rose like
the tossing of lances and assegais over the riders’ heads. They swept the beach with
steel blue and diamond-tipped water. They drew in and out with the energy, the
muscularity, of an engine which sweeps its force out and in again. The sun fell on
cornfields and woods, rivers became blue and many-plaited, lawns that sloped down to
the water’s edge became green as birds’ feathers softly ruffling their plumes. The hills,
curved and controlled, seemed bound back by thongs, as a limb is laced by muscles; and
the woods which bristled proudly on their flanks were like the curt, clipped mane on the
neck of a horse.
In the garden where the trees stood, thick over flowerbeds, ponds, and greenhouses the
birds sang in the hot sunshine, each alone. One sang under the bedroom window;
another on the topmost twig of the lilac bush; another on the edge of the wall. Each sang
stridently, with passion, with vehemence, as if to let the song burst out of it, no matter if
it shattered the song of another bird with harsh discord. Their round eyes bulged with
brightness; their claws gripped the twig or rail. They sang, exposed without shelter, to
the air and the sun, beautiful in their new plumage, shell-veined or brightly mailed, here
barred with soft blues, here splashed with gold, or striped with one bright feather. They
sang as if the song were urged out of them by the pressure of the morning. They sang as
if the edge of being were sharpened and must cut, must split the softness of the blue-
green light, the dampness of the wet earth; the fumes and steams of the greasy kitchen
vapour; the hot breath of mutton and beef; the richness of pastry and fruit; the damp
shreds and peelings thrown from the kitchen bucket, from which a slow steam oozed on
the rubbish heap. On all the sodden, the damp-spotted, the curled with wetness, they
descended, dry-beaked, ruthless, abrupt. They swooped suddenly from the lilac bough
or the fence. They spied a snail and tapped the shell against a stone. They tapped
furiously, methodically, until the shell broke and something slimy oozed from the crack.
They swept and soared sharply in flights high into the air, twittering short, sharp notes,
and perched in the upper branches of some tree, and looked down upon leaves and
spires beneath, and the country white with blossom, flowing with grass, and the sea
which beat like a drum that raises a regiment of plumed and turbaned soldiers. Now and
again their songs ran together in swift scales like the interlacings of a mountain stream
whose waters, meeting, foam and then mix, and hasten quicker and quicker down the
same channel, brushing the same broad leaves. But there is a rock; they sever.
The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became
dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a
dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers revealed themselves upheld by streaks of light. Tables
and chairs rose to the surface as if they had been sunk under water and rose, filmed
with red, orange, purple like the bloom on the skin of ripe fruit. The veins on the glaze of
the china, the grain of the wood, the fibres of the matting became more and more finely
engraved. Everything was without shadow. A jar was so green that the eye seemed
 40

sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet. Then shapes
took on mass and edge. Here was the boss of a chair; here the bulk of a cupboard. And as
the light increased, flocks of shadow were driven before it and conglomerated and hung
in many-pleated folds in the background.
‘How fair, how strange,’ said Bernard, ‘glittering, many-pointed and many-domed
London lies before me under mist. Guarded by gasometers, by factory chimneys, she lies
sleeping as we approach. She folds the ant-heap to her breast. All cries, all clamour, are
softly enveloped in silence. Not Rome herself looks more majestic. But we are aimed at
her. Already her maternal somnolence is uneasy. Ridges, fledged with houses rise from
the mist. Factories, cathedrals, glass domes, institutions and theatres erect themselves.
The early train from the north is hurled at her like a missile. We draw a curtain as we
pass. Blank expectant faces stare at us as we rattle and flash through stations. Men
clutch their newspapers a little tighter, as our wind sweeps them, envisaging death. But
we roar on. We are about to explode in the flanks of the city like a shell in the side of
some ponderous, maternal, majestic animal. She hums and murmurs; she awaits us.
‘Meanwhile as I stand looking from the train window, I feel strangely, persuasively, that
because of my great happiness (being engaged to be married) I am become part of this
speed, this missile hurled at the city. I am numbed to tolerance and acquiescence. My
dear sir, I could say, why do you fidget, taking down your suitcase and pressing into it
the cap that you have worn all night? Nothing we can do will avail. Over us all broods a
splendid unanimity. We are enlarged and solemnized and brushed into uniformity as
with the grey wing of some enormous goose (it is a fine but colourless morning)
because we have only one desire — to arrive at the station. I do not want the train to
stop with a thud. I do not want the connection which has bound us together sitting
opposite each other all night long to be broken. I do not want to feel that hate and
rivalry have resumed their sway; and different desires. Our community in the rushing
train, sitting together with only one wish, to arrive at Euston, was very welcome. But
behold! It is over. We have attained our desire. We have drawn up at the platform.
Hurry and confusion and the wish to be first through the gate into the lift assert
themselves. But I do not wish to be first through the gate, to assume the burden of
individual life. I, who have been since Monday, when she accepted me, charged in every
nerve with a sense of identity, who could not see a tooth- brush in a glass without
saying, “My toothbrush”, now wish to unclasp my hands and let fall my possessions, and
merely stand here in the street, taking no part, watching the omnibuses, without desire;
without envy; with what would be boundless curiosity about human destiny if there
were any longer an edge to my mind. But it has none. I have arrived; am accepted. I ask
nothing.
‘Having dropped off satisfied like a child from the breast, I am at liberty now to sink
down, deep, into what passes, this omnipresent, general life. (How much, let me note,
depends upon trousers; the intelligent head is entirely handicapped by shabby
trousers.) One observes curious hesitations at the door of the lift. This way, that way,
the other? Then individuality asserts itself. They are off. They are all impelled by some
necessity. Some miserable affair of keeping an appointment, of buying a hat, severs
these beautiful human beings once so united. For myself, I have no aim. I have no
ambition. I will let myself be carried on by the general impulse. The surface of my mind
slips along like a pale-grey stream, reflecting what passes. I cannot remember my past,
my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in
moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs
 41

out and seizes me and stops me, here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living.
Then again, indifference descends. The roar of the traffic, the passage of
undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features
from faces. People might walk through me. And, what is this moment of time, this
particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any
uproar — forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two
on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in
truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these
pavements are shells, bones and silence.
‘It is, however, true that my dreaming, my tentative advance like one carried beneath
the surface of a stream, is interrupted, torn, pricked and plucked at by sensations,
spontaneous and irrelevant, of curiosity, greed, desire, irresponsible as in sleep. (I covet
that bag — etc.) No, but I wish to go under; to visit the profound depths; once in a while
to exercise my prerogative not always to act, but to explore; to hear vague, ancestral
sounds of boughs creaking, of mammoths; to indulge impossible desires to embrace the
whole world with the arms of understanding — impossible to those who act. Am I not,
as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy, which,
unmoored as I am from a private being, bid me embrace these engrossed flocks; these
starers and trippers; these errand-boys and furtive and fugitive girls who, ignoring their
doom, look in at shop-windows? But I am aware of our ephemeral passage.
‘It is, however, true that I cannot deny a sense that life for me is now mysteriously
prolonged. Is it that I may have children, may cast a fling of seed wider, beyond this
generation, this doom- encircled population, shuffling each other in endless competition
along the street? My daughters shall come here, in other summers; my sons shall turn
new fields. Hence we are not raindrops, soon dried by the wind; we make gardens blow
and forests roar; we come up differently, for ever and ever. This, then, serves to explain
my confidence, my central stability, otherwise so monstrously absurd as I breast the
stream of this crowded thoroughfare, making always a passage for myself between
people’s bodies, taking advantage of safe moments to cross. It is not vanity; for I am
emptied of ambition; I do not remember my special gifts, or idiosyncrasy, or the marks I
bear on my person; eyes, nose or mouth. I am not, at this moment, myself.
‘Yet behold, it returns. One cannot extinguish that persistent smell. It steals in through
some crack in the structure — one’s identity. I am not part of the street — no, I observe
the street. One splits off, therefore. For instance, up that back street a girl stands
waiting; for whom? A romantic story. On the wall of that shop is fixed a small crane, and
for what reason, I ask, was that crane fixed there? and invent a purple lady swelling,
circumambient, hauled from a barouche landau by a perspiring husband sometime in
the sixties. A grotesque story. That is, I am a natural coiner of words, a blower of
bubbles through one thing and another. And, striking off these observations
spontaneously, I elaborate myself; differentiate myself and, listening to the voice that
says as I stroll past, “Look! Take note of that!” I conceive myself called upon to provide,
some winter’s night, a meaning for all my observations — a line that runs from one to
another, a summing up that completes. But soliloquies in back streets soon pall. I need
an audience. That is my downfall. That always ruffles the edge of the final statement and
prevents it from forming. I cannot seat myself in some sordid eating-house and order
the same glass day after day and imbue myself entirely in one fluid — this life. I make
my phrase and run off with it to some furnished room where it will be lit by dozens of
candles. I need eyes on me to draw out these frills and furbelows. To be myself (I note) I
 42

need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what
is my self. The authentics, like Louis, like Rhoda, exist most completely in solitude. They
resent illumination, reduplication. They toss their pictures once painted face downward
on the field. On Louis’ words the ice is packed thick. His words issue pressed,
condensed, enduring.
‘I wish, then, after this somnolence to sparkle, many-faceted under the light of my
friends’ faces. I have been traversing the sunless territory of non-identity. A strange
land. I have heard in my moment of appeasement, in my moment of obliterating
satisfaction, the sigh, as it goes in, comes out, of the tide that draws beyond this circle of
bright light, this drumming of insensate fury. I have had one moment of enormous
peace. This perhaps is happiness. Now I am drawn back by pricking sensations; by
curiosity, greed (I am hungry) and the irresistible desire to be myself. I think of people
to whom I could say things: Louis, Neville, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda. With them I am
many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness. We shall meet tonight, thank Heaven.
Thank Heaven, I need not be alone. We shall dine together. We shall say good-bye to
Percival, who goes to India. The hour is still distant, but I feel already those harbingers,
those outriders, figures of one’s friends in absence. I see Louis, stone-carved,
sculpturesque; Neville, scissor-cutting, exact; Susan with eyes like lumps of crystal;
Jinny dancing like a flame, febrile, hot, over dry earth; and Rhoda the nymph of the
fountain always wet. These are fantastic pictures — these are figments, these visions of
friends in absence, grotesque, dropsical, vanishing at the first touch of the toe of a real
boot. Yet they drum me alive. They brush off these vapours. I begin to be impatient of
solitude — to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me. Oh, to toss
them off and be active! Anybody will do. I am not fastidious. The crossing- sweeper will
do; the postman; the waiter in this French restaurant; better still the genial proprietor,
whose geniality seems reserved for oneself. He mixes the salad with his own hands for
some privileged guest. Which is the privileged guest, I ask, and why? And what is he
saying to the lady in ear-rings; is she a friend or a customer? I feel at once, as I sit down
at a table, the delicious jostle of confusion, of uncertainty, of possibility, of speculation.
Images breed instantly. I am embarrassed by my own fertility. I could describe every
chair, table, luncher here copiously, freely. My mind hums hither and thither with its veil
of words for everything. To speak, about wine even to the waiter, is to bring about an
explosion. Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilizing, upon the rich soil of my
imagination. The entirely unexpected nature of this explosion — that is the joy of
intercourse. I, mixed with an unknown Italian waiter — what am I? There is no stability
in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the
flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile.
All is experiment and adventure. We are for ever mixing ourselves with unknown
quantities. What is to come? I know not. But as I put down my glass I remember: I am
engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends tonight. I am Bernard, myself.’
‘It is now five minutes to eight,’ said Neville. ‘I have come early. I have taken my place at
the table ten minutes before the time in order to taste every moment of anticipation; to
see the door open and to say, “Is it Percival? No; it is not Percival.” There is a morbid
pleasure in saying: “No, it is not Percival.” I have seen the door open and shut twenty
times already; each time the suspense sharpens. This is the place to which he is coming.
This is the table at which he will sit. Here, incredible as it seems, will be his actual body.
This table, these chairs, this metal vase with its three red flowers are about to undergo
an extraordinary transformation. Already the room, with its swing- doors, its tables
 43

heaped with fruit, with cold joints, wears the wavering, unreal appearance of a place
where one waits expecting something to happen. Things quiver as if not yet in being.
The blankness of the white table-cloth glares. The hostility, the indifference of other
people dining here is oppressive. We look at each other; see that we do not know each
other, stare, and go off. Such looks are lashes. I feel the whole cruelty and indifference of
the world in them. If he should not come I could not bear it. I should go. Yet somebody
must be seeing him now. He must be in some cab; he must be passing some shop. And
every moment he seems to pump into this room this prickly light, this intensity of being,
so that things have lost their normal uses — this knife-blade is only a flash of light, not a
thing to cut with. The normal is abolished.
‘The door opens, but he does not come. That is Louis hesitating there. That is his strange
mixture of assurance and timidity. He looks at himself in the looking-glass as he comes
in; he touches his hair; he is dissatisfied with his appearance. He says, “I am a Duke —
the last of an ancient race.” He is acrid, suspicious, domineering, difficult (I am
comparing him with Percival). At the same time he is formidable, for there is laughter in
his eyes. He has seen me. Here he is.’
‘There is Susan,’ said Louis. ‘She does not see us. She has not dressed, because she
despises the futility of London. She stands for a moment at the swing-door, looking
about her like a creature dazed by the light of a lamp. Now she moves. She has the
stealthy yet assured movements (even among tables and chairs) of a wild beast. She
seems to find her way by instinct in and out among these little tables, touching no one,
disregarding waiters, yet comes straight to our table in the corner. When she sees us
(Neville, and myself) her face assumes a certainty which is alarming, as if she had what
she wanted. To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird’s sharp beak, to be
nailed to a barnyard door. Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by a
beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door, positively, once and for all.
‘Rhoda comes now, from nowhere, having slipped in while we were not looking. She
must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind a waiter, now behind some
ornamental pillar, so as to put off as long as possible the shock of recognition, so as to be
secure for one more moment to rock her petals in her basin. We wake her. We torture
her. She dreads us, she despises us, yet comes cringing to our sides because for all our
cruelty there is always some name, some face, which sheds a radiance, which lights up
her pavements and makes it possible for her to replenish her dreams.’
‘The door opens, the door goes on opening,’ said Neville, ‘yet he does not come.’
‘There is Jinny,’ said Susan. ‘She stands in the door. Everything seems stayed. The waiter
stops. The diners at the table by the door look. She seems to centre everything; round
her tables, lines of doors, windows, ceilings, ray themselves, like rays round the star in
the middle of a smashed window-pane. She brings things to a point, to order. Now she
sees us, and moves, and all the rays ripple and flow and waver over us, bringing in new
tides of sensation. We change. Louis puts his hand to his tie. Neville, who sits waiting
with agonized intensity, nervously straightens the forks in front of him. Rhoda sees her
with surprise, as if on some far horizon a fire blazed. And I, though I pile my mind with
damp grass, with wet fields, with the sound of rain on the roof and the gusts of wind
that batter at the house in winter and so protect my soul against her, feel her derision
steal round me, feel her laughter curl its tongues of fire round me and light up
unsparingly my shabby dress, my square-tipped finger-nails, which I at once hide under
the table-cloth.’
 44

‘He has not come,’ said Neville. The door opens and he does not come. That is Bernard.
As he pulls off his coat he shows, of course, the blue shirt under his arm-pits. And then,
unlike the rest of us, he comes in without pushing open a door, without knowing that he
comes into a room full of strangers. He does not look in the glass. His hair is untidy, but
he does not know it. He has no perception that we differ, or that this table is his goal. He
hesitates on his way here. Who is that? he asks himself, as he half knows a woman in an
opera cloak. He half knows everybody; he knows nobody (I compare him with Percival).
But now, perceiving us, he waves a benevolent salute; he bears down with such
benignity, with such love of mankind (crossed with humour at the futility of “loving
mankind”), that, if it were not for Percival, who turns all this to vapour, one would feel,
as the others already feel: Now is our festival; now we are together. But without Percival
there is no solidity. We are silhouettes, hollow phantoms moving mistily without a
background.’
‘The swing-door goes on opening,’ said Rhoda. ‘Strangers keep on coming, people we
shall never see again, people who brush us disagreeably with their familiarity, their
indifference, and the sense of a world continuing without us. We cannot sink down, we
cannot forget our faces. Even I who have no face, who make no difference when I come
in (Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces), flutter unattached, without anchorage
anywhere, unconsolidated, incapable of composing any blankness or continuity or wall
against which these bodies move. It is because of Neville and his misery. The sharp
breath of his misery scatters my being. Nothing can settle; nothing can subside. Every
time the door opens he looks fixedly at the table — he dare not raise his eyes — then
looks for one second and says, “He has not come.” But here he is.’
‘Now,’ said Neville, ‘my tree flowers. My heart rises. All oppression is relieved. All
impediment is removed. The reign of chaos is over. He has imposed order. Knives cut
again.’
‘Here is Percival,’ said Jinny. ‘He has not dressed.’
‘Here is Percival,’ said Bernard, ‘smoothing his hair, not from vanity (he does not look in
the glass), but to propitiate the god of decency. He is conventional; he is a hero. The little
boys trooped after him across the playing-fields. They blew their noses as he blew his
nose, but unsuccessfully, for he is Percival. Now, when he is about to leave us, to go to
India, all these trifles come together. He is a hero. Oh yes, that is not to be denied, and
when he takes his seat by Susan, whom he loves, the occasion is crowned. We who
yelped like jackals biting at each other’s heels now assume the sober and confident air
of soldiers in the presence of their captain. We who have been separated by our youth
(the oldest is not yet twenty-five), who have sung like eager birds each his own song
and tapped with the remorseless and savage egotism of the young our own snail-shell
till it cracked (I am engaged), or perched solitary outside some bedroom window and
sang of love, of fame and other single experiences so dear to the callow bird with a
yellow tuft on its beak, now come nearer; and shuffling closer on our perch in this
restaurant where everybody’s interests are at variance, and the incessant passage of
traffic chafes us with distractions, and the door opening perpetually its glass cage
solicits us with myriad temptations and offers insults and wounds to our confidence —
sitting together here we love each other and believe in our own endurance.’
‘Now let us issue from the darkness of solitude,’ said Louis.
 45

‘Now let us say, brutally and directly, what is in our minds,’ said Neville. ‘Our isolation,
our preparation, is over. The furtive days of secrecy and hiding, the revelations on
staircases, moments of terror and ecstasy.’
‘Old Mrs Constable lifted her sponge and warmth poured over us,’ said Bernard. ‘We
became clothed in this changing, this feeling garment of flesh.’
‘The boot-boy made love to the scullery-maid in the kitchen garden,’ said Susan, ‘among
the blown-out washing.’
‘The breath of the wind was like a tiger panting,’ said Rhoda.
‘The man lay livid with his throat cut in the gutter,’ said Neville. ‘And going upstairs I
could not raise my foot against the immitigable apple tree with its silver leaves held
stiff.’
The leaf danced in the hedge without anyone to blow it,’ said Jinny.
‘In the sun-baked corner,’ said Louis, ‘the petals swam on depths of green.’
‘At Elvedon the gardeners swept and swept with their great brooms, and the woman sat
at a table writing,’ said Bernard.
‘From these close-furled balls of string we draw now every filament,’ said Louis,
‘remembering, when we meet.’
‘And then,’ said Bernard, ‘the cab came to the door, and, pressing our new bowler hats
tightly over our eyes to hide our unmanly tears, we drove through streets in which even
the housemaids looked at us, and our names painted in white letters on our boxes
proclaimed to all the world that we were going to school with the regulation number of
socks and drawers, on which our mothers for some nights previously had stitched our
initials, in our boxes. A second severance from the body of our mother.’
‘And Miss Lambert, Miss Cutting and Miss Bard,’ said Jinny, ‘monumental ladies, white-
ruffed, stone-coloured, enigmatic, with amethyst rings moving like virginal tapers, dim
glow-worms over the pages of French, geography and arithmetic, presided; and there
were maps, green-baize boards, and rows of shoes on a shelf.’
‘Bells rang punctually,’ said Susan, ‘maids scuffled and giggled. There was a drawing in
of chairs and a drawing out of chairs on the linoleum. But from one attic there was a
blue view, a distant view of a field unstained by the corruption of this regimented,
unreal existence.’
‘Down from our heads veils fell,’ said Rhoda. ‘We clasped the flowers with their green
leaves rustling in garlands.’
‘We changed, we became unrecognizable,’ said Louis. ‘Exposed to all these different
lights, what we had in us (for we are all so different) came intermittently, in violent
patches, spaced by blank voids, to the surface as if some acid had dropped unequally on
the plate. I was this, Neville that, Rhoda different again, and Bernard too.’
‘Then canoes slipped through palely tinted yellow branches,’ said Neville, ‘and Bernard,
advancing in his casual way against breadths of green, against houses of very ancient
foundation, tumbled in a heap on the ground beside me. In an access of emotion —
winds are not more raving, nor lightning more sudden — I took my poem, I flung my
poem, I slammed the door behind me.’
 46

‘I, however,’ said Louis, ‘losing sight of you, sat in my office and tore the date from the
calendar, and announced to the world of ship-brokers, corn-chandlers and actuaries
that Friday the tenth, or Tuesday the eighteenth, had dawned on the city of London.’
‘Then,’ said Jinny, ‘Rhoda and I, exposed in bright dresses, with a few precious stones
nestling on a cold ring round our throats, bowed, shook hands and took a sandwich
from a plate with a smile.’
‘The tiger leapt, and the swallow dipped her wings in dark pools on the other side of the
world,’ said Rhoda.
‘But here and now we are together,’ said Bernard. ‘We have come together, at a
particular time, to this particular spot. We are drawn into this communion by some
deep, some common emotion. Shall we call it, conveniently, “love”? Shall we say “love of
Percival” because Percival is going to India?
‘No, that is too small, too particular a name. We cannot attach the width and spread of
our feelings to so small a mark. We have come together (from the North, from the South,
from Susan’s farm, from Louis’ house of business) to make one thing, not enduring —
for what endures? — but seen by many eyes simultaneously. There is a red carnation in
that vase. A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-
petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves — a whole flower to
which every eye brings its own contribution.
‘After the capricious fires, the abysmal dullness of youth,’ said Neville, ‘the light falls
upon real objects now. Here are knives and forks. The world is displayed, and we too, so
that we can talk.’
‘We differ, it may be too profoundly,’ said Louis, ‘for explanation. But let us attempt it. I
smoothed my hair when I came in, hoping to look like the rest of you. But I cannot, for I
am not single and entire as you are. I have lived a thousand lives already. Every day I
unbury — I dig up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of
years ago, when I heard songs by the Nile and the chained beast stamping. What you see
beside you, this man, this Louis, is only the cinders and refuse of something once
splendid. I was an Arab prince; behold my free gestures. I was a great poet in the time of
Elizabeth. I was a Duke at the court of Louis the Fourteenth. I am very vain, very
confident; I have an immeasurable desire that women should sigh in sympathy. I have
eaten no lunch today in order that Susan may think me cadaverous and that Jinny may
extend to me the exquisite balm of her sympathy. But while I admire Susan and Percival,
I hate the others, because it is for them that I do these antics, smoothing my hair,
concealing my accent. I am the little ape who chatters over a nut, and you are the dowdy
women with shiny bags of stale buns; I am also the caged tiger, and you are the keepers
with red-hot bars. That is, I am fiercer and stronger than you are, yet the apparition that
appears above ground after ages of nonentity will be spent in terror lest you should
laugh at me, in veerings with the wind against the soot storms, in efforts to make a steel
ring of clear poetry that shall connect the gulls and the women with bad teeth, the
church spire and the bobbing billycock hats as I see them when I take my luncheon and
prop my poet — is it Lucretius? — against a cruet and the gravy-splashed bill of fare.’
‘But you will never hate me,’ said Jinny. ‘You will never see me, even across a room full
of gilt chairs and ambassadors, without coming to me across the room to seek my
sympathy. When I came in just now everything stood still in a pattern. Waiters stopped,
diners raised their forks and held them. I had the air of being prepared for what would
 47

happen. When I sat down you put your hands to your ties, you hid them under the table.
But I hide nothing. I am prepared. Every time the door opens I cry “More!” But my
imagination is the bodies. I can imagine nothing beyond the circle cast by my body. My
body goes before me, like a lantern down a dark lane, bringing one thing after another
out of darkness into a ring of light. I dazzle you; I make you believe that this is all.’
‘But when you stand in the door,’ said Neville, ‘you inflict stillness, demanding
admiration, and that is a great impediment to the freedom of intercourse. You stand in
the door making us notice you. But none of you saw me approach. I came early; I came
quickly and directly, HERE, to sit by the person whom I love. My life has a rapidity that
yours lack. I am like a hound on the scent. I hunt from dawn to dusk. Nothing, not the
pursuit of perfection through the sand, nor fame, nor money, has meaning for me. I shall
have riches; I shall have fame. But I shall never have what I want, for I lack bodily grace
and the courage that comes with it. The swiftness of my mind is too strong for my body.
I fail before I reach the end and fall in a heap, damp, perhaps disgusting. I excite pity in
the crises of life, not love. Therefore I suffer horribly. But I do not suffer, as Louis does,
to make myself a spectacle. I have too fine a sense of fact to allow myself these
juggleries, these pretences. I see everything — except one thing — with complete
clarity. That is my saving. That is what gives my suffering an unceasing excitement. That
is what makes me dictate, even when I am silent. And since I am, in one respect,
deluded, since the person is always changing, though not the desire, and I do not know
in the morning by whom I shall sit at night, I am never stagnant; I rise from my worst
disasters, I turn, I change. Pebbles bounce off the mail of my muscular, my extended
body. In this pursuit I shall grow old.’
‘If I could believe,’ said Rhoda, ‘that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be
rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens
and the tiger leaps. You did not see me come. I circled round the chairs to avoid the
horror of the spring. I am afraid of you all. I am afraid of the shock of sensation that
leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do — I cannot make one moment
merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of
the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I
do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some
natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. Because
you have an end in view — one person, is it, to sit beside, an idea is it, your beauty is it? I
do not know — your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth
green of forest rides to a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no
single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the
beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the
mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like
paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw
myself back.
‘But since I wish above all things to have lodgment, I pretend, as I go upstairs lagging
behind Jinny and Susan, to have an end in view. I pull on my stockings as I see them pull
on theirs. I wait for you to speak and then speak like you. I am drawn here across
London to a particular spot, to a particular place, not to see you or you or you, but to
light my fire at the general blaze of you who live wholly, indivisibly and without caring.’
‘When I came into the room tonight,’ said Susan, ‘I stopped, I peered about like an
animal with its eyes near to the ground. The smell of carpets and furniture and scent
 48

disgusts me. I like to walk through the wet fields alone, or to stop at a gate and watch
my setter nose in a circle, and to ask: Where is the hare? I like to be with people who
twist herbs, and spit into the fire, and shuffle down long passages in slippers like my
father. The only sayings I understand are cries of love, hate, rage and pain. This talking
is undressing an old woman whose dress had seemed to be part of her, but now, as we
talk, she turns pinkish underneath, and has wrinkled thighs and sagging breasts. When
you are silent you are again beautiful. I shall never have anything but natural happiness.
It will almost content me. I shall go to bed tired. I shall lie like a field bearing crops in
rotation; in the summer heat will dance over me; in the winter I shall be cracked with
the cold. But heat and cold will follow each other naturally without my willing or
unwilling. My children will carry me on; their teething, their crying, their going to school
and coming back will be like the waves of the sea under me. No day will be without its
movement. I shall be lifted higher than any of you on the backs of the seasons. I shall
possess more than Jinny, more than Rhoda, by the time I die. But on the other hand,
where you are various and dimple a million times to the ideas and laughter of others, I
shall be sullen, storm-tinted and all one purple. I shall be debased and hide-bound by
the bestial and beautiful passion of maternity. I shall push the fortunes of my children
unscrupulously. I shall hate those who see their faults. I shall lie basely to help them. I
shall let them wall me away from you, from you and from you. Also, I am torn with
jealousy. I hate Jinny because she shows me that my hands are red, my nails bitten. I
love with such ferocity that it kills me when the object of my love shows by a phrase
that he can escape. He escapes, and I am left clutching at a string that slips in and out
among the leaves on the tree-tops. I do not understand phrases.’
‘Had I been born,’ said Bernard, ‘not knowing that one word follows another I might
have been, who knows, perhaps anything. As it is, finding sequences everywhere, I
cannot bear the pressure of solitude. When I cannot see words curling like rings of
smoke round me I am in darkness — I am nothing. When I am alone I fall into lethargy,
and say to myself dismally as I poke the cinders through the bars of the grate, Mrs
Moffat will come. She will come and sweep it all up. When Louis is alone he sees with
astonishing intensity, and will write some words that may outlast us all. Rhoda loves to
be alone. She fears us because we shatter the sense of being which is so extreme in
solitude — see how she grasps her fork — her weapon against us. But I only come into
existence when the plumber, or the horse-dealer, or whoever it may be, says something
which sets me alight. Then how lovely the smoke of my phrase is, rising and falling,
flaunting and falling, upon red lobsters and yellow fruit, wreathing them into one
beauty. But observe how meretricious the phrase is — made up of what evasions and
old lies. Thus my character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide,
and is not mine, as yours are. There is some fatal streak, some wandering and irregular
vein of silver, weakening it. Hence the fact that used to enrage Neville at school, that I
left him. I went with the boasting boys with little caps and badges, driving off in big
brakes — there are some here tonight, dining together, correctly dressed, before they go
off in perfect concord to the music hall; I loved them. For they bring me into existence as
certainly as you do. Hence, too, when I am leaving you and the train is going, you feel
that it is not the train that is going, but I, Bernard, who does not care, who does not feel,
who has no ticket, and has lost perhaps his purse. Susan, staring at the string that slips
in and out among the leaves of the beech trees, cries: “He is gone! He has escaped me!”
For there is nothing to lay hold of. I am made and remade continually. Different people
draw different words from me.
 49

‘Thus there is not one person but fifty people whom I want to sit beside tonight. But I
am the only one of you who is at home here without taking liberties. I am not gross; I am
not a snob. If I lie open to the pressure of society I often succeed with the dexterity of
my tongue in putting something difficult into the currency. See my little toys, twisted
out of nothing in a second, how they entertain. I am no hoarder — I shall leave only a
cupboard of old clothes when I die — and I am almost indifferent to the minor vanities
of life which cause Louis so much torture. But I have sacrificed much. Veined as I am
with iron, with silver and streaks of common mud, I cannot contract into the firm fist
which those clench who do not depend upon stimulus. I am incapable of the denials, the
heroisms of Louis and Rhoda. I shall never succeed, even in talk, in making a perfect
phrase. But I shall have contributed more to the passing moment than any of you; I shall
go into more rooms, more different rooms, than any of you. But because there is
something that comes from outside and not from within I shall be forgotten; when my
voice is silent you will not remember me, save as the echo of a voice that once wreathed
the fruit into phrases.’
‘Look,’ said Rhoda; ‘listen. Look how the light becomes richer, second by second, and
bloom and ripeness lie everywhere; and our eyes, as they range round this room with
all its tables, seem to push through curtains of colour, red, orange, umber and queer
ambiguous tints, which yield like veils and close behind them, and one thing melts into
another.’
‘Yes,’ said Jinny, ‘our senses have widened. Membranes, webs of nerve that lay white
and limp, have filled and spread themselves and float round us like filaments, making
the air tangible and catching in them far-away sounds unheard before.’
‘The roar of London,’ said Louis, ‘is round us. Motor-cars, vans, omnibuses pass and
repass continuously. All are merged in one turning wheel of single sound. All separate
sounds — wheels, bells, the cries of drunkards, of merrymakers — are churned into one
sound, steel blue, circular. Then a siren hoots. At that shores slip away, chimneys flatten
themselves, the ship makes for the open sea.’
‘Percival is going,’ said Neville. ‘We sit here, surrounded, lit up, many coloured; all things
— hands, curtains, knives and forks, other people dining — run into each other. We are
walled in here. But India lies outside.’
‘I see India,’ said Bernard. ‘I see the low, long shore; I see the tortuous lanes of stamped
mud that lead in and out among ramshackle pagodas; I see the gilt and crenellated
buildings which have an air of fragility and decay as if they were temporarily run up
buildings in some Oriental exhibition. I see a pair of bullocks who drag a low cart along
the sun-baked road. The cart sways incompetently from side to side. Now one wheel
sticks in the rut, and at once innumerable natives in loin-cloths swarm round it,
chattering excitedly. But they do nothing. Time seems endless, ambition vain. Over all
broods a sense of the uselessness of human exertion. There are strange sour smells. An
old man in a ditch continues to chew betel and to contemplate his navel. But now,
behold, Percival advances; Percival rides a flea-bitten mare, and wears a sun-helmet. By
applying the standards of the West, by using the violent language that is natural to him,
the bullock-cart is righted in less than five minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. He
rides on; the multitude cluster round him, regarding him as if he were — what indeed
he is — a God.’
‘Unknown, with or without a secret, it does not matter,’ said Rhoda, ‘he is like a stone
fallen into a pond round which minnows swarm. Like minnows, we who had been
 50

shooting this way, that way, all shot round him when he came. Like minnows, conscious
of the presence of a great stone, we undulate and eddy contentedly. Comfort steals over
us. Gold runs in our blood. One, two; one, two; the heart beats in serenity, in confidence,
in some trance of well-being, in some rapture of benignity; and look — the outermost
parts of the earth — pale shadows on the utmost horizon, India for instance, rise into
our purview. The world that had been shrivelled, rounds itself; remote provinces are
fetched up out of darkness; we see muddy roads, twisted jungle, swarms of men, and the
vulture that feeds on some bloated carcass as within our scope, part of our proud and
splendid province, since Percival, riding alone on a flea-bitten mare, advances down a
solitary path, has his camp pitched among desolate trees, and sits alone, looking at the
enormous mountains.’
‘It is Percival,’ said Louis, ‘sitting silent as he sat among the tickling grasses when the
breeze parted the clouds and they formed again, who makes us aware that these
attempts to say, “I am this, I am that,” which we make, coming together, like separated
parts of one body and soul, are false. Something has been left out from fear. Something
has been altered, from vanity. We have tried to accentuate differences. From the desire
to be separate we have laid stress upon our faults, and what is particular to us. But there
is a chain whirling round, round, in a steel-blue circle beneath.’
‘It is hate, it is love,’ said Susan. That is the furious coal- black stream that makes us
dizzy if we look down into it. We stand on a ledge here, but if we look down we turn
giddy.’
‘It is love,’ said Jinny, ‘it is hate, such as Susan feels for me because I kissed Louis once in
the garden; because equipped as I am, I make her think when I come in, “My hands are
red,” and hide them. But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.’
‘Yet these roaring waters,’ said Neville, ‘upon which we build our crazy platforms are
more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries that we utter when, trying
to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk out these false sayings, “I am this; I am that!”
Speech is false.
‘But I eat. I gradually lose all knowledge of particulars as I eat. I am becoming weighed
down with food. These delicious mouthfuls of roast duck, fitly piled with vegetables,
following each other in exquisite rotation of warmth, weight, sweet and bitter, past my
palate, down my gullet, into my stomach, have stabilized my body. I feel quiet, gravity,
control. All is solid now. Instinctively my palate now requires and anticipates sweetness
and lightness, something sugared and evanescent; and cool wine, fitting glove-like over
those finer nerves that seem to tremble from the roof of my mouth and make it spread
(as I drink) into a domed cavern, green with vine leaves, musk-scented, purple with
grapes. Now I can look steadily into the mill-race that foams beneath. By what particular
name are we to call it? Let Rhoda speak, whose face I see reflected mistily in the
looking-glass opposite; Rhoda whom I interrupted when she rocked her petals in a
brown basin, asking for the pocket-knife that Bernard had stolen. Love is not a
whirlpool to her. She is not giddy when she looks down. She looks far away over our
heads, beyond India.’
‘Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape,’ said Rhoda, ‘to a hollow
where the many-backed steep hills come down like birds’ wings folded. There, on the
short, firm turf, are bushes, dark leaved, and against their darkness I see a shape, white,
but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. But it is not you, it is not you, it is not you; not
Percival, Susan, Jinny, Neville or Louis. When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a
 51

triangle; now it is upright — a column; now a fountain, falling. It makes no sign, it does
not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I
venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller
and fuller with dreams. And for a second even now, even here, I reach my object and
say, “Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe. Here is the end.” But these
pilgrimages, these moments of departure, start always in your presence, from this table,
these lights from Percival and Susan, here and now. Always I see the grove over your
heads, between your shoulders, or from a window when I have crossed the room at a
party and stand looking down into the street.’
‘But his slippers?’ said Neville. ‘And his voice downstairs in the hall? And catching sight
of him when he does not see one? One waits and he does not come. It gets later and
later. He has forgotten. He is with someone else. He is faithless, his love meant nothing.
Oh, then the agony — then the intolerable despair! And then the door opens. He is here.’
‘Ripping gold, I say to him, “Come”,’ said Jinny. ‘And he comes; he crosses the room to
where I sit, with my dress like a veil billowing round me on the gilt chair. Our hands
touch, our bodies burst into fire. The chair, the cup, the table — nothing remains unlit.
All quivers, all kindles, all burns clear.’
(‘Look, Rhoda,’ said Louis, ‘they have become nocturnal, rapt. Their eyes are like moths’
wings moving so quickly that they do not seem to move at all.’
‘Horns and trumpets,’ said Rhoda, ‘ring out. Leaves unfold; the stags blare in the thicket.
There is a dancing and a drumming, like the dancing and the drumming of naked men
with assegais.’
‘Like the dance of savages,’ said Louis, ‘round the camp-fire. They are savage; they are
ruthless. They dance in a circle, flapping bladders. The flames leap over their painted
faces, over the leopard skins and the bleeding limbs which they have torn from the
living body.’
‘The flames of the festival rise high,’ said Rhoda. ‘The great procession passes, flinging
green boughs and flowering branches. Their horns spill blue smoke; their skins are
dappled red and yellow in the torchlight. They throw violets. They deck the beloved
with garlands and with laurel leaves, there on the ring of turf where the steep-backed
hills come down. The procession passes. And while it passes, Louis, we are aware of
downfalling, we forebode decay. The shadow slants. We who are conspirators,
withdrawn together to lean over some cold urn, note how the purple flame flows
downwards.’
‘Death is woven in with the violets,’ said Louis. ‘Death and again death.’)
‘How proudly we sit here,’ said Jinny, ‘we who are not yet twenty- five! Outside the trees
flower; outside the women linger; outside the cabs swerve and sweep. Emerged from
the tentative ways, the obscurities and dazzle of youth, we look straight in front of us,
ready for what may come (the door opens, the door keeps on opening). All is real; all is
firm without shadow or illusion. Beauty rides our brows. There is mine, there is Susan’s.
Our flesh is firm and cool. Our differences are clear-cut as the shadows of rocks in full
sunlight. Beside us lie crisp rolls, yellow-glazed and hard; the table-cloth is white; and
our hands lie half curled, ready to contract. Days and days are to come; winter days,
summer days; we have scarcely broken into our hoard. Now the fruit is swollen beneath
the leaf. The room is golden, and I say to him, “Come”.’
 52

‘He has red ears,’ said Louis, ‘and the smell of meat hangs down in a damp net while the
city clerks take snacks at the lunch bar.’
‘With infinite time before us,’ said Neville, ‘we ask what shall we do? Shall we loiter
down Bond Street, looking here and there, and buying perhaps a fountain-pen because
it is green, or asking how much is the ring with the blue stone? Or shall we sit indoors
and watch the coals turn crimson? Shall we stretch our hands for books and read here a
passage and there a passage? Shall we shout with laughter for no reason? Shall we push
through flowering meadows and make daisy chains? Shall we find out when the next
train starts for the Hebrides and engage a reserved compartment? All is to come.’
‘For you,’ said Bernard, ‘but yesterday I walked bang into a pillar-box. Yesterday I
became engaged.’
‘How strange,’ said Susan, ‘the little heaps of sugar look by the side of our plates. Also
the mottled peelings of pears, and the plush rims to the looking-glasses. I had not seen
them before. Everything is now set; everything is fixed. Bernard is engaged. Something
irrevocable has happened. A circle has been cast on the waters; a chain is imposed. We
shall never flow freely again.’
‘For one moment only,’ said Louis. ‘Before the chain breaks, before disorder returns, see
us fixed, see us displayed, see us held in a vice.
‘But now the circle breaks. Now the current flows. Now we rush faster than before. Now
passions that lay in wait down there in the dark weeds which grow at the bottom rise
and pound us with their waves. Pain and jealousy, envy and desire, and something
deeper than they are, stronger than love and more subterranean. The voice of action
speaks. Listen, Rhoda (for we are conspirators, with our hands on the cold urn), to the
casual, quick, exciting voice of action, of hounds running on the scent. They speak now
without troubling to finish their sentences. They talk a little language such as lovers use.
An imperious brute possesses them. The nerves thrill in their thighs. Their hearts pound
and churn in their sides. Susan screws her pocket-handkerchief. Jinny’s eyes dance with
fire.’
‘They are immune,’ said Rhoda, ‘from picking fingers and searching eyes. How easily
they turn and glance; what poses they take of energy and pride! What life shines in
Jinny’s eyes; how fell, how entire Susan’s glance is, searching for insects at the roots!
Their hair shines lustrous. Their eyes burn like the eyes of animals brushing through
leaves on the scent of the prey. The circle is destroyed. We are thrown asunder.’
‘But soon, too soon,’ said Bernard, ‘this egotistic exultation fails. Too soon the moment
of ravenous identity is over, and the appetite for happiness, and happiness, and still
more happiness is glutted. The stone is sunk; the moment is over. Round me there
spreads a wide margin of indifference. Now open in my eyes a thousand eyes of
curiosity. Anyone now is at liberty to murder Bernard, who is engaged to be married, so
long as they leave untouched this margin of unknown territory, this forest of the
unknown world. Why, I ask (whispering discreetly), do women dine alone together
there? Who are they? And what has brought them on this particular evening to this
particular spot? The youth in the corner, judging from the nervous way in which he puts
his hand from time to time to the back of his head, is from the country. He is suppliant,
and so anxious to respond suitably to the kindness of his father’s friend, his host, that he
can scarcely enjoy now what he will enjoy very much at about half-past eleven
tomorrow morning. I have also seen that lady powder her nose three times in the midst
 53

of an absorbing conversation — about love, perhaps, about the unhappiness of their

dearest friend perhaps. “Ah, but the state of my nose!” she thinks, and out comes her
powder-puff, obliterating in its passage all the most fervent feelings of the human heart.
There remains, however, the insoluble problem of the solitary man with the eyeglass; of
the elderly lady drinking champagne alone. Who and what are these unknown people? I
ask. I could make a dozen stories of what he said, of what she said — I can see a dozen
pictures. But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through
another. And sometimes I begin to doubt if there are stories. What is my story? What is
Rhoda’s? What is Neville’s? There are facts, as, for example: “The handsome young man
in the grey suit, whose reserve contrasted so strangely with the loquacity of the others,
now brushed the crumbs from his waistcoat and, with a characteristic gesture at once
commanding and benign, made a sign to the waiter, who came instantly and returned a
moment later with the bill discreetly folded upon a plate.” That is the truth; that is a fact,
but beyond it all is darkness and conjecture.’
‘Now once more,’ said Louis, ‘as we are about to part, having paid our bill, the circle in
our blood, broken so often, so sharply, for we are so different, closes in a ring.
Something is made. Yes, as we rise and fidget, a little nervously, we pray, holding in our
hands this common feeling, “Do not move, do not let the swing door cut to pieces the
thing that we have made, that globes itself here, among these lights, these peelings, this
litter of bread crumbs and people passing. Do not move, do not go. Hold it for ever.”’
‘Let us hold it for one moment,’ said Jinny; ‘love, hatred, by whatever name we call it,
this globe whose walls are made of Percival, of youth and beauty, and something so
deep sunk within us that we shall perhaps never make this moment out of one man
again.’
‘Forests and far countries on the other side of the world,’ said Rhoda, ‘are in it; seas and
jungles; the howlings of jackals and moonlight falling upon some high peak where the
eagle soars.’
‘Happiness is in it,’ said Neville, ‘and the quiet of ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book
with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the
light flickering as we sit silent, or, perhaps, bethinking us of some trifle, suddenly speak.’
‘Week-days are in it,’ said Susan, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; the horses going up to
the fields, and the horses returning; the rooks rising and falling, and catching the elm-
trees in their net, whether it is April, whether it is November.’
‘What is to come is in it,’ said Bernard. ‘That is the last drop and the brightest that we let
fall like some supernal quicksilver into the swelling and splendid moment created by us
from Percival. What is to come? I ask, brushing the crumbs from my waistcoat, what is
outside? We have proved, sitting eating, sitting talking, that we can add to the treasury
of moments. We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on
our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following a master. We are creators. We too
have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too,
as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world
that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined and everlasting road.
‘Look, Percival, while they fetch the taxi, at the prospect which you are so soon to lose.
The street is hard and burnished with the churning of innumerable wheels. The yellow
canopy of our tremendous energy hangs like a burning cloth above our heads. Theatres,
music halls and lamps in private houses make that light.’
 54

‘Peaked clouds,’ said Rhoda, ‘voyage over a sky dark like polished whalebone.’
‘Now the agony begins; now the horror has seized me with its fangs,’ said Neville. ‘Now
the cab comes; now Percival goes. What can we do to keep him? How bridge the
distance between us? How fan the fire so that it blazes for ever? How signal to all time to
come that we, who stand in the street, in the lamplight, loved Percival? Now Percival is
gone.’
The sun had risen to its full height. It was no longer half seen and guessed at, from hints
and gleams, as if a girl couched on her green-sea mattress tired her brows with water-
globed jewels that sent lances of opal-tinted light falling and flashing in the uncertain air
like the flanks of a dolphin leaping, or the flash of a falling blade. Now the sun burnt
uncompromising, undeniable. It struck upon the hard sand, and the rocks became
furnaces of red heat; it searched each pool and caught the minnow hiding in the cranny,
and showed the rusty cartwheel, the white bone, or the boot without laces stuck, black
as iron, in the sand. It gave to everything its exact measure of colour; to the sandhills
their innumerable glitter, to the wild grasses their glancing green; or it fell upon the arid
waste of the desert, here wind-scourged into furrows, here swept into desolate cairns,
here sprinkled with stunted dark-green jungle trees. It lit up the smooth gilt mosque,
the frail pink-and-white card houses of the southern village, and the long-breasted,
white-haired women who knelt in the river bed beating wrinkled cloths upon stones.
Steamers thudding slowly over the sea were caught in the level stare of the sun, and it
beat through the yellow awnings upon passengers who dozed or paced the deck,
shading their eyes to look for the land, while day after day, compressed in its oily
throbbing sides, the ship bore them on monotonously over the waters.
The sun beat on the crowded pinnacles of southern hills and glared into deep, stony
river beds where the water was shrunk beneath the high slung bridge so that
washerwomen kneeling on hot stones could scarcely wet their linen; and lean mules
went picking their way among the chattering grey stones with panniers slung across
their narrow shoulders. At midday the heat of the sun made the hills grey as if shaved
and singed in an explosion, while, further north, in cloudier and rainier countries hills
smoothed into slabs as with the back of a spade had a light in them as if a warder, deep
within, went from chamber to chamber carrying a green lamp. Through atoms of grey-
blue air the sun struck at English fields and lit up marshes and pools, a white gull on a
stake, the slow sail of shadows over blunt-headed woods and young corn and flowing
hayfields. It beat on the orchard wall, and every pit and grain of the brick was silver
pointed, purple, fiery as if soft to touch, as if touched it must melt into hot-baked grains
of dust. The currants hung against the wall in ripples and cascades of polished red;
plums swelled out their leaves, and all the blades of the grass were run together in one
fluent green blaze. The trees’ shadow was sunk to a dark pool at the root. Light
descending in floods dissolved the separate foliation into one green mound.
The birds sang passionate songs addressed to one ear only and then stopped. Bubbling
and chuckling they carried little bits of straw and twig to the dark knots in the higher
branches of the trees. Gilt and purpled they perched in the garden where cones of
laburnum and purple shook down gold and lilac, for now at midday the garden was all
blossom and profusion and even the tunnels under the plants were green and purple
and tawny as the sun beat through the red petal, or the broad yellow petal, or was
barred by some thickly furred green stalk.
 55

The sun struck straight upon the house, making the white walls glare between the dark
windows. Their panes, woven thickly with green branches, held circles of impenetrable
darkness. Sharp-edged wedges of light lay upon the window-sill and showed inside the
room plates with blue rings, cups with curved handles, the bulge of a great bowl, the
crisscross pattern in the rug, and the formidable corners and lines of cabinets and
bookcases. Behind their conglomeration hung a zone of shadow in which might be a
further shape to be disencumbered of shadow or still denser depths of darkness.
The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they
massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The
waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their
backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The
waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.
‘He is dead,’ said Neville. ‘He fell. His horse tripped. He was thrown. The sails of the
world have swung round and caught me on the head. All is over. The lights of the world
have gone out. There stands the tree which I cannot pass.
‘Oh, to crumple this telegram in my fingers — to let the light of the world flood back —
to say this has not happened! But why turn one’s head hither and thither? This is the
truth. This is the fact. His horse stumbled; he was thrown. The flashing trees and white
rails went up in a shower. There was a surge; a drumming in his ears. Then the blow;
the world crashed; he breathed heavily. He died where he fell.
‘Barns and summer days in the country, rooms where we sat — all now lie in the unreal
world which is gone. My past is cut from me. They came running. They carried him to
some pavilion, men in riding-boots, men in sun helmets; among unknown men he died.
Loneliness and silence often surrounded him. He often left me. And then, returning, “See
where he comes!” I said.
‘Women shuffle past the window as if there were no gulf cut in the street, no tree with
stiff leaves which we cannot pass. We deserve then to be tripped by molehills. We are
infinitely abject, shuffling past with our eyes shut. But why should I submit? Why try to
lift my foot and mount the stair? This is where I stand; here, holding the telegram. The
past, summer days and rooms where we sat, stream away like burnt paper with red
eyes in it. Why meet and resume? Why talk and eat and make up other combinations
with other people? From this moment I am solitary. No one will know me now. I have
three letters, “I am about to play quoits with a colonel, so no more,” thus he ends our
friendship, shouldering his way through the crowd with a wave of his hand. This farce is
worth no more formal celebration. Yet if someone had but said: “Wait”; had pulled the
strap three holes tighter — he would have done justice for fifty years, and sat in Court
and ridden alone at the head of troops and denounced some monstrous tyranny, and
come back to us.
‘Now I say there is a grinning, there is a subterfuge. There is something sneering behind
our backs. That boy almost lost his footing as he leapt on the bus. Percival fell; was
killed; is buried; and I watch people passing; holding tight to the rails of omnibuses;
determined to save their lives.
‘I will not lift my foot to climb the stair. I will stand for one moment beneath the
immitigable tree, alone with the man whose throat is cut, while downstairs the cook
shoves in and out the dampers. I will not climb the stair. We are doomed, all of us.
Women shuffle past with shopping-bags. People keep on passing. Yet you shall not
 56

destroy me. For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me.
Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.’
‘Such is the incomprehensible combination,’ said Bernard, ‘such is the complexity of
things, that as I descend the staircase I do not know which is sorrow, which joy. My son
is born; Percival is dead. I am upheld by pillars, shored up on either side by stark
emotions; but which is sorrow, which is joy? I ask, and do not know, only that I need
silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has
happened to my world, what death has done to my world.
‘This then is the world that Percival sees no longer. Let me look. The butcher delivers
meat next door; two old men stumble along the pavement; sparrows alight. The
machine then works; I note the rhythm, the throb, but as a thing in which I have no part,
since he sees it no longer. (He lies pale and bandaged in some room.) Now then is my
chance to find out what is of great importance, and I must be careful, and tell no lies.
About him my feeling was: he sat there in the centre. Now I go to that spot no longer.
The place is empty.
‘Oh yes, I can assure you, men in felt hats and women carrying baskets — you have lost
something that would have been very valuable to you. You have lost a leader whom you
would have followed; and one of you has lost happiness and children. He is dead who
would have given you that. He lies on a camp-bed, bandaged, in some hot Indian
hospital while coolies squatted on the floor agitate those fans — I forget how they call
them. But this is important; “You are well out of it,” I said, while the doves descended
over the roofs and my son was born, as if it were a fact. I remember, as a boy, his curious
air of detachment. And I go on to say (my eyes fill with tears and then are dry), “But this
is better than one had dared to hope.” I say, addressing what is abstract, facing me
eyeless at the end of the avenue, in the sky, “Is this the utmost you can do?” Then we
have triumphed. You have done your utmost, I say, addressing that blank and brutal face
(for he was twenty-five and should have lived to be eighty) without avail. I am not going
to lie down and weep away a life of care. (An entry to be made in my pocket-book;
contempt for those who inflict meaningless death.) Further, this is important; that I
should be able to place him in trifling and ridiculous situations, so that he may not feel
himself absurd, perched on a great horse. I must be able to say, “Percival, a ridiculous
name.” At the same time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station,
you would have had to respect him. You would have had to form up and follow behind
him. How strange to oar one’s way through crowds seeing life through hollow eyes,
burning eyes.
‘Yet already signals begin, beckonings, attempts to lure me back. Curiosity is knocked
out for only a short time. One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than
half an hour. Bodies, I note, already begin to look ordinary; but what is behind them
differs — the perspective. Behind that newspaper placard is the hospital; the long room
with black men pulling ropes; and then they bury him. Yet since it says a famous actress
has been divorced, I ask instantly Which? Yet I cannot take out my penny; I cannot buy a
paper; I cannot suffer interruption yet.
‘I ask, if I shall never see you again and fix my eyes on that solidity, what form will our
communication take? You have gone across the court, further and further, drawing finer
and finer the thread between us. But you exist somewhere. Something of you remains. A
judge. That is, if I discover a new vein in myself I shall submit it to you privately. I shall
ask, What is your verdict? You shall remain the arbiter. But for how long? Things will
 57

become too difficult to explain: there will be new things; already my son. I am now at
the zenith of an experience. It will decline. Already I no longer cry with conviction,
“What luck!” Exaltation, the flight of doves descending, is over. Chaos, detail return. I am
no longer amazed by names written over shop-windows. I do not feel Why hurry? Why
catch trains? The sequence returns; one thing leads to another — the usual order.
‘Yes, but I still resent the usual order. I will not let myself be made yet to accept the
sequence of things. I will walk; I will not change the rhythm of my mind by stopping, by
looking; I will walk. I will go up these steps into the gallery and submit myself to the
influence of minds like mine outside the sequence. There is little time left to answer the
question; my powers flag; I become torpid. Here are pictures. Here are cold madonnas
among their pillars. Let them lay to rest the incessant activity of the mind’s eye, the
bandaged head, the men with ropes, so that I may find something unvisual beneath.
Here are gardens; and Venus among her flowers; here are saints and blue madonnas.
Mercifully these pictures make no reference; they do not nudge; they do not point. Thus
they expand my consciousness of him and bring him back to me differently. I remember
his beauty. “Look, where he comes,” I said.
‘Lines and colours almost persuade me that I too can be heroic, I, who make phrases so
easily, am so soon seduced, love what comes next, and cannot clench my fist, but
vacillate weakly making phrases according to my circumstances. Now, through my own
infirmity I recover what he was to me: my opposite. Being naturally truthful, he did not
see the point of these exaggerations, and was borne on by a natural sense of the fitting,
was indeed a great master of the art of living so that he seems to have lived long, and to
have spread calm round him, indifference one might almost say, certainly to his own
advancement, save that he had also great compassion. A child playing — a summer
evening — doors will open and shut, will keep opening and shutting, through which I
see sights that make me weep. For they cannot be imparted. Hence our loneliness; hence
our desolation. I turn to that spot in my mind and find it empty. My own infirmities
oppress me. There is no longer him to oppose them.
‘Behold, then, the blue madonna streaked with tears. This is my funeral service. We have
no ceremonies, only private dirges and no conclusions, only violent sensations, each
separate. Nothing that has been said meets our case. We sit in the Italian room at the
National Gallery picking up fragments. I doubt that Titian ever felt this rat gnaw.
Painters live lives of methodical absorption, adding stroke to stroke. They are not like
poets — scapegoats; they are not chained to the rock. Hence the silence, the sublimity.
Yet that crimson must have burnt in Titian’s gizzard. No doubt he rose with the great
arms holding the cornucopia, and fell, in that descent. But the silence weighs on me —
the perpetual solicitation of the eye. The pressure is intermittent and muffled. I
distinguish too little and too vaguely. The bell is pressed and I do not ring or give out
irrelevant clamours all jangled. I am titillated inordinately by some splendour; the
ruffled crimson against the green lining; the march of pillars: the orange light behind the
black, pricked ears of the olive trees. Arrows of sensation strike from my spine, but
without order.
‘Yet something is added to my interpretation. Something lies deeply buried. For one
moment I thought to grasp it. But bury it, bury it; let it breed, hidden in the depths of my
mind some day to fructify. After a long lifetime, loosely, in a moment of revelation, I may
lay hands on it, but now the idea breaks in my hand. Ideas break a thousand times for
 58

once that they globe themselves entire. They break: they fall over me. “Line and colours
they survive, therefore . . . ”
‘I am yawning. I am glutted with sensations. I am exhausted with the strain and the long,
long time — twenty-five minutes, half an hour — that I have held myself alone outside
the machine. I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which
discredits my sympathetic heart? There are others suffering — multitudes of people
suffering. Neville suffers. He loved Percival. But I can no longer endure extremities; I
want someone with whom to laugh, with whom to yawn, with whom to remember how
he scratched his head; someone he was at ease with and liked (not Susan, whom he
loved, but Jinny rather). In her room also I could do penance. I could ask, Did he tell you
how I refused him when he asked me to go to Hampton Court that day? Those are the
thoughts that will wake me leaping in anguish in the middle of the night — the crimes
for which one would do penance in all the markets of the world bareheaded; that one
did not go to Hampton Court that day.
‘But now I want life round me, and books and little ornaments, and the usual sounds of
tradesmen calling on which to pillow my head after this exhaustion, and shut my eyes
after this revelation. I will go straight, then, down the stairs, and hail the first taxi and
drive to Jinny.’
‘There is the puddle,’ said Rhoda, ‘and I cannot cross it. I hear the rush of the great
grindstone within an inch of my head. Its wind roars in my face. All palpable forms of
life have failed me. Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown
down the eternal corridors for ever. What, then, can I touch? What brick, what stone?
and so draw myself across the enormous gulf into my body safely?
‘Now the shadow has fallen and the purple light slants downwards. The figure that was
robed in beauty is now clothed in ruin. The figure that stood in the grove where the
steep-backed hills come down falls in ruin, as I told them when they said they loved his
voice on the stair, and his old shoes and moments of being together.
‘Now I will walk down Oxford Street envisaging a world rent by lightning; I will look at
oaks cracked asunder and red where the flowering branch has fallen. I will go to Oxford
Street and buy stockings for a party. I will do the usual things under the lightning flash.
On the bare ground I will pick violets and bind them together and offer them to Percival,
something given him by me. Look now at what Percival has given me. Look at the street
now that Percival is dead. The houses are lightly founded to be puffed over by a breath
of air. Reckless and random the cars race and roar and hunt us to death like
bloodhounds. I am alone in a hostile world. The human face is hideous. This is to my
liking. I want publicity and violence and to be dashed like a stone on the rocks. I like
factory chimneys and cranes and lorries. I like the passing of face and face and face,
deformed, indifferent. I am sick of prettiness; I am sick of privacy. I ride rough waters
and shall sink with no one to save me.
‘Percival, by his death, has made me this present, has revealed this terror, has left me to
undergo this humiliation — faces and faces, served out like soup-plates by scullions;
coarse, greedy, casual; looking in at shop-windows with pendent parcels; ogling,
brushing, destroying everything, leaving even our love impure, touched now by their
dirty fingers.
‘Here is the shop where they sell stockings. And I could believe that beauty is once more
set flowing. Its whisper comes down these aisles, through these laces, breathing among
 59

baskets of coloured ribbons. There are then warm hollows grooved in the heart of the
uproar; alcoves of silence where we can shelter under the wing of beauty from truth
which I desire. Pain is suspended as a girl silently slides open a drawer. And then, she
speaks; her voice wakes me. I shoot to the bottom among the weeds and see envy,
jealousy, hatred and spite scuttle like crabs over the sand as she speaks. These are our
companion’s. I will pay my bill and take my parcel.
‘This is Oxford Street. Here are hate, jealousy, hurry, and indifference frothed into the
wild semblance of life. These are our companions. Consider the friends with whom we
sit and eat. I think of Louis, reading the sporting column of an evening newspaper, afraid
of ridicule; a snob. He says, looking at the people passing, he will shepherd us if we will
follow. If we submit he will reduce us to order. Thus he will smooth out the death of
Percival to his satisfaction, looking fixedly over the cruet, past the houses at the sky.
Bernard, meanwhile, flops red- eyed into some arm-chair. He will have out his
notebook; under D, he will enter “Phrases to be used on the deaths of friends”. Jinny,
pirouetting across the room, will perch on the arm of his chair and ask, “Did he love
me?” “More than he loved Susan?” Susan, engaged to her farmer in the country, will
stand for a second with the telegram before her, holding a plate; and then, with a kick of
her heel, slam to the oven door. Neville, after staring at the window through his tears,
will see through his tears, and ask, “Who passes the window?”—“What lovely boy?” This
is my tribute to Percival; withered violets, blackened violets.
‘Where shall I go then? To some museum, where they keep rings under glass cases,
where there are cabinets, and the dresses that queens have worn? Or shall I go to
Hampton Court and look at the red walls and courtyards and the seemliness of herded
yew trees making black pyramids symmetrically on the grass among flowers? There
shall I recover beauty, and impose order upon my raked, my dishevelled soul? But what
can one make in loneliness? Alone I should stand on the empty grass and say, Rooks fly;
somebody passes with a bag; there is a gardener with a wheelbarrow. I should stand in
a queue and smell sweat, and scent as horrible as sweat; and be hung with other people
like a joint of meat among other joints of meat.
‘Here is a hall where one pays money and goes in, where one hears music among
somnolent people who have come here after lunch on a hot afternoon. We have eaten
beef and pudding enough to live for a week without tasting food. Therefore we cluster
like maggots on the back of something that will carry us on. Decorous, portly — we have
white hair waved under our hats; slim shoes; little bags; clean-shaven cheeks; here and
there a military moustache; not a speck of dust has been allowed to settle anywhere on
our broadcloth. Swaying and opening programmes, with a few words of greeting to
friends, we settle down, like walruses stranded on rocks, like heavy bodies incapable of
waddling to the sea, hoping for a wave to lift us, but we are too heavy, and too much dry
shingle lies between us and the sea. We lie gorged with food, torpid in the heat. Then,
swollen but contained in slippery satin, the seagreen woman comes to our rescue. She
sucks in her lips, assumes an air of intensity, inflates herself and hurls herself precisely
at the right moment as if she saw an apple and her voice was the arrow into the note,
“Ah!”
‘An axe has split a tree to the core; the core is warm; sound quivers within the bark.
“Ah!” cried a woman to her lover, leaning from her window in Venice. “Ah, ah!” she
cried, and again she cries “Ah!” She has provided us with a cry. But only a cry. And what
is a cry? Then the beetle-shaped men come with their violins; wait; count; nod; down
 60

come their bows. And there is ripple and laughter like the dance of olive trees and their
myriad-tongued grey leaves when a seafarer, biting a twig between his lips where the
many-backed steep hills come down, leaps on shore.
‘“Like” and “like” and “like”— but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of
the thing? Now that lightning has gashed the tree and the flowering branch has fallen
and Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing. There is a square;
there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place
it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The
structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so
mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is
our consolation.
The sweetness of this content overflowing runs down the walls of my mind, and
liberates understanding. Wander no more, I say; this is the end. The oblong has been set
upon the square; the spiral is on top. We have been hauled over the shingle, down to the
sea. The players come again. But they are mopping their faces. They are no longer so
spruce or so debonair. I will go. I will set aside this afternoon. I will make a pilgrimage. I
will go to Greenwich. I will fling myself fearlessly into trams, into omnibuses. As we
lurch down Regent Street, and I am flung upon this woman, upon this man, I am not
injured, I am not outraged by the collision. A square stands upon an oblong. Here are
mean streets where chaffering goes on in street markets, and every sort of iron rod, bolt
and screw is laid out, and people swarm off the pavement, pinching raw meat with thick
fingers. The structure is visible. We have made a dwelling-place.
‘These, then, are the flowers that grow among the rough grasses of the field which the
cows trample, wind-bitten, almost deformed, without fruit or blossom. These are what I
bring, torn up by the roots from the pavement of Oxford Street, my penny bunch, my
penny bunch of violets. Now from the window of the tram I see masts among chimneys;
there is the river; there are ships that sail to India. I will walk by the river. I will pace
this embankment, where an old man reads a newspaper in a glass shelter. I will pace
this terrace and watch the ships bowling down the tide. A woman walks on deck, with a
dog barking round her. Her skirts are blown; her hair is blown; they are going out to
sea; they are leaving us; they are vanishing this summer evening. Now I will relinquish;
now I will let loose. Now I will at last free the checked, the jerked- back desire to be
spent, to be consumed. We will gallop together over desert hills where the swallow dips
her wings in dark pools and the pillars stand entire. Into the wave that dashes upon the
shore, into the wave that flings its white foam to the uttermost corners of the earth, I
throw my violets, my offering to Percival.’
The sun no longer stood in the middle of the sky. Its light slanted, falling obliquely. Here
it caught on the edge of a cloud and burnt it into a slice of light, a blazing island on which
no foot could rest. Then another cloud was caught in the light and another and another,
so that the waves beneath were arrow-struck with fiery feathered darts that shot
erratically across the quivering blue.
The topmost leaves of the tree were crisped in the sun. They rustled stiffly in the
random breeze. The birds sat still save that they flicked their heads sharply from side to
side. Now they paused in their song as if glutted with sound, as if the fullness of midday
had gorged them. The dragon-fly poised motionless over a reed, then shot its blue stitch
further through the air. The far hum in the distance seemed made of the broken tremor
of fine wings dancing up and down on the horizon. The river water held the reeds now
 61

fixed as if glass had hardened round them; and then the glass wavered and the reeds
swept low. Pondering, sunken headed, the cattle stood in the fields and cumbrously
moved one foot and then another. In the bucket near the house the tap stopped
dripping, as if the bucket were full, and then the tap dripped one, two, three separate
drops in succession.
The windows showed erratically spots of burning fire, the elbow of one branch, and
then some tranquil space of pure clarity. The blind hung red at the window’s edge and
within the room daggers of light fell upon chairs and tables making cracks across their
lacquer and polish. The green pot bulged enormously, with its white window elongated
in its side. Light driving darkness before it spilt itself profusely upon the corners and
bosses; and yet heaped up darkness in mounds of unmoulded shape.
The waves massed themselves, curved their backs and crashed. Up spurted stones and
shingle. They swept round the rocks, and the spray, leaping high, spattered the walls of
a cave that had been dry before, and left pools inland, where some fish stranded lashed
its tail as the wave drew back.
‘I have signed my name,’ said Louis, ‘already twenty times. I, and again I, and again I.
Clear, firm, unequivocal, there it stands, my name. Clear-cut and unequivocal am I too.
Yet a vast inheritance of experience is packed in me. I have lived thousands of years. I
am like a worm that has eaten its way through the wood of a very old oak beam. But
now I am compact; now I am gathered together this fine morning.
‘The sun shines from a clear sky. But twelve o’clock brings neither rain nor sunshine. It
is the hour when Miss Johnson brings me my letters in a wire tray. Upon these white
sheets I indent my name. The whisper of leaves, water running down gutters, green
depths flecked with dahlias or zinnias; I, now a duke, now Plato, companion of Socrates;
the tramp of dark men and yellow men migrating east, west, north and south; the
eternal procession, women going with attaché cases down the Strand as they went once
with pitchers to the Nile; all the furled and close-packed leaves of my many-folded life
are now summed in my name; incised cleanly and barely on the sheet. Now a full-grown
man; now upright standing in sun or rain. I must drop heavy as a hatchet and cut the
oak with my sheer weight, for if I deviate, glancing this way, or that way, I shall fall like
snow and be wasted.
‘I am half in love with the typewriter and the telephone. With letters and cables and
brief but courteous commands on the telephone to Paris, Berlin, New York, I have fused
my many lives into one; I have helped by my assiduity and decision to score those lines
on the map there by which the different parts of the world are laced together. I love
punctually at ten to come into my room; I love the purple glow of the dark mahogany; I
love the table and its sharp edge; and the smooth-running drawers. I love the telephone
with its lip stretched to my whisper, and the date on the wall; and the engagement book.
Mr Prentice at four; Mr Eyres sharp at four-thirty.
‘I like to be asked to come to Mr Burchard’s private room and report on our
commitments to China. I hope to inherit an arm-chair and a Turkey carpet. My shoulder
is to the wheel; I roll the dark before me, spreading commerce where there was chaos in
the far parts of the world. If I press on — from chaos making order, I shall find myself
where Chatham stood, and Pitt, Burke and Sir Robert Peel. Thus I expunge certain
stains, and erase old defilements; the woman who gave me a flag from the top of the
Christmas tree; my accent; beatings and other tortures; the boasting boys; my father, a
banker at Brisbane.
 62

‘I have read my poet in an eating-house, and, stirring my coffee, listened to the clerks
making bets at the little tables, watched the women hesitating at the counter. I said that
nothing should be irrelevant, like a piece of brown paper dropped casually on the floor. I
said their journeys should have an end in view; they should earn their two pound ten a
week at the command of an august master; some hand, some robe, should fold us about
in the evening. When I have healed these fractures and comprehended these
monstrosities so that they need neither excuse nor apology, which both waste our
strength, I shall give back to the street and the eating-shop what they lost when they fell
on these hard times and broke on these stony beaches. I shall assemble a few words and
forge round us a hammered ring of beaten steel.
‘But now I have not a moment to spare. There is no respite here, no shadow made of
quivering leaves, or alcove to which one can retreat from the sun, to sit, with a lover, in
the cool of the evening. The weight of the world is on our shoulders; its vision is through
our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember
Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is
life; Mr Prentice at four; Mr Eyres at four-thirty. I like to hear the soft rush of the lift and
the thud with which it stops on my landing and the heavy male tread of responsible feet
down the corridors. So by dint of our united exertions we send ships to the remotest
parts of the globe; replete with lavatories and gymnasiums. The weight of the world is
on our shoulders. This is life. If I press on, I shall inherit a chair and a rug; a place in
Surrey with glass houses, and some rare conifer, melon or flowering tree which other
merchants will envy.
‘Yet I still keep my attic room. There I open the usual little book; there I watch the rain
glisten on the tiles till they shine like a policeman’s waterproof; there I see the broken
windows in poor people’s houses; the lean cats; some slattern squinting in a cracked
looking-glass as she arranges her face for the street corner; there Rhoda sometimes
comes. For we are lovers.
‘Percival has died (he died in Egypt; he died in Greece; all deaths are one death). Susan
has children; Neville mounts rapidly to the conspicuous heights. Life passes. The clouds
change perpetually over our houses. I do this, do that, and again do this and then that.
Meeting and parting, we assemble different forms, make different patterns. But if I do
not nail these impressions to the board and out of the many men in me make one; exist
here and now and not in streaks and patches, like scattered snow wreaths on far
mountains; and ask Miss Johnson as I pass through the office about the movies and take
my cup of tea and accept also my favourite biscuit, then I shall fall like snow and be
wasted.
‘Yet when six o’clock comes and I touch my hat to the commissionaire, being always too
effusive in ceremony since I desire so much to be accepted; and struggle, leaning against
the wind, buttoned up, with my jaws blue and my eyes running water, I wish that a little
typist would cuddle on my knees; I think that my favourite dish is liver and bacon; and
so am apt to wander to the river, to the narrow streets where there are frequent public-
houses, and the shadows of ships passing at the end of the street, and women fighting.
But I say to myself, recovering my sanity, Mr Prentice at four; Mr Eyres at four-thirty.
The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the
world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire
basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.’
 63

‘Summer comes, and winter,’ said Susan. ‘The seasons pass. The pear fills itself and
drops from the tree. The dead leaf rests on its edge. But steam has obscured the
window. I sit by the fire watching the kettle boil. I see the pear tree through the streaked
steam on the window-pane.
‘Sleep, sleep, I croon, whether it is summer or winter, May or November. Sleep I sing —
I, who am unmelodious and hear no music save rustic music when a dog barks, a bell
tinkles, or wheels crunch upon the gravel. I sing my song by the fire like an old shell
murmuring on the beach. Sleep, sleep, I say, warning off with my voice all who rattle
milk-cans, fire at rooks, shoot rabbits, or in any way bring the shock of destruction near
this wicker cradle, laden with soft limbs, curled under a pink coverlet.
‘I have lost my indifference, my blank eyes, my pear-shaped eyes that saw to the root. I
am no longer January, May or any other season, but am all spun to a fine thread round
the cradle, wrapping in a cocoon made of my own blood the delicate limbs of my baby.
Sleep, I say, and feel within me uprush some wilder, darker violence, so that I would fell
down with one blow any intruder, any snatcher, who should break into this room and
wake the sleeper.
‘I pad about the house all day long in apron and slippers, like my mother who died of
cancer. Whether it is summer, whether it is winter, I no longer know by the moor grass,
and the heath flower; only by the steam on the window-pane, or the frost on the
window- pane. When the lark peels high his ring of sound and it falls through the air like
an apple paring, I stoop; I feed my baby. I, who used to walk through beech woods
noting the jay’s feather turning blue as it falls, past the shepherd and the tramp, who
stared at the woman squatted beside a tilted cart in a ditch, go from room to room with
a duster. Sleep, I say, desiring sleep to fall like a blanket of down and cover these weak
limbs; demanding that life shall sheathe its claws and gird its lightning and pass by,
making of my own body a hollow, a warm shelter for my child to sleep in. Sleep, I say,
sleep. Or I go to the window, I look at the rook’s high nest; and the pear tree. “His eyes
will see when mine are shut,” I think. “I shall go mixed with them beyond my body and
shall see India. He will come home, bringing trophies to be laid at my feet. He will
increase my possessions.”
‘But I never rise at dawn and see the purple drops in the cabbage leaves; the red drops
in the roses. I do not watch the setter nose in a circle, or lie at night watching the leaves
hide the stars and the stars move and the leaves hang still. The butcher calls; the milk
has to be stood under a shade lest it should sour.
‘Sleep, I say, sleep, as the kettle boils and its breath comes thicker and thicker issuing in
one jet from the spout. So life fills my veins. So life pours through my limbs. So I am
driven forward, till I could cry, as I move from dawn to dusk opening and shutting, “No
more. I am glutted with natural happiness.” Yet more will come, more children; more
cradles, more baskets in the kitchen and hams ripening; and onions glistening; and
more beds of lettuce and potatoes. I am blown like a leaf by the gale; now brushing the
wet grass, now whirled up. I am glutted with natural happiness; and wish sometimes
that the fullness would pass from me and the weight of the sleeping house rise, when we
sit reading, and I stay the thread at the eye of my needle. The lamp kindles a fire in the
dark pane. A fire burns in the heart of the ivy. I see a lit-up street in the evergreens. I
hear traffic in the brush of the wind down the lane, and broken voices, and laughter, and
Jinny who cries as the door opens, “Come! Come!”
 64

‘But no sound breaks the silence of our house, where the fields sigh close to the door.
The wind washes through the elm trees; a moth hits the lamp; a cow lows; a crack of
sound starts in the rafter, and I push my head through the needle and murmur, “Sleep”.’
‘Now is the moment,’ said Jinny. ‘Now we have met, and have come together. Now let us
talk, let us tell stories. Who is he? Who is she? I am infinitely curious and do not know
what is to come. If you, whom I meet for the first time, were to say to me, “The coach
starts at four from Piccadilly,” I would not stay to fling a few necessaries in a bandbox,
but would come at once.
‘Let us sit here under the cut flowers, on the sofa by the picture. Let us decorate our
Christmas tree with facts and again with facts. People are so soon gone; let us catch
them. That man there, by the cabinet; he lives you say, surrounded by china pots. Break
one and you shatter a thousand pounds. And he loved a girl in Rome and she left him.
Hence the pots, old junk found in lodging-houses or dug from the desert sands. And
since beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static, his life stagnates
in a china sea. It is strange though; for once as a young man, he sat on damp ground and
drank rum with soldiers.
‘One must be quick and add facts deftly, like toys to a tree, fixing them with a twist of the
fingers. He stoops, how he stoops, even over an azalea. He stoops over the old woman
even, because she wears diamonds in her ears, and, bundling about her estate in a pony
carriage, directs who is to be helped, what tree felled, and who turned out tomorrow. (I
have lived my life, I must tell you, all these years, and I am now past thirty, perilously,
like a mountain goat, leaping from crag to crag; I do not settle long anywhere; I do not
attach myself to one person in particular; but you will find that if I raise my arm, some
figure at once breaks off and will come.) And that man is a judge; and that man is a
millionaire, and that man, with the eyeglass, shot his governess through the heart with
an arrow when he was ten years old. Afterwards he rode through deserts with
despatches, took part in revolutions and now collects materials for a history of his
mother’s family, long settled in Norfolk. That little man with a blue chin has a right hand
that is withered. But why? We do not know. That woman, you whisper discreetly, with
the pearl pagodas hanging from her ears, was the pure flame who lit the life of one of
our statesmen; now since his death she sees ghosts, tells fortunes, and has adopted a
coffee-coloured youth whom she calls the Messiah. That man with the drooping
moustache, like a cavalry officer, lived a life of the utmost debauchery (it is all in some
memoir) until one day he met a stranger in a train who converted him between
Edinburgh and Carlisle by reading the Bible.
‘Thus, in a few seconds, deftly, adroitly, we decipher the hieroglyphs written on other
people’s faces. Here, in this room, are the abraded and battered shells cast on the shore.
The door goes on opening. The room fills and fills with knowledge, anguish, many kinds
of ambition, much indifference, some despair. Between us, you say, we could build
cathedrals, dictate policies, condemn men to death, and administer the affairs of several
public offices. The common fund of experience is very deep. We have between us scores
of children of both sexes, whom we are educating, going to see at school with the
measles, and bringing up to inherit our houses. In one way or another we make this day,
this Friday, some by going to the Law Courts; others to the city; others to the nursery;
others by marching and forming fours. A million hands stitch, raise hods with bricks.
The activity is endless. And tomorrow it begins again; tomorrow we make Saturday.
Some take train for France; others ship for India. Some will never come into this room
 65

again. One may die tonight. Another will beget a child. From us every sort of building,
policy, venture, picture, poem, child, factory, will spring. Life comes; life goes; we make
life. So you say.
‘But we who live in the body see with the body’s imagination things in outline. I see
rocks in bright sunshine. I cannot take these facts into some cave and, shading my eyes,
grade their yellows, blues, umbers into one substance. I cannot remain seated for long. I
must jump up and go. The coach may start from Piccadilly. I drop all these facts —
diamonds, withered hands, china pots and the rest of it — as a monkey drops nuts from
its naked paws. I cannot tell you if life is this or that. I am going to push out into the
heterogeneous crowd. I am going to be buffeted; to be flung up, and flung down, among
men, like a ship on the sea.
‘For now my body, my companion, which is always sending its signals, the rough black
“No”, the golden “Come”, in rapid running arrows of sensation, beckons. Someone
moves. Did I raise my arm? Did I look? Did my yellow scarf with the strawberry spots
float and signal? He has broken from the wall. He follows. I am pursued through the
forest. All is rapt, all is nocturnal, and the parrots go screaming through the branches.
All my senses stand erect. Now I feel the roughness of the fibre of the curtain through
which I push; now I feel the cold iron railing and its blistered paint beneath my palm.
Now the cool tide of darkness breaks its waters over me. We are out of doors. Night
opens; night traversed by wandering moths; night hiding lovers roaming to adventure. I
smell roses; I smell violets; I see red and blue just hidden. Now gravel is under my
shoes; now grass. Up reel the tall backs of houses guilty with lights. All London is uneasy
with flashing lights. Now let us sing our love song — Come, come, come. Now my gold
signal is like a dragonfly flying taut. Jug, jug, jug, I sing like the nightingale whose
melody is crowded in the too narrow passage of her throat. Now I hear crash and
rending of boughs and the crack of antlers as if the beasts of the forest were all hunting,
all rearing high and plunging down among the thorns. One has pierced me. One is driven
deep within me.
‘And velvet flowers and leaves whose coolness has been stood in water wash me round,
and sheathe me, embalming me.’
‘Why, look,’ said Neville, ‘at the clock ticking on the mantelpiece? Time passes, yes. And
we grow old. But to sit with you, alone with you, here in London, in this firelit room, you
there, I here, is all. The world ransacked to its uttermost ends, and all its heights
stripped and gathered of their flowers, holds no more. Look at the firelight running up
and down the gold thread in the curtain. The fruit it circles droops heavy. It falls on the
toe of your boot, it gives your face a red rim — I think it is the firelight and not your
face; I think those are books against the wall, and that a curtain, and that perhaps an
armchair. But when you come everything changes. The cups and saucers changed when
you came in this morning. There can be no doubt, I thought, pushing aside the
newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have
meaning only under the eyes of love.
‘I rose. I had done my breakfast. There was the whole day before us, and as it was fine,
tender, non-committal, we walked through the Park to the Embankment, along the
Strand to St Paul’s, then to the shop where I bought an umbrella, always talking, and
now and then stopping to look. But can this last? I said to myself, by a lion in Trafalgar
Square, by the lion seen once and for ever; — so I revisit my past life, scene by scene;
there is an elm tree, and there lies Percival. For ever and ever, I swore. Then darted in
 66

the usual doubt. I clutched your hand. You left me. The descent into the Tube was like
death. We were cut up, we were dissevered by all those faces and the hollow wind that
seemed to roar down there over desert boulders. I sat staring in my own room. By five I
knew that you were faithless. I snatched the telephone and the buzz, buzz, buzz of its
stupid voice in your empty room battered my heart down, when the door opened and
there you stood. That was the most perfect of our meetings. But these meetings, these
partings, finally destroy us.
‘Now this room seems to me central, something scooped out of the eternal night.
Outside lines twist and intersect, but round us, wrapping us about. Here we are centred.
Here we can be silent, or speak without raising our voices. Did you notice that and then
that? we say. He said that, meaning. . . . She hesitated, and I believe suspected. Anyhow, I
heard voices, a sob on the stair late at night. It is the end of their relationship. Thus we
spin round us infinitely fine filaments and construct a system. Plato and Shakespeare
are included, also quite obscure people, people of no importance whatsoever. I hate men
who wear crucifixes on the left side of their waistcoats. I hate ceremonies and
lamentations and the sad figure of Christ trembling beside another trembling and sad
figure. Also the pomp and the indifference and the emphasis, always on the wrong place,
of people holding forth under chandeliers in full evening dress, wearing stars and
decorations. Some spray in a hedge, though, or a sunset over a flat winter field, or again
the way some old woman sits, arms akimbo, in an omnibus with a basket — those we
point at for the other to look at. It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another
to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past,
to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit. And you take it
and marvel, as I take the careless movements of your body and marvel at its ease, its
power — how you fling open windows and are dexterous with your hands. For alas! my
mind is a little impeded, it soon tires; I fall damp, perhaps disgusting, at the goal.
‘Alas! I could not ride about India in a sun helmet and return to a bungalow. I cannot
tumble, as you do, like half-naked boys on the deck of a ship, squirting each other with
hose-pipes. I want this fire, I want this chair. I want someone to sit beside me after the
day’s pursuit and all its anguish, after its listenings, and its waitings, and its suspicions.
After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy — to be alone with you, to set this
hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits. We must oppose the waste and
deformity of the world, its crowds eddying round and round disgorged and trampling.
One must slip paper- knives, even, exactly through the pages of novels, and tie up
packets of letters neatly with green silk, and brush up the cinders with a hearth broom.
Everything must be done to rebuke the horror of deformity. Let us read writers of
Roman severity and virtue; let us seek perfection through the sand. Yes, but I love to slip
the virtue and severity of the noble Romans under the grey light of your eyes, and
dancing grasses and summer breezes and the laughter and shouts of boys at play — of
naked cabin-boys squirting each other with hosepipes on the decks of ships. Hence I am
not a disinterested seeker, like Louis, after perfection through the sand. Colours always
stain the page; clouds pass over it. And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
Alcibiades, Ajax, Hector and Percival are also you. They loved riding, they risked their
lives wantonly, they were not great readers either. But you are not Ajax or Percival.
They did not wrinkle their noses and scratch their foreheads with your precise gesture.
You are you. That is what consoles me for the lack of many things — I am ugly, I am
weak — and the depravity of the world, and the flight of youth and Percival’s death, and
bitterness and rancour and envies innumerable.
 67

‘But if one day you do not come after breakfast, if one day I see you in some looking-
glass perhaps looking after another, if the telephone buzzes and buzzes in your empty
room, I shall then, after unspeakable anguish, I shall then — for there is no end to the
folly of the human heart — seek another, find another, you. Meanwhile, let us abolish
the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.’
The sun had now sunk lower in the sky. The islands of cloud had gained in density and
drew themselves across the sun so that the rocks went suddenly black, and the
trembling sea holly lost its blue and turned silver, and shadows were blown like grey
cloths over the sea. The waves no longer visited the further pools or reached the dotted
black line which lay irregularly upon the beach. The sand was pearl white, smoothed
and shining. Birds swooped and circled high up in the air. Some raced in the furrows of
the wind and turned and sliced through them as if they were one body cut into a
thousand shreds. Birds fell like a net descending on the tree-tops. Here one bird taking
its way alone made wing for the marsh and sat solitary on a white stake, opening its
wings and shutting them.
Some petals had fallen in the garden. They lay shell-shaped on the earth. The dead leaf
no longer stood upon its edge, but had been blown, now running, now pausing, against
some stalk. Through all the flowers the same wave of light passed in a sudden flaunt and
flash as if a fin cut the green glass of a lake. Now and again some level and masterly blast
blew the multitudinous leaves up and down and then, as the wind flagged, each blade
regained its identity. The flowers, burning their bright discs in the sun, flung aside the
sunlight as the wind tossed them, and then some heads too heavy to rise again drooped
slightly.
The afternoon sun warmed the fields, poured blue into the shadows and reddened the
corn. A deep varnish was laid like a lacquer over the fields. A cart, a horse, a flock of
rooks — whatever moved in it was rolled round in gold. If a cow moved a leg it stirred
ripples of red gold, and its horns seemed lined with light. Sprays of flaxen-haired corn
lay on the hedges, brushed from the shaggy carts that came up from the meadows short
legged and primeval looking. The round-headed clouds never dwindled as they bowled
along, but kept every atom of their rotundity. Now, as they passed, they caught a whole
village in the fling of their net and, passing, let it fly free again. Far away on the horizon,
among the million grains of blue-grey dust, burnt one pane, or stood the single line of
one steeple or one tree.
The red curtains and the white blinds blew in and out, flapping against the edge of the
window, and the light which entered by flaps and breadths unequally had in it some
brown tinge, and some abandonment as it blew through the blowing curtains in gusts.
Here it browned a cabinet, there reddened a chair, here it made the window waver in
the side of the green jar.
All for a moment wavered and bent in uncertainty and ambiguity, as if a great moth
sailing through the room had shadowed the immense solidity of chairs and tables with
floating wings.
‘And time,’ said Bernard, ‘lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed on the roof of the
soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming, lets fall its drop. Last week, as I stood
shaving, the drop fell. I, standing with my razor in my hand, became suddenly aware of
the merely habitual nature of my action (this is the drop forming) and congratulated my
hands, ironically, for keeping at it. Shave, shave, shave, I said. Go on shaving. The drop
fell. All through the day’s work, at intervals, my mind went to an empty place, saying,
 68

“What is lost? What is over?” And “Over and done with,” I muttered, “over and done
with,” solacing myself with words. People noticed the vacuity of my face and the
aimlessness of my conversation. The last words of my sentence tailed away. And as I
buttoned on my coat to go home I said more dramatically, “I have lost my youth.”
‘It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to
the rescue — the penalty of living in an old civilization with a notebook. This drop
falling has nothing to do with losing my youth. This drop falling is time tapering to a
point. Time, which is a sunny pasture covered with a dancing light, time, which is
widespread as a field at midday, becomes pendant. Time tapers to a point. As a drop
falls from a glass heavy with some sediment, time falls. These are the true cycles, these
are the true events. Then as if all the luminosity of the atmosphere were withdrawn I
see to the bare bottom. I see what habit covers. I lie sluggish in bed for days. I dine out
and gape like a codfish. I do not trouble to finish my sentences, and my actions, usually
so uncertain, acquire a mechanical precision. On this occasion, passing an office, I went
in and bought, with all the composure of a mechanical figure, a ticket for Rome.
‘Now I sit on a stone seat in these gardens surveying the eternal city, and the little man
who was shaving in London five days ago looks already like a heap of old clothes.
London has also crumbled. London consists of fallen factories and a few gasometers. At
the same time I am not involved in this pageantry. I see the violet-sashed priests and the
picturesque nursemaids; I notice externals only. I sit here like a convalescent, like a very
simple man who knows only words of one syllable. “The sun is hot,” I say. “The wind is
cold.” I feel myself carried round like an insect on top of the earth and could swear that,
sitting here, I feel its hardness, its turning movement. I have no desire to go the opposite
way from the earth. Could I prolong this sense another six inches I have a foreboding
that I should touch some queer territory. But I have a very limited proboscis. I never
wish to prolong these states of detachment; I dislike them; I also despise them. I do not
wish to be a man who sits for fifty years on the same spot thinking of his navel. I wish to
be harnessed to a cart, a vegetable-cart that rattles over the cobbles.
‘The truth is that I am not one of those who find their satisfaction in one person, or in
infinity. The private room bores me, also the sky. My being only glitters when all its
facets are exposed to many people. Let them fail and I am full of holes, dwindling like
burnt paper. Oh, Mrs Moffat, Mrs Moffat, I say, come and sweep it all up. Things have
dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death —
Percival — others through sheer inability to cross the street. I am not so gifted as at one
time seemed likely. Certain things lie beyond my scope. I shall never understand the
harder problems of philosophy. Rome is the limit of my travelling. As I drop asleep at
night it strikes me sometimes with a pang that I shall never see savages in Tahiti
spearing fish by the light of a blazing cresset, or a lion spring in the jungle, or a naked
man eating raw flesh. Nor shall I learn Russian or read the Vedas. I shall never again
walk bang into the pillar-box. (But still a few stars fall through my night, beautifully,
from the violence of that concussion.) But as I think, truth has come nearer. For many
years I crooned complacently, “My children . . . my wife . . . my house . . . my dog.” As I let
myself in with the latch-key I would go through that familiar ritual and wrap myself in
those warm coverings. Now that lovely veil has fallen. I do not want possessions now.
(Note: an Italian washer- woman stands on the same rung of physical refinement as the
daughter of an English duke.)
 69

‘But let me consider. The drop falls; another stage has been reached. Stage upon stage.
And why should there be an end of stages? and where do they lead? To what
conclusion? For they come wearing robes of solemnity. In these dilemmas the devout
consult those violet-sashed and sensual-looking gentry who are trooping past me. But
for ourselves, we resent teachers. Let a man get up and say, “Behold, this is the truth,”
and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you
have forgotten the cat, I say. So Neville, at school, in the dim chapel, raged at the sight of
the doctor’s crucifix. I, who am always distracted, whether by a cat or by a bee buzzing
round the bouquet that Lady Hampden keeps so diligently pressed to her nose, at once
make up a story and so obliterate the angles of the crucifix. I have made up thousands of
stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found
the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found
that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?
‘Look now from this terrace at the swarming population beneath. Look at the general
activity and clamour. That man is in difficulties with his mule. Half a dozen good-
natured loafers offer their services. Others pass by without looking. They have as many
interests as there are threads in a skein. Look at the sweep of the sky, bowled over by
round white clouds. Imagine the leagues of level land and the aqueducts and the broken
Roman pavement and the tombstones in the Campagna, and beyond the Campagna, the
sea, then again more land, then the sea. I could break off any detail in all that prospect
— say the mule-cart — and describe it with the greatest ease. But why describe a man
in trouble with his mule? Again, I could invent stories about that girl coming up the
steps. “She met him under the dark archway. . . . ‘It is over,’ he said, turning from the
cage where the china parrot hangs.” Or simply, “That was all.” But why impose my
arbitrary design? Why stress this and shape that and twist up little figures like the toys
men sell in trays in the street? Why select this, out of all that — one detail?
‘Here am I shedding one of my life-skins, and all they will say is, “Bernard is spending
ten days in Rome.” Here am I marching up and down this terrace alone, unoriented. But
observe how dots and dashes are beginning, as I walk, to run themselves into
continuous lines, how things are losing the bald, the separate identity that they had as I
walked up those steps. The great red pot is now a reddish streak in a wave of yellowish
green. The world is beginning to move past me like the banks of a hedge when the train
starts, like the waves of the sea when a steamer moves. I am moving too, am becoming
involved in the general sequence when one thing follows another and it seems
inevitable that the tree should come, then the telegraph-pole, then the break in the
hedge. And as I move, surrounded, included and taking part, the usual phrases begin to
bubble up, and I wish to free these bubbles from the trap- door in my head, and direct
my steps therefore towards that man, the back of whose head is half familiar to me. We
were together at school. We shall undoubtedly meet. We shall certainly lunch together.
We shall talk. But wait, one moment wait.
‘These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom. Tahiti
becomes possible. Leaning over this parapet I see far out a waste of water. A fin turns.
This bare visual impression is unattached to any line of reason, it springs up as one
might see the fin of a porpoise on the horizon. Visual impressions often communicate
thus briefly statements that we shall in time to come uncover and coax into words. I
note under F., therefore, “Fin in a waste of waters.” I, who am perpetually making notes
in the margin of my mind for some final statement, make this mark, waiting for some
winter’s evening.
 70

‘Now I shall go and lunch somewhere, I shall hold my glass up, I shall look through the
wine, I shall observe with more than my usual detachment, and when a pretty woman
enters the restaurant and comes down the room between the tables I shall say to
myself, “Look where she comes against a waste of waters.” A meaningless observation,
but to me, solemn, slate-coloured, with a fatal sound of ruining worlds and waters
falling to destruction.
‘So, Bernard (I recall you, you the usual partner in my enterprises), let us begin this new
chapter, and observe the formation of this new, this unknown, strange, altogether
unidentified and terrifying experience — the new drop — which is about to shape itself.
Larpent is that man’s name.’
‘In this hot afternoon,’ said Susan, ‘here in this garden, here in this field where I walk
with my son, I have reached the summit of my desires. The hinge of the gate is rusty; he
heaves it open. The violent passions of childhood, my tears in the garden when Jinny
kissed Louis, my rage in the schoolroom, which smelt of pine, my loneliness in foreign
places, when the mules came clattering in on their pointed hoofs and the Italian women
chattered at the fountain, shawled, with carnations twisted in their hair, are rewarded
by security, possession, familiarity. I have had peaceful, productive years. I possess all I
see. I have grown trees from the seed. I have made ponds in which goldfish hide under
the broad-leaved lilies. I have netted over strawberry beds and lettuce beds, and
stitched the pears and the plums into white bags to keep them safe from the wasps. I
have seen my sons and daughters, once netted over like fruit in their cots, break the
meshes and walk with me, taller than I am, casting shadows on the grass.
‘I am fenced in, planted here like one of my own trees. I say, “My son,” I say, “My
daughter,” and even the ironmonger looking up from his counter strewn with nails,
paint and wire-fencing respects the shabby car at the door with its butterfly nets, pads
and bee-hives. We hang mistletoe over the clock at Christmas, weigh our blackberries
and mushrooms, count out jam-pots, and stand year by year to be measured against the
shutter in the drawing-room window. I also make wreaths of white flowers, twisting
silver-leaved plants among them for the dead, attaching my card with sorrow for the
dead shepherd, with sympathy for the wife of the dead carter; and sit by the beds of
dying women, who murmur their last terrors, who clutch my hand; frequenting rooms
intolerable except to one born as I was and early acquainted with the farmyard and the
dung-heap and the hens straying in and out, and the mother with two rooms and
growing children. I have seen the windows run with heat, I have smelt the sink.
‘I ask now, standing with my scissors among my flowers, Where can the shadow enter?
What shock can loosen my laboriously gathered, relentlessly pressed down life? Yet
sometimes I am sick of natural happiness, and fruit growing, and children scattering the
house with oars, guns, skulls, books won for prizes and other trophies. I am sick of the
body, I am sick of my own craft, industry and cunning, of the unscrupulous ways of the
mother who protects, who collects under her jealous eyes at one long table her own
children, always her own.
‘It is when spring comes, cold showery, with sudden yellow flowers — then as I look at
the meat under the blue shade and press the heavy silver bags of tea, of sultanas, I
remember how the sun rose, and the swallows skimmed the grass, and phrases that
Bernard made when we were children, and the leaves shook over us, many-folded, very
light, breaking the blue of the sky, scattering wandering lights upon the skeleton roots
of the beech trees where I sat, sobbing. The pigeon rose. I jumped up and ran after the
 71

words that trailed like the dangling string from an air ball, up and up, from branch to
branch escaping. Then like a cracked bowl the fixity of my morning broke, and putting
down the bags of flour I thought, Life stands round me like a glass round the imprisoned
reed.
‘I hold some scissors and snip off the hollyhocks, who went to Elvedon and trod on
rotten oak-apples, and saw the lady writing and the gardeners with their great brooms.
We ran back panting lest we should be shot and nailed like stoats to the wall. Now I
measure, I preserve. At night I sit in the arm-chair and stretch my arm for my sewing;
and hear my husband snore; and look up when the light from a passing car dazzles the
windows and feel the waves of my life tossed, broken, round me who am rooted; and
hear cries, and see other’s lives eddying like straws round the piers of a bridge while I
push my needle in and out and draw my thread through the calico.
‘I think sometimes of Percival who loved me. He rode and fell in India. I think sometimes
of Rhoda. Uneasy cries wake me at dead of night. But for the most part I walk content
with my sons. I cut the dead petals from hollyhocks. Rather squat, grey before my time,
but with clear eyes, pear-shaped eyes, I pace my fields.’
‘Here I stand,’ said Jinny, ‘in the Tube station where everything that is desirable meets
— Piccadilly South Side, Piccadilly North Side, Regent Street and the Haymarket. I stand
for a moment under the pavement in the heart of London. Innumerable wheels rush and
feet press just over my head. The great avenues of civilization meet here and strike this
way and that. I am in the heart of life. But look — there is my body in that looking glass.
How solitary, how shrunk, how aged! I am no longer young. I am no longer part of the
procession. Millions descend those stairs in a terrible descent. Great wheels churn
inexorably urging them downwards. Millions have died. Percival died. I still move. I still
live. But who will come if I signal?
‘Little animal that I am, sucking my flanks in and out with fear, I stand here, palpitating,
trembling. But I will not be afraid. I will bring the whip down on my flanks. I am not a
whimpering little animal making for the shadow. It was only for a moment, catching
sight of myself before I had time to prepare myself as I always prepare myself for the
sight of myself, that I quailed. It is true; I am not young — I shall soon raise my arm in
vain and my scarf will fall to my side without having signalled. I shall not hear the
sudden sigh in the night and feel through the dark someone coming. There will be no
reflections in window-panes in dark tunnels. I shall look into faces, and I shall see them
seek some other face. I admit for one moment the soundless flight of upright bodies
down the moving stairs like the pinioned and terrible descent of some army of the dead
downwards and the churning of the great engines remorselessly forwarding us, all of us,
onwards, made me cower and run for shelter.
‘But now I swear, making deliberately in front of the glass those slight preparations that
equip me, I will not be afraid. Think of the superb omnibuses, red and yellow, stopping
and starting, punctually in order. Think of the powerful and beautiful cars that now slow
to a foot’s pace and now shoot forward; think of men, think of women, equipped,
prepared, driving onward. This is the triumphant procession; this is the army of victory
with banners and brass eagles and heads crowned with laurel-leaves won in battle.
They are better than savages in loin-cloths, and women whose hair is dank, whose long
breasts sag, with children tugging at their long breasts. These broad thoroughfares —
Piccadilly South, Piccadilly North, Regent Street and the Haymarket — are sanded paths
of victory driven through the jungle. I too, with my little patent-leather shoes, my
 72

handkerchief that is but a film of gauze, my reddened lips and my finely pencilled
eyebrows, march to victory with the band.
‘Look how they show off clothes here even under ground in a perpetual radiance. They
will not let the earth even lie wormy and sodden. There are gauzes and silks illumined
in glass cases and underclothes trimmed with a million close stitches of fine
embroidery. Crimson, green, violet, they are dyed all colours. Think how they organize,
roll out, smooth, dip in dyes, and drive tunnels blasting the rock. Lifts rise and fall; trains
stop, trams start as regularly as the waves of the sea. This is what has my adhesion. I am
a native of this world, I follow its banners. How could I run for shelter when they are so
magnificently adventurous, daring, curious, too, and strong enough in the midst of effort
to pause and scrawl with a free hand a joke upon the wall? Therefore I will powder my
face and redden my lips. I will make the angle of my eyebrows sharper than usual. I will
rise to the surface, standing erect with the others in Piccadilly Circus. I will sign with a
sharp gesture to a cab whose driver will signify by some indescribable alacrity his
understanding of my signals. For I still excite eagerness. I still feel the bowing of men in
the street like the silent stoop of the corn when the light wind blows, ruffling it red.
‘I will drive to my own house. I will fill the vases with lavish, with luxurious, with
extravagant flowers nodding in great bunches. I will place one chair there, another here.
I will put ready cigarettes, glasses and some gaily covered new unread book in case
Bernard comes, or Neville or Louis. But perhaps it will not be Bernard, Neville or Louis,
but somebody new, somebody unknown, somebody I passed on a staircase and, just
turning as we passed, I murmured, “Come.” He will come this afternoon; somebody I do
not know, somebody new. Let the silent army of the dead descend. I march forward.’
‘I no longer need a room now,’ said Neville, ‘or walls and firelight. I am no longer young.
I pass Jinny’s house without envy, and smile at the young man who arranges his tie a
little nervously on the door-step. Let the dapper young man ring the bell; let him find
her. I shall find her if I want her; if not, I pass on. The old corrosion has lost its bite —
envy, intrigue and bitterness have been washed out. We have lost our glory too. When
we were young we sat anywhere, on bare benches in draughty halls with the doors
always banging. We tumbled about half naked like boys on the deck of a ship squirting
each other with hose-pipes. Now I could swear that I like people pouring profusely out
of the Tube when the day’s work is done, unanimous, indiscriminate, uncounted. I have
picked my own fruit. I look dispassionately.
‘After all, we are not responsible. We are not judges. We are not called upon to torture
our fellows with thumb-screws and irons; we are not called upon to mount pulpits and
lecture them on pale Sunday afternoons. It is better to look at a rose, or to read
Shakespeare as I read him here in Shaftesbury Avenue. Here’s the fool, here’s the villain,
here in a car comes Cleopatra, burning on her barge. Here are figures of the damned too,
noseless men by the police-court wall, standing with their feet in fire, howling. This is
poetry if we do not write it. They act their parts infallibly, and almost before they open
their lips I know what they are going to say, and wait the divine moment when they
speak the word that must have been written. If it were only for the sake of the play, I
could walk Shaftesbury Avenue for ever.
‘Then coming from the street, entering some room, there are people talking, or hardly
troubling to talk. He says, she says, somebody else says things have been said so often
that one word is now enough to lift a whole weight. Argument, laughter, old grievances
— they fall through the air, thickening it. I take a book and read half a page of anything.
 73

They have not mended the spout of the teapot yet. The child dances, dressed in her
mother’s clothes.
‘But then Rhoda, or it may be Louis, some fasting and anguished spirit, passes through
and out again. They want a plot, do they? They want a reason? It is not enough for them,
this ordinary scene. It is not enough to wait for the thing to be said as if it were written;
to see the sentence lay its dab of clay precisely on the right place, making character; to
perceive, suddenly, some group in outline against the sky. Yet if they want violence, I
have seen death and murder and suicide all in one room. One comes in, one goes out.
There are sobs on the staircase. I have heard threads broken and knots tied and the
quiet stitching of white cambric going on and on on the knees of a woman. Why ask, like
Louis, for a reason, or fly like Rhoda to some far grove and part the leaves of the laurels
and look for statues? They say that one must beat one’s wings against the storm in the
belief that beyond this welter the sun shines; the sun falls sheer into pools that are
fledged with willows. (Here it is November; the poor hold out matchboxes in wind-
bitten fingers.) They say truth is to be found there entire, and virtue, that shuffles along
here, down blind alleys, is to be had there perfect. Rhoda flies with her neck
outstretched and blind fanatic eyes, past us. Louis, now so opulent, goes to his attic
window among the blistered roofs and gazes where she has vanished, but must sit down
in his office among the typewriters and the telephone and work it all out for our
instruction, for our regeneration, and the reform of an unborn world.
‘But now in this room, which I enter without knocking, things are said as if they had
been written. I go to the bookcase. If I choose, I read half a page of anything. I need not
speak. But I listen. I am marvellously on the alert. Certainly, one cannot read this poem
without effort. The page is often corrupt and mud- stained, and torn and stuck together
with faded leaves, with scraps of verbena or geranium. To read this poem one must
have myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight
in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly
the waves gape and up shoulders a monster. One must put aside antipathies and
jealousies and not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light
sound, whether of spiders’ delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some
irrelevant drain-pipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror. The poet
who has written this page (what I read with people talking) has withdrawn. There are
no commas or semi-colons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths. Much is sheer
nonsense. One must be sceptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door
opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of
the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts. And so (while they talk) let down one’s
net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she
said and make poetry.
‘Now I have listened to them talking. They have gone now. I am alone. I could be content
to watch the fire burn for ever, like a dome, like a furnace; now some spike of wood
takes the look of a scaffold, or pit, or happy valley; now it is a serpent curled crimson
with white scales. The fruit on the curtain swells beneath the parrot’s beak. Cheep,
cheep, creaks the fire, like the cheep of insects in the middle of a forest. Cheep, cheep, it
clicks while out there the branches thrash the air, and now, like a volley of shot, a tree
falls. These are the sounds of a London night. Then I hear the one sound I wait for. Up
and up it comes, approaches, hesitates, stops at my door. I cry, “Come in. Sit by me. Sit
on the edge of the chair.” Swept away by the old hallucination, I cry, “Come closer,
closer”.’
 74

‘I come back from the office,’ said Louis. ‘I hang my coat here, place my stick there — I
like to fancy that Richelieu walked with such a cane. Thus I divest myself of my
authority. I have been sitting at the right hand of a director at a varnished table. The
maps of our successful undertakings confront us on the wall. We have laced the world
together with our ships. The globe is strung with our lines. I am immensely respectable.
All the young ladies in the office acknowledge my entrance. I can dine where I like now,
and without vanity may suppose that I shall soon acquire a house in Surrey, two cars, a
conservatory and some rare species of melon. But I still return, I still come back to my
attic, hang up my hat and resume in solitude that curious attempt which I have made
since I brought down my fist on my master’s grained oak door. I open a little book. I
read one poem. One poem is enough.
O western wind . . .
O western wind, you are at enmity with my mahogany table and spats, and also, alas,
with the vulgarity of my mistress, the little actress, who has never been able to speak
English correctly —
O western wind, when wilt thou blow . . .
Rhoda, with her intense abstraction, with her unseeing eyes the colour of snail’s flesh,
does not destroy you, western wind, whether she comes at midnight when the stars
blaze or at the most prosaic hour of midday. She stands at the window and looks at the
chimney-pots and the broken windows in the houses of poor people —
O western wind, when wilt thou blow . . .
‘My task, my burden, has always been greater than other people’s. A pyramid has been
set on my shoulders. I have tried to do a colossal labour. I have driven a violent, an
unruly, a vicious team. With my Australian accent I have sat in eating-shops and tried to
make the clerks accept me, yet never forgotten my solemn and severe convictions and
the discrepancies and incoherences that must be resolved. As a boy I dreamt of the Nile,
was reluctant to awake, yet brought down my fist on the grained oak door. It would
have been happier to have been born without a destiny, like Susan, like Percival, whom I
most admire.
O western wind, when wilt thou blow.
That the small rain down can rain?
‘Life has been a terrible affair for me. I am like some vast sucker, some glutinous, some
adhesive, some insatiable mouth. I have tried to draw from the living flesh the stone
lodged at the centre. I have known little natural happiness, thought I chose my mistress
in order that, with her cockney accent, she might make me feel at my ease. But she only
tumbled the floor with dirty under- linen, and the charwoman and the shop-boys called
after me a dozen times a day, mocking my prim and supercilious gait.
O western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
‘What has my destiny been, the sharp-pointed pyramid that has pressed on my ribs all
these years? That I remember the Nile and the women carrying pitchers on their heads;
that I feel myself woven in and out of the long summers and winters that have made the
corn flow and have frozen the streams. I am not a single and passing being. My life is not
a moment’s bright spark like that on the surface of a diamond. I go beneath ground
tortuously, as if a warder carried a lamp from cell to cell. My destiny has been that I
 75

remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the
thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and
varied day. There is always more to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity
to be reprimanded. Broken and soot-stained are these roofs with their chimney cowls,
their loose slates, their slinking cats and attic windows. I pick my way over broken glass,
among blistered tiles, and see only vile and famished faces.
‘Let us suppose that I make reason of it all — one poem on a page, and then die. I can
assure you it will not be unwillingly. Percival died. Rhoda left me. But I shall live to be
gaunt and sere, to tap my way, much respected, with my gold-headed cane along the
pavements of the city. Perhaps I shall never die, shall never attain even that continuity
and permanence —
O western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
‘Percival was flowering with green leaves and was laid in the earth with all his branches
still sighing in the summer wind. Rhoda, with whom I shared silence when the others
spoke, she who hung back and turned aside when the herd assembled and galloped with
orderly, sleek backs over the rich pastures, has gone now like the desert heat. When the
sun blisters the roofs of the city I think of her; when the dry leaves patter to the ground;
when the old men come with pointed sticks and pierce little bits of paper as we pierced
her —
O western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
I return now to my book; I return now to my attempt.’
‘Oh, life, how I have dreaded you,’ said Rhoda, ‘oh, human beings, how I have hated you!
How you have nudged, how you have interrupted, how hideous you have looked in
Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite each other staring in the Tube! Now as I
climb this mountain, from the top of which I shall see Africa, my mind is printed with
brown-paper parcels and your faces. I have been stained by you and corrupted. You
smelt so unpleasant too, lining up outside doors to buy tickets. All were dressed in
indeterminate shades of grey and brown, never even a blue feather pinned to a hat.
None had the courage to be one thing rather than another. What dissolution of the soul
you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency
and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves
down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and
hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the waste-paper basket
with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.
‘But I yielded. Sneers and yawns were covered with my hand. I did not go out into the
street and break a bottle in the gutter as a sign of rage. Trembling with ardour, I
pretended that I was not surprised. What you did, I did. If Susan and Jinny pulled up
their stockings like that, I pulled mine up like that also. So terrible was life that I held up
shade after shade. Look at life through this, look at life through that; let there be rose
leaves, let there be vine leaves — I covered the whole street, Oxford Street, Piccadilly
Circus, with the blaze and ripple of my mind, with vine leaves and rose leaves. There
were boxes too, standing in the passage when the school broke up. I stole secretly to
 76

read the labels and dream of names and faces. Harrogate, perhaps, Edinburgh, perhaps,
was ruffled with golden glory where some girl whose name I forget stood on the
pavement. But it was the name only. I left Louis; I feared embraces. With fleeces, with
vestments, I have tried to cover the blue-black blade. I implored day to break into night.
I have longed to see the cupboard dwindle, to feel the bed soften, to float suspended, to
perceive lengthened trees, lengthened faces, a green bank on a moor and two figures in
distress saying good-bye. I flung words in fans like those the sower throws over the
ploughed fields when the earth is bare. I desired always to stretch the night and fill it
fuller and fuller with dreams.
‘Then in some Hall I parted the boughs of music and saw the house we have made; the
square stood upon the oblong. “The house which contains all,” I said, lurching against
people’s shoulders in an omnibus after Percival died; yet I went to Greenwich. Walking
on the embankment, I prayed that I might thunder for ever on the verge of the world
where there is no vegetation, but here and there a marble pillar. I threw my bunch into
the spreading wave. I said, “Consume me, carry me to the furthest limit.” The wave has
broken; the bunch is withered. I seldom think of Percival now.
‘Now I climb this Spanish hill; and I will suppose that this mule- back is my bed and that
I lie dying. There is only a thin sheet between me now and the infinite depths. The
lumps in the mattress soften beneath me. We stumble up — we stumble on. My path has
been up and up, towards some solitary tree with a pool beside it on the very top. I have
sliced the waters of beauty in the evening when the hills close themselves like birds’
wings folded. I have picked sometimes a red carnation, and wisps of hay. I have sunk
alone on the turf and fingered some old bone and thought: When the wind stoops to
brush this height, may there be nothing found but a pinch of dust.
‘The mule stumbles up and on. The ridge of the hill rises like mist, but from the top I
shall see Africa. Now the bed gives under me. The sheets spotted with yellow holes let
me fall through. The good woman with a face like a white horse at the end of the bed
makes a valedictory movement and turns to go. Who then comes with me? Flowers only,
the cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May. Gathering them loosely in a sheaf I made
of them a garland and gave them — Oh, to whom? We launch out now over the
precipice. Beneath us lie the lights of the herring fleet. The cliffs vanish. Rippling small,
rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We
may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be
darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over
the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving
me.
‘Yet that tree has bristling branches; that is the hard line of a cottage roof. Those bladder
shapes painted red and yellow are faces. Putting my foot to the ground I step gingerly
and press my hand against the hard door of a Spanish inn.’
The sun was sinking. The hard stone of the day was cracked and light poured through
its splinters. Red and gold shot through the waves, in rapid running arrows, feathered
with darkness. Erratically rays of light flashed and wandered, like signals from sunken
islands, or darts shot through laurel groves by shameless, laughing boys. But the waves,
as they neared the shore, were robbed of light, and fell in one long concussion, like a
wall falling, a wall of grey stone, unpierced by any chink of light.
A breeze rose; a shiver ran through the leaves; and thus stirred they lost their brown
density and became grey or white as the tree shifted its mass, winked and lost its domed
 77

uniformity. The hawk poised on the topmost branch flicked its eyelids and rose and
sailed and soared far away. The wild plover cried in the marshes, evading, circling, and
crying further off in loneliness. The smoke of trains and chimneys was stretched and
torn and became part of the fleecy canopy that hung over the sea and the fields.
Now the corn was cut. Now only a brisk stubble was left of all its flowing and waving.
Slowly a great owl launched itself from the elm tree and swung and rose, as if on a line
that dipped, to the height of the cedar. On the hills the slow shadows now broadened,
now shrank, as they passed over. The pool on the top of the moor looked blank. No furry
face looked there, or hoof splashed, or hot muzzle seethed in the water. A bird, perched
on an ash-coloured twig, sipped a beak full of cold water. There was no sound of
cropping, and no sound of wheels, but only the sudden roar of the wind letting its sails
fill and brushing the tops of the grasses. One bone lay rain-pocked and sun-bleached till
it shone like a twig that the sea has polished. The tree, that had burnt foxy red in spring
and in midsummer bent pliant leaves to the south wind, was now black as iron, and as
bare.
The land was so distant that no shining roof or glittering window could be any longer
seen. The tremendous weight of the shadowed earth had engulfed such frail fetters,
such snail-shell encumbrances. Now there was only the liquid shadow of the cloud, the
buffeting of the rain, a single darting spear of sunshine, or the sudden bruise of the
rainstorm. Solitary trees marked distant hills like obelisks.
The evening sun, whose heat had gone out of it and whose burning spot of intensity had
been diffused, made chairs and tables mellower and inlaid them with lozenges of brown
and yellow. Lined with shadows their weight seemed more ponderous, as if colour,
tilted, had run to one side. Here lay knife, fork and glass, but lengthened, swollen, and
made portentous. Rimmed in a gold circle the looking-glass held the scene immobile as
if everlasting in its eye.
Meanwhile the shadows lengthened on the beach; the blackness deepened. The iron
black boot became a pool of deep blue. The rocks lost their hardness. The water that
stood round the old boat was dark as if mussels had been steeped in it. The foam had
turned livid and left here and there a white gleam of pearl on the misty sand.
‘Hampton Court,’ said Bernard. ‘Hampton Court. This is our meeting-place. Behold the
red chimneys, the square battlements of Hampton Court. The tone of my voice as I say
“Hampton Court” proves that I am middle-aged. Ten years, fifteen years ago, I should
have said “Hampton Court?” with interrogation — what will it be like? Will there be
lakes, mazes? Or with anticipation, What is going to happen to me here? Whom shall I
meet? Now, Hampton Court — Hampton Court — the words beat a gong in the space
which I have so laboriously cleared with half a dozen telephone messages and post
cards, give off ring after ring of sound, booming, sonorous: and pictures rise — summer
afternoons, boats, old ladies holding their skirts up, one urn in winter, some daffodils in
March — these all float to the top of the waters that now lie deep on every scene.
There at the door by the Inn, our meeting-place, they are already standing — Susan,
Louis, Rhoda, Jinny and Neville. They have come together already. In a moment, when I
have joined them, another arrangement will form, another pattern. What now runs to
waste, forming scenes profusely, will be checked, stated. I am reluctant to suffer that
compulsion. Already at fifty yards distance I feel the order of my being changed. The tug
of the magnet of their society tells upon me. I come nearer. They do not see me. Now
Rhoda sees me, but she pretends, with her horror of the shock of meeting, that I am a
 78

stranger. Now Neville turns. Suddenly, raising my hand, saluting Neville I cry, “I too have
pressed flowers between the pages of Shakespeare’s sonnets,” and am churned up. My
little boat bobs unsteadily upon the chopped and tossing waves. There is no panacea
(let me note) against the shock of meeting.
‘It is uncomfortable too, joining ragged edges, raw edges; only gradually, as we shuffle
and trample into the Inn, taking coats and hats off, does meeting become agreeable.
Now we assemble in the long, bare dining-room that overlooks some park, some green
space still fantastically lit by the setting sun so that there is a gold bar between the trees,
and sit ourselves down.’
‘Now sitting side by side,’ said Neville, ‘at this narrow table, now before the first
emotion is worn smooth, what do we feel? Honestly now, openly and directly as befits
old friends meeting with difficulty, what do we feel on meeting? Sorrow. The door will
not open; he will not come. And we are laden. Being now all of us middle-aged, loads are
on us. Let us put down our loads. What have you made of life, we ask, and I? You,
Bernard; you, Susan; you, Jinny; and Rhoda and Louis? The lists have been posted on the
doors. Before we break these rolls, and help ourselves to fish and salad, I feel in my
private pocket and find my credentials — what I carry to prove my superiority. I have
passed. I have papers in my private pocket that prove it. But your eyes, Susan, full of
turnips and cornfields, disturb me. These papers in my private pocket — the clamour
that proves that I have passed — make a faint sound like that of a man clapping in an
empty field to scare away rooks. Now it has died down altogether, under Susan’s stare
(the clapping, the reverberation that I have made), and I hear only the wind sweeping
over the ploughed land and some bird singing — perhaps some intoxicated lark. Has the
waiter heard of me, or those furtive everlasting couples, now loitering, now holding
back and looking at the trees which are not yet dark enough to shelter their prostrate
bodies? No; the sound of clapping has failed.
‘What then remains, when I cannot pull out my papers and make you believe by reading
aloud my credentials that I have passed? What remains is what Susan brings to light
under the acid of her green eyes, her crystal, pear-shaped eyes. There is always
somebody, when we come together, and the edges of meeting are still sharp, who
refuses to be submerged; whose identity therefore one wishes to make crouch beneath
one’s own. For me now, it is Susan. I talk to impress Susan. Listen to me, Susan.
‘When someone comes in at breakfast, even the embroidered fruit on my curtain swells
so that parrots can peck it; one can break it off between one’s thumb and finger. The
thin, skimmed milk of early morning turns opal, blue, rose. At that hour your husband
— the man who slapped his gaiters, pointing with his whip at the barren cow —
grumbles. You say nothing. You see nothing. Custom blinds your eyes. At that hour your
relationship is mute, null, dun-coloured. Mine at that hour is warm and various. There
are no repetitions for me. Each day is dangerous. Smooth on the surface, we are all bone
beneath like snakes coiling. Suppose we read The Times; suppose we argue. It is an
experience. Suppose it is winter. The snow falling loads down the roof and seals us
together in a red cave. The pipes have burst. We stand a yellow tin bath in the middle of
the room. We rush helter-skelter for basins. Look there — it has burst again over the
bookcase. We shout with laughter at the sight of ruin. Let solidity be destroyed. Let us
have no possessions. Or is it summer? We may wander to a lake and watch Chinese
geese waddling flat-footed to the water’s edge or see a bone-like city church with young
green trembling before it. (I choose at random; I choose the obvious.) Each sight is an
 79

arabesque scrawled suddenly to illustrate some hazard and marvel of intimacy. The
snow, the burst pipe, the tin bath, the Chinese goose — these are signs swung high aloft
upon which, looking back, I read the character of each love; how each was different.
‘You meanwhile — for I want to diminish your hostility, your green eyes fixed on mine,
and your shabby dress, your rough hands, and all the other emblems of your maternal
splendour — have stuck like a limpet to the same rock. Yet it is true, I do not want to
hurt you; only to refresh and furbish up my own belief in myself that failed at your
entry. Change is no longer possible. We are committed. Before, when we met in a
restaurant in London with Percival, all simmered and shook; we could have been
anything. We have chosen now, or sometimes it seems the choice was made for us — a
pair of tongs pinched us between the shoulders. I chose. I took the print of life not
outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre. I am clouded
and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell,
colour, texture, substance, but no name. I am merely “Neville” to you, who see the
narrow limits of my life and the line it cannot pass. But to myself I am immeasurable; a
net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world. My net is almost
indistinguishable from that which it surrounds. It lifts whales — huge leviathans and
white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering; I detect, I perceive. Beneath my eyes
opens — a book; I see to the bottom; the heart — I see to the depths. I know what loves
are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how
intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have
been knotted; I have been torn apart.
‘But there was another glory once, when we watched for the door to open, and Percival
came; when we flung ourselves unattached on the edge of a hard bench in a public
room.’
‘There was the beech wood,’ said Susan, ‘Elvedon, and the gilt hands of the clock
sparkling among the trees. The pigeons broke the leaves. The changing travelling lights
wandered over me. They escaped me. Yet look, Neville, whom I discredit in order to be
myself, at my hand on the table. Look at the gradations of healthy colour here on the
knuckles, here on the palm. My body has been used daily, rightly, like a tool by a good
workman, all over. The blade is clean, sharp, worn in the centre. (We battle together like
beasts fighting in a field, like stags making their horns clash.) Seen through your pale
and yielding flesh, even apples and bunches of fruit must have a filmed look as if they
stood under glass. Lying deep in a chair with one person, one person only, but one
person who changes, you see one inch of flesh only; its nerves, fibres, the sullen or quick
flow of blood on it; but nothing entire. You do not see a house in a garden; a horse in a
field; a town laid out, as you bend like an old woman straining her eyes over her
darning. But I have seen life in blocks, substantial, huge; its battlements and towers,
factories and gasometers; a dwelling-place made from time immemorial after an
hereditary pattern. These things remain square, prominent, undissolved in my mind. I
am not sinuous or suave; I sit among you abrading your softness with my hardness,
quenching the silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of
my clear eyes.
‘Now we have clashed our antlers. This is the necessary prelude; the salute of old
friends.’
‘The gold has faded between the trees,’ said Rhoda, ‘and a slice of green lies behind
them, elongated like the blade of a knife seen in dreams, or some tapering island on
 80

which nobody sets foot. Now the cars begin to wink and flicker, coming down the
avenue. Lovers can draw into the darkness now; the boles of the trees are swollen, are
obscene with lovers.’
‘It was different once,’ said Bernard. ‘Once we could break the current as we chose. How
many telephone calls, how many post cards, are now needed to cut this hole through
which we come together, united, at Hampton Court? How swift life runs from January to
December! We are all swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast
no shade; we make no comparisons; think scarcely ever of I or of you; and in this
unconsciousness attain the utmost freedom from friction and part the weeds that grow
over the mouths of sunken channels. We have to leap like fish, high in the air, in order to
catch the train from Waterloo. And however high we leap we fall back again into the
stream. I shall never now take ship for the South Sea Islands. A journey to Rome is the
limit of my travelling. I have sons and daughters. I am wedged into my place in the
puzzle.
‘But it is only my body — this elderly man here whom you call Bernard — that is fixed
irrevocably — so I desire to believe. I think more disinterestedly than I could when I
was young and must dig furiously like a child rummaging in a bran-pie to discover my
self. “Look, what is this? And this? Is this going to be a fine present? Is that all?” and so
on. Now I know what the parcels hold; and do not care much. I throw my mind out in
the air as a man throws seeds in great fan-flights, falling through the purple sunset,
falling on the pressed and shining ploughland which is bare.
‘A phrase. An imperfect phrase. And what are phrases? They have left me very little to
lay on the table, beside Susan’s hand; to take from my pocket, with Neville’s credentials.
I am not an authority on law, or medicine, or finance. I am wrapped round with phrases,
like damp straw; I glow, phosphorescent. And each of you feels when I speak, “I am lit
up. I am glowing.” The little boys used to feel “That’s a good one, that’s a good one”, as
the phrases bubbled up from my lips under the elm trees in the playing-fields. They too
bubbled up; they also escaped with my phrases. But I pine in solitude. Solitude is my
undoing.
‘I pass from house to house like the friars in the Middle Ages who cozened the wives and
girls with beads and ballads. I am a traveller, a pedlar, paying for my lodging with a
ballad; I am an indiscriminate, an easily pleased guest; often putting up in the best room
in a four-poster; then lying in a barn on a haystack. I don’t mind the fleas and find no
fault with silk either. I am very tolerant. I am not a moralist. I have too great a sense of
the shortness of life and its temptations to rule red lines. Yet I am not so indiscriminate
as you think, judging me — as you judge me — from my fluency. I have a little dagger of
contempt and severity hidden up my sleeve. But I am apt to be deflected. I make stories.
I twist up toys out of anything. A girl sits at a cottage door; she is waiting; for whom?
Seduced, or not seduced? The headmaster sees the hole in the carpet. He sighs. His wife,
drawing her fingers through the waves of her still abundant hair, reflects — et cetera.
Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the
gutter — all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep
my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them. Thus
waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then another, I do not cling to life. I shall
be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up
moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once. But Louis, wild-eyed
 81

but severe, in his attic, in his office, has formed unalterable conclusions upon the true
nature of what is to be known.’
‘It breaks,’ said Louis, ‘the thread I try to spin; your laughter breaks it, your indifference,
also your beauty. Jinny broke the thread when she kissed me in the garden years ago.
The boasting boys mocked me at school for my Australian accent and broke it. “This is
the meaning,” I say; and then start with a pang — vanity. “Listen,” I say, “to the
nightingale, who sings among the trampling feet; the conquests and migrations. Believe
—” and then am twitched asunder. Over broken tiles and splinters of glass I pick my
way. Different lights fall, making the ordinary leopard spotted and strange. This
moment of reconciliation, when we meet together united, this evening moment, with its
wine and shaking leaves, and youth coming up from the river in white flannels, carrying
cushions, is to me black with the shadows of dungeons and the tortures and infamies
practised by man upon man. So imperfect are my senses that they never blot out with
one purple the serious charge that my reason adds and adds against us, even as we sit
here. What is the solution, I ask myself, and the bridge? How can I reduce these dazzling,
these dancing apparitions to one line capable of linking all in one? So I ponder; and you
meanwhile observe maliciously my pursed lips, my sallow cheeks and my invariable
frown.
‘But I beg you also to notice my cane and my waistcoat. I have inherited a desk of solid
mahogany in a room hung with maps. Our steamers have won an enviable reputation
for their cabins replete with luxury. We supply swimming-baths and gymnasiums. I
wear a white waistcoat now and consult a little book before I make an engagement.
‘This is the arch and ironical manner in which I hope to distract you from my shivering,
my tender, and infinitely young and unprotected soul. For I am always the youngest; the
most naïvely surprised; the one who runs in advance in apprehension and sympathy
with discomfort or ridicule — should there be a smut on a nose, or a button undone. I
suffer for all humiliations. Yet I am also ruthless, marmoreal. I do not see how you can
say that it is fortunate to have lived. Your little excitements, your childish transports,
when a kettle boils, when the soft air lifts Jinny’s spotted scarf and it floats web-like, are
to me like silk streamers thrown in the eyes of the charging bull. I condemn you. Yet my
heart yearns towards you. I would go with you through the fires of death. Yet am
happiest alone. I luxuriate in gold and purple vestments. Yet I prefer a view over
chimneypots; cats scraping their mangy sides upon blistered chimney-stacks; broken
windows; and the hoarse clangour of bells from the steeple of some brick chapel.’
‘I see what is before me,’ said Jinny. ‘This scarf, these wine- coloured spots. This glass.
This mustard pot. This flower. I like what one touches, what one tastes. I like rain when
it has turned to snow and become palatable. And being rash, and much more
courageous than you are, I do not temper my beauty with meanness lest it should scorch
me. I gulp it down entire. It is made of flesh; it is made of stuff. My imagination is the
body’s. Its visions are not fine-spun and white with purity like Louis’. I do not like your
lean cats and your blistered chimney-pots. The scrannel beauties of your roof-tops repel
me. Men and women, in uniforms, wigs and gowns, bowler hats and tennis shirts
beautifully open at the neck, the infinite variety of women’s dresses (I note all clothes
always) delight me. I eddy with them, in and out, in and out, into rooms, into halls, here,
there, everywhere, wherever they go. This man lifts the hoof of a horse. This man shoves
in and out the drawers of his private collection. I am never alone. I am attended by a
regiment of my fellows. My mother must have followed the drum, my father the sea. I
 82

am like a little dog that trots down the road after the regimental band, but stops to snuff
a tree-trunk, to sniff some brown stain, and suddenly careers across the street after
some mongrel cur and then holds one paw up while it sniffs an entrancing whiff of meat
from the butcher’s shop. My traffics have led me into strange places. Men, how many,
have broken from the wall and come to me. I have only to hold my hand up. Straight as a
dart they have come to the place of assignation — perhaps a chair on a balcony, perhaps
a shop at a street corner. The torments, the divisions of your lives have been solved for
me night after night, sometimes only by the touch of a finger under the table-cloth as we
sat dining — so fluid has my body become, forming even at the touch of a finger into one
full drop, which fills itself, which quivers, which flashes, which falls in ecstasy.
‘I have sat before a looking-glass as you sit writing, adding up figures at desks. So, before
the looking-glass in the temple of my bedroom, I have judged my nose and my chin; my
lips that open too wide and show too much gum. I have looked. I have noted. I have
chosen what yellow or white, what shine or dullness, what loop or straightness suits. I
am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a
candle flame in gold. I have run violently like a whip flung out to the extreme end of my
tether. His shirt front, there in the corner, has been white; then purple; smoke and flame
have wrapped us about; after a furious conflagration — yet we scarcely raised our
voices, sitting on the hearth-rug, as we murmured all the secrets of our hearts as into
shells so that nobody might hear in the sleeping-house, but I heard the cook stir once,
and once we thought the ticking of the clock was a footfall — we have sunk to ashes,
leaving no relics, no unburnt bones, no wisps of hair to be kept in lockets such as your
intimacies leave behind them. Now I turn grey; now I turn gaunt; but I look at my face at
midday sitting in front of the looking- glass in broad daylight, and note precisely my
nose, my chin, my lips that open too wide and show too much gum. But I am not afraid.’
‘There were lamp-posts,’ said Rhoda, ‘and trees that had not yet shed their leaves on the
way from the station. The leaves might have hidden me still. But I did not hide behind
them. I walked straight up to you instead of circling round to avoid the shock of
sensation as I used. But it is only that I have taught my body to do a certain trick.
Inwardly I am not taught; I fear, I hate, I love, I envy and despise you, but I never join
you happily. Coming up from the station, refusing to accept the shadow of the trees and
the pillar-boxes, I perceived, from your coats and umbrellas, even at a distance, how you
stand embedded in a substance made of repeated moments run together; are
committed, have an attitude, with children, authority, fame, love, society; where I have
nothing. I have no face.
‘Here in this dining-room you see the antlers and the tumblers; the salt-cellars; the
yellow stains on the tablecloth. “Waiter!” says Bernard. “Bread!” says Susan. And the
waiter comes; he brings bread. But I see the side of a cup like a mountain and only parts
of antlers, and the brightness on the side of that jug like a crack in darkness with
wonder and terror. Your voices sound like trees creaking in a forest. So with your faces
and their prominences and hollows. How beautiful, standing at a distance immobile at
midnight against the railings of some square! Behind you is a white crescent of foam,
and fishermen on the verge of the world are drawing in nets and casting them. A wind
ruffles the topmost leaves of primeval trees. (Yet here we sit at Hampton Court.) Parrots
shrieking break the intense stillness of the jungle. (Here the trams start.) The swallow
dips her wings in midnight pools. (Here we talk.) That is the circumference that I try to
grasp as we sit together. Thus I must undergo the penance of Hampton Court at seven
thirty precisely.
 83

‘But since these rolls of bread and wine bottles are needed by me, and your faces with
their hollows and prominences are beautiful, and the table-cloth and its yellow stain, far
from being allowed to spread in wider and wider circles of understanding that may at
last (so I dream, falling off the edge of the earth at night when my bed floats suspended)
embrace the entire world, I must go through the antics of the individual. I must start
when you pluck at me with your children, your poems, your chilblains or whatever it is
that you do and suffer. But I am not deluded. After all these callings hither and thither,
these pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet into gulfs of fire.
And you will not help me. More cruel than the old torturers, you will let me fall, and will
tear me to pieces when I am fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind
grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a
bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and
the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.’
‘Drop upon drop,’ said Bernard, ‘silence falls. It forms on the roof of the mind and falls
into pools beneath. For ever alone, alone, alone — hear silence fall and sweep its rings
to the farthest edges. Gorged and replete, solid with middle-aged content, I, whom
loneliness destroys, let silence fall, drop by drop.
‘But now silence falling pits my face, wastes my nose like a snowman stood out in a yard
in the rain. As silence falls I am dissolved utterly and become featureless and scarcely to
be distinguished from another. It does not matter. What matters? We have dined well.
The fish, the veal cutlets, the wine have blunted the sharp tooth of egotism. Anxiety is at
rest. The vainest of us, Louis perhaps, does not care what people think. Neville’s tortures
are at rest. Let others prosper — that is what he thinks. Susan hears the breathing of all
her children safe asleep. Sleep, sleep, she murmurs. Rhoda has rocked her ships to
shore. Whether they have foundered, whether they have anchored, she cares no longer.
We are ready to consider any suggestion that the world may offer quite impartially. I
reflect now that the earth is only a pebble flicked off accidentally from the face of the
sun and that there is no life anywhere in the abysses of space.’
‘In this silence,’ said Susan, ‘it seems as if no leaf would ever fall, or bird fly.’
‘As if the miracle had happened,’ said Jinny, ‘and life were stayed here and now.’
‘And,’ said Rhoda, ‘we had no more to live.’
‘But listen,’ said Louis, ‘to the world moving through abysses of infinite space. It roars;
the lighted strip of history is past and our Kings and Queens; we are gone; our
civilization; the Nile; and all life. Our separate drops are dissolved; we are extinct, lost in
the abysses of time, in the darkness.’
‘Silence falls; silence falls,’ said Bernard. ‘But now listen; tick, tick; hoot, hoot; the world
has hailed us back to it. I heard for one moment the howling winds of darkness as we
passed beyond life. Then tick, tick (the clock); then hoot, hoot (the cars). We are landed;
we are on shore; we are sitting, six of us, at a table. It is the memory of my nose that
recalls me. I rise; “Fight,” I cry, “fight!” remembering the shape of my own nose, and
strike with this spoon upon this table pugnaciously.’
‘Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos,’ said Neville, ‘this formless imbecility.
Making love to a nursemaid behind a tree, that soldier is more admirable than all the
stars. Yet sometimes one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the
world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lust.’
 84

(‘Yet, Louis,’ said Rhoda, ‘how short a time silence lasts. Already they are beginning to
smooth their napkins by the side of their plates. “Who comes?” says Jinny; and Neville
sighs, remembering that Percival comes no more. Jinny has taken out her looking-glass.
Surveying her face like an artist, she draws a powder-puff down her nose, and after one
moment of deliberation has given precisely that red to the lips that the lips need. Susan,
who feels scorn and fear at the sight of these preparations, fastens the top button of her
coat, and unfastens it. What is she making ready for? For something, but something
different.’
‘They are saying to themselves,’ said Louis, ‘“It is time. I am still vigorous,” they are
saying. “My face shall be cut against the black of infinite space.” They do not finish their
sentences. “It is time,” they keep saying. “The gardens will be shut.” And going with
them, Rhoda, swept into their current, we shall perhaps drop a little behind.’
‘Like conspirators who have something to whisper,’ said Rhoda.)
‘It is true, and I know for a fact,’ said Bernard, ‘as we walk down this avenue, that a King,
riding, fell over a molehill here. But how strange it seems to set against the whirling
abysses of infinite space a little figure with a golden teapot on his head. Soon one
recovers belief in figures: but not at once in what they put on their heads. Our English
past — one inch of light. Then people put teapots on their heads and say, “I am a King!”
No, I try to recover, as we walk, the sense of time, but with that streaming darkness in
my eyes I have lost my grip. This Palace seems light as a cloud set for a moment on the
sky. It is a trick of the mind — to put Kings on their thrones, one following another, with
crowns on their heads. And we ourselves, walking six abreast, what do we oppose, with
this random flicker of light in us that we call brain and feeling, how can we do battle
against this flood; what has permanence? Our lives too stream away, down the
unlighted avenues, past the strip of time, unidentified. Once Neville threw a poem at my
head. Feeling a sudden conviction of immortality, I said, “I too know what Shakespeare
knew.” But that has gone.’
‘Unreasonably, ridiculously,’ said Neville, ‘as we walk, time comes back. A dog does it,
prancing. The machine works. Age makes hoary that gateway. Three hundred years now
seem no more than a moment vanished against that dog. King William mounts his horse
wearing a wig, and the court ladies sweep the turf with their embroidered panniers. I
am beginning to be convinced, as we walk, that the fate of Europe is of immense
importance, and, ridiculous as it still seems, that all depends upon the battle of
Blenheim. Yes; I declare, as we pass through this gateway, it is the present moment; I am
become a subject of King George.’
‘While we advance down this avenue,’ said Louis, ‘I leaning slightly upon Jinny, Bernard
arm-in-arm with Neville, and Susan with her hand in mine, it is difficult not to weep,
calling ourselves little children, praying that God may keep us safe while we sleep. It is
sweet to sing together, clasping hands, afraid of the dark, while Miss Curry plays the
harmonium.’
‘The iron gates have rolled back,’ said Jinny. ‘Time’s fangs have ceased their devouring.
We have triumphed over the abysses of space, with rouge, with powder, with flimsy
pocket-handkerchiefs.’
‘I grasp, I hold fast,’ said Susan. ‘I hold firmly to this hand, anyone’s, with love, with
hatred; it does not matter which.’
 85

‘The still mood, the disembodied mood is on us,’ said Rhoda, ‘and we enjoy this
momentary alleviation (it is not often that one has no anxiety) when the walls of the
mind become transparent. Wren’s palace, like the quartet played to the dry and
stranded people in the stalls, makes an oblong. A square is stood upon the oblong and
we say, “This is our dwelling-place. The structure is now visible. Very little is left
outside.”’
‘The flower,’ said Bernard, ‘the red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the
restaurant when we dined together with Percival, is become a six-sided flower; made of
six lives.’
‘A mysterious illumination,’ said Louis, ‘visible against those yew trees.’
‘Built up with much pain, many strokes,’ said Jinny.
‘Marriage, death, travel, friendship,’ said Bernard; ‘town and country; children and all
that; a many-sided substance cut out of this dark; a many-faceted flower. Let us stop for
a moment; let us behold what we have made. Let it blaze against the yew trees. One life.
There. It is over. Gone out.’
‘Now they vanish,’ said Louis. ‘Susan with Bernard. Neville with Jinny. You and I, Rhoda,
stop for a moment by this stone urn. What song shall we hear now that these couples
have sought the groves, and Jinny, pointing with her gloved hand, pretends to notice the
water-lilies, and Susan, who has always loved Bernard, says to him, “My ruined life, my
wasted life.” And Neville, taking Jinny’s little hand, with the cherry-coloured finger-nails,
by the lake, by the moonlit water, cries, “Love, love,” and she answers, imitating the bird,
“Love, love?” What song do we hear?’
‘They vanish, towards the lake,’ said Rhoda. ‘They slink away over the grass furtively,
yet with assurance as if they asked of our pity their ancient privilege — not to be
disturbed. The tide in the soul, tipped, flows that way; they cannot help deserting us.
The dark has closed over their bodies. What song do we hear — the owl’s, the
nightingale’s, the wren’s? The steamer hoots; the light on the electric rails flashes; the
trees gravely bow and bend. The flare hangs over London. Here is an old woman, quietly
returning, and a man, a late fisherman, comes down the terrace with his rod. Not a
sound, not a movement must escape us.’
‘A bird flies homeward,’ said Louis. ‘Evening opens her eyes and gives one quick glance
among the bushes before she sleeps. How shall we put it together, the confused and
composite message that they send back to us, and not they only, but many dead, boys
and girls, grown men and women, who have wandered here, under one king or
another?’
‘A weight has dropped into the night,’ said Rhoda, ‘dragging it down. Every tree is big
with a shadow that is not the shadow of the tree behind it. We hear a drumming on the
roofs of a fasting city when the Turks are hungry and uncertain tempered. We hear
them crying with sharp, stag-like barks, “Open, open.” Listen to the trams squealing and
to the flashes from the electric rails. We hear the beech trees and the birch trees raise
their branches as if the bride had let her silken nightdress fall and come to the doorway
saying “Open, open”.’
‘All seems alive,’ said Louis. ‘I cannot hear death anywhere tonight. Stupidity, on that
man’s face, age, on that woman’s, would be strong enough, one would think, to resist the
incantation, and bring in death. But where is death tonight? All the crudity, odds and
 86

ends, this and that, have been crushed like glass splinters into the blue, the red-fringed
tide, which, drawing into the shore, fertile with innumerable fish, breaks at our feet.’
‘If we could mount together, if we could perceive from a sufficient height,’ said Rhoda, ‘if
we could remain untouched without any support — but you, disturbed by faint clapping
sounds of praise and laughter, and I, resenting compromise and right and wrong on
human lips, trust only in solitude and the violence of death and thus are divided.’
‘For ever,’ said Louis, ‘divided. We have sacrificed the embrace among the ferns, and
love, love, love by the lake, standing, like conspirators who have drawn apart to share
some secret, by the urn. But now look, as we stand here, a ripple breaks on the horizon.
The net is raised higher and higher. It comes to the top of the water. The water is broken
by silver, by quivering little fish. Now leaping, now lashing, they are laid on shore. Life
tumbles its catch upon the grass. There are figures coming towards us. Are they men or
are they women? They still wear the ambiguous draperies of the flowing tide in which
they have been immersed.’
‘Now,’ said Rhoda, ‘as they pass that tree, they regain their natural size. They are only
men, only women. Wonder and awe change as they put off the draperies of the flowing
tide. Pity returns, as they emerge into the moonlight, like the relics of an army, our
representatives, going every night (here or in Greece) to battle, and coming back every
night with their wounds, their ravaged faces. Now light falls on them again. They have
faces. They become Susan and Bernard, Jinny and Neville, people we know. Now what a
shrinkage takes place! Now what a shrivelling, what an humiliation! The old shivers run
through me, hatred and terror, as I feel myself grappled to one spot by these hooks they
cast on us; these greetings, recognitions, pluckings of the finger and searchings of the
eyes. Yet they have only to speak, and their first words, with the remembered tone and
the perpetual deviation from what one expects, and their hands moving and making a
thousand past days rise again in the darkness, shake my purpose.’
‘Something flickers and dances,’ said Louis. ‘Illusion returns as they approach down the
avenue. Rippling and questioning begin. What do I think of you — what do you think of
me? Who are you? Who am I? — that quivers again its uneasy air over us, and the pulse
quickens and the eye brightens and all the insanity of personal existence without which
life would fall flat and die, begins again. They are on us. The southern sun flickers over
this urn; we push off in to the tide of the violent and cruel sea. Lord help us to act our
parts as we greet them returning — Susan and Bernard, Neville and Jinny.’
‘We have destroyed something by our presence,’ said Bernard, ‘a world perhaps.’
‘Yet we scarcely breathe,’ said Neville, ‘spent as we are. We are in that passive and
exhausted frame of mind when we only wish to rejoin the body of our mother from
whom we have been severed. All else is distasteful, forced and fatiguing. Jinny’s yellow
scarf is moth-coloured in this light; Susan’s eyes are quenched. We are scarcely to be
distinguished from the river. One cigarette end is the only point of emphasis among us.
And sadness tinges our content, that we should have left you, torn the fabric; yielded to
the desire to press out, alone, some bitterer, some blacker juice, which was sweet too.
But now we are worn out.’
‘After our fire,’ said Jinny, ‘there is nothing left to put in lockets.’
‘Still I gape,’ said Susan, ‘like a young bird, unsatisfied, for something that has escaped
me.’
 87

‘Let us stay for a moment,’ said Bernard, ‘before we go. Let us pace the terrace by the
river almost alone. It is nearly bed-time. People have gone home. Now how comforting it
is to watch the lights coming out in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers on the other
side of the river. There is one — there is another. What do you think their takings have
been today? Only just enough to pay for the rent, for light and food and the children’s
clothing. But just enough. What a sense of the tolerableness of life the lights in the
bedrooms of small shopkeepers give us! Saturday comes, and there is just enough to pay
perhaps for seats at the Pictures. Perhaps before they put out the light they go into the
little garden and look at the giant rabbit couched in its wooden hut. That is the rabbit
they will have for Sunday dinner. Then they put out the light. Then they sleep. And for
thousands of people sleep is nothing but warmth and silence and one moment’s sport
with some fantastic dream. “I have posted my letter,” the greengrocer thinks, “to the
Sunday newspaper. Suppose I win five hundred pounds in the football competition? And
we shall kill the rabbit. Life is pleasant. Life is good. I have posted the letter. We shall kill
the rabbit.” And he sleeps.
‘That goes on. Listen. There is a sound like the knocking of railway trucks in a siding.
That is the happy concatenation of one event following another in our lives. Knock,
knock, knock. Must, must, must. Must go, must sleep, must wake, must get up — sober,
merciful word which we pretend to revile, which we press tight to our hearts, without
which we should be undone. How we worship that sound like the knocking together of
trucks in a siding!
‘Now far off down the river I hear the chorus; the song of the boasting boys, who are
coming back in large charabancs from a day’s outing on the decks of crowded steamers.
Still they are singing as they used to sing, across the court, on winters’ nights, or with
the windows open in summer, getting drunk, breaking the furniture, wearing little
striped caps, all turning their heads the same way as the brake rounded the corner; and
I wished to be with them.
‘What with the chorus, and the spinning water and the just perceptible murmur of the
breeze we are slipping away. Little bits of ourselves are crumbling. There! Something
very important fell then. I cannot keep myself together. I shall sleep. But we must go;
must catch our train; must walk back to the station — must, must, must. We are only
bodies jogging along side by side. I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired
muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot
remember. I am like a log slipping smoothly over some waterfall. I am not a judge. I am
not called upon to give my opinion. Houses and trees are all the same in this grey light.
Is that a post? Is that a woman walking? Here is the station, and if the train were to cut
me in two, I should come together on the further side, being one, being indivisible. But
what is odd is that I still clasp the return half of my ticket to Waterloo firmly between
the fingers of my right hand, even now, even sleeping.’
Now the sun had sunk. Sky and sea were indistinguishable. The waves breaking spread
their white fans far out over the shore, sent white shadows into the recesses of
sonorous caves and then rolled back sighing over the shingle.
The tree shook its branches and a scattering of leaves fell to the ground. There they
settled with perfect composure on the precise spot where they would await dissolution.
Black and grey were shot into the garden from the broken vessel that had once held red
light. Dark shadows blackened the tunnels between the stalks. The thrush was silent
and the worm sucked itself back into its narrow hole. Now and again a whitened and
 88

hollow straw was blown from an old nest and fell into the dark grasses among the
rotten apples. The light had faded from the tool-house wall and the adder’s skin hung
from the nail empty. All the colours in the room had overflown their banks. The precise
brush stroke was swollen and lop-sided; cupboards and chairs melted their brown
masses into one huge obscurity. The height from floor to ceiling was hung with vast
curtains of shaking darkness. The looking-glass was pale as the mouth of a cave
shadowed by hanging creepers.
The substance had gone from the solidity of the hills. Travelling lights drove a plumy
wedge among unseen and sunken roads, but no lights opened among the folded wings
of the hills, and there was no sound save the cry of a bird seeking some lonelier tree. At
the cliff’s edge there was an equal murmur of air that had been brushed through forests,
of water that had been cooled in a thousand glassy hollows of mid-ocean.
As if there were waves of darkness in the air, darkness moved on, covering houses, hills,
trees, as waves of water wash round the sides of some sunken ship. Darkness washed
down streets, eddying round single figures, engulfing them; blotting out couples clasped
under the showery darkness of elm trees in full summer foliage. Darkness rolled its
waves along grassy rides and over the wrinkled skin of the turf, enveloping the solitary
thorn tree and the empty snail shells at its foot. Mounting higher, darkness blew along
the bare upland slopes, and met the fretted and abraded pinnacles of the mountain
where the snow lodges for ever on the hard rock even when the valleys are full of
running streams and yellow vine leaves, and girls, sitting on verandahs, look up at the
snow, shading their faces with their fans. Them, too, darkness covered.
‘Now to sum up,’ said Bernard. ‘Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we
do not know each other (though I met you once, I think, on board a ship going to Africa),
we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has
roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it
were possible, I would hand it to you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a
bunch of grapes. I would say, “Take it. This is my life.”
‘But unfortunately, what I see (this globe, full of figures) you do not see. You see me,
sitting at a table opposite you, a rather heavy, elderly man, grey at the temples. You see
me take my napkin and unfold it. You see me pour myself out a glass of wine. And you
see behind me the door opening, and people passing. But in order to make you
understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story — and there are so many, and so
many — stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, death, and so on; and
none of them are true. Yet like children we tell each other stories, and to decorate them
we make up these ridiculous, flamboyant, beautiful phrases. How tired I am of stories,
how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground!
Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of note-paper. I
begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate
words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in
accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then
undeniably. Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining, then enormous
clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me
then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always
changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter;
towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design,
I do not see a trace then.
 89

‘But meanwhile, while we eat, let us turn over these scenes as children turn over the
pages of a picture-book and the nurse says, pointing: “That’s a cow. That’s a boat.” Let us
turn over the pages, and I will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin.
‘In the beginning, there was the nursery, with windows opening on to a garden, and
beyond that the sea. I saw something brighten — no doubt the brass handle of a
cupboard. Then Mrs Constable raised the sponge above her head, squeezed it, and out
shot, right, left, all down the spine, arrows of sensation. And so, as long as we draw
breath, for the rest of time, if we knock against a chair, a table, or a woman, we are
pierced with arrows of sensation — if we walk in a garden, if we drink this wine.
Sometimes indeed, when I pass a cottage with a light in the window where a child has
been born, I could implore them not to squeeze the sponge over that new body. Then,
there was the garden and the canopy of the currant leaves which seemed to enclose
everything; flowers, burning like sparks upon the depths of green; a rat wreathing with
maggots under a rhubarb leaf; the fly going buzz, buzz, buzz upon the nursery ceiling,
and plates upon plates of innocent bread and butter. All these things happen in one
second and last for ever. Faces loom. Dashing round the corner. “Hullo,” one says,
“there’s Jinny. That’s Neville. That’s Louis in grey flannel with a snake belt. That’s
Rhoda.” She had a basin in which she sailed petals of white flowers. It was Susan who
cried, that day when I was in the tool- house with Neville; and I felt my indifference
melt. Neville did not melt. “Therefore,” I said, “I am myself, not Neville”, a wonderful
discovery. Susan cried and I followed her. Her wet pocket-handkerchief, and the sight of
her little back heaving up and down like a pump-handle, sobbing for what was denied
her, screwed my nerves up. “That is not to be borne,” I said, as I sat beside her on the
roots that were hard as skeletons. I then first became aware of the presence of those
enemies who change, but are always there; the forces we fight against. To let oneself be
carried on passively is unthinkable. “That’s your course, world,” one says, “mine is this.”
So, “Let’s explore,” I cried, and jumped up, and ran downhill with Susan and saw the
stable-boy clattering about the yard in great boots. Down below, through the depths of
the leaves, the gardeners swept the lawns with great brooms. The lady sat writing.
Transfixed, stopped dead, I thought, “I cannot interfere with a single stroke of those
brooms. They sweep and they sweep. Nor with the fixity of that woman writing.” It is
strange that one cannot stop gardeners sweeping nor dislodge a woman. There they
have remained all my life. It is as if one had woken in Stonehenge surrounded by a circle
of great stones, these enemies, these presences. Then a wood-pigeon flew out of the
trees. And being in love for the first time, I made a phrase — a poem about a wood-
pigeon — a single phrase, for a hole had been knocked in my mind, one of those sudden
transparencies through which one sees everything. Then more bread and butter and
more flies droning round the nursery ceiling on which quivered islands of light, ruffled,
opalescent, while the pointed fingers of the lustre dripped blue pools on the corner of
the mantelpiece. Day after day as we sat at tea we observed these sights.
‘But we were all different. The wax — the virginal wax that coats the spine melted in
different patches for each of us. The growl of the boot-boy making love to the tweeny
among the gooseberry bushes; the clothes blown out hard on the line; the dead man in
the gutter; the apple tree, stark in the moonlight; the rat swarming with maggots; the
lustre dripping blue — our white wax was streaked and stained by each of these
differently. Louis was disgusted by the nature of human flesh; Rhoda by our cruelty;
Susan could not share; Neville wanted order; Jinny love; and so on. We suffered terribly
as we became separate bodies.
 90

‘Yet I was preserved from these excesses and have survived many of my friends, am a
little stout, grey, rubbed on the thorax as it were, because it is the panorama of life, seen
not from the roof, but from the third-storey window, that delights me, not what one
woman says to one man, even if that man is myself. How could I be bullied at school
therefore? How could they make things hot for me? There was the Doctor lurching into
chapel, as if he trod a battleship in a gale of wind, shouting out his commands through a
megaphone, since people in authority always become melodramatic — I did not hate
him like Neville, or revere him like Louis. I took notes as we sat together in chapel.
There were pillars, shadows, memorial brasses, boys scuffling and swopping stamps
behind Prayer Books; the sound of a rusty pump; the Doctor booming, about
immortality and quitting ourselves like men; and Percival scratching his thigh. I made
notes for stories; drew portraits in the margin of my pocket-book and thus became still
more separate. Here are one or two of the figures I saw.
‘Percival sat staring straight ahead of him that day in chapel. He also had a way of
flicking his hand to the back of his neck. His movements were always remarkable. We all
flicked our hands to the backs of our heads — unsuccessfully. He had the kind of beauty
which defends itself from any caress. As he was not in the least precocious, he read
whatever was written up for our edification without any comment, and thought with
that magnificent equanimity (Latin words come naturally) that was to preserve him
from so many meannesses and humiliations, that Lucy’s flaxen pigtails and pink cheeks
were the height of female beauty. Thus preserved, his taste later was of extreme
fineness. But there should be music, some wild carol. Through the window should come
a hunting-song from some rapid unapprehended life — a sound that shouts among the
hills and dies away. What is startling, what is unexpected, what we cannot account for,
what turns symmetry to nonsense — that comes suddenly to my mind, thinking of him.
The little apparatus of observation is unhinged. Pillars go down; the Doctor floats off;
some sudden exaltation possesses me. He was thrown, riding in a race, and when I came
along Shaftesbury Avenue tonight, those insignificant and scarcely formulated faces that
bubble up out of the doors of the Tube, and many obscure Indians, and people dying of
famine and disease, and women who have been cheated, and whipped dogs and crying
children — all these seemed to me bereft. He would have done justice. He would have
protected. About the age of forty he would have shocked the authorities. No lullaby has
ever occurred to me capable of singing him to rest.
‘But let me dip again and bring up in my spoon another of these minute objects which
we call optimistically, “characters of our friends”— Louis. He sat staring at the preacher.
His being seemed conglobulated in his brow, his lips were pressed; his eyes were fixed,
but suddenly they flashed with laughter. Also he suffered from chilblains, the penalty of
an imperfect circulation. Unhappy, unfriended, in exile he would sometimes, in
moments of confidence, describe how the surf swept over the beaches of his home. The
remorseless eye of youth fixed itself upon his swollen joints. Yes, but we were also quick
to perceive how cutting, how apt, how severe he was, how naturally, when we lay under
the elm trees pretending to watch cricket, we waited his approval, seldom given. His
ascendancy was resented, as Percival’s was adored. Prim, suspicious, lifting his feet like
a crane, there was yet a legend that he had smashed a door with his naked fist. But his
peak was too bare, too stony for that kind of mist to cling to it. He was without those
simple attachments by which one is connected with another. He remained aloof;
enigmatic; a scholar capable of that inspired accuracy which has something formidable
about it. My phrases (how to describe the moon) did not meet with his approval. On the
 91

other hand, he envied me to the point of desperation for being at my ease with servants.
Not that the sense of his own deserts failed him. That was commensurate with his
respect for discipline. Hence his success, finally. His life, though, was not happy. But look
— his eye turns white as he lies in the palm of my hand. Suddenly the sense of what
people are leaves one. I return him to the pool where he will acquire lustre.
‘Neville next — lying on his back staring up at the summer sky. He floated among us like
a piece of thistledown, indolently haunting the sunny corner of the playing-field, not
listening, yet not remote. It was through him that I have nosed round without ever
precisely touching the Latin classics and have also derived some of those persistent
habits of thought which make us irredeemably lop- sided — for instance about
crucifixes, that they are the mark of the devil. Our half-loves and half-hates and
ambiguities on these points were to him indefensible treacheries. The swaying and
sonorous Doctor, whom I made to sit swinging his braces over a gas- fire, was to him
nothing but an instrument of the inquisition. So he turned with a passion that made up
for his indolence upon Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, lying lazily dormant, yes, but
regardant, noticing, with rapture, cricketers, while with a mind like the tongue of an ant-
eater, rapid, dexterous, glutinous, he searched out every curl and twist of those Roman
sentences, and sought out one person, always one person to sit beside.
‘And the long skirts of the masters’ wives would come swishing by, mountainous,
menacing; and our hands would fly to our caps. And immense dullness would descend
unbroken, monotonous. Nothing, nothing, nothing broke with its fin that leaden waste
of waters. Nothing would happen to lift that weight of intolerable boredom. The terms
went on. We grew; we changed; for, of course, we are animals. We are not always aware
by any means; we breathe, eat, sleep automatically. We exist not only separately but in
undifferentiated blobs of matter. With one scoop a whole brakeful of boys is swept up
and goes cricketing, footballing. An army marches across Europe. We assemble in parks
and halls and sedulously oppose any renegade (Neville, Louis, Rhoda) who sets up a
separate existence. And I am so made that, while I hear one or two distinct melodies,
such as Louis sings, or Neville, I am also drawn irresistibly to the sound of the chorus
chanting its old, chanting its almost wordless, almost senseless song that comes across
courts at night; which we hear now booming round us as cars and omnibuses take
people to theatres. (Listen; the cars rush past this restaurant; now and then, down the
river, a siren hoots, as a steamer makes for the sea.) If a bagman offers me snuff in a
train I accept. I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy
and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses, of miners
half naked in drawers — the forthright, perfectly unassuming, and without end in view
except dinner, love, money and getting along tolerably; that which is without great
hopes, ideals or anything of that kind; what is unassuming except to make a tolerably
good job of it. I like all that. So I joined them, when Neville sulked or Louis, as I quite
agree sublimely, turned on his heel.
‘Thus, not equally by any means or with order, but in great streaks my waxen waistcoat
melted, here one drop, there another. Now through this transparency became visible
those wondrous pastures, at first so moon-white, radiant, where no foot has been;
meadows of the rose, the crocus, of the rock and the snake too; of the spotted and swart;
the embarrassing, the binding and tripping up. One leaps out of bed, throws up the
window; with what a whirr the birds rise! You know that sudden rush of wings, that
exclamation, carol, and confusion; the riot and babble of voices; and all the drops are
sparkling, trembling, as if the garden were a splintered mosaic, vanishing, twinkling; not
 92

yet formed into one whole; and a bird sings close to the window. I heard those songs. I
followed those phantoms. I saw Joans, Dorothys, Miriams, I forget their names, passing
down avenues, stopping on the crest of bridges to look down into the river. And from
among them rise one or two distinct figures, birds who sang with the rapt egotism of
youth by the window; broke their snails on stones, dipped their beaks in sticky, viscous
matter; hard, avid, remorseless; Jinny, Susan, Rhoda. They had been educated on the
east coast or on the south coast. They had grown long pigtails and acquired the look of
startled foals, which is the mark of adolescence.
‘Jinny was the first to come sidling up to the gate to eat sugar. She nipped it off the
palms of one’s hands very cleverly, but her ears were laid back as if she might bite.
Rhoda was wild — Rhoda one never could catch. She was both frightened and clumsy. It
was Susan who first became wholly woman, purely feminine. It was she who dropped
on my face those scalding tears which are terrible, beautiful; both, neither. She was born
to be the adored of poets, since poets require safety; someone who sits sewing, who
says, “I hate, I love,” who is neither comfortable nor prosperous, but has some quality in
accordance with the high but unemphatic beauty of pure style which those who create
poetry so particularly admire. Her father trailed from room to room and down flagged
corridors in his flapping dressing-gown and worn slippers. On still nights a wall of
water fell with a roar a mile off. The ancient dog could scarcely heave himself up on to
his chair. And some witless servant could be heard laughing at the top of the house as
she whirred the wheel of the sewing-machine round and round.
‘That I observed even in the midst of my anguish when, twisting her pocket-
handkerchief, Susan cried, “I love; I hate.” “A worthless servant,” I observed, “laughs
upstairs in the attic,” and that little piece of dramatization shows how incompletely we
are merged in our own experiences. On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant
fellow who points; who whispers as he whispered to me that summer morning in the
house where the corn comes up to the window, “The willow grows on the turf by the
river. The gardeners sweep with great brooms and the lady sits writing.” Thus he
directed me to that which is beyond and outside our own predicament; to that which is
symbolic, and thus perhaps permanent, if there is any permanence in our sleeping,
eating, breathing, so animal, so spiritual and tumultuous lives.
‘The willow tree grew by the river. I sat on the smooth turf with Neville, with Larpent,
with Baker, Romsey, Hughes, Percival and Jinny. Through its fine plumes specked with
little pricked ears of green in spring, of orange in autumn, I saw boats; buildings; I saw
hurrying, decrepit women. I buried match after match in the turf decidedly to mark this
or that stage in the process of understanding (it might be philosophy; science; it might
be myself) while the fringe of my intelligence floating unattached caught those distant
sensations which after a time the mind draws in and works upon; the chime of bells;
general murmurs; vanishing figures; one girl on a bicycle who, as she rode, seemed to
lift the corner of a curtain concealing the populous undifferentiated chaos of life which
surged behind the outlines of my friends and the willow tree.
‘The tree alone resisted our eternal flux. For I changed and changed; was Hamlet, was
Shelley, was the hero, whose name I now forget, of a novel by Dostoevsky; was for a
whole term, incredibly, Napoleon; but was Byron chiefly. For many weeks at a time it
was my part to stride into rooms and fling gloves and coat on the back of chairs,
scowling slightly. I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine
specific. Therefore, I let fly my tremendous battery of phrases upon somebody quite
 93

inappropriate — a girl now married, now buried; every book, every window-seat was
littered with the sheets of my unfinished letters to the woman who made me Byron. For
it is difficult to finish a letter in somebody else’s style. I arrived all in a lather at her
house; exchanged tokens but did not marry her, being no doubt unripe for that
intensity.
‘Here again there should be music. Not that wild hunting-song, Percival’s music; but a
painful, guttural, visceral, also soaring, lark-like, pealing song to replace these flagging,
foolish transcripts — how much too deliberate! how much too reasonable! — which
attempt to describe the flying moment of first love. A purple slide is slipped over the
day. Look at a room before she comes and after. Look at the innocents outside pursuing
their way. They neither see nor hear; yet on they go. Moving oneself in this radiant yet
gummy atmosphere how conscious one is of every movement — something adheres,
something sticks to one’s hands, taking up a newspaper even. Then there is the being
eviscerated — drawn out, spun like a spider’s web and twisted in agony round a thorn.
Then a thunder-clap of complete indifference; the light blown out; then the return of
measureless irresponsible joy; certain fields seem to glow green for ever, and innocent
landscapes appear as if in the light of the first dawn — one patch of green, for example,
up at Hampstead; and all faces are lit up, all conspire in a hush of tender joy; and then
the mystic sense of completion and then that rasping, dog-fish skin-like roughness —
those black arrows of shivering sensation, when she misses the post, when she does not
come. Out rush a bristle of horned suspicions, horror, horror, horror — but what is the
use of painfully elaborating these consecutive sentences when what one needs is
nothing consecutive but a bark, a groan? And years later to see a middle-aged woman in
a restaurant taking off her cloak.
‘But to return. Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe,
which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and
logical story, so that when one matter is despatched — love for instance — we go on, in
an orderly manner, to the next. I was saying there was a willow tree. Its shower of
falling branches, its creased and crooked bark had the effect of what remains outside
our illusions yet cannot stay them, is changed by them for the moment, yet shows
through stable, still, and with a sternness that our lives lack. Hence the comment it
makes; the standard it supplies, and the reason why, as we flow and change, it seems to
measure. Neville, for example, sat with me on the turf. But can anything be as clear as all
that, I would say, following his gaze, through the branches, to a punt on the river, and a
young man eating bananas from a paper bag? The scene was cut out with such intensity
and so permeated with the quality of his vision that for a moment I could see it too; the
punt, the bananas, the young man, through the branches of the willow tree. Then it
faded.
‘Rhoda came wandering vaguely. She would take advantage of any scholar in a blowing
gown, or donkey rolling the turf with slippered feet to hide behind. What fear wavered
and hid itself and blew to a flame in the depths of her grey, her startled, her dreaming
eyes? Cruel and vindictive as we are, we are not bad to that extent. We have our
fundamental goodness surely or to talk as I talk freely to someone I hardly know would
be impossible — we should cease. The willow as she saw it grew on the verge of a grey
desert where no bird sang. The leaves shrivelled as she looked at them, tossed in agony
as she passed them. The trams and omnibuses roared hoarse in the street ran over
rocks and sped foaming away. Perhaps one pillar, sunlit, stood in her desert by a pool
where wild beasts come down stealthily to drink.
 94

‘Then Jinny came. She flashed her fire over the tree. She was like a crinkled poppy,
febrile, thirsty with the desire to drink dry dust. Darting, angular, not in the least
impulsive, she came prepared. So little flames zigzag over the cracks in the dry earth.
She made the willows dance, but not with illusion; for she saw nothing that was not
there. It was a tree; there was the river; it was afternoon; here we were; I in my serge
suit; she in green. There was no past, no future; merely the moment in its ring of light,
and our bodies; and the inevitable climax, the ecstasy.
‘Louis, when he let himself down on the grass, cautiously spreading (I do not
exaggerate) a mackintosh square, made one acknowledge his presence. It was
formidable. I had the intelligence to salute his integrity; his research with bony fingers
wrapped in rags because of chilblains for some diamond of indissoluble veracity. I
buried boxes of burnt matches in holes in the turf at his feet. His grim and caustic
tongue reproved my indolence. He fascinated me with his sordid imagination. His
heroes wore bowler-hats and talked about selling pianos for tenners. Through his
landscape the tram squealed; the factory poured its acrid fumes. He haunted mean
streets and towns where women lay drunk, naked, on counterpanes on Christmas day.
His words falling from a shot-tower hit the water and up it spurted. He found one word,
one only for the moon. Then he got up and went; we all got up; we all went. But I,
pausing, looked at the tree, and as I looked in autumn at the fiery and yellow branches,
some sediment formed; I formed; a drop fell; I fell — that is, from some completed
experience I had emerged.
‘I rose and walked away — I, I, I; not Byron, Shelley, Dostoevsky, but I, Bernard. I even
repeated my own name once or twice. I went, swinging my stick, into a shop, and bought
— not that I love music — a picture of Beethoven in a silver frame. Not that I love music,
but because the whole of life, its masters, its adventurers, then appeared in long ranks of
magnificent human beings behind me; and I was the inheritor; I, the continuer; I, the
person miraculously appointed to carry it on. So, swinging my stick, with my eyes
filmed, not with pride, but with humility rather, I walked down the street. The first
whirr of wings had gone up, the carol, the exclamation; and now one enters; one goes
into the house, the dry, uncompromising, inhabited house, the place with all its
traditions, its objects, its accumulations of rubbish, and treasures displayed upon tables.
I visited the family tailor, who remembered my uncle. People turned up in great
quantities, not cut out, like the first faces (Neville, Louis, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda), but
confused, featureless, or changed their features so fast that they seemed to have none.
And blushing yet scornful, in the oddest condition of raw rapture and scepticism, I took
the blow; the mixed sensations; the complex and disturbing and utterly unprepared for
impacts of life all over, in all places, at the same time. How upsetting! How humiliating
never to be sure what to say next, and those painful silences, glaring as dry deserts, with
every pebble apparent; and then to say what one ought not to have said, and then to be
conscious of a ramrod of incorruptible sincerity which one would willingly exchange for
a shower of smooth pence, but could not, there at that party, where Jinny sat quite at
her ease, rayed out on a gilt chair.
‘Then says some lady with an impressive gesture, “Come with me.” She leads one into a
private alcove and admits one to the honour of her intimacy. Surnames change to
Christian names; Christian names to nicknames. What is to be done about India, Ireland
or Morocco? Old gentlemen answer the question standing decorated under chandeliers.
One finds oneself surprisingly supplied with information. Outside the undifferentiated
forces roar; inside we are very private, very explicit, have a sense indeed, that it is here,
 95

in this little room, that we make whatever day of the week it may be. Friday or Saturday.
A shell forms upon the soft soul, nacreous, shiny, upon which sensations tap their beaks
in vain. On me it formed earlier than on most. Soon I could carve my pear when other
people had done dessert. I could bring my sentence to a close in a hush of complete
silence. It is at that season too that perfection has a lure. One can learn Spanish, one
thinks, by tying a string to the right toe and waking early. One fills up the little
compartments of one’s engagement book with dinner at eight; luncheon at one-thirty.
One has shirts, socks, ties laid out on one’s bed.
‘But it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a
convenience, a lie. There is always deep below it, even when we arrive punctually at the
appointed time with our white waistcoats and polite formalities, a rushing stream of
broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights — elm
trees, willow trees, gardeners sweeping, women writing — that rise and sink even as we
hand a lady down to dinner. While one straightens the fork so precisely on the table-
cloth, a thousand faces mop and mow. There is nothing one can fish up in a spoon;
nothing one can call an event. Yet it is alive too and deep, this stream. Immersed in it I
would stop between one mouthful and the next, and look intently at a vase, perhaps
with one red flower, while a reason struck me, a sudden revelation. Or I would say,
walking along the Strand, “That’s the phrase I want”, as some beautiful, fabulous
phantom bird, fish or cloud with fiery edges swam up to enclose once and for all some
notion haunting me, after which on I trotted taking stock with renewed delight of ties
and things in shop-windows.
‘The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch,
has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will burst. Whatever sentence I extract whole
and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be
caught while a million others leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling
silver, and slip through my fingers. Faces recur, faces and faces — they press their
beauty to the walls of my bubble — Neville, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and a thousand
others. How impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the
effect of the whole — again like music. What a symphony with its concord and its
discord, and its tunes on top and its complicated bass beneath, then grew up! Each
played his own tune, fiddle, flute, trumpet, drum or whatever the instrument might be.
With Neville, “Let’s discuss Hamlet.” With Louis, science. With Jinny, love. Then
suddenly, in a moment of exasperation, off to Cumberland with a quiet man for a whole
week in an inn, with the rain running down the window-panes and nothing but mutton
and mutton and again mutton for dinner. Yet that week remains a solid stone in the
welter of unrecorded sensation. It was then we played dominoes; then we quarrelled
about tough mutton. Then we walked on the fell. And a little girl, peeping round the
door, gave me that letter, written on blue paper, in which I learnt that the girl who had
made me Byron was to marry a squire. A man in gaiters, a man with a whip, a man who
made speeches about fat oxen at dinner — I exclaimed derisively and looked at the
racing clouds, and felt my own failure; my desire to be free; to escape; to be bound; to
make an end; to continue; to be Louis; to be myself; and walked out in my mackintosh
alone, and felt grumpy under the eternal hills and not in the least sublime; and came
home and blamed the meat and packed and so back again to the welter; to the torture.
‘Nevertheless, life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday; then comes
Wednesday. The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in
growth. Opening and shutting, shutting and opening, with increasing hum and
 96

sturdiness, the haste and fever of youth are drawn into service until the whole being
seems to expand in and out like the mainspring of a clock. How fast the stream flows
from January to December! We are swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar
that they cast no shadow. We float, we float . . .
‘However, since one must leap (to tell you this story), I leap, here, at this point, and
alight now upon some perfectly commonplace object — say the poker and tongs, as I
saw them sometime later, after that lady who had made me Byron had married, under
the light of one whom I will call the third Miss Jones. She is the girl who wears a certain
dress expecting one at dinner, who picks a certain rose, who makes one feel “Steady,
steady, this is a matter of some importance”, as one shaves. Then one asks, “How does
she behave to children?” One observes that she is a little clumsy with her umbrella; but
minded when the mole was caught in the trap; and finally, would not make the loaf at
breakfast (I was thinking of the interminable breakfasts of married life as I shaved)
altogether prosaic — it would not surprise one sitting opposite this girl to see a dragon-
fly perched on the loaf at breakfast. Also she inspired me with a desire to rise in the
world; also she made me look with curiosity at the hitherto repulsive faces of new-born
babies. And the little fierce beat — tick-tack, tick-tack — of the pulse of one’s mind took
on a more majestic rhythm. I roamed down Oxford Street. We are the continuers, we are
the inheritors, I said, thinking of my sons and daughters; and if the feeling is so
grandiose as to be absurd and one conceals it by jumping on to a bus or buying the
evening paper, it is still a curious element in the ardour with which one laces up one’s
boots, with which one now addresses old friends committed to different careers. Louis,
the attic dweller; Rhoda, the nymph of the fountain always wet; both contradicted what
was then so positive to me; both gave the other side of what seemed to me so evident
(that we marry, that we domesticate); for which I loved them, pitied them, and also
deeply envied them their different lot.
‘Once I had a biographer, dead long since, but if he still followed my footsteps with his
old flattering intensity he would here say, “About this time Bernard married and bought
a house . . . His friends observed in him a growing tendency to domesticity . . . The birth
of children made it highly desirable that he should augment his income.” That is the
biographic style, and it does to tack together torn bits of stuff, stuff with raw edges.
After all, one cannot find fault with the biographic style if one begins letters “Dear Sir”,
ends them “your faithfully”; one cannot despise these phrases laid like Roman roads
across the tumult of our lives, since they compel us to walk in step like civilized people
with the slow and measured tread of policemen though one may be humming any
nonsense under one’s breath at the same time —“Hark, hark, the dogs do bark”, “Come
away, come away, death”, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”, and so on. “He
attained some success in his profession . . . He inherited a small sum of money from an
uncle”— that is how the biographer continues, and if one wears trousers and hitches
them up with braces, one has to say that, though it is tempting now and then to go
blackberrying; tempting to play ducks and drakes with all these phrases. But one has to
say that.
‘I became, I mean, a certain kind of man, scoring my path across life as one treads a path
across the fields. My boots became worn a little on the left side. When I came in, certain
re-arrangements took place. “Here’s Bernard!” How differently different people say
that! There are many rooms — many Bernards. There was the charming, but weak; the
strong, but supercilious; the brilliant, but remorseless; the very good fellow, but, I make
no doubt, the awful bore; the sympathetic, but cold; the shabby, but — go into the next
 97

room — the foppish, worldly, and too well dressed. What I was to myself was different;
was none of these. I am inclined to pin myself down most firmly there before the loaf at
breakfast with my wife, who being now entirely my wife and not at all the girl who wore
when she hoped to meet me a certain rose, gave me that feeling of existing in the midst
of unconsciousness such as the tree-frog must have couched on the right shade of green
leaf. “Pass” . . . I would say. “Milk” . . . she might answer, or “Mary’s coming” . . . — simple
words for those who have inherited the spoils of all the ages but not as said then, day
after day, in the full tide of life, when one feels complete, entire, at breakfast. Muscles,
nerves, intestines, blood-vessels, all that makes the coil and spring of our being, the
unconscious hum of the engine, as well as the dart and flicker of the tongue, functioned
superbly. Opening, shutting; shutting, opening; eating, drinking; sometimes speaking —
the whole mechanism seemed to expand, to contract, like the mainspring of a clock.
Toast and butter, coffee and bacon. The Times and letters — suddenly the telephone
rang with urgency and I rose deliberately and went to the telephone. I took up the black
mouth. I marked the ease with which my mind adjusted itself to assimilate the message
— it might be (one has these fancies) to assume command of the British Empire; I
observed my composure; I remarked with what magnificent vitality the atoms of my
attention dispersed, swarmed round the interruption, assimilated the message, adapted
themselves to a new state of affairs and had created, by the time I put back the receiver,
a richer, stronger, a more complicated world in which I was called upon to act my part
and had no doubt whatever that I could do it. Clapping my hat on my head, I strode into
a world inhabited by vast numbers of men who had also clapped their hats on their
heads, and as we jostled and encountered in trains and tubes we exchanged the
knowing wink of competitors and comrades braced with a thousand snares and dodges
to achieve the same end — to earn our livings.
‘Life is pleasant. Life is good. The mere process of life is satisfactory. Take the ordinary
man in good health. He likes eating and sleeping. He likes the snuff of fresh air and
walking at a brisk pace down the Strand. Or in the country there’s a cock crowing on a
gate; there’s a foal galloping round a field. Something always has to be done next.
Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday Tuesday. Each spreads the same ripple of
wellbeing, repeats the same curve of rhythm; covers fresh sand with a chill or ebbs a
little slackly without. So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery
and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild
gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose
— so it seems.
‘Lord, how pleasant! Lord, how good! How tolerable is the life of little shopkeepers, I
would say, as the train drew through the suburbs and one saw lights in bedroom
windows. Active, energetic as a swarm of ants, I said, as I stood at the window and
watched workers, bag in hand, stream into town. What hardness, what energy and
violence of limb, I thought, seeing men in white drawers’ scouring after a football on a
patch of snow in January. Now being grumpy about some small matter — it might be the
meat — it seemed luxurious to disturb with a little ripple the enormous stability, whose
quiver, for our child was about to be born, increased its joy, of our married life. I
snapped at dinner. I spoke unreasonably as if, being a millionaire, I could throw away
five shillings; or, being a perfect steeple-jack, stumbled over a footstool on purpose.
Going up to bed we settled our quarrel on the stairs, and standing by the window
looking at a sky clear like the inside of a blue stone, “Heaven be praised,” I said, “we
need not whip this prose into poetry. The little language is enough.” For the space of the
 98

prospect and its clarity seemed to offer no impediment whatsoever, but to allow our
lives to spread out and out beyond all bristling of roofs and chimneys to the flawless
verge.
‘Into this crashed death — Percival’s. “Which is happiness?” I said (our child had been
born), “which pain?” referring to the two sides of my body, as I came downstairs,
making a purely physical statement. Also I made note of the state of the house; the
curtain blowing; the cook singing; the wardrobe showing through the half- opened door.
I said, “Give him (myself) another moment’s respite” as I went downstairs. “Now in this
drawing-room he is going to suffer. There is no escape.” But for pain words are lacking.
There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers,
interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing
objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood
spurting, a joint suddenly twisted — beneath all of which appears something very
important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude. So I went out. I saw the first morning
he would never see — the sparrows were like toys dangled from a string by a child. To
see things without attachment, from the outside, and to realize their beauty in itself —
how strange! And then the sense that a burden has been removed; pretence and make-
believe and unreality are gone, and lightness has come with a kind of transparency,
making oneself invisible and things seen through as one walks — how strange. “And
now what other discovery will there be?” I said, and in order to hold it tight ignored
newspaper placards and went and looked at pictures. Madonnas and pillars, arches and
orange trees, still as on the first day of creation, but acquainted with grief, there they
hung, and I gazed at them. “Here,” I said, “we are together without interruption.” This
freedom, this immunity, seemed then a conquest, and stirred in me such exaltation that
I sometimes go there, even now, to bring back exaltation and Percival. But it did not last.
What torments one is the horrible activity of the mind’s eye — how he fell, how he
looked, where they carried him; men in loin-cloths, pulling ropes; the bandages and the
mud. Then comes the terrible pounce of memory, not to be foretold, not to be warded
off — that I did not go with him to Hampton Court. That claw scratched; that fang tore; I
did not go. In spite of his impatiently protesting that it did not matter; why interrupt,
why spoil our moment of uninterrupted community? — Still, I repeated sullenly, I did
not go, and so, driven out of the sanctuary by these officious devils, went to Jinny
because she had a room; a room with little tables, with little ornaments scattered on
little tables. There I confessed, with tears — I had not gone to Hampton Court. And she,
remembering other things, to me trifles but torturing to her, showed me how life
withers when there are things we cannot share. Soon, too, a maid came in with a note,
and as she turned to answer it and I felt my own curiosity to know what she was writing
and to whom, I saw the first leaf fall on his grave. I saw us push beyond this moment,
and leave it behind us for ever. And then sitting side by side on the sofa we remembered
inevitably what had been said by others; “the lily of the day is fairer far in May”; we
compared Percival to a lily — Percival whom I wanted to lose his hair, to shock the
authorities, to grow old with me; he was already covered with lilies.
‘So the sincerity of the moment passed; so it became symbolical; and that I could not
stand. Let us commit any blasphemy of laughter and criticism rather than exude this
lily-sweet glue; and cover him with phrases, I cried. Therefore I broke off, and Jinny,
who was without future, or speculation, but respected the moment with complete
integrity, gave her body a flick with the whip, powdered her face (for which I loved her),
and waved to me as she stood on the doorstep, pressing her hand to her hair so that the
 99

wind might not disorder it, a gesture for which I honoured her, as if it confirmed our
determination — not to let lilies grow.
‘I observed with disillusioned clarity the despicable nonentity of the street; its porches;
its window curtains; the drab clothes, the cupidity and complacency of shopping
women; and old men taking the air in comforters; the caution of people crossing; the
universal determination to go on living, when really, fools and gulls that you are, I said,
any slate may fly from a roof, any car may swerve, for there is neither rhyme nor reason
when a drunk man staggers about with a club in his hand — that is all. I was like one
admitted behind the scenes: like one shown how the effects are produced. I returned,
however, to my own snug home and was warned by the parlourmaid to creep upstairs
in my stockings. The child was asleep. I went to my room.
‘Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection,
this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved
and committed, with books and pictures? Better burn one’s life out like Louis, desiring
perfection; or like Rhoda leave us, flying past us to the desert; or choose one out of
millions and one only like Neville; better be like Susan and love and hate the heat of the
sun or the frost-bitten grass; or be like Jinny, honest, an animal. All had their rapture;
their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited
each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked
caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow — no, not my sorrow but the
incomprehensible nature of this our life — for their inspection. Some people go to
priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and
fragments something unbroken — I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or
tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even
that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.
‘Should this be the end of the story? a kind of sigh? a last ripple of the wave? A trickle of
water in some gutter where, burbling, it dies away? Let me touch the table — so — and
thus recover my sense of the moment. A sideboard covered with cruets; a basket full of
rolls; a plate of bananas — these are comfortable sights. But if there are no stories, what
end can there be, or what beginning? Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we
give it when we try to tell it. Sitting up late at night it seems strange not to have more
control. Pigeon-holes are not then very useful. It is strange how force ebbs away and
away into some dry creek. Sitting alone, it seems we are spent; our waters can only just
surround feebly that spike of sea-holly; we cannot reach that further pebble so as to wet
it. It is over, we are ended. But wait — I sat all night waiting — an impulse again runs
through us; we rise, we toss back a mane of white spray; we pound on the shore; we are
not to be confined. That is, I shaved and washed; did not wake my wife, and had
breakfast; put on my hat, and went out to earn my living. After Monday, Tuesday comes.
‘Yet some doubt remained, some note of interrogation. I was surprised, opening a door,
to find people thus occupied; I hesitated, taking a cup of tea, whether one said milk or
sugar. And the light of the stars falling, as it falls now, on my hand after travelling for
millions upon millions of years — I could get a cold shock from that for a moment — not
more, my imagination is too feeble. But some doubt remained. A shadow flitted through
my mind like moths’ wings among chairs and tables in a room in the evening. When, for
example, I went to Lincolnshire that summer to see Susan and she advanced towards
me across the garden with the lazy movement of a half-filled sail, with the swaying
movement of a woman with child, I thought, “It goes on; but why?” We sat in the garden;
 100

the farm carts came up dripping with hay; there was the usual gabble of rooks and
doves; fruit was netted and covered over; the gardener dug. Bees boomed down the
purple tunnels of flowers; bees embedded themselves on the golden shields of
sunflowers. Little twigs were blown across the grass. How rhythmical, and half
conscious and like something wrapped in mist it was; but to me hateful, like a net
folding one’s limbs in its meshes, cramping. She who had refused Percival lent herself to
this, to this covering over.
‘Sitting down on a bank to wait for my train, I thought then how we surrender, how we
submit to the stupidity of nature. Woods covered in thick green leafage lay in front of
me. And by some flick of a scent or a sound on a nerve, the old image — the gardeners
sweeping, the lady writing — returned. I saw the figures beneath the beech trees at
Elvedon. The gardeners swept; the lady at the table sat writing. But I now made the
contribution of maturity to childhood’s intuitions — satiety and doom; the sense of
what is unescapable in our lot; death; the knowledge of limitations; how life is more
obdurate than one had thought it. Then, when I was a child, the presence of an enemy
had asserted itself; the need for opposition had stung me. I had jumped up and cried,
“Let’s explore.” The horror of the situation was ended.
‘Now what situation was there to end? Dullness and doom. And what to explore? The
leaves and the wood concealed nothing. If a bird rose I should no longer make a poem
— I should repeat what I had seen before. Thus if I had a stick with which to point to
indentations in the curve of being, this is the lowest; here it coils useless on the mud
where no tide comes — here, where I sit with my back to a hedge, and my hat over my
eyes, while the sheep advanced remorselessly in that wooden way of theirs, step by step
on stiff, pointed legs. But if you hold a blunt blade to a grindstone long enough,
something spurts — a jagged edge of fire; so held to lack of reason, aimlessness, the
usual, all massed together, out spurted in one flame hatred, contempt. I took my mind,
my being, the old dejected, almost inanimate object, and lashed it about among these
odds and ends, sticks and straws, detestable little bits of wreckage, flotsam and jetsam,
floating on the oily surface. I jumped up. I said, “Fight! Fight!” I repeated. It is the effort
and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together —
this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing pursuit. The trees, scattered, put
on order; the thick green of the leaves thinned itself to a dancing light. I netted them
under with a sudden phrase. I retrieved them from formlessness with words.
‘The train came in. Lengthening down the platform, the train came to a stop. I caught my
train. And so back to London in the evening. How satisfactory, the atmosphere of
common sense and tobacco; old women clambering into the third-class carriage with
their baskets; the sucking at pipes; the good-nights and see you tomorrows of friends
parting at wayside stations, and then the lights of London — not the flaring ecstasy of
youth, not that tattered violet banner, but still the lights of London all the same; hard,
electric lights, high up in offices; street lamps laced along dry pavements; flares roaring
above street markets. I like all this when I have despatched the enemy for a moment.
‘Also I like to find the pageant of existence roaring, in a theatre for instance. The clay-
coloured, earthy nondescript animal of the field here erects himself and with infinite
ingenuity and effort puts up a fight against the green woods and green fields and sheep
advancing with measured tread, munching. And, of course, windows in the long grey
streets were lit up; strips of carpet cut the pavement; there were swept and garnished
rooms, fire, food, wine, talk. Men with withered hands, women with pearl pagodas
 101

hanging from their ears, came in and went out. I saw old men’s faces carved into
wrinkles and sneers by the work of the world; beauty cherished so that it seemed newly
sprung even in age; and youth so apt for pleasure that pleasure, one thought, must exist;
it seemed that grass-lands must roll for it; and the sea be chopped up into little waves;
and the woods rustle with bright-coloured birds for youth, for youth expectant. There
one met Jinny and Hal, Tom and Betty; there we had our jokes and shared our secrets;
and never parted in the doorway without arranging to meet again in some other room
as the occasion, as the time of the year, suggested. Life is pleasant; life is good. After
Monday comes Tuesday, and Wednesday follows.
‘Yes, but after a time with a difference. It may be that something in the look of the room
one night, in the arrangement of the chairs, suggests it. It seems comfortable to sink
down on a sofa in a corner, to look, to listen. Then it happens that two figures standing
with their backs to the window appear against the branches of a spreading willow. With
a shock of emotion one feels “There are figures without features robed in beauty.” In the
pause that follows while the ripples spread, the girl to whom one should be talking says
to herself, “He is old.” But she is wrong. It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another
drop. Time has given the arrangement another shake. Out we creep from the arch of the
currant leaves, out into a wider world. The true order of things — this is our perpetual
illusion — is now apparent. Thus in a moment, in a drawing-room, our life adjusts itself
to the majestic march of day across the sky.
‘It was for this reason that instead of pulling on my patent- leather shoes and finding a
tolerable tie, I sought Neville. I sought my oldest friend, who had known me when I was
Byron; when I was Meredith’s young man, and also that hero in a book by Dostoevsky
whose name I have forgotten. I found him alone, reading. A perfectly neat table; a
curtain pulled methodically straight; a paper-knife dividing a French volume — nobody,
I thought, ever changes the attitude in which we saw them first, or the clothes. Here he
has sat in this chair, in these clothes, ever since we first met. Here was freedom; here
was intimacy; the firelight broke off some round apple on the curtain. There we talked;
sat talking; sauntered down that avenue, the avenue which runs under the trees, under
the thick-leaved murmuring trees, the trees that are hung with fruit, which we have
trodden so often together, so that now the turf is bare round some of those trees, round
certain plays and poems, certain favourites of ours — the turf is trodden bare by our
incessant unmethodical pacing. If I have to wait, I read; if I wake in the night, I feel along
the shelf for a book. Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of
unrecorded matter in my head. Now and then I break off a lump, Shakespeare it may be,
it may be some old woman called Peck; and say to myself, smoking a cigarette in bed,
“That’s Shakespeare. That’s Peck”— with a certainty of recognition and a shock of
knowledge which is endlessly delightful, though not to be imparted. So we shared our
Pecks, our Shakespeares; compared each other’s versions; allowed each other’s insight
to set our own Peck or Shakespeare in a better light; and then sank into one of those
silences which are now and again broken by a few words, as if a fin rose in the wastes of
silence; and then the fin, the thought, sinks back into the depths, spreading round it a
little ripple of satisfaction, content.
‘Yes, but suddenly one hears a clock tick. We who had been immersed in this world
became aware of another. It is painful. It was Neville who changed our time. He, who
had been thinking with the unlimited time of the mind, which stretches in a flash from
Shakespeare to ourselves, poked the fire and began to live by that other clock which
marks the approach of a particular person. The wide and dignified sweep of his mind
 102

contracted. He became on the alert. I could feel him listening to sounds in the street. I
noted how he touched a cushion. From the myriads of mankind and all time past he had
chosen one person, one moment in particular. A sound was heard in the hall. What he
was saying wavered in the air like an uneasy flame. I watched him disentangle one
footstep from other footsteps; wait for some particular mark of identification and glance
with the swiftness of a snake at the handle of the door. (Hence the astonishing acuteness
of his perceptions; he has been trained always by one person.) So concentrated a
passion shot out others like foreign matter from a still, sparkling fluid. I became aware
of my own vague and cloudy nature full of sediment, full of doubt, full of phrases and
notes to be made in pocket-books. The folds of the curtain became still, statuesque; the
paperweight on the table hardened; the threads on the curtain sparkled; everything
became definite, external, a scene in which I had no part. I rose, therefore; I left him.
‘Heavens! how they caught me as I left the room, the fangs of that old pain! the desire for
someone not there. For whom? I did not know at first; then remembered Percival. I had
not thought of him for months. Now to laugh with him, to laugh with him at Neville —
that was what I wanted, to walk off arm-in-arm together laughing. But he was not there.
The place was empty.
‘It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams.
‘This fitful gust blowing so sharp and cold upon me sent me that night across London to
visit other friends, Rhoda and Louis, desiring company, certainty, contact. I wondered,
as I mounted the stairs, what was their relationship? What did they say alone? I figured
her awkward with the tea-kettle. She gazed over the slate roofs — the nymph of the
fountain always wet, obsessed with visions, dreaming. She parted the curtain to look at
the night. “Away!” she said. “The moor is dark beneath the moon.” I rang; I waited. Louis
perhaps poured out milk in a saucer for the cat; Louis, whose bony hands shut like the
sides of a dock closing themselves with a slow anguish of effort upon an enormous
tumult of waters, who knew what has been said by the Egyptian, the Indian, by men
with high cheek-bones and solitaires in hair shirts. I knocked: I waited; there was no
answer. I tramped down the stone stairs again. Our friends — how distant, how mute,
how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a
phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely. Our flame, the will-o’-the-
wisp that dances in a few eyes, is soon to be blown out and all will fade. I recalled my
friends. I thought of Susan. She had bought fields. Cucumbers and tomatoes ripened in
her hothouses. The vine that had been killed by last year’s frost was putting out a leaf or
two. She walked heavily with her sons across her meadows. She went about the land
attended by men in gaiters, pointing with her stick at a roof, at hedges, at walls fallen
into disrepair. The pigeons followed her, waddling, for the grain that she let fall from
her capable, earthy fingers. “But I no longer rise at dawn,” she said. Then Jinny —
entertaining, no doubt, some new young man. They reached the crisis of the usual
conversation. The room would be darkened; chairs arranged. For she still sought the
moment. Without illusions, hard and clear as crystal, she rode at the day with her breast
bared. She let its spikes pierce her. When the lock whitened on her forehead she twisted
it fearlessly among the rest. So when they come to bury her nothing will be out of order.
Bits of ribbons will be found curled up. But still the door opens. Who is coming in? she
asks, and rises to meet him, prepared, as on those first spring nights when the tree
under the big London houses where respectable citizens were going soberly to bed
scarcely sheltered her love; and the squeak of trams mixed with her cry of delight and
the rippling of leaves had to shade her languor, her delicious lassitude as she sank down
 103

cooled by all the sweetness of nature satisfied. Our friends, how seldom visited, how
little known — it is true; and yet, when I meet an unknown person, and try to break off,
here at this table, what I call “my life”, it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not
one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am — Jinny, Susan,
Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs.
‘So I thought that night in early autumn when we came together and dined once more at
Hampton Court. Our discomfort was at first considerable, for each by that time was
committed to a statement, and the other person coming along the road to the meeting-
place dressed like this or that, with a stick or without, seemed to contradict it. I saw
Jinny look at Susan’s earthy fingers and then hide her own; I, considering Neville, so
neat and exact, felt the nebulosity of my own life blurred with all these phrases. He then
boasted, because he was ashamed of one room and one person and his own success.
Louis and Rhoda, the conspirators, the spies at table, who take notes, felt, “After all,
Bernard can make the waiter fetch us rolls — a contact denied us.” We saw for a
moment laid out among us the body of the complete human being whom we have failed
to be, but at the same time, cannot forget. All that we might have been we saw; all that
we had missed, and we grudged for a moment the other’s claim, as children when the
cake is cut, the one cake, the only cake, watch their slice diminishing.
‘However, we had our bottle of wine, and under that seduction lost our enmity, and
stopped comparing. And, half-way through dinner, we felt enlarge itself round us the
huge blackness of what is outside us, of what we are not. The wind, the rush of wheels
became the roar of time, and we rushed — where? And who were we? We were
extinguished for a moment, went out like sparks in burnt paper and the blackness
roared. Past time, past history we went. For me this lasts but one second. It is ended by
my own pugnacity. I strike the table with a spoon. If I could measure things with
compasses I would, but since my only measure is a phrase, I make phrases — I forget
what, on this occasion. We became six people at a table in Hampton Court. We rose and
walked together down the avenue. In the thin, the unreal twilight, fitfully like the echo of
voices laughing down some alley, geniality returned to me and flesh. Against the
gateway, against some cedar tree I saw blaze bright, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda, Louis, Susan,
and myself, our life, our identity. Still King William seemed an unreal monarch and his
crown mere tinsel. But we — against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how
many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time
and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was
enough. And then Neville, Jinny, Susan and I, as a wave breaks, burst asunder,
surrendered — to the next leaf, to the precise bird, to a child with a hoop, to a prancing
dog, to the warmth that is hoarded in woods after a hot day, to the lights twisted like
white ribbon on rippled waters. We drew apart; we were consumed in the darkness of
the trees, leaving Rhoda and Louis to stand on the terrace by the urn.
‘When we emerged from that immersion — how sweet, how deep! — and came to the
surface and saw the conspirators still standing there it was with some compunction. We
had lost what they had kept. We interrupted. But we were tired, and whether it had
been good or bad, accomplished or left undone, the dusky veil was falling upon our
endeavours; the lights were sinking as we paused for a moment upon the terrace that
overlooks the river. The steamers were landing their trippers on the bank; there was a
distant cheering, the sound of singing, as if people waved their hats and joined in some
last song. The sound of the chorus came across the water and I felt leap up that old
impulse, which has moved me all my life, to be thrown up and down on the roar of other
 104

people’s voices, singing the same song; to be tossed up and down on the roar of almost
senseless merriment, sentiment, triumph, desire. But not now. No! I could not collect
myself; I could not distinguish myself; I could not help letting fall the things that had
made me a minute ago eager, amused, jealous, vigilant, and hosts of other things, into
the water. I could not recover myself from that endless throwing away, dissipation,
flooding forth without our willing it and rushing soundlessly away out there under the
arches of the bridge, round some clump of trees or an island, out where sea-birds sit on
stakes, over the roughened water to become waves in the sea — I could not recover
myself from that dissipation. So we parted.
‘Was this, then, this streaming away mixed with Susan, Jinny, Neville, Rhoda, Louis, a
sort of death? A new assembly of elements? Some hint of what was to come? The note
was scribbled, the book shut, for I am an intermittent student. I do not say my lessons
by any means at the stated hour. Later, walking down Fleet Street at the rush hour, I
recalled that moment; I continued it. “Must I for ever,” I said, “beat my spoon on the
table-cloth? Shall I not, too, consent?” The omnibuses were clogged; one came up behind
another and stopped with a click, like a link added to a stone chain. People passed.
‘Multitudinous, carrying attaché-cases, dodging with incredible celerity in and out, they
went past like a river in spate. They went past roaring like a train in a tunnel. Seizing my
chance I crossed; dived down a dark passage and entered the shop where they cut my
hair. I leant my head back and was swathed in a sheet. Looking-glasses confronted me in
which I could see my pinioned body and people passing; stopping, looking, and going on
indifferent. The hairdresser began to move his scissors to and fro. I felt myself
powerless to stop the oscillations of the cold steel. So we are cut and laid in swaths, I
said; so we lie side by side on the damp meadows, withered branches and flowering. We
have no more to expose ourselves on the bare hedges to the wind and snow; no more to
carry ourselves erect when the gale sweeps, to bear our burden upheld; or stay,
unmurmuring, on those pallid noondays when the bird creeps close to the bough and
the damp whitens the leaf. We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that
unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie
asleep. We have renounced our station and lie now flat, withered and how soon
forgotten! Upon which I saw an expression in the tail of the eye of the hairdresser as if
something interested him in the street.
‘What interested the hairdresser? What did the hairdresser see in the street? It is thus
that I am recalled. (For I am no mystic; something always plucks at me — curiosity,
envy, admiration, interest in hairdressers and the like bring me to the surface.) While he
brushed the fluff from my coat I took pains to assure myself of his identity, and then,
swinging my stick, I went into the Strand, and evoked to serve as opposite to myself the
figure of Rhoda, always so furtive, always with fear in her eyes, always seeking some
pillar in the desert, to find which she had gone; she had killed herself. “Wait,” I said,
putting my arm in imagination (thus we consort with our friends) through her arm.
“Wait until these omnibuses have gone by. Do not cross so dangerously. These men are
your brothers.” In persuading her I was also persuading my own soul. For this is not one
life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny,
or Rhoda — so strange is the contact of one with another.
‘Swinging my stick, with my hair newly cut and the nape of my neck tingling, I went past
all those trays of penny toys imported from Germany that men hold out in the street by
St Paul’s — St Paul’s, the brooding hen with spread wings from whose shelter run
 105

omnibuses and streams of men and women at the rush hour. I thought how Louis would
mount those steps in his neat suit with his cane in his hand and his angular, rather
detached gait. With his Australian accent (“My father, a banker at Brisbane”) he would
come, I thought, with greater respect to these old ceremonies than I do, who have heard
the same lullabies for a thousand years. I am always impressed, as I enter, by the rubbed
roses; the polished brasses; the flapping and the chanting, while one boy’s voice wails
round the dome like some lost and wandering dove. The recumbency and the peace of
the dead impress me — warriors at rest under their old banners. Then I scoff at the
floridity and absurdity of some scrolloping tomb; and the trumpets and the victories
and the coats of arms and the certainty, so sonorously repeated, of resurrection, of
eternal life. My wandering and inquisitive eye then shows me an awe- stricken child; a
shuffling pensioner; or the obeisances of tired shop-girls burdened with heaven knows
what strife in their poor thin breasts come to solace themselves in the rush hour. I stray
and look and wonder, and sometimes, rather furtively, try to rise on the shaft of
somebody else’s prayer into the dome, out, beyond, wherever they go. But then like the
lost and wailing dove, I find myself failing, fluttering, descending and perching upon
some curious gargoyle, some battered nose or absurd tombstone, with humour, with
wonder, and so again watch the sightseers with their Baedekers shuffling past, while the
boy’s voice soars in the dome and the organ now and then indulges in a moment of
elephantine triumph. How then, I asked, would Louis roof us all in? How would he
confine us, make us one, with his red ink, with his very fine nib? The voice petered out
in the dome, wailing.
‘So into the street again, swinging my stick, looking at wire trays in stationers’ shop-
windows, at baskets of fruit grown in the colonies, murmuring Pillicock sat on Pillicock’s
hill, or Hark, hark, the dogs do bark, or The World’s great age begins anew, or Come
away, come away, death — mingling nonsense and poetry, floating in the stream.
Something always has to be done next. Tuesday follows Monday: Wednesday, Tuesday.
Each spreads the same ripple. The being grows rings, like a tree. Like a tree, leaves fall.
‘For one day as I leant over a gate that led into a field, the rhythm stopped; the rhymes
and the hummings, the nonsense and the poetry. A space was cleared in my mind. I saw
through the thick leaves of habit. Leaning over the gate I regretted so much litter, so
much unaccomplishment and separation, for one cannot cross London to see a friend,
life being so full of engagements; nor take ship to India and see a naked man spearing
fish in blue water. I said life had been imperfect, an unfinishing phrase. It had been
impossible for me, taking snuff as I do from any bagman met in a train, to keep
coherency — that sense of the generations, of women carrying red pitchers to the Nile,
of the nightingale who sings among conquests and migrations. It had been too vast an
undertaking, I said, and how can I go on lifting my foot perpetually to climb the stair? I
addressed myself as one would speak to a companion with whom one is voyaging to the
North Pole.
‘I spoke to that self who had been with me in many tremendous adventures; the faithful
man who sits over the fire when everybody has gone to bed, stirring the cinders with a
poker; the man who has been so mysteriously and with sudden accretions of being built
up, in a beech wood, sitting by a willow tree on a bank, leaning over a parapet at
Hampton Court; the man who has collected himself in moments of emergency and
banged his spoon on the table, saying, “I will not consent.”
 106

‘This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour
beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His
fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden
conviction of complete desertion, Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this
immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied
words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth. I am
the swathed figure in the hairdresser’s shop taking up only so much space.
‘The scene beneath me withered. It was like the eclipse when the sun went out and left
the earth, flourishing in full summer foliage, withered, brittle, false. Also I saw on a
winding road in a dust dance the groups we had made, how they came together, how
they ate together, how they met in this room or that. I saw my own indefatigable
busyness — how I had rushed from one to the other, fetched and carried, travelled and
returned, joined this group and that, here kissed, here withdrawn; always kept hard at it
by some extraordinary purpose, with my nose to the ground like a dog on the scent;
with an occasional toss of the head, an occasional cry of amazement, despair and then
back again with my nose to the scent. What a litter — what a confusion; with here birth,
here death; succulence and sweetness; effort and anguish; and myself always running
hither and thither. Now it was done with. I had no more appetites to glut; no more stings
in me with which to poison people; no more sharp teeth and clutching hands or desire
to feel the pear and the grape and the sun beating down from the orchard wall.
‘The woods had vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow. No sound broke the silence
of the wintry landscape. No cock crowed; no smoke rose; no train moved. A man
without a self, I said. A heavy body leaning on a gate. A dead man. With dispassionate
despair, with entire disillusionment, I surveyed the dust dance; my life, my friends’ lives,
and those fabulous presences, men with brooms, women writing, the willow tree by the
river — clouds and phantoms made of dust too, of dust that changed, as clouds lose and
gain and take gold or red and lose their summits and billow this way and that, mutable,
vain. I, carrying a notebook, making phrases, had recorded mere changes; a shadow. I
had been sedulous to take note of shadows. How can I proceed now, I said, without a
self, weightless and visionless, through a world weightless, without illusion?
‘The heaviness of my despondency thrust open the gate I leant on and pushed me, an
elderly man, a heavy man with grey hair, through the colourless field, the empty field.
No more to hear echoes, no more to see phantoms, to conjure up no opposition, but to
walk always unshadowed, making no impress upon the dead earth. If even there had
been sheep munching, pushing one foot after another, or a bird, or a man driving a
spade into the earth, had there been a bramble to trip me, or a ditch, damp with soaked
leaves, into which to fall — but no, the melancholy path led along the level, to more
wintriness and pallor and the equal and uninteresting view of the same landscape.
‘How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously.
Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar.
There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were
breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone
walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and
green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a
blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on
weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.
 107

‘So the landscape returned to me; so I saw the fields rolling in waves of colour beneath
me, but now with this difference; I saw but was not seen. I walked unshadowed; I came
unheralded. From me had dropped the old cloak, the old response; the hollowed hand
that beats back sounds. Thin as a ghost, leaving no trace where I trod, perceiving
merely, I walked alone in a new world, never trodden; brushing new flowers, unable to
speak save in a child’s words of one syllable; without shelter from phrases — I who
have made so many; unattended, I who have always gone with my kind; solitary, I who
have always had someone to share the empty grate, or the cupboard with its hanging
loop of gold.
‘But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red — even
they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through. How
describe or say anything in articulate words again? — save that it fades, save that it
undergoes a gradual transformation, becomes, even in the course of one short walk,
habitual — this scene also. Blindness returns as one moves and one leaf repeats
another. Loveliness returns as one looks, with all its train of phantom phrases. One
breathes in and out substantial breath; down in the valley the train draws across the
fields lop-eared with smoke.
‘But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and
the sound of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking. The
old nurse who turns the pages of the picture-book had stopped and had said, “Look. This
is the truth.”
‘So I was thinking as I came along Shaftesbury Avenue to-night. I was thinking of that
page in the picture-book. And when I met you in the place where one goes to hang up
one’s coat I said to myself, “It does not matter whom I meet. All this little affair of ‘being’
is over. Who this is I do not know; nor care; we will dine together.” So I hung up my coat,
tapped you on the shoulder, and said, “Sit with me.”
‘Now the meal is finished; we are surrounded by peelings and breadcrumbs. I have tried
to break off this bunch and hand it you; but whether there is substance or truth in it I do
not know. Nor do I know exactly where we are. What city does that stretch of sky look
down upon? Is it Paris, is it London where we sit, or some southern city of pink-washed
houses lying under cypresses, under high mountains, where eagles soar? I do not at this
moment feel certain.
‘I begin now to forget; I begin to doubt the fixity of tables, the reality of here and now, to
tap my knuckles smartly upon the edges of apparently solid objects and say, “Are you
hard?” I have seen so many different things, have made so many different sentences. I
have lost in the process of eating and drinking and rubbing my eyes along surfaces that
thin, hard shell which cases the soul, which, in youth, shuts one in — hence the
fierceness, and the tap, tap, tap of the remorseless beaks of the young. And now I ask,
“Who am I?” I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I
all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now
Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find
any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt
“I am you”. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish,
was overcome. Yes, ever since old Mrs Constable lifted her sponge and pouring warm
water over me covered me with flesh I have been sensitive, percipient. Here on my brow
is the blow I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape of my neck is the kiss Jinny gave
 108

Louis. My eyes fill with Susan’s tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread, the
pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of the wind of her flight when she leapt.
‘Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and
set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk
into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the
inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night;
who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom
fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape — shadows of people one might have been;
unborn selves. There is the old brute, too, the savage, the hairy man who dabbles his
fingers in ropes of entrails; and gobbles and belches; whose speech is guttural, visceral
— well, he is here. He squats in me. To-night he has been feasted on quails, salad, and
sweetbread. He now holds a glass of fine old brandy in his paw. He brindles, purrs and
shoots warm thrills all down my spine as I sip. It is true, he washes his hands before
dinner, but they are still hairy. He buttons on trousers and waistcoats, but they contain
the same organs. He jibs if I keep him waiting for dinner. He mops and mows
perpetually, pointing with his half-idiot gestures of greed and covetousness at what he
desires. I assure you, I have great difficulty sometimes in controlling him. That man, the
hairy, the ape-like, has contributed his part to my life. He has given a greener glow to
green things, has held his torch with its red flames, its thick and smarting smoke, behind
every leaf. He has lit up the cool garden even. He has brandished his torch in murky by-
streets where girls suddenly seem to shine with a red and intoxicating translucency. Oh,
he has tossed his torch high! He has led me wild dances!
‘But no more. Now to-night, my body rises tier upon tier like some cool temple whose
floor is strewn with carpets and murmurs rise and the altars stand smoking; but up
above, here in my serene head, comes only fine gusts of melody, waves of incense, while
the lost dove wails, and the banners tremble above tombs, and the dark airs of midnight
shake trees outside the open windows.
'When I look down from this transcendency, how beautiful are even the crumbled relics
of bread! What shapely spirals the peelings of pears make — how thin, and mottled like
some sea-bird’s egg. Even the forks laid straight side by side appear lucid, logical, exact;
and the horns of the rolls which we have left are glazed, yellow-plated, hard. I could
worship my hand even, with its fan of bones laced by blue mysterious veins and its
astonishing look of aptness, suppleness and ability to curl softly or suddenly crush — its
infinite sensibility.
‘Immeasurably receptive, holding everything, trembling with fullness, yet clear,
contained — so my being seems, now that desire urges it no more out and away; now
that curiosity no longer dyes it a thousand colours. It lies deep, tideless, immune, now
that he is dead, the man I called “Bernard”, the man who kept a book in his pocket in
which he made notes — phrases for the moon, notes of features; how people looked,
turned, dropped their cigarette ends; under B, butterfly powder, under D, ways of
naming death. But now let the door open, the glass door that is for ever turning on its
hinges.
'Let a woman come, let a young man in evening-dress with a moustache sit down: is
there anything that they can tell me? No! I know all that, too. And if she suddenly gets up
and goes, “My dear,” I say, “you no longer make me look after you.” The shock of the
falling wave which has sounded all my life, which woke me so that I saw the gold loop
on the cupboard, no longer makes quiver what I hold.
 109

‘So now, taking upon me the mystery of things, I could go like a spy without leaving this
place, without stirring from my chair. I can visit the remote verges of the desert lands
where the savage sits by the camp-fire. Day rises; the girl lifts the watery fire- hearted
jewels to her brow; the sun levels his beams straight at the sleeping house; the waves
deepen their bars; they fling themselves on shore; back blows the spray; sweeping their
waters they surround the boat and the sea-holly. The birds sing in chorus; deep tunnels
run between the stalks of flowers; the house is whitened; the sleeper stretches;
gradually all is astir. Light floods the room and drives shadow beyond shadow to where
they hang in folds inscrutable. What does the central shadow hold? Something?
Nothing? I do not know.
‘Oh, but there is your face. I catch your eye. I, who had been thinking myself so vast, a
temple, a church, a whole universe, unconfined and capable of being everywhere on the
verge of things and here too, am now nothing but what you see — an elderly man,
rather heavy, grey above the ears, who (I see myself in the glass) leans one elbow on the
table, and holds in his left hand a glass of old brandy. That is the blow you have dealt
me. I have walked bang into the pillar-box. I reel from side to side. I put my hands to my
head. My hat is off — I have dropped my stick. I have made an awful ass of myself and
am justly laughed at by any passer- by.
‘Lord, how unutterably disgusting life is! What dirty tricks it plays us, one moment free;
the next, this. Here we are among the breadcrumbs and the stained napkins again. That
knife is already congealing with grease. Disorder, sordidity and corruption surround us.
We have been taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds. It is with these greasy
crumbs, slobbered over napkins, and little corpses that we have to build. Always it
begins again; always there is the enemy; eyes meeting ours; fingers twitching ours; the
effort waiting. Call the waiter. Pay the bill. We must pull ourselves up out of our chairs.
We must find our coats. We must go. Must, must, must — detestable word. Once more, I
who had thought myself immune, who had said, “Now I am rid of all that,” find that the
wave has tumbled me over, head over heels, scattering my possessions, leaving me to
collect, to assemble, to heap together, summon my forces, rise and confront the enemy.
‘It is strange that we, who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much
suffering. Strange that the face of a person whom I scarcely know save that I think we
met once on the gangway of a ship bound for Africa — a mere adumbration of eyes,
cheeks, nostrils — should have power to inflict this insult. You look, eat, smile, are
bored, pleased, annoyed — that is all I know. Yet this shadow which has sat by me for an
hour or two, this mask from which peep two eyes, has power to drive me back, to pinion
me down among all those other faces, to shut me in a hot room; to send me dashing like
a moth from candle to candle.
‘But wait. While they add up the bill behind the screen, wait one moment. Now that I
have reviled you for the blow that sent me staggering among peelings and crumblings
and old scraps of meat, I will record in words of one syllable how also under your gaze
with that compulsion on me I begin to perceive this, that and the other. The clock ticks;
the woman sneezes; the waiter comes — there is a gradual coming together, running
into one, acceleration and unification. Listen: a whistle sounds, wheels rush, the door
creaks on its hinges. I regain the sense of the complexity and the reality and the
struggle, for which I thank you. And with some pity, some envy and much good will, take
your hand and bid you good night.
 110

‘Heaven be praised for solitude! I am alone now. That almost unknown person has gone,
to catch some train, to take some cab, to go to some place or person whom I do not
know. The face looking at me has gone. The pressure is removed. Here are empty coffee-
cups. Here are chairs turned but nobody sits on them. Here are empty tables and
nobody any more coming to dine at them to-night.
‘Let me now raise my song of glory. Heaven be praised for solitude. Let me be alone. Let
me cast and throw away this veil of being, this cloud that changes with the least breath,
night and day, and all night and all day. While I sat here I have been changing. I have
watched the sky change. I have seen clouds cover the stars, then free the stars, then
cover the stars again. Now I look at their changing no more. Now no one sees me and I
change no more. Heaven be praised for solitude that has removed the pressure of the
eye, the solicitation of the body, and all need of lies and phrases.
‘My book, stuffed with phrases, has dropped to the floor. It lies under the table, to be
swept up by the charwoman when she comes wearily at dawn looking for scraps of
paper, old tram tickets, and here and there a note screwed into a ball and left with the
litter to be swept up. What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what
name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use,
words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find
their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of
chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me
where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes
down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that
break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts, making wild music, false phrases. I
have done with phrases.
‘How much better is silence; the coffee-cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself
like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with
bare things, this coffee-cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being
myself. Do not come and worry me with your hints that it is time to shut the shop and be
gone. I would willingly give all my money that you should not disturb me but will let me
sit on and on, silent, alone.
‘But now the head waiter, who has finished his own meal, appears and frowns; he takes
his muffler from his pocket and ostentatiously makes ready to go. They must go; must
put up the shutters, most fold the table-cloths, and give one brush with a wet mop under
the tables.
‘Curse you then. However beat and done with it all I am, I must haul myself up, and find
the particular coat that belongs to me; must push my arms into the sleeves; must muffle
myself up against the night air and be off. I, I, I, tired as I am, spent as I am, and almost
worn out with all this rubbing of my nose along the surfaces of things, even I, an elderly
man who is getting rather heavy and dislikes exertion, must take myself off and catch
some last train.
‘Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilization is burnt out. The sky is
dark as polished whalebone. But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of
dawn. There is a stir of some sort — sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping.
There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an
elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some
sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another
twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw
 111

back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of
mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that
hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes,
this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.
‘And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a
new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs
and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you
whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the
enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back
like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my
horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’
The waves broke on the shore.

I'm Julie, the woman who runs Global Grey - the website where this ebook was
published. These are my own formatted editions, and I hope you enjoyed reading
this particular one.
If you have this book because you bought it as part of a collection – thank you so
much for your support.
If you downloaded it for free – please consider (if you haven’t already) making a
small donation to help keep the site running.
If you bought this from Amazon or anywhere else, you have been ripped off by
someone taking free ebooks from my site and selling them as their own. You
should definitely get a refund :/
Thanks for reading this and I hope you visit the site again - new books are added
regularly so you'll always find something of interest :)