Virginia Woolf

In the Orchard
Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple tree. Her book
had fallen into the grass, and her finger still seemed to point at the sentence ‘Ce pays
est vraiment un des coins du monde oui le rire des filles elate le mieux … ‘ as if she
had fallen asleep just there. The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and
again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple-trees, filled them. Then,
when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the
grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her
face.

Four feet in the air over her head the apples hung. Suddenly there was a shrill clamour
as if they were gongs of cracked brass beaten violently, irregularly, and brutally. It
was only the school-children saying the multiplication table in unison, stopped by the
teacher, scolded, and beginning to say the multiplication table over again. But this
clamour passed four feet above Miranda’s head, went through the apple boughs, and,
striking against the cowman’s little boy who was picking blackberries in the hedge
when he should have been at school, made him tear his thumb on the thorns.

Next there was a solitary cry—sad, human, brutal. Old Parsley was, indeed, blind
drunk.

Then the very topmost leaves of the apple-tree, flat like little fish against the blue,
thirty feet above the earth, chimed with a pensive and lugubrious note. It was the
organ in the church playing one of Hymns Ancient and Modern. The sound floated
out and was cut into atoms by a flock of field-fares flying at an enormous speed—
somewhere or other. Miranda lay asleep thirty feet beneath.
Then above the apple-tree and the pear-tree two hundred feet above Miranda lying
asleep in the orchard bells thudded, intermittent, sullen, didactic, for six poor women
of the parish were being churched and the Rector was returning thanks to heaven.

And above that with a sharp squeak the golden feather of the church tower turned
from south to east. The wind changed. Above everything else it droned, above the
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woods, the meadows, the hills, miles above Miranda lying in the orchard asleep. It
swept on, eyeless, brainless, meeting nothing that could stand against it, until,
wheeling the other way, it turned south again. Miles below, in a space as big as the
eye of a needle, Miranda stood upright and cried aloud: ‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!

Miranda slept in the orchard—or perhaps she was not asleep, for her lips moved very
slightly as if they were saying, ‘Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde … oui le
rire des filles … eclate … eclate … eclate .’and then she smiled and let her body sink
all its weight on to the enormous earth which rises, she thought, to carry me on its
back as if I were a leaf, or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table), or,
Miranda went on, I might be lying on the top of a cliff with the gulls screaming above
me. The higher they fly, she continued, as the teacher scolded the children and rapped
Jimmy over the knuckles till they bled, the deeper they look into the sea—into the sea,
she repeated, and her fingers relaxed and her lips closed gently as if she were floating
on the sea, and then, when the shout of the drunken man sounded overhead, she drew
breath with an extraordinary ecstasy, for she thought that she heard life itself crying
out from a rough tongue in a scarlet mouth, from the wind, from the bells, from the
curved green leaves of the cabbages.

Naturally she was being married when the organ played the tune from Hymns Ancient
and Modern, and, when the bells rang after the six poor women had been churched,
the sullen intermittent thud made her think that the very earth shook with the hoofs of
the horse that was galloping towards her (‘Ah, I have only to wait!’ she sighed), and it
seemed to her that everything had already begun moving, crying, riding, flying round
her, across her, towards her in a pattern.

Mary is chopping the wood, she thought; Pearman is herding the cows; the carts are
coming up from the meadows; the rider—and she traced out the lines that the men, the
carts, the birds, and the rider made over the countryside until they all seemed driven
out, round, and across by the beat of her own heart.

Miles up in the air the wind changed; the golden feather of the church tower
squeaked; and Miranda jumped up and cried: ‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!
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Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep or was she not asleep? Her purple
dress stretched between the two apple trees. There were twenty-four apple-trees in the
orchard, some slanting slightly, others growing straight with a rush up the trunk which
spread wide into branches and formed into round red or yellow drops. Each apple-tree
had sufficient space. The sky exactly fitted the leaves. When the breeze blew, the line
of the boughs against the wall slanted slightly and then returned. A wagtail flew
diagonally from one corner to another. Cautiously hopping, a thrush advanced
towards a fallen apple; from the other wall a sparrow fluttered just above the grass.
The uprush of the trees was tied down by these movements; the whole was compacted
by the orchard walls. For miles beneath the earth was clamped together; rippled on the
surface with wavering air; and across the corner of the orchard the blue-green was slit
by a purple streak. The wind changing, one bunch of apples was tossed so high that it
blotted out two cows in the meadow (‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!’ cried Miranda), and
the apples hung straight across the wall again.
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Kew Gardens
FROM THE OVAL-SHAPED flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks
spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the
tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface;
and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough
with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to
be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow
lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a
spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a
pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop,
it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one
expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver
grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the
branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its
illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and
tongue-shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the
colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk
in Kew Gardens in July.

The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously
irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the
turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. The man was about six inches in front of the
woman, strolling carelessly, while she bore on with greater purpose, only turning her
head now and then to see that the children were not too far behind. The man kept this
distance in front of the woman purposely, though perhaps unconsciously, for he
wished to go on with his thoughts.

"Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily," he thought. "We sat somewhere over there
by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot afternoon. How the
dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the
square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved
impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her
seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some
reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower
in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say 'Yes' at once. But
the dragonfly went round and round: it never settled anywhere–of course not, happily
not, or I shouldn't be walking here with Eleanor and the children–Tell me, Eleanor.
D'you ever think of the past?"

"Why do you ask, Simon?"

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"Because I've been thinking of the past. I've been thinking of Lily, the woman I might
have married.... Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?"

"Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with
men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it,
those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees,... one's happiness, one's
reality?"

"For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly–"

"For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago,
down by the side of a lake, painting the water-lilies, the first red water-lilies I'd ever
seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the
afternoon so that I couldn't paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I
would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only–it was so precious–the
kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses
all my life. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert."

They walked on the past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon
diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and
shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.

In the oval flower bed the snail, whose shell had been stained red, blue, and yellow for
the space of two minutes or so, now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell,
and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth which broke away and rolled
down as it passed over them. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing
in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to
cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennæ trembling as if in
deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction.
Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved
from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin
crackling texture–all these objects lay across the snail's progress between one stalk
and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent
of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.

This time they were both men. The younger of the two wore an expression of perhaps
unnatural calm; he raised his eyes and fixed them very steadily in front of him while
his companion spoke, and directly his companion had done speaking he looked on the
ground again and sometimes opened his lips only after a long pause and sometimes
did not open them at all. The elder man had a curiously uneven and shaky method of
walking, jerking his hand forward and throwing up his head abruptly, rather in the
manner of an impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house; but in the man
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these gestures were irresolute and pointless. He talked almost incessantly; he smiled
to himself and again began to talk, as if the smile had been an answer. He was talking
about spirits–the spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling
him all sorts of odd things about their experiences in Heaven.

"Heaven was known to the ancients as Thessaly, William, and now, with this war, the
spirit matter is rolling between the hills like thunder." He paused, seemed to listen,
smiled, jerked his head and continued:–

"You have a small electric battery and a piece of rubber to insulate the wire–isolate?–
insulate?–well, we'll skip the details, no good going into details that wouldn't be
understood–and in short the little machine stands in any convenient position by the
head of the bed, we will say, on a neat mahogany stand. All arrangements being
properly fixed by workmen under my direction, the widow applies her ear and
summons the spirit by sign as agreed. Women! Widows! Women in black–"

Here he seemed to have caught sight of a woman's dress in the distance, which in the
shade looked a purple black. He took off his hat, placed his hand upon his heart, and
hurried towards her muttering and gesticulating feverishly. But William caught him
by the sleeve and touched a flower with the tip of his walking-stick in order to divert
the old man's attention. After looking at it for a moment in some confusion the old
man bent his ear to it and seemed to answer a voice speaking from it, for he began
talking about the forests of Uruguay which he had visited hundreds of years ago in
company with the most beautiful young woman in Europe. He could be heard
murmuring about forests of Uruguay blanketed with the wax petals of tropical roses,
nightingales, sea beaches, mermaids, and women drowned at sea, as he suffered
himself to be moved on by William, upon whose face the look of stoical patience
grew slowly deeper and deeper.

Following his steps so closely as to be slightly puzzled by his gestures came two
elderly women of the lower middle class, one stout and ponderous, the other rosy
cheeked and nimble. Like most people of their station they were frankly fascinated by
any signs of eccentricity betokening a disordered brain, especially in the well-to-do;
but they were too far off to be certain whether the gestures were merely eccentric or
genuinely mad. After they had scrutinised the old man's back in silence for a moment
and given each other a queer, sly look, they went on energetically piecing together
their very complicated dialogue:

"Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says–"

"My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar,

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Sugar, flour, kippers, greens,

Sugar, sugar, sugar."
The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the flowers
standing cool, firm, and upright in the earth, with a curious expression. She saw them
as a sleeper waking from a heavy sleep sees a brass candlestick reflecting the light in
an unfamiliar way, and closes his eyes and opens them, and seeing the brass
candlestick again, finally starts broad awake and stares at the candlestick with all his
powers. So the heavy woman came to a standstill opposite the oval-shaped flower
bed, and ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was saying. She
stood there letting the words fall over her, swaying the top part of her body slowly
backwards and forwards, looking at the flowers. Then she suggested that they should
find a seat and have their tea.

The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without
going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing
a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming
crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this
determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved
high enough from the ground to admit him. He had just inserted his head in the
opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting used to the cool
brown light when two other people came past outside on the turf. This time they were
both young, a young man and a young woman. They were both in the prime of youth,
or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth, the season before the
smooth pink folds of the flower have burst their gummy case, when the wings of the
butterfly, though fully grown, are motionless in the sun.

"Lucky it isn't Friday," he observed.

"Why? D'you believe in luck?"

"They make you pay sixpence on Friday."

"What's sixpence anyway? Isn't it worth sixpence?"

"What's 'it'–what do you mean by 'it'?"

"O, anything–I mean–you know what I mean."

Long pauses came between each of these remarks; they were uttered in toneless and
monotonous voices. The couple stood still on the edge of the flower bed, and together
pressed the end of her parasol deep down into the soft earth. The action and the fact
that his hand rested on the top of hers expressed their feelings in a strange way, as
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these short insignificant words also expressed something, words with short wings for
their heavy body of meaning, inadequate to carry them far and thus alighting
awkwardly upon the very common objects that surrounded them, and were to their
inexperienced touch so massive; but who knows (so they thought as they pressed the
parasol into the earth) what precipices aren't concealed in them, or what slopes of ice
don't shine in the sun on the other side? Who knows? Who has ever seen this before?
Even when she wondered what sort of tea they gave you at Kew, he felt that
something loomed up behind her words, and stood vast and solid behind them; and the
mist very slowly rose and uncovered–O, Heavens, what were those shapes?–little
white tables, and waitresses who looked first at her and then at him; and there was a
bill that he would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he
assured himself, fingering the coin in his pocket, real to everyone except to him and to
her; even to him it began to seem real; and then–but it was too exciting to stand and
think any longer, and he pulled the parasol out of the earth with a jerk and was
impatient to find the place where one had tea with other people, like other people.

"Come along, Trissie; it's time we had our tea."

"Wherever does one have one's tea?" she asked with the oddest thrill of excitement in
her voice, looking vaguely round and letting herself be drawn on down the grass path,
trailing her parasol, turning her head this way and that way, forgetting her tea, wishing
to go down there and then down there, remembering orchids and cranes among wild
flowers, a Chinese pagoda and a crimson crested bird; but he bore her on.

Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement
passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green blue vapour, in
which at first their bodies had substance and a dash of colour, but later both substance
and colour dissolved in the green-blue atmosphere. How hot it was! So hot that even
the thrush chose to hop, like a mechanical bird, in the shadow of the flowers, with
long pauses between one movement and the next; instead of rambling vaguely the
white butterflies danced one above another, making with their white shifting flakes
the outline of a shattered marble column above the tallest flowers; the glass roofs of
the palm house shone as if a whole market full of shiny green umbrellas had opened in
the sun; and in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its
fierce soul. Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men,
women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the
breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the
trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it
faintly with red and blue. It seemed as if all gross and heavy bodies had sunk down in
the heat motionless and lay huddled upon the ground, but their voices went wavering
from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick waxen bodies of candles.
Voices. Yes, voices. Wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly with such depth
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of contentment, such passion of desire, or, in the voices of children, such freshness of
surprise; breaking the silence? But there was no silence; all the time the motor
omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of
Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city
murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of
flowers flashed their colours into the air.
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The Mark on the Wall

PERHAPS IT WAS the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up
and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what
one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of
my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes,
it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember
that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the
first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a
moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from
the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights
riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark
interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child
perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or
seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry
a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.... If that mark was made by a nail, it
can't have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature–the miniature of a lady
with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A
fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen
pictures in that way–an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they
were–very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places,
because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted
to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said,
and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it
when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and
the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as
one rushes past in the train.

But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made by a nail after
all; it's too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten
to one I shouldn't be able to say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever
knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought!
The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we
have–what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization–let me just count
over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most
mysterious of losses–what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble–three pale blue
canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the
steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ–all
gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a
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scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back,
that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare
life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an
hour–landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the
feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like
brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying
back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the
perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the
flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should
one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's
eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying
which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that
one won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces
of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-
shaped blots of an indistinct colour–dim pinks and blues–which will, as time goes on,
become more definite, become–I don't know what....

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some
round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not
being a very vigilant housekeeper–look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example,
the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots
utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe.

The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane.... I want to think quietly,
calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip
easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to
sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady
myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes.... Shakespeare.... Well, he will
do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into
the fire, so–A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down
through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through
the open door,–for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's evening–But
how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit
upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for
those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest
mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own
praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them;
they are thoughts like this:
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"And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I'd seen a
flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I
said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the
reign of Charles the First?" I asked–(but I don't remember the answer). Tall flowers
with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up
the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if
I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-
protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself
from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the
original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a
matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears,
and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer,
but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people–what an airless, shallow,
bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other
in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts
for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will
realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not
one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore,
those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more
out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and
Shakespeare perhaps–but these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound
of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers–a whole class of
things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real
thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation.
Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks,
Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits–like the
habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it.
There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was
that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon
them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal
palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and
yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday
walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half
phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense
of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real
standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view
which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table
of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many
men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where
the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils,
 13

Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom–if
freedom exists....

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it
entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow,
suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain
point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on
the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should
prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it
natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf.... There
must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given
them a name.... What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the
most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods
of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy,
which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the
comparison of arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns,
an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make
plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great
question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself
feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It
is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites a
pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when
a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of
the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum,
together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great
many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson
drank out of–proving I really don't know what.

No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very
moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really–what shall we say?–the head
of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the
patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat
of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit
room, what should I gain?–Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think
sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men
save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods
brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars?
And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty
and health of mind increases.... Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A
quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world
without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a
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world which one could slice with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin,
grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea
eggs.... How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up
through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections–if it
were not for Whitaker's Almanack–if it were not for the Table of Precedency!

I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is–a nail, a rose-
leaf, a crack in the wood?

Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought,
she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality,
for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker's Table of Precedency? The
Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High
Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody,
such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom.
Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging
you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the
mark on the wall.

I understand Nature's game–her prompting to take action as a way of ending any

thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight
contempt for men of action–men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in
putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the
sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and
the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite,
something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on
the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity,
worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some
existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of.... Wood is a pleasant
thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how
they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in
meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers–all things one likes to think about. The
cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that
when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up
again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and
of water-beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think
of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the
storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights
standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the
iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all
 15

night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold
the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases
of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look
straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes.... One by one the fibres snap
beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling,
the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn't done with;
there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in
bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after
tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I
should like to take each one separately–but something is getting in the way.... Where
was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker's
Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving,
falling, slipping, vanishing.... There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing
over me and saying–

"I'm going out to buy a newspaper."

"Yes?"

"Though it's no good buying newspapers.... Nothing ever happens. Curse this war;
God damn this war!... All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our
wall."

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.