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?"
"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 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
antennae 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 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,
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 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 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.
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 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:
"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, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense
of illegitimate freedom--if freedom exists....