Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf [books like beach read .TXT] 📗

as much as for the face. And the Greeks could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it. First you read Xenophon; then Euripides. One day⁠—that was an occasion, by God⁠—what people have said appears to have sense in it; “the Greek spirit”; the Greek this, that, and the other; though it is absurd, by the way, to say that any Greek comes near Shakespeare. The point is, however, that we have been brought up in an illusion.

Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the Daily Mail crumpled in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom.

“But it’s the way we’re brought up,” he went on.

And it all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done about it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about to be executed. Clara Durrant had left him at a party to talk to an American called Pilchard. And he had come all the way to Greece and left her. They wore evening-dresses, and talked nonsense⁠—what damned nonsense⁠—and he put out his hand for the Globe Trotter, an international magazine which is supplied free of charge to the proprietors of hotels.

In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge, beneath the windows. The whole of civilization was being condemned.

The waiter was quite indifferent to that too. Aristotle, a dirty man, carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest now occupying the only armchair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down, put something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there.

“I shall want to be called early tomorrow,” said Jacob, over his shoulder. “I am going to Olympia.”

This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention. Perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough. Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. He would go into Parliament and make fine speeches⁠—but what use are fine speeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters? Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins⁠—of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and evening parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray’s Inn⁠—something solid, immovable, and grotesque⁠—is at the back of it, Jacob thought probable. But then there was the British Empire which was beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving Home Rule to Ireland. What did the Daily Mail say about that?

For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things⁠—as indeed the chambermaid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys, studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing-table, was aware.

That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florinda knew, as she knew everything, by instinct.

And Betty Flanders even now suspected it, as she read his letter, posted at Milan, “Telling me,” she complained to Mrs. Jarvis, “really nothing that I want to know”; but she brooded over it.

Fanny Elmer felt it to desperation. For he would take his stick and his hat and would walk to the window, and look perfectly absentminded and very stern too, she thought.

“I am going,” he would say, “to cadge a meal of Bonamy.”

“Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames,” Fanny cried, as she hurried past the Foundling Hospital.

“But the Daily Mail isn’t to be trusted,” Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed so profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him at any moment, which was odd in a man who enjoyed things so, was not much given to analysis, but was horribly romantic, of course, Bonamy thought, in his rooms in Lincoln’s Inn.

“He will fall in love,” thought Bonamy. “Some Greek woman with a straight nose.”

It was to Bonamy that Jacob wrote from Patras⁠—to Bonamy who couldn’t love a woman and never read a foolish book.

There are very few good books after all, for we can’t count profuse histories, travels in mule carts to discover the sources of the Nile, or the volubility of fiction.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them. I like words to be hard⁠—such were Bonamy’s views, and they won him the hostility of those whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can’t forbear a shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature. That was not Bonamy’s way at all. That his taste in literature affected his friendships, and made him silent, secretive, fastidious, and only quite at his ease with one or two young men of his own way of thinking, was the charge against him.

But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking⁠—far from it, Bonamy sighed, laying the thin sheets of notepaper on the table and falling into thought about Jacob’s character, not for the first time.

The trouble was this romantic vein in him. “But mixed with the stupidity which leads him into these absurd predicaments,” thought Bonamy, “there is something⁠—something”⁠—he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob than of anyone in the world.

Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him