Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf [non fiction books to read .txt] 📗

CHAPTER ONE

“So of course,” wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper

in the sand, “there was nothing for it but to leave.”

 

Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved

the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly

filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she

had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor’s little yacht was bending

like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful

things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular;

the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.

 

“…nothing for it but to leave,” she read.

 

“Well, if Jacob doesn’t want to play” (the shadow of Archer, her eldest

son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt

chilly—it was the third of September already), “if Jacob doesn’t want

to play”—what a horrid blot! It must be getting late.

 

“Where IS that tiresome little boy?” she said. “I don’t see him. Run and

find him. Tell him to come at once.” “…but mercifully,” she scribbled,

ignoring the full stop, “everything seems satisfactorily arranged,

packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand the

perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won’t allow….”

 

Such were Betty Flanders’s letters to Captain Barfoot—many-paged, tear-stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain

Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahlias

in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her

eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis,

the rector’s wife, think at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs.

Flanders bent low over her little boys’ heads, that marriage is a

fortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking up

stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poor

creatures. Mrs. Flanders had been a widow for these two years.

 

“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” Archer shouted.

 

“Scarborough,” Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold

line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a

stamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then

fumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama

hat suspended his paint-brush.

 

Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Here

was that woman moving—actually going to get up—confound her! He struck

the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was

too pale—greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull

suspended just so—too pale as usual. The critics would say it was too

pale, for he was an unknown man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite with

his landladies’ children, wearing a cross on his watch chain, and much

gratified if his landladies liked his pictures—which they often did.

 

“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” Archer shouted.

 

Exasperated by the noise, yet loving children, Steele picked nervously

at the dark little coils on his palette.

 

“I saw your brother—I saw your brother,” he said, nodding his head, as

Archer lagged past him, trailing his spade, and scowling at the old

gentleman in spectacles.

 

“Over there—by the rock,” Steele muttered, with his brush between his

teeth, squeezing out raw sienna, and keeping his eyes fixed on Betty

Flanders’s back.

 

“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” shouted Archer, lagging on after a second.

 

The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from

all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking

against rocks—so it sounded.

 

Steele frowned; but was pleased by the effect of the black—it was just

THAT note which brought the rest together. “Ah, one may learn to paint

at fifty! There’s Titian…” and so, having found the right tint, up he

looked and saw to his horror a cloud over the bay.

 

Mrs. Flanders rose, slapped her coat this side and that to get the sand

off, and picked up her black parasol.

 

The rock was one of those tremendously solid brown, or rather black,

rocks which emerge from the sand like something primitive. Rough with

crinkled limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, a

small boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel rather

heroic, before he gets to the top.

 

But there, on the very top, is a hollow full of water, with a sandy

bottom; with a blob of jelly stuck to the side, and some mussels. A fish

darts across. The fringe of yellow-brown seaweed flutters, and out

pushes an opal-shelled crab—

 

“Oh, a huge crab,” Jacob murmured—and begins his journey on weakly legs

on the sandy bottom. Now! Jacob plunged his hand. The crab was cool and

very light. But the water was thick with sand, and so, scrambling down,

Jacob was about to jump, holding his bucket in front of him, when he

saw, stretched entirely rigid, side by side, their faces very red, an

enormous man and woman.

 

An enormous man and woman (it was early-closing day) were stretched

motionless, with their heads on pocket-handkerchiefs, side by side,

within a few feet of the sea, while two or three gulls gracefully

skirted the incoming waves, and settled near their boots.

 

The large red faces lying on the bandanna handkerchiefs stared up at

Jacob. Jacob stared down at them. Holding his bucket very carefully,

Jacob then jumped deliberately and trotted away very nonchalantly at

first, but faster and faster as the waves came creaming up to him and he

had to swerve to avoid them, and the gulls rose in front of him and

floated out and settled again a little farther on. A large black woman

was sitting on the sand. He ran towards her.

 

“Nanny! Nanny!” he cried, sobbing the words out on the crest of each

gasping breath.

 

The waves came round her. She was a rock. She was covered with the

seaweed which pops when it is pressed. He was lost.

 

There he stood. His face composed itself. He was about to roar when,

lying among the black sticks and straw under the cliff, he saw a whole

skull—perhaps a cow’s skull, a skull, perhaps, with the teeth in it.

Sobbing, but absent-mindedly, he ran farther and farther away until he

held the skull in his arms.

 

“There he is!” cried Mrs. Flanders, coming round the rock and covering

the whole space of the beach in a few seconds. “What has he got hold of?

Put it down, Jacob! Drop it this moment! Something horrid, I know. Why

didn’t you stay with us? Naughty little boy! Now put it down. Now come

along both of you,” and she swept round, holding Archer by one hand and

fumbling for Jacob’s arm with the other. But he ducked down and picked

up the sheep’s jaw, which was loose.

 

Swinging her bag, clutching her parasol, holding Archer’s hand, and

telling the story of the gunpowder explosion in which poor Mr. Curnow

had lost his eye, Mrs. Flanders hurried up the steep lane, aware all the

time in the depths of her mind of some buried discomfort.

 

There on the sand not far from the lovers lay the old sheep’s skull

without its jaw. Clean, white, wind-swept, sand-rubbed, a more

unpolluted piece of bone existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall. The

sea holly would grow through the eye-sockets; it would turn to powder,

or some golfer, hitting his ball one fine day, would disperse a little

dust—No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs. Flanders. It’s a great

experiment coming so far with young children. There’s no man to help

with the perambulator. And Jacob is such a handful; so obstinate

already.

 

“Throw it away, dear, do,” she said, as they got into the road; but

Jacob squirmed away from her; and the wind rising, she took out her

bonnet-pin, looked at the sea, and stuck it in afresh. The wind was

rising. The waves showed that uneasiness, like something alive, restive,

expecting the whip, of waves before a storm. The fishing-boats were

leaning to the water’s brim. A pale yellow light shot across the purple

sea; and shut. The lighthouse was lit. “Come along,” said Betty

Flanders. The sun blazed in their faces and gilded the great

blackberries trembling out from the hedge which Archer tried to strip as

they passed.

 

“Don’t lag, boys. You’ve got nothing to change into,” said Betty,

pulling them along, and looking with uneasy emotion at the earth

displayed so luridly, with sudden sparks of light from greenhouses in

gardens, with a sort of yellow and black mutability, against this

blazing sunset, this astonishing agitation and vitality of colour, which

stirred Betty Flanders and made her think of responsibility and danger.

She gripped Archer’s hand. On she plodded up the hill.

 

“What did I ask you to remember?” she said.

 

“I don’t know,” said Archer.

 

“Well, I don’t know either,” said Betty, humorously and simply, and who

shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion,

mother wit, old wives’ tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing

daring, humour, and sentimentality—who shall deny that in these

respects every woman is nicer than any man?

 

Well, Betty Flanders, to begin with.

 

She had her hand upon the garden gate.

 

“The meat!” she exclaimed, striking the latch down.

 

She had forgotten the meat.

 

There was Rebecca at the window.

 

The bareness of Mrs. Pearce’s front room was fully displayed at ten

o’clock at night when a powerful oil lamp stood on the middle of the

table. The harsh light fell on the garden; cut straight across the lawn;

lit up a child’s bucket and a purple aster and reached the hedge. Mrs.

Flanders had left her sewing on the table. There were her large reels of

white cotton and her steel spectacles; her