Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf [non fiction books to read .txt] 📗
- Author: Virginia Woolf
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and reciting the names of the constellations: “Andromeda, Bootes,
Sidonia, Cassiopeia. …”
“Andromeda,” murmured Miss Eliot, shifting the telescope slightly.
Mrs. Durrant and Charlotte looked along the barrel of the instrument
pointed at the skies.
“There are MILLIONS of stars,” said Charlotte with conviction. Miss
Eliot turned away from the telescope. The young men laughed suddenly in
the dining-room.
“Let ME look,” said Charlotte eagerly.
“The stars bore me,” said Mrs. Durrant, walking down the terrace with
Julia Eliot. “I read a book once about the stars. … What are they
saying?” She stopped in front of the dining-room window. “Timothy,” she
noted.
“The silent young man,” said Miss Eliot.
“Yes, Jacob Flanders,” said Mrs. Durrant.
“Oh, mother! I didn’t recognize you!” exclaimed Clara Durrant, coming
from the opposite direction with Elsbeth. “How delicious,” she breathed,
crushing a verbena leaf.
Mrs. Durrant turned and walked away by herself.
“Clara!” she called. Clara went to her.
“How unlike they are!” said Miss Eliot.
Mr. Wortley passed them, smoking a cigar.
“Every day I live I find myself agreeing …” he said as he passed them.
“It’s so interesting to guess …” murmured Julia Eliot.
“When first we came out we could see the flowers in that bed,” said
Elsbeth.
“We see very little now,” said Miss Eliot.
“She must have been so beautiful, and everybody loved her, of course,”
said Charlotte. “I suppose Mr. Wortley …” she paused.
“Edward’s death was a tragedy,” said Miss Eliot decidedly.
Here Mr. Erskine joined them.
“There’s no such thing as silence,” he said positively. “I can hear
twenty different sounds on a night like this without counting your
voices.”
“Make a bet of it?” said Charlotte.
“Done,” said Mr. Erskine. “One, the sea; two, the wind; three, a dog;
four …”
The others passed on.
“Poor Timothy,” said Elsbeth.
“A very fine night,” shouted Miss Eliot into Mr. Clutterbuck’s ear.
“Like to look at the stars?” said the old man, turning the telescope
towards Elsbeth.
“Doesn’t it make you melancholy—looking at the stars?” shouted Miss
Eliot.
“Dear me no, dear me no,” Mr. Clutterbuck chuckled when he understood
her. “Why should it make me melancholy? Not for a moment—dear me no.”
“Thank you, Timothy, but I’m coming in,” said Miss Eliot. “Elsbeth,
here’s a shawl.”
“I’m coming in,” Elsbeth murmured with her eye to the telescope.
“Cassiopeia,” she murmured. “Where are you all?” she asked, taking her
eye away from the telescope. “How dark it is!”
Mrs. Durrant sat in the drawing-room by a lamp winding a ball of wool.
Mr. Clutterbuck read the Times. In the distance stood a second lamp, and
round it sat the young ladies, flashing scissors over silver-spangled
stuff for private theatricals. Mr. Wortley read a book.
“Yes; he is perfectly right,” said Mrs. Durrant, drawing herself up and
ceasing to wind her wool. And while Mr. Clutterbuck read the rest of
Lord Lansdowne’s speech she sat upright, without touching her ball.
“Ah, Mr. Flanders,” she said, speaking proudly, as if to Lord Lansdowne
himself. Then she sighed and began to wind her wool again.
“Sit THERE,” she said.
Jacob came out from the dark place by the window where he had hovered.
The light poured over him, illuminating every cranny of his skin; but
not a muscle of his face moved as he sat looking out into the garden.
“I want to hear about your voyage,” said Mrs. Durrant.
“Yes,” he said.
“Twenty years ago we did the same thing.”
“Yes,” he said. She looked at him sharply.
“He is extraordinarily awkward,” she thought, noticing how he fingered
his socks. “Yet so distinguished-looking.”
“In those days …” she resumed, and told him how they had sailed …
“my husband, who knew a good deal about sailing, for he kept a yacht
before we married” … and then how rashly they had defied the
fishermen, “almost paid for it with our lives, but so proud of
ourselves!” She flung the hand out that held the ball of wool.
“Shall I hold your wool?” Jacob asked stiffly.
“You do that for your mother,” said Mrs. Durrant, looking at him again
keenly, as she transferred the skein. “Yes, it goes much better.”
He smiled; but said nothing.
Elsbeth Siddons hovered behind them with something silver on her arm.
“We want,” she said. … “I’ve come …” she paused.
“Poor Jacob,” said Mrs. Durrant, quietly, as if she had known him all
his life. “They’re going to make you act in their play.”
“How I love you!” said Elsbeth, kneeling beside Mrs. Durrant’s chair.
“Give me the wool,” said Mrs. Durrant.
“He’s come—he’s come!” cried Charlotte Wilding. “I’ve won my bet!”
“There’s another bunch higher up,” murmured Clara Durrant, mounting
another step of the ladder. Jacob held the ladder as she stretched out
to reach the grapes high up on the vine.
“There!” she said, cutting through the stalk. She looked semi-transparent, pale, wonderfully beautiful up there among the vine leaves
and the yellow and purple bunches, the lights swimming over her in
coloured islands. Geraniums and begonias stood in pots along planks;
tomatoes climbed the walls.
“The leaves really want thinning,” she considered, and one green one,
spread like the palm of a hand, circled down past Jacob’s head.
“I have more than I can eat already,” he said, looking up.
“It does seem absurd …” Clara began, “going back to London. …”
“Ridiculous,” said Jacob, firmly.
“Then …” said Clara, “you must come next year, properly,” she said,
snipping another vine leaf, rather at random.
“If … if …”
A child ran past the greenhouse shouting. Clara slowly descended the
ladder with her basket of grapes.
“One bunch of white, and two of purple,” she said, and she placed two
great leaves over them where they lay curled warm in the basket.
“I have enjoyed myself,” said Jacob, looking down the greenhouse.
“Yes, it’s been delightful,” she said vaguely.
“Oh, Miss Durrant,” he said, taking the basket of grapes; but she walked
past him towards the door of the greenhouse.
“You’re too good—too good,” she thought, thinking of Jacob, thinking
that he must not say that he loved her. No, no, no.
The children were whirling past the door, throwing things high into the
air.
“Little demons!” she cried. “What have they got?” she asked Jacob.
“Onions, I think,” said Jacob. He looked at them without moving.
“Next August, remember, Jacob,” said Mrs. Durrant, shaking hands with
him on the terrace where the fuchsia hung, like a scarlet ear-ring,
behind her head. Mr. Wortley came out of the window in yellow slippers,
trailing the Times and holding out his hand very cordially.
“Good-bye,” said Jacob. “Good-bye,” he repeated. “Good-bye,” he said
once more. Charlotte Wilding flung up her bedroom window and cried out:
“Good-bye, Mr. Jacob!”
“Mr. Flanders!” cried Mr. Clutterbuck, trying to extricate himself from
his beehive chair. “Jacob Flanders!”
“Too late, Joseph,” said Mrs. Durrant.
“Not to sit for me,” said Miss Eliot, planting her tripod upon the lawn.
“I rather think,” said Jacob, taking his pipe from his mouth, “it’s in
Virgil,” and pushing back his chair, he went to the window.
The rashest drivers in the world are, certainly, the drivers of post-office vans. Swinging down Lamb’s Conduit Street, the scarlet van
rounded the corner by the pillar box in such a way as to graze the kerb
and make the little girl who was standing on tiptoe to post a letter
look up, half frightened, half curious. She paused with her hand in the
mouth of the box; then dropped her letter and ran away. It is seldom
only that we see a child on tiptoe with pity—more often a dim
discomfort, a grain of sand in the shoe which it’s scarcely worth while
to remove—that’s our feeling, and so—Jacob turned to the bookcase.
Long ago great people lived here, and coming back from Court past
midnight stood, huddling their satin skirts, under the carved door-posts
while the footman roused himself from his mattress on the floor,
hurriedly fastened the lower buttons of his waistcoat, and let them in.
The bitter eighteenth-century rain rushed down the kennel. Southampton
Row, however, is chiefly remarkable nowadays for the fact that you will
always find a man there trying to sell a tortoise to a tailor. “Showing
off the tweed, sir; what the gentry wants is something singular to catch
the eye, sir—and clean in their habits, sir!” So they display their
tortoises.
At Mudie’s corner in Oxford Street all the red and blue beads had run
together on the string. The motor omnibuses were locked. Mr. Spalding
going to the city looked at Mr. Charles Budgeon bound for Shepherd’s
Bush. The proximity of the omnibuses gave the outside passengers an
opportunity to stare into each other’s faces. Yet few took advantage of
it. Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him
like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could
only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the
passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all—save “a man
with a red moustache,” “a young man in grey smoking a pipe.” The October
sunlight rested upon all these men and women sitting immobile; and
little Johnnie Sturgeon took the chance to swing down the staircase,
carrying his large mysterious parcel, and so dodging a zigzag course
between the wheels he reached the pavement, started to whistle a tune
and was soon out of sight—for ever. The omnibuses jerked on, and every
single person felt relief at being a little nearer to his journey’s end,
though some cajoled themselves past the immediate engagement by promise
of indulgence beyond—steak and kidney pudding, drink or a game of
dominoes in the smoky corner of a city restaurant. Oh yes, human life is
very tolerable on the top of an omnibus in Holborn, when the policeman
holds up his arm and the sun beats on your back, and if there is such a
thing as a shell secreted by man to fit man himself here we find it, on
the banks of the Thames, where the great streets join and St. Paul’s
Cathedral, like the volute on the top of the snail shell, finishes it
off. Jacob, getting off his omnibus, loitered up the steps, consulted
his watch, and finally made up his mind to go in. … Does it need an
effort? Yes. These changes of mood wear us out.
Dim it is, haunted by ghosts of white marble, to whom the organ for ever
chaunts. If a boot creaks, it’s awful; then the order; the discipline.
The verger with his rod has life ironed out beneath him. Sweet and holy
are the angelic choristers. And for ever round the marble shoulders, in
and out of the folded fingers, go the thin high sounds of voice and
organ. For ever requiem—repose. Tired with scrubbing the steps of the
Prudential Society’s office, which she did year in year out, Mrs.
Lidgett took her seat beneath the great Duke’s tomb, folded her hands,
and half closed her eyes. A magnificent place for an old woman to rest
in, by the very side of the great Duke’s bones, whose victories mean
nothing to her, whose name she knows not, though she never fails to
greet the little angels opposite, as she passes out, wishing the like on
her
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