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

own tomb, for the leathern curtain of the heart has flapped wide,

and out steal on tiptoe thoughts of rest, sweet melodies. … Old

Spicer, jute merchant, thought nothing of the kind though. Strangely

enough he’d never been in St. Paul’s these fifty years, though his

office windows looked on the churchyard. “So that’s all? Well, a gloomy

old place. … Where’s Nelson’s tomb? No time now—come again—a coin to

leave in the box. … Rain or fine is it? Well, if it would only make up

its mind!” Idly the children stray in—the verger dissuades them—and

another and another … man, woman, man, woman, boy … casting their

eyes up, pursing their lips, the same shadow brushing the same faces;

the leathern curtain of the heart flaps wide.

 

Nothing could appear more certain from the steps of St. Paul’s than that

each person is miraculously provided with coat, skirt, and boots; an

income; an object. Only Jacob, carrying in his hand Finlay’s Byzantine

Empire, which he had bought in Ludgate Hill, looked a little different;

for in his hand he carried a book, which book he would at nine-thirty

precisely, by his own fireside, open and study, as no one else of all

these multitudes would do. They have no houses. The streets belong to

them; the shops; the churches; theirs the innumerable desks; the

stretched office lights; the vans are theirs, and the railway slung high

above the street. If you look closer you will see that three elderly men

at a little distance from each other run spiders along the pavement as

if the street were their parlour, and here, against the wall, a woman

stares at nothing, boot-laces extended, which she does not ask you to

buy. The posters are theirs too; and the news on them. A town destroyed;

a race won. A homeless people, circling beneath the sky whose blue or

white is held off by a ceiling cloth of steel filings and horse dung

shredded to dust.

 

There, under the green shade, with his head bent over white paper, Mr.

Sibley transferred figures to folios, and upon each desk you observe,

like provender, a bunch of papers, the day’s nutriment, slowly consumed

by the industrious pen. Innumerable overcoats of the quality prescribed

hung empty all day in the corridors, but as the clock struck six each

was exactly filled, and the little figures, split apart into trousers or

moulded into a single thickness, jerked rapidly with angular forward

motion along the pavement; then dropped into darkness. Beneath the

pavement, sunk in the earth, hollow drains lined with yellow light for

ever conveyed them this way and that, and large letters upon enamel

plates represented in the underworld the parks, squares, and circuses of

the upper. “Marble Arch—Shepherd’s Bush”—to the majority the Arch and

the Bush are eternally white letters upon a blue ground. Only at one

point—it may be Acton, Holloway, Kensal Rise, Caledonian Road—does the

name mean shops where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, down

to the right, where the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones,

there is a square curtained window, and a bedroom.

 

Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to

the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith’s Bank, clasping a brown

mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no,

from the depths of her gay wild heart—her sinful, tanned heart—for the

child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed,

curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother’s wild

song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with her

dog against her breast.

 

Home they went. The grey church spires received them; the hoary city,

old, sinful, and majestic. One behind another, round or pointed,

piercing the sky or massing themselves, like sailing ships, like granite

cliffs, spires and offices, wharves and factories crowd the bank;

eternally the pilgrims trudge; barges rest in mid stream heavy laden; as

some believe, the city loves her prostitutes.

 

But few, it seems, are admitted to that degree. Of all the carriages

that leave the arch of the Opera House, not one turns eastward, and when

the little thief is caught in the empty market-place no one in black-and-white or rose-coloured evening dress blocks the way by pausing with

a hand upon the carriage door to help or condemn—though Lady Charles,

to do her justice, sighs sadly as she ascends her staircase, takes down

Thomas a Kempis, and does not sleep till her mind has lost itself

tunnelling into the complexity of things. “Why? Why? Why?” she sighs. On

the whole it’s best to walk back from the Opera House. Fatigue is the

safest sleeping draught.

 

The autumn season was in full swing. Tristan was twitching his rug up

under his armpits twice a week; Isolde waved her scarf in miraculous

sympathy with the conductor’s baton. In all parts of the house were to

be found pink faces and glittering breasts. When a Royal hand attached

to an invisible body slipped out and withdrew the red and white bouquet

reposing on the scarlet ledge, the Queen of England seemed a name worth

dying for. Beauty, in its hothouse variety (which is none of the worst),

flowered in box after box; and though nothing was said of profound

importance, and though it is generally agreed that wit deserted

beautiful lips about the time that Walpole died—at any rate when

Victoria in her nightgown descended to meet her ministers, the lips

(through an opera glass) remained red, adorable. Bald distinguished men

with gold-headed canes strolled down the crimson avenues between the

stalls, and only broke from intercourse with the boxes when the lights

went down, and the conductor, first bowing to the Queen, next to the

bald-headed men, swept round on his feet and raised his wand.

 

Then two thousand hearts in the semi-darkness remembered, anticipated,

travelled dark labyrinths; and Clara Durrant said farewell to Jacob

Flanders, and tasted the sweetness of death in effigy; and Mrs. Durrant,

sitting behind her in the dark of the box, sighed her sharp sigh; and

Mr. Wortley, shifting his position behind the Italian Ambassador’s wife,

thought that Brangaena was a trifle hoarse; and suspended in the gallery

many feet above their heads, Edward Whittaker surreptitiously held a

torch to his miniature score; and … and …

 

In short, the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us

from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have

arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls,

boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no

need to distinguish details. But the difficulty remains—one has to

choose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England or only for a

moment—I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime

Minister’s gossip; the countess whisper, and share her memories of halls

and gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after all

their secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one’s own

headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment some one’s—any one’s—to

be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena

sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherd

pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But no—we must choose. Never was

there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more

certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker

in his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the Manor.

 

A young man with a Wellington nose, who had occupied a seven-and-sixpenny seat, made his way down the stone stairs when the opera ended,

as if he were still set a little apart from his fellows by the influence

of the music.

 

At midnight Jacob Flanders heard a rap on his door.

 

“By Jove!” he exclaimed. “You’re the very man I want!” and without more

ado they discovered the lines which he had been seeking all day; only

they come not in Virgil, but in Lucretius.

 

“Yes; that should make him sit up,” said Bonamy, as Jacob stopped

reading. Jacob was excited. It was the first time he had read his essay

aloud.

 

“Damned swine!” he said, rather too extravagantly; but the praise had

gone to his head. Professor Bulteel, of Leeds, had issued an edition of

Wycherley without stating that he had left out, disembowelled, or

indicated only by asterisks, several indecent words and some indecent

phrases. An outrage, Jacob said; a breach of faith; sheer prudery; token

of a lewd mind and a disgusting nature. Aristophanes and Shakespeare

were cited. Modern life was repudiated. Great play was made with the

professional title, and Leeds as a seat of learning was laughed to

scorn. And the extraordinary thing was that these young men were

perfectly right—extraordinary, because, even as Jacob copied his pages,

he knew that no one would ever print them; and sure enough back they

came from the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century—

when Jacob threw them into the black wooden box where he kept his

mother’s letters, his old flannel trousers, and a note or two with the

Cornish postmark. The lid shut upon the truth.

 

This black wooden box, upon which his name was still legible in white

paint, stood between the long windows of the sitting-room. The street

ran beneath. No doubt the bedroom was behind. The furniture—three

wicker chairs and a gate-legged table—came from Cambridge. These houses

(Mrs. Garfit’s daughter, Mrs. Whitehorn, was the landlady of this one)

were built, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. The rooms are shapely,

the ceilings high; over the doorway a rose, or a ram’s skull, is carved

in the wood. The eighteenth century has its distinction. Even the

panels, painted in raspberry-coloured paint, have their distinction. …

 

“Distinction”—Mrs. Durrant said that Jacob Flanders was “distinguished-looking.” “Extremely awkward,” she said, “but so distinguished-looking.”

Seeing him for the first time that no doubt is the word for him. Lying

back in his chair, taking his pipe from his lips, and saying to Bonamy:

“About this opera now” (for they had done with indecency). “This fellow

Wagner” … distinction was one of the words to use naturally, though,

from looking at him, one would have found it difficult to say which seat

in the opera house was his, stalls, gallery, or dress circle. A writer?

He lacked self-consciousness. A painter? There was something in the

shape of his hands (he was descended on his mother’s side from a family

of the greatest antiquity and deepest obscurity) which indicated taste.

Then his mouth—but surely, of all futile occupations this of

cataloguing features is the worst. One word is sufficient. But if one

cannot find it?

 

“I like Jacob Flanders,” wrote Clara Durrant in her diary. “He is so

unworldly. He gives himself no airs, and one can say what one likes to

him, though he’s frightening because …” But Mr. Letts allows little

space in his shilling diaries. Clara was not the one to encroach upon

Wednesday. Humblest, most candid of women! “No, no, no,” she sighed,

standing at the greenhouse door, “don’t break—don’t spoil”—what?

Something infinitely wonderful.

 

But then, this is only a young woman’s language, one, too, who loves, or

refrains from loving. She wished the moment to continue for ever

precisely as it was that July morning. And moments don’t. Now, for

instance, Jacob was telling a story about some walking tour he’d taken,

and the inn was called “The Foaming Pot,” which, considering the

landlady’s name … They shouted with laughter. The joke was indecent.

 

Then Julia Eliot said “the silent young man,” and as she dined with

Prime Ministers, no doubt she meant: “If he is going to