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

CHAPTER SIX

The flames had fairly caught.

 

“There’s St. Paul’s!” some one cried.

 

As the wood caught the city of London was lit up for a second; on other

sides of the fire there were trees. Of the faces which came out fresh

and vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a

girl’s face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The

oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for

background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the

flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in

her thus staring—her age between twenty and twenty-five.

 

A hand descending from the chequered darkness thrust on her head the

conical white hat of a pierrot. Shaking her head, she still stared. A

whiskered face appeared above her. They dropped two legs of a table upon

the fire and a scattering of twigs and leaves. All this blazed up and

showed faces far back, round, pale, smooth, bearded, some with billycock

hats on; all intent; showed too St. Paul’s floating on the uneven white

mist, and two or three narrow, paper-white, extinguisher-shaped spires.

 

The flames were struggling through the wood and roaring up when,

goodness knows where from, pails flung water in beautiful hollow shapes,

as of polished tortoiseshell; flung again and again; until the hiss was

like a swarm of bees; and all the faces went out.

 

“Oh Jacob,” said the girl, as they pounded up the hill in the dark, “I’m

so frightfully unhappy!”

 

Shouts of laughter came from the others—high, low; some before, others

after.

 

The hotel dining-room was brightly lit. A stag’s head in plaster was at

one end of the table; at the other some Roman bust blackened and

reddened to represent Guy Fawkes, whose night it was. The diners were

linked together by lengths of paper roses, so that when it came to

singing “Auld Lang Syne” with their hands crossed a pink and yellow line

rose and fell the entire length of the table. There was an enormous

tapping of green wine-glasses. A young man stood up, and Florinda,

taking one of the purplish globes that lay on the table, flung it

straight at his head. It crushed to powder.

 

“I’m so frightfully unhappy!” she said, turning to Jacob, who sat beside

her.

 

The table ran, as if on invisible legs, to the side of the room, and a

barrel organ decorated with a red cloth and two pots of paper flowers

reeled out waltz music.

 

Jacob could not dance. He stood against the wall smoking a pipe.

 

“We think,” said two of the dancers, breaking off from the rest, and

bowing profoundly before him, “that you are the most beautiful man we

have ever seen.”

 

So they wreathed his head with paper flowers. Then somebody brought out

a white and gilt chair and made him sit on it. As they passed, people

hung glass grapes on his shoulders, until he looked like the figure-head

of a wrecked ship. Then Florinda got upon his knee and hid her face in

his waistcoat. With one hand he held her; with the other, his pipe.

 

“Now let us talk,” said Jacob, as he walked down Haverstock Hill between

four and five o’clock in the morning of November the sixth arm-in-arm

with Timmy Durrant, “about something sensible.”

 

The Greeks—yes, that was what they talked about—how when all’s said

and done, when one’s rinsed one’s mouth with every literature in the

world, including Chinese and Russian (but these Slavs aren’t civilized),

it’s the flavour of Greek that remains. Durrant quoted Aeschylus—Jacob

Sophocles. It is true that no Greek could have understood or professor

refrained from pointing out—Never mind; what is Greek for if not to be

shouted on Haverstock Hill in the dawn? Moreover, Durrant never listened

to Sophocles, nor Jacob to Aeschylus. They were boastful, triumphant; it

seemed to both that they had read every book in the world; known every

sin, passion, and joy. Civilizations stood round them like flowers ready

for picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing. And

surveying all this, looming through the fog, the lamplight, the shades

of London, the two young men decided in favour of Greece.

 

“Probably,” said Jacob, “we are the only people in the world who know

what the Greeks meant.”

 

They drank coffee at a stall where the urns were burnished and little

lamps burnt along the counter.

 

Taking Jacob for a military gentleman, the stall-keeper told him about

his boy at Gibraltar, and Jacob cursed the British army and praised the

Duke of Wellington. So on again they went down the hill talking about

the Greeks.

 

A strange thing—when you come to think of it—this love of Greek,

flourishing in such obscurity, distorted, discouraged, yet leaping out,

all of a sudden, especially on leaving crowded rooms, or after a surfeit

of print, or when the moon floats among the waves of the hills, or in

hollow, sallow, fruitless London days, like a specific; a clean blade;

always a miracle. Jacob knew no more Greek than served him to stumble

through a play. Of ancient history he knew nothing. However, as he

tramped into London it seemed to him that they were making the

flagstones ring on the road to the Acropolis, and that if Socrates saw

them coming he would bestir himself and say “my fine fellows,” for the

whole sentiment of Athens was entirely after his heart; free,

venturesome, high-spirited. … She had called him Jacob without asking

his leave. She had sat upon his knee. Thus did all good women in the

days of the Greeks.

 

At this moment there shook out into the air a wavering, quavering,

doleful lamentation which seemed to lack strength to unfold itself, and

yet flagged on; at the sound of which doors in back streets burst

sullenly open; workmen stumped forth.

 

Florinda was sick.

 

Mrs. Durrant, sleepless as usual, scored a mark by the side of certain

lines in the Inferno.

 

Clara slept buried in her pillows; on her dressing-table dishevelled

roses and a pair of long white gloves.

 

Still wearing the conical white hat of a pierrot, Florinda was sick.

 

The bedroom seemed fit for these catastrophes—cheap, mustard-coloured,

half attic, half studio, curiously ornamented with silver paper stars,

Welshwomen’s hats, and rosaries pendent from the gas brackets. As for

Florinda’s story, her name had been bestowed upon her by a painter who

had wished it to signify that the flower of her maidenhood was still

unplucked. Be that as it may, she was without a surname, and for parents

had only the photograph of a tombstone beneath which, she said, her

father lay buried. Sometimes she would dwell upon the size of it, and

rumour had it that Florinda’s father had died from the growth of his

bones which nothing could stop; just as her mother enjoyed the

confidence of a Royal master, and now and again Florinda herself was a

Princess, but chiefly when drunk. Thus deserted, pretty into the

bargain, with tragic eyes and the lips of a child, she talked more about

virginity than women mostly do; and had lost it only the night before,

or cherished it beyond the heart in her breast, according to the man she

talked to. But did she always talk to men? No, she had her confidante:

Mother Stuart. Stuart, as the lady would point out, is the name of a

Royal house; but what that signified, and what her business way, no one

knew; only that Mrs. Stuart