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

Flanders knew precisely how Mrs. Jarvis felt; and how

interesting her letters were, about Mrs. Jarvis, could one read them

year in, year out—the unpublished works of women, written by the

fireside in pale profusion, dried by the flame, for the blotting-paper’s

worn to holes and the nib cleft and clotted. Then Captain Barfoot. Him

she called “the Captain,” spoke of frankly, yet never without reserve.

The Captain was enquiring for her about Garfit’s acre; advised chickens;

could promise profit; or had the sciatica; or Mrs. Barfoot had been

indoors for weeks; or the Captain says things look bad, politics that

is, for as Jacob knew, the Captain would sometimes talk, as the evening

waned, about Ireland or India; and then Mrs. Flanders would fall musing

about Morty, her brother, lost all these years—had the natives got him,

was his ship sunk—would the Admiralty tell her?—the Captain knocking

his pipe out, as Jacob knew, rising to go, stiffly stretching to pick up

Mrs. Flanders’s wool which had rolled beneath the chair. Talk of the

chicken farm came back and back, the women, even at fifty, impulsive at

heart, sketching on the cloudy future flocks of Leghorns, Cochin Chinas,

Orpingtons; like Jacob in the blur of her outline; but powerful as he

was; fresh and vigorous, running about the house, scolding Rebecca.

 

The letter lay upon the hall table; Florinda coming in that night took

it up with her, put it on the table as she kissed Jacob, and Jacob

seeing the hand, left it there under the lamp, between the biscuit-tin

and the tobacco-box. They shut the bedroom door behind them.

 

The sitting-room neither knew nor cared. The door was shut; and to

suppose that wood, when it creaks, transmits anything save that rats are

busy and wood dry is childish. These old houses are only brick and wood,

soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt. But if the pale blue

envelope lying by the biscuit-box had the feelings of a mother, the

heart was torn by the little creak, the sudden stir. Behind the door was

the obscene thing, the alarming presence, and terror would come over her

as at death, or the birth of a child. Better, perhaps, burst in and face

it than sit in the antechamber listening to the little creak, the sudden

stir, for her heart was swollen, and pain threaded it. My son, my son—

such would be her cry, uttered to hide her vision of him stretched with

Florinda, inexcusable, irrational, in a woman with three children living

at Scarborough. And the fault lay with Florinda. Indeed, when the door

opened and the couple came out, Mrs. Flanders would have flounced upon

her—only it was Jacob who came first, in his dressing-gown, amiable,

authoritative, beautifully healthy, like a baby after an airing, with an

eye clear as running water. Florinda followed, lazily stretching;

yawning a little; arranging her hair at the looking-glass—while Jacob

read his mother’s letter.

 

Let us consider letters—how they come at breakfast, and at night, with

their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the

postmark—for to see one’s own envelope on another’s table is to realize

how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of the

mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish

annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table. Still, there

are letters that merely say how dinner’s at seven; others ordering coal;

making appointments. The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alone

the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter

comes always the miracle seems repeated—speech attempted. Venerable are

letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

 

Life would split asunder without them. “Come to tea, come to dinner,

what’s the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the

capital is gay; the Russian dancers….” These are our stays and props.

These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet,

and yet … when we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to

meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend

our days? the rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us—drinking tea?

dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And

everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that

try to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over.

“Try to penetrate,” for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the

hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be

certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which

fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments,

while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and

the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound

together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps—who

knows?—we might talk by the way.

 

Well, people have tried. Byron wrote letters. So did Cowper. For

centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the

communications of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have

turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing

aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written

when the dark presses round a bright red cave), and addressed themselves

to the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart.

Were it possible! But words have been used too often; touched and

turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek

hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the

leaf.

 

Mrs. Flanders wrote letters; Mrs. Jarvis wrote them; Mrs. Durrant too;

Mother Stuart actually scented her pages, thereby adding a flavour which

the English language fails to provide; Jacob had written in his day long

letters about art, morality, and politics to young men at college. Clara

Durrant’s letters were those of a child. Florinda—the impediment

between Florinda and her pen was something impassable. Fancy a

butterfly, gnat, or other winged insect, attached to a twig which,

clogged with mud, it rolls across a page. Her spelling was abominable.

Her sentiments infantile. And for some reason when she wrote she

declared her belief in God. Then there were crosses—tear stains; and

the hand itself rambling and redeemed only by the fact—which always did

redeem Florinda—by the fact that she cared. Yes, whether it was for

chocolate creams, hot baths, the shape of her face in the looking-glass,

Florinda could no more pretend a feeling than swallow whisky.

Incontinent was her rejection. Great men are truthful, and these little

prostitutes, staring in the fire, taking out a powder-puff, decorating

lips at an inch of looking-glass, have (so Jacob thought) an inviolable

fidelity.

 

Then he saw her turning up Greek Street upon another man’s arm.

 

The light from the arc lamp drenched him from head to toe. He stood for

a minute motionless beneath it. Shadows chequered the street. Other

figures, single and together, poured out, wavered across, and

obliterated Florinda and the man.

 

The light drenched Jacob from head to toe. You could see the pattern on

his trousers; the old thorns on his stick; his shoe laces; bare hands;

and face.

 

It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from a

livid whetstone, which was his spine; as if the switchback railway,

having swooped to the depths, fell, fell, fell. This was in his face.

 

Whether we know what was in his mind is another question. Granted ten

years’ seniority and a difference of sex, fear of him comes first; this

is swallowed up by a desire to help—overwhelming sense, reason, and the

time of night; anger would follow close on that—with Florinda, with

destiny; and then up would bubble an irresponsible optimism. “Surely

there’s enough light in the street at this moment to drown all our cares

in gold!” Ah, what’s the use of saying it? Even while you speak and look

over your shoulder towards Shaftesbury Avenue, destiny is chipping a

dent in him. He has turned to go. As for following him back to his

rooms, no—that we won’t do.

 

Yet that, of course, is precisely what one does. He let himself in and

shut the door, though it was only striking ten on one of the city

clocks. No one can go to bed at ten. Nobody was thinking of going to

bed. It was January and dismal, but Mrs. Wagg stood on her doorstep, as

if expecting something to happen. A barrel-organ played like an obscene

nightingale beneath wet leaves. Children ran across the road. Here and

there one could see brown panelling inside the hall door…. The march

that the mind keeps beneath the windows of others is queer enough. Now

distracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a pot; here improvising

a few phrases to dance with the barrel-organ; again snatching a detached

gaiety from a drunken man; then altogether absorbed by words the poor

shout across the street at each other (so outright, so lusty)—yet all

the while having for centre, for magnet, a young man alone in his room.

 

“Life is wicked—life is detestable,” cried Rose Shaw.

 

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have

been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any

adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our

passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this

corner?

 

“Holborn straight ahead of you” says the policeman. Ah, but where are

you going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard,

the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his

story, which ends in an invitation to step somewhere, to his room,

presumably, off Queen’s Square, and there he shows you a collection of

birds’ eggs and a letter from the Prince of Wales’s secretary, and this

(skipping the intermediate stages) brings you one winter’s day to the

Essex coast, where the little boat makes off to the ship, and the ship

sails and you behold on the skyline the Azores; and the flamingoes rise;

and there you sit on the verge of the marsh drinking rum-punch, an

outcast from civilization, for you have committed a crime, are infected

with yellow fever as likely as not, and—fill in the sketch as you like.

As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in the

continuity of our ways. Yet we keep straight on.

 

Rose Shaw, talking in rather an emotional manner to Mr. Bowley at Mrs.

Durrant’s evening party a few nights back, said that life was wicked

because a man called Jimmy refused to marry a woman called (if memory

serves) Helen Aitken.

 

Both were beautiful. Both were inanimate. The oval tea-table invariably

separated them, and the plate of biscuits was all he ever gave her. He

bowed; she inclined her head. They danced. He danced divinely. They sat

in the alcove; never a word was said. Her pillow was wet with tears.

Kind Mr. Bowley and dear Rose Shaw marvelled and deplored. Bowley had

rooms in the Albany. Rose was re-born every evening precisely as the

clock struck eight. All four were civilization’s triumphs, and if you

persist that a command of the English language is part of our

inheritance, one can only reply that beauty is almost always dumb. Male

beauty in association with female beauty breeds in the onlooker a sense

of fear. Often have I seen them—Helen and Jimmy—and likened them to

ships adrift, and feared for my own little craft. Or again, have you

ever