Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf [non fiction books to read .txt] 📗
- Author: Virginia Woolf
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passed him his cup there was that quiver in her flanks. Bowley saw what
was up-asked Jimmy to breakfast. Helen must have confided in Rose. For
my own part, I find it exceedingly difficult to interpret songs without
words. And now Jimmy feeds crows in Flanders and Helen visits hospitals.
Oh, life is damnable, life is wicked, as Rose Shaw said.
The lamps of London uphold the dark as upon the points of burning
bayonets. The yellow canopy sinks and swells over the great four-poster.
Passengers in the mail-coaches running into London in the eighteenth
century looked through leafless branches and saw it flaring beneath
them. The light burns behind yellow blinds and pink blinds, and above
fanlights, and down in basement windows. The street market in Soho is
fierce with light. Raw meat, china mugs, and silk stockings blaze in it.
Raw voices wrap themselves round the flaring gas-jets. Arms akimbo, they
stand on the pavement bawling—Messrs. Kettle and Wilkinson; their wives
sit in the shop, furs wrapped round their necks, arms folded, eyes
contemptuous. Such faces as one sees. The little man fingering the meat
must have squatted before the fire in innumerable lodging-houses, and
heard and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself even
volubly from dark eyes, loose lips, as he fingers the meat silently, his
face sad as a poet’s, and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babies
with purple eyelids; boys stand at street corners; girls look across the
road—rude illustrations, pictures in a book whose pages we turn over
and over as if we should at last find what we look for. Every face,
every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture
feverishly turned—in search of what? It is the same with books. What do
we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages—
oh, here is Jacob’s room.
He sat at the table reading the Globe. The pinkish sheet was spread flat
before him. He propped his face in his hand, so that the skin of his
cheek was wrinkled in deep folds. Terribly severe he looked, set, and
defiant. (What people go through in half an hour! But nothing could save
him. These events are features of our landscape. A foreigner coming to
London could scarcely miss seeing St. Paul’s.) He judged life. These
pinkish and greenish newspapers are thin sheets of gelatine pressed
nightly over the brain and heart of the world. They take the impression
of the whole. Jacob cast his eye over it. A strike, a murder, football,
bodies found; vociferation from all parts of England simultaneously. How
miserable it is that the Globe newspaper offers nothing better to Jacob
Flanders! When a child begins to read history one marvels, sorrowfully,
to hear him spell out in his new voice the ancient words.
The Prime Minister’s speech was reported in something over five columns.
Feeling in his pocket, Jacob took out a pipe and proceeded to fill it.
Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed. Jacob took the paper
over to the fire. The Prime Minister proposed a measure for giving Home
Rule to Ireland. Jacob knocked out his pipe. He was certainly thinking
about Home Rule in Ireland—a very difficult matter. A very cold night.
The snow, which had been falling all night, lay at three o’clock in the
afternoon over the fields and the hill. Clumps of withered grass stood
out upon the hill-top; the furze bushes were black, and now and then a
black shiver crossed the snow as the wind drove flurries of frozen
particles before it. The sound was that of a broom sweeping—sweeping.
The stream crept along by the road unseen by any one. Sticks and leaves
caught in the frozen grass. The sky was sullen grey and the trees of
black iron. Uncompromising was the severity of the country. At four
o’clock the snow was again falling. The day had gone out.
A window tinged yellow about two feet across alone combated the white
fields and the black trees …. At six o’clock a man’s figure carrying a
lantern crossed the field …. A raft of twig stayed upon a stone,
suddenly detached itself, and floated towards the culvert …. A load of
snow slipped and fell from a fir branch …. Later there was a mournful
cry …. A motor car came along the road shoving the dark before it ….
The dark shut down behind it….
Spaces of complete immobility separated each of these movements. The
land seemed to lie dead …. Then the old shepherd returned stiffly
across the field. Stiffly and painfully the frozen earth was trodden
under and gave beneath pressure like a treadmill. The worn voices of
clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long.
Jacob, too, heard them, and raked out the fire. He rose. He stretched
himself. He went to bed.
The Countess of Rocksbier sat at the head of the table alone with Jacob.
Fed upon champagne and spices for at least two centuries (four, if you
count the female line), the Countess Lucy looked well fed. A
discriminating nose she had for scents, prolonged, as if in quest of
them; her underlip protruded a narrow red shelf; her eyes were small,
with sandy tufts for eyebrows, and her jowl was heavy. Behind her (the
window looked on Grosvenor Square) stood Moll Pratt on the pavement,
offering violets for sale; and Mrs. Hilda Thomas, lifting her skirts,
preparing to cross the road. One was from Walworth; the other from
Putney. Both wore black stockings, but Mrs. Thomas was coiled in furs.
The comparison was much in Lady Rocksbier’s favour. Moll had more
humour, but was violent; stupid too. Hilda Thomas was mealy-mouthed, all
her silver frames aslant; egg-cups in the drawing-room; and the windows
shrouded. Lady Rocksbier, whatever the deficiencies of her profile, had
been a great rider to hounds. She used her knife with authority, tore
her chicken bones, asking Jacob’s pardon, with her own hands.
“Who is that driving by?” she asked Boxall, the butler.
“Lady Firtlemere’s carriage, my lady,” which reminded her to send a card
to ask after his lordship’s health. A rude old lady, Jacob thought. The
wine was excellent. She called herself “an old woman”—“so kind to lunch
with an old woman”—which flattered him. She talked of Joseph
Chamberlain, whom she had known. She said that Jacob must come and meet—
one of our celebrities. And the Lady Alice came in with three dogs on a
leash, and Jackie, who ran to kiss his grandmother, while Boxall brought
in a telegram, and Jacob was given a good cigar.
A few moments before a horse jumps it slows, sidles, gathers itself
together, goes up like a monster wave, and pitches down on the further
side. Hedges and sky swoop in a semicircle. Then as if your own body ran
into the horse’s body and it was your own forelegs grown with his that
sprang, rushing through the air you go, the ground resilient, bodies a
mass of muscles, yet you have command too, upright stillness, eyes
accurately judging. Then the curves cease, changing to downright hammer
strokes, which jar; and you draw up with a jolt; sitting back a little,
sparkling, tingling, glazed with ice over pounding arteries, gasping:
“Ah! ho! Hah!” the steam going up from the horses as they jostle
together at the cross-roads, where the signpost is, and the woman in the
apron stands and stares at the doorway. The man raises himself from the
cabbages to stare too.
So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the
hunt, and rode by himself eating sandwiches, looking over the hedges,
noticing the colours as if new scraped, cursing his luck.
He had tea at the Inn; and there they all were, slapping, stamping,
saying, “After you,” clipped, curt, jocose, red as the wattles of
turkeys, using free speech until Mrs. Horsefield and her friend Miss
Dudding appeared at the doorway with their skirts hitched up, and hair
looping down. Then Tom Dudding rapped at the window with his whip. A
motor car throbbed in the courtyard. Gentlemen, feeling for matches,
moved out, and Jacob went into the bar with Brandy Jones to smoke with
the rustics. There was old Jevons with one eye gone, and his clothes the
colour of mud, his bag over his back, and his brains laid feet down in
earth among the violet roots and the nettle roots; Mary Sanders with her
box of wood; and Tom sent for beer, the half-witted son of the sexton—
all this within thirty miles of London.
Mrs. Papworth, of Endell Street, Covent Garden, did for Mr. Bonamy in
New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, and as she washed up the dinner things in the
scullery she heard the young gentlemen talking in the room next door.
Mr. Sanders was there again; Flanders she meant; and where an
inquisitive old woman gets a name wrong, what chance is there that she
will faithfully report an argument? As she held the plates under water
and then dealt them on the pile beneath the hissing gas, she listened:
heard Sanders speaking in a loud rather overbearing tone of voice:
“good,” he said, and “absolute” and “justice” and “punishment,” and “the
will of the majority.” Then her gentleman piped up; she backed him for
argument against Sanders. Yet Sanders was a fine young fellow (here all
the scraps went swirling round the sink, scoured after by her purple,
almost nailless hands). “Women”—she thought, and wondered what Sanders
and her gentleman did in THAT line, one eyelid sinking perceptibly as
she mused, for she was the mother of nine—three still-born and one deaf
and dumb from birth. Putting the plates in the rack she heard once more
Sanders at it again (“He don’t give Bonamy a chance,” she thought).
“Objective something,” said Bonamy; and “common ground” and something
else—all very long words, she noted. “Book learning does it,” she
thought to herself, and, as she thrust her arms into her jacket, heard
something—might be the little table by the fire—fall; and then stamp,
stamp, stamp—as if they were having at each other—round the room,
making the plates dance.
“To-morrow’s breakfast, sir,” she said, opening the door; and there were
Sanders and Bonamy like two bulls of Bashan driving each other up and
down, making such a racket, and all them chairs in the way. They never
noticed her. She felt motherly towards them. “Your breakfast, sir,” she
said, as they came near. And Bonamy, all his hair touzled and his tie
flying, broke off, and pushed Sanders into the arm-chair, and said Mr.
Sanders had smashed the coffee-pot and he was teaching Mr. Sanders—
Sure enough, the coffee-pot lay broken on the hearthrug.
“Any day this week except Thursday,” wrote Miss Perry, and this was not
the first invitation by any means. Were all Miss Perry’s weeks blank
with the exception of Thursday, and was her only desire to see her old
friend’s son? Time is issued to spinster ladies of wealth in long white
ribbons. These they wind round and round, round and round, assisted by
five female servants, a butler, a fine Mexican parrot, regular meals,
Mudie’s library, and friends dropping in. A little hurt she was already
that Jacob had not called.
“Your mother,” she said, “is one of my oldest friends.”
Miss Rosseter, who was sitting by the fire, holding the Spectator
between her cheek and the blaze, refused to have a fire screen, but
finally accepted one. The weather was then discussed, for in deference
to Parkes, who was opening little tables, graver matters were postponed.
Miss Rosseter drew Jacob’s attention to the beauty
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