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

of the cabinet.

 

“So wonderfully clever in picking things up,” she said. Miss Perry had

found it in Yorkshire. The North of England was discussed. When Jacob

spoke they both listened. Miss Perry was bethinking her of something

suitable and manly to say when the door opened and Mr. Benson was

announced. Now there were four people sitting in that room. Miss Perry

aged 66; Miss Rosseter 42; Mr. Benson 38; and Jacob 25.

 

“My old friend looks as well as ever,” said Mr. Benson, tapping the bars

of the parrot’s cage; Miss Rosseter simultaneously praised the tea;

Jacob handed the wrong plates; and Miss Perry signified her desire to

approach more closely. “Your brothers,” she began vaguely.

 

“Archer and John,” Jacob supplied her. Then to her pleasure she

recovered Rebecca’s name; and how one day “when you were all little

boys, playing in the drawing-room—”

 

“But Miss Perry has the kettle-holder,” said Miss Rosseter, and indeed

Miss Perry was clasping it to her breast. (Had she, then, loved Jacob’s

father?)

 

“So clever”—“not so good as usual”—“I thought it most unfair,” said

Mr. Benson and Miss Rosseter, discussing the Saturday Westminster. Did

they not compete regularly for prizes? Had not Mr. Benson three times

won a guinea, and Miss Rosseter once ten and sixpence? Of course Everard

Benson had a weak heart, but still, to win prizes, remember parrots,

toady Miss Perry, despise Miss Rosseter, give tea-parties in his rooms

(which were in the style of Whistler, with pretty books on tables), all

this, so Jacob felt without knowing him, made him a contemptible ass. As

for Miss Rosseter, she had nursed cancer, and now painted water-colours.

 

“Running away so soon?” said Miss Perry vaguely. “At home every

afternoon, if you’ve nothing better to do—except Thursdays.”

 

“I’ve never known you desert your old ladies once,” Miss Rosseter was

saying, and Mr. Benson was stooping over the parrot’s cage, and Miss

Perry was moving towards the bell….

 

The fire burnt clear between two pillars of greenish marble, and on the

mantelpiece there was a green clock guarded by Britannia leaning on her

spear. As for pictures—a maiden in a large hat offered roses over the

garden gate to a gentleman in eighteenth-century costume. A mastiff lay

extended against a battered door. The lower panes of the windows were of

ground glass, and the curtains, accurately looped, were of plush and

green too.

 

Laurette and Jacob sat with their toes in the fender side by side, in

two large chairs covered in green plush. Laurette’s skirts were short,

her legs long, thin, and transparently covered. Her fingers stroked her

ankles.

 

“It’s not exactly that I don’t understand them,” she was saying

thoughtfully. “I must go and try again.”

 

“What time will you be there?” said Jacob.

 

She shrugged her shoulders.

 

“To-morrow?”

 

No, not to-morrow.

 

“This weather makes me long for the country,” she said, looking over her

shoulder at the back view of tall houses through the window.

 

“I wish you’d been with me on Saturday,” said Jacob.

 

“I used to ride,” she said. She got up gracefully, calmly. Jacob got up.

She smiled at him. As she shut the door he put so many shillings on the

mantelpiece.

 

Altogether a most reasonable conversation; a most respectable room; an

intelligent girl. Only Madame herself seeing Jacob out had about her

that leer, that lewdness, that quake of the surface (visible in the eyes

chiefly), which threatens to spill the whole bag of ordure, with

difficulty held together, over the pavement. In short, something was

wrong.

 

Not so very long ago the workmen had gilt the final “y” in Lord

Macaulay’s name, and the names stretched in unbroken file round the dome

of the British Museum. At a considerable depth beneath, many hundreds of

the living sat at the spokes of a cartwheel copying from printed books

into manuscript books; now and then rising to consult the catalogue;

regaining their places stealthily, while from time to time a silent man

replenished their compartments.

 

There was a little catastrophe. Miss Marchmont’s pile overbalanced and

fell into Jacob’s compartment. Such things happened to Miss Marchmont.

What was she seeking through millions of pages, in her old plush dress,

and her wig of claret-coloured hair, with her gems and her chilblains?

Sometimes one thing, sometimes another, to confirm her philosophy that

colour is sound—or, perhaps, it has something to do with music. She

could never quite say, though it was not for lack of trying. And she

could not ask you back to her room, for it was “not very clean, I’m

afraid,” so she must catch you in the passage, or take a chair in Hyde

Park to explain her philosophy. The rhythm of the soul depends on it—

(“how rude the little boys are!” she would say), and Mr. Asquith’s Irish

policy, and Shakespeare comes in, “and Queen Alexandra most graciously

once acknowledged a copy of my pamphlet,” she would say, waving the

little boys magnificently away. But she needs funds to publish her book,

for “publishers are capitalists—publishers are cowards.” And so,

digging her elbow into her pile of books it fell over.

 

Jacob remained quite unmoved.

 

But Fraser, the atheist, on the other side, detesting plush, more than

once accosted with leaflets, shifted irritably. He abhorred vagueness—

the Christian religion, for example, and old Dean Parker’s

pronouncements. Dean Parker wrote books and Fraser utterly destroyed

them by force of logic and left his children unbaptized—his wife did it

secretly in the washing basin—but Fraser ignored her, and went on

supporting blasphemers, distributing leaflets, getting up his facts in

the British Museum, always in the same check suit and fiery tie, but

pale, spotted, irritable. Indeed, what a work—to destroy religion!

 

Jacob transcribed a whole passage from Marlowe.

 

Miss Julia Hedge, the feminist, waited for her books. They did not come.

She wetted her pen. She looked about her. Her eye was caught by the

final letters in Lord Macaulay’s name. And she read them all round the

dome—the names of great men which remind us—“Oh damn,” said Julia

Hedge, “why didn’t they leave room for an Eliot or a Bronte?”

 

Unfortunate Julia! wetting her pen in bitterness, and leaving her shoe

laces untied. When her books came she applied herself to her gigantic

labours, but perceived through one of the nerves of her exasperated

sensibility how composedly, unconcernedly, and with every consideration

the male readers applied themselves to theirs. That young man for

example. What had he got to do except copy out poetry? And she must

study statistics. There are more women than men. Yes; but if you let

women work as men work, they’ll die off much quicker. They’ll become

extinct. That was her argument. Death and gall and bitter dust were on

her pen-tip; and as the afternoon wore on, red had worked into her

cheek-bones and a light was in her eyes.

 

But what brought Jacob Flanders to read Marlowe in the British Museum?

Youth, youth—something savage—something pedantic. For example, there

is Mr. Masefield, there is Mr. Bennett. Stuff them into the flame of

Marlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain. Don’t palter

with the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one. And to

set that on foot read incredibly dull essays upon Marlowe to your

friends. For which purpose one most collate editions in the British

Museum. One must do the thing oneself. Useless to trust to the

Victorians, who disembowel, or to the living, who are mere publicists.

The flesh and blood of the future depends entirely upon six young men.

And as Jacob was one of them, no doubt he looked a little regal and

pompous as he turned his page, and Julia Hedge disliked him naturally

enough.

 

But then a pudding-faced man pushed a note towards Jacob, and Jacob,

leaning back in his chair, began an uneasy murmured conversation, and

they went off together (Julia Hedge watched them), and laughed aloud

(she thought) directly they were in the hall.

 

Nobody laughed in the reading-room. There were shirtings, murmurings,

apologetic sneezes, and sudden unashamed devastating coughs. The lesson

hour was almost over. Ushers were collecting exercises. Lazy children

wanted to stretch. Good ones scribbled assiduously—ah, another day over

and so little done! And now and then was to be heard from the whole

collection of human beings a heavy sigh, after which the humiliating old

man would cough shamelessly, and Miss Marchmont hinnied like a horse.

 

Jacob came back only in time to return his books.

 

The books were now replaced. A few letters of the alphabet were

sprinkled round the dome. Closely stood together in a ring round the

dome were Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Shakespeare; the literature

of Rome, Greece, China, India, Persia. One leaf of poetry was pressed

flat against another leaf, one burnished letter laid smooth against

another in a density of meaning, a conglomeration of loveliness.

 

“One does want one’s tea,” said Miss Marchmont, reclaiming her shabby

umbrella.

 

Miss Marchmont wanted her tea, but could never resist a last look at the

Elgin Marbles. She looked at them sideways, waving her hand and

muttering a word or two of salutation which made Jacob and the other man

turn round. She smiled at them amiably. It all came into her philosophy—

that colour is sound, or perhaps it has something to do with music. And

having done her service, she hobbled off to tea. It was closing time.

The public collected in the hall to receive their umbrellas.

 

For the most part the students wait their turn very patiently. To stand

and wait while some one examines white discs is soothing. The umbrella

will certainly be found. But the fact leads you on all day through

Macaulay, Hobbes, Gibbon; through octavos, quartos, folios; sinks deeper

and deeper through ivory pages and morocco bindings into this density of

thought, this conglomeration of knowledge.

 

Jacob’s walking-stick was like all the others; they had muddled the

pigeon-holes perhaps.

 

There is in the British Museum an enormous mind. Consider that Plato is

there cheek by jowl with Aristotle; and Shakespeare with Marlowe. This

great mind is hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it.

Nevertheless (as they take so long finding one’s walking-stick) one

can’t help thinking how one might come with a notebook, sit at a desk,

and read it all through. A learned man is the most venerable of all—a

man like Huxtable of Trinity, who writes all his letters in Greek, they

say, and could have kept his end up with Bentley. And then there is

science, pictures, architecture,—an enormous mind.

 

They pushed the walking-stick across the counter. Jacob stood beneath

the porch of the British Museum. It was raining. Great Russell Street

was glazed and shining—here yellow, here, outside the chemist’s, red

and pale blue. People scuttled quickly close to the wall; carriages

rattled rather helter-skelter down the streets. Well, but a little rain

hurts nobody. Jacob walked off much as if he had been in the country;

and late that night there he was sitting at his table with his pipe and

his book.

 

The rain poured down. The British Museum stood in one solid immense

mound, very pale, very sleek in the rain, not a quarter of a mile from

him. The vast mind was sheeted with stone; and each compartment in the

depths of it was safe and dry. The night-watchmen, flashing their

lanterns over the backs of Plato and Shakespeare, saw that on the

twenty-second of February neither flame, rat, nor burglar was going to

violate these treasures—poor, highly respectable men, with wives and

families at Kentish Town, do their best for twenty years to protect

Plato and Shakespeare, and