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

of work,” said Jacob, straddling his legs in front

of it. “But what I wish you’d explain …”

 

Miss Jinny Carslake, pale, freckled, morbid, came into the room.

 

“Oh Jinny, here’s a friend. Flanders. An Englishman. Wealthy. Highly

connected. Go on, Flanders. …”

 

Jacob said nothing.

 

“It’s THAT—that’s not right,” said Jinny Carslake.

 

“No,” said Cruttendon decidedly. “Can’t be done.”

 

He took the canvas off the chair and stood it on the floor with its back

to them.

 

“Sit down, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Carslake comes from your part of

the world, Flanders. From Devonshire. Oh, I thought you said Devonshire.

Very well. She’s a daughter of the church too. The black sheep of the

family. Her mother writes her such letters. I say—have you one about

you? It’s generally Sundays they come. Sort of church-bell effect, you

know.”

 

“Have you met all the painter men?” said Jinny. “Was Mallinson drunk? If

you go to his studio he’ll give you one of his pictures. I say, Teddy

…”

 

“Half a jiff,” said Cruttendon. “What’s the season of the year?” He

looked out of the window.

 

“We take a day off on Sundays, Flanders.”

 

“Will he …” said Jinny, looking at Jacob. “You …”

 

“Yes, he’ll come with us,” said Cruttendon.

 

And then, here is Versailles. Jinny stood on the stone rim and leant

over the pond, clasped by Cruttendon’s arms or she would have fallen in.

“There! There!” she cried. “Right up to the top!” Some sluggish,

sloping-shouldered fish had floated up from the depths to nip her

crumbs. “You look,” she said, jumping down. And then the dazzling white

water, rough and throttled, shot up into the air. The fountain spread

itself. Through it came the sound of military music far away. All the

water was puckered with drops. A blue air-ball gently bumped the

surface. How all the nurses and children and old men and young crowded

to the edge, leant over and waved their sticks! The little girl ran

stretching her arms towards her air-ball, but it sank beneath the

fountain.

 

Edward Cruttendon, Jinny Carslake, and Jacob Flanders walked in a row

along the yellow gravel path; got on to the grass; so passed under the

trees; and came out at the summer-house where Marie Antoinette used to

drink chocolate. In went Edward and Jinny, but Jacob waited outside,

sitting on the handle of his walking-stick. Out they came again.

 

“Well?” said Cruttendon, smiling at Jacob.

 

Jinny waited; Edward waited; and both looked at Jacob.

 

“Well?” said Jacob, smiling and pressing both hands on his stick.

 

“Come along,” he decided; and started off. The others followed him,

smiling.

 

And then they went to the little cafe in the by-street where people sit

drinking coffee, watching the soldiers, meditatively knocking ashes into

trays.

 

“But he’s quite different,” said Jinny, folding her hands over the top

of her glass. “I don’t suppose you know what Ted means when he says a

thing like that,” she said, looking at Jacob. “But I do. Sometimes I

could kill myself. Sometimes he lies in bed all day long—just lies

there. … I don’t want you right on the table”; she waved her hands.

Swollen iridescent pigeons were waddling round their feet.

 

“Look at that woman’s hat,” said Cruttendon. “How do they come to think

of it? … No, Flanders, I don’t think I could live like you. When one

walks down that street opposite the British Museum—what’s it called?—

that’s what I mean. It’s all like that. Those fat women—and the man

standing in the middle of the road as if he were going to have a fit

…”

 

“Everybody feeds them,” said Jinny, waving the pigeons away. “They’re

stupid old things.”

 

“Well, I don’t know,” said Jacob, smoking his cigarette. “There’s St.

Paul’s.”

 

“I mean going to an office,” said Cruttendon.

 

“Hang it all,” Jacob expostulated.

 

“But you don’t count,” said Jinny, looking at Cruttendon. “You’re mad. I

mean, you just think of painting.”

 

“Yes, I know. I can’t help it. I say, will King George give way about

the peers?”

 

“He’ll jolly well have to,” said Jacob.

 

“There!” said Jinny. “He really knows.”

 

“You see, I would if I could,” said Cruttendon, “but I simply can’t.”

 

“I THINK I could,” said Jinny. “Only, it’s all the people one dislikes

who do it. At home, I mean. They talk of nothing else. Even people like

my mother.”

 

“Now if I came and lived here–” said Jacob. “What’s my share,

Cruttendon? Oh, very well. Have it your own way. Those silly birds,

directly one wants them—they’ve flown away.”

 

And finally under the arc lamps in the Gare des Invalides, with one of

those queer movements which are so slight yet so definite, which may

wound or pass unnoticed but generally inflict a good deal of discomfort,

Jinny and Cruttendon drew together; Jacob stood apart. They had to

separate. Something must be said. Nothing was said. A man wheeled a

trolley past Jacob’s legs so near that he almost grazed them. When Jacob

recovered his balance the other two were turning away, though Jinny

looked over her shoulder, and Cruttendon, waving his hand, disappeared

like the very great genius that he was.

 

No—Mrs. Flanders was told none of this, though Jacob felt, it is safe

to say, that nothing in the world was of greater importance; and as for

Cruttendon and Jinny, he thought them the most remarkable people he had

ever met—being of course unable to foresee how it fell out in the

course of time that Cruttendon took to painting orchards; had therefore

to live in Kent; and must, one would think, see through apple blossom by

this time, since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with a

novelist; but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards, savagely, in

solitude. Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the American

painter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her in

pensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller’s box containing ordinary

pebbles picked off the road. But if you look at them steadily, she says,

multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life, though

it does not prevent her from following the macaroni as it goes round the

table, and sometimes, on spring nights, she makes the strangest

confidences to shy young Englishmen.

 

Jacob had nothing to hide from his mother. It was only that he could

make no sense himself of his extraordinary excitement, and as for

writing it down–

 

“Jacob’s letters are so like him,” said Mrs. Jarvis, folding the sheet.

 

“Indeed he seems to be having …” said Mrs. Flanders, and paused, for

she was cutting out a dress and had to straighten the pattern, “… a

very gay time.”

 

Mrs. Jarvis thought of Paris. At her back the window was open, for it

was a mild night; a calm night; when the moon seemed muffled and the

apple trees stood perfectly still.

 

“I never pity the dead,” said Mrs. Jarvis, shifting the cushion at her

back, and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did not

hear, for her scissors made so much noise on the table.

 

“They are at rest,” said Mrs. Jarvis. “And we spend our days doing

foolish unnecessary things without knowing why.”

 

Mrs. Jarvis was not liked in the village.

 

“You never walk at this time of night?” she asked Mrs. Flanders.

 

“It is certainly wonderfully mild,” said Mrs. Flanders.

 

Yet it was years since she had opened the orchard gate and gone out on

Dods Hill after dinner.

 

“It is perfectly dry,” said Mrs. Jarvis, as they shut the orchard door

and stepped on to the turf.

 

“I shan’t go far,” said Betty Flanders. “Yes, Jacob will leave Paris on

Wednesday.”

 

“Jacob was always my friend of the three,” said Mrs. Jarvis.

 

“Now, my dear, I am going no further,” said Mrs. Flanders. They had

climbed the dark hill and reached the Roman camp.

 

The rampart rose at their feet—the smooth circle surrounding the camp

or the grave. How many needles Betty Flanders had lost there; and her

garnet brooch.

 

“It is much clearer than this sometimes,” said Mrs. Jarvis, standing

upon the ridge. There were no clouds, and yet there was a haze over the

sea, and over the moors. The lights of Scarborough flashed, as if a

woman wearing a diamond necklace turned her head this way and that.

 

“How quiet it is!” said Mrs. Jarvis.

 

Mrs. Flanders rubbed the turf with her toe, thinking of her garnet

brooch.

 

Mrs. Jarvis found it difficult to think of herself to-night. It was so

calm. There was no wind; nothing racing, flying, escaping. Black shadows

stood still over the silver moors. The furze bushes stood perfectly

still. Neither did Mrs. Jarvis think of God. There was a church behind

them, of course. The church clock struck ten. Did the strokes reach the

furze bush, or did the thorn tree hear them?

 

Mrs. Flanders was stooping down to pick up a pebble. Sometimes people do

find things, Mrs. Jarvis thought, and yet in this hazy moonlight it was

impossible to see anything, except bones, and little pieces of chalk.

 

“Jacob bought it with his own money, and then I brought Mr. Parker up to

see the view, and it must have dropped—” Mrs. Flanders murmured.

 

Did the bones stir, or the rusty swords? Was Mrs. Flanders’s twopenny-halfpenny brooch for ever part of the rich accumulation? and if all the

ghosts flocked thick and rubbed shoulders with Mrs. Flanders in the

circle, would she not have seemed perfectly in her place, a live English

matron, growing stout?

 

The clock struck the quarter.

 

The frail waves of sound broke among the stiff gorse and the hawthorn

twigs as the church clock divided time into quarters.

 

Motionless and broad-backed the moors received the statement “It is

fifteen minutes past the hour,” but made no answer, unless a bramble

stirred.

 

Yet even in this light the legends on the tombstones could be read,

brief voices saying, “I am Bertha Ruck,” “I am Tom Gage.” And they say

which day of the year they died, and the New Testament says something

for them, very proud, very emphatic, or consoling.

 

The moors accept all that too.

 

The moonlight falls like a pale page upon the church wall, and illumines

the kneeling family in the niche, and the tablet set up in 1780 to the

Squire of the parish who relieved the poor, and believed in God—so the

measured voice goes on down the marble scroll, as though it could impose

itself upon time and the open air.

 

Now a fox steals out from behind the gorse bushes.

 

Often, even at night, the church seems full of people. The pews are worn

and greasy, and the cassocks in place, and the hymn-books on the ledges.

It is a ship with all its crew aboard. The timbers strain to hold the

dead and the living, the ploughmen, the carpenters, the fox-hunting

gentlemen and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join

together in syllabling the sharp-cut words, which for ever slice asunder

time and the broad-backed moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despair

and triumph, but for the most part good sense and jolly indifference, go

trampling out of the windows any time these five hundred years.

 

Still, as Mrs. Jarvis said, stepping out on to the moors, “How quiet it

is!” Quiet at midday, except when the hunt scatters across it; quiet in

the afternoon, save for the drifting sheep; at night the moor is

perfectly quiet.

 

A garnet