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

CHAPTER TWELVE

The water fell off a ledge like lead—like a chain with thick white

links. The train ran out into a steep green meadow, and Jacob saw

striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy.

 

A motor car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept up

with the train, raising dust behind it. There were trees laced together

with vines—as Virgil said. Here was a station; and a tremendous leave-taking going on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys in

ringed socks. Virgil’s bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. It

was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Then at

Milan there were sharp-winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures

over the roofs.

 

These Italian carriages get damnably hot with the afternoon sun on them,

and the chances are that before the engine has pulled to the top of the

gorge the clanking chain will have broken. Up, up, up, it goes, like a

train on a scenic railway. Every peak is covered with sharp trees, and

amazing white villages are crowded on ledges. There is always a white

tower on the very summit, flat red-frilled roofs, and a sheer drop

beneath. It is not a country in which one walks after tea. For one thing

there is no grass. A whole hillside will be ruled with olive trees.

Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust between them. And

there are neither stiles nor footpaths, nor lanes chequered with the

shadows of leaves nor eighteenth-century inns with bow-windows, where

one eats ham and eggs. Oh no, Italy is all fierceness, bareness,

exposure, and black priests shuffling along the roads. It is strange,

too, how you never get away from villas.

 

Still, to be travelling on one’s own with a hundred pounds to spend is a

fine affair. And if his money gave out, as it probably would, he would

go on foot. He could live on bread and wine—the wine in straw bottles—

for after doing Greece he was going to knock off Rome. The Roman

civilization was a very inferior affair, no doubt. But Bonamy talked a

lot of rot, all the same. “You ought to have been in Athens,” he would

say to Bonamy when he got back. “Standing on the Parthenon,” he would

say, or “The ruins of the Coliseum suggest some fairly sublime

reflections,” which he would write out at length in letters. It might

turn to an essay upon civilization. A comparison between the ancients

and moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr. Asquith—something in

the style of Gibbon.

 

A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in, dusty, baggy, slung

with gold chains, and Jacob, regretting that he did not come of the

Latin race, looked out of the window.

 

It is a strange reflection that by travelling two days and nights you

are in the heart of Italy. Accidental villas among olive trees appear;

and men-servants watering the cactuses. Black victorias drive in between

pompous pillars with plaster shields stuck to them. It is at once

momentary and astonishingly intimate—to be displayed before the eyes of

a foreigner. And there is a lonely hill-top where no one ever comes, and

yet it is seen by me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an

omnibus. And what I should like would be to get out among the fields,

sit down and hear the grasshoppers, and take up a handful of earth—

Italian earth, as this is Italian dust upon my shoes.

 

Jacob heard them crying strange names at railway stations through the

night. The train stopped and he heard frogs croaking close by, and he

wrinkled back the blind cautiously and saw a vast strange marsh all

white in the moonlight. The carriage was thick with cigar smoke, which

floated round the globe with the green shade on it. The Italian

gentleman lay snoring with his boots off and his waistcoat unbuttoned.

… And all this business of going to Greece seemed to Jacob an

intolerable weariness—sitting in hotels by oneself and looking at

monuments—he’d have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durrant.

… “O—h,” Jacob protested, as the darkness began breaking in front of

him and the light showed through, but the man was reaching across him to

get something—the fat Italian man in his dicky, unshaven, crumpled,

obese, was opening the door and going off to have a wash.

 

So Jacob sat up, and saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun walking

down the road in the early morning light, and the whole idea of the

Parthenon came upon him in a clap.

 

“By Jove!” he thought, “we must be nearly there!” and he stuck his head

out of the window and got the air full in his face.

 

It is highly exasperating that twenty-five people of your acquaintance

should be able to say straight off something very much to the point

about being in Greece, while for yourself there is a stopper upon all

emotions whatsoever. For after washing at the hotel at Patras, Jacob had

followed the tram lines a mile or so out; and followed them a mile or so

back; he had met several droves of turkeys; several strings of donkeys;

had got lost in back streets; had read advertisements of corsets and of

Maggi’s consomme; children had trodden on his toes; the place smelt of

bad cheese; and he was glad to find himself suddenly come out opposite

his hotel. There was an old copy of the Daily Mail lying among coffee-cups; which he read. But what could he do after dinner?

 

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without

our astonishing gift for illusion. At the age of twelve or so, having

given up dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much more

probably Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous

imagination. One’s aunts have been to Rome; and every one has an uncle

who was last heard of—poor man—in Rangoon. He will never come back any

more. But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth. Look at that

for a head (they say)—nose, you see, straight as a dart, curls,

eyebrows—everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs and

arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of development—

the Greeks caring for the body as much as for the face. And the Greeks

could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it. First you read Xenophon;

then Euripides. One day—that was an occasion, by God—what people have

said appears to have sense in it; “the Greek spirit”; the Greek this,

that, and the other; though it is absurd, by the way, to say that any

Greek comes near Shakespeare. The point is, however, that we have been

brought up in an illusion.

 

Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the Daily Mail

crumpled in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom.

 

“But it’s the way we’re brought up,” he went on.

 

And it all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done

about it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about

to be executed. Clara Durrant had left him at a party to talk to an

American called Pilchard. And he had come all the way to Greece and left

her. They wore evening-dresses, and talked nonsense—what damned

nonsense—and he put out his hand for the Globe Trotter, an

international magazine which is supplied free of charge to the

proprietors of hotels.

 

In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in

the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel

sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to

get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge,

beneath the windows. The whole of civilization was being condemned.

 

The waiter was quite indifferent to that too. Aristotle, a dirty man,

carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest now occupying the

only arm-chair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down,

put something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there.

 

“I shall want to be called early to-morrow,” said Jacob, over his

shoulder. “I am going to Olympia.”

 

This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a

modern invention. Perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough.

Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the

matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. He

would go into Parliament and make fine speeches—but what use are fine

speeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters?

Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our

veins—of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and evening

parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray’s

Inn—something solid, immovable, and grotesque—is at the back of it,

Jacob thought probable. But then there was the British Empire which was

beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving Home

Rule to Ireland. What did the Daily Mail say about that?

 

For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things—as

indeed the chambermaid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys,

studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing-table,

was aware.

 

That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florinda knew, as she knew

everything, by instinct.

 

And Betty Flanders even now suspected it, as she read his letter, posted

at Milan, “Telling me,” she complained to Mrs. Jarvis, “really nothing

that I want to know”; but she brooded over it.

 

Fanny Elmer felt it to desperation. For he would take his stick and his

hat and would walk to the window, and look perfectly absent-minded and

very stern too, she thought.

 

“I am going,” he would say, “to cadge a meal of Bonamy.”

 

“Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames,” Fanny cried, as she hurried

past the Foundling Hospital.

 

“But the Daily Mail isn’t to be trusted,” Jacob said to himself, looking

about for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed so

profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him

at any moment, which was odd in a man who enjoyed things so, was not

much given to analysis, but was horribly romantic, of course, Bonamy

thought, in his rooms in Lincoln’s Inn.

 

“He will fall in love,” thought Bonamy. “Some Greek woman with a

straight nose.”

 

It was to Bonamy that Jacob wrote from Patras—to Bonamy who couldn’t

love a woman and never read a foolish book.