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

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There are very few good books after all, for we can’t count profuse

histories, travels in mule carts to discover the sources of the Nile, or

the volubility of fiction.

 

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like

sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them. I like words to be

hard—such were Bonamy’s views, and they won him the hostility of those

whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up

the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can’t forbear a

shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature.

That was not Bonamy’s way at all. That his taste in literature affected

his friendships, and made him silent, secretive, fastidious, and only

quite at his ease with one or two young men of his own way of thinking,

was the charge against him.

 

But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking—far

from it, Bonamy sighed, laying the thin sheets of notepaper on the table

and falling into thought about Jacob’s character, not for the first

time.

 

The trouble was this romantic vein in him. “But mixed with the stupidity

which leads him into these absurd predicaments,” thought Bonamy, “there

is something—something”—he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob than of

any one in the world.

 

Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There

he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of

the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into

groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him

was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction—it

was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.

 

Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia,

the Greek peasant women were out among the vines; the old Greek men were

sitting at the stations, sipping sweet wine. And though Jacob remained

gloomy he had never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be

alone; out of England; on one’s own; cut off from the whole thing. There

are very sharp bare hills on the way to Olympia; and between them blue

sea in triangular spaces. A little like the Cornish coast. Well now, to

go walking by oneself all day—to get on to that track and follow it up

between the bushes—or are they small trees?—to the top of that

mountain from which one can see half the nations of antiquity—

 

“Yes,” said Jacob, for his carriage was empty, “let’s look at the map.”

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To

gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth

spin; to have—positively—a rush of friendship for stones and grasses,

as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang—

there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty

often.

 

The evening air slightly moved the dirty curtains in the hotel window at

Olympia.

 

“I am full of love for every one,” thought Mrs. Wentworth Williams, “—

for the poor most of all—for the peasants coming back in the evening

with their burdens. And everything is soft and vague and very sad. It is

sad, it is sad. But everything has meaning,” thought Sandra Wentworth

Williams, raising her head a little and looking very beautiful, tragic,

and exalted. “One must love everything.”

 

She held in her hand a little book convenient for travelling—stories by

Tchekov—as she stood, veiled, in white, in the window of the hotel at

Olympia. How beautiful the evening was! and her beauty was its beauty.

The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high souls. The inevitable

compromise. She seemed to have grasped something. She would write it

down. And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she leant

her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her

own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it

down. Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish when

he shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup

which were now being placed before them. Only his drooping bloodhound

eyes and his heavy sallow cheeks expressed his melancholy tolerance, his

conviction that though forced to live with circumspection and

deliberation he could never possibly achieve any of those objects which,

as he knew, are the only ones worth pursuing. His consideration was

flawless; his silence unbroken.

 

“Everything seems to mean so much,” said Sandra. But with the sound of

her own voice the spell was broken. She forgot the peasants. Only there

remained with her a sense of her own beauty, and in front, luckily,

there was a looking-glass.

 

“I am very beautiful,” she thought.

 

She shifted her hat slightly. Her husband saw her looking in the glass;

and agreed that beauty is important; it is an inheritance; one cannot

ignore it. But it is a barrier; it is in fact rather a bore. So he drank

his soup; and kept his eyes fixed upon the window.

 

“Quails,” said Mrs. Wentworth Williams languidly. “And then goat, I

suppose; and then…”

 

“Caramel custard presumably,” said her husband in the same cadence, with

his toothpick out already.

 

She laid her spoon upon her plate, and her soup was taken away half

finished. Never did she do anything without dignity; for hers was the

English type which is so Greek, save that villagers have touched their

hats to it, the vicarage reveres it; and upper-gardeners and under-gardeners respectfully straighten their backs as she comes down the

broad terrace on Sunday morning, dallying at the stone urns with the

Prime Minister to pick a rose—which, perhaps, she was trying to forget,

as her eye wandered round the dining-room of the inn at Olympia, seeking

the window where her book lay, where a few minutes ago she had

discovered something—something very profound it had been, about love

and sadness and the peasants.

 

But it was Evan who sighed; not in despair nor indeed in rebellion. But,

being the most ambitious of men and temperamentally the most sluggish,

he had accomplished nothing; had the political history of England at his

finger-ends, and living much in company with Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and

Charles James Fox could not help contrasting himself and his age with

them and theirs. “Yet there never was a time when great men are more

needed,” he was in the habit of saying to himself, with a sigh. Here he

was picking his teeth in an inn at Olympia. He had done. But Sandra’s

eyes wandered.

 

“Those pink melons are sure to be dangerous,” he said gloomily. And as

he spoke the door opened and in came a young man in a grey check suit.

 

“Beautiful but dangerous,” said Sandra, immediately talking to her

husband in the presence of a third person. (“Ah, an English boy on

tour,” she thought to herself.)

 

And Evan knew all that too.

 

Yes, he knew all that; and he admired her. Very pleasant, he thought, to

have affairs. But for himself, what with his height (Napoleon was five

feet four, he remembered), his bulk, his inability to impose his own

personality (and yet great men are needed more than ever now, he

sighed), it was useless. He threw away his cigar, went up to Jacob and

asked him, with a simple sort of sincerity which Jacob liked, whether he

had come straight out from England.

 

“How very English!” Sandra laughed when the waiter told them next

morning that the young gentleman had left at five to climb the mountain.

“I am sure he asked you for a bath?” at which the waiter shook his head,

and said that he would ask the manager.

 

“You do not understand,” laughed Sandra. “Never mind.”

 

Stretched on the top of the mountain, quite alone, Jacob enjoyed

himself immensely. Probably he had never been so happy in the whole of

his life.

 

But at dinner that night Mr. Williams asked him whether he would like to

see the paper; then Mrs. Williams asked him (as they strolled on the

terrace smoking—and how could he refuse that man’s cigar?) whether he’d

seen the theatre by moonlight; whether he knew Everard Sherborn; whether

he read Greek and whether (Evan rose silently and went in) if he had to

sacrifice one it would be the French literature or the Russian?

 

“And now,” wrote Jacob in his letter to Bonamy, “I shall have to read

her cursed book”—her Tchekov, he meant, for she had lent it him.

 

Though the opinion is unpopular it seems likely enough that bare places,

fields too thick with stones to be ploughed, tossing sea-meadows half-way between England and America, suit us better than cities.

 

There is something absolute in us which despises qualification. It is

this which is teased and twisted in society. People come together in a

room. “So delighted,” says somebody, “to meet you,” and that is a lie.

And then: “I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I

think, as one gets older.” For women are always, always, always talking

about what one feels, and if they say “as one gets older,” they mean you

to reply with something quite off the point.

 

Jacob sat himself down in the quarry where the Greeks had cut marble for

the theatre. It is hot work walking up Greek hills at midday. The wild

red cyclamen was out; he had seen the little tortoises hobbling from

clump to clump; the air smelt strong and suddenly sweet, and the sun,

striking on jagged splinters of marble, was very dazzling to the eyes.

Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored with

an august kind of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe.

 

Bonamy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made him

uneasy—when Jacob got into the doldrums, looked like a Margate

fisherman out of a job, or a British Admiral. You couldn’t make him

understand a thing when he was in a mood like that. One had better leave

him alone. He was dull. He was apt to be grumpy.

 

He was up very early, looking at the statues with his Baedeker.

 

Sandra Wentworth Williams, ranging the world before breakfast in quest

of adventure or a point of view, all in white, not so very tall perhaps,

but uncommonly upright—Sandra Williams got Jacob’s head exactly on a

level with the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles. The comparison was all

in his favour. But before she could say a single word he had gone out of

the Museum and left her.

 

Still, a lady of fashion travels with more than one dress, and if white

suits the morning hour, perhaps sandy yellow with purple spots on it, a

black hat, and a volume of Balzac, suit the evening. Thus she was

arranged on the terrace when Jacob came in. Very beautiful she looked.

With her hands folded she mused, seemed to listen to her husband, seemed

to watch the peasants coming down with brushwood on their backs, seemed

to notice how the hill changed from blue to black, seemed to

discriminate between truth and falsehood, Jacob thought, and crossed his

legs suddenly, observing the extreme shabbiness of his trousers.

 

“But he is very distinguished looking,” Sandra decided.

 

And Evan Williams, lying back in his chair with the paper on his knees,

envied them. The best thing he could do would be to publish, with

Macmillans, his monograph upon