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

the foreign policy of Chatham. But

confound this tumid, queasy feeling—this restlessness, swelling, and

heat—it was jealousy! jealousy! jealousy! which he had sworn never to

feel again.

 

“Come with us to Corinth, Flanders,” he said with more than his usual

energy, stopping by Jacob’s chair. He was relieved by Jacob’s reply, or

rather by the solid, direct, if shy manner in which he said that he

would like very much to come with them to Corinth.

 

“Here is a fellow,” thought Evan Williams, “who might do very well in

politics.”

 

“I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live,” Jacob wrote

to Bonamy. “It is the only chance I can see of protecting oneself from

civilization.”

 

“Goodness knows what he means by that,” Bonamy sighed. For as he never

said a clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob’s made him feel

apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the

definite, the concrete, and the rational.

 

Nothing could be much simpler than what Sandra said as she descended the

Acro-Corinth, keeping to the little path, while Jacob strode over

rougher ground by her side. She had been left motherless at the age of

four; and the Park was vast.

 

“One never seemed able to get out of it,” she laughed. Of course there

was the library, and dear Mr. Jones, and notions about things. “I used

to stray into the kitchen and sit upon the butler’s knees,” she laughed,

sadly though.

 

Jacob thought that if he had been there he would have saved her; for she

had been exposed to great dangers, he felt, and, he thought to himself,

“People wouldn’t understand a woman talking as she talks.”

 

She made little of the roughness of the hill; and wore breeches, he saw,

under her short skirts.

 

“Women like Fanny Elmer don’t,” he thought. “What’s-her-name Carslake

didn’t; yet they pretend…”

 

Mrs. Williams said things straight out. He was surprised by his own

knowledge of the rules of behaviour; how much more can be said than one

thought; how open one can be with a woman; and how little he had known

himself before.

 

Evan joined them on the road; and as they drove along up hill and down

hill (for Greece is in a state of effervescence, yet astonishingly

clean-cut, a treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades,

each hill cut and shaped and outlined as often as not against sparkling

deep blue waters, islands white as sand floating on the horizon,

occasional groves of palm trees standing in the valleys, which are

scattered with black goats, spotted with little olive trees and

sometimes have white hollows, rayed and criss-crossed, in their flanks),

as they drove up hill and down he scowled in the corner of the carriage,

with his paw so tightly closed that the skin was stretched between the

knuckles and the little hairs stood upright. Sandra rode opposite,

dominant, like a Victory prepared to fling into the air.

 

“Heartless!” thought Evan (which was untrue).

 

“Brainless!” he suspected (and that was not true either). “Still…!” He

envied her.

 

When bedtime came the difficulty was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found.

Yet he had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonamy!

No; there was something queer about it. He could not write to Bonamy.

 

“I shall go to Athens all the same,” he resolved, looking very set, with

this hook dragging in his side.

 

The Williamses had already been to Athens.

 

Athens is still quite capable of striking a young man as the oddest

combination, the most incongruous assortment. Now it is suburban; now

immortal. Now cheap continental jewellery is laid upon plush trays. Now

the stately woman stands naked, save for a wave of drapery above the

knee. No form can he set on his sensations as he strolls, one blazing

afternoon, along the Parisian boulevard and skips out of the way of the

royal landau which, looking indescribably ramshackle, rattles along the

pitted roadway, saluted by citizens of both sexes cheaply dressed in

bowler hats and continental costumes; though a shepherd in kilt, cap,

and gaiters very nearly drives his herd of goats between the royal

wheels; and all the time the Acropolis surges into the air, raises

itself above the town, like a large immobile wave with the yellow

columns of the Parthenon firmly planted upon it.

 

The yellow columns of the Parthenon are to be seen at all hours of the

day firmly planted upon the Acropolis; though at sunset, when the ships

in the Piraeus fire their guns, a bell rings, a man in uniform (the

waistcoat unbuttoned) appears; and the women roll up the black stockings

which they are knitting in the shadow of the columns, call to the

children, and troop off down the hill back to their houses.

 

There they are again, the pillars, the pediment, the Temple of Victory

and the Erechtheum, set on a tawny rock cleft with shadows, directly you

unlatch your shutters in the morning and, leaning out, hear the clatter,

the clamour, the whip cracking in the street below. There they are.

 

The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white,

again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of

the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere

dissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite

independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficiently

humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud—memories,

abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions—the Parthenon is separate

from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out all night, for

centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at midday the glare is

dazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps it

is beauty alone that is immortal.

 

Added to this, compared with the blistered stucco, the new love songs

rasped out to the strum of guitar and gramophone, and the mobile yet

insignificant faces of the street, the Parthenon is really astonishing

in its silent composure; which is so vigorous that, far from being

decayed, the Parthenon appears, on the contrary, likely to outlast the

entire world.

 

“And the Greeks, like sensible men, never bothered to finish the backs

of their statues,” said Jacob, shading his eyes and observing that the

side of the figure which is turned away from view is left in the rough.

 

He noted the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which “the

artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy,” he

read in his guide-book.

 

He stood on the exact spot where the great statue of Athena used to

stand, and identified the more famous landmarks of the scene beneath.

 

In short he was accurate and diligent; but profoundly morose. Moreover

he was pestered by guides. This was on Monday.

 

But on Wednesday he wrote a telegram to Bonamy, telling him to come at

once. And then he crumpled it in his hand and threw it in the gutter.

 

“For one thing he wouldn’t come,” he thought. “And then I daresay this

sort of thing wears off.” “This sort of thing” being that uneasy,

painful feeling, something like selfishness—one wishes almost that the

thing would stop—it is getting more and more beyond what is possible—

“If it goes on much longer I shan’t be able to cope with it—but if some

one else were seeing it at the same time—Bonamy is stuffed in his room

in Lincoln’s Inn—oh, I say, damn it all, I say,”—the sight of

Hymettus, Pentelicus, Lycabettus on one side, and the sea on the other,

as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky pink feathered, the

plain all colours, the marble tawny in one’s eyes, is thus oppressive.

Luckily Jacob had little sense of personal association; he seldom

thought of Plato or Socrates in the flesh; on the other hand his feeling

for architecture was very strong; he preferred statues to pictures; and

he was beginning to think a great deal about the problems of

civilization, which were solved, of course, so very remarkably by the

ancient Greeks, though their solution is no help to us. Then the hook

gave a great tug in his side as he lay in bed on Wednesday night; and he

turned over with a desperate sort of tumble, remembering Sandra

Wentworth Williams with whom he was in love.

 

Next day he climbed Pentelicus.

 

The day after he went up to the Acropolis. The hour was early; the place

almost deserted; and possibly there was thunder in the air. But the sun

struck full upon the Acropolis.

 

Jacob’s intention was to sit down and read, and, finding a drum of

marble conveniently placed, from which Marathon could be seen, and yet

it was in the shade, while the Erechtheum blazed white in front of him,

there he sat. And after reading a page he put his thumb in his book. Why

not rule countries in the way they should be ruled? And he read again.

 

No doubt his position there overlooking Marathon somehow raised his

spirits. Or it may have been that a slow capacious brain has these

moments of flowering. Or he had, insensibly, while he was abroad, got

into the way of thinking about politics.

 

And then looking up and seeing the sharp outline, his meditations were

given an extraordinary edge; Greece was over; the Parthenon in ruins;

yet there he was.

 

(Ladies with green and white umbrellas passed through the courtyard—

French ladies on their way to join their husbands in Constantinople.)

 

Jacob read on again. And laying the book on the ground he began, as if

inspired by what he had read, to write a note upon the importance of

history—upon democracy—one of those scribbles upon which the work of a

lifetime may be based; or again, it falls out of a book twenty years

later, and one can’t remember a word of it. It is a little painful. It

had better be burnt.

 

Jacob wrote; began to draw a straight nose; when all the French ladies

opening and shutting their umbrellas just beneath him exclaimed, looking

at the sky, that one did not know what to expect—rain or fine weather?

 

Jacob got up and strolled across to the Erechtheum. There are still

several women standing there holding the roof on their heads. Jacob

straightened himself slightly; for stability and balance affect the body

first. These statues annulled things so! He stared at them, then turned,

and there was Madame Lucien Grave perched on a block of marble with her

kodak pointed at his head. Of course she jumped down, in spite of her

age, her figure, and her tight boots—having, now that her daughter was

married, lapsed with a luxurious abandonment, grand enough in its way,

into the fleshy grotesque; she jumped down, but not before Jacob had

seen her.

 

“Damn these women—damn these women!” he thought. And he went to fetch

his book which he had left lying on the ground in the Parthenon.

 

“How they spoil things,” he murmured, leaning against one of the

pillars, pressing his book tight between his arm and his side. (As for

the weather, no doubt the storm would break soon; Athens was under

cloud.)

 

“It is those damned women,” said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness,

but rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have been

should never be.

 

(This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men

in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become

fathers of families and directors of banks.)

 

Then, making sure that the Frenchwomen had gone, and looking cautiously

round him, Jacob strolled over to the Erechtheum and