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

Acropolis, Evan—or are you

too tired?”

 

At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him,

at his wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress—not that

she would pity him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love, for

anything he could do, cease its tortures.

 

They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out on to the

Square of the Constitution.

 

“Evan is happier alone,” said Sandra. “We have been separated from the

newspapers. Well, it is better that people should have what they

want…. You have seen all these wonderful things since we met…. What

impression … I think that you are changed.”

 

“You want to go to the Acropolis,” said Jacob. “Up here then.”

 

“One will remember it all one’s life,” said Sandra.

 

“Yes,” said Jacob. “I wish you could have come in the day-time.”

 

“This is more wonderful,” said Sandra, waving her hand.

 

Jacob looked vaguely.

 

“But you should see the Parthenon in the day-time,” he said. “You

couldn’t come to-morrow—it would be too early?”

 

“You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?”

 

“There were some awful women this morning,” said Jacob.

 

“Awful women?” Sandra echoed.

 

“Frenchwomen.”

 

“But something very wonderful has happened,” said Sandra. Ten minutes,

fifteen minutes, half an hour—that was all the time before her.

 

“Yes,” he said.

 

“When one is your age—when one is young. What will you do? You will

fall in love—oh yes! But don’t be in too great a hurry. I am so much

older.”

 

She was brushed off the pavement by parading men.

 

“Shall we go on?” Jacob asked.

 

“Let us go on,” she insisted.

 

For she could not stop until she had told him—or heard him say—or was

it some action on his part that she required? Far away on the horizon

she discerned it and could not rest.

 

“You’d never get English people to sit out like this,” he said.

 

“Never—no. When you get back to England you won’t forget this—or come

with us to Constantinople!” she cried suddenly.

 

“But then…”

 

Sandra sighed.

 

“You must go to Delphi, of course,” she said. “But,” she asked herself,

“what do I want from him? Perhaps it is something that I have

missed….”

 

“You will get there about six in the evening,” she said. “You will see

the eagles.”

 

Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner

and yet composed. He was suffering, perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there

was something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme

disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life.

Perhaps if one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it need

not come to him—this disillusionment from women in middle life.

 

“The hotel is awful,” she said. “The last visitors had left their basins

full of dirty water. There is always that,” she laughed.

 

“The people one meets ARE beastly,” Jacob said.

 

His excitement was clear enough.

 

“Write and tell me about it,” she said. “And tell me what you feel and

what you think. Tell me everything.”

 

The night was dark. The Acropolis was a jagged mound.

 

“I should like to, awfully,” he said.

 

“When we get back to London, we shall meet…”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I suppose they leave the gates open?” he asked.

 

“We could climb them!” she answered wildly.

 

Obscuring the moon and altogether darkening the Acropolis the clouds

passed from east to west. The clouds solidified; the vapours thickened;

the trailing veils stayed and accumulated.

 

It was dark now over Athens, except for gauzy red streaks where the

streets ran; and the front of the Palace was cadaverous from electric

light. At sea the piers stood out, marked by separate dots; the waves

being invisible, and promontories and islands were dark humps with a few

lights.

 

“I’d love to bring my brother, if I may,” Jacob murmured.

 

“And then when your mother comes to London—,” said Sandra.

 

The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must

have touched the waves and spattered them—the dolphins circling deeper

and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea

of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy.

 

In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the

sand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it

pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing

stiff by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle.

 

Sandra’s veils were swirled about her.

 

“I will give you my copy,” said Jacob. “Here. Will you keep it?”

 

(The book was the poems of Donne.)

 

Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark.

Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns—Paris—

Constantinople—London—were black as strewn rocks. Waterways might be

distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps in

some southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled.

The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly towards another. The English

sky is softer, milkier than the Eastern. Something gentle has passed

into it from the grass-rounded hills, something damp. The salt gale blew

in at Betty Flanders’s bedroom window, and the widow lady, raising

herself slightly on her elbow, sighed like one who realizes, but would

fain ward off a little longer—oh, a little longer!—the oppression of

eternity.

 

But to return to Jacob and Sandra.

 

They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? The

columns and the Temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh on

them year after year; and of that what remains?

 

As for reaching the Acropolis who shall say that we ever do it, or that

when Jacob woke next morning he found anything hard and durable to keep

for ever? Still, he went with them to Constantinople.

 

Sandra Wentworth Williams certainly woke to find a copy of Donne’s poems

upon her dressing-table. And the book would be stood on the shelf in the

English country house where Sally Duggan’s Life of Father Damien in

verse would join it one of these days. There were ten or twelve little

volumes already. Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and

her eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into the

arm-chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, for

sometimes she was restless, would pull out book after book and swing

across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. She

had had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing ticked

and Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask herself, “What for?

What for?”

 

“What for? What for?” Sandra would say, putting the book back, and

strolling to the looking-glass and pressing her hair. And Miss Edwards

would be startled at dinner, as she opened her mouth to admit roast

mutton, by Sandra’s sudden solicitude: “Are you happy, Miss Edwards?”—a

thing Cissy Edwards hadn’t thought of for years.

 

“What for? What for?” Jacob never asked himself any such questions, to

judge by the way he laced his boots; shaved himself; to judge by the

depth of his sleep that night, with the wind fidgeting at the shutters,

and half-a-dozen mosquitoes singing in his ears. He was young—a man.

And then Sandra was right when she judged him to be credulous as yet. At

forty it might be a different matter. Already he had marked the things

he liked in Donne, and they were savage enough. However, you might place

beside them passages of the purest poetry in Shakespeare.

 

But the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens,

rolling it, one might suppose, with a sort of trampling energy of mood

which forbids too close an analysis of the feelings of any single

person, or inspection of features. All faces—Greek, Levantine, Turkish,

English—would have looked much the same in that darkness. At length the

columns and the Temples whiten, yellow, turn rose; and the Pyramids and

St. Peter’s arise, and at last sluggish St. Paul’s looms up.

 

The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their

interpretation of the day’s meaning. Then, less melodiously, dissenters

of different sects issue a cantankerous emendation. The steamers,

resounding like gigantic tuning-forks, state the old old fact—how there

is a sea coldly, greenly, swaying outside. But nowadays it is the thin

voice of duty, piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel, that

collects the largest multitudes, and night is nothing but a long-drawn

sigh between hammer-strokes, a deep breath—you can hear it from an open

window even in the heart of London.

 

But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with

hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in

skeleton outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton is wrapped in

flesh.

 

“The kettle never boils so well on a sunny morning,” says Mrs. Grandage,

glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. Then the grey Persian cat

stretches itself on the window-seat, and buffets a moth with soft round

paws. And before breakfast is half over (they were late today), a baby

is deposited in her lap, and she must guard the sugar basin while Tom

Grandage reads the golfing article in the “Times,” sips his coffee,

wipes his moustaches, and is off to the office, where he is the greatest

authority upon the foreign exchanges and marked for promotion. The

skeleton is well wrapped in flesh. Even this dark night when the wind

rolls the darkness through Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford

Square it stirs (since it is summer-time and the height of the season),

plane trees spangled with electric light, and curtains still preserving

the room from the dawn. People still murmur over the last word said on

the staircase, or strain, all through their dreams, for the voice of the

alarum clock. So when the wind roams through a forest innumerable twigs

stir; hives are brushed; insects sway on grass blades; the spider runs

rapidly up a crease in the bark; and the whole air is tremulous with

breathing; elastic with filaments.

 

Only here—in Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square—each

insect carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of the

forest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honey

is treasure of one sort and another; and the stir in the air is the

indescribable agitation of life.

 

But colour returns; runs up the stalks of the grass; blows out into

tulips and crocuses; solidly stripes the tree trunks; and fills the

gauze of the air and the grasses and pools.

 

The Bank of England emerges; and the Monument with its bristling head of

golden hair; the dray horses crossing London Bridge show grey and

strawberry and iron-coloured. There is a whir of wings as the suburban

trains rush into the terminus. And the light mounts over the faces of

all the tall blind houses, slides through a chink and paints the

lustrous bellying crimson curtains; the green wine-glasses; the coffee-cups; and the chairs standing askew.

 

Sunlight strikes in upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon

all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured,

resplendent, summer’s day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which

has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood

glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an

armoury of weapons