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

the Strand,

in her incompetent way with this very careless, indifferent, sublime

manner he had of talking to railway guards or porters; or Mrs.

Whitehorn, when she consulted him about her little boy who was beaten by

the schoolmaster.

 

Sustained entirely upon picture post cards for the past two months,

Fanny’s idea of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever.

To reinforce her vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum,

where, keeping her eyes downcast until she was alongside of the battered

Ulysses, she opened them and got a fresh shock of Jacob’s presence,

enough to last her half a day. But this was wearing thin. And she wrote

now—poems, letters that were never posted, saw his face in

advertisements on hoardings, and would cross the road to let the barrel-organ turn her musings to rhapsody. But at breakfast (she shared rooms

with a teacher), when the butter was smeared about the plate, and the

prongs of the forks were clotted with old egg yolk, she revised these

visions violently; was, in truth, very cross; was losing her complexion,

as Margery Jackson told her, bringing the whole thing down (as she laced

her stout boots) to a level of mother-wit, vulgarity, and sentiment, for

she had loved too; and been a fool.

 

“One’s godmothers ought to have told one,” said Fanny, looking in at the

window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand—told one that it is no

use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it

now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines.

 

“This is life. This is life,” said Fanny.

 

“A very hard face,” thought Miss Barrett, on the other side of the

glass, buying maps of the Syrian desert and waiting impatiently to be

served. “Girls look old so soon nowadays.”

 

The equator swam behind tears.

 

“Piccadilly?” Fanny asked the conductor of the omnibus, and climbed to

the top. After all, he would, he must, come back to her.

 

But Jacob might have been thinking of Rome; of architecture; of

jurisprudence; as he sat under the plane tree in Hyde Park.

 

The omnibus stopped outside Charing Cross; and behind it were clogged

omnibuses, vans, motor-cars, for a procession with banners was passing

down Whitehall, and elderly people were stiffly descending from between

the paws of the slippery lions, where they had been testifying to their

faith, singing lustily, raising their eyes from their music to look into

the sky, and still their eyes were on the sky as they marched behind the

gold letters of their creed.

 

The traffic stopped, and the sun, no longer sprayed out by the breeze,

became almost too hot. But the procession passed; the banners glittered

—far away down Whitehall; the traffic was released; lurched on; spun to

a smooth continuous uproar; swerving round the curve of Cockspur Street;

and sweeping past Government offices and equestrian statues down

Whitehall to the prickly spires, the tethered grey fleet of masonry, and

the large white clock of Westminster.

 

Five strokes Big Ben intoned; Nelson received the salute. The wires of

the Admiralty shivered with some faraway communication. A voice kept

remarking that Prime Ministers and Viceroys spoke in the Reichstag;

entered Lahore; said that the Emperor travelled; in Milan they rioted;

said there were rumours in Vienna; said that the Ambassador at

Constantinople had audience with the Sultan; the fleet was at Gibraltar.

The voice continued, imprinting on the faces of the clerks in Whitehall

(Timothy Durrant was one of them) something of its own inexorable

gravity, as they listened, deciphered, wrote down. Papers accumulated,

inscribed with the utterances of Kaisers, the statistics of ricefields,

the growling of hundreds of work-people, plotting sedition in back

streets, or gathering in the Calcutta bazaars, or mustering their forces

in the uplands of Albania, where the hills are sand-coloured, and bones

lie unburied.

 

The voice spoke plainly in the square quiet room with heavy tables,

where one elderly man made notes on the margin of typewritten sheets,

his silver-topped umbrella leaning against the bookcase.

 

His head—bald, red-veined, hollow-looking—represented all the heads in

the building. His head, with the amiable pale eyes, carried the burden

of knowledge across the street; laid it before his colleagues, who came

equally burdened; and then the sixteen gentlemen, lifting their pens or

turning perhaps rather wearily in their chairs, decreed that the course

of history should shape itself this way or that way, being manfully

determined, as their faces showed, to impose some coherency upon Rajahs

and Kaisers and the muttering in bazaars, the secret gatherings, plainly

visible in Whitehall, of kilted peasants in Albanian uplands; to control

the course of events.

 

Pitt and Chatham, Burke and Gladstone looked from side to side with

fixed marble eyes and an air of immortal quiescence which perhaps the

living may have envied, the air being full of whistling and concussions,

as the procession with its banners passed down Whitehall. Moreover, some

were troubled with dyspepsia; one had at that very moment cracked the

glass of his spectacles; another spoke in Glasgow to-morrow; altogether

they looked too red, fat, pale or lean, to be dealing, as the marble

heads had dealt, with the course of history.

 

Timmy Durrant in his little room in the Admiralty, going to consult a

Blue book, stopped for a moment by the window and observed the placard

tied round the lamp-post.

 

Miss Thomas, one of the typists, said to her friend that if the Cabinet

was going to sit much longer she should miss her boy outside the Gaiety.

 

Timmy Durrant, returning with his Blue book under his arm, noticed a

little knot of people at the street corner; conglomerated as though one

of them knew something; and the others, pressing round him, looked up,

looked down, looked along the street. What was it that he knew?

 

Timothy, placing the Blue book before him, studied a paper sent round by

the Treasury for information. Mr. Crawley, his fellow-clerk, impaled a

letter on a skewer.

 

Jacob rose from his chair in Hyde Park, tore his ticket to pieces, and

walked away.

 

“Such a sunset,” wrote Mrs. Flanders in her letter to Archer at

Singapore. “One couldn’t make up one’s mind to come indoors,” she wrote.

“It seemed wicked to waste even a moment.”

 

The long windows of Kensington Palace flushed fiery rose as Jacob walked

away; a flock of wild duck flew over the Serpentine; and the trees were

stood against the sky, blackly, magnificently.

 

“Jacob,” wrote Mrs. Flanders, with the red light on her page, “is hard

at work after his delightful journey…”

 

“The Kaiser,” the faraway voice remarked in Whitehall, “received me in

audience.”

 

“Now I know that face—” said the Reverend Andrew Floyd, coming out of

Carter’s shop in Piccadilly, “but who the dickens—?” and he watched

Jacob, turned round to look at him, but could not be sure—

 

“Oh, Jacob Flanders!” he remembered in a flash.

 

But he was so tall; so unconscious; such a fine young fellow.

 

“I gave him Byron’s works,” Andrew Floyd mused, and started forward, as

Jacob crossed the road; but hesitated, and let the moment pass, and lost

the opportunity.

 

Another procession, without banners, was blocking Long Acre. Carriages,

with dowagers in amethyst and gentlemen spotted with carnations,

intercepted cabs and motor-cars turned in the opposite direction, in

which jaded men in white waistcoats lolled, on their way home to

shrubberies and billiard-rooms in Putney and Wimbledon.

 

Two barrel-organs played by the kerb, and horses coming out of

Aldridge’s with white labels on their buttocks straddled across the road

and were smartly jerked back.

 

Mrs. Durrant, sitting with Mr. Wortley in a motor-car, was impatient

lest they should miss the overture.

 

But Mr. Wortley, always urbane, always in time for the overture,

buttoned his gloves, and admired Miss Clara.

 

“A shame to spend such a night in the theatre!” said Mrs. Durrant,

seeing all the windows of the coachmakers in Long Acre ablaze.

 

“Think of your moors!” said Mr. Wortley to Clara.

 

“Ah! but Clara likes this better,” Mrs. Durrant laughed.

 

“I don’t know—really,” said Clara, looking at the blazing windows. She

started.

 

She saw Jacob.

 

“Who?” asked Mrs. Durrant sharply, leaning forward.

 

But she saw no one.

 

Under the arch of the Opera House large faces and lean ones, the

powdered and the hairy, all alike were red in the sunset; and, quickened

by the great hanging lamps with their repressed primrose lights, by the

tramp, and the scarlet, and the pompous ceremony, some ladies looked for

a moment into steaming bedrooms near by, where women with loose hair

leaned out of windows, where girls—where children—(the long mirrors

held the ladies suspended) but one must follow; one must not block the

way.

 

Clara’s moors were fine enough. The Phoenicians slept under their piled

grey rocks; the chimneys of the old mines pointed starkly; early moths

blurred the heather-bells; cartwheels could be heard grinding on the

road far beneath; and the suck and sighing of the waves sounded gently,

persistently, for ever.

 

Shading her eyes with her hand Mrs. Pascoe stood in her cabbage-garden

looking out to sea. Two steamers and a sailing-ship crossed each other;

passed each other; and in the bay the gulls kept alighting on a log,

rising high, returning again to the log, while some rode in upon the

waves and stood on the rim of the water until the moon blanched all to

whiteness.

 

Mrs. Pascoe had gone indoors long ago.

 

But the red light was on the columns of the Parthenon, and the Greek

women who were knitting their stockings and sometimes crying to a child

to come and have the insects picked from its head were as jolly as sand-martins in the heat, quarrelling, scolding, suckling their babies, until

the ships in the Piraeus fired their guns.

 

The sound spread itself flat, and then went tunnelling its way with

fitful explosions among the channels of the islands.

 

Darkness drops like a knife over Greece.

 

“The guns?” said Betty Flanders, half asleep, getting out of bed and

going to the window, which was decorated with a fringe of dark leaves.

 

“Not at this distance,” she thought. “It is the sea.”

 

Again, far away, she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women were

beating great carpets. There was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons

fighting for their country. But were the chickens safe? Was that some

one moving downstairs? Rebecca with the toothache? No. The nocturnal

women were beating great carpets. Her hens shifted slightly on their

perches.