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

light and flashed and gone. The red

underwing had never come back, though Jacob had waited. It was after

twelve when he crossed the lawn and saw his mother in the bright room,

playing patience, sitting up.

 

“How you frightened me!” she had cried. She thought something dreadful

had happened. And he woke Rebecca, who had to be up so early.

 

There he stood pale, come out of the depths of darkness, in the hot

room, blinking at the light.

 

No, it could not be a straw-bordered underwing.

 

The mowing-machine always wanted oiling. Barnet turned it under Jacob’s

window, and it creaked—creaked, and rattled across the lawn and creaked

again.

 

Now it was clouding over.

 

Back came the sun, dazzlingly.

 

It fell like an eye upon the stirrups, and then suddenly and yet very

gently rested upon the bed, upon the alarum clock, and upon the

butterfly box stood open. The pale clouded yellows had pelted over the

moor; they had zigzagged across the purple clover. The fritillaries

flaunted along the hedgerows. The blues settled on little bones lying on

the turf with the sun beating on them, and the painted ladies and the

peacocks feasted upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk. Miles away from

home, in a hollow among teasles beneath a ruin, he had found the commas.

He had seen a white admiral circling higher and higher round an oak

tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living alone,

high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer to

her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she

told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two

badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys fighting,

she said.

 

“You won’t go far this afternoon, Jacob,” said his mother, popping her

head in at the door, “for the Captain’s coming to say good-bye.” It was

the last day of the Easter holidays.

 

Wednesday was Captain Barfoot’s day. He dressed himself very neatly in

blue serge, took his rubber-shod stick—for he was lame and wanted two

fingers on the left hand, having served his country—and set out from

the house with the flagstaff precisely at four o’clock in the afternoon.

 

At three Mr. Dickens, the bath-chair man, had called for Mrs. Barfoot.

 

“Move me,” she would say to Mr. Dickens, after sitting on the esplanade

for fifteen minutes. And again, “That’ll do, thank you, Mr. Dickens.” At

the first command he would seek the sun; at the second he would stay the

chair there in the bright strip.

 

An old inhabitant himself, he had much in common with Mrs. Barfoot—

James Coppard’s daughter. The drinking-fountain, where West Street joins

Broad Street, is the gift of James Coppard, who was mayor at the time of

Queen Victoria’s jubilee, and Coppard is painted upon municipal

watering-carts and over shop windows, and upon the zinc blinds of

solicitors’ consulting-room windows. But Ellen Barfoot never visited the

Aquarium (though she had known Captain Boase who had caught the shark

quite well), and when the men came by with the posters she eyed them

superciliously, for she knew that she would never see the Pierrots, or

the brothers Zeno, or Daisy Budd and her troupe of performing seals. For

Ellen Barfoot in her bath-chair on the esplanade was a prisoner—

civilization’s prisoner—all the bars of her cage falling across the

esplanade on sunny days when the town hall, the drapery stores, the

swimming-bath, and the memorial hall striped the ground with shadow.

 

An old inhabitant himself, Mr. Dickens would stand a little behind her,

smoking his pipe. She would ask him questions—who people were—who now

kept Mr. Jones’s shop—then about the season—and had Mrs. Dickens

tried, whatever it might be—the words issuing from her lips like crumbs

of dry biscuit.

 

She closed her eyes. Mr. Dickens took a turn. The feelings of a man had

not altogether deserted him, though as you saw him coming towards you,

you noticed how one knobbed black boot swung tremulously in front of the

other; how there was a shadow between his waistcoat and his trousers;

how he leant forward unsteadily, like an old horse who finds himself

suddenly out of the shafts drawing no cart. But as Mr. Dickens sucked in

the smoke and puffed it out again, the feelings of a man were

perceptible in his eyes. He was thinking how Captain Barfoot was now on

his way to Mount Pleasant; Captain Barfoot, his master. For at home in

the little sitting-room above the mews, with the canary in the window,

and the girls at the sewing-machine, and Mrs. Dickens huddled up with

the rheumatics—at home where he was made little of, the thought of

being in the employ of Captain Barfoot supported him. He liked to think

that while he chatted with Mrs. Barfoot on the front, he helped the

Captain on his way to Mrs. Flanders. He, a man, was in charge of Mrs.

Barfoot, a woman.

 

Turning, he saw that she was chatting with Mrs. Rogers. Turning again,

he saw that Mrs. Rogers had moved on. So he came back to the bath-chair,

and Mrs. Barfoot asked him the time, and he took out his great silver

watch and told her the time very obligingly, as if he knew a great deal

more about the time and everything than she did. But Mrs. Barfoot knew

that Captain Barfoot was on his way to Mrs. Flanders.

 

Indeed he was well on his way there, having left the tram, and seeing

Dods Hill to the south-east, green against a blue sky that was suffused

with dust colour on the horizon. He was marching up the hill. In spite

of his lameness there was something military in his approach. Mrs.

Jarvis, as she came out of the Rectory gate, saw him coming, and her

Newfoundland dog, Nero, slowly swept his tail from side to side.

 

“Oh, Captain Barfoot!” Mrs. Jarvis exclaimed.

 

“Good-day, Mrs. Jarvis,” said the Captain.

 

They walked on together, and when they reached Mrs. Flanders’s gate

Captain Barfoot took off his tweed cap, and said, bowing very

courteously:

 

“Good-day to you, Mrs. Jarvis.”

 

And Mrs. Jarvis walked on alone.

 

She was going to walk on the moor. Had she again been pacing her lawn

late at night? Had she again tapped on the study window and cried: “Look

at the moon, look at the moon, Herbert!”

 

And Herbert looked at the moon.

 

Mrs. Jarvis walked on the moor when she was unhappy, going as far as a

certain saucer-shaped hollow, though she always meant to go to a more

distant ridge; and there she sat down, and took out the little book

hidden beneath her cloak and read a few lines of poetry, and looked

about her. She was not very unhappy, and, seeing that she was forty-five, never perhaps would be very unhappy, desperately unhappy that is,

and leave her husband, and ruin a good man’s career, as she sometimes

threatened.

 

Still there is no need to say what risks a clergyman’s wife runs when

she walks on the moor. Short, dark, with kindling eyes, a pheasant’s

feather in her hat, Mrs. Jarvis was just the sort of woman to lose her

faith upon the moors—to confound her God with the universal that is—

but she did not lose her faith, did not leave her husband, never read

her poem through, and went on walking the moors, looking at the moon

behind the elm trees, and feeling as she sat on the grass high above

Scarborough… Yes, yes, when the lark soars; when the sheep, moving a

step or two onwards, crop the turf, and at the same time set their bells

tinkling; when the breeze first blows, then dies down, leaving the cheek

kissed; when the ships on the sea below seem to cross each other and

pass on as if drawn by an invisible hand; when there are distant

concussions in the air and phantom horsemen galloping, ceasing; when the

horizon swims blue, green, emotional—then Mrs. Jarvis, heaving a sigh,

thinks to herself, “If only some one could give me… if I could give

some one….” But she does not know what she wants to give, nor who

could give it her.

 

“Mrs. Flanders stepped out only five minutes ago, Captain,” said

Rebecca. Captain Barfoot sat him down in the arm-chair to wait. Resting

his elbows on the arms, putting one hand over the other, sticking his

lame leg straight out, and placing the stick with the rubber ferrule

beside it, he sat perfectly still. There was something rigid about him.

Did he think? Probably the same thoughts again and again. But were they

“nice” thoughts, interesting thoughts? He was a man with a temper;

tenacious, faithful. Women would have felt, “Here is law. Here is order.

Therefore we must cherish this man. He is on the Bridge at night,” and,

handing him his cup, or whatever it might be, would run on to visions of

shipwreck and disaster, in which all the passengers come tumbling from

their cabins, and there is the captain, buttoned in his pea-jacket,

matched with the storm, vanquished by it but by none other. “Yet I have

a soul,” Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her, as Captain Barfoot suddenly blew

his nose in a great red bandanna handkerchief, “and it’s the man’s

stupidity that’s the cause of this, and the storm’s my storm as well as

his”… so Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her when the Captain dropped in to

see them and found Herbert out, and spent two or three hours, almost

silent, sitting in the arm-chair. But Betty Flanders thought nothing of

the kind.

 

“Oh, Captain,” said Mrs. Flanders, bursting into the drawing-room, “I

had to run after Barker’s man… I hope Rebecca… I hope Jacob…”

 

She was very much out of breath, yet not at all upset, and as she put

down the hearth-brush which she had bought of the oil-man, she said it

was hot, flung the window further open, straightened a cover, picked up

a book, as if she were very confident, very fond of the Captain, and a

great many years younger than he was. Indeed, in her blue apron she did

not look more than thirty-five. He was well over fifty.

 

She moved her hands about the table; the Captain moved his head from

side to side, and made little sounds, as Betty went on chattering,

completely at his ease—after twenty years.

 

“Well,” he said at length, “I’ve heard from Mr. Polegate.”

 

He had heard from Mr. Polegate that he could advise nothing better than

to send a boy to one of the universities.

 

“Mr. Floyd was at Cambridge… no, at Oxford… well, at one or the

other,” said Mrs. Flanders.

 

She looked out of the window. Little windows, and the lilac and green of

the garden were reflected in her eyes.

 

“Archer is doing very well,” she said. “I have a very nice report from

Captain Maxwell.”

 

“I will leave you the letter to show Jacob,” said the Captain, putting

it clumsily back in its envelope.

 

“Jacob is after his butterflies as usual,” said Mrs. Flanders irritably,

but was surprised by a sudden afterthought, “Cricket begins this week,

of course.”

 

“Edward Jenkinson has handed in his resignation,” said Captain Barfoot.

 

“Then you will stand for the Council?” Mrs. Flanders exclaimed, looking

the Captain full in the face.

 

“Well, about that,” Captain Barfoot began, settling himself rather

deeper in his chair.

 

Jacob Flanders, therefore, went up to Cambridge in October, 1906.