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Title: Monday or Tuesday

Author: Virginia Woolf

Release date: June 25, 2009 [eBook #29220]
Most recently updated: June 29, 2017

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MONDAY OR
TUESDAY ***

Monday or Tuesday

By

VIRGINIA WOOLF

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.

CONTENTS

A Haunted House

A Society

Monday or Tuesday

An Unwritten Novel

The String Quartet

Blue and Green

Kew Gardens

The Mark on the Wall

MONDAY OR TUESDAY

A HAUNTED HOUSE
Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room
they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly
couple.
"Here we left it," she said. And he added, "Oh, but here too!" "It's upstairs,"
she murmured. "And in the garden," he whispered. "Quietly," they said, "or
we shall wake them."
But it wasn't that you woke us. Oh, no. "They're looking for it; they're
drawing the curtain," one might say, and so read on a page or two. "Now
they've found it," one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin.
And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all
empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with
content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm.
"What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?" My hands were
empty. "Perhaps it's upstairs then?" The apples were in the loft. And so
down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the
grass.
But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see
them. The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves
were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only
turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread
about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My
hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the
deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. "Safe,
safe, safe," the pulse of the house beat softly. "The treasure buried; the room
..." the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?
A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees
spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk
beneath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass. Death
was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds
of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were

darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in
the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs.
"Safe, safe, safe," the pulse of the house beat gladly. "The Treasure yours."
The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that.
Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp
falls straight from the window. The candle burns stiff and still. Wandering
through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the
ghostly couple seek their joy.
"Here we slept," she says. And he adds, "Kisses without number." "Waking
in the morning—" "Silver between the trees—" "Upstairs—" "In the garden
—" "When summer came—" "In winter snowtime—" The doors go shutting
far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.
Nearer they come; cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides
silver down the glass. Our eyes darken; we hear no steps beside us; we see
no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. "Look," he
breathes. "Sound asleep. Love upon their lips."
Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply.
Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild
beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces
bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their
hidden joy.
"Safe, safe, safe," the heart of the house beats proudly. "Long years—" he
sighs. "Again you found me." "Here," she murmurs, "sleeping; in the
garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our
treasure—" Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. "Safe! safe!
safe!" the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry "Oh, is this your
buried treasure? The light in the heart."

A SOCIETY
This is how it all came about. Six or seven of us were sitting one day after
tea. Some were gazing across the street into the windows of a milliner's
shop where the light still shone brightly upon scarlet feathers and golden
slippers. Others were idly occupied in building little towers of sugar upon
the edge of the tea tray. After a time, so far as I can remember, we drew
round the fire and began as usual to praise men—how strong, how noble,
how brilliant, how courageous, how beautiful they were—how we envied
those who by hook or by crook managed to get attached to one for life—
when Poll, who had said nothing, burst into tears. Poll, I must tell you, has
always been queer. For one thing her father was a strange man. He left her a
fortune in his will, but on condition that she read all the books in the
London Library. We comforted her as best we could; but we knew in our
hearts how vain it was. For though we like her, Poll is no beauty; leaves her
shoe laces untied; and must have been thinking, while we praised men, that
not one of them would ever wish to marry her. At last she dried her tears.
For some time we could make nothing of what she said. Strange enough it
was in all conscience. She told us that, as we knew, she spent most of her
time in the London Library, reading. She had begun, she said, with English
literature on the top floor; and was steadily working her way down to the
Times on the bottom. And now half, or perhaps only a quarter, way through
a terrible thing had happened. She could read no more. Books were not
what we thought them. "Books," she cried, rising to her feet and speaking
with an intensity of desolation which I shall never forget, "are for the most
part unutterably bad!"
Of course we cried out that Shakespeare wrote books, and Milton and
Shelley.
"Oh, yes," she interrupted us. "You've been well taught, I can see. But you
are not members of the London Library." Here her sobs broke forth anew.
At length, recovering a little, she opened one of the pile of books which she
always carried about with her—"From a Window" or "In a Garden," or
some such name as that it was called, and it was written by a man called

Benton or Henson, or something of that kind. She read the first few pages.
We listened in silence. "But that's not a book," someone said. So she chose
another. This time it was a history, but I have forgotten the writer's name.
Our trepidation increased as she went on. Not a word of it seemed to be
true, and the style in which it was written was execrable.
"Poetry! Poetry!" we cried, impatiently. "Read us poetry!" I cannot describe
the desolation which fell upon us as she opened a little volume and mouthed
out the verbose, sentimental foolery which it contained.
"It must have been written by a woman," one of us urged. But no. She told
us that it was written by a young man, one of the most famous poets of the
day. I leave you to imagine what the shock of the discovery was. Though
we all cried and begged her to read no more, she persisted and read us
extracts from the Lives of the Lord Chancellors. When she had finished,
Jane, the eldest and wisest of us, rose to her feet and said that she for one
was not convinced.
"Why," she asked, "if men write such rubbish as this, should our mothers
have wasted their youth in bringing them into the world?"
We were all silent; and, in the silence, poor Poll could be heard sobbing out,
"Why, why did my father teach me to read?"
Clorinda was the first to come to her senses. "It's all our fault," she said.
"Every one of us knows how to read. But no one, save Poll, has ever taken
the trouble to do it. I, for one, have taken it for granted that it was a
woman's duty to spend her youth in bearing children. I venerated my
mother for bearing ten; still more my grandmother for bearing fifteen; it
was, I confess, my own ambition to bear twenty. We have gone on all these
ages supposing that men were equally industrious, and that their works
were of equal merit. While we have borne the children, they, we supposed,
have borne the books and the pictures. We have populated the world. They
have civilized it. But now that we can read, what prevents us from judging
the results? Before we bring another child into the world we must swear
that we will find out what the world is like."
So we made ourselves into a society for asking questions. One of us was to
visit a man-of-war; another was to hide herself in a scholar's study; another

was to attend a meeting of business men; while all were to read books, look
at pictures, go to concerts, keep our eyes open in the streets, and ask
questions perpetually. We were very young. You can judge of our simplicity
when I tell you that before parting that night we agreed that the objects of
life were to produce good people and good books. Our questions were to be
directed to finding out how far these objects were now attained by men. We
vowed solemnly that we would not bear a single child until we were
satisfied.
Off we went then, some to the British Museum; others to the King's Navy;
some to Oxford; others to Cambridge; we visited the Royal Academy and
the Tate; heard modern music in concert rooms, went to the Law Courts,
and saw new plays. No one dined out without asking her partner certain
questions and carefully noting his replies. At intervals we met together and
compared our observations. Oh, those were merry meetings! Never have I
laughed so much as I did when Rose read her notes upon "Honour" and
described how she had dressed herself as an Æthiopian Prince and gone
aboard one of His Majesty's ships. Discovering the hoax, the Captain
visited her (now disguised as a private gentleman) and demanded that
honour should be satisfied. "But how?" she asked. "How?" he bellowed.
"With the cane of course!" Seeing that he was beside himself with rage and
expecting that her last moment had come, she bent over and received, to her
amazement, six light taps upon the behind. "The honour of the British Navy
is avenged!" he cried, and, raising herself, she saw him with the sweat
pouring down his face holding out a trembling right hand. "Away!" she
exclaimed, striking an attitude and imitating the ferocity of his own
expression, "My honour has still to be satisfied!" "Spoken like a
gentleman!" he returned, and fell into profound thought. "If six strokes
avenge the honour of the King's Navy," he mused, "how many avenge the
honour of a private gentleman?" He said he would prefer to lay the case
before his brother officers. She replied haughtily that she could not wait. He
praised her sensibility. "Let me see," he cried suddenly, "did your father
keep a carriage?" "No," she said. "Or a riding horse!" "We had a donkey,"
she bethought her, "which drew the mowing machine." At this his face
lighted. "My mother's name——" she added. "For God's sake, man, don't
mention your mother's name!" he shrieked, trembling like an aspen and
flushing to the roots of his hair, and it was ten minutes at least before she

could induce him to proceed. At length he decreed that if she gave him four
strokes and a half in the small of the back at a spot indicated by himself (the
half conceded, he said, in recognition of the fact that her great
grandmother's uncle was killed at Trafalgar) it was his opinion that her
honour would be as good as new. This was done; they retired to a
restaurant; drank two bottles of wine for which he insisted upon paying; and
parted with protestations of eternal friendship.
Then we had Fanny's account of her visit to the Law Courts. At her first
visit she had come to the conclusion that the Judges were either made of
wood or were impersonated by large animals resembling man who had been
trained to move with extreme dignity, mumble and nod their heads. To test
her theory she had liberated a handkerchief of bluebottles at the critical
moment of a trial, but was unable to judge whether the creatures gave signs
of humanity for the buzzing of the flies induced so sound a sleep that she
only woke in time to see the prisoners led into the cells below. But from the
evidence she brought we voted that it is unfair to suppose that the Judges
are men.
Helen went to the Royal Academy, but when asked to deliver her report
upon the pictures she began to recite from a pale blue volume, "O! for the
touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still. Home is the
hunter, home from the hill. He gave his bridle reins a shake. Love is sweet,
love is brief. Spring, the fair spring, is the year's pleasant King. O! to be in
England now that April's there. Men must work and women must weep. The
path of duty is the way to glory—" We could listen to no more of this
gibberish.
"We want no more poetry!" we cried.
"Daughters of England!" she began, but here we pulled her down, a vase of
water getting spilt over her in the scuffle.
"Thank God!" she exclaimed, shaking herself like a dog. "Now I'll roll on
the carpet and see if I can't brush off what remains of the Union Jack. Then
perhaps—" here she rolled energetically. Getting up she began to explain to
us what modern pictures are like when Castalia stopped her.

"What is the average size of a picture?" she asked. "Perhaps two feet by two
and a half," she said. Castalia made notes while Helen spoke, and when she
had done, and we were trying not to meet each other's eyes, rose and said,
"At your wish I spent last week at Oxbridge, disguised as a charwoman. I
thus had access to the rooms of several Professors and will now attempt to
give you some idea—only," she broke off, "I can't think how to do it. It's all
so queer. These Professors," she went on, "live in large houses built round
grass plots each in a kind of cell by himself. Yet they have every
convenience and comfort. You have only to press a button or light a little
lamp. Their papers are beautifully filed. Books abound. There are no
children or animals, save half a dozen stray cats and one aged bullfinch—a
cock. I remember," she broke off, "an Aunt of mine who lived at Dulwich
and kept cactuses. You reached the conservatory through the double
drawing-room, and there, on the hot pipes, were dozens of them, ugly,
squat, bristly little plants each in a separate pot. Once in a hundred years the
Aloe flowered, so my Aunt said. But she died before that happened—" We
told her to keep to the point. "Well," she resumed, "when Professor Hobkin
was out, I examined his life work, an edition of Sappho. It's a queer looking
book, six or seven inches thick, not all by Sappho. Oh, no. Most of it is a
defence of Sappho's chastity, which some German had denied, and I can
assure you the passion with which these two gentlemen argued, the learning
they displayed, the prodigious ingenuity with which they disputed the use
of some implement which looked to me for all the world like a hairpin
astounded me; especially when the door opened and Professor Hobkin
himself appeared. A very nice, mild, old gentleman, but what could he
know about chastity?" We misunderstood her.
"No, no," she protested, "he's the soul of honour I'm sure—not that he
resembles Rose's sea captain in the least. I was thinking rather of my Aunt's
cactuses. What could they know about chastity?"
Again we told her not to wander from the point,—did the Oxbridge
professors help to produce good people and good books?—the objects of
life.
"There!" she exclaimed. "It never struck me to ask. It never occurred to me
that they could possibly produce anything."

"I believe," said Sue, "that you made some mistake. Probably Professor
Hobkin was a gynæcologist. A scholar is a very different sort of man. A
scholar is overflowing with humour and invention—perhaps addicted to
wine, but what of that?—a delightful companion, generous, subtle,
imaginative—as stands to reason. For he spends his life in company with
the finest human beings that have ever existed."
"Hum," said Castalia. "Perhaps I'd better go back and try again."
Some three months later it happened that I was sitting alone when Castalia
entered. I don't know what it was in the look of her that so moved me; but I
could not restrain myself, and, dashing across the room, I clasped her in my
arms. Not only was she very beautiful; she seemed also in the highest
spirits. "How happy you look!" I exclaimed, as she sat down.
"I've been at Oxbridge," she said.
"Asking questions?"
"Answering them," she replied.
"You have not broken our vow?" I said anxiously, noticing something about
her figure.
"Oh, the vow," she said casually. "I'm going to have a baby, if that's what
you mean. You can't imagine," she burst out, "how exciting, how beautiful,
how satisfying—"
"What is?" I asked.
"To—to—answer questions," she replied in some confusion. Whereupon
she told me the whole of her story. But in the middle of an account which
interested and excited me more than anything I had ever heard, she gave the
strangest cry, half whoop, half holloa—
"Chastity! Chastity! Where's my chastity!" she cried. "Help Ho! The scent
bottle!"
There was nothing in the room but a cruet containing mustard, which I was
about to administer when she recovered her composure.

"You should have thought of that three months ago," I said severely.
"True," she replied. "There's not much good in thinking of it now. It was
unfortunate, by the way, that my mother had me called Castalia."
"Oh, Castalia, your mother—" I was beginning when she reached for the
mustard pot.
"No, no, no," she said, shaking her head. "If you'd been a chaste woman
yourself you would have screamed at the sight of me—instead of which you
rushed across the room and took me in your arms. No, Cassandra. We are
neither of us chaste." So we went on talking.
Meanwhile the room was filling up, for it was the day appointed to discuss
the results of our observations. Everyone, I thought, felt as I did about
Castalia. They kissed her and said how glad they were to see her again. At
length, when we were all assembled, Jane rose and said that it was time to
begin. She began by saying that we had now asked questions for over five
years, and that though the results were bound to be inconclusive—here
Castalia nudged me and whispered that she was not so sure about that. Then
she got up, and, interrupting Jane in the middle of a sentence, said:
"Before you say any more, I want to know—am I to stay in the room?
Because," she added, "I have to confess that I am an impure woman."
Everyone looked at her in astonishment.
"You are going to have a baby?" asked Jane.
She nodded her head.
It was extraordinary to see the different expressions on their faces. A sort of
hum went through the room, in which I could catch the words "impure,"
"baby," "Castalia," and so on. Jane, who was herself considerably moved,
put it to us:
"Shall she go? Is she impure?"
Such a roar filled the room as might have been heard in the street outside.

"No! No! No! Let her stay! Impure? Fiddlesticks!" Yet I fancied that some
of the youngest, girls of nineteen or twenty, held back as if overcome with
shyness. Then we all came about her and began asking questions, and at last
I saw one of the youngest, who had kept in the background, approach shyly
and say to her:
"What is chastity then? I mean is it good, or is it bad, or is it nothing at all?"
She replied so low that I could not catch what she said.
"You know I was shocked," said another, "for at least ten minutes."
"In my opinion," said Poll, who was growing crusty from always reading in
the London Library, "chastity is nothing but ignorance—a most
discreditable state of mind. We should admit only the unchaste to our
society. I vote that Castalia shall be our President."
This was violently disputed.
"It is as unfair to brand women with chastity as with unchastity," said Poll.
"Some of us haven't the opportunity either. Moreover, I don't believe Cassy
herself maintains that she acted as she did from a pure love of knowledge."
"He is only twenty-one and divinely beautiful," said Cassy, with a ravishing
gesture.
"I move," said Helen, "that no one be allowed to talk of chastity or
unchastity save those who are in love."
"Oh, bother," said Judith, who had been enquiring into scientific matters,
"I'm not in love and I'm longing to explain my measures for dispensing with
prostitutes and fertilizing virgins by Act of Parliament."
She went on to tell us of an invention of hers to be erected at Tube stations
and other public resorts, which, upon payment of a small fee, would
safeguard the nation's health, accommodate its sons, and relieve its
daughters. Then she had contrived a method of preserving in sealed tubes
the germs of future Lord Chancellors "or poets or painters or musicians,"
she went on, "supposing, that is to say, that these breeds are not extinct, and
that women still wish to bear children——"

"Of course we wish to bear children!" cried Castalia, impatiently. Jane
rapped the table.
"That is the very point we are met to consider," she said. "For five years we
have been trying to find out whether we are justified in continuing the
human race. Castalia has anticipated our decision. But it remains for the rest
of us to make up our minds."
Here one after another of our messengers rose and delivered their reports.
The marvels of civilisation far exceeded our expectations, and, as we learnt
for the first time how man flies in the air, talks across space, penetrates to
the heart of an atom, and embraces the universe in his speculations, a
murmur of admiration burst from our lips.
"We are proud," we cried, "that our mothers sacrificed their youth in such a
cause as this!" Castalia, who had been listening intently, looked prouder
than all the rest. Then Jane reminded us that we had still much to learn, and
Castalia begged us to make haste. On we went through a vast tangle of
statistics. We learnt that England has a population of so many millions, and
that such and such a proportion of them is constantly hungry and in prison;
that the average size of a working man's family is such, and that so great a
percentage of women die from maladies incident to childbirth. Reports were
read of visits to factories, shops, slums, and dockyards. Descriptions were
given of the Stock Exchange, of a gigantic house of business in the City,
and of a Government Office. The British Colonies were now discussed, and
some account was given of our rule in India, Africa and Ireland. I was
sitting by Castalia and I noticed her uneasiness.
"We shall never come to any conclusion at all at this rate," she said. "As it
appears that civilisation is so much more complex than we had any notion,
would it not be better to confine ourselves to our original enquiry? We
agreed that it was the object of life to produce good people and good books.
All this time we have been talking of aeroplanes, factories, and money. Let
us talk about men themselves and their arts, for that is the heart of the
matter."
So the diners out stepped forward with long slips of paper containing
answers to their questions. These had been framed after much
consideration. A good man, we had agreed, must at any rate be honest,

passionate, and unworldly. But whether or not a particular man possessed
those qualities could only be discovered by asking questions, often
beginning at a remote distance from the centre. Is Kensington a nice place
to live in? Where is your son being educated—and your daughter? Now
please tell me, what do you pay for your cigars? By the way, is Sir Joseph a
baronet or only a knight? Often it seemed that we learnt more from trivial
questions of this kind than from more direct ones. "I accepted my peerage,"
said Lord Bunkum, "because my wife wished it." I forget how many titles
were accepted for the same reason. "Working fifteen hours out of the
twenty-four, as I do——" ten thousand professional men began.
"No, no, of course you can neither read nor write. But why do you work so
hard?" "My dear lady, with a growing family——" "But why does your
family grow?" Their wives wished that too, or perhaps it was the British
Empire. But more significant than the answers were the refusals to answer.
Very few would reply at all to questions about morality and religion, and
such answers as were given were not serious. Questions as to the value of
money and power were almost invariably brushed aside, or pressed at
extreme risk to the asker. "I'm sure," said Jill, "that if Sir Harley Tightboots
hadn't been carving the mutton when I asked him about the capitalist system
he would have cut my throat. The only reason why we escaped with our
lives over and over again is that men are at once so hungry and so
chivalrous. They despise us too much to mind what we say."
"Of course they despise us," said Eleanor. "At the same time how do you
account for this—I made enquiries among the artists. Now, no woman has
ever been an artist, has she, Poll?"
"Jane-Austen-Charlotte-Brontë-George-Eliot," cried Poll, like a man crying
muffins in a back street.
"Damn the woman!" someone exclaimed. "What a bore she is!"
"Since Sappho there has been no female of first rate——" Eleanor began,
quoting from a weekly newspaper.
"It's now well known that Sappho was the somewhat lewd invention of
Professor Hobkin," Ruth interrupted.

"Anyhow, there is no reason to suppose that any woman ever has been able
to write or ever will be able to write," Eleanor continued. "And yet,
whenever I go among authors they never cease to talk to me about their
books. Masterly! I say, or Shakespeare himself! (for one must say
something) and I assure you, they believe me."
"That proves nothing," said Jane. "They all do it. Only," she sighed, "it
doesn't seem to help us much. Perhaps we had better examine modern
literature next. Liz, it's your turn."
Elizabeth rose and said that in order to prosecute her enquiry she had
dressed as a man and been taken for a reviewer.
"I have read new books pretty steadily for the past five years," said she.
"Mr. Wells is the most popular living writer; then comes Mr. Arnold
Bennett; then Mr. Compton Mackenzie; Mr. McKenna and Mr. Walpole
may be bracketed together." She sat down.
"But you've told us nothing!" we expostulated. "Or do you mean that these
gentlemen have greatly surpassed Jane-Elliot and that English fiction is
——where's that review of yours? Oh, yes, 'safe in their hands.'"
"Safe, quite safe," she said, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. "And I'm
sure that they give away even more than they receive."
We were all sure of that. "But," we pressed her, "do they write good
books?"
"Good books?" she said, looking at the ceiling. "You must remember," she
began, speaking with extreme rapidity, "that fiction is the mirror of life. And
you can't deny that education is of the highest importance, and that it would
be extremely annoying, if you found yourself alone at Brighton late at
night, not to know which was the best boarding house to stay at, and
suppose it was a dripping Sunday evening—wouldn't it be nice to go to the
Movies?"
"But what has that got to do with it?" we asked.
"Nothing—nothing—nothing whatever," she replied.
"Well, tell us the truth," we bade her.

"The truth? But isn't it wonderful," she broke off—"Mr. Chitter has written
a weekly article for the past thirty years upon love or hot buttered toast and
has sent all his sons to Eton——"
"The truth!" we demanded.
"Oh, the truth," she stammered, "the truth has nothing to do with literature,"
and sitting down she refused to say another word.
It all seemed to us very inconclusive.
"Ladies, we must try to sum up the results," Jane was beginning, when a
hum, which had been heard for some time through the open window,
drowned her voice.
"War! War! War! Declaration of War!" men were shouting in the street
below.
We looked at each other in horror.
"What war?" we cried. "What war?" We remembered, too late, that we had
never thought of sending anyone to the House of Commons. We had
forgotten all about it. We turned to Poll, who had reached the history
shelves in the London Library, and asked her to enlighten us.
"Why," we cried, "do men go to war?"
"Sometimes for one reason, sometimes for another," she replied calmly. "In
1760, for example——" The shouts outside drowned her words. "Again in
1797—in 1804—It was the Austrians in 1866—1870 was the Franco-
Prussian—In 1900 on the other hand——"
"But it's now 1914!" we cut her short.
"Ah, I don't know what they're going to war for now," she admitted.
* * * * *
The war was over and peace was in process of being signed, when I once
more found myself with Castalia in the room where our meetings used to be
held. We began idly turning over the pages of our old minute books.
"Queer," I mused, "to see what we were thinking five years ago." "We are

agreed," Castalia quoted, reading over my shoulder, "that it is the object of
life to produce good people and good books." We made no comment upon
that. "A good man is at any rate honest, passionate and unworldly." "What a
woman's language!" I observed. "Oh, dear," cried Castalia, pushing the
book away from her, "what fools we were! It was all Poll's father's fault,"
she went on. "I believe he did it on purpose—that ridiculous will, I mean,
forcing Poll to read all the books in the London Library. If we hadn't learnt
to read," she said bitterly, "we might still have been bearing children in
ignorance and that I believe was the happiest life after all. I know what
you're going to say about war," she checked me, "and the horror of bearing
children to see them killed, but our mothers did it, and their mothers, and
their mothers before them. And they didn't complain. They couldn't read.
I've done my best," she sighed, "to prevent my little girl from learning to
read, but what's the use? I caught Ann only yesterday with a newspaper in
her hand and she was beginning to ask me if it was 'true.' Next she'll ask me
whether Mr. Lloyd George is a good man, then whether Mr. Arnold Bennett
is a good novelist, and finally whether I believe in God. How can I bring
my daughter up to believe in nothing?" she demanded.
"Surely you could teach her to believe that a man's intellect is, and always
will be, fundamentally superior to a woman's?" I suggested. She brightened
at this and began to turn over our old minutes again. "Yes," she said, "think
of their discoveries, their mathematics, their science, their philosophy, their
scholarship——" and then she began to laugh, "I shall never forget old
Hobkin and the hairpin," she said, and went on reading and laughing and I
thought she was quite happy, when suddenly she drew the book from her
and burst out, "Oh, Cassandra, why do you torment me? Don't you know
that our belief in man's intellect is the greatest fallacy of them all?" "What?"
I exclaimed. "Ask any journalist, schoolmaster, politician or public house
keeper in the land and they will all tell you that men are much cleverer than
women." "As if I doubted it," she said scornfully. "How could they help it?
Haven't we bred them and fed and kept them in comfort since the beginning
of time so that they may be clever even if they're nothing else? It's all our
doing!" she cried. "We insisted upon having intellect and now we've got it.
And it's intellect," she continued, "that's at the bottom of it. What could be
more charming than a boy before he has begun to cultivate his intellect? He
is beautiful to look at; he gives himself no airs; he understands the meaning

of art and literature instinctively; he goes about enjoying his life and
making other people enjoy theirs. Then they teach him to cultivate his
intellect. He becomes a barrister, a civil servant, a general, an author, a
professor. Every day he goes to an office. Every year he produces a book.
He maintains a whole family by the products of his brain—poor devil! Soon
he cannot come into a room without making us all feel uncomfortable; he
condescends to every woman he meets, and dares not tell the truth even to
his own wife; instead of rejoicing our eyes we have to shut them if we are
to take him in our arms. True, they console themselves with stars of all
shapes, ribbons of all shades, and incomes of all sizes—but what is to
console us? That we shall be able in ten years' time to spend a week-end at
Lahore? Or that the least insect in Japan has a name twice the length of its
body? Oh, Cassandra, for Heaven's sake let us devise a method by which
men may bear children! It is our only chance. For unless we provide them
with some innocent occupation we shall get neither good people nor good
books; we shall perish beneath the fruits of their unbridled activity; and not
a human being will survive to know that there once was Shakespeare!"
"It is too late," I replied. "We cannot provide even for the children that we
have."
"And then you ask me to believe in intellect," she said.
While we spoke, men were crying hoarsely and wearily in the street, and,
listening, we heard that the Treaty of Peace had just been signed. The voices
died away. The rain was falling and interfered no doubt with the proper
explosion of the fireworks.
"My cook will have bought the Evening News," said Castalia, "and Ann
will be spelling it out over her tea. I must go home."
"It's no good—not a bit of good," I said. "Once she knows how to read
there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in—and that is herself."
"Well, that would be a change," sighed Castalia.
So we swept up the papers of our Society, and, though Ann was playing
with her doll very happily, we solemnly made her a present of the lot and
told her we had chosen her to be President of the Society of the future—
upon which she burst into tears, poor little girl.

MONDAY OR TUESDAY
Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his
way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant,
absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and
remains. A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect—the
sun gold on its slopes. Down that falls. Ferns then, or white feathers, for
ever and ever——
Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever
desiring—(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike
divergently. Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict)—for ever desiring—(the
clock asseverates with twelve distinct strokes that it is midday; light sheds
gold scales; children swarm)—for ever desiring truth. Red is the dome;
coins hang on the trees; smoke trails from the chimneys; bark, shout, cry
"Iron for sale"—and truth?
Radiating to a point men's feet and women's feet, black or gold-encrusted—
(This foggy weather—Sugar? No, thank you—The commonwealth of the
future)—the firelight darting and making the room red, save for the black
figures and their bright eyes, while outside a van discharges, Miss
Thingummy drinks tea at her desk, and plate-glass preserves fur coats——
Flaunted, leaf-light, drifting at corners, blown across the wheels, silver-
splashed, home or not home, gathered, scattered, squandered in separate
scales, swept up, down, torn, sunk, assembled—and truth?
Now to recollect by the fireside on the white square of marble. From ivory
depths words rising shed their blackness, blossom and penetrate. Fallen the
book; in the flame, in the smoke, in the momentary sparks—or now
voyaging, the marble square pendant, minarets beneath and the Indian seas,
while space rushes blue and stars glint—truth? or now, content with
closeness?
Lazy and indifferent the heron returns; the sky veils her stars; then bares
them.

AN UNWRITTEN NOVEL
Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one's eyes
slide above the paper's edge to the poor woman's face—insignificant
without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it. Life's what
you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn, and, having learnt it, never,
though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of—what? That life's like
that, it seems. Five faces opposite—five mature faces—and the knowledge
in each face. Strange, though, how people want to conceal it! Marks of
reticence are on all those faces: lips shut, eyes shaded, each one of the five
doing something to hide or stultify his knowledge. One smokes; another
reads; a third checks entries in a pocket book; a fourth stares at the map of
the line framed opposite; and the fifth—the terrible thing about the fifth is
that she does nothing at all. She looks at life. Ah, but my poor, unfortunate
woman, do play the game—do, for all our sakes, conceal it!
As if she heard me, she looked up, shifted slightly in her seat and sighed.
She seemed to apologise and at the same time to say to me, "If only you
knew!" Then she looked at life again. "But I do know," I answered silently,
glancing at the Times for manners' sake. "I know the whole business. 'Peace
between Germany and the Allied Powers was yesterday officially ushered in
at Paris—Signor Nitti, the Italian Prime Minister—a passenger train at
Doncaster was in collision with a goods train....' We all know—the Times
knows—but we pretend we don't." My eyes had once more crept over the
paper's rim. She shuddered, twitched her arm queerly to the middle of her
back and shook her head. Again I dipped into my great reservoir of life.
"Take what you like," I continued, "births, deaths, marriages, Court
Circular, the habits of birds, Leonardo da Vinci, the Sandhills murder, high
wages and the cost of living—oh, take what you like," I repeated, "it's all in
the Times!" Again with infinite weariness she moved her head from side to
side until, like a top exhausted with spinning, it settled on her neck.
The Times was no protection against such sorrow as hers. But other human
beings forbade intercourse. The best thing to do against life was to fold the
paper so that it made a perfect square, crisp, thick, impervious even to life.

This done, I glanced up quickly, armed with a shield of my own. She
pierced through my shield; she gazed into my eyes as if searching any
sediment of courage at the depths of them and damping it to clay. Her
twitch alone denied all hope, discounted all illusion.
So we rattled through Surrey and across the border into Sussex. But with
my eyes upon life I did not see that the other travellers had left, one by one,
till, save for the man who read, we were alone together. Here was Three
Bridges station. We drew slowly down the platform and stopped. Was he
going to leave us? I prayed both ways—I prayed last that he might stay. At
that instant he roused himself, crumpled his paper contemptuously, like a
thing done with, burst open the door, and left us alone.
The unhappy woman, leaning a little forward, palely and colourlessly
addressed me—talked of stations and holidays, of brothers at Eastbourne,
and the time of year, which was, I forget now, early or late. But at last
looking from the window and seeing, I knew, only life, she breathed,
"Staying away—that's the drawback of it——" Ah, now we approached the
catastrophe, "My sister-in-law"—the bitterness of her tone was like lemon
on cold steel, and speaking, not to me, but to herself, she muttered,
"nonsense, she would say—that's what they all say," and while she spoke
she fidgeted as though the skin on her back were as a plucked fowl's in a
poulterer's shop-window.
"Oh, that cow!" she broke off nervously, as though the great wooden cow in
the meadow had shocked her and saved her from some indiscretion. Then
she shuddered, and then she made the awkward angular movement that I
had seen before, as if, after the spasm, some spot between the shoulders
burnt or itched. Then again she looked the most unhappy woman in the
world, and I once more reproached her, though not with the same
conviction, for if there were a reason, and if I knew the reason, the stigma
was removed from life.
"Sisters-in-law," I said—
Her lips pursed as if to spit venom at the word; pursed they remained. All
she did was to take her glove and rub hard at a spot on the window-pane.
She rubbed as if she would rub something out for ever—some stain, some
indelible contamination. Indeed, the spot remained for all her rubbing, and

back she sank with the shudder and the clutch of the arm I had come to
expect. Something impelled me to take my glove and rub my window.
There, too, was a little speck on the glass. For all my rubbing it remained.
And then the spasm went through me; I crooked my arm and plucked at the
middle of my back. My skin, too, felt like the damp chicken's skin in the
poulterer's shop-window; one spot between the shoulders itched and
irritated, felt clammy, felt raw. Could I reach it? Surreptitiously I tried. She
saw me. A smile of infinite irony, infinite sorrow, flitted and faded from her
face. But she had communicated, shared her secret, passed her poison; she
would speak no more. Leaning back in my corner, shielding my eyes from
her eyes, seeing only the slopes and hollows, greys and purples, of the
winter's landscape, I read her message, deciphered her secret, reading it
beneath her gaze.
Hilda's the sister-in-law. Hilda? Hilda? Hilda Marsh—Hilda the blooming,
the full bosomed, the matronly. Hilda stands at the door as the cab draws
up, holding a coin. "Poor Minnie, more of a grasshopper than ever—old
cloak she had last year. Well, well, with two children these days one can't
do more. No, Minnie, I've got it; here you are, cabby—none of your ways
with me. Come in, Minnie. Oh, I could carry you, let alone your basket!" So
they go into the dining-room. "Aunt Minnie, children."
Slowly the knives and forks sink from the upright. Down they get (Bob and
Barbara), hold out hands stiffly; back again to their chairs, staring between
the resumed mouthfuls. [But this we'll skip; ornaments, curtains, trefoil
china plate, yellow oblongs of cheese, white squares of biscuit—skip—oh,
but wait! Halfway through luncheon one of those shivers; Bob stares at her,
spoon in mouth. "Get on with your pudding, Bob;" but Hilda disapproves.
"Why should she twitch?" Skip, skip, till we reach the landing on the upper
floor; stairs brass-bound; linoleum worn; oh, yes! little bedroom looking out
over the roofs of Eastbourne—zigzagging roofs like the spines of
caterpillars, this way, that way, striped red and yellow, with blue-black
slating]. Now, Minnie, the door's shut; Hilda heavily descends to the
basement; you unstrap the straps of your basket, lay on the bed a meagre
nightgown, stand side by side furred felt slippers. The looking-glass—no,
you avoid the looking-glass. Some methodical disposition of hat-pins.
Perhaps the shell box has something in it? You shake it; it's the pearl stud
there was last year—that's all. And then the sniff, the sigh, the sitting by the

window. Three o'clock on a December afternoon; the rain drizzling; one
light low in the skylight of a drapery emporium; another high in a servant's
bedroom—this one goes out. That gives her nothing to look at. A moment's
blankness—then, what are you thinking? (Let me peep across at her
opposite; she's asleep or pretending it; so what would she think about sitting
at the window at three o'clock in the afternoon? Health, money, hills, her
God?) Yes, sitting on the very edge of the chair looking over the roofs of
Eastbourne, Minnie Marsh prays to God. That's all very well; and she may
rub the pane too, as though to see God better; but what God does she see?
Who's the God of Minnie Marsh, the God of the back streets of Eastbourne,
the God of three o'clock in the afternoon? I, too, see roofs, I see sky; but,
oh, dear—this seeing of Gods! More like President Kruger than Prince
Albert—that's the best I can do for him; and I see him on a chair, in a black
frock-coat, not so very high up either; I can manage a cloud or two for him
to sit on; and then his hand trailing in the cloud holds a rod, a truncheon is
it?—black, thick, thorned—a brutal old bully—Minnie's God! Did he send
the itch and the patch and the twitch? Is that why she prays? What she rubs
on the window is the stain of sin. Oh, she committed some crime!
I have my choice of crimes. The woods flit and fly—in summer there are
bluebells; in the opening there, when Spring comes, primroses. A parting,
was it, twenty years ago? Vows broken? Not Minnie's!... She was faithful.
How she nursed her mother! All her savings on the tombstone—wreaths
under glass—daffodils in jars. But I'm off the track. A crime.... They would
say she kept her sorrow, suppressed her secret—her sex, they'd say—the
scientific people. But what flummery to saddle her with sex! No—more
like this. Passing down the streets of Croydon twenty years ago, the violet
loops of ribbon in the draper's window spangled in the electric light catch
her eye. She lingers—past six. Still by running she can reach home. She
pushes through the glass swing door. It's sale-time. Shallow trays brim with
ribbons. She pauses, pulls this, fingers that with the raised roses on it—no
need to choose, no need to buy, and each tray with its surprises. "We don't
shut till seven," and then it is seven. She runs, she rushes, home she
reaches, but too late. Neighbours—the doctor—baby brother—the kettle—
scalded—hospital—dead—or only the shock of it, the blame? Ah, but the
detail matters nothing! It's what she carries with her; the spot, the crime, the

thing to expiate, always there between her shoulders. "Yes," she seems to
nod to me, "it's the thing I did."
Whether you did, or what you did, I don't mind; it's not the thing I want.
The draper's window looped with violet—that'll do; a little cheap perhaps, a
little commonplace—since one has a choice of crimes, but then so many (let
me peep across again—still sleeping, or pretending sleep! white, worn, the
mouth closed—a touch of obstinacy, more than one would think—no hint
of sex)—so many crimes aren't your crime; your crime was cheap; only the
retribution solemn; for now the church door opens, the hard wooden pew
receives her; on the brown tiles she kneels; every day, winter, summer,
dusk, dawn (here she's at it) prays. All her sins fall, fall, for ever fall. The
spot receives them. It's raised, it's red, it's burning. Next she twitches. Small
boys point. "Bob at lunch to-day"—But elderly women are the worst.
Indeed now you can't sit praying any longer. Kruger's sunk beneath the
clouds—washed over as with a painter's brush of liquid grey, to which he
adds a tinge of black—even the tip of the truncheon gone now. That's what
always happens! Just as you've seen him, felt him, someone interrupts. It's
Hilda now.
How you hate her! She'll even lock the bathroom door overnight, too,
though it's only cold water you want, and sometimes when the night's been
bad it seems as if washing helped. And John at breakfast—the children—
meals are worst, and sometimes there are friends—ferns don't altogether
hide 'em—they guess, too; so out you go along the front, where the waves
are grey, and the papers blow, and the glass shelters green and draughty, and
the chairs cost tuppence—too much—for there must be preachers along the
sands. Ah, that's a nigger—that's a funny man—that's a man with parakeets
—poor little creatures! Is there no one here who thinks of God?—just up
there, over the pier, with his rod—but no—there's nothing but grey in the
sky or if it's blue the white clouds hide him, and the music—it's military
music—and what they are fishing for? Do they catch them? How the
children stare! Well, then home a back way—"Home a back way!" The
words have meaning; might have been spoken by the old man with
whiskers—no, no, he didn't really speak; but everything has meaning—
placards leaning against doorways—names above shop-windows—red fruit
in baskets—women's heads in the hairdresser's—all say "Minnie Marsh!"

But here's a jerk. "Eggs are cheaper!" That's what always happens! I was
heading her over the waterfall, straight for madness, when, like a flock of
dream sheep, she turns t'other way and runs between my fingers. Eggs are
cheaper. Tethered to the shores of the world, none of the crimes, sorrows,
rhapsodies, or insanities for poor Minnie Marsh; never late for luncheon;
never caught in a storm without a mackintosh; never utterly unconscious of
the cheapness of eggs. So she reaches home—scrapes her boots.
Have I read you right? But the human face—the human face at the top of
the fullest sheet of print holds more, withholds more. Now, eyes open, she
looks out; and in the human eye—how d'you define it?—there's a break—a
division—so that when you've grasped the stem the butterfly's off—the
moth that hangs in the evening over the yellow flower—move, raise your
hand, off, high, away. I won't raise my hand. Hang still, then, quiver, life,
soul, spirit, whatever you are of Minnie Marsh—I, too, on my flower—the
hawk over the down—alone, or what were the worth of life? To rise; hang
still in the evening, in the midday; hang still over the down. The flicker of a
hand—off, up! then poised again. Alone, unseen; seeing all so still down
there, all so lovely. None seeing, none caring. The eyes of others our
prisons; their thoughts our cages. Air above, air below. And the moon and
immortality.... Oh, but I drop to the turf! Are you down too, you in the
corner, what's your name—woman—Minnie Marsh; some such name as
that? There she is, tight to her blossom; opening her hand-bag, from which
she takes a hollow shell—an egg—who was saying that eggs were cheaper?
You or I? Oh, it was you who said it on the way home, you remember, when
the old gentleman, suddenly opening his umbrella—or sneezing was it?
Anyhow, Kruger went, and you came "home a back way," and scraped your
boots. Yes. And now you lay across your knees a pocket-handkerchief into
which drop little angular fragments of eggshell—fragments of a map—a
puzzle. I wish I could piece them together! If you would only sit still. She's
moved her knees—the map's in bits again. Down the slopes of the Andes
the white blocks of marble go bounding and hurtling, crushing to death a
whole troop of Spanish muleteers, with their convoy—Drake's booty, gold
and silver. But to return——
To what, to where? She opened the door, and, putting her umbrella in the
stand—that goes without saying; so, too, the whiff of beef from the
basement; dot, dot, dot. But what I cannot thus eliminate, what I must, head

down, eyes shut, with the courage of a battalion and the blindness of a bull,
charge and disperse are, indubitably, the figures behind the ferns,
commercial travellers. There I've hidden them all this time in the hope that
somehow they'd disappear, or better still emerge, as indeed they must, if the
story's to go on gathering richness and rotundity, destiny and tragedy, as
stories should, rolling along with it two, if not three, commercial travellers
and a whole grove of aspidistra. "The fronds of the aspidistra only partly
concealed the commercial traveller—" Rhododendrons would conceal him
utterly, and into the bargain give me my fling of red and white, for which I
starve and strive; but rhododendrons in Eastbourne—in December—on the
Marshes' table—no, no, I dare not; it's all a matter of crusts and cruets, frills
and ferns. Perhaps there'll be a moment later by the sea. Moreover, I feel,
pleasantly pricking through the green fretwork and over the glacis of cut
glass, a desire to peer and peep at the man opposite—one's as much as I can
manage. James Moggridge is it, whom the Marshes call Jimmy? [Minnie,
you must promise not to twitch till I've got this straight]. James Moggridge
travels in—shall we say buttons?—but the time's not come for bringing
them in—the big and the little on the long cards, some peacock-eyed, others
dull gold; cairngorms some, and others coral sprays—but I say the time's
not come. He travels, and on Thursdays, his Eastbourne day, takes his meals
with the Marshes. His red face, his little steady eyes—by no means
altogether commonplace—his enormous appetite (that's safe; he won't look
at Minnie till the bread's swamped the gravy dry), napkin tucked diamond-
wise—but this is primitive, and, whatever it may do the reader, don't take
me in. Let's dodge to the Moggridge household, set that in motion. Well, the
family boots are mended on Sundays by James himself. He reads Truth. But
his passion? Roses—and his wife a retired hospital nurse—interesting—for
God's sake let me have one woman with a name I like! But no; she's of the
unborn children of the mind, illicit, none the less loved, like my
rhododendrons. How many die in every novel that's written—the best, the
dearest, while Moggridge lives. It's life's fault. Here's Minnie eating her egg
at the moment opposite and at t'other end of the line—are we past Lewes?
—there must be Jimmy—or what's her twitch for?
There must be Moggridge—life's fault. Life imposes her laws; life blocks
the way; life's behind the fern; life's the tyrant; oh, but not the bully! No, for
I assure you I come willingly; I come wooed by Heaven knows what

compulsion across ferns and cruets, table splashed and bottles smeared. I
come irresistibly to lodge myself somewhere on the firm flesh, in the robust
spine, wherever I can penetrate or find foothold on the person, in the soul,
of Moggridge the man. The enormous stability of the fabric; the spine tough
as whalebone, straight as oak-tree; the ribs radiating branches; the flesh taut
tarpaulin; the red hollows; the suck and regurgitation of the heart; while
from above meat falls in brown cubes and beer gushes to be churned to
blood again—and so we reach the eyes. Behind the aspidistra they see
something: black, white, dismal; now the plate again; behind the aspidistra
they see elderly woman; "Marsh's sister, Hilda's more my sort;" the
tablecloth now. "Marsh would know what's wrong with Morrises ..." talk
that over; cheese has come; the plate again; turn it round—the enormous
fingers; now the woman opposite. "Marsh's sister—not a bit like Marsh;
wretched, elderly female.... You should feed your hens.... God's truth, what's
set her twitching? Not what I said? Dear, dear, dear! these elderly women.
Dear, dear!"
[Yes, Minnie; I know you've twitched, but one moment—James
Moggridge].
"Dear, dear, dear!" How beautiful the sound is! like the knock of a mallet on
seasoned timber, like the throb of the heart of an ancient whaler when the
seas press thick and the green is clouded. "Dear, dear!" what a passing bell
for the souls of the fretful to soothe them and solace them, lap them in
linen, saying, "So long. Good luck to you!" and then, "What's your
pleasure?" for though Moggridge would pluck his rose for her, that's done,
that's over. Now what's the next thing? "Madam, you'll miss your train," for
they don't linger.
That's the man's way; that's the sound that reverberates; that's St. Paul's and
the motor-omnibuses. But we're brushing the crumbs off. Oh, Moggridge,
you won't stay? You must be off? Are you driving through Eastbourne this
afternoon in one of those little carriages? Are you the man who's walled up
in green cardboard boxes, and sometimes has the blinds down, and
sometimes sits so solemn staring like a sphinx, and always there's a look of
the sepulchral, something of the undertaker, the coffin, and the dusk about
horse and driver? Do tell me—but the doors slammed. We shall never meet
again. Moggridge, farewell!

Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up to the top of the house. One moment I'll
linger. How the mud goes round in the mind—what a swirl these monsters
leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there,
striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts
itself, and again through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to
the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those
one nods to, the people one never meets again.
James Moggridge is dead now, gone for ever. Well, Minnie—"I can face it
no longer." If she said that—(Let me look at her. She is brushing the
eggshell into deep declivities). She said it certainly, leaning against the wall
of the bedroom, and plucking at the little balls which edge the claret-
coloured curtain. But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?—
the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the
self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow
beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark
corridors. "I can bear it no longer," her spirit says. "That man at lunch—
Hilda—the children." Oh, heavens, her sob! It's the spirit wailing its
destiny, the spirit driven hither, thither, lodging on the diminishing carpets
—meagre footholds—shrunken shreds of all the vanishing universe—love,
life, faith, husband, children, I know not what splendours and pageantries
glimpsed in girlhood. "Not for me—not for me."
But then—the muffins, the bald elderly dog? Bead mats I should fancy and
the consolation of underlinen. If Minnie Marsh were run over and taken to
hospital, nurses and doctors themselves would exclaim.... There's the vista
and the vision—there's the distance—the blue blot at the end of the avenue,
while, after all, the tea is rich, the muffin hot, and the dog—"Benny, to your
basket, sir, and see what mother's brought you!" So, taking the glove with
the worn thumb, defying once more the encroaching demon of what's called
going in holes, you renew the fortifications, threading the grey wool,
running it in and out.
Running it in and out, across and over, spinning a web through which God
himself—hush, don't think of God! How firm the stitches are! You must be
proud of your darning. Let nothing disturb her. Let the light fall gently, and
the clouds show an inner vest of the first green leaf. Let the sparrow perch
on the twig and shake the raindrop hanging to the twig's elbow.... Why look

up? Was it a sound, a thought? Oh, heavens! Back again to the thing you
did, the plate glass with the violet loops? But Hilda will come. Ignominies,
humiliations, oh! Close the breach.
Having mended her glove, Minnie Marsh lays it in the drawer. She shuts the
drawer with decision. I catch sight of her face in the glass. Lips are pursed.
Chin held high. Next she laces her shoes. Then she touches her throat.
What's your brooch? Mistletoe or merry-thought? And what is happening?
Unless I'm much mistaken, the pulse's quickened, the moment's coming, the
threads are racing, Niagara's ahead. Here's the crisis! Heaven be with you!
Down she goes. Courage, courage! Face it, be it! For God's sake don't wait
on the mat now! There's the door! I'm on your side. Speak! Confront her,
confound her soul!
"Oh, I beg your pardon! Yes, this is Eastbourne. I'll reach it down for you.
Let me try the handle." [But, Minnie, though we keep up pretences, I've
read you right—I'm with you now].
"That's all your luggage?"
"Much obliged, I'm sure."
(But why do you look about you? Hilda won't come to the station, nor John;
and Moggridge is driving at the far side of Eastbourne).
"I'll wait by my bag, ma'am, that's safest. He said he'd meet me.... Oh, there
he is! That's my son."
So they walk off together.
Well, but I'm confounded.... Surely, Minnie, you know better! A strange
young man.... Stop! I'll tell him—Minnie!—Miss Marsh!—I don't know
though. There's something queer in her cloak as it blows. Oh, but it's untrue,
it's indecent.... Look how he bends as they reach the gateway. She finds her
ticket. What's the joke? Off they go, down the road, side by side.... Well, my
world's done for! What do I stand on? What do I know? That's not Minnie.
There never was Moggridge. Who am I? Life's bare as bone.
And yet the last look of them—he stepping from the kerb and she following
him round the edge of the big building brims me with wonder—floods me

anew. Mysterious figures! Mother and son. Who are you? Why do you walk
down the street? Where to-night will you sleep, and then, to-morrow? Oh,
how it whirls and surges—floats me afresh! I start after them. People drive
this way and that. The white light splutters and pours. Plate-glass windows.
Carnations; chrysanthemums. Ivy in dark gardens. Milk carts at the door.
Wherever I go, mysterious figures, I see you, turning the corner, mothers
and sons; you, you, you. I hasten, I follow. This, I fancy, must be the sea.
Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves. If I fall
on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it's you, unknown
figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, it's you I embrace, you I draw to me
—adorable world!

THE STRING QUARTET
Well, here we are, and if you cast your eye over the room you will see that
Tubes and trams and omnibuses, private carriages not a few, even, I venture
to believe, landaus with bays in them, have been busy at it, weaving threads
from one end of London to the other. Yet I begin to have my doubts—
If indeed it's true, as they're saying, that Regent Street is up, and the Treaty
signed, and the weather not cold for the time of year, and even at that rent
not a flat to be had, and the worst of influenza its after effects; if I bethink
me of having forgotten to write about the leak in the larder, and left my
glove in the train; if the ties of blood require me, leaning forward, to accept
cordially the hand which is perhaps offered hesitatingly—
"Seven years since we met!"
"The last time in Venice."
"And where are you living now?"
"Well, the late afternoon suits me the best, though, if it weren't asking too
much——"
"But I knew you at once!"
"Still, the war made a break——"
If the mind's shot through by such little arrows, and—for human society
compels it—no sooner is one launched than another presses forward; if this
engenders heat and in addition they've turned on the electric light; if saying
one thing does, in so many cases, leave behind it a need to improve and
revise, stirring besides regrets, pleasures, vanities, and desires—if it's all the
facts I mean, and the hats, the fur boas, the gentlemen's swallow-tail coats,
and pearl tie-pins that come to the surface—what chance is there?
Of what? It becomes every minute more difficult to say why, in spite of
everything, I sit here believing I can't now say what, or even remember the

last time it happened.
"Did you see the procession?"
"The King looked cold."
"No, no, no. But what was it?"
"She's bought a house at Malmesbury."
"How lucky to find one!"
On the contrary, it seems to me pretty sure that she, whoever she may be, is
damned, since it's all a matter of flats and hats and sea gulls, or so it seems
to be for a hundred people sitting here well dressed, walled in, furred,
replete. Not that I can boast, since I too sit passive on a gilt chair, only
turning the earth above a buried memory, as we all do, for there are signs, if
I'm not mistaken, that we're all recalling something, furtively seeking
something. Why fidget? Why so anxious about the sit of cloaks; and gloves
—whether to button or unbutton? Then watch that elderly face against the
dark canvas, a moment ago urbane and flushed; now taciturn and sad, as if
in shadow. Was it the sound of the second violin tuning in the ante-room?
Here they come; four black figures, carrying instruments, and seat
themselves facing the white squares under the downpour of light; rest the
tips of their bows on the music stand; with a simultaneous movement lift
them; lightly poise them, and, looking across at the player opposite, the first
violin counts one, two, three——
Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst! The pear tree on the top of the mountain.
Fountains jet; drops descend. But the waters of the Rhone flow swift and
deep, race under the arches, and sweep the trailing water leaves, washing
shadows over the silver fish, the spotted fish rushed down by the swift
waters, now swept into an eddy where—it's difficult this—conglomeration
of fish all in a pool; leaping, splashing, scraping sharp fins; and such a boil
of current that the yellow pebbles are churned round and round, round and
round—free now, rushing downwards, or even somehow ascending in
exquisite spirals into the air; curled like thin shavings from under a plane;
up and up.... How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go
smiling through the world! Also in jolly old fishwives, squatted under

arches, obscene old women, how deeply they laugh and shake and rollick,
when they walk, from side to side, hum, hah!
"That's an early Mozart, of course——"
"But the tune, like all his tunes, makes one despair—I mean hope. What do
I mean? That's the worst of music! I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes,
yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, now—I could
relish that. The older one grows the more one likes indecency. Hah, hah! I'm
laughing. What at? You said nothing, nor did the old gentleman opposite....
But suppose—suppose—Hush!"
The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the
trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird
singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow.
Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight. Woven together,
inextricably commingled, bound in pain and strewn in sorrow—crash!
The boat sinks. Rising, the figures ascend, but now leaf thin, tapering to a
dusky wraith, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold passion from my heart.
For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the
sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves
in and out until in this pattern, this consummation, the cleft ones unify; soar,
sob, sink to rest, sorrow and joy.
Why then grieve? Ask what? Remain unsatisfied? I say all's been settled;
yes; laid to rest under a coverlet of rose leaves, falling. Falling. Ah, but they
cease. One rose leaf, falling from an enormous height, like a little parachute
dropped from an invisible balloon, turns, flutters waveringly. It won't reach
us.
"No, no. I noticed nothing. That's the worst of music—these silly dreams.
The second violin was late, you say?"
"There's old Mrs. Munro, feeling her way out—blinder each year, poor
woman—on this slippery floor."
Eyeless old age, grey-headed Sphinx.... There she stands on the pavement,
beckoning, so sternly, the red omnibus.

"How lovely! How well they play! How—how—how!"
The tongue is but a clapper. Simplicity itself. The feathers in the hat next
me are bright and pleasing as a child's rattle. The leaf on the plane-tree
flashes green through the chink in the curtain. Very strange, very exciting.
"How—how—how!" Hush!
These are the lovers on the grass.
"If, madam, you will take my hand——"
"Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in
the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls."
"Then these are the embraces of our souls." The lemons nod assent. The
swan pushes from the bank and floats dreaming into mid stream.
"But to return. He followed me down the corridor, and, as we turned the
corner, trod on the lace of my petticoat. What could I do but cry 'Ah!' and
stop to finger it? At which he drew his sword, made passes as if he were
stabbing something to death, and cried, 'Mad! Mad! Mad!' Whereupon I
screamed, and the Prince, who was writing in the large vellum book in the
oriel window, came out in his velvet skull-cap and furred slippers, snatched
a rapier from the wall—the King of Spain's gift, you know—on which I
escaped, flinging on this cloak to hide the ravages to my skirt—to hide....
But listen! the horns!"
The gentleman replies so fast to the lady, and she runs up the scale with
such witty exchange of compliment now culminating in a sob of passion,
that the words are indistinguishable though the meaning is plain enough—
love, laughter, flight, pursuit, celestial bliss—all floated out on the gayest
ripple of tender endearment—until the sound of the silver horns, at first far
distant, gradually sounds more and more distinctly, as if seneschals were
saluting the dawn or proclaiming ominously the escape of the lovers.... The
green garden, moonlit pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the
opal sky, across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported
by clarions there rise white arches firmly planted on marble pillars.... Tramp
and trumpeting. Clang and clangour. Firm establishment. Fast foundations.
March of myriads. Confusion and chaos trod to earth. But this city to which

we travel has neither stone nor marble; hangs enduring; stands unshakable;
nor does a face, nor does a flag greet or welcome. Leave then to perish your
hope; droop in the desert my joy; naked advance. Bare are the pillars;
auspicious to none; casting no shade; resplendent; severe. Back then I fall,
eager no more, desiring only to go, find the street, mark the buildings, greet
the applewoman, say to the maid who opens the door: A starry night.

"Good night, good night. You go this way?"
"Alas. I go that."

BLUE & GREEN
GREEN

The pointed fingers of glass hang downwards. The light slides down the
glass, and drops a pool of green. All day long the ten fingers of the lustre
drop green upon the marble. The feathers of parakeets—their harsh cries—
sharp blades of palm trees—green, too; green needles glittering in the sun.
But the hard glass drips on to the marble; the pools hover above the dessert
sand; the camels lurch through them; the pools settle on the marble; rushes
edge them; weeds clog them; here and there a white blossom; the frog flops
over; at night the stars are set there unbroken. Evening comes, and the
shadow sweeps the green over the mantelpiece; the ruffled surface of ocean.
No ships come; the aimless waves sway beneath the empty sky. It's night;
the needles drip blots of blue. The green's out.

BLUE

The snub-nosed monster rises to the surface and spouts through his blunt
nostrils two columns of water, which, fiery-white in the centre, spray off
into a fringe of blue beads. Strokes of blue line the black tarpaulin of his
hide. Slushing the water through mouth and nostrils he sings, heavy with
water, and the blue closes over him dowsing the polished pebbles of his
eyes. Thrown upon the beach he lies, blunt, obtuse, shedding dry blue
scales. Their metallic blue stains the rusty iron on the beach. Blue are the
ribs of the wrecked rowing boat. A wave rolls beneath the blue bells. But
the cathedral's different, cold, incense laden, faint blue with the veils of
madonnas.

KEW GARDENS
From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks
spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and
unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour
raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the
throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at
the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer
breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one
over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the
most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a
pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a
raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin
walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the
drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled
upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the
surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green
spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves.
Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was
flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in
Kew Gardens in July.
The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a
curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue
butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. The man
was about six inches in front of the woman, strolling carelessly, while she
bore on with greater purpose, only turning her head now and then to see that
the children were not too far behind. The man kept this distance in front of
the woman purposely, though perhaps unconsciously, for he wished to go
on with his thoughts.
"Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily," he thought. "We sat somewhere
over there by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot
afternoon. How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the
dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time

I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without
looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her
shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I
thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower
in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say "Yes"
at once. But the dragonfly went round and round: it never settled anywhere
—of course not, happily not, or I shouldn't be walking here with Eleanor
and the children—Tell me, Eleanor. D'you ever think of the past?"
"Why do you ask, Simon?"
"Because I've been thinking of the past. I've been thinking of Lily, the
woman I might have married.... Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my
thinking of the past?"
"Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn't one always think of the past, in a
garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past,
all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the
trees, ... one's happiness, one's reality?"
"For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly—"
"For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty
years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water-lilies, the first red
water-lilies I'd ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my
neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn't paint. I took
out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of
the kiss for five minutes only—it was so precious—the kiss of an old grey-
haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses all my
life. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert."
They walked on past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon
diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the
sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular
patches.
In the oval flower bed the snail, whose shell had been stained red, blue, and
yellow for the space of two minutes or so, now appeared to be moving very
slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth
which broke away and rolled down as it passed over them. It appeared to

have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular
high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and
waited for a second with its antennæ trembling as if in deliberation, and
then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Brown
cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved
from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a
thin crackling texture—all these objects lay across the snail's progress
between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to
circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the
bed the feet of other human beings.
This time they were both men. The younger of the two wore an expression
of perhaps unnatural calm; he raised his eyes and fixed them very steadily
in front of him while his companion spoke, and directly his companion had
done speaking he looked on the ground again and sometimes opened his
lips only after a long pause and sometimes did not open them at all. The
elder man had a curiously uneven and shaky method of walking, jerking his
hand forward and throwing up his head abruptly, rather in the manner of an
impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house; but in the man
these gestures were irresolute and pointless. He talked almost incessantly;
he smiled to himself and again began to talk, as if the smile had been an
answer. He was talking about spirits—the spirits of the dead, who,
according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things about
their experiences in Heaven.
"Heaven was known to the ancients as Thessaly, William, and now, with
this war, the spirit matter is rolling between the hills like thunder." He
paused, seemed to listen, smiled, jerked his head and continued:—
"You have a small electric battery and a piece of rubber to insulate the wire
—isolate?—insulate?—well, we'll skip the details, no good going into
details that wouldn't be understood—and in short the little machine stands
in any convenient position by the head of the bed, we will say, on a neat
mahogany stand. All arrangements being properly fixed by workmen under
my direction, the widow applies her ear and summons the spirit by sign as
agreed. Women! Widows! Women in black——"

Here he seemed to have caught sight of a woman's dress in the distance,
which in the shade looked a purple black. He took off his hat, placed his
hand upon his heart, and hurried towards her muttering and gesticulating
feverishly. But William caught him by the sleeve and touched a flower with
the tip of his walking-stick in order to divert the old man's attention. After
looking at it for a moment in some confusion the old man bent his ear to it
and seemed to answer a voice speaking from it, for he began talking about
the forests of Uruguay which he had visited hundreds of years ago in
company with the most beautiful young woman in Europe. He could be
heard murmuring about forests of Uruguay blanketed with the wax petals of
tropical roses, nightingales, sea beaches, mermaids, and women drowned at
sea, as he suffered himself to be moved on by William, upon whose face the
look of stoical patience grew slowly deeper and deeper.
Following his steps so closely as to be slightly puzzled by his gestures came
two elderly women of the lower middle class, one stout and ponderous, the
other rosy cheeked and nimble. Like most people of their station they were
frankly fascinated by any signs of eccentricity betokening a disordered
brain, especially in the well-to-do; but they were too far off to be certain
whether the gestures were merely eccentric or genuinely mad. After they
had scrutinised the old man's back in silence for a moment and given each
other a queer, sly look, they went on energetically piecing together their
very complicated dialogue:
"Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I
says——"
"My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar,

Sugar, flour, kippers, greens,
Sugar, sugar, sugar."

The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the
flowers standing cool, firm, and upright in the earth, with a curious
expression. She saw them as a sleeper waking from a heavy sleep sees a
brass candlestick reflecting the light in an unfamiliar way, and closes his
eyes and opens them, and seeing the brass candlestick again, finally starts
broad awake and stares at the candlestick with all his powers. So the heavy

woman came to a standstill opposite the oval-shaped flower bed, and ceased
even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was saying. She stood
there letting the words fall over her, swaying the top part of her body slowly
backwards and forwards, looking at the flowers. Then she suggested that
they should find a seat and have their tea.
The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal
without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort
needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which
vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his
horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep
beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the
ground to admit him. He had just inserted his head in the opening and was
taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting used to the cool brown
light when two other people came past outside on the turf. This time they
were both young, a young man and a young woman. They were both in the
prime of youth, or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth,
the season before the smooth pink folds of the flower have burst their
gummy case, when the wings of the butterfly, though fully grown, are
motionless in the sun.
"Lucky it isn't Friday," he observed.
"Why? D'you believe in luck?"
"They make you pay sixpence on Friday."
"What's sixpence anyway? Isn't it worth sixpence?"
"What's 'it'—what do you mean by 'it'?"
"O, anything—I mean—you know what I mean."
Long pauses came between each of these remarks; they were uttered in
toneless and monotonous voices. The couple stood still on the edge of the
flower bed, and together pressed the end of her parasol deep down into the
soft earth. The action and the fact that his hand rested on the top of hers
expressed their feelings in a strange way, as these short insignificant words
also expressed something, words with short wings for their heavy body of
meaning, inadequate to carry them far and thus alighting awkwardly upon

the very common objects that surrounded them, and were to their
inexperienced touch so massive; but who knows (so they thought as they
pressed the parasol into the earth) what precipices aren't concealed in them,
or what slopes of ice don't shine in the sun on the other side? Who knows?
Who has ever seen this before? Even when she wondered what sort of tea
they gave you at Kew, he felt that something loomed up behind her words,
and stood vast and solid behind them; and the mist very slowly rose and
uncovered—O, Heavens, what were those shapes?—little white tables, and
waitresses who looked first at her and then at him; and there was a bill that
he would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he
assured himself, fingering the coin in his pocket, real to everyone except to
him and to her; even to him it began to seem real; and then—but it was too
exciting to stand and think any longer, and he pulled the parasol out of the
earth with a jerk and was impatient to find the place where one had tea with
other people, like other people.
"Come along, Trissie; it's time we had our tea."
"Wherever does one have one's tea?" she asked with the oddest thrill of
excitement in her voice, looking vaguely round and letting herself be drawn
on down the grass path, trailing her parasol, turning her head this way and
that way, forgetting her tea, wishing to go down there and then down there,
remembering orchids and cranes among wild flowers, a Chinese pagoda and
a crimson crested bird; but he bore her on.
Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless
movement passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of
green blue vapour, in which at first their bodies had substance and a dash of
colour, but later both substance and colour dissolved in the green-blue
atmosphere. How hot it was! So hot that even the thrush chose to hop, like a
mechanical bird, in the shadow of the flowers, with long pauses between
one movement and the next; instead of rambling vaguely the white
butterflies danced one above another, making with their white shifting
flakes the outline of a shattered marble column above the tallest flowers;
the glass roofs of the palm house shone as if a whole market full of shiny
green umbrellas had opened in the sun; and in the drone of the aeroplane
the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul. Yellow and black,
pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children

were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of
yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the
trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere,
staining it faintly with red and blue. It seemed as if all gross and heavy
bodies had sunk down in the heat motionless and lay huddled upon the
ground, but their voices went wavering from them as if they were flames
lolling from the thick waxen bodies of candles. Voices. Yes, voices.
Wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly with such depth of
contentment, such passion of desire, or, in the voices of children, such
freshness of surprise; breaking the silence? But there was no silence; all the
time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their
gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning
ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of which the
voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours
into the air.

THE MARK ON THE WALL
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked
up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to
remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of
yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the
round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter
time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a
cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I
looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a
moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag
flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the
cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my
relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an
automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round
mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the
mantelpiece.
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as
ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.... If that mark
was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it must have been for a
miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-
dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people
who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way—an
old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very
interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places,
because one will never see them again, never know what happened next.
They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style
of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion
art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn
from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the
tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the
train.

But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made by a
nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up
and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say for certain; because
once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the
mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To
show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an
accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count
over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems
always the most mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat
would nibble—three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there
were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-
scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone, and jewels, too.
Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping
paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back,
that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to
compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube
at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in
one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over
heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a
shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-
horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and
repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of
the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after
all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless,
unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes
of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and
women, or whether there are such things, that one won't be in a condition to
do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark,
intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots
of an indistinct colour—dim pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on,
become more definite, become—I don't know what....
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by
some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the
summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on
the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three

times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can
believe.
The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane.... I want to think
quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise
from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of
hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the
surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of
the first idea that passes.... Shakespeare.... Well, he will do as well as
another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the
fire, so—A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven
down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people,
looking in through the open door,—for this scene is supposed to take place
on a summer's evening—But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It
doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought,
a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest
thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured
people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises.
They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them;
they are thoughts like this:
"And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how
I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in
Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the
First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?" I asked—(but I
don't remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them
perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself
in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I
should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-
protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of
oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or
too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very
curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking
glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green
of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person
which is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent
world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in
omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that

accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the
novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these
reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite
number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will
pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories,
taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare
perhaps—but these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound
of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers—a whole
class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the
standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the
risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday
in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of
speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits—like the habit of sitting all
together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There
was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period
was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments
marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the
corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real
tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that
these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and
tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the
damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of
illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder,
those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the
masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard,
which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which has become, I
suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which
soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms
go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils,
Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate
freedom—if freedom exists....
In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the
wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a
perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the
wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a
smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they

say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs,
desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the
end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf.... There must
be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and
given them a name.... What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired
Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to
the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into
correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at
breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of
arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns, an
agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to
make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping
that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while
the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence
on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe
in the camp; and, being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to
read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him
low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp
and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum,
together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan
nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the
wine-glass that Nelson drank out of—proving I really don't know what.
No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this
very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—what shall
we say?—the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago,
which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of
housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first
view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should
I gain?—Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still
as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men
save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in
woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the
language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions
dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases.... Yes, one
could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the
flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or

specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which
one could slice with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin,
grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white
sea eggs.... How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world
and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light,
and their reflections—if it were not for Whitaker's Almanack—if it were not
for the Table of Precedency!
I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is—a
nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?
Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of
thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some
collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against
Whitaker's Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed
by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the
Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy
of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker
knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging
you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace,
think of the mark on the wall.
I understand Nature's game—her prompting to take action as a way of
ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose,
comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don't
think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable
thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a
plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the
two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades.
Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight
dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent,
worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality,
worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other
than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of.... Wood is a pleasant thing
to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how
they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to

us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers—all things one likes to
think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they
paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its
feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish
balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles
slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the
tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of
the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on
winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled,
nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon
an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long. The song of birds must
sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must
feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or
sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight
in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes.... One by one the fibres snap
beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes
and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so,
life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree,
all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms,
where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful
thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately
—but something is getting in the way.... Where was I? What has it all been
about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker's Almanack? The fields of
asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping,
vanishing.... There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over
me and saying—
"I'm going out to buy a newspaper."
"Yes?"
"Though it's no good buying newspapers.... Nothing ever happens. Curse
this war; God damn this war!... All the same, I don't see why we should
have a snail on our wall."
Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

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