So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea whichhad scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the cloudsseemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance:
whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling for Mr Ramsaychanged as he sailed further and further across the bay. It seemed to beelongated, stretched out; he seemed to become more and more remote.
He and his children seemed to be swallowed up in that blue, that distance;but here, on the lawn, close at hand, Mr Carmichael suddenlygrunted. She laughed. He clawed his book up from the grass. He settledinto his chair again puffing and blowing like some sea monster. That wasdifferent altogether, because he was so near. And now again all wasquiet. They must be out of bed by this time, she supposed, looking at thehouse, but nothing appeared there. But then, she remembered, they hadalways made off directly a meal was over, on business of their own. Itwas all in keeping with this silence, this emptiness, and the unreality ofthe early morning hour. It was a way things had sometimes, she thought,lingering for a moment and looking at the long glittering windows andthe plume of blue smoke: they became illness, before habits had spunthemselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was sostartling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could beat one's ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawnto greet old Mrs Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner tosit in, "Oh, good-morning, Mrs Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are you goingto be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper's hidden the chairs. Do let mefind you one!" and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need not speak atall. One glided, one shook one's sails (there was a good deal of movementin the bay, boats were starting off) between things, beyond things.
Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up tothe lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for thesewaters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives.
The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washer-woman with her basket; a rook, a red-hot poker; thepurples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling which heldthe whole together.
It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten yearsago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that shemust be in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There mightbe lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and placethem together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make ofsome scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one ofthose globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and loveplays.
Her eyes rested on the brown speck of Mr Ramsay's sailing boat. Theywould be at the Lighthouse by lunch time she supposed. But the windhad freshened, and, as the sky changed slightly and the sea changedslightly and the boats altered their positions, the view, which a momentbefore had seemed miraculously fixed, was now unsatisfactory. Thewind had blown the trail of smoke about; there was something displeasingabout the placing of the ships.
The disproportion there seemed to upset some harmony in her ownmind. She felt an obscure distress. It was confirmed when she turned toher picture. She had been wasting her morning. For whatever reason shecould not achieve that razor edge of balance between two oppositeforces; Mr Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary. There wassomething perhaps wrong with the design? Was it, she wondered, thatthe line of the wall wanted breaking, was it that the mass of the trees wastoo heavy? She smiled ironically; for had she not thought, when shebegan, that she had solved her problem?
What was the problem then? She must try to get hold of something thtevaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs Ramsay; it evadedher now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came.
Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold ofwas that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been madeanything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said desperately,pitching herself firmly again before her easel. It was a miserablemachine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus forpainting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment;heroically, one must force it on. She stared, frowning. There was thehedge, sure enough. But one got nothing by soliciting urgently. One gotonly a glare in the eye from looking at the line of the wall, or from thinking—she wore a grey hat. She was astonishingly beautiful. Let itcome, she thought, if it will come. For there are moments when one canneither think nor feel. And if one can neither think nor feel, she thought,where is one?
Here on the grass, on the ground, she thought, sitting down, and examiningwith her brush a little colony of plantains. For the lawn wasvery rough. Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could notshake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happeningfor the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, eventhough he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that hemust look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or thatwoman at work in the fields, again. The lawn was the world; they wereup here together, on this exalted station, she thought, looking at old MrCarmichael, who seemed (though they had not said a word all this time)to share her thoughts. And she would never see him again perhaps. Hewas growing old. Also, she remembered, smiling at the slipper thatdangled from his foot, he was growing famous. People said that his poetrywas "so beautiful." They went and published things he had writtenforty years ago. There was a famous man now called Carmichael, shesmiled, thinking how many shapes one person might wear, how he wasthat in the newspapers, but here the same as he had always been. Helooked the same—greyer, rather. Yes, he looked the same, but somebodyhad said, she recalled, that when he had heard of Andrew Ramsay'sdeath (he was killed in a second by a shell; he should have been a greatmathematician) Mr Carmichael had "lost all interest in life." What did itmean—that? she wondered. Had he marched through Trafalgar Squaregrasping a big stick? Had he turned pages over and over, without readingthem, sitting in his room in St. John's Wood alone? She did not knowwhat he had done, when he heard that Andrew was killed, but she felt itin him all the same. They only mumbled at each other on staircases; theylooked up at the sky and said it will be fine or it won't be fine. But thiswas one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, notthe detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill runningpurple down into the distant heather. She knew him in that way. Sheknew that he had changed somehow. She had never read a line of his poetry.
She thought that she knew how it went though, slowly and sonorously.
It was seasoned and mellow. It was about the desert and thecamel. It was about the palm tree and the sunset. It was extremely impersonal;it said something about death; it said very little about love. Therewas an impersonality about him. He wanted very little of other people.
Had he not always lurched rather awkwardly past the drawing-roomwindow with some newspaper under his arm, trying to avoid Mrs Ram-say whom for some reason he did not much like? On that account, ofcourse, she would always try to make him stop. He would bow to her.
He would halt unwillingly and bow profoundly. Annoyed that he didnot want anything of her, Mrs Ramsay would ask him (Lily could hearher) wouldn't he like a coat, a rug, a newspaper? No, he wanted nothing.
(Here he bowed.) There was some quality in her which he did not muchlike. It was perhaps her masterfulness, her positiveness, somethingmatter-of-fact in her. She was so direct.
(A noise drew her attention to the drawing-room window—the squeakof a hinge. The light breeze was toying with the window.)There must have been people who disliked her very much, Lilythought (Yes; she realised that the drawing-room step was empty, but ithad no effect on her whatever. She did not want Mrs Ramsaynow.)—People who thought her too sure, too drastic.
Also, her beauty offended people probably. How monotonous, theywould say, and the same always! They preferred another type—the dark,the vivacious. Then she was weak with her husband. She let him makethose scenes. Then she was reserved. Nobody knew exactly what hadhappened to her. And (to go back to Mr Carmichael and his dislike) onecould not imagine Mrs Ramsay standing painting, lying reading, a wholemorning on the lawn. It was unthinkable. Without saying a word, theonly token of her errand a basket on her arm, she went off to the town, tothe poor, to sit in some stuffy little bedroom. Often and often Lily hadseen her go silently in the midst of some game, some discussion, withher basket on her arm, very upright. She had noted her return. She hadthought, half laughing (she was so methodical with the tea cups), halfmoved (her beauty took one's breath away), eyes that are closing in painhave looked on you. You have been with them there.
And then Mrs Ramsay would be annoyed because somebody was late,or the butter not fresh, or the teapot chipped. And all the time she wassaying that the butter was not fresh one would be thinking of Greektemples, and how beauty had been with them there in that stuffy littleroom. She never talked of it—she went, punctually, directly. It was herinstinct to go, an instinct like the swallows for the south, the artichokesfor the sun, turning her infallibly to the human race, making her nest inits heart. And this, like all instincts, was a little distressing to people whodid not share it; to Mr Carmichael perhaps, to herself certainly. Some notion was in both of them about the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacyof thought. Her going was a reproach to them, gave a differenttwist to the world, so that they were led to protest, seeing their own prepossessionsdisappear, and clutch at them vanishing. Charles Tansleydid that too: it was part of the reason why one disliked him. He upset theproportions of one's world. And what had happened to him, shewondered, idly stirring the platains with her brush. He had got his fellowship.
He had married; he lived at Golder's Green.
She had gone one day into a Hall and heard him speaking during thewar. He was denouncing something: he was condemning somebody. Hewas preaching brotherly love. And all she felt was how could he love hiskind who did not know one picture from anothe............