Yes, that is their boat, Lily Briscoe decided, standing on the edge of thelawn. It was the boat with greyish-brown sails, which she saw now flattenitself upon the water and shoot off across the bay. There he sits, shethought, and the children are quite silent still. And she could not reachhim either. The sympathy she had not given him weighed her down. Itmade it difficult for her to paint.
She had always found him difficult. She never had been able to praisehim to his face, she remembered. And that reduced their relationship tosomething neutral, without that element of sex in it which made hismanner to Minta so gallant, almost gay. He would pick a flower for her,lend her his books. But could he believe that Minta read them? Shedragged them about the garden, sticking in leaves to mark the place.
"D'you remember, Mr Carmichael?" she was inclined to ask, looking atthe old man. But he had pulled his hat half over his forehead; he wasasleep, or he was dreaming, or he was lying there catching words, shesupposed.
"D'you remember?" she felt inclined to ask him as she passed him,thinking again of Mrs Ramsay on the beach; the cask bobbing up anddown; and the pages flying. Why, after all these years had that survived,ringed round, lit up, visible to the last detail, with all before it blank andall after it blank, for miles and miles?
"Is it a boat? Is it a cork?" she would say, Lily repeated, turning back,reluctantly again, to her canvas. Heaven be praised for it, the problem ofspace remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her.
The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautifuland bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one col-our melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneaththe fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to bea thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodgewith a team of horses. And she began to lay on a red, a grey, and she began to model her way into the hollow there. At the same time, sheseemed to be sitting beside Mrs Ramsay on the beach.
"Is it a boat? Is it a cask?" Mrs Ramsay said. And she began huntinground for her spectacles. And she sat, having found them, silent, lookingout to sea. And Lily, painting steadily, felt as if a door had opened, andone went in and stood gazing silently about in a high cathedral-likeplace, very dark, very solemn. Shouts came from a world far away.
Steamers vanished in stalks of smoke on the horizon. Charles threwstones and sent them skipping.
Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence,uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships.
Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at themoment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, MrsRamsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silenceby her side) by saying them? Aren't we more expressive thus? Themoment at least seemed extraordinarily fertile. She rammed a little holein the sand and covered it up, by way of burying in it the perfection ofthe moment. It was like a drop of silver in which one dipped and illuminedthe darkness of the past.
Lily stepped back to get her canvas—so—into perspective. It was anodd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further,until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, overthe sea. And as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into thepast there. Now Mrs Ramsay got up, she remembered. It was time to goback to the house—time for luncheon. And they all walked up from thebeach together, she walking behind with William Bankes, and there wasMinta in front of them with a hole in her stocking. How that little roundhole of pink heel seemed to flaunt itself before them! How WilliamBankes deplored it, without, so far as she could remember, saying anythingabout it! It meant to him the annihilation of womanhood, and dirtand disorder, and servants leaving and beds not made at mid-day—allthe things he most abhorred. He had a way of shuddering and spreadinghis fingers out as if to cover an unsightly object which he didnow—holding his hand in front of him. And Minta walked on ahead,and presumably Paul met her and she went off with Paul in the garden.
The Rayleys, thought Lily Briscoe, squeezing her tube of green paint.
She collected her impressions of the Rayleys. Their lives appeared to herin a series of scenes; one, on the staircase at dawn. Paul had come in andgone to bed early; Minta was late. There was Minta, wreathed, tinted, garish on the stairs about three o'clock in the morning. Paul came out inhis pyjamas carrying a poker in case of burglars. Minta was eating asandwich, standing half-way up by a window, in the cadaverous earlymorning light, and the carpet had a hole in it. But what did they say?
Lily asked herself, as if by looking she could hear them. Minta went oneating her sandwich, annoyingly, while he spoke something violent, abusingher, in a mutter so as not to wake the children, the two little boys.
He was withered, drawn; she flamboyant, careless. For things hadworked loose after the first year or so; the marriage had turned outrather badly.
And this, Lily thought, taking the green paint on her brush, this makingup scenes about them, is what we call "knowing" people, "thinking"of them, "being fond" of them! Not a word of it was true; she had made itup; but it was what she knew them by all the same. She went on tunnellingher way into her picture, into the past.
Another time, Paul said he "played chess in coffee-houses." She hadbuilt up a whole structure of imagination on that saying too. She rememberedhow, as he said it, she thought how he rang up the servant,and she said, "Mrs Rayley's out, sir," and he decided that he would notcome home either. She saw him sitting in the corner of some lugubriousplace where the smoke attached itself to the red plush seats, and thewaitresses got to know you, and he played chess with a little man whowas in the tea trade and lived at Surbiton, but that was all Paul knewabout him. And then Minta was out when he came home and then therewas that scene on the stairs, when he got the poker in case of burglars(no doubt to frighten her too) and spoke so bitterly, saying she hadruined his life. At any rate when she went down to see them at a cottagenear Rickmansworth, things were horribly strained. Paul took her downthe garden to look at the Belgian hares which he bred, and Minta followedthem, singing, and put her bare arm on his shoulder, lest heshould tell her anything.
Minta was bored by hares, Lily thought. But Minta never gave herselfaway. She never said things like that about playing chess in coffeehouses.
She was far too conscious, far too wary. But to go on with theirstory—they had got through the dangerous stage by now. She had beenstaying with them last summer some time and the car broke down andMinta had to hand him his tools. He sat on the road mending the car,and it was the way she gave him the tools—business-like, straightforward,friendly—that proved it was all right now. They were "in love" nolonger; no, he had taken up with another woman, a serious woman, with her hair in a plait and a case in her hand (Minta had described her gratefully,almost admiringly), who went to meetings and shared Paul's views(they had got more and more pronounced) about the taxation of landvalues and a capital levy. Far from breaking up the marriage, that alliancehad righted it. They were excellent friends, obviously, as he sat onthe road and she handed him his tools.
So that was the story of the Rayleys, Lily thought. She imagined herselftelling it to Mrs Ramsay, who would be full of curiosity to knowwhat had become of the Rayleys. She would feel a little triumphant,telling Mrs Ramsay that the marriage had not been a success.
But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some obstacle in her designwhich made her pause and ponder, stepping back a foot or so, oh, thedead! she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one hadeven a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy. Mrs Ramsay hasfaded and gone, she thought. We can over-ride her wishes, improveaway her limited, old-fashioned ideas. She recedes further and furtherfrom us. Mockingly she seemed to see her there at the end of the corridorof years saying, of all incongruous things, "Marry, marry!" (sitting veryupright early in the morning with the birds beginning to cheep in thegarden outside). And one would have to say to her, It has all goneagainst your wishes. They're happy like that; I'm happy like this. Life haschanged completely. At that all her being, even her beauty, became for amoment, dusty and out of date. For a moment Lily, standing there, withthe sun hot on her back, summing up the Rayleys, triumphed over MrsRamsay, who would never know how Paul went to coffee-houses andhad a mistress; how he sat on the ground and Minta handed him histools; how she stood here painting, had never married, not even WilliamBankes.
Mrs Ramsay had planned it. Perhaps, had she lived, she would havecompelled it. Already that summer he was "the kindest of men." He was"the first scientist of his age, my husband says." He was also "poor William—it makes me so unhappy, when I go to see him, to find nothing nicein his house—no one to arrange the flowers." So they were sent for walkstogether, and she was told, with that faint touch of irony that made MrsRamsay slip thro............