The Window

"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch. James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting pictures out of the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, was six years old, and he endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss.

"But," said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, "it won't be fine."

Had there been an axe handy, a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr Ramsay excited in his children's breasts by his mere presence: standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth.

"But it may be fine — I expect it will be fine," said Mrs Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines and some tobacco — whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, only littering the room — to give those poor fellows, who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick, something to amuse them.

"It's due west," said the atheist Tansley, holding his bony fingers spread so that the wind blew through them. That is to say, the wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse. Charles Tansley was one of Mr Ramsay's young disciples, a poor, awkward, sarcastic young man from a grim northern town, who was writing a dissertation and who said disagreeable things. The children laughed at him and called him "the little atheist." Mrs Ramsay was kind to him, as she was kind to all the young men, for she pitied men always as if they lacked something; and she took him with her into the town on an errand, and listened to him talk about himself, and about his father, a chemist, and his own poverty; and saw him, at one moment, stop and look at her with a sudden pride, as she stood in the sun with cyclamen and wild violets behind her — for she was fifty, and she had had eight children, and she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

The house was a holiday house on an island in the Hebrides, shabby, full of sand and damp, with the windows open and the sea always in sight, and across the bay the Lighthouse, a stark tower, with its yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening. There were the eight Ramsay children — Prue, Andrew, Jasper, Roger, Nancy, Rose, Cam and James; there were guests: old Mr Carmichael, a poet who took opium and lay all day on the lawn in a deck chair, dozing, with his yellow-stained beard; William Bankes, an elderly widower, a botanist, Mr Ramsay's old friend; Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, two young people whom Mrs Ramsay hoped to see engaged; and Lily Briscoe, a small, plain, thirty-three-year-old woman with Chinese eyes, who was painting a picture on the lawn.

Lily was painting Mrs Ramsay sitting in the window with James. She could not get it right. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral; but when she came to paint it, it changed. Mr Bankes, standing beside her, asked her what she meant by the triangular purple shape just there. It was Mrs Ramsay reading to James, she said. Mother and child might be reduced, without irreverence, to a purple shadow. It was a question of the relations of masses, of lights and shadows. She showed him; she could not show him. She would never be a painter; women could not paint, Tansley said. Still she would go on.

She and Mr Bankes, walking together on the lawn at evening, talked about Mr Ramsay. Lily had asked Andrew once what his father's books were about. "Subject and object and the nature of reality," Andrew had said. And when she said, Heavens, she had no notion what that meant, "Think of a kitchen table then," he told her, "when you're not there." So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr Ramsay's work, a scrubbed kitchen table, lodged in the fork of a pear tree. Mr Bankes said that Ramsay had done his best work before he was forty; that he had married and had children and had written little since; and that he, Bankes, who had never married again, was still sorry for him, and a little envious. Lily thought of Mr Ramsay's narrowness and his greatness, his selfishness and his honesty, his absurdity, and his fine mind; and all of it danced up and down like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net.

And Mr Bankes, looking at Mrs Ramsay across the lawn, felt a rapture that needed no words — as if a beautiful thing had been done before his eyes — which Lily saw and was grateful for. Lily loved Mrs Ramsay. Once, sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs Ramsay's knees, she had wanted to press herself into her, to know what lay hidden in her heart, like treasures in the tombs of kings; and Mrs Ramsay had laughed, and Lily had known nothing more. Mrs Ramsay wanted Lily to marry William Bankes. Lily would not marry; she had her painting; she need not marry; she was glad.

Mr Ramsay strode up and down the terrace, reciting poetry to himself — "Boldly we rode and well," and "Someone had blundered" — and nearly walking into Lily and Mr Bankes, and turning away. He was thinking about his work. If thought were like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet, arranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. But after Q? What comes next? He could not reach R. A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. He would never reach R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying — he was a failure — that R was beyond him. Then he came to his wife, as he always did, for sympathy; and she gave it to him, she poured it out, until he was filled; and he went away, renewed, like a child who drops off satisfied; and she folded herself together, exhausted, like a flower that closes.

Mrs Ramsay sat in the window, knitting, reading Grimm's fairy tale of the Fisherman and his Wife to James, and thinking. She thought of her husband, whom she admired more than anyone; of his need of her, and of the fifty pounds for the greenhouse roof that she dared not tell him about; of her children, whom she wished would never grow up; of the poor, whose cottages she visited; of Minta and Paul, who had gone off to the beach together with Andrew and Nancy. She thought, when she was alone for a moment, that what she really was, beneath all that she did, was a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others; and she looked out at the Lighthouse, at the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, and felt that she was one with it.

She measured the stocking against James's leg, and it was too short; and she looked round the shabby room, at the chairs whose entrails had come out, at the books, the faded rugs, and thought that things got shabbier and shabbier every summer; and that the Swiss maid was crying because her father was dying of cancer in the valleys of the Alps. Then Mr Ramsay came and stood by her, and they walked together in the garden in the evening, and talked about Jasper shooting birds, and about Prue, how beautiful she was going to be; and each knew what the other was thinking without saying it. He thought she was sad; she was not; she was thinking of the Lighthouse, and of the children, and of how they would all grow up and lose all this.

On the beach, among the rocks, Paul Rayley asked Minta Doyle to marry him, and she accepted; and Minta lost her grandmother's brooch, and cried, and they could not find it. They came back late, after the tide had come in, and everyone was waiting for dinner.

Nancy, meanwhile, had gone off by herself among the rocks, to a pool, and crouched over it, and made the little fish and the anemones and the sand into a whole world, with herself as a god above it, casting shadows across it like clouds; and then she looked up and saw the waves and the long line of the sea, and felt how small everything was; and she saw Paul and Minta embracing, and was indignant.

Dinner was a triumph. The cook had spent three days over a Boeuf en Daube, an old French recipe of Mrs Ramsay's grandmother's; and it had to be served the moment it was ready. At first everything went wrong. The long table was set; the people sat down; and Mrs Ramsay, ladling out soup, looked round at them all and felt that nothing was merging; they all sat separate. Mr Ramsay was cross because Mr Carmichael had asked for a second plate of soup; Tansley was miserable and said women could not write; Lily was bored; William Bankes wished he were at home. And she began, as she always did, to make it go — to draw them together, to soothe and to flatter; she sent Lily to talk to Tansley; and Lily, though she would rather not, did. Then the candles were lit, and the windows went dark, and the faces round the table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass. Some change at once went through them all; they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there. And Paul and Minta came in, and their engagement was understood without being spoken of; and the Boeuf en Daube was perfect — and Mrs Ramsay felt it all come together.

It partook, she felt, of eternity; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out, in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

Lily, at the table, looking at the salt-cellar on the pattern of the tablecloth, suddenly saw how to finish her picture: she would move the tree to the middle. She moved the salt-cellar to remind herself.

Then dinner was over. Mrs Ramsay stood a moment in the doorway, looking back. With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked; and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

She went up to the children's room. James and Cam were still awake, because of a boar's skull which someone had sent them and which Cam was frightened of; and Mrs Ramsay wrapped her own shawl round it, and told Cam that it was a beautiful mountain, with birds and gardens and little antelopes; and Cam fell asleep, saying it after her.

Then she went down and sat with her husband in the drawing room. He was reading Scott and she was knitting, and she took up a book of poems and read; and they did not speak. She felt that he wanted her to say that she loved him. She could not say it; she never could. But she got up and stood at the window with the reddish-brown stocking in her hands, looking at the sea, and turning she smiled at him. And she said, "Yes, you were right. It's going to be wet tomorrow. You won't be able to go." And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he knew.

He was reading Scott — The Antiquary — and was moved by it, by the fisherman's grief in it, and was absorbed in it and forgot his own fear that his books would not last, and that no one would read him in a hundred years. She took up a book of poems that lay on the table and turned the pages, climbing from line to line as from branch to branch, until she came to a sonnet of Shakespeare's, which she read: Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose. And as she read, it seemed to her that she was climbing up into the light, and that the whole of life was there, in the sonnet, round and complete.