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THE WAVES
ships to shore. Whether they have foundered, whether they
have anchored, she cares no longer. We are ready to consider
any suggestion that the world may offer quite impartially. I refl ect now that the earth is only a pebble fl icked off accidentally
from the face of the sun and that there is no life anywhere in
the abysses of space.”
“In this silence,” said Susan, “it seems as if no leaf would
ever fall, or bird fl y.”
“As if the miracle had happened,” said Jinny, “and life were
stayed here and now.”
“And,” said Rhoda, “we had no more to live.”
“But listen,” said Louis, “to the world moving through
abysses of infi nite space. It roars; the lighted strip of history is
past and our Kings and Queens; we are gone; our civilization;
the Nile; and all life. Our separate drops are dissolved; we are
extinct, lost in the abysses of time, in the darkness.”
“Silence falls; silence falls,” said Bernard. “But now listen;
tick, tick; hoot, hoot; the world has hailed us back to it. I heard
for one moment the howling winds of darkness as we passed
beyond life. Then tick, tick (the clock); then hoot, hoot (the
cars). We are landed; we are on shore; we are sitting, six of
us, at a table. It is the memory of my nose that recalls me. I rise;
“Fight,” I cry, “fi ght!” remembering the shape of my own nose,
and strike with this spoon upon this table pugnaciously.”
“Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos,” said Neville,
“this formless imbecility. Making love to a nursemaid behind
a tree, that soldier is more admirable than all the stars. Yet
sometimes one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes
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VIRGINIA WOOLF
me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even
the trees with our lust.”
(“Yet, Louis,” said Rhoda, “how short a time silence lasts. Already they are beginning to smooth their napkins by the side of
their plates. “Who comes?” says Jinny; and Neville sighs, remembering that Percival comes no more. Jinny has taken out
her looking-glass. Surveying her face like an artist, she draws
a powder-puff down her nose, and after one moment of deliberation has given precisely that red to the lips that the lips
need. Susan, who feels scorn and fear at the sight of these preparations, fastens the top button of her coat, and unfastens it.
What is she making ready for? For something, but something
different.”
“They are saying to themselves,” said Louis, ““It is time. I am
still vigorous,” they are saying. “My face shall be cut against
the black of infi nite space.” They do not fi nish their sentences.
“It is time,” they keep saying. “The gardens will be shut.” And
going with them, Rhoda, swept into their current, we shall
perhaps drop a little behind.”
“Like conspirators who have something to whisper,”
said Rhoda.)
“It is true, and I know for a fact,” said Bernard, “as we walk
down this avenue, that a King, riding, fell over a molehill here.
But how strange it seems to set against the whirling abysses of
infi nite space a little fi gure with a golden teapot on his head.
Soon one recovers belief in fi gures: but not at once in what
they put on their heads. Our English past – one inch of light.
Then people put teapots on their heads and say, “I am a King!”
No, I try to recover, as we walk, the sense of time, but with
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THE WAVES
that streaming darkness in my eyes I have lost my grip. This
Palace seems light as a cloud set for a moment on the sky. It is
a trick of the mind – to put Kings on their thrones, one following another, with crowns on their heads. And we ourselves,
walking six abreast, what do we oppose, with this random
fl icker of light in us that we call brain and feeling, how can we
do battle against this fl ood; what has permanence? Our lives
too stream away, down the unlighted avenues, past the strip of
time, unidentifi ed. Once Neville threw a poem at my head.
Feeling a sudden conviction of immortality, I said, “I too know
what Shakespeare knew.” But that has gone.”
“Unreasonably, ridiculously,” said Neville, “as we walk,
time comes back. A dog does it, prancing. The machine works.
Age makes hoary that gateway. Three hundred years now seem
no more than a moment vanished against that dog. King William mounts his horse wearing a wig, and the court ladies
sweep the turf with their embroidered panniers. I am beginning to be convinced, as we walk, that the fate of Europe is of
immense importance, and, ridiculous as it still seems, that all
depends upon the battle of Blenheim. Yes; I declare, as we pass
through this gateway, it is the present moment; I am become
a subject of King George.”
“While we advance down this avenue,” said Louis, “I leaning slightly upon Jinny, Bernard arm-in-arm with Neville, and
Susan with her hand in mine, it is diffi cult not to weep, calling
ourselves little children, praying that God may keep us safe
while we sleep. It is sweet to sing together, clasping hands,
afraid of the dark, while Miss Curry plays the harmonium.”
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VIRGINIA WOOLF
“The iron gates have rolled back,” said Jinny. “Time’s
fangs have ceased their devouring. We have triumphed over
the abysses of space, with rouge, with powder, with fl imsy
pocket-handkerchiefs.”
“I grasp, I hold fast,” said Susan. “I hold fi rmly to this hand,
anyone’s, with love, with hatred; it does not matter which.”
“The still mood, the disembodied mood is on us,” said Rhoda, “and we enjoy this momentary alleviation (it is not often
that one has no anxiety) when the walls of the mind become
transparent. Wren’s palace, like the quartet played to the dry
and stranded people in the stalls, makes an oblong. A square is
stood upon the oblong and we say, “This is our dwelling-place.
The structure is now visible. Very little is left outside.””
“The fl ower,” said Bernard, “the red carnation that stood in
the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together
with Percival, is become a six-sided fl ower; made of six lives.”
“A mysterious illumination,” said Louis, “visible against
those yew trees.”
“Built up with much pain, many strokes,” said Jinny.
“Marriage, death, travel, friendship,” said Bernard; “town
and country; children and all that; a many-sided substance cut
out of this dark; a many-faceted fl ower. Let us stop for a moment; let us behold what we have made. Let it blaze against
the yew trees. One life. There. It is over. Gone out.”
“Now they vanish,” said Louis. “Susan with Bernard. Neville with Jinny. You and I, Rhoda, stop for a moment by this
stone urn. What song shall we hear now that these couples
have sought the groves, and Jinny, pointing with her gloved
hand, pretends to notice the water-lilies, and Susan, who has
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THE WAVES
always loved Bernard, says to him, “My ruined life, my wasted
life.” And Neville, taking Jinny’s little hand, with the cherrycoloured fi nger-nails, by the lake, by the moonlit water, cries,
“Love, love,” and she answers, imitating the bird, “Love, love?”
What song do we hear?”
“They vanish, towards the lake,” said Rhoda. “They slink
away over the grass furtively, yet with assurance as if they
asked of our pity their ancient privilege – not to be disturbed.
The tide in the soul, tipped, fl ows that way; they cannot help deserting us. The dark has closed over their bodies. What song do
we hear – the owl’s, the nightingale’s, the wren’s? The steamer
hoots; the light on the electric rails fl ashes; the trees gravely
bow and bend. The fl are hangs over London. Here is an old
woman, quietly returning, and a man, a late fi sherman, comes
down the terrace with his rod. Not a sound, not a movement
must escape us.”
“A bird fl ies homeward,” said Louis. “Evening opens her
eyes and gives one quick glance among the bushes before she
sleeps. How shall we put it together, the confused and composite message that they send back to us, and not they only, but
many dead, boys and girls, grown men and women, who have
wandered here, under one king or another?”
“A weight has dropped into the night,” said Rhoda, “dragging it down. Every tree is big with a shadow that is not the shadow of the tree behind it. We hear a drumming on the roofs of
a fasting city when the Turks are hungry and uncertain tempered. We hear them crying with sharp, stag-like barks, “Open,
open.” Listen to the trams squealing and to the fl ashes from
the electric rails. We hear the beech trees and the birch trees
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VIRGINIA WOOLF
raise their branches as if the bride had let her silken nightdress fall and come to the doorway saying “Open, open”.”
“All seems alive,” said Louis. “I cannot hear death anywhere
tonight. Stupidity, on that man’s face, age, on that woman’s,
would be strong enough, one would think, to resist the incantation, and bring in death. But where is death tonight? All
the crudity, odds and ends, this and that, have been crushed
like glass splinters into the blue, the red-fringed tide, which,
drawing into the shore, fertile with innumerable fi sh, breaks at
our feet.”
“If we could mount together, if we could perceive from
a suffi cient height,” said Rhoda, “if we could remain untouched
without any support – but you, disturbed by faint clapping
sounds of praise and laughter, and I, resenting compromise
and right and wrong on human lips, trust only in solitude and
the violence of death and thus are divided.”
“For ever,” said Louis, “divided. We have sacrifi ced the embrace among the ferns, and love, love, love by the lake, standing, like conspirators who have drawn apart to share some
secret, by the urn. But now look, as we stand here, a ripple
breaks on the horizon. The net is raised higher and higher.
It comes to the top of the water. The water is broken by silver, by quivering little fi sh. Now leaping, now lashing, they are
laid on shore. Life tumbles its catch upon the grass. There are
fi gures coming towards us. Are they men or are they women?
They still wear the ambiguous draperies of the fl owing tide in
which they have been immersed.”
“Now,” said Rhoda, “as they pass that tree, they regain their
natural size. They are only men, only women. Wonder and
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THE WAVES
awe change as they put off the draperies of the fl owing tide.
Pity returns, as they emerge into the moonlight, like the relics of an army, our representatives, going every night (here
or in Greece) to battle, and coming back every night with their
wounds, their ravaged faces. Now light falls on them again.
They have faces. They become Susan and Bernard, Jinny and
Neville, people we know. Now what a shrinkage takes place!
Now what a shrivelling, what an humiliation! The old shivers
run through me, hatred and terror, as I feel myself grappled to
one spot by these hooks they cast on us; these greetings, recognitions, pluckings of the fi nger and searchings of the eyes. Yet
they have only to speak, and their fi rst words, with the remembered tone and the perpetual deviation from what one expects,
and their hands moving and making a thousand past days rise
again in the darkness, shake my purpose.”
“Something fl ickers and dances,” said Louis. “Illusion returns as they approach down the avenue. Rippling and questioning begin. What do I think of you – what do you think of
me? Who are you? Who am I? – that quivers again its uneasy
air over us, and the pulse quickens and the eye brightens and
all the insanity of personal existence without which life would
fall fl at and die, begins again. They are on us. The southern sun
fl ickers over this urn; we push off in to the tide of the violent
and cruel sea. Lord help us to act our parts as we greet them
returning – Susan and Bernard, Neville and Jinny.”
“We have destroyed something by our presence,” said Bernard, “a world perhaps.”
“Yet we scarcely breathe,” said Neville, “spent as we are.
We are in that passive and exhausted frame of mind when we
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VIRGINIA WOOLF
only wish to rejoin the body of our mother from whom we
have been severed. All else is distasteful, forced and fatiguing.
Jinny’s yellow scarf is moth-coloured in this light; Susan’s eyes
are quenched. We are scarcely to be distinguished from the river. One cigarette end is the only point of emphasis among us.
And sadness tinges our content, that we should have left you,
torn the fabric; yielded to the desire to press out, alone, some
bitterer, some blacker juice, which was sweet too. But now we
are worn out.”
“After our fi re,” said Jinny, “there is nothing left to
put in lockets.”
“Still I gape,” said Susan, “like a young bird, unsatisfi ed, for
something that has escaped me.”
“Let us stay for a moment,” said Bernard, “before we go.
Let us pace the terrace by the river almost alone. It is nearly
bed-time. People have gone home. Now how comforting it is to
watch the lights coming out in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers on the other side of the river. There is one – there is
another. What do you think their takings have been today?
Only just enough to pay for the rent, for light and food and
the children’s clothing. But just enough. What a sense of the tolerableness of life the lights in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers give us! Saturday comes, and there is just enough to
pay perhaps for seats at the Pictures. Perhaps before they put
out the light they go into the little garden and look at the giant rabbit couched in its wooden hut. That is the rabbit they
will have for Sunday dinner. Then they put out the light. Then
they sleep. And for thousands of people sleep is nothing but
warmth and silence and one moment’s sport with some fantas-
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THE WAVES
tic dream. “I have posted my letter,” the greengrocer thinks, “to
the Sunday newspaper. Suppose I win fi ve hundred pounds in
the football competition? And we shall kill the rabbit. Life is
pleasant. Life is good. I have posted the letter. We shall kill
the rabbit.” And he sleeps.
“That goes on. Listen. There is a sound like the knocking of railway trucks in a siding. That is the happy concatenation of one event following another in our lives. Knock, knock,
knock. Must, must, must. Must go, must sleep, must wake, must
get up – sober, merciful word which we pretend to revile,
which we press tight to our hearts, without which we should
be undone. How we worship that sound like the knocking together of trucks in a siding!
“Now far off down the river I hear the chorus; the song of
the boasting boys, who are coming back in large charabancs
from a day’s outing on the decks of crowded steamers. Still they
are singing as they used to sing, across the court, on winters’
nights, or with the windows open in summer, getting drunk,
breaking the furniture, wearing little striped caps, all turning
their heads the same way as the brake rounded the corner; and
I wished to be with them.
“What with the chorus, and the spinning water and the just
perceptible murmur of the breeze we are slipping away. Little
bits of ourselves are crumbling. There! Something very important fell then. I cannot keep myself together. I shall sleep. But
we must go; must catch our train; must walk back to the station – must, must, must. We are only bodies jogging along side
by side. I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But
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VIRGINIA WOOLF
where? I cannot remember. I am like a log slipping smoothly
over some waterfall. I am not a judge. I am not called upon to
give my opinion. Houses and trees are all the same in this grey
light. Is that a post? Is that a woman walking? Here is the station, and if the train were to cut me in two, I should come
together on the further side, being one, being indivisible. But
what is odd is that I still clasp the return half of my ticket to
Waterloo fi rmly between the fi ngers of my right hand, even
now, even sleeping.”
Now the sun had sunk. Sky and sea were indistinguishable. The waves breaking spread their white fans far out over
the shore, sent white shadows into the recesses of sonorous
caves and then rolled back sighing over the shingle.
The tree shook its branches and a scattering of leaves fell to
the ground. There they settled with perfect composure on
the precise spot where they would await dissolution. Black and
grey were shot into the garden from the broken vessel that had
once held red light. Dark shadows blackened the tunnels between the stalks. The thrush was silent and the worm sucked
itself back into its narrow hole. Now and again a whitened and
hollow straw was blown from an old nest and fell into the dark
grasses among the rotten apples. The light had faded from
the tool-house wall and the adder’s skin hung from the nail
empty. All the colours in the room had overfl own their banks.
The precise brush stroke was swollen and lop-sided; cupboards
and chairs melted their brown masses into one huge obscurity.
The height from fl oor to ceiling was hung with vast curtains of
shaking darkness. The looking-glass was pale as the mouth of
a cave shadowed by hanging creepers.
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