Title:      The Waves (1931)
Author:     Virginia Woolf
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Waves (1931)
Author:     Virginia Woolf





The sun had not yet risen.  The sea was indistinguishable from the
sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had
wrinkles in it.  Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on
the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became
barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the
surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and
swept a thin veil of white water across the sand.  The wave paused,
and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes
and goes unconsciously.  Gradually the dark bar on the horizon
became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and
left the glass green.  Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the
white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched
beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green
and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan.  Then
she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and
to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red
and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire.
Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one
haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey
sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue.
The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling
and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out.
Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher
until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim
of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf
transparent and then another.  One bird chirped high up; there was
a pause; another chirped lower down.  The sun sharpened the walls
of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind
and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the
bedroom window.  The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim
and unsubstantial.  The birds sang their blank melody outside.




'I see a ring,' said Bernard, 'hanging above me.  It quivers and
hangs in a loop of light.'

'I see a slab of pale yellow,' said Susan, 'spreading away until it
meets a purple stripe.'

'I hear a sound,' said Rhoda, 'cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up
and down.'

'I see a globe,' said Neville, 'hanging down in a drop against the
enormous flanks of some hill.'

'I see a crimson tassel,' said Jinny, 'twisted with gold threads.'

'I hear something stamping,' said Louis.  'A great beast's foot is
chained.  It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.'

'Look at the spider's web on the corner of the balcony,' said
Bernard.  'It has beads of water on it, drops of white light.'

'The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears,' said
Susan.

'A shadow falls on the path,' said Louis, 'like an elbow bent.'

'Islands of light are swimming on the grass,' said Rhoda.  'They
have fallen through the trees.'

'The birds' eyes are bright in the tunnels between the leaves,'
said Neville.

'The stalks are covered with harsh, short hairs,' said Jinny, 'and
drops of water have stuck to them.'

'A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,' said Susan, 'notched
with blunt feet.'

'The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the
blades behind him,' said Rhoda.

'And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out on the
grasses,' said Louis.

'Stones are cold to my feet,' said Neville.  'I feel each one,
round or pointed, separately.'

'The back of my hand burns,' said Jinny, 'but the palm is clammy
and damp with dew.'

'Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white
tide,' said Bernard.

'Birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us,' said
Susan.

'The beast stamps; the elephant with its foot chained; the great
brute on the beach stamps,' said Louis.

'Look at the house,' said Jinny, 'with all its windows white with
blinds.'

'Cold water begins to run from the scullery tap,' said Rhoda, 'over
the mackerel in the bowl.'

'The walls are cracked with gold cracks,' said Bernard, 'and there
are blue, finger-shaped shadows of leaves beneath the windows.'

'Now Mrs Constable pulls up her thick black stockings,' said Susan.

'When the smoke rises, sleep curls off the roof like a mist,' said
Louis.

'The birds sang in chorus first,' said Rhoda.  'Now the scullery
door is unbarred.  Off they fly.  Off they fly like a fling of
seed.  But one sings by the bedroom window alone.'

'Bubbles form on the floor of the saucepan,' said Jinny.  'Then
they rise, quicker and quicker, in a silver chain to the top.'

'Now Billy scrapes the fish-scales with a jagged knife on to a
wooden board,' said Neville.

'The dining-room window is dark blue now,' said Bernard, 'and the
air ripples above the chimneys.'

'A swallow is perched on the lightning-conductor,' said Susan.
'And Biddy has smacked down the bucket on the kitchen flags.'

'That is the first stroke of the church bell,' said Louis.  'Then
the others follow; one, two; one, two; one, two.'

'Look at the table-cloth, flying white along the table,' said
Rhoda.  'Now there are rounds of white china, and silver streaks
beside each plate.'

'Suddenly a bee booms in my ear,' said Neville.  'It is here; it is
past.'

'I burn, I shiver,' said Jinny, 'out of this sun, into this
shadow.'

'Now they have all gone,' said Louis.  'I am alone.  They have gone
into the house for breakfast, and I am left standing by the wall
among the flowers.  It is very early, before lessons.  Flower after
flower is specked on the depths of green.  The petals are
harlequins.  Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath.  The
flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters.
I hold a stalk in my hand.  I am the stalk.  My roots go down to
the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp
earth, through veins of lead and silver.  I am all fibre.  All
tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my
ribs.  Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.  I am a boy in
grey flannels with a belt fastened by a brass snake up here.  Down
there my eyes are the lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert by
the Nile.  I see women passing with red pitchers to the river; I
see camels swaying and men in turbans.  I hear tramplings,
tremblings, stirrings round me.

'Up here Bernard, Neville, Jinny and Susan (but not Rhoda) skim the
flower-beds with their nets.  They skim the butterflies from the
nodding tops of the flowers.  They brush the surface of the world.
Their nets are full of fluttering wings.  "Louis!  Louis!  Louis!"
they shout.  But they cannot see me.  I am on the other side of the
hedge.  There are only little eye-holes among the leaves.  Oh Lord,
let them pass.  Lord, let them lay their butterflies on a pocket-
handkerchief on the gravel.  Let them count out their tortoise-
shells, their red admirals and cabbage whites.  But let me be
unseen.  I am green as a yew tree in the shade of the hedge.  My
hair is made of leaves.  I am rooted to the middle of the earth.
My body is a stalk.  I press the stalk.  A drop oozes from the hole
at the mouth and slowly, thickly, grows larger and larger.  Now
something pink passes the eyehole.  Now an eye-beam is slid through
the chink.  Its beam strikes me.  I am a boy in a grey flannel
suit.  She has found me.  I am struck on the nape of the neck.  She
has kissed me.  All is shattered.'

'I was running,' said Jinny, 'after breakfast.  I saw leaves moving
in a hole in the hedge.  I thought "That is a bird on its nest."  I
parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a nest.  The
leaves went on moving.  I was frightened.  I ran past Susan, past
Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking.  I cried
as I ran, faster and faster.  What moved the leaves?  What moves my
heart, my legs?  And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush,
like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed.  "Is he
dead?" I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my
pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is
nothing to move them.  Now I smell geraniums; I smell earth mould.
I dance.  I ripple.  I am thrown over you like a net of light.  I
lie quivering flung over you.'

'Through the chink in the hedge,' said Susan, 'I saw her kiss him.
I raised my head from my flower-pot and looked through a chink in
the hedge.  I saw her kiss him.  I saw them, Jinny and Louis,
kissing.  Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief.
It shall be screwed tight into a ball.  I will go to the beech wood
alone, before lessons.  I will not sit at a table, doing sums.  I
will not sit next Jinny and next Louis.  I will take my anguish and
lay it upon the roots under the beech trees.  I will examine it and
take it between my fingers.  They will not find me.  I shall eat
nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be
matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches
and die there.'

'Susan has passed us,' said Bernard.  'She has passed the tool-
house door with her handkerchief screwed into a ball.  She was not
crying, but her eyes, which are so beautiful, were narrow as cats'
eyes before they spring.  I shall follow her, Neville.  I shall go
gently behind her, to be at hand, with my curiosity, to comfort her
when she bursts out in a rage and thinks, "I am alone."

'Now she walks across the field with a swing, nonchalantly, to
deceive us.  Then she comes to the dip; she thinks she is unseen;
she begins to run with her fists clenched in front of her.  Her
nails meet in the ball of her pocket-handkerchief.  She is making
for the beech woods out of the light.  She spreads her arms as she
comes to them and takes to the shade like a swimmer.  But she is
blind after the light and trips and flings herself down on the
roots under the trees, where the light seems to pant in and out, in
and out.  The branches heave up and down.  There is agitation and
trouble here.  There is gloom.  The light is fitful.  There is
anguish here.  The roots make a skeleton on the ground, with dead
leaves heaped in the angles.  Susan has spread her anguish out.
Her pocket-handkerchief is laid on the roots of the beech trees and
she sobs, sitting crumpled where she has fallen.'

'I saw her kiss him,' said Susan.  'I looked between the leaves and
saw her.  She danced in flecked with diamonds light as dust.  And I
am squat, Bernard, I am short.  I have eyes that look close to the
ground and see insects in the grass.  The yellow warmth in my side
turned to stone when I saw Jinny kiss Louis.  I shall eat grass and
die in a ditch in the brown water where dead leaves have rotted.'

'I saw you go,' said Bernard.  'As you passed the door of the tool-
house I heard you cry "I am unhappy."  I put down my knife.  I was
making boats out of firewood with Neville.  And my hair is untidy,
because when Mrs Constable told me to brush it there was a fly in a
web, and I asked, "Shall I free the fly?  Shall I let the fly be
eaten?"  So I am late always.  My hair is unbrushed and these chips
of wood stick in it.  When I heard you cry I followed you, and saw
you put down your handkerchief, screwed up, with its rage, with its
hate, knotted in it.  But soon that will cease.  Our bodies are
close now.  You hear me breathe.  You see the beetle too carrying
off a leaf on its back.  It runs this way, then that way, so that
even your desire while you watch the beetle, to possess one single
thing (it is Louis now) must waver, like the light in and out of
the beech leaves; and then words, moving darkly, in the depths of
your mind will break up this knot of hardness, screwed in your
pocket-handkerchief.'

'I love,' said Susan, 'and I hate.  I desire one thing only.  My
eyes are hard.  Jinny's eyes break into a thousand lights.  Rhoda's
are like those pale flowers to which moths come in the evening.
Yours grow full and brim and never break.  But I am already set on
my pursuit.  I see insects in the grass.  Though my mother still
knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child, I
love and I hate.'

'But when we sit together, close,' said Bernard, 'we melt into each
other with phrases.  We are edged with mist.  We make an
unsubstantial territory.'

'I see the beetle,' said Susan.  'It is black, I see; it is green,
I see; I am tied down with single words.  But you wander off; you
slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.'

'Now,' said Bernard, 'let us explore.  There is the white house
lying among the trees.  It lies down there ever so far beneath us.
We shall sink like swimmers just touching the ground with the tips
of their toes.  We shall sink through the green air of the leaves,
Susan.  We sink as we run.  The waves close over us, the beech
leaves meet above our heads.  There is the stable clock with its
gilt hands shining.  Those are the flats and heights of the roofs
of the great house.  There is the stable-boy clattering in the yard
in rubber boots.  That is Elvedon.

'Now we have fallen through the tree-tops to the earth.  The air no
longer rolls its long, unhappy, purple waves over us.  We touch
earth; we tread ground.  That is the close-clipped hedge of the
ladies' garden.  There they walk at noon, with scissors, clipping
roses.  Now we are in the ringed wood with the wall round it.  This
is Elvedon.  I have seen signposts at the cross-roads with one arm
pointing "To Elvedon".  No one has been there.  The ferns smell
very strong, and there are red funguses growing beneath them.  Now
we wake the sleeping daws who have never seen a human form; now we
tread on rotten oak apples, red with age and slippery.  There is a
ring of wall round this wood; nobody comes here.  Listen!  That is
the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is the patter of
some primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns.

'Put your foot on this brick.  Look over the wall.  That is
Elvedon.  The lady sits between the two long windows, writing.  The
gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms.  We are the first to
come here.  We are the discoverers of an unknown land.  Do not
stir; if the gardeners saw us they would shoot us.  We should be
nailed like stoats to the stable door.  Look!  Do not move.  Grasp
the ferns tight on the top of the wall.'

'I see the lady writing.  I see the gardeners sweeping,' said
Susan.  'If we died here, nobody would bury us.'

'Run!' said Bernard.  'Run!  The gardener with the black beard has
seen us!  We shall be shot!  We shall be shot like jays and pinned
to the wall!  We are in a hostile country.  We must escape to the
beech wood.  We must hide under the trees.  I turned a twig as we
came.  There is a secret path.  Bend as low as you can.  Follow
without looking back.  They will think we are foxes.  Run!

'Now we are safe.  Now we can stand upright again.  Now we can
stretch our arms in this high canopy, in this vast wood.  I hear
nothing.  That is only the murmur of the waves in the air.  That is
a wood-pigeon breaking cover in the tops of the beech trees.  The
pigeon beats the air; the pigeon beats the air with wooden wings.'

'Now you trail away,' said Susan, 'making phrases.  Now you mount
like an air-ball's string, higher and higher through the layers of
the leaves, out of reach.  Now you lag.  Now you tug at my skirts,
looking back, making phrases.  You have escaped me.  Here is the
garden.  Here is the hedge.  Here is Rhoda on the path rocking
petals to and fro in her brown basin.'

'All my ships are white,' said Rhoda.  'I do not want red petals of
hollyhocks or geranium.  I want white petals that float when I tip
the basin up.  I have a fleet now swimming from shore to shore.  I
will drop a twig in as a raft for a drowning sailor.  I will drop a
stone in and see bubbles rise from the depths of the sea.  Neville
has gone and Susan has gone; Jinny is in the kitchen garden picking
currants with Louis perhaps.  I have a short time alone, while Miss
Hudson spreads our copy-books on the schoolroom table.  I have a
short space of freedom.  I have picked all the fallen petals and
made them swim.  I have put raindrops in some.  I will plant a
lighthouse here, a head of Sweet Alice.  And I will now rock the
brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves.
Some will founder.  Some will dash themselves against the cliffs.
One sails alone.  That is my ship.  It sails into icy caverns where
the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chains.  The waves
rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads.  They
have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship, which
mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands
where the parrots chatter and the creepers . . .'

'Where is Bernard?' said Neville.  'He has my knife.  We were in
the tool-shed making boats, and Susan came past the door.  And
Bernard dropped his boat and went after her taking my knife, the
sharp one that cuts the keel.  He is like a dangling wire, a broken
bell-pull, always twangling.  He is like the seaweed hung outside
the window, damp now, now dry.  He leaves me in the lurch; he
follows Susan; and if Susan cries he will take my knife and tell
her stories.  The big blade is an emperor; the broken blade a
Negro.  I hate dangling things; I hate dampish things.  I hate
wandering and mixing things together.  Now the bell rings and we
shall be late.  Now we must drop our toys.  Now we must go in
together.  The copy-books are laid out side by side on the green
baize table.'

'I will not conjugate the verb,' said Louis, 'until Bernard has
said it.  My father is a banker in Brisbane and I speak with an
Australian accent.  I will wait and copy Bernard.  He is English.
They are all English.  Susan's father is a clergyman.  Rhoda has no
father.  Bernard and Neville are the sons of gentlemen.  Jinny
lives with her grandmother in London.  Now they suck their pens.
Now they twist their copy-books, and, looking sideways at Miss
Hudson, count the purple buttons on her bodice.  Bernard has a chip
in his hair.  Susan has a red look in her eyes.  Both are flushed.
But I am pale; I am neat, and my knickerbockers are drawn together
by a belt with a brass snake.  I know the lesson by heart.  I know
more than they will ever know.  I knew my cases and my genders; I
could know everything in the world if I wished.  But I do not wish
to come to the top and say my lesson.  My roots are threaded, like
fibres in a flower-pot, round and round about the world.  I do not
wish to come to the top and live in the light of this great clock,
yellow-faced, which ticks and ticks.  Jinny and Susan, Bernard and
Neville bind themselves into a thong with which to lash me.  They
laugh at my neatness, at my Australian accent.  I will now try to
imitate Bernard softly lisping Latin.'

'Those are white words,' said Susan, 'like stones one picks up by
the seashore.'

'They flick their tails right and left as I speak them,' said
Bernard.  'They wag their tails; they flick their tails; they move
through the air in flocks, now this way, now that way, moving all
together, now dividing, now coming together.'

'Those are yellow words, those are fiery words,' said Jinny.  'I
should like a fiery dress, a yellow dress, a fulvous dress to wear
in the evening.'

'Each tense,' said Neville, 'means differently.  There is an order
in this world; there are distinctions, there are differences in
this world, upon whose verge I step.  For this is only a
beginning.'

'Now Miss Hudson,' said Rhoda, 'has shut the book.  Now the terror
is beginning.  Now taking her lump of chalk she draws figures, six,
seven, eight, and then a cross and then a line on the blackboard.
What is the answer?  The others look; they look with understanding.
Louis writes; Susan writes; Neville writes; Jinny writes; even
Bernard has now begun to write.  But I cannot write.  I see only
figures.  The others are handing in their answers, one by one.  Now
it is my turn.  But I have no answer.  The others are allowed to
go.  They slam the door.  Miss Hudson goes.  I am left alone to
find an answer.  The figures mean nothing now.  Meaning has gone.
The clock ticks.  The two hands are convoys marching through a
desert.  The black bars on the clock face are green oases.  The
long hand has marched ahead to find water.  The other, painfully
stumbles among hot stones in the desert.  It will die in the
desert.  The kitchen door slams.  Wild dogs bark far away.  Look,
the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the
world in it.  I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in
it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join--so--and
seal up, and make entire.  The world is entire, and I am outside of
it, crying, "Oh save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop
of time!"'

'There Rhoda sits staring at the blackboard,' said Louis, 'in the
schoolroom, while we ramble off, picking here a bit of thyme,
pinching here a leaf of southernwood while Bernard tells a story.
Her shoulder-blades meet across her back like the wings of a small
butterfly.  And as she stares at the chalk figures, her mind lodges
in those white circles, it steps through those white loops into
emptiness, alone.  They have no meaning for her.  She has no answer
for them.  She has no body as the others have.  And I, who speak
with an Australian accent, whose father is a banker in Brisbane, do
not fear her as I fear the others.'

'Let us now crawl,' said Bernard, 'under the canopy of the currant
leaves, and tell stories.  Let us inhabit the underworld.  Let us
take possession of our secret territory, which is lit by pendant
currants like candelabra, shining red on one side, black on the
other.  Here, Jinny, if we curl up close, we can sit under the
canopy of the currant leaves and watch the censers swing.  This is
our universe.  The others pass down the carriage-drive.  The skirts
of Miss Hudson and Miss Curry sweep by like candle extinguishers.
Those are Susan's white socks.  Those are Louis' neat sand-shoes
firmly printing the gravel.  Here come warm gusts of decomposing
leaves, of rotting vegetation.  We are in a swamp now; in a
malarial jungle.  There is an elephant white with maggots, killed
by an arrow shot dead in its eye.  The bright eyes of hopping
birds--eagles, vultures--are apparent.  They take us for fallen
trees.  They pick at a worm--that is a hooded cobra--and leave it
with a festering brown scar to be mauled by lions.  This is our
world, lit with crescents and stars of light; and great petals half
transparent block the openings like purple windows.  Everything is
strange.  Things are huge and very small.  The stalks of flowers
are thick as oak trees.  Leaves are high as the domes of vast
cathedrals.  We are giants, lying here, who can make forests
quiver.'

'This is here,' said Jinny, 'this is now.  But soon we shall go.
Soon Miss Curry will blow her whistle.  We shall walk.  We shall
part.  You will go to school.  You will have masters wearing
crosses with white ties.  I shall have a mistress in a school on
the East Coast who sits under a portrait of Queen Alexandra.  That
is where I am going, and Susan and Rhoda.  This is only here; this
is only now.  Now we lie under the currant bushes and every time
the breeze stirs we are mottled all over.  My hand is like a
snake's skin.  My knees are pink floating islands.  Your face is
like an apple tree netted under.'

'The heat is going,' said Bernard, 'from the Jungle.  The leaves
flap black wings over us.  Miss Curry has blown her whistle on the
terrace.  We must creep out from the awning of the currant leaves
and stand upright.  There are twigs in your hair, Jinny.  There is
a green caterpillar on your neck.  We must form, two by two.  Miss
Curry is taking us for a brisk walk, while Miss Hudson sits at her
desk settling her accounts.'

'It is dull,' said Jinny, 'walking along the high road with no
windows to look at, with no bleared eyes of blue glass let into the
pavement.'

'We must form into pairs,' said Susan, 'and walk in order, not
shuffling our feet, not lagging, with Louis going first to lead us,
because Louis is alert and not a wool-gatherer.'

'Since I am supposed,' said Neville, 'to be too delicate to go with
them, since I get so easily tired and then am sick, I will use this
hour of solitude, this reprieve from conversation, to coast round
the purlieus of the house and recover, if I can, by standing on the
same stair half-way up the landing, what I felt when I heard about
the dead man through the swing-door last night when cook was
shoving in and out the dampers.  He was found with his throat cut.
The apple-tree leaves became fixed in the sky; the moon glared; I
was unable to lift my foot up the stair.  He was found in the
gutter.  His blood gurgled down the gutter.  His jowl was white as
a dead codfish.  I shall call this stricture, this rigidity, "death
among the apple trees" for ever.  There were the floating, pale-
grey clouds; and the immitigable tree; the implacable tree with its
greaved silver bark.  The ripple of my life was unavailing.  I was
unable to pass by.  There was an obstacle.  "I cannot surmount this
unintelligible obstacle," I said.  And the others passed on.  But
we are doomed, all of us, by the apple trees, by the immitigable
tree which we cannot pass.

'Now the stricture and rigidity are over; and I will continue to
make my survey of the purlieus of the house in the late afternoon,
in the sunset, when the sun makes oleaginous spots on the linoleum,
and a crack of light kneels on the wall, making the chair legs look
broken.'

'I saw Florrie in the kitchen garden,' said Susan, 'as we came back
from our walk, with the washing blown out round her, the pyjamas,
the drawers, the night-gowns blown tight.  And Ernest kissed her.
He was in his green baize apron, cleaning silver; and his mouth was
sucked like a purse in wrinkles and he seized her with the pyjamas
blown out hard between them.  He was blind as a bull, and she
swooned in anguish, only little veins streaking her white cheeks
red.  Now though they pass plates of bread and butter and cups of
milk at tea-time I see a crack in the earth and hot steam hisses
up; and the urn roars as Ernest roared, and I am blown out hard
like the pyjamas, even while my teeth meet in the soft bread and
butter, and I lap the sweet milk.  I am not afraid of heat, nor of
the frozen winter.  Rhoda dreams, sucking a crust soaked in milk;
Louis regards the wall opposite with snail-green eyes; Bernard
moulds his bread into pellets and calls them "people".  Neville
with his clean and decisive ways has finished.  He has rolled his
napkin and slipped it through the silver ring.  Jinny spins her
fingers on the table-cloth, as if they were dancing in the
sunshine, pirouetting.  But I am not afraid of the heat or of the
frozen winter.'

'Now,' said Louis, 'we all rise; we all stand up.  Miss Curry
spreads wide the black book on the harmonium.  It is difficult not
to weep as we sing, as we pray that God may keep us safe while we
sleep, calling ourselves little children.  When we are sad and
trembling with apprehension it is sweet to sing together, leaning
slightly, I towards Susan, Susan towards Bernard, clasping hands,
afraid of much, I of my accent, Rhoda of figures; yet resolute to
conquer.'

'We troop upstairs like ponies,' said Bernard, 'stamping,
clattering one behind another to take our turns in the bathroom.
We buffet, we tussle, we spring up and down on the hard, white
beds.  My turn has come.  I come now.

'Mrs Constable, girt in a bath-towel, takes her lemon-coloured
sponge and soaks it in water; it turns chocolate-brown; it drips;
and, holding it high above me, shivering beneath her, she squeezes
it.  Water pours down the runnel of my spine.  Bright arrows of
sensation shoot on either side.  I am covered with warm flesh.  My
dry crannies are wetted; my cold body is warmed; it is sluiced and
gleaming.  Water descends and sheets me like an eel.  Now hot
towels envelop me, and their roughness, as I rub my back, makes my
blood purr.  Rich and heavy sensations form on the roof of my mind;
down showers the day--the woods; and Elvedon; Susan and the pigeon.
Pouring down the walls of my mind, running together, the day falls
copious, resplendent.  Now I tie my pyjamas loosely round me, and
lie under this thin sheet afloat in the shallow light which is like
a film of water drawn over my eyes by a wave.  I hear through it
far off, far away, faint and far, the chorus beginning; wheels;
dogs; men shouting; church bells; the chorus beginning.'

'As I fold up my frock and my chemise,' said Rhoda, 'so I put off
my hopeless desire to be Susan, to be Jinny.  But I will stretch my
toes so that they touch the rail at the end of the bed; I will
assure myself, touching the rail, of something hard.  Now I cannot
sink; cannot altogether fall through the thin sheet now.  Now I
spread my body on this frail mattress and hang suspended.  I am
above the earth now.  I am no longer upright, to be knocked against
and damaged.  All is soft, and bending.  Walls and cupboards whiten
and bend their yellow squares on top of which a pale glass gleams.
Out of me now my mind can pour.  I can think of my Armadas sailing
on the high waves.  I am relieved of hard contacts and collisions.
I sail on alone under the white cliffs.  Oh, but I sink, I fall!
That is the corner of the cupboard; that is the nursery looking-
glass.  But they stretch, they elongate.  I sink down on the black
plumes of sleep; its thick wings are pressed to my eyes.
Travelling through darkness I see the stretched flower-beds, and
Mrs Constable runs from behind the corner of the pampas-grass to
say my aunt has come to fetch me in a carriage.  I mount; I escape;
I rise on spring-heeled boots over the tree-tops.  But I am now
fallen into the carriage at the hall door, where she sits nodding
yellow plumes with eyes hard like glazed marbles.  Oh, to awake
from dreaming!  Look, there is the chest of drawers.  Let me pull
myself out of these waters.  But they heap themselves on me; they
sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled;
I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these
endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.'




The sun rose higher.  Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan
over the beach, circling the spike of sea-holly and leaving shallow
pools of light here and there on the sand.  A faint black rim was
left behind them.  The rocks which had been misty and soft hardened
and were marked with red clefts.

Sharp stripes of shadow lay on the grass, and the dew dancing on
the tips of the flowers and leaves made the garden like a mosaic of
single sparks not yet formed into one whole.  The birds, whose
breasts were specked canary and rose, now sang a strain or two
together, wildly, like skaters rollicking arm-in-arm, and were
suddenly silent, breaking asunder.

The sun laid broader blades upon the house.  The light touched
something green in the window corner and made it a lump of emerald,
a cave of pure green like stoneless fruit.  It sharpened the edges
of chairs and tables and stitched white table-cloths with fine gold
wires.  As the light increased a bud here and there split asunder
and shook out flowers, green veined and quivering, as if the effort
of opening had set them rocking, and pealing a faint carillon as
they beat their frail clappers against their white walls.
Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate
flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid.  Meanwhile the
concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds, like logs
falling, on the shore.




'Now,' said Bernard, 'the time has come.  The day has come.  The
cab is at the door.  My huge box bends George's bandy-legs even
wider.  The horrible ceremony is over, the tips, and the good-byes
in the hall.  Now there is this gulping ceremony with my mother,
this hand-shaking ceremony with my father; now I must go on waving,
I must go on waving, till we turn the corner.  Now that ceremony is
over.  Heaven be praised, all ceremonies are over.  I am alone; I
am going to school for the first time.

'Everybody seems to be doing things for this moment only; and never
again.  Never again.  The urgency of it all is fearful.  Everybody
knows I am going to school, going to school for the first time.
"That boy is going to school for the first time," says the
housemaid, cleaning the steps.  I must not cry.  I must behold them
indifferently.  Now the awful portals of the station gape; "the
moon-faced clock regards me."  I must make phrases and phrases and
so interpose something hard between myself and the stare of
housemaids, the stare of clocks, staring faces, indifferent faces,
or I shall cry.  There is Louis, there is Neville, in long coats,
carrying handbags, by the booking-office.  They are composed.  But
they look different.'

'Here is Bernard,' said Louis.  'He is composed; he is easy.  He
swings his bag as he walks.  I will follow Bernard, because he is
not afraid.  We are drawn through the booking-office on to the
platform as a stream draws twigs and straws round the piers of a
bridge.  There is the very powerful, bottle-green engine without a
neck, all back and thighs, breathing steam.  The guard blows his
whistle; the flag is dipped; without an effort, of its own
momentum, like an avalanche started by a gentle push, we start
forward.  Bernard spreads a rug and plays knuckle-bones.  Neville
reads.  London crumbles.  London heaves and surges.  There is a
bristling of chimneys and towers.  There a white church; there a
mast among the spires.  There a canal.  Now there are open spaces
with asphalt paths upon which it is strange that people should now
be walking.  There is a hill striped with red houses.  A man
crosses a bridge with a dog at his heels.  Now the red boy begins
firing at a pheasant.  The blue boy shoves him aside.  "My uncle is
the best shot in England.  My cousin is Master of Foxhounds."
Boasting begins.  And I cannot boast, for my father is a banker in
Brisbane, and I speak with an Australian accent.'

'After all this hubbub,' said Neville, 'all this scuffling and
hubbub, we have arrived.  This is indeed a moment--this is indeed a
solemn moment.  I come, like a lord to his halls appointed.  That
is our founder; our illustrious founder, standing in the courtyard
with one foot raised.  I salute our founder.  A noble Roman air
hangs over these austere quadrangles.  Already the lights are lit
in the form rooms.  Those are laboratories perhaps; and that a
library, where I shall explore the exactitude of the Latin
language, and step firmly upon the well-laid sentences, and
pronounce the explicit, the sonorous hexameters of Virgil, of
Lucretius; and chant with a passion that is never obscure or
formless the loves of Catullus, reading from a big book, a quarto
with margins.  I shall lie, too, in the fields among the tickling
grasses.  I shall lie with my friends under the towering elm trees.

'Behold, the Headmaster.  Alas, that he should excite my ridicule.
He is too sleek, he is altogether too shiny and black, like some
statue in a public garden.  And on the left side of his waistcoat,
his taut, his drum-like waistcoat, hangs a crucifix.'

'Old Crane,' said Bernard, 'now rises to address us.  Old Crane,
the Headmaster, has a nose like a mountain at sunset, and a blue
cleft in his chin, like a wooded ravine, which some tripper has
fired; like a wooded ravine seen from the train window.  He sways
slightly, mouthing out his tremendous and sonorous words.  I love
tremendous and sonorous words.  But his words are too hearty to be
true.  Yet he is by this time convinced of their truth.  And when
he leaves the room, lurching rather heavily from side to side, and
hurls his way through the swing-doors, all the masters, lurching
rather heavily from side to side, hurl themselves also through the
swing-doors.  This is our first night at school, apart from our
sisters.'



'This is my first night at school,' said Susan, 'away from my
father, away from my home.  My eyes swell; my eyes prick with
tears.  I hate the smell of pine and linoleum.  I hate the wind-
bitten shrubs and the sanitary tiles.  I hate the cheerful jokes
and the glazed look of everyone.  I left my squirrel and my doves
for the boy to look after.  The kitchen door slams, and shot
patters among the leaves when Percy fires at the rooks.  All here
is false; all is meretricious.  Rhoda and Jinny sit far off in
brown serge, and look at Miss Lambert who sits under a picture of
Queen Alexandra reading from a book before her.  There is also a
blue scroll of needlework embroidered by some old girl.  If I do
not purse my lips, if I do not screw my handkerchief, I shall cry.'

'The purple light,' said Rhoda, 'in Miss Lambert's ring passes to
and fro across the black stain on the white page of the Prayer
Book.  It is a vinous, it is an amorous light.  Now that our boxes
are unpacked in the dormitories, we sit herded together under maps
of the entire world.  There are desks with wells for the ink.  We
shall write our exercises in ink here.  But here I am nobody.  I
have no face.  This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has
robbed me of my identity.  We are all callous, unfriended.  I will
seek out a face, a composed, a monumental face, and will endow it
with omniscience, and wear it under my dress like a talisman and
then (I promise this) I will find some dingle in a wood where I can
display my assortment of curious treasures.  I promise myself this.
So I will not cry.'

'That dark woman,' said Jinny, 'with high cheek-bones, has a shiny
dress, like a shell, veined, for wearing in the evening.  That is
nice for summer, but for winter I should like a thin dress shot
with red threads that would gleam in the firelight.  Then when the
lamps were lit, I should put on my red dress and it would be thin
as a veil, and would wind about my body, and billow out as I came
into the room, pirouetting.  It would make a flower shape as I sank
down, in the middle of the room, on a gilt chair.  But Miss Lambert
wears an opaque dress, that falls in a cascade from her snow-white
ruffle as she sits under a picture of Queen Alexandra pressing one
white finger firmly on the page.  And we pray.'

'Now we march, two by two,' said Louis, 'orderly, processional,
into chapel.  I like the dimness that falls as we enter the sacred
building.  I like the orderly progress.  We file in; we seat
ourselves.  We put off our distinctions as we enter.  I like it
now, when, lurching slightly, but only from his momentum, Dr Crane
mounts the pulpit and reads the lesson from a Bible spread on the
back of the brass eagle.  I rejoice; my heart expands in his bulk,
in his authority.  He lays the whirling dust clouds in my
tremulous, my ignominiously agitated mind--how we danced round the
Christmas tree and handing parcels they forgot me, and the fat
woman said, "This little boy has no present," and gave me a shiny
Union Jack from the top of the tree, and I cried with fury--to be
remembered with pity.  Now all is laid by his authority, his
crucifix, and I feel come over me the sense of the earth under me,
and my roots going down and down till they wrap themselves round
some hardness at the centre.  I recover my continuity, as he reads.
I become a figure in the procession, a spoke in the huge wheel that
turning, at last erects me, here and now.  I have been in the dark;
I have been hidden; but when the wheel turns (as he reads) I rise
into this dim light where I just perceive, but scarcely, kneeling
boys, pillars and memorial brasses.  There is no crudity here, no
sudden kisses.'

'The brute menaces my liberty,' said Neville, 'when he prays.
Unwarmed by imagination, his words fall cold on my head like
paving-stones, while the gilt cross heaves on his waistcoat.  The
words of authority are corrupted by those who speak them.  I gibe
and mock at this sad religion, at these tremulous, grief-stricken
figures advancing, cadaverous and wounded, down a white road
shadowed by fig trees where boys sprawl in the dust--naked boys;
and goatskins distended with wine hang at the tavern door.  I was
in Rome travelling with my father at Easter; and the trembling
figure of Christ's mother was borne niddle-noddling along the
streets; there went by also the stricken figure of Christ in a
glass case.

'Now I will lean sideways as if to scratch my thigh.  So I shall
see Percival.  There he sits, upright among the smaller fry.  He
breathes through his straight nose rather heavily.  His blue and
oddly inexpressive eyes are fixed with pagan indifference upon the
pillar opposite.  He would make an admirable churchwarden.  He
should have a birch and beat little boys for misdemeanours.  He is
allied with the Latin phrases on the memorial brasses.  He sees
nothing; he hears nothing.  He is remote from us all in a pagan
universe.  But look--he flicks his hand to the back of his neck.
For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.
Dalton, Jones, Edgar and Bateman flick their hands to the back of
their necks likewise.  But they do not succeed.'

'At last,' said Bernard, 'the growl ceases.  The sermon ends.  He
has minced the dance of the white butterflies at the door to
powder.  His rough and hairy voice is like an unshaven chin.  Now
he lurches back to his seat like a drunken sailor.  It is an action
that all the other masters will try to imitate; but, being flimsy,
being floppy, wearing grey trousers, they will only succeed in
making themselves ridiculous.  I do not despise them.  Their antics
seem pitiable in my eyes.  I note the fact for future reference
with many others in my notebook.  When I am grown up I shall carry
a notebook--a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered.  I
shall enter my phrases.  Under B shall come "Butterfly powder".
If, in my novel, I describe the sun on the window-sill, I shall
look under B and find butterfly powder.  That will be useful.  The
tree "shades the window with green fingers".  That will be useful.
But alas!  I am so soon distracted--by a hair like twisted candy,
by Celia's Prayer Book, ivory covered.  Louis' can contemplate
nature, unwinking, by the hour.  Soon I fail, unless talked to.
"The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon
sinks into an oily somnolence."  That will be useful.'

'Now we move out of this cool temple, into the yellow playing-
fields,' said Louis.  'And, as it is a half-holiday (the Duke's
birthday) we will settle among the long grasses, while they play
cricket.  Could I be "they" I would choose it; I would buckle on my
pads and stride across the playing-field at the head of the
batsmen.  Look now, how everybody follows Percival.  He is heavy.
He walks clumsily down the field, through the long grass, to where
the great elm trees stand.  His magnificence is that of some
mediaeval commander.  A wake of light seems to lie on the grass
behind him.  Look at us trooping after him, his faithful servants,
to be shot like sheep, for he will certainly attempt some forlorn
enterprise and die in battle.  My heart turns rough; it abrades my
side like a file with two edges: one, that I adore his magnificence;
the other I despise his slovenly accents--I who am so much his
superior--and am jealous.'

'And now,' said Neville, 'let Bernard begin.  Let him burble on,
telling us stories, while we lie recumbent.  Let him describe what
we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence.  Bernard says there
is always a story.  I am a story.  Louis is a story.  There is the
story of the boot-boy, the story of the man with one eye, the story
of the woman who sells winkles.  Let him burble on with his story
while I lie back and regard the stiff-legged figures of the padded
batsmen through the trembling grasses.  It seems as if the whole
world were flowing and curving--on the earth the trees, in the sky
the clouds.  I look up, through the trees, into the sky.  The match
seems to be played up there.  Faintly among the soft, white clouds
I hear the cry "Run", I hear the cry "How's that?"  The clouds lose
tufts of whiteness as the breeze dishevels them.  If that blue
could stay for ever; if that hole could remain for ever; if this
moment could stay for ever--

'But Bernard goes on talking.  Up they bubble--images.  "Like a
camel," . . . "a vulture."  The camel is a vulture; the vulture a
camel; for Bernard is a dangling wire, loose, but seductive.  Yes,
for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a
lightness comes over one.  One floats, too, as if one were that
bubble; one is freed; I have escaped, one feels.  Even the chubby
little boys (Dalton, Larpent and Baker) feel the same abandonment.
They like this better than the cricket.  They catch the phrases as
they bubble.  They let the feathery grasses tickle their noses.
And then we all feel Percival lying heavy among us.  His curious
guffaw seems to sanction our laughter.  But now he has rolled
himself over in the long grass.  He is, I think, chewing a stalk
between his teeth.  He feels bored; I too feel bored.  Bernard at
once perceives that we are bored.  I detect a certain effort, an
extravagance in his phrase, as if he said "Look!" but Percival says
"No."  For he is always the first to detect insincerity; and is
brutal in the extreme.  The sentence tails off feebly.  Yes, the
appalling moment has come when Bernard's power fails him and there
is no longer any sequence and he sags and twiddles a bit of string
and falls silent, gaping as if about to burst into tears.  Among
the tortures and devastations of life is this then--our friends are
not able to finish their stories.'

'Now let me try,' said Louis, 'before we rise, before we go to tea,
to fix the moment in one effort of supreme endeavour.  This shall
endure.  We are parting; some to tea; some to the nets; I to show
my essay to Mr Barker.  This will endure.  From discord, from
hatred (I despise dabblers in imagery--I resent the power of
Percival intensely) my shattered mind is pieced together by some
sudden perception.  I take the trees, the clouds, to be witnesses
of my complete integration.  I, Louis, I, who shall walk the earth
these seventy years, am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord.
Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the
tremendous power of some inner compulsion.  The trees wave, the
clouds pass.  The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be
shared.  We shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as
one sensation strikes and then another.  Children, our lives have
been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows
on the nape of the neck in gardens.

'Now grass and trees, the travelling air blowing empty spaces in
the blue which they then recover, shaking the leaves which then
replace themselves, and our ring here, sitting, with our arms
binding our knees, hint at some other order, and better, which
makes a reason everlastingly.  This I see for a second, and shall
try tonight to fix in words, to forge in a ring of steel, though
Percival destroys it, as he blunders off, crushing the grasses,
with the small fry trotting subservient after him.  Yet it is
Percival I need; for it is Percival who inspires poetry.'



'For how many months,' said Susan, 'for how many years, have I run
up these stairs, in the dismal days of winter, in the chilly days
of spring?  Now it is midsummer.  We go upstairs to change into
white frocks to play tennis--Jinny and I with Rhoda following
after.  I count each step as I mount, counting each step something
done with.  So each night I tear off the old day from the calendar,
and screw it tight into a ball.  I do this vindictively, while
Betty and Clara are on their knees.  I do not pray.  I revenge
myself upon the day.  I wreak my spite upon its image.  You are
dead now, I say, school day, hated day.  They have made all the
days of June--this is the twenty-fifth--shiny and orderly, with
gongs, with lessons, with orders to wash, to change, to work, to
eat.  We listen to missionaries from China.  We drive off in brakes
along the asphalt pavement, to attend concerts in halls.  We are
shown galleries and pictures.

'At home the hay waves over the meadows.  My father leans upon the
stile, smoking.  In the house one door bangs and then another, as
the summer air puffs along the empty passages.  Some old picture
perhaps swings on the wall.  A petal drops from the rose in the
jar.  The farm wagons strew the hedges with tufts of hay.  All this
I see, I always see, as I pass the looking-glass on the landing,
with Jinny in front and Rhoda lagging behind.  Jinny dances.  Jinny
always dances in the hall on the ugly, the encaustic tiles; she
turns cartwheels in the playground; she picks some flower
forbiddenly, and sticks it behind her ear so that Miss Perry's dark
eyes smoulder with admiration, for Jinny, not me.  Miss Perry loves
Jinny; and I could have loved her, but now love no one, except my
father, my doves and the squirrel whom I left in the cage at home
for the boy to look after.'

'I hate the small looking-glass on the stairs,' said Jinny.  'It
shows our heads only; it cuts off our heads.  And my lips are too
wide, and my eyes are too close together; I show my gums too much
when I laugh.  Susan's head, with its fell look, with its grass-
green eyes which poets will love, Bernard said, because they fall
upon close white stitching, put mine out; even Rhoda's face,
mooning, vacant, is completed, like those white petals she used to
swim in her bowl.  So I skip up the stairs past them, to the next
landing, where the long glass hangs and I see myself entire.  I see
my body and head in one now; for even in this serge frock they are
one, my body and my head.  Look, when I move my head I ripple all
down my narrow body; even my thin legs ripple like a stalk in the
wind.  I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda's
vagueness; I leap like one of those flames that run between the
cracks of the earth; I move, I dance; I never cease to move and to
dance.  I move like the leaf that moved in the hedge as a child and
frightened me.  I dance over these streaked, these impersonal,
distempered walls with their yellow skirting as firelight dances
over teapots.  I catch fire even from women's cold eyes.  When I
read, a purple rim runs round the black edge of the textbook.  Yet
I cannot follow any word through its changes.  I cannot follow any
thought from present to past.  I do not stand lost, like Susan,
with tears in my eyes remembering home; or lie, like Rhoda,
crumpled among the ferns, staining my pink cotton green, while I
dream of plants that flower under the sea, and rocks through which
the fish swim slowly.  I do not dream.

'Now let us be quick.  Now let me be the first to pull off these
coarse clothes.  Here are my clean white stockings.  Here are my
new shoes.  I bind my hair with a white ribbon, so that when I leap
across the court the ribbon will stream out in a flash, yet curl
round my neck, perfectly in its place.  Not a hair shall be
untidy.'

'That is my face,' said Rhoda, 'in the looking-glass behind Susan's
shoulder--that face is my face.  But I will duck behind her to hide
it, for I am not here.  I have no face.  Other people have faces;
Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here.  Their world is the real
world.  The things they lift are heavy.  They say Yes, they say No;
whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second.  If
they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing.  But she
laughs at me.  They know what to say if spoken to.  They laugh
really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do
what other people do when they have done it.

'See now with what extraordinary certainty Jinny pulls on her
stockings, simply to play tennis.  That I admire.  But I like
Susan's way better, for she is more resolute, and less ambitious of
distinction than Jinny.  Both despise me for copying what they do;
but Susan sometimes teaches me, for instance, how to tie a bow,
while Jinny has her own knowledge but keeps it to herself.  They
have friends to sit by.  They have things to say privately in
corners.  But I attach myself only to names and faces; and hoard
them like amulets against disaster.  I choose out across the hall
some unknown face and can hardly drink my tea when she whose name I
do not know sits opposite.  I choke.  I am rocked from side to side
by the violence of my emotion.  I imagine these nameless, these
immaculate people, watching me from behind bushes.  I leap high to
excite their admiration.  At night, in bed, I excite their complete
wonder.  I often die pierced with arrows to win their tears.  If
they should say, or I should see from a label on their boxes, that
they were in Scarborough last holidays, the whole town runs gold,
the whole pavement is illuminated.  Therefore I hate looking-
glasses which show me my real face.  Alone, I often fall down into
nothingness.  I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off
the edge of the world into nothingness.  I have to bang my head
against some hard door to call myself back to the body.'

'We are late,' said Susan.  We must wait our turn to play.  We will
pitch here in the long grass and pretend to watch Jinny and Clara,
Betty and Mavis.  But we will not watch them.  I hate watching
other people play games.  I will make images of all the things I
hate most and bury them in the ground.  This shiny pebble is Madame
Carlo, and I will bury her deep because of her fawning and
ingratiating manners, because of the sixpence she gave me for
keeping my knuckles flat when I played my scales.  I buried her
sixpence.  I would bury the whole school: the gymnasium; the
classroom; the dining-room that always smells of meat; and the
chapel.  I would bury the red-brown tiles and the oily portraits of
old men--benefactors, founders of schools.  There are some trees I
like; the cherry tree with lumps of clear gum on the bark; and one
view from the attic towards some far hills.  Save for these, I
would bury it all as I bury these ugly stones that are always
scattered about this briny coast, with its piers and its trippers.
At home, the waves are mile long.  On winter nights we hear them
booming.  Last Christmas a man was drowned sitting alone in his
cart.'

'When Miss Lambert passes,' said Rhoda, 'talking to the clergyman,
the others laugh and imitate her hunch behind her back; yet
everything changes and becomes luminous.  Jinny leaps higher too
when Miss Lambert passes.  Suppose she saw that daisy, it would
change.  Wherever she goes, things are changed under her eyes; and
yet when she has gone is not the thing the same again?  Miss
Lambert is taking the clergyman through the wicket-gate to her
private garden; and when she comes to the pond, she sees a frog on
a leaf, and that will change.  All is solemn, all is pale where she
stands, like a statue in a grove.  She lets her tasselled silken
cloak slip down, and only her purple ring still glows, her vinous,
her amethystine ring.  There is this mystery about people when they
leave us.  When they leave us I can companion them to the pond and
make them stately.  When Miss Lambert passes, she makes the daisy
change; and everything runs like streaks of fire when she carves
the beef.  Month by month things are losing their hardness; even my
body now lets the light through; my spine is soft like wax near the
flame of the candle.  I dream; I dream.'

'I have won the game,' said Jinny.  'Now it is your turn.  I must
throw myself on the ground and pant.  I am out of breath with
running, with triumph.  Everything in my body seems thinned out
with running and triumph.  My blood must be bright red, whipped up,
slapping against my ribs.  My soles tingle, as if wire rings opened
and shut in my feet.  I see every blade of grass very clear.  But
the pulse drums so in my forehead, behind my eyes, that everything
dances--the net, the grass; your faces leap like butterflies; the
trees seem to jump up and down.  There is nothing staid, nothing
settled, in this universe.  All is rippling, all is dancing; all is
quickness and triumph.  Only, when I have lain alone on the hard
ground, watching you play your game, I begin to feel the wish to be
singled out; to be summoned, to be called away by one person who
comes to find me, who is attracted towards me, who cannot keep
himself from me, but comes to where I sit on my gilt chair, with my
frock billowing round me like a flower.  And withdrawing into an
alcove, sitting alone on a balcony we talk together.

'Now the tide sinks.  Now the trees come to earth; the brisk waves
that slap my ribs rock more gently, and my heart rides at anchor,
like a sailing-boat whose sails slide slowly down on to the white
deck.  The game is over.  We must go to tea now.'



'The boasting boys,' said Louis, 'have gone now in a vast team to
play cricket.  They have driven off in their great brake, singing
in chorus.  All their heads turn simultaneously at the corner by
the laurel bushes.  Now they are boasting.  Larpent's brother
played football for Oxford; Smith's father made a century at Lords.
Archie and Hugh; Parker and Dalton; Larpent and Smith; then again
Archie and Hugh; Parker and Dalton; Larpent and Smith--the names
repeat themselves; the names are the same always.  They are the
volunteers; they are the cricketers; they are the officers of the
Natural History Society.  They are always forming into fours and
marching in troops with badges on their caps; they salute
simultaneously passing the figure of their general.  How majestic
is their order, how beautiful is their obedience!  If I could
follow, if I could be with them, I would sacrifice all I know.  But
they also leave butterflies trembling with their wings pinched off;
they throw dirty pocket-handkerchiefs clotted with blood screwed up
into corners.  They make little boys sob in dark passages.  They
have big red ears that stand out under their caps.  Yet that is
what we wish to be, Neville and I.  I watch them go with envy.
Peeping from behind a curtain, I note the simultaneity of their
movements with delight.  If my legs were reinforced by theirs, how
they would run!  If I had been with them and won matches and rowed
in great races, and galloped all day, how I should thunder out
songs at midnight!  In what a torrent the words would rush from my
throat!'

'Percival has gone now,' said Neville.  'He is thinking of nothing
but the match.  He never waved his hand as the brake turned the
corner by the laurel bush.  He despises me for being too weak to
play (yet he is always kind to my weakness).  He despises me for
not caring if they win or lose except that he cares.  He takes my
devotion; he accepts my tremulous, no doubt abject offering, mixed
with contempt as it is for his mind.  For he cannot read.  Yet when
I read Shakespeare or Catullus, lying in the long grass, he
understands more than Louis.  Not the words--but what are words?
Do I not know already how to rhyme, how to imitate Pope, Dryden,
even Shakespeare?  But I cannot stand all day in the sun with my
eyes on the ball; I cannot feel the flight of the ball through my
body and think only of the ball.  I shall be a clinger to the
outsides of words all my life.  Yet I could not live with him and
suffer his stupidity.  He will coarsen and snore.  He will marry
and there will be scenes of tenderness at breakfast.  But now he is
young.  Not a thread, not a sheet of paper lies between him and the
sun, between him and the rain, between him and the moon as he lies
naked, tumbled, hot, on his bed.  Now as they drive along the high
road in their brake his face is mottled red and yellow.  He will
throw off his coat and stand with his legs apart, with his hands
ready, watching the wicket.  And he will pray, "Lord let us win";
he will think of one thing only, that they should win.

'How could I go with them in a brake to play cricket?  Only Bernard
could go with them, but Bernard is too late to go with them.  He is
always too late.  He is prevented by his incorrigible moodiness
from going with them.  He stops, when he washes his hands, to say,
"There is a fly in that web.  Shall I rescue that fly; shall I let
the spider eat it?"  He is shaded with innumerable perplexities, or
he would go with them to play cricket, and would lie in the grass,
watching the sky, and would start when the ball was hit.  But they
would forgive him; for he would tell them a story.'

'They have bowled off,' said Bernard, 'and I am too late to go with
them.  The horrid little boys, who are also so beautiful, whom you
and Louis, Neville, envy so deeply, have bowled off with their
heads all turned the same way.  But I am unaware of these profound
distinctions.  My fingers slip over the keyboard without knowing
which is black and which white.  Archie makes easily a hundred; I
by a fluke make sometimes fifteen.  But what is the difference
between us?  Wait though, Neville; let me talk.  The bubbles are
rising like the silver bubbles from the floor of a saucepan; image
on top of image.  I cannot sit down to my book, like Louis, with
ferocious tenacity.  I must open the little trap-door and let out
these linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens, so
that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread,
lightly joining one thing to another.  I will tell you the story of
the doctor.

'When Dr Crane lurches through the swing-doors after prayers he is
convinced, it seems, of his immense superiority; and indeed
Neville, we cannot deny that his departure leaves us not only with
a sense of relief, but also with a sense of something removed, like
a tooth.  Now let us follow him as he heaves through the swing-door
to his own apartments.  Let us imagine him in his private room over
the stables undressing.  He unfastens his sock suspenders (let us
be trivial, let us be intimate).  Then with a characteristic
gesture (it is difficult to avoid these ready-made phrases, and
they are, in his case, somehow appropriate) he takes the silver, he
takes the coppers from his trouser pockets and places them there,
and there, on his dressing-table.  With both arms stretched on the
arms of his chair he reflects (this is his private moment; it is
here we must try to catch him): shall he cross the pink bridge into
his bedroom or shall he not cross it?  The two rooms are united by
a bridge of rosy light from the lamp at the bedside where Mrs Crane
lies with her hair on the pillow reading a French memoir.  As she
reads, she sweeps her hand with an abandoned and despairing gesture
over her forehead, and sighs, "Is this all?" comparing herself with
some French duchess.  Now, says the doctor, in two years I shall
retire.  I shall clip yew hedges in a west country garden.  An
admiral I might have been; or a judge; not a schoolmaster.  What
forces, he asks, staring at the gas-fire with his shoulders hunched
up more hugely than we know them (he is in his shirt-sleeves
remember), have brought me to this?  What vast forces? he thinks,
getting into the stride of his majestic phrases as he looks over
his shoulder at the window.  It is a stormy night; the branches of
the chestnut trees are ploughing up and down.  Stars flash between
them.  What vast forces of good and evil have brought me here? he
asks, and sees with sorrow that his chair has worn a little hole in
the pile of the purple carpet.  So there he sits, swinging his
braces.  But stories that follow people into their private rooms
are difficult.  I cannot go on with this story.  I twiddle a piece
of string; I turn over four or five coins in my trouser pocket.'

'Bernard's stories amuse me,' said Neville, 'at the start.  But
when they tail off absurdly and he gapes, twiddling a bit of
string, I feel my own solitude.  He sees everyone with blurred
edges.  Hence I cannot talk to him of Percival.  I cannot expose my
absurd and violent passion to his sympathetic understanding.  It
too would make a "story".  I need someone whose mind falls like a
chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of absurdity is sublime, and
a shoe-string adorable.  To whom I can expose the urgency of my own
passion?  Louis is too cold, too universal.  There is nobody here
among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games
and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organized to prevent
feeling alone.  Yet I am struck still as I walk by sudden
premonitions of what is to come.  Yesterday, passing the open door
leading into the private garden, I saw Fenwick with his mallet
raised.  The steam from the tea-urn rose in the middle of the lawn.
There were banks of blue flowers.  Then suddenly descended upon me
the obscure, the mystic sense of adoration, of completeness that
triumphed over chaos.  Nobody saw my poised and intent figure as I
stood at the open door.  Nobody guessed the need I had to offer my
being to one god; and perish, and disappear.  His mallet descended;
the vision broke.

'Should I seek out some tree?  Should I desert these form rooms and
libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for
woods and fields?  Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter
along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in
the water?  But nature is too vegetable, too vapid.  She has only
sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves.  I begin to wish
for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person.'

'I begin to wish,' said Louis, 'for night to come.  As I stand here
with my hand on the grained oak panel of Mr Wickham's door I think
myself the friend of Richelieu, or the Duke of St Simon holding out
a snuff-box to the King himself.  It is my privilege.  My
witticisms "run like wildfire through the court".  Duchesses tear
emeralds from their earrings out of admiration--but these rockets
rise best in darkness, in my cubicle at night.  I am now a boy only
with a colonial accent holding my knuckles against Mr Wickham's
grained oak door.  The day has been full of ignominies and triumphs
concealed from fear of laughter.  I am the best scholar in the
school.  But when darkness comes I put off this unenviable body--my
large nose, my thin lips, my colonial accent--and inhabit space.  I
am then Virgil's companion, and Plato's.  I am then the last scion
of one of the great houses of France.  But I am also one who will
force himself to desert these windy and moonlit territories, these
midnight wanderings, and confront grained oak doors.  I will
achieve in my life--Heaven grant that it be not long--some gigantic
amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to
me.  Out of my suffering I will do it.  I will knock.  I will
enter.'



'I have torn off the whole of May and June,' said Susan, 'and
twenty days of July.  I have torn them off and screwed them up so
that they no longer exist, save as a weight in my side.  They have
been crippled days, like moths with shrivelled wings unable to fly.
There are only eight days left.  In eight days' time I shall get
out of the train and stand on the platform at six twenty five.
Then my freedom will unfurl, and all these restrictions that
wrinkle and shrivel--hours and order and discipline, and being here
and there exactly at the right moment--will crack asunder.  Out the
day will spring, as I open the carriage-door and see my father in
his old hat and gaiters.  I shall tremble.  I shall burst into
tears.  Then next morning I shall get up at dawn.  I shall let
myself out by the kitchen door.  I shall walk on the moor.  The
great horses of the phantom riders will thunder behind me and stop
suddenly.  I shall see the swallow skim the grass.  I shall throw
myself on a bank by the river and watch the fish slip in and out
among the reeds.  The palms of my hands will be printed with pine-
needles.  I shall there unfold and take out whatever it is I have
made here; something hard.  For something has grown in me here,
through the winters and summers, on staircases, in bedrooms.  I do
not want, as Jinny wants, to be admired.  I do not want people,
when I come in, to look up with admiration.  I want to give, to be
given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

'Then I shall come back through the trembling lanes under the
arches of the nut leaves.  I shall pass an old woman wheeling a
perambulator full of sticks; and the shepherd.  But we shall not
speak.  I shall come back through the kitchen garden, and see the
curved leaves of the cabbages pebbled with dew, and the house in
the garden, blind with curtained windows.  I shall go upstairs to
my room, and turn over my own things, locked carefully in the
wardrobe: my shells; my eggs; my curious grasses.  I shall feed my
doves and my squirrel.  I shall go to the kennel and comb my
spaniel.  So gradually I shall turn over the hard thing that has
grown here in my side.  But here bells ring; feet shuffle
perpetually.'

'I hate darkness and sleep and night,' said Jinny, 'and lie longing
for the day to come.  I long that the week should be all one day
without divisions.  When I wake early--and the birds wake me--I lie
and watch the brass handles on the cupboard grow clear; then the
basin; then the towel-horse.  As each thing in the bedroom grows
clear, my heart beats quicker.  I feel my body harden, and become
pink, yellow, brown.  My hands pass over my legs and body.  I feel
its slopes, its thinness.  I love to hear the gong roar through the
house and the stir begin--here a thud, there a patter.  Doors slam;
water rushes.  Here is another day, here is another day, I cry, as
my feet touch the floor.  It may be a bruised day, an imperfect
day.  I am often scolded.  I am often in disgrace for idleness, for
laughing; but even as Miss Matthews grumbles at my feather-headed
carelessness, I catch sight of something moving--a speck of sun
perhaps on a picture, or the donkey drawing the mowing-machine
across the lawn; or a sail that passes between the laurel leaves,
so that I am never cast down.  I cannot be prevented from
pirouetting behind Miss Matthews into prayers.

'Now, too, the time is coming when we shall leave school and wear
long skirts.  I shall wear necklaces and a white dress without
sleeves at night.  There will be parties in brilliant rooms; and
one man will single me out and will tell me what he has told no
other person.  He will like me better than Susan or Rhoda.  He will
find in me some quality, some peculiar thing.  But I shall not let
myself be attached to one person only.  I do not want to be fixed,
to be pinioned.  I tremble, I quiver, like the leaf in the hedge,
as I sit dangling my feet, on the edge of the bed, with a new day
to break open.  I have fifty years, I have sixty years to spend.  I
have not yet broken into my hoard.  This is the beginning.'

'There are hours and hours,' said Rhoda, 'before I can put out the
light and lie suspended on my bed above the world, before I can let
the day drop down, before I can let my tree grow, quivering in
green pavilions above my head.  Here I cannot let it grow.
Somebody knocks through it.  They ask questions, they interrupt,
they throw it down.

'Now I will go to the bathroom and take off my shoes and wash; but
as I wash, as I bend my head down over the basin, I will let the
Russian Empress's veil flow about my shoulders.  The diamonds of
the Imperial crown blaze on my forehead.  I hear the roar of the
hostile mob as I step out on to the balcony.  Now I dry my hands,
vigorously, so that Miss, whose name I forget, cannot suspect that
I am waving my fist at an infuriated mob.  "I am your Empress,
people."  My attitude is one of defiance.  I am fearless.  I
conquer.

'But this is a thin dream.  This is a papery tree.  Miss Lambert
blows it down.  Even the sight of her vanishing down the corridor
blows it to atoms.  It is not solid; it gives me no satisfaction--
this Empress dream.  It leaves me, now that it has fallen, here in
the passage rather shivering.  Things seem paler.  I will go now
into the library and take out some book, and read and look; and
read again and look.  Here is a poem about a hedge.  I will wander
down it and pick flowers, green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured
May, wild roses and ivy serpentine.  I will clasp them in my hands
and lay them on the desk's shiny surface.  I will sit by the
river's trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad and
bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with moonlight
beams of their own watery light.  I will pick flowers; I will bind
flowers in one garland and clasp them and present them--Oh! to
whom?  There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream
presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the
centre resists.  Oh, this is pain, this is anguish!  I faint, I
fail.  Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent.  Now
the stream pours in a deep tide fertilizing, opening the shut,
forcing the tight-folded, flooding free.  To whom shall I give all
that now flows through me, from my warm, my porous body?  I will
gather my flowers and present them--Oh! to whom?

'Sailors loiter on the parade, and amorous couples; the omnibuses
rattle along the sea front to the town.  I will give; I will
enrich; I will return to the world this beauty.  I will bind my
flowers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched will
present them--Oh! to whom?'



'Now we have received,' said Louis, 'for this is the last day of
the last term--Neville's and Bernard's and my last day--whatever
our masters have had to give us.  The introduction has been made;
the world presented.  They stay, we depart.  The great Doctor, whom
of all men I most revere, swaying a little from side to side among
the tables, the bound volumes, has dealt out Horace, Tennyson, the
complete works of Keats and Matthew Arnold, suitably inscribed.  I
respect the hand which gave them.  He speaks with complete
conviction.  To him his words are true, though not to us.  Speaking
in the gruff voice of deep emotion, fiercely, tenderly, he has told
us that we are about to go.  He has bid us "quit ourselves like
men".  (On his lips quotations from the Bible, from The Times, seem
equally magnificent.)  Some will do this; others that.  Some will
not meet again.  Neville, Bernard and I shall not meet here again.
Life will divide us.  But we have formed certain ties.  Our boyish,
our irresponsible years are over.  But we have forged certain
links.  Above all, we have inherited traditions.  These stone flags
have been worn for six hundred years.  On these walls are inscribed
the names of men of war, of statesmen, of some unhappy poets (mine
shall be among them).  Blessings be on all traditions, on all
safeguards and circumscriptions!  I am most grateful to you men in
black gowns, and you, dead, for your leading, for your guardianship;
yet after all, the problem remains.  The differences are not yet
solved.  Flowers toss their heads outside the window. I see wild
birds, and impulses wilder than the wildest birds strike from my
wild heart.  My eyes are wild; my lips tight pressed.  The bird
flies; the flower dances; but I hear always the sullen thud of the
waves; and the chained beast stamps on the beach.  It stamps and
stamps.'

'This is the final ceremony,' said Bernard.  This is the last of
all our ceremonies.  We are overcome by strange feelings.  The
guard holding his flag is about to blow his whistle; the train
breathing steam in another moment is about to start.  One wants to
say something, to feel something, absolutely appropriate to the
occasion.  One's mind is primed; one's lips are pursed.  And then a
bee drifts in and hums round the flowers in the bouquet which Lady
Hampton, the wife of the General, keeps smelling to show her
appreciation of the compliment.  If the bee were to sting her nose?
We are all deeply moved; yet irreverent; yet penitent; yet anxious
to get it over; yet reluctant to part.  The bee distracts us; its
casual flight seems to deride our intensity.  Humming vaguely,
skimming widely, it is settled now on the carnation.  Many of us
will not meet again.  We shall not enjoy certain pleasures again,
when we are free to go to bed, or to sit up, when I need no longer
smuggle in bits of candle-ends and immoral literature.  The bee now
hums round the head of the great Doctor.  Larpent, John, Archie,
Percival, Baker and Smith--I have liked them enormously.  I have
known one mad boy only.  I have hated one mean boy only.  I enjoy
in retrospect my terribly awkward breakfasts at the Headmaster's
table with toast and marmalade.  He alone does not notice the bee.
If it were to settle on his nose he would flick it off with one
magnificent gesture.  Now he has made his joke; now his voice has
almost broken but not quite.  Now we are dismissed--Louis, Neville
and I for ever.  We take our highly polished books, scholastically
inscribed in a little crabbed hand.  We rise, we disperse; the
pressure is removed.  The bee has become an insignificant, a
disregarded insect, flown through the open window into obscurity.
Tomorrow we go.'

'We are about to part,' said Neville.  'Here are the boxes; here
are the cabs.  There is Percival in his billycock hat.  He will
forget me.  He will leave my letters lying about among guns and
dogs unanswered.  I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply
with a picture post card.  But it is for that that I love him.  I
shall propose meeting--under a clock, by some Cross; and shall
wait, and he will not come.  It is for that that I love him.
Oblivious, almost entirely ignorant, he will pass from my life.
And I shall pass, incredible as it seems, into other lives; this is
only an escapade perhaps, a prelude only.  I feel already, though I
cannot endure the Doctor's pompous mummery and faked emotions, that
things we have only dimly perceived draw near.  I shall be free to
enter the garden where Fenwick raises his mallet.  Those who have
despised me shall acknowledge my sovereignty.  But by some
inscrutable law of my being sovereignty and the possession of power
will not be enough; I shall always push through curtains to
privacy, and want some whispered words alone.  Therefore I go,
dubious, but elate; apprehensive of intolerable pain; yet I think
bound in my adventuring to conquer after huge suffering, bound,
surely, to discover my desire in the end.  There, for the last
time, I see the statue of our pious founder with the doves about
his head.  They will wheel for ever about his head, whitening it,
while the organ moans in the chapel.  So I take my seat; and, when
I have found my place in the comer of our reserved compartment, I
will shade my eyes with a book to hide one tear; I will shade my
eyes to observe; to peep at one face.  It is the first day of the
summer holidays.'



'It is the first day of the summer holidays,' said Susan.  'But the
day is still rolled up.  I will not examine it until I step out on
to the platform in the evening.  I will not let myself even smell
it until I smell the cold green air off the fields.  But already
these are not school fields; these are not school hedges; the men
in these fields are doing real things; they fill carts with real
hay; and those are real cows, not school cows.  But the carbolic
smell of corridors and the chalky smell of schoolrooms is still in
my nostrils.  The glazed, shiny look of matchboard is still in my
eyes.  I must wait for fields and hedges, and woods and fields, and
steep railway cuttings, sprinkled with gorse bushes, and trucks in
sidings, and tunnels and suburban gardens with women hanging out
washing, and then fields again and children swinging on gates, to
cover it over, to bury it deep, this school that I have hated.

'I will not send my children to school nor spend a night all my
life in London.  Here in this vast station everything echoes and
booms hollowly.  The light is like the yellow light under an
awning.  Jinny lives here.  Jinny takes her dog for walks on these
pavements.  People here shoot through the streets silently.  They
look at nothing but shop-windows.  Their heads bob up and down all
at about the same height.  The streets are laced together with
telegraph wires.  The houses are all glass, all festoons and
glitter; now all front doors and lace curtains, all pillars and
white steps.  But now I pass on, out of London again; the fields
begin again; and the houses, and women hanging washing, and trees
and fields.  London is now veiled, now vanished, now crumbled, now
fallen.  The carbolic and the pitch-pine begin to lose their
savour.  I smell corn and turnips.  I undo a paper packet tied with
a piece of white cotton.  The egg shells slide into the cleft
between my knees.  Now we stop at station after station, rolling
out milk cans.  Now women kiss each other and help with baskets.
Now I will let myself lean out of the window.  The air rushes down
my nose and throat--the cold air, the salt air with the smell of
turnip fields in it.  And there is my father, with his back turned,
talking to a farmer.  I tremble, I cry.  There is my father in
gaiters.  There is my father.'

'I sit snug in my own corner going North,' said Jinny, 'in this
roaring express which is yet so smooth that it flattens hedges,
lengthens hills.  We flash past signal-boxes; we make the earth
rock slightly from side to side.  The distance closes for ever in a
point; and we for ever open the distance wide again.  The telegraph
poles bob up incessantly; one is felled, another rises.  Now we
roar and swing into a tunnel.  The gentleman pulls up the window.
I see reflections on the shining glass which lines the tunnel.  I
see him lower his paper.  He smiles at my reflection in the tunnel.
My body instantly of its own accord puts forth a frill under his
gaze.  My body lives a life of its own.  Now the black window glass
is green again.  We are out of the tunnel.  He reads his paper.
But we have exchanged the approval of our bodies.  There is then a
great society of bodies, and mine is introduced; mine has come into
the room where the gilt chairs are.  Look--all the windows of the
villas and their white-tented curtains dance; and the men sitting
in the hedges in the cornfields with knotted blue handkerchiefs are
aware too, as I am aware, of heat and rapture.  One waves as we
pass him.  There are bowers and arbours in these villa gardens and
young men in shirt-sleeves on ladders trimming roses.  A man on a
horse canters over the field.  His horse plunges as we pass.  And
the rider turns to look at us.  We roar again through blackness.
And I lie back; I give myself up to rapture; I think that at the
end of the tunnel I enter a lamp-lit room with chairs, into one of
which I sink, much admired, my dress billowing round me.  But
behold, looking up, I meet the eyes of a sour woman, who suspects
me of rapture.  My body shuts in her face, impertinently, like a
parasol.  I open my body, I shut my body at my will.  Life is
beginning.  I now break into my hoard of life.'

'It is the first day of the summer holidays,' said Rhoda.  'And
now, as the train passes by these red rocks, by this blue sea, the
term, done with, forms itself into one shape behind me.  I see its
colour.  June was white.  I see the fields white with daisies, and
white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white.  Then
there was wind and violent thunder.  There was a star riding
through clouds one night, and I said to the star, "Consume me."
That was at midsummer, after the garden party and my humiliation at
the garden party.  Wind and storm coloured July.  Also, in the
middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard,
when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message.  I came
to the puddle.  I could not cross it.  Identity failed me.  We are
nothing, I said, and fell.  I was blown like a feather, I was
wafted down tunnels.  Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across.
I laid my hand against a brick wall.  I returned very painfully,
drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of
the puddle.  This is life then to which I am committed.

'So I detach the summer term.  With intermittent shocks, sudden as
the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from
the sea.  It is to this we are attached; it is to this we are
bound, as bodies to wild horses.  And yet we have invented devices
for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures.  Here is
the ticket collector.  Here are two men; three women; there is a
cat in a basket; myself with my elbow on the window-sill--this is
here and now.  We draw on, we make off, through whispering fields
of golden corn.  Women in the fields are surprised to be left
behind there, hoeing.  The train now stamps heavily, breathes
stertorously, as it climbs up and up.  At last we are on the top of
the moor.  Only a few wild sheep live here; a few shaggy ponies;
yet we are provided with every comfort; with tables to hold our
newspapers, with rings to hold our tumblers.  We come carrying
these appliances with us over the top of the moor.  Now we are on
the summit.  Silence will close behind us.  If I look back over
that bald head, I can see silence already closing and the shadows
of clouds chasing each other over the empty moor; silence closes
over our transient passage.  This I say is the present moment; this
is the first day of the summer holidays.  This is part of the
emerging monster to whom we are attached.'



'Now we are off,' said Louis.  'Now I hang suspended without
attachments.  We are nowhere.  We are passing through England in a
train.  England slips by the window, always changing from hill to
wood, from rivers and willows to towns again.  And I have no firm
ground to which I go.  Bernard and Neville, Percival, Archie,
Larpent and Baker go to Oxford or Cambridge, to Edinburgh, Rome,
Paris, Berlin, or to some American University.  I go vaguely, to
make money vaguely.  Therefore a poignant shadow, a keen accent,
falls on these golden bristles, on these poppy-red fields, this
flowing corn that never overflows its boundaries; but runs rippling
to the edge.  This is the first day of a new life, another spoke of
the rising wheel.  But my body passes vagrant as a bird's shadow.
I should be transient as the shadow on the meadow, soon fading,
soon darkening and dying there where it meets the wood, were it not
that I coerce my brain to form in my forehead; I force myself to
state, if only in one line of unwritten poetry, this moment; to
mark this inch in the long, long history that began in Egypt, in
the time of the Pharaohs, when women carried red pitchers to the
Nile.  I seem already to have lived many thousand years.  But if I
now shut my eyes, if I fail to realize the meeting-place of past
and present, that I sit in a third-class railway carriage full of
boys going home for the holidays, human history is defrauded of a
moment's vision.  Its eye, that would see through me, shuts--if I
sleep now, through slovenliness, or cowardice, burying myself in
the past, in the dark; or acquiesce, as Bernard acquiesces, telling
stories; or boast, as Percival, Archie, John, Walter, Lathom,
Larpent, Roper, Smith boast--the names are the same always, the
names of the boasting boys.  They are all boasting, all talking,
except Neville, who slips a look occasionally over the edge of a
French novel, and so will always slip into cushioned firelit rooms,
with many books and one friend, while I tilt on an office chair
behind a counter.  Then I shall grow bitter and mock at them.  I
shall envy them their continuance down the safe traditional ways
under the shade of old yew trees while I consort with cockneys and
clerks, and tap the pavements of the city.

'But now disembodied, passing over fields without lodgment--(there
is a river; a man fishes; there is a spire, there is the village
street with its bow-windowed inn)--all is dreamlike and dim to me.
These hard thoughts, this envy, this bitterness, make no lodgment
in me.  I am the ghost of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, in whose
mind dreams have power, and garden sounds when in the early morning
petals float on fathomless depths and the birds sing.  I dash and
sprinkle myself with the bright waters of childhood.  Its thin veil
quivers.  But the chained beast stamps and stamps on the shore.'

'Louis and Neville,' said Bernard, 'both sit silent.  Both are
absorbed.  Both feel the presence of other people as a separating
wall.  But if I find myself in company with other people, words at
once make smoke rings--see how phrases at once begin to wreathe off
my lips.  It seems that a match is set to a fire; something burns.
An elderly and apparently prosperous man, a traveller, now gets in.
And I at once wish to approach him; I instinctively dislike the
sense of his presence, cold, unassimilated, among us.  I do not
believe in separation.  We are not single.  Also I wish to add to
my collection of valuable observations upon the true nature of
human life.  My book will certainly run to many volumes, embracing
every known variety of man and woman.  I fill my mind with whatever
happens to be the contents of a room or a railway carriage as one
fills a fountain-pen in an inkpot.  I have a steady unquenchable
thirst.  Now I feel by imperceptible signs, which I cannot yet
interpret but will later, that his defiance is about to thaw.  His
solitude shows signs of cracking.  He has passed a remark about a
country house.  A smoke ring issues from my lips (about crops) and
circles him, bringing him into contact.  The human voice has a
disarming quality--(we are not single, we are one).  As we exchange
these few but amiable remarks about country houses, I furbish him
up and make him concrete.  He is indulgent as a husband but not
faithful; a small builder who employs a few men.  In local society
he is important; is already a councillor, and perhaps in time will
be mayor.  He wears a large ornament, like a double tooth torn up
by the roots, made of coral, hanging at his watch-chain.  Walter J.
Trumble is the sort of name that would fit him.  He has been in
America, on a business trip with his wife, and a double room in a
smallish hotel cost him a whole month's wages.  His front tooth is
stopped with gold.

'The fact is that I have little aptitude for reflection.  I require
the concrete in everything.  It is so only that I lay hands upon
the world.  A good phrase, however, seems to me to have an
independent existence.  Yet I think it is likely that the best are
made in solitude.  They require some final refrigeration which I
cannot give them, dabbling always in warm soluble words.  My
method, nevertheless, has certain advantages over theirs.  Neville
is repelled by the grossness of Trumble.  Louis, glancing, tripping
with the high step of a disdainful crane, picks up words as if in
sugar-tongs.  It is true that his eyes--wild, laughing, yet
desperate--express something that we have not gauged.  There is
about both Neville and Louis a precision, an exactitude, that I
admire and shall never possess.  Now I begin to be aware that
action is demanded.  We approach a junction; at a junction I have
to change.  I have to board a train for Edinburgh.  I cannot
precisely lay fingers on this fact--it lodges loosely among my
thoughts like a button, like a small coin.  Here is the jolly old
boy who collects tickets.  I had one--I had one certainly.  But it
does not matter.  Either I shall find it, or I shall not find it.
I examine my note-case.  I look in all my pockets.  These are the
things that for ever interrupt the process upon which I am
eternally engaged of finding some perfect phrase that fits this
very moment exactly.'

'Bernard has gone,' said Neville, 'without a ticket.  He has
escaped us, making a phrase, waving his hand.  He talked as easily
to the horse-breeder or to the plumber as to us.  The plumber
accepted him with devotion.  "If he had a son like that," he was
thinking, "he would manage to send him to Oxford."  But what did
Bernard feel for the plumber?  Did he not only wish to continue the
sequence of the story which he never stops telling himself?  He
began it when he rolled his bread into pellets as a child.  One
pellet was a man, one was a woman.  We are all pellets.  We are all
phrases in Bernard's story, things he writes down in his notebook
under A or under B.  He tells our story with extraordinary
understanding, except of what we most feel.  For he does not need
us.  He is never at our mercy.  There he is, waving his arms on the
platform.  The train has gone without him.  He has missed his
connection.  He has lost his ticket.  But that does not matter.  He
will talk to the barmaid about the nature of human destiny.  We are
off; he has forgotten us already; we pass out of his view; we go
on, filled with lingering sensations, half bitter, half sweet, for
he is somehow to be pitied, breasting the world with half-finished
phrases, having lost his ticket: he is also to be loved.

'Now I pretend again to read.  I raise my book, till it almost
covers my eyes.  But I cannot read in the presence of horse-dealers
and plumbers.  I have no power of ingratiating myself.  I do not
admire that man; he does not admire me.  Let me at least be honest.
Let me denounce this piffling, trifling, self-satisfied world;
these horse-hair seats; these coloured photographs of piers and
parades.  I could shriek aloud at the smug self-satisfaction, at
the mediocrity of this world, which breeds horse-dealers with coral
ornaments hanging from their watch-chains.  There is that in me
which will consume them entirely.  My laughter shall make them
twist in their seats; shall drive them howling before me.  No; they
are immortal.  They triumph.  They will make it impossible for me
always to read Catullus in a third-class railway carriage.  They
will drive me in October to take refuge in one of the universities,
where I shall become a don; and go with schoolmasters to Greece;
and lecture on the ruins of the Parthenon.  It would be better to
breed horses and live in one of those red villas than to run in and
out of the skulls of Sophocles and Euripides like a maggot, with a
high-minded wife, one of those University women.  That, however,
will be my fate.  I shall suffer.  I am already at eighteen capable
of such contempt that horse-breeders hate me.  That is my triumph;
I do not compromise.  I am not timid; I have no accent.  I do not
finick about fearing what people think of "my father a banker at
Brisbane" like Louis.

'Now we draw near the centre of the civilized world.  There are the
familiar gasometers.  There are the public gardens intersected by
asphalt paths.  There are the lovers lying shamelessly mouth to
mouth on the burnt grass.  Percival is now almost in Scotland; his
train draws through the red moors; he sees the long line of the
Border hills and the Roman wall.  He reads a detective novel, yet
understands everything.

The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre,
and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exultation.  I am about to
meet--what?  What extraordinary adventure waits me, among these
mail vans, these porters, these swarms of people calling taxis?  I
feel insignificant, lost, but exultant.  With a soft shock we stop.
I will let the others get out before me.  I will sit still one
moment before I emerge into that chaos, that tumult.  I will not
anticipate what is to come.  The huge uproar is in my ears.  It
sounds and resounds, under this glass roof like the surge of a sea.
We are cast down on the platform with our handbags.  We are whirled
asunder.  My sense of self almost perishes; my contempt.  I become
drawn in, tossed down, thrown sky-high.  I step out on to the
platform, grasping tightly all that I possess--one bag.'




The sun rose.  Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding
the ribs of the eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its
mailed leaves gleam blue as steel.  Light almost pierced the thin
swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach.  The girl who
had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the
aquamarine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them,
dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a
straight pathway over the waves.  Their quivering mackerel
sparkling was darkened; they massed themselves; their green hollows
deepened and darkened and might be traversed by shoals of wandering
fish.  As they splashed and drew back they left a black rim of
twigs and cork on the shore and straws and sticks of wood, as if
some light shallop had foundered and burst its sides and the sailor
had swum to land and bounded up the cliff and left his frail cargo
to be washed ashore.

In the garden the birds that had sung erratically and spasmodically
in the dawn on that tree, on that bush, now sang together in
chorus, shrill and sharp; now together, as if conscious of
companionship, now alone as if to the pale blue sky.  They swerved,
all in one flight, when the black cat moved among the bushes, when
the cook threw cinders on the ash heap and startled them.  Fear was
in their song, and apprehension of pain, and joy to be snatched
quickly now at this instant.  Also they sang emulously in the clear
morning air, swerving high over the elm tree, singing together as
they chased each other, escaping, pursuing, pecking each other as
they turned high in the air.  And then tiring of pursuit and
flight, lovelily they came descending, delicately declining,
dropped down and sat silent on the tree, on the wall, with their
bright eyes glancing, and their heads turned this way, that way;
aware, awake; intensely conscious of one thing, one object in
particular.

Perhaps it was a snail shell, rising in the grass like a grey
cathedral, a swelling building burnt with dark rings and shadowed
green by the grass.  Or perhaps they saw the splendour of the
flowers making a light of flowing purple over the beds, through
which dark tunnels of purple shade were driven between the stalks.
Or they fixed their gaze on the small bright apple leaves, dancing
yet withheld, stiffly sparkling among the pink-tipped blossoms.  Or
they saw the rain drop on the hedge, pendent but not falling, with
a whole house bent in it, and towering elms; or, gazing straight at
the sun, their eyes became gold beads.

Now glancing this side, that side, they looked deeper, beneath the
flowers, down the dark avenues into the unlit world where the leaf
rots and the flower has fallen.  Then one of them, beautifully
darting, accurately alighting, spiked the soft, monstrous body of
the defenceless worm, pecked again and yet again, and left it to
fester.  Down there among the roots where the flowers decayed,
gusts of dead smells were wafted; drops formed on the bloated sides
of swollen things.  The skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter
oozed too thick to run.  Yellow excretions were exuded by slugs,
and now and again an amorphous body with a head at either end
swayed slowly from side to side.  The gold-eyed birds darting in
between the leaves observed that purulence, that wetness,
quizzically.  Now and then they plunged the tips of their beaks
savagely into the sticky mixture.

Now, too, the rising sun came in at the window, touching the red-
edged curtain, and began to bring out circles and lines.  Now in
the growing light its whiteness settled in the plate; the blade
condensed its gleam.  Chairs and cupboards loomed behind so that
though each was separate they seemed inextricably involved.  The
looking-glass whitened its pool upon the wall.  The real flower on
the window-sill was attended by a phantom flower.  Yet the phantom
was part of the flower, for when a bud broke free the paler flower
in the glass opened a bud too.

The wind rose.  The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned
warriors, like turbaned men with poisoned assegais who, whirling
their arms on high, advance upon the feeding flocks, the white
sheep.




'The complexity of things becomes more close,' said Bernard, 'here
at college, where the stir and pressure of life are so extreme,
where the excitement of mere living becomes daily more urgent.
Every hour something new is unburied in the great bran pie.  What
am I? I ask.  This?  No, I am that.  Especially now, when I have
left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with
my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely,
indifferently, over the ancient chapel--then it becomes clear that
I am not one and simple, but complex and many.  Bernard, in public,
bubbles; in private, is secretive.  That is what they do not
understand, for they are now undoubtedly discussing me, saying I
escape them, am evasive.  They do not understand that I have to
effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits
of several different men who alternately act their parts as
Bernard.  I am abnormally aware of circumstances.  I can never read
a book in a railway carriage without asking, Is he a builder?  Is
she unhappy?  I was aware today acutely that poor Simes, with his
pimple, was feeling, how bitterly, that his chance of making a good
impression upon Billy Jackson was remote.  Feeling this painfully,
I invited him to dinner with ardour.  This he will attribute to an
admiration which is not mine.  That is true.  But "joined to the
sensibility of a woman" (I am here quoting my own biographer)
"Bernard possessed the logical sobriety of a man."  Now people who
make a single impression, and that, in the main, a good one (for
there seems to be a virtue in simplicity), are those who keep their
equilibrium in mid-stream.  (I instantly see fish with their noses
one way, the stream rushing past another.)  Canon, Lycett, Peters,
Hawkins, Larpent, Neville--all fish in mid-stream.  But you
understand, YOU, my self, who always comes at a call (that would be
a harrowing experience to call and for no one to come; that would
make the midnight hollow, and explains the expression of old men in
clubs--they have given up calling for a self who does not come),
you understand that I am only superficially represented by what I
was saying tonight.  Underneath, and, at the moment when I am most
disparate, I am also integrated.  I sympathize effusively; I also
sit, like a toad in a hole, receiving with perfect coldness
whatever comes.  Very few of you who are now discussing me have the
double capacity to feel, to reason.  Lycett, you see, believes in
running after hares; Hawkins has spent a most industrious afternoon
in the library.  Peters has his young lady at the circulating
library.  You are all engaged, involved, drawn in, and absolutely
energized to the top of your bent--all save Neville, whose mind is
far too complex to be roused by any single activity.  I also am too
complex.  In my case something remains floating, unattached.

'Now, as a proof of my susceptibility to atmosphere, here, as I
come into my room, and turn on the light, and see the sheet of
paper, the table, my gown lying negligently over the back of the
chair, I feel that I am that dashing yet reflective man, that bold
and deleterious figure, who, lightly throwing off his cloak, seizes
his pen and at once flings off the following letter to the girl
with whom he is passionately in love.

'Yes, all is propitious.  I am now in the mood.  I can write the
letter straight off which I have begun ever so many times.  I have
just come in; I have flung down my hat and my stick; I am writing
the first thing that comes into my head without troubling to put
the paper straight.  It is going to be a brilliant sketch which,
she must think, was written without a pause, without an erasure.
Look how unformed the letters are--there is a careless blot.  All
must be sacrificed to speed and carelessness.  I will write a
quick, running, small hand, exaggerating the down stroke of the "y"
and crossing the "t" thus--with a dash.  The date shall be only
Tuesday, the 17th, and then a question mark.  But also I must give
her the impression that though he--for this is not myself--is
writing in such an off-hand, such a slap-dash way, there is some
subtle suggestion of intimacy and respect.  I must allude to talks
we have had together--bring back some remembered scene.  But I must
seem to her (this is very important) to be passing from thing to
thing with the greatest ease in the world.  I shall pass from the
service for the man who was drowned (I have a phrase for that) to
Mrs Moffat and her sayings (I have a note of them), and so to some
reflections apparently casual but full of profundity (profound
criticism is often written casually) about some book I have been
reading, some out-of-the-way book.  I want her to say as she
brushes her hair or puts out the candle, "Where did I read that?
Oh, in Bernard's letter."  It is the speed, the hot, molten effect,
the laval flow of sentence into sentence that I need.  Who am I
thinking of?  Byron of course.  I am, in some ways, like Byron.
Perhaps a sip of Byron will help to put me in the vein.  Let me
read a page.  No; this is dull; this is scrappy.  This is rather
too formal.  Now I am getting the hang of it.  Now I am getting his
beat into my brain (the rhythm is the main thing in writing).  Now,
without pausing I will begin, on the very lilt of the stroke--.

'Yet it falls flat.  It peters out.  I cannot get up steam enough
to carry me over the transition.  My true self breaks off from my
assumed.  And if I begin to re-write it, she will feel "Bernard is
posing as a literary man; Bernard is thinking of his biographer"
(which is true).  No, I will write the letter tomorrow directly
after breakfast.

'Now let me fill my mind with imaginary pictures.  Let me suppose
that I am asked to stay at Restover, King's Laughton, Station
Langley three miles.  I arrive in the dusk.  In the courtyard of
this shabby but distinguished house there are two or three dogs,
slinking, long-legged.  There are faded rugs in the hall; a
military gentleman smokes a pipe as he paces the terrace.  The note
is of distinguished poverty and military connections.  A hunter's
hoof on the writing table--a favourite horse.  "Do you ride?"
"Yes, sir, I love riding."  "My daughter expects us in the drawing-
room."  My heart pounds against my ribs.  She is standing at a low
table; she has been hunting; she munches sandwiches like a tomboy.
I make a fairly good impression on the Colonel.  I am not too
clever, he thinks; I am not too raw.  Also I play billiards.  Then
the nice maid who has been with the family thirty years comes in.
The pattern on the plates is of Oriental long-tailed birds.  Her
mother's portrait in muslin hangs over the fireplace.  I can sketch
the surroundings up to a point with extraordinary ease.  But can I
make it work?  Can I hear her voice--the precise tone with which,
when we are alone, she says "Bernard"?  And then what next?

'The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people.  Alone,
over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories.
The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on,
indefinitely, imagining.  He would not integrate, as I do.  He
would not have this devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out
grate.  Some blind flaps in my eyes.  Everything becomes
impervious.  I cease to invent.

'Let me recollect.  It has been on the whole a good day.  The drop
that forms on the roof of the soul in the evening is round, many-
coloured.  There was the morning, fine; there was the afternoon,
walking.  I like views of spires across grey fields.  I like
glimpses between people's shoulders.  Things kept popping into my
head.  I was imaginative, subtle.  After dinner, I was dramatic.  I
put into concrete form many things that we had dimly observed about
our common friends.  I made my transitions easily.  But now let me
ask myself the final question, as I sit over this grey fire, with
its naked promontories of black coal, which of these people am I?
It depends so much upon the room.  When I say to myself, "Bernard",
who comes?  A faithful, sardonic man, disillusioned, but not
embittered.  A man of no particular age or calling.  Myself,
merely.  It is he who now takes the poker and rattles the cinders
so that they fall in showers through the grate.  "Lord," he says to
himself, watching them fall, "what a pother!" and then he adds,
lugubriously, but with some sense of consolation, "Mrs Moffat will
come and sweep it all up--"  I fancy I shall often repeat to myself
that phrase, as I rattle and bang through life, hitting first this
side of the carriage, then the other, "Oh, yes, Mrs Moffat will
come and sweep it all up."  And so to bed.'

'In a world which contains the present moment,' said Neville, 'why
discriminate?  Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change
it.  Let it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I, for one instant,
steeped in pleasure.  The sun is hot.  I see the river.  I see
trees specked and burnt in the autumn sunlight.  Boats float past,
through the red, through the green.  Far away a bell tolls, but not
for death.  There are bells that ring for life.  A leaf falls, from
joy.  Oh, I am in love with life!  Look how the willow shoots its
fine sprays into the air!  Look how through them a boat passes,
filled with indolent, with unconscious, with powerful young men.
They are listening to the gramophone; they are eating fruit out of
paper bags.  They are tossing the skins of bananas, which then sink
eel-like, into the river.  All they do is beautiful.  There are
cruets behind them and ornaments; their rooms are full of oars and
oleographs but they have turned all to beauty.  That boat passes
under the bridge.  Another comes.  Then another.  That is Percival,
lounging on the cushions, monolithic, in giant repose.  No, it is
only one of his satellites, imitating his monolithic, his giant
repose.  He alone is unconscious of their tricks, and when he
catches them at it he buffets them good-humouredly with a blow of
his paw.  They, too, have passed under the bridge through 'the
fountains of the pendant trees', through its fine strokes of yellow
and plum colour.  The breeze stirs; the curtain quivers; I see
behind the leaves the grave, yet eternally joyous buildings, which
seem porous, not gravid; light, though set so immemorially on the
ancient turf.  Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words
that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall
and rise, and fall and rise again.  I am a poet, yes.  Surely I am
a great poet.  Boats and youth passing and distant trees, "the
falling fountains of the pendant trees".  I see it all.  I feel it
all.  I am inspired.  My eyes fill with tears.  Yet even as I feel
this, I lash my frenzy higher and higher.  It foams.  It becomes
artificial, insincere.  Words and words and words, how they gallop--
how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me
I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them,
scattering women and string bags.  There is some flaw in me--some
fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and
falsity.  Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet.
What did I write last night if it was not good poetry?  Am I too
fast, too facile?  I do not know.  I do not know myself sometimes,
or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me
what I am.

'Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that
figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see
who it is.  How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a
distance, of a friend.  How useful an office one's friends perform
when they recall us.  Yet how painful to be recalled, to be
mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of
another.  As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed
with somebody--with whom?--with Bernard?  Yes, it is Bernard, and
it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?'

'How strange,' said Bernard, 'the willow looks seen together.  I
was Byron, and the tree was Byron's tree, lachrymose, down-
showering, lamenting.  Now that we look at the tree together, it
has a combined look, each branch distinct, and I will tell you what
I feel, under the compulsion of your clarity.

'I feel your disapproval, I feel your force.  I become, with you,
an untidy, an impulsive human being whose bandanna handkerchief is
for ever stained with the grease of crumpets.  Yes, I hold Gray's
Elegy in one hand; with the other I scoop out the bottom crumpet,
that has absorbed all the butter and sticks to the bottom of the
plate.  This offends you; I feel your distress acutely.  Inspired
by it and anxious to regain your good opinion, I proceed to tell
you how I have just pulled Percival out of bed; I describe his
slippers, his table, his guttered candle; his surly and complaining
accents as I pull the blankets off his feet; he burrowing like some
vast cocoon meanwhile.  I describe all this in such a way that,
centred as you are upon some private sorrow (for a hooded shape
presides over our encounter), you give way, you laugh and delight
in me.  My charm and flow of language, unexpected and spontaneous
as it is, delights me too.  I am astonished, as I draw the veil off
things with words, how much, how infinitely more than I can say, I
have observed.  More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk,
images and images.  This, I say to myself, is what I need; why, I
ask, can I not finish the letter that I am writing?  For my room is
always scattered with unfinished letters.  I begin to suspect, when
I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men.  I am filled
with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is
to come.  Blundering, but fervid, I see myself buzzing round
flowers, humming down scarlet cups, making blue funnels resound
with my prodigious booming.  How richly I shall enjoy my youth (you
make me feel).  And London.  And freedom.  But stop.  You are not
listening.  You are making some protest, as you slide, with an
inexpressibly familiar gesture, your hand along your knee.  By such
signs we diagnose our friends' diseases.  "Do not, in your
affluence and plenty," you seem to say, "pass me by."  "Stop," you
say.  "Ask me what I suffer."

'Let me then create you.  (You have done as much for me.)  You lie
on this hot bank, in this lovely, this fading, this still bright
October day, watching boat after boat float through the combed-out
twigs of the willow tree.  And you wish to be a poet; and you wish
to be a lover.  But the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and
the remorseless honesty of your intellect (these Latin words I owe
you; these qualities of yours make me shift a little uneasily and
see the faded patches, the thin strands in my own equipment) bring
you to a halt.  You indulge in no mystifications.  You do not fog
yourself with rosy clouds, or yellow.

'Am I right?  Have I read the little gesture of your left hand
correctly?  If so, give me your poems; hand over the sheets you
wrote last night in such a fervour of inspiration that you now feel
a little sheepish.  For you distrust inspiration, yours or mine.
Let us go back together, over the bridge, under the elm trees, to
my room, where, with walls round us and red serge curtains drawn,
we can shut out these distracting voices, scents and savours of
lime trees, and other lives; these pert shop-girls, disdainfully
tripping, these shuffling, heavy-laden old women; these furtive
glimpses of some vague and vanishing figure--it might be Jinny, it
might be Susan, or was that Rhoda disappearing down the avenue?
Again, from some slight twitch I guess your feeling; I have escaped
you; I have gone buzzing like a swarm of bees, endlessly vagrant,
with none of your power of fixing remorselessly upon a single
object.  But I will return.'

'When there are buildings like these,' said Neville, 'I cannot
endure that there should be shop-girls.  Their titter, their
gossip, offends me; breaks into my stillness, and nudges me, in
moments of purest exultation, to remember our degradation.

'But now we have regained our territory after that brief brush with
the bicycles and the lime scent and the vanishing figures in the
distracted street.  Here we are masters of tranquillity and order;
inheritors of proud tradition.  The lights are beginning to make
yellow slits across the square.  Mists from the river are filling
these ancient spaces.  They cling, gently, to the hoary stone.  The
leaves now are thick in country lanes, sheep cough in the damp
fields; but here in your room we are dry.  We talk privately.  The
fire leaps and sinks, making some knob bright.

'You have been reading Byron.  You have been marking the passages
that seem to approve of your own character.  I find marks against
all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate
nature; a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass.
You thought, as you drew your pencil there, "I too throw off my
cloak like that.  I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny."
Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when
you put the lid on the tea spills over.  There is a brown pool on
the table--it is running among your books and papers.  Now you mop
it up, clumsily, with your pocket-handkerchief.  You then stuff
your handkerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is
you; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty
years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it
will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.  Once you
were Tolstoi's young man; now you are Byron's young man; perhaps
you will be Meredith's young man; then you will visit Paris in the
Easter vacation and come back wearing a black tie, some detestable
Frenchman whom nobody has ever heard of.  Then I shall drop you.

'I am one person--myself.  I do not impersonate Catullus, whom I
adore.  I am the most slavish of students, with here a dictionary,
there a notebook in which I enter curious uses of the past
participle.  But one cannot go on for ever cutting these ancient
inscriptions clearer with a knife.  Shall I always draw the red
serge curtain close and see my book, laid like a block of marble,
pale under the lamp?  That would be a glorious life, to addict
oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever
it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of
lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be
ridiculous in Piccadilly.

'But I am too nervous to end my sentence properly.  I speak
quickly, as I pace up and down, to conceal my agitation.  I hate
your greasy handkerchiefs--you will stain your copy of Don Juan.
You are not listening to me.  You are making phrases about Byron.
And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying
to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand
with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me
whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?

'I stand with my back to you fidgeting.  No, my hands are now
perfectly still.  Precisely, opening a space in the bookcase, I
insert Don Juan; there.  I would rather be loved, I would rather be
famous than follow perfection through the sand.  But am I doomed to
cause disgust?  Am I a poet?  Take it.  The desire which is loaded
behind my lips, cold as lead, fell as a bullet, the thing I aim at
shop-girls, women, the pretence, the vulgarity of life (because I
love it) shoots at you as I throw--catch it--my poem.'

'He has shot like an arrow from the room,' said Bernard.  'He has
left me his poem.  O friendship, I too will press flowers between
the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!  O friendship, how piercing are
your darts--there, there, again there.  He looked at me, turning to
face me; he gave me his poem.  All mists curl off the roof of my
being.  That confidence I shall keep to my dying day.  Like a long
wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating
presence--dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of
my soul.  It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones.  All
semblances were rolled up.  "You are not Byron; you are your self."
To be contracted by another person into a single being--how
strange.

'How strange to feel the line that is spun from us lengthening its
fine filament across the misty spaces of the intervening world.  He
is gone; I stand here, holding his poem.  Between us is this line.
But now, how comfortable, how reassuring to feel that alien
presence removed, that scrutiny darkened and hooded over!  How
grateful to draw the blinds, and admit no other presence; to feel
returning from the dark corners in which they took refuge, those
shabby inmates, those familiars, whom, with his superior force, he
drove into hiding.  The mocking, the observant spirits who, even in
the crisis and stab of the moment, watched on my behalf now come
flocking home again.  With their addition, I am Bernard; I am
Byron; I am this, that and the other.  They darken the air and
enrich me, as of old, with their antics, their comments, and cloud
the fine simplicity of my moment of emotion.  For I am more selves
than Neville thinks.  We are not simple as our friends would have
us to meet their needs.  Yet love is simple.

'Now they have returned, my inmates, my familiars.  Now the stab,
the rent in my defences that Neville made with his astonishing fine
rapier, is repaired.  I am almost whole now; and see how jubilant I
am, bringing into play all that Neville ignores in me.  I feel, as
I look from the window, parting the curtains, "That would give him
no pleasure; but it rejoices me."  (We use our friends to measure
our own stature.)  My scope embraces what Neville never reaches.
They are shouting hunting-songs over the way.  They are celebrating
some run with the beagles.  The, little boys in caps who always
turned at the same moment when the brake went round the corner are
clapping each other on the shoulder and boasting.  But Neville,
delicately avoiding interference, stealthily, like a conspirator,
hastens back to his room.  I see him sunk in his low chair gazing
at the fire which has assumed for the moment an architectural
solidity.  If life, he thinks, could wear that permanence, if life
could have that order--for above all he desires order, and detests
my Byronic untidiness; and so draws his curtain; and bolts his
door.  His eyes (for he is in love; the sinister figure of love
presided at our encounter) fill with longing; fill with tears.  He
snatches the poker and with one blow destroys that momentary
appearance of solidity in the burning coals.  All changes.  And
youth and love.  The boat has floated through the arch of the
willows and is now under the bridge.  Percival, Tony, Archie, or
another, will go to India.  We shall not meet again.  Then he
stretches his hand for his copy-book--a neat volume bound in
mottled paper--and writes feverishly long lines of poetry, in the
manner of whomever he admires most at the moment.

'But I want to linger; to lean from the window; to listen.  There
again comes that rollicking chorus.  They are now smashing china--
that also is the convention.  The chorus, like a torrent jumping
rocks, brutally assaulting old trees, pours with splendid
abandonment headlong over precipices.  On they roll; on they
gallop, after hounds, after footballs; they pump up and down
attached to oars like sacks of flour.  All divisions are merged--
they act like one man.  The gusty October wind blows the uproar in
bursts of sound and silence across the court.  Now again they are
smashing the china--that is the convention.  An old, unsteady woman
carrying a bag trots home under the fire-red windows.  She is half
afraid that they will fall on her and tumble her into the gutter.
Yet she pauses as if to warm her knobbed, her rheumaticky hands at
the bonfire which flares away with streams of sparks and bits of
blown paper.  The old woman pauses against the lit window.  A
contrast.  That I see and Neville does not see; that I feel and
Neville does not feel.  Hence he will reach perfection and I shall
fail and shall leave nothing behind me but imperfect phrases
littered with sand.

'I think of Louis now.  What malevolent yet searching light would
Louis throw upon this dwindling autumn evening, upon this china-
smashing and trolling of hunting-songs, upon Neville, Byron and our
life here?  His thin lips are somewhat pursed; his cheeks are pale;
he pores in an office over some obscure commercial document.  "My
father, a banker at Brisbane"--being ashamed of him he always talks
of him--failed.  So he sits in an office, Louis the best scholar in
the school.  But I seeking contrasts often feel his eye on us, his
laughing eye, his wild eye, adding us up like insignificant items
in some grand total which he is for ever pursuing in his office.
And one day, taking a fine pen and dipping it in red ink, the
addition will be complete; our total will be known; but it will not
be enough.

'Bang!  They have thrown a chair now against the wall.  We are
damned then.  My case is dubious too.  Am I not indulging in
unwarranted emotions?  Yes, as I lean out of the window and drop my
cigarette so that it twirls lightly to the ground, I feel Louis
watching even my cigarette.  And Louis says, "That means something.
But what?"'

'People go on passing,' said Louis.  They pass the window of this
eating-shop incessantly.  Motor-cars, vans, motor-omnibuses; and
again motor-omnibuses, vans, motor-cars--they pass the window.  In
the background I perceive shops and houses; also the grey spires of
a city church.  In the foreground are glass shelves set with plates
of buns and ham sandwiches.  All is somewhat obscured by steam from
a tea-urn.  A meaty, vapourish smell of beef and mutton, sausages
and mash, hangs down like a damp net in the middle of the eating-
house.  I prop my book against a bottle of Worcester sauce and try
to look like the rest.

'Yet I cannot.  (They go on passing, they go on passing in
disorderly procession.)  I cannot read my book, or order my beef,
with conviction.  I repeat, "I am an average Englishman; I am an
average clerk", yet I look at the little men at the next table to
be sure that I do what they do.  Supple-face