 Chapter 13 The height of the season, said Barnamy, The sun had already blisted the paint on the backs of the green chairs in Hyde Park, peeled the bark of the plain trees, and turned the earth to powder and to smooth yellow pebbles. Hyde Park was circled incessantly by turning wheels. The height of the season, said Barnamy, sarcastically. It was sarcastic because of Clara Durant, because Jacob had come back from Greece very brown and lean, with his pockets full of Greek notes, which he pulled out when the chairman came from Pence, because Jacob was silent. He has not said a word to show that he is glad to see me, thought Barnamy bitterly. The motor-cars passed incessantly over the bridge of the serpentine. The upper classes walked upright, or bent themselves gracefully over the palings. The lower classes lay with their knees cocked up, flattened their backs. The sheep grazed and pointed wooden legs. Small children ran down the sloping grass, stretched their arms, and fell. Very obeying, Jacob brought out. Obeying, on the lips of Jacob, had mysteriously all the shapeliness of a character, which Barnamy thought daily more sublime, devastating, terrific than ever, though he was still, and perhaps would be for other, barbaric, obscure. What superlatives, what adjectives, how a quid Barnamy of sentimentality of the grossest sort, of being tossed like a cork on the waves, of having no steady insight into character, of being unsupported by reason, and of drawing no comfort whatever from the works of the classics. The height of civilisation, said Jacob. He was fond of using Latin words. Magnanimity, virtue, such words, when Jacob used them in talk with Barnamy, meant that he took control of the situation. That Barnamy would play round him like an affectionate Spaniel, and that, as likely as not, they would end by rolling on the floor. And Greece, said Barnamy, the Parthenon and all that, there's none of this European mysticism, said Jacob. It's the atmosphere, I suppose, said Barnamy. And you went to Constantinople? Yes, said Jacob. Barnamy paused, moved a pebble, then darted in with the rapidity and certainty of a lizard's tongue. You ain't love, he exclaimed. Jacob blushed. The sharpest of knives never cut so deep. As for responding or taking the least account of it, Jacob stared straight ahead of him, fixed monolithic. Oh, very beautiful, like a British admiral exclaimed Barnamy in a rage, rising from his seat and walking off. Waiting for some sound, none came, too proud to look back, wore him quicker and quicker until he found himself gazing into motor-cars and cursing women. Where was the pretty woman's face, Clarys, Fannies, Florendes? Who was the pretty little creature? Not Clara Durant. The Aberdeen Terrier must be exercised, and as Mr. Barley was gone there the very moment, would like nothing better than a walk, they went together, Clara and kind little Barley. Barley, who had runes in the Albany, Barley who wrote letters to the Times in a jacular vein, about foreign hotels and the Aurora Borealis, Barley who liked young people and walked down Piccadilly with his right arm resting on the boss of his back. Little demon cried Clara and a touched chariot to his chain. Barley anticipated, hoped for, a confidence. Divided to her mother, Clara sometimes felt her a little, well, her mother was so sure of herself that she could not understand other people being, being, as ludicrous as I am, Clara jet out, the dog tugging her forwards, and Barley thought she looked like a huntress and turned over in his mind which it should be. Some pale virgin with a slip of the moon in her hair, which was a flight for Barley. Her colour was in her cheeks, to have spoken outright about her mother. Still it was only to Mr Barley who loved her as everybody must, but this bee was unnatural to her, yet it was awful to feel as she had done all day that she must tell someone. Wait till we're cross the road, she said to the dog, bending down, happily she had recovered by that time. She thinks so much about England, she said. She is so anxious. Barley was defrauded as usual. Clara never confided in anyone. Why didn't they and people settle it, eh? He wanted to ask. What's all this about England? A question poor Clara could not have answered since, as Mrs Durant discussed with Zeratgar the policy of said Edward Gray, Clara only wondered why the cabinet looked dusty and Jacob had never come. Oh, here was Mrs Cowley Johnson, and Clara would hand the pretty china tea cups and smile at the compliment that no one in London made tea so well as she did. We get it at Brocklebanks, she said, in Cercito Street. Ought she not to be grateful? Ought she not to be happy? Especially since her mother looked so well and enjoyed so much talking to Zeratgar about Morocco, Venezuela, or some such place. Jacob, Jacob, thought Clara, and kind Mr Barley, who was ever so good with all ladies, looked, stopped, wondered whether Elizabeth wasn't too harsh with her daughter, wondered if it was not Bonany, Jacob, which I'm feeling was it? And jumped up, directly Clara said she must exercise Troy. They had reached the side of the old exhibition. They looked at the chillips, stiff and curled, the little rugs of walksy smoothness raised from the earth, nourished, yet contained, suffused with scarlet and coral pink. Each had its shadow. Each grew trimly in the diamond shaped wedge as the gardener had planned it. Barnes never gets them to grow like that. Clara mused. She sighed. You are neglecting your friends, said Barley, as someone going the other way lifted his hut. She started. Acknowledged Mr Lionel Harry's bowel, wasting on him what had sprung for Jacob. Jacob, Jacob, she thought. But you'll get run over if I let you go, she said to the dog. England seems all right, said Mr Barley. The loop of the railing beneath the statue of Achilles was full of parasols and waistcoats, chains and bangles of ladies and gentlemen lounging elegantly, lightly observant. The statue was erected by the women of England. Clara read out with a foolish little laugh. Oh, Mr Barley, oh, gallop, gallop, gallop, a horse galloped past without a rider. The stirrups swung, the pebbles spurted. Oh, stop, stop it, Mr Barley. She cried, white, trembling, gripping his arm, utterly unconscious. The tears coming, said Mr Barley in his dressing room an hour later. A comment that was profound enough, though inarticulately expressed, since his valet was handing his shirt studs. Julia Elliot, too, had seen the horse run away and had risen from his seat to watch the end of the incident, which, since she came of a sporty family, seemed to her slightly ridiculous. Sure enough, the little man came pounding behind with his breeches dusty, looked thoroughly annoyed, and was being helped to mount by a policeman when Julia Elliot, with a sardonic smile, turned towards the marble arch on her errand of mercy. It was only to visit a sick old lady who had known her mother, and perhaps the Duke of Wellington. For Julia shared the love of her sex for the distressed, liked to visit deathbeds, through slippers at weddings, received confidences by the dozen, knew more pedigrees than a scholar knows dates, and was one of the kindliest, most generous, least continent, of women. Yet five minutes after she had passed the statue of Achilles, she had the rapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer's afternoon, when the trees are wrestling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoasts, and she saw people passing tragically to distraction. Yet heaven knows Julia was no fool. A sharper woman at a bargain did not exist. She was always punctual. The watch on her wrist gave her twelve minutes and a half in which to reach Bruton streets, Lady Congrive expected her at five. The gill-clock at Verri's was striking five. Florenda looked at it with a dull expression, like an animal. She looked at the clock, looked at the door, looked at the long glass opposite, disposed her cloak, drew closer to the table for all she was pregnant. No doubt about it, Mother Stuart said, recommending remedies, consulting friends, sunk, cut by the heel, as she tripped so lightly over the surface. Her tumbler of pinkish-sweet stuff was sat down by the waiter, and she sucked through a straw, her eyes on the looking glass, on the door, now soothed by the sweet taste. When Nick Bramham came in, it was plain, even to the young Swiss waiter, that there was a bargain between them. Nick hedged his clothes together, clumsily, run his fingers through his hair, sat down to an ordeal nervously. She looked at him, and set off laughing, laughed, laughed, laughed. The young Swiss waiter, standing with crossed legs by the pillar, laughed too. The door opened, in came the roar of Rachel Street, the roar of traffic, impersonal, and pitying, and sunshine grained with dirt. The Swiss waiter must see to the newcomers. Bramham lifted his glass. His leg, Jacob, said Florenda, looking at the newcomer. The way he stares, she stopped laughing. Jacob, leaning forward, drew a plan of the Parthenon in the dust in Hyde Park, a network of strokes at least, which may have been the Parthenon, or again a mathematical diagram. And why was the pebble so emphatically ground in at the corner? It was not to count his notes that he took out a wad of papers, and read a long flowering letter, which Sandra had written two days ago at Milton Dower House, with his book before her, and in her mind the memory of something said or attempted, some moment in the dark, on the road to the Acropolis, which, such was her creed, mattered forever. He is, she mused, like that man in Molière. She meant Alceste. She meant that he was severe. She meant that she could deceive him. Or could I not, she thought, putting the poems of Don back in the bookcase. Jacob, she went on, going to the window, and looking over the spotted flower beds across the grass, where the pine-walled cows grazed under beech trees. Jacob would be shocked. The perambulator was going through the little gate in the railing. She kissed her hand, directed by the nurse, Jimmy, waved his. His a small boy, she said, thinking of Jacob. And yet, Alceste? What a nuisance you are, Jacob grumbled, stretching out first one leg and then the other, and feeling an itch draws a pocket for his chair-ticket. I took the sheep of it, he said. Why do you keep sheep? Story did disturb you, sir, said the ticket-collector, his hand deep in the enormous patch of pants. Well, I hope they'd pay you for it, said Jacob. There you are. No, you can stick to it. Go and get drunk. He had parted with half a crown, tolerantly, compassionately, with considerable contempt for his species. Even though poor Fanny Elmer was dealing, as she walked along the strand, in her incompetent way, with this very careless, indifferent, sublime manner he had of talking to railway guards or porters, or Mrs. Whitehorn, when she consulted him about her little boy, who was beaten by the schoolmaster. Sustained entirely upon picture-postcards for the past two months, Fanny's idea of Jacob was more statuistic, noble, and eyeless than ever. To reinforce her vision, she had taken to visiting the British Museum, where, keeping her eyes downcast until she was alongside of the battered Ulysses, she opened them and got a fresh shock of Jacob's presence, enough to last her half a day. But this was wherein thin. And she wrote now, poems, letters that were never posted, saw his face in advertisement and hoardings, and he crossed the road to let the barrel-organ turn him usings to rhapsody. But at breakfast, she shared rooms with the teacher, when the batter was smeared about the blade and the prongs of the forks were clotted with old egg-yoke, she revised this visions violently. Was, in truth, very cross? Was losing her complexion, as Marjorie Jackson told her, bringing the whole thing down, as she laced her stout boots to a level of mother-wit, vulgarity, and sentiment, for she had loved too, and been a fool. One's godmothers are to have told one, said Fanny, looking in at the window of bacon, the map-seller, in the strand, told them that it is no use making the fuss. This is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines. This is life, this is life, said Fanny, a very hard face, thought Miss Barrett on the other side of the glass, buying maps of the Syrian desert, and waiting impatiently to be served. Girls look all so soon nowadays. The equate is swam behind tears. Piccadilly, Fanny asked the conductor of the omnibus, and climbed to the top. After all, he would. He must come back to her. But Jacob might have been thinking of Rome, of architecture, of jurisprudence, as he sat under the plain tree in Hyde Park. The omnibus stopped outside Charing Cross, and behind it were clogged omnibuses, vans, motorcalls. For a procession with banners was passing down Whitehall, and elderly people were stiffly defending from between the paws of the slippery lions, where they had been testifying to their faith, singing lustily, raising their eyes from their music and looking to the sky, and still their eyes were in the sky as they marched behind the gold letters of their creed. The traffic stopped, and the sun, no longer sprayed out by the breeze, became almost too hot. But the procession passed. The banners glitted, far away down Whitehall. The traffic was released, lurched on, spun to a smooth continuous uproar, swerving round the curve of Cuxborough Street, and sweeping past government offices and equestrian statues down Whitehall to the Britly Spires, the tethered grey fleet of masonry, and the large white clock of Westminster. Five strokes, Big Ben intoned. Nelson received the solute. The wires of the admiralty shivered with some faraway communication. A voice kept remarking that Prime Ministers and Vice Royce, spoke in the Reichstag, entered Lahore, said that the emperor travelled. In Milan they rioted, said there were rumors in Vienna, said that the ambassadors of Constantinople had audience with the sultan. The fleet was at Gibraltar. The voice continued, imprinting on the faces of the clerks in Whitehall, Timothy Durant was one of them, something of its own inexorable gravity, as they listened, deciphered, wrote down. Papers accumulated, inscribed with the utterances of Caesars, the statistics of rice fields, the growling of hundreds of work people, plotting sedition in back streets, or gathering in the coquette of bazaars, or mustering their forces in the uplands of Albania, where the hills are sand-collared and bones lie unburied. The voice spoke plainly in the square-quiet room with heavy tables, where one elderly man made notes on the margin of typewritten sheets, his silver-topped umbrella leaning against the bookcase. His head, bald, red-veined, hello-looking, represented all the heads in the building. His head, with the amiable pale eyes, carried the burden of knowledge across the street, laded before his colleagues, who came equally burdened. And then the sixteen gentlemen, lifting their pens, or turning perhaps rather warily in their chairs, decreed that the cause of history should shape itself this way or that way, being manfully determined, as their faces showed, to impose some coherency upon Rujars and Caesars, and the metering in bazaars, the secret gatherings, plainly visible in Whitehall, of quilted peasant and Albanian uplands, to control the court of events. Pit and Chatham, Pit and Chatham, Burke and Gladstone, looked from side to side with fixed marble eyes, and an air of immortal quiescence, which perhaps the living may have envied, the air being full of whistling and concussions, as the procession with its banners passed down Whitehall. Moreover, somewhere trouble with dyspepsia, one had at that very moment cracked the glass of his spectacles, another, spoken Glasgow, tomorrow. Altogether, they looked too red, fat, pale, or lean, to be dealing, as the marble heads had dealt, with the cause of history. Timidurrent, in his little room in the annulty, went to consult a blue-book, stalked for a moment by the window, and observed the placard tied round the lamppost. Miss Thomas, one of the typists, said to her friend that if the cabinet was going to sit much longer, she should miss her boy outside the gaiety. Timidurrent, returning with his blue-book, under his arm, noticed a little knot of people at the street corner, conglomerated as the one of them knew something, and the others, pressing round him, looked up, looked down, looked along the street. What was it that he knew? Timothy, placing the blue-book before him, stared at a paper sent round by the treasury for information. Mr. Crawley, his fellow clerk, impaled a letter on a skewer. Jacob rose from his chair in Hyde Park, tore his stick up to pieces, and walked away. Such a sunset, wrote Mrs. Flanders and her letter to Archer at Singapore. One couldn't make up one's mind come indoors, she wrote. It seemed wicked to waste even a moment. The long windows of Kensington Palace flushed fiery rows as Jacob walked away. A flock of wild duck flew over the serpentine, and the trees were stood against the sky, blackly, magnificently. Jacob, wrote Mrs. Flanders with the red light on her page, is hard at work after his dim-lightful journey. The geyser, the faraway voice remarked in Whitehall, received me in audience. Look at that face, said the Reverend Andrew Floyd, coming out to Carter's shop in Piccadilly, but who the dickens? And he watched Jacob, turned round to look at him, but could not be sure, oh, Jacob Flanders, he remembered in a flash. But he was so tall, so unconscious, such a fine young fellow. I gave him Byron's works, Andrew Floyd mused, and started forward as Jacob crossed the road, but hesitated and let the moment pass, and lost the opportunity. Another procession without bannies was blocking Long Acre. Carriages, with dowages in amethyst, and gentlemen spotted with carnations, intercepted carves and motorcars turned in the opposite direction, in which jaded men in white waistcoats lulled on their way home to shrubberies and billiard rooms in Putney and Wimbledon. Two barrel organs played by the curb, and horses coming out to voltages with white labels on their buttocks straddled across the road, and were smartly jerked back. Mrs. Durant, sitting with Mr. Wartley in a motor car, was impatient, lest they should miss the overture. But Mr. Wartley, always urbane, always in time for the overture, better than his gloves and admired Miss Clara. A shame to spend such a night in the theatre, said Mrs. Durant, seeing all the windows of the coachmakers in Long Acre ablaze. Think of your moors, said Mr. Wartley to Clara. Ah, but Clara likes this better! Mrs. Durant laughed. I don't know, really, said Clara, looking at the blazing windows. She started. She saw Jacob. Who? asked Mrs. Durant sharply, leaning forward. But she, so no one. Under the arch of the opera house, large faces and lean ones, the powdered and the hairy, all alike were red in the sunset. And, quickened by the great-hanging lamps with their repressed primrose lights, by the tramp and the scarlet and the pompous ceremony, some ladies looked for a moment into steaming bedrooms nearby, where women with loose hair leaned out of windows, where girls, where children, the long mirrors held the ladies suspended. But one must follow. One must not block the way. Clara's moors were fine enough. The Phoenicians slept under their piled, grey rocks. The chimneys of the old mines pointed starkly. Early moths blared the heather bells. Cut wheels could be heard grinding them the road far beneath. And the second sign of the waves sounded gently, persistently, forever. Shading her eyes with her hand, Mrs. Pascoe stood in her cabbage garden, looking out to sea. Two steamoos and a sailing ship crossed each other, passed each other. And in the bay, the gulls kept a lightning on the log, rising high, returning again to the log, while some rode in upon the waves and stood in the rim of the water, until the moon blanched all to whiteness. Mrs. Pascoe had gone indoors long ago. But the red light wasn't the columns of the Parthenon, and the Greek women who were knitting chockings, and sometimes crying to a child to come and have the insects picked from its head were as jolly as sand martins in the heat, quarreling, scalding, circling their babies until the ships in the Pyreus fired their guns. The sand spread itself flat and then went tunnelling its way with fitful explosions among the channels of the islands. Darkness drops like a knife over grease. The guns, said Betty Flanders, half asleep, getting out of bed and going to the window which was decorated with a fringe of dark leaves. Not at this distance, she thought, it is the sea. Again, far away, she heard the dull sound as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets. There was Morty lost and Seabrook dead, her sons fighting for their country. But were the chickens safe? Was that someone moving downstairs? Rebecca with the toothache? No, the nocturnal women were beating great carpets. Her hands shifted slightly on their perches. End of Chapter 13 Chapter 14 of Jacob's Room This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Isabel Bram Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf Chapter 14 He left everything just as it was. Barnamy marvelled. Nothing arranged. All his letters strewn about for anyone to read. What did he expect? Did he think he would come back? Him used, standing in the middle of Jacob's Room. The 18th Century has its distinction. These houses were built, say, 150 years ago. The rooms are shapely, the ceilings high. Over the doorways, a rose or a ram-score is carved in the wood. Even the panels painted in raspberry-coloured paint have their distinction. Barnamy took up a bill for a hunting crop. That seems to be paid, he said. There were Sandra's letters. Mrs. Durant was taking the party to Greenwich. Lady Roxbury hoped for the pleasure. Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain. The flowers in the jar shift. When fibre in the Wicca armchair creaks, then no one sits there. Barnamy crossed to the window. Pickford's vans whunked down the street. The omnibuses were locked together at Mudie's corner. Engines throbbed, and carriages jamming the brakes down pulled their horses sharp up. A harsh and unhappy voice cried something unintelligible. And then suddenly all the leaves seemed to raise themselves. Jacob! Jacob! cried Barnamy, standing by the window. The leaves sank down again. Such confusion everywhere exclaimed Betty Flanders, bursting open the bedroom door. Barnamy turned away from the window. What am I to do with these, Mr. Barnamy? She held out a pair of Jacob's old shoes. End of Chapter 14 End of Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf