Title: Two Stories
Author: Woolf, Virginia, Woolf, Leonard
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Two Stories" ***


generously made available by British Library.)



PUBLICATION NO. I.

TWO STORIES


WRITTEN AND PRINTED

BY

VIRGINIA WOOLF

AND

L. S. WOOLF


HOGARTH PRESS
RICHMOND

1917



CONTENTS
THREE JEWS By L. S. WOOLF
THE MARK ON THE WALL By VIRGINIA WOOLF


[Illustration]



THREE JEWS

By

LEONARD WOOLF.


It was a Sunday and the first day of spring, the first day on which one
felt at any rate spring in the air. It blew in at my window with its
warm breath, with its inevitable little touch of sadness. I felt
restless, and I had nowhere to go to; everyone I knew was out of town. I
looked out of my window at the black trees breaking into bud, the tulips
and the hyacinths that even London could not rob of their reds and blues
and yellows, the delicate spring sunshine on the asphalt, and the pale
blue sky that the chimney pots broke into. I found myself muttering
"damn it" for no very obvious reason. It was spring, I suppose, the
first stirring of the blood.

I wanted to see clean trees, and the sun shine upon grass; I wanted
flowers and leaves unsoiled by soot; I wanted to see and smell the
earth; above all I wanted the horizon. I felt that something was waiting
for me beyond the houses and the chimney-pots: I should find it where
earth and sky meet. I didn't of course but I took the train to Kew.

If I did not find in Kew the place where earth and sky meet or even the
smell of the earth, I saw at any rate the sun upon the brown bark of
trees and the delicate green of grass. It was spring there, English
spring with its fresh warm breath, and its pale blue sky above the
trees. Yes, the quiet orderly English spring that embraced and sobered
even the florid luxuriance of great flowers bursting in white cascades
over strange tropical trees.

And the spring had brought the people out into the gardens, the quiet
orderly English people. It was the first stirring of the blood. It had
stirred them to come out in couples, in family parties, in tight
matronly black dresses, in drab coats and trousers in dowdy skirts and
hats. It had stirred some to come in elegant costumes and morning suits
and spats. They looked at the flaunting tropical trees, and made jokes,
and chaffed one another, and laughed not very loud. They were happy in
their quiet orderly English way, happy in the warmth of the sunshine,
happy to be among quiet trees, and to feel the soft grass under their
feet. They did not run about or shout, they walked slowly, quietly,
taking care to keep off the edges of the grass because the notices told
them to do so.

It was very warm, very pleasant, and very tiring. I wandered cut at last
through the big gates, and was waved by a man with a napkin--he stood on
the pavement--through a Georgian house into a garden studded with white
topped tables and dirty ricketty chairs. It was crowded with people, and
I sat down at the only vacant table, and watched them eating plum-cake
and drinking tea quietly, soberly, under the gentle apple-blossom.

A man came up the garden looking quickly from side to side for an empty
place. I watched him in a tired lazy way. There was a bustle and roll
and energy in his walk. I noticed the thickness of his legs above the
knee, the arms that hung so loosely and limply by his sides as they do
with people who wear loose hanging clothes without sleeves, his dark fat
face and the sensual mouth, the great curve of the upper lip and the
hanging lower one. A clever face, dark and inscrutable, with its large
mysterious eyes and the heavy lids which went into deep folds at the
corners.

He stopped near my table, looked at the empty chair and then at me, and
said:

"Excuse me, Sir, but d'you mind my sitting at your table?"

I noticed the slight thickness of the voice, the overemphasis, and the
little note of assertiveness in it. I said I didn't mind at all.

He sat down, leaned back in his chair, and took his hat off. He had a
high forehead, black hair, and well-shaped fat hands.

"Fine day," he said, "wonderfully fine day, the finest day I ever
remember. Nothing to beat a fine English spring day."

I saw the delicate apple-blossom and the pale blue sky behind his large
dark head. I smiled. He saw the smile, flushed, and then smiled himself.

"You are amused," he said, still smiling, "I believe I know why."

"Yes," I said, "You knew me at once and I knew you. We show up, don't
we, under the apple-blossom and this sky. It doesn't belong to us, do
you wish it did?"

"Ah," he said seriously, "that's the question. Or rather we don't belong
to it. We belong to Palestine still, but I'm not sure that it doesn't
belong to us for all that."

"Well, perhaps your version is truer than mine. I'll take it, but
there's still the question, do you wish _you_ belonged to _it_?"

He wasn't a bit offended. He tilted back his chair, put one thumb in the
arm-hole of his waistcoat, and looked round the garden. He showed
abominably concentrated, floridly intelligent, in the thin spring air
and among the inconspicuous tea-drinkers. He didn't answer my question;
he was thinking, and when he spoke, he asked another:

"Do you ever go to Synagogue?"

"No."

"Nor do I, except on Yom Kippur. I still go then every year--pure habit.
I don't believe in it, of course; I believe in nothing--you believe in
nothing--we're all sceptics. And yet we belong to Palestine still.
Funny, ain't it? How it comes out! Under the apple-blossom and blue sky,
as you say, as well as--as--among the tombs."

"Among the tombs?"

"Ah, I was thinking of another man I met. He belongs to Palestine too.
Shall I tell you about him?"

I said I wished he would. He put his hand's in his pockets and began at
once.

* * * * * * * * *

The first time I saw him, I remember the day well, as well as yesterday.
There was no apple-blossom then, a November day, cold, bitter cold, the
coldest day I remember. It was the anniversary of my poor wife's death.
She was my first wife, Rebecca. She made me a good wife, I tell you--we
were very happy. (He took out a white silk pocket handkerchief, opened
it with something of a flourish, and blew his nose long and loudly. Then
he continued.)

I buried her at the cemetery in K--Road. You know it? What? No? You must
know it, the big cemetery near the hospital. You know the hospital at
any rate? Well, you turn down by it coming from the station, take the
first turning to the right and the second to the left, and there you
are. It's a big cemetery, very big, almost as big as Golders Green, and
they keep the gardens very nicely. Well, my poor wife lies there--my
first wife, I've married again, you see, and she's living and well,
thank God--and I went on the first anniversary to visit the grave and
put flowers on it.

There you are now, there's another curious thing. I often wonder why we
do it. It's not as if it did anyone any _good._ I don't believe in
immortality, nor do you, nor do any of us. But I go and put flowers on
her grave though it won't do her any good, poor soul. It's sentiment, I
suppose. No one can say we Jews haven't got that, and family affection.
They're among our very strongest characteristics.

Yes, they don't like us. (He looked round at the quiet tea-drinkers.)
We're too clever perhaps, too sharp, too go-ahead. _Nous_, that's what
we've got, _Nous_, and they don't like it, eh? But they can't deny us
our other virtues--sentiment and family affection. Now look at the
Titanic disaster: who was it refused to get into the boats, unless her
husband went too? Who met death hand in hand with him? Eh? A Jewess!
There you are! Her children rise up and call her blessed: her husband
also and he praiseth her!

I put that verse from Proverbs on my poor wife's tombstone. I remember
standing in front of it, and reading it over and over again that day,
the day I'm talking about. My dear Sir, I felt utterly wretched,
standing there in that cold wet cemetery, with all those white
tombstones round me and a damp yellow November fog. I put some beautiful
white flowers on her grave.

The cemetery-keeper had given me some glass gallipots to stand the
flowers in, and, as I left, I thought I would give him a shilling. He
was standing near the gates. By Jove! You couldn't mistake him for
anything but a Jew. His arms hung down from his shoulders in that
curious, loose, limp way--you know it?--it makes the clothes look as if
they didn't belong to the man who is wearing them. Clever cunning grey
eyes, gold pince-nez, and a nose, by Jove, Sir, one of the best, one of
those noses, white and shiny, which, when you look at it full face,
seems almost flat on the face, but immensely broad, curving down, like a
broad highroad from between the bushy eye-brows down over the lips. And
side face, it was colossal; it stood out like an elephant's trunk with
its florid curves and scrolls.

I was, as I say, utterly wretched. I wanted someone to talk to, and
though I didn't expect to get much comfort out of a cemetery-keeper, I
said by way of conversation, as I gave him a shilling:

"You keep these gardens very nicely."

He looked at me over the gold rims of his glasses:

"We do our best. I haven't been here long, you know, but I do my best.
And a man can't do more, now _can_ he?"

"No" I said, "he can't."

He put his head on one side, and looked at a tombstone near by: it was
tilted over to one side, blackened by the soot to a dirty yellow colour,
the plaster peeling off. There was one dirty scraggy evergreen growing
on the grave. There was a text on the stone, I remember, something about
the righteous nourishing like the bay-tree.

"Of course one can't do everything. Look at that now. Some people don't
do anything, never come near the place, don't spend a penny on their
graves. Then of course they go like that. It will get worse and worse,
for we only bury reserves here now. Sometimes it ain't anyone's fault:
families die out, the graves are forgotten. It don't look nice, but
well, I say, what does it matter after all? When I'm dead, they may
chuck me on the dung-hill, for all I care."

He looked down his nose at the rows and rows of dirty white
grave-stones, which were under his charge, critically, with an air of
hostility, as if they had done him some wrong.

"You don't perhaps believe in a life after death?" I said.

He pushed his hands well down into the pockets of his long overcoat,
hugged himself together, and looked up at the yellow sky and dirty
yellow houses, looming over the cemetery.

"No I don't," he said with conviction. "It ain't likely. Nobody knows
anything about it. It ain't likely, is it?"

"No, but what about the Bible?"

His cold grey eyes looked at me steadily over the gold pince-nez.

"I'm not sure there's much in the Bible about it, eh? And one can't
believe everything in the Bible. There's the Almighty of course, well,
who can say? He may exist, he may not--I say I don't know. But a life
hereafter, I don't believe in it. One don't have to believe everything
now: it was different when I was young. You had to believe everything
then; you had to believe everything they told you in Schul. Now you may
think for yourself. And _mind you_, it don't _do_ to think too much: if
you think too much about those things, you go mad, raving mad. What I
say is, lead a pure clean life here, and you'll get your reward here.
I've seen it in my own case: I wasn't always in a job like this. I had a
business once, things went wrong through no fault of mine, and I lost
everything--everything sold up except an old wooden bed. Ah, those were
hard times, I can tell you! Then I got offered this job--it ain't very
good, but I thought to myself: well, there'll be a comfortable home for
my wife and my two boys as long as I live. I've tried to live a clean
life, and I shall have better times now, eh?

I thought of my own wife and my motherless children: my sadness
increased. And I thought of our race, its traditions and its faith, how
they are vanishing in the life that surrounds us. The old spirit, the
old faith, they had kept alive hot and vigorous--for how many
centuries?--when we were spat upon, outcasts. But now they are cold and
feeble, vanishing in the universal disbelief. I looked at the man under
the shadow of the dirty yellow London fog and the squalid yellow London
houses. "This man," I thought to myself, "a mere keeper of graves is
touched by it as much as I am. He isn't a Jew now any more than I am.
We're Jews only externally now, in our black hair and our large noses,
in the way we stand and the way we walk. But inside we're Jews no
longer. Even _he_ doesn't believe, the keeper of Jewish graves! The old
spirit, the ancient faith has gone out of him."

I was wrong; I know now, and I'll tell you how I came to see it. The
spirit's still there all right; it comes out under the apple-blossom,
eh?, and it came out among the tombs too.

The next time I saw him was another November day, an English, a London
day; O Lord, his nose showed in it very white and florid under the
straight houses and the chimney-pots and the heavy, melancholy dripping
sky. I had married in the meantime, and my wife--like the good soul that
she is--had come with me to put flowers on my poor Rebecca's
grave--another anniversary you see. Yes, I was happy--I don't mind
telling you so--even at my poor Rebecca's graveside.

He was standing there in the same place, in a black top-hat and a great
black overcoat, looking at the tombstones over the top of his
gold-rimmed glasses. All the cares of the world seemed to be weighing
down his sloping shoulders.

"Good day", he said to me, just touching the brim of his hat.

"Well", I said, "and how's the world going with you?"

He fixed me with his hard grey eyes that had a look of pain in them, and
said in a tone which had neither reverence nor irony in it, nor indeed
any feeling at all:

"The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the
Lord. I buried my poor wife last Thursday".

There was an awkward silence.

"I'm very sorry to hear that," I said, "very sorry."

"Yes" he said, "The righteous flourish like the bay-tree: they tell us
that: you see it there on the tombstone."

He put his head on one side and stared at it.

"Vell," he said--and I noticed for the first time the thick Jewish
speech--"vell, its there, so I suppose its true, ain't it? But its
difficult to see, y' know always. I've often said the only thing we can
do is to lead a clean life here, a pure life, and we'll get our reward.
But mine seems to be pretty long in coming," he sighed, "yes pretty
long, I tell you. I had hard times before: we both of us did, my poor
wife and I. And then at last I got this job; I thought she was going to
have a happy peaceful life at last. Nothing very grand in pay, but
enough to keep us and the two boys. And a nice enough house for her. And
then as soon as we come here she takes ill and dies, poor soul."

He wiped his eyes.

"I don't know why I should call her poor soul. She's at rest any way.
And she made me the best, the very best wife a man could have."

He put his hands well down in the pockets of his overcoat, drew his arms
to his sides so that he looked like a great black bird folding its wings
round itself, and rocked himself backwards and forwards, first on his
toes and then on his heels, looking up at me sideways with wrinkled
forehead.

"Vell," he said, "EI've got my two boys. I wish you could see 'em. Fine
young fellows. One earning 30/- a week, though he's only eighteen. He'll
do well, I tell you; all right up here." He tapped his forehead. "And
the other, though I'm his father I'm not afraid to tell anyone, he's a
genius--he draws, draws beautiful, and paints too, real artistic
pictures. Ah they're good lads--a bit wild, the elder one--" he lowered
his voice and showed his teeth in a grin, "he's got an eye for the
petticoats, but then boys will be boys. I daresay I was the same
myself."

I didn't altogether like the grin, with my wife standing there, so I
gave him a shilling and went. I've seen him once more: the day came
round again, and I took my boy this time, dear little chap, to see his
mother's grave. And Fanny came too,--ah, she's a mother to those
motherless children.

There he was standing in the same place, in his top-hat and seedy black
coat. I saw at once that things were not right with him. His clothes
seemed to hang on him as if he were merely an old clothes prop; his old
bowed shoulders sloped more than ever. His face was grey, pasty,
terribly lined, and his nose more white and shiny than ever. Seedy was
the word for him, seedy inside and out, seedy through and through. He
was beaten, degraded, down, gone under, gone all to bits. And yet
somehow he looked as if that was just what hadn't happened--he hadn't
gone all to bits: there was something in him that still stood up and
held him together, something like a rock which, beaten and buffeted,
still held out indomitable.

"Well, and how are you?" I asked.

"Poorly," he said in a flat voice, "poorly--I'm not what I was."

"Nothing serious, I hope?"

"Vell, I'm not on my back yet."

"And the boys? They're still doing well, I hope."

A sort of rigidity came over him: he eyed me furtively and yet sternly.

"Boys? I've only one boy."

"Ah, I'm sorry, very sorry to--"

"No, no, it's not what you think, not that. I've had trouble, but not
that. That eldest boy of mine, he's no longer my son----I have done with
him; I have only one son now."

There was nothing dejected, nothing humble in him now. He seemed to draw
himself together, to become taller. A stiff-necked race, I thought!

"If you ask me how many sons I've got, I say only one, only one. That
fellow isn't my son at all. I had a servant girl here working in my
house, a Christian serving girl--and he married her behind my back. He
asks me to sit down to meat with a girl, a Christian girl, who worked in
my house--I can't do it. I'm not proud, but there are some things--If he
had come to me and said: "Dad, I want to marry a girl"--a really nice
girl--"but she's not one of us: will you give me your permission and
blessing?" Well I don't believe in it. Our women are as good, better
than Christian women. Aren't they as beautiful, as clever, as good
wives? I know my poor mother, God rest her soul, used to say: "My son,"
she said, "if you come to me and say you want to marry a good girl, a
Jewess, I don't care whether she hasn't a chemise to her back, I'll
welcome her--but if you marry a Christian, if she's as rich as Solomon,
I've done with you--don't you ever dare to come into my house again."
Vell, I don't go as far as that, though I understand it. Times change: I
might have received his wife, even though she was a Goy. But a servant
girl who washed my dishes! I couldn't do it. One must have some
dignity."

He stood there upright, stern, noble: a battered scarred old rock, but
immovable under his seedy black coat. I couldn't offer him a shilling; I
shook his hand, and left him brooding over his son and his graves.


[Illustration]

[Illustration]



THE MARK ON THE WALL

By

VIRGINIA WOOLF


Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first
looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is
necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the
steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three
chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must
have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I
remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the
mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my
cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and
that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came
into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up
the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark
interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made
as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the
white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little
way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it . .
. . . . If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a
picture, it must have been for a miniature--the miniature of a lady with
white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red
carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before
us would have chosen pictures in that way--an old picture for an old
room. That is the sort of people they were--very interesting people, and
I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never
see them again, never know what happened next. She wore a flannel dog
collar round her throat, and he drew posters for an oatmeal company, and
they wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their
style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in
his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder,
as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man
about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as
one rushes past in the train.

But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made
by a nail after all; its too big, too round for that. I might get up,
but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say
for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it
happened. O dear me, the mystery of life! The inaccuracy of thought! The
ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our
possessions we have--what an accidental affair this living is after all
our civilisation--let me just count over a few of the things lost in one
lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of all
loses--what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble--three pale blue
canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the
iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle
board, the hand organ--all gone, and jewels too. Opals and emeralds,
they lie about the root of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is
to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit
surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to
compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the
Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the other end without a single
hair pin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked!
Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper
parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying
back like the tail of a race horse. Yes, that seems to express the
rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so
haphazard. . . .

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the
cup of the flower as it turns over deluges one with purple and red
light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here,
helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the
roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are
trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things,
that one won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will
be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks,
and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct
colour--dim pinks and blues--which will, as time goes on, become more
definite, become--I don't know what.

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be
caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf,
left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant
house-keeper--look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust
which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots
utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe. But I know a
house-keeper, a woman with the profile of a policeman, those little
round buttons marked even upon the edge of her shadow, a woman with a
broom in her hand, a thumb on picture frames, an eye under beds and she
talks always of art. She is coming nearer and nearer; and now, pointing
to certain spots of yellow rust on the fender, she becomes so menacing
that to oust her, I shall have to end her by taking action: I shall have
to get up and see for myself what that mark--

But no. I refuse to be beaten. I will not move. I will not recognise
her. See, she fades already. I am very nearly rid of her and her
insinuations, which I can hear quite distinctly. Yet she has about her
the pathos of all people who wish to compromise. And why should I resent
the fact that she has a few books in her house, a picture or two? But
what I really resent is that she resents me--life being an affair of
attack and defence after all. Another time I will have it out with her,
not now. She must go now. The tree outside the window taps very gently
on the pane. I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be
interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from
one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I
want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard
separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea
that passes. Shakespeare. Well, he will do as well as another. A man who
sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so--A
shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through
his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people looking in
through the open door, for this scene is supposed to take place on a
summer's evening,--But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It
doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of
thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are
the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest
mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear
their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that
is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this.

"And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how
I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in
Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles
the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First? I
asked--(but I don't remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple
tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up
the figure of myself in my own mind lovingly, stealthily, not openly
adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my
hand at once for a book in self protection. Indeed, it is curious how
instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any
other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original
to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It
is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the
image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest
depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person
which is seen by other people--what an airless shallow, bald, prominent
world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in
omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that
accounts for the expression in our vague and almost glassy eyes. And the
novelists in future will realise more and more the importance of these
reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost
infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the
phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and
more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the
Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps; but these generalisations are very
worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading
articles, cabinet ministers--a whole class of things indeed which as a
child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing,
from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation.
Generalisations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon
walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes
and habits--like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a
certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything.
The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should
be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them,
such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of
the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real
tablecloths. How shocking and yet how wonderful it was to discover that
these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and
tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the
damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of
illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things, I
wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman;
the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the
standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which has
become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women,
which soon one may hope will be laughed into the dustbin where the
phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and Landseer prints, Gods and
Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of
illegitimate freedom--if freedom exists.

In certain lights, that mark on the wall seems actually to project from
the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to
cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that
strip of the wall it would at a certain point mount and descend a small
tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which
are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to
be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people and finding it
natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the
turf. There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up
those bones and given them a name. What sort of man is an antiquary, I
wonder? Retired colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties
of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone,
and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which
being opened at breakfast time gives them a feeling of importance, and
the comparison of arrowheads necessitates cross country journeys to the
county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly
wives, who wish to make plum jam, or to clean out the study, and have
every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in
perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably
philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It
is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being
opposed, casts all his arrowheads into one scale, and being still
further opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read at the
quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and
his last conscious thoughts are not of wire or child, but of the camp
and that arrow-head there which is now in the case at the local museum,
together with the hand of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan
nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes a piece of Roman pottery, and the
wine-glass that Nelson drank out of--proving I really don't know what.

No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at
this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really--what
shall we say?--the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred
years ago which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many
generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint,
and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a
white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain? Knowledge? Matter for
further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up.
And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of
witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs,
interrogating shrew-mice, and writing down the language of the stars?
And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect
for beauty and health of mind increases. . . . . Yes, one could imagine
a very pleasant world. A quiet spacious world, with the flowers so red
and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists
or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could
slice with ones thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing
the stems of the water-lilies, and hanging suspended over nests of white
sea eggs. . . . . . How peaceful it is down here, rooted into the centre
of the world and gazing up through the gray waters, with their sudden
gleams of light, and their reflections--If it were not for Whitakers
Almanack--if it were not for the Table of Precedency!

I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really
is--a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?

Here is Nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This
train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy,
even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a
finger against Whitaker's Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of
Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High
Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows
somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to
know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels,
comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can't be comforted, if
you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.

I understand Nature's game--her prompting to take action as a way of
ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I
suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action, men, we assume,
who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's
disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel I have grasped a
plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once
turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of
shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a
midnight dream of horror one hastily turns on the light and lies
quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity,
worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof
of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure
of.... Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree;
and trees grow and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they
grow without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests and by
the side of rivers--all things one likes to think about. The cows swish
their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green
that when a moor-hen dives one expects to see its feathers all green
when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the
stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raising domes
of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself;
first the close dry sensation of being wood; then there is the grinding
of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of
it too on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves
close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a
naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long.
The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold
the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses
up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning
of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with huge diamond-cut
red eyes. One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure
of the earth; then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest
branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn't done
with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all
over the world, in bed-rooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms
where men and women sit after tea smoking their cigarettes. It is full
of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take
each one separately--but something is getting in the way ... Where was
I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs, Whitaker's
Almanack, the fields of asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's
moving, falling, slipping, vanishing... There is a vast upheaval of
matter. Someone is standing over me and saying--

"I'm going out to buy a newspaper."

"Yes?"

"Though it's no good, buying newspapers....... Nothing ever happens.
Curse this war! God damn this war!... All the same, I don't see why we
should have a snail on our wall."

Ah, the mark on the wall! For it was a snail.


[Illustration]





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Two Stories" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.