Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Virginia Woolf
Title Page
Introduction by Jeanette Winterson
Introduction by Gillian Beer
The Waves
Copyright
About the Book
The Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel. It begins with six children playing in a garden by the sea and follows their lives as they grow up and experience friendship, love and grief at the death of their beloved friend Percival. Regarded by many as her greatest work, The Waves is also seen as Virginia Woolf’s response to the loss of her brother Thoby, who died when he was twenty-six.
The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
About the Author
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of ‘The Bloomsbury Group’. This informal collective of artists and writers, which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob’s Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf’s distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey.
Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One’s Own (1929), a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother’s death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
Also by Virginia Woolf
Novels
The Voyage Out
Night and Day
Jacob’s Room
Mrs Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
Orlando
The Years
Between the Acts
Shorter Fiction
The Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction
Non-Fiction and Other Works
Flush
Roger Fry
A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas
The Common Reader Vols 1 and 2
Selected Diaries (edited by Anne Olivier Bell)
Selected Letters (edited by Joanne Trautmann Banks)
The text of this edition of The Waves is based on that of the original Hogarth Press edition, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf on 8th October 1931.
Jeanette Winterson on The Waves
‘I burn, I shiver,’ said Jinny. ‘out of this sun, into this shadow.’
Sun and moon are usually paired together, but sun and shadow are the light-changes that affect our lives.
Virginia Woolf lived from intensity to intensity. There were lit-up days when she could see everything, days where nothing was hidden, where secrets became only a code that needed the light to fall on them to be read. There were other days when the shadows not only obscured the world but became a monstrous kingdom of their own. Woolf’s struggle with the shadow, her pleasure in the light, and her growing understanding of the strange balance of both, was a personal epic of the Gilgamesh kind, of the Job kind. The close details can be found in her letters and diaries. They are among the best letters and diaries written in English, but even so, frank as they are, revealing as they are, they cannot tell us what we need to know. Only her fiction can do that.
What do we need to know?
About sun. About shadow.
The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers revealed themselves upheld by streaks of light. Tables and chairs rose to the surface as if they had been sunk under water...The veins of the glaze of the china, the grain of wood, the fibres of the matting became more and more finely engraved. Everything was without shadow.
This noonday madness, where everything assumes a ‘fanatical existence’, where there is no shadow, is the briefest point of the day. Where there is sun there must be shadow, but the king-moment, at the high pause of the wheel, the sun turns everything to light. It is brief but it is true, or, if you prefer, it is true but it is brief. We all know this moment, in reality and as symbol. For a very short time we know it in our own bodies. In The Waves, Percival represents this perfect risen sun. ‘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...’ Percival’s arrogance, his dynamic laziness, the simple fact of his presence, alters the landscape. Neville, the gay man, cannot bear to look at Percival at their farewell dinner before he goes to India. Percival is too bright. He is the hero, the sun-god.
What happens to this hero? This sun-god?
‘He is dead,’ said Neville. ‘He fell. His horse tripped. He was thrown. The sails of the world have swung round and caught me on the head. All is over. The lights of the world have gone out.’
Reading this, I think of Siegfried, the hero who Percival most resembles. Siegfried, the only man in the world strong enough to row against the current of the Rhine, is stabbed in the back, drunk, at a hunting party. Bernard, remembering Percival, longs to hear his ‘wild carol’, the sound of a hunting song when the windows are thrown open. He remembers him as strong, unvanquished, but like Siegfried, fate, not fight kills Percival. He does not die in battle, he dies in the dirt thrown from a flea-bitten mare. The sun is plunged out.
If the values that Percival represents are admirable – and he is never criticised in the novel – he is, like Siegfried, already an anachronism. The Empire Percival chooses to serve is at the end of its life. Valhalla, the home for heroes that is the proper resting place for Siegfried, is burning down before he gets there, destroyed not so much by Wotan’s bad management as an inevitability in which they both collude. Time changes everything, even heroes, even gods.
Time, which is a sunny pasture covered with a dancing light, time which is widespread as a field at midday, becomes pendant. Time tapers to a point. As a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment, time falls. These are the true cycles, these are the true events.
Trapped by their own certainties in worlds that are dying, Percival and Siegfried can only die. Time falls, the wheel turns.
For the others, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda, Louis, Neville and Bernard, the shadow is closer than the sun. ‘But without Percival there is no solidity. We are silhouettes...’ None of the six enjoy Percival’s magnificent confidence, but with the exception of Rhoda, all survive. The Waves is a book of constant re-orientation – to a changing world, to a changing self. Without this re-orientation, where the compass must be checked and new directions given, it is not possible to survive. Woolf keenly felt the unknown world opening around her. She knew that after the First World War a way of life had gone forever. The certainties had gone forever. The shelters of money, class, Church, tradition, could no longer be relied upon to protect. The long summer days of childhood had vanished. Narrative itself was no longer a steady progress of character and action and resolution. The writing swerved and faltered, had to begin again. Virginia Woolf was one of the first to begin again. All her books are an effort towards a new chart. The chart is not always easy to read and sometimes there is little light to read it by. This is the condition of our lives. We are not easy to read and we read others badly, either blinded by sun or mislead by shadows. Since Einstein, science has warned us that even our simple certainties are uncertain. The difficulty of knowing is that we are both the instrument of knowing and what we seek to know.
In The Waves, Virginia Woolf tried to walk on water. She did this so that her readers could do it too. She wanted to write about the vast unknown uncertain continent that is the world and us in it. This continent is not a land mass. It is not solid, it is not stable. It shifts, it storms, it drowns, it is both the simple surface of things and their depths. At noon it is calm and clear. When the shadows fall, even shallow water menaces. How to write this?
Her method was not the method of the nineteenth century, where a boat could be put out, and a course decided, and everyone on board securely taken to the Captain’s destination. She wanted something riskier, more intimate, but she still needed to keep control. She chose to walk. She put language under the soles of her feet and she walked. She watched the way the sun affected the water and she walked. All the time she walked she wrote. It is a delicate exposed method. As readers we sometimes long for something hard and firm and unyielding, a Percival narrative, a hero text, that would dash through the water like a powerboat, controlling the waves. Which of us can say that our lives are like that – definite, purposed, fully controlled? Which of us can say that our emotions are solid things we can hold in our hands?
To try and tell the truth about life is to admit that truth is not found in any one place, but swarms plankton-like in any scoop of water we draw up. The sense is in the pattern and the pattern is always changing. The pattern looks different in different lights. We try to make an order but our order is always provisional and the trick is to know that and not get caught in the hero-certainties of too much sun.
There is a great sense of loss in The Waves, for those certainties, that sun. It is a sense of loss that is not nostalgia. Loss is pain but pain can be a navigational aid. The Waves steers us out into the water into the shadows. We have to go because soon only the desert will be left behind.
Jeanette Winterson
January, 2000
Gillian Beer on The Waves
When in 1926 Virginia Woolf first glimpsed the book that became The Waves it was to be about ‘the thing that exists when we aren’t there’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Vol. 3 (1925–1930), p. 114). That was a thought that had already entered To the Lighthouse published in 1927: ‘Think of a table when you’re not there’, Andrew tells the painter Lily, in an attempt to explain his father’ s philosophy. What survives, in absence? – do tables, houses, people, friends, the dead? In To the Lighthouse the death of Mrs Ramsay gives poignant intensity to the question as she comes back in memory, both there and not there. In its first inklings, as Woolf finished writing To the Lighthouse, The Waves was imagined as the story of a single woman, ‘a mind thinking’, but as the work grew it burgeoned out as a group of friends who meet from time to time across a life-time. The work muses on presence and absence and on the massing of experience, shared and isolated. Are our friends there when we are not? Are they our continuity? Do they ensure our being? Near the end of the book the writer, Bernard, muses on identity:
And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda, and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt ‘I am you’. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome.
How we merge and separate and merge again becomes the rhythm of the book. Its presence is expressed through the hidden voices of the individual friends, sustained together in the reader’s mind.
In silent reading, sounds are at once heard and unheard. As we read fiction, its people are both present and absent. Woolf explores how deeply these paradoxes correspond to the reality of extended life, in which friends matter across time but are only intermittently present in consciousness, in which our bodies change through youth to age and yet seem constant. From near the start of Woolf’s imagining of it, the book was to be peopled by sounds and voices: ‘voices of cock & nightingale; & then all the children at a long table’. She continued:
The unreal world must be round all this – the phantom waves...Could one not get the waves to be heard all through. Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises. (Diary, 3, (1925–1930), p. 236).
There must be, she thought, ‘the beautiful single moth’ and ‘a flower growing’. Moth and flower and farmyard noises drop away, or appear only momentarily in the finished work. But the desire for ‘farmyard noises’ and ‘odd, irrelevant noises’ is revealing. The idea brings to the surface a vein of satire on human utterance, a longing to reach down past it to primal sounds, that haunts the completed (and exhaustively verbal) work. Grunts, purrs, footsteps, hoofs, street sounds, ‘the voices of cock and nightingale’, the little language that lovers use, the poker rattling cinders, the gardeners sweeping, and the founding sounds of pain form the ground of the book’s harmonies, its cacophonies.
Here again there should be music. Not that wild hunting-song, Percival’s music; but a painful, guttural, visceral, also soaring, lark-like, pealing song to replace these flagging foolish, transcripts.
Bernard, the phrase-maker, seeks to escape from phrases to
a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl, a cry.
Woolf knows herself as phrase maker too as she works on the book, though she allies the activity with waves rather than fragments:
I say to myself instinctively ‘Whats the phrase for that?’ & try to make more & more vivid the roughness of the air current & the tremor of the rooks wings <deep breasting it> slicing-as if the air were full of ridges & ripples & roughnesses; they rise & sink, up & down, as if the exercise <pleased them> rubbed & braced them like swimmers in rough water. (Diary, 3, (1925–1930), p. 191).
Waves sound throughout Virginia Woolf’s writing, sometimes evoking a past fulfilled, as in her early novel Night and Day (1919): ‘Once more Katherine felt the serene air all around her, and seemed far off to hear the solemn beating of the sea upon the shore. But she knew that she must join the present on to this past.’ In To the Lighthouse waves thud like logs on the shore of the holiday island, marking the verge of the human and human meaning. In her Diary in the years leading up to the writing of The Waves the wave sometimes means the intensification of life: ‘I note the strength & vividness of feelings which suddenly break & foam away.’ At other times the wave is an intrusive energy, annihilating identity. On the last day of writing To the Lighthouse (15 September 1926) Woolf observed her own depression with a mixture of self-immersion and caustic distance:
Woke up perhaps at 3. Oh its beginning its coming – the horror – physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart – tossing me up. I’m unhappy unhappy! Down – God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling like this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes; I detect that. Failure failure. (The wave rises.) Oh they laughed at my taste in green paint! Wave crashes. I wish I were dead.
Green paint and failure, her sister and childlessness, overwhelm her as she yet stands watching, seeking a language that will fulfil and resist the wave: ‘I brace myself to shove to throw to batter down. I begin to march blindly forward.’ (That fierce language of combat will enter Bernard’s vocabulary in The Waves.) In this diary passage, morning comes: ‘I feel the wave beginning & watch the light whitening & wonder how, this time, breakfast and daylight will overcome it.’
The mercy of routine and return is fundamental to the rhythm of The Waves. The work shows also that horror springs out of the humdrum, quite as much as from the exotic. Often it displays that movement as comedy. The constrained passion of Neville, the gay man, declares itself as tidiness even while he longs vehemently for liberty:
We must oppose the waste and deformity of the world, its crowds eddying round and round disgorged and trampling. One must slip paper-knives, even, exactly through the pages of novels, and tie up packets of letters neatly with green silk, and brush up the cinders with a hearth broom. Everything must be done to rebuke the horror of deformity.
Louis thinks:
To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird’s sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door. Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by a beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door, positively, once and for all.
Things will not keep their habitual scale; the strain produces disquiet and the stirrings of absurdity: Bernard, thinking great thoughts finds his nose in the way, Rhoda hesitating at the door, feels the tiger leap. The passionate declarative life within finds no answering medium in action: the imbalances make the reader smile and wince.
Humdrum life is the medium of experience at its most profound. Its quality of repetition and recurrence aligns it with the wave-motion that is the nature of the universe, as James Jeans had recently affirmed in The Universe Around Us, which Woolf read as she wrote The Waves. For Jinny, the urbanite, ‘Lifts rise and fall; trains stop, trains start as regularly as the waves of the sea’. For Susan, the country-dweller, recurrence is expressed as weekdays and seasons:
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; the horses going up to the fields, and the horses returning; the rooks rising and falling, and catching the elm-trees in their net, whether it is April, whether it is November.
The turn of night and day, the procession of the week, holds experience within bounds and allays that other knowledge that swells through consciousness: of time irreversible, self without limits, age coming on. But the humdrum also wastes experience:
This is human life: this is the infinitely precious stuff issued in a narrow roll to us now, & then withdrawn for ever; and we spend it thus.
(Diary, 3, (1925–1930), p. 95).
The Waves releases the intensity of response always lying at a level just beneath utterance. The hidden voices of six people moving through childhood to late life are the medium of the reader’s discovery in this book. What is that discovery? – Something permeable, something intimate, closer to our own silent experience than fiction usually permits. And something that seeks through language to reach the habitual states of being where language hardly counts, as Bernard, the professional writer among the characters, at last perceives: ‘Blue, red-even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through.’
Seeking ways out of language sounds like a self-annihilating project for a novelist, but in the event Woolf uses sturdy description of everyday happening, oddly disproportioned, rather than an abstract distance from experience. Everything that happens in The Waves happens through someone. Their senses are the medium as much as their opinions.
A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves – a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution.
Event is retrieved through each particular consciousness, and each consciousness is also part of a loose grouping of friends who we meet only in the periods where they first knew each other or on the formal separate occasions when they gather in adulthood: they are present in infancy, at school, in youth and young adulthood (at university for the men but not the women), at a restaurant to say farewell to Percival, in their reactions to Percival’s death far away in India, in middle age for a rare expedition, to Hampton Court. And last, implicit but absent in Bernard’s long evening alone in a restaurant in age, brooding on the others and on his own being. The effect is curious: many readers who have difficulty telling the characters apart while they are reading find that in retrospect the six people spring vividly to separate life. They are held in the memory like people one has known, in recollected scenes, in momentary intimacies, in fixed tableaux.
Three women and three men – Jinny, Rhoda, Susan, Bernard, Louis, Neville – are living recognisably middle-class lives mainly in 1930s London. Louis, for example, is the businessman and also the poet of mean and battered images who draws on the language and dilemmas of T.S. Eliot (who was born in St Louis): Louis is the outsider, the man from a colony who is also the future of language and of commerce: ‘his words issue pressed, condensed, enduring’.
I have read my poet in an eating-house, and, stirring my coffee, listened to the clerks making bets at the little tables, watched the women hesitating at the counter. I said that nothing should be irrelevant, like a piece of brown paper dropped casually on the floor.
But all the characters are also wave-clusters of experience mentally traversing time and space, back to ancient Egypt, across the world to India. India is the downfall of the seventh figure of the book, a figure both dull and magical: Percival, whose consciousness we never enter, who is worshipped but aloof, unaware. Percival’s death in a fall from his horse makes him a figure of the imperial past, trying to bring order to a world whose nature and value is to be unruly. Rhoda, the most vehement and the most isolated of them all, has died as well, but when we never know. She kills herself outside narrative time and re-appears in the episode at Hampton Court.
As she wrote, Woolf read Jeans on ‘time bending backwards’ in quantum physics and was fascinated by his ideas. She holds the book together with italicised interludes that draw time and space together as arc and as repetition, describing the passage of the day from dawn to night, lives from the nursery to old age. ‘I am convinced’ she wrote in the diary in 1929 ‘that I am right to seek for a station whence I can set my people against time and the sea.’ This suggests perspective (‘set against’) but also resistance: ‘against time and the sea’. Moreover, ‘against’ is an arrested image; that arrest has dissolved into wave-motion by the time the book was finished. Beneath the onward passages of day and life is a welter of being that has no set trajectory and so is not subject to time. The form of the waves moves on; the molecules that compose them simply rise and fall.
The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.
What appears as description of the sea half way through the world becomes Bernard’s resistance to death, heroic and absurd in its high language, its low setting. The ‘stretch of pavement’ undermines the gallant self-projection as rider:
And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back...What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death.
Gillian Beer
January, 2000
The Waves
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 Biddy 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 eyebeam 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 crossroads 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 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 school-room 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 know 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.”