Chapter 6 chapter Five

Mrs. Ramsay looked up and saw William Bankes and Lily pass by the window. "If it doesn't clear up tomorrow," she said, "it's the day after tomorrow. Now..." She was thinking as she spoke: Lily's Chinese eyes slanted into her pale, wrinkled little face. Delicate, but it takes a smart man to find out. "Stand up now and let me measure your leg." Because, maybe they're going to the lighthouse tomorrow, and she'll have to see if the stocking needs an inch or two more. She smiled sweetly, for a good idea had crossed her mind at that moment—William and Lily should get married.She picked up the pair of mélange wool socks, with the crossed steel needles on the cuff, and went to measure James' leg.

"Honey, stand still," she said.Out of jealousy, James is unwilling to be the sock ruler for the lighthouse keeper's children.He moved restlessly on purpose.How could she tell if the socks were too long or too short if he was always like that?she asked. Her youngest child, her darling, had been bewitched by what?She looked up, saw the room, saw the chairs, and thought they were worn out.The cores of those cushions, as Andrew had said the other day, were leaking all over the place.But what good is buying good chairs and letting them sit here all winter to rot wet?she asked.In winter, there is only an old woman looking after the house, and the house will definitely leak water.Never mind, the rent was exactly two pennies and a half a day, and the children liked it.It would have done her husband three thousand miles, or, if she had to be more exact, three hundred miles, far from his library, lectures, and disciples;The straw mats and camp beds and rickety desks and chairs had long since served in London--they were all right here; and a photograph or two, and some books.Books, she thought, would add automatically.She never had time to read, ouch!Even those books given to her by others have the inscription written by the poet "To the lady who must obey her wishes"... "A contemporary beauty who is happier than Helen"... It is shameful to say that she has never bought these books. read.And Crome's On Consciousness and Bates' On the Savage Customs of the Polynesians ("Stand still, my dear," she said)—neither of those books could To the lighthouse.At some point, she guessed, the house would be so dilapidated that something would have to be done.If they would listen to her, and wipe their feet before going into the house, so as not to bring in the sand from the beach, that might be the way.She had to let them bring crabs into the house, if Andrew really wanted to dissect them; or Jesper believed in seaweed for making soup, and you couldn't stop it; or whatever Ruth chose—shells, reeds, Stone; for her children are all a little gifted, but each has a very different taste.And the result, when she took the socks to measure James' legs, she sighed and looked the whole room from floor to ceiling, and this was the result: autumn came and went, year after year, the furniture in the house became more and more Dilapidated, the straw mats are fading, and the scraps of wallpaper crackle in the wind, and you can no longer tell the pattern of roses on the paper.Also, if all the doors in a house are always open, and there isn't a locksmith in all Scotland who can fix the latches, things are bound to rot.Every door is open.She listened.The drawing-room door was open; the hall door was open; it sounded as though the bedroom door was open; and the window on the landing must have been open because she had opened it herself.The windows had to be open, the doors had to be shut—it was such a simple thing, didn't any of them remember?She used to go into the maid's room at night and find the windows shut and the room as airless as an oven.The only exception was the room of the Swiss girl Marie, who would rather not have a bath than be without fresh air.Back home, she had said, "How beautiful those mountains are." Her father was dying far away, and Mrs. Ramsay knew it.He was about to leave his children and make them orphans.She reprimanded the servant girl and demonstrated (how to make the bed, how to open the window, like a French woman, fold her hands together and spread them out for a while), and when the girl spoke, all the quilts around her quietly folded themselves Well, just like a bird's wings folded quietly after flying in the sun for a while, its blue feathers suddenly changed from bright blue steel to lavender.She stood there silently because she had nothing to say.He has throat cancer.She was thinking--how she stood there, and how the girl said, "How beautiful the mountains are at home," but there was no hope, no hope at all.Feeling restless, she said sharply to James:

"Stand still. Don't be impatient." He immediately understood that she was really angry, so he stood up straight for her to measure. Lighthouse Keeper Sollet's little boy was probably much shorter than James, and even taking that into account, the sock was at least half an inch shorter. "Too short," she said, "too short." No one ever looked so downcast, so sad and gloomy, that in the dark, on the way down the shaft from the sun above the surface to the abyss below, perhaps a tear welled up in the corner of his eye; The incoming tide accepted it and calmed down again.No one has ever looked so depressed.

But, people say, is there nothing else but a melancholy appearance?Behind her beauty and abundance - what is hiding?Did he blow his own head off with a gun, they asked.Had he died in the week before their marriage—the other, earlier lover?People heard gossip about him.Or really nothing happened?Nothing more than a beautiful, undisturbed exterior?For, in the moments of great passion, the turmoil of love, and the setback of her career, she could have easily revealed in intimate situations what she herself knew, felt, or experienced, but she But always tight-lipped.She knew it then--she knew it without being told.Her simple mind guessed at once what wise men tend to get wrong.Her pure heart made her thoughts fly to the truth naturally, as crisply as the falling of a stone, and as precise as the landing of a bird.And this truth has been accepted happily, easily, and frankly-this may be just an illusion.

Once, Mr. Banks was moved by her voice on the phone, although she was only telling him the timetable of the train. "The kind of clay that nature molds you with is rare," he said.In his imagination, he clearly saw her standing on the other end of the telephone line, graceful and straight like a Greek statue, with blue eyes.How inappropriate it seemed to be on the phone with such a woman.The three goddesses of grace in Greek mythology who bestow beauty and joy seem to have worked hand in hand in a garden full of green grass and periwinkle to shape that face.He should catch the ten-thirty train to Urston.

"But she was as unaware of her beauty as a child," said Mr. Banks, putting the receiver back on the hook.He went across the room to the window to see how the workmen were progressing with the building of the hotel behind his house.He thought of Mrs Ramsay again when he saw the confusion of workmen scurrying to and fro between the unfinished walls.He thought, there are always some incongruous factors mixed into the harmonious atmosphere on her face.She threw a straw hunting hat on casually; she ran across the meadow in wellies to catch a naughty child.So if all you think about is her beauty, you also have to think of the quivering, living thing (he saw the workmen carrying the bricks onto a little plank of the scaffolding) and add that to the frame portrait to go.Or, if you see her only as a woman, you endow her with some peculiar eccentricity--she does not like to be admired--or she has some underlying desire to abandon her elegant appearance, It was as if beauty and all the men's compliments on beauty bored her, and she wanted nothing more than to be like everyone else, ordinary.he does not know.He doesn't know.He has to go to work.

She was knitting the red-brown wool socks.The gilded picture frame, the green veil over the frame, the authenticated immortal masterpiece of Michelangelo, set off the outline of her head ridiculously.Mrs. Ramsay calmed down, the sternness of the moment disappeared, and she lifted the little boy's head and kissed him on the forehead. "Let's find another picture to cut," she said.