Chapter 40 chapter Ten

Cam dipped her fingers in the waves again, thinking that this was the island they lived on.She had never seen it from the sea before.It just lay there on the sea, with a hollow and two steep crags in the middle, and the water rushed through the hollow, and the waves spread for miles on either side of the island.The island was small; it was shaped somewhat like an upturned leaf.She began to make up a story for herself about escaping from death on a sinking ship, and she thought, we just got on a light boat like this.The water ran through her fingers, and a clump of seaweed scattered and disappeared behind her fingers; however, she wasn't serious about making up a story for herself, what she needed was this sense of near-death and adventure, because, She was thinking, as the boat sailed on, how angry her father was for her ignorance of the compass; slipped away, vanished, drifted away.What will follow?Where are they going?A fountain of joy seemed to spring from her cold hands, deep in the sea, and she loved the change of atmosphere, the sense of escape and adventure that she had survived to be here. feel joy.From this fountain of joy that sprung up unintentionally, the water splashed and splashed into a dim darkness, and floated on the vague shape sleeping in the bottom of her heart, an uncomprehended, A world tossing and turning in darkness, catching occasional flashes of light from everywhere—Greece, Rome, Constantinople.She thought: Although it is only a small place like a standing leaf, and the golden water rushes through its hollows and flows around it, is not even such a small island in the universe? Occupy a certain position?She thought that those old gentlemen in the study would be able to answer this question for her.Sometimes she wandered there from the garden on purpose to catch them and see what they were doing.They were in the study (probably Mr. Carmichael or Mr. Banks with her father), sitting opposite each other in low armchairs.They were rattling through the pages of The Times before them when she came in from the garden, where someone had said about Jesus Christ, or that a mammoth had been dug up in a London street, or about Speculation about what Napoleon was like, it's all jumbled together.Then they picked it all up with clean hands (they were dressed in gray and smelled of heather), they swept together the scraps of paper, they turned the papers over, crossed their legs, and said a few words now and then. A very short sentence.Just for her own pleasure, she would take a book off the shelf and stand there watching her father write very neatly from one page to the other, coughing a little now and then, or talking to him. Another old gentleman sitting opposite said a few brief words.She stood there with the open book in her hand and thought: Here you can spread out whatever you think of like a leaf soaked in water; If it can pass between an old gentleman smoking a cigarette and clipping The Times, then it is correct.He was not, she thought, as she watched her father writing in his study (he was now in the boat), nor was he vain, nor was he a tyrant, nor did he seek to compel sympathy for him.Indeed, if he had seen her standing there reading a book, he would have asked her as pleasantly as anyone: Is there nothing he can do to help her?

She feared the idea was wrong.She watched him read the little book with a shiny cover, mottled like a snipe egg.No, it's right.She looked at him now and wanted to speak to James aloud. (James' eyes, however, were still on the sail.) James would say he was a sarcastic brute.James would say that he kept pulling the conversation around himself and his work.His self-willed conceit was almost intolerable.Worst of all: he's a tyrant.But lo!Look at him, she said.Look at him now.She watched him sit cross-legged, reading the little book; the yellow pages were familiar to her, but she did not know what was written on them.It was a small book; it was densely printed; and she knew that on the back pages he had written down the fifteen francs he had spent on dinner, how much he had spent on wine, how much he had spent on tips to waiters, and all that. , all neatly added together at the bottom corner of that page.However, she didn't know what was written in this little book that he often put in his pocket and curled up the corners.What he was thinking, none of them knew.However, he was absorbed in reading, and when he looked up as he was doing now, he was not looking at anything, he was merely trying to grasp a certain idea more precisely.This goal was achieved, his mind flew back again, and he immersed himself in reading again.She thought that when he was reading, he seemed to be pointing the way, or was driving a flock of sheep, or climbing up a small path; It hit him, and a thorn thorn blocked him, but he never let himself be defeated by these difficulties; he went on bravely, turning page after page.She went on telling herself the story of the narrow escape from the sinking ship, because, while he sat there, she was safe; as she felt safe when she crept in from the garden into the house. , taking a book from the shelf, the old gentleman suddenly put down the newspaper in his hand, and said a few words about Napoleon's personality very briefly.

She stared back out to sea again, at the island.But the leaf has lost its sharp outline.It is very small, very far away.Now the sea is more important than the coast.Waves rolled around them, a log rolled in the trough of one, a seagull soared over the crest of another.She dipped her fingers in the water and thought that at about this point a boat had sunk once.So she murmured to herself half asleep: We all perish, each alone.