Jacob’s Room - Virginia Woolf (smart ebook reader .TXT) 📗

“Indeed he seems to be having⁠ ⁠…” said Mrs. Flanders, and paused, for she was cutting out a dress and had to straighten the pattern, “… a very gay time.”

Mrs. Jarvis thought of Paris. At her back the window was open, for it was a mild night; a calm night; when the moon seemed muffled and the apple trees stood perfectly still.

“I never pity the dead,” said Mrs. Jarvis, shifting the cushion at her back, and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did not hear, for her scissors made so much noise on the table.

“They are at rest,” said Mrs. Jarvis. “And we spend our days doing foolish unnecessary things without knowing why.”

Mrs. Jarvis was not liked in the village.

“You never walk at this time of night?” she asked Mrs. Flanders.

“It is certainly wonderfully mild,” said Mrs. Flanders.

Yet it was years since she had opened the orchard gate and gone out on Dods Hill after dinner.

“It is perfectly dry,” said Mrs. Jarvis, as they shut the orchard door and stepped on to the turf.

“I shan’t go far,” said Betty Flanders. “Yes, Jacob will leave Paris on Wednesday.”

“Jacob was always my friend of the three,” said Mrs. Jarvis.

“Now, my dear, I am going no further,” said Mrs. Flanders. They had climbed the dark hill and reached the Roman camp.

The rampart rose at their feet⁠—the smooth circle surrounding the camp or the grave. How many needles Betty Flanders had lost there; and her garnet brooch.

“It is much clearer than this sometimes,” said Mrs. Jarvis, standing upon the ridge. There were no clouds, and yet there was a haze over the sea, and over the moors. The lights of Scarborough flashed, as if a woman wearing a diamond necklace turned her head this way and that.

“How quiet it is!” said Mrs. Jarvis.

Mrs. Flanders rubbed the turf with her toe, thinking of her garnet brooch.

Mrs. Jarvis found it difficult to think of herself tonight. It was so calm. There was no wind; nothing racing, flying, escaping. Black shadows stood still over the silver moors. The furze bushes stood perfectly still. Neither did Mrs. Jarvis think of God. There was a church behind them, of course. The church clock struck ten. Did the strokes reach the furze bush, or did the thorn tree hear them?

Mrs. Flanders was stooping down to pick up a pebble. Sometimes people do find things, Mrs. Jarvis thought, and yet in this hazy moonlight it was impossible to see anything, except bones, and little pieces of chalk.

“Jacob bought it with his own money, and then I brought Mr. Parker up to see the view, and it must have dropped⁠—” Mrs. Flanders murmured.

Did the bones stir, or the rusty swords? Was Mrs. Flanders’s twopenny-halfpenny brooch forever part of the rich accumulation? and if all the ghosts flocked thick and rubbed shoulders with Mrs. Flanders in the circle, would she not have seemed perfectly in her place, a live English matron, growing stout?

The clock struck the quarter.

The frail waves of sound broke among the stiff gorse and the hawthorn twigs as the church clock divided time into quarters.

Motionless and broad-backed the moors received the statement “It is fifteen minutes past the hour,” but made no answer, unless a bramble stirred.

Yet even in this light the legends on the tombstones could be read, brief voices saying, “I am Bertha Ruck,” “I am Tom Gage.” And they say which day of the year they died, and the New Testament says something for them, very proud, very emphatic, or consoling.

The moors accept all that too.

The moonlight falls like a pale page upon the church wall, and illumines the kneeling family in the niche, and the tablet set up in 1780 to the Squire of the parish who relieved the poor, and believed in God⁠—so the measured voice goes on down the marble scroll, as though it could impose itself upon time and the open air.

Now a fox steals out from behind the gorse bushes.

Often, even at night, the church seems full of people. The pews are worn and greasy, and the cassocks in place, and the hymnbooks on the ledges. It is a ship with all its crew aboard. The timbers strain to hold the dead and the living, the ploughmen, the carpenters, the foxhunting gentlemen and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join together in syllabling the sharp-cut words, which forever slice asunder time and the broad-backed moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despair and triumph, but for the most part good sense and jolly indifference, go trampling out of the windows any time these five hundred years.

Still, as Mrs. Jarvis said, stepping out on to the moors, “How quiet it is!” Quiet at midday, except when the hunt scatters across it; quiet in the afternoon, save for the drifting sheep; at night the moor is perfectly quiet.

A garnet brooch has dropped into its grass. A fox pads stealthily. A leaf turns on its edge. Mrs. Jarvis, who is fifty years of age, reposes in the camp in the hazy moonlight.

“… and,” said Mrs. Flanders, straightening her back, “I never cared for Mr. Parker.”

“Neither did I,” said Mrs. Jarvis. They began to walk home.

But their voices floated for a little above the camp. The moonlight destroyed nothing. The moor accepted everything. Tom Gage cries aloud so long as his tombstone endures. The Roman skeletons are in safe keeping. Betty Flanders’s darning needles are safe too and her garnet brooch. And sometimes at midday, in the sunshine, the moor seems to hoard these little treasures, like a nurse. But at midnight when no one speaks or gallops, and the thorn tree is perfectly still, it would be foolish to vex the moor with questions⁠—what? and why?

The church clock, however, strikes twelve.

The water fell off a ledge like lead⁠—like a chain with thick white links. The train ran out into a steep green meadow, and Jacob saw striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy.

A motor car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept up with the train, raising dust behind it. There were