Jacob's Room - Virginia Woolf (polar express read aloud txt) 📗

seeing Jacob walk down the

street, take out his latch-key, and open the door, “I’m afraid I’m

late”; upon which Nick said nothing and Fanny grew defiant.

 

“I’ll never come again!” she cried at length.

 

“Don’t, then,” Nick replied, and off she ran without so much as good-night.

 

How exquisite it was—that dress in Evelina’s shop off Shaftesbury

Avenue! It was four o’clock on a fine day early in April, and was Fanny

the one to spend four o’clock on a fine day indoors? Other girls in that

very street sat over ledgers, or drew long threads wearily between silk

and gauze; or, festooned with ribbons in Swan and Edgars, rapidly added

up pence and farthings on the back of the bill and twisted the yard and

three-quarters in tissue paper and asked “Your pleasure?” of the next

comer.

 

In Evelina’s shop off Shaftesbury Avenue the parts of a woman were shown

separate. In the left hand was her skirt. Twining round a pole in the

middle was a feather boa. Ranged like the heads of malefactors on Temple

Bar were hats—emerald and white, lightly wreathed or drooping beneath

deep-dyed feathers. And on the carpet were her feet—pointed gold, or

patent leather slashed with scarlet.

 

Feasted upon by the eyes of women, the clothes by four o’clock were

flyblown like sugar cakes in a baker’s window. Fanny eyed them too. But

coming along Gerrard Street was a tall man in a shabby coat. A shadow

fell across Evelina’s window—Jacob’s shadow, though it was not Jacob.

And Fanny turned and walked along Gerrard Street and wished that she had

read books. Nick never read books, never talked of Ireland, or the House

of Lords; and as for his finger-nails! She would learn Latin and read

Virgil. She had been a great reader. She had read Scott; she had read

Dumas. At the Slade no one read. But no one knew Fanny at the Slade, or

guessed how empty it seemed to her; the passion for ear-rings, for

dances, for Tonks and Steer—when it was only the French who could

paint, Jacob said. For the moderns were futile; painting the least

respectable of the arts; and why read anything but Marlowe and

Shakespeare, Jacob said, and Fielding if you must read novels?

 

“Fielding,” said Fanny, when the man in Charing Cross Road asked her

what book she wanted.

 

She bought Tom Jones.

 

At ten o’clock in the morning, in a room which she shared with a school

teacher, Fanny Elmer read Tom Jones—that mystic book. For this dull

stuff (Fanny thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes.

Good people like it. Dowdy women who don’t mind how they cross their

legs read Tom Jones—a mystic book; for there is something, Fanny

thought, about books which if I had been educated I could have liked—

much better than ear-rings and flowers, she sighed, thinking of the

corridors at the Slade and the fancy-dress dance next week. She had

nothing to wear.

 

They are real, thought Fanny Elmer, setting her feet on the mantelpiece.

Some people are. Nick perhaps, only he was so stupid. And women never—

except Miss Sargent, but she went off at lunch-time and gave herself

airs. There they sat quietly of a night reading, she thought. Not going

to music-halls; not looking in at shop windows; not wearing each other’s

clothes, like Robertson who had worn her shawl, and she had worn his

waistcoat, which Jacob could only do very awkwardly; for he liked Tom

Jones.

 

There it lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence;

the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked

Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For

he never read modern novels. He liked Tom Jones.

 

“I do like Tom Jones,” said Fanny, at five-thirty that same day early in

April when Jacob took out his pipe in the arm-chair opposite.

 

Alas, women lie! But not Clara Durrant. A flawless mind; a candid

nature; a virgin chained to a rock (somewhere off Lowndes Square)

eternally pouring out tea for old men in white waistcoats, blue-eyed,

looking you straight in the face, playing Bach. Of all women, Jacob

honoured her most. But to sit at a table with bread and butter, with

dowagers in velvet, and never say more to Clara Durrant than Benson said

to the parrot when old Miss Perry poured out tea, was an insufferable

outrage upon the liberties and decencies of human nature—or words to

that effect. For Jacob said nothing. Only he glared at the fire. Fanny

laid down Tom Jones.

 

She stitched or knitted.

 

“What’s that?” asked Jacob.

 

“For the dance at the Slade.”

 

And she fetched her head-dress; her trousers; her shoes with red

tassels. What should she wear?

 

“I shall be in Paris,” said Jacob.

 

And what is the point of fancy-dress dances? thought Fanny. You meet the

same people; you wear the same clothes; Mangin gets drunk; Florinda sits

on his knee. She flirts outrageously—with Nick Bramham just now.

 

“In Paris?” said Fanny.

 

“On my way to Greece,” he replied.

 

For, he said, there is nothing so detestable as London in May.

 

He would forget her.

 

A sparrow flew past the window trailing a straw—a straw from a stack

stood by a barn in a farmyard. The old brown spaniel snuffs at the base

for a rat. Already the upper branches of the elm trees are blotted with

nests. The chestnuts have flirted their fans. And the butterflies are

flaunting across the rides in the Forest. Perhaps the Purple Emperor is

feasting, as Morris says, upon a mass of putrid carrion at the base of

an oak tree.

 

Fanny thought it all came from Tom Jones. He could go alone with a book

in his pocket and watch the badgers. He would take a train at eight-thirty and walk all night. He saw fire-flies, and brought back glow-worms in pill-boxes. He would hunt with the New Forest Staghounds. It

all came from Tom Jones; and he would go to Greece with a book in his

pocket and forget her.

 

She fetched her hand-glass. There was her face. And suppose one wreathed

Jacob in a turban? There was his face. She lit the lamp. But as the

daylight came through the window only half was lit up by the lamp. And

though he looked terrible and magnificent and would chuck the Forest, he

said, and come to the Slade, and be a Turkish knight or a Roman emperor

(and he let her blacken his lips and clenched his teeth and scowled in

the glass), still—there lay Tom Jones.