Читать книгу На маяк. Уровень 3 / To the Lighthouse - Вирджиния Вулф - Страница 5

Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over. He came down upon her, “Boldly we rode and well!” Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so alarming.

Someone came out of the house. He came towards her. It was William Bankes; her brush quivered. William Bankes stood beside her.

They had rooms in the village. When they were walking in, walking out, parting late on door-mats, they said little things about the soup, about the children, about one thing and another which made them allies. When he stood beside her now (he was old enough to be her father too, a botanist, a widower, very scrupulous and clean) she just stood there. He just stood there. Her shoes were excellent, he observed. He was lodging in the same house with her.

Mr. Ramsay glared at them. That did make them both vaguely uncomfortable. It was with difficulty that she took her eyes off her picture.

She laid her brushes neatly in the box, side by side, and said to William Bankes:

“It suddenly gets cold. The sun gives less heat,” she said.

It was bright enough, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers. But something moved, flashed, turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after all, the middle of September, and past six in the evening. So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge.

They came there regularly every evening. The pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it.

They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity. William Bankes was looking at the far sand hills. He thought of Ramsay, he thought of a road in Westmorland. William Bankes remembered a hen with its little chicks. It seemed to him that their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay married and something important went out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained his affection for Ramsay.

He was anxious to clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of dryness. Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes was childless and a widower.

Yes. That was it. He turned from the view. And Mr. Bankes felt aged and saddened. He has dried indeed.

The Ramsays were not rich. It was a wonder how they managed to contrive it all[6]. Eight children! To feed eight children! And the education was very expensive (true, Mrs. Ramsay had something of her own perhaps). And those fellows, angular, ruthless youngsters, required clothes. He called them after the Kings and Queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless, Andrew the Just, Prue the Fair. Prue must be beautiful, he thought, and Andrew must have brains.

While he walked up the drive and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments (for she was in love with them all), he commiserated Ramsay, envied him. But what, for example, did this Lily Briscoe think?

“Oh, but,” said Lily, “think of his work!”

Whenever she “thought of his work” she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew’s. She asked him what his father’s books were about.

“Subject and object and the nature of reality,” Andrew said.

She said,

“Oh, I don’t understand what that means”.

“Think of a kitchen table then,” he told her, “when you’re not there.”

So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table.

Mr. Bankes was glad that she had asked him “to think of his work.” He had thought of it, often and often.

“Ramsay is one of those men who do their best work before they are forty.”

He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty. But the number of men who make a definite contribution to anything whatsoever is very small, he said.

How to judge people, how to think of them? She was standing by the pear tree. You have greatness, but Mr. Ramsay has none of it. He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical. He is spoilt; he is a tyrant. But he has what you (she addressed Mr. Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles. He loves dogs and his children. He has eight. Mr. Bankes has none.