Читать книгу На маяк. Уровень 3 / To the Lighthouse - Вирджиния Вулф - Страница 7

But what happened?

Someone made a mistake.

She fixed her short-sighted[7] eyes upon her husband. She gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to her that something had happened.

He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own splendour, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well. He quivered; he shivered.

She realised, from the familiar signs, that he needed privacy to regain his equilibrium, that he was outraged and anguished. She stroked James’s head; she transferred to him what she felt for her husband. Her husband passed her. She was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled; domesticity triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm. At the window he bent quizzically and whimsically to tickle James’s bare calf with a sprig of something. She twitted him that he had dispatched “that poor young man,” Charles Tansley.

“Tansley had to write his dissertation,” he said. “James will have to write his dissertation one of these days,” he added ironically.

She was trying to finish these tiresome stockings to send them to Sorley’s little boy tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay.

“There isn’t the slightest possible chance that we can go to the Lighthouse tomorrow,” Mr. Ramsay said irascibly.

“How do you know?” she asked. “The wind often changes”.

The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. He stamped his foot on the stone step.

“Damn you,” he said.

But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.

Such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings was to her so horrible that she bent her head. There was nothing to say.

He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said,

“I will ask the Coastguards if you like”.

There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him.

Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands, Mr. Ramsay sheepishly prodded his son’s bare legs, and then he dived into the evening air.

He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his pipe. He looked once at his wife and son in the window. Who will blame him?