Дом с привидениями. Уровень 2 / A Haunted House. Вирджиния Вулф

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about it. Some antiquary dug up those bones. He gave them a name.

      What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part[19], I daresay. They examine clods of earth and stone. They get into correspondence with the clergy. The Colonel himself feels philosophic. He accumulates evidence. He finally believes in the camp. Suddenly a stroke kills him. His last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child. His last conscious thoughts are of the camp and that arrow-head there. It is now at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and Nelson’s wineglass.

      No, no, nothing is proved. Nothing is known. I get up at this very moment. I ascertain that the mark on the wall is really the head of a gigantic old nail. But what shall I gain? Knowledge?

      And what is knowledge? Our learned men are the descendants of witches and hermits. They crouched in caves. They interrogated shrew-mice. They wrote down the language of the stars.

      Yes, we can imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers. How peaceful it is down here! How peaceful it is in the centre of the world!

      I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is. A nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?

      This thought is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality. Who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Lord High Chancellor[20] follows the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop of York follows the Lord High Chancellor. Everybody follows somebody. Such is the philosophy of Whitaker. The great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows. Let that comfort you.

      I understand Nature’s game. I take action to end any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, our slight contempt for men of action comes. Men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, I want to stop the disagreeable thoughts.

      I feel a satisfying sense of reality. It turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite. Here is something real. Thus, one wakes from a midnight dream of horror. One hastily turns on the light. One lies quiescent. One worships the chest of drawers[21]. One worships solidity. One worships reality. One worships the impersonal world. The world is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of[22].

      Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree. Trees grow. We don’t know how they grow. For years and years they grow. They grow in meadows, in forests. They grow by the side of rivers.

      The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons. They paint rivers green. I like to think of the fish. I like to think of water-beetles. I like to think of the tree itself. The slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June.

      One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth. Then the last storm comes. The high branches drive deep into the ground. Even so, life isn’t done with[23]. There are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree. They are all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement. They are in lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea. This tree is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts. I want to take each one separately.

      Where was I? What was it? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker’s Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can’t remember anything.

      Everything is moving. Everything is falling. Everything is slipping. Everything is vanishing. Someone is standing over me. Someone is saying:

      “I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”

      “Yes?”

      “Though why buy newspapers? Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war! I don’t see why we have a snail on our wall.”

      Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

      The New Dress

      Mrs. Barnet handed her the mirror. Mabel took her cloak off. She had her first serious suspicion that something was wrong. Thus she confirmed the suspicion. It was not right, not quite right. She went upstairs. She greeted Clarissa Dalloway. She went straight to the far end of the room, to the corner. There a looking-glass hung. She looked. No! It was not right. And at once the misery, the profound dissatisfaction met her, relentlessly. She always tried to hide it.

      When she woke at night at home, when she was reading Borrow or Scott; these men, these women were thinking “What’s Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!” Her own cowardice, her mean blood depressed her. And at once the room seemed sordid. It was repulsive. Her own drawing-room seemed shabby. She touched the letters on the hall table. She said: “How dull!” All this now seemed unutterably silly, paltry, and provincial. She came into Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room. All this was absolutely destroyed.

      That evening she was sitting over the teacups. Mrs. Dalloway’s invitation came. She decided not to be fashionable. It was absurd to pretend it even. Fashion meant style. Fashion meant thirty guineas at least. Why not be original? Why not be herself, anyhow? And she took her mother’s old fashion book[24]. It was a Paris fashion book of the time of the Empire.

      But she dared not look in the glass. She did not face the whole horror—the pale yellow, idiotically old-fashioned silk dress. This dress was with its long skirt and its high sleeves and its waist. All these things looked so charming in the fashion book, but not on her, not among all these ordinary people. She felt like a dressmaker’s dummy.

      “But, my dear, it’s perfectly charming!” Rose Shaw said.

      We are all like flies which are trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer. Mabel repeated this phrase. She was trying to find some spell to annul this pain. She was trying to make this agony endurable. Tags of Shakespeare, lines from books suddenly came to her. She was in agony. She repeated them over and over again. “Flies which are trying to crawl,” she repeated. Now she saw flies which were crawling slowly out of a saucer of milk. The other people there are like flies. They are trying to hoist themselves out of something, or into something, meagre, insignificant, toiling flies. She saw them like that, not other people. She saw herself like that. She was a fly. The others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects. They were dancing, fluttering, skimming. She alone dragged herself up out of the saucer.

      “I feel like some dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly,” she said to Robert Haydon.

      She wanted to reassure herself. And, of course, Robert Haydon answered something quite polite, quite insincere. And she said to herself (again from some book), “Lies, lies, lies!”

      She saw the bottom of Robert Haydon’s heart. She saw through everything. She saw the truth. This was true, this drawing-room, this self, and the other false. Miss Milan’s little workroom was really terribly hot, stuffy, sordid. It smelt of clothes and cabbage. Miss Milan put the glass in her hand. Then she looked at herself with the dress on. An extraordinary bliss shot through her heart.

      She became a beautiful woman. Just for a second, a grey-white, mysterious, charming girl looked at her. It was the core of herself. It was the soul of herself.

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