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acting it--perhaps he was thinking himself the person in the book. She wondered what book it was.
Oh, it was one of old Sir Walter's she saw, adjusting the shade of her lamp so that the light fell on
her knitting. For Charles Tansley had been saying (she looked up as if she expected to hear the
crash of books on the floor above), had been saying that people don't read Scott any more. Then her
husband thought, "That's what they'll say of me;" so he went and got one of those books. And if he
came to the conclusion "That's true" what Charles Tansley said, he would accept it about Scott.
(She could see that he was weighing, considering, putting this with that as he read.) But not about
himself. He was always uneasy about himself. That troubled her. He would always be worrying
about his own books--will they be read, are they good, why aren't they better, what do people think
of me? Not liking to think of him so, and wondering if they had guessed at dinner why he suddenly
became irritable when they talked about fame and books lasting, wondering if the children were
laughing at that, she twitched the stockings out, and all the fine gravings came drawn with steel
instruments about her lips and forehead, and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and
quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet.
It didn't matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book, fame--who could tell? She
knew nothing about it. But it was his way with him, his truthfulness--for instance at dinner she had
been thinking quite instinctively, If only he would speak! She had complete trust in him. And
dismissing all this, as one passes in diving now a weed, now a straw, now a bubble, she felt again,
sinking deeper, as she had felt in the hall when the others were talking, There is something I
want--something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it
was, with her eyes closed. And she waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly rose those words
they had said at dinner, "the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee," began
washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded
lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their
perches up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be echoed; so she turned and felt on
the table beside her for a book.
And all the lives we ever lived And all the lives to be, Are full of trees and changing leaves,
she murmured, sticking her needles into the stocking. And she opened the book and began
reading here and there at random, and as she did so, she felt that she was climbing backwards,
upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white,
or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all.
Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners
she read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to
another as from one branch to another, from one red and white flower to another, until a little sound
roused her--her husband slapping his thighs. Their eyes met for a second; but they did not want to
speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him
to her. It was the life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew, that made
him slap his thighs. Don't interrupt me, he seemed to be saying, don't say anything; just sit there.
And he went on reading. His lips twitched. It filled him. It fortified him. He clean forgot all the
little rubs and digs of the evening, and how it bored him unutterably to sit still while people ate and
drank interminably, and his being so irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding when they
passed his books over as if they didn't exist at all. But now, he felt, it didn't matter a damn who
reached Z (if thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach it--if not he, then
another. This man's strength and sanity, his feeling for straight forward simple things, these
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fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackit's cottage made him feel so vigorous, so
relieved of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back his tears.
Raising the book a little to hide his face, he let them fall and shook his head from side to side and
forgot himself completely (but not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and
English novels and Scott's hands being tied but his view perhaps being as true as the other view),
forgot his own bothers and failures completely in poor Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's
sorrow (that was Scott at his best) and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him.
Well, let them improve upon that, he thought as he finished the chapter. He felt that he had been
arguing with somebody, and had got the better of him. They could not improve upon that, whatever
they might say; and his own position became more secure. The lovers were fiddlesticks, he thought,
collecting it all in his mind again. That's fiddlesticks, that's first-rate, he thought, putting one thing
beside another. But he must read it again. He could not remember the whole shape of the thing. He
had to keep his judgement in suspense. So he returned to the other thought--if young men did not [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]