There was something, of course, that people wanted. When Minta took her hand and held it, Nancy, reluctantly, saw the whole world spread out beneath her. Nancy asked, when Minta took her hand. “What is it that she wants? Is it that?” And what was that? Here and there emerged from the mist a pinnacle and a dome, the things without names.
Minta, Andrew observed, was rather a good walker. She wore more sensible clothes that most women. She wore very short skirts. She could jump straight into a stream and flounder across. He liked her rashness, but he saw that she could kill herself. She was afraid of nothing – except bulls. At the mere sight of a bull in a field she threw up her arms and ran away. She knew she was an awful coward about bulls, she said. But didn’t mind what she said or did. Suddenly now she stood on the edge of the cliff and began to sing a song:
“Damn your eyes, damn your eyes!”
They all had to join in and sing the chorus together:
“Damn your eyes, damn your eyes!”
It will be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the hunting-grounds[23] before they got on to the beach.
“Fatal,” Paul agreed.
He sprang up. As they went down, he was quoting the guide-book: “These islands are famous for their prospects and the extent and variety of their marine curiosities.” It is not right to sing aloud “Damn your eyes, damn your eyes!” Andrew felt. It was not right to take women on walks.
Once on the beach they separated. He went out on to the Pope’s Nose. He took his shoes off, and rolled his socks in them. He left that couple.
Nancy went to her rocks and searched her pools. She touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones. She changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world, like God himself. Out on the pale sand, stalked some fantastic leviathan, and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountain side. She was listening to the waves, she was dreaming.
Andrew shouted that the sea was coming in. So she ran through the shallow waves to the shore and ran up the beach. She went behind a rock and there – oh, heavens! in each other’s arms, were Paul and Minta kissing probably. She was outraged, indignant. She and Andrew put on their shoes and stockings in dead silence without saying a thing about it. Indeed they were rather sharp with each other. It irritated Andrew that Nancy was a woman, and Nancy that Andrew was a man. They tied their shoes very neatly and drew the bows rather tight.
On the top of the cliff Minta cried out that she had lost her grandmother’s brooch – her grandmother’s brooch, the sole ornament she possessed. It was a weeping willow, in pearls. They saw it, she said, with the tears down her cheeks, the brooch which her grandmother had fastened her cap with till the last day of her life. Now she had lost it.
She will go back and look for it. They all went back. They poked and peered and looked. Paul Rayley searched like a madman all about the rock where they were sitting. All this pother about a brooch is nonsense, Andrew thought, as Paul told him to make a “thorough search between this point and that.”
The tide was coming in fast. The sea will cover the place where they sit in a minute. It is impossible to find that brooch.
“We shall be cut off![24]” Minta shrieked, suddenly terrified.
She had no control over her emotions, Andrew thought. Women hadn’t. The wretched Paul must pacify her. The men (Andrew and Paul at once became manly) decided to plant Rayley’s stick where they had sat and come back later. If the brooch is there, it will still be there in the morning, they assured her. But Minta still sobbed. It was her grandmother’s brooch. Nancy felt she wasn’t crying only for that. She was crying for something else. We may all sit down and cry, she felt. But she did not know what for.
Paul comforted Minta. He said how famous he was for finding things. Once when he was a little boy he had found a gold watch. He will get up early, he is positive he will find it.
He began to tell her, however, that he would certainly find it. She said that it was lost: she knew that. She had had a presentiment when she put it on that afternoon. And he resolved to slip out of the house at dawn when they were all asleep. If he doesn’t find it he will go to Edinburgh and buy her another, just like it but more beautiful. He will prove what he can do.
And as they came out on the hill and saw the lights of the town beneath them, the lights seemed like things that were going to happen to him: his marriage, his children, his house. It was the worst moment of his life when he asked Minta to marry him.
He will go straight to Mrs. Ramsay because he felt somehow that she was the person who had made him do it… He can do anything. Nobody else took him seriously. But she made him believe that he could do whatever he wanted. He felt her eyes on him all day today. These eyes were saying,
“Yes, you can do it. I believe in you. I expect it of you.”
He will go to her and say,
“I’ve done it, Mrs. Ramsay; thanks to you.”
He turned into the lane that led to the house. He saw lights in the upper windows. They must be awfully late then. People were getting ready for dinner.
15
“Yes,” answered Prue her mother’s question, “I think Nancy went with them.”
16
Well then, Nancy had gone with them, Mrs. Ramsay supposed.
Of course, they could not all be drowned. And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.
Jasper and Rose said that Mildred wanted to know whether she should wait dinner[25].
“Not for the Queen of England,” said Mrs. Ramsay emphatically.
“Not for the Empress of Mexico,” she added.
And if Rose liked, she said, she might choose which jewels she would wear. When there are fifteen people sitting down to dinner, one cannot wait for ever. She felt annoyed with them for being so late. It was inconsiderate of them. It annoyed her greatly.
Jasper offered her an opal necklace; Rose a gold necklace. Which looked best against her black dress? While the children rummaged among her things, she looked out of the window. The rooks were trying to decide which tree to settle on. Every time, they changed their minds and rose up into the air again. The old rook, the father rook, was a disreputable old bird. He was like an old gentleman in a top hat[26] who was playing the horn in the public house.
“Look!” she said and laughed.
The rooks were fighting. The air was shoved aside by their black wings. But what to choose? The gold necklace, which was Italian, or the opal necklace, which Uncle James had brought her from India? Or maybe her amethysts?
“Choose, dearests, choose,” she said.
She let Rose take up this and then that, and hold her jewels against the black dress. Rose liked this little ceremony, she knew. What was the reason, Mrs. Ramsay wondered. And Rose will grow up; and Rose will suffer with these deep feelings. She said she was ready now, and they were ready to go down. Jasper, because he is the gentleman, will give her his arm. Rose, as she is the lady, will carry her handkerchief (she gave her the handkerchief), and what else? Oh, yes, it may be cold: a shawl.
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