На маяк. Уровень 3 / To the Lighthouse

It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! Nobody will look at it, nobody will even hang it. Mr. Tansley was whispering in her ear,

“Women can’t paint, women can’t write.”

She now remembered what she wanted say about Mrs. Ramsay. She was annoyed by some highhandedness. She thought of Mr. Bankes. She thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped. Mrs. Ramsay was unquestionably the loveliest of people; the best perhaps; but also, different. But why different, and how different? she asked herself.

She scraped her palette of all those mounds of blue and green. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her? She was like a bird, an arrow. She was willful; she was commanding. She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. The house was full of children.

Oh, but there was her father; her home; even her painting. But all this seemed so little, so virginal, against the other. She liked to be alone; she liked to be herself.

Lily Briscoe looked up at last. She saw Mrs.

Ramsay, still presiding.

Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty? Did she lock up within her some secret? She was sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay’s knees. She was smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure. She imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman were tablets with sacred inscriptions. What was the key to those secret chambers? Can love, as people called it, make her and Mrs.

Ramsay one? It was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge. And she put her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.

Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.

And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs. Ramsay’s heart. Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs. Ramsay went. A ray passed Mr. Bankes’s eyes. He put on his spectacles. He stepped back. He raised his hand.

He slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes,

Lily winced like a dog that sees a hand raised to strike it. Mr. Bankes was less alarming than another.

Mr. Bankes took out a pen-knife and tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple shape, “just there”? he asked.

It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, she said.

Mother and child are the objects of universal veneration. The mother was famous for her beauty.