На маяк. Уровень 3 / To the Lighthouse

There was freedom, there was peace, there was a platform of stability.

No one finds rest ever, in her experience, but as a wedge of darkness. One lost the fret, the hurry, the stir. There rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity.

She looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke. That light lifted up some little phrase like that – “Children don’t forget, children don’t forget”.

She could repeat it. It will end, it will end, she said. It will come, it will come, when suddenly she added, “We are in the hands of the Lord”.

But instantly she was annoyed with herself. Who had said it? Not she. She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke. It seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes[13 - like her own eyes meeting her own eyes – как будто её собственные глаза встретились с её же глазами].

They searched into her mind and her heart, they purified out of existence that lie, any lie. She was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light. It was odd, she thought. She looked and looked; a mist rose from the lake. A bride to meet her lover.

Why did she say that: “We are in the hands of the Lord?” she wondered. The insincerity annoyed her. She returned to her knitting again. How could any Lord make this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor.

She knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that. She knitted with firm composure.

Her husband passed. He noted the sternness at the heart of her beauty. It saddened him, and her remoteness pained him. He felt, as he passed, that he could not protect her. When he reached the hedge, he was sad. He could do nothing to help her. He must stand by and watch her. Indeed, the infernal truth was, he made things worse for her.

He was irritable – he was touchy. He had lost his temper over the Lighthouse. He looked into the hedge, into its intricacy, its darkness.

Mrs. Ramsay listened, but it was all very still. Cricket was over; the children were in their baths; there was only the sound of the sea. She stopped knitting. She held the long reddish-brown stocking in her hands. She saw the light again. With some irony, she was watching it with fascination, hypnotized.