На маяк. Уровень 3 / To the Lighthouse

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 - hunting-grounds – охотничьи зоны] 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.