На маяк. Уровень 3 / To the Lighthouse

“There isn’t the slightest possible chance that we can go to the Lighthouse tomorrow,” Mr. Ramsay said irascibly.

“How do you know?” she asked. “The wind often changes”.

The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. He stamped his foot on the stone step.

“Damn you,” he said.

But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.

Such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings was to her so horrible that she bent her head.

There was nothing to say.

He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said,

“I will ask the Coastguards if you like”.

There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him.

Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands, Mr. Ramsay sheepishly prodded his son’s bare legs, and then he dived into the evening air.

He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his pipe.

He looked once at his wife and son in the window. Who will blame him?

7

But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them. He hated him for interrupting them. He hated him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures. He hated him for the magnificence of his head. He hated him for his exactingness and egotism.

He looked at the page. He pointed his finger at a word, and he hoped to recall his mother’s attention, which, he knew angrily, wavered instantly.

But, no. Nothing will make Mr. Ramsay move on. There he stood. He was demanding sympathy.

Mrs. Ramsay was folding her son in her arm. She braced herself, and raised herself with an effort. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure, he said. Mrs. Ramsay flashed her needles.

“Charles Tansley…” she said.

But it was sympathy he wanted. He wanted to be assured of his genius.

Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said.

But he must have sympathy. She laughed, she knitted.

He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing.