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people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown? For one moment she felt that if they
both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it
so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing
should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty
flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs Ramsay would return. "Mrs
Ramsay!" she said aloud, "Mrs Ramsay!" The tears ran down her face.
6
[Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The
mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea.]
7
"Mrs Ramsay!" Lily cried, "Mrs Ramsay!" But nothing happened. The pain increased. That
anguish could reduce one to such a pitch of imbecility, she thought! Anyhow the old man had not
heard her. He remained benignant, calm--if one chose to think it, sublime. Heaven be praised, no
one had heard her cry that ignominious cry, stop pain, stop! She had not obviously taken leave of
her senses. No one had seen her step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation. She
remained a skimpy old maid, holding a paint-brush.
And now slowly the pain of the want, and the bitter anger (to be called back, just as she thought
she would never feel sorrow for Mrs Ramsay again. Had she missed her among the coffee cups at
breakfast? not in the least) lessened; and of their anguish left, as antidote, a relief that was balm in
itself, and also, but more mysteriously, a sense of some one there, of Mrs Ramsay, relieved for a
moment of the weight that the world had put on her, staying lightly by her side and then (for this
was Mrs Ramsay in all her beauty) raising to her forehead a wreath of white flowers with which she
went. Lily squeezed her tubes again. She attacked that problem of the hedge. It was strange how
clearly she saw her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose folds, purplish
and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinth or lilies, she vanished. It was some trick of the painter's
eye. For days after she had heard of her death she had seen her thus, putting her wreath to her
forehead and going unquestioningly with her companion, a shade across the fields. The sight, the
phrase, had its power to console. Wherever she happened to be, painting, here, in the country or in
London, the vision would come to her, and her eyes, half closing, sought something to base her
vision on. She looked down the railway carriage, the omnibus; took a line from shoulder or cheek;
looked at the windows opposite; at Piccadilly, lamp-strung in the evening. All had been part of the
fields of death. But always something--it might be a face, a voice, a paper boy crying STANDARD,
NEWS--thrust through, snubbed her, waked her, required and got in the end an effort of attention,
so that the vision must be perpetually remade. Now again, moved as she was by some instinctive
need of distance and blue, she looked at the bay beneath her, making hillocks of the blue spaces,
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again she was roused as usual by something incongruous. There was a brown spot in the middle of
the bay. It was a boat. Yes, she realised that after a second. But whose boat? Mr Ramsay's boat, she
replied. Mr Ramsay; the man who had marched past her, with his hand raised, aloof, at the head of
a procession, in his beautiful boots, asking her for sympathy, which she had refused. The boat was
now half way across the bay.
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked
all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
A steamer far out at sea had drawn in the air a great scroll of smoke which stayed there curving and
circling decoratively, as if the air were a fine gauze which held things and kept them softly in its
mesh, only gently swaying them this way and that. And as happens sometimes when the weather is
very fine, the cliffs looked as if they were conscious of the ships, and the ships looked as if they
were conscious of the cliffs, as if they signalled to each other some message of their own. For
sometimes quite close to the shore, the Lighthouse looked this morning in the haze an enormous
distance away.
"Where are they now?" Lily thought, looking out to sea. Where was he, that very old man who
had gone past her silently, holding a brown paper parcel under his arm? The boat was in the middle
of the bay.
8
They don't feel a thing there, Cam thought, looking at the shore, which, rising and falling,
became steadily more distant and more peaceful. Her hand cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made
the green swirls and streaks into patterns and, numbed and shrouded, wandered in imagination in
that underworld of waters where the pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green
light a change came over one's entire mind and one's body shone half transparent enveloped in a
green cloak.
Then the eddy slackened round her hand. The rush of the water ceased; the world became full
of little creaking and squeaking sounds. One heard the waves breaking and flapping against the side
of the boat as if they were anchored in harbour. Everything became very close to one. For the sail,
upon which James had his eyes fixed until it had become to him like a person whom he knew,
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