Between the acts, p.20
Between the Acts, page 20
“The play’s over,” he said. “The actors have departed.”
“And we mustn’t, my brother says, thank the author,” Mrs. Swithin repeated, looking in the direction of Miss La Trobe.
“So I thank you,” he said. He took her hand and pressed it. Putting one thing with another, it was unlikely that they would ever meet again.
The church bells always stopped, leaving you to ask: Won’t there be another note? Isa, half-way across the lawn, listened. . . . Ding, dong, ding . . . There was not going to be another note. The congregation was assembled, on their knees, in the church. The service was beginning. The play was over; swallows skimmed the grass that had been the stage.
There was Dodge, the lip reader, her semblable, her conspirator, a seeker like her after hidden faces. He was hurrying to rejoin Mrs. Manresa who had gone in front with Giles—“the father of my children,” she muttered. The flesh poured over her, the hot, nerve wired, now lit up, now dark as the grave physical body. By way of healing the rusty fester of the poisoned dart she sought the face that all day long she had been seeking. Preening and peering, between backs, over shoulders, she had sought the man in grey. He had given her a cup of tea at a tennis party; handed her, once, a racquet. That was all. But, she was crying, had we met before the salmon leapt like a bar of silver . . . had we met, she was crying. And when her little boy came battling through the bodies in the Barn “Had he been his son,” she had muttered . . . In passing she stripped the bitter leaf that grew, as it happened, outside the nursery window. Old Man’s Beard. Shrivelling the shreds in lieu of words, for no words grow there, nor roses either, she swept past her conspirator, her semblable, the seeker after vanished faces “like Venus” he thought, making a rough translation, “to her prey . . .” and followed after.
Turning the corner, there was Giles attached to Mrs. Manresa. She was standing at the door of her car. Giles had his foot on the edge of the running board. Did they perceive the arrows about to strike them?
“Jump in, Bill,” Mrs. Manresa chaffed him.
And the wheels scurred on the gravel, and the car drove off.
At last, Miss La Trobe could raise herself from her stooping position. It had been prolonged to avoid attention. The bells had stopped; the audience had gone; also the actors. She could straighten her back. She could open her arms. She could say to the world, You have taken my gift! Glory possessed her—for one moment. But what had she given? A cloud that melted into the other clouds on the horizon. It was in the giving that the triumph was. And the triumph faded. Her gift meant nothing. If they had understood her meaning; if they had known their parts; if the pearls had been real and the funds illimitable—it would have been a better gift. Now it had gone to join the others.
“A failure,” she groaned, and stooped to put away the records.
Then suddenly the starlings attacked the tree behind which she had hidden. In one flock they pelted it like so many winged stones. The whole tree hummed with the whizz they made, as if each bird plucked a wire. A whizz, a buzz rose from the bird-buzzing, bird-vibrant, bird-blackened tree. The tree became a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony, a whizz and vibrant rapture, branches, leaves, birds syllabling discordantly life, life, life, without measure, without stop devouring the tree. Then up! Then off!
What interrupted? It was old Mrs. Chalmers, creeping through the grass with a bunch of flowers—pinks apparently—to fill the vase that stood on her husband’s grave. In winter it was holly, or ivy. In summer, a flower. It was she who had scared the starlings. Now she passed.
Miss La Trobe nicked the lock and hoisted the heavy case of gramophone records to her shoulder. She crossed the terrace and stopped by the tree where the starlings had gathered. It was here that she had suffered triumph, humiliation, ecstasy, despair—for nothing. Her heels had ground a hole in the grass.
It was growing dark. Since there were no clouds to trouble the sky, the blue was bluer, the green greener. There was no longer a view—no Folly, no spire of Bolney Minster. It was land merely, no land in particular. She put down her case and stood looking at the land. Then something rose to the surface.
“I should group them,” she murmured, “here.” It would be midnight; there would be two figures, half concealed by a rock. The curtain would rise. What would the first words be? The words escaped her.
Again she lifted the heavy suit case to her shoulder. She strode off across the lawn. The house was dormant; one thread of smoke thickened against the trees. It was strange that the earth, with all those flowers incandescent—the lilies, the roses, and clumps of white flowers and bushes of burning green—should still be hard. From the earth green waters seemed to rise over her. She took her voyage away from the shore, and, raising her hand, fumbled for the latch of the iron entrance gate.
She would drop her suit case in at the kitchen window, and then go on up to the Inn. Since the row with the actress who had shared her bed and her purse the need of drink had grown on her. And the horror and the terror of being alone. One of these days she would break—which of the village laws? Sobriety? Chastity? Or take something that did not properly belong to her?
At the corner she ran into old Mrs. Chalmers returning from the grave. The old woman looked down at the dead flowers she was carrying and cut her. The women in the cottages with the red geraniums always did that. She was an outcast. Nature had somehow set her apart from her kind. Yet she had scribbled in the margin of her manuscript: “I am the slave of my audience.”
She thrust her suit case in at the scullery window and walked on, till at the corner she saw the red curtain at the bar window. There would be shelter; voices; oblivion. She turned the handle of the public house door. The acrid smell of stale beer saluted her; and voices talking. They stopped. They had been talking about Bossy as they called her—it didn’t matter. She took her chair and looked through the smoke at a crude glass painting of a cow in a stable; also at a cock and a hen. She raised her glass to her lips. And drank. And listened. Words of one syllable sank down into the mud. She drowsed; she nodded. The mud became fertile. Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning—wonderful words.
The cheap clock ticked; smoke obscured the pictures. Smoke became tart on the roof of her mouth. Smoke obscured the earth-coloured jackets. She no longer saw them, yet they upheld her, sitting arms akimbo with her glass before her. There was the high ground at midnight; there the rock; and two scarcely perceptible figures. Suddenly the tree was pelted with starlings. She set down her glass. She heard the first words.
Down in the hollow, at Pointz Hall, beneath the trees, the table was cleared in the dining room. Candish, with his curved brush had swept the crumbs; had spared the petals and finally left the family to dessert. The play was over, the strangers gone, and they were alone—the family.
Still the play hung in the sky of the mind—moving, diminishing, but still there. Dipping her raspberry in sugar, Mrs. Swithin looked at the play. She said, popping the berry into her mouth, “What did it mean?” and added: “The peasants; the kings; the fool and” (she swallowed) “ourselves?”
They all looked at the play; Isa, Giles and Mr. Oliver. Each of course saw something different. In another moment it would be beneath the horizon, gone to join the other plays. Mr. Oliver, holding out his cheroot said: “Too ambitious.” And, lighting his cheroot he added: “Considering her means.”
It was drifting away to join the other clouds: becoming invisible. Through the smoke Isa saw not the play but the audience dispersing. Some drove; others cycled. A gate swung open. A car swept up the drive to the red villa in the cornfields. Low hanging boughs of acacia brushed the roof. Acacia petalled the car arrived.
“The looking-glasses and the voices in the bushes,” she murmured. “What did she mean?”
“When Mr. Streatfield asked her to explain, she wouldn’t,” said Mrs. Swithin.
Here, with its sheaf sliced in four, exposing a white cone, Giles offered his wife a banana. She refused it. He stubbed his match on the plate. Out it went with a little fizz in the raspberry juice.
“We should be thankful,” said Mrs. Swithin, folding her napkin, “for the weather, which was perfect, save for one shower.”
Here she rose, Isa followed her across the hall to the big room.
They never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold. Why shut out the day before it was over? The flowers were still bright; the birds chirped. You could see more in the evening often when nothing interrupted, when there was no fish to order, no telephone to answer. Mrs. Swithin stopped by the great picture of Venice—school of Canaletto. Possibly in the hood of the gondola there was a little figure—a woman, veiled; or a man?
Isa, sweeping her sewing from the table, sank, her knee doubled, into the chair by the window. Within the shell of the room she overlooked the summer night. Lucy returned from her voyage into the picture and stood silent. The sun made each pane of her glasses shine red. Silver sparkled on her black shawl. For a moment she looked like a tragic figure from another play.
Then she spoke in her usual voice. “We made more this year than last, he said. But then last year it rained.”
“This year, last year, next year, never . . .” Isa murmured. Her hand burnt in the sun on the window sill. Mrs. Swithin took her knitting from the table.
“Did you feel,” she asked, “what he said: we act different parts but are the same?”
“Yes,” Isa answered. “No,” she added. It was Yes, No. Yes, yes, yes, the tide rushed out embracing. No, no, no, it contracted. The old boot appeared on the shingle.
“Orts, scraps and fragments,” she quoted what she remembered of the vanishing play.
Lucy had just opened her lips to reply, and had laid her hand on her cross caressingly, when the gentlemen came in. She made her little chirruping sound of welcome. She shuffled her feet to clear a space. But in fact there was more space than was needed, and great hooded chairs.
They sat down, ennobled both of them by the setting sun. Both had changed. Giles now wore the black coat and white tie of the professional classes, which needed—Isa looked down at his feet—patent leather pumps. “Our representative, our spokesman,” she sneered. Yet he was extraordinarily handsome. “The father of my children, whom I love and hate.” Love and hate—how they tore her asunder! Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes . . .
Here Candish came in. He brought the second post on a silver salver. There were letters; bills; and the morning paper—the paper that obliterated the day before. Like a fish rising to a crumb of biscuit, Bartholomew snapped at the paper. Giles slit the flap of an apparently business document. Lucy read a criss-cross from an old friend at Scarborough. Isa had only bills.
The usual sounds reverberated through the shell; Sands making up the fire; Candish stoking the boiler. Isa had done with her bills. Sitting in the shell of the room she watched the pageant fade. The flowers flashed before they faded. She watched them flash.
The paper crackled. The second hand jerked on. M. Daladier had pegged down the franc. The girl had gone skylarking with the troopers. She had screamed. She had hit him. . . . What then?
When Isa looked at the flowers again, the flowers had faded.
Bartholomew flicked on the reading lamp. The circle of the readers, attached to white papers, was lit up. There in that hollow of the sun-baked field were congregated the grasshopper, the ant, and the beetle, rolling pebbles of sun-baked earth through the glistening stubble. In that rosy corner of the sun-baked field Bartholomew, Giles and Lucy polished and nibbled and broke off crumbs. Isa watched them.
Then the newspaper dropped.
“Finished?” said Giles, taking it from his father.
The old man relinquished his paper. He basked. One hand caressing the dog rippled folds of skin towards the collar.
The clock ticked. The house gave little cracks as if it were very brittle, very dry. Isa’s hand on the window felt suddenly cold. Shadow had obliterated the garden. Roses had withdrawn for the night.
Mrs. Swithin folding her letter murmured to Isa: “I looked in and saw the babies, sound asleep, under the paper roses.”
“Left over from the Coronation,” Bartholomew muttered, half asleep.
“But we needn’t have been to all that trouble with the decorations,” Lucy added, “for it didn’t rain this year.”
“This year, last year, next year, never,” Isa murmured.
“Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,” Bartholomew echoed. He was talking in his sleep.
Lucy slipped her letter into its envelope. It was time to read now, her Outline of History. But she had lost her place. She turned the pages looking at pictures—mammoths, mastodons, prehistoric birds. Then she found the page where she had stopped.
The darkness increased. The breeze swept round the room. With a little shiver Mrs. Swithin drew her sequin shawl about her shoulders. She was too deep in the story to ask for the window to be shut. “England,” she was reading, “was then a swamp. Thick forests covered the land. On the top of their matted branches birds sang . . .”
The great square of the open window showed only sky now. It was drained of light, severe, stone cold. Shadows fell. Shadows crept over Bartholomew’s high forehead; over his great nose. He looked leafless, spectral, and his chair monumental. As a dog shudders its skin, his skin shuddered. He rose, shook himself, glared at nothing, and stalked from the room. They heard the dog’s paws padding on the carpet behind him.
Lucy turned the page, quickly, guiltily, like a child who will be told to go to bed before the end of the chapter.
“Prehistoric man,” she read, “half-human, half-ape, roused himself from his semi-crouching position and raised great stones.”
She slipped the letter from Scarborough between the pages to mark the end of the chapter, rose, smiled, and tiptoed silently out of the room.
The old people had gone up to bed. Giles crumpled the newspaper and turned out the light. Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night.
Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too. And Isa too against the window. The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks.
Then the curtain rose. They spoke.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The text of this edition follows the first U.S. edition of the novel, with the following variations: The phrase “and ‘in strict confidence, I needn’t tell you’” on page 29 had an erroneous repetition of “in” that was not present in the first British edition and so has been corrected here; and the typographical error “We’re the oracles” has been corrected to “Were the oracles” on page 135.
NOTES TO Between the Acts
The following abbreviations are used below: PH (Pointy Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts. Edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: University Publications, 1983); SH (Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts. Edited by Susan Dick and Mary S. Millar. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 2002). Details of other sources cited will be found either in the list of works cited in the introduction, in the suggestions for further reading, or within specific notes. In annotating this rich and complex novel, I am deeply indebted to its previous annotators, Mitchell Leaska (PH), Susan Dick and Mary S. Millar (SH), Gillian Beer (Penguin, 1992), and Mark Hussey (Cambridge University Press, 2008). I would not have been able to identify so many allusions and echoes if it had not been for their previous work. I would also like to thank John Baird and Brian Corman for helpful suggestions, Bob Johnson of Bacchus Antiques for information on champagne openers, and Tania Botticella, Kimberly Fairbrother Canton, Glenn Clifton, Rohanna Green, Adam Hammond, and Daniel Harney for their help with some of the materials and with the electronic files.
[3] cesspool: A cesspool is a tank or well for processing raw sewage; “to bring water to the village” would mean to introduce indoor plumbing. The Woolfs lived for years with an earth closet—a “cane chair over a bucket”—at Rodmell and, at the time when Virginia Woolf was beginning this novel, they were engaged in fighting the district council over a proposal to erect a sewage pump in the adjoining field (Diary 5: 341; 162–63).
[3] What a subject to talk about: Mrs. Haines’s response epitomizes the still-lingering taboos against discussing bodily wastes and fluids in polite, middle-class, mixed society. See E. M. Forster’s preface to Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable (1935), whose central character is a cleaner of latrines in India: “We have been trained from childhood to think excretion shameful, and grave evils have resulted, both physical and psychological, with which modern education is just beginning to cope” (London: Penguin, 1940, vi). Virginia Woolf considered the liberation of Bloomsbury dated from the moment when the word semen was said aloud, in mixed company (“Old Bloomsbury,” Moments of Being 200).
[3] Liskeard: An ancient market town in Cornwall, recorded in the Domesday Book. Some of the details, however, suggest the location of this village is in the north or the midlands, whereas references, such as to the village of Pyecombe [11], would place the village in Sussex where the Woolfs were living during the war. The setting is a composite place. (See SH xxiii–iv.)
[3] nightingale: The first of many specific birds to be named in this novel; the nightingale, because of its melodious song, is associated with the lyric poetic voice.
[3] Indian Civil Service: Bartholomew’s occupation implicates him in England’s imperial project, although in a milder fashion than E. M. Forster’s Ronny Heaslop in A Passage to India (1924). In Imperialism and Civilisation, Leonard Woolf indicted the British government of India for “debarr[ing| Indians, however able and educated, from all the higher administrative posts” (London: Hogarth Press, 1928, 56).
