Towards the Beacon E-Book

Avneet Kumar Singla

• Herausgeber: Avneet Kumar Singla
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 344

Beschreibung

The plot of Towards the Beacon is secondary to its philosophical introspection. the novel includes little dialogue and almost no direct action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, the nature of art and the problem of perception.This book is in 3 parts. The brief description of the book is written as follows.Part-1The novel is set in the Ahuja summer house in the Hebrides on the Isle of Skye. The section begins with Mrs. Ahuja reassuring her son James that you should be able to visit the Beacon the next day. This prediction is disputed by Mr. Ahuja, who expresses his certainty that the weather will not be clear, an opinion that forces a certain tension between Mr. and Mrs. Ahuja and also between Mr. Ahuja and James. This particular incident is referred to several times throughout the section, especially in connection with the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Ahuja. The Ahuja's and their eight children were accompanied by a number of friends and colleagues in the house. One of them, Lily Briscoe, begins the novel as a young, uncertain painter attempting a portrait of Mrs. Ahuja and James. Throughout the novel, Briscoe is plagued by doubts, doubts that are largely fed by the claims of Charles Tansley, another guest, who claims that women can neither paint nor write. Tansley himself is an admirer of Mr. Ahuja, a philosophy Professor, and his academic treatises. When Augustus Carmichael, a guest poet, asks for a second portion of soup, Lord. Ahuja almost catches him. Mrs. Ahuja is out of line when Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, two acquaintances whom she has engaged, arrive late for dinner when Minta has lost her grandmother's brooch on the beach.Part-2The second section," Time flies, " gives a sense of time gone by, absence, and death. Ten years pass, in which the First world war begins and ends. Mrs. Ahuja dies as well as two of her children-Prue dies of complications in childbirth and Andrew is killed in the war. Mr. Ahuja has gone without his wife to praise and comfort him during his bouts of fear and anxiety regarding the longevity of his philosophical work. Part-3In the final section, "The Beacon", some of the remaining Ahujas and other guests return to their summer home ten years after the events of Part I. Finally, Mr. Ahuja plans to make the long delayed trip to the Beacon with his daughter Cam(illa) and son James (the remaining Ahuja children are practically not mentioned in the last section). The journey almost does not happen as the children are not ready, but they eventually make their way. As they travel, the children remain silent in protest against their father for forcing them to come with them. James the sail boat keeps stable and rather than receiving the harsh words he expected from his father, he hears praise, and offers a rare Moment of empathy between father and son; Cam's attitude towards her father changes, from resentment to any admiration. The son cuts a piece of meat from a fish he has caught to use as bait, and throws the injured fish back into the sea. As they set sail for the Beacon, Lily tries to finally complete the painting she has held in her mind since the beginning of the novel. She revisits her memory of Ms. and Mr. Ahuja, balancing the multitude of impressions from ten years ago to achieve an objective truth about Ms. Ahuja and life itself. When she finishes the painting (just as the sailing party reaches the Beacon) and sees that it satisfies her, she realizes that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the idea of leaving a legacy in her work.

Leseprobe

Towards The Beacon

Avneet Kumar Singla

Copyright © 2021-2040 by Avneet Kumar Singla

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

Avneet Kumar Singla

[email protected]

Disclaimer

This is a just a fictional novel. However, The Author, or The Publisher or The Distributor(s) will not be responsible for your actions by reading this fictional novel.

Contents

Part 1

Window

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Part 2

Time flies

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part 3

Beacon

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part 1

Window

Chapter 1

"Yes, of course, if it goes well tomorrow," said Mrs. Ahuja. "But you have to be done with the lark," she added.

For her son, these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if they were settled, the expedition was to take place, and the miracle he had been looking forward to for years and years, it seemed, after a night of darkness and a day of sailing, in contact. Since, at the age of six, he belonged to that great clan which cannot separate this feeling from it, but must let future perspectives with their joys and worries cloud what is actually at hand, since for such people, even in their earliest childhood, every turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transform the moment on which their darkness or radiance rests, James Ahuja, who sits on the ground and cuts out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of army and navy business, bestowed the image of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, heavenly bliss. It was full of joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, brightening leaves from the rain, stroking towers, knocking brooms, rustling clothes-all these were so colored and different in his head that he already had his private code, his secret language, although he appeared the image of strong and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably open and pure, slightly frowning at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly around the refrigerator, imagine him all red and ermine on the bench or run a strict and significant company in a crisis of public affairs.

"But," said his father, stopping in front of the living room window, " it's not going to be good."

If there had been an axe, a poker, or any weapon that ripped a hole in his father's chest and killed him, James would have grabbed it there and then. These were the extreme emotions that Mr. Ahuja aroused in the breasts of his children by his mere presence; as now, lean like a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and mocking his wife, who was in every way tens of thousands of times better than he (James thought), but also with a secret conceit in his own accuracy of judgment. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never changed an unpleasant word to suit the pleasure or comfort of a mortal being, least of all his own children, who, springing from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to the fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail man barks in the darkness (here Mr. Ahuja straightened his back and narrowed his little blue eyes on the horizon), one who above all needs courage, truth and the strength to endure.

"But it may be all right—I expect it will be all right," said Mrs. Ahuja, impatiently making a little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting. If she had finished it tonight, if they did go to the beacon, it should be given to the beacon keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tubercular hip; along with a bunch of old magazines and some tobacco, in fact, which she could lie about, she didn't really, but just wanted to acidify the room, to do nothing all day long to these poor guys who have to be bored to death, but to polish the lamp and cut the wick and rake around on their garden junk, something to amuse them. Because how would you like to be closed for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, on a rock the size of a tennis court? she would ask; and not to have letters or newspapers, and not to see anyone; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were— - if they were sick, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week and then a terrible storm comes and the spray-covered windows and birds crash against the lamp and the whole place swings, and not to be able to stick your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like that? she asked and especially addressed her daughters. So she added, quite differently, you have to take her what you can.

"It's to the west," said the atheist Tansley, holding his bony fingers spread so that the wind blew through them, for he divided Mr. Ahuja's evening walk up and down, up and down the terrace. That is, the wind blew from the worst possible direction to land at the beacon. Yes, he said unpleasant things, Mrs. Ahuja admitted; it was disgusting of him to rub that in and make James even more disappointed; but at the same time, she would not make her laugh at him. "The Atheist", they called him; " the little Atheist."Rose mocked him; Prue mocked him; Andrew, Jasper, Roger mocked him; even the old badger with no tooth in his head had bitten him because he was (as Nancy put it) the hundredth young man who chased them all the way to the Hebrides when it was always so much nicer to be alone.

"Nonsense," Mrs. Ahuja said with great severity. Apart from the habit of exaggeration they had of her, and from the implication (which was true) that she asked too many people to stay, and had to accommodate some in the city, she could "exceptionally capable" her guests, especially young men who were poor as church mice, said her husband, his great admirer, and came there for a holiday. In fact, she had the entire opposite sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for her chivalry and bravery, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finances; finally for an attitude toward herself that no woman could feel or find pleasant without loss of dignity, something trusting, childlike, awesome; what an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe to the girl-pray heaven, it was none of her daughters!- who does not feel the value of it, and everything it implies, on the bone marrow of their bones!

She turned on Nancy with severity. He did not chase her, she said. He had been asked.

You need to find a way out. There might be an easier way, a less arduous one, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and saw her hair gray, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought maybe she had managed things better—her husband; money; his books. But for her own part, she would never regret her decision for a second, dodge difficulties, or slurp over duties. She was terrible to see now, and it was only in silence, looking up from her plates, after she had spoken so sternly about Charles Tansley that her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose-could live with infidel ideas they had concocted for themselves of a life other than hers; in Paris perhaps; a wilder life; not always to a man or another; for there was in all their minds a mute question of reverence and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ring fingers and tips, though there was something to them all in that essence of beauty which called forth masculinity in their girlish hearts, and caused them, as they sat at the table under their mother's eyes, to honor their strange severity, their utmost courtesy, like a queen raised from the mud to wash the dirty foot of a beggar, when she made them so very strict over the wretched Atheists admonished, the one who had hunted them-or, speaking accurately, was invited to stay with them-on the Isle of Skye.

"There will be no landing at the beacon tomorrow," said Charles Tansley, clapping his hands together as he stood by the window with her husband. Surely he had said enough. She wished they would leave her and James alone and keep talking. She looked at him. He was such a wretched specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He could not play cricket; he pushed; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew said. They knew what he liked best—always going up and down, up and down, with Mr Ahuja, and saying who had won this, who had won that, who was a "first-class man" in Latin verse, who was "brilliant, but I think fundamentally unhealthy," who was undoubtedly the "ablest fellow in Balliol," who had temporarily buried his light in Bristol or Bedford, but was obliged to be heard later when his prolegomena, of which Mr Tansley had written the first pages in Proof with him when Mr Ahuja see you, to a branch of mathematics or philosophy saw the light of day. They talked about it.

She couldn't help but laugh herself sometimes. She said something about " Waves mountains high."Yes," said Charles Tansley, it was a little rough. "Aren't you soaked in the skin?"she had said. "Wet, not wet through," said Mr. Tansley, pinching his sleeve and feeling his socks.

But it wasn't that they wanted it, the children said. It was not his face; it was not his manners. It was him-his point of view. When they talked about something interesting, people, music, history, anything, even said it was a nice evening, so why not sit out the door, then they complained about Charles Tansley until he had turned the whole thing around and it somehow reflected itself and disparaged them—he wasn't happy. And he would go to picture galleries, they said, and he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, Rose said, they didn't.

Disappearing as stealthily as deer from the dining table when the meal was over, the eight sons and daughters of Mr and Mrs Ahuja sought their bedrooms, their authenticity in a house where there was no other privacy to discuss anything, anything; Tansley's tie; the passing of the reform bill; seabirds and butterflies; people living nearby; as the sun streamed into those attics which alone separated a plank so that every step could be clearly heard, the Swiss girl sobbed after her father, who was ill with cancer, in a valley of the Grisons, and lit up bats, flannels, straw hats, ink pots, paint pots, beetles and the skulls of small birds, while she drew from the long toasted strips of seaweed attached to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was also in the towels, gravelly with sand from bathing.

Quarrels, divisions, disagreements, prejudices twisted into the fiber of being, oh that they should begin so early, Mrs. Ahuja regretted. They were so critical of their children. They talked such nonsense. She walked out of the dining room and held James by the hand as he would not go with the others. It seemed such nonsense to her to invent differences when people, as heaven knows, were different enough without it. The real differences, she thought, standing at the living room window, are enough, quite enough. She had in mind at the moment, rich and poor, high and low; the great birth received from her, half resentfully, a certain respect, for she had not in her veins the blood of this very noble, though slightly mythical Italian house, whose daughters, scattered about English salons in the nineteenth century, lisped so charmingly, had stormed so wildly, and all her wit and bearing and temper came from them, and not from the sluggish English, or the cold Scotch; but deeper, she pondered over the other problem, of rich and poor, and the things she saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here or in London, when she visited this widow, or this struggling woman in person with a bag on her arm, and a notebook and pencil, with which she carefully ruled in columns, around wages and expenses, employment and unemployment, hoping that she would stop being a private woman whose charity was half a sop to her own outrage, half a relief to her own curiosity, and what with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an investigator who elucidates the social problem.

Unsolvable questions they were, it seemed to her, standing there holding James by the hand. He had followed her into the drawing-room, that young man they were laughing at; he was standing at the table, fidgeting about something, clumsy, feeling out of things, as she knew, without looking around. They had all gone-the children; Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley; Augustus Carmichael; her husband-they had all gone. So she turned with a sigh and said, " Would you be bored to come with me, Mr. Tansley?"

She had a dull assignment in the city; she had one or two letters to write; she would be perhaps ten minutes; she would put on her hat. And with her basket and her parasol, she was back ten minutes later and gave out the feeling of being ready for a trip, which, however, must interrupt her for a moment as they passed the tennis court to ask Mr. Carmichael, who was basking in the sun with his yellow cat's eyes fixed so that they seemed like a cat's reflecting the moving branches or passing clouds, but giving no idea of inner thoughts or emotions when he wanted something.

For they were making the great expedition, she said, laughing. They went into the city. "Stamps, Writing-Paper, Tobacco?"she suggested stopping by his side. But no, he didn't want anything. His hands clasped over his big crunch, his eyes blinked as if he had wanted to respond kindly to these mild circumstances (she was seductive, but a little nervous), but could not, sunk in a gray-green somnolence that embraced them all without needing words, in a vast and benevolent lethargy of benevolence; the whole house; the whole world; all the people in it, for he had slipped a few drops of something into his glass at lunch, which, the children thought, accounted for the lively canary-yellow stripe in his mustache and beard, which was otherwise milk-white. No, nothing, he muttered.

He should have been a great philosopher, said Mrs. Ahuja as they walked down the road to the fishing village, but he had made an unhappy marriage. She held her black parasol very upright and moved with an indescribable expectation, as if she were meeting someone around the corner, she told the story; an affair in Oxford with a girl; an early marriage; poverty; going to India; a little poetry "translate very nicely, I think", be willing to teach the young Persian or Hindustani, but what good was that really?—and then lying, as they saw him, on the lawn.

It flattered him; pushed as he had been, it reassured him that Mrs. Ahuja should tell him so. Charles Tansley revived. She also insinuated, as she did the greatness of the human intellect, even in its decay, the subjugation of all women—not that she blamed the girl, and the marriage had been happy enough, she believed—to her husband's work, she made him feel better satisfied with himself than he had yet done, and he would have liked it if, for example, they had taken a taxi to have paid the fare. As for your little bag, could he not carry it? No, no, she said, she always carried IT herself. She did it too. Yes, he felt that in her. He felt many things, especially something that aroused him and disturbed him for reasons he could not give. He wants her to see him, rubberized and hooded, walking in a procession. A scholarship, a professorship, he felt capable of everything and saw himself—but what did she look at? With a man who inserts an invoice. The huge fluttering sheet flattened, and each stroke of the brush revealed fresh legs, hoops, horses, glittering shades of red and blue, beautifully smooth, until half the wall was covered with the advertisement of a circus; a hundred horsemen, twenty seals, lions, tigers... Who pushed forward, because she was short-sighted, she read it... "will visit this city," she read. It was terribly dangerous work for a one-armed man, she exclaimed, to stand on a ladder like that-his left arm had been cut off in a harvester two years ago.

"Let's all go!"she wept and went on as if all these horsemen and horses had filled her with childlike exultation and made her forget her pity.

"Let's go," he said, repeating her words but clicking them out with a self-confidence that made her wink. "Let's all go to the circus." No. He could not say it correctly. He couldn't feel it right. But why not? she wondered. Then what was wrong with him? She liked him very much at the moment. Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked exactly what he wanted; had longed all these days to say how they did not go to circuses. It was a large family, nine brothers and sisters, and his father was a worker. "My father is a chemist, Mrs Ahuja. He runs a business."He had paid his own way since he was thirteen. He often went out without a coat in winter. He could never "return hospitality" at college (those were his parched stiff words). He had to do things twice as long as other people; he smoked the cheapest tobacco; shag; the same was done by the old men in the quays. He worked hard-seven hours a day; his theme now was the influence of something on someone—they went on and Mrs. Ahuja didn't quite catch the meaning, just the words here and there... Dissertation... Community... Readership... Lecture. She couldn't follow the ugly academic jargon that rattled so slippery, but said to herself that she now saw why the circus had knocked him off his perch, the poor little man, and why he came out immediately, with all that about his father and mother and his brothers and sisters, and she would make sure they didn't laugh at him any more; she would tell Prue about it. What he would have wished for, she suspected, would have been to say how he would not have gone to the circus, but to Ibsen with the Ahuja. He was a terrible prig - oh yes, an unbearable bore. For though they had now reached the city and were in the main street, with carts grinding by on the cobblestone pavement, he continued to talk, about settlements and teaching and labourers, helping our own class and lectures, until it gathered that he had got all the confidence back, had recovered from the circus and was about (and now again she liked him warmly) to tell her-but here, the houses that faded away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread out before them and Mrs. Ahuja could not help, than exclaiming, " Oh, how beautiful!"For the great plate of blue water was before her; the hoarse beacon, distant, stern, in the middle; and to the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft deep folds, the green sand dunes with the wildly flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to run away into a moonland, uninhabited by men.

That was the view she said stop, growing greyer-eyed that her husband loved.

She paused for a moment. But now, she said, artists have come here. In fact, just a few steps away, one of them, in Panama hat and yellow boots, stood earnestly, quietly, absorbing, for all he was observed by ten little boys, with a touch of deep satisfaction on his round red face, and then, as he had looked, dipping; imitating the top of his brush in a soft mound of green or pink. Since Mr. Paunceforte was there, three years earlier, all the pictures were like this, she said, green and gray, with lemon-colored sailboats, and pink women on the beach.

But her grandmother's friends, she said, and looked discreetly as they passed, took the greatest pains; first they mixed their own colors, and then they ground them, and then they put damp cloths to keep them moist.

So Mr. Tansley said she wanted him to see that this man's picture was scarce, they said? The colors were not solid? Did they say that? Under the influence of that extraordinary Emotion which had grown all the time, had begun in the garden when he wanted to take her bag, had increased in the city, as he wanted to tell her everything about himself, he came to see himself, and everything he had ever known, was gone a little wrong. It was terribly strange.

There he stood in the drawing room of the poky Little House where she had taken him, waiting for her while she went upstairs for a moment to see a woman. He heard her quick step; heard her voice cheerful, then low; looked at the mats, tea-Caddies, glass shades; waited quite impatiently; looked excited on the way home; determined to carry her bag; then heard her come out; lock a door; say you have to keep the windows open and close the doors, ask in the house about everything you wanted (she has to talk to a child), when suddenly, when she came, she stood still for a moment (as if she had faked up there and left herself for a moment now), stood for a moment quite motionless against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the garter; when he suddenly realized that it was this: it was this:—She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense did he think? She was at least fifty; she had eight children. He walked through fields of flowers, and took to her breast buds that were broken, and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes, and the wind in her hair—He had held her purse.

"Good-bye, Elsie," she said, and they walked up the street, holding up her parasol and walking as if expecting to meet someone around the corner, while Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride for the first time in his life; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked at her, dropped his arm and looked at her; for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets, for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had her bag in his hand.

Chapter 2

"No going to the Beacon, James," he said as he tried, out of respect for Mrs. Ahuja, to at least turn his voice into a semblance of genius.

Vile little man, thought Mrs. Ahuja, why do you keep saying that?

Chapter 3

"Maybe you'll wake up and see the sun shining and the birds singing," she said sympathetically, smoothing the little boy's hair, for her husband had smashed his spirits with his caustic saying that it would not be okay to see them. This way to the beacon was a passion of his, she saw, and then, as if her husband had not said enough, with his caustic saying that it would not be good tomorrow, this vile little man went and rubbed it again.

"Maybe tomorrow will be fine," she said, smoothing his hair.

All she could do now was admire the fridge and turn over the pages of the shopping list in the hope that she might come across something like a rake or a mowing machine, which with its tines and handles would require the greatest skill and care in cutting out. All these young men parodied her husband, she reflected; he said it was going to rain; they said it was going to be a positive tornado.

But here, as she turned the page, her search for the image of a rake or a mower was suddenly interrupted. The harsh murmur that was broken irregularly by the removal of pipes and the insertion of pipes that had repeatedly assured her, although she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window that opened on the terrace), that the men were talking happily; this sound, which had now lasted half an hour and had taken its place reassuringly in the scale of sounds pressing on them, such as the knocking of balls on bats, the sharp, sudden barking now and then, "How is that? How is that?"from the kids playing cricket, had stopped; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part struck a measured and soothing tattoo on her thoughts and seemed desolate, repeated again and again as she sat with the children, the words of an old lullaby, muttered by nature ," I guard you—I am your support", but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind rose slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such friendly meaning, but like a ghostly drum roll she ruthlessly beat the measure of life, they thought of the destruction of the island and its devouring in the sea, and warned them, whose day had slipped by in one swift movement after another, that everything was transitory like a rainbow—this sound, which had been concealed and concealed under the other sounds, suddenly thundered hollow in their ears and made them look up with a pulse of terror.

They had stopped talking; that was the explanation. In a second of the tension she had packed to the other extreme, which, as if to regain her for her unnecessary cost of emotion, was cool, amused, and even faintly vicious, she came to the conclusion that poor Charles Tansley had been shed. This was not meaningful to them. When her husband needed sacrifice (and indeed he did), she cheerfully offered him Charles Tansley, who had pushed her little boy.

A moment more, with her head raised, she listened as if waiting for an ordinary sound, a regular mechanical sound; and then she heard something rhythmic, half-said, half-chanted, beginning in the garden, as her husband beat up and down the terrace, something between a croak and a song, she was reassured once more, reassured again that everything was all right, and when she looked down at the book on her knee, she found the picture of a pocket knife with six blades, which could only be cut out if James was very careful.

Suddenly a loud scream, as if from a sleepwalker, half aroused, something about

Hit with shot and grenade

singing with the greatest intensity in her ear, she anxiously took her turn to see if anyone had heard him. Only Lily Briscoe, she was glad to find; and that didn't matter. But the sight of the girl standing at the edge of the lawn painting reminded her of this; she should keep her head in the same position as possible for Lily's picture as far as possible. Lily's picture! Mrs Ahuja smiled. With her little Chinese eyes and her puffed face, she would never marry; you couldn't take her painting very seriously; She was an independent little creature, and Mrs. Ahuja liked her for it; when she remembered her promise, she bowed her head.

Chapter 4

In fact, he almost knocked over her easel and came down on her with his hands, shouting, "We rode boldly and well," but graciously he turned sharply and rode away to die gloriously, which she suspected on the heights of the balaclava. Never has anyone been so ridiculous and alarming at once. But as long as he remained like that, she was safe, waving and screaming; He would not stand still and look at her image. And Lily Briscoe couldn't have put up with that. Even as she looked at the mass, the line, the color, Mrs. Ahuja, who was sitting in the window with James, held a feeler around her so that no one should sneak in, and suddenly she should see her picture. But now, with all her senses quickened as they were, looking, straining until the color of the wall and the jacmanna beyond burned into her eyes, she was aware that someone coming out of the house was coming toward her; but somehow divine, from the footstep, William Bankes, so that although her brush trembled, she did not do it as she would have done if it had been Mr. Tansley would have been, Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle, or virtually anyone else, turning her canvas on the grass, but let it stand. William Bankes Stood beside her.

They had rooms in the village, and so, going in, going out, parting late on door mats, saying little things about the soup, about the children, about one thing and another that made them allies; so that when he now stood beside her in his judicial way (he was old enough to be her father, a botanist, a widower, smells of soap, very conscientious and clean) she just stood there. He just stood there. Her shoes were excellent, he observed. They allowed the toes their natural extension. Accommodation in the same house with her, he had also noticed, how neat she was until before breakfast and away to paint, he believed alone: poor, presumably, and without the complexion or the allure of Miss Doyle certainly, but with a good feeling that made her superior in his eyes to that young lady. Well, for example, when Ahuja bored her, shouted, gesticulated, Miss Briscoe, he felt sure understood.

One had made a mistake.

Mr. Ahuja stared at her. He stared at her without seeing her. This made them both vaguely uncomfortable. Together they had seen something they did not want to see. They had invaded a privacy. So, Lily thought it was probably an excuse from him to move to get out of ear candy, which almost immediately made Mr. Bankes say something about it being cool and suggested taking a walk. She would come, Yes. But it was with difficulty that she took her eyes off her picture.

The Jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would not have thought it honest to manipulate the shining violet and the staring white, since she saw them like that, although it was like that since Mr. Paunceforte's visit to see everything pale, elegant and semi-transparent. Then under the color was the form. She could see everything so clearly, so commanding, as she looked: when she took her brush in her hand, the whole thing changed. It was at that moment flight between the image and her canvas that the demons set upon her, which often brought her to the brink of tears and made this passage from conception as terrible as any down a dark passage for a child to work with. So she often felt herself-struggling against terrible adversity to maintain her courage; to say," But this I see; this I see, " and thus clinging to her breast a miserable remnant of her vision, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then, too, in that cool and windy way when she began to paint, that it forced itself on her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, to keep house for her father from Brompton Road, and had much trouble controlling her impulse to fling herself (thank God she had always resisted so far) at Mrs. Ahuja's knee and say to her—but what could you say to her? "I'm in love with you?"No, that was not true. "I'm in love with all this," she waved her hand to the hedge, to the house, to the children. It was absurd, it was impossible. Now she put her brushes neatly side by side in the box and said to William Bankes:

"It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less warmth, " she said, looking at her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep green, the house played in its green with purple passion blossoms and towers that let cool cries fall from the high blue. But something moved, flashed and turned a silver wing in the air. It was finally September, mid-September, and after six o'clock in the evening. So they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis grass, past the pampas grass, to this break in the thick hedge, guarded by glowing poker like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever.

They came there regularly every evening drawn by some needy. It was as if the water was floating off and sailing thoughts that had grown stagnant on dry land, and even gave their bodies a kind of physical relief. First, the pulse of colour flooded the Bay with Blue, and the heart expanded with it and the body swam, only the next Moment, he was checked by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves, and cooled. Then, up behind the great black rock, almost every evening, irregular, broken, so you had to make sure and it was a delight when it came, a fountain of white water; and then while one waited, watched, on the pale semicircular beach, wave after wave, again and again smoothly, a Film of mother-of-pearl.

Both smiled and stood there. They both felt a common merriment, excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift tailoring of a sailboat which, having cut a bend in the bay, had stopped; trembled; let its sails fall; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the picture, after this quick movement, both looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt some sadness coming over them—because the thing was partly completed, and partly because distant views seem to last around a million years (Lily thought) the view and already to be with a sky that sees an earth quite at rest.

Looking at the distant sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ahuja: thought of a road in Westmorland, thought of Ahuja walking alone down a road and hanging about with that loneliness that seemed to be his natural air. But this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to an actual incident), a hen that laid out their wings for the protection of a Covey of little Chicks, on Ahuja, Stopping, pointed his stick and said "Pretty-pretty", a strange lighting in his heart, Bankes had thought of it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased to section on this road. After that, Ahuja had married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had gone out of their friendship. Whose fault he was, he could not tell, only after some time repetition had taken the place of novelty. It was to repeat that they met. But in this stupid colloquium with the sand dunes, he claimed that his affection for Ahuja had in no way diminished; but there, like the body of a young man lying in peat for a century, with the red fresh on his lips, his friendship lay in its sharpness and reality over the bay between the sand hills.

He was concerned for the sake of this friendship, and perhaps also to free himself from the insinuation that he had dried up and shrunk—for Ahuja lived in a world full of children, while Bankes was childless and a widower—he was concerned that Lily Briscoe should not denigrate Ahuja (a great man in his own way), but should understand how things stood between them. Started many years ago, their friendship had petrified on a Westmorland Road, where the hen spread her wings in front of her chicks; after that, Ahuja had married, and their paths were different, There was certainly no one's fault, a tendency, when they met, repeat.

Yes. That was it. He is finished. He turned away from the view. And when he turned to run back in the other direction, up the drive, Mr. Bankes was alive for things that would not have hit him had not these sand hills revealed to him the body of his friendship that lay with the red on the lips laid in peat—for example, Cam, the little girl, Ahuja's youngest daughter. She picked sweet Alice on the shore. She was wild and wild. She would not give the Lord a "flower," as the nanny told her. No! no! no! she would not! She clenched her fist. She stamped. And Mr. Bankes felt aged and sad and somehow put into the wrong of her about his friendship. It must be dried and shrunk.

The Ahuja were not rich, and it was a miracle how they managed to rob everything. Eight Children! To feed eight children on philosophy! Here was another of them, Jasper this time, strolling by to have a shot at a bird, he said nonchalantly, swinging Lily's hand like a pump handle as he passed by, which led Mr Bankes to say bitterly as SHE was a favourite. There was now an education to be considered (true, Mrs. Ahuja may have had something of his own), let alone the daily wear and tear of shoes and stockings that these "great fellows", all well-grown, angular, reckless youngsters, need. To be sure which was which, or in what order they came, was beyond him. He called her privately after the kings and queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless, Andrew the Righteous, Prue the Righteous - for Prue had beauty, he thought, how could she help him?- Andrew brains. As he walked up the drive and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments (for she was in love with them all, in love with this world), he weighed Ahuja's case, praised him, envied him, as if he had seen him liberate himself from all the glories of isolation and thrift that crowned him in youth, to definitely cumulate with fluttering wings and cohesive domesticities. They gave him something—William Bankes admitted that; it would have been pleasant if Cam had stuck a flower in his coat or pinned it over his shoulder, as over her father's, to look at a picture of the eruption of Vesuvius; but they had also, his old friends could only feel, destroyed something. What would a Stranger think now? What was this Lily Briscoe thinking? Could you help notice that habits grew on him? eccentricities, weaknesses perhaps? It was amazing that a man with his intellect could stoop as low as he did—but that was too harsh a sentence— that could depend so much on people's praise.

"Oh, but," Lily said, " think of his work!"

Whenever she "thought about his work," she always saw clearly in front of her a large kitchen table. It was Andrews did. She asked him what his father's books were about. "Subject and object and the nature of reality," Andrew had said. And when she said heavens, she had no idea what that meant. "Then think of a kitchen table," he told her, " when you're not there."