Jacobs Room

Jacob's Room

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Title: Jacob's Room
Author: Virginia Woolf
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year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on August 6, 2002]

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Jacob's Room
VIRGINIA WOOLF


CHAPTER ONE
"So of course," wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper
in the sand, "there was nothing for it but to leave."
Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved
the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly
filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she
had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor's little yacht was bending
like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful
things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were
regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.
"...nothing for it but to leave," she read.
"Well, if Jacob doesn't want to play" (the shadow of Archer, her eldest
son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt
chilly--it was the third of September already), "if Jacob doesn't want to
play"--what a horrid blot! It must be getting late.

"Where IS that tiresome little boy?" she said. "I don't see him. Run and
find him. Tell him to come at once." "...but mercifully," she scribbled,
ignoring the full stop, "everything seems satisfactorily arranged, packed
though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand the
perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won't allow...."
Such were Betty Flanders's letters to Captain Barfoot--many-paged,
tear- stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall:
Captain Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all
the dahlias in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass
house in her eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and
made Mrs. Jarvis, the rector's wife, think at church, while the
hymn-tune played and Mrs. Flanders bent low over her little boys'
heads, that marriage is a fortress and widows stray solitary in the open
fields, picking up stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely,
unprotected, poor creatures. Mrs. Flanders had been a widow for these
two years.
"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" Archer shouted.
"Scarborough," Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold
line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a
stamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then
fumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama
hat suspended his paint-brush.
Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Here
was that woman moving--actually going to get up--confound her! He
struck the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it.
It was too pale--greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white
gull suspended just so--too pale as usual. The critics would say it was
too pale, for he was an unknown man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite
with his landladies' children, wearing a cross on his watch chain, and
much gratified if his landladies liked his pictures--which they often did.
"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" Archer shouted.
Exasperated by the noise, yet loving children, Steele picked nervously

at the dark little coils on his palette.
"I saw your brother--I saw your brother," he said, nodding his head, as
Archer lagged past him, trailing his spade, and scowling at the old
gentleman in spectacles.
"Over there--by the rock," Steele muttered, with his brush between his
teeth, squeezing out raw sienna, and keeping his eyes fixed on Betty
Flanders's back.
"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" shouted Archer, lagging on after a second.