Jacobs Room | Page 2

The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from
all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking
against rocks--so it sounded.
Steele frowned; but was pleased by the effect of the black--it was just
THAT note which brought the rest together. "Ah, one may learn to
paint at fifty! There's Titian..." and so, having found the right tint, up he
looked and saw to his horror a cloud over the bay.
Mrs. Flanders rose, slapped her coat this side and that to get the sand
off, and picked up her black parasol.
The rock was one of those tremendously solid brown, or rather black,
rocks which emerge from the sand like something primitive. Rough
with crinkled limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry
seaweed, a small boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel
rather heroic, before he gets to the top.
But there, on the very top, is a hollow full of water, with a sandy
bottom; with a blob of jelly stuck to the side, and some mussels. A fish
darts across. The fringe of yellow-brown seaweed flutters, and out
pushes an opal-shelled crab--
"Oh, a huge crab," Jacob murmured--and begins his journey on weakly
legs on the sandy bottom. Now! Jacob plunged his hand. The crab was
cool and very light. But the water was thick with sand, and so,

scrambling down, Jacob was about to jump, holding his bucket in front
of him, when he saw, stretched entirely rigid, side by side, their faces
very red, an enormous man and woman.
An enormous man and woman (it was early-closing day) were stretched
motionless, with their heads on pocket-handkerchiefs, side by side,
within a few feet of the sea, while two or three gulls gracefully skirted
the incoming waves, and settled near their boots.
The large red faces lying on the bandanna handkerchiefs stared up at
Jacob. Jacob stared down at them. Holding his bucket very carefully,
Jacob then jumped deliberately and trotted away very nonchalantly at
first, but faster and faster as the waves came creaming up to him and he
had to swerve to avoid them, and the gulls rose in front of him and
floated out and settled again a little farther on. A large black woman
was sitting on the sand. He ran towards her.
"Nanny! Nanny!" he cried, sobbing the words out on the crest of each
gasping breath.
The waves came round her. She was a rock. She was covered with the
seaweed which pops when it is pressed. He was lost.
There he stood. His face composed itself. He was about to roar when,
lying among the black sticks and straw under the cliff, he saw a whole
skull--perhaps a cow's skull, a skull, perhaps, with the teeth in it.
Sobbing, but absent-mindedly, he ran farther and farther away until he
held the skull in his arms.
"There he is!" cried Mrs. Flanders, coming round the rock and covering
the whole space of the beach in a few seconds. "What has he got hold
of? Put it down, Jacob! Drop it this moment! Something horrid, I know.
Why didn't you stay with us? Naughty little boy! Now put it down.
Now come along both of you," and she swept round, holding Archer by
one hand and fumbling for Jacob's arm with the other. But he ducked
down and picked up the sheep's jaw, which was loose.
Swinging her bag, clutching her parasol, holding Archer's hand, and

telling the story of the gunpowder explosion in which poor Mr. Curnow
had lost his eye, Mrs. Flanders hurried up the steep lane, aware all the
time in the depths of her mind of some buried discomfort.
There on the sand not far from the lovers lay the old sheep's skull
without its jaw. Clean, white, wind-swept, sand-rubbed, a more
unpolluted piece of bone existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall.
The sea holly would grow through the eye-sockets; it would turn to
powder, or some golfer, hitting his ball one fine day, would disperse a
little dust--No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs. Flanders. It's a great
experiment coming so far with young children. There's no man to help
with the perambulator. And Jacob is such a handful; so obstinate
already.
"Throw it away, dear, do," she said, as they got into the road; but Jacob
squirmed away from her; and the wind rising, she took out her
bonnet-pin, looked at the sea, and stuck it in afresh. The wind was
rising. The waves showed that uneasiness, like something alive, restive,
expecting the whip, of waves before a storm. The fishing-boats were
leaning to the water's brim. A pale yellow light shot across the purple
sea; and shut. The lighthouse was lit. "Come along,"