The Years (Unabridged). Вирджиния Вулф

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СКАЧАТЬ she said. From the tone of her mother’s voice Kitty knew that something had happened. She sat holding the note in her hand. Hiscock shut the door.

      “Rose is dead!” said Mrs Malone. “Cousin Rose.”

      The note lay open on her knee.

      “It’s from Edward,” she said.

      “Cousin Rose is dead?” said Kitty. A moment before she had been thinking of a bright light on a red rock. Now everything looked dingy. There was a pause. There was silence. Tears stood in her mother’s eyes.

      “Just when the children most wanted her,” she said, sticking the needle into her embroidery. She began to roll it up very slowly. Kitty folded The Times and laid it on a little table, slowly, so that it should not crackle. She had only seen Cousin Rose once or twice. She felt awkward.

      “Fetch me my engagement book,” said her mother at last. Kitty brought it.

      “We must put off our dinner on Monday,” said Mrs Malone, looking through her engagements.

      “And the Lathoms’ party on Wednesday,” Kitty murmured, looking over her mother’s shoulder.

      “We can’t put off everything,” said her mother sharply, and Kitty felt rebuked.

      But there were notes to be written. She wrote them at her mother’s dictation.

      Why is she so ready to put off all our engagements? thought Mrs Malone, watching her write. Why doesn’t she enjoy going out with me any more? She glanced through the notes that her daughter brought her.

      “Why don’t you take more interest in things here, Kitty?” she said irritably, pushing the letters away.

      “Mama, dear—” Kitty began, deprecating the usual argument.

      “But what is it you want to do?” her mother persisted. She had put away her embroidery; she was sitting upright, she was looking rather formidable.

      “Your father and I only want you to do what you want to do,” she continued.

      “Mama, dear—” Kitty repeated.

      “You could help your father if it bores you helping me,” said Mrs Malone. “Papa told me the other day that you never come to him now.” She referred, Kitty knew, to his history of the college. He had suggested that she should help him. Again she saw the ink flowing—she had made an awkward brush with her arm—over five generations of Oxford men, obliterating hours of her father’s exquisite penmanship; and could hear him say with his usual courteous irony, “Nature did not intend you to be a scholar, my dear,” as he applied the blotting-paper.

      “I know,” she said guiltily. “I haven’t been to Papa lately. But then there’s always something—” She hesitated.

      “Naturally,” said Mrs Malone, “with a man in your father’s position…” Kitty sat silent. They both sat silent. They both disliked this petty bickering; they both detested these recurring scenes; and yet they seemed inevitable. Kitty got up, took the letters she had written and put them in the hall.

      What does she want? Mrs Malone asked herself, looking up at the picture without seeing it. When I was her age … she thought, and smiled. How well she remembered sitting at home on a spring evening like this up in Yorkshire, miles from anywhere. You could hear the beat of a horse’s hoof on the road miles away. She could remember flinging up her bedroom window and looking down on the dark shrubs in the garden and crying out, “Is this life?” And in the winter there was the snow. She could still hear the snow flopping off the trees in the garden. And here was Kitty, living in Oxford, in the midst of everything.

      Kitty came back into the drawing-room and yawned very slightly. She raised her hand to her face with an unconscious gesture of fatigue that touched her mother.

      “Tired, Kitty?” she said. “It’s been a long day; you look pale.”

      “And you look tired too,” said Kitty.

      The bells came pushing forth one after another, one on top of another, through the damp, heavy air.

      “Go to bed, Kitty,” said Mrs Malone. “There! It’s striking ten.”

      “But aren’t you coming too, Mama?” said Kitty, standing beside her chair.

      “Your father won’t be back just yet,” said Mrs Malone, putting on her spectacles again.

      Kitty knew it was useless to try to persuade her. It was part of the mysterious ritual of her parents’ lives. She bent down and gave her mother the little perfunctory peck that was the only sign they ever gave each other outwardly of their affection. Yet they were very fond of each other; yet they always quarrelled.

      “Good-night, and sleep well,” said Mrs Malone.

      “I don’t like to see your roses fade,” she added, putting her arm round her for once in a way.

      She sat still after Kitty had gone. Rose is dead, she thought—Rose who was about her own age. She read the note again. It was from Edward. And Edward, she mused, is in love with Kitty, but I don’t know that I want her to marry him, she thought, taking up her needle. No, not Edward…. There was young Lord Lasswade…. That would be a nice marriage, she thought. Not that I want her to be rich, not that I care about rank, she thought, threading her needle. No, but he could give her what she wants…. What was it? … Scope, she decided, beginning to stitch. Then again her thoughts turned to Rose. Rose was dead. Rose who was about her own age. That must have been the first time he proposed to her, she thought, the day we had the picnic on the moors. It was a spring day. They were sitting on the grass. She could see Rose wearing a black hat with a cock’s feather in it over her bright red hair. She could still see her blush and look extremely pretty when Abel rode up, much to their surprise—he was stationed at Scarborough—the day they had the picnic on the moors.

      The house at Abercorn Terrace was very dark. It smelt strongly of spring flowers. For some days now wreaths had been piled one on top of another on the hall table. In the dimness—all the blinds were drawn—the flowers gleamed; and the hall smelt with the amorous intensity of a hot-house. Wreath after wreath, they kept arriving. There were lilies with broad bars of gold in them; others with spotted throats sticky with honey; white tulips, white lilac—flowers of all kinds, some with petals as thick as velvet, others transparent, paper-thin; but all white, and clubbed together, head to head, in circles, in ovals, in crosses so that they scarcely looked like flowers. Black-edged cards were attached to them, “With deep sympathy from Major and Mrs Brand”; “With love and sympathy from General and Mrs Elkin”; “For dearest Rose from Susan.” Each card had a few words written on it.

      Even now with the hearse at the door the bell rang; a messenger boy appeared bearing more lilies. He raised his cap, as he stood in the hall, for men were lurching down the stairs carrying the coffin. Rose, in deep black, prompted by her nurse, stepped forward and dropped her little bunch of violets on the coffin. But it slipped off as it swayed down the brilliant sunlit steps on the slanting shoulders of Whiteleys’ men. The family followed after.

      It was an uncertain day, with passing shadows and darting rays of bright sunshine. The funeral started at a walking pace. Delia, getting into the second carriage with Milly and Edward, noticed that the houses opposite had their blinds drawn in sympathy, but a servant peeped. The others, she noticed, did not seem to see her; they were thinking СКАЧАТЬ