На маяк. Уровень 3 / To the Lighthouse

She was thinking it was about going to the Lighthouse. Was he going to say he was sorry for being harsh? But no. He did not like to see her look so sad, he said. She flushed a little. They both felt uncomfortable, as if they did not know whether to go on or go back.

She was reading fairy tales to James, she said.

No, they could not share that; they could not say that.

They had reached the gap between the two clumps of red-hot pokers. There was the Lighthouse again. But she did not look at it.

She looked over her shoulder, at the town.

The lights were rippling and running as if they were drops of silver water in a wind.

All the poverty, all the suffering had turned to that, Mrs. Ramsay thought.

The lights of the town and of the harbour and of the boats seemed like a phantom net. Mr. Ramsay wanted to tell the story how Hume was stuck in a bog. He wanted to laugh. It was nonsense to be anxious about Andrew. When he was Andrew’s age he used to walk about the country all day long. He had nothing but a biscuit in his pocket and nobody bothered about him.

He said he was going to spend a day alone. Enough of Bankes and of Carmichael. He wanted a little solitude.

Yes, she said.

It annoyed him that she did not protest. She knew that he would never do it. He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket. She worried about the boys, but not about him. Years ago, before he had married, he thought, he had walked all day. He had made a meal off bread and cheese in a public house[16 - public house – трактир].

He had worked ten hours.

That was the view he liked best, over there; those sandhills. One could walk all day without meeting a soul. There was not a house scarcely, not a single village for miles on end. There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the beginning of time. The seals sat up and looked at you.

It sometimes seemed to him that in a little house out there, alone – he stopped. He sighed. He had no right.

The father of eight children – he reminded himself. He will be a beast and a cur if he changes something. Andrew will be a better man than he was. Prue will be a beauty, her mother says. His eight children – a good bit of work.

“Poor little place,” he murmured with a sigh.

She heard him. He said the most melancholy things. But she knew when he said them he always seemed more cheerful afterwards. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought.