На маяк. Уровень 3 / To the Lighthouse

Alas! She sighed and saw the whole room from floor to ceiling, as she held the stocking against James’s leg. Things got shabbier and shabbier summer after summer. The mat was fading; the wall-paper was flapping. You can’t tell anymore that those were roses on it.

But it was the doors that annoyed her; every door was left open. She listened. The drawing-room door was open; the hall door was open. It sounded as if the bedroom doors were open. Certainly the window was open. That windows must be open, and doors shut – it’s simple.

Can’t they remember it?

She had a spasm of irritation, and spoke sharply to James:

“Stand still. Don’t be tiresome.”

He knew instantly that her severity was real. He straightened his leg and she measured it.

The stocking was too short. It was the stocking for Sorley’s little boy, and he was less well grown than James.

“It’s too short,” she said.

Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black. A tear formed; a tear fell.

Never did anybody look so sad.

Mrs. Ramsay smoothed out her harsh manner, raised his head, and kissed her little boy on the forehead.

“Let us find another picture to cut out,” she said.

6

But what happened?

Someone made a mistake.

She fixed her short-sighted[7 - short-sighted – близорукий] eyes upon her husband. She gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to her that something had happened.

He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own splendour, had been shattered, destroyed.

Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well. He quivered; he shivered.

She realised, from the familiar signs, that he needed privacy to regain his equilibrium, that he was outraged and anguished. She stroked James’s head; she transferred to him what she felt for her husband. Her husband passed her. She was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled; domesticity triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm.

At the window he bent quizzically and whimsically to tickle James’s bare calf with a sprig of something. She twitted him that he had dispatched “that poor young man,” Charles Tansley.

“Tansley had to write his dissertation,” he said. “James will have to write his dissertation one of these days,” he added ironically.

She was trying to finish these tiresome stockings to send them to Sorley’s little boy tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay.