THE LIGHTHOUSEher fingers, a spray of seaweed vanishing behind them,she did not want to tell herself seriously a story; itwas the sense of adventure and escape that she wanted,for she was thinking, as the boat sailed on, how herfather’s anger about the points of the compass, James’sobstinacy about the compact, and her own anguish,all had slipped, all had passed, all had streamed away.What then came next? Where were they going? Fromher hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurtedup a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, atthe adventure (that she should be alive, that sheshould be there). And the drops falling from thissudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here andthere on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind;shapes of a world not realised but turning in theirdarkness, catching here and there, a spark of light;Greece, Rome, Constantinople. Small as it was, andshaped something like a leaf stood on end with thegold sprinkled waters flowing in and about it, it had,she supposed, a place in the universe — even thatlittle island? The old gentlemen in the study shethought could have told her. Sometimes she strayedin from the garden purposely to catch them at it.There they were (it might be Mr. Carmichael or Mr.Bankes, very old, very stiff) sitting opposite each otherin their low arm-chairs. They were crackling in frontof them the pages of The Times, when she came infrom the garden, all in a muddle, about somethingsome one had said about Christ; a mammoth hadbeen dug up in a London street; what was the greatNapoleon like? Then they took all this with theirclean hands (they wore grey coloured clothes; theysmelt of heather) and they brushed the scraps to-219
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