Slide to View Image: Opacity 0%
 
214 TO THE LIGHTHOUSEone end of dinner to the other. Yes, thought James,while the boat slapped and dawdled there in the hotsun; there was a waste of snow and rock very lonelyand austere; and there he had come to feel, quiteoften lately, when his father said something whichsurprised the others, were two pairs of footprintsonly; his own and his father’s. They alone kneweach other. What then was this terror, this hatred?Turning back among the many leaves which the pasthad folded in him, peering into the heart of thatforest where light and shade so chequer each otherthat all shape is distorted, and one blunders, nowwith the sun in one’s eyes, now with a dark shadow,he sought an image to cool and detach and round offhis feeling in a concrete shape. Suppose then thatas a child sitting helpless in a perambulator, oron someone’s knee, he had seen a wagon crushignorantly and innocently, someone’s foot? Sup-pose he had seen the foot first, in the grass,smooth, and whole; then the wheel; and the samefoot, purple, crushed. But the wheel was innocent.So now, when his father came striding down thepassage knocking them up early in the morning togo to the Lighthouse down it came over his foot,over Cam’s foot, over anybody’s foot. One satand watched it.

But whose foot was he thinking of, and in whatgarden did all this happen? For one had settingsfor these scenes; trees that grew there; flowers; acertain light; a few figures. Everything tendedto set itself in a garden where there was none ofthis gloom and none of this throwing of handsabout; people spoke in an ordinary tone of voice.