THE LIGHTHOUSEthe fields of death. But always something — it mightbe a face, a voice, a paper boy crying Standard, News —thrust through, snubbed her, waked her, required andgot in the end an effort of attention, so that the visionmust be perpetually remade. Now again, moved asshe was by some instinctive need of distance andblue, she looked at the bay beneath her, making hil-locks of the blue bars of the waves, and stony fieldsof the purpler spaces. Again she was roused as usualby something incongruous. There was a brown spotin the middle of the bay. It was a boat. Yes, she real-ised that after a second. But whose boat? Mr. Ram-say’s boat, she replied. Mr. Ramsay; the man who hadmarched past her, with his hand raised, aloof, at thehead of a procession, in his beautiful boots, askingher for sympathy, which she had refused. The boatwas now half way across the bay.
So fine was the morning except for a streak ofwind here and there that the sea and sky looked allone fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, orthe clouds had dropped down into the sea. A steamerfar out at sea had drawn in the air a great scroll ofsmoke which stayed there curving and circling dec-oratively, as if the air were a fine gauze which heldthings and kept them softly in its mesh, only gentlyswaying them this way and that. And as happenssometimes when the weather is very fine, the cliffslooked as if they were conscious of the ships, and theships looked as if they were conscious of the cliffs,as if they signalled to each other some secret messageof their own. For sometimes quite close to the shore,the Lighthouse looked this morning in the haze anenormous distance away.211