Four ---- He dressed himself very neatly in blue serge, took his rubber-shod stick — for he was lame and wanted two fingers on the left hand, having served his country — and set out from the house with the flagstaff precisely at four o'clock in the afternoon. "Waverley," the villa on the road to Girton was called, not that Mr. Plumer admired Scott or would have chosen any name at all, but names are useful when you have to entertain undergraduates, and as they sat waiting for the fourth undergraduate, on Sunday at lunch-time, there was talk of names upon gates. "Oh God, oh God, oh God!" exclaimed Jacob, as the four undergraduates left the house. Until midnight or later there would be undergraduates in his room, sometimes as many as twelve, sometimes three or four; but nobody got up when they went or when they came; Sopwith went on talking. "One, the sea; two, the wind; three, a dog; four Empty content. "Now let us talk," said Jacob, as he walked down Haverstock Hill between four and five o'clock in the morning of November the sixth arm-in-arm with Timmy Durrant, "about something sensible." All four were civilization's triumphs, and if you persist that a command of the English language is part of our inheritance, one can only reply that beauty is almost always dumb. At four o'clock the snow was again falling. Fed upon champagne and spices for at least two centuries (four, if you count the female line), the Countess Lucy looked well fed. Now there were four people sitting in that room. Then, hurrying after them comes a fourth, very large and menacing; it lifts the boat; on it goes; somehow merges without accomplishing anything; flattens itself out with the rest. It was four o'clock on a fine day early in April, and was Fanny the one to spend four o'clock on a fine day indoors? Feasted upon by the eyes of women, the clothes by four o'clock were flyblown like sugar cakes in a baker's window. The post for which she was waiting (strolling up Dods Hill while the random church bells swung a hymn tune about her head, the clock striking four straight through the circling notes; the glass purpling under a storm-cloud; and the two dozen houses of the village cowering, infinitely humble, in company under a leaf of shadow), the post, with all its variety of messages, envelopes addressed in bold hands,.

Numbers in Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

Item catalogue number:

723

Size:

9 pages

Preview:

Page 1

Zoom:

Open preview image

Next item:

Collection:

Numbers in Literature

Next collection: