homework

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Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall”

Short story, 1921

Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark

on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the

fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the

round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just

finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the

mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye

lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping

from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up

the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is

an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark,

black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of

straw so feverishly, and then leave it.... If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a

picture, it must have been for a miniature–the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls,

powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had

this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way–an old picture for an old room. That

is the sort of people they were–very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such

queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They

wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and

he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn

asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the

tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made by a nail after all; it's too

big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be

able to say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh!

dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show

how very little control of our possessions we have–what an accidental affair this living is after all

our civilization–let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that

seems always the most mysterious of losses–what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble–three

pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the

steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ–all gone, and

jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair

it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid

furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to

being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour–landing at the other end without a single

hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the

asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's

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hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the

perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns

over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is

born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass,

at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or

whether there are such things, that one won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There

will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up

perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour–dim pinks and blues–which will, as time goes

on, become more definite, become–I don't know what....

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black

substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant

housekeeper–look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say,

buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can

believe.

The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane.... I want to think quietly, calmly,

spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one

thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper,

away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the

first idea that passes.... Shakespeare.... Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat

himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so–A shower of ideas fell perpetually

from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and

people, looking in through the open door,–for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's

evening–But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit

upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the

pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people,

who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly

praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:

"And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I'd seen a flower

growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been

sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?" I

asked–(but I don't remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And

so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly,

stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand

at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the

image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike

the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of

great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic

figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person

which is seen by other people–what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A

world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are

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looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.

And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of

course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will

explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more

out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare

perhaps–but these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough.

It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers–a whole class of things indeed which as a child one

thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save

at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London,

Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and

habits–like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody

liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that

they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you

may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a

different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover

that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not

entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them

was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder,

those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view

which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of

Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and

women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the

mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all

with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom–if freedom exists....

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely

circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my

finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus,

a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or

camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English

people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the

turf.... There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and

given them a name.... What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the

most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth

and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at

breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-heads

necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and

to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every

reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the

Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the

question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites

a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke

lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that

arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a

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Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of

Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson drank out of–proving I really don't know what.

No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and

ascertain that the mark on the wall is really–what shall we say?–the head of a gigantic old nail,

driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many

generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view

of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?–Knowledge?

Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is

knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who

crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the

language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect

for beauty and health of mind increases.... Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet,

spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors

or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice

with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies,

hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs.... How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the

centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and

their reflections–if it were not for Whitaker's Almanack–if it were not for the Table of

Precedency!

I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is–a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack

in the wood?

Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she

perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will

ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker's Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of

Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by

the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and

the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels,

comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour

of peace, think of the mark on the wall.

I understand Nature's game–her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that

threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action–

men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable

thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel

a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High

Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking

from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping

the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal

world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of....

Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know

how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows,

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in forests, and by the side of rivers–all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails

beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one

expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced

against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon

the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood;

then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on

winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to

the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night

long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of

insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun

themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with

diamond-cut red eyes.... One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the

earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground

again. Even so, life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all

over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit

after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should

like to take each one separately–but something is getting in the way.... Where was I? What has it

all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker's Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I

can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing.... There is a vast

upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying–

"I'm going out to buy a newspaper."

"Yes?"

"Though it's no good buying newspapers.... Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn

this war!... All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall." Ah, the mark

on the wall! It was a snail.