(Scene 4. The conservatory. VIRGINIA sits unmoving before a tea-table. Enter LEONARD.)
LEONARD
I see I am in time for tea. May I join you?
VIRGINIA
I can’t stop you.
LEONARD
(daringly pulls his chair to the table)
How are you feeling?
VIRGINIA
Like a helpless baby on the shore of life, turning over pebbles. The ocean tosses me pebbles and I turn them over, one by one. I’m naked, a child, and no one helps me.
LEONARD
I want to help you. May I pour? Lovely cakes.
(he pours two cups, carefully serves her a cake, takes one himself, munches and sips)
Delicious. Sir George keeps an excellent cook.
VIRGINIA
His brain is in his stomach. Or rather, he has a stomach instead of a brain but no one’s noticed. I’m afraid the tea is cold. They won’t let me have a spirit lamp in case I set the place on fire, like mad Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre.
LEONARD
The tea is perfect. Oolong, I notice. May I sugar yours?
VIRGINIA
You’re certainly sugaring everything else. Why are you in such a good mood?
LEONARD
I’m happy to see you looking so well. What have you been thinking?
VIRGINIA
That I want to write a novel about silence. Depression interests me. One could make a game of assembling the fractured pieces, capturing the things people don’t say. How deeply they drive themselves into me, those things people daren’t say aloud! It seems everyone is in agreement that the truth of women must be suppressed. Repress, control. If I am going to write all this I will need a different word than novel or people won’t know what to expect. Elegy, perhaps?
LEONARD
You were born to write, Virginia. Your book is beautiful. I mean The Voyage Out.
VIRGINIA
My book? My poor sad, dull novel which shall certainly be abused? A whole made painfully from shivering fragments. “The spring, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid on fields entirely careless of beholders.” I tried to speak truth but I collapsed under the burden of my failure.
LEONARD
You can’t think how I envy you your spring of fantastic imagination.
It’s beautifully written. But it’s so very sad. Tell me, why must Rachel die before the wedding?
VIRGINIA
Because the fiancé is based on Clive and who would ever want to marry him?
LEONARD
Nessa did.
VIRGINIA
He kept his real face very well hidden. The things he says about me to others! Adrian showed me the letters!
LEONARD
He’s angry because you refused him. Clive’s a monster. We’re in complete agreement. What if we eliminated monsters from your life? What would you write next?
VIRGINIA
It’s not possible to eliminate monsters. Look at this new war they’re brewing. War is a stupid, violent, hateful, idiotic, trifling, mean, ignoble display. Why should I dare to love you when you will only fight and die, trodden underfoot in some soggy foreign field?
LEONARD
You won’t get rid of me that easily. Dr. Craig has given me a dispensation because of my tremor.
VIRGINIA
So you’ve seen Dr. Craig. Is he as stupid as the others?
LEONARD
He thinks we need to design a healthy life. I think so too. And because your healthy life is writing, I want to hear about what you’ll write next.
VIRGINIA
(dreamily)
I want to write about the islands of light swimming through the grass. I want to show the peace, the unity in the smallest flower – but whenever I try the great ugly beast on the beach stamps and snorts.
LEONARD
What beast?
VIRGINIA
He is chained, but he pulls at his chain. I’m so afraid – he might escape.
LEONARD
Is this a memory, Virginia?
VIRGINIA
What have we but memory? Women are the beggars of every family; memory is our only treasure, the only dowry we inherit. Tell the truth, said father. But mother said sometimes a lie is better than the truth, because of feelings. You must spare people’s feelings, but only if they have the right feelings. What if their feelings are false to begin with? My feelings were never the right ones. Father was my writing teacher, did I tell you that?
LEONARD
And what was his recipe?
VIRGINIA
He said only write the truth and say exactly what you mean.
LEONARD
If only that were possible! You saw how I botched my turn.
VIRGINIA
But the truth is that when father died, I hated him. I was so relieved to be free of the exacting tyrant, the histrionic, self-pitying, violent, deaf, alternately loved and hated father. We all were. We fled that house, from a crypt slimy with fungus, disgusting with mold, gushing a sour stench of decay.
(A catch in her voice)
How we rejoiced! But in truth we had graduated from a life of suppressed rage into one of perpetual mourning. In my fantasies, Father confesses and repents his crimes, asking my forgiveness. But he could never do that, really. Everyone saw him as the pinnacle of reason and privilege, yet he felt ill-used by everyone he knew, even by life itself. I wonder, was he haunted by a devil, by some demon? Was it not he, himself, but something sitting on his shoulder that pecked at us so fiercely?
LEONARD
Naturally he grieved when your mother died. He must have altered greatly then.
VIRGINIA
My mother’s death was the greatest disaster that could possibly have happened. Father sat through countless meals groaning aloud about how he wished to die. Do you know, it is my worst fear that I will become like him. It is a fate more to be feared than madness, to my mind. He is inexplicable. Extraordinarily gifted, godlike, yet somehow childlike. There was an infantile fixation! Bubbling up from some dark place, I suppose, below the level of conscious thought. But he was protected by society, as we were not. In the privacy of our home he seemed unbound by any of the laws of ordinary people. Yet he desired constant pity! We were the ones forced to be self-controlled and coolly analytical, plotting ways to get around him. But when he shouted at Nessa I hated him so much I could have killed him myself. Our punishment came when Thoby died. Violet and Vanessa also were stricken with typhoid but only the sheltered males perished.
LEONARD
Thoby’s death wasn’t punishment. Thoby died of a typhoid germ. If these men are fragile as you say, how could your father be the brute you dreamed of, stamping on the beach?
VIRGINIA
All you men are brutes, with your gaming, your competitions, your subjugation and your wars. Men use knives, to cut things, to sacrifice, while women use needle and thread, to sew them up. But nothing’s as good once it’s been repaired. When my father threw a fish into the bottom of the boat, I felt I suddenly was that fish, flopping, gasping, drowning in the very air all had sworn was safe to breathe. I had more in common with waves and seabirds than with that man.
LEONARD
Now Virginia, you mustn’t get excited.
VIRGINIA
The great secret is not to feel. Strong feelings create an abyss between oneself and others. No one ever says anything they really mean. I am bored by men and their silly violence and wars. I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by heroism, virtue and honor. Men’s acquisitive instincts cause them to desire other people’s fields and goods, to make frontiers and flags, battleships and poison gas, to offer up their own lives and their children’s lives. Why should I submit to them, why endure a lifetime of unpaid service to their shoddy interests?
LEONARD
I agree we are a disgusting species. But man’s only locomotion is logic and reason. We must never give up.
Alysse Aallyn 