TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions,
the things you know us by, are simply childish.
Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is
unfathomably deep ; but now and again we rise
to the surface and that is what you see us by.
Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There
were all the places she had not seen; the Indian
plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick
leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of
darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it.
They could not stop it, she thought, exulting.
There was freedom, there was peace, there was,
most welcome of all, a summoning together, a
resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself
did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accom-
plished here something dexterous with her needles),^
but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality,
one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there
rose to her lips always some exclamation of
triumph over life when things came together in
this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing
there she looked out to meet that stroke of the
Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the
three, which was her stroke, for watching them in
this mood always at this hour one could not help
attaching oneself to one thing especially of the
things one saw; and this thing, the long steady
stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself
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