TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
looking out of the train window, that he must
look now, for he will never see that town, or
that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the
fields, again. The lawn was the world; they were
up here together, on this exalted station, she
thought, looking at old Mr. Carmichael, who
seemed (though they had not said a word all this
time) to share her thoughts. And she would
never see him again perhaps. He was growing
old. Also, she remembered, smiling at the slipper
that dangled from his foot, he was growing
famous. People said that his poetry was “so
beautiful.” They went and published things he
had written forty years ago. There was a famous
man now called Carmichael, she smiled, thinking
how many shapes one person might wear, how he
was that in the newspapers, but here the same
as he had always been. He looked the same—
greyer, rather. Yes, he looked the same, but
somebody had said, she recalled, that when he
had heard of Andrew Ramsay’s death (he was
killed in a second by a shell; he should have been
a great mathematician) Mr. Carmichael had lost
all interest in life.” What did it mean—that?
she wondered. Had he marched through Trafalgar
 Square grasping a big stick? Had he
turned pages over and over, without reading them,
sitting in his room in St. John’s Wood alone?
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