THE LIGHTHOUSE 225colony of plantains. For the lawn was very rough.Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she couldnot shake herself free from the sense that everythingthis morning was happening for the first time, per-haps for the last time, as a traveller, even though heis half asleep, knows, looking out of the train win-dow, that he must look now, for he will never seethat town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at workin the fields, again. The lawn was the world; theywere up here together, on this exalted station, shethought, looking at old Mr Carmichael, who seemed(though they had not said a word all this time) toshare her thoughts. And she would never see himagain perhaps. He was growing old. Also, she re-membered, smiling at the slipper that dangled fromhis foot, he was growing famous. People said thathis poetry was ‘so beautiful.’ They went andpublished things he had written forty years ago.There was a famous man now called Carmichael, shesmiled, thinking how many shapes one person mightwear, how he was that in the newspapers, but herethe same as he had always been. He looked thesame—greyer, rather. Yes, he looked the same,but somebody had said, she recalled, that when hehad heard of Andrew Ramsay’s death (he was killedin a second by a shell; he should have been a greatmathematician) Mr Carmichael had ‘lost all interestin life.’ What did it mean—that? she wondered.Had he marched through Trafalgar Square graspinga big stick? Had he turned pages over and over,without reading them, sitting in his room in St John’sWood alone? She did not know what he had done,when he heard that Andrew was killed, but she felt
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