A Passionate Apprentice by Virginia Woolf

Author:Virginia Woolf [Virginia Woolf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

THE SERPENTINE

The evening paper is always prolific in tragedies & tonight’s sheet was unusually so. Four young men all in the prime of life have fallen & killed themselves on Scafell59 – the average number of husbands have murdered their wives while in drink or out of it, & love sick shop girls & maniacs have rushed to their knives & poison pots with unusual frequency. One might easily have sated one’s horrid curiosity & passed without reading a certain insignificant little paragraph at the bottom of the column. ‘A Suicides pathetic letter’60 I think they headed it – & in my idleness I read. It was by no means an out of the way story & the Editor had judged his readers taste judiciously when he allotted his capitals to the Yarmouth murder.61 This was printed I daresay for lack of something more blood curdling.

But I read it & it has stuck in my memory so that I can write it here. Yesterday morning then, the first Park Keepers saw something afloat in the Serpentine – What it needed little looking to tell. Bodies in the Serpentine are not uncommon in the early morning. They drew it ashore & found that it was a woman who had been drowned, drowned herself presumably some hours before. She was quite dead, & there was nothing to be done but take her to the mortuary & leave her for her relations to identify. Her soaked clothes were taken off, & the pockets searched in case her name or address might be found there. Very few people go out of the world in silence; almost every dead man or woman who is picked up has written some word of apology or farewell or justification. The most friendless knows that some one – if only the coroner – will be curious to learn what drove him to this last step – & it was so in this case. A scrap of paper was found pinned to the inside of her dress as though she had meant to keep it from the water as long as possible. It was blurred but the writing was still legible. Her last message to the world – whatever its import, was short – so short that I can remember it. ‘No father, no mother, no work’ she had written ‘May God forgive me for what I have done tonight’. This was her message & no more; name or dwelling place, friend or relation, she had none apparently. The inquest therefore could do nothing but declare that the body of an unknown woman age about 45 had been found drowned, & that as no relation claimed it it was to have burial at the hands of the parish. Here the newspaper ended – but I could not get the words out of my head. ‘No father, no mother, no work,’ & so she killed herself. Had this been the act & writing of a girl it would have been sad

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