[Vwoolf] "Jacob's Room": crux #7

[Stuart N. Clarke]

I think you’ll like this one!

‘A voice kept remarking that Prime Ministers and Viceroys spoke in the Reichstag; entered Lahore; said that the Emperor travelled; in Milan they rioted; said there were rumours in Vienna; said that the Ambassador at Constantinople had audience with the Sultan; the fleet was at Gibraltar. The voice continued, imprinting on the faces of the clerks in Whitehall (Timothy Durrant was one of them) something of its own inexorable gravity, as they listened, deciphered, wrote down. Papers accumulated . . . 
‘The voice spoke plainly in the square quiet room with heavy tables, where one elderly man made notes on the margin of type-written sheets, his silver-topped umbrella leaning against the bookcase. . . .

‘“The Kaiser,” the far-away voice remarked in Whitehall, “received me in audience.”’ (near end of ch. xiii)


What voice?  Sir Edward Grey’s? Asquith’s? The telephone? Harold Nicolson’s father’s? Morse code? Wireless telegraphy?  Or is it just messages pouring in?

Some metaphorical uses of “voice(s)” elsewhere in JR:

‘The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long.’ (end of ch. viii)

‘Yet even in this light the legends on the tombstones could be read, brief voices saying, “I am Bertha Ruck,” “I am Tom Gage.” . . . the tablet set up in 1780 to the Squire of the parish who relieved the poor, and believed in God—so the measured voice goes on down the marble scroll, as though it could impose itself upon time and the open air.’ (end of ch. xi)
Stuart
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