Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be
taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming.
And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh
as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to
her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could
hear now, she had burst open the French windows and
plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm,
stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning;
like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp
and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn,
feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that
something awful was about to happen; looking at the
flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and
the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter
Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?
—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have
said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to
the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one
of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters
were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his
eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when
millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!
—a few sayings like this about cabbages.
She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to
pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her
(knowing her as one does know people who live next door to
one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the
jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty,
and grown very white since her illness. There she perched,
never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.
For having lived in Westminster—how many years now?
over twenty,—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or
waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or
solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might
be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben
strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then
the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For
Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so,
making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it
every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most
dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their
downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive,
by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In
people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow
and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans,
sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel
organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high
singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life;
London; this moment of June.
For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for
some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating
her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the
old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough
who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her
hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank
Heaven—over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the
Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there
was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of
cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it;
wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air,
which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set
down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose
forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the
whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent
muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking
their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this
hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor
cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were
fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds,
their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century
settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not
buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she
did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it,
since her people were courtiers once in the time of the
Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and
illuminate; to give her party. But how strange, on entering
the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming
happy ducks; the pouched birds waddling; and who should
be coming along with his back against the Government
buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch box
stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her
old friend Hugh—the admirable Hugh!
“Good-morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh, rather
extravagantly, for they had known each other as children.
“Where are you off to?”
“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really it’s
better than walking in the country.”
They had just come up—unfortunately—to see doctors. Other
people came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their
daughters out; the Whitbreads came “to see doctors.” Times
without number Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a
nursing home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good deal
out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell
of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome,
perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well dressed
always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at
Court) that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing
serious, which, as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would
quite understand without requiring him to specify. Ah yes,
she did of course; what a nuisance; and felt very sisterly and
oddly conscious at the same time of her hat. Not the right
hat for the early morning, was that it? For Hugh always
made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat rather
extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of
eighteen, and of course he was coming to her party to-night,
Evelyn absolutely insisted, only a little late he might be after
the party at the Palace to which he had to take one of Jim’s
boys,—she always felt a little skimpy beside Hugh;
schoolgirlish; but attached to him, partly from having known
him always, but she did think him a good sort in his own
way, though Richard was nearly driven mad by him, and as
for Peter Walsh, he had never to this day forgiven her for
liking him.
She could remember scene after scene at Bourton—Peter
furious; Hugh not, of course, his match in any way, but still
not a positive imbecile as Peter made out; not a mere
barber’s block. When his old mother wanted him to give up
shooting or to take her to Bath he did it, without a word; he
was really unselfish, and as for saying, as Peter did, that he
had no heart, no brain, nothing but the manners and
breeding of an English gentleman, that was only her dear
Peter at his worst; and he could be intolerable; he could be
impossible; but adorable to walk with on a morning like this.
(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of
Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing
from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and
Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its
leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality
which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all
that.)
For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and
Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but
suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now
what would he say?—some days, some sights bringing him
back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps
was the reward of having cared for people; they came back
in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morning—indeed
they did. But Peter—however beautiful the day might be,
and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink—Peter
never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles,
if she told him to; he would look. It was the state of the
world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s
characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul. How he
scolded her! How they argued! She would marry a Prime
Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect
hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom),
she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said.
So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park,
still making out that she had been right—and she had too—
not to marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little
independence there must be between people living together
day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her,
and she him. (Where was he this morning for instance? Some
committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything
had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was
intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little
garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they
would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was
convinced; though she had borne about with her for years
like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and
then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a
concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going
to India! Never should she forget all that! Cold, heartless, a
prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he
cared. But those Indian women did presumably—silly, pretty,
flimsy nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was
quite happy, he assured her—perfectly happy, though he had
never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life had
been a failure. It made her angry still.
She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment,
looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly.
She would not say of any one in the world now that they
were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time
unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything;
at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a
perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out,
out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that
it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that
she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How
she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge
Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew
nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book
now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely
absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of
Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she
thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one,
up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred. Devonshire
House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she
had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred,
Sally Seton—such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and
the waggons plodding past to market; and driving home
across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling
into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she
loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the
cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards
Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease
completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it;
or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended
absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on
the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter
survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was
positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly,
rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she
had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people
she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had
seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life,
herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked into
Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover?
What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the
book spread open:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all,
all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows;
courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical
bearing. Think, for example, of the woman she admired
most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar.
There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy
Sponge and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in
Nigeria, all spread open. Ever so many books there were; but
none that seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread
in her nursing home. Nothing that would serve to amuse her
and make that indescribably dried-up little woman look, as
Clarissa came in, just for a moment cordial; before they
settled down for the usual interminable talk of women’s
ailments. How much she wanted it—that people should look
pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and
walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was
silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather
would she have been one of those people like Richard who
did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to
cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for
themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect
idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand)
for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could
have had her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the
pavement, could have looked even differently!
She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady
Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful
eyes. She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and
stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a
country house; very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which
she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face,
beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well was true; and
had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that
she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she
stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its
capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the
oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown;
there being no more marrying, no more having of children
now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress
with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs.
Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs.
Richard Dalloway.
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning
in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter;
one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought
his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.
“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is
all,” she repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a
glove shop where, before the War, you could buy almost
perfect gloves. And her old Uncle William used to say a lady
is known by her shoes and her gloves. He had turned on his
bed one morning in the middle of the War. He had said, “I
have had enough.” Gloves and shoes; she had a passion for
gloves; but her own daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not a
straw for either of them.
Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bond Street to a shop
where they kept flowers for her when she gave a party.
Elizabeth really cared for her dog most of all. The whole
house this morning smelt of tar. Still, better poor Grizzle
than Miss Kilman; better distemper and tar and all the rest of
it than sitting mewed in a stuffy bedroom with a prayer
book! Better anything, she was inclined to say. But it might
be only a phase, as Richard said, such as all girls go through.
It might be falling in love. But why with Miss Kilman? who
had been badly treated of course; one must make allowances
for that, and Richard said she was very able, had a really
historical mind. Anyhow they were inseparable, and
Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to Communion; and how
she dressed, how she treated people who came to lunch she
did not care a bit, it being her experience that the religious
ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their
feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians,
starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted
positive torture, so insensitive was she, dressed in a green
mackintosh coat. Year in year out she wore that coat; she
perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without
making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor
she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without
a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her
soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal
from school during the War—poor embittered unfortunate
creature! For it was not her one hated but the idea of her,
which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that
was not Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with
which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who
stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators
and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the dice, had
the black been uppermost and not the white, she would have
loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal
monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted
down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul;
never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment
the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially
since her illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in
her spine; gave her physical pain, and made all pleasure in
beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and
making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if
indeed there were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the
whole panoply of content were nothing but self love! this
hatred!
Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing through
the swing doors of Mulberry’s the florists.
She advanced, light, tall, very upright, to be greeted at once
by button-faced Miss Pym, whose hands were always bright
red, as if they had been stood in cold water with the flowers.
There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of
lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses;
there were irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy
garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who
owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been
years ago; very kind, but she looked older, this year, turning
her head from side to side among the irises and roses and
nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in,
after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite
coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled
linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses
looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their
heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls,
tinged violet, snow white, pale—as if it were the evening and
girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses
after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black
sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over;
and it was the moment between six and seven when every
flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet,
red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly,
purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white
moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the
evening primroses!
And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar,
choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and
more gently, as if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and
Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let
flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster,
surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when—oh! a
pistol shot in the street outside!
“Dear, those motor cars,” said Miss Pym, going to the
window to look, and coming back and smiling apologetically
with her hands full of sweet peas, as if those motor cars,
those tyres of motor cars, were all her fault.
The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and
Miss Pym go to the window and apologise came from a
motor car which had drawn to the side of the pavement
precisely opposite Mulberry’s shop window. Passers-by who,
of course, stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of
the
very
greatest
importance
against
the
dove-grey
upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and there was
nothing to be seen except a square of dove grey.
Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of
Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent
shop on the other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud,
swift, veil-like upon hills, falling indeed with something of a
cloud’s sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a
second before had been utterly disorderly. But now mystery
had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of
authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes
bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew
whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the
Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody
knew.
Edgar J. Watkiss, with his roll of lead piping round his arm,
said audibly, humorously of course: “The Proime Minister’s
kyar.”
Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass,
heard him.
Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-
nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with
hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them
which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The
world has raised its whip; where will it descend?
Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor
engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through
an entire body. The sun became extraordinarily hot because
the motor car had stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window;
old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black
parasols; here a green, here a red parasol opened with a little
pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms
full of sweet peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed
in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus
looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated.
And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon
them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this
gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before
his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface
and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world
wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It
is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being
looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted there, rooted
to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose?
“Let us go on, Septimus,” said his wife, a little woman, with
large eyes in a sallow pointed face; an Italian girl.
But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the motor car
and the tree pattern on the blinds. Was it the Queen in there
—the Queen going shopping?
The chauffeur, who had been opening something, turning
something, shutting something, got on to the box.
“Come on,” said Lucrezia.
But her husband, for they had been married four, five years
now, jumped, started, and said, “All right!” angrily, as if she
had interrupted him.
People must notice; people must see. People, she thought,
looking at the crowd staring at the motor car; the English
people, with their children and their horses and their clothes,
which she admired in a way; but they were “people” now,
because Septimus had said, “I will kill myself”; an awful
thing to say. Suppose they had heard him? She looked at the
crowd. Help, help! she wanted to cry out to butchers’ boys
and women. Help! Only last autumn she and Septimus had
stood on the Embankment wrapped in the same cloak and,
Septimus reading a paper instead of talking, she had
snatched it from him and laughed in the old man’s face who
saw them! But failure one conceals. She must take him away
into some park.
“Now we will cross,” she said.
She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling. He
would give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only
twenty-four, without friends in England, who had left Italy
for his sake, a piece of bone.
The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air of inscrutable
reserve proceeded towards Piccadilly, still gazed at, still
ruffling the faces on both sides of the street with the same
dark breath of veneration whether for Queen, Prince, or
Prime Minister nobody knew. The face itself had been seen
only once by three people for a few seconds. Even the sex
was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that
greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden,
down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from
ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time,
be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the
enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious
antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-
grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this
Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings
mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable
decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be known.
It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway, coming out
of Mulberry’s with her flowers; the Queen. And for a second
she wore a look of extreme dignity standing by the flower
shop in the sunlight while the car passed at a foot’s pace,
with its blinds drawn. The Queen going to some hospital; the
Queen opening some bazaar, thought Clarissa.
The crush was terrific for the time of day. Lords, Ascot,
Hurlingham, what was it? she wondered, for the street was
blocked. The British middle classes sitting sideways on the
tops of omnibuses with parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs
on a day like this, were, she thought, more ridiculous, more
unlike anything there has ever been than one could conceive;
and the Queen herself held up; the Queen herself unable to
pass. Clarissa was suspended on one side of Brook Street; Sir
John Buckhurst, the old Judge on the other, with the car
between them (Sir John had laid down the law for years and
liked a well-dressed woman) when the chauffeur, leaning
ever so slightly, said or showed something to the policeman,
who saluted and raised his arm and jerked his head and
moved the omnibus to the side and the car passed through.
Slowly and very silently it took its way.
Clarissa guessed; Clarissa knew of course; she had seen
something white, magical, circular, in the footman’s hand, a
disc inscribed with a name,—the Queen’s, the Prince of
Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s?—which, by force of its own
lustre, burnt its way through (Clarissa saw the car
diminishing, disappearing), to blaze among candelabras,
glittering stars, breasts stiff with oak leaves, Hugh Whitbread
and all his colleagues, the gentlemen of England, that night
in Buckingham Palace. And Clarissa, too, gave a party. She
stiffened a little; so she would stand at the top of her stairs.
The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed
through glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both
sides of Bond Street. For thirty seconds all heads were
inclined the same way—to the window. Choosing a pair of
gloves—should they be to the elbow or above it, lemon or
pale grey?—ladies stopped; when the sentence was finished
something had happened. Something so trifling in single
instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable
of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration;
yet in its fulness rather formidable and in its common appeal
emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers
looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of
Empire. In a public house in a back street a Colonial insulted
the House of Windsor which led to words, broken beer
glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed strangely across
the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen threaded
with pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface
agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very
profound.
Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James’s
Street. Tall men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men
with their tail-coats and their white slips and their hair raked
back who, for reasons difficult to discriminate, were standing
in the bow window of Brooks’s with their hands behind the
tails of their coats, looking out, perceived instinctively that
greatness was passing, and the pale light of the immortal
presence fell upon them as it had fallen upon Clarissa
Dalloway. At once they stood even straighter, and removed
their hands, and seemed ready to attend their Sovereign, if
need be, to the cannon’s mouth, as their ancestors had done
before them. The white busts and the little tables in the
background covered with copies of the Tatler and syphons of
soda water seemed to approve; seemed to indicate the
flowing corn and the manor houses of England; and to return
the frail hum of the motor wheels as the walls of a
whispering gallery return a single voice expanded and made
sonorous by the might of a whole cathedral. Shawled Moll
Pratt with her flowers on the pavement wished the dear boy
well (it was the Prince of Wales for certain) and would have
tossed the price of a pot of beer—a bunch of roses—into St.
James’s Street out of sheer light-heartedness and contempt of
poverty had she not seen the constable’s eye upon her,
discouraging an old Irishwoman’s loyalty. The sentries at St.
James’s saluted; Queen Alexandra’s policeman approved.
A small crowd meanwhile had gathered at the gates of
Buckingham Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people
all of them, they waited; looked at the Palace itself with the
flag flying; at Victoria, billowing on her mound, admired her
shelves of running water, her geraniums; singled out from
the motor cars in the Mall first this one, then that; bestowed
emotion, vainly, upon commoners out for a drive; recalled
their tribute to keep it unspent while this car passed and
that; and all the time let rumour accumulate in their veins
and thrill the nerves in their thighs at the thought of Royalty
looking at them; the Queen bowing; the Prince saluting; at
the thought of the heavenly life divinely bestowed upon
Kings; of the equerries and deep curtsies; of the Queen’s old
doll’s house; of Princess Mary married to an Englishman, and
the Prince—ah! the Prince! who took wonderfully, they said,
after old King Edward, but was ever so much slimmer. The
Prince lived at St. James’s; but he might come along in the
morning to visit his mother.
So Sarah Bletchley said with her baby in her arms, tipping
her foot up and down as though she were by her own fender
in Pimlico, but keeping her eyes on the Mall, while Emily
Coates ranged over the Palace windows and thought of the
housemaids, the innumerable housemaids, the bedrooms, the
innumerable bedrooms. Joined by an elderly gentleman with
an Aberdeen terrier, by men without occupation, the crowd
increased. Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany
and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but
could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally,
by this sort of thing—poor women waiting to see the Queen
go past—poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows,
the War—tut-tut—actually had tears in his eyes. A breeze
flaunting ever so warmly down the Mall through the thin
trees, past the bronze heroes, lifted some flag flying in the
British breast of Mr. Bowley and he raised his hat as the car
turned into the Mall and held it high as the car approached;
and let the poor mothers of Pimlico press close to him, and
stood very upright. The car came on.
Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of
an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd.
There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke
from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing
something! making letters in the sky! Every one looked up.
Dropping dead down the aeroplane soared straight up,
curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose, and whatever it did,
wherever it went, out fluttered behind it a thick ruffled bar
of white smoke which curled and wreathed upon the sky in
letters. But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only
for a moment did they lie still; then they moved and melted
and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the aeroplane shot
further away and again, in a fresh space of sky, began
writing a K, an E, a Y perhaps?
“Glaxo,” said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awestricken voice,
gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her
arms, gazed straight up.
“Kreemo,” murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-walker.
With his hat held out perfectly still in his hand, Mr. Bowley
gazed straight up. All down the Mall people were standing
and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world
became perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky,
first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary
silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck
eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls.
The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where
it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater—
“That’s an E,” said Mrs. Bletchley— or a dancer—
“It’s toffee,” murmured Mr. Bowley— (and the car went in at
the gates and nobody looked at it), and shutting off the
smoke, away and away it rushed, and the smoke faded and
assembled itself round the broad white shapes of the clouds.
It had gone; it was behind the clouds. There was no sound.
The clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached
themselves moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to
East on a mission of the greatest importance which would
never be revealed, and yet certainly so it was—a mission of
the greatest importance. Then suddenly, as a train comes out
of a tunnel, the aeroplane rushed out of the clouds again, the
sound boring into the ears of all people in the Mall, in the
Green Park, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent’s Park,
and the bar of smoke curved behind and it dropped down,
and it soared up and wrote one letter after another—but
what word was it writing?
Lucrezia Warren Smith, sitting by her husband’s side on a
seat in Regent’s Park in the Broad Walk, looked up.
“Look, look, Septimus!” she cried. For Dr. Holmes had told
her to make her husband (who had nothing whatever
seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts)
take an interest in things outside himself.
So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me.
Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the
language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this
exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the
smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and
bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and
laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable
beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for
nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more
beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks.
It was toffee; they were advertising toffee, a nursemaid told
Rezia. Together they began to spell t … o … f….
“K … R …” said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say
“Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow
organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s,
which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into
his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A
marvellous discovery indeed—that the human voice in
certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific,
above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! Happily Rezia
put her hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that
he was weighted down, transfixed, or the excitement of the
elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their
leaves alight and the colour thinning and thickening from
blue to the green of a hollow wave, like plumes on horses’
heads, feathers on ladies’, so proudly they rose and fell, so
superbly, would have sent him mad. But he would not go
mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more.
But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And
the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own
body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the
branch stretched he, too, made that statement. The sparrows
fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of
the pattern; the white and blue, barred with black branches.
Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces
between them were as significant as the sounds. A child
cried. Rightly far away a horn sounded. All taken together
meant the birth of a new religion—
“Septimus!” said Rezia. He started violently. People must
notice.
“I am going to walk to the fountain and back,” she said.
For she could stand it no longer. Dr. Holmes might say there
was nothing the matter. Far rather would she that he were
dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did
not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree,
children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling
down; all were terrible. And he would not kill himself; and
she could tell no one. “Septimus has been working too
hard”—that was all she could say to her own mother. To love
makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not
even Septimus now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in
his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up, staring.
And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself,
but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus
now. She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and
he never noticed; and he was happy without her. Nothing
could make her happy without him! Nothing! He was selfish.
So men are. For he was not ill. Dr. Holmes said there was
nothing the matter with him. She spread her hand before
her. Look! Her wedding ring slipped—she had grown so thin.
It was she who suffered—but she had nobody to tell.
Far was Italy and the white houses and the room where her
sisters sat making hats, and the streets crowded every
evening with people walking, laughing out loud, not half
alive like people here, huddled up in Bath chairs, looking at
a few ugly flowers stuck in pots!
“For you should see the Milan gardens,” she said aloud. But
to whom?
There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its
sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to
it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and
towers; bleak hillsides soften and fall in. But though they are
gone, the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank of
windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what the
frank daylight fails to transmit—the trouble and suspense of
things conglomerated there in the darkness; huddled together
in the darkness; reft of the relief which dawn brings when,
washing the walls white and grey, spotting each window-
pane, lifting the mist from the fields, showing the red-brown
cows peacefully grazing, all is once more decked out to the
eye; exists again. I am alone; I am alone! she cried, by the
fountain in Regent’s Park (staring at the Indian and his
cross), as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost,
the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw
it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no
names and rivers wound they knew not where—such was her
darkness; when suddenly, as if a shelf were shot forth and
she stood on it, she said how she was his wife, married years
ago in Milan, his wife, and would never, never tell that he
was mad! Turning, the shelf fell; down, down she dropped.
For he was gone, she thought—gone, as he threatened, to kill
himself—to throw himself under a cart! But no; there he was;
still sitting alone on the seat, in his shabby overcoat, his legs
crossed, staring, talking aloud.
Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such
revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No
one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He
waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing
opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over
and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and
piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined
by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and
piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life
beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.
There was his hand; there the dead. White things were
assembling behind the railings opposite. But he dared not
look. Evans was behind the railings!
“What are you saying?” said Rezia suddenly, sitting down by
him.
Interrupted again! She was always interrupting.
Away from people—they must get away from people, he said
(jumping up), right away over there, where there were chairs
beneath a tree and the long slope of the park dipped like a
length of green stuff with a ceiling cloth of blue and pink
smoke high above, and there was a rampart of far irregular
houses hazed in smoke, the traffic hummed in a circle, and
on the right, dun-coloured animals stretched long necks over
the Zoo palings, barking, howling. There they sat down
under a tree.
“Look,” she implored him, pointing at a little troop of boys
carrying cricket stumps, and one shuffled, spun round on his
heel and shuffled, as if he were acting a clown at the music
hall.
“Look,” she implored him, for Dr. Holmes had told her to
make him notice real things, go to a music hall, play cricket
—that was the very game, Dr. Holmes said, a nice out-of-
door game, the very game for her husband.
“Look,” she repeated.
Look the unseen bade him, the voice which now
communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind,
Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had
come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow
blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering
for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not
want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his
hand that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness.
“Look,” she repeated, for he must not talk aloud to himself
out of doors.
“Oh look,” she implored him. But what was there to look at?
A few sheep. That was all.
The way to Regent’s Park Tube station—could they tell her
the way to Regent’s Park Tube station—Maisie Johnson
wanted to know. She was only up from Edinburgh two days
ago.
“Not this way—over there!” Rezia exclaimed, waving her
aside, lest she should see Septimus.
Both seemed queer, Maisie Johnson thought. Everything
seemed very queer. In London for the first time, come to take
up a post at her uncle’s in Leadenhall Street, and now
walking through Regent’s Park in the morning, this couple on
the chairs gave her quite a turn; the young woman seeming
foreign, the man looking queer; so that should she be very
old she would still remember and make it jangle again
among her memories how she had walked through Regent’s
Park on a fine summer’s morning fifty years ago. For she was
only nineteen and had got her way at last, to come to
London; and now how queer it was, this couple she had
asked the way of, and the girl started and jerked her hand,
and the man—he seemed awfully odd; quarrelling, perhaps;
parting for ever, perhaps; something was up, she knew; and
now all these people (for she returned to the Broad Walk),
the stone basins, the prim flowers, the old men and women,
invalids most of them in Bath chairs—all seemed, after
Edinburgh, so queer. And Maisie Johnson, as she joined that
gently trudging, vaguely gazing, breeze-kissed company—
squirrels perching and preening, sparrow fountains fluttering
for crumbs, dogs busy with the railings, busy with each
other, while the soft warm air washed over them and lent to
the fixed unsurprised gaze with which they received life
something
whimsical
and
mollified—Maisie
Johnson
positively felt she must cry Oh! (for that young man on the
seat had given her quite a turn. Something was up, she
knew.)
Horror! horror! she wanted to cry. (She had left her people;
they had warned her what would happen.)
Why hadn’t she stayed at home? she cried, twisting the knob
of the iron railing.
That girl, thought Mrs. Dempster (who saved crusts for the
squirrels and often ate her lunch in Regent’s Park), don’t
know a thing yet; and really it seemed to her better to be a
little stout, a little slack, a little moderate in one’s
expectations. Percy drank. Well, better to have a son,
thought Mrs. Dempster. She had had a hard time of it, and
couldn’t help smiling at a girl like that. You’ll get married,
for you’re pretty enough, thought Mrs. Dempster. Get
married, she thought, and then you’ll know. Oh, the cooks,
and so on. Every man has his ways. But whether I’d have
chosen quite like that if I could have known, thought Mrs.
Dempster, and could not help wishing to whisper a word to
Maisie Johnson; to feel on the creased pouch of her worn old
face the kiss of pity. For it’s been a hard life, thought Mrs.
Dempster. What hadn’t she given to it? Roses; figure; her feet
too. (She drew the knobbed lumps beneath her skirt.)
Roses, she thought sardonically. All trash, m’dear. For really,
what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and
good, life had been no mere matter of roses, and what was
more, let me tell you, Carrie Dempster had no wish to
change her lot with any woman’s in Kentish Town! But, she
implored, pity. Pity, for the loss of roses. Pity she asked of
Maisie Johnson, standing by the hyacinth beds.
Ah, but that aeroplane! Hadn’t Mrs. Dempster always longed
to see foreign parts? She had a nephew, a missionary. It
soared and shot. She always went on the sea at Margate, not
out o’ sight of land, but she had no patience with women
who were afraid of water. It swept and fell. Her stomach was
in her mouth. Up again. There’s a fine young feller aboard of
it, Mrs. Dempster wagered, and away and away it went, fast
and fading, away and away the aeroplane shot; soaring over
Greenwich and all the masts; over the little island of grey
churches, St. Paul’s and the rest till, on either side of London,
fields spread out and dark brown woods where adventurous
thrushes hopping boldly, glancing quickly, snatched the snail
and tapped him on a stone, once, twice, thrice.
Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a
bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it
seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at
Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr.
Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his
body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein,
speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory—away the
aeroplane shot.
Then, while a seedy-looking nondescript man carrying a
leather bag stood on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and
hesitated, for within was what balm, how great a welcome,
how many tombs with banners waving over them, tokens of
victories not over armies, but over, he thought, that plaguy
spirit of truth seeking which leaves me at present without a
situation, and more than that, the cathedral offers company,
he thought, invites you to membership of a society; great
men belong to it; martyrs have died for it; why not enter in,
he thought, put this leather bag stuffed with pamphlets
before an altar, a cross, the symbol of something which has
soared beyond seeking and questing and knocking of words
together and has become all spirit, disembodied, ghostly—
why not enter in? he thought and while he hesitated out flew
the aeroplane over Ludgate Circus.
It was strange; it was still. Not a sound was to be heard
above the traffic. Unguided it seemed; sped of its own free
will. And now, curving up and up, straight up, like
something mounting in ecstasy, in pure delight, out from
behind poured white smoke looping, writing a T, an O, an F.
“What are they looking at?” said Clarissa Dalloway to the
maid who opened her door.
The hall of the house was cool as a vault. Mrs. Dalloway
raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door
to, and she heard the swish of Lucy’s skirts, she felt like a
nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the
familiar veils and the response to old devotions. The cook
whistled in the kitchen. She heard the click of the typewriter.
It was her life, and, bending her head over the hall table, she
bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified,
saying to herself, as she took the pad with the telephone
message on it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of
life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some
lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only); not for a
moment did she believe in God; but all the more, she
thought, taking up the pad, must one repay in daily life to
servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her
husband, who was the foundation of it—of the gay sounds, of
the green lights, of the cook even whistling, for Mrs. Walker
was Irish and whistled all day long—one must pay back from
this secret deposit of exquisite moments, she thought, lifting
the pad, while Lucy stood by her, trying to explain how.
“Mr. Dalloway, ma’am”—
Clarissa read on the telephone pad, “Lady Bruton wishes to
know if Mr. Dalloway will lunch with her to-day.”
“Mr. Dalloway, ma’am, told me to tell you he would be
lunching out.”
“Dear!” said Clarissa, and Lucy shared as she meant her to
her disappointment (but not the pang); felt the concord
between them; took the hint; thought how the gentry love;
gilded her own future with calm; and, taking Mrs. Dalloway’s
parasol, handled it like a sacred weapon which a Goddess,
having acquitted herself honourably in the field of battle,
sheds, and placed it in the umbrella stand.
“Fear no more,” said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o’ the
sun; for the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch
without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver,
as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar
and shivers: so she rocked: so she shivered.
Millicent Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be
extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. No vulgar
jealousy could separate her from Richard. But she feared
time itself, and read on Lady Bruton’s face, as if it had been a
dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year
by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that
remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing,
as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence,
so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she
stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her
drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a
diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens
beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but
only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as
they just turn over the weeds with pearl.
She put the pad on the hall table. She began to go slowly
upstairs, with her hand on the bannisters, as if she had left a
party, where now this friend now that had flashed back her
face, her voice; had shut the door and gone out and stood
alone, a single figure against the appalling night, or rather,
to be accurate, against the stare of this matter-of-fact June
morning; soft with the glow of rose petals for some, she
knew, and felt it, as she paused by the open staircase
window which let in blinds flapping, dogs barking, let in, she
thought, feeling herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless,
the grinding, blowing, flowering of the day, out of doors, out
of the window, out of her body and brain which now failed,
since Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be
extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her.
Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she
went upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom.
There was the green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was
an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women
must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe.
She pierced the pincushion and laid her feathered yellow hat
on the bed. The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad
white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would
her bed be. The candle was half burnt down and she had
read deep in Baron Marbot’s Memoirs. She had read late at
night of the retreat from Moscow. For the House sat so long
that Richard insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep
undisturbed. And really she preferred to read of the retreat
from Moscow. He knew it. So the room was an attic; the bed
narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she
could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth
which clung to her like a sheet. Lovely in girlhood, suddenly
there came a moment—for example on the river beneath the
woods at Clieveden—when, through some contraction of this
cold spirit, she had failed him. And then at Constantinople,
and again and again. She could see what she lacked. It was
not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which
permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and
rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women
together. For that she could dimly perceive. She resented it,
had a scruple picked up Heaven knows where, or, as she felt,
sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet she could not
resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a
girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some
scrape, some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty,
or that she was older, or some accident—like a faint scent, or
a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at
certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men
felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden
revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and
then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to
the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world
come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance,
some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed
and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks
and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an
illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning
almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened.
It was over—the moment. Against such moments (with
women too) there contrasted (as she laid her hat down) the
bed and Baron Marbot and the candle half-burnt. Lying
awake, the floor creaked; the lit house was suddenly
darkened, and if she raised her head she could just hear the
click of the handle released as gently as possible by Richard,
who slipped upstairs in his socks and then, as often as not,
dropped his hot-water bottle and swore! How she laughed!
But this question of love (she thought, putting her coat
away), this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her
relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after
all, been love?
She sat on the floor—that was her first impression of Sally—
she sat on the floor with her arms round her knees, smoking
a cigarette. Where could it have been? The Mannings? The
Kinloch-Jones’s? At some party (where, she could not be
certain), for she had a distinct recollection of saying to the
man she was with, “Who is that?” And he had told her, and
said that Sally’s parents did not get on (how that shocked her
—that one’s parents should quarrel!). But all that evening
she could not take her eyes off Sally. It was an extraordinary
beauty of the kind she most admired, dark, large-eyed, with
that quality which, since she hadn’t got it herself, she always
envied—a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything,
do anything; a quality much commoner in foreigners than in
Englishwomen. Sally always said she had French blood in her
veins, an ancestor had been with Marie Antoinette, had his
head cut off, left a ruby ring. Perhaps that summer she came
to stay at Bourton, walking in quite unexpectedly without a
penny in her pocket, one night after dinner, and upsetting
poor Aunt Helena to such an extent that she never forgave
her. There had been some quarrel at home. She literally
hadn’t a penny that night when she came to them—had
pawned a brooch to come down. She had rushed off in a
passion. They sat up till all hours of the night talking. Sally it
was who made her feel, for the first time, how sheltered the
life at Bourton was. She knew nothing about sex—nothing
about social problems. She had once seen an old man who
had dropped dead in a field—she had seen cows just after
their calves were born. But Aunt Helena never liked
discussion of anything (when Sally gave her William Morris,
it had to be wrapped in brown paper). There they sat, hour
after hour, talking in her bedroom at the top of the house,
talking about life, how they were to reform the world. They
meant to found a society to abolish private property, and
actually had a letter written, though not sent out. The ideas
were Sally’s, of course—but very soon she was just as excited
—read Plato in bed before breakfast; read Morris; read
Shelley by the hour.
Sally’s power was amazing, her gift, her personality. There
was her way with flowers, for instance. At Bourton they
always had stiff little vases all the way down the table. Sally
went out, picked hollyhocks, dahlias—all sorts of flowers
that had never been seen together—cut their heads off, and
made them swim on the top of water in bowls. The effect
was extraordinary—coming in to dinner in the sunset. (Of
course Aunt Helena thought it wicked to treat flowers like
that.) Then she forgot her sponge, and ran along the passage
naked. That grim old housemaid, Ellen Atkins, went about
grumbling—“Suppose any of the gentlemen had seen?”
Indeed she did shock people. She was untidy, Papa said.
The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the
integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling
for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it
had a quality which could only exist between women,
between women just grown up. It was protective, on her
side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a
presentiment of something that was bound to part them
(they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led
to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more
on her side than Sally’s. For in those days she was completely
reckless; did the most idiotic things out of bravado; bicycled
round the parapet on the terrace; smoked cigars. Absurd, she
was—very absurd. But the charm was overpowering, to her
at least, so that she could remember standing in her bedroom
at the top of the house holding the hot-water can in her
hands and saying aloud, “She is beneath this roof…. She is
beneath this roof!”
No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her now. She
could not even get an echo of her old emotion. But she could
remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in
a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to
her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-
table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and
down in the pink evening light, and dressing, and going
downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were
now to die ’twere now to be most happy.” That was her
feeling—Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced,
as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all
because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to
meet Sally Seton!
She was wearing pink gauze—was that possible? She seemed,
anyhow, all light, glowing, like some bird or air ball that has
flown in, attached itself for a moment to a bramble. But
nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this
except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other
people. Aunt Helena just wandered off after dinner; Papa
read the paper. Peter Walsh might have been there, and old
Miss Cummings; Joseph Breitkopf certainly was, for he came
every summer, poor old man, for weeks and weeks, and
pretended to read German with her, but really played the
piano and sang Brahms without any voice.
All this was only a background for Sally. She stood by the
fireplace talking, in that beautiful voice which made
everything she said sound like a caress, to Papa, who had
begun to be attracted rather against his will (he never got
over lending her one of his books and finding it soaked on
the terrace), when suddenly she said, “What a shame to sit
indoors!” and they all went out on to the terrace and walked
up and down. Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf went on
about Wagner. She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came
the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone
urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed
her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside
down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with
Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present,
wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a
diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which,
as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered,
or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious
feeling!—when old Joseph and Peter faced them:
“Star-gazing?” said Peter.
It was like running one’s face against a granite wall in the
darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible!
Not for herself. She felt only how Sally was being mauled
already, maltreated; she felt his hostility; his jealousy; his
determination to break into their companionship. All this she
saw as one sees a landscape in a flash of lightning—and Sally
(never had she admired her so much!) gallantly taking her
way unvanquished. She laughed. She made old Joseph tell
her the names of the stars, which he liked doing very
seriously. She stood there: she listened. She heard the names
of the stars.
“Oh this horror!” she said to herself, as if she had known all
along that something would interrupt, would embitter her
moment of happiness.
Yet, after all, how much she owed to him later. Always when
she thought of him she thought of their quarrels for some
reason—because she wanted his good opinion so much,
perhaps. She owed him words: “sentimental,” “civilised”;
they started up every day of her life as if he guarded her. A
book was sentimental; an attitude to life sentimental.
“Sentimental,” perhaps she was to be thinking of the past.
What would he think, she wondered, when he came back?
That she had grown older? Would he say that, or would she
see him thinking when he came back, that she had grown
older? It was true. Since her illness she had turned almost
white.
Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as
if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix
in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her
fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still
untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost
whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing
to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the
moment, transfixed it, there—the moment of this June
morning on which was the pressure of all the other
mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the
bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as
she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the
woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa
Dalloway; of herself.
How many million times she had seen her face, and always
with the same imperceptible contraction! She pursed her lips
when she looked in the glass. It was to give her face point.
That was her self—pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her
self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew
the parts together, she alone knew how different, how
incompatible and composed so for the world only into one
centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-
room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in
some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps;
she had helped young people, who were grateful to her; had
tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the
other sides of her—faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions, like
this of Lady Bruton not asking her to lunch; which, she
thought (combing her hair finally), is utterly base! Now,
where was her dress?
Her evening dresses hung in the cupboard. Clarissa, plunging
her hand into the softness, gently detached the green dress
and carried it to the window. She had torn it. Some one had
trod on the skirt. She had felt it give at the Embassy party at
the top among the folds. By artificial light the green shone,
but lost its colour now in the sun. She would mend it. Her
maids had too much to do. She would wear it to-night. She
would take her silks, her scissors, her—what was it?—her
thimble, of course, down into the drawing-room, for she
must also write, and see that things generally were more or
less in order.
Strange, she thought, pausing on the landing, and assembling
that diamond shape, that single person, strange how a
mistress knows the very moment, the very temper of her
house! Faint sounds rose in spirals up the well of the stairs;
the swish of a mop; tapping; knocking; a loudness when the
front door opened; a voice repeating a message in the
basement; the chink of silver on a tray; clean silver for the
party. All was for the party.
(And Lucy, coming into the drawing-room with her tray held
out, put the giant candlesticks on the mantelpiece, the silver
casket in the middle, turned the crystal dolphin towards the
clock. They would come; they would stand; they would talk
in the mincing tones which she could imitate, ladies and
gentlemen. Of all, her mistress was loveliest—mistress of
silver, of linen, of china, for the sun, the silver, doors off
their hinges, Rumpelmayer’s men, gave her a sense, as she
laid the paper-knife on the inlaid table, of something
achieved. Behold! Behold! she said, speaking to her old
friends in the baker’s shop, where she had first seen service
at Caterham, prying into the glass. She was Lady Angela,
attending Princess Mary, when in came Mrs. Dalloway.)
“Oh Lucy,” she said, “the silver does look nice!”
“And how,” she said, turning the crystal dolphin to stand
straight, “how did you enjoy the play last night?” “Oh, they
had to go before the end!” she said. “They had to be back at
ten!” she said. “So they don’t know what happened,” she
said. “That does seem hard luck,” she said (for her servants
stayed later, if they asked her). “That does seem rather a
shame,” she said, taking the old bald-looking cushion in the
middle of the sofa and putting it in Lucy’s arms, and giving
her a little push, and crying:
“Take it away! Give it to Mrs. Walker with my compliments!
Take it away!” she cried.
And Lucy stopped at the drawing-room door, holding the
cushion, and said, very shyly, turning a little pink, Couldn’t
she help to mend that dress?
But, said Mrs. Dalloway, she had enough on her hands
already, quite enough of her own to do without that.
“But, thank you, Lucy, oh, thank you,” said Mrs. Dalloway,
and thank you, thank you, she went on saying (sitting down
on the sofa with her dress over her knees, her scissors, her
silks), thank you, thank you, she went on saying in gratitude
to her servants generally for helping her to be like this, to be
what she wanted, gentle, generous-hearted. Her servants
liked her. And then this dress of hers—where was the tear?
and now her needle to be threaded. This was a favourite
dress, one of Sally Parker’s, the last almost she ever made,
alas, for Sally had now retired, living at Ealing, and if ever I
have a moment, thought Clarissa (but never would she have
a moment any more), I shall go and see her at Ealing. For she
was a character, thought Clarissa, a real artist. She thought
of little out-of-the-way things; yet her dresses were never
queer. You could wear them at Hatfield; at Buckingham
Palace. She had worn them at Hatfield; at Buckingham
Palace.
Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle,
drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the
green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the
belt. So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and
fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying
“that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart
in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That
is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the
heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs
collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets
fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave
breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.
“Heavens, the front-door bell!” exclaimed Clarissa, staying
her needle. Roused, she listened.
“Mrs. Dalloway will see me,” said the elderly man in the hall.
“Oh yes, she will see me,” he repeated, putting Lucy aside
very benevolently, and running upstairs ever so quickly.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he muttered as he ran upstairs. “She will see
me. After five years in India, Clarissa will see me.”
“Who can—what can,” asked Mrs. Dalloway (thinking it was
outrageous to be interrupted at eleven o’clock on the
morning of the day she was giving a party), hearing a step on
the stairs. She heard a hand upon the door. She made to hide
her dress, like a virgin protecting chastity, respecting
privacy. Now the brass knob slipped. Now the door opened,
and in came—for a single second she could not remember
what he was called! so surprised she was to see him, so glad,
so shy, so utterly taken aback to have Peter Walsh come to
her unexpectedly in the morning! (She had not read his
letter.)
“And how are you?” said Peter Walsh, positively trembling;
taking both her hands; kissing both her hands. She’s grown
older, he thought, sitting down. I shan’t tell her anything
about it, he thought, for she’s grown older. She’s looking at
me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him,
though he had kissed her hands. Putting his hand into his
pocket, he took out a large pocket-knife and half opened the
blade.
Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the
same check suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little
thinner, dryer, perhaps, but he looks awfully well, and just
the same.
“How heavenly it is to see you again!” she exclaimed. He had
his knife out. That’s so like him, she thought.
He had only reached town last night, he said; would have to
go down into the country at once; and how was everything,
how was everybody—Richard? Elizabeth?
“And what’s all this?” he said, tilting his penknife towards
her green dress.
He’s very well dressed, thought Clarissa; yet he always
criticises me.
Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual,
he thought; here she’s been sitting all the time I’ve been in
India; mending her dress; playing about; going to parties;
running to the House and back and all that, he thought,
growing more and more irritated, more and more agitated,
for there’s nothing in the world so bad for some women as
marriage,
he
thought;
and
politics;
and
having
a
Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard. So it is, so
it is, he thought, shutting his knife with a snap.
“Richard’s very well. Richard’s at a Committee,” said
Clarissa.
And she opened her scissors, and said, did he mind her just
finishing what she was doing to her dress, for they had a
party that night?
“Which I shan’t ask you to,” she said. “My dear Peter!” she
said.
But it was delicious to hear her say that—my dear Peter!
Indeed, it was all so delicious—the silver, the chairs; all so
delicious!
Why wouldn’t she ask him to her party? he asked.
Now of course, thought Clarissa, he’s enchanting! perfectly
enchanting! Now I remember how impossible it was ever to
make up my mind—and why did I make up my mind—not to
marry him? she wondered, that awful summer?
“But it’s so extraordinary that you should have come this
morning!” she cried, putting her hands, one on top of
another, down on her dress.
“Do you remember,” she said, “how the blinds used to flap at
Bourton?”
“They did,” he said; and he remembered breakfasting alone,
very awkwardly, with her father; who had died; and he had
not written to Clarissa. But he had never got on well with old
Parry, that querulous, weak-kneed old man, Clarissa’s father,
Justin Parry.
“I often wish I’d got on better with your father,” he said.
“But he never liked any one who—our friends,” said Clarissa;
and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter
that he had wanted to marry her.
Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too,
he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which
rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful
with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than
I’ve ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were
sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa;
put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it
hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on
the terrace, in the moonlight.
“Herbert has it now,” she said. “I never go there now,” she
said.
Then, just as happens on a terrace in the moonlight, when
one person begins to feel ashamed that he is already bored,
and yet as the other sits silent, very quiet, sadly looking at
the moon, does not like to speak, moves his foot, clears his
throat, notices some iron scroll on a table leg, stirs a leaf, but
says nothing—so Peter Walsh did now. For why go back like
this to the past? he thought. Why make him think of it
again? Why make him suffer, when she had tortured him so
infernally? Why?
“Do you remember the lake?” she said, in an abrupt voice,
under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart,
made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips
in a spasm as she said “lake.” For she was a child, throwing
bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same
time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by
the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared
them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a
whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and
said, “This is what I have made of it! This!” And what had
she made of it? What, indeed? sitting there sewing this
morning with Peter.
She looked at Peter Walsh; her look, passing through all that
time and that emotion, reached him doubtfully; settled on
him tearfully; and rose and fluttered away, as a bird touches
a branch and rises and flutters away. Quite simply she wiped
her eyes.
“Yes,” said Peter. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, as if she drew up to
the surface something which positively hurt him as it rose.
Stop! Stop! he wanted to cry. For he was not old; his life was
not over; not by any means. He was only just past fifty. Shall
I tell her, he thought, or not? He would like to make a clean
breast of it all. But she is too cold, he thought; sewing, with
her scissors; Daisy would look ordinary beside Clarissa. And
she would think me a failure, which I am in their sense, he
thought; in the Dalloways’ sense. Oh yes, he had no doubt
about that; he was a failure, compared with all this—the
inlaid table, the mounted paper-knife, the dolphin and the
candlesticks, the chair-covers and the old valuable English
tinted prints—he was a failure! I detest the smugness of the
whole affair he thought; Richard’s doing, not Clarissa’s; save
that she married him. (Here Lucy came into the room,
carrying silver, more silver, but charming, slender, graceful
she looked, he thought, as she stooped to put it down.) And
this has been going on all the time! he thought; week after
week; Clarissa’s life; while I—he thought; and at once
everything seemed to radiate from him; journeys; rides;
quarrels; adventures; bridge parties; love affairs; work; work,
work! and he took out his knife quite openly—his old horn-
handled knife which Clarissa could swear he had had these
thirty years—and clenched his fist upon it.
What an extraordinary habit that was, Clarissa thought;
always playing with a knife. Always making one feel, too,
frivolous; empty-minded; a mere silly chatterbox, as he used.
But I too, she thought, and, taking up her needle, summoned,
like a Queen whose guards have fallen asleep and left her
unprotected (she had been quite taken aback by this visit—it
had upset her) so that any one can stroll in and have a look
at her where she lies with the brambles curving over her,
summoned to her help the things she did; the things she
liked; her husband; Elizabeth; her self, in short, which Peter
hardly knew now, all to come about her and beat off the
enemy.
“Well, and what’s happened to you?” she said. So before a
battle begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads;
the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve. So Peter
Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa,
challenged each other. His powers chafed and tossed in him.
He assembled from different quarters all sorts of things;
praise; his career at Oxford; his marriage, which she knew
nothing whatever about; how he had loved; and altogether
done his job.
“Millions of things!” he exclaimed, and, urged by the
assembly of powers which were now charging this way and
that and giving him the feeling at once frightening and
extremely exhilarating of being rushed through the air on the
shoulders of people he could no longer see, he raised his
hands to his forehead.
Clarissa sat very upright; drew in her breath.
“I am in love,” he said, not to her however, but to some one
raised up in the dark so that you could not touch her but
must lay your garland down on the grass in the dark.
“In love,” he repeated, now speaking rather dryly to Clarissa
Dalloway; “in love with a girl in India.” He had deposited his
garland. Clarissa could make what she would of it.
“In love!” she said. That he at his age should be sucked
under in his little bow-tie by that monster! And there’s no
flesh on his neck; his hands are red; and he’s six months
older than I am! her eye flashed back to her; but in her heart
she felt, all the same, he is in love. He has that, she felt; he is
in love.
But the indomitable egotism which for ever rides down the
hosts opposed to it, the river which says on, on, on; even
though, it admits, there may be no goal for us whatever, still
on, on; this indomitable egotism charged her cheeks with
colour; made her look very young; very pink; very bright-
eyed as she sat with her dress upon her knee, and her needle
held to the end of green silk, trembling a little. He was in
love! Not with her. With some younger woman, of course.
“And who is she?” she asked.
Now this statue must be brought from its height and set
down between them.
“A married woman, unfortunately,” he said; “the wife of a
Major in the Indian Army.”
And with a curious ironical sweetness he smiled as he placed
her in this ridiculous way before Clarissa.
(All the same, he is in love, thought Clarissa.)
“She has,” he continued, very reasonably, “two small
children; a boy and a girl; and I have come over to see my
lawyers about the divorce.”
There they are! he thought. Do what you like with them,
Clarissa! There they are! And second by second it seemed to
him that the wife of the Major in the Indian Army (his Daisy)
and her two small children became more and more lovely as
Clarissa looked at them; as if he had set light to a grey pellet
on a plate and there had risen up a lovely tree in the brisk
sea-salted air of their intimacy (for in some ways no one
understood him, felt with him, as Clarissa did)—their
exquisite intimacy.
She flattered him; she fooled him, thought Clarissa; shaping
the woman, the wife of the Major in the Indian Army, with
three strokes of a knife. What a waste! What a folly! All his
life long Peter had been fooled like that; first getting sent
down from Oxford; next marrying the girl on the boat going
out to India; now the wife of a Major in the Indian Army—
thank Heaven she had refused to marry him! Still, he was in
love; her old friend, her dear Peter, he was in love.
“But what are you going to do?” she asked him. Oh the
lawyers and solicitors, Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of
Lincoln’s Inn, they were going to do it, he said. And he
actually pared his nails with his pocket-knife.
For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to
herself
in
irrepressible
irritation;
it
was
his
silly
unconventionality, his weakness; his lack of the ghost of a
notion what any one else was feeling that annoyed her, had
always annoyed her; and now at his age, how silly!
I know all that, Peter thought; I know what I’m up against,
he thought, running his finger along the blade of his knife,
Clarissa and Dalloway and all the rest of them; but I’ll show
Clarissa—and then to his utter surprise, suddenly thrown by
those uncontrollable forces thrown through the air, he burst
into tears; wept; wept without the least shame, sitting on the
sofa, the tears running down his cheeks.
And Clarissa had leant forward, taken his hand, drawn him
to her, kissed him,—actually had felt his face on hers before
she could down the brandishing of silver flashing—plumes
like pampas grass in a tropic gale in her breast, which,
subsiding, left her holding his hand, patting his knee and,
feeling as she sat back extraordinarily at her ease with him
and light-hearted, all in a clap it came over her, If I had
married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day!
It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed
narrow. She had gone up into the tower alone and left them
blackberrying in the sun. The door had shut, and there
among the dust of fallen plaster and the litter of birds’ nests
how distant the view had looked, and the sounds came thin
and chill (once on Leith Hill, she remembered), and Richard,
Richard! she cried, as a sleeper in the night starts and
stretches a hand in the dark for help. Lunching with Lady
Bruton, it came back to her. He has left me; I am alone for
ever, she thought, folding her hands upon her knee.
Peter Walsh had got up and crossed to the window and stood
with his back to her, flicking a bandanna handkerchief from
side to side. Masterly and dry and desolate he looked, his
thin shoulder-blades lifting his coat slightly; blowing his nose
violently. Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as
if he were starting directly upon some great voyage; and
then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that
had been very exciting and moving were now over and she
had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived
with Peter, and it was now over.
Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her
things together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera-glasses, and
gets up to go out of the theatre into the street, she rose from
the sofa and went to Peter.
And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the
power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as
she came across the room, to make the moon, which he
detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.
“Tell me,” he said, seizing her by the shoulders. “Are you
happy, Clarissa? Does Richard—”
The door opened.
“Here
is
my
Elizabeth,”
said
Clarissa,
emotionally,
histrionically, perhaps.
“How d’y do?” said Elizabeth coming forward.
The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out
between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man,
strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells
this way and that.
“Hullo, Elizabeth!” cried Peter, stuffing his handkerchief into
his pocket, going quickly to her, saying “Good-bye, Clarissa”
without looking at her, leaving the room quickly, and
running downstairs and opening the hall door.
“Peter! Peter!” cried Clarissa, following him out on to the
landing. “My party to-night! Remember my party to-night!”
she cried, having to raise her voice against the roar of the
open air, and, overwhelmed by the traffic and the sound of
all the clocks striking, her voice crying “Remember my party
to-night!” sounded frail and thin and very far away as Peter
Walsh shut the door.
Remember my party, remember my party, said Peter Walsh
as he stepped down the street, speaking to himself
rhythmically, in time with the flow of the sound, the direct
downright sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour. (The
leaden circles dissolved in the air.) Oh these parties, he
thought; Clarissa’s parties. Why does she give these parties,
he thought. Not that he blamed her or this effigy of a man in
a tail-coat with a carnation in his buttonhole coming towards
him. Only one person in the world could be as he was, in
love. And there he was, this fortunate man, himself, reflected
in the plate-glass window of a motor-car manufacturer in
Victoria Street. All India lay behind him; plains, mountains;
epidemics of cholera; a district twice as big as Ireland;
decisions he had come to alone—he, Peter Walsh; who was
now really for the first time in his life, in love. Clarissa had
grown hard, he thought; and a trifle sentimental into the
bargain, he suspected, looking at the great motor-cars
capable of doing—how many miles on how many gallons?
For he had a turn for mechanics; had invented a plough in
his district, had ordered wheel-barrows from England, but
the coolies wouldn’t use them, all of which Clarissa knew
nothing whatever about.
The way she said “Here is my Elizabeth!”—that annoyed
him. Why not “Here’s Elizabeth” simply? It was insincere.
And Elizabeth didn’t like it either. (Still the last tremors of
the great booming voice shook the air round him; the half-
hour; still early; only half-past eleven still.) For he
understood young people; he liked them. There was always
something cold in Clarissa, he thought. She had always, even
as a girl, a sort of timidity, which in middle age becomes
conventionality, and then it’s all up, it’s all up, he thought,
looking rather drearily into the glassy depths, and wondering
whether by calling at that hour he had annoyed her;
overcome with shame suddenly at having been a fool; wept;
been emotional; told her everything, as usual, as usual.
As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls
on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we
stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone
upholds the human frame. Where there is nothing, Peter
Walsh said to himself; feeling hollowed out, utterly empty
within. Clarissa refused me, he thought. He stood there
thinking, Clarissa refused me.
Ah, said St. Margaret’s, like a hostess who comes into her
drawing-room on the very stroke of the hour and finds her
guests there already. I am not late. No, it is precisely half-
past eleven, she says. Yet, though she is perfectly right, her
voice, being the voice of the hostess, is reluctant to inflict its
individuality. Some grief for the past holds it back; some
concern for the present. It is half-past eleven, she says, and
the sound of St. Margaret’s glides into the recesses of the
heart and buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like
something alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse
itself, to be, with a tremor of delight, at rest—like Clarissa
herself, thought Peter Walsh, coming down the stairs on the
stroke of the hour in white. It is Clarissa herself, he thought,
with a deep emotion, and an extraordinarily clear, yet
puzzling, recollection of her, as if this bell had come into the
room years ago, where they sat at some moment of great
intimacy, and had gone from one to the other and had left,
like a bee with honey, laden with the moment. But what
room? What moment? And why had he been so profoundly
happy when the clock was striking? Then, as the sound of St.
Margaret’s languished, he thought, She has been ill, and the
sound expressed languor and suffering. It was her heart, he
remembered; and the sudden loudness of the final stroke
tolled for death that surprised in the midst of life, Clarissa
falling where she stood, in her drawing-room. No! No! he
cried. She is not dead! I am not old, he cried, and marched
up Whitehall, as if there rolled down to him, vigorous,
unending, his future.
He was not old, or set, or dried in the least. As for caring
what they said of him—the Dalloways, the Whitbreads, and
their set, he cared not a straw—not a straw (though it was
true he would have, some time or other, to see whether
Richard couldn’t help him to some job). Striding, staring, he
glared at the statue of the Duke of Cambridge. He had been
sent down from Oxford—true. He had been a Socialist, in
some sense a failure—true. Still the future of civilisation lies,
he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young
men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of
abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the
way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading
science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of
young men like that, he thought.
A patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came from
behind, and with it a rustling, regular thudding sound, which
as it overtook him drummed his thoughts, strict in step, up
Whitehall, without his doing. Boys in uniform, carrying guns,
marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms
stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a
legend written round the base of a statue praising duty,
gratitude, fidelity, love of England.
It is, thought Peter Walsh, beginning to keep step with them,
a very fine training. But they did not look robust. They were
weedy for the most part, boys of sixteen, who might, to-
morrow, stand behind bowls of rice, cakes of soap on
counters. Now they wore on them unmixed with sensual
pleasure or daily preoccupations the solemnity of the wreath
which they had fetched from Finsbury Pavement to the
empty tomb. They had taken their vow. The traffic respected
it; vans were stopped.
I can’t keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they
marched up Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched,
past him, past every one, in their steady way, as if one will
worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties,
its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of
monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring
corpse by discipline. One had to respect it; one might laugh;
but one had to respect it, he thought. There they go, thought
Peter Walsh, pausing at the edge of the pavement; and all the
exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the black, the
spectacular images of great soldiers stood looking ahead of
them, as if they too had made the same renunciation (Peter
Walsh felt he too had made it, the great renunciation),
trampled under the same temptations, and achieved at length
a marble stare. But the stare Peter Walsh did not want for
himself in the least; though he could respect it in others. He
could respect it in boys. They don’t know the troubles of the
flesh yet, he thought, as the marching boys disappeared in
the direction of the Strand—all that I’ve been through, he
thought, crossing the road, and standing under Gordon’s
statue, Gordon whom as a boy he had worshipped; Gordon
standing lonely with one leg raised and his arms crossed,—
poor Gordon, he thought.
And just because nobody yet knew he was in London, except
Clarissa, and the earth, after the voyage, still seemed an
island to him, the strangeness of standing alone, alive,
unknown, at half-past eleven in Trafalgar Square overcame
him. What is it? Where am I? And why, after all, does one do
it? he thought, the divorce seeming all moonshine. And
down his mind went flat as a marsh, and three great
emotions
bowled
over
him;
understanding;
a
vast
philanthropy; and finally, as if the result of the others, an
irrepressible, exquisite delight; as if inside his brain by
another hand strings were pulled, shutters moved, and he,
having nothing to do with it, yet stood at the opening of
endless avenues, down which if he chose he might wander.
He had not felt so young for years.
He had escaped! was utterly free—as happens in the
downfall of habit when the mind, like an unguarded flame,
bows and bends and seems about to blow from its holding. I
haven’t felt so young for years! thought Peter, escaping (only
of course for an hour or so) from being precisely what he
was, and feeling like a child who runs out of doors, and sees,
as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong window. But
she’s extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking
across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket,
came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon’s statue,
seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed
veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had
always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet;
black, but enchanting.
Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his pocket-
knife he started after her to follow this woman, this
excitement, which seemed even with its back turned to shed
on him a light which connected them, which singled him
out, as if the random uproar of the traffic had whispered
through hollowed hands his name, not Peter, but his private
name which he called himself in his own thoughts. “You,”
she said, only “you,” saying it with her white gloves and her
shoulders. Then the thin long cloak which the wind stirred as
she walked past Dent’s shop in Cockspur Street blew out with
an enveloping kindness, a mournful tenderness, as of arms
that would open and take the tired—
But she’s not married; she’s young; quite young, thought
Peter, the red carnation he had seen her wear as she came
across Trafalgar Square burning again in his eyes and making
her lips red. But she waited at the kerbstone. There was a
dignity about her. She was not worldly, like Clarissa; not
rich, like Clarissa. Was she, he wondered as she moved,
respectable? Witty, with a lizard’s flickering tongue, he
thought (for one must invent, must allow oneself a little
diversion), a cool waiting wit, a darting wit; not noisy.
She moved; she crossed; he followed her. To embarrass her
was the last thing he wished. Still if she stopped he would
say “Come and have an ice,” he would say, and she would
answer, perfectly simply, “Oh yes.”
But other people got between them in the street, obstructing
him, blotting her out. He pursued; she changed. There was
colour in her cheeks; mockery in her eyes; he was an
adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift, daring, indeed
(landed as he was last night from India) a romantic
buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties, yellow
dressing-gowns, pipes, fishing-rods, in the shop windows;
and respectability and evening parties and spruce old men
wearing white slips beneath their waistcoats. He was a
buccaneer. On and on she went, across Piccadilly, and up
Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her gloves, her
shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the
feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of finery and
whimsy which dwindled out of the shops on to the
pavement, as the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over
hedges in the darkness.
Laughing and delightful, she had crossed Oxford Street and
Great Portland Street and turned down one of the little
streets, and now, and now, the great moment was
approaching, for now she slackened, opened her bag, and
with one look in his direction, but not at him, one look that
bade farewell, summed up the whole situation and dismissed
it triumphantly, for ever, had fitted her key, opened the
door, and gone! Clarissa’s voice saying, Remember my party,
Remember my party, sang in his ears. The house was one of
those flat red houses with hanging flower-baskets of vague
impropriety. It was over.
Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at
the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed
to atoms—his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very
well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one
makes up the better part of life, he thought—making oneself
up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and
something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one
could never share—it smashed to atoms.
He turned; went up the street, thinking to find somewhere to
sit, till it was time for Lincoln’s Inn—for Messrs. Hooper and
Grateley. Where should he go? No matter. Up the street,
then, towards Regent’s Park. His boots on the pavement
struck out “no matter”; for it was early, still very early.
It was a splendid morning too. Like the pulse of a perfect
heart, life struck straight through the streets. There was no
fumbling—no hesitation. Sweeping and swerving, accurately,
punctually, noiselessly, there, precisely at the right instant,
the motor-car stopped at the door. The girl, silk-stockinged,
feathered, evanescent, but not to him particularly attractive
(for he had had his fling), alighted. Admirable butlers, tawny
chow dogs, halls laid in black and white lozenges with white
blinds blowing, Peter saw through the opened door and
approved of. A splendid achievement in its own way, after
all, London; the season; civilisation. Coming as he did from a
respectable Anglo-Indian family which for at least three
generations had administered the affairs of a continent (it’s
strange, he thought, what a sentiment I have about that,
disliking India, and empire, and army as he did), there were
moments when civilisation, even of this sort, seemed dear to
him as a personal possession; moments of pride in England;
in butlers; chow dogs; girls in their security. Ridiculous
enough, still there it is, he thought. And the doctors and men
of business and capable women all going about their
business, punctual, alert, robust, seemed to him wholly
admirable, good fellows, to whom one would entrust one’s
life, companions in the art of living, who would see one
through. What with one thing and another, the show was
really very tolerable; and he would sit down in the shade and
smoke.
There was Regent’s Park. Yes. As a child he had walked in
Regent’s Park—odd, he thought, how the thought of
childhood keeps coming back to me—the result of seeing
Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than
we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places; and
their fathers—a woman’s always proud of her father. Bourton
was a nice place, a very nice place, but I could never get on
with the old man, he thought. There was quite a scene one
night—an argument about something or other, what, he
could not remember. Politics presumably.
Yes, he remembered Regent’s Park; the long straight walk;
the little house where one bought air-balls to the left; an
absurd statue with an inscription somewhere or other. He
looked for an empty seat. He did not want to be bothered
(feeling a little drowsy as he did) by people asking him the
time. An elderly grey nurse, with a baby asleep in its
perambulator—that was the best he could do for himself; sit
down at the far end of the seat by that nurse.
She’s
a
queer-looking
girl,
he
thought,
suddenly
remembering Elizabeth as she came into the room and stood
by her mother. Grown big; quite grown-up, not exactly
pretty; handsome rather; and she can’t be more than
eighteen. Probably she doesn’t get on with Clarissa. “There’s
my Elizabeth”—that sort of thing—why not “Here’s
Elizabeth” simply?—trying to make out, like most mothers,
that things are what they’re not. She trusts to her charm too
much, he thought. She overdoes it.
The rich benignant cigar smoke eddied coolly down his
throat; he puffed it out again in rings which breasted the air
bravely for a moment; blue, circular—I shall try and get a
word alone with Elizabeth to-night, he thought—then began
to wobble into hour-glass shapes and taper away; odd shapes
they take, he thought. Suddenly he closed his eyes, raised his
hand with an effort, and threw away the heavy end of his
cigar. A great brush swept smooth across his mind, sweeping
across it moving branches, children’s voices, the shuffle of
feet, and people passing, and humming traffic, rising and
falling traffic. Down, down he sank into the plumes and
feathers of sleep, sank, and was muffled over.
The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the
hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving
her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the
champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral
presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and
branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of
ferns, and devastator of great hemlock plants, looking up,
suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.
By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with
moments of extraordinary exaltation. Nothing exists outside
us except a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for
relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these
feeble, these ugly, these craven men and women. But if he
can conceive of her, then in some sort she exists, he thinks,
and advancing down the path with his eyes upon sky and
branches he rapidly endows them with womanhood; sees
with amazement how grave they become; how majestically,
as the breeze stirs them, they dispense with a dark flutter of
the leaves charity, comprehension, absolution, and then,
flinging themselves suddenly aloft, confound the piety of
their aspect with a wild carouse.
Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of
fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens
lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his
face like bunches of roses, or rise to the surface like pale
faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.
Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside,
put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often
overpowering the solitary traveller and taking away from
him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him
for substitute a general peace, as if (so he thinks as he
advances down the forest ride) all this fever of living were
simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing;
and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen
from the troubled sea (he is elderly, past fifty now) as a
shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down
from her magnificent hands compassion, comprehension,
absolution. So, he thinks, may I never go back to the
lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my book; never
knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away;
rather let me walk straight on to this great figure, who will,
with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let
me blow to nothingness with the rest.
Such are the visions. The solitary traveller is soon beyond the
wood; and there, coming to the door with shaded eyes,
possibly to look for his return, with hands raised, with white
apron blowing, is an elderly woman who seems (so powerful
is this infirmity) to seek, over a desert, a lost son; to search
for a rider destroyed; to be the figure of the mother whose
sons have been killed in the battles of the world. So, as the
solitary traveller advances down the village street where the
women stand knitting and the men dig in the garden, the
evening seems ominous; the figures still; as if some august
fate, known to them, awaited without fear, were about to
sweep them into complete annihilation.
Indoors among ordinary things, the cupboard, the table, the
window-sill with its geraniums, suddenly the outline of the
landlady, bending to remove the cloth, becomes soft with
light, an adorable emblem which only the recollection of
cold human contacts forbids us to embrace. She takes the
marmalade; she shuts it in the cupboard.
“There is nothing more to-night, sir?”
But to whom does the solitary traveller make reply?
So the elderly nurse knitted over the sleeping baby in
Regent’s Park. So Peter Walsh snored.
He woke with extreme suddenness, saying to himself, “The
death of the soul.”
“Lord, Lord!” he said to himself out loud, stretching and
opening his eyes. “The death of the soul.” The words
attached themselves to some scene, to some room, to some
past he had been dreaming of. It became clearer; the scene,
the room, the past he had been dreaming of.
It was at Bourton that summer, early in the ’nineties, when
he was so passionately in love with Clarissa. There were a
great many people there, laughing and talking, sitting round
a table after tea and the room was bathed in yellow light and
full of cigarette smoke. They were talking about a man who
had married his housemaid, one of the neighbouring squires,
he had forgotten his name. He had married his housemaid,
and she had been brought to Bourton to call—an awful visit
it had been. She was absurdly over-dressed, “like a
cockatoo,” Clarissa had said, imitating her, and she never
stopped talking. On and on she went, on and on. Clarissa
imitated her. Then somebody said—Sally Seton it was—did it
make any real difference to one’s feelings to know that
before they’d married she had had a baby? (In those days, in
mixed company, it was a bold thing to say.) He could see
Clarissa now, turning bright pink; somehow contracting; and
saying, “Oh, I shall never be able to speak to her again!”
Whereupon the whole party sitting round the tea-table
seemed to wobble. It was very uncomfortable.
He hadn’t blamed her for minding the fact, since in those
days a girl brought up as she was, knew nothing, but it was
her manner that annoyed him; timid; hard; something
arrogant; unimaginative; prudish. “The death of the soul.” He
had said that instinctively, ticketing the moment as he used
to do—the death of her soul.
Every one wobbled; every one seemed to bow, as she spoke,
and then to stand up different. He could see Sally Seton, like
a child who has been in mischief, leaning forward, rather
flushed, wanting to talk, but afraid, and Clarissa did frighten
people. (She was Clarissa’s greatest friend, always about the
place, totally unlike her, an attractive creature, handsome,
dark, with the reputation in those days of great daring and
he used to give her cigars, which she smoked in her
bedroom. She had either been engaged to somebody or
quarrelled with her family and old Parry disliked them both
equally, which was a great bond.) Then Clarissa, still with an
air of being offended with them all, got up, made some
excuse, and went off, alone. As she opened the door, in came
that great shaggy dog which ran after sheep. She flung
herself upon him, went into raptures. It was as if she said to
Peter—it was all aimed at him, he knew—“I know you
thought me absurd about that woman just now; but see how
extraordinarily sympathetic I am; see how I love my Rob!”
They had always this queer power of communicating without
words. She knew directly he criticised her. Then she would
do something quite obvious to defend herself, like this fuss
with the dog—but it never took him in, he always saw
through Clarissa. Not that he said anything, of course; just
sat looking glum. It was the way their quarrels often began.
She shut the door. At once he became extremely depressed. It
all seemed useless—going on being in love; going on
quarrelling; going on making it up, and he wandered off
alone, among outhouses, stables, looking at the horses. (The
place was quite a humble one; the Parrys were never very
well off; but there were always grooms and stable-boys about
—Clarissa loved riding—and an old coachman—what was his
name?—an old nurse, old Moody, old Goody, some such
name they called her, whom one was taken to visit in a little
room with lots of photographs, lots of bird-cages.)
It was an awful evening! He grew more and more gloomy,
not about that only; about everything. And he couldn’t see
her; couldn’t explain to her; couldn’t have it out. There were
always people about—she’d go on as if nothing had
happened. That was the devilish part of her—this coldness,
this woodenness, something very profound in her, which he
had
felt
again
this
morning
talking
to
her;
an
impenetrability. Yet Heaven knows he loved her. She had
some queer power of fiddling on one’s nerves, turning one’s
nerves to fiddle-strings, yes.
He had gone in to dinner rather late, from some idiotic idea
of making himself felt, and had sat down by old Miss Parry—
Aunt Helena—Mr. Parry’s sister, who was supposed to
preside. There she sat in her white Cashmere shawl, with her
head against the window—a formidable old lady, but kind to
him, for he had found her some rare flower, and she was a
great botanist, marching off in thick boots with a black
collecting-box slung between her shoulders. He sat down
beside her, and couldn’t speak. Everything seemed to race
past him; he just sat there, eating. And then half-way
through dinner he made himself look across at Clarissa for
the first time. She was talking to a young man on her right.
He had a sudden revelation. “She will marry that man,” he
said to himself. He didn’t even know his name.
For of course it was that afternoon, that very afternoon, that
Dalloway had come over; and Clarissa called him
“Wickham”; that was the beginning of it all. Somebody had
brought him over; and Clarissa got his name wrong. She
introduced him to everybody as Wickham. At last he said
“My name is Dalloway!”—that was his first view of Richard
—a fair young man, rather awkward, sitting on a deck-chair,
and blurting out “My name is Dalloway!” Sally got hold of it;
always after that she called him “My name is Dalloway!”
He was a prey to revelations at that time. This one—that she
would marry Dalloway—was blinding—overwhelming at the
moment. There was a sort of—how could he put it?—a sort
of ease in her manner to him; something maternal;
something gentle. They were talking about politics. All
through dinner he tried to hear what they were saying.
Afterwards he could remember standing by old Miss Parry’s
chair in the drawing-room. Clarissa came up, with her
perfect manners, like a real hostess, and wanted to introduce
him to some one—spoke as if they had never met before,
which enraged him. Yet even then he admired her for it. He
admired her courage; her social instinct; he admired her
power of carrying things through. “The perfect hostess,” he
said to her, whereupon she winced all over. But he meant her
to feel it. He would have done anything to hurt her after
seeing her with Dalloway. So she left him. And he had a
feeling that they were all gathered together in a conspiracy
against him—laughing and talking—behind his back. There
he stood by Miss Parry’s chair as though he had been cut out
of wood, he talking about wild flowers. Never, never had he
suffered so infernally! He must have forgotten even to
pretend to listen; at last he woke up; he saw Miss Parry
looking rather disturbed, rather indignant, with her
prominent eyes fixed. He almost cried out that he couldn’t
attend because he was in Hell! People began going out of the
room. He heard them talking about fetching cloaks; about its
being cold on the water, and so on. They were going boating
on the lake by moonlight—one of Sally’s mad ideas. He could
hear her describing the moon. And they all went out. He was
left quite alone.
“Don’t you want to go with them?” said Aunt Helena—old
Miss Parry!—she had guessed. And he turned round and
there was Clarissa again. She had come back to fetch him. He
was overcome by her generosity—her goodness.
“Come along,” she said. “They’re waiting.”
He had never felt so happy in the whole of his life! Without a
word they made it up. They walked down to the lake. He had
twenty minutes of perfect happiness. Her voice, her laugh,
her dress (something floating, white, crimson), her spirit, her
adventurousness; she made them all disembark and explore
the island; she startled a hen; she laughed; she sang. And all
the time, he knew perfectly well, Dalloway was falling in
love with her; she was falling in love with Dalloway; but it
didn’t seem to matter. Nothing mattered. They sat on the
ground and talked—he and Clarissa. They went in and out of
each other’s minds without any effort. And then in a second
it was over. He said to himself as they were getting into the
boat, “She will marry that man,” dully, without any
resentment; but it was an obvious thing. Dalloway would
marry Clarissa.
Dalloway rowed them in. He said nothing. But somehow as
they watched him start, jumping on to his bicycle to ride
twenty miles through the woods, wobbling off down the
drive, waving his hand and disappearing, he obviously did
feel, instinctively, tremendously, strongly, all that; the night;
the romance; Clarissa. He deserved to have her.
For himself, he was absurd. His demands upon Clarissa (he
could see it now) were absurd. He asked impossible things.
He made terrible scenes. She would have accepted him still,
perhaps, if he had been less absurd. Sally thought so. She
wrote him all that summer long letters; how they had talked
of him; how she had praised him, how Clarissa burst into
tears! It was an extraordinary summer—all letters, scenes,
telegrams—arriving at Bourton early in the morning,
hanging about till the servants were up; appalling tête-à-têtes
with old Mr. Parry at breakfast; Aunt Helena formidable but
kind; Sally sweeping him off for talks in the vegetable
garden; Clarissa in bed with headaches.
The final scene, the terrible scene which he believed had
mattered more than anything in the whole of his life (it
might be an exaggeration—but still so it did seem now)
happened at three o’clock in the afternoon of a very hot day.
It was a trifle that led up to it—Sally at lunch saying
something about Dalloway, and calling him “My name is
Dalloway”; whereupon Clarissa suddenly stiffened, coloured,
in a way she had, and rapped out sharply, “We’ve had
enough of that feeble joke.” That was all; but for him it was
precisely as if she had said, “I’m only amusing myself with
you; I’ve an understanding with Richard Dalloway.” So he
took it. He had not slept for nights. “It’s got to be finished
one way or the other,” he said to himself. He sent a note to
her by Sally asking her to meet him by the fountain at three.
“Something very important has happened,” he scribbled at
the end of it.
The fountain was in the middle of a little shrubbery, far from
the house, with shrubs and trees all round it. There she
came, even before the time, and they stood with the fountain
between them, the spout (it was broken) dribbling water
incessantly. How sights fix themselves upon the mind! For
example, the vivid green moss.
She did not move. “Tell me the truth, tell me the truth,” he
kept on saying. He felt as if his forehead would burst. She
seemed contracted, petrified. She did not move. “Tell me the
truth,” he repeated, when suddenly that old man Breitkopf
popped his head in carrying the Times; stared at them; gaped;
and went away. They neither of them moved. “Tell me the
truth,” he repeated. He felt that he was grinding against
something physically hard; she was unyielding. She was like
iron, like flint, rigid up the backbone. And when she said,
“It’s no use. It’s no use. This is the end”—after he had spoken
for hours, it seemed, with the tears running down his cheeks
—it was as if she had hit him in the face. She turned, she left
him, went away.
“Clarissa!” he cried. “Clarissa!” But she never came back. It
was over. He went away that night. He never saw her again.
It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!
Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had
a way of adding day to day. Still, he thought, yawning and
beginning to take notice—Regent’s Park had changed very
little since he was a boy, except for the squirrels—still,
presumably there were compensations—when little Elise
Mitchell, who had been picking up pebbles to add to the
pebble collection which she and her brother were making on
the nursery mantelpiece, plumped her handful down on the
nurse’s knee and scudded off again full tilt into a lady’s legs.
Peter Walsh laughed out.
But Lucrezia Warren Smith was saying to herself, It’s wicked;
why should I suffer? she was asking, as she walked down the
broad path. No; I can’t stand it any longer, she was saying,
having left Septimus, who wasn’t Septimus any longer, to say
hard, cruel, wicked things, to talk to himself, to talk to a
dead man, on the seat over there; when the child ran full tilt
into her, fell flat, and burst out crying.
That was comforting rather. She stood her upright, dusted
her frock, kissed her.
But for herself she had done nothing wrong; she had loved
Septimus; she had been happy; she had had a beautiful
home, and there her sisters lived still, making hats. Why
should she suffer?
The child ran straight back to its nurse, and Rezia saw her
scolded, comforted, taken up by the nurse who put down her
knitting, and the kind-looking man gave her his watch to
blow open to comfort her—but why should she be exposed?
Why not left in Milan? Why tortured? Why?
Slightly waved by tears the broad path, the nurse, the man in
grey, the perambulator, rose and fell before her eyes. To be
rocked by this malignant torturer was her lot. But why? She
was like a bird sheltering under the thin hollow of a leaf,
who blinks at the sun when the leaf moves; starts at the
crack of a dry twig. She was exposed; she was surrounded by
the enormous trees, vast clouds of an indifferent world,
exposed; tortured; and why should she suffer? Why?
She frowned; she stamped her foot. She must go back again
to Septimus since it was almost time for them to be going to
Sir William Bradshaw. She must go back and tell him, go
back to him sitting there on the green chair under the tree,
talking to himself, or to that dead man Evans, whom she had
only seen once for a moment in the shop. He had seemed a
nice quiet man; a great friend of Septimus’s, and he had been
killed in the War. But such things happen to every one. Every
one has friends who were killed in the War. Every one gives
up something when they marry. She had given up her home.
She had come to live here, in this awful city. But Septimus
let himself think about horrible things, as she could too, if
she tried. He had grown stranger and stranger. He said
people were talking behind the bedroom walls. Mrs. Filmer
thought it odd. He saw things too—he had seen an old
woman’s head in the middle of a fern. Yet he could be happy
when he chose. They went to Hampton Court on top of a bus,
and they were perfectly happy. All the little red and yellow
flowers were out on the grass, like floating lamps he said,
and talked and chattered and laughed, making up stories.
Suddenly he said, “Now we will kill ourselves,” when they
were standing by the river, and he looked at it with a look
which she had seen in his eyes when a train went by, or an
omnibus—a look as if something fascinated him; and she felt
he was going from her and she caught him by the arm. But
going home he was perfectly quiet—perfectly reasonable. He
would argue with her about killing themselves; and explain
how wicked people were; how he could see them making up
lies as they passed in the street. He knew all their thoughts,
he said; he knew everything. He knew the meaning of the
world, he said.
Then when they got back he could hardly walk. He lay on
the sofa and made her hold his hand to prevent him from
falling down, down, he cried, into the flames! and saw faces
laughing at him, calling him horrible disgusting names, from
the walls, and hands pointing round the screen. Yet they
were quite alone. But he began to talk aloud, answering
people, arguing, laughing, crying, getting very excited and
making her write things down. Perfect nonsense it was;
about death; about Miss Isabel Pole. She could stand it no
longer. She would go back.
She was close to him now, could see him staring at the sky,
muttering, clasping his hands. Yet Dr. Holmes said there was
nothing the matter with him. What then had happened—why
had he gone, then, why, when she sat by him, did he start,
frown at her, move away, and point at her hand, take her
hand, look at it terrified?
Was it that she had taken off her wedding ring? “My hand
has grown so thin,” she said. “I have put it in my purse,” she
told him.
He dropped her hand. Their marriage was over, he thought,
with agony, with relief. The rope was cut; he mounted; he
was free, as it was decreed that he, Septimus, the lord of
men, should be free; alone (since his wife had thrown away
her wedding ring; since she had left him), he, Septimus, was
alone, called forth in advance of the mass of men to hear the
truth, to learn the meaning, which now at last, after all the
toils of civilisation—Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin,
and now himself—was to be given whole to…. “To whom?”
he asked aloud. “To the Prime Minister,” the voices which
rustled above his head replied. The supreme secret must be
told to the Cabinet; first that trees are alive; next there is no
crime; next love, universal love, he muttered, gasping,
trembling, painfully drawing out these profound truths
which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense
effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by
them for ever.
No crime; love; he repeated, fumbling for his card and
pencil, when a Skye terrier snuffed his trousers and he
started in an agony of fear. It was turning into a man! He
could not watch it happen! It was horrible, terrible to see a
dog become a man! At once the dog trotted away.
Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant. It spared
him, pardoned his weakness. But what was the scientific
explanation (for one must be scientific above all things)?
Why could he see through bodies, see into the future, when
dogs will become men? It was the heat wave presumably,
operating upon a brain made sensitive by eons of evolution.
Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world.
His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left.
It was spread like a veil upon a rock.
He lay back in his chair, exhausted but upheld. He lay
resting, waiting, before he again interpreted, with effort,
with agony, to mankind. He lay very high, on the back of the
world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew
through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music
began clanging against the rocks up here. It is a motor horn
down in the street, he muttered; but up here it cannoned
from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which
rose in smooth columns (that music should be visible was a
discovery) and became an anthem, an anthem twined round
now by a shepherd boy’s piping (That’s an old man playing a
penny whistle by the public-house, he muttered) which, as
the boy stood still came bubbling from his pipe, and then, as
he climbed higher, made its exquisite plaint while the traffic
passed beneath. This boy’s elegy is played among the traffic,
thought Septimus. Now he withdraws up into the snows, and
roses hang about him—the thick red roses which grow on my
bedroom wall, he reminded himself. The music stopped. He
has his penny, he reasoned it out, and has gone on to the
next public-house.
But he himself remained high on his rock, like a drowned
sailor on a rock. I leant over the edge of the boat and fell
down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead,
and yet am now alive, but let me rest still; he begged (he was
talking to himself again—it was awful, awful!); and as,
before waking, the voices of birds and the sound of wheels
chime and chatter in a queer harmony, grow louder and
louder and the sleeper feels himself drawing to the shores of
life, so he felt himself drawing towards life, the sun growing
hotter, cries sounding louder, something tremendous about
to happen.
He had only to open his eyes; but a weight was on them; a
fear. He strained; he pushed; he looked; he saw Regent’s Park
before him. Long streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet.
The trees waved, brandished. We welcome, the world
seemed to say; we accept; we create. Beauty, the world
seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever
he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes
stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To
watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy.
Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging
themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with
perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising
and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in
mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and
now and again some chime (it might be a motor horn)
tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and
reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was,
was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty
was everywhere.
“It is time,” said Rezia.
The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him;
and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane,
without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words,
and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to
Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered
from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang,
among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over,
and now the dead, now Evans himself—
“For God’s sake don’t come!” Septimus cried out. For he
could not look upon the dead.
But the branches parted. A man in grey was actually walking
towards them. It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no
wounds; he was not changed. I must tell the whole world,
Septimus cried, raising his hand (as the dead man in the grey
suit came nearer), raising his hand like some colossal figure
who has lamented the fate of man for ages in the desert
alone with his hands pressed to his forehead, furrows of
despair on his cheeks, and now sees light on the desert’s edge
which broadens and strikes the iron-black figure (and
Septimus half rose from his chair), and with legions of men
prostrate behind him he, the giant mourner, receives for one
moment on his face the whole—
“But I am so unhappy, Septimus,” said Rezia trying to make
him sit down.
The millions lamented; for ages they had sorrowed. He
would turn round, he would tell them in a few moments,
only a few moments more, of this relief, of this joy, of this
astonishing revelation—
“The time, Septimus,” Rezia repeated. “What is the time?”
He was talking, he was starting, this man must notice him.
He was looking at them.
“I will tell you the time,” said Septimus, very slowly, very
drowsily, smiling mysteriously. As he sat smiling at the dead
man in the grey suit the quarter struck—the quarter to
twelve.
And that is being young, Peter Walsh thought as he passed
them. To be having an awful scene—the poor girl looked
absolutely desperate—in the middle of the morning. But
what was it about, he wondered, what had the young man in
the overcoat been saying to her to make her look like that;
what awful fix had they got themselves into, both to look so
desperate as that on a fine summer morning? The amusing
thing about coming back to England, after five years, was the
way it made, anyhow the first days, things stand out as if one
had never seen them before; lovers squabbling under a tree;
the domestic family life of the parks. Never had he seen
London look so enchanting—the softness of the distances; the
richness; the greenness; the civilisation, after India, he
thought, strolling across the grass.
This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing no
doubt. Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these
alternations of mood; good days, bad days, for no reason
whatever, happiness from a pretty face, downright misery at
the sight of a frump. After India of course one fell in love
with every woman one met. There was a freshness about
them; even the poorest dressed better than five years ago
surely; and to his eye the fashions had never been so
becoming; the long black cloaks; the slimness; the elegance;
and then the delicious and apparently universal habit of
paint. Every woman, even the most respectable, had roses
blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife; curls of Indian
ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a change of some sort
had undoubtedly taken place. What did the young people
think about? Peter Walsh asked himself.
Those five years—1918 to 1923—had been, he suspected,
somehow
very
important.
People
looked
different.
Newspapers seemed different. Now for instance there was a
man writing quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies
about water-closets. That you couldn’t have done ten years
ago—written
quite
openly
about
water-closets
in
a
respectable weekly. And then this taking out a stick of rouge,
or a powder-puff and making up in public. On board ship
coming home there were lots of young men and girls—Betty
and Bertie he remembered in particular—carrying on quite
openly; the old mother sitting and watching them with her
knitting, cool as a cucumber. The girl would stand still and
powder her nose in front of every one. And they weren’t
engaged; just having a good time; no feelings hurt on either
side. As hard as nails she was—Betty What’shername—; but a
thorough good sort. She would make a very good wife at
thirty—she would marry when it suited her to marry; marry
some rich man and live in a large house near Manchester.
Who was it now who had done that? Peter Walsh asked
himself, turning into the Broad Walk,—married a rich man
and lived in a large house near Manchester? Somebody who
had written him a long, gushing letter quite lately about
“blue hydrangeas.” It was seeing blue hydrangeas that made
her think of him and the old days—Sally Seton, of course! It
was Sally Seton—the last person in the world one would
have expected to marry a rich man and live in a large house
near Manchester, the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!
But of all that ancient lot, Clarissa’s friends—Whitbreads,
Kinderleys,
Cunninghams,
Kinloch-Jones’s—Sally
was
probably the best. She tried to get hold of things by the right
end anyhow. She saw through Hugh Whitbread anyhow—the
admirable Hugh—when Clarissa and the rest were at his feet.
“The Whitbreads?” he could hear her saying. “Who are the
Whitbreads? Coal merchants. Respectable tradespeople.”
Hugh she detested for some reason. He thought of nothing
but his own appearance, she said. He ought to have been a
Duke. He would be certain to marry one of the Royal
Princesses. And of course Hugh had the most extraordinary,
the most natural, the most sublime respect for the British
aristocracy of any human being he had ever come across.
Even Clarissa had to own that. Oh, but he was such a dear,
so unselfish, gave up shooting to please his old mother—
remembered his aunts’ birthdays, and so on.
Sally, to do her justice, saw through all that. One of the
things he remembered best was an argument one Sunday
morning at Bourton about women’s rights (that antediluvian
topic), when Sally suddenly lost her temper, flared up, and
told Hugh that he represented all that was most detestable in
British middle-class life. She told him that she considered
him responsible for the state of “those poor girls in
Piccadilly”—Hugh, the perfect gentleman, poor Hugh!—
never did a man look more horrified! She did it on purpose
she said afterwards (for they used to get together in the
vegetable garden and compare notes). “He’s read nothing,
thought nothing, felt nothing,” he could hear her saying in
that very emphatic voice which carried so much farther than
she knew. The stable boys had more life in them than Hugh,
she said. He was a perfect specimen of the public school
type, she said. No country but England could have produced
him. She was really spiteful, for some reason; had some
grudge against him. Something had happened—he forgot
what—in the smoking-room. He had insulted her—kissed
her? Incredible! Nobody believed a word against Hugh of
course. Who could? Kissing Sally in the smoking-room! If it
had been some Honourable Edith or Lady Violet, perhaps;
but not that ragamuffin Sally without a penny to her name,
and a father or a mother gambling at Monte Carlo. For of all
the people he had ever met Hugh was the greatest snob—the
most obsequious—no, he didn’t cringe exactly. He was too
much of a prig for that. A first-rate valet was the obvious
comparison—somebody who walked behind carrying suit
cases; could be trusted to send telegrams—indispensable to
hostesses. And he’d found his job—married his Honourable
Evelyn; got some little post at Court, looked after the King’s
cellars, polished the Imperial shoe-buckles, went about in
knee-breeches and lace ruffles. How remorseless life is! A
little job at Court!
He had married this lady, the Honourable Evelyn, and they
lived hereabouts, so he thought (looking at the pompous
houses overlooking the Park), for he had lunched there once
in a house which had, like all Hugh’s possessions, something
that no other house could possibly have—linen cupboards it
might have been. You had to go and look at them—you had
to spend a great deal of time always admiring whatever it
was—linen cupboards, pillow-cases, old oak furniture,
pictures, which Hugh had picked up for an old song. But Mrs.
Hugh sometimes gave the show away. She was one of those
obscure mouse-like little women who admire big men. She
was almost negligible. Then suddenly she would say
something quite unexpected—something sharp. She had the
relics of the grand manner perhaps. The steam coal was a
little too strong for her—it made the atmosphere thick. And
so there they lived, with their linen cupboards and their old
masters and their pillow-cases fringed with real lace at the
rate of five or ten thousand a year presumably, while he,
who was two years older than Hugh, cadged for a job.
At fifty-three he had to come and ask them to put him into
some secretary’s office, to find him some usher’s job teaching
little boys Latin, at the beck and call of some mandarin in an
office, something that brought in five hundred a year; for if
he married Daisy, even with his pension, they could never do
on less. Whitbread could do it presumably; or Dalloway. He
didn’t mind what he asked Dalloway. He was a thorough
good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a
thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same
matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination,
without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable
niceness of his type. He ought to have been a country
gentleman—he was wasted on politics. He was at his best out
of doors, with horses and dogs—how good he was, for
instance, when that great shaggy dog of Clarissa’s got caught
in a trap and had its paw half torn off, and Clarissa turned
faint and Dalloway did the whole thing; bandaged, made
splints; told Clarissa not to be a fool. That was what she liked
him for perhaps—that was what she needed. “Now, my dear,
don’t be a fool. Hold this—fetch that,” all the time talking to
the dog as if it were a human being.
But how could she swallow all that stuff about poetry? How
could she let him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously
and solemnly Richard Dalloway got on his hind legs and said
that no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets
because it was like listening at keyholes (besides the
relationship was not one that he approved). No decent man
ought to let his wife visit a deceased wife’s sister. Incredible!
The only thing to do was to pelt him with sugared almonds—
it was at dinner. But Clarissa sucked it all in; thought it so
honest of him; so independent of him; Heaven knows if she
didn’t think him the most original mind she’d ever met!
That was one of the bonds between Sally and himself. There
was a garden where they used to walk, a walled-in place,
with rose-bushes and giant cauliflowers—he could remember
Sally tearing off a rose, stopping to exclaim at the beauty of
the cabbage leaves in the moonlight (it was extraordinary
how vividly it all came back to him, things he hadn’t thought
of for years,) while she implored him, half laughing of
course, to carry off Clarissa, to save her from the Hughs and
the Dalloways and all the other “perfect gentlemen” who
would “stifle her soul” (she wrote reams of poetry in those
days), make a mere hostess of her, encourage her
worldliness. But one must do Clarissa justice. She wasn’t
going to marry Hugh anyhow. She had a perfectly clear
notion of what she wanted. Her emotions were all on the
surface. Beneath, she was very shrewd—a far better judge of
character than Sally, for instance, and with it all, purely
feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift, of
making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.
She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in
a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa
one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at
all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said
anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she
was.
No, no, no! He was not in love with her any more! He only
felt, after seeing her that morning, among her scissors and
silks, making ready for the party, unable to get away from
the thought of her; she kept coming back and back like a
sleeper jolting against him in a railway carriage; which was
not being in love, of course; it was thinking of her, criticising
her, starting again, after thirty years, trying to explain her.
The obvious thing to say of her was that she was worldly;
cared too much for rank and society and getting on in the
world—which was true in a sense; she had admitted it to
him. (You could always get her to own up if you took the
trouble; she was honest.) What she would say was that she
hated frumps, fogies, failures, like himself presumably;
thought people had no right to slouch about with their hands
in their pockets; must do something, be something; and these
great swells, these Duchesses, these hoary old Countesses one
met in her drawing-room, unspeakably remote as he felt
them to be from anything that mattered a straw, stood for
something real to her. Lady Bexborough, she said once, held
herself upright (so did Clarissa herself; she never lounged in
any sense of the word; she was straight as a dart, a little rigid
in fact). She said they had a kind of courage which the older
she grew the more she respected. In all this there was a great
deal of Dalloway, of course; a great deal of the public-
spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, governing-class spirit,
which had grown on her, as it tends to do. With twice his
wits, she had to see things through his eyes—one of the
tragedies of married life. With a mind of her own, she must
always be quoting Richard—as if one couldn’t know to a
tittle what Richard thought by reading the Morning Post of a
morning! These parties for example were all for him, or for
her idea of him (to do Richard justice he would have been
happier farming in Norfolk). She made her drawing-room a
sort of meeting-place; she had a genius for it. Over and over
again he had seen her take some raw youth, twist him, turn
him, wake him up; set him going. Infinite numbers of dull
people conglomerated round her of course. But odd
unexpected people turned up; an artist sometimes; sometimes
a writer; queer fish in that atmosphere. And behind it all was
that network of visiting, leaving cards, being kind to people;
running about with bunches of flowers, little presents; So-
and-so was going to France—must have an air-cushion; a real
drain on her strength; all that interminable traffic that
women of her sort keep up; but she did it genuinely, from a
natural instinct.
Oddly enough, she was one of the most thoroughgoing
sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he
used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some
ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly she said to herself,
As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her
favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they
were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is
a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the
sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate
the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as
we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all
their own way,—her notion being that the Gods, who never
lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives
were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a
lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia’s death—that
horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling tree
(all Justin Parry’s fault—all his carelessness) before your
very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of
them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter.
Later she wasn’t so positive perhaps; she thought there were
no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this
atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature
to enjoy (though goodness only knows, she had her reserves;
it was a mere sketch, he often felt, that even he, after all
these years, could make of Clarissa). Anyhow there was no
bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is
so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically
everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was
a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some
absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment.
(Very likely, she would have talked to those lovers, if she
had thought them unhappy.) She had a sense of comedy that
was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people,
to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered
her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant
parties of hers, talking nonsense, sayings things she didn’t
mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her
discrimination. There she would sit at the head of the table
taking infinite pains with some old buffer who might be
useful to Dalloway—they knew the most appalling bores in
Europe—or in came Elizabeth and everything must give way
to her. She was at a High School, at the inarticulate stage last
time he was over, a round-eyed, pale-faced girl, with nothing
of her mother in her, a silent stolid creature, who took it all
as a matter of course, let her mother make a fuss of her, and
then said “May I go now?” like a child of four; going off,
Clarissa explained, with that mixture of amusement and
pride which Dalloway himself seemed to rouse in her, to play
hockey. And now Elizabeth was “out,” presumably; thought
him an old fogy, laughed at her mother’s friends. Ah well, so
be it. The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought,
coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand,
was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever,
but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the
supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of
experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but
now, at the age of fifty-three one scarcely needed people any
more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here,
this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough.
Too much indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring
out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour;
to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning;
which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so
much less personal. It was impossible that he should ever
suffer again as Clarissa had made him suffer. For hours at a
time (pray God that one might say these things without
being overheard!), for hours and days he never thought of
Daisy.
Could it be that he was in love with her then, remembering
the misery, the torture, the extraordinary passion of those
days? It was a different thing altogether—a much pleasanter
thing—the truth being, of course, that now she was in love
with him. And that perhaps was the reason why, when the
ship actually sailed, he felt an extraordinary relief, wanted
nothing so much as to be alone; was annoyed to find all her
little attentions—cigars, notes, a rug for the voyage—in his
cabin. Every one if they were honest would say the same;
one doesn’t want people after fifty; one doesn’t want to go on
telling women they are pretty; that’s what most men of fifty
would say, Peter Walsh thought, if they were honest.
But then these astonishing accesses of emotion—bursting
into tears this morning, what was all that about? What could
Clarissa have thought of him? thought him a fool
presumably, not for the first time. It was jealousy that was at
the bottom of it—jealousy which survives every other
passion of mankind, Peter Walsh thought, holding his pocket-
knife at arm’s length. She had been meeting Major Orde,
Daisy said in her last letter; said it on purpose he knew; said
it to make him jealous; he could see her wrinkling her
forehead as she wrote, wondering what she could say to hurt
him; and yet it made no difference; he was furious! All this
pother of coming to England and seeing lawyers wasn’t to
marry her, but to prevent her from marrying anybody else.
That was what tortured him, that was what came over him
when he saw Clarissa so calm, so cold, so intent on her dress
or whatever it was; realising what she might have spared
him, what she had reduced him to—a whimpering, snivelling
old ass. But women, he thought, shutting his pocket-knife,
don’t know what passion is. They don’t know the meaning of
it to men. Clarissa was as cold as an icicle. There she would
sit on the sofa by his side, let him take her hand, give him
one kiss—Here he was at the crossing.
A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice
bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end,
running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human
meaning into
ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo—
the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring
spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s
Park Tube station from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel,
like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of
leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches
singing
ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo
and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.
Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it
was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through
the age of silent sunrise, the battered woman—for she wore a
skirt—with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her
side, stood singing of love—love which has lasted a million
years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years
ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had
walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of
ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered,
with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous
sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she
laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now
become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by
her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial
place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the
pageant of the universe would be over.
As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent’s Park Tube
station still the earth seemed green and flowery; still, though
it issued from so rude a mouth, a mere hole in the earth,
muddy too, matted with root fibres and tangled grasses, still
the old bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knotted
roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure, streamed
away in rivulets over the pavement and all along the
Marylebone Road, and down towards Euston, fertilising,
leaving a damp stain.
Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had
walked with her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old
woman with one hand exposed for coppers the other
clutching her side, would still be there in ten million years,
remembering how once she had walked in May, where the
sea flows now, with whom it did not matter—he was a man,
oh yes, a man who had loved her. But the passage of ages
had blurred the clarity of that ancient May day; the bright
petalled flowers were hoar and silver frosted; and she no
longer saw, when she implored him (as she did now quite
clearly) “look in my eyes with thy sweet eyes intently,” she
no longer saw brown eyes, black whiskers or sunburnt face
but only a looming shape, a shadow shape, to which, with
the bird-like freshness of the very aged she still twittered
“give me your hand and let me press it gently” (Peter Walsh
couldn’t help giving the poor creature a coin as he stepped
into his taxi), “and if some one should see, what matter
they?” she demanded; and her fist clutched at her side, and
she smiled, pocketing her shilling, and all peering inquisitive
eyes seemed blotted out, and the passing generations—the
pavement was crowded with bustling middle-class people—
vanished, like leaves, to be trodden under, to be soaked and
steeped and made mould of by that eternal spring—
ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo
“Poor old woman,” said Rezia Warren Smith, waiting to
cross.
Oh poor old wretch!
Suppose it was a wet night? Suppose one’s father, or
somebody who had known one in better days had happened
to pass, and saw one standing there in the gutter? And where
did she sleep at night?
Cheerfully, almost gaily, the invincible thread of sound
wound up into the air like the smoke from a cottage
chimney, winding up clean beech trees and issuing in a tuft
of blue smoke among the topmost leaves. “And if some one
should see, what matter they?”
Since she was so unhappy, for weeks and weeks now, Rezia
had given meanings to things that happened, almost felt
sometimes that she must stop people in the street, if they
looked good, kind people, just to say to them “I am
unhappy”; and this old woman singing in the street “if some
one should see, what matter they?” made her suddenly quite
sure that everything was going to be right. They were going
to Sir William Bradshaw; she thought his name sounded nice;
he would cure Septimus at once. And then there was a
brewer’s cart, and the grey horses had upright bristles of
straw in their tails; there were newspaper placards. It was a
silly, silly dream, being unhappy.
So they crossed, Mr. and Mrs. Septimus Warren Smith, and
was there, after all, anything to draw attention to them,
anything to make a passer-by suspect here is a young man
who carries in him the greatest message in the world, and is,
moreover, the happiest man in the world, and the most
miserable? Perhaps they walked more slowly than other
people, and there was something hesitating, trailing, in the
man’s walk, but what more natural for a clerk, who has not
been in the West End on a weekday at this hour for years,
than to keep looking at the sky, looking at this, that and the
other, as if Portland Place were a room he had come into
when the family are away, the chandeliers being hung in
holland bags, and the caretaker, as she lets in long shafts of
dusty light upon deserted, queer-looking arm-chairs, lifting
one corner of the long blinds, explains to the visitors what a
wonderful place it is; how wonderful, but at the same time,
he thinks, as he looks at chairs and tables, how strange.
To look at, he might have been a clerk, but of the better sort;
for he wore brown boots; his hands were educated; so, too,
his profile—his angular, big-nosed, intelligent, sensitive
profile; but not his lips altogether, for they were loose; and
his eyes (as eyes tend to be), eyes merely; hazel, large; so
that he was, on the whole, a border case, neither one thing
nor the other, might end with a house at Purley and a motor
car, or continue renting apartments in back streets all his
life; one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose
education is all learnt from books borrowed from public
libraries, read in the evening after the day’s work, on the
advice of well-known authors consulted by letter.
As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people
go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking
the fields and the streets of London, he had them; had left
home, a mere boy, because of his mother; she lied; because
he came down to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands
unwashed; because he could see no future for a poet in
Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister, had
gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as
great men have written, and the world has read later when
the story of their struggles has become famous.
London has swallowed up many millions of young men
called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names
like Septimus with which their parents have thought to
distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston Road, there were
experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two
years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted,
hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of
friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens
the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new
blossom on his plant:—It has flowered; flowered from vanity,
ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the
usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston
Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to
improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole,
lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.
Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she
might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest;
lent him books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him
such a fire as burns only once in a lifetime, without heat,
flickering a red gold flame infinitely ethereal and
insubstantial over Miss Pole; Antony and Cleopatra; and the
Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her
impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her,
which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink; he saw
her, one summer evening, walking in a green dress in a
square. “It has flowered,” the gardener might have said, had
he opened the door; had he come in, that is to say, any night
about this time, and found him writing; found him tearing up
his writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three
o’clock in the morning and running out to pace the streets,
and visiting churches, and fasting one day, drinking another,
devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation,
and Bernard Shaw.
Something was up, Mr. Brewer knew; Mr. Brewer, managing
clerk at Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land
and estate agents; something was up, he thought, and, being
paternal with his young men, and thinking very highly of
Smith’s abilities, and prophesying that he would, in ten or
fifteen years, succeed to the leather arm-chair in the inner
room under the skylight with the deed-boxes round him, “if
he keeps his health,” said Mr. Brewer, and that was the
danger—he looked weakly; advised football, invited him to
supper and was seeing his way to consider recommending a
rise of salary, when something happened which threw out
many of Mr. Brewer’s calculations, took away his ablest
young fellows, and eventually, so prying and insidious were
the fingers of the European War, smashed a plaster cast of
Ceres, ploughed a hole in the geranium beds, and utterly
ruined the cook’s nerves at Mr. Brewer’s establishment at
Muswell Hill.
Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France
to save an England which consisted almost entirely of
Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress
walking in a square. There in the trenches the change which
Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football was produced
instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew
the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by
name. It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug; one
worrying a paper screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch,
now and then, at the old dog’s ear; the other lying
somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a paw, turning and
growling good-temperedly. They had to be together, share
with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each
other. But when Evans (Rezia who had only seen him once
called him “a quiet man,” a sturdy red-haired man,
undemonstrative in the company of women), when Evans
was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far
from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the
end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very
little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was
sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship,
European War, death, had won promotion, was still under
thirty and was bound to survive. He was right there. The last
shells missed him. He watched them explode with
indifference. When peace came he was in Milan, billeted in
the house of an innkeeper with a courtyard, flowers in tubs,
little tables in the open, daughters making hats, and to
Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he became engaged one
evening when the panic was on him—that he could not feel.
For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead
buried, he had, especially in the evening, these sudden
thunder-claps of fear. He could not feel. As he opened the
door of the room where the Italian girls sat making hats, he
could see them; could hear them; they were rubbing wires
among coloured beads in saucers; they were turning buckram
shapes this way and that; the table was all strewn with
feathers, spangles, silks, ribbons; scissors were rapping on
the table; but something failed him; he could not feel. Still,
scissors rapping, girls laughing, hats being made protected
him; he was assured of safety; he had a refuge. But he could
not sit there all night. There were moments of waking in the
early morning. The bed was falling; he was falling. Oh for
the scissors and the lamplight and the buckram shapes! He
asked Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two, the
gay, the frivolous, with those little artist’s fingers that she
would hold up and say “It is all in them.” Silk, feathers, what
not were alive to them.
“It is the hat that matters most,” she would say, when they
walked out together. Every hat that passed, she would
examine; and the cloak and the dress and the way the
woman
held
herself.
Ill-dressing,
over-dressing
she
stigmatised, not savagely, rather with impatient movements
of the hands, like those of a painter who puts from him some
obvious well-meant glaring imposture; and then, generously,
but always critically, she would welcome a shop-girl who
had turned her little bit of stuff gallantly, or praise, wholly,
with enthusiastic and professional understanding, a French
lady descending from her carriage, in chinchilla, robes,
pearls.
“Beautiful!” she would murmur, nudging Septimus, that he
might see. But beauty was behind a pane of glass. Even taste
(Rezia liked ices, chocolates, sweet things) had no relish to
him. He put down his cup on the little marble table. He
looked at people outside; happy they seemed, collecting in
the middle of the street, shouting, laughing, squabbling over
nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the tea-
shop among the tables and the chattering waiters the
appalling fear came over him—he could not feel. He could
reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily
(“Septimus, do put down your book,” said Rezia, gently
shutting the Inferno), he could add up his bill; his brain was
perfect; it must be the fault of the world then—that he could
not feel.
“The English are so silent,” Rezia said. She liked it, she said.
She respected these Englishmen, and wanted to see London,
and the English horses, and the tailor-made suits, and could
remember hearing how wonderful the shops were, from an
Aunt who had married and lived in Soho.
It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England
from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be
possible that the world itself is without meaning.
At the office they advanced him to a post of considerable
responsibility. They were proud of him; he had won crosses.
“You have done your duty; it is up to us—” began Mr.
Brewer; and could not finish, so pleasurable was his emotion.
They took admirable lodgings off the Tottenham Court Road.
Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business
of the intoxication of language—Antony and Cleopatra—had
shrivelled utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the
putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of
the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus;
the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal
which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is
loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus
(translated) the same. There Rezia sat at the table trimming
hats. She trimmed hats for Mrs. Filmer’s friends; she trimmed
hats by the hour. She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily,
drowned, under water, he thought.
“The English are so serious,” she would say, putting her arms
round Septimus, her cheek against his.
Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare.
The business of copulation was filth to him before the end.
But, Rezia said, she must have children. They had been
married five years.
They went to the Tower together; to the Victoria and Albert
Museum; stood in the crowd to see the King open
Parliament. And there were the shops—hat shops, dress
shops, shops with leather bags in the window, where she
would stand staring. But she must have a boy.
She must have a son like Septimus, she said. But nobody
could be like Septimus; so gentle; so serious; so clever. Could
she not read Shakespeare too? Was Shakespeare a difficult
author? she asked.
One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot
perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful
animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and
vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
He watched her snip, shape, as one watches a bird hop, flit in
the grass, without daring to move a finger. For the truth is
(let her ignore it) that human beings have neither kindness,
nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the
pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs
scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness.
They desert the fallen. They are plastered over with
grimaces. There was Brewer at the office, with his waxed
moustache, coral tie-pin, white slip, and pleasurable
emotions—all
coldness
and
clamminess
within,—his
geraniums ruined in the War—his cook’s nerves destroyed; or
Amelia
What’shername,
handing
round
cups
of
tea
punctually at five—a leering, sneering obscene little harpy;
and the Toms and Berties in their starched shirt fronts oozing
thick drops of vice. They never saw him drawing pictures of
them naked at their antics in his notebook. In the street, vans
roared past him; brutality blared out on placards; men were
trapped in mines; women burnt alive; and once a maimed
file of lunatics being exercised or displayed for the diversion
of the populace (who laughed aloud), ambled and nodded
and grinned past him, in the Tottenham Court Road, each
half apologetically, yet triumphantly, inflicting his hopeless
woe. And would he go mad?
At tea Rezia told him that Mrs. Filmer’s daughter was
expecting a baby. She could not grow old and have no
children! She was very lonely, she was very unhappy! She
cried for the first time since they were married. Far away he
heard her sobbing; he heard it accurately, he noticed it
distinctly; he compared it to a piston thumping. But he felt
nothing.
His wife was crying, and he felt nothing; only each time she
sobbed in this profound, this silent, this hopeless way, he
descended another step into the pit.
At last, with a melodramatic gesture which he assumed
mechanically and with complete consciousness of its
insincerity, he dropped his head on his hands. Now he had
surrendered; now other people must help him. People must
be sent for. He gave in.
Nothing could rouse him. Rezia put him to bed. She sent for
a doctor—Mrs. Filmer’s Dr. Holmes. Dr. Holmes examined
him. There was nothing whatever the matter, said Dr.
Holmes. Oh, what a relief! What a kind man, what a good
man! thought Rezia. When he felt like that he went to the
Music Hall, said Dr. Holmes. He took a day off with his wife
and played golf. Why not try two tabloids of bromide
dissolved in a glass of water at bedtime? These old
Bloomsbury houses, said Dr. Holmes, tapping the wall, are
often full of very fine panelling, which the landlords have the
folly to paper over. Only the other day, visiting a patient, Sir
Somebody Something in Bedford Square—
So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except
the sin for which human nature had condemned him to
death; that he did not feel. He had not cared when Evans was
killed; that was worst; but all the other crimes raised their
heads and shook their fingers and jeered and sneered over
the rail of the bed in the early hours of the morning at the
prostrate body which lay realising its degradation; how he
had married his wife without loving her; had lied to her;
seduced her; outraged Miss Isabel Pole, and was so pocked
and marked with vice that women shuddered when they saw
him in the street. The verdict of human nature on such a
wretch was death.
Dr. Holmes came again. Large, fresh coloured, handsome,
flicking his boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside
—headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams—nerve symptoms
and nothing more, he said. If Dr. Holmes found himself even
half a pound below eleven stone six, he asked his wife for
another plate of porridge at breakfast. (Rezia would learn to
cook porridge.) But, he continued, health is largely a matter
in our own control. Throw yourself into outside interests;
take up some hobby. He opened Shakespeare—Antony and
Cleopatra; pushed Shakespeare aside. Some hobby, said Dr.
Holmes, for did he not owe his own excellent health (and he
worked as hard as any man in London) to the fact that he
could always switch off from his patients on to old furniture?
And what a very pretty comb, if he might say so, Mrs.
Warren Smith was wearing!
When the damned fool came again, Septimus refused to see
him. Did he indeed? said Dr. Holmes, smiling agreeably.
Really he had to give that charming little lady, Mrs. Smith, a
friendly push before he could get past her into her husband’s
bedroom.
“So you’re in a funk,” he said agreeably, sitting down by his
patient’s side. He had actually talked of killing himself to his
wife, quite a girl, a foreigner, wasn’t she? Didn’t that give
her a very odd idea of English husbands? Didn’t one owe
perhaps a duty to one’s wife? Wouldn’t it be better to do
something instead of lying in bed? For he had had forty
years’ experience behind him; and Septimus could take Dr.
Holmes’s word for it—there was nothing whatever the matter
with him. And next time Dr. Holmes came he hoped to find
Smith out of bed and not making that charming little lady his
wife anxious about him.
Human nature, in short, was on him—the repulsive brute,
with the blood-red nostrils. Holmes was on him. Dr. Holmes
came quite regularly every day. Once you stumble, Septimus
wrote on the back of a postcard, human nature is on you.
Holmes is on you. Their only chance was to escape, without
letting Holmes know; to Italy—anywhere, anywhere, away
from Dr. Holmes.
But Rezia could not understand him. Dr. Holmes was such a
kind man. He was so interested in Septimus. He only wanted
to help them, he said. He had four little children and he had
asked her to tea, she told Septimus.
So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill
yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill
himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and
this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table
knife, uglily, with floods of blood,—by sucking a gaspipe? He
was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now
that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who
are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an
isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can
never know. Holmes had won of course; the brute with the
red nostrils had won. But even Holmes himself could not
touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this
outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay,
like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.
It was at that moment (Rezia gone shopping) that the great
revelation took place. A voice spoke from behind the screen.
Evans was speaking. The dead were with him.
“Evans, Evans!” he cried.
Mr. Smith was talking aloud to himself, Agnes the servant
girl cried to Mrs. Filmer in the kitchen. “Evans, Evans,” he
had said as she brought in the tray. She jumped, she did. She
scuttled downstairs.
And Rezia came in, with her flowers, and walked across the
room, and put the roses in a vase, upon which the sun struck
directly, and it went laughing, leaping round the room.
She had had to buy the roses, Rezia said, from a poor man in
the street. But they were almost dead already, she said,
arranging the roses.
So there was a man outside; Evans presumably; and the
roses, which Rezia said were half dead, had been picked by
him in the fields of Greece. “Communication is health;
communication
is
happiness,
communication—”
he
muttered.
“What are you saying, Septimus?” Rezia asked, wild with
terror, for he was talking to himself.
She sent Agnes running for Dr. Holmes. Her husband, she
said, was mad. He scarcely knew her.
“You brute! You brute!” cried Septimus, seeing human
nature, that is Dr. Holmes, enter the room.
“Now what’s all this about?” said Dr. Holmes in the most
amiable way in the world. “Talking nonsense to frighten
your wife?” But he would give him something to make him
sleep. And if they were rich people, said Dr. Holmes, looking
ironically round the room, by all means let them go to
Harley Street; if they had no confidence in him, said Dr.
Holmes, looking not quite so kind.
It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben; whose
stroke was wafted over the northern part of London; blent
with that of other clocks, mixed in a thin ethereal way with
the clouds and wisps of smoke, and died up there among the
seagulls—twelve o’clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway laid her
green dress on her bed, and the Warren Smiths walked down
Harley Street. Twelve was the hour of their appointment.
Probably, Rezia thought, that was Sir William Bradshaw’s
house with the grey motor car in front of it. The leaden
circles dissolved in the air.
Indeed it was—Sir William Bradshaw’s motor car; low,
powerful, grey with plain initials interlocked on the panel, as
if the pomps of heraldry were incongruous, this man being
the ghostly helper, the priest of science; and, as the motor
car was grey, so to match its sober suavity, grey furs, silver
grey rugs were heaped in it, to keep her ladyship warm while
she waited. For often Sir William would travel sixty miles or
more down into the country to visit the rich, the afflicted,
who could afford the very large fee which Sir William very
properly charged for his advice. Her ladyship waited with
the rugs about her knees an hour or more, leaning back,
thinking sometimes of the patient, sometimes, excusably, of
the wall of gold, mounting minute by minute while she
waited; the wall of gold that was mounting between them
and all shifts and anxieties (she had borne them bravely;
they had had their struggles) until she felt wedged on a calm
ocean, where only spice winds blow; respected, admired,
envied, with scarcely anything left to wish for, though she
regretted her stoutness; large dinner-parties every Thursday
night to the profession; an occasional bazaar to be opened;
Royalty greeted; too little time, alas, with her husband,
whose work grew and grew; a boy doing well at Eton; she
would have liked a daughter too; interests she had, however,
in plenty; child welfare; the after-care of the epileptic, and
photography, so that if there was a church building, or a
church decaying, she bribed the sexton, got the key and took
photographs, which were scarcely to be distinguished from
the work of professionals, while she waited.
Sir William himself was no longer young. He had worked
very hard; he had won his position by sheer ability (being
the son of a shopkeeper); loved his profession; made a fine
figurehead at ceremonies and spoke well—all of which had
by the time he was knighted given him a heavy look, a weary
look (the stream of patients being so incessant, the
responsibilities and privileges of his profession so onerous),
which weariness, together with his grey hairs, increased the
extraordinary distinction of his presence and gave him the
reputation (of the utmost importance in dealing with nerve
cases) not merely of lightning skill, and almost infallible
accuracy in diagnosis but of sympathy; tact; understanding of
the human soul. He could see the first moment they came
into the room (the Warren Smiths they were called); he was
certain directly he saw the man; it was a case of extreme
gravity. It was a case of complete breakdown—complete
physical and nervous breakdown, with every symptom in an
advanced stage, he ascertained in two or three minutes
(writing answers to questions, murmured discreetly, on a
pink card).
How long had Dr. Holmes been attending him?
Six weeks.
Prescribed a little bromide? Said there was nothing the
matter? Ah yes (those general practitioners! thought Sir
William. It took half his time to undo their blunders. Some
were irreparable).
“You served with great distinction in the War?”
The patient repeated the word “war” interrogatively.
He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A
serious symptom, to be noted on the card.
“The War?” the patient asked. The European War—that little
shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder? Had he served with
distinction? He really forgot. In the War itself he had failed.
“Yes, he served with the greatest distinction,” Rezia assured
the doctor; “he was promoted.”
“And they have the very highest opinion of you at your
office?” Sir William murmured, glancing at Mr. Brewer’s very
generously worded letter. “So that you have nothing to
worry you, no financial anxiety, nothing?”
He had committed an appalling crime and been condemned
to death by human nature.
“I have—I have,” he began, “committed a crime—”
“He has done nothing wrong whatever,” Rezia assured the
doctor. If Mr. Smith would wait, said Sir William, he would
speak to Mrs. Smith in the next room. Her husband was very
seriously ill, Sir William said. Did he threaten to kill himself?
Oh, he did, she cried. But he did not mean it, she said. Of
course not. It was merely a question of rest, said Sir William;
of rest, rest, rest; a long rest in bed. There was a delightful
home down in the country where her husband would be
perfectly looked after. Away from her? she asked.
Unfortunately, yes; the people we care for most are not good
for us when we are ill. But he was not mad, was he? Sir
William said he never spoke of “madness”; he called it not
having a sense of proportion. But her husband did not like
doctors. He would refuse to go there. Shortly and kindly Sir
William explained to her the state of the case. He had
threatened to kill himself. There was no alternative. It was a
question of law. He would lie in bed in a beautiful house in
the country. The nurses were admirable. Sir William would
visit him once a week. If Mrs. Warren Smith was quite sure
she had no more questions to ask—he never hurried his
patients—they would return to her husband. She had nothing
more to ask—not of Sir William.
So they returned to the most exalted of mankind; the
criminal who faced his judges; the victim exposed on the
heights; the fugitive; the drowned sailor; the poet of the
immortal ode; the Lord who had gone from life to death; to
Septimus Warren Smith, who sat in the arm-chair under the
skylight staring at a photograph of Lady Bradshaw in Court
dress, muttering messages about beauty.
“We have had our little talk,” said Sir William.
“He says you are very, very ill,” Rezia cried.
“We have been arranging that you should go into a home,”
said Sir William.
“One of Holmes’s homes?” sneered Septimus.
The fellow made a distasteful impression. For there was in
Sir William, whose father had been a tradesman, a natural
respect for breeding and clothing, which shabbiness nettled;
again, more profoundly, there was in Sir William, who had
never had time for reading, a grudge, deeply buried, against
cultivated people who came into his room and intimated that
doctors, whose profession is a constant strain upon all the
highest faculties, are not educated men.
“One of my homes, Mr. Warren Smith,” he said, “where we
will teach you to rest.”
And there was just one thing more.
He was quite certain that when Mr. Warren Smith was well
he was the last man in the world to frighten his wife. But he
had talked of killing himself.
“We all have our moments of depression,” said Sir William.
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is
on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the
desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and
the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.
“Impulses came upon him sometimes?” Sir William asked,
with his pencil on a pink card.
That was his own affair, said Septimus.
“Nobody lives for himself alone,” said Sir William, glancing
at the photograph of his wife in Court dress.
“And you have a brilliant career before you,” said Sir
William. There was Mr. Brewer’s letter on the table. “An
exceptionally brilliant career.”
But if he confessed? If he communicated? Would they let him
off then, his torturers?
“I—I—” he stammered.
But what was his crime? He could not remember it.
“Yes?” Sir William encouraged him. (But it was growing
late.)
Love, trees, there is no crime—what was his message?
He could not remember it.
“I—I—” Septimus stammered.
“Try to think as little about yourself as possible,” said Sir
William kindly. Really, he was not fit to be about.
Was there anything else they wished to ask him? Sir William
would make all arrangements (he murmured to Rezia) and
he would let her know between five and six that evening he
murmured.
“Trust everything to me,” he said, and dismissed them.
Never, never had Rezia felt such agony in her life! She had
asked for help and been deserted! He had failed them! Sir
William Bradshaw was not a nice man.
The upkeep of that motor car alone must cost him quite a lot,
said Septimus, when they got out into the street.
She clung to his arm. They had been deserted.
But what more did she want?
To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in
this exacting science which has to do with what, after all, we
know nothing about—the nervous system, the human brain
—a doctor loses his sense of proportion, as a doctor he fails.
Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that when
a man comes into your room and says he is Christ (a
common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have,
and threatens, as they often do, to kill himself, you invoke
proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and
rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages;
six months’ rest; until a man who went in weighing seven
stone six comes out weighing twelve.
Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess, was
acquired by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon,
begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who
caught salmon herself and took photographs scarcely to be
distinguished from the work of professionals. Worshipping
proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made
England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth,
penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to
propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of
proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they
were women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out
of seven at home with her son), so that not only did his
colleagues respect him, his subordinates fear him, but the
friends and relations of his patients felt for him the keenest
gratitude for insisting that these prophetic Christs and
Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the
advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William
ordered; Sir William with his thirty years’ experience of these
kinds of cases, and his infallible instinct, this is madness, this
sense; in fact, his sense of proportion.
But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a
Goddess even now engaged—in the heat and sands of India,
the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London,
wherever in short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall
from the true belief which is her own—is even now engaged
in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in
their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her
name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to
impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the
face of the populace. At Hyde Park Corner on a tub she
stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks
penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories
and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites out of
her way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows her
blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively
from her eyes the light of their own. This lady too (Rezia
Warren Smith divined it) had her dwelling in Sir William’s
heart, though concealed, as she mostly is, under some
plausible disguise; some venerable name; love, duty, self
sacrifice. How he would work—how toil to raise funds,
propagate reforms, initiate institutions! But conversion,
fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts
most subtly on the human will. For example, Lady Bradshaw.
Fifteen years ago she had gone under. It was nothing you
could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap;
only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his.
Sweet was her smile, swift her submission; dinner in Harley
Street, numbering eight or nine courses, feeding ten or
fifteen guests of the professional classes, was smooth and
urbane. Only as the evening wore on a very slight dulness, or
uneasiness perhaps, a nervous twitch, fumble, stumble and
confusion indicated, what it was really painful to believe—
that the poor lady lied. Once, long ago, she had caught
salmon freely: now, quick to minister to the craving which lit
her husband’s eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she
cramped, squeezed, pared, pruned, drew back, peeped
through; so that without knowing precisely what made the
evening disagreeable, and caused this pressure on the top of
the head (which might well be imputed to the professional
conversation, or the fatigue of a great doctor whose life,
Lady Bradshaw said, “is not his own but his patients’”)
disagreeable it was: so that guests, when the clock struck ten,
breathed in the air of Harley Street even with rapture; which
relief, however, was denied to his patients.
There in the grey room, with the pictures on the wall, and
the valuable furniture, under the ground glass skylight, they
learnt the extent of their transgressions; huddled up in arm-
chairs, they watched him go through, for their benefit, a
curious exercise with the arms, which he shot out, brought
sharply back to his hip, to prove (if the patient was
obstinate) that Sir William was master of his own actions,
which the patient was not. There some weakly broke down;
sobbed, submitted; others, inspired by Heaven knows what
intemperate madness, called Sir William to his face a
damnable humbug; questioned, even more impiously, life
itself. Why live? they demanded. Sir William replied that life
was good. Certainly Lady Bradshaw in ostrich feathers hung
over the mantelpiece, and as for his income it was quite
twelve thousand a year. But to us, they protested, life has
given no such bounty. He acquiesced. They lacked a sense of
proportion. And perhaps, after all, there is no God? He
shrugged his shoulders. In short, this living or not living is an
affair of our own? But there they were mistaken. Sir William
had a friend in Surrey where they taught, what Sir William
frankly admitted was a difficult art—a sense of proportion.
There were, moreover, family affection; honour; courage;
and a brilliant career. All of these had in Sir William a
resolute champion. If they failed him, he had to support
police and the good of society, which, he remarked very
quietly, would take care, down in Surrey, that these unsocial
impulses, bred more than anything by the lack of good
blood, were held in control. And then stole out from her
hiding-place and mounted her throne that Goddess whose
lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the
sanctuaries of others the image of herself. Naked,
defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received the
impress of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He
shut people up. It was this combination of decision and
humanity that endeared Sir William so greatly to the
relations of his victims.
But Rezia Warren Smith cried, walking down Harley Street,
that she did not like that man.
Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks
of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled
submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the
supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the
mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial
clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced,
genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs.
Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was
half-past one.
Looking up, it appeared that each letter of their names stood
for one of the hours; subconsciously one was grateful to
Rigby and Lowndes for giving one time ratified by
Greenwich;
and
this
gratitude
(so
Hugh
Whitbread
ruminated, dallying there in front of the shop window),
naturally took the form later of buying off Rigby and
Lowndes socks or shoes. So he ruminated. It was his habit.
He did not go deeply. He brushed surfaces; the dead
languages, the living, life in Constantinople, Paris, Rome;
riding, shooting, tennis, it had been once. The malicious
asserted that he now kept guard at Buckingham Palace,
dressed in silk stockings and knee-breeches, over what
nobody knew. But he did it extremely efficiently. He had
been afloat on the cream of English society for fifty-five
years. He had known Prime Ministers. His affections were
understood to be deep. And if it were true that he had not
taken part in any of the great movements of the time or held
important office, one or two humble reforms stood to his
credit; an improvement in public shelters was one; the
protection of owls in Norfolk another; servant girls had
reason to be grateful to him; and his name at the end of
letters to the Times, asking for funds, appealing to the public
to protect, to preserve, to clear up litter, to abate smoke, and
stamp out immorality in parks, commanded respect.
A magnificent figure he cut too, pausing for a moment (as
the sound of the half hour died away) to look critically,
magisterially, at socks and shoes; impeccable, substantial, as
if he beheld the world from a certain eminence, and dressed
to match; but realised the obligations which size, wealth,
health, entail, and observed punctiliously even when not
absolutely
necessary,
little
courtesies,
old-fashioned
ceremonies which gave a quality to his manner, something to
imitate, something to remember him by, for he would never
lunch, for example, with Lady Bruton, whom he had known
these twenty years, without bringing her in his outstretched
hand a bunch of carnations and asking Miss Brush, Lady
Bruton’s secretary, after her brother in South Africa, which,
for some reason, Miss Brush, deficient though she was in
every attribute of female charm, so much resented that she
said “Thank you, he’s doing very well in South Africa,”
when, for half a dozen years, he had been doing badly in
Portsmouth.
Lady Bruton herself preferred Richard Dalloway, who arrived
at the next moment. Indeed they met on the doorstep.
Lady Bruton preferred Richard Dalloway of course. He was
made of much finer material. But she wouldn’t let them run
down her poor dear Hugh. She could never forget his
kindness—he had been really remarkably kind—she forgot
precisely upon what occasion. But he had been—remarkably
kind. Anyhow, the difference between one man and another
does not amount to much. She had never seen the sense of
cutting people up, as Clarissa Dalloway did—cutting them up
and sticking them together again; not at any rate when one
was sixty-two. She took Hugh’s carnations with her angular
grim smile. There was nobody else coming, she said. She had
got them there on false pretences, to help her out of a
difficulty—
“But let us eat first,” she said.
And so there began a soundless and exquisite passing to and
fro through swing doors of aproned white-capped maids,
handmaidens not of necessity, but adepts in a mystery or
grand deception practised by hostesses in Mayfair from one-
thirty to two, when, with a wave of the hand, the traffic
ceases, and there rises instead this profound illusion in the
first place about the food—how it is not paid for; and then
that the table spreads itself voluntarily with glass and silver,
little mats, saucers of red fruit; films of brown cream mask
turbot; in casseroles severed chickens swim; coloured,
undomestic, the fire burns; and with the wine and the coffee
(not paid for) rise jocund visions before musing eyes; gently
speculative eyes; eyes to whom life appears musical,
mysterious; eyes now kindled to observe genially the beauty
of the red carnations which Lady Bruton (whose movements
were always angular) had laid beside her plate, so that Hugh
Whitbread, feeling at peace with the entire universe and at
the same time completely sure of his standing, said, resting
his fork,
“Wouldn’t they look charming against your lace?”
Miss Brush resented this familiarity intensely. She thought
him an underbred fellow. She made Lady Bruton laugh.
Lady Bruton raised the carnations, holding them rather stiffly
with much the same attitude with which the General held
the scroll in the picture behind her; she remained fixed,
tranced. Which was she now, the General’s great-grand-
daughter? great-great-grand-daughter? Richard Dalloway
asked himself. Sir Roderick, Sir Miles, Sir Talbot—that was
it. It was remarkable how in that family the likeness
persisted in the women. She should have been a general of
dragoons herself. And Richard would have served under her,
cheerfully; he had the greatest respect for her; he cherished
these romantic views about well-set-up old women of
pedigree, and would have liked, in his good-humoured way,
to bring some young hot-heads of his acquaintance to lunch
with her; as if a type like hers could be bred of amiable tea-
drinking enthusiasts! He knew her country. He knew her
people. There was a vine, still bearing, which either Lovelace
or Herrick—she never read a word of poetry herself, but so
the story ran—had sat under. Better wait to put before them
the question that bothered her (about making an appeal to
the public; if so, in what terms and so on), better wait until
they have had their coffee, Lady Bruton thought; and so laid
the carnations down beside her plate.
“How’s Clarissa?” she asked abruptly.
Clarissa always said that Lady Bruton did not like her.
Indeed, Lady Bruton had the reputation of being more
interested in politics than people; of talking like a man; of
having had a finger in some notorious intrigue of the
eighties, which was now beginning to be mentioned in
memoirs. Certainly there was an alcove in her drawing-room,
and a table in that alcove, and a photograph upon that table
of General Sir Talbot Moore, now deceased, who had written
there (one evening in the eighties) in Lady Bruton’s presence,
with her cognisance, perhaps advice, a telegram ordering the
British troops to advance upon an historical occasion. (She
kept the pen and told the story.) Thus, when she said in her
offhand way “How’s Clarissa?” husbands had difficulty in
persuading their wives and indeed, however devoted, were
secretly doubtful themselves, of her interest in women who
often got in their husbands’ way, prevented them from
accepting posts abroad, and had to be taken to the seaside in
the middle of the session to recover from influenza.
Nevertheless her inquiry, “How’s Clarissa?” was known by
women infallibly, to be a signal from a well-wisher, from an
almost silent companion, whose utterances (half a dozen
perhaps in the course of a lifetime) signified recognition of
some feminine comradeship which went beneath masculine
lunch parties and united Lady Bruton and Mrs. Dalloway,
who seldom met, and appeared when they did meet
indifferent and even hostile, in a singular bond.
“I met Clarissa in the Park this morning,” said Hugh
Whitbread, diving into the casserole, anxious to pay himself
this little tribute, for he had only to come to London and he
met everybody at once; but greedy, one of the greediest men
she had ever known, Milly Brush thought, who observed men
with unflinching rectitude, and was capable of everlasting
devotion, to her own sex in particular, being knobbed,
scraped, angular, and entirely without feminine charm.
“D’you know who’s in town?” said Lady Bruton suddenly
bethinking her. “Our old friend, Peter Walsh.”
They all smiled. Peter Walsh! And Mr. Dalloway was
genuinely glad, Milly Brush thought; and Mr. Whitbread
thought only of his chicken.
Peter Walsh! All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and
Richard Dalloway, remembered the same thing—how
passionately Peter had been in love; been rejected; gone to
India; come a cropper; made a mess of things; and Richard
Dalloway had a very great liking for the dear old fellow too.
Milly Brush saw that; saw a depth in the brown of his eyes;
saw him hesitate; consider; which interested her, as Mr.
Dalloway always interested her, for what was he thinking,
she wondered, about Peter Walsh?
That Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa; that he
would go back directly after lunch and find Clarissa; that he
would tell her, in so many words, that he loved her. Yes, he
would say that.
Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these
silences; and Mr. Dalloway was always so dependable; such a
gentleman too. Now, being forty, Lady Bruton had only to
nod, or turn her head a little abruptly, and Milly Brush took
the signal, however deeply she might be sunk in these
reflections of a detached spirit, of an uncorrupted soul whom
life could not bamboozle, because life had not offered her a
trinket of the slightest value; not a curl, smile, lip, cheek,
nose; nothing whatever; Lady Bruton had only to nod, and
Perkins was instructed to quicken the coffee.
“Yes; Peter Walsh has come back,” said Lady Bruton. It was
vaguely flattering to them all. He had come back, battered,
unsuccessful, to their secure shores. But to help him, they
reflected, was impossible; there was some flaw in his
character. Hugh Whitbread said one might of course mention
his
name
to
So-and-so.
He
wrinkled
lugubriously,
consequentially, at the thought of the letters he would write
to the heads of Government offices about “my old friend,
Peter Walsh,” and so on. But it wouldn’t lead to anything—
not to anything permanent, because of his character.
“In trouble with some woman,” said Lady Bruton. They had
all guessed that that was at the bottom of it.
“However,” said Lady Bruton, anxious to leave the subject,
“we shall hear the whole story from Peter himself.”
(The coffee was very slow in coming.)
“The address?” murmured Hugh Whitbread; and there was at
once a ripple in the grey tide of service which washed round
Lady Bruton day in, day out, collecting, intercepting,
enveloping her in a fine tissue which broke concussions,
mitigated interruptions, and spread round the house in Brook
Street a fine net where things lodged and were picked out
accurately, instantly, by grey-haired Perkins, who had been
with Lady Bruton these thirty years and now wrote down the
address; handed it to Mr. Whitbread, who took out his
pocket-book, raised his eyebrows, and slipping it in among
documents of the highest importance, said that he would get
Evelyn to ask him to lunch.
(They were waiting to bring the coffee until Mr. Whitbread
had finished.)
Hugh was very slow, Lady Bruton thought. He was getting
fat, she noticed. Richard always kept himself in the pink of
condition. She was getting impatient; the whole of her being
was setting positively, undeniably, domineeringly brushing
aside all this unnecessary trifling (Peter Walsh and his
affairs) upon that subject which engaged her attention, and
not merely her attention, but that fibre which was the
ramrod of her soul, that essential part of her without which
Millicent Bruton would not have been Millicent Bruton; that
project for emigrating young people of both sexes born of
respectable parents and setting them up with a fair prospect
of doing well in Canada. She exaggerated. She had perhaps
lost her sense of proportion. Emigration was not to others the
obvious remedy, the sublime conception. It was not to them
(not to Hugh, or Richard, or even to devoted Miss Brush) the
liberator of the pent egotism, which a strong martial woman,
well nourished, well descended, of direct impulses,
downright feelings, and little introspective power (broad and
simple—why could not every one be broad and simple? she
asked) feels rise within her, once youth is past, and must
eject upon some object—it may be Emigration, it may be
Emancipation; but whatever it be, this object round which
the essence of her soul is daily secreted, becomes inevitably
prismatic, lustrous, half looking-glass, half precious stone;
now carefully hidden in case people should sneer at it; now
proudly displayed. Emigration had become, in short, largely
Lady Bruton.
But she had to write. And one letter to the Times, she used to
say to Miss Brush, cost her more than to organise an
expedition to South Africa (which she had done in the war).
After a morning’s battle beginning, tearing up, beginning
again, she used to feel the futility of her own womanhood as
she felt it on no other occasion, and would turn gratefully to
the thought of Hugh Whitbread who possessed—no one
could doubt it—the art of writing letters to the Times.
A being so differently constituted from herself, with such a
command of language; able to put things as editors like them
put; had passions which one could not call simply greed.
Lady Bruton often suspended judgement upon men in
deference to the mysterious accord in which they, but no
woman, stood to the laws of the universe; knew how to put
things; knew what was said; so that if Richard advised her,
and Hugh wrote for her, she was sure of being somehow
right. So she let Hugh eat his soufflé; asked after poor
Evelyn; waited until they were smoking, and then said,
“Milly, would you fetch the papers?”
And Miss Brush went out, came back; laid papers on the
table; and Hugh produced his fountain pen; his silver
fountain pen, which had done twenty years’ service, he said,
unscrewing the cap. It was still in perfect order; he had
shown it to the makers; there was no reason, they said, why
it should ever wear out; which was somehow to Hugh’s
credit, and to the credit of the sentiments which his pen
expressed (so Richard Dalloway felt) as Hugh began carefully
writing capital letters with rings round them in the margin,
and thus marvellously reduced Lady Bruton’s tangles to
sense, to grammar such as the editor of the Times, Lady
Bruton felt, watching the marvellous transformation, must
respect. Hugh was slow. Hugh was pertinacious. Richard said
one must take risks. Hugh proposed modifications in
deference to people’s feelings, which, he said rather tartly
when Richard laughed, “had to be considered,” and read out
“how, therefore, we are of opinion that the times are ripe …
the superfluous youth of our ever-increasing population …
what we owe to the dead …” which Richard thought all
stuffing and bunkum, but no harm in it, of course, and Hugh
went on drafting sentiments in alphabetical order of the
highest nobility, brushing the cigar ash from his waistcoat,
and summing up now and then the progress they had made
until, finally, he read out the draft of a letter which Lady
Bruton felt certain was a masterpiece. Could her own
meaning sound like that?
Hugh could not guarantee that the editor would put it in; but
he would be meeting somebody at luncheon.
Whereupon Lady Bruton, who seldom did a graceful thing,
stuffed all Hugh’s carnations into the front of her dress, and
flinging her hands out called him “My Prime Minister!” What
she would have done without them both she did not know.
They rose. And Richard Dalloway strolled off as usual to
have a look at the General’s portrait, because he meant,
whenever he had a moment of leisure, to write a history of
Lady Bruton’s family.
And Millicent Bruton was very proud of her family. But they
could wait, they could wait, she said, looking at the picture;
meaning that her family, of military men, administrators,
admirals, had been men of action, who had done their duty;
and Richard’s first duty was to his country, but it was a fine
face, she said; and all the papers were ready for Richard
down at Aldmixton whenever the time came; the Labour
Government she meant. “Ah, the news from India!” she
cried.
And then, as they stood in the hall taking yellow gloves from
the bowl on the malachite table and Hugh was offering Miss
Brush with quite unnecessary courtesy some discarded ticket
or other compliment, which she loathed from the depths of
her heart and blushed brick red, Richard turned to Lady
Bruton, with his hat in his hand, and said,
“We shall see you at our party to-night?” whereupon Lady
Bruton resumed the magnificence which letter-writing had
shattered. She might come; or she might not come. Clarissa
had wonderful energy. Parties terrified Lady Bruton. But
then, she was getting old. So she intimated, standing at her
doorway; handsome; very erect; while her chow stretched
behind her, and Miss Brush disappeared into the background
with her hands full of papers.
And Lady Bruton went ponderously, majestically, up to her
room, lay, one arm extended, on the sofa. She sighed, she
snored, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy,
drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this
hot June day, with the bees going round and about and the
yellow butterflies. Always she went back to those fields down
in Devonshire, where she had jumped the brooks on Patty,
her pony, with Mortimer and Tom, her brothers. And there
were the dogs; there were the rats; there were her father and
mother on the lawn under the trees, with the tea-things out,
and the beds of dahlias, the hollyhocks, the pampas grass;
and they, little wretches, always up to some mischief!
stealing back through the shrubbery, so as not to be seen, all
bedraggled from some roguery. What old nurse used to say
about her frocks!
Ah dear, she remembered—it was Wednesday in Brook
Street. Those kind good fellows, Richard Dalloway, Hugh
Whitbread, had gone this hot day through the streets whose
growl came up to her lying on the sofa. Power was hers,
position, income. She had lived in the forefront of her time.
She had had good friends; known the ablest men of her day.
Murmuring London flowed up to her, and her hand, lying on
the sofa back, curled upon some imaginary baton such as her
grandfathers might have held, holding which she seemed,
drowsy and heavy, to be commanding battalions marching to
Canada, and those good fellows walking across London, that
territory of theirs, that little bit of carpet, Mayfair.
And they went further and further from her, being attached
to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her)
which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as
they walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached
to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread,
which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of
bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single
spider’s thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened,
sags down. So she slept.
And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread hesitated at the
corner of Conduit Street at the very moment that Millicent
Bruton, lying on the sofa, let the thread snap; snored.
Contrary winds buffeted at the street corner. They looked in
at a shop window; they did not wish to buy or to talk but to
part, only with contrary winds buffeting the street corner,
with some sort of lapse in the tides of the body, two forces
meeting in a swirl, morning and afternoon, they paused.
Some newspaper placard went up in the air, gallantly, like a
kite at first, then paused, swooped, fluttered; and a lady’s
veil hung. Yellow awnings trembled. The speed of the
morning traffic slackened, and single carts rattled carelessly
down half-empty streets. In Norfolk, of which Richard
Dalloway was half thinking, a soft warm wind blew back the
petals; confused the waters; ruffled the flowering grasses.
Haymakers, who had pitched beneath hedges to sleep away
the morning toil, parted curtains of green blades; moved
trembling globes of cow parsley to see the sky; the blue, the
steadfast, the blazing summer sky.
Aware that he was looking at a silver two-handled Jacobean
mug, and that Hugh Whitbread admired condescendingly
with airs of connoisseurship a Spanish necklace which he
thought of asking the price of in case Evelyn might like it—
still Richard was torpid; could not think or move. Life had
thrown up this wreckage; shop windows full of coloured
paste, and one stood stark with the lethargy of the old, stiff
with the rigidity of the old, looking in. Evelyn Whitbread
might like to buy this Spanish necklace—so she might. Yawn
he must. Hugh was going into the shop.
“Right you are!” said Richard, following.
Goodness knows he didn’t want to go buying necklaces with
Hugh. But there are tides in the body. Morning meets
afternoon. Borne like a frail shallop on deep, deep floods,
Lady Bruton’s great-grandfather and his memoir and his
campaigns in North America were whelmed and sunk. And
Millicent Bruton too. She went under. Richard didn’t care a
straw what became of Emigration; about that letter, whether
the editor put it in or not. The necklace hung stretched
between Hugh’s admirable fingers. Let him give it to a girl, if
he must buy jewels—any girl, any girl in the street. For the
worthlessness of this life did strike Richard pretty forcibly—
buying necklaces for Evelyn. If he’d had a boy he’d have
said, Work, work. But he had his Elizabeth; he adored his
Elizabeth.
“I should like to see Mr. Dubonnet,” said Hugh in his curt
worldly way. It appeared that this Dubonnet had the
measurements of Mrs. Whitbread’s neck, or, more strangely
still, knew her views upon Spanish jewellery and the extent
of her possessions in that line (which Hugh could not
remember). All of which seemed to Richard Dalloway
awfully odd. For he never gave Clarissa presents, except a
bracelet two or three years ago, which had not been a
success. She never wore it. It pained him to remember that
she never wore it. And as a single spider’s thread after
wavering here and there attaches itself to the point of a leaf,
so Richard’s mind, recovering from its lethargy, set now on
his wife, Clarissa, whom Peter Walsh had loved so
passionately; and Richard had had a sudden vision of her
there at luncheon; of himself and Clarissa; of their life
together; and he drew the tray of old jewels towards him,
and taking up first this brooch then that ring, “How much is
that?” he asked, but doubted his own taste. He wanted to
open the drawing-room door and come in holding out
something; a present for Clarissa. Only what? But Hugh was
on his legs again. He was unspeakably pompous. Really, after
dealing here for thirty-five years he was not going to be put
off by a mere boy who did not know his business. For
Dubonnet, it seemed, was out, and Hugh would not buy
anything until Mr. Dubonnet chose to be in; at which the
youth flushed and bowed his correct little bow. It was all
perfectly correct. And yet Richard couldn’t have said that to
save his life! Why these people stood that damned insolence
he could not conceive. Hugh was becoming an intolerable
ass. Richard Dalloway could not stand more than an hour of
his society. And, flicking his bowler hat by way of farewell,
Richard turned at the corner of Conduit Street eager, yes,
very eager, to travel that spider’s thread of attachment
between himself and Clarissa; he would go straight to her, in
Westminster.
But he wanted to come in holding something. Flowers? Yes,
flowers, since he did not trust his taste in gold; any number
of flowers, roses, orchids, to celebrate what was, reckoning
things as you will, an event; this feeling about her when they
spoke of Peter Walsh at luncheon; and they never spoke of it;
not for years had they spoken of it; which, he thought,
grasping his red and white roses together (a vast bunch in
tissue paper), is the greatest mistake in the world. The time
comes when it can’t be said; one’s too shy to say it, he
thought, pocketing his sixpence or two of change, setting off
with his great bunch held against his body to Westminster to
say straight out in so many words (whatever she might think
of him), holding out his flowers, “I love you.” Why not?
Really it was a miracle thinking of the war, and thousands of
poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shovelled
together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle. Here he
was walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many
words that he loved her. Which one never does say, he
thought. Partly one’s lazy; partly one’s shy. And Clarissa—it
was difficult to think of her; except in starts, as at luncheon,
when he saw her quite distinctly; their whole life. He
stopped at the crossing; and repeated—being simple by
nature, and undebauched, because he had tramped, and shot;
being pertinacious and dogged, having championed the
down-trodden and followed his instincts in the House of
Commons; being preserved in his simplicity yet at the same
time grown rather speechless, rather stiff—he repeated that
it was a miracle that he should have married Clarissa; a
miracle—his life had been a miracle, he thought; hesitating
to cross. But it did make his blood boil to see little creatures
of five or six crossing Piccadilly alone. The police ought to
have stopped the traffic at once. He had no illusions about
the London police. Indeed, he was collecting evidence of
their malpractices; and those costermongers, not allowed to
stand their barrows in the streets; and prostitutes, good Lord,
the fault wasn’t in them, nor in young men either, but in our
detestable social system and so forth; all of which he
considered, could be seen considering, grey, dogged, dapper,
clean, as he walked across the Park to tell his wife that he
loved her.
For he would say it in so many words, when he came into
the room. Because it is a thousand pities never to say what
one feels, he thought, crossing the Green Park and observing
with pleasure how in the shade of the trees whole families,
poor families, were sprawling; children kicking up their legs;
sucking milk; paper bags thrown about, which could easily
be picked up (if people objected) by one of those fat
gentlemen in livery; for he was of opinion that every park,
and every square, during the summer months should be open
to children (the grass of the park flushed and faded, lighting
up the poor mothers of Westminster and their crawling
babies, as if a yellow lamp were moved beneath). But what
could be done for female vagrants like that poor creature,
stretched on her elbow (as if she had flung herself on the
earth, rid of all ties, to observe curiously, to speculate boldly,
to consider the whys and the wherefores, impudent, loose-
lipped, humorous), he did not know. Bearing his flowers like
a weapon, Richard Dalloway approached her; intent he
passed her; still there was time for a spark between them—
she laughed at the sight of him, he smiled good-humouredly,
considering the problem of the female vagrant; not that they
would ever speak. But he would tell Clarissa that he loved
her, in so many words. He had, once upon a time, been
jealous of Peter Walsh; jealous of him and Clarissa. But she
had often said to him that she had been right not to marry
Peter Walsh; which, knowing Clarissa, was obviously true;
she wanted support. Not that she was weak; but she wanted
support.
As for Buckingham Palace (like an old prima donna facing
the audience all in white) you can’t deny it a certain dignity,
he considered, nor despise what does, after all, stand to
millions of people (a little crowd was waiting at the gate to
see the King drive out) for a symbol, absurd though it is; a
child with a box of bricks could have done better, he
thought; looking at the memorial to Queen Victoria (whom
he could remember in her horn spectacles driving through
Kensington), its white mound, its billowing motherliness; but
he liked being ruled by the descendant of Horsa; he liked
continuity; and the sense of handing on the traditions of the
past. It was a great age in which to have lived. Indeed, his
own life was a miracle; let him make no mistake about it;
here he was, in the prime of life, walking to his house in
Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her. Happiness is
this he thought.
It is this, he said, as he entered Dean’s Yard. Big Ben was
beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour,
irrevocable. Lunch parties waste the entire afternoon, he
thought, approaching his door.
The sound of Big Ben flooded Clarissa’s drawing-room, where
she sat, ever so annoyed, at her writing-table; worried;
annoyed. It was perfectly true that she had not asked Ellie
Henderson to her party; but she had done it on purpose. Now
Mrs. Marsham wrote “she had told Ellie Henderson she
would ask Clarissa—Ellie so much wanted to come.”
But why should she invite all the dull women in London to
her parties? Why should Mrs. Marsham interfere? And there
was Elizabeth closeted all this time with Doris Kilman.
Anything more nauseating she could not conceive. Prayer at
this hour with that woman. And the sound of the bell flooded
the room with its melancholy wave; which receded, and
gathered itself together to fall once more, when she heard,
distractingly, something fumbling, something scratching at
the door. Who at this hour? Three, good Heavens! Three
already! For with overpowering directness and dignity the
clock struck three; and she heard nothing else; but the door
handle slipped round and in came Richard! What a surprise!
In came Richard, holding out flowers. She had failed him,
once at Constantinople; and Lady Bruton, whose lunch
parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not
asked her. He was holding out flowers—roses, red and white
roses. (But he could not bring himself to say he loved her;
not in so many words.)
But how lovely, she said, taking his flowers. She understood;
she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa. She put
them in vases on the mantelpiece. How lovely they looked!
she said. And was it amusing, she asked? Had Lady Bruton
asked after her? Peter Walsh was back. Mrs. Marsham had
written. Must she ask Ellie Henderson? That woman Kilman
was upstairs.
“But let us sit down for five minutes,” said Richard.
It all looked so empty. All the chairs were against the wall.
What had they been doing? Oh, it was for the party; no, he
had not forgotten, the party. Peter Walsh was back. Oh yes;
she had had him. And he was going to get a divorce; and he
was in love with some woman out there. And he hadn’t
changed in the slightest. There she was, mending her dress….
“Thinking of Bourton,” she said.
“Hugh was at lunch,” said Richard. She had met him too!
Well, he was getting absolutely intolerable. Buying Evelyn
necklaces; fatter than ever; an intolerable ass.
“And it came over me ‘I might have married you,’” she said,
thinking of Peter sitting there in his little bow-tie; with that
knife, opening it, shutting it. “Just as he always was, you
know.”
They were talking about him at lunch, said Richard. (But he
could not tell her he loved her. He held her hand. Happiness
is this, he thought.) They had been writing a letter to the
Times for Millicent Bruton. That was about all Hugh was fit
for.
“And our dear Miss Kilman?” he asked. Clarissa thought the
roses absolutely lovely; first bunched together; now of their
own accord starting apart.
“Kilman arrives just as we’ve done lunch,” she said.
“Elizabeth turns pink. They shut themselves up. I suppose
they’re praying.”
Lord! He didn’t like it; but these things pass over if you let
them.
“In a mackintosh with an umbrella,” said Clarissa.
He had not said “I love you”; but he held her hand.
Happiness is this, is this, he thought.
“But why should I ask all the dull women in London to my
parties?” said Clarissa. And if Mrs. Marsham gave a party,
did she invite her guests?
“Poor Ellie Henderson,” said Richard—it was a very odd
thing how much Clarissa minded about her parties, he
thought.
But Richard had no notion of the look of a room. However—
what was he going to say?
If she worried about these parties he would not let her give
them. Did she wish she had married Peter? But he must go.
He must be off, he said, getting up. But he stood for a
moment as if he were about to say something; and she
wondered what? Why? There were the roses.
“Some Committee?” she asked, as he opened the door.
“Armenians,” he said; or perhaps it was “Albanians.”
And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between
husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought
Clarissa, watching him open the door; for one would not part
with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one’s
husband, without losing one’s independence, one’s self-
respect—something, after all, priceless.
He returned with a pillow and a quilt.
“An hour’s complete rest after luncheon,” he said. And he
went.
How like him! He would go on saying “An hour’s complete
rest after luncheon” to the end of time, because a doctor had
ordered it once. It was like him to take what doctors said
literally; part of his adorable, divine simplicity, which no one
had to the same extent; which made him go and do the thing
while she and Peter frittered their time away bickering. He
was already half-way to the House of Commons, to his
Armenians, his Albanians, having settled her on the sofa,
looking at his roses. And people would say, “Clarissa
Dalloway is spoilt.” She cared much more for her roses than
for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen,
the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard
say so over and over again)—no, she could feel nothing for
the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her
roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)—the only flowers she
could bear to see cut. But Richard was already at the House
of Commons; at his Committee, having settled all her
difficulties. But no; alas, that was not true. He did not see the
reasons against asking Ellie Henderson. She would do it, of
course, as he wished it. Since he had brought the pillows, she
would lie down…. But—but—why did she suddenly feel, for
no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? As a
person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into
the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way
and that, and searches here and there vainly, and at last spies
it there at the roots, so she went through one thing and
another; no, it was not Sally Seton saying that Richard would
never be in the Cabinet because he had a second-class brain
(it came back to her); no, she did not mind that; nor was it to
do with Elizabeth either and Doris Kilman; those were facts.
It was a feeling, some unpleasant feeling, earlier in the day
perhaps; something that Peter had said, combined with some
depression of her own, in her bedroom, taking off her hat;
and what Richard had said had added to it, but what had he
said? There were his roses. Her parties! That was it! Her
parties! Both of them criticised her very unfairly, laughed at
her very unjustly, for her parties. That was it! That was it!
Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she
knew what it was, she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or
Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself;
liked to have famous people about her; great names; was
simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard
merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she
knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought.
And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.
“That’s what I do it for,” she said, speaking aloud, to life.
Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the
presence of this thing which she felt to be so obvious became
physically existent; with robes of sound from the street,
sunny, with hot breath, whispering, blowing out the blinds.
But suppose Peter said to her, “Yes, yes, but your parties—
what’s the sense of your parties?” all she could say was (and
nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an
offering; which sounded horribly vague. But who was Peter
to make out that life was all plain sailing?—Peter always in
love, always in love with the wrong woman? What’s your
love? she might say to him. And she knew his answer; how it
is the most important thing in the world and no woman
possibly understood it. Very well. But could any man
understand what she meant either? about life? She could not
imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party
for no reason whatever.
But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these
judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in
her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she
called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in
South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody
else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense
of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt
what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought
together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to
create; but to whom?
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was
her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance;
could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled
Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must
be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her
what the Equator was, and she did not know.
All the same, that one day should follow another;
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should
wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet
Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these
roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!
—that it must end; and no one in the whole world would
know how she had loved it all; how, every instant….
The door opened. Elizabeth knew that her mother was
resting. She came in very quietly. She stood perfectly still.
Was it that some Mongol had been wrecked on the coast of
Norfolk (as Mrs. Hilbery said), had mixed with the Dalloway
ladies, perhaps, a hundred years ago? For the Dalloways, in
general, were fair-haired; blue-eyed; Elizabeth, on the
contrary, was dark; had Chinese eyes in a pale face; an
Oriental mystery; was gentle, considerate, still. As a child,
she had had a perfect sense of humour; but now at
seventeen, why, Clarissa could not in the least understand,
she had become very serious; like a hyacinth, sheathed in
glossy green, with buds just tinted, a hyacinth which has had
no sun.
She stood quite still and looked at her mother; but the door
was ajar, and outside the door was Miss Kilman, as Clarissa
knew; Miss Kilman in her mackintosh, listening to whatever
they said.
Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a
mackintosh; but had her reasons. First, it was cheap; second,
she was over forty; and did not, after all, dress to please. She
was poor, moreover; degradingly poor. Otherwise she would
not be taking jobs from people like the Dalloways; from rich
people, who liked to be kind. Mr. Dalloway, to do him
justice, had been kind. But Mrs. Dalloway had not. She had
been merely condescending. She came from the most
worthless of all classes—the rich, with a smattering of
culture. They had expensive things everywhere; pictures,
carpets, lots of servants. She considered that she had a
perfect right to anything that the Dalloways did for her.
She had been cheated. Yes, the word was no exaggeration,
for surely a girl has a right to some kind of happiness? And
she had never been happy, what with being so clumsy and so
poor. And then, just as she might have had a chance at Miss
Dolby’s school, the war came; and she had never been able to
tell lies. Miss Dolby thought she would be happier with
people who shared her views about the Germans. She had
had to go. It was true that the family was of German origin;
spelt the name Kiehlman in the eighteenth century; but her
brother had been killed. They turned her out because she
would not pretend that the Germans were all villains—when
she had German friends, when the only happy days of her
life had been spent in Germany! And after all, she could read
history. She had had to take whatever she could get. Mr.
Dalloway had come across her working for the Friends. He
had allowed her (and that was really generous of him) to
teach his daughter history. Also she did a little Extension
lecturing and so on. Then Our Lord had come to her (and
here she always bowed her head). She had seen the light two
years and three months ago. Now she did not envy women
like Clarissa Dalloway; she pitied them.
She pitied and despised them from the bottom of her heart,
as she stood on the soft carpet, looking at the old engraving
of a little girl with a muff. With all this luxury going on,
what hope was there for a better state of things? Instead of
lying on a sofa—“My mother is resting,” Elizabeth had said—
she should have been in a factory; behind a counter; Mrs.
Dalloway and all the other fine ladies!
Bitter and burning, Miss Kilman had turned into a church
two years three months ago. She had heard the Rev. Edward
Whittaker preach; the boys sing; had seen the solemn lights
descend, and whether it was the music, or the voices (she
herself when alone in the evening found comfort in a violin;
but the sound was excruciating; she had no ear), the hot and
turbulent feelings which boiled and surged in her had been
assuaged as she sat there, and she had wept copiously, and
gone to call on Mr. Whittaker at his private house in
Kensington. It was the hand of God, he said. The Lord had
shown her the way. So now, whenever the hot and painful
feelings boiled within her, this hatred of Mrs. Dalloway, this
grudge against the world, she thought of God. She thought of
Mr. Whittaker. Rage was succeeded by calm. A sweet savour
filled her veins, her lips parted, and, standing formidable
upon the landing in her mackintosh, she looked with steady
and sinister serenity at Mrs. Dalloway, who came out with
her daughter.
Elizabeth said she had forgotten her gloves. That was
because Miss Kilman and her mother hated each other. She
could not bear to see them together. She ran upstairs to find
her gloves.
But Miss Kilman did not hate Mrs. Dalloway. Turning her
large gooseberry-coloured eyes upon Clarissa, observing her
small pink face, her delicate body, her air of freshness and
fashion, Miss Kilman felt, Fool! Simpleton! You who have
known neither sorrow nor pleasure; who have trifled your
life away! And there rose in her an overmastering desire to
overcome her; to unmask her. If she could have felled her it
would have eased her. But it was not the body; it was the
soul and its mockery that she wished to subdue; make feel
her mastery. If only she could make her weep; could ruin
her; humiliate her; bring her to her knees crying, You are
right! But this was God’s will, not Miss Kilman’s. It was to be
a religious victory. So she glared; so she glowered.
Clarissa was really shocked. This a Christian—this woman!
This woman had taken her daughter from her! She in touch
with invisible presences! Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without
kindness or grace, she know the meaning of life!
“You are taking Elizabeth to the Stores?” Mrs. Dalloway said.
Miss Kilman said she was. They stood there. Miss Kilman was
not going to make herself agreeable. She had always earned
her living. Her knowledge of modern history was thorough in
the extreme. She did out of her meagre income set aside so
much for causes she believed in; whereas this woman did
nothing, believed nothing; brought up her daughter—but
here was Elizabeth, rather out of breath, the beautiful girl.
So they were going to the Stores. Odd it was, as Miss Kilman
stood there (and stand she did, with the power and
taciturnity of some prehistoric monster armoured for
primeval warfare), how, second by second, the idea of her
diminished, how hatred (which was for ideas, not people)
crumbled, how she lost her malignity, her size, became
second by second merely Miss Kilman, in a mackintosh,
whom Heaven knows Clarissa would have liked to help.
At this dwindling of the monster, Clarissa laughed. Saying
good-bye, she laughed.
Off they went together, Miss Kilman and Elizabeth,
downstairs.
With a sudden impulse, with a violent anguish, for this
woman was taking her daughter from her, Clarissa leant over
the bannisters and cried out, “Remember the party!
Remember our party to-night!”
But Elizabeth had already opened the front door; there was a
van passing; she did not answer.
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the
drawing-room, tingling all over. How detestable, how
detestable they are! For now that the body of Miss Kilman
was not before her, it overwhelmed her—the idea. The
cruelest things in the world, she thought, seeing them
clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping,
jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a
mackintosh coat, on the landing; love and religion. Had she
ever tried to convert any one herself? Did she not wish
everybody merely to be themselves? And she watched out of
the window the old lady opposite climbing upstairs. Let her
climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her, as
Clarissa had often seen her, gain her bedroom, part her
curtains, and disappear again into the background. Somehow
one respected that—that old woman looking out of the
window, quite unconscious that she was being watched.
There was something solemn in it—but love and religion
would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul.
The odious Kilman would destroy it. Yet it was a sight that
made her want to cry.
Love destroyed too. Everything that was fine, everything that
was true went. Take Peter Walsh now. There was a man,
charming, clever, with ideas about everything. If you wanted
to know about Pope, say, or Addison, or just to talk
nonsense, what people were like, what things meant, Peter
knew better than any one. It was Peter who had helped her;
Peter who had lent her books. But look at the women he
loved—vulgar, trivial, commonplace. Think of Peter in love
—he came to see her after all these years, and what did he
talk about? Himself. Horrible passion! she thought.
Degrading passion! she thought, thinking of Kilman and her
Elizabeth walking to the Army and Navy Stores.
Big Ben struck the half-hour.
How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the
old lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years)
move away from the window, as if she were attached to that
sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do
with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the
finger fell making the moment solemn. She was forced, so
Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move, to go—but
where? Clarissa tried to follow her as she turned and
disappeared, and could still just see her white cap moving at
the back of the bedroom. She was still there moving about at
the other end of the room. Why creeds and prayers and
mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle,
that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could
see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table. She could
still see her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman might
say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but
Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an
idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there
another. Did religion solve that, or love?
Love—but here the other clock, the clock which always
struck two minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its
lap full of odds and ends, which it dumped down as if Big
Ben were all very well with his majesty laying down the law,
so solemn, so just, but she must remember all sorts of little
things besides—Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for
ices—all sorts of little things came flooding and lapping and
dancing in on the wake of that solemn stroke which lay flat
like a bar of gold on the sea. Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson,
glasses for ices. She must telephone now at once.
Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on
the wake of Big Ben, with its lap full of trifles. Beaten up,
broken up by the assault of carriages, the brutality of vans,
the eager advance of myriads of angular men, of flaunting
women, the domes and spires of offices and hospitals, the
last relics of this lap full of odds and ends seemed to break,
like the spray of an exhausted wave, upon the body of Miss
Kilman standing still in the street for a moment to mutter “It
is the flesh.”
It was the flesh that she must control. Clarissa Dalloway had
insulted her. That she expected. But she had not triumphed;
she had not mastered the flesh. Ugly, clumsy, Clarissa
Dalloway had laughed at her for being that; and had revived
the fleshly desires, for she minded looking as she did beside
Clarissa. Nor could she talk as she did. But why wish to
resemble her? Why? She despised Mrs. Dalloway from the
bottom of her heart. She was not serious. She was not good.
Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit. Yet Doris Kilman
had been overcome. She had, as a matter of fact, very nearly
burst into tears when Clarissa Dalloway laughed at her. “It is
the flesh, it is the flesh,” she muttered (it being her habit to
talk aloud) trying to subdue this turbulent and painful
feeling as she walked down Victoria Street. She prayed to
God. She could not help being ugly; she could not afford to
buy pretty clothes. Clarissa Dalloway had laughed—but she
would concentrate her mind upon something else until she
had reached the pillar-box. At any rate she had got Elizabeth.
But she would think of something else; she would think of
Russia; until she reached the pillar-box.
How nice it must be, she said, in the country, struggling, as
Mr. Whittaker had told her, with that violent grudge against
the world which had scorned her, sneered at her, cast her off,
beginning with this indignity—the infliction of her unlovable
body which people could not bear to see. Do her hair as she
might, her forehead remained like an egg, bald, white. No
clothes suited her. She might buy anything. And for a
woman, of course, that meant never meeting the opposite
sex. Never would she come first with any one. Sometimes
lately it had seemed to her that, except for Elizabeth, her
food was all that she lived for; her comforts; her dinner, her
tea; her hot-water bottle at night. But one must fight;
vanquish; have faith in God. Mr. Whittaker had said she was
there for a purpose. But no one knew the agony! He said,
pointing to the crucifix, that God knew. But why should she
have to suffer when other women, like Clarissa Dalloway,
escaped? Knowledge comes through suffering, said Mr.
Whittaker.
She had passed the pillar-box, and Elizabeth had turned into
the cool brown tobacco department of the Army and Navy
Stores while she was still muttering to herself what Mr.
Whittaker had said about knowledge coming through
suffering and the flesh. “The flesh,” she muttered.
What department did she want? Elizabeth interrupted her.
“Petticoats,” she said abruptly, and stalked straight on to the
lift.
Up they went. Elizabeth guided her this way and that; guided
her in her abstraction as if she had been a great child, an
unwieldy battleship. There were the petticoats, brown,
decorous, striped, frivolous, solid, flimsy; and she chose, in
her abstraction, portentously, and the girl serving thought
her mad.
Elizabeth rather wondered, as they did up the parcel, what
Miss Kilman was thinking. They must have their tea, said
Miss Kilman, rousing, collecting herself. They had their tea.
Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kilman could be
hungry. It was her way of eating, eating with intensity, then
looking, again and again, at a plate of sugared cakes on the
table next them; then, when a lady and a child sat down and
the child took the cake, could Miss Kilman really mind it?
Yes, Miss Kilman did mind it. She had wanted that cake—the
pink one. The pleasure of eating was almost the only pure
pleasure left her, and then to be baffled even in that!
When people are happy, they have a reserve, she had told
Elizabeth, upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel
without a tyre (she was fond of such metaphors), jolted by
every pebble, so she would say staying on after the lesson
standing by the fireplace with her bag of books, her
“satchel,” she called it, on a Tuesday morning, after the
lesson was over. And she talked too about the war. After all,
there were people who did not think the English invariably
right. There were books. There were meetings. There were
other points of view. Would Elizabeth like to come with her
to listen to So-and-so (a most extraordinary looking old
man)? Then Miss Kilman took her to some church in
Kensington and they had tea with a clergyman. She had lent
her books. Law, medicine, politics, all professions are open to
women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. But for herself,
her career was absolutely ruined and was it her fault? Good
gracious, said Elizabeth, no.
And her mother would come calling to say that a hamper
had come from Bourton and would Miss Kilman like some
flowers? To Miss Kilman she was always very, very nice, but
Miss Kilman squashed the flowers all in a bunch, and hadn’t
any small talk, and what interested Miss Kilman bored her
mother, and Miss Kilman and she were terrible together; and
Miss Kilman swelled and looked very plain. But then Miss
Kilman was frightfully clever. Elizabeth had never thought
about the poor. They lived with everything they wanted,—
her mother had breakfast in bed every day; Lucy carried it
up; and she liked old women because they were Duchesses,
and being descended from some Lord. But Miss Kilman said
(one of those Tuesday mornings when the lesson was over),
“My grandfather kept an oil and colour shop in Kensington.”
Miss Kilman made one feel so small.
Miss Kilman took another cup of tea. Elizabeth, with her
oriental bearing, her inscrutable mystery, sat perfectly
upright; no, she did not want anything more. She looked for
her gloves—her white gloves. They were under the table. Ah,
but she must not go! Miss Kilman could not let her go! this
youth, that was so beautiful, this girl, whom she genuinely
loved! Her large hand opened and shut on the table.
But perhaps it was a little flat somehow, Elizabeth felt. And
really she would like to go.
But said Miss Kilman, “I’ve not quite finished yet.”
Of course, then, Elizabeth would wait. But it was rather
stuffy in here.
“Are you going to the party to-night?” Miss Kilman said.
Elizabeth supposed she was going; her mother wanted her to
go. She must not let parties absorb her, Miss Kilman said,
fingering the last two inches of a chocolate éclair.
She did not much like parties, Elizabeth said. Miss Kilman
opened her mouth, slightly projected her chin, and
swallowed down the last inches of the chocolate éclair, then
wiped her fingers, and washed the tea round in her cup.
She was about to split asunder, she felt. The agony was so
terrific. If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she
could make her hers absolutely and forever and then die;
that was all she wanted. But to sit here, unable to think of
anything to say; to see Elizabeth turning against her; to be
felt repulsive even by her—it was too much; she could not
stand it. The thick fingers curled inwards.
“I never go to parties,” said Miss Kilman, just to keep
Elizabeth from going. “People don’t ask me to parties”—and
she knew as she said it that it was this egotism that was her
undoing; Mr. Whittaker had warned her; but she could not
help it. She had suffered so horribly. “Why should they ask
me?” she said. “I’m plain, I’m unhappy.” She knew it was
idiotic. But it was all those people passing—people with
parcels who despised her, who made her say it. However, she
was Doris Kilman. She had her degree. She was a woman
who had made her way in the world. Her knowledge of
modern history was more than respectable.
“I don’t pity myself,” she said. “I pity”—she meant to say
“your mother” but no, she could not, not to Elizabeth. “I pity
other people,” she said, “more.”
Like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate
for an unknown purpose, and stands there longing to gallop
away, Elizabeth Dalloway sat silent. Was Miss Kilman going
to say anything more?
“Don’t quite forget me,” said Doris Kilman; her voice
quivered. Right away to the end of the field the dumb
creature galloped in terror.
The great hand opened and shut.
Elizabeth turned her head. The waitress came. One had to
pay at the desk, Elizabeth said, and went off, drawing out, so
Miss Kilman felt, the very entrails in her body, stretching
them as she crossed the room, and then, with a final twist,
bowing her head very politely, she went.
She had gone. Miss Kilman sat at the marble table among the
éclairs, stricken once, twice, thrice by shocks of suffering.
She had gone. Mrs. Dalloway had triumphed. Elizabeth had
gone. Beauty had gone, youth had gone.
So she sat. She got up, blundered off among the little tables,
rocking slightly from side to side, and somebody came after
her with her petticoat, and she lost her way, and was
hemmed in by trunks specially prepared for taking to India;
next got among the accouchement sets, and baby linen;
through all the commodities of the world, perishable and
permanent, hams, drugs, flowers, stationery, variously
smelling, now sweet, now sour she lurched; saw herself thus
lurching with her hat askew, very red in the face, full length
in a looking-glass; and at last came out into the street.
The tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in front of her, the
habitation of God. In the midst of the traffic, there was the
habitation of God. Doggedly she set off with her parcel to
that other sanctuary, the Abbey, where, raising her hands in
a tent before her face, she sat beside those driven into shelter
too; the variously assorted worshippers, now divested of
social rank, almost of sex, as they raised their hands before
their faces; but once they removed them, instantly reverent,
middle class, English men and women, some of them
desirous of seeing the wax works.
But Miss Kilman held her tent before her face. Now she was
deserted; now rejoined. New worshippers came in from the
street to replace the strollers, and still, as people gazed round
and shuffled past the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, still she
barred her eyes with her fingers and tried in this double
darkness, for the light in the Abbey was bodiless, to aspire
above the vanities, the desires, the commodities, to rid
herself both of hatred and of love. Her hands twitched. She
seemed to struggle. Yet to others God was accessible and the
path to Him smooth. Mr. Fletcher, retired, of the Treasury,
Mrs. Gorham, widow of the famous K.C., approached Him
simply, and having done their praying, leant back, enjoyed
the music (the organ pealed sweetly), and saw Miss Kilman
at the end of the row, praying, praying, and, being still on
the threshold of their underworld, thought of her
sympathetically as a soul haunting the same territory; a soul
cut out of immaterial substance; not a woman, a soul.
But Mr. Fletcher had to go. He had to pass her, and being
himself neat as a new pin, could not help being a little
distressed by the poor lady’s disorder; her hair down; her
parcel on the floor. She did not at once let him pass. But, as
he stood gazing about him, at the white marbles, grey
window panes, and accumulated treasures (for he was
extremely proud of the Abbey), her largeness, robustness,
and power as she sat there shifting her knees from time to
time (it was so rough the approach to her God—so tough her
desires) impressed him, as they had impressed Mrs. Dalloway
(she could not get the thought of her out of her mind that
afternoon), the Rev. Edward Whittaker, and Elizabeth too.
And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It
was so nice to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need
not go home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air. So
she would get on to an omnibus. And already, even as she
stood there, in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning….
People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early
dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies;
and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much
preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the
country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to
go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with
being alone in the country with her father and the dogs.
Buses swooped, settled, were off—garish caravans, glistening
with red and yellow varnish. But which should she get on to?
She had no preferences. Of course, she would not push her
way. She inclined to be passive. It was expression she
needed, but her eyes were fine, Chinese, oriental, and, as her
mother said, with such nice shoulders and holding herself so
straight, she was always charming to look at; and lately, in
the evening especially, when she was interested, for she
never seemed excited, she looked almost beautiful, very
stately, very serene. What could she be thinking? Every man
fell in love with her, and she was really awfully bored. For it
was beginning. Her mother could see that—the compliments
were beginning. That she did not care more about it—for
instance for her clothes—sometimes worried Clarissa, but
perhaps it was as well with all those puppies and guinea pigs
about having distemper, and it gave her a charm. And now
there was this odd friendship with Miss Kilman. Well,
thought Clarissa about three o’clock in the morning, reading
Baron Marbot for she could not sleep, it proves she has a
heart.
Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently
boarded the omnibus, in front of everybody. She took a seat
on top. The impetuous creature—a pirate—started forward,
sprang away; she had to hold the rail to steady herself, for a
pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down
ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a
passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and
arrogant in between, and then rushing insolently all sails
spread up Whitehall. And did Elizabeth give one thought to
poor Miss Kilman who loved her without jealousy, to whom
she had been a fawn in the open, a moon in a glade? She was
delighted to be free. The fresh air was so delicious. It had
been so stuffy in the Army and Navy Stores. And now it was
like riding, to be rushing up Whitehall; and to each
movement of the omnibus the beautiful body in the fawn-
coloured coat responded freely like a rider, like the
figurehead of a ship, for the breeze slightly disarrayed her;
the heat gave her cheeks the pallor of white painted wood;
and her fine eyes, having no eyes to meet, gazed ahead,
blank, bright, with the staring incredible innocence of
sculpture.
It was always talking about her own sufferings that made
Miss Kilman so difficult. And was she right? If it was being
on committees and giving up hours and hours every day (she
hardly ever saw him in London) that helped the poor, her
father did that, goodness knows,—if that was what Miss
Kilman meant about being a Christian; but it was so difficult
to say. Oh, she would like to go a little further. Another
penny was it to the Strand? Here was another penny then.
She would go up the Strand.
She liked people who were ill. And every profession is open
to the women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. So she
might be a doctor. She might be a farmer. Animals are often
ill. She might own a thousand acres and have people under
her. She would go and see them in their cottages. This was
Somerset House. One might be a very good farmer—and
that, strangely enough though Miss Kilman had her share in
it, was almost entirely due to Somerset House. It looked so
splendid, so serious, that great grey building. And she liked
the feeling of people working. She liked those churches, like
shapes of grey paper, breasting the stream of the Strand. It
was quite different here from Westminster, she thought,
getting off at Chancery Lane. It was so serious; it was so
busy. In short, she would like to have a profession. She
would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into
Parliament, if she found it necessary, all because of the
Strand.
The feet of those people busy about their activities, hands
putting stone to stone, minds eternally occupied not with
trivial chatterings (comparing women to poplars—which was
rather exciting, of course, but very silly), but with thoughts
of ships, of business, of law, of administration, and with it all
so stately (she was in the Temple), gay (there was the river),
pious (there was the Church), made her quite determined,
whatever her mother might say, to become either a farmer or
a doctor. But she was, of course, rather lazy.
And it was much better to say nothing about it. It seemed so
silly. It was the sort of thing that did sometimes happen,
when one was alone—buildings without architects’ names,
crowds of people coming back from the city having more
power than single clergymen in Kensington, than any of the
books Miss Kilman had lent her, to stimulate what lay
slumbrous, clumsy, and shy on the mind’s sandy floor to
break surface, as a child suddenly stretches its arms; it was
just that, perhaps, a sigh, a stretch of the arms, an impulse, a
revelation, which has its effects for ever, and then down
again it went to the sandy floor. She must go home. She must
dress for dinner. But what was the time?—where was a
clock?
She looked up Fleet Street. She walked just a little way
towards St. Paul’s, shyly, like some one penetrating on
tiptoe, exploring a strange house by night with a candle, on
edge lest the owner should suddenly fling wide his bedroom
door and ask her business, nor did she dare wander off into
queer alleys, tempting bye-streets, any more than in a
strange house open doors which might be bedroom doors, or
sitting-room doors, or lead straight to the larder. For no
Dalloways came down the Strand daily; she was a pioneer, a
stray, venturing, trusting.
In many ways, her mother felt, she was extremely immature,
like a child still, attached to dolls, to old slippers; a perfect
baby; and that was charming. But then, of course, there was
in the Dalloway family the tradition of public service.
Abbesses, principals, head mistresses, dignitaries, in the
republic of women—without being brilliant, any of them,
they were that. She penetrated a little further in the direction
of St. Paul’s. She liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood,
brotherhood of this uproar. It seemed to her good. The noise
was tremendous; and suddenly there were trumpets (the
unemployed) blaring, rattling about in the uproar; military
music; as if people were marching; yet had they been dying
—had some woman breathed her last and whoever was
watching, opening the window of the room where she had
just brought off that act of supreme dignity, looked down on
Fleet Street, that uproar, that military music would have
come triumphing up to him, consolatory, indifferent.
It was not conscious. There was no recognition in it of one
fortune, or fate, and for that very reason even to those dazed
with watching for the last shivers of consciousness on the
faces of the dying, consoling. Forgetfulness in people might
wound, their ingratitude corrode, but this voice, pouring
endlessly, year in year out, would take whatever it might be;
this vow; this van; this life; this procession, would wrap them
all about and carry them on, as in the rough stream of a
glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some
oak trees, and rolls them on.
But it was later than she thought. Her mother would not like
her to be wandering off alone like this. She turned back
down the Strand.
A puff of wind (in spite of the heat, there was quite a wind)
blew a thin black veil over the sun and over the Strand. The
faces faded; the omnibuses suddenly lost their glow. For
although the clouds were of mountainous white so that one
could fancy hacking hard chips off with a hatchet, with
broad golden slopes, lawns of celestial pleasure gardens, on
their flanks, and had all the appearance of settled habitations
assembled for the conference of gods above the world, there
was a perpetual movement among them. Signs were
interchanged, when, as if to fulfil some scheme arranged
already, now a summit dwindled, now a whole block of
pyramidal size which had kept its station inalterably
advanced into the midst or gravely led the procession to
fresh anchorage. Fixed though they seemed at their posts, at
rest in perfect unanimity, nothing could be fresher, freer,
more sensitive superficially than the snow-white or gold-
kindled surface; to change, to go, to dismantle the solemn
assemblage was immediately possible; and in spite of the
grave fixity, the accumulated robustness and solidity, now
they struck light to the earth, now darkness.
Calmly and competently, Elizabeth Dalloway mounted the
Westminster omnibus.
Going and coming, beckoning, signalling, so the light and
shadow which now made the wall grey, now the bananas
bright yellow, now made the Strand grey, now made the
omnibuses bright yellow, seemed to Septimus Warren Smith
lying on the sofa in the sitting-room; watching the watery
gold glow and fade with the astonishing sensibility of some
live creature on the roses, on the wall-paper. Outside the
trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the
air; the sound of water was in the room and through the
waves came the voices of birds singing. Every power poured
its treasures on his head, and his hand lay there on the back
of the sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he was bathing,
floating, on the top of the waves, while far away on shore he
heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no more, says
the heart in the body; fear no more.
He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by
some laughing hint like that gold spot which went round the
wall—there, there, there—her determination to show, by
brandishing her plumes, shaking her tresses, flinging her
mantle this way and that, beautifully, always beautifully, and
standing close up to breathe through her hollowed hands
Shakespeare’s words, her meaning.
Rezia, sitting at the table twisting a hat in her hands,
watched him; saw him smiling. He was happy then. But she
could not bear to see him smiling. It was not marriage; it was
not being one’s husband to look strange like that, always to
be starting, laughing, sitting hour after hour silent, or
clutching her and telling her to write. The table drawer was
full of those writings; about war; about Shakespeare; about
great discoveries; how there is no death. Lately he had
become excited suddenly for no reason (and both Dr. Holmes
and Sir William Bradshaw said excitement was the worst
thing for him), and waved his hands and cried out that he
knew the truth! He knew everything! That man, his friend
who was killed, Evans, had come, he said. He was singing
behind the screen. She wrote it down just as he spoke it.
Some things were very beautiful; others sheer nonsense. And
he was always stopping in the middle, changing his mind;
wanting to add something; hearing something new; listening
with his hand up.
But she heard nothing.
And once they found the girl who did the room reading one
of these papers in fits of laughter. It was a dreadful pity. For
that made Septimus cry out about human cruelty—how they
tear each other to pieces. The fallen, he said, they tear to
pieces. “Holmes is on us,” he would say, and he would invent
stories about Holmes; Holmes eating porridge; Holmes
reading Shakespeare—making himself roar with laughter or
rage, for Dr. Holmes seemed to stand for something horrible
to him. “Human nature,” he called him. Then there were the
visions. He was drowned, he used to say, and lying on a cliff
with the gulls screaming over him. He would look over the
edge of the sofa down into the sea. Or he was hearing music.
Really it was only a barrel organ or some man crying in the
street. But “Lovely!” he used to cry, and the tears would run
down his cheeks, which was to her the most dreadful thing of
all, to see a man like Septimus, who had fought, who was
brave, crying. And he would lie listening until suddenly he
would cry that he was falling down, down into the flames!
Actually she would look for flames, it was so vivid. But there
was nothing. They were alone in the room. It was a dream,
she would tell him and so quiet him at last, but sometimes
she was frightened too. She sighed as she sat sewing.
Her sigh was tender and enchanting, like the wind outside a
wood in the evening. Now she put down her scissors; now
she turned to take something from the table. A little stir, a
little crinkling, a little tapping built up something on the
table there, where she sat sewing. Through his eyelashes he
could see her blurred outline; her little black body; her face
and hands; her turning movements at the table, as she took
up a reel, or looked (she was apt to lose things) for her silk.
She was making a hat for Mrs. Filmer’s married daughter,
whose name was—he had forgotten her name.
“What is the name of Mrs. Filmer’s married daughter?” he
asked.
“Mrs. Peters,” said Rezia. She was afraid it was too small, she
said, holding it before her. Mrs. Peters was a big woman; but
she did not like her. It was only because Mrs. Filmer had
been so good to them. “She gave me grapes this morning,”
she said—that Rezia wanted to do something to show that
they were grateful. She had come into the room the other
evening and found Mrs. Peters, who thought they were out,
playing the gramophone.
“Was it true?” he asked. She was playing the gramophone?
Yes; she had told him about it at the time; she had found
Mrs. Peters playing the gramophone.
He began, very cautiously, to open his eyes, to see whether a
gramophone was really there. But real things—real things
were too exciting. He must be cautious. He would not go
mad. First he looked at the fashion papers on the lower shelf,
then, gradually at the gramophone with the green trumpet.
Nothing could be more exact. And so, gathering courage, he
looked at the sideboard; the plate of bananas; the engraving
of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort; at the mantelpiece,
with the jar of roses. None of these things moved. All were
still; all were real.
“She is a woman with a spiteful tongue,” said Rezia.
“What does Mr. Peters do?” Septimus asked.
“Ah,” said Rezia, trying to remember. She thought Mrs.
Filmer had said that he travelled for some company. “Just
now he is in Hull,” she said.
“Just now!” She said that with her Italian accent. She said
that herself. He shaded his eyes so that he might see only a
little of her face at a time, first the chin, then the nose, then
the forehead, in case it were deformed, or had some terrible
mark on it. But no, there she was, perfectly natural, sewing,
with the pursed lips that women have, the set, the
melancholy expression, when sewing. But there was nothing
terrible about it, he assured himself, looking a second time, a
third time at her face, her hands, for what was frightening or
disgusting in her as she sat there in broad daylight, sewing?
Mrs. Peters had a spiteful tongue. Mr. Peters was in Hull.
Why then rage and prophesy? Why fly scourged and outcast?
Why be made to tremble and sob by the clouds? Why seek
truths and deliver messages when Rezia sat sticking pins into
the front of her dress, and Mr. Peters was in Hull? Miracles,
revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling through the sea,
down, down into the flames, all were burnt out, for he had a
sense, as he watched Rezia trimming the straw hat for Mrs.
Peters, of a coverlet of flowers.
“It’s too small for Mrs. Peters,” said Septimus.
For the first time for days he was speaking as he used to do!
Of course it was—absurdly small, she said. But Mrs. Peters
had chosen it.
He took it out of her hands. He said it was an organ grinder’s
monkey’s hat.
How it rejoiced her that! Not for weeks had they laughed like
this together, poking fun privately like married people. What
she meant was that if Mrs. Filmer had come in, or Mrs.
Peters or anybody they would not have understood what she
and Septimus were laughing at.
“There,” she said, pinning a rose to one side of the hat. Never
had she felt so happy! Never in her life!
But that was still more ridiculous, Septimus said. Now the
poor woman looked like a pig at a fair. (Nobody ever made
her laugh as Septimus did.)
What had she got in her work-box? She had ribbons and
beads, tassels, artificial flowers. She tumbled them out on the
table. He began putting odd colours together—for though he
had no fingers, could not even do up a parcel, he had a
wonderful eye, and often he was right, sometimes absurd, of
course, but sometimes wonderfully right.
“She shall have a beautiful hat!” he murmured, taking up
this and that, Rezia kneeling by his side, looking over his
shoulder. Now it was finished—that is to say the design; she
must stitch it together. But she must be very, very careful, he
said, to keep it just as he had made it.
So she sewed. When she sewed, he thought, she made a
sound like a kettle on the hob; bubbling, murmuring, always
busy, her strong little pointed fingers pinching and poking;
her needle flashing straight. The sun might go in and out, on
the tassels, on the wall-paper, but he would wait, he thought,
stretching out his feet, looking at his ringed sock at the end
of the sofa; he would wait in this warm place, this pocket of
still air, which one comes on at the edge of a wood
sometimes in the evening, when, because of a fall in the
ground, or some arrangement of the trees (one must be
scientific above all, scientific), warmth lingers, and the air
buffets the cheek like the wing of a bird.
“There it is,” said Rezia, twirling Mrs. Peters’ hat on the tips
of her fingers. “That’ll do for the moment. Later …” her
sentence bubbled away drip, drip, drip, like a contented tap
left running.
It was wonderful. Never had he done anything which made
him feel so proud. It was so real, it was so substantial, Mrs.
Peters’ hat.
“Just look at it,” he said.
Yes, it would always make her happy to see that hat. He had
become himself then, he had laughed then. They had been
alone together. Always she would like that hat.
He told her to try it on.
“But I must look so queer!” she cried, running over to the
glass and looking first this side then that. Then she snatched
it off again, for there was a tap at the door. Could it be Sir
William Bradshaw? Had he sent already?
No! it was only the small girl with the evening paper.
What always happened, then happened—what happened
every night of their lives. The small girl sucked her thumb at
the door; Rezia went down on her knees; Rezia cooed and
kissed; Rezia got a bag of sweets out of the table drawer. For
so it always happened. First one thing, then another. So she
built it up, first one thing and then another. Dancing,
skipping, round and round the room they went. He took the
paper. Surrey was all out, he read. There was a heat wave.
Rezia repeated: Surrey was all out. There was a heat wave,
making it part of the game she was playing with Mrs.
Filmer’s grandchild, both of them laughing, chattering at the
same time, at their game. He was very tired. He was very
happy. He would sleep. He shut his eyes. But directly he saw
nothing the sounds of the game became fainter and stranger
and sounded like the cries of people seeking and not finding,
and passing further and further away. They had lost him!
He started up in terror. What did he see? The plate of
bananas on the sideboard. Nobody was there (Rezia had
taken the child to its mother. It was bedtime). That was it: to
be alone forever. That was the doom pronounced in Milan
when he came into the room and saw them cutting out
buckram shapes with their scissors; to be alone forever.
He was alone with the sideboard and the bananas. He was
alone, exposed on this bleak eminence, stretched out—but
not on a hill-top; not on a crag; on Mrs. Filmer’s sitting-room
sofa. As for the visions, the faces, the voices of the dead,
where were they? There was a screen in front of him, with
black bulrushes and blue swallows. Where he had once seen
mountains, where he had seen faces, where he had seen
beauty, there was a screen.
“Evans!” he cried. There was no answer. A mouse had
squeaked, or a curtain rustled. Those were the voices of the
dead. The screen, the coal-scuttle, the sideboard remained to
him. Let him then face the screen, the coal-scuttle and the
sideboard … but Rezia burst into the room chattering.
Some letter had come. Everybody’s plans were changed. Mrs.
Filmer would not be able to go to Brighton after all. There
was no time to let Mrs. Williams know, and really Rezia
thought it very, very annoying, when she caught sight of the
hat and thought … perhaps … she … might just make a
little…. Her voice died out in contented melody.
“Ah, damn!” she cried (it was a joke of theirs, her swearing),
the needle had broken. Hat, child, Brighton, needle. She built
it up; first one thing, then another, she built it up, sewing.
She wanted him to say whether by moving the rose she had
improved the hat. She sat on the end of the sofa.
They were perfectly happy now, she said, suddenly, putting
the hat down. For she could say anything to him now. She
could say whatever came into her head. That was almost the
first thing she had felt about him, that night in the café when
he had come in with his English friends. He had come in,
rather shyly, looking round him, and his hat had fallen when
he hung it up. That she could remember. She knew he was
English, though not one of the large Englishmen her sister
admired, for he was always thin; but he had a beautiful fresh
colour; and with his big nose, his bright eyes, his way of
sitting a little hunched made her think, she had often told
him, of a young hawk, that first evening she saw him, when
they were playing dominoes, and he had come in—of a
young hawk; but with her he was always very gentle. She
had never seen him wild or drunk, only suffering sometimes
through this terrible war, but even so, when she came in, he
would put it all away. Anything, anything in the whole
world, any little bother with her work, anything that struck
her to say she would tell him, and he understood at once.
Her own family even were not the same. Being older than
she was and being so clever—how serious he was, wanting
her to read Shakespeare before she could even read a child’s
story in English!—being so much more experienced, he could
help her. And she too could help him.
But this hat now. And then (it was getting late) Sir William
Bradshaw.
She held her hands to her head, waiting for him to say did he
like the hat or not, and as she sat there, waiting, looking
down, he could feel her mind, like a bird, falling from branch
to branch, and always alighting, quite rightly; he could
follow her mind, as she sat there in one of those loose lax
poses that came to her naturally and, if he should say
anything, at once she smiled, like a bird alighting with all its
claws firm upon the bough.
But he remembered Bradshaw said, “The people we are most
fond of are not good for us when we are ill.” Bradshaw said,
he must be taught to rest. Bradshaw said they must be
separated.
“Must,” “must,” why “must”? What power had Bradshaw
over him? “What right has Bradshaw to say ‘must’ to me?” he
demanded.
“It is because you talked of killing yourself,” said Rezia.
(Mercifully, she could now say anything to Septimus.)
So he was in their power! Holmes and Bradshaw were on
him! The brute with the red nostrils was snuffing into every
secret place! “Must” it could say! Where were his papers? the
things he had written?
She brought him his papers, the things he had written, things
she had written for him. She tumbled them out on to the
sofa. They looked at them together. Diagrams, designs, little
men and women brandishing sticks for arms, with wings—
were they?—on their backs; circles traced round shillings
and sixpences—the suns and stars; zigzagging precipices with
mountaineers ascending roped together, exactly like knives
and forks; sea pieces with little faces laughing out of what
might perhaps be waves: the map of the world. Burn them!
he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind
rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with
Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans—his messages from the
dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister.
Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he
cried.
But Rezia laid her hands on them. Some were very beautiful,
she thought. She would tie them up (for she had no
envelope) with a piece of silk.
Even if they took him, she said, she would go with him. They
could not separate them against their wills, she said.
Shuffling the edges straight, she did up the papers, and tied
the parcel almost without looking, sitting beside him, he
thought, as if all her petals were about her. She was a
flowering tree; and through her branches looked out the face
of a lawgiver, who had reached a sanctuary where she feared
no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle, a triumph, the
last and greatest. Staggering he saw her mount the appalling
staircase, laden with Holmes and Bradshaw, men who never
weighed less than eleven stone six, who sent their wives to
Court, men who made ten thousand a year and talked of
proportion; who different in their verdicts (for Holmes said
one thing, Bradshaw another), yet judges they were; who
mixed the vision and the sideboard; saw nothing clear, yet
ruled, yet inflicted. “Must” they said. Over them she
triumphed.
“There!” she said. The papers were tied up. No one should
get at them. She would put them away.
And, she said, nothing should separate them. She sat down
beside him and called him by the name of that hawk or crow
which being malicious and a great destroyer of crops was
precisely like him. No one could separate them, she said.
Then she got up to go into the bedroom to pack their things,
but hearing voices downstairs and thinking that Dr. Holmes
had perhaps called, ran down to prevent him coming up.
Septimus could hear her talking to Holmes on the staircase.
“My dear lady, I have come as a friend,” Holmes was saying.
“No. I will not allow you to see my husband,” she said.
He could see her, like a little hen, with her wings spread
barring his passage. But Holmes persevered.
“My dear lady, allow me….” Holmes said, putting her aside
(Holmes was a powerfully built man).
Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would burst open the
door. Holmes would say “In a funk, eh?” Holmes would get
him. But no; not Holmes; not Bradshaw. Getting up rather
unsteadily, hopping indeed from foot to foot, he considered
Mrs. Filmer’s nice clean bread knife with “Bread” carved on
the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t spoil that. The gas fire? But
it was too late now. Holmes was coming. Razors he might
have got, but Rezia, who always did that sort of thing, had
packed them. There remained only the window, the large
Bloomsbury-lodging house window, the tiresome, the
troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening
the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of
tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she was with him). Holmes
and Bradshaw like that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But
he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to
die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings—what
did they want? Coming down the staircase opposite an old
man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. “I’ll
give it you!” he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently
down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings.
“The coward!” cried Dr. Holmes, bursting the door open.
Rezia ran to the window, she saw; she understood. Dr.
Holmes and Mrs. Filmer collided with each other. Mrs.
Filmer flapped her apron and made her hide her eyes in the
bedroom. There was a great deal of running up and down
stairs. Dr. Holmes came in—white as a sheet, shaking all
over, with a glass in his hand. She must be brave and drink
something, he said (What was it? Something sweet), for her
husband
was
horribly
mangled,
would
not
recover
consciousness, she must not see him, must be spared as much
as possible, would have the inquest to go through, poor
young woman. Who could have foretold it? A sudden
impulse, no one was in the least to blame (he told Mrs.
Filmer). And why the devil he did it, Dr. Holmes could not
conceive.
It seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that she was
opening long windows, stepping out into some garden. But
where? The clock was striking—one, two, three: how
sensible the sound was; compared with all this thumping and
whispering; like Septimus himself. She was falling asleep. But
the clock went on striking, four, five, six and Mrs. Filmer
waving her apron (they wouldn’t bring the body in here,
would they?) seemed part of that garden; or a flag. She had
once seen a flag slowly rippling out from a mast when she
stayed with her aunt at Venice. Men killed in battle were
thus saluted, and Septimus had been through the War. Of her
memories, most were happy.
She put on her hat, and ran through cornfields—where could
it have been?—on to some hill, somewhere near the sea, for
there were ships, gulls, butterflies; they sat on a cliff. In
London too, there they sat, and, half dreaming, came to her
through the bedroom door, rain falling, whisperings, stirrings
among dry corn, the caress of the sea, as it seemed to her,
hollowing them in its arched shell and murmuring to her laid
on shore, strewn she felt, like flying flowers over some tomb.
“He is dead,” she said, smiling at the poor old woman who
guarded her with her honest light-blue eyes fixed on the
door. (They wouldn’t bring him in here, would they?) But
Mrs. Filmer pooh-poohed. Oh no, oh no! They were carrying
him away now. Ought she not to be told? Married people
ought to be together, Mrs. Filmer thought. But they must do
as the doctor said.
“Let her sleep,” said Dr. Holmes, feeling her pulse. She saw
the large outline of his body standing dark against the
window. So that was Dr. Holmes.
One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh thought. It is
one of the triumphs of civilisation, as the light high bell of
the ambulance sounded. Swiftly, cleanly the ambulance sped
to the hospital, having picked up instantly, humanely, some
poor devil; some one hit on the head, struck down by
disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so ago at one of
these crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was
civilisation. It struck him coming back from the East—the
efficiency, the organisation, the communal spirit of London.
Every cart or carriage of its own accord drew aside to let the
ambulance pass. Perhaps it was morbid; or was it not
touching rather, the respect which they showed this
ambulance with its victim inside—busy men hurrying home
yet instantly bethinking them as it passed of some wife; or
presumably how easily it might have been them there,
stretched on a shelf with a doctor and a nurse…. Ah, but
thinking became morbid, sentimental, directly one began
conjuring up doctors, dead bodies; a little glow of pleasure, a
sort of lust too over the visual impression warned one not to
go on with that sort of thing any more—fatal to art, fatal to
friendship. True. And yet, thought Peter Walsh, as the
ambulance turned the corner though the light high bell could
be heard down the next street and still farther as it crossed
the Tottenham Court Road, chiming constantly, it is the
privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses.
One might weep if no one saw. It had been his undoing—this
susceptibility—in Anglo-Indian society; not weeping at the
right time, or laughing either. I have that in me, he thought
standing by the pillar-box, which could now dissolve in tears.
Why, Heaven knows. Beauty of some sort probably, and the
weight of the day, which beginning with that visit to Clarissa
had exhausted him with its heat, its intensity, and the drip,
drip, of one impression after another down into that cellar
where they stood, deep, dark, and no one would ever know.
Partly for that reason, its secrecy, complete and inviolable,
he had found life like an unknown garden, full of turns and
corners, surprising, yes; really it took one’s breath away,
these moments; there coming to him by the pillar-box
opposite the British Museum one of them, a moment, in
which things came together; this ambulance; and life and
death. It was as if he were sucked up to some very high roof
by that rush of emotion and the rest of him, like a white
shell-sprinkled beach, left bare. It had been his undoing in
Anglo-Indian society—this susceptibility.
Clarissa once, going on top of an omnibus with him
somewhere, Clarissa superficially at least, so easily moved,
now in despair, now in the best of spirits, all aquiver in those
days and such good company, spotting queer little scenes,
names, people from the top of a bus, for they used to explore
London and bring back bags full of treasures from the
Caledonian market—Clarissa had a theory in those days—
they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people
have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction;
not knowing people; not being known. For how could they
know each other? You met every day; then not for six
months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how
little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going
up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not
“here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but
everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury
Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one,
one must seek out the people who completed them; even the
places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never
spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a
counter—even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental
theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to
believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that
since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so
momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us,
which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered
somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting
certain places after death … perhaps—perhaps.
Looking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years
her theory worked to this extent. Brief, broken, often painful
as their actual meetings had been what with his absences and
interruptions (this morning, for instance, in came Elizabeth,
like a long-legged colt, handsome, dumb, just as he was
beginning to talk to Clarissa) the effect of them on his life
was immeasurable. There was a mystery about it. You were
given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain—the actual
meeting; horribly painful as often as not; yet in absence, in
the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its
scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel
of it and understanding, after years of lying lost. Thus she
had come to him; on board ship; in the Himalayas; suggested
by the oddest things (so Sally Seton, generous, enthusiastic
goose! thought of him when she saw blue hydrangeas). She
had influenced him more than any person he had ever
known. And always in this way coming before him without
his wishing it, cool, lady-like, critical; or ravishing, romantic,
recalling some field or English harvest. He saw her most
often in the country, not in London. One scene after another
at Bourton….
He had reached his hotel. He crossed the hall, with its
mounds of reddish chairs and sofas, its spike-leaved,
withered-looking plants. He got his key off the hook. The
young lady handed him some letters. He went upstairs—he
saw her most often at Bourton, in the late summer, when he
stayed there for a week, or fortnight even, as people did in
those days. First on top of some hill there she would stand,
hands clapped to her hair, her cloak blowing out, pointing,
crying to them—she saw the Severn beneath. Or in a wood,
making the kettle boil—very ineffective with her fingers; the
smoke curtseying, blowing in their faces; her little pink face
showing through; begging water from an old woman in a
cottage, who came to the door to watch them go. They
walked always; the others drove. She was bored driving,
disliked all animals, except that dog. They tramped miles
along roads. She would break off to get her bearings, pilot
him back across country; and all the time they argued,
discussed poetry, discussed people, discussed politics (she
was a Radical then); never noticing a thing except when she
stopped, cried out at a view or a tree, and made him look
with her; and so on again, through stubble fields, she
walking ahead, with a flower for her aunt, never tired of
walking for all her delicacy; to drop down on Bourton in the
dusk. Then, after dinner, old Breitkopf would open the piano
and sing without any voice, and they would lie sunk in arm-
chairs, trying not to laugh, but always breaking down and
laughing, laughing—laughing at nothing. Breitkopf was
supposed not to see. And then in the morning, flirting up and
down like a wagtail in front of the house….
Oh it was a letter from her! This blue envelope; that was her
hand. And he would have to read it. Here was another of
those meetings, bound to be painful! To read her letter
needed the devil of an effort. “How heavenly it was to see
him. She must tell him that.” That was all.
But it upset him. It annoyed him. He wished she hadn’t
written it. Coming on top of his thoughts, it was like a nudge
in the ribs. Why couldn’t she let him be? After all, she had
married Dalloway, and lived with him in perfect happiness
all these years.
These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any
number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even
the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people’s
noses. As for the cleanliness which hit him in the face, it
wasn’t cleanliness, so much as bareness, frigidity; a thing
that had to be. Some arid matron made her rounds at dawn
sniffing, peering, causing blue-nosed maids to scour, for all
the world as if the next visitor were a joint of meat to be
served on a perfectly clean platter. For sleep, one bed; for
sitting in, one arm-chair; for cleaning one’s teeth and shaving
one’s chin, one tumbler, one looking-glass. Books, letters,
dressing-gown, slipped about on the impersonality of the
horsehair like incongruous impertinences. And it was
Clarissa’s letter that made him see all this. “Heavenly to see
you. She must say so!” He folded the paper; pushed it away;
nothing would induce him to read it again!
To get that letter to him by six o’clock she must have sat
down and written it directly he left her; stamped it; sent
somebody to the post. It was, as people say, very like her.
She was upset by his visit. She had felt a great deal; had for a
moment, when she kissed his hand, regretted, envied him
even, remembered possibly (for he saw her look it)
something he had said—how they would change the world if
she married him perhaps; whereas, it was this; it was middle
age; it was mediocrity; then forced herself with her
indomitable vitality to put all that aside, there being in her a
thread of life which for toughness, endurance, power to
overcome obstacles, and carry her triumphantly through he
had never known the like of. Yes; but there would come a
reaction directly he left the room. She would be frightfully
sorry for him; she would think what in the world she could
do to give him pleasure (short always of the one thing) and
he could see her with the tears running down her cheeks
going to her writing-table and dashing off that one line
which he was to find greeting him…. “Heavenly to see you!”
And she meant it.
Peter Walsh had now unlaced his boots.
But it would not have been a success, their marriage. The
other thing, after all, came so much more naturally.
It was odd; it was true; lots of people felt it. Peter Walsh,
who had done just respectably, filled the usual posts
adequately, was liked, but thought a little cranky, gave
himself airs—it was odd that he should have had, especially
now that his hair was grey, a contented look; a look of
having reserves. It was this that made him attractive to
women who liked the sense that he was not altogether
manly. There was something unusual about him, or
something behind him. It might be that he was bookish—
never came to see you without taking up the book on the
table (he was now reading, with his bootlaces trailing on the
floor); or that he was a gentleman, which showed itself in the
way he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and in his manners
of course to women. For it was very charming and quite
ridiculous how easily some girl without a grain of sense
could twist him round her finger. But at her own risk. That is
to say, though he might be ever so easy, and indeed with his
gaiety and good-breeding fascinating to be with, it was only
up to a point. She said something—no, no; he saw through
that. He wouldn’t stand that—no, no. Then he could shout
and rock and hold his sides together over some joke with
men. He was the best judge of cooking in India. He was a
man. But not the sort of man one had to respect—which was
a mercy; not like Major Simmons, for instance; not in the
least like that, Daisy thought, when, in spite of her two small
children, she used to compare them.
He pulled off his boots. He emptied his pockets. Out came
with his pocket-knife a snapshot of Daisy on the verandah;
Daisy all in white, with a fox-terrier on her knee; very
charming, very dark; the best he had ever seen of her. It did
come, after all so naturally; so much more naturally than
Clarissa. No fuss. No bother. No finicking and fidgeting. All
plain sailing. And the dark, adorably pretty girl on the
verandah exclaimed (he could hear her). Of course, of course
she would give him everything! she cried (she had no sense
of discretion) everything he wanted! she cried, running to
meet him, whoever might be looking. And she was only
twenty-four. And she had two children. Well, well!
Well indeed he had got himself into a mess at his age. And it
came over him when he woke in the night pretty forcibly.
Suppose they did marry? For him it would be all very well,
but what about her? Mrs. Burgess, a good sort and no
chatterbox, in whom he had confided, thought this absence
of his in England, ostensibly to see lawyers might serve to
make Daisy reconsider, think what it meant. It was a
question of her position, Mrs. Burgess said; the social barrier;
giving up her children. She’d be a widow with a past one of
these days, draggling about in the suburbs, or more likely,
indiscriminate (you know, she said, what such women get
like, with too much paint). But Peter Walsh pooh-poohed all
that. He didn’t mean to die yet. Anyhow she must settle for
herself; judge for herself, he thought, padding about the
room in his socks smoothing out his dress-shirt, for he might
go to Clarissa’s party, or he might go to one of the Halls, or
he might settle in and read an absorbing book written by a
man he used to know at Oxford. And if he did retire, that’s
what he’d do—write books. He would go to Oxford and poke
about in the Bodleian. Vainly the dark, adorably pretty girl
ran to the end of the terrace; vainly waved her hand; vainly
cried she didn’t care a straw what people said. There he was,
the man she thought the world of, the perfect gentleman, the
fascinating, the distinguished (and his age made not the least
difference to her), padding about a room in an hotel in
Bloomsbury, shaving, washing, continuing, as he took up
cans, put down razors, to poke about in the Bodleian, and get
at the truth about one or two little matters that interested
him. And he would have a chat with whoever it might be,
and so come to disregard more and more precise hours for
lunch, and miss engagements, and when Daisy asked him, as
she would, for a kiss, a scene, fail to come up to the scratch
(though he was genuinely devoted to her)—in short it might
be happier, as Mrs. Burgess said, that she should forget him,
or merely remember him as he was in August 1922, like a
figure standing at the cross roads at dusk, which grows more
and more remote as the dog-cart spins away, carrying her
securely fastened to the back seat, though her arms are
outstretched, and as she sees the figure dwindle and
disappear still she cries out how she would do anything in
the world, anything, anything, anything….
He never knew what people thought. It became more and
more difficult for him to concentrate. He became absorbed;
he became busied with his own concerns; now surly, now
gay; dependent on women, absent-minded, moody, less and
less able (so he thought as he shaved) to understand why
Clarissa couldn’t simply find them a lodging and be nice to
Daisy; introduce her. And then he could just—just do what?
just haunt and hover (he was at the moment actually
engaged in sorting out various keys, papers), swoop and
taste, be alone, in short, sufficient to himself; and yet nobody
of course was more dependent upon others (he buttoned his
waistcoat); it had been his undoing. He could not keep out of
smoking-rooms, liked colonels, liked golf, liked bridge, and
above all women’s society, and the fineness of their
companionship, and their faithfulness and audacity and
greatness in loving which though it had its drawbacks
seemed to him (and the dark, adorably pretty face was on
top of the envelopes) so wholly admirable, so splendid a
flower to grow on the crest of human life, and yet he could
not come up to the scratch, being always apt to see round
things (Clarissa had sapped something in him permanently),
and to tire very easily of mute devotion and to want variety
in love, though it would make him furious if Daisy loved
anybody else, furious! for he was jealous, uncontrollably
jealous by temperament. He suffered tortures! But where was
his knife; his watch; his seals, his note-case, and Clarissa’s
letter which he would not read again but liked to think of,
and Daisy’s photograph? And now for dinner.
They were eating.
Sitting at little tables round vases, dressed or not dressed,
with their shawls and bags laid beside them, with their air of
false composure, for they were not used to so many courses
at dinner, and confidence, for they were able to pay for it,
and strain, for they had been running about London all day
shopping, sightseeing; and their natural curiosity, for they
looked round and up as the nice-looking gentleman in horn-
rimmed spectacles came in, and their good nature, for they
would have been glad to do any little service, such as lend a
time-table or impart useful information, and their desire,
pulsing in them, tugging at them subterraneously, somehow
to establish connections if it were only a birthplace
(Liverpool, for example) in common or friends of the same
name; with their furtive glances, odd silences, and sudden
withdrawals into family jocularity and isolation; there they
sat eating dinner when Mr. Walsh came in and took his seat
at a little table by the curtain.
It was not that he said anything, for being solitary he could
only address himself to the waiter; it was his way of looking
at the menu, of pointing his forefinger to a particular wine,
of hitching himself up to the table, of addressing himself
seriously, not gluttonously to dinner, that won him their
respect; which, having to remain unexpressed for the greater
part of the meal, flared up at the table where the Morrises sat
when Mr. Walsh was heard to say at the end of the meal,
“Bartlett pears.” Why he should have spoken so moderately
yet firmly, with the air of a disciplinarian well within his
rights which are founded upon justice, neither young Charles
Morris, nor old Charles, neither Miss Elaine nor Mrs. Morris
knew. But when he said, “Bartlett pears,” sitting alone at his
table, they felt that he counted on their support in some
lawful demand; was champion of a cause which immediately
became their own, so that their eyes met his eyes
sympathetically, and when they all reached the smoking-
room simultaneously, a little talk between them became
inevitable.
It was not very profound—only to the effect that London was
crowded; had changed in thirty years; that Mr. Morris
preferred Liverpool; that Mrs. Morris had been to the
Westminster flower-show, and that they had all seen the
Prince of Wales. Yet, thought Peter Walsh, no family in the
world can compare with the Morrises; none whatever; and
their relations to each other are perfect, and they don’t care
a hang for the upper classes, and they like what they like,
and Elaine is training for the family business, and the boy
has won a scholarship at Leeds, and the old lady (who is
about his own age) has three more children at home; and
they have two motor cars, but Mr. Morris still mends the
boots on Sunday: it is superb, it is absolutely superb, thought
Peter Walsh, swaying a little backwards and forwards with
his liqueur glass in his hand among the hairy red chairs and
ash-trays, feeling very well pleased with himself, for the
Morrises liked him. Yes, they liked a man who said, “Bartlett
pears.” They liked him, he felt.
He would go to Clarissa’s party. (The Morrises moved off; but
they would meet again.) He would go to Clarissa’s party,
because he wanted to ask Richard what they were doing in
India—the conservative duffers. And what’s being acted?
And music…. Oh yes, and mere gossip.
For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who
fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities
threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over
sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep,
inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on
the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to
brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping. What did the
Government mean—Richard Dalloway would know—to do
about India?
Since it was a very hot night and the paper boys went by
with placards proclaiming in huge red letters that there was
a heat-wave, wicker chairs were placed on the hotel steps
and there, sipping, smoking, detached gentlemen sat. Peter
Walsh sat there. One might fancy that day, the London day,
was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her
print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and
pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to
evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a
woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed
dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling,
darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there
among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung.
I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded
above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed,
of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I
disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her
bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to
partnership in her revelry.
For the great revolution of Mr. Willett’s summer time had
taken place since Peter Walsh’s last visit to England. The
prolonged evening was new to him. It was inspiriting, rather.
For as the young people went by with their despatch-boxes,
awfully glad to be free, proud too, dumbly, of stepping this
famous pavement, joy of a kind, cheap, tinselly, if you like,
but all the same rapture, flushed their faces. They dressed
well too; pink stockings; pretty shoes. They would now have
two hours at the pictures. It sharpened, it refined them, the
yellow-blue evening light; and on the leaves in the square
shone lurid, livid—they looked as if dipped in sea water—the
foliage of a submerged city. He was astonished by the
beauty; it was encouraging too, for where the returned
Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds of them) in the
Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world,
here was he, as young as ever; envying young people their
summer time and the rest of it, and more than suspecting
from the words of a girl, from a housemaid’s laughter—
intangible things you couldn’t lay your hands on—that shift
in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had
seemed immovable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed
them down, the women especially, like those flowers
Clarissa’s Aunt Helena used to press between sheets of grey
blotting-paper with Littré’s dictionary on top, sitting under
the lamp after dinner. She was dead now. He had heard of
her, from Clarissa, losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so
fitting—one of nature’s masterpieces—that old Miss Parry
should turn to glass. She would die like some bird in a frost
gripping her perch. She belonged to a different age, but
being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the
horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking
some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this
interminable (he felt for a copper to buy a paper and read
about Surrey and Yorkshire—he had held out that copper
millions of times. Surrey was all out once more)—this
interminable life. But cricket was no mere game. Cricket was
important. He could never help reading about cricket. He
read the scores in the stop press first, then how it was a hot
day; then about a murder case. Having done things millions
of times enriched them, though it might be said to take the
surface off. The past enriched, and experience, and having
cared for one or two people, and so having acquired the
power which the young lack, of cutting short, doing what
one likes, not caring a rap what people say and coming and
going without any very great expectations (he left his paper
on the table and moved off), which however (and he looked
for his hat and coat) was not altogether true of him, not to-
night, for here he was starting to go to a party, at his age,
with the belief upon him that he was about to have an
experience. But what?
Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the eye. It was not
beauty pure and simple—Bedford Place leading into Russell
Square. It was straightness and emptiness of course; the
symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a
piano, a gramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-making
hidden, but now and again emerging when, through the
uncurtained window, the window left open, one saw parties
sitting
over
tables,
young
people
slowly
circling,
conversations between men and women, maids idly looking
out (a strange comment theirs, when work was done),
stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants.
Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life. And in
the large square where the cabs shot and swerved so quick,
there were loitering couples, dallying, embracing, shrunk up
under the shower of a tree; that was moving; so silent, so
absorbed, that one passed, discreetly, timidly, as if in the
presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would
have been impious. That was interesting. And so on into the
flare and glare.
His light overcoat blew open, he stepped with indescribable
idiosyncrasy, leant a little forward, tripped, with his hands
behind his back and his eyes still a little hawklike; he tripped
through London, towards Westminster, observing.
Was everybody dining out, then? Doors were being opened
here by a footman to let issue a high-stepping old dame, in
buckled shoes, with three purple ostrich feathers in her hair.
Doors were being opened for ladies wrapped like mummies
in shawls with bright flowers on them, ladies with bare
heads. And in respectable quarters with stucco pillars
through small front gardens lightly swathed with combs in
their hair (having run up to see the children), women came;
men waited for them, with their coats blowing open, and the
motor started. Everybody was going out. What with these
doors being opened, and the descent and the start, it seemed
as if the whole of London were embarking in little boats
moored to the bank, tossing on the waters, as if the whole
place were floating off in carnival. And Whitehall was skated
over, silver beaten as it was, skated over by spiders, and
there was a sense of midges round the arc lamps; it was so
hot that people stood about talking. And here in Westminster
was a retired Judge, presumably, sitting four square at his
house
door
dressed
all
in
white.
An
Anglo-Indian
presumably.
And here a shindy of brawling women, drunken women; here
only a policeman and looming houses, high houses, domed
houses, churches, parliaments, and the hoot of a steamer on
the river, a hollow misty cry. But it was her street, this,
Clarissa’s; cabs were rushing round the corner, like water
round the piers of a bridge, drawn together, it seemed to him
because they bore people going to her party, Clarissa’s party.
The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if
the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down
its china walls unrecorded. The brain must wake now. The
body must contract now, entering the house, the lighted
house, where the door stood open, where the motor cars
were standing, and bright women descending: the soul must
brave itself to endure. He opened the big blade of his pocket-
knife.
Lucy came running full tilt downstairs, having just nipped in
to the drawing-room to smooth a cover, to straighten a chair,
to pause a moment and feel whoever came in must think
how clean, how bright, how beautifully cared for, when they
saw the beautiful silver, the brass fire-irons, the new chair-
covers, and the curtains of yellow chintz: she appraised each;
heard a roar of voices; people already coming up from
dinner; she must fly!
The Prime Minister was coming, Agnes said: so she had
heard them say in the dining-room, she said, coming in with
a tray of glasses. Did it matter, did it matter in the least, one
Prime Minister more or less? It made no difference at this
hour of the night to Mrs. Walker among the plates,
saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-
cream freezers, pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup tureens,
and pudding basins which, however hard they washed up in
the scullery seemed to be all on top of her, on the kitchen
table, on chairs, while the fire blared and roared, the electric
lights glared, and still supper had to be laid. All she felt was,
one Prime Minister more or less made not a scrap of
difference to Mrs. Walker.
The ladies were going upstairs already, said Lucy; the ladies
were going up, one by one, Mrs. Dalloway walking last and
almost always sending back some message to the kitchen,
“My love to Mrs. Walker,” that was it one night. Next
morning they would go over the dishes—the soup, the
salmon; the salmon, Mrs. Walker knew, as usual underdone,
for she always got nervous about the pudding and left it to
Jenny; so it happened, the salmon was always underdone.
But some lady with fair hair and silver ornaments had said,
Lucy said, about the entrée, was it really made at home? But
it was the salmon that bothered Mrs. Walker, as she spun the
plates round and round, and pulled in dampers and pulled
out dampers; and there came a burst of laughter from the
dining-room; a voice speaking; then another burst of laughter
—the gentlemen enjoying themselves when the ladies had
gone. The tokay, said Lucy running in. Mr. Dalloway had
sent for the tokay, from the Emperor’s cellars, the Imperial
Tokay.
It was borne through the kitchen. Over her shoulder Lucy
reported how Miss Elizabeth looked quite lovely; she
couldn’t take her eyes off her; in her pink dress, wearing the
necklace Mr. Dalloway had given her. Jenny must remember
the dog, Miss Elizabeth’s fox-terrier, which, since it bit, had
to be shut up and might, Elizabeth thought, want something.
Jenny must remember the dog. But Jenny was not going
upstairs with all those people about. There was a motor at
the door already! There was a ring at the bell—and the
gentlemen still in the dining-room, drinking tokay!
There, they were going upstairs; that was the first to come,
and now they would come faster and faster, so that Mrs.
Parkinson (hired for parties) would leave the hall door ajar,
and the hall would be full of gentlemen waiting (they stood
waiting, sleeking down their hair) while the ladies took their
cloaks off in the room along the passage; where Mrs. Barnet
helped them, old Ellen Barnet, who had been with the family
for forty years, and came every summer to help the ladies,
and remembered mothers when they were girls, and though
very unassuming did shake hands; said “milady” very
respectfully, yet had a humorous way with her, looking at
the young ladies, and ever so tactfully helping Lady Lovejoy,
who had some trouble with her underbodice. And they could
not help feeling, Lady Lovejoy and Miss Alice, that some
little privilege in the matter of brush and comb, was awarded
them having known Mrs. Barnet—“thirty years, milady,”
Mrs. Barnet supplied her. Young ladies did not use to rouge,
said Lady Lovejoy, when they stayed at Bourton in the old
days. And Miss Alice didn’t need rouge, said Mrs. Barnet,
looking at her fondly. There Mrs. Barnet would sit, in the
cloakroom, patting down the furs, smoothing out the Spanish
shawls, tidying the dressing-table, and knowing perfectly
well, in spite of the furs and the embroideries, which were
nice ladies, which were not. The dear old body, said Lady
Lovejoy, mounting the stairs, Clarissa’s old nurse.
And then Lady Lovejoy stiffened. “Lady and Miss Lovejoy,”
she said to Mr. Wilkins (hired for parties). He had an
admirable manner, as he bent and straightened himself, bent
and straightened himself and announced with perfect
impartiality “Lady and Miss Lovejoy … Sir John and Lady
Needham … Miss Weld … Mr. Walsh.” His manner was
admirable; his family life must be irreproachable, except that
it seemed impossible that a being with greenish lips and
shaven cheeks could ever have blundered into the nuisance
of children.
“How delightful to see you!” said Clarissa. She said it to
every one. How delightful to see you! She was at her worst—
effusive, insincere. It was a great mistake to have come. He
should have stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter
Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should have
stayed at home, for he knew no one.
Oh dear, it was going to be a failure; a complete failure,
Clarissa felt it in her bones as dear old Lord Lexham stood
there apologising for his wife who had caught cold at the
Buckingham Palace garden party. She could see Peter out of
the tail of her eye, criticising her, there, in that corner. Why,
after all, did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles and
stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn
her to cinders! Better anything, better brandish one’s torch
and hurl it to earth than taper and dwindle away like some
Ellie Henderson! It was extraordinary how Peter put her into
these states just by coming and standing in a corner. He
made her see herself; exaggerate. It was idiotic. But why did
he come, then, merely to criticise? Why always take, never
give? Why not risk one’s one little point of view? There he
was wandering off, and she must speak to him. But she
would not get the chance. Life was that—humiliation,
renunciation. What Lord Lexham was saying was that his
wife would not wear her furs at the garden party because
“my dear, you ladies are all alike”—Lady Lexham being
seventy-five at least! It was delicious, how they petted each
other, that old couple. She did like old Lord Lexham. She did
think it mattered, her party, and it made her feel quite sick
to know that it was all going wrong, all falling flat. Anything,
any explosion, any horror was better than people wandering
aimlessly, standing in a bunch at a corner like Ellie
Henderson, not even caring to hold themselves upright.
Gently the yellow curtain with all the birds of Paradise blew
out and it seemed as if there were a flight of wings into the
room, right out, then sucked back. (For the windows were
open.) Was it draughty, Ellie Henderson wondered? She was
subject to chills. But it did not matter that she should come
down sneezing to-morrow; it was the girls with their naked
shoulders she thought of, being trained to think of others by
an old father, an invalid, late vicar of Bourton, but he was
dead now; and her chills never went to her chest, never. It
was the girls she thought of, the young girls with their bare
shoulders, she herself having always been a wisp of a
creature, with her thin hair and meagre profile; though now,
past fifty, there was beginning to shine through some mild
beam, something purified into distinction by years of self-
abnegation but obscured again, perpetually, by her
distressing gentility, her panic fear, which arose from three
hundred pounds’ income, and her weaponless state (she
could not earn a penny) and it made her timid, and more and
more disqualified year by year to meet well-dressed people
who did this sort of thing every night of the season, merely
telling their maids “I’ll wear so and so,” whereas Ellie
Henderson ran out nervously and bought cheap pink flowers,
half a dozen, and then threw a shawl over her old black
dress. For her invitation to Clarissa’s party had come at the
last moment. She was not quite happy about it. She had a
sort of feeling that Clarissa had not meant to ask her this
year.
Why should she? There was no reason really, except that
they had always known each other. Indeed, they were
cousins. But naturally they had rather drifted apart, Clarissa
being so sought after. It was an event to her, going to a
party. It was quite a treat just to see the lovely clothes.
Wasn’t that Elizabeth, grown up, with her hair done in the
fashionable way, in the pink dress? Yet she could not be
more than seventeen. She was very, very handsome. But girls
when they first came out didn’t seem to wear white as they
used. (She must remember everything to tell Edith.) Girls
wore straight frocks, perfectly tight, with skirts well above
the ankles. It was not becoming, she thought.
So, with her weak eyesight, Ellie Henderson craned rather
forward, and it wasn’t so much she who minded not having
any one to talk to (she hardly knew anybody there), for she
felt that they were all such interesting people to watch;
politicians presumably; Richard Dalloway’s friends; but it
was Richard himself who felt that he could not let the poor
creature go on standing there all the evening by herself.
“Well, Ellie, and how’s the world treating you?” he said in his
genial way, and Ellie Henderson, getting nervous and
flushing and feeling that it was extraordinarily nice of him to
come and talk to her, said that many people really felt the
heat more than the cold.
“Yes, they do,” said Richard Dalloway. “Yes.”
But what more did one say?
“Hullo, Richard,” said somebody, taking him by the elbow,
and, good Lord, there was old Peter, old Peter Walsh. He was
delighted to see him—ever so pleased to see him! He hadn’t
changed a bit. And off they went together walking right
across the room, giving each other little pats, as if they
hadn’t met for a long time, Ellie Henderson thought,
watching them go, certain she knew that man’s face. A tall
man, middle aged, rather fine eyes, dark, wearing spectacles,
with a look of John Burrows. Edith would be sure to know.
The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out
again. And Clarissa saw—she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back,
and go on talking. So it wasn’t a failure after all! it was going
to be all right now—her party. It had begun. It had started.
But it was still touch and go. She must stand there for the
present. People seemed to come in a rush.
Colonel and Mrs. Garrod … Mr. Hugh Whitbread … Mr.
Bowley … Mrs. Hilbery … Lady Mary Maddox … Mr. Quin …
intoned Wilkin. She had six or seven words with each, and
they went on, they went into the rooms; into something now,
not nothing, since Ralph Lyon had beat back the curtain.
And yet for her own part, it was too much of an effort. She
was not enjoying it. It was too much like being—just
anybody, standing there; anybody could do it; yet this
anybody she did a little admire, couldn’t help feeling that she
had, anyhow, made this happen, that it marked a stage, this
post that she felt herself to have become, for oddly enough
she had quite forgotten what she looked like, but felt herself
a stake driven in at the top of her stairs. Every time she gave
a party she had this feeling of being something not herself,
and that every one was unreal in one way; much more real in
another. It was, she thought, partly their clothes, partly
being taken out of their ordinary ways, partly the
background, it was possible to say things you couldn’t say
anyhow else, things that needed an effort; possible to go
much deeper. But not for her; not yet anyhow.
“How delightful to see you!” she said. Dear old Sir Harry! He
would know every one.
And what was so odd about it was the sense one had as they
came up the stairs one after another, Mrs. Mount and Celia,
Herbert Ainsty, Mrs. Dakers—oh and Lady Bruton!
“How awfully good of you to come!” she said, and she meant
it—it was odd how standing there one felt them going on,
going on, some quite old, some….
What name? Lady Rosseter? But who on earth was Lady
Rosseter?
“Clarissa!” That voice! It was Sally Seton! Sally Seton! after
all these years! She loomed through a mist. For she hadn’t
looked like that, Sally Seton, when Clarissa grasped the hot
water can, to think of her under this roof, under this roof!
Not like that!
All on top of each other, embarrassed, laughing, words
tumbled out—passing through London; heard from Clara
Haydon; what a chance of seeing you! So I thrust myself in—
without an invitation….
One might put down the hot water can quite composedly.
The lustre had gone out of her. Yet it was extraordinary to
see her again, older, happier, less lovely. They kissed each
other, first this cheek then that, by the drawing-room door,
and Clarissa turned, with Sally’s hand in hers, and saw her
rooms full, heard the roar of voices, saw the candlesticks, the
blowing curtains, and the roses which Richard had given her.
“I have five enormous boys,” said Sally.
She had the simplest egotism, the most open desire to be
thought first always, and Clarissa loved her for being still
like that. “I can’t believe it!” she cried, kindling all over with
pleasure at the thought of the past.
But alas, Wilkins; Wilkins wanted her; Wilkins was emitting
in a voice of commanding authority as if the whole company
must be admonished and the hostess reclaimed from
frivolity, one name:
“The Prime Minister,” said Peter Walsh.
The Prime Minister? Was it really? Ellie Henderson
marvelled. What a thing to tell Edith!
One couldn’t laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might
have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits—poor
chap, all rigged up in gold lace. And to be fair, as he went his
rounds, first with Clarissa then with Richard escorting him,
he did it very well. He tried to look somebody. It was
amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him. They just went on
talking, yet it was perfectly plain that they all knew, felt to
the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol
of what they all stood for, English society. Old Lady Bruton,
and she looked very fine too, very stalwart in her lace, swam
up, and they withdrew into a little room which at once
became spied upon, guarded, and a sort of stir and rustle
rippled through every one, openly: the Prime Minister!
Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh,
standing in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold
lace and doing homage! There! That must be, by Jove it was,
Hugh Whitbread, snuffing round the precincts of the great,
grown rather fatter, rather whiter, the admirable Hugh!
He looked always as if he were on duty, thought Peter, a
privileged, but secretive being, hoarding secrets which he
would die to defend, though it was only some little piece of
tittle-tattle dropped by a court footman, which would be in
all the papers to-morrow. Such were his rattles, his baubles,
in playing with which he had grown white, come to the
verge of old age, enjoying the respect and affection of all
who had the privilege of knowing this type of the English
public school man. Inevitably one made up things like that
about Hugh; that was his style; the style of those admirable
letters which Peter had read thousands of miles across the
sea in the Times, and had thanked God he was out of that
pernicious hubble-bubble if it were only to hear baboons
chatter and coolies beat their wives. An olive-skinned youth
from one of the Universities stood obsequiously by. Him he
would patronise, initiate, teach how to get on. For he liked
nothing better than doing kindnesses, making the hearts of
old ladies palpitate with the joy of being thought of in their
age, their affliction, thinking themselves quite forgotten, yet
here was dear Hugh driving up and spending an hour talking
of the past, remembering trifles, praising the home-made
cake, though Hugh might eat cake with a Duchess any day of
his life, and, to look at him, probably did spend a good deal
of time in that agreeable occupation. The All-judging, the
All-merciful, might excuse. Peter Walsh had no mercy.
Villains there must be, and God knows the rascals who get
hanged for battering the brains of a girl out in a train do less
harm on the whole than Hugh Whitbread and his kindness.
Look at him now, on tiptoe, dancing forward, bowing and
scraping, as the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton emerged,
intimating for all the world to see that he was privileged to
say something, something private, to Lady Bruton as she
passed. She stopped. She wagged her fine old head. She was
thanking him presumably for some piece of servility. She had
her toadies, minor officials in Government offices who ran
about putting through little jobs on her behalf, in return for
which she gave them luncheon. But she derived from the
eighteenth century. She was all right.
And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the
room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey
hair. She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress.
Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed,
having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the
moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some
other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most
perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element. But
age had brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her
glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the
waves. There was a breath of tenderness; her severity, her
prudery, her woodenness were all warmed through now, and
she had about her as she said good-bye to the thick gold-
laced man who was doing his best, and good luck to him, to
look important, an inexpressible dignity; an exquisite
cordiality; as if she wished the whole world well, and must
now, being on the very verge and rim of things, take her
leave. So she made him think. (But he was not in love.)
Indeed, Clarissa felt, the Prime Minister had been good to
come. And, walking down the room with him, with Sally
there and Peter there and Richard very pleased, with all
those people rather inclined, perhaps, to envy, she had felt
that intoxication of the moment, that dilatation of the nerves
of the heart itself till it seemed to quiver, steeped, upright;—
yes, but after all it was what other people felt, that; for,
though she loved it and felt it tingle and sting, still these
semblances, these triumphs (dear old Peter, for example,
thinking her so brilliant), had a hollowness; at arm’s length
they were, not in the heart; and it might be that she was
growing old but they satisfied her no longer as they used;
and suddenly, as she saw the Prime Minister go down the
stairs, the gilt rim of the Sir Joshua picture of the little girl
with a muff brought back Kilman with a rush; Kilman her
enemy. That was satisfying; that was real. Ah, how she hated
her—hot, hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power;
Elizabeth’s seducer; the woman who had crept in to steal and
defile (Richard would say, What nonsense!). She hated her:
she loved her. It was enemies one wanted, not friends—not
Mrs. Durrant and Clara, Sir William and Lady Bradshaw,
Miss Truelock and Eleanor Gibson (whom she saw coming
upstairs). They must find her if they wanted her. She was for
the party!
There was her old friend Sir Harry.
“Dear Sir Harry!” she said, going up to the fine old fellow
who had produced more bad pictures than any other two
Academicians in the whole of St. John’s Wood (they were
always of cattle, standing in sunset pools absorbing moisture,
or signifying, for he had a certain range of gesture, by the
raising of one foreleg and the toss of the antlers, “the
Approach of the Stranger”—all his activities, dining out,
racing, were founded on cattle standing absorbing moisture
in sunset pools).
“What are you laughing at?” she asked him. For Willie
Titcomb and Sir Harry and Herbert Ainsty were all laughing.
But no. Sir Harry could not tell Clarissa Dalloway (much
though he liked her; of her type he thought her perfect, and
threatened to paint her) his stories of the music hall stage.
He chaffed her about her party. He missed his brandy. These
circles, he said, were above him. But he liked her; respected
her, in spite of her damnable, difficult upper-class
refinement, which made it impossible to ask Clarissa
Dalloway to sit on his knee. And up came that wandering
will-o’-the-wisp, that vagulous phosphorescence, old Mrs.
Hilbery, stretching her hands to the blaze of his laughter
(about the Duke and the Lady), which, as she heard it across
the room, seemed to reassure her on a point which
sometimes bothered her if she woke early in the morning and
did not like to call her maid for a cup of tea; how it is certain
we must die.
“They won’t tell us their stories,” said Clarissa.
“Dear Clarissa!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery. She looked to-night,
she said, so like her mother as she first saw her walking in a
garden in a grey hat.
And really Clarissa’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother,
walking in a garden! But alas, she must go.
For there was Professor Brierly, who lectured on Milton,
talking to little Jim Hutton (who was unable even for a party
like this to compass both tie and waistcoat or make his hair
lie flat), and even at this distance they were quarrelling, she
could see. For Professor Brierly was a very queer fish. With
all those degrees, honours, lectureships between him and the
scribblers he suspected instantly an atmosphere not
favourable to his queer compound; his prodigious learning
and timidity; his wintry charm without cordiality; his
innocence blent with snobbery; he quivered if made
conscious by a lady’s unkempt hair, a youth’s boots, of an
underworld, very creditable doubtless, of rebels, of ardent
young people; of would-be geniuses, and intimated with a
little toss of the head, with a sniff—Humph!—the value of
moderation; of some slight training in the classics in order to
appreciate Milton. Professor Brierly (Clarissa could see)
wasn’t hitting it off with little Jim Hutton (who wore red
socks, his black being at the laundry) about Milton. She
interrupted.
She said she loved Bach. So did Hutton. That was the bond
between them, and Hutton (a very bad poet) always felt that
Mrs. Dalloway was far the best of the great ladies who took
an interest in art. It was odd how strict she was. About music
she was purely impersonal. She was rather a prig. But how
charming to look at! She made her house so nice if it weren’t
for her Professors. Clarissa had half a mind to snatch him off
and set him down at the piano in the back room. For he
played divinely.
“But the noise!” she said. “The noise!”
“The sign of a successful party.” Nodding urbanely, the
Professor stepped delicately off.
“He knows everything in the whole world about Milton,”
said Clarissa.
“Does he indeed?” said Hutton, who would imitate the
Professor throughout Hampstead; the Professor on Milton;
the Professor on moderation; the Professor stepping
delicately off.
But she must speak to that couple, said Clarissa, Lord Gayton
and Nancy Blow.
Not that they added perceptibly to the noise of the party.
They were not talking (perceptibly) as they stood side by
side by the yellow curtains. They would soon be off
elsewhere, together; and never had very much to say in any
circumstances. They looked; that was all. That was enough.
They looked so clean, so sound, she with an apricot bloom of
powder and paint, but he scrubbed, rinsed, with the eyes of a
bird, so that no ball could pass him or stroke surprise him.
He struck, he leapt, accurately, on the spot. Ponies’ mouths
quivered at the end of his reins. He had his honours,
ancestral monuments, banners hanging in the church at
home. He had his duties; his tenants; a mother and sisters;
had been all day at Lords, and that was what they were
talking about—cricket, cousins, the movies—when Mrs.
Dalloway came up. Lord Gayton liked her most awfully. So
did Miss Blow. She had such charming manners.
“It is angelic—it is delicious of you to have come!” she said.
She loved Lords; she loved youth, and Nancy, dressed at
enormous expense by the greatest artists in Paris, stood there
looking as if her body had merely put forth, of its own
accord, a green frill.
“I had meant to have dancing,” said Clarissa.
For the young people could not talk. And why should they?
Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn; carry sugar to ponies;
kiss and caress the snouts of adorable chows; and then all
tingling and streaming, plunge and swim. But the enormous
resources of the English language, the power it bestows, after
all, of communicating feelings (at their age, she and Peter
would have been arguing all the evening), was not for them.
They would solidify young. They would be good beyond
measure to the people on the estate, but alone, perhaps,
rather dull.
“What a pity!” she said. “I had hoped to have dancing.”
It was so extraordinarily nice of them to have come! But talk
of dancing! The rooms were packed.
There was old Aunt Helena in her shawl. Alas, she must
leave them—Lord Gayton and Nancy Blow. There was old
Miss Parry, her aunt.
For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive.
She was past eighty. She ascended staircases slowly with a
stick. She was placed in a chair (Richard had seen to it).
People who had known Burma in the ’seventies were always
led up to her. Where had Peter got to? They used to be such
friends. For at the mention of India, or even Ceylon, her eyes
(only one was glass) slowly deepened, became blue, beheld,
not human beings—she had no tender memories, no proud
illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies—it was orchids
she saw, and mountain passes and herself carried on the
backs of coolies in the ’sixties over solitary peaks; or
descending to uproot orchids (startling blossoms, never
beheld before) which she painted in water-colour; an
indomitable Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the War,
say, which dropped a bomb at her very door, from her deep
meditation over orchids and her own figure journeying in the
’sixties in India—but here was Peter.
“Come and talk to Aunt Helena about Burma,” said Clarissa.
And yet he had not had a word with her all the evening!
“We will talk later,” said Clarissa, leading him up to Aunt
Helena, in her white shawl, with her stick.
“Peter Walsh,” said Clarissa.
That meant nothing.
Clarissa had asked her. It was tiring; it was noisy; but
Clarissa had asked her. So she had come. It was a pity that
they lived in London—Richard and Clarissa. If only for
Clarissa’s health it would have been better to live in the
country. But Clarissa had always been fond of society.
“He has been in Burma,” said Clarissa.
Ah. She could not resist recalling what Charles Darwin had
said about her little book on the orchids of Burma.
(Clarissa must speak to Lady Bruton.)
No doubt it was forgotten now, her book on the orchids of
Burma, but it went into three editions before 1870, she told
Peter. She remembered him now. He had been at Bourton
(and he had left her, Peter Walsh remembered, without a
word in the drawing-room that night when Clarissa had
asked him to come boating).
“Richard so much enjoyed his lunch party,” said Clarissa to
Lady Bruton.
“Richard was the greatest possible help,” Lady Bruton
replied. “He helped me to write a letter. And how are you?”
“Oh, perfectly well!” said Clarissa. (Lady Bruton detested
illness in the wives of politicians.)
“And there’s Peter Walsh!” said Lady Bruton (for she could
never think of anything to say to Clarissa; though she liked
her. She had lots of fine qualities; but they had nothing in
common—she and Clarissa. It might have been better if
Richard had married a woman with less charm, who would
have helped him more in his work. He had lost his chance of
the Cabinet). “There’s Peter Walsh!” she said, shaking hands
with that agreeable sinner, that very able fellow who should
have made a name for himself but hadn’t (always in
difficulties with women), and, of course, old Miss Parry.
Wonderful old lady!
Lady Bruton stood by Miss Parry’s chair, a spectral grenadier,
draped in black, inviting Peter Walsh to lunch; cordial; but
without small talk, remembering nothing whatever about the
flora or fauna of India. She had been there, of course; had
stayed with three Viceroys; thought some of the Indian
civilians uncommonly fine fellows; but what a tragedy it was
—the state of India! The Prime Minister had just been telling
her (old Miss Parry huddled up in her shawl, did not care
what the Prime Minister had just been telling her), and Lady
Bruton would like to have Peter Walsh’s opinion, he being
fresh from the centre, and she would get Sir Sampson to
meet him, for really it prevented her from sleeping at night,
the folly of it, the wickedness she might say, being a soldier’s
daughter. She was an old woman now, not good for much.
But her house, her servants, her good friend Milly Brush—
did he remember her?—were all there only asking to be used
if—if they could be of help, in short. For she never spoke of
England, but this isle of men, this dear, dear land, was in her
blood (without reading Shakespeare), and if ever a woman
could have worn the helmet and shot the arrow, could have
led troops to attack, ruled with indomitable justice barbarian
hordes and lain under a shield noseless in a church, or made
a green grass mound on some primeval hillside, that woman
was Millicent Bruton. Debarred by her sex and some truancy,
too, of the logical faculty (she found it impossible to write a
letter to the Times), she had the thought of Empire always at
hand, and had acquired from her association with that
armoured goddess her ramrod bearing, her robustness of
demeanour, so that one could not figure her even in death
parted from the earth or roaming territories over which, in
some spiritual shape, the Union Jack had ceased to fly. To be
not English even among the dead—no, no! Impossible!
But was it Lady Bruton (whom she used to know)? Was it
Peter Walsh grown grey? Lady Rosseter asked herself (who
had been Sally Seton). It was old Miss Parry certainly—the
old aunt who used to be so cross when she stayed at Bourton.
Never should she forget running along the passage naked,
and being sent for by Miss Parry! And Clarissa! oh Clarissa!
Sally caught her by the arm.
Clarissa stopped beside them.
“But I can’t stay,” she said. “I shall come later. Wait,” she
said, looking at Peter and Sally. They must wait, she meant,
until all these people had gone.
“I shall come back,” she said, looking at her old friends, Sally
and Peter, who were shaking hands, and Sally, remembering
the past no doubt, was laughing.
But her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness; her
eyes not aglow as they used to be, when she smoked cigars,
when she ran down the passage to fetch her sponge bag,
without a stitch of clothing on her, and Ellen Atkins asked,
What if the gentlemen had met her? But everybody forgave
her. She stole a chicken from the larder because she was
hungry in the night; she smoked cigars in her bedroom; she
left a priceless book in the punt. But everybody adored her
(except perhaps Papa). It was her warmth; her vitality—she
would paint, she would write. Old women in the village
never to this day forgot to ask after “your friend in the red
cloak who seemed so bright.” She accused Hugh Whitbread,
of all people (and there he was, her old friend Hugh, talking
to the Portuguese Ambassador), of kissing her in the
smoking-room to punish her for saying that women should
have votes. Vulgar men did, she said. And Clarissa
remembered having to persuade her not to denounce him at
family prayers—which she was capable of doing with her
daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love of being the
centre of everything and creating scenes, and it was bound,
Clarissa used to think, to end in some awful tragedy; her
death; her martyrdom; instead of which she had married,
quite unexpectedly, a bald man with a large buttonhole who
owned, it was said, cotton mills at Manchester. And she had
five boys!
She and Peter had settled down together. They were talking:
it seemed so familiar—that they should be talking. They
would discuss the past. With the two of them (more even
than with Richard) she shared her past; the garden; the trees;
old Joseph Breitkopf singing Brahms without any voice; the
drawing-room wall-paper; the smell of the mats. A part of
this Sally must always be; Peter must always be. But she
must leave them. There were the Bradshaws, whom she
disliked. She must go up to Lady Bradshaw (in grey and
silver, balancing like a sea-lion at the edge of its tank,
barking for invitations, Duchesses, the typical successful
man’s wife), she must go up to Lady Bradshaw and say….
But Lady Bradshaw anticipated her.
“We are shockingly late, dear Mrs. Dalloway, we hardly
dared to come in,” she said.
And Sir William, who looked very distinguished, with his
grey hair and blue eyes, said yes; they had not been able to
resist the temptation. He was talking to Richard about that
Bill probably, which they wanted to get through the
Commons. Why did the sight of him, talking to Richard, curl
her up? He looked what he was, a great doctor. A man
absolutely at the head of his profession, very powerful,
rather worn. For think what cases came before him—people
in the uttermost depths of misery; people on the verge of
insanity; husbands and wives. He had to decide questions of
appalling difficulty. Yet—what she felt was, one wouldn’t
like Sir William to see one unhappy. No; not that man.
“How is your son at Eton?” she asked Lady Bradshaw.
He had just missed his eleven, said Lady Bradshaw, because
of the mumps. His father minded even more than he did, she
thought “being,” she said, “nothing but a great boy himself.”
Clarissa looked at Sir William, talking to Richard. He did not
look like a boy—not in the least like a boy. She had once
gone with some one to ask his advice. He had been perfectly
right; extremely sensible. But Heavens—what a relief to get
out to the street again! There was some poor wretch sobbing,
she remembered, in the waiting-room. But she did not know
what it was—about Sir William; what exactly she disliked.
Only Richard agreed with her, “didn’t like his taste, didn’t
like his smell.” But he was extraordinarily able. They were
talking about this Bill. Some case, Sir William was
mentioning, lowering his voice. It had its bearing upon what
he was saying about the deferred effects of shell shock. There
must be some provision in the Bill.
Sinking her voice, drawing Mrs. Dalloway into the shelter of
a common femininity, a common pride in the illustrious
qualities of husbands and their sad tendency to overwork,
Lady Bradshaw (poor goose—one didn’t dislike her)
murmured how, “just as we were starting, my husband was
called up on the telephone, a very sad case. A young man
(that is what Sir William is telling Mr. Dalloway) had killed
himself. He had been in the army.” Oh! thought Clarissa, in
the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought.
She went on, into the little room where the Prime Minister
had gone with Lady Bruton. Perhaps there was somebody
there. But there was nobody. The chairs still kept the impress
of the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton, she turned
deferentially, he sitting four-square, authoritatively. They
had been talking about India. There was nobody. The party’s
splendour fell to the floor, so strange it was to come in alone
in her finery.
What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her
party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it
at her party—the Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed
himself—but how? Always her body went through it first,
when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress
flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a
window. Up had flashed the ground; through him,
blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay
with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation
of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the
Bradshaws talked of it at her party!
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never
anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on
living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still
crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she had
been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would
grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed
about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let
drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had
preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to
communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching
the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew
apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace
in death.
But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged
holding his treasure? “If it were now to die, ’twere now to be
most happy,” she had said to herself once, coming down in
white.
Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had
that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great
doctor yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust,
extremely
polite
to
women,
but
capable
of
some
indescribable outrage—forcing your soul, that was it—if this
young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed
him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said
(indeed she felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make
life intolerable, men like that?
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror;
the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into
one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked
with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful
fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there
reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and
gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight,
rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have
perished. But that young man had killed himself.
Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her
punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a
woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand
here in her evening dress. She had schemed; she had
pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted
success. Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she
had walked on the terrace at Bourton.
It was due to Richard; she had never been so happy. Nothing
could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure
could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in
one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of
youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a
shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a
time had she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to
look at the sky; or seen it between people’s shoulders at
dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She
walked to the window.
It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it,
this country sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the
curtains; she looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in the room
opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She was going to
bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it
will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But
there it was—ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast
clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen. She was
going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to
watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room,
coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating,
with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room,
to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She
pulled the blind now. The clock began striking. The young
man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the
clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him,
with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her
light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she
repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat
of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an
extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the
young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had
done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden
circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty;
made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must
assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in
from the little room.
“But where is Clarissa?” said Peter. He was sitting on the sofa
with Sally. (After all these years he really could not call her
“Lady Rosseter.”) “Where’s the woman gone to?” he asked.
“Where’s Clarissa?”
Sally supposed, and so did Peter for the matter of that, that
there were people of importance, politicians, whom neither
of them knew unless by sight in the picture papers, whom
Clarissa had to be nice to, had to talk to. She was with them.
Yet there was Richard Dalloway not in the Cabinet. He
hadn’t been a success, Sally supposed? For herself, she
scarcely ever read the papers. She sometimes saw his name
mentioned. But then—well, she lived a very solitary life, in
the wilds, Clarissa would say, among great merchants, great
manufacturers, men, after all, who did things. She had done
things too!
“I have five sons!” she told him.
Lord, Lord, what a change had come over her! the softness of
motherhood; its egotism too. Last time they met, Peter
remembered, had been among the cauliflowers in the
moonlight, the leaves “like rough bronze” she had said, with
her literary turn; and she had picked a rose. She had
marched him up and down that awful night, after the scene
by the fountain; he was to catch the midnight train. Heavens,
he had wept!
That was his old trick, opening a pocket-knife, thought Sally,
always opening and shutting a knife when he got excited.
They had been very, very intimate, she and Peter Walsh,
when he was in love with Clarissa, and there was that
dreadful, ridiculous scene over Richard Dalloway at lunch.
She had called Richard “Wickham.” Why not call Richard
“Wickham”? Clarissa had flared up! and indeed they had
never seen each other since, she and Clarissa, not more than
half a dozen times perhaps in the last ten years. And Peter
Walsh had gone off to India, and she had heard vaguely that
he had made an unhappy marriage, and she didn’t know
whether he had any children, and she couldn’t ask him, for
he had changed. He was rather shrivelled-looking, but
kinder, she felt, and she had a real affection for him, for he
was connected with her youth, and she still had a little Emily
Brontë he had given her, and he was to write, surely? In
those days he was to write.
“Have you written?” she asked him, spreading her hand, her
firm and shapely hand, on her knee in a way he recalled.
“Not a word!” said Peter Walsh, and she laughed.
She was still attractive, still a personage, Sally Seton. But
who was this Rosseter? He wore two camellias on his
wedding day—that was all Peter knew of him. “They have
myriads of servants, miles of conservatories,” Clarissa wrote;
something like that. Sally owned it with a shout of laughter.
“Yes, I have ten thousand a year”—whether before the tax
was paid or after, she couldn’t remember, for her husband,
“whom you must meet,” she said, “whom you would like,”
she said, did all that for her.
And Sally used to be in rags and tatters. She had pawned her
grandmother’s ring which Marie Antoinette had given her
great-grandfather to come to Bourton.
Oh yes, Sally remembered; she had it still, a ruby ring which
Marie Antoinette had given her great-grandfather. She never
had a penny to her name in those days, and going to Bourton
always meant some frightful pinch. But going to Bourton had
meant so much to her—had kept her sane, she believed, so
unhappy had she been at home. But that was all a thing of
the past—all over now, she said. And Mr. Parry was dead;
and Miss Parry was still alive. Never had he had such a shock
in his life! said Peter. He had been quite certain she was
dead. And the marriage had been, Sally supposed, a success?
And that very handsome, very self-possessed young woman
was Elizabeth, over there, by the curtains, in red.
(She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a
hyacinth, Willie Titcomb was thinking. Oh how much nicer
to be in the country and do what she liked! She could hear
her poor dog howling, Elizabeth was certain.) She was not a
bit like Clarissa, Peter Walsh said.
“Oh, Clarissa!” said Sally.
What Sally felt was simply this. She had owed Clarissa an
enormous amount. They had been friends, not acquaintances,
friends, and she still saw Clarissa all in white going about the
house with her hands full of flowers—to this day tobacco
plants made her think of Bourton. But—did Peter
understand?—she lacked something. Lacked what was it?
She had charm; she had extraordinary charm. But to be frank
(and she felt that Peter was an old friend, a real friend—did
absence matter? did distance matter? She had often wanted
to write to him, but torn it up, yet felt he understood, for
people understand without things being said, as one realises
growing old, and old she was, had been that afternoon to see
her sons at Eton, where they had the mumps), to be quite
frank then, how could Clarissa have done it?—married
Richard Dalloway? a sportsman, a man who cared only for
dogs. Literally, when he came into the room he smelt of the
stables. And then all this? She waved her hand.
Hugh Whitbread it was, strolling past in his white waistcoat,
dim, fat, blind, past everything he looked, except self-esteem
and comfort.
“He’s not going to recognise us,” said Sally, and really she
hadn’t the courage—so that was Hugh! the admirable Hugh!
“And what does he do?” she asked Peter.
He blacked the King’s boots or counted bottles at Windsor,
Peter told her. Peter kept his sharp tongue still! But Sally
must be frank, Peter said. That kiss now, Hugh’s.
On the lips, she assured him, in the smoking-room one
evening. She went straight to Clarissa in a rage. Hugh didn’t
do such things! Clarissa said, the admirable Hugh! Hugh’s
socks were without exception the most beautiful she had
ever seen—and now his evening dress. Perfect! And had he
children?
“Everybody in the room has six sons at Eton,” Peter told her,
except himself. He, thank God, had none. No sons, no
daughters, no wife. Well, he didn’t seem to mind, said Sally.
He looked younger, she thought, than any of them.
But it had been a silly thing to do, in many ways, Peter said,
to marry like that; “a perfect goose she was,” he said, but, he
said, “we had a splendid time of it,” but how could that be?
Sally wondered; what did he mean? and how odd it was to
know him and yet not know a single thing that had
happened to him. And did he say it out of pride? Very likely,
for after all it must be galling for him (though he was an
oddity, a sort of sprite, not at all an ordinary man), it must
be lonely at his age to have no home, nowhere to go to. But
he must stay with them for weeks and weeks. Of course he
would; he would love to stay with them, and that was how it
came out. All these years the Dalloways had never been
once. Time after time they had asked them. Clarissa (for it
was Clarissa of course) would not come. For, said Sally,
Clarissa was at heart a snob—one had to admit it, a snob.
And it was that that was between them, she was convinced.
Clarissa thought she had married beneath her, her husband
being—she was proud of it—a miner’s son. Every penny they
had he had earned. As a little boy (her voice trembled) he
had carried great sacks.
(And so she would go on, Peter felt, hour after hour; the
miner’s son; people thought she had married beneath her;
her five sons; and what was the other thing—plants,
hydrangeas, syringas, very, very rare hibiscus lilies that
never grow north of the Suez Canal, but she, with one
gardener in a suburb near Manchester, had beds of them,
positively beds! Now all that Clarissa had escaped,
unmaternal as she was.)
A snob was she? Yes, in many ways. Where was she, all this
time? It was getting late.
“Yet,” said Sally, “when I heard Clarissa was giving a party, I
felt I couldn’t not come—must see her again (and I’m staying
in Victoria Street, practically next door). So I just came
without an invitation. But,” she whispered, “tell me, do. Who
is this?”
It was Mrs. Hilbery, looking for the door. For how late it was
getting! And, she murmured, as the night grew later, as
people went, one found old friends; quiet nooks and corners;
and the loveliest views. Did they know, she asked, that they
were surrounded by an enchanted garden? Lights and trees
and wonderful gleaming lakes and the sky. Just a few fairy
lamps, Clarissa Dalloway had said, in the back garden! But
she was a magician! It was a park…. And she didn’t know
their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without
names, songs without words, always the best. But there were
so many doors, such unexpected places, she could not find
her way.
“Old Mrs. Hilbery,” said Peter; but who was that? that lady
standing by the curtain all the evening, without speaking?
He knew her face; connected her with Bourton. Surely she
used to cut up underclothes at the large table in the window?
Davidson, was that her name?
“Oh, that is Ellie Henderson,” said Sally. Clarissa was really
very hard on her. She was a cousin, very poor. Clarissa was
hard on people.
She was rather, said Peter. Yet, said Sally, in her emotional
way, with a rush of that enthusiasm which Peter used to love
her for, yet dreaded a little now, so effusive she might
become—how generous to her friends Clarissa was! and what
a rare quality one found it, and how sometimes at night or
on Christmas Day, when she counted up her blessings, she
put that friendship first. They were young; that was it.
Clarissa was pure-hearted; that was it. Peter would think her
sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was
the only thing worth saying—what one felt. Cleverness was
silly. One must say simply what one felt.
“But I do not know,” said Peter Walsh, “what I feel.”
Poor Peter, thought Sally. Why did not Clarissa come and
talk to them? That was what he was longing for. She knew it.
All the time he was thinking only of Clarissa, and was
fidgeting with his knife.
He had not found life simple, Peter said. His relations with
Clarissa had not been simple. It had spoilt his life, he said.
(They had been so intimate—he and Sally Seton, it was
absurd not to say it.) One could not be in love twice, he said.
And what could she say? Still, it is better to have loved (but
he would think her sentimental—he used to be so sharp). He
must come and stay with them in Manchester. That is all
very true, he said. All very true. He would love to come and
stay with them, directly he had done what he had to do in
London.
And Clarissa had cared for him more than she had ever cared
for Richard. Sally was positive of that.
“No, no, no!” said Peter (Sally should not have said that—she
went too far). That good fellow—there he was at the end of
the room, holding forth, the same as ever, dear old Richard.
Who was he talking to? Sally asked, that very distinguished-
looking man? Living in the wilds as she did, she had an
insatiable curiosity to know who people were. But Peter did
not know. He did not like his looks, he said, probably a
Cabinet Minister. Of them all, Richard seemed to him the
best, he said—the most disinterested.
“But what has he done?” Sally asked. Public work, she
supposed. And were they happy together? Sally asked (she
herself was extremely happy); for, she admitted, she knew
nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one
does, for what can one know even of the people one lives
with every day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners? She had
read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the
wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life—one
scratched on the wall. Despairing of human relationships
(people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and
got from her flowers a peace which men and women never
gave her. But no; he did not like cabbages; he preferred
human beings, Peter said. Indeed, the young are beautiful,
Sally said, watching Elizabeth cross the room. How unlike
Clarissa at her age! Could he make anything of her? She
would not open her lips. Not much, not yet, Peter admitted.
She was like a lily, Sally said, a lily by the side of a pool. But
Peter did not agree that we know nothing. We know
everything, he said; at least he did.
But these two, Sally whispered, these two coming now (and
really she must go, if Clarissa did not come soon), this
distinguished-looking man and his rather common-looking
wife who had been talking to Richard—what could one know
about people like that?
“That they’re damnable humbugs,” said Peter, looking at
them casually. He made Sally laugh.
But Sir William Bradshaw stopped at the door to look at a
picture. He looked in the corner for the engraver’s name. His
wife looked too. Sir William Bradshaw was so interested in
art.
When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited
to know people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be
precise (Sally was fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart
was like a girl’s of twenty); now that one was mature then,
said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one
did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true,
said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every
year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be
glad of it—it went on increasing in his experience. There was
some one in India. He would like to tell Sally about her. He
would like Sally to know her. She was married, he said. She
had two small children. They must all come to Manchester,
said Sally—he must promise before they left.
There’s Elizabeth, he said, she feels not half what we feel,
not yet. But, said Sally, watching Elizabeth go to her father,
one can see they are devoted to each other. She could feel it
by the way Elizabeth went to her father.
For her father had been looking at her, as he stood talking to
the Bradshaws, and he had thought to himself, Who is that
lovely girl? And suddenly he realised that it was his
Elizabeth, and he had not recognised her, she looked so
lovely in her pink frock! Elizabeth had felt him looking at
her as she talked to Willie Titcomb. So she went to him and
they stood together, now that the party was almost over,
looking at the people going, and the rooms getting emptier
and emptier, with things scattered on the floor. Even Ellie
Henderson was going, nearly last of all, though no one had
spoken to her, but she had wanted to see everything, to tell
Edith. And Richard and Elizabeth were rather glad it was
over, but Richard was proud of his daughter. And he had not
meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her. He had
looked at her, he said, and he had wondered, Who is that
lovely girl? and it was his daughter! That did make her
happy. But her poor dog was howling.
“Richard has improved. You are right,” said Sally. “I shall go
and talk to him. I shall say good-night. What does the brain
matter,” said Lady Rosseter, getting up, “compared with the
heart?”
“I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is
this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What
is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.

THE END