Full Text

_BY VIRGINIA WOOLF_

_Fiction_

THE VOYAGE OUT

NIGHT AND DAY

JACOB’S ROOM

MRS. DALLOWAY

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

ORLANDO

THE WAVES

THE YEARS

BETWEEN THE ACTS

A HAUNTED HOUSE

_Biography_

FLUSH

ROGER FRY

_Criticism, etc._

THE COMMON READER

THE SECOND COMMON READER

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

THREE GUINEAS

THE DEATH OF THE MOTH

THE MOMENT AND OTHER ESSAYS

MRS. DALLOWAY

_by_

VIRGINIA WOOLF

[Illustration: HBMC]

_New York_

HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC.

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY

HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC.

RENEWED BY LEONARD WOOLF

_All rights reserved, including

the right to reproduce this book

or portions thereof in any form._

Twenty-third printing

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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, saying 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

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. The

following printer errors have been changed.

=CHANGED FROM TO=

Page 159: “word poetry of herself” “word of poetry herself”

Page 248: “lent a little forward” “leant a little forward”

All other inconsistencies are as in the original.