Title: Mrs. Dalloway
Author: Woolf, Virginia
Language: English
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_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, sayings things she didn’t mean,
blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination. There she
would sit at the head of the table taking infinite pains with some old
buffer who might be useful to Dalloway--they knew the most appalling
bores in Europe--or in came Elizabeth and everything must give way to
_her_. She was at a High School, at the inarticulate stage last time he
was over, a round-eyed, pale-faced girl, with nothing of her mother in
her, a silent stolid creature, who took it all as a matter of course,
let her mother make a fuss of her, and then said “May I go now?” like
a child of four; going off, Clarissa explained, with that mixture of
amusement and pride which Dalloway himself seemed to rouse in her,
to play hockey. And now Elizabeth was “out,” presumably; thought him
an old fogy, laughed at her mother’s friends. Ah well, so be it.
The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of
Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the
passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained--at last!--the
power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,--the power of taking
hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the
age of fifty-three one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself,
every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the
sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much indeed. A whole lifetime
was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the
full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of
meaning; which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so
much less personal. It was impossible that he should ever suffer again
as Clarissa had made him suffer. For hours at a time (pray God that one
might say these things without being overheard!), for hours and days he
never thought of Daisy.

Could it be that he was in love with her then, remembering the misery,
the torture, the extraordinary passion of those days? It was a
different thing altogether--a much pleasanter thing--the truth being,
of course, that now _she_ was in love with _him_. And that perhaps was
the reason why, when the ship actually sailed, he felt an extraordinary
relief, wanted nothing so much as to be alone; was annoyed to find all
her little attentions--cigars, notes, a rug for the voyage--in his
cabin. Every one if they were honest would say the same; one doesn’t
want people after fifty; one doesn’t want to go on telling women they
are pretty; that’s what most men of fifty would say, Peter Walsh
thought, if they were honest.

But then these astonishing accesses of emotion--bursting into tears
this morning, what was all that about? What could Clarissa have thought
of him? thought him a fool presumably, not for the first time. It was
jealousy that was at the bottom of it--jealousy which survives every
other passion of mankind, Peter Walsh thought, holding his pocket-knife
at arm’s length. She had been meeting Major Orde, Daisy said in her
last letter; said it on purpose he knew; said it to make him jealous;
he could see her wrinkling her forehead as she wrote, wondering what
she could say to hurt him; and yet it made no difference; he was
furious! All this pother of coming to England and seeing lawyers wasn’t
to marry her, but to prevent her from marrying anybody else. That was
what tortured him, that was what came over him when he saw Clarissa so
calm, so cold, so intent on her dress or whatever it was; realising
what she might have spared him, what she had reduced him to--a
whimpering, snivelling old ass. But women, he thought, shutting his
pocket-knife, don’t know what passion is. They don’t know the meaning
of it to men. Clarissa was as cold as an icicle. There she would sit
on the sofa by his side, let him take her hand, give him one kiss--Here
he was at the crossing.

A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up
without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly
and with an absence of all human meaning into

    ee um fah um so
    foo swee too eem oo--

the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting
from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube station
from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a
wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up
and down its branches singing

    ee um fah um so
    foo swee too eem oo

and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.

Through all ages--when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp,
through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise,
the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed,
her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has
lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of
years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked,
she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer
days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had
gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and
when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth,
now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her
side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which
the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the
universe would be over.

As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent’s Park Tube station
still the earth seemed green and flowery; still, though it issued from
so rude a mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root
fibres and tangled grasses, still the old bubbling burbling song,
soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and
treasure, streamed away in rivulets over the pavement and all along the
Marylebone Road, and down towards Euston, fertilising, leaving a damp
stain.

Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked with her
lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand exposed
for coppers the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten
million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the
sea flows now, with whom it did not matter--he was a man, oh yes, a man
who had loved her. But the passage of ages had blurred the clarity of
that ancient May day; the bright petalled flowers were hoar and silver
frosted; and she no longer saw, when she implored him (as she did now
quite clearly) “look in my eyes with thy sweet eyes intently,” she
no longer saw brown eyes, black whiskers or sunburnt face but only a
looming shape, a shadow shape, to which, with the bird-like freshness
of the very aged she still twittered “give me your hand and let me
press it gently” (Peter Walsh couldn’t help giving the poor creature a
coin as he stepped into his taxi), “and if some one should see, what
matter they?” she demanded; and her fist clutched at her side, and she
smiled, pocketing her shilling, and all peering inquisitive eyes seemed
blotted out, and the passing generations--the pavement was crowded with
bustling middle-class people--vanished, like leaves, to be trodden
under, to be soaked and steeped and made mould of by that eternal
spring--

    ee um fah um so
    foo swee too eem oo

“Poor old woman,” said Rezia Warren Smith, waiting to cross.

Oh poor old wretch!

Suppose it was a wet night? Suppose one’s father, or somebody who had
known one in better days had happened to pass, and saw one standing
there in the gutter? And where did she sleep at night?

Cheerfully, almost gaily, the invincible thread of sound wound up into
the air like the smoke from a cottage chimney, winding up clean beech
trees and issuing in a tuft of blue smoke among the topmost leaves.
“And if some one should see, what matter they?”

Since she was so unhappy, for weeks and weeks now, Rezia had given
meanings to things that happened, almost felt sometimes that she must
stop people in the street, if they looked good, kind people, just to
say to them “I am unhappy”; and this old woman singing in the street
“if some one should see, what matter they?” made her suddenly quite
sure that everything was going to be right. They were going to Sir
William Bradshaw; she thought his name sounded nice; he would cure
Septimus at once. And then there was a brewer’s cart, and the grey
horses had upright bristles of straw in their tails; there were
newspaper placards. It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.

So they crossed, Mr. and Mrs. Septimus Warren Smith, and was there,
after all, anything to draw attention to them, anything to make a
passer-by suspect here is a young man who carries in him the greatest
message in the world, and is, moreover, the happiest man in the world,
and the most miserable? Perhaps they walked more slowly than other
people, and there was something hesitating, trailing, in the man’s
walk, but what more natural for a clerk, who has not been in the West
End on a weekday at this hour for years, than to keep looking at the
sky, looking at this, that and the other, as if Portland Place were a
room he had come into when the family are away, the chandeliers being
hung in holland bags, and the caretaker, as she lets in long shafts of
dusty light upon deserted, queer-looking arm-chairs, lifting one corner
of the long blinds, explains to the visitors what a wonderful place
it is; how wonderful, but at the same time, he thinks, as he looks at
chairs and tables, how strange.

To look at, he might have been a clerk, but of the better sort; for he
wore brown boots; his hands were educated; so, too, his profile--his
angular, big-nosed, intelligent, sensitive profile; but not his lips
altogether, for they were loose; and his eyes (as eyes tend to be),
eyes merely; hazel, large; so that he was, on the whole, a border case,
neither one thing nor the other, might end with a house at Purley and a
motor car, or continue renting apartments in back streets all his life;
one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all
learnt from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening
after the day’s work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by
letter.

As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go
through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields
and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy,
because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the
fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future
for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister,
had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great
men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their
struggles has become famous.

London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith;
thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which
their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston
Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face
in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted,
hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have
said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door
in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant:--It has flowered;
flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage,
laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the
Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve
himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the
Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.

Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him
a taste of _Antony and Cleopatra_ and the rest; lent him books; wrote
him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once
in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a red gold flame infinitely
ethereal and insubstantial over Miss Pole; _Antony and Cleopatra_; and
the Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably
wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject,
she corrected in red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking in a
green dress in a square. “It has flowered,” the gardener might have
said, had he opened the door; had he come in, that is to say, any
night about this time, and found him writing; found him tearing up his
writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o’clock in the
morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and
fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, _The
History of Civilisation_, and Bernard Shaw.

Something was up, Mr. Brewer knew; Mr. Brewer, managing clerk at
Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents;
something was up, he thought, and, being paternal with his young men,
and thinking very highly of Smith’s abilities, and prophesying that he
would, in ten or fifteen years, succeed to the leather arm-chair in the
inner room under the skylight with the deed-boxes round him, “if he
keeps his health,” said Mr. Brewer, and that was the danger--he looked
weakly; advised football, invited him to supper and was seeing his way
to consider recommending a rise of salary, when something happened
which threw out many of Mr. Brewer’s calculations, took away his ablest
young fellows, and eventually, so prying and insidious were the fingers
of the European War, smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole
in the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook’s nerves at Mr.
Brewer’s establishment at Muswell Hill.

Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save
an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and
Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the
trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football
was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he
drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by
name. It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying
a paper screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and then, at
the old dog’s ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire,
raising a paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. They had to be
together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with
each other. But when Evans (Rezia who had only seen him once called
him “a quiet man,” a sturdy red-haired man, undemonstrative in the
company of women), when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in
Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here
was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very
little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He
had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had
won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive. He was
right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with
indifference. When peace came he was in Milan, billeted in the house of
an innkeeper with a courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the
open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he
became engaged one evening when the panic was on him--that he could not
feel.

For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried,
he had, especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of
fear. He could not feel. As he opened the door of the room where the
Italian girls sat making hats, he could see them; could hear them;
they were rubbing wires among coloured beads in saucers; they were
turning buckram shapes this way and that; the table was all strewn
with feathers, spangles, silks, ribbons; scissors were rapping on the
table; but something failed him; he could not feel. Still, scissors
rapping, girls laughing, hats being made protected him; he was assured
of safety; he had a refuge. But he could not sit there all night. There
were moments of waking in the early morning. The bed was falling; he
was falling. Oh for the scissors and the lamplight and the buckram
shapes! He asked Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two, the
gay, the frivolous, with those little artist’s fingers that she would
hold up and say “It is all in them.” Silk, feathers, what not were
alive to them.

“It is the hat that matters most,” she would say, when they walked
out together. Every hat that passed, she would examine; and the cloak
and the dress and the way the woman held herself. Ill-dressing,
over-dressing she stigmatised, not savagely, rather with impatient
movements of the hands, like those of a painter who puts from him
some obvious well-meant glaring imposture; and then, generously, but
always critically, she would welcome a shop-girl who had turned her
little bit of stuff gallantly, or praise, wholly, with enthusiastic and
professional understanding, a French lady descending from her carriage,
in chinchilla, robes, pearls.

“Beautiful!” she would murmur, nudging Septimus, that he might see.
But beauty was behind a pane of glass. Even taste (Rezia liked ices,
chocolates, sweet things) had no relish to him. He put down his cup
on the little marble table. He looked at people outside; happy they
seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing,
squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. In
the tea-shop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling
fear came over him--he could not feel. He could reason; he could read,
Dante for example, quite easily (“Septimus, do put down your book,”
said Rezia, gently shutting the _Inferno_), he could add up his bill;
his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then--that he
could not feel.

“The English are so silent,” Rezia said. She liked it, she said. She
respected these Englishmen, and wanted to see London, and the English
horses, and the tailor-made suits, and could remember hearing how
wonderful the shops were, from an Aunt who had married and lived in
Soho.

It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the
train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the
world itself is without meaning.

At the office they advanced him to a post of considerable
responsibility. They were proud of him; he had won crosses. “You have
done your duty; it is up to us--” began Mr. Brewer; and could not
finish, so pleasurable was his emotion. They took admirable lodgings
off the Tottenham Court Road.

Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business of the
intoxication of language--_Antony and Cleopatra_--had shrivelled
utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity--the putting on of clothes,
the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly!
This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of
words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise,
to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus
(translated) the same. There Rezia sat at the table trimming hats. She
trimmed hats for Mrs. Filmer’s friends; she trimmed hats by the hour.
She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned, under water, he
thought.

“The English are so serious,” she would say, putting her arms round
Septimus, her cheek against his.

Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business
of copulation was filth to him before the end. But, Rezia said, she
must have children. They had been married five years.

They went to the Tower together; to the Victoria and Albert Museum;
stood in the crowd to see the King open Parliament. And there were the
shops--hat shops, dress shops, shops with leather bags in the window,
where she would stand staring. But she must have a boy.

She must have a son like Septimus, she said. But nobody could be
like Septimus; so gentle; so serious; so clever. Could she not read
Shakespeare too? Was Shakespeare a difficult author? she asked.

One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate
suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no
lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this
way, now that.

He watched her snip, shape, as one watches a bird hop, flit in the
grass, without daring to move a finger. For the truth is (let her
ignore it) that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor
charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming
into the wilderness. They desert the fallen. They are plastered
over with grimaces. There was Brewer at the office, with his waxed
moustache, coral tie-pin, white slip, and pleasurable emotions--all
coldness and clamminess within,--his geraniums ruined in the War--his
cook’s nerves destroyed; or Amelia What’shername, handing round cups
of tea punctually at five--a leering, sneering obscene little harpy;
and the Toms and Berties in their starched shirt fronts oozing thick
drops of vice. They never saw him drawing pictures of them naked at
their antics in his notebook. In the street, vans roared past him;
brutality blared out on placards; men were trapped in mines; women
burnt alive; and once a maimed file of lunatics being exercised or
displayed for the diversion of the populace (who laughed aloud), ambled
and nodded and grinned past him, in the Tottenham Court Road, each half
apologetically, yet triumphantly, inflicting his hopeless woe. And
would _he_ go mad?

At tea Rezia told him that Mrs. Filmer’s daughter was expecting a baby.
_She_ could not grow old and have no children! She was very lonely, she
was very unhappy! She cried for the first time since they were married.
Far away he heard her sobbing; he heard it accurately, he noticed it
distinctly; he compared it to a piston thumping. But he felt nothing.

His wife was crying, and he felt nothing; only each time she sobbed in
this profound, this silent, this hopeless way, he descended another
step into the pit.

At last, with a melodramatic gesture which he assumed mechanically and
with complete consciousness of its insincerity, he dropped his head
on his hands. Now he had surrendered; now other people must help him.
People must be sent for. He gave in.

Nothing could rouse him. Rezia put him to bed. She sent for a
doctor--Mrs. Filmer’s Dr. Holmes. Dr. Holmes examined him. There was
nothing whatever the matter, said Dr. Holmes. Oh, what a relief! What
a kind man, what a good man! thought Rezia. When he felt like that he
went to the Music Hall, said Dr. Holmes. He took a day off with his
wife and played golf. Why not try two tabloids of bromide dissolved
in a glass of water at bedtime? These old Bloomsbury houses, said
Dr. Holmes, tapping the wall, are often full of very fine panelling,
which the landlords have the folly to paper over. Only the other day,
visiting a patient, Sir Somebody Something in Bedford Square--

So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the sin
for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not
feel. He had not cared when Evans was killed; that was worst; but all
the other crimes raised their heads and shook their fingers and jeered
and sneered over the rail of the bed in the early hours of the morning
at the prostrate body which lay realising its degradation; how he had
married his wife without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her;
outraged Miss Isabel Pole, and was so pocked and marked with vice that
women shuddered when they saw him in the street. The verdict of human
nature on such a wretch was death.

Dr. Holmes came again. Large, fresh coloured, handsome, flicking his
boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside--headaches,
sleeplessness, fears, dreams--nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said.
If Dr. Holmes found himself even half a pound below eleven stone six,
he asked his wife for another plate of porridge at breakfast. (Rezia
would learn to cook porridge.) But, he continued, health is largely a
matter in our own control. Throw yourself into outside interests; take
up some hobby. He opened Shakespeare--_Antony and Cleopatra_; pushed
Shakespeare aside. Some hobby, said Dr. Holmes, for did he not owe his
own excellent health (and he worked as hard as any man in London) to
the fact that he could always switch off from his patients on to old
furniture? And what a very pretty comb, if he might say so, Mrs. Warren
Smith was wearing!

When the damned fool came again, Septimus refused to see him. Did he
indeed? said Dr. Holmes, smiling agreeably. Really he had to give that
charming little lady, Mrs. Smith, a friendly push before he could get
past her into her husband’s bedroom.

“So you’re in a funk,” he said agreeably, sitting down by his patient’s
side. He had actually talked of killing himself to his wife, quite a
girl, a foreigner, wasn’t she? Didn’t that give her a very odd idea
of English husbands? Didn’t one owe perhaps a duty to one’s wife?
Wouldn’t it be better to do something instead of lying in bed? For he
had had forty years’ experience behind him; and Septimus could take Dr.
Holmes’s word for it--there was nothing whatever the matter with him.
And next time Dr. Holmes came he hoped to find Smith out of bed and not
making that charming little lady his wife anxious about him.

Human nature, in short, was on him--the repulsive brute, with the
blood-red nostrils. Holmes was on him. Dr. Holmes came quite regularly
every day. Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a postcard,
human nature is on you. Holmes is on you. Their only chance was to
escape, without letting Holmes know; to Italy--anywhere, anywhere, away
from Dr. Holmes.

But Rezia could not understand him. Dr. Holmes was such a kind man. He
was so interested in Septimus. He only wanted to help them, he said.
He had four little children and he had asked her to tea, she told
Septimus.

So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself,
kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their
sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how
does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of
blood,--by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise
his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted,
as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an
isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never
know. Holmes had won of course; the brute with the red nostrils had
won. But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying
on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited
regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.

It was at that moment (Rezia gone shopping) that the great revelation
took place. A voice spoke from behind the screen. Evans was speaking.
The dead were with him.

“Evans, Evans!” he cried.

Mr. Smith was talking aloud to himself, Agnes the servant girl cried to
Mrs. Filmer in the kitchen. “Evans, Evans,” he had said as she brought
in the tray. She jumped, she did. She scuttled downstairs.

And Rezia came in, with her flowers, and walked across the room, and
put the roses in a vase, upon which the sun struck directly, and it
went laughing, leaping round the room.

She had had to buy the roses, Rezia said, from a poor man in the
street. But they were almost dead already, she said, arranging the
roses.

So there was a man outside; Evans presumably; and the roses, which
Rezia said were half dead, had been picked by him in the fields
of Greece. “Communication is health; communication is happiness,
communication--” he muttered.

“What are you saying, Septimus?” Rezia asked, wild with terror, for he
was talking to himself.

She sent Agnes running for Dr. Holmes. Her husband, she said, was mad.
He scarcely knew her.

“You brute! You brute!” cried Septimus, seeing human nature, that is
Dr. Holmes, enter the room.

“Now what’s all this about?” said Dr. Holmes in the most amiable way in
the world. “Talking nonsense to frighten your wife?” But he would give
him something to make him sleep. And if they were rich people, said Dr.
Holmes, looking ironically round the room, by all means let them go
to Harley Street; if they had no confidence in him, said Dr. Holmes,
looking not quite so kind.

It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben; whose stroke was
wafted over the northern part of London; blent with that of other
clocks, mixed in a thin ethereal way with the clouds and wisps of
smoke, and died up there among the seagulls--twelve o’clock struck
as Clarissa Dalloway laid her green dress on her bed, and the Warren
Smiths walked down Harley Street. Twelve was the hour of their
appointment. Probably, Rezia thought, that was Sir William Bradshaw’s
house with the grey motor car in front of it. The leaden circles
dissolved in the air.

Indeed it was--Sir William Bradshaw’s motor car; low, powerful, grey
with plain initials interlocked on the panel, as if the pomps of
heraldry were incongruous, this man being the ghostly helper, the
priest of science; and, as the motor car was grey, so to match its
sober suavity, grey furs, silver grey rugs were heaped in it, to
keep her ladyship warm while she waited. For often Sir William would
travel sixty miles or more down into the country to visit the rich,
the afflicted, who could afford the very large fee which Sir William
very properly charged for his advice. Her ladyship waited with the
rugs about her knees an hour or more, leaning back, thinking sometimes
of the patient, sometimes, excusably, of the wall of gold, mounting
minute by minute while she waited; the wall of gold that was mounting
between them and all shifts and anxieties (she had borne them bravely;
they had had their struggles) until she felt wedged on a calm ocean,
where only spice winds blow; respected, admired, envied, with scarcely
anything left to wish for, though she regretted her stoutness; large
dinner-parties every Thursday night to the profession; an occasional
bazaar to be opened; Royalty greeted; too little time, alas, with her
husband, whose work grew and grew; a boy doing well at Eton; she would
have liked a daughter too; interests she had, however, in plenty; child
welfare; the after-care of the epileptic, and photography, so that
if there was a church building, or a church decaying, she bribed the
sexton, got the key and took photographs, which were scarcely to be
distinguished from the work of professionals, while she waited.

Sir William himself was no longer young. He had worked very hard; he
had won his position by sheer ability (being the son of a shopkeeper);
loved his profession; made a fine figurehead at ceremonies and spoke
well--all of which had by the time he was knighted given him a heavy
look, a weary look (the stream of patients being so incessant, the
responsibilities and privileges of his profession so onerous), which
weariness, together with his grey hairs, increased the extraordinary
distinction of his presence and gave him the reputation (of the utmost
importance in dealing with nerve cases) not merely of lightning skill,
and almost infallible accuracy in diagnosis but of sympathy; tact;
understanding of the human soul. He could see the first moment they
came into the room (the Warren Smiths they were called); he was certain
directly he saw the man; it was a case of extreme gravity. It was a
case of complete breakdown--complete physical and nervous breakdown,
with every symptom in an advanced stage, he ascertained in two or three
minutes (writing answers to questions, murmured discreetly, on a pink
card).

How long had Dr. Holmes been attending him?

Six weeks.

Prescribed a little bromide? Said there was nothing the matter? Ah yes
(those general practitioners! thought Sir William. It took half his
time to undo their blunders. Some were irreparable).

“You served with great distinction in the War?”

The patient repeated the word “war” interrogatively.

He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious
symptom, to be noted on the card.

“The War?” the patient asked. The European War--that little shindy of
schoolboys with gunpowder? Had he served with distinction? He really
forgot. In the War itself he had failed.

“Yes, he served with the greatest distinction,” Rezia assured the
doctor; “he was promoted.”

“And they have the very highest opinion of you at your office?” Sir
William murmured, glancing at Mr. Brewer’s very generously worded
letter. “So that you have nothing to worry you, no financial anxiety,
nothing?”

He had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by
human nature.

“I have--I have,” he began, “committed a crime--”

“He has done nothing wrong whatever,” Rezia assured the doctor. If Mr.
Smith would wait, said Sir William, he would speak to Mrs. Smith in
the next room. Her husband was very seriously ill, Sir William said.
Did he threaten to kill himself?

Oh, he did, she cried. But he did not mean it, she said. Of course not.
It was merely a question of rest, said Sir William; of rest, rest,
rest; a long rest in bed. There was a delightful home down in the
country where her husband would be perfectly looked after. Away from
her? she asked. Unfortunately, yes; the people we care for most are not
good for us when we are ill. But he was not mad, was he? Sir William
said he never spoke of “madness”; he called it not having a sense of
proportion. But her husband did not like doctors. He would refuse to go
there. Shortly and kindly Sir William explained to her the state of the
case. He had threatened to kill himself. There was no alternative. It
was a question of law. He would lie in bed in a beautiful house in the
country. The nurses were admirable. Sir William would visit him once a
week. If Mrs. Warren Smith was quite sure she had no more questions to
ask--he never hurried his patients--they would return to her husband.
She had nothing more to ask--not of Sir William.

So they returned to the most exalted of mankind; the criminal who
faced his judges; the victim exposed on the heights; the fugitive; the
drowned sailor; the poet of the immortal ode; the Lord who had gone
from life to death; to Septimus Warren Smith, who sat in the arm-chair
under the skylight staring at a photograph of Lady Bradshaw in Court
dress, muttering messages about beauty.

“We have had our little talk,” said Sir William.

“He says you are very, very ill,” Rezia cried.

“We have been arranging that you should go into a home,” said Sir
William.

“One of Holmes’s homes?” sneered Septimus.

The fellow made a distasteful impression. For there was in Sir William,
whose father had been a tradesman, a natural respect for breeding and
clothing, which shabbiness nettled; again, more profoundly, there was
in Sir William, who had never had time for reading, a grudge, deeply
buried, against cultivated people who came into his room and intimated
that doctors, whose profession is a constant strain upon all the
highest faculties, are not educated men.

“One of _my_ homes, Mr. Warren Smith,” he said, “where we will teach
you to rest.”

And there was just one thing more.

He was quite certain that when Mr. Warren Smith was well he was the
last man in the world to frighten his wife. But he had talked of
killing himself.

“We all have our moments of depression,” said Sir William.

Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you.
Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly
screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied.
Human nature is remorseless.

“Impulses came upon him sometimes?” Sir William asked, with his pencil
on a pink card.

That was his own affair, said Septimus.

“Nobody lives for himself alone,” said Sir William, glancing at the
photograph of his wife in Court dress.

“And you have a brilliant career before you,” said Sir William. There
was Mr. Brewer’s letter on the table. “An exceptionally brilliant
career.”

But if he confessed? If he communicated? Would they let him off then,
his torturers?

“I--I--” he stammered.

But what was his crime? He could not remember it.

“Yes?” Sir William encouraged him. (But it was growing late.)

Love, trees, there is no crime--what was his message?

He could not remember it.

“I--I--” Septimus stammered.

“Try to think as little about yourself as possible,” said Sir William
kindly. Really, he was not fit to be about.

Was there anything else they wished to ask him? Sir William would make
all arrangements (he murmured to Rezia) and he would let her know
between five and six that evening he murmured.

“Trust everything to me,” he said, and dismissed them.

Never, never had Rezia felt such agony in her life! She had asked for
help and been deserted! He had failed them! Sir William Bradshaw was
not a nice man.

The upkeep of that motor car alone must cost him quite a lot, said
Septimus, when they got out into the street.

She clung to his arm. They had been deserted.

But what more did she want?

To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in this
exacting science which has to do with what, after all, we know nothing
about--the nervous system, the human brain--a doctor loses his sense
of proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health we must have; and health
is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is
Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and
threatens, as they often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion;
order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without
friends, without books, without messages; six months’ rest; until a man
who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve.

Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess, was acquired
by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon, begetting one
son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who caught salmon herself
and took photographs scarcely to be distinguished from the work
of professionals. Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only
prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics,
forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the
unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of
proportion--his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women
(she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home
with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him, his
subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients
felt for him the keenest gratitude for insisting that these prophetic
Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the
advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered; Sir
William with his thirty years’ experience of these kinds of cases, and
his infallible instinct, this is madness, this sense; in fact, his
sense of proportion.

But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess
even now engaged--in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of
Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the
devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own--is even
now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up
in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and
she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose,
adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde
Park Corner on a tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white
and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories
and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites out of her
way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing
on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the
light of their own. This lady too (Rezia Warren Smith divined it) had
her dwelling in Sir William’s heart, though concealed, as she mostly
is, under some plausible disguise; some venerable name; love, duty,
self sacrifice. How he would work--how toil to raise funds, propagate
reforms, initiate institutions! But conversion, fastidious Goddess,
loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human
will. For example, Lady Bradshaw. Fifteen years ago she had gone under.
It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene,
no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his.
Sweet was her smile, swift her submission; dinner in Harley Street,
numbering eight or nine courses, feeding ten or fifteen guests of the
professional classes, was smooth and urbane. Only as the evening wore
on a very slight dulness, or uneasiness perhaps, a nervous twitch,
fumble, stumble and confusion indicated, what it was really painful to
believe--that the poor lady lied. Once, long ago, she had caught salmon
freely: now, quick to minister to the craving which lit her husband’s
eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she cramped, squeezed, pared,
pruned, drew back, peeped through; so that without knowing precisely
what made the evening disagreeable, and caused this pressure on the
top of the head (which might well be imputed to the professional
conversation, or the fatigue of a great doctor whose life, Lady
Bradshaw said, “is not his own but his patients’”) disagreeable it
was: so that guests, when the clock struck ten, breathed in the air of
Harley Street even with rapture; which relief, however, was denied to
his patients.

There in the grey room, with the pictures on the wall, and the valuable
furniture, under the ground glass skylight, they learnt the extent of
their transgressions; huddled up in arm-chairs, they watched him go
through, for their benefit, a curious exercise with the arms, which he
shot out, brought sharply back to his hip, to prove (if the patient
was obstinate) that Sir William was master of his own actions, which
the patient was not. There some weakly broke down; sobbed, submitted;
others, inspired by Heaven knows what intemperate madness, called Sir
William to his face a damnable humbug; questioned, even more impiously,
life itself. Why live? they demanded. Sir William replied that life
was good. Certainly Lady Bradshaw in ostrich feathers hung over the
mantelpiece, and as for his income it was quite twelve thousand a
year. But to us, they protested, life has given no such bounty. He
acquiesced. They lacked a sense of proportion. And perhaps, after all,
there is no God? He shrugged his shoulders. In short, this living or
not living is an affair of our own? But there they were mistaken. Sir
William had a friend in Surrey where they taught, what Sir William
frankly admitted was a difficult art--a sense of proportion. There
were, moreover, family affection; honour; courage; and a brilliant
career. All of these had in Sir William a resolute champion. If they
failed him, he had to support police and the good of society, which,
he remarked very quietly, would take care, down in Surrey, that these
unsocial impulses, bred more than anything by the lack of good blood,
were held in control. And then stole out from her hiding-place and
mounted her throne that Goddess whose lust is to override opposition,
to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself.
Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress
of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up. It
was this combination of decision and humanity that endeared Sir William
so greatly to the relations of his victims.

But Rezia Warren Smith cried, walking down Harley Street, that she did
not like that man.

Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of
Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld
authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense
of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a
commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced,
genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and
Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one.

Looking up, it appeared that each letter of their names stood for
one of the hours; subconsciously one was grateful to Rigby and
Lowndes for giving one time ratified by Greenwich; and this gratitude
(so Hugh Whitbread ruminated, dallying there in front of the shop
window), naturally took the form later of buying off Rigby and Lowndes
socks or shoes. So he ruminated. It was his habit. He did not go
deeply. He brushed surfaces; the dead languages, the living, life in
Constantinople, Paris, Rome; riding, shooting, tennis, it had been
once. The malicious asserted that he now kept guard at Buckingham
Palace, dressed in silk stockings and knee-breeches, over what nobody
knew. But he did it extremely efficiently. He had been afloat on the
cream of English society for fifty-five years. He had known Prime
Ministers. His affections were understood to be deep. And if it were
true that he had not taken part in any of the great movements of the
time or held important office, one or two humble reforms stood to
his credit; an improvement in public shelters was one; the protection
of owls in Norfolk another; servant girls had reason to be grateful
to him; and his name at the end of letters to the _Times_, asking for
funds, appealing to the public to protect, to preserve, to clear up
litter, to abate smoke, and stamp out immorality in parks, commanded
respect.

A magnificent figure he cut too, pausing for a moment (as the sound of
the half hour died away) to look critically, magisterially, at socks
and shoes; impeccable, substantial, as if he beheld the world from a
certain eminence, and dressed to match; but realised the obligations
which size, wealth, health, entail, and observed punctiliously even
when not absolutely necessary, little courtesies, old-fashioned
ceremonies which gave a quality to his manner, something to imitate,
something to remember him by, for he would never lunch, for example,
with Lady Bruton, whom he had known these twenty years, without
bringing her in his outstretched hand a bunch of carnations and asking
Miss Brush, Lady Bruton’s secretary, after her brother in South Africa,
which, for some reason, Miss Brush, deficient though she was in every
attribute of female charm, so much resented that she said “Thank you,
he’s doing very well in South Africa,” when, for half a dozen years, he
had been doing badly in Portsmouth.

Lady Bruton herself preferred Richard Dalloway, who arrived at the next
moment. Indeed they met on the doorstep.

Lady Bruton preferred Richard Dalloway of course. He was made of
much finer material. But she wouldn’t let them run down her poor
dear Hugh. She could never forget his kindness--he had been really
remarkably kind--she forgot precisely upon what occasion. But he
had been--remarkably kind. Anyhow, the difference between one man
and another does not amount to much. She had never seen the sense
of cutting people up, as Clarissa Dalloway did--cutting them up and
sticking them together again; not at any rate when one was sixty-two.
She took Hugh’s carnations with her angular grim smile. There was
nobody else coming, she said. She had got them there on false
pretences, to help her out of a difficulty--

“But let us eat first,” she said.

And so there began a soundless and exquisite passing to and fro
through swing doors of aproned white-capped maids, handmaidens not
of necessity, but adepts in a mystery or grand deception practised
by hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when, with a wave of
the hand, the traffic ceases, and there rises instead this profound
illusion in the first place about the food--how it is not paid for; and
then that the table spreads itself voluntarily with glass and silver,
little mats, saucers of red fruit; films of brown cream mask turbot; in
casseroles severed chickens swim; coloured, undomestic, the fire burns;
and with the wine and the coffee (not paid for) rise jocund visions
before musing eyes; gently speculative eyes; eyes to whom life appears
musical, mysterious; eyes now kindled to observe genially the beauty
of the red carnations which Lady Bruton (whose movements were always
angular) had laid beside her plate, so that Hugh Whitbread, feeling at
peace with the entire universe and at the same time completely sure of
his standing, said, resting his fork,

“Wouldn’t they look charming against your lace?”

Miss Brush resented this familiarity intensely. She thought him an
underbred fellow. She made Lady Bruton laugh.

Lady Bruton raised the carnations, holding them rather stiffly with
much the same attitude with which the General held the scroll in the
picture behind her; she remained fixed, tranced. Which was she now,
the General’s great-grand-daughter? great-great-grand-daughter? Richard
Dalloway asked himself. Sir Roderick, Sir Miles, Sir Talbot--that was
it. It was remarkable how in that family the likeness persisted in the
women. She should have been a general of dragoons herself. And Richard
would have served under her, cheerfully; he had the greatest respect
for her; he cherished these romantic views about well-set-up old women
of pedigree, and would have liked, in his good-humoured way, to bring
some young hot-heads of his acquaintance to lunch with her; as if a
type like hers could be bred of amiable tea-drinking enthusiasts! He
knew her country. He knew her people. There was a vine, still bearing,
which either Lovelace or Herrick--she never read a word of poetry
herself, but so the story ran--had sat under. Better wait to put before
them the question that bothered her (about making an appeal to the
public; if so, in what terms and so on), better wait until they have
had their coffee, Lady Bruton thought; and so laid the carnations down
beside her plate.

“How’s Clarissa?” she asked abruptly.

Clarissa always said that Lady Bruton did not like her. Indeed, Lady
Bruton had the reputation of being more interested in politics than
people; of talking like a man; of having had a finger in some notorious
intrigue of the eighties, which was now beginning to be mentioned
in memoirs. Certainly there was an alcove in her drawing-room, and
a table in that alcove, and a photograph upon that table of General
Sir Talbot Moore, now deceased, who had written there (one evening in
the eighties) in Lady Bruton’s presence, with her cognisance, perhaps
advice, a telegram ordering the British troops to advance upon an
historical occasion. (She kept the pen and told the story.) Thus, when
she said in her offhand way “How’s Clarissa?” husbands had difficulty
in persuading their wives and indeed, however devoted, were secretly
doubtful themselves, of her interest in women who often got in their
husbands’ way, prevented them from accepting posts abroad, and had to
be taken to the seaside in the middle of the session to recover from
influenza. Nevertheless her inquiry, “How’s Clarissa?” was known by
women infallibly, to be a signal from a well-wisher, from an almost
silent companion, whose utterances (half a dozen perhaps in the course
of a lifetime) signified recognition of some feminine comradeship which
went beneath masculine lunch parties and united Lady Bruton and Mrs.
Dalloway, who seldom met, and appeared when they did meet indifferent
and even hostile, in a singular bond.

“I met Clarissa in the Park this morning,” said Hugh Whitbread, diving
into the casserole, anxious to pay himself this little tribute, for he
had only to come to London and he met everybody at once; but greedy,
one of the greediest men she had ever known, Milly Brush thought, who
observed men with unflinching rectitude, and was capable of everlasting
devotion, to her own sex in particular, being knobbed, scraped,
angular, and entirely without feminine charm.

“D’you know who’s in town?” said Lady Bruton suddenly bethinking her.
“Our old friend, Peter Walsh.”

They all smiled. Peter Walsh! And Mr. Dalloway was genuinely glad,
Milly Brush thought; and Mr. Whitbread thought only of his chicken.

Peter Walsh! All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and Richard
Dalloway, remembered the same thing--how passionately Peter had been
in love; been rejected; gone to India; come a cropper; made a mess of
things; and Richard Dalloway had a very great liking for the dear old
fellow too. Milly Brush saw that; saw a depth in the brown of his eyes;
saw him hesitate; consider; which interested her, as Mr. Dalloway
always interested her, for what was he thinking, she wondered, about
Peter Walsh?

That Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa; that he would go back
directly after lunch and find Clarissa; that he would tell her, in so
many words, that he loved her. Yes, he would say that.

Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences;
and Mr. Dalloway was always so dependable; such a gentleman too. Now,
being forty, Lady Bruton had only to nod, or turn her head a little
abruptly, and Milly Brush took the signal, however deeply she might
be sunk in these reflections of a detached spirit, of an uncorrupted
soul whom life could not bamboozle, because life had not offered her
a trinket of the slightest value; not a curl, smile, lip, cheek,
nose; nothing whatever; Lady Bruton had only to nod, and Perkins was
instructed to quicken the coffee.

“Yes; Peter Walsh has come back,” said Lady Bruton. It was vaguely
flattering to them all. He had come back, battered, unsuccessful, to
their secure shores. But to help him, they reflected, was impossible;
there was some flaw in his character. Hugh Whitbread said one might
of course mention his name to So-and-so. He wrinkled lugubriously,
consequentially, at the thought of the letters he would write to the
heads of Government offices about “my old friend, Peter Walsh,” and
so on. But it wouldn’t lead to anything--not to anything permanent,
because of his character.

“In trouble with some woman,” said Lady Bruton. They had all guessed
that _that_ was at the bottom of it.

“However,” said Lady Bruton, anxious to leave the subject, “we shall
hear the whole story from Peter himself.”

(The coffee was very slow in coming.)

“The address?” murmured Hugh Whitbread; and there was at once a ripple
in the grey tide of service which washed round Lady Bruton day in, day
out, collecting, intercepting, enveloping her in a fine tissue which
broke concussions, mitigated interruptions, and spread round the house
in Brook Street a fine net where things lodged and were picked out
accurately, instantly, by grey-haired Perkins, who had been with Lady
Bruton these thirty years and now wrote down the address; handed it to
Mr. Whitbread, who took out his pocket-book, raised his eyebrows, and
slipping it in among documents of the highest importance, said that he
would get Evelyn to ask him to lunch.

(They were waiting to bring the coffee until Mr. Whitbread had
finished.)

Hugh was very slow, Lady Bruton thought. He was getting fat, she
noticed. Richard always kept himself in the pink of condition. She
was getting impatient; the whole of her being was setting positively,
undeniably, domineeringly brushing aside all this unnecessary trifling
(Peter Walsh and his affairs) upon that subject which engaged her
attention, and not merely her attention, but that fibre which was
the ramrod of her soul, that essential part of her without which
Millicent Bruton would not have been Millicent Bruton; that project
for emigrating young people of both sexes born of respectable parents
and setting them up with a fair prospect of doing well in Canada. She
exaggerated. She had perhaps lost her sense of proportion. Emigration
was not to others the obvious remedy, the sublime conception. It was
not to them (not to Hugh, or Richard, or even to devoted Miss Brush)
the liberator of the pent egotism, which a strong martial woman, well
nourished, well descended, of direct impulses, downright feelings, and
little introspective power (broad and simple--why could not every one
be broad and simple? she asked) feels rise within her, once youth is
past, and must eject upon some object--it may be Emigration, it may be
Emancipation; but whatever it be, this object round which the essence
of her soul is daily secreted, becomes inevitably prismatic, lustrous,
half looking-glass, half precious stone; now carefully hidden in case
people should sneer at it; now proudly displayed. Emigration had
become, in short, largely Lady Bruton.

But she had to write. And one letter to the _Times_, she used to say
to Miss Brush, cost her more than to organise an expedition to South
Africa (which she had done in the war). After a morning’s battle
beginning, tearing up, beginning again, she used to feel the futility
of her own womanhood as she felt it on no other occasion, and would
turn gratefully to the thought of Hugh Whitbread who possessed--no one
could doubt it--the art of writing letters to the _Times_.

A being so differently constituted from herself, with such a command
of language; able to put things as editors like them put; had passions
which one could not call simply greed. Lady Bruton often suspended
judgement upon men in deference to the mysterious accord in which
they, but no woman, stood to the laws of the universe; knew how to put
things; knew what was said; so that if Richard advised her, and Hugh
wrote for her, she was sure of being somehow right. So she let Hugh eat
his soufflé; asked after poor Evelyn; waited until they were smoking,
and then said,

“Milly, would you fetch the papers?”

And Miss Brush went out, came back; laid papers on the table; and Hugh
produced his fountain pen; his silver fountain pen, which had done
twenty years’ service, he said, unscrewing the cap. It was still in
perfect order; he had shown it to the makers; there was no reason,
they said, why it should ever wear out; which was somehow to Hugh’s
credit, and to the credit of the sentiments which his pen expressed (so
Richard Dalloway felt) as Hugh began carefully writing capital letters
with rings round them in the margin, and thus marvellously reduced
Lady Bruton’s tangles to sense, to grammar such as the editor of the
_Times_, Lady Bruton felt, watching the marvellous transformation,
must respect. Hugh was slow. Hugh was pertinacious. Richard said one
must take risks. Hugh proposed modifications in deference to people’s
feelings, which, he said rather tartly when Richard laughed, “had to
be considered,” and read out “how, therefore, we are of opinion that
the times are ripe ... the superfluous youth of our ever-increasing
population ... what we owe to the dead ...” which Richard thought
all stuffing and bunkum, but no harm in it, of course, and Hugh went
on drafting sentiments in alphabetical order of the highest nobility,
brushing the cigar ash from his waistcoat, and summing up now and then
the progress they had made until, finally, he read out the draft of a
letter which Lady Bruton felt certain was a masterpiece. Could her own
meaning sound like that?

Hugh could not guarantee that the editor would put it in; but he would
be meeting somebody at luncheon.

Whereupon Lady Bruton, who seldom did a graceful thing, stuffed all
Hugh’s carnations into the front of her dress, and flinging her hands
out called him “My Prime Minister!” What she would have done without
them both she did not know. They rose. And Richard Dalloway strolled
off as usual to have a look at the General’s portrait, because he
meant, whenever he had a moment of leisure, to write a history of Lady
Bruton’s family.

And Millicent Bruton was very proud of her family. But they could
wait, they could wait, she said, looking at the picture; meaning that
her family, of military men, administrators, admirals, had been men
of action, who had done their duty; and Richard’s first duty was to
his country, but it was a fine face, she said; and all the papers were
ready for Richard down at Aldmixton whenever the time came; the Labour
Government she meant. “Ah, the news from India!” she cried.

And then, as they stood in the hall taking yellow gloves from the bowl
on the malachite table and Hugh was offering Miss Brush with quite
unnecessary courtesy some discarded ticket or other compliment, which
she loathed from the depths of her heart and blushed brick red, Richard
turned to Lady Bruton, with his hat in his hand, and said,

“We shall see you at our party to-night?” whereupon Lady Bruton resumed
the magnificence which letter-writing had shattered. She might come; or
she might not come. Clarissa had wonderful energy. Parties terrified
Lady Bruton. But then, she was getting old. So she intimated, standing
at her doorway; handsome; very erect; while her chow stretched behind
her, and Miss Brush disappeared into the background with her hands full
of papers.

And Lady Bruton went ponderously, majestically, up to her room, lay,
one arm extended, on the sofa. She sighed, she snored, not that she
was asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of
clover in the sunshine this hot June day, with the bees going round
and about and the yellow butterflies. Always she went back to those
fields down in Devonshire, where she had jumped the brooks on Patty,
her pony, with Mortimer and Tom, her brothers. And there were the dogs;
there were the rats; there were her father and mother on the lawn
under the trees, with the tea-things out, and the beds of dahlias, the
hollyhocks, the pampas grass; and they, little wretches, always up to
some mischief! stealing back through the shrubbery, so as not to be
seen, all bedraggled from some roguery. What old nurse used to say
about her frocks!

Ah dear, she remembered--it was Wednesday in Brook Street. Those kind
good fellows, Richard Dalloway, Hugh Whitbread, had gone this hot day
through the streets whose growl came up to her lying on the sofa. Power
was hers, position, income. She had lived in the forefront of her time.
She had had good friends; known the ablest men of her day. Murmuring
London flowed up to her, and her hand, lying on the sofa back, curled
upon some imaginary baton such as her grandfathers might have held,
holding which she seemed, drowsy and heavy, to be commanding battalions
marching to Canada, and those good fellows walking across London, that
territory of theirs, that little bit of carpet, Mayfair.

And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a
thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and
stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if
one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by
a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of
bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s
thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she
slept.

And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread hesitated at the corner of
Conduit Street at the very moment that Millicent Bruton, lying on the
sofa, let the thread snap; snored. Contrary winds buffeted at the
street corner. They looked in at a shop window; they did not wish to
buy or to talk but to part, only with contrary winds buffeting the
street corner, with some sort of lapse in the tides of the body, two
forces meeting in a swirl, morning and afternoon, they paused. Some
newspaper placard went up in the air, gallantly, like a kite at first,
then paused, swooped, fluttered; and a lady’s veil hung. Yellow
awnings trembled. The speed of the morning traffic slackened, and
single carts rattled carelessly down half-empty streets. In Norfolk,
of which Richard Dalloway was half thinking, a soft warm wind blew
back the petals; confused the waters; ruffled the flowering grasses.
Haymakers, who had pitched beneath hedges to sleep away the morning
toil, parted curtains of green blades; moved trembling globes of cow
parsley to see the sky; the blue, the steadfast, the blazing summer sky.

Aware that he was looking at a silver two-handled Jacobean mug,
and that Hugh Whitbread admired condescendingly with airs of
connoisseurship a Spanish necklace which he thought of asking the price
of in case Evelyn might like it--still Richard was torpid; could not
think or move. Life had thrown up this wreckage; shop windows full of
coloured paste, and one stood stark with the lethargy of the old, stiff
with the rigidity of the old, looking in. Evelyn Whitbread might like
to buy this Spanish necklace--so she might. Yawn he must. Hugh was
going into the shop.

“Right you are!” said Richard, following.

Goodness knows he didn’t want to go buying necklaces with Hugh. But
there are tides in the body. Morning meets afternoon. Borne like a
frail shallop on deep, deep floods, Lady Bruton’s great-grandfather
and his memoir and his campaigns in North America were whelmed and
sunk. And Millicent Bruton too. She went under. Richard didn’t care a
straw what became of Emigration; about that letter, whether the editor
put it in or not. The necklace hung stretched between Hugh’s admirable
fingers. Let him give it to a girl, if he must buy jewels--any girl,
any girl in the street. For the worthlessness of this life did strike
Richard pretty forcibly--buying necklaces for Evelyn. If he’d had a boy
he’d have said, Work, work. But he had his Elizabeth; he adored his
Elizabeth.

“I should like to see Mr. Dubonnet,” said Hugh in his curt worldly way.
It appeared that this Dubonnet had the measurements of Mrs. Whitbread’s
neck, or, more strangely still, knew her views upon Spanish jewellery
and the extent of her possessions in that line (which Hugh could not
remember). All of which seemed to Richard Dalloway awfully odd. For
he never gave Clarissa presents, except a bracelet two or three years
ago, which had not been a success. She never wore it. It pained him
to remember that she never wore it. And as a single spider’s thread
after wavering here and there attaches itself to the point of a leaf,
so Richard’s mind, recovering from its lethargy, set now on his wife,
Clarissa, whom Peter Walsh had loved so passionately; and Richard had
had a sudden vision of her there at luncheon; of himself and Clarissa;
of their life together; and he drew the tray of old jewels towards him,
and taking up first this brooch then that ring, “How much is that?” he
asked, but doubted his own taste. He wanted to open the drawing-room
door and come in holding out something; a present for Clarissa. Only
what? But Hugh was on his legs again. He was unspeakably pompous.
Really, after dealing here for thirty-five years he was not going to
be put off by a mere boy who did not know his business. For Dubonnet,
it seemed, was out, and Hugh would not buy anything until Mr. Dubonnet
chose to be in; at which the youth flushed and bowed his correct
little bow. It was all perfectly correct. And yet Richard couldn’t
have said that to save his life! Why these people stood that damned
insolence he could not conceive. Hugh was becoming an intolerable ass.
Richard Dalloway could not stand more than an hour of his society.
And, flicking his bowler hat by way of farewell, Richard turned at
the corner of Conduit Street eager, yes, very eager, to travel that
spider’s thread of attachment between himself and Clarissa; he would
go straight to her, in Westminster.

But he wanted to come in holding something. Flowers? Yes, flowers,
since he did not trust his taste in gold; any number of flowers,
roses, orchids, to celebrate what was, reckoning things as you will,
an event; this feeling about her when they spoke of Peter Walsh at
luncheon; and they never spoke of it; not for years had they spoken of
it; which, he thought, grasping his red and white roses together (a
vast bunch in tissue paper), is the greatest mistake in the world. The
time comes when it can’t be said; one’s too shy to say it, he thought,
pocketing his sixpence or two of change, setting off with his great
bunch held against his body to Westminster to say straight out in so
many words (whatever she might think of him), holding out his flowers,
“I love you.” Why not? Really it was a miracle thinking of the war, and
thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shovelled
together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle. Here he was walking
across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her.
Which one never does say, he thought. Partly one’s lazy; partly one’s
shy. And Clarissa--it was difficult to think of her; except in starts,
as at luncheon, when he saw her quite distinctly; their whole life.
He stopped at the crossing; and repeated--being simple by nature, and
undebauched, because he had tramped, and shot; being pertinacious and
dogged, having championed the down-trodden and followed his instincts
in the House of Commons; being preserved in his simplicity yet at the
same time grown rather speechless, rather stiff--he repeated that it
was a miracle that he should have married Clarissa; a miracle--his
life had been a miracle, he thought; hesitating to cross. But it did
make his blood boil to see little creatures of five or six crossing
Piccadilly alone. The police ought to have stopped the traffic at once.
He had no illusions about the London police. Indeed, he was collecting
evidence of their malpractices; and those costermongers, not allowed
to stand their barrows in the streets; and prostitutes, good Lord, the
fault wasn’t in them, nor in young men either, but in our detestable
social system and so forth; all of which he considered, could be seen
considering, grey, dogged, dapper, clean, as he walked across the Park
to tell his wife that he loved her.

For he would say it in so many words, when he came into the room.
Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he
thought, crossing the Green Park and observing with pleasure how in
the shade of the trees whole families, poor families, were sprawling;
children kicking up their legs; sucking milk; paper bags thrown about,
which could easily be picked up (if people objected) by one of those
fat gentlemen in livery; for he was of opinion that every park, and
every square, during the summer months should be open to children (the
grass of the park flushed and faded, lighting up the poor mothers of
Westminster and their crawling babies, as if a yellow lamp were moved
beneath). But what could be done for female vagrants like that poor
creature, stretched on her elbow (as if she had flung herself on the
earth, rid of all ties, to observe curiously, to speculate boldly,
to consider the whys and the wherefores, impudent, loose-lipped,
humorous), he did not know. Bearing his flowers like a weapon, Richard
Dalloway approached her; intent he passed her; still there was time
for a spark between them--she laughed at the sight of him, he smiled
good-humouredly, considering the problem of the female vagrant; not
that they would ever speak. But he would tell Clarissa that he loved
her, in so many words. He had, once upon a time, been jealous of Peter
Walsh; jealous of him and Clarissa. But she had often said to him that
she had been right not to marry Peter Walsh; which, knowing Clarissa,
was obviously true; she wanted support. Not that she was weak; but she
wanted support.

As for Buckingham Palace (like an old prima donna facing the audience
all in white) you can’t deny it a certain dignity, he considered, nor
despise what does, after all, stand to millions of people (a little
crowd was waiting at the gate to see the King drive out) for a symbol,
absurd though it is; a child with a box of bricks could have done
better, he thought; looking at the memorial to Queen Victoria (whom he
could remember in her horn spectacles driving through Kensington), its
white mound, its billowing motherliness; but he liked being ruled by
the descendant of Horsa; he liked continuity; and the sense of handing
on the traditions of the past. It was a great age in which to have
lived. Indeed, his own life was a miracle; let him make no mistake
about it; here he was, in the prime of life, walking to his house in
Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her. Happiness is this he
thought.

It is this, he said, as he entered Dean’s Yard. Big Ben was beginning
to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.
Lunch parties waste the entire afternoon, he thought, approaching his
door.

The sound of Big Ben flooded Clarissa’s drawing-room, where she sat,
ever so annoyed, at her writing-table; worried; annoyed. It was
perfectly true that she had not asked Ellie Henderson to her party; but
she had done it on purpose. Now Mrs. Marsham wrote “she had told Ellie
Henderson she would ask Clarissa--Ellie so much wanted to come.”

But why should she invite all the dull women in London to her
parties? Why should Mrs. Marsham interfere? And there was Elizabeth
closeted all this time with Doris Kilman. Anything more nauseating
she could not conceive. Prayer at this hour with that woman. And the
sound of the bell flooded the room with its melancholy wave; which
receded, and gathered itself together to fall once more, when she
heard, distractingly, something fumbling, something scratching at the
door. Who at this hour? Three, good Heavens! Three already! For with
overpowering directness and dignity the clock struck three; and she
heard nothing else; but the door handle slipped round and in came
Richard! What a surprise! In came Richard, holding out flowers. She
had failed him, once at Constantinople; and Lady Bruton, whose lunch
parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. He
was holding out flowers--roses, red and white roses. (But he could not
bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.)

But how lovely, she said, taking his flowers. She understood; she
understood without his speaking; his Clarissa. She put them in vases on
the mantelpiece. How lovely they looked! she said. And was it amusing,
she asked? Had Lady Bruton asked after her? Peter Walsh was back. Mrs.
Marsham had written. Must she ask Ellie Henderson? That woman Kilman
was upstairs.

“But let us sit down for five minutes,” said Richard.

It all looked so empty. All the chairs were against the wall. What had
they been doing? Oh, it was for the party; no, he had not forgotten,
the party. Peter Walsh was back. Oh yes; she had had him. And he was
going to get a divorce; and he was in love with some woman out there.
And he hadn’t changed in the slightest. There she was, mending her
dress....

“Thinking of Bourton,” she said.

“Hugh was at lunch,” said Richard. She had met him too! Well, he was
getting absolutely intolerable. Buying Evelyn necklaces; fatter than
ever; an intolerable ass.

“And it came over me ‘I might have married you,’” she said, thinking
of Peter sitting there in his little bow-tie; with that knife, opening
it, shutting it. “Just as he always was, you know.”

They were talking about him at lunch, said Richard. (But he could
not tell her he loved her. He held her hand. Happiness is this, he
thought.) They had been writing a letter to the _Times_ for Millicent
Bruton. That was about all Hugh was fit for.

“And our dear Miss Kilman?” he asked. Clarissa thought the roses
absolutely lovely; first bunched together; now of their own accord
starting apart.

“Kilman arrives just as we’ve done lunch,” she said. “Elizabeth turns
pink. They shut themselves up. I suppose they’re praying.”

Lord! He didn’t like it; but these things pass over if you let them.

“In a mackintosh with an umbrella,” said Clarissa.

He had not said “I love you”; but he held her hand. Happiness is this,
is this, he thought.

“But why should I ask all the dull women in London to my parties?” said
Clarissa. And if Mrs. Marsham gave a party, did _she_ invite her guests?

“Poor Ellie Henderson,” said Richard--it was a very odd thing how much
Clarissa minded about her parties, he thought.

But Richard had no notion of the look of a room. However--what was he
going to say?

If she worried about these parties he would not let her give them. Did
she wish she had married Peter? But he must go.

He must be off, he said, getting up. But he stood for a moment as if he
were about to say something; and she wondered what? Why? There were the
roses.

“Some Committee?” she asked, as he opened the door.

“Armenians,” he said; or perhaps it was “Albanians.”

And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and
wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching
him open the door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take
it, against his will, from one’s husband, without losing one’s
independence, one’s self-respect--something, after all, priceless.

He returned with a pillow and a quilt.

“An hour’s complete rest after luncheon,” he said. And he went.

How like him! He would go on saying “An hour’s complete rest after
luncheon” to the end of time, because a doctor had ordered it once.
It was like him to take what doctors said literally; part of his
adorable, divine simplicity, which no one had to the same extent;
which made him go and do the thing while she and Peter frittered
their time away bickering. He was already half-way to the House of
Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, having settled her on the
sofa, looking at his roses. And people would say, “Clarissa Dalloway
is spoilt.” She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians.
Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and
injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again)--no, she
could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she
loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)--the only flowers
she could bear to see cut. But Richard was already at the House of
Commons; at his Committee, having settled all her difficulties. But
no; alas, that was not true. He did not see the reasons against asking
Ellie Henderson. She would do it, of course, as he wished it. Since
he had brought the pillows, she would lie down.... But--but--why did
she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately
unhappy? As a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond
into the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way and
that, and searches here and there vainly, and at last spies it there
at the roots, so she went through one thing and another; no, it was not
Sally Seton saying that Richard would never be in the Cabinet because
he had a second-class brain (it came back to her); no, she did not
mind that; nor was it to do with Elizabeth either and Doris Kilman;
those were facts. It was a feeling, some unpleasant feeling, earlier
in the day perhaps; something that Peter had said, combined with some
depression of her own, in her bedroom, taking off her hat; and what
Richard had said had added to it, but what had he said? There were his
roses. Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised
her very unfairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties. That
was it! That was it!

Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she knew what it
was, she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or Peter at any rate
thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people
about her; great names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might
think so. Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement
when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought.
And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.

“That’s what I do it for,” she said, speaking aloud, to life.

Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the presence
of this thing which she felt to be so obvious became physically
existent; with robes of sound from the street, sunny, with hot breath,
whispering, blowing out the blinds. But suppose Peter said to her,
“Yes, yes, but your parties--what’s the sense of your parties?” all she
could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an
offering; which sounded horribly vague. But who was Peter to make out
that life was all plain sailing?--Peter always in love, always in love
with the wrong woman? What’s your love? she might say to him. And she
knew his answer; how it is the most important thing in the world and no
woman possibly understood it. Very well. But could any man understand
what she meant either? about life? She could not imagine Peter or
Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever.

But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how
superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did
it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer.
Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and
somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense
of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a
pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did
it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?

An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift.
Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think,
write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved
success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense:
and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky;
walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter;
then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death
was!--that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how
she had loved it all; how, every instant....

The door opened. Elizabeth knew that her mother was resting. She came
in very quietly. She stood perfectly still. Was it that some Mongol
had been wrecked on the coast of Norfolk (as Mrs. Hilbery said), had
mixed with the Dalloway ladies, perhaps, a hundred years ago? For the
Dalloways, in general, were fair-haired; blue-eyed; Elizabeth, on
the contrary, was dark; had Chinese eyes in a pale face; an Oriental
mystery; was gentle, considerate, still. As a child, she had had a
perfect sense of humour; but now at seventeen, why, Clarissa could not
in the least understand, she had become very serious; like a hyacinth,
sheathed in glossy green, with buds just tinted, a hyacinth which has
had no sun.

She stood quite still and looked at her mother; but the door was ajar,
and outside the door was Miss Kilman, as Clarissa knew; Miss Kilman in
her mackintosh, listening to whatever they said.

Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a mackintosh; but had
her reasons. First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty; and did
not, after all, dress to please. She was poor, moreover; degradingly
poor. Otherwise she would not be taking jobs from people like the
Dalloways; from rich people, who liked to be kind. Mr. Dalloway, to
do him justice, had been kind. But Mrs. Dalloway had not. She had
been merely condescending. She came from the most worthless of all
classes--the rich, with a smattering of culture. They had expensive
things everywhere; pictures, carpets, lots of servants. She considered
that she had a perfect right to anything that the Dalloways did for her.

She had been cheated. Yes, the word was no exaggeration, for surely
a girl has a right to some kind of happiness? And she had never been
happy, what with being so clumsy and so poor. And then, just as she
might have had a chance at Miss Dolby’s school, the war came; and she
had never been able to tell lies. Miss Dolby thought she would be
happier with people who shared her views about the Germans. She had had
to go. It was true that the family was of German origin; spelt the name
Kiehlman in the eighteenth century; but her brother had been killed.
They turned her out because she would not pretend that the Germans were
all villains--when she had German friends, when the only happy days
of her life had been spent in Germany! And after all, she could read
history. She had had to take whatever she could get. Mr. Dalloway had
come across her working for the Friends. He had allowed her (and that
was really generous of him) to teach his daughter history. Also she
did a little Extension lecturing and so on. Then Our Lord had come to
her (and here she always bowed her head). She had seen the light two
years and three months ago. Now she did not envy women like Clarissa
Dalloway; she pitied them.

She pitied and despised them from the bottom of her heart, as she stood
on the soft carpet, looking at the old engraving of a little girl
with a muff. With all this luxury going on, what hope was there for
a better state of things? Instead of lying on a sofa--“My mother is
resting,” Elizabeth had said--she should have been in a factory; behind
a counter; Mrs. Dalloway and all the other fine ladies!

Bitter and burning, Miss Kilman had turned into a church two years
three months ago. She had heard the Rev. Edward Whittaker preach; the
boys sing; had seen the solemn lights descend, and whether it was the
music, or the voices (she herself when alone in the evening found
comfort in a violin; but the sound was excruciating; she had no ear),
the hot and turbulent feelings which boiled and surged in her had been
assuaged as she sat there, and she had wept copiously, and gone to call
on Mr. Whittaker at his private house in Kensington. It was the hand of
God, he said. The Lord had shown her the way. So now, whenever the hot
and painful feelings boiled within her, this hatred of Mrs. Dalloway,
this grudge against the world, she thought of God. She thought of
Mr. Whittaker. Rage was succeeded by calm. A sweet savour filled her
veins, her lips parted, and, standing formidable upon the landing in
her mackintosh, she looked with steady and sinister serenity at Mrs.
Dalloway, who came out with her daughter.

Elizabeth said she had forgotten her gloves. That was because Miss
Kilman and her mother hated each other. She could not bear to see them
together. She ran upstairs to find her gloves.

But Miss Kilman did not hate Mrs. Dalloway. Turning her large
gooseberry-coloured eyes upon Clarissa, observing her small pink face,
her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion, Miss Kilman felt,
Fool! Simpleton! You who have known neither sorrow nor pleasure; who
have trifled your life away! And there rose in her an overmastering
desire to overcome her; to unmask her. If she could have felled her
it would have eased her. But it was not the body; it was the soul and
its mockery that she wished to subdue; make feel her mastery. If only
she could make her weep; could ruin her; humiliate her; bring her to
her knees crying, You are right! But this was God’s will, not Miss
Kilman’s. It was to be a religious victory. So she glared; so she
glowered.

Clarissa was really shocked. This a Christian--this woman! This woman
had taken her daughter from her! She in touch with invisible presences!
Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without kindness or grace, she know the
meaning of life!

“You are taking Elizabeth to the Stores?” Mrs. Dalloway said.

Miss Kilman said she was. They stood there. Miss Kilman was not going
to make herself agreeable. She had always earned her living. Her
knowledge of modern history was thorough in the extreme. She did out of
her meagre income set aside so much for causes she believed in; whereas
this woman did nothing, believed nothing; brought up her daughter--but
here was Elizabeth, rather out of breath, the beautiful girl.

So they were going to the Stores. Odd it was, as Miss Kilman stood
there (and stand she did, with the power and taciturnity of some
prehistoric monster armoured for primeval warfare), how, second by
second, the idea of her diminished, how hatred (which was for ideas,
not people) crumbled, how she lost her malignity, her size, became
second by second merely Miss Kilman, in a mackintosh, whom Heaven knows
Clarissa would have liked to help.

At this dwindling of the monster, Clarissa laughed. Saying good-bye,
she laughed.

Off they went together, Miss Kilman and Elizabeth, downstairs.

With a sudden impulse, with a violent anguish, for this woman was
taking her daughter from her, Clarissa leant over the bannisters and
cried out, “Remember the party! Remember our party to-night!”

But Elizabeth had already opened the front door; there was a van
passing; she did not answer.

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing-room,
tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are! For now
that the body of Miss Kilman was not before her, it overwhelmed
her--the idea. The cruelest things in the world, she thought, seeing
them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous,
infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat, on
the landing; love and religion. Had she ever tried to convert any one
herself? Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves? And she
watched out of the window the old lady opposite climbing upstairs. Let
her climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her, as
Clarissa had often seen her, gain her bedroom, part her curtains, and
disappear again into the background. Somehow one respected that--that
old woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious that she was
being watched. There was something solemn in it--but love and religion
would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul. The
odious Kilman would destroy it. Yet it was a sight that made her want
to cry.

Love destroyed too. Everything that was fine, everything that was true
went. Take Peter Walsh now. There was a man, charming, clever, with
ideas about everything. If you wanted to know about Pope, say, or
Addison, or just to talk nonsense, what people were like, what things
meant, Peter knew better than any one. It was Peter who had helped her;
Peter who had lent her books. But look at the women he loved--vulgar,
trivial, commonplace. Think of Peter in love--he came to see her after
all these years, and what did he talk about? Himself. Horrible passion!
she thought. Degrading passion! she thought, thinking of Kilman and her
Elizabeth walking to the Army and Navy Stores.

Big Ben struck the half-hour.

How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old lady
(they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the
window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as
it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst
of ordinary things the finger fell making the moment solemn. She was
forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move, to go--but where?
Clarissa tried to follow her as she turned and disappeared, and could
still just see her white cap moving at the back of the bedroom. She was
still there moving about at the other end of the room. Why creeds and
prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle,
that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going
from chest of drawers to dressing-table. She could still see her. And
the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter
might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had
the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room;
there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

Love--but here the other clock, the clock which always struck two
minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its lap full of odds and
ends, which it dumped down as if Big Ben were all very well with his
majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so just, but she must remember
all sorts of little things besides--Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson,
glasses for ices--all sorts of little things came flooding and lapping
and dancing in on the wake of that solemn stroke which lay flat like
a bar of gold on the sea. Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for
ices. She must telephone now at once.

Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on the wake
of Big Ben, with its lap full of trifles. Beaten up, broken up by the
assault of carriages, the brutality of vans, the eager advance of
myriads of angular men, of flaunting women, the domes and spires of
offices and hospitals, the last relics of this lap full of odds and
ends seemed to break, like the spray of an exhausted wave, upon the
body of Miss Kilman standing still in the street for a moment to mutter
“It is the flesh.”

It was the flesh that she must control. Clarissa Dalloway had insulted
her. That she expected. But she had not triumphed; she had not mastered
the flesh. Ugly, clumsy, Clarissa Dalloway had laughed at her for being
that; and had revived the fleshly desires, for she minded looking as
she did beside Clarissa. Nor could she talk as she did. But why wish to
resemble her? Why? She despised Mrs. Dalloway from the bottom of her
heart. She was not serious. She was not good. Her life was a tissue of
vanity and deceit. Yet Doris Kilman had been overcome. She had, as a
matter of fact, very nearly burst into tears when Clarissa Dalloway
laughed at her. “It is the flesh, it is the flesh,” she muttered (it
being her habit to talk aloud) trying to subdue this turbulent and
painful feeling as she walked down Victoria Street. She prayed to God.
She could not help being ugly; she could not afford to buy pretty
clothes. Clarissa Dalloway had laughed--but she would concentrate her
mind upon something else until she had reached the pillar-box. At any
rate she had got Elizabeth. But she would think of something else; she
would think of Russia; until she reached the pillar-box.

How nice it must be, she said, in the country, struggling, as Mr.
Whittaker had told her, with that violent grudge against the world
which had scorned her, sneered at her, cast her off, beginning with
this indignity--the infliction of her unlovable body which people could
not bear to see. Do her hair as she might, her forehead remained like
an egg, bald, white. No clothes suited her. She might buy anything.
And for a woman, of course, that meant never meeting the opposite sex.
Never would she come first with any one. Sometimes lately it had seemed
to her that, except for Elizabeth, her food was all that she lived
for; her comforts; her dinner, her tea; her hot-water bottle at night.
But one must fight; vanquish; have faith in God. Mr. Whittaker had
said she was there for a purpose. But no one knew the agony! He said,
pointing to the crucifix, that God knew. But why should she have to
suffer when other women, like Clarissa Dalloway, escaped? Knowledge
comes through suffering, said Mr. Whittaker.

She had passed the pillar-box, and Elizabeth had turned into the cool
brown tobacco department of the Army and Navy Stores while she was
still muttering to herself what Mr. Whittaker had said about knowledge
coming through suffering and the flesh. “The flesh,” she muttered.

What department did she want? Elizabeth interrupted her.

“Petticoats,” she said abruptly, and stalked straight on to the lift.

Up they went. Elizabeth guided her this way and that; guided her in her
abstraction as if she had been a great child, an unwieldy battleship.
There were the petticoats, brown, decorous, striped, frivolous, solid,
flimsy; and she chose, in her abstraction, portentously, and the girl
serving thought her mad.

Elizabeth rather wondered, as they did up the parcel, what Miss Kilman
was thinking. They must have their tea, said Miss Kilman, rousing,
collecting herself. They had their tea.

Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kilman could be hungry. It was
her way of eating, eating with intensity, then looking, again and
again, at a plate of sugared cakes on the table next them; then, when
a lady and a child sat down and the child took the cake, could Miss
Kilman really mind it? Yes, Miss Kilman did mind it. She had wanted
that cake--the pink one. The pleasure of eating was almost the only
pure pleasure left her, and then to be baffled even in that!

When people are happy, they have a reserve, she had told Elizabeth,
upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre (she
was fond of such metaphors), jolted by every pebble, so she would say
staying on after the lesson standing by the fireplace with her bag of
books, her “satchel,” she called it, on a Tuesday morning, after the
lesson was over. And she talked too about the war. After all, there
were people who did not think the English invariably right. There
were books. There were meetings. There were other points of view.
Would Elizabeth like to come with her to listen to So-and-so (a most
extraordinary looking old man)? Then Miss Kilman took her to some
church in Kensington and they had tea with a clergyman. She had lent
her books. Law, medicine, politics, all professions are open to women
of your generation, said Miss Kilman. But for herself, her career was
absolutely ruined and was it her fault? Good gracious, said Elizabeth,
no.

And her mother would come calling to say that a hamper had come from
Bourton and would Miss Kilman like some flowers? To Miss Kilman she
was always very, very nice, but Miss Kilman squashed the flowers all
in a bunch, and hadn’t any small talk, and what interested Miss Kilman
bored her mother, and Miss Kilman and she were terrible together; and
Miss Kilman swelled and looked very plain. But then Miss Kilman was
frightfully clever. Elizabeth had never thought about the poor. They
lived with everything they wanted,--her mother had breakfast in bed
every day; Lucy carried it up; and she liked old women because they
were Duchesses, and being descended from some Lord. But Miss Kilman
said (one of those Tuesday mornings when the lesson was over), “My
grandfather kept an oil and colour shop in Kensington.” Miss Kilman
made one feel so small.

Miss Kilman took another cup of tea. Elizabeth, with her oriental
bearing, her inscrutable mystery, sat perfectly upright; no, she did
not want anything more. She looked for her gloves--her white gloves.
They were under the table. Ah, but she must not go! Miss Kilman could
not let her go! this youth, that was so beautiful, this girl, whom she
genuinely loved! Her large hand opened and shut on the table.

But perhaps it was a little flat somehow, Elizabeth felt. And really
she would like to go.

But said Miss Kilman, “I’ve not quite finished yet.”

Of course, then, Elizabeth would wait. But it was rather stuffy in here.

“Are you going to the party to-night?” Miss Kilman said. Elizabeth
supposed she was going; her mother wanted her to go. She must not let
parties absorb her, Miss Kilman said, fingering the last two inches of
a chocolate éclair.

She did not much like parties, Elizabeth said. Miss Kilman opened her
mouth, slightly projected her chin, and swallowed down the last inches
of the chocolate éclair, then wiped her fingers, and washed the tea
round in her cup.

She was about to split asunder, she felt. The agony was so terrific.
If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her
hers absolutely and forever and then die; that was all she wanted.
But to sit here, unable to think of anything to say; to see Elizabeth
turning against her; to be felt repulsive even by her--it was too much;
she could not stand it. The thick fingers curled inwards.

“I never go to parties,” said Miss Kilman, just to keep Elizabeth from
going. “People don’t ask me to parties”--and she knew as she said it
that it was this egotism that was her undoing; Mr. Whittaker had warned
her; but she could not help it. She had suffered so horribly. “Why
should they ask me?” she said. “I’m plain, I’m unhappy.” She knew it
was idiotic. But it was all those people passing--people with parcels
who despised her, who made her say it. However, she was Doris Kilman.
She had her degree. She was a woman who had made her way in the world.
Her knowledge of modern history was more than respectable.

“I don’t pity myself,” she said. “I pity”--she meant to say “your
mother” but no, she could not, not to Elizabeth. “I pity other people,”
she said, “more.”

Like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate for an
unknown purpose, and stands there longing to gallop away, Elizabeth
Dalloway sat silent. Was Miss Kilman going to say anything more?

“Don’t quite forget me,” said Doris Kilman; her voice quivered. Right
away to the end of the field the dumb creature galloped in terror.

The great hand opened and shut.

Elizabeth turned her head. The waitress came. One had to pay at the
desk, Elizabeth said, and went off, drawing out, so Miss Kilman felt,
the very entrails in her body, stretching them as she crossed the room,
and then, with a final twist, bowing her head very politely, she went.

She had gone. Miss Kilman sat at the marble table among the éclairs,
stricken once, twice, thrice by shocks of suffering. She had gone. Mrs.
Dalloway had triumphed. Elizabeth had gone. Beauty had gone, youth had
gone.

So she sat. She got up, blundered off among the little tables, rocking
slightly from side to side, and somebody came after her with her
petticoat, and she lost her way, and was hemmed in by trunks specially
prepared for taking to India; next got among the accouchement sets, and
baby linen; through all the commodities of the world, perishable and
permanent, hams, drugs, flowers, stationery, variously smelling, now
sweet, now sour she lurched; saw herself thus lurching with her hat
askew, very red in the face, full length in a looking-glass; and at
last came out into the street.

The tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in front of her, the habitation
of God. In the midst of the traffic, there was the habitation of
God. Doggedly she set off with her parcel to that other sanctuary,
the Abbey, where, raising her hands in a tent before her face, she
sat beside those driven into shelter too; the variously assorted
worshippers, now divested of social rank, almost of sex, as they raised
their hands before their faces; but once they removed them, instantly
reverent, middle class, English men and women, some of them desirous of
seeing the wax works.

But Miss Kilman held her tent before her face. Now she was deserted;
now rejoined. New worshippers came in from the street to replace the
strollers, and still, as people gazed round and shuffled past the tomb
of the Unknown Warrior, still she barred her eyes with her fingers and
tried in this double darkness, for the light in the Abbey was bodiless,
to aspire above the vanities, the desires, the commodities, to rid
herself both of hatred and of love. Her hands twitched. She seemed
to struggle. Yet to others God was accessible and the path to Him
smooth. Mr. Fletcher, retired, of the Treasury, Mrs. Gorham, widow of
the famous K.C., approached Him simply, and having done their praying,
leant back, enjoyed the music (the organ pealed sweetly), and saw Miss
Kilman at the end of the row, praying, praying, and, being still on the
threshold of their underworld, thought of her sympathetically as a soul
haunting the same territory; a soul cut out of immaterial substance;
not a woman, a soul.

But Mr. Fletcher had to go. He had to pass her, and being himself neat
as a new pin, could not help being a little distressed by the poor
lady’s disorder; her hair down; her parcel on the floor. She did not
at once let him pass. But, as he stood gazing about him, at the white
marbles, grey window panes, and accumulated treasures (for he was
extremely proud of the Abbey), her largeness, robustness, and power as
she sat there shifting her knees from time to time (it was so rough the
approach to her God--so tough her desires) impressed him, as they had
impressed Mrs. Dalloway (she could not get the thought of her out of
her mind that afternoon), the Rev. Edward Whittaker, and Elizabeth too.

And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so nice
to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just yet.
It was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an omnibus.
And already, even as she stood there, in her very well cut clothes,
it was beginning.... People were beginning to compare her to poplar
trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies;
and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being
left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare
her to lilies, and she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary
compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs.

Buses swooped, settled, were off--garish caravans, glistening with
red and yellow varnish. But which should she get on to? She had no
preferences. Of course, she would not push her way. She inclined to be
passive. It was expression she needed, but her eyes were fine, Chinese,
oriental, and, as her mother said, with such nice shoulders and holding
herself so straight, she was always charming to look at; and lately,
in the evening especially, when she was interested, for she never
seemed excited, she looked almost beautiful, very stately, very serene.
What could she be thinking? Every man fell in love with her, and she
was really awfully bored. For it was beginning. Her mother could see
that--the compliments were beginning. That she did not care more about
it--for instance for her clothes--sometimes worried Clarissa, but
perhaps it was as well with all those puppies and guinea pigs about
having distemper, and it gave her a charm. And now there was this odd
friendship with Miss Kilman. Well, thought Clarissa about three o’clock
in the morning, reading Baron Marbot for she could not sleep, it proves
she has a heart.

Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently boarded the
omnibus, in front of everybody. She took a seat on top. The impetuous
creature--a pirate--started forward, sprang away; she had to hold the
rail to steady herself, for a pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous,
bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching
a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and arrogant
in between, and then rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall.
And did Elizabeth give one thought to poor Miss Kilman who loved her
without jealousy, to whom she had been a fawn in the open, a moon in a
glade? She was delighted to be free. The fresh air was so delicious.
It had been so stuffy in the Army and Navy Stores. And now it was
like riding, to be rushing up Whitehall; and to each movement of the
omnibus the beautiful body in the fawn-coloured coat responded freely
like a rider, like the figurehead of a ship, for the breeze slightly
disarrayed her; the heat gave her cheeks the pallor of white painted
wood; and her fine eyes, having no eyes to meet, gazed ahead, blank,
bright, with the staring incredible innocence of sculpture.

It was always talking about her own sufferings that made Miss Kilman so
difficult. And was she right? If it was being on committees and giving
up hours and hours every day (she hardly ever saw him in London) that
helped the poor, her father did that, goodness knows,--if that was what
Miss Kilman meant about being a Christian; but it was so difficult to
say. Oh, she would like to go a little further. Another penny was it to
the Strand? Here was another penny then. She would go up the Strand.

She liked people who were ill. And every profession is open to
the women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. So she might be a
doctor. She might be a farmer. Animals are often ill. She might own a
thousand acres and have people under her. She would go and see them
in their cottages. This was Somerset House. One might be a very good
farmer--and that, strangely enough though Miss Kilman had her share in
it, was almost entirely due to Somerset House. It looked so splendid,
so serious, that great grey building. And she liked the feeling of
people working. She liked those churches, like shapes of grey paper,
breasting the stream of the Strand. It was quite different here from
Westminster, she thought, getting off at Chancery Lane. It was so
serious; it was so busy. In short, she would like to have a profession.
She would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament, if
she found it necessary, all because of the Strand.

The feet of those people busy about their activities, hands putting
stone to stone, minds eternally occupied not with trivial chatterings
(comparing women to poplars--which was rather exciting, of course,
but very silly), but with thoughts of ships, of business, of law, of
administration, and with it all so stately (she was in the Temple), gay
(there was the river), pious (there was the Church), made her quite
determined, whatever her mother might say, to become either a farmer or
a doctor. But she was, of course, rather lazy.

And it was much better to say nothing about it. It seemed so silly.
It was the sort of thing that did sometimes happen, when one
was alone--buildings without architects’ names, crowds of people
coming back from the city having more power than single clergymen
in Kensington, than any of the books Miss Kilman had lent her, to
stimulate what lay slumbrous, clumsy, and shy on the mind’s sandy floor
to break surface, as a child suddenly stretches its arms; it was just
that, perhaps, a sigh, a stretch of the arms, an impulse, a revelation,
which has its effects for ever, and then down again it went to the
sandy floor. She must go home. She must dress for dinner. But what was
the time?--where was a clock?

She looked up Fleet Street. She walked just a little way towards St.
Paul’s, shyly, like some one penetrating on tiptoe, exploring a strange
house by night with a candle, on edge lest the owner should suddenly
fling wide his bedroom door and ask her business, nor did she dare
wander off into queer alleys, tempting bye-streets, any more than in a
strange house open doors which might be bedroom doors, or sitting-room
doors, or lead straight to the larder. For no Dalloways came down the
Strand daily; she was a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting.

In many ways, her mother felt, she was extremely immature, like a
child still, attached to dolls, to old slippers; a perfect baby; and
that was charming. But then, of course, there was in the Dalloway
family the tradition of public service. Abbesses, principals, head
mistresses, dignitaries, in the republic of women--without being
brilliant, any of them, they were that. She penetrated a little further
in the direction of St. Paul’s. She liked the geniality, sisterhood,
motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar. It seemed to her good. The
noise was tremendous; and suddenly there were trumpets (the unemployed)
blaring, rattling about in the uproar; military music; as if people
were marching; yet had they been dying--had some woman breathed her
last and whoever was watching, opening the window of the room where she
had just brought off that act of supreme dignity, looked down on Fleet
Street, that uproar, that military music would have come triumphing up
to him, consolatory, indifferent.

It was not conscious. There was no recognition in it of one fortune, or
fate, and for that very reason even to those dazed with watching for
the last shivers of consciousness on the faces of the dying, consoling.
Forgetfulness in people might wound, their ingratitude corrode, but
this voice, pouring endlessly, year in year out, would take whatever
it might be; this vow; this van; this life; this procession, would
wrap them all about and carry them on, as in the rough stream of a
glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees,
and rolls them on.

But it was later than she thought. Her mother would not like her to be
wandering off alone like this. She turned back down the Strand.

A puff of wind (in spite of the heat, there was quite a wind) blew a
thin black veil over the sun and over the Strand. The faces faded; the
omnibuses suddenly lost their glow. For although the clouds were of
mountainous white so that one could fancy hacking hard chips off with a
hatchet, with broad golden slopes, lawns of celestial pleasure gardens,
on their flanks, and had all the appearance of settled habitations
assembled for the conference of gods above the world, there was a
perpetual movement among them. Signs were interchanged, when, as if to
fulfil some scheme arranged already, now a summit dwindled, now a whole
block of pyramidal size which had kept its station inalterably advanced
into the midst or gravely led the procession to fresh anchorage. Fixed
though they seemed at their posts, at rest in perfect unanimity,
nothing could be fresher, freer, more sensitive superficially than the
snow-white or gold-kindled surface; to change, to go, to dismantle the
solemn assemblage was immediately possible; and in spite of the grave
fixity, the accumulated robustness and solidity, now they struck light
to the earth, now darkness.

Calmly and competently, Elizabeth Dalloway mounted the Westminster
omnibus.

Going and coming, beckoning, signalling, so the light and shadow which
now made the wall grey, now the bananas bright yellow, now made the
Strand grey, now made the omnibuses bright yellow, seemed to Septimus
Warren Smith lying on the sofa in the sitting-room; watching the watery
gold glow and fade with the astonishing sensibility of some live
creature on the roses, on the wall-paper. Outside the trees dragged
their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of
water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds
singing. Every power poured its treasures on his head, and his hand lay
there on the back of the sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he was
bathing, floating, on the top of the waves, while far away on shore he
heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no more, says the heart
in the body; fear no more.

He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by some laughing
hint like that gold spot which went round the wall--there, there,
there--her determination to show, by brandishing her plumes, shaking
her tresses, flinging her mantle this way and that, beautifully, always
beautifully, and standing close up to breathe through her hollowed
hands Shakespeare’s words, her meaning.

Rezia, sitting at the table twisting a hat in her hands, watched him;
saw him smiling. He was happy then. But she could not bear to see him
smiling. It was not marriage; it was not being one’s husband to look
strange like that, always to be starting, laughing, sitting hour after
hour silent, or clutching her and telling her to write. The table
drawer was full of those writings; about war; about Shakespeare; about
great discoveries; how there is no death. Lately he had become excited
suddenly for no reason (and both Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw
said excitement was the worst thing for him), and waved his hands and
cried out that he knew the truth! He knew everything! That man, his
friend who was killed, Evans, had come, he said. He was singing behind
the screen. She wrote it down just as he spoke it. Some things were
very beautiful; others sheer nonsense. And he was always stopping in
the middle, changing his mind; wanting to add something; hearing
something new; listening with his hand up.

But she heard nothing.

And once they found the girl who did the room reading one of these
papers in fits of laughter. It was a dreadful pity. For that made
Septimus cry out about human cruelty--how they tear each other to
pieces. The fallen, he said, they tear to pieces. “Holmes is on us,”
he would say, and he would invent stories about Holmes; Holmes eating
porridge; Holmes reading Shakespeare--making himself roar with laughter
or rage, for Dr. Holmes seemed to stand for something horrible to him.
“Human nature,” he called him. Then there were the visions. He was
drowned, he used to say, and lying on a cliff with the gulls screaming
over him. He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea.
Or he was hearing music. Really it was only a barrel organ or some man
crying in the street. But “Lovely!” he used to cry, and the tears would
run down his cheeks, which was to her the most dreadful thing of all,
to see a man like Septimus, who had fought, who was brave, crying. And
he would lie listening until suddenly he would cry that he was falling
down, down into the flames! Actually she would look for flames, it was
so vivid. But there was nothing. They were alone in the room. It was a
dream, she would tell him and so quiet him at last, but sometimes she
was frightened too. She sighed as she sat sewing.

Her sigh was tender and enchanting, like the wind outside a wood in
the evening. Now she put down her scissors; now she turned to take
something from the table. A little stir, a little crinkling, a little
tapping built up something on the table there, where she sat sewing.
Through his eyelashes he could see her blurred outline; her little
black body; her face and hands; her turning movements at the table,
as she took up a reel, or looked (she was apt to lose things) for her
silk. She was making a hat for Mrs. Filmer’s married daughter, whose
name was--he had forgotten her name.

“What is the name of Mrs. Filmer’s married daughter?” he asked.

“Mrs. Peters,” said Rezia. She was afraid it was too small, she said,
holding it before her. Mrs. Peters was a big woman; but she did not
like her. It was only because Mrs. Filmer had been so good to them.
“She gave me grapes this morning,” she said--that Rezia wanted to do
something to show that they were grateful. She had come into the room
the other evening and found Mrs. Peters, who thought they were out,
playing the gramophone.

“Was it true?” he asked. She was playing the gramophone? Yes; she had
told him about it at the time; she had found Mrs. Peters playing the
gramophone.

He began, very cautiously, to open his eyes, to see whether a
gramophone was really there. But real things--real things were too
exciting. He must be cautious. He would not go mad. First he looked
at the fashion papers on the lower shelf, then, gradually at the
gramophone with the green trumpet. Nothing could be more exact. And
so, gathering courage, he looked at the sideboard; the plate of
bananas; the engraving of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort; at the
mantelpiece, with the jar of roses. None of these things moved. All
were still; all were real.

“She is a woman with a spiteful tongue,” said Rezia.

“What does Mr. Peters do?” Septimus asked.

“Ah,” said Rezia, trying to remember. She thought Mrs. Filmer had said
that he travelled for some company. “Just now he is in Hull,” she said.

“Just now!” She said that with her Italian accent. She said that
herself. He shaded his eyes so that he might see only a little of her
face at a time, first the chin, then the nose, then the forehead, in
case it were deformed, or had some terrible mark on it. But no, there
she was, perfectly natural, sewing, with the pursed lips that women
have, the set, the melancholy expression, when sewing. But there
was nothing terrible about it, he assured himself, looking a second
time, a third time at her face, her hands, for what was frightening
or disgusting in her as she sat there in broad daylight, sewing? Mrs.
Peters had a spiteful tongue. Mr. Peters was in Hull. Why then rage
and prophesy? Why fly scourged and outcast? Why be made to tremble and
sob by the clouds? Why seek truths and deliver messages when Rezia sat
sticking pins into the front of her dress, and Mr. Peters was in Hull?
Miracles, revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling through the sea,
down, down into the flames, all were burnt out, for he had a sense, as
he watched Rezia trimming the straw hat for Mrs. Peters, of a coverlet
of flowers.

“It’s too small for Mrs. Peters,” said Septimus.

For the first time for days he was speaking as he used to do! Of course
it was--absurdly small, she said. But Mrs. Peters had chosen it.

He took it out of her hands. He said it was an organ grinder’s monkey’s
hat.

How it rejoiced her that! Not for weeks had they laughed like this
together, poking fun privately like married people. What she meant was
that if Mrs. Filmer had come in, or Mrs. Peters or anybody they would
not have understood what she and Septimus were laughing at.

“There,” she said, pinning a rose to one side of the hat. Never had she
felt so happy! Never in her life!

But that was still more ridiculous, Septimus said. Now the poor woman
looked like a pig at a fair. (Nobody ever made her laugh as Septimus
did.)

What had she got in her work-box? She had ribbons and beads, tassels,
artificial flowers. She tumbled them out on the table. He began putting
odd colours together--for though he had no fingers, could not even do
up a parcel, he had a wonderful eye, and often he was right, sometimes
absurd, of course, but sometimes wonderfully right.

“She shall have a beautiful hat!” he murmured, taking up this and that,
Rezia kneeling by his side, looking over his shoulder. Now it was
finished--that is to say the design; she must stitch it together. But
she must be very, very careful, he said, to keep it just as he had made
it.

So she sewed. When she sewed, he thought, she made a sound like a
kettle on the hob; bubbling, murmuring, always busy, her strong little
pointed fingers pinching and poking; her needle flashing straight.
The sun might go in and out, on the tassels, on the wall-paper, but
he would wait, he thought, stretching out his feet, looking at his
ringed sock at the end of the sofa; he would wait in this warm place,
this pocket of still air, which one comes on at the edge of a wood
sometimes in the evening, when, because of a fall in the ground, or
some arrangement of the trees (one must be scientific above all,
scientific), warmth lingers, and the air buffets the cheek like the
wing of a bird.

“There it is,” said Rezia, twirling Mrs. Peters’ hat on the tips of her
fingers. “That’ll do for the moment. Later ...” her sentence bubbled
away drip, drip, drip, like a contented tap left running.

It was wonderful. Never had he done anything which made him feel so
proud. It was so real, it was so substantial, Mrs. Peters’ hat.

“Just look at it,” he said.

Yes, it would always make her happy to see that hat. He had become
himself then, he had laughed then. They had been alone together.
Always she would like that hat.

He told her to try it on.

“But I must look so queer!” she cried, running over to the glass and
looking first this side then that. Then she snatched it off again, for
there was a tap at the door. Could it be Sir William Bradshaw? Had he
sent already?

No! it was only the small girl with the evening paper.

What always happened, then happened--what happened every night of their
lives. The small girl sucked her thumb at the door; Rezia went down
on her knees; Rezia cooed and kissed; Rezia got a bag of sweets out
of the table drawer. For so it always happened. First one thing, then
another. So she built it up, first one thing and then another. Dancing,
skipping, round and round the room they went. He took the paper.
Surrey was all out, he read. There was a heat wave. Rezia repeated:
Surrey was all out. There was a heat wave, making it part of the game
she was playing with Mrs. Filmer’s grandchild, both of them laughing,
chattering at the same time, at their game. He was very tired. He was
very happy. He would sleep. He shut his eyes. But directly he saw
nothing the sounds of the game became fainter and stranger and sounded
like the cries of people seeking and not finding, and passing further
and further away. They had lost him!

He started up in terror. What did he see? The plate of bananas on the
sideboard. Nobody was there (Rezia had taken the child to its mother.
It was bedtime). That was it: to be alone forever. That was the doom
pronounced in Milan when he came into the room and saw them cutting out
buckram shapes with their scissors; to be alone forever.

He was alone with the sideboard and the bananas. He was alone, exposed
on this bleak eminence, stretched out--but not on a hill-top; not on
a crag; on Mrs. Filmer’s sitting-room sofa. As for the visions, the
faces, the voices of the dead, where were they? There was a screen in
front of him, with black bulrushes and blue swallows. Where he had once
seen mountains, where he had seen faces, where he had seen beauty,
there was a screen.

“Evans!” he cried. There was no answer. A mouse had squeaked, or a
curtain rustled. Those were the voices of the dead. The screen, the
coal-scuttle, the sideboard remained to him. Let him then face the
screen, the coal-scuttle and the sideboard ... but Rezia burst into the
room chattering.

Some letter had come. Everybody’s plans were changed. Mrs. Filmer would
not be able to go to Brighton after all. There was no time to let Mrs.
Williams know, and really Rezia thought it very, very annoying, when
she caught sight of the hat and thought ... perhaps ... she ... might
just make a little.... Her voice died out in contented melody.

“Ah, damn!” she cried (it was a joke of theirs, her swearing), the
needle had broken. Hat, child, Brighton, needle. She built it up; first
one thing, then another, she built it up, sewing.

She wanted him to say whether by moving the rose she had improved the
hat. She sat on the end of the sofa.

They were perfectly happy now, she said, suddenly, putting the hat
down. For she could say anything to him now. She could say whatever
came into her head. That was almost the first thing she had felt about
him, that night in the café when he had come in with his English
friends. He had come in, rather shyly, looking round him, and his hat
had fallen when he hung it up. That she could remember. She knew he was
English, though not one of the large Englishmen her sister admired, for
he was always thin; but he had a beautiful fresh colour; and with his
big nose, his bright eyes, his way of sitting a little hunched made
her think, she had often told him, of a young hawk, that first evening
she saw him, when they were playing dominoes, and he had come in--of
a young hawk; but with her he was always very gentle. She had never
seen him wild or drunk, only suffering sometimes through this terrible
war, but even so, when she came in, he would put it all away. Anything,
anything in the whole world, any little bother with her work, anything
that struck her to say she would tell him, and he understood at once.
Her own family even were not the same. Being older than she was and
being so clever--how serious he was, wanting her to read Shakespeare
before she could even read a child’s story in English!--being so much
more experienced, he could help her. And she too could help him.

But this hat now. And then (it was getting late) Sir William Bradshaw.

She held her hands to her head, waiting for him to say did he like
the hat or not, and as she sat there, waiting, looking down, he could
feel her mind, like a bird, falling from branch to branch, and always
alighting, quite rightly; he could follow her mind, as she sat there
in one of those loose lax poses that came to her naturally and, if he
should say anything, at once she smiled, like a bird alighting with
all its claws firm upon the bough.

But he remembered Bradshaw said, “The people we are most fond of are
not good for us when we are ill.” Bradshaw said, he must be taught to
rest. Bradshaw said they must be separated.

“Must,” “must,” why “must”? What power had Bradshaw over him? “What
right has Bradshaw to say ‘must’ to me?” he demanded.

“It is because you talked of killing yourself,” said Rezia.
(Mercifully, she could now say anything to Septimus.)

So he was in their power! Holmes and Bradshaw were on him! The brute
with the red nostrils was snuffing into every secret place! “Must” it
could say! Where were his papers? the things he had written?

She brought him his papers, the things he had written, things she had
written for him. She tumbled them out on to the sofa. They looked at
them together. Diagrams, designs, little men and women brandishing
sticks for arms, with wings--were they?--on their backs; circles
traced round shillings and sixpences--the suns and stars; zigzagging
precipices with mountaineers ascending roped together, exactly like
knives and forks; sea pieces with little faces laughing out of what
might perhaps be waves: the map of the world. Burn them! he cried.
Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes;
odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans--his
messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister.
Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried.

But Rezia laid her hands on them. Some were very beautiful, she
thought. She would tie them up (for she had no envelope) with a piece
of silk.

Even if they took him, she said, she would go with him. They could not
separate them against their wills, she said.

Shuffling the edges straight, she did up the papers, and tied the
parcel almost without looking, sitting beside him, he thought, as if
all her petals were about her. She was a flowering tree; and through
her branches looked out the face of a lawgiver, who had reached a
sanctuary where she feared no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle,
a triumph, the last and greatest. Staggering he saw her mount the
appalling staircase, laden with Holmes and Bradshaw, men who never
weighed less than eleven stone six, who sent their wives to Court, men
who made ten thousand a year and talked of proportion; who different
in their verdicts (for Holmes said one thing, Bradshaw another), yet
judges they were; who mixed the vision and the sideboard; saw nothing
clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. “Must” they said. Over them she
triumphed.

“There!” she said. The papers were tied up. No one should get at them.
She would put them away.

And, she said, nothing should separate them. She sat down beside him
and called him by the name of that hawk or crow which being malicious
and a great destroyer of crops was precisely like him. No one could
separate them, she said.

Then she got up to go into the bedroom to pack their things, but
hearing voices downstairs and thinking that Dr. Holmes had perhaps
called, ran down to prevent him coming up.

Septimus could hear her talking to Holmes on the staircase.

“My dear lady, I have come as a friend,” Holmes was saying.

“No. I will not allow you to see my husband,” she said.

He could see her, like a little hen, with her wings spread barring his
passage. But Holmes persevered.

“My dear lady, allow me....” Holmes said, putting her aside (Holmes was
a powerfully built man).

Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would burst open the door. Holmes
would say “In a funk, eh?” Holmes would get him. But no; not Holmes;
not Bradshaw. Getting up rather unsteadily, hopping indeed from foot to
foot, he considered Mrs. Filmer’s nice clean bread knife with “Bread”
carved on the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t spoil that. The gas fire?
But it was too late now. Holmes was coming. Razors he might have got,
but Rezia, who always did that sort of thing, had packed them. There
remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury-lodging house window,
the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of
opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of
tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw
like that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But he would wait till
the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun
hot. Only human beings--what did _they_ want? Coming down the staircase
opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door.
“I’ll give it you!” he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently
down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings.

“The coward!” cried Dr. Holmes, bursting the door open. Rezia ran
to the window, she saw; she understood. Dr. Holmes and Mrs. Filmer
collided with each other. Mrs. Filmer flapped her apron and made her
hide her eyes in the bedroom. There was a great deal of running up
and down stairs. Dr. Holmes came in--white as a sheet, shaking all
over, with a glass in his hand. She must be brave and drink something,
he said (What was it? Something sweet), for her husband was horribly
mangled, would not recover consciousness, she must not see him, must be
spared as much as possible, would have the inquest to go through, poor
young woman. Who could have foretold it? A sudden impulse, no one was
in the least to blame (he told Mrs. Filmer). And why the devil he did
it, Dr. Holmes could not conceive.

It seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that she was opening
long windows, stepping out into some garden. But where? The clock
was striking--one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared
with all this thumping and whispering; like Septimus himself. She was
falling asleep. But the clock went on striking, four, five, six and
Mrs. Filmer waving her apron (they wouldn’t bring the body in here,
would they?) seemed part of that garden; or a flag. She had once seen a
flag slowly rippling out from a mast when she stayed with her aunt at
Venice. Men killed in battle were thus saluted, and Septimus had been
through the War. Of her memories, most were happy.

She put on her hat, and ran through cornfields--where could it have
been?--on to some hill, somewhere near the sea, for there were ships,
gulls, butterflies; they sat on a cliff. In London too, there they sat,
and, half dreaming, came to her through the bedroom door, rain falling,
whisperings, stirrings among dry corn, the caress of the sea, as it
seemed to her, hollowing them in its arched shell and murmuring to her
laid on shore, strewn she felt, like flying flowers over some tomb.

“He is dead,” she said, smiling at the poor old woman who guarded her
with her honest light-blue eyes fixed on the door. (They wouldn’t bring
him in here, would they?) But Mrs. Filmer pooh-poohed. Oh no, oh no!
They were carrying him away now. Ought she not to be told? Married
people ought to be together, Mrs. Filmer thought. But they must do as
the doctor said.

“Let her sleep,” said Dr. Holmes, feeling her pulse. She saw the large
outline of his body standing dark against the window. So that was Dr.
Holmes.

One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh thought. It is one of
the triumphs of civilisation, as the light high bell of the ambulance
sounded. Swiftly, cleanly the ambulance sped to the hospital, having
picked up instantly, humanely, some poor devil; some one hit on the
head, struck down by disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so
ago at one of these crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was
civilisation. It struck him coming back from the East--the efficiency,
the organisation, the communal spirit of London. Every cart or carriage
of its own accord drew aside to let the ambulance pass. Perhaps it was
morbid; or was it not touching rather, the respect which they showed
this ambulance with its victim inside--busy men hurrying home yet
instantly bethinking them as it passed of some wife; or presumably
how easily it might have been them there, stretched on a shelf with a
doctor and a nurse.... Ah, but thinking became morbid, sentimental,
directly one began conjuring up doctors, dead bodies; a little glow
of pleasure, a sort of lust too over the visual impression warned one
not to go on with that sort of thing any more--fatal to art, fatal
to friendship. True. And yet, thought Peter Walsh, as the ambulance
turned the corner though the light high bell could be heard down the
next street and still farther as it crossed the Tottenham Court Road,
chiming constantly, it is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one
may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw. It had been his
undoing--this susceptibility--in Anglo-Indian society; not weeping
at the right time, or laughing either. I have that in me, he thought
standing by the pillar-box, which could now dissolve in tears. Why,
Heaven knows. Beauty of some sort probably, and the weight of the day,
which beginning with that visit to Clarissa had exhausted him with
its heat, its intensity, and the drip, drip, of one impression after
another down into that cellar where they stood, deep, dark, and no one
would ever know. Partly for that reason, its secrecy, complete and
inviolable, he had found life like an unknown garden, full of turns
and corners, surprising, yes; really it took one’s breath away, these
moments; there coming to him by the pillar-box opposite the British
Museum one of them, a moment, in which things came together; this
ambulance; and life and death. It was as if he were sucked up to some
very high roof by that rush of emotion and the rest of him, like a
white shell-sprinkled beach, left bare. It had been his undoing in
Anglo-Indian society--this susceptibility.

Clarissa once, going on top of an omnibus with him somewhere, Clarissa
superficially at least, so easily moved, now in despair, now in the
best of spirits, all aquiver in those days and such good company,
spotting queer little scenes, names, people from the top of a bus, for
they used to explore London and bring back bags full of treasures from
the Caledonian market--Clarissa had a theory in those days--they had
heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to
explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people;
not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every
day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they
agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus
going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here,
here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She
waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that
to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed
them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never
spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter--even
trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her
horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for
all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which
appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of
us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow
attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after
death ... perhaps--perhaps.

Looking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years her
theory worked to this extent. Brief, broken, often painful as their
actual meetings had been what with his absences and interruptions
(this morning, for instance, in came Elizabeth, like a long-legged
colt, handsome, dumb, just as he was beginning to talk to Clarissa)
the effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was a mystery
about it. You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain--the
actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not; yet in absence, in
the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent,
let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and
understanding, after years of lying lost. Thus she had come to him; on
board ship; in the Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things (so Sally
Seton, generous, enthusiastic goose! thought of _him_ when she saw blue
hydrangeas). She had influenced him more than any person he had ever
known. And always in this way coming before him without his wishing
it, cool, lady-like, critical; or ravishing, romantic, recalling some
field or English harvest. He saw her most often in the country, not in
London. One scene after another at Bourton....

He had reached his hotel. He crossed the hall, with its mounds of
reddish chairs and sofas, its spike-leaved, withered-looking plants.
He got his key off the hook. The young lady handed him some letters.
He went upstairs--he saw her most often at Bourton, in the late
summer, when he stayed there for a week, or fortnight even, as people
did in those days. First on top of some hill there she would stand,
hands clapped to her hair, her cloak blowing out, pointing, crying
to them--she saw the Severn beneath. Or in a wood, making the kettle
boil--very ineffective with her fingers; the smoke curtseying, blowing
in their faces; her little pink face showing through; begging water
from an old woman in a cottage, who came to the door to watch them go.
They walked always; the others drove. She was bored driving, disliked
all animals, except that dog. They tramped miles along roads. She would
break off to get her bearings, pilot him back across country; and all
the time they argued, discussed poetry, discussed people, discussed
politics (she was a Radical then); never noticing a thing except when
she stopped, cried out at a view or a tree, and made him look with
her; and so on again, through stubble fields, she walking ahead, with
a flower for her aunt, never tired of walking for all her delicacy; to
drop down on Bourton in the dusk. Then, after dinner, old Breitkopf
would open the piano and sing without any voice, and they would lie
sunk in arm-chairs, trying not to laugh, but always breaking down and
laughing, laughing--laughing at nothing. Breitkopf was supposed not to
see. And then in the morning, flirting up and down like a wagtail in
front of the house....

Oh it was a letter from her! This blue envelope; that was her hand. And
he would have to read it. Here was another of those meetings, bound
to be painful! To read her letter needed the devil of an effort. “How
heavenly it was to see him. She must tell him that.” That was all.

But it upset him. It annoyed him. He wished she hadn’t written it.
Coming on top of his thoughts, it was like a nudge in the ribs. Why
couldn’t she let him be? After all, she had married Dalloway, and
lived with him in perfect happiness all these years.

These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of
people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if
you thought of it, had settled on other people’s noses. As for the
cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn’t cleanliness, so much
as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be. Some arid matron made
her rounds at dawn sniffing, peering, causing blue-nosed maids to
scour, for all the world as if the next visitor were a joint of meat
to be served on a perfectly clean platter. For sleep, one bed; for
sitting in, one arm-chair; for cleaning one’s teeth and shaving one’s
chin, one tumbler, one looking-glass. Books, letters, dressing-gown,
slipped about on the impersonality of the horsehair like incongruous
impertinences. And it was Clarissa’s letter that made him see all this.
“Heavenly to see you. She must say so!” He folded the paper; pushed it
away; nothing would induce him to read it again!

To get that letter to him by six o’clock she must have sat down and
written it directly he left her; stamped it; sent somebody to the
post. It was, as people say, very like her. She was upset by his
visit. She had felt a great deal; had for a moment, when she kissed
his hand, regretted, envied him even, remembered possibly (for he
saw her look it) something he had said--how they would change the
world if she married him perhaps; whereas, it was this; it was middle
age; it was mediocrity; then forced herself with her indomitable
vitality to put all that aside, there being in her a thread of life
which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome obstacles, and
carry her triumphantly through he had never known the like of. Yes;
but there would come a reaction directly he left the room. She would
be frightfully sorry for him; she would think what in the world she
could do to give him pleasure (short always of the one thing) and he
could see her with the tears running down her cheeks going to her
writing-table and dashing off that one line which he was to find
greeting him.... “Heavenly to see you!” And she meant it.

Peter Walsh had now unlaced his boots.

But it would not have been a success, their marriage. The other thing,
after all, came so much more naturally.

It was odd; it was true; lots of people felt it. Peter Walsh, who had
done just respectably, filled the usual posts adequately, was liked,
but thought a little cranky, gave himself airs--it was odd that _he_
should have had, especially now that his hair was grey, a contented
look; a look of having reserves. It was this that made him attractive
to women who liked the sense that he was not altogether manly. There
was something unusual about him, or something behind him. It might be
that he was bookish--never came to see you without taking up the book
on the table (he was now reading, with his bootlaces trailing on the
floor); or that he was a gentleman, which showed itself in the way he
knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and in his manners of course to
women. For it was very charming and quite ridiculous how easily some
girl without a grain of sense could twist him round her finger. But
at her own risk. That is to say, though he might be ever so easy, and
indeed with his gaiety and good-breeding fascinating to be with, it was
only up to a point. She said something--no, no; he saw through that.
He wouldn’t stand that--no, no. Then he could shout and rock and hold
his sides together over some joke with men. He was the best judge of
cooking in India. He was a man. But not the sort of man one had to
respect--which was a mercy; not like Major Simmons, for instance; not
in the least like that, Daisy thought, when, in spite of her two small
children, she used to compare them.

He pulled off his boots. He emptied his pockets. Out came with his
pocket-knife a snapshot of Daisy on the verandah; Daisy all in white,
with a fox-terrier on her knee; very charming, very dark; the best he
had ever seen of her. It did come, after all so naturally; so much
more naturally than Clarissa. No fuss. No bother. No finicking and
fidgeting. All plain sailing. And the dark, adorably pretty girl on
the verandah exclaimed (he could hear her). Of course, of course she
would give him everything! she cried (she had no sense of discretion)
everything he wanted! she cried, running to meet him, whoever might be
looking. And she was only twenty-four. And she had two children. Well,
well!

Well indeed he had got himself into a mess at his age. And it came over
him when he woke in the night pretty forcibly. Suppose they did marry?
For him it would be all very well, but what about her? Mrs. Burgess,
a good sort and no chatterbox, in whom he had confided, thought this
absence of his in England, ostensibly to see lawyers might serve to
make Daisy reconsider, think what it meant. It was a question of
her position, Mrs. Burgess said; the social barrier; giving up her
children. She’d be a widow with a past one of these days, draggling
about in the suburbs, or more likely, indiscriminate (you know, she
said, what such women get like, with too much paint). But Peter Walsh
pooh-poohed all that. He didn’t mean to die yet. Anyhow she must settle
for herself; judge for herself, he thought, padding about the room in
his socks smoothing out his dress-shirt, for he might go to Clarissa’s
party, or he might go to one of the Halls, or he might settle in and
read an absorbing book written by a man he used to know at Oxford. And
if he did retire, that’s what he’d do--write books. He would go to
Oxford and poke about in the Bodleian. Vainly the dark, adorably pretty
girl ran to the end of the terrace; vainly waved her hand; vainly
cried she didn’t care a straw what people said. There he was, the man
she thought the world of, the perfect gentleman, the fascinating, the
distinguished (and his age made not the least difference to her),
padding about a room in an hotel in Bloomsbury, shaving, washing,
continuing, as he took up cans, put down razors, to poke about in the
Bodleian, and get at the truth about one or two little matters that
interested him. And he would have a chat with whoever it might be, and
so come to disregard more and more precise hours for lunch, and miss
engagements, and when Daisy asked him, as she would, for a kiss, a
scene, fail to come up to the scratch (though he was genuinely devoted
to her)--in short it might be happier, as Mrs. Burgess said, that she
should forget him, or merely remember him as he was in August 1922,
like a figure standing at the cross roads at dusk, which grows more and
more remote as the dog-cart spins away, carrying her securely fastened
to the back seat, though her arms are outstretched, and as she sees
the figure dwindle and disappear still she cries out how she would do
anything in the world, anything, anything, anything....

He never knew what people thought. It became more and more difficult
for him to concentrate. He became absorbed; he became busied with his
own concerns; now surly, now gay; dependent on women, absent-minded,
moody, less and less able (so he thought as he shaved) to understand
why Clarissa couldn’t simply find them a lodging and be nice to Daisy;
introduce her. And then he could just--just do what? just haunt and
hover (he was at the moment actually engaged in sorting out various
keys, papers), swoop and taste, be alone, in short, sufficient to
himself; and yet nobody of course was more dependent upon others (he
buttoned his waistcoat); it had been his undoing. He could not keep
out of smoking-rooms, liked colonels, liked golf, liked bridge, and
above all women’s society, and the fineness of their companionship, and
their faithfulness and audacity and greatness in loving which though
it had its drawbacks seemed to him (and the dark, adorably pretty face
was on top of the envelopes) so wholly admirable, so splendid a flower
to grow on the crest of human life, and yet he could not come up to
the scratch, being always apt to see round things (Clarissa had sapped
something in him permanently), and to tire very easily of mute devotion
and to want variety in love, though it would make him furious if Daisy
loved anybody else, furious! for he was jealous, uncontrollably jealous
by temperament. He suffered tortures! But where was his knife; his
watch; his seals, his note-case, and Clarissa’s letter which he would
not read again but liked to think of, and Daisy’s photograph? And now
for dinner.

They were eating.

Sitting at little tables round vases, dressed or not dressed, with
their shawls and bags laid beside them, with their air of false
composure, for they were not used to so many courses at dinner, and
confidence, for they were able to pay for it, and strain, for they
had been running about London all day shopping, sightseeing; and their
natural curiosity, for they looked round and up as the nice-looking
gentleman in horn-rimmed spectacles came in, and their good nature,
for they would have been glad to do any little service, such as lend a
time-table or impart useful information, and their desire, pulsing in
them, tugging at them subterraneously, somehow to establish connections
if it were only a birthplace (Liverpool, for example) in common or
friends of the same name; with their furtive glances, odd silences, and
sudden withdrawals into family jocularity and isolation; there they
sat eating dinner when Mr. Walsh came in and took his seat at a little
table by the curtain.

It was not that he said anything, for being solitary he could only
address himself to the waiter; it was his way of looking at the menu,
of pointing his forefinger to a particular wine, of hitching himself
up to the table, of addressing himself seriously, not gluttonously
to dinner, that won him their respect; which, having to remain
unexpressed for the greater part of the meal, flared up at the table
where the Morrises sat when Mr. Walsh was heard to say at the end of
the meal, “Bartlett pears.” Why he should have spoken so moderately
yet firmly, with the air of a disciplinarian well within his rights
which are founded upon justice, neither young Charles Morris, nor
old Charles, neither Miss Elaine nor Mrs. Morris knew. But when he
said, “Bartlett pears,” sitting alone at his table, they felt that
he counted on their support in some lawful demand; was champion of
a cause which immediately became their own, so that their eyes met
his eyes sympathetically, and when they all reached the smoking-room
simultaneously, a little talk between them became inevitable.

It was not very profound--only to the effect that London was crowded;
had changed in thirty years; that Mr. Morris preferred Liverpool; that
Mrs. Morris had been to the Westminster flower-show, and that they
had all seen the Prince of Wales. Yet, thought Peter Walsh, no family
in the world can compare with the Morrises; none whatever; and their
relations to each other are perfect, and they don’t care a hang for the
upper classes, and they like what they like, and Elaine is training
for the family business, and the boy has won a scholarship at Leeds,
and the old lady (who is about his own age) has three more children at
home; and they have two motor cars, but Mr. Morris still mends the
boots on Sunday: it is superb, it is absolutely superb, thought Peter
Walsh, swaying a little backwards and forwards with his liqueur glass
in his hand among the hairy red chairs and ash-trays, feeling very well
pleased with himself, for the Morrises liked him. Yes, they liked a man
who said, “Bartlett pears.” They liked him, he felt.

He would go to Clarissa’s party. (The Morrises moved off; but they
would meet again.) He would go to Clarissa’s party, because he wanted
to ask Richard what they were doing in India--the conservative duffers.
And what’s being acted? And music.... Oh yes, and mere gossip.

For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who
fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her
way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and
on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots
to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a
positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping. What did the
Government mean--Richard Dalloway would know--to do about India?

Since it was a very hot night and the paper boys went by with placards
proclaiming in huge red letters that there was a heat-wave, wicker
chairs were placed on the hotel steps and there, sipping, smoking,
detached gentlemen sat. Peter Walsh sat there. One might fancy that
day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped
off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and
pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening,
and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling
petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic
thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans;
and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense
light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded
above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel,
flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but
London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky,
pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.

For the great revolution of Mr. Willett’s summer time had taken place
since Peter Walsh’s last visit to England. The prolonged evening was
new to him. It was inspiriting, rather. For as the young people went by
with their despatch-boxes, awfully glad to be free, proud too, dumbly,
of stepping this famous pavement, joy of a kind, cheap, tinselly, if
you like, but all the same rapture, flushed their faces. They dressed
well too; pink stockings; pretty shoes. They would now have two hours
at the pictures. It sharpened, it refined them, the yellow-blue evening
light; and on the leaves in the square shone lurid, livid--they
looked as if dipped in sea water--the foliage of a submerged city. He
was astonished by the beauty; it was encouraging too, for where the
returned Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds of them) in the
Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world, here was
he, as young as ever; envying young people their summer time and the
rest of it, and more than suspecting from the words of a girl, from a
housemaid’s laughter--intangible things you couldn’t lay your hands
on--that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth
had seemed immovable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed them down,
the women especially, like those flowers Clarissa’s Aunt Helena used to
press between sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré’s dictionary
on top, sitting under the lamp after dinner. She was dead now. He had
heard of her, from Clarissa, losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so
fitting--one of nature’s masterpieces--that old Miss Parry should turn
to glass. She would die like some bird in a frost gripping her perch.
She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete,
would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a
lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long
voyage, this interminable (he felt for a copper to buy a paper and
read about Surrey and Yorkshire--he had held out that copper millions
of times. Surrey was all out once more)--this interminable life. But
cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. He could never help
reading about cricket. He read the scores in the stop press first, then
how it was a hot day; then about a murder case. Having done things
millions of times enriched them, though it might be said to take the
surface off. The past enriched, and experience, and having cared for
one or two people, and so having acquired the power which the young
lack, of cutting short, doing what one likes, not caring a rap what
people say and coming and going without any very great expectations
(he left his paper on the table and moved off), which however (and
he looked for his hat and coat) was not altogether true of him, not
to-night, for here he was starting to go to a party, at his age, with
the belief upon him that he was about to have an experience. But what?

Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the eye. It was not beauty
pure and simple--Bedford Place leading into Russell Square. It was
straightness and emptiness of course; the symmetry of a corridor; but
it was also windows lit up, a piano, a gramophone sounding; a sense
of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging when, through
the uncurtained window, the window left open, one saw parties sitting
over tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men
and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment theirs, when work
was done), stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants.
Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life. And in the
large square where the cabs shot and swerved so quick, there were
loitering couples, dallying, embracing, shrunk up under the shower
of a tree; that was moving; so silent, so absorbed, that one passed,
discreetly, timidly, as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to
interrupt which would have been impious. That was interesting. And so
on into the flare and glare.

His light overcoat blew open, he stepped with indescribable
idiosyncrasy, leant a little forward, tripped, with his hands behind
his back and his eyes still a little hawklike; he tripped through
London, towards Westminster, observing.

Was everybody dining out, then? Doors were being opened here by a
footman to let issue a high-stepping old dame, in buckled shoes, with
three purple ostrich feathers in her hair. Doors were being opened for
ladies wrapped like mummies in shawls with bright flowers on them,
ladies with bare heads. And in respectable quarters with stucco pillars
through small front gardens lightly swathed with combs in their hair
(having run up to see the children), women came; men waited for them,
with their coats blowing open, and the motor started. Everybody was
going out. What with these doors being opened, and the descent and the
start, it seemed as if the whole of London were embarking in little
boats moored to the bank, tossing on the waters, as if the whole place
were floating off in carnival. And Whitehall was skated over, silver
beaten as it was, skated over by spiders, and there was a sense of
midges round the arc lamps; it was so hot that people stood about
talking. And here in Westminster was a retired Judge, presumably,
sitting four square at his house door dressed all in white. An
Anglo-Indian presumably.

And here a shindy of brawling women, drunken women; here only a
policeman and looming houses, high houses, domed houses, churches,
parliaments, and the hoot of a steamer on the river, a hollow misty
cry. But it was her street, this, Clarissa’s; cabs were rushing round
the corner, like water round the piers of a bridge, drawn together, it
seemed to him because they bore people going to her party, Clarissa’s
party.

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye
were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls
unrecorded. The brain must wake now. The body must contract now,
entering the house, the lighted house, where the door stood open,
where the motor cars were standing, and bright women descending: the
soul must brave itself to endure. He opened the big blade of his
pocket-knife.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lucy came running full tilt downstairs, having just nipped in to the
drawing-room to smooth a cover, to straighten a chair, to pause a
moment and feel whoever came in must think how clean, how bright, how
beautifully cared for, when they saw the beautiful silver, the brass
fire-irons, the new chair-covers, and the curtains of yellow chintz:
she appraised each; heard a roar of voices; people already coming up
from dinner; she must fly!

The Prime Minister was coming, Agnes said: so she had heard them say
in the dining-room, she said, coming in with a tray of glasses. Did it
matter, did it matter in the least, one Prime Minister more or less? It
made no difference at this hour of the night to Mrs. Walker among the
plates, saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream
freezers, pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup tureens, and pudding
basins which, however hard they washed up in the scullery seemed to
be all on top of her, on the kitchen table, on chairs, while the fire
blared and roared, the electric lights glared, and still supper had to
be laid. All she felt was, one Prime Minister more or less made not a
scrap of difference to Mrs. Walker.

The ladies were going upstairs already, said Lucy; the ladies were
going up, one by one, Mrs. Dalloway walking last and almost always
sending back some message to the kitchen, “My love to Mrs. Walker,”
that was it one night. Next morning they would go over the dishes--the
soup, the salmon; the salmon, Mrs. Walker knew, as usual underdone,
for she always got nervous about the pudding and left it to Jenny;
so it happened, the salmon was always underdone. But some lady with
fair hair and silver ornaments had said, Lucy said, about the entrée,
was it really made at home? But it was the salmon that bothered Mrs.
Walker, as she spun the plates round and round, and pulled in dampers
and pulled out dampers; and there came a burst of laughter from the
dining-room; a voice speaking; then another burst of laughter--the
gentlemen enjoying themselves when the ladies had gone. The tokay,
said Lucy running in. Mr. Dalloway had sent for the tokay, from the
Emperor’s cellars, the Imperial Tokay.

It was borne through the kitchen. Over her shoulder Lucy reported how
Miss Elizabeth looked quite lovely; she couldn’t take her eyes off her;
in her pink dress, wearing the necklace Mr. Dalloway had given her.
Jenny must remember the dog, Miss Elizabeth’s fox-terrier, which, since
it bit, had to be shut up and might, Elizabeth thought, want something.
Jenny must remember the dog. But Jenny was not going upstairs with all
those people about. There was a motor at the door already! There was a
ring at the bell--and the gentlemen still in the dining-room, drinking
tokay!

There, they were going upstairs; that was the first to come, and now
they would come faster and faster, so that Mrs. Parkinson (hired for
parties) would leave the hall door ajar, and the hall would be full
of gentlemen waiting (they stood waiting, sleeking down their hair)
while the ladies took their cloaks off in the room along the passage;
where Mrs. Barnet helped them, old Ellen Barnet, who had been with the
family for forty years, and came every summer to help the ladies, and
remembered mothers when they were girls, and though very unassuming did
shake hands; said “milady” very respectfully, yet had a humorous way
with her, looking at the young ladies, and ever so tactfully helping
Lady Lovejoy, who had some trouble with her underbodice. And they
could not help feeling, Lady Lovejoy and Miss Alice, that some little
privilege in the matter of brush and comb, was awarded them having
known Mrs. Barnet--“thirty years, milady,” Mrs. Barnet supplied her.
Young ladies did not use to rouge, said Lady Lovejoy, when they stayed
at Bourton in the old days. And Miss Alice didn’t need rouge, said Mrs.
Barnet, looking at her fondly. There Mrs. Barnet would sit, in the
cloakroom, patting down the furs, smoothing out the Spanish shawls,
tidying the dressing-table, and knowing perfectly well, in spite of the
furs and the embroideries, which were nice ladies, which were not. The
dear old body, said Lady Lovejoy, mounting the stairs, Clarissa’s old
nurse.

And then Lady Lovejoy stiffened. “Lady and Miss Lovejoy,” she said to
Mr. Wilkins (hired for parties). He had an admirable manner, as he bent
and straightened himself, bent and straightened himself and announced
with perfect impartiality “Lady and Miss Lovejoy ... Sir John and Lady
Needham ... Miss Weld ... Mr. Walsh.” His manner was admirable; his
family life must be irreproachable, except that it seemed impossible
that a being with greenish lips and shaven cheeks could ever have
blundered into the nuisance of children.

“How delightful to see you!” said Clarissa. She said it to every one.
How delightful to see you! She was at her worst--effusive, insincere.
It was a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and
read his book, thought Peter Walsh; should have gone to a music hall;
he should have stayed at home, for he knew no one.

Oh dear, it was going to be a failure; a complete failure, Clarissa
felt it in her bones as dear old Lord Lexham stood there apologising
for his wife who had caught cold at the Buckingham Palace garden party.
She could see Peter out of the tail of her eye, criticising her, there,
in that corner. Why, after all, did she do these things? Why seek
pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn
her to cinders! Better anything, better brandish one’s torch and hurl
it to earth than taper and dwindle away like some Ellie Henderson! It
was extraordinary how Peter put her into these states just by coming
and standing in a corner. He made her see herself; exaggerate. It was
idiotic. But why did he come, then, merely to criticise? Why always
take, never give? Why not risk one’s one little point of view? There
he was wandering off, and she must speak to him. But she would not
get the chance. Life was that--humiliation, renunciation. What Lord
Lexham was saying was that his wife would not wear her furs at the
garden party because “my dear, you ladies are all alike”--Lady Lexham
being seventy-five at least! It was delicious, how they petted each
other, that old couple. She did like old Lord Lexham. She did think it
mattered, her party, and it made her feel quite sick to know that it
was all going wrong, all falling flat. Anything, any explosion, any
horror was better than people wandering aimlessly, standing in a bunch
at a corner like Ellie Henderson, not even caring to hold themselves
upright.

Gently the yellow curtain with all the birds of Paradise blew out and
it seemed as if there were a flight of wings into the room, right
out, then sucked back. (For the windows were open.) Was it draughty,
Ellie Henderson wondered? She was subject to chills. But it did not
matter that she should come down sneezing to-morrow; it was the girls
with their naked shoulders she thought of, being trained to think of
others by an old father, an invalid, late vicar of Bourton, but he
was dead now; and her chills never went to her chest, never. It was
the girls she thought of, the young girls with their bare shoulders,
she herself having always been a wisp of a creature, with her thin
hair and meagre profile; though now, past fifty, there was beginning
to shine through some mild beam, something purified into distinction
by years of self-abnegation but obscured again, perpetually, by her
distressing gentility, her panic fear, which arose from three hundred
pounds’ income, and her weaponless state (she could not earn a penny)
and it made her timid, and more and more disqualified year by year to
meet well-dressed people who did this sort of thing every night of
the season, merely telling their maids “I’ll wear so and so,” whereas
Ellie Henderson ran out nervously and bought cheap pink flowers, half
a dozen, and then threw a shawl over her old black dress. For her
invitation to Clarissa’s party had come at the last moment. She was not
quite happy about it. She had a sort of feeling that Clarissa had not
meant to ask her this year.

Why should she? There was no reason really, except that they had always
known each other. Indeed, they were cousins. But naturally they had
rather drifted apart, Clarissa being so sought after. It was an event
to her, going to a party. It was quite a treat just to see the lovely
clothes. Wasn’t that Elizabeth, grown up, with her hair done in the
fashionable way, in the pink dress? Yet she could not be more than
seventeen. She was very, very handsome. But girls when they first
came out didn’t seem to wear white as they used. (She must remember
everything to tell Edith.) Girls wore straight frocks, perfectly tight,
with skirts well above the ankles. It was not becoming, she thought.

So, with her weak eyesight, Ellie Henderson craned rather forward,
and it wasn’t so much she who minded not having any one to talk to
(she hardly knew anybody there), for she felt that they were all such
interesting people to watch; politicians presumably; Richard Dalloway’s
friends; but it was Richard himself who felt that he could not let the
poor creature go on standing there all the evening by herself.

“Well, Ellie, and how’s the world treating _you_?” he said in his
genial way, and Ellie Henderson, getting nervous and flushing and
feeling that it was extraordinarily nice of him to come and talk to
her, said that many people really felt the heat more than the cold.

“Yes, they do,” said Richard Dalloway. “Yes.”

But what more did one say?

“Hullo, Richard,” said somebody, taking him by the elbow, and, good
Lord, there was old Peter, old Peter Walsh. He was delighted to see
him--ever so pleased to see him! He hadn’t changed a bit. And off they
went together walking right across the room, giving each other little
pats, as if they hadn’t met for a long time, Ellie Henderson thought,
watching them go, certain she knew that man’s face. A tall man, middle
aged, rather fine eyes, dark, wearing spectacles, with a look of John
Burrows. Edith would be sure to know.

The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out again. And
Clarissa saw--she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back, and go on talking. So
it wasn’t a failure after all! it was going to be all right now--her
party. It had begun. It had started. But it was still touch and go. She
must stand there for the present. People seemed to come in a rush.

Colonel and Mrs. Garrod ... Mr. Hugh Whitbread ... Mr. Bowley ... Mrs.
Hilbery ... Lady Mary Maddox ... Mr. Quin ... intoned Wilkin. She had
six or seven words with each, and they went on, they went into the
rooms; into something now, not nothing, since Ralph Lyon had beat back
the curtain.

And yet for her own part, it was too much of an effort. She was not
enjoying it. It was too much like being--just anybody, standing there;
anybody could do it; yet this anybody she did a little admire, couldn’t
help feeling that she had, anyhow, made this happen, that it marked a
stage, this post that she felt herself to have become, for oddly enough
she had quite forgotten what she looked like, but felt herself a stake
driven in at the top of her stairs. Every time she gave a party she
had this feeling of being something not herself, and that every one
was unreal in one way; much more real in another. It was, she thought,
partly their clothes, partly being taken out of their ordinary ways,
partly the background, it was possible to say things you couldn’t say
anyhow else, things that needed an effort; possible to go much deeper.
But not for her; not yet anyhow.

“How delightful to see you!” she said. Dear old Sir Harry! He would
know every one.

And what was so odd about it was the sense one had as they came up the
stairs one after another, Mrs. Mount and Celia, Herbert Ainsty, Mrs.
Dakers--oh and Lady Bruton!

“How awfully good of you to come!” she said, and she meant it--it was
odd how standing there one felt them going on, going on, some quite
old, some....

_What_ name? Lady Rosseter? But who on earth was Lady Rosseter?

“Clarissa!” That voice! It was Sally Seton! Sally Seton! after all
these years! She loomed through a mist. For she hadn’t looked like
_that_, Sally Seton, when Clarissa grasped the hot water can, to think
of her under this roof, under this roof! Not like that!

All on top of each other, embarrassed, laughing, words tumbled
out--passing through London; heard from Clara Haydon; what a chance of
seeing you! So I thrust myself in--without an invitation....

One might put down the hot water can quite composedly. The lustre had
gone out of her. Yet it was extraordinary to see her again, older,
happier, less lovely. They kissed each other, first this cheek then
that, by the drawing-room door, and Clarissa turned, with Sally’s hand
in hers, and saw her rooms full, heard the roar of voices, saw the
candlesticks, the blowing curtains, and the roses which Richard had
given her.

“I have five enormous boys,” said Sally.

She had the simplest egotism, the most open desire to be thought first
always, and Clarissa loved her for being still like that. “I can’t
believe it!” she cried, kindling all over with pleasure at the thought
of the past.

But alas, Wilkins; Wilkins wanted her; Wilkins was emitting in a voice
of commanding authority as if the whole company must be admonished and
the hostess reclaimed from frivolity, one name:

“The Prime Minister,” said Peter Walsh.

The Prime Minister? Was it really? Ellie Henderson marvelled. What a
thing to tell Edith!

One couldn’t laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might have stood
him behind a counter and bought biscuits--poor chap, all rigged up in
gold lace. And to be fair, as he went his rounds, first with Clarissa
then with Richard escorting him, he did it very well. He tried to look
somebody. It was amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him. They just
went on talking, yet it was perfectly plain that they all knew, felt to
the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of what
they all stood for, English society. Old Lady Bruton, and she looked
very fine too, very stalwart in her lace, swam up, and they withdrew
into a little room which at once became spied upon, guarded, and a
sort of stir and rustle rippled through every one, openly: the Prime
Minister!

Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh, standing
in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing
homage! There! That must be, by Jove it was, Hugh Whitbread, snuffing
round the precincts of the great, grown rather fatter, rather whiter,
the admirable Hugh!

He looked always as if he were on duty, thought Peter, a privileged,
but secretive being, hoarding secrets which he would die to defend,
though it was only some little piece of tittle-tattle dropped by a
court footman, which would be in all the papers to-morrow. Such were
his rattles, his baubles, in playing with which he had grown white,
come to the verge of old age, enjoying the respect and affection of
all who had the privilege of knowing this type of the English public
school man. Inevitably one made up things like that about Hugh; that
was his style; the style of those admirable letters which Peter had
read thousands of miles across the sea in the _Times_, and had thanked
God he was out of that pernicious hubble-bubble if it were only to
hear baboons chatter and coolies beat their wives. An olive-skinned
youth from one of the Universities stood obsequiously by. Him he would
patronise, initiate, teach how to get on. For he liked nothing better
than doing kindnesses, making the hearts of old ladies palpitate with
the joy of being thought of in their age, their affliction, thinking
themselves quite forgotten, yet here was dear Hugh driving up and
spending an hour talking of the past, remembering trifles, praising the
home-made cake, though Hugh might eat cake with a Duchess any day of
his life, and, to look at him, probably did spend a good deal of time
in that agreeable occupation. The All-judging, the All-merciful, might
excuse. Peter Walsh had no mercy. Villains there must be, and God knows
the rascals who get hanged for battering the brains of a girl out in a
train do less harm on the whole than Hugh Whitbread and his kindness.
Look at him now, on tiptoe, dancing forward, bowing and scraping,
as the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton emerged, intimating for all
the world to see that he was privileged to say something, something
private, to Lady Bruton as she passed. She stopped. She wagged her fine
old head. She was thanking him presumably for some piece of servility.
She had her toadies, minor officials in Government offices who ran
about putting through little jobs on her behalf, in return for which
she gave them luncheon. But she derived from the eighteenth century.
She was all right.

And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing,
sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She wore ear-rings,
and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding
her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to
sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf
in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most
perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element. But age had
brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the setting
sun on some very clear evening over the waves. There was a breath of
tenderness; her severity, her prudery, her woodenness were all warmed
through now, and she had about her as she said good-bye to the thick
gold-laced man who was doing his best, and good luck to him, to look
important, an inexpressible dignity; an exquisite cordiality; as if she
wished the whole world well, and must now, being on the very verge and
rim of things, take her leave. So she made him think. (But he was not
in love.)

Indeed, Clarissa felt, the Prime Minister had been good to come. And,
walking down the room with him, with Sally there and Peter there and
Richard very pleased, with all those people rather inclined, perhaps,
to envy, she had felt that intoxication of the moment, that dilatation
of the nerves of the heart itself till it seemed to quiver, steeped,
upright;--yes, but after all it was what other people felt, that;
for, though she loved it and felt it tingle and sting, still these
semblances, these triumphs (dear old Peter, for example, thinking her
so brilliant), had a hollowness; at arm’s length they were, not in the
heart; and it might be that she was growing old but they satisfied her
no longer as they used; and suddenly, as she saw the Prime Minister
go down the stairs, the gilt rim of the Sir Joshua picture of the
little girl with a muff brought back Kilman with a rush; Kilman her
enemy. That was satisfying; that was real. Ah, how she hated her--hot,
hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power; Elizabeth’s seducer; the
woman who had crept in to steal and defile (Richard would say, What
nonsense!). She hated her: she loved her. It was enemies one wanted,
not friends--not Mrs. Durrant and Clara, Sir William and Lady Bradshaw,
Miss Truelock and Eleanor Gibson (whom she saw coming upstairs). They
must find her if they wanted her. She was for the party!

There was her old friend Sir Harry.

“Dear Sir Harry!” she said, going up to the fine old fellow who had
produced more bad pictures than any other two Academicians in the whole
of St. John’s Wood (they were always of cattle, standing in sunset
pools absorbing moisture, or signifying, for he had a certain range of
gesture, by the raising of one foreleg and the toss of the antlers,
“the Approach of the Stranger”--all his activities, dining out, racing,
were founded on cattle standing absorbing moisture in sunset pools).

“What are you laughing at?” she asked him. For Willie Titcomb and
Sir Harry and Herbert Ainsty were all laughing. But no. Sir Harry
could not tell Clarissa Dalloway (much though he liked her; of her
type he thought her perfect, and threatened to paint her) his stories
of the music hall stage. He chaffed her about her party. He missed
his brandy. These circles, he said, were above him. But he liked
her; respected her, in spite of her damnable, difficult upper-class
refinement, which made it impossible to ask Clarissa Dalloway to sit on
his knee. And up came that wandering will-o’-the-wisp, that vagulous
phosphorescence, old Mrs. Hilbery, stretching her hands to the blaze
of his laughter (about the Duke and the Lady), which, as she heard it
across the room, seemed to reassure her on a point which sometimes
bothered her if she woke early in the morning and did not like to call
her maid for a cup of tea; how it is certain we must die.

“They won’t tell us their stories,” said Clarissa.

“Dear Clarissa!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery. She looked to-night, she said,
so like her mother as she first saw her walking in a garden in a grey
hat.

And really Clarissa’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother, walking in a
garden! But alas, she must go.

For there was Professor Brierly, who lectured on Milton, talking to
little Jim Hutton (who was unable even for a party like this to compass
both tie and waistcoat or make his hair lie flat), and even at this
distance they were quarrelling, she could see. For Professor Brierly
was a very queer fish. With all those degrees, honours, lectureships
between him and the scribblers he suspected instantly an atmosphere
not favourable to his queer compound; his prodigious learning and
timidity; his wintry charm without cordiality; his innocence blent with
snobbery; he quivered if made conscious by a lady’s unkempt hair, a
youth’s boots, of an underworld, very creditable doubtless, of rebels,
of ardent young people; of would-be geniuses, and intimated with a
little toss of the head, with a sniff--Humph!--the value of moderation;
of some slight training in the classics in order to appreciate Milton.
Professor Brierly (Clarissa could see) wasn’t hitting it off with
little Jim Hutton (who wore red socks, his black being at the laundry)
about Milton. She interrupted.

She said she loved Bach. So did Hutton. That was the bond between them,
and Hutton (a very bad poet) always felt that Mrs. Dalloway was far the
best of the great ladies who took an interest in art. It was odd how
strict she was. About music she was purely impersonal. She was rather
a prig. But how charming to look at! She made her house so nice if it
weren’t for her Professors. Clarissa had half a mind to snatch him off
and set him down at the piano in the back room. For he played divinely.

“But the noise!” she said. “The noise!”

“The sign of a successful party.” Nodding urbanely, the Professor
stepped delicately off.

“He knows everything in the whole world about Milton,” said Clarissa.

“Does he indeed?” said Hutton, who would imitate the Professor
throughout Hampstead; the Professor on Milton; the Professor on
moderation; the Professor stepping delicately off.

But she must speak to that couple, said Clarissa, Lord Gayton and Nancy
Blow.

Not that _they_ added perceptibly to the noise of the party. They were
not talking (perceptibly) as they stood side by side by the yellow
curtains. They would soon be off elsewhere, together; and never had
very much to say in any circumstances. They looked; that was all. That
was enough. They looked so clean, so sound, she with an apricot bloom
of powder and paint, but he scrubbed, rinsed, with the eyes of a bird,
so that no ball could pass him or stroke surprise him. He struck, he
leapt, accurately, on the spot. Ponies’ mouths quivered at the end of
his reins. He had his honours, ancestral monuments, banners hanging
in the church at home. He had his duties; his tenants; a mother and
sisters; had been all day at Lords, and that was what they were
talking about--cricket, cousins, the movies--when Mrs. Dalloway came
up. Lord Gayton liked her most awfully. So did Miss Blow. She had such
charming manners.

“It is angelic--it is delicious of you to have come!” she said. She
loved Lords; she loved youth, and Nancy, dressed at enormous expense by
the greatest artists in Paris, stood there looking as if her body had
merely put forth, of its own accord, a green frill.

“I had meant to have dancing,” said Clarissa.

For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout,
embrace, swing, be up at dawn; carry sugar to ponies; kiss and caress
the snouts of adorable chows; and then all tingling and streaming,
plunge and swim. But the enormous resources of the English language,
the power it bestows, after all, of communicating feelings (at their
age, she and Peter would have been arguing all the evening), was not
for them. They would solidify young. They would be good beyond measure
to the people on the estate, but alone, perhaps, rather dull.

“What a pity!” she said. “I had hoped to have dancing.”

It was so extraordinarily nice of them to have come! But talk of
dancing! The rooms were packed.

There was old Aunt Helena in her shawl. Alas, she must leave them--Lord
Gayton and Nancy Blow. There was old Miss Parry, her aunt.

For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive. She was past
eighty. She ascended staircases slowly with a stick. She was placed in
a chair (Richard had seen to it). People who had known Burma in the
’seventies were always led up to her. Where had Peter got to? They
used to be such friends. For at the mention of India, or even Ceylon,
her eyes (only one was glass) slowly deepened, became blue, beheld,
not human beings--she had no tender memories, no proud illusions about
Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies--it was orchids she saw, and mountain
passes and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the ’sixties over
solitary peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (startling blossoms,
never beheld before) which she painted in water-colour; an indomitable
Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the War, say, which dropped a
bomb at her very door, from her deep meditation over orchids and her
own figure journeying in the ’sixties in India--but here was Peter.

“Come and talk to Aunt Helena about Burma,” said Clarissa.

And yet he had not had a word with her all the evening!

“We will talk later,” said Clarissa, leading him up to Aunt Helena, in
her white shawl, with her stick.

“Peter Walsh,” said Clarissa.

That meant nothing.

Clarissa had asked her. It was tiring; it was noisy; but Clarissa
had asked her. So she had come. It was a pity that they lived in
London--Richard and Clarissa. If only for Clarissa’s health it would
have been better to live in the country. But Clarissa had always been
fond of society.

“He has been in Burma,” said Clarissa.

Ah. She could not resist recalling what Charles Darwin had said about
her little book on the orchids of Burma.

(Clarissa must speak to Lady Bruton.)

No doubt it was forgotten now, her book on the orchids of Burma,
but it went into three editions before 1870, she told Peter. She
remembered him now. He had been at Bourton (and he had left her, Peter
Walsh remembered, without a word in the drawing-room that night when
Clarissa had asked him to come boating).

“Richard so much enjoyed his lunch party,” said Clarissa to Lady Bruton.

“Richard was the greatest possible help,” Lady Bruton replied. “He
helped me to write a letter. And how are you?”

“Oh, perfectly well!” said Clarissa. (Lady Bruton detested illness in
the wives of politicians.)

“And there’s Peter Walsh!” said Lady Bruton (for she could never think
of anything to say to Clarissa; though she liked her. She had lots of
fine qualities; but they had nothing in common--she and Clarissa. It
might have been better if Richard had married a woman with less charm,
who would have helped him more in his work. He had lost his chance of
the Cabinet). “There’s Peter Walsh!” she said, shaking hands with that
agreeable sinner, that very able fellow who should have made a name for
himself but hadn’t (always in difficulties with women), and, of course,
old Miss Parry. Wonderful old lady!

Lady Bruton stood by Miss Parry’s chair, a spectral grenadier, draped
in black, inviting Peter Walsh to lunch; cordial; but without small
talk, remembering nothing whatever about the flora or fauna of India.
She had been there, of course; had stayed with three Viceroys; thought
some of the Indian civilians uncommonly fine fellows; but what a
tragedy it was--the state of India! The Prime Minister had just been
telling her (old Miss Parry huddled up in her shawl, did not care what
the Prime Minister had just been telling her), and Lady Bruton would
like to have Peter Walsh’s opinion, he being fresh from the centre,
and she would get Sir Sampson to meet him, for really it prevented her
from sleeping at night, the folly of it, the wickedness she might say,
being a soldier’s daughter. She was an old woman now, not good for
much. But her house, her servants, her good friend Milly Brush--did
he remember her?--were all there only asking to be used if--if they
could be of help, in short. For she never spoke of England, but this
isle of men, this dear, dear land, was in her blood (without reading
Shakespeare), and if ever a woman could have worn the helmet and shot
the arrow, could have led troops to attack, ruled with indomitable
justice barbarian hordes and lain under a shield noseless in a church,
or made a green grass mound on some primeval hillside, that woman
was Millicent Bruton. Debarred by her sex and some truancy, too, of
the logical faculty (she found it impossible to write a letter to
the _Times_), she had the thought of Empire always at hand, and had
acquired from her association with that armoured goddess her ramrod
bearing, her robustness of demeanour, so that one could not figure her
even in death parted from the earth or roaming territories over which,
in some spiritual shape, the Union Jack had ceased to fly. To be not
English even among the dead--no, no! Impossible!

But was it Lady Bruton (whom she used to know)? Was it Peter Walsh
grown grey? Lady Rosseter asked herself (who had been Sally Seton).
It was old Miss Parry certainly--the old aunt who used to be so cross
when she stayed at Bourton. Never should she forget running along the
passage naked, and being sent for by Miss Parry! And Clarissa! oh
Clarissa! Sally caught her by the arm.

Clarissa stopped beside them.

“But I can’t stay,” she said. “I shall come later. Wait,” she said,
looking at Peter and Sally. They must wait, she meant, until all these
people had gone.

“I shall come back,” she said, looking at her old friends, Sally and
Peter, who were shaking hands, and Sally, remembering the past no
doubt, was laughing.

But her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness; her eyes not
aglow as they used to be, when she smoked cigars, when she ran down
the passage to fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of clothing on
her, and Ellen Atkins asked, What if the gentlemen had met her? But
everybody forgave her. She stole a chicken from the larder because
she was hungry in the night; she smoked cigars in her bedroom; she
left a priceless book in the punt. But everybody adored her (except
perhaps Papa). It was her warmth; her vitality--she would paint, she
would write. Old women in the village never to this day forgot to
ask after “your friend in the red cloak who seemed so bright.” She
accused Hugh Whitbread, of all people (and there he was, her old friend
Hugh, talking to the Portuguese Ambassador), of kissing her in the
smoking-room to punish her for saying that women should have votes.
Vulgar men did, she said. And Clarissa remembered having to persuade
her not to denounce him at family prayers--which she was capable of
doing with her daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love of
being the centre of everything and creating scenes, and it was bound,
Clarissa used to think, to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her
martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald
man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at
Manchester. And she had five boys!

She and Peter had settled down together. They were talking: it seemed
so familiar--that they should be talking. They would discuss the past.
With the two of them (more even than with Richard) she shared her past;
the garden; the trees; old Joseph Breitkopf singing Brahms without any
voice; the drawing-room wall-paper; the smell of the mats. A part of
this Sally must always be; Peter must always be. But she must leave
them. There were the Bradshaws, whom she disliked. She must go up to
Lady Bradshaw (in grey and silver, balancing like a sea-lion at the
edge of its tank, barking for invitations, Duchesses, the typical
successful man’s wife), she must go up to Lady Bradshaw and say....

But Lady Bradshaw anticipated her.

“We are shockingly late, dear Mrs. Dalloway, we hardly dared to come
in,” she said.

And Sir William, who looked very distinguished, with his grey hair and
blue eyes, said yes; they had not been able to resist the temptation.
He was talking to Richard about that Bill probably, which they wanted
to get through the Commons. Why did the sight of him, talking to
Richard, curl her up? He looked what he was, a great doctor. A man
absolutely at the head of his profession, very powerful, rather worn.
For think what cases came before him--people in the uttermost depths of
misery; people on the verge of insanity; husbands and wives. He had to
decide questions of appalling difficulty. Yet--what she felt was, one
wouldn’t like Sir William to see one unhappy. No; not that man.

“How is your son at Eton?” she asked Lady Bradshaw.

He had just missed his eleven, said Lady Bradshaw, because of the
mumps. His father minded even more than he did, she thought “being,”
she said, “nothing but a great boy himself.”

Clarissa looked at Sir William, talking to Richard. He did not look
like a boy--not in the least like a boy. She had once gone with some
one to ask his advice. He had been perfectly right; extremely sensible.
But Heavens--what a relief to get out to the street again! There was
some poor wretch sobbing, she remembered, in the waiting-room. But
she did not know what it was--about Sir William; what exactly she
disliked. Only Richard agreed with her, “didn’t like his taste, didn’t
like his smell.” But he was extraordinarily able. They were talking
about this Bill. Some case, Sir William was mentioning, lowering his
voice. It had its bearing upon what he was saying about the deferred
effects of shell shock. There must be some provision in the Bill.

Sinking her voice, drawing Mrs. Dalloway into the shelter of a common
femininity, a common pride in the illustrious qualities of husbands and
their sad tendency to overwork, Lady Bradshaw (poor goose--one didn’t
dislike her) murmured how, “just as we were starting, my husband was
called up on the telephone, a very sad case. A young man (that is what
Sir William is telling Mr. Dalloway) had killed himself. He had been
in the army.” Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s
death, she thought.

She went on, into the little room where the Prime Minister had gone
with Lady Bruton. Perhaps there was somebody there. But there was
nobody. The chairs still kept the impress of the Prime Minister
and Lady Bruton, she turned deferentially, he sitting four-square,
authoritatively. They had been talking about India. There was nobody.
The party’s splendour fell to the floor, so strange it was to come in
alone in her finery.

What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A
young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party--the
Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself--but how? Always
her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an
accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from
a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising,
went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his
brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had
he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!

She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything
more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to
go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They
(all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they
would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed
about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every
day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was
defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the
impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them;
closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an
embrace in death.

But this young man who had killed himself--had he plunged holding his
treasure? “If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy,” she had
said to herself once, coming down in white.

Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion,
and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor yet to her
obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but
capable of some indescribable outrage--forcing your soul, that was
it--if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed
him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she
felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men
like that?

Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the
overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this
life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in
the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard
had not been there reading the _Times_, so that she could crouch like a
bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight,
rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished.
But that young man had killed himself.

Somehow it was her disaster--her disgrace. It was her punishment to
see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound
darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had
schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had
wanted success. Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had
walked on the terrace at Bourton.

It was due to Richard; she had never been so happy. Nothing could
be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she
thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf,
this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the
process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun
rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they
were all talking, to look at the sky; or seen it between people’s
shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She
walked to the window.

It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this
country sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains; she
looked. Oh, but how surprising!--in the room opposite the old lady
stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be
a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away
its cheek in beauty. But there it was--ashen pale, raced over quickly
by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen.
She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to
watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to
the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with people still
laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman,
quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock began
striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him;
with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity
him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light!
the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the
words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back
to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like
him--the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had
done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles
dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the
fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and
Peter. And she came in from the little room.

“But where is Clarissa?” said Peter. He was sitting on the sofa with
Sally. (After all these years he really could not call her “Lady
Rosseter.”) “Where’s the woman gone to?” he asked. “Where’s Clarissa?”

Sally supposed, and so did Peter for the matter of that, that there
were people of importance, politicians, whom neither of them knew
unless by sight in the picture papers, whom Clarissa had to be nice
to, had to talk to. She was with them. Yet there was Richard Dalloway
not in the Cabinet. He hadn’t been a success, Sally supposed? For
herself, she scarcely ever read the papers. She sometimes saw his name
mentioned. But then--well, she lived a very solitary life, in the
wilds, Clarissa would say, among great merchants, great manufacturers,
men, after all, who did things. She had done things too!

“I have five sons!” she told him.

Lord, Lord, what a change had come over her! the softness of
motherhood; its egotism too. Last time they met, Peter remembered, had
been among the cauliflowers in the moonlight, the leaves “like rough
bronze” she had said, with her literary turn; and she had picked a
rose. She had marched him up and down that awful night, after the scene
by the fountain; he was to catch the midnight train. Heavens, he had
wept!

That was his old trick, opening a pocket-knife, thought Sally, always
opening and shutting a knife when he got excited. They had been very,
very intimate, she and Peter Walsh, when he was in love with Clarissa,
and there was that dreadful, ridiculous scene over Richard Dalloway
at lunch. She had called Richard “Wickham.” Why not call Richard
“Wickham”? Clarissa had flared up! and indeed they had never seen each
other since, she and Clarissa, not more than half a dozen times perhaps
in the last ten years. And Peter Walsh had gone off to India, and she
had heard vaguely that he had made an unhappy marriage, and she didn’t
know whether he had any children, and she couldn’t ask him, for he had
changed. He was rather shrivelled-looking, but kinder, she felt, and
she had a real affection for him, for he was connected with her youth,
and she still had a little Emily Brontë he had given her, and he was to
write, surely? In those days he was to write.

“Have you written?” she asked him, spreading her hand, her firm and
shapely hand, on her knee in a way he recalled.

“Not a word!” said Peter Walsh, and she laughed.

She was still attractive, still a personage, Sally Seton. But who
was this Rosseter? He wore two camellias on his wedding day--that
was all Peter knew of him. “They have myriads of servants, miles of
conservatories,” Clarissa wrote; something like that. Sally owned it
with a shout of laughter.

“Yes, I have ten thousand a year”--whether before the tax was paid or
after, she couldn’t remember, for her husband, “whom you must meet,”
she said, “whom you would like,” she said, did all that for her.

And Sally used to be in rags and tatters. She had pawned
her grandmother’s ring which Marie Antoinette had given her
great-grandfather to come to Bourton.

Oh yes, Sally remembered; she had it still, a ruby ring which Marie
Antoinette had given her great-grandfather. She never had a penny
to her name in those days, and going to Bourton always meant some
frightful pinch. But going to Bourton had meant so much to her--had
kept her sane, she believed, so unhappy had she been at home. But that
was all a thing of the past--all over now, she said. And Mr. Parry was
dead; and Miss Parry was still alive. Never had he had such a shock in
his life! said Peter. He had been quite certain she was dead. And the
marriage had been, Sally supposed, a success? And that very handsome,
very self-possessed young woman was Elizabeth, over there, by the
curtains, in red.

(She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth,
Willie Titcomb was thinking. Oh how much nicer to be in the country and
do what she liked! She could hear her poor dog howling, Elizabeth was
certain.) She was not a bit like Clarissa, Peter Walsh said.

“Oh, Clarissa!” said Sally.

What Sally felt was simply this. She had owed Clarissa an enormous
amount. They had been friends, not acquaintances, friends, and she
still saw Clarissa all in white going about the house with her hands
full of flowers--to this day tobacco plants made her think of Bourton.
But--did Peter understand?--she lacked something. Lacked what was it?
She had charm; she had extraordinary charm. But to be frank (and she
felt that Peter was an old friend, a real friend--did absence matter?
did distance matter? She had often wanted to write to him, but torn
it up, yet felt he understood, for people understand without things
being said, as one realises growing old, and old she was, had been
that afternoon to see her sons at Eton, where they had the mumps), to
be quite frank then, how could Clarissa have done it?--married Richard
Dalloway? a sportsman, a man who cared only for dogs. Literally, when
he came into the room he smelt of the stables. And then all this? She
waved her hand.

Hugh Whitbread it was, strolling past in his white waistcoat, dim, fat,
blind, past everything he looked, except self-esteem and comfort.

“He’s not going to recognise _us_,” said Sally, and really she hadn’t
the courage--so that was Hugh! the admirable Hugh!

“And what does he do?” she asked Peter.

He blacked the King’s boots or counted bottles at Windsor, Peter told
her. Peter kept his sharp tongue still! But Sally must be frank, Peter
said. That kiss now, Hugh’s.

On the lips, she assured him, in the smoking-room one evening. She went
straight to Clarissa in a rage. Hugh didn’t do such things! Clarissa
said, the admirable Hugh! Hugh’s socks were without exception the most
beautiful she had ever seen--and now his evening dress. Perfect! And
had he children?

“Everybody in the room has six sons at Eton,” Peter told her, except
himself. He, thank God, had none. No sons, no daughters, no wife. Well,
he didn’t seem to mind, said Sally. He looked younger, she thought,
than any of them.

But it had been a silly thing to do, in many ways, Peter said, to marry
like that; “a perfect goose she was,” he said, but, he said, “we had a
splendid time of it,” but how could that be? Sally wondered; what did
he mean? and how odd it was to know him and yet not know a single thing
that had happened to him. And did he say it out of pride? Very likely,
for after all it must be galling for him (though he was an oddity,
a sort of sprite, not at all an ordinary man), it must be lonely at
his age to have no home, nowhere to go to. But he must stay with them
for weeks and weeks. Of course he would; he would love to stay with
them, and that was how it came out. All these years the Dalloways had
never been once. Time after time they had asked them. Clarissa (for
it was Clarissa of course) would not come. For, said Sally, Clarissa
was at heart a snob--one had to admit it, a snob. And it was that
that was between them, she was convinced. Clarissa thought she had
married beneath her, her husband being--she was proud of it--a miner’s
son. Every penny they had he had earned. As a little boy (her voice
trembled) he had carried great sacks.

(And so she would go on, Peter felt, hour after hour; the miner’s son;
people thought she had married beneath her; her five sons; and what
was the other thing--plants, hydrangeas, syringas, very, very rare
hibiscus lilies that never grow north of the Suez Canal, but she, with
one gardener in a suburb near Manchester, had beds of them, positively
beds! Now all that Clarissa had escaped, unmaternal as she was.)

A snob was she? Yes, in many ways. Where was she, all this time? It was
getting late.

“Yet,” said Sally, “when I heard Clarissa was giving a party, I felt I
couldn’t _not_ come--must see her again (and I’m staying in Victoria
Street, practically next door). So I just came without an invitation.
But,” she whispered, “tell me, do. Who is this?”

It was Mrs. Hilbery, looking for the door. For how late it was getting!
And, she murmured, as the night grew later, as people went, one found
old friends; quiet nooks and corners; and the loveliest views. Did
they know, she asked, that they were surrounded by an enchanted garden?
Lights and trees and wonderful gleaming lakes and the sky. Just a few
fairy lamps, Clarissa Dalloway had said, in the back garden! But she
was a magician! It was a park.... And she didn’t know their names, but
friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words,
always the best. But there were so many doors, such unexpected places,
she could not find her way.

“Old Mrs. Hilbery,” said Peter; but who was that? that lady standing
by the curtain all the evening, without speaking? He knew her face;
connected her with Bourton. Surely she used to cut up underclothes at
the large table in the window? Davidson, was that her name?

“Oh, that is Ellie Henderson,” said Sally. Clarissa was really very
hard on her. She was a cousin, very poor. Clarissa _was_ hard on people.

She was rather, said Peter. Yet, said Sally, in her emotional way, with
a rush of that enthusiasm which Peter used to love her for, yet dreaded
a little now, so effusive she might become--how generous to her friends
Clarissa was! and what a rare quality one found it, and how sometimes
at night or on Christmas Day, when she counted up her blessings, she
put that friendship first. They were young; that was it. Clarissa
was pure-hearted; that was it. Peter would think her sentimental. So
she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth
saying--what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what
one felt.

“But I do not know,” said Peter Walsh, “what I feel.”

Poor Peter, thought Sally. Why did not Clarissa come and talk to them?
That was what he was longing for. She knew it. All the time he was
thinking only of Clarissa, and was fidgeting with his knife.

He had not found life simple, Peter said. His relations with Clarissa
had not been simple. It had spoilt his life, he said. (They had been so
intimate--he and Sally Seton, it was absurd not to say it.) One could
not be in love twice, he said. And what could she say? Still, it is
better to have loved (but he would think her sentimental--he used to be
so sharp). He must come and stay with them in Manchester. That is all
very true, he said. All very true. He would love to come and stay with
them, directly he had done what he had to do in London.

And Clarissa had cared for him more than she had ever cared for
Richard. Sally was positive of that.

“No, no, no!” said Peter (Sally should not have said that--she went too
far). That good fellow--there he was at the end of the room, holding
forth, the same as ever, dear old Richard. Who was he talking to? Sally
asked, that very distinguished-looking man? Living in the wilds as she
did, she had an insatiable curiosity to know who people were. But Peter
did not know. He did not like his looks, he said, probably a Cabinet
Minister. Of them all, Richard seemed to him the best, he said--the
most disinterested.

“But what has he done?” Sally asked. Public work, she supposed. And
were they happy together? Sally asked (she herself was extremely
happy); for, she admitted, she knew nothing about them, only jumped to
conclusions, as one does, for what can one know even of the people one
lives with every day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners? She had read
a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell,
and she had felt that was true of life--one scratched on the wall.
Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often
went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and
women never gave her. But no; he did not like cabbages; he preferred
human beings, Peter said. Indeed, the young are beautiful, Sally said,
watching Elizabeth cross the room. How unlike Clarissa at her age!
Could he make anything of her? She would not open her lips. Not much,
not yet, Peter admitted. She was like a lily, Sally said, a lily by the
side of a pool. But Peter did not agree that we know nothing. We know
everything, he said; at least he did.

But these two, Sally whispered, these two coming now (and really she
must go, if Clarissa did not come soon), this distinguished-looking
man and his rather common-looking wife who had been talking to
Richard--what could one know about people like that?

“That they’re damnable humbugs,” said Peter, looking at them casually.
He made Sally laugh.

But Sir William Bradshaw stopped at the door to look at a picture. He
looked in the corner for the engraver’s name. His wife looked too. Sir
William Bradshaw was so interested in art.

When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know
people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was
fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl’s of
twenty); now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch,
one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling,
he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more
passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one
should be glad of it--it went on increasing in his experience. There
was some one in India. He would like to tell Sally about her. He would
like Sally to know her. She was married, he said. She had two small
children. They must all come to Manchester, said Sally--he must promise
before they left.

There’s Elizabeth, he said, she feels not half what we feel, not yet.
But, said Sally, watching Elizabeth go to her father, one can see they
are devoted to each other. She could feel it by the way Elizabeth went
to her father.

For her father had been looking at her, as he stood talking to the
Bradshaws, and he had thought to himself, Who is that lovely girl?
And suddenly he realised that it was his Elizabeth, and he had not
recognised her, she looked so lovely in her pink frock! Elizabeth had
felt him looking at her as she talked to Willie Titcomb. So she went
to him and they stood together, now that the party was almost over,
looking at the people going, and the rooms getting emptier and emptier,
with things scattered on the floor. Even Ellie Henderson was going,
nearly last of all, though no one had spoken to her, but she had wanted
to see everything, to tell Edith. And Richard and Elizabeth were rather
glad it was over, but Richard was proud of his daughter. And he had not
meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her. He had looked at
her, he said, and he had wondered, Who is that lovely girl? and it was
his daughter! That did make her happy. But her poor dog was howling.

“Richard has improved. You are right,” said Sally. “I shall go and talk
to him. I shall say good-night. What does the brain matter,” said Lady
Rosseter, getting up, “compared with the heart?”

“I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this
terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that
fills me with extraordinary excitement?

It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was.


THE END

       *       *       *       *       *



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.




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