_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.