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?