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.