with relief. The rope was cut; he mounted; he was free, as it was
decreed that he, Septimus, the lord of men, should be free; alone
(since his wife had thrown away her wedding ring; since she had left
him), he, Septimus, was alone, called forth in advance of the mass of
men to hear the truth, to learn the meaning, which now at last, after
all the toils of civilisation--Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin,
and now himself--was to be given whole to.... “To whom?” he asked
aloud. “To the Prime Minister,” the voices which rustled above his head
replied. The supreme secret must be told to the Cabinet; first that
trees are alive; next there is no crime; next love, universal love,
he muttered, gasping, trembling, painfully drawing out these profound
truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense effort
to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them for ever.
No crime; love; he repeated, fumbling for his card and pencil, when
a Skye terrier snuffed his trousers and he started in an agony of
fear. It was turning into a man! He could not watch it happen! It was
horrible, terrible to see a dog become a man! At once the dog trotted
away.
Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant. It spared him,
pardoned his weakness. But what was the scientific explanation (for one
must be scientific above all things)? Why could he see through bodies,
see into the future, when dogs will become men? It was the heat wave
presumably, operating upon a brain made sensitive by eons of evolution.
Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body
was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread
like a veil upon a rock.
He lay back in his chair, exhausted but upheld. He lay resting,
waiting, before he again interpreted, with effort, with agony, to
mankind. He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled
beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves
rustled by his head. Music began clanging against the rocks up here.
It is a motor horn down in the street, he muttered; but up here it
cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose
in smooth columns (that music should be visible was a discovery) and
became an anthem, an anthem twined round now by a shepherd boy’s piping
(That’s an old man playing a penny whistle by the public-house, he
muttered) which, as the boy stood still came bubbling from his pipe,
and then, as he climbed higher, made its exquisite plaint while the
traffic passed beneath. This boy’s elegy is played among the traffic,
thought Septimus. Now he withdraws up into the snows, and roses hang
about him--the thick red roses which grow on my bedroom wall, he
reminded himself. The music stopped. He has his penny, he reasoned it
out, and has gone on to the next public-house.
But he himself remained high on his rock, like a drowned sailor on a
rock. I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I
went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive, but let me
rest still; he begged (he was talking to himself again--it was awful,
awful!); and as, before waking, the voices of birds and the sound of
wheels chime and chatter in a queer harmony, grow louder and louder and
the sleeper feels himself drawing to the shores of life, so he felt
himself drawing towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding
louder, something tremendous about to happen.
He had only to open his eyes; but a weight was on them; a fear. He
strained; he pushed; he looked; he saw Regent’s Park before him. Long
streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet. The trees waved, brandished.
We welcome, the world seemed to say; we accept; we create. Beauty, the
world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever
he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching
over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering
in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows
swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round,
yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies
rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in
mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now and
again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the
grass stalks--all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of
ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the
truth now. Beauty was everywhere.
“It is time,” said Rezia.
The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from
his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his
making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach
themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to
Time. He sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in
Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War
was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself--
“For God’s sake don’t come!” Septimus cried out. For he could not look
upon the dead.
But the branches parted. A man in grey was actually walking towards
them. It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not
changed. I must tell the whole world, Septimus cried, raising his hand
(as the dead man in the grey suit came nearer), raising his hand like
some colossal figure who has lamented the fate of man for ages in
the desert alone with his hands pressed to his forehead, furrows of
despair on his cheeks, and now sees light on the desert’s edge which
broadens and strikes the iron-black figure (and Septimus half rose from
his chair), and with legions of men prostrate behind him he, the giant
mourner, receives for one moment on his face the whole--
“But I am so unhappy, Septimus,” said Rezia trying to make him sit down.
The millions lamented; for ages they had sorrowed. He would turn round,
he would tell them in a few moments, only a few moments more, of this
relief, of this joy, of this astonishing revelation--
“The time, Septimus,” Rezia repeated. “What is the time?”
He was talking, he was starting, this man must notice him. He was
looking at them.
“I will tell you the time,” said Septimus, very slowly, very drowsily,
smiling mysteriously. As he sat smiling at the dead man in the grey
suit the quarter struck--the quarter to twelve.
And that is being young, Peter Walsh thought as he passed them. To be
having an awful scene--the poor girl looked absolutely desperate--in
the middle of the morning. But what was it about, he wondered, what
had the young man in the overcoat been saying to her to make her look
like that; what awful fix had they got themselves into, both to look
so desperate as that on a fine summer morning? The amusing thing about
coming back to England, after five years, was the way it made, anyhow
the first days, things stand out as if one had never seen them before;
lovers squabbling under a tree; the domestic family life of the parks.
Never had he seen London look so enchanting--the softness of the
distances; the richness; the greenness; the civilisation, after India,
he thought, strolling across the grass.
This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing no doubt.
Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations
of mood; good days, bad days, for no reason whatever, happiness from
a pretty face, downright misery at the sight of a frump. After India
of course one fell in love with every woman one met. There was a
freshness about them; even the poorest dressed better than five years
ago surely; and to his eye the fashions had never been so becoming; the
long black cloaks; the slimness; the elegance; and then the delicious
and apparently universal habit of paint. Every woman, even the most
respectable, had roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife;
curls of Indian ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a change of
some sort had undoubtedly taken place. What did the young people think
about? Peter Walsh asked himself.
Those five years--1918 to 1923--had been, he suspected, somehow very
important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed different.
Now for instance there was a man writing quite openly in one of the
respectable weeklies about water-closets. That you couldn’t have
done ten years ago--written quite openly about water-closets in a
respectable weekly. And then this taking out a stick of rouge, or a
powder-puff and making up in public. On board ship coming home there
were lots of young men and girls--Betty and Bertie he remembered in
particular--carrying on quite openly; the old mother sitting and
watching them with her knitting, cool as a cucumber. The girl would
stand still and powder her nose in front of every one. And they weren’t
engaged; just having a good time; no feelings hurt on either side. As
hard as nails she was--Betty What’shername--; but a thorough good sort.
She would make a very good wife at thirty--she would marry when it
suited her to marry; marry some rich man and live in a large house near
Manchester.
Who was it now who had done that? Peter Walsh asked himself, turning
into the Broad Walk,--married a rich man and lived in a large house
near Manchester? Somebody who had written him a long, gushing letter
quite lately about “blue hydrangeas.” It was seeing blue hydrangeas
that made her think of him and the old days--Sally Seton, of course! It
was Sally Seton--the last person in the world one would have expected
to marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the
wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!
But of all that ancient lot, Clarissa’s friends--Whitbreads,
Kinderleys, Cunninghams, Kinloch-Jones’s--Sally was probably the best.
She tried to get hold of things by the right end anyhow. She saw
through Hugh Whitbread anyhow--the admirable Hugh--when Clarissa and
the rest were at his feet.
“The Whitbreads?” he could hear her saying. “Who are the Whitbreads?
Coal merchants. Respectable tradespeople.”
Hugh she detested for some reason. He thought of nothing but his own
appearance, she said. He ought to have been a Duke. He would be certain
to marry one of the Royal Princesses. And of course Hugh had the most
extraordinary, the most natural, the most sublime respect for the
British aristocracy of any human being he had ever come across. Even
Clarissa had to own that. Oh, but he was such a dear, so unselfish,
gave up shooting to please his old mother--remembered his aunts’
birthdays, and so on.
Sally, to do her justice, saw through all that. One of the things he
remembered best was an argument one Sunday morning at Bourton about
women’s rights (that antediluvian topic), when Sally suddenly lost
her temper, flared up, and told Hugh that he represented all that
was most detestable in British middle-class life. She told him that
she considered him responsible for the state of “those poor girls in
Piccadilly”--Hugh, the perfect gentleman, poor Hugh!--never did a man
look more horrified! She did it on purpose she said afterwards (for
they used to get together in the vegetable garden and compare notes).
“He’s read nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing,” he could hear her
saying in that very emphatic voice which carried so much farther than
she knew. The stable boys had more life in them than Hugh, she said. He
was a perfect specimen of the public school type, she said. No country
but England could have produced him. She was really spiteful, for
some reason; had some grudge against him. Something had happened--he
forgot what--in the smoking-room. He had insulted her--kissed her?
Incredible! Nobody believed a word against Hugh of course. Who could?
Kissing Sally in the smoking-room! If it had been some Honourable
Edith or Lady Violet, perhaps; but not that ragamuffin Sally without a
penny to her name, and a father or a mother gambling at Monte Carlo.
For of all the people he had ever met Hugh was the greatest snob--the
most obsequious--no, he didn’t cringe exactly. He was too much of a
prig for that. A first-rate valet was the obvious comparison--somebody
who walked behind carrying suit cases; could be trusted to send
telegrams--indispensable to hostesses. And he’d found his job--married
his Honourable Evelyn; got some little post at Court, looked after
the King’s cellars, polished the Imperial shoe-buckles, went about in
knee-breeches and lace ruffles. How remorseless life is! A little job
at Court!
He had married this lady, the Honourable Evelyn, and they lived
hereabouts, so he thought (looking at the pompous houses overlooking
the Park), for he had lunched there once in a house which had, like
all Hugh’s possessions, something that no other house could possibly
have--linen cupboards it might have been. You had to go and look at
them--you had to spend a great deal of time always admiring whatever
it was--linen cupboards, pillow-cases, old oak furniture, pictures,
which Hugh had picked up for an old song. But Mrs. Hugh sometimes gave
the show away. She was one of those obscure mouse-like little women
who admire big men. She was almost negligible. Then suddenly she would
say something quite unexpected--something sharp. She had the relics of
the grand manner perhaps. The steam coal was a little too strong for
her--it made the atmosphere thick. And so there they lived, with their
linen cupboards and their old masters and their pillow-cases fringed
with real lace at the rate of five or ten thousand a year presumably,
while he, who was two years older than Hugh, cadged for a job.
At fifty-three he had to come and ask them to put him into some
secretary’s office, to find him some usher’s job teaching little boys
Latin, at the beck and call of some mandarin in an office, something
that brought in five hundred a year; for if he married Daisy, even
with his pension, they could never do on less. Whitbread could do it
presumably; or Dalloway. He didn’t mind what he asked Dalloway. He was
a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes;
but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same
matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a
spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type. He
ought to have been a country gentleman--he was wasted on politics. He
was at his best out of doors, with horses and dogs--how good he was,
for instance, when that great shaggy dog of Clarissa’s got caught in
a trap and had its paw half torn off, and Clarissa turned faint and
Dalloway did the whole thing; bandaged, made splints; told Clarissa not
to be a fool. That was what she liked him for perhaps--that was what
she needed. “Now, my dear, don’t be a fool. Hold this--fetch that,” all
the time talking to the dog as if it were a human being.
But how could she swallow all that stuff about poetry? How could she
let him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously and solemnly Richard
Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to
read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes
(besides the relationship was not one that he approved). No decent
man ought to let his wife visit a deceased wife’s sister. Incredible!
The only thing to do was to pelt him with sugared almonds--it was at
dinner. But Clarissa sucked it all in; thought it so honest of him;
so independent of him; Heaven knows if she didn’t think him the most
original mind she’d ever met!
That was one of the bonds between Sally and himself. There was a garden
where they used to walk, a walled-in place, with rose-bushes and giant
cauliflowers--he could remember Sally tearing off a rose, stopping to
exclaim at the beauty of the cabbage leaves in the moonlight (it was
extraordinary how vividly it all came back to him, things he hadn’t
thought of for years,) while she implored him, half laughing of course,
to carry off Clarissa, to save her from the Hughs and the Dalloways
and all the other “perfect gentlemen” who would “stifle her soul” (she
wrote reams of poetry in those days), make a mere hostess of her,
encourage her worldliness. But one must do Clarissa justice. She wasn’t
going to marry Hugh anyhow. She had a perfectly clear notion of what
she wanted. Her emotions were all on the surface. Beneath, she was
very shrewd--a far better judge of character than Sally, for instance,
and with it all, purely feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that
woman’s gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.
She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway
with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered.
Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing
picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there
she was, however; there she was.
No, no, no! He was not in love with her any more! He only felt, after
seeing her that morning, among her scissors and silks, making ready for
the party, unable to get away from the thought of her; she kept coming
back and back like a sleeper jolting against him in a railway carriage;
which was not being in love, of course; it was thinking of her,
criticising her, starting again, after thirty years, trying to explain
her. The obvious thing to say of her was that she was worldly; cared
too much for rank and society and getting on in the world--which was
true in a sense; she had admitted it to him. (You could always get her
to own up if you took the trouble; she was honest.) What she would say
was that she hated frumps, fogies, failures, like himself presumably;
thought people had no right to slouch about with their hands in their
pockets; must do something, be something; and these great swells, these
Duchesses, these hoary old Countesses one met in her drawing-room,
unspeakably remote as he felt them to be from anything that mattered
a straw, stood for something real to her. Lady Bexborough, she said
once, held herself upright (so did Clarissa herself; she never lounged
in any sense of the word; she was straight as a dart, a little rigid
in fact). She said they had a kind of courage which the older she
grew the more she respected. In all this there was a great deal of
Dalloway, of course; a great deal of the public-spirited, British
Empire, tariff-reform, governing-class spirit, which had grown on her,
as it tends to do. With twice his wits, she had to see things through
his eyes--one of the tragedies of married life. With a mind of her
own, she must always be quoting Richard--as if one couldn’t know to a
tittle what Richard thought by reading the _Morning Post_ of a morning!
These parties for example were all for him, or for her idea of him (to
do Richard justice he would have been happier farming in Norfolk). She
made her drawing-room a sort of meeting-place; she had a genius for it.
Over and over again he had seen her take some raw youth, twist him,
turn him, wake him up; set him going. Infinite numbers of dull people
conglomerated round her of course. But odd unexpected people turned up;
an artist sometimes; sometimes a writer; queer fish in that atmosphere.
And behind it all was that network of visiting, leaving cards, being
kind to people; running about with bunches of flowers, little presents;
So-and-so was going to France--must have an air-cushion; a real drain
on her strength; all that interminable traffic that women of her sort
keep up; but she did it genuinely, from a natural instinct.
Oddly enough, she was one of the most thoroughgoing sceptics he had
ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account
for her, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others),
possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a
sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall,
and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is
a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings
of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with
flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those
ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way,--her notion
being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting
and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same,
you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia’s
death--that horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling
tree (all Justin Parry’s fault--all his carelessness) before your
very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them,
Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn’t
so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to
blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the
sake of goodness.
And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy
(though goodness only knows, she had her reserves; it was a mere
sketch, he often felt, that even he, after all these years, could make
of Clarissa). Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that
sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed
practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it
was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd
little drama she made up on the spur of the moment. (Very likely, she
would have talked to those lovers, if she had thought them unhappy.)
She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed
people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that
she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant
parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn’t mean,
blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination. There she
would sit at the head of the table taking infinite pains with some old
buffer who might be useful to Dalloway--they knew the most appalling
bores in Europe--or in came Elizabeth and everything must give way to
_her_. She was at a High School, at the inarticulate stage last time he
was over, a round-eyed, pale-faced girl, with nothing of her mother in
her, a silent stolid creature, who took it all as a matter of course,
let her mother make a fuss of her, and then said “May I go now?” like
a child of four; going off, Clarissa explained, with that mixture of
amusement and pride which Dalloway himself seemed to rouse in her,
to play hockey. And now Elizabeth was “out,” presumably; thought him
an old fogy, laughed at her mother’s friends. Ah well, so be it.
The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of
Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the
passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained--at last!--the
power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,--the power of taking
hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the
age of fifty-three one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself,
every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the
sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much indeed. A whole lifetime
was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the
full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of
meaning; which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so
much less personal. It was impossible that he should ever suffer again
as Clarissa had made him suffer. For hours at a time (pray God that one
might say these things without being overheard!), for hours and days he
never thought of Daisy.
Could it be that he was in love with her then, remembering the misery,
the torture, the extraordinary passion of those days? It was a
different thing altogether--a much pleasanter thing--the truth being,
of course, that now _she_ was in love with _him_. And that perhaps was
the reason why, when the ship actually sailed, he felt an extraordinary
relief, wanted nothing so much as to be alone; was annoyed to find all
her little attentions--cigars, notes, a rug for the voyage--in his
cabin. Every one if they were honest would say the same; one doesn’t
want people after fifty; one doesn’t want to go on telling women they
are pretty; that’s what most men of fifty would say, Peter Walsh
thought, if they were honest.