odd how standing there one felt them going on, going on, some quite
old, some....
_What_ name? Lady Rosseter? But who on earth was Lady Rosseter?
“Clarissa!” That voice! It was Sally Seton! Sally Seton! after all
these years! She loomed through a mist. For she hadn’t looked like
_that_, Sally Seton, when Clarissa grasped the hot water can, to think
of her under this roof, under this roof! Not like that!
All on top of each other, embarrassed, laughing, words tumbled
out--passing through London; heard from Clara Haydon; what a chance of
seeing you! So I thrust myself in--without an invitation....
One might put down the hot water can quite composedly. The lustre had
gone out of her. Yet it was extraordinary to see her again, older,
happier, less lovely. They kissed each other, first this cheek then
that, by the drawing-room door, and Clarissa turned, with Sally’s hand
in hers, and saw her rooms full, heard the roar of voices, saw the
candlesticks, the blowing curtains, and the roses which Richard had
given her.
“I have five enormous boys,” said Sally.
She had the simplest egotism, the most open desire to be thought first
always, and Clarissa loved her for being still like that. “I can’t
believe it!” she cried, kindling all over with pleasure at the thought
of the past.
But alas, Wilkins; Wilkins wanted her; Wilkins was emitting in a voice
of commanding authority as if the whole company must be admonished and
the hostess reclaimed from frivolity, one name:
“The Prime Minister,” said Peter Walsh.
The Prime Minister? Was it really? Ellie Henderson marvelled. What a
thing to tell Edith!
One couldn’t laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might have stood
him behind a counter and bought biscuits--poor chap, all rigged up in
gold lace. And to be fair, as he went his rounds, first with Clarissa
then with Richard escorting him, he did it very well. He tried to look
somebody. It was amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him. They just
went on talking, yet it was perfectly plain that they all knew, felt to
the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of what
they all stood for, English society. Old Lady Bruton, and she looked
very fine too, very stalwart in her lace, swam up, and they withdrew
into a little room which at once became spied upon, guarded, and a
sort of stir and rustle rippled through every one, openly: the Prime
Minister!
Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh, standing
in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing
homage! There! That must be, by Jove it was, Hugh Whitbread, snuffing
round the precincts of the great, grown rather fatter, rather whiter,
the admirable Hugh!
He looked always as if he were on duty, thought Peter, a privileged,
but secretive being, hoarding secrets which he would die to defend,
though it was only some little piece of tittle-tattle dropped by a
court footman, which would be in all the papers to-morrow. Such were
his rattles, his baubles, in playing with which he had grown white,
come to the verge of old age, enjoying the respect and affection of
all who had the privilege of knowing this type of the English public
school man. Inevitably one made up things like that about Hugh; that
was his style; the style of those admirable letters which Peter had
read thousands of miles across the sea in the _Times_, and had thanked
God he was out of that pernicious hubble-bubble if it were only to
hear baboons chatter and coolies beat their wives. An olive-skinned
youth from one of the Universities stood obsequiously by. Him he would
patronise, initiate, teach how to get on. For he liked nothing better
than doing kindnesses, making the hearts of old ladies palpitate with
the joy of being thought of in their age, their affliction, thinking
themselves quite forgotten, yet here was dear Hugh driving up and
spending an hour talking of the past, remembering trifles, praising the
home-made cake, though Hugh might eat cake with a Duchess any day of
his life, and, to look at him, probably did spend a good deal of time
in that agreeable occupation. The All-judging, the All-merciful, might
excuse. Peter Walsh had no mercy. Villains there must be, and God knows
the rascals who get hanged for battering the brains of a girl out in a
train do less harm on the whole than Hugh Whitbread and his kindness.
Look at him now, on tiptoe, dancing forward, bowing and scraping,
as the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton emerged, intimating for all
the world to see that he was privileged to say something, something
private, to Lady Bruton as she passed. She stopped. She wagged her fine
old head. She was thanking him presumably for some piece of servility.
She had her toadies, minor officials in Government offices who ran
about putting through little jobs on her behalf, in return for which
she gave them luncheon. But she derived from the eighteenth century.
She was all right.
And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing,
sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She wore ear-rings,
and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding
her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to
sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf
in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most
perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element. But age had
brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the setting
sun on some very clear evening over the waves. There was a breath of
tenderness; her severity, her prudery, her woodenness were all warmed
through now, and she had about her as she said good-bye to the thick
gold-laced man who was doing his best, and good luck to him, to look
important, an inexpressible dignity; an exquisite cordiality; as if she
wished the whole world well, and must now, being on the very verge and
rim of things, take her leave. So she made him think. (But he was not
in love.)
Indeed, Clarissa felt, the Prime Minister had been good to come. And,
walking down the room with him, with Sally there and Peter there and
Richard very pleased, with all those people rather inclined, perhaps,
to envy, she had felt that intoxication of the moment, that dilatation
of the nerves of the heart itself till it seemed to quiver, steeped,
upright;--yes, but after all it was what other people felt, that;
for, though she loved it and felt it tingle and sting, still these
semblances, these triumphs (dear old Peter, for example, thinking her
so brilliant), had a hollowness; at arm’s length they were, not in the
heart; and it might be that she was growing old but they satisfied her
no longer as they used; and suddenly, as she saw the Prime Minister
go down the stairs, the gilt rim of the Sir Joshua picture of the
little girl with a muff brought back Kilman with a rush; Kilman her
enemy. That was satisfying; that was real. Ah, how she hated her--hot,
hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power; Elizabeth’s seducer; the
woman who had crept in to steal and defile (Richard would say, What
nonsense!). She hated her: she loved her. It was enemies one wanted,
not friends--not Mrs. Durrant and Clara, Sir William and Lady Bradshaw,
Miss Truelock and Eleanor Gibson (whom she saw coming upstairs). They
must find her if they wanted her. She was for the party!
There was her old friend Sir Harry.
“Dear Sir Harry!” she said, going up to the fine old fellow who had
produced more bad pictures than any other two Academicians in the whole
of St. John’s Wood (they were always of cattle, standing in sunset
pools absorbing moisture, or signifying, for he had a certain range of
gesture, by the raising of one foreleg and the toss of the antlers,
“the Approach of the Stranger”--all his activities, dining out, racing,
were founded on cattle standing absorbing moisture in sunset pools).
“What are you laughing at?” she asked him. For Willie Titcomb and
Sir Harry and Herbert Ainsty were all laughing. But no. Sir Harry
could not tell Clarissa Dalloway (much though he liked her; of her
type he thought her perfect, and threatened to paint her) his stories
of the music hall stage. He chaffed her about her party. He missed
his brandy. These circles, he said, were above him. But he liked
her; respected her, in spite of her damnable, difficult upper-class
refinement, which made it impossible to ask Clarissa Dalloway to sit on
his knee. And up came that wandering will-o’-the-wisp, that vagulous
phosphorescence, old Mrs. Hilbery, stretching her hands to the blaze
of his laughter (about the Duke and the Lady), which, as she heard it
across the room, seemed to reassure her on a point which sometimes
bothered her if she woke early in the morning and did not like to call
her maid for a cup of tea; how it is certain we must die.
“They won’t tell us their stories,” said Clarissa.
“Dear Clarissa!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery. She looked to-night, she said,
so like her mother as she first saw her walking in a garden in a grey
hat.
And really Clarissa’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother, walking in a
garden! But alas, she must go.
For there was Professor Brierly, who lectured on Milton, talking to
little Jim Hutton (who was unable even for a party like this to compass
both tie and waistcoat or make his hair lie flat), and even at this
distance they were quarrelling, she could see. For Professor Brierly
was a very queer fish. With all those degrees, honours, lectureships
between him and the scribblers he suspected instantly an atmosphere
not favourable to his queer compound; his prodigious learning and
timidity; his wintry charm without cordiality; his innocence blent with
snobbery; he quivered if made conscious by a lady’s unkempt hair, a
youth’s boots, of an underworld, very creditable doubtless, of rebels,
of ardent young people; of would-be geniuses, and intimated with a
little toss of the head, with a sniff--Humph!--the value of moderation;
of some slight training in the classics in order to appreciate Milton.
Professor Brierly (Clarissa could see) wasn’t hitting it off with
little Jim Hutton (who wore red socks, his black being at the laundry)
about Milton. She interrupted.
She said she loved Bach. So did Hutton. That was the bond between them,
and Hutton (a very bad poet) always felt that Mrs. Dalloway was far the
best of the great ladies who took an interest in art. It was odd how
strict she was. About music she was purely impersonal. She was rather
a prig. But how charming to look at! She made her house so nice if it
weren’t for her Professors. Clarissa had half a mind to snatch him off
and set him down at the piano in the back room. For he played divinely.
“But the noise!” she said. “The noise!”
“The sign of a successful party.” Nodding urbanely, the Professor
stepped delicately off.
“He knows everything in the whole world about Milton,” said Clarissa.
“Does he indeed?” said Hutton, who would imitate the Professor
throughout Hampstead; the Professor on Milton; the Professor on
moderation; the Professor stepping delicately off.
But she must speak to that couple, said Clarissa, Lord Gayton and Nancy
Blow.
Not that _they_ added perceptibly to the noise of the party. They were
not talking (perceptibly) as they stood side by side by the yellow
curtains. They would soon be off elsewhere, together; and never had
very much to say in any circumstances. They looked; that was all. That
was enough. They looked so clean, so sound, she with an apricot bloom
of powder and paint, but he scrubbed, rinsed, with the eyes of a bird,
so that no ball could pass him or stroke surprise him. He struck, he
leapt, accurately, on the spot. Ponies’ mouths quivered at the end of
his reins. He had his honours, ancestral monuments, banners hanging
in the church at home. He had his duties; his tenants; a mother and
sisters; had been all day at Lords, and that was what they were
talking about--cricket, cousins, the movies--when Mrs. Dalloway came
up. Lord Gayton liked her most awfully. So did Miss Blow. She had such
charming manners.
“It is angelic--it is delicious of you to have come!” she said. She
loved Lords; she loved youth, and Nancy, dressed at enormous expense by
the greatest artists in Paris, stood there looking as if her body had
merely put forth, of its own accord, a green frill.
“I had meant to have dancing,” said Clarissa.
For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout,
embrace, swing, be up at dawn; carry sugar to ponies; kiss and caress
the snouts of adorable chows; and then all tingling and streaming,
plunge and swim. But the enormous resources of the English language,
the power it bestows, after all, of communicating feelings (at their
age, she and Peter would have been arguing all the evening), was not
for them. They would solidify young. They would be good beyond measure
to the people on the estate, but alone, perhaps, rather dull.
“What a pity!” she said. “I had hoped to have dancing.”
It was so extraordinarily nice of them to have come! But talk of
dancing! The rooms were packed.
There was old Aunt Helena in her shawl. Alas, she must leave them--Lord
Gayton and Nancy Blow. There was old Miss Parry, her aunt.
For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive. She was past
eighty. She ascended staircases slowly with a stick. She was placed in
a chair (Richard had seen to it). People who had known Burma in the
’seventies were always led up to her. Where had Peter got to? They
used to be such friends. For at the mention of India, or even Ceylon,
her eyes (only one was glass) slowly deepened, became blue, beheld,
not human beings--she had no tender memories, no proud illusions about
Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies--it was orchids she saw, and mountain
passes and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the ’sixties over
solitary peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (startling blossoms,
never beheld before) which she painted in water-colour; an indomitable
Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the War, say, which dropped a
bomb at her very door, from her deep meditation over orchids and her
own figure journeying in the ’sixties in India--but here was Peter.
“Come and talk to Aunt Helena about Burma,” said Clarissa.
And yet he had not had a word with her all the evening!
“We will talk later,” said Clarissa, leading him up to Aunt Helena, in
her white shawl, with her stick.
“Peter Walsh,” said Clarissa.
That meant nothing.
Clarissa had asked her. It was tiring; it was noisy; but Clarissa
had asked her. So she had come. It was a pity that they lived in
London--Richard and Clarissa. If only for Clarissa’s health it would
have been better to live in the country. But Clarissa had always been
fond of society.
“He has been in Burma,” said Clarissa.
Ah. She could not resist recalling what Charles Darwin had said about
her little book on the orchids of Burma.
(Clarissa must speak to Lady Bruton.)
No doubt it was forgotten now, her book on the orchids of Burma,
but it went into three editions before 1870, she told Peter. She
remembered him now. He had been at Bourton (and he had left her, Peter
Walsh remembered, without a word in the drawing-room that night when
Clarissa had asked him to come boating).
“Richard so much enjoyed his lunch party,” said Clarissa to Lady Bruton.
“Richard was the greatest possible help,” Lady Bruton replied. “He
helped me to write a letter. And how are you?”
“Oh, perfectly well!” said Clarissa. (Lady Bruton detested illness in
the wives of politicians.)
“And there’s Peter Walsh!” said Lady Bruton (for she could never think
of anything to say to Clarissa; though she liked her. She had lots of
fine qualities; but they had nothing in common--she and Clarissa. It
might have been better if Richard had married a woman with less charm,
who would have helped him more in his work. He had lost his chance of
the Cabinet). “There’s Peter Walsh!” she said, shaking hands with that
agreeable sinner, that very able fellow who should have made a name for
himself but hadn’t (always in difficulties with women), and, of course,
old Miss Parry. Wonderful old lady!
Lady Bruton stood by Miss Parry’s chair, a spectral grenadier, draped
in black, inviting Peter Walsh to lunch; cordial; but without small
talk, remembering nothing whatever about the flora or fauna of India.
She had been there, of course; had stayed with three Viceroys; thought
some of the Indian civilians uncommonly fine fellows; but what a
tragedy it was--the state of India! The Prime Minister had just been
telling her (old Miss Parry huddled up in her shawl, did not care what
the Prime Minister had just been telling her), and Lady Bruton would
like to have Peter Walsh’s opinion, he being fresh from the centre,
and she would get Sir Sampson to meet him, for really it prevented her
from sleeping at night, the folly of it, the wickedness she might say,
being a soldier’s daughter. She was an old woman now, not good for
much. But her house, her servants, her good friend Milly Brush--did
he remember her?--were all there only asking to be used if--if they
could be of help, in short. For she never spoke of England, but this
isle of men, this dear, dear land, was in her blood (without reading
Shakespeare), and if ever a woman could have worn the helmet and shot
the arrow, could have led troops to attack, ruled with indomitable
justice barbarian hordes and lain under a shield noseless in a church,
or made a green grass mound on some primeval hillside, that woman
was Millicent Bruton. Debarred by her sex and some truancy, too, of
the logical faculty (she found it impossible to write a letter to
the _Times_), she had the thought of Empire always at hand, and had
acquired from her association with that armoured goddess her ramrod
bearing, her robustness of demeanour, so that one could not figure her
even in death parted from the earth or roaming territories over which,
in some spiritual shape, the Union Jack had ceased to fly. To be not
English even among the dead--no, no! Impossible!
But was it Lady Bruton (whom she used to know)? Was it Peter Walsh
grown grey? Lady Rosseter asked herself (who had been Sally Seton).
It was old Miss Parry certainly--the old aunt who used to be so cross
when she stayed at Bourton. Never should she forget running along the
passage naked, and being sent for by Miss Parry! And Clarissa! oh
Clarissa! Sally caught her by the arm.
Clarissa stopped beside them.
“But I can’t stay,” she said. “I shall come later. Wait,” she said,
looking at Peter and Sally. They must wait, she meant, until all these
people had gone.
“I shall come back,” she said, looking at her old friends, Sally and
Peter, who were shaking hands, and Sally, remembering the past no
doubt, was laughing.
But her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness; her eyes not
aglow as they used to be, when she smoked cigars, when she ran down
the passage to fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of clothing on
her, and Ellen Atkins asked, What if the gentlemen had met her? But
everybody forgave her. She stole a chicken from the larder because
she was hungry in the night; she smoked cigars in her bedroom; she
left a priceless book in the punt. But everybody adored her (except
perhaps Papa). It was her warmth; her vitality--she would paint, she
would write. Old women in the village never to this day forgot to
ask after “your friend in the red cloak who seemed so bright.” She
accused Hugh Whitbread, of all people (and there he was, her old friend
Hugh, talking to the Portuguese Ambassador), of kissing her in the
smoking-room to punish her for saying that women should have votes.
Vulgar men did, she said. And Clarissa remembered having to persuade
her not to denounce him at family prayers--which she was capable of
doing with her daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love of
being the centre of everything and creating scenes, and it was bound,
Clarissa used to think, to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her
martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald
man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at
Manchester. And she had five boys!
She and Peter had settled down together. They were talking: it seemed
so familiar--that they should be talking. They would discuss the past.
With the two of them (more even than with Richard) she shared her past;
the garden; the trees; old Joseph Breitkopf singing Brahms without any
voice; the drawing-room wall-paper; the smell of the mats. A part of
this Sally must always be; Peter must always be. But she must leave
them. There were the Bradshaws, whom she disliked. She must go up to
Lady Bradshaw (in grey and silver, balancing like a sea-lion at the
edge of its tank, barking for invitations, Duchesses, the typical
successful man’s wife), she must go up to Lady Bradshaw and say....
But Lady Bradshaw anticipated her.
“We are shockingly late, dear Mrs. Dalloway, we hardly dared to come
in,” she said.
And Sir William, who looked very distinguished, with his grey hair and
blue eyes, said yes; they had not been able to resist the temptation.
He was talking to Richard about that Bill probably, which they wanted
to get through the Commons. Why did the sight of him, talking to
Richard, curl her up? He looked what he was, a great doctor. A man
absolutely at the head of his profession, very powerful, rather worn.
For think what cases came before him--people in the uttermost depths of
misery; people on the verge of insanity; husbands and wives. He had to
decide questions of appalling difficulty. Yet--what she felt was, one
wouldn’t like Sir William to see one unhappy. No; not that man.
“How is your son at Eton?” she asked Lady Bradshaw.
He had just missed his eleven, said Lady Bradshaw, because of the
mumps. His father minded even more than he did, she thought “being,”
she said, “nothing but a great boy himself.”
Clarissa looked at Sir William, talking to Richard. He did not look
like a boy--not in the least like a boy. She had once gone with some
one to ask his advice. He had been perfectly right; extremely sensible.
But Heavens--what a relief to get out to the street again! There was
some poor wretch sobbing, she remembered, in the waiting-room. But
she did not know what it was--about Sir William; what exactly she
disliked. Only Richard agreed with her, “didn’t like his taste, didn’t
like his smell.” But he was extraordinarily able. They were talking
about this Bill. Some case, Sir William was mentioning, lowering his
voice. It had its bearing upon what he was saying about the deferred
effects of shell shock. There must be some provision in the Bill.
Sinking her voice, drawing Mrs. Dalloway into the shelter of a common
femininity, a common pride in the illustrious qualities of husbands and
their sad tendency to overwork, Lady Bradshaw (poor goose--one didn’t
dislike her) murmured how, “just as we were starting, my husband was
called up on the telephone, a very sad case. A young man (that is what
Sir William is telling Mr. Dalloway) had killed himself. He had been
in the army.” Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s
death, she thought.
She went on, into the little room where the Prime Minister had gone
with Lady Bruton. Perhaps there was somebody there. But there was
nobody. The chairs still kept the impress of the Prime Minister
and Lady Bruton, she turned deferentially, he sitting four-square,
authoritatively. They had been talking about India. There was nobody.
The party’s splendour fell to the floor, so strange it was to come in
alone in her finery.
What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A
young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party--the
Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself--but how? Always
her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an
accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from
a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising,
went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his
brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had
he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!