Mrs. Dalloway
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