Mrs. Dalloway
it is; how wonderful, but at the same time, he thinks, as he looks at
chairs and tables, how strange.
To look at, he might have been a clerk, but of the better sort; for he
wore brown boots; his hands were educated; so, too, his profile--his
angular, big-nosed, intelligent, sensitive profile; but not his lips
altogether, for they were loose; and his eyes (as eyes tend to be),
eyes merely; hazel, large; so that he was, on the whole, a border case,
neither one thing nor the other, might end with a house at Purley and a
motor car, or continue renting apartments in back streets all his life;
one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all
learnt from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening
after the day’s work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by
letter.
As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go
through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields
and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy,
because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the
fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future
for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister,
had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great
men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their
struggles has become famous.
London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith;
thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which
their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston
Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face
in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted,
hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have
said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door
in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant:--It has flowered;
flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage,
laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the
Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve
himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the
Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.
Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him
a taste of _Antony and Cleopatra_ and the rest; lent him books; wrote
him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once
in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a red gold flame infinitely
ethereal and insubstantial over Miss Pole; _Antony and Cleopatra_; and
the Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably
wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject,
she corrected in red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking in a
green dress in a square. “It has flowered,” the gardener might have
said, had he opened the door; had he come in, that is to say, any
night about this time, and found him writing; found him tearing up his
writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o’clock in the
morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and
fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, _The
History of Civilisation_, and Bernard Shaw.
Something was up, Mr. Brewer knew; Mr. Brewer, managing clerk at
Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents;
something was up, he thought, and, being paternal with his young men,
and thinking very highly of Smith’s abilities, and prophesying that he
would, in ten or fifteen years, succeed to the leather arm-chair in the
inner room under the skylight with the deed-boxes round him, “if he
keeps his health,” said Mr. Brewer, and that was the danger--he looked
weakly; advised football, invited him to supper and was seeing his way
to consider recommending a rise of salary, when something happened
which threw out many of Mr. Brewer’s calculations, took away his ablest
young fellows, and eventually, so prying and insidious were the fingers
of the European War, smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole
in the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook’s nerves at Mr.
Brewer’s establishment at Muswell Hill.
Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save
an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and
Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the
trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football
was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he
drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by
name. It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying
a paper screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and then, at
the old dog’s ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire,
raising a paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. They had to be
together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with
each other. But when Evans (Rezia who had only seen him once called
him “a quiet man,” a sturdy red-haired man, undemonstrative in the
company of women), when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in
Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here
was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very
little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He
had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had
won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive. He was
right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with
indifference. When peace came he was in Milan, billeted in the house of
an innkeeper with a courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the
open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he
became engaged one evening when the panic was on him--that he could not
feel.
For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried,
he had, especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of
fear. He could not feel. As he opened the door of the room where the
Italian girls sat making hats, he could see them; could hear them;
they were rubbing wires among coloured beads in saucers; they were
turning buckram shapes this way and that; the table was all strewn
with feathers, spangles, silks, ribbons; scissors were rapping on the
table; but something failed him; he could not feel. Still, scissors
rapping, girls laughing, hats being made protected him; he was assured
of safety; he had a refuge. But he could not sit there all night. There
were moments of waking in the early morning. The bed was falling; he
was falling. Oh for the scissors and the lamplight and the buckram
shapes! He asked Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two, the
gay, the frivolous, with those little artist’s fingers that she would
hold up and say “It is all in them.” Silk, feathers, what not were
alive to them.
“It is the hat that matters most,” she would say, when they walked
out together. Every hat that passed, she would examine; and the cloak
and the dress and the way the woman held herself. Ill-dressing,
over-dressing she stigmatised, not savagely, rather with impatient
movements of the hands, like those of a painter who puts from him
some obvious well-meant glaring imposture; and then, generously, but
always critically, she would welcome a shop-girl who had turned her
little bit of stuff gallantly, or praise, wholly, with enthusiastic and
professional understanding, a French lady descending from her carriage,
in chinchilla, robes, pearls.
“Beautiful!” she would murmur, nudging Septimus, that he might see.
But beauty was behind a pane of glass. Even taste (Rezia liked ices,
chocolates, sweet things) had no relish to him. He put down his cup
on the little marble table. He looked at people outside; happy they
seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing,
squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. In
the tea-shop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling
fear came over him--he could not feel. He could reason; he could read,
Dante for example, quite easily (“Septimus, do put down your book,”
said Rezia, gently shutting the _Inferno_), he could add up his bill;
his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then--that he
could not feel.
“The English are so silent,” Rezia said. She liked it, she said. She
respected these Englishmen, and wanted to see London, and the English
horses, and the tailor-made suits, and could remember hearing how
wonderful the shops were, from an Aunt who had married and lived in
Soho.
It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the
train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the
world itself is without meaning.
At the office they advanced him to a post of considerable
responsibility. They were proud of him; he had won crosses. “You have
done your duty; it is up to us--” began Mr. Brewer; and could not
finish, so pleasurable was his emotion. They took admirable lodgings
off the Tottenham Court Road.
Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business of the
intoxication of language--_Antony and Cleopatra_--had shrivelled
utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity--the putting on of clothes,
the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly!
This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of
words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise,
to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus
(translated) the same. There Rezia sat at the table trimming hats. She
trimmed hats for Mrs. Filmer’s friends; she trimmed hats by the hour.
She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned, under water, he
thought.
“The English are so serious,” she would say, putting her arms round
Septimus, her cheek against his.
Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business
of copulation was filth to him before the end. But, Rezia said, she
must have children. They had been married five years.
They went to the Tower together; to the Victoria and Albert Museum;
stood in the crowd to see the King open Parliament. And there were the
shops--hat shops, dress shops, shops with leather bags in the window,
where she would stand staring. But she must have a boy.
She must have a son like Septimus, she said. But nobody could be
like Septimus; so gentle; so serious; so clever. Could she not read
Shakespeare too? Was Shakespeare a difficult author? she asked.
One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate
suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no
lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this
way, now that.
He watched her snip, shape, as one watches a bird hop, flit in the
grass, without daring to move a finger. For the truth is (let her
ignore it) that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor
charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming
into the wilderness. They desert the fallen. They are plastered
over with grimaces. There was Brewer at the office, with his waxed
moustache, coral tie-pin, white slip, and pleasurable emotions--all
coldness and clamminess within,--his geraniums ruined in the War--his
cook’s nerves destroyed; or Amelia What’shername, handing round cups
of tea punctually at five--a leering, sneering obscene little harpy;
and the Toms and Berties in their starched shirt fronts oozing thick
drops of vice. They never saw him drawing pictures of them naked at
their antics in his notebook. In the street, vans roared past him;