Mrs. Dalloway
once. The malicious asserted that he now kept guard at Buckingham
Palace, dressed in silk stockings and knee-breeches, over what nobody
knew. But he did it extremely efficiently. He had been afloat on the
cream of English society for fifty-five years. He had known Prime
Ministers. His affections were understood to be deep. And if it were
true that he had not taken part in any of the great movements of the
time or held important office, one or two humble reforms stood to
his credit; an improvement in public shelters was one; the protection
of owls in Norfolk another; servant girls had reason to be grateful
to him; and his name at the end of letters to the _Times_, asking for
funds, appealing to the public to protect, to preserve, to clear up
litter, to abate smoke, and stamp out immorality in parks, commanded
respect.
A magnificent figure he cut too, pausing for a moment (as the sound of
the half hour died away) to look critically, magisterially, at socks
and shoes; impeccable, substantial, as if he beheld the world from a
certain eminence, and dressed to match; but realised the obligations
which size, wealth, health, entail, and observed punctiliously even
when not absolutely necessary, little courtesies, old-fashioned
ceremonies which gave a quality to his manner, something to imitate,
something to remember him by, for he would never lunch, for example,
with Lady Bruton, whom he had known these twenty years, without
bringing her in his outstretched hand a bunch of carnations and asking
Miss Brush, Lady Bruton’s secretary, after her brother in South Africa,
which, for some reason, Miss Brush, deficient though she was in every
attribute of female charm, so much resented that she said “Thank you,
he’s doing very well in South Africa,” when, for half a dozen years, he
had been doing badly in Portsmouth.
Lady Bruton herself preferred Richard Dalloway, who arrived at the next
moment. Indeed they met on the doorstep.
Lady Bruton preferred Richard Dalloway of course. He was made of
much finer material. But she wouldn’t let them run down her poor
dear Hugh. She could never forget his kindness--he had been really
remarkably kind--she forgot precisely upon what occasion. But he
had been--remarkably kind. Anyhow, the difference between one man
and another does not amount to much. She had never seen the sense
of cutting people up, as Clarissa Dalloway did--cutting them up and
sticking them together again; not at any rate when one was sixty-two.
She took Hugh’s carnations with her angular grim smile. There was
nobody else coming, she said. She had got them there on false
pretences, to help her out of a difficulty--
“But let us eat first,” she said.
And so there began a soundless and exquisite passing to and fro
through swing doors of aproned white-capped maids, handmaidens not
of necessity, but adepts in a mystery or grand deception practised
by hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when, with a wave of
the hand, the traffic ceases, and there rises instead this profound
illusion in the first place about the food--how it is not paid for; and
then that the table spreads itself voluntarily with glass and silver,
little mats, saucers of red fruit; films of brown cream mask turbot; in
casseroles severed chickens swim; coloured, undomestic, the fire burns;
and with the wine and the coffee (not paid for) rise jocund visions
before musing eyes; gently speculative eyes; eyes to whom life appears
musical, mysterious; eyes now kindled to observe genially the beauty
of the red carnations which Lady Bruton (whose movements were always
angular) had laid beside her plate, so that Hugh Whitbread, feeling at
peace with the entire universe and at the same time completely sure of
his standing, said, resting his fork,
“Wouldn’t they look charming against your lace?”
Miss Brush resented this familiarity intensely. She thought him an
underbred fellow. She made Lady Bruton laugh.
Lady Bruton raised the carnations, holding them rather stiffly with
much the same attitude with which the General held the scroll in the
picture behind her; she remained fixed, tranced. Which was she now,
the General’s great-grand-daughter? great-great-grand-daughter? Richard
Dalloway asked himself. Sir Roderick, Sir Miles, Sir Talbot--that was
it. It was remarkable how in that family the likeness persisted in the
women. She should have been a general of dragoons herself. And Richard
would have served under her, cheerfully; he had the greatest respect
for her; he cherished these romantic views about well-set-up old women
of pedigree, and would have liked, in his good-humoured way, to bring
some young hot-heads of his acquaintance to lunch with her; as if a
type like hers could be bred of amiable tea-drinking enthusiasts! He
knew her country. He knew her people. There was a vine, still bearing,
which either Lovelace or Herrick--she never read a word of poetry
herself, but so the story ran--had sat under. Better wait to put before
them the question that bothered her (about making an appeal to the
public; if so, in what terms and so on), better wait until they have
had their coffee, Lady Bruton thought; and so laid the carnations down
beside her plate.
“How’s Clarissa?” she asked abruptly.
Clarissa always said that Lady Bruton did not like her. Indeed, Lady
Bruton had the reputation of being more interested in politics than
people; of talking like a man; of having had a finger in some notorious
intrigue of the eighties, which was now beginning to be mentioned
in memoirs. Certainly there was an alcove in her drawing-room, and
a table in that alcove, and a photograph upon that table of General
Sir Talbot Moore, now deceased, who had written there (one evening in
the eighties) in Lady Bruton’s presence, with her cognisance, perhaps
advice, a telegram ordering the British troops to advance upon an
historical occasion. (She kept the pen and told the story.) Thus, when
she said in her offhand way “How’s Clarissa?” husbands had difficulty
in persuading their wives and indeed, however devoted, were secretly
doubtful themselves, of her interest in women who often got in their
husbands’ way, prevented them from accepting posts abroad, and had to
be taken to the seaside in the middle of the session to recover from
influenza. Nevertheless her inquiry, “How’s Clarissa?” was known by
women infallibly, to be a signal from a well-wisher, from an almost
silent companion, whose utterances (half a dozen perhaps in the course
of a lifetime) signified recognition of some feminine comradeship which
went beneath masculine lunch parties and united Lady Bruton and Mrs.
Dalloway, who seldom met, and appeared when they did meet indifferent
and even hostile, in a singular bond.
“I met Clarissa in the Park this morning,” said Hugh Whitbread, diving
into the casserole, anxious to pay himself this little tribute, for he
had only to come to London and he met everybody at once; but greedy,
one of the greediest men she had ever known, Milly Brush thought, who
observed men with unflinching rectitude, and was capable of everlasting
devotion, to her own sex in particular, being knobbed, scraped,
angular, and entirely without feminine charm.
“D’you know who’s in town?” said Lady Bruton suddenly bethinking her.
“Our old friend, Peter Walsh.”
They all smiled. Peter Walsh! And Mr. Dalloway was genuinely glad,
Milly Brush thought; and Mr. Whitbread thought only of his chicken.
Peter Walsh! All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and Richard
Dalloway, remembered the same thing--how passionately Peter had been
in love; been rejected; gone to India; come a cropper; made a mess of
things; and Richard Dalloway had a very great liking for the dear old
fellow too. Milly Brush saw that; saw a depth in the brown of his eyes;
saw him hesitate; consider; which interested her, as Mr. Dalloway
always interested her, for what was he thinking, she wondered, about
Peter Walsh?
That Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa; that he would go back
directly after lunch and find Clarissa; that he would tell her, in so
many words, that he loved her. Yes, he would say that.
Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences;
and Mr. Dalloway was always so dependable; such a gentleman too. Now,
being forty, Lady Bruton had only to nod, or turn her head a little
abruptly, and Milly Brush took the signal, however deeply she might
be sunk in these reflections of a detached spirit, of an uncorrupted
soul whom life could not bamboozle, because life had not offered her
a trinket of the slightest value; not a curl, smile, lip, cheek,
nose; nothing whatever; Lady Bruton had only to nod, and Perkins was
instructed to quicken the coffee.
“Yes; Peter Walsh has come back,” said Lady Bruton. It was vaguely
flattering to them all. He had come back, battered, unsuccessful, to
their secure shores. But to help him, they reflected, was impossible;
there was some flaw in his character. Hugh Whitbread said one might
of course mention his name to So-and-so. He wrinkled lugubriously,
consequentially, at the thought of the letters he would write to the
heads of Government offices about “my old friend, Peter Walsh,” and
so on. But it wouldn’t lead to anything--not to anything permanent,
because of his character.
“In trouble with some woman,” said Lady Bruton. They had all guessed
that _that_ was at the bottom of it.
“However,” said Lady Bruton, anxious to leave the subject, “we shall
hear the whole story from Peter himself.”
(The coffee was very slow in coming.)
“The address?” murmured Hugh Whitbread; and there was at once a ripple
in the grey tide of service which washed round Lady Bruton day in, day
out, collecting, intercepting, enveloping her in a fine tissue which
broke concussions, mitigated interruptions, and spread round the house
in Brook Street a fine net where things lodged and were picked out
accurately, instantly, by grey-haired Perkins, who had been with Lady
Bruton these thirty years and now wrote down the address; handed it to
Mr. Whitbread, who took out his pocket-book, raised his eyebrows, and
slipping it in among documents of the highest importance, said that he
would get Evelyn to ask him to lunch.
(They were waiting to bring the coffee until Mr. Whitbread had
finished.)
Hugh was very slow, Lady Bruton thought. He was getting fat, she
noticed. Richard always kept himself in the pink of condition. She
was getting impatient; the whole of her being was setting positively,
undeniably, domineeringly brushing aside all this unnecessary trifling
(Peter Walsh and his affairs) upon that subject which engaged her
attention, and not merely her attention, but that fibre which was
the ramrod of her soul, that essential part of her without which
Millicent Bruton would not have been Millicent Bruton; that project
for emigrating young people of both sexes born of respectable parents
and setting them up with a fair prospect of doing well in Canada. She
exaggerated. She had perhaps lost her sense of proportion. Emigration
was not to others the obvious remedy, the sublime conception. It was
not to them (not to Hugh, or Richard, or even to devoted Miss Brush)
the liberator of the pent egotism, which a strong martial woman, well
nourished, well descended, of direct impulses, downright feelings, and
little introspective power (broad and simple--why could not every one
be broad and simple? she asked) feels rise within her, once youth is
past, and must eject upon some object--it may be Emigration, it may be
Emancipation; but whatever it be, this object round which the essence
of her soul is daily secreted, becomes inevitably prismatic, lustrous,
half looking-glass, half precious stone; now carefully hidden in case