Mrs. Dalloway
with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and
remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton--such hosts of people; and dancing
all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and driving home
across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the
Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here,
now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she
asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must
inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she
resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended
absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and
flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in
each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home;
of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was;
part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between
the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had
seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life,
herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’ shop
window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the
country, as she read in the book spread open:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men
and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a
perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman
she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar.
There were Jorrocks’ _Jaunts and Jollities_; there were _Soapy Sponge_
and Mrs. Asquith’s _Memoirs_ and _Big Game Shooting in Nigeria_, all
spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed
exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home. Nothing
that would serve to amuse her and make that indescribably dried-up
little woman look, as Clarissa came in, just for a moment cordial;
before they settled down for the usual interminable talk of women’s
ailments. How much she wanted it--that people should look pleased
as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards
Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for
doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like
Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting
to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves;
but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and
now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second
taken in. Oh if she could have had her life over again! she thought,
stepping on to the pavement, could have looked even differently!
She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough,
with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have
been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested
in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very
sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a
ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself
well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well,
considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore
(she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its
capacities, seemed nothing--nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of
being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying,
no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather
solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs.
Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the
season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll
of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty
years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.
“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is all,”
she repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove shop where,
before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves. And her old Uncle
William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves. He had
turned on his bed one morning in the middle of the War. He had said, “I
have had enough.” Gloves and shoes; she had a passion for gloves; but
her own daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not a straw for either of them.
Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bond Street to a shop where they
kept flowers for her when she gave a party. Elizabeth really cared for
her dog most of all. The whole house this morning smelt of tar. Still,
better poor Grizzle than Miss Kilman; better distemper and tar and all
the rest of it than sitting mewed in a stuffy bedroom with a prayer
book! Better anything, she was inclined to say. But it might be only
a phase, as Richard said, such as all girls go through. It might be
falling in love. But why with Miss Kilman? who had been badly treated
of course; one must make allowances for that, and Richard said she was
very able, had a really historical mind. Anyhow they were inseparable,
and Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to Communion; and how she
dressed, how she treated people who came to lunch she did not care a
bit, it being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people
callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings, for Miss Kilman would
do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but
in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she, dressed
in a green mackintosh coat. Year in year out she wore that coat; she
perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without making you
feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you
were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or
whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking
in it, her dismissal from school during the War--poor embittered
unfortunate creature! For it was not her one hated but the idea of her,
which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that was not
Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with which one battles in
the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half
our life-blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw
of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would
have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal
monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the
depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content
quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring,
this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make
her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made
all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved
and making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed
there were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of
content were nothing but self love! this hatred!
Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing through the swing
doors of Mulberry’s the florists.
She advanced, light, tall, very upright, to be greeted at once by
button-faced Miss Pym, whose hands were always bright red, as if they
had been stood in cold water with the flowers.
There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and
carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises.
Ah yes--so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood
talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for
kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked older, this
year, turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses
and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in,
after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness.
And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from
a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim
the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas
spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale--as if it
were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas
and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black
sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and
it was the moment between six and seven when every flower--roses,
carnations, irises, lilac--glows; white, violet, red, deep orange;
every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds;
and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the
cherry pie, over the evening primroses!
And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing,
nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if
this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting
her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred,
that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when--oh! a
pistol shot in the street outside!
“Dear, those motor cars,” said Miss Pym, going to the window to look,
and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full of sweet
peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all _her_
fault.
* * * * *
The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss Pym go
to the window and apologise came from a motor car which had drawn to
the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry’s shop window.
Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had just time to see a
face of the very greatest importance against the dove-grey upholstery,
before a male hand drew the blind and there was nothing to be seen
except a square of dove grey.
Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond Street
to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other,
passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon
hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and
stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly.
But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the
voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes
bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face
had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime
Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody knew.
Edgar J. Watkiss, with his roll of lead piping round his arm, said
audibly, humorously of course: “The Proime Minister’s kyar.”
Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass, heard him.
Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed,
wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had
that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers
apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?
Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines
sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body. The
sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped
outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of omnibuses
spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red parasol opened
with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms
full of sweet peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed in
enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on
bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motor car
stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree,
Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to