Mrs. Dalloway
could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an
offering; which sounded horribly vague. But who was Peter to make out
that life was all plain sailing?--Peter always in love, always in love
with the wrong woman? What’s your love? she might say to him. And she
knew his answer; how it is the most important thing in the world and no
woman possibly understood it. Very well. But could any man understand
what she meant either? about life? She could not imagine Peter or
Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever.
But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how
superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did
it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer.
Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and
somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense
of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a
pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did
it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift.
Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think,
write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved
success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense:
and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.
All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky;
walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter;
then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death
was!--that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how
she had loved it all; how, every instant....
The door opened. Elizabeth knew that her mother was resting. She came
in very quietly. She stood perfectly still. Was it that some Mongol
had been wrecked on the coast of Norfolk (as Mrs. Hilbery said), had
mixed with the Dalloway ladies, perhaps, a hundred years ago? For the
Dalloways, in general, were fair-haired; blue-eyed; Elizabeth, on
the contrary, was dark; had Chinese eyes in a pale face; an Oriental
mystery; was gentle, considerate, still. As a child, she had had a
perfect sense of humour; but now at seventeen, why, Clarissa could not
in the least understand, she had become very serious; like a hyacinth,
sheathed in glossy green, with buds just tinted, a hyacinth which has
had no sun.
She stood quite still and looked at her mother; but the door was ajar,
and outside the door was Miss Kilman, as Clarissa knew; Miss Kilman in
her mackintosh, listening to whatever they said.
Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a mackintosh; but had
her reasons. First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty; and did
not, after all, dress to please. She was poor, moreover; degradingly
poor. Otherwise she would not be taking jobs from people like the
Dalloways; from rich people, who liked to be kind. Mr. Dalloway, to
do him justice, had been kind. But Mrs. Dalloway had not. She had
been merely condescending. She came from the most worthless of all
classes--the rich, with a smattering of culture. They had expensive
things everywhere; pictures, carpets, lots of servants. She considered
that she had a perfect right to anything that the Dalloways did for her.
She had been cheated. Yes, the word was no exaggeration, for surely
a girl has a right to some kind of happiness? And she had never been
happy, what with being so clumsy and so poor. And then, just as she
might have had a chance at Miss Dolby’s school, the war came; and she
had never been able to tell lies. Miss Dolby thought she would be
happier with people who shared her views about the Germans. She had had
to go. It was true that the family was of German origin; spelt the name
Kiehlman in the eighteenth century; but her brother had been killed.
They turned her out because she would not pretend that the Germans were
all villains--when she had German friends, when the only happy days
of her life had been spent in Germany! And after all, she could read
history. She had had to take whatever she could get. Mr. Dalloway had
come across her working for the Friends. He had allowed her (and that
was really generous of him) to teach his daughter history. Also she
did a little Extension lecturing and so on. Then Our Lord had come to
her (and here she always bowed her head). She had seen the light two
years and three months ago. Now she did not envy women like Clarissa
Dalloway; she pitied them.
She pitied and despised them from the bottom of her heart, as she stood
on the soft carpet, looking at the old engraving of a little girl
with a muff. With all this luxury going on, what hope was there for
a better state of things? Instead of lying on a sofa--“My mother is
resting,” Elizabeth had said--she should have been in a factory; behind
a counter; Mrs. Dalloway and all the other fine ladies!
Bitter and burning, Miss Kilman had turned into a church two years
three months ago. She had heard the Rev. Edward Whittaker preach; the
boys sing; had seen the solemn lights descend, and whether it was the
music, or the voices (she herself when alone in the evening found
comfort in a violin; but the sound was excruciating; she had no ear),
the hot and turbulent feelings which boiled and surged in her had been
assuaged as she sat there, and she had wept copiously, and gone to call
on Mr. Whittaker at his private house in Kensington. It was the hand of
God, he said. The Lord had shown her the way. So now, whenever the hot
and painful feelings boiled within her, this hatred of Mrs. Dalloway,
this grudge against the world, she thought of God. She thought of
Mr. Whittaker. Rage was succeeded by calm. A sweet savour filled her
veins, her lips parted, and, standing formidable upon the landing in
her mackintosh, she looked with steady and sinister serenity at Mrs.
Dalloway, who came out with her daughter.
Elizabeth said she had forgotten her gloves. That was because Miss
Kilman and her mother hated each other. She could not bear to see them
together. She ran upstairs to find her gloves.
But Miss Kilman did not hate Mrs. Dalloway. Turning her large
gooseberry-coloured eyes upon Clarissa, observing her small pink face,
her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion, Miss Kilman felt,
Fool! Simpleton! You who have known neither sorrow nor pleasure; who
have trifled your life away! And there rose in her an overmastering
desire to overcome her; to unmask her. If she could have felled her
it would have eased her. But it was not the body; it was the soul and
its mockery that she wished to subdue; make feel her mastery. If only
she could make her weep; could ruin her; humiliate her; bring her to
her knees crying, You are right! But this was God’s will, not Miss
Kilman’s. It was to be a religious victory. So she glared; so she
glowered.
Clarissa was really shocked. This a Christian--this woman! This woman
had taken her daughter from her! She in touch with invisible presences!
Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without kindness or grace, she know the
meaning of life!
“You are taking Elizabeth to the Stores?” Mrs. Dalloway said.
Miss Kilman said she was. They stood there. Miss Kilman was not going
to make herself agreeable. She had always earned her living. Her
knowledge of modern history was thorough in the extreme. She did out of
her meagre income set aside so much for causes she believed in; whereas
this woman did nothing, believed nothing; brought up her daughter--but
here was Elizabeth, rather out of breath, the beautiful girl.
So they were going to the Stores. Odd it was, as Miss Kilman stood
there (and stand she did, with the power and taciturnity of some
prehistoric monster armoured for primeval warfare), how, second by
second, the idea of her diminished, how hatred (which was for ideas,
not people) crumbled, how she lost her malignity, her size, became
second by second merely Miss Kilman, in a mackintosh, whom Heaven knows
Clarissa would have liked to help.
At this dwindling of the monster, Clarissa laughed. Saying good-bye,
she laughed.
Off they went together, Miss Kilman and Elizabeth, downstairs.
With a sudden impulse, with a violent anguish, for this woman was
taking her daughter from her, Clarissa leant over the bannisters and
cried out, “Remember the party! Remember our party to-night!”
But Elizabeth had already opened the front door; there was a van
passing; she did not answer.
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing-room,
tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are! For now
that the body of Miss Kilman was not before her, it overwhelmed
her--the idea. The cruelest things in the world, she thought, seeing
them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous,
infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat, on
the landing; love and religion. Had she ever tried to convert any one
herself? Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves? And she
watched out of the window the old lady opposite climbing upstairs. Let
her climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her, as
Clarissa had often seen her, gain her bedroom, part her curtains, and
disappear again into the background. Somehow one respected that--that
old woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious that she was
being watched. There was something solemn in it--but love and religion
would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul. The
odious Kilman would destroy it. Yet it was a sight that made her want
to cry.
Love destroyed too. Everything that was fine, everything that was true
went. Take Peter Walsh now. There was a man, charming, clever, with
ideas about everything. If you wanted to know about Pope, say, or
Addison, or just to talk nonsense, what people were like, what things
meant, Peter knew better than any one. It was Peter who had helped her;
Peter who had lent her books. But look at the women he loved--vulgar,
trivial, commonplace. Think of Peter in love--he came to see her after
all these years, and what did he talk about? Himself. Horrible passion!
she thought. Degrading passion! she thought, thinking of Kilman and her
Elizabeth walking to the Army and Navy Stores.
Big Ben struck the half-hour.
How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old lady
(they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the
window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as
it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst
of ordinary things the finger fell making the moment solemn. She was
forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move, to go--but where?
Clarissa tried to follow her as she turned and disappeared, and could
still just see her white cap moving at the back of the bedroom. She was
still there moving about at the other end of the room. Why creeds and
prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle,
that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going
from chest of drawers to dressing-table. She could still see her. And
the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter
might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had
the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room;
there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
Love--but here the other clock, the clock which always struck two
minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its lap full of odds and
ends, which it dumped down as if Big Ben were all very well with his
majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so just, but she must remember