Mrs. Dalloway
(this morning, for instance, in came Elizabeth, like a long-legged
colt, handsome, dumb, just as he was beginning to talk to Clarissa)
the effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was a mystery
about it. You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain--the
actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not; yet in absence, in
the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent,
let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and
understanding, after years of lying lost. Thus she had come to him; on
board ship; in the Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things (so Sally
Seton, generous, enthusiastic goose! thought of _him_ when she saw blue
hydrangeas). She had influenced him more than any person he had ever
known. And always in this way coming before him without his wishing
it, cool, lady-like, critical; or ravishing, romantic, recalling some
field or English harvest. He saw her most often in the country, not in
London. One scene after another at Bourton....
He had reached his hotel. He crossed the hall, with its mounds of
reddish chairs and sofas, its spike-leaved, withered-looking plants.
He got his key off the hook. The young lady handed him some letters.
He went upstairs--he saw her most often at Bourton, in the late
summer, when he stayed there for a week, or fortnight even, as people
did in those days. First on top of some hill there she would stand,
hands clapped to her hair, her cloak blowing out, pointing, crying
to them--she saw the Severn beneath. Or in a wood, making the kettle
boil--very ineffective with her fingers; the smoke curtseying, blowing
in their faces; her little pink face showing through; begging water
from an old woman in a cottage, who came to the door to watch them go.
They walked always; the others drove. She was bored driving, disliked
all animals, except that dog. They tramped miles along roads. She would
break off to get her bearings, pilot him back across country; and all
the time they argued, discussed poetry, discussed people, discussed
politics (she was a Radical then); never noticing a thing except when
she stopped, cried out at a view or a tree, and made him look with
her; and so on again, through stubble fields, she walking ahead, with
a flower for her aunt, never tired of walking for all her delicacy; to
drop down on Bourton in the dusk. Then, after dinner, old Breitkopf
would open the piano and sing without any voice, and they would lie
sunk in arm-chairs, trying not to laugh, but always breaking down and
laughing, laughing--laughing at nothing. Breitkopf was supposed not to
see. And then in the morning, flirting up and down like a wagtail in
front of the house....
Oh it was a letter from her! This blue envelope; that was her hand. And
he would have to read it. Here was another of those meetings, bound
to be painful! To read her letter needed the devil of an effort. “How
heavenly it was to see him. She must tell him that.” That was all.
But it upset him. It annoyed him. He wished she hadn’t written it.
Coming on top of his thoughts, it was like a nudge in the ribs. Why
couldn’t she let him be? After all, she had married Dalloway, and
lived with him in perfect happiness all these years.
These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of
people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if
you thought of it, had settled on other people’s noses. As for the
cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn’t cleanliness, so much
as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be. Some arid matron made
her rounds at dawn sniffing, peering, causing blue-nosed maids to
scour, for all the world as if the next visitor were a joint of meat
to be served on a perfectly clean platter. For sleep, one bed; for
sitting in, one arm-chair; for cleaning one’s teeth and shaving one’s
chin, one tumbler, one looking-glass. Books, letters, dressing-gown,
slipped about on the impersonality of the horsehair like incongruous
impertinences. And it was Clarissa’s letter that made him see all this.
“Heavenly to see you. She must say so!” He folded the paper; pushed it
away; nothing would induce him to read it again!
To get that letter to him by six o’clock she must have sat down and
written it directly he left her; stamped it; sent somebody to the
post. It was, as people say, very like her. She was upset by his
visit. She had felt a great deal; had for a moment, when she kissed
his hand, regretted, envied him even, remembered possibly (for he
saw her look it) something he had said--how they would change the
world if she married him perhaps; whereas, it was this; it was middle
age; it was mediocrity; then forced herself with her indomitable
vitality to put all that aside, there being in her a thread of life
which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome obstacles, and
carry her triumphantly through he had never known the like of. Yes;
but there would come a reaction directly he left the room. She would
be frightfully sorry for him; she would think what in the world she
could do to give him pleasure (short always of the one thing) and he
could see her with the tears running down her cheeks going to her
writing-table and dashing off that one line which he was to find
greeting him.... “Heavenly to see you!” And she meant it.
Peter Walsh had now unlaced his boots.
But it would not have been a success, their marriage. The other thing,
after all, came so much more naturally.
It was odd; it was true; lots of people felt it. Peter Walsh, who had
done just respectably, filled the usual posts adequately, was liked,
but thought a little cranky, gave himself airs--it was odd that _he_
should have had, especially now that his hair was grey, a contented
look; a look of having reserves. It was this that made him attractive
to women who liked the sense that he was not altogether manly. There
was something unusual about him, or something behind him. It might be
that he was bookish--never came to see you without taking up the book
on the table (he was now reading, with his bootlaces trailing on the
floor); or that he was a gentleman, which showed itself in the way he
knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and in his manners of course to
women. For it was very charming and quite ridiculous how easily some
girl without a grain of sense could twist him round her finger. But
at her own risk. That is to say, though he might be ever so easy, and
indeed with his gaiety and good-breeding fascinating to be with, it was
only up to a point. She said something--no, no; he saw through that.
He wouldn’t stand that--no, no. Then he could shout and rock and hold
his sides together over some joke with men. He was the best judge of
cooking in India. He was a man. But not the sort of man one had to
respect--which was a mercy; not like Major Simmons, for instance; not
in the least like that, Daisy thought, when, in spite of her two small
children, she used to compare them.
He pulled off his boots. He emptied his pockets. Out came with his
pocket-knife a snapshot of Daisy on the verandah; Daisy all in white,
with a fox-terrier on her knee; very charming, very dark; the best he
had ever seen of her. It did come, after all so naturally; so much
more naturally than Clarissa. No fuss. No bother. No finicking and
fidgeting. All plain sailing. And the dark, adorably pretty girl on
the verandah exclaimed (he could hear her). Of course, of course she
would give him everything! she cried (she had no sense of discretion)
everything he wanted! she cried, running to meet him, whoever might be
looking. And she was only twenty-four. And she had two children. Well,
well!
Well indeed he had got himself into a mess at his age. And it came over
him when he woke in the night pretty forcibly. Suppose they did marry?
For him it would be all very well, but what about her? Mrs. Burgess,
a good sort and no chatterbox, in whom he had confided, thought this
absence of his in England, ostensibly to see lawyers might serve to
make Daisy reconsider, think what it meant. It was a question of
her position, Mrs. Burgess said; the social barrier; giving up her
children. She’d be a widow with a past one of these days, draggling
about in the suburbs, or more likely, indiscriminate (you know, she
said, what such women get like, with too much paint). But Peter Walsh
pooh-poohed all that. He didn’t mean to die yet. Anyhow she must settle
for herself; judge for herself, he thought, padding about the room in
his socks smoothing out his dress-shirt, for he might go to Clarissa’s
party, or he might go to one of the Halls, or he might settle in and
read an absorbing book written by a man he used to know at Oxford. And
if he did retire, that’s what he’d do--write books. He would go to
Oxford and poke about in the Bodleian. Vainly the dark, adorably pretty
girl ran to the end of the terrace; vainly waved her hand; vainly
cried she didn’t care a straw what people said. There he was, the man
she thought the world of, the perfect gentleman, the fascinating, the
distinguished (and his age made not the least difference to her),
padding about a room in an hotel in Bloomsbury, shaving, washing,
continuing, as he took up cans, put down razors, to poke about in the
Bodleian, and get at the truth about one or two little matters that
interested him. And he would have a chat with whoever it might be, and
so come to disregard more and more precise hours for lunch, and miss
engagements, and when Daisy asked him, as she would, for a kiss, a
scene, fail to come up to the scratch (though he was genuinely devoted
to her)--in short it might be happier, as Mrs. Burgess said, that she
should forget him, or merely remember him as he was in August 1922,
like a figure standing at the cross roads at dusk, which grows more and
more remote as the dog-cart spins away, carrying her securely fastened
to the back seat, though her arms are outstretched, and as she sees
the figure dwindle and disappear still she cries out how she would do
anything in the world, anything, anything, anything....
He never knew what people thought. It became more and more difficult
for him to concentrate. He became absorbed; he became busied with his
own concerns; now surly, now gay; dependent on women, absent-minded,
moody, less and less able (so he thought as he shaved) to understand
why Clarissa couldn’t simply find them a lodging and be nice to Daisy;
introduce her. And then he could just--just do what? just haunt and
hover (he was at the moment actually engaged in sorting out various
keys, papers), swoop and taste, be alone, in short, sufficient to
himself; and yet nobody of course was more dependent upon others (he
buttoned his waistcoat); it had been his undoing. He could not keep
out of smoking-rooms, liked colonels, liked golf, liked bridge, and
above all women’s society, and the fineness of their companionship, and
their faithfulness and audacity and greatness in loving which though
it had its drawbacks seemed to him (and the dark, adorably pretty face
was on top of the envelopes) so wholly admirable, so splendid a flower
to grow on the crest of human life, and yet he could not come up to
the scratch, being always apt to see round things (Clarissa had sapped
something in him permanently), and to tire very easily of mute devotion
and to want variety in love, though it would make him furious if Daisy
loved anybody else, furious! for he was jealous, uncontrollably jealous
by temperament. He suffered tortures! But where was his knife; his
watch; his seals, his note-case, and Clarissa’s letter which he would
not read again but liked to think of, and Daisy’s photograph? And now
for dinner.
They were eating.
Sitting at little tables round vases, dressed or not dressed, with