Mrs. Dalloway
their shawls and bags laid beside them, with their air of false
composure, for they were not used to so many courses at dinner, and
confidence, for they were able to pay for it, and strain, for they
had been running about London all day shopping, sightseeing; and their
natural curiosity, for they looked round and up as the nice-looking
gentleman in horn-rimmed spectacles came in, and their good nature,
for they would have been glad to do any little service, such as lend a
time-table or impart useful information, and their desire, pulsing in
them, tugging at them subterraneously, somehow to establish connections
if it were only a birthplace (Liverpool, for example) in common or
friends of the same name; with their furtive glances, odd silences, and
sudden withdrawals into family jocularity and isolation; there they
sat eating dinner when Mr. Walsh came in and took his seat at a little
table by the curtain.
It was not that he said anything, for being solitary he could only
address himself to the waiter; it was his way of looking at the menu,
of pointing his forefinger to a particular wine, of hitching himself
up to the table, of addressing himself seriously, not gluttonously
to dinner, that won him their respect; which, having to remain
unexpressed for the greater part of the meal, flared up at the table
where the Morrises sat when Mr. Walsh was heard to say at the end of
the meal, “Bartlett pears.” Why he should have spoken so moderately
yet firmly, with the air of a disciplinarian well within his rights
which are founded upon justice, neither young Charles Morris, nor
old Charles, neither Miss Elaine nor Mrs. Morris knew. But when he
said, “Bartlett pears,” sitting alone at his table, they felt that
he counted on their support in some lawful demand; was champion of
a cause which immediately became their own, so that their eyes met
his eyes sympathetically, and when they all reached the smoking-room
simultaneously, a little talk between them became inevitable.
It was not very profound--only to the effect that London was crowded;
had changed in thirty years; that Mr. Morris preferred Liverpool; that
Mrs. Morris had been to the Westminster flower-show, and that they
had all seen the Prince of Wales. Yet, thought Peter Walsh, no family
in the world can compare with the Morrises; none whatever; and their
relations to each other are perfect, and they don’t care a hang for the
upper classes, and they like what they like, and Elaine is training
for the family business, and the boy has won a scholarship at Leeds,
and the old lady (who is about his own age) has three more children at
home; and they have two motor cars, but Mr. Morris still mends the
boots on Sunday: it is superb, it is absolutely superb, thought Peter
Walsh, swaying a little backwards and forwards with his liqueur glass
in his hand among the hairy red chairs and ash-trays, feeling very well
pleased with himself, for the Morrises liked him. Yes, they liked a man
who said, “Bartlett pears.” They liked him, he felt.
He would go to Clarissa’s party. (The Morrises moved off; but they
would meet again.) He would go to Clarissa’s party, because he wanted
to ask Richard what they were doing in India--the conservative duffers.
And what’s being acted? And music.... Oh yes, and mere gossip.
For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who
fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her
way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and
on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots
to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a
positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping. What did the
Government mean--Richard Dalloway would know--to do about India?
Since it was a very hot night and the paper boys went by with placards
proclaiming in huge red letters that there was a heat-wave, wicker
chairs were placed on the hotel steps and there, sipping, smoking,
detached gentlemen sat. Peter Walsh sat there. One might fancy that
day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped
off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and
pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening,
and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling
petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic
thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans;
and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense
light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded
above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel,
flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but
London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky,
pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.
For the great revolution of Mr. Willett’s summer time had taken place
since Peter Walsh’s last visit to England. The prolonged evening was
new to him. It was inspiriting, rather. For as the young people went by
with their despatch-boxes, awfully glad to be free, proud too, dumbly,
of stepping this famous pavement, joy of a kind, cheap, tinselly, if
you like, but all the same rapture, flushed their faces. They dressed
well too; pink stockings; pretty shoes. They would now have two hours
at the pictures. It sharpened, it refined them, the yellow-blue evening
light; and on the leaves in the square shone lurid, livid--they
looked as if dipped in sea water--the foliage of a submerged city. He
was astonished by the beauty; it was encouraging too, for where the
returned Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds of them) in the
Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world, here was
he, as young as ever; envying young people their summer time and the
rest of it, and more than suspecting from the words of a girl, from a
housemaid’s laughter--intangible things you couldn’t lay your hands
on--that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth
had seemed immovable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed them down,
the women especially, like those flowers Clarissa’s Aunt Helena used to
press between sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré’s dictionary
on top, sitting under the lamp after dinner. She was dead now. He had
heard of her, from Clarissa, losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so
fitting--one of nature’s masterpieces--that old Miss Parry should turn
to glass. She would die like some bird in a frost gripping her perch.
She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete,
would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a
lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long
voyage, this interminable (he felt for a copper to buy a paper and
read about Surrey and Yorkshire--he had held out that copper millions
of times. Surrey was all out once more)--this interminable life. But
cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. He could never help
reading about cricket. He read the scores in the stop press first, then
how it was a hot day; then about a murder case. Having done things
millions of times enriched them, though it might be said to take the
surface off. The past enriched, and experience, and having cared for
one or two people, and so having acquired the power which the young
lack, of cutting short, doing what one likes, not caring a rap what
people say and coming and going without any very great expectations
(he left his paper on the table and moved off), which however (and
he looked for his hat and coat) was not altogether true of him, not
to-night, for here he was starting to go to a party, at his age, with
the belief upon him that he was about to have an experience. But what?
Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the eye. It was not beauty
pure and simple--Bedford Place leading into Russell Square. It was
straightness and emptiness of course; the symmetry of a corridor; but
it was also windows lit up, a piano, a gramophone sounding; a sense
of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging when, through
the uncurtained window, the window left open, one saw parties sitting
over tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men
and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment theirs, when work
was done), stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants.
Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life. And in the
large square where the cabs shot and swerved so quick, there were
loitering couples, dallying, embracing, shrunk up under the shower
of a tree; that was moving; so silent, so absorbed, that one passed,
discreetly, timidly, as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to
interrupt which would have been impious. That was interesting. And so
on into the flare and glare.
His light overcoat blew open, he stepped with indescribable
idiosyncrasy, leant a little forward, tripped, with his hands behind
his back and his eyes still a little hawklike; he tripped through
London, towards Westminster, observing.
Was everybody dining out, then? Doors were being opened here by a
footman to let issue a high-stepping old dame, in buckled shoes, with
three purple ostrich feathers in her hair. Doors were being opened for
ladies wrapped like mummies in shawls with bright flowers on them,
ladies with bare heads. And in respectable quarters with stucco pillars
through small front gardens lightly swathed with combs in their hair
(having run up to see the children), women came; men waited for them,
with their coats blowing open, and the motor started. Everybody was
going out. What with these doors being opened, and the descent and the
start, it seemed as if the whole of London were embarking in little
boats moored to the bank, tossing on the waters, as if the whole place
were floating off in carnival. And Whitehall was skated over, silver
beaten as it was, skated over by spiders, and there was a sense of
midges round the arc lamps; it was so hot that people stood about
talking. And here in Westminster was a retired Judge, presumably,
sitting four square at his house door dressed all in white. An
Anglo-Indian presumably.
And here a shindy of brawling women, drunken women; here only a
policeman and looming houses, high houses, domed houses, churches,
parliaments, and the hoot of a steamer on the river, a hollow misty
cry. But it was her street, this, Clarissa’s; cabs were rushing round
the corner, like water round the piers of a bridge, drawn together, it
seemed to him because they bore people going to her party, Clarissa’s
party.
The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye
were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls
unrecorded. The brain must wake now. The body must contract now,
entering the house, the lighted house, where the door stood open,
where the motor cars were standing, and bright women descending: the
soul must brave itself to endure. He opened the big blade of his
pocket-knife.
* * * * *
Lucy came running full tilt downstairs, having just nipped in to the
drawing-room to smooth a cover, to straighten a chair, to pause a
moment and feel whoever came in must think how clean, how bright, how
beautifully cared for, when they saw the beautiful silver, the brass
fire-irons, the new chair-covers, and the curtains of yellow chintz:
she appraised each; heard a roar of voices; people already coming up
from dinner; she must fly!
The Prime Minister was coming, Agnes said: so she had heard them say
in the dining-room, she said, coming in with a tray of glasses. Did it
matter, did it matter in the least, one Prime Minister more or less? It
made no difference at this hour of the night to Mrs. Walker among the