Mrs. Dalloway
“I had meant to have dancing,” said Clarissa.
For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout,
embrace, swing, be up at dawn; carry sugar to ponies; kiss and caress
the snouts of adorable chows; and then all tingling and streaming,
plunge and swim. But the enormous resources of the English language,
the power it bestows, after all, of communicating feelings (at their
age, she and Peter would have been arguing all the evening), was not
for them. They would solidify young. They would be good beyond measure
to the people on the estate, but alone, perhaps, rather dull.
“What a pity!” she said. “I had hoped to have dancing.”
It was so extraordinarily nice of them to have come! But talk of
dancing! The rooms were packed.
There was old Aunt Helena in her shawl. Alas, she must leave them--Lord
Gayton and Nancy Blow. There was old Miss Parry, her aunt.
For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive. She was past
eighty. She ascended staircases slowly with a stick. She was placed in
a chair (Richard had seen to it). People who had known Burma in the
’seventies were always led up to her. Where had Peter got to? They
used to be such friends. For at the mention of India, or even Ceylon,
her eyes (only one was glass) slowly deepened, became blue, beheld,
not human beings--she had no tender memories, no proud illusions about
Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies--it was orchids she saw, and mountain
passes and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the ’sixties over
solitary peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (startling blossoms,
never beheld before) which she painted in water-colour; an indomitable
Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the War, say, which dropped a
bomb at her very door, from her deep meditation over orchids and her
own figure journeying in the ’sixties in India--but here was Peter.
“Come and talk to Aunt Helena about Burma,” said Clarissa.
And yet he had not had a word with her all the evening!
“We will talk later,” said Clarissa, leading him up to Aunt Helena, in
her white shawl, with her stick.
“Peter Walsh,” said Clarissa.
That meant nothing.
Clarissa had asked her. It was tiring; it was noisy; but Clarissa
had asked her. So she had come. It was a pity that they lived in
London--Richard and Clarissa. If only for Clarissa’s health it would
have been better to live in the country. But Clarissa had always been
fond of society.
“He has been in Burma,” said Clarissa.
Ah. She could not resist recalling what Charles Darwin had said about
her little book on the orchids of Burma.
(Clarissa must speak to Lady Bruton.)
No doubt it was forgotten now, her book on the orchids of Burma,
but it went into three editions before 1870, she told Peter. She
remembered him now. He had been at Bourton (and he had left her, Peter
Walsh remembered, without a word in the drawing-room that night when
Clarissa had asked him to come boating).
“Richard so much enjoyed his lunch party,” said Clarissa to Lady Bruton.
“Richard was the greatest possible help,” Lady Bruton replied. “He
helped me to write a letter. And how are you?”
“Oh, perfectly well!” said Clarissa. (Lady Bruton detested illness in
the wives of politicians.)
“And there’s Peter Walsh!” said Lady Bruton (for she could never think
of anything to say to Clarissa; though she liked her. She had lots of
fine qualities; but they had nothing in common--she and Clarissa. It
might have been better if Richard had married a woman with less charm,
who would have helped him more in his work. He had lost his chance of
the Cabinet). “There’s Peter Walsh!” she said, shaking hands with that
agreeable sinner, that very able fellow who should have made a name for
himself but hadn’t (always in difficulties with women), and, of course,
old Miss Parry. Wonderful old lady!
Lady Bruton stood by Miss Parry’s chair, a spectral grenadier, draped
in black, inviting Peter Walsh to lunch; cordial; but without small
talk, remembering nothing whatever about the flora or fauna of India.
She had been there, of course; had stayed with three Viceroys; thought
some of the Indian civilians uncommonly fine fellows; but what a
tragedy it was--the state of India! The Prime Minister had just been
telling her (old Miss Parry huddled up in her shawl, did not care what
the Prime Minister had just been telling her), and Lady Bruton would
like to have Peter Walsh’s opinion, he being fresh from the centre,
and she would get Sir Sampson to meet him, for really it prevented her
from sleeping at night, the folly of it, the wickedness she might say,
being a soldier’s daughter. She was an old woman now, not good for
much. But her house, her servants, her good friend Milly Brush--did
he remember her?--were all there only asking to be used if--if they
could be of help, in short. For she never spoke of England, but this
isle of men, this dear, dear land, was in her blood (without reading
Shakespeare), and if ever a woman could have worn the helmet and shot
the arrow, could have led troops to attack, ruled with indomitable
justice barbarian hordes and lain under a shield noseless in a church,
or made a green grass mound on some primeval hillside, that woman
was Millicent Bruton. Debarred by her sex and some truancy, too, of
the logical faculty (she found it impossible to write a letter to
the _Times_), she had the thought of Empire always at hand, and had
acquired from her association with that armoured goddess her ramrod
bearing, her robustness of demeanour, so that one could not figure her
even in death parted from the earth or roaming territories over which,
in some spiritual shape, the Union Jack had ceased to fly. To be not
English even among the dead--no, no! Impossible!
But was it Lady Bruton (whom she used to know)? Was it Peter Walsh
grown grey? Lady Rosseter asked herself (who had been Sally Seton).
It was old Miss Parry certainly--the old aunt who used to be so cross
when she stayed at Bourton. Never should she forget running along the
passage naked, and being sent for by Miss Parry! And Clarissa! oh
Clarissa! Sally caught her by the arm.
Clarissa stopped beside them.
“But I can’t stay,” she said. “I shall come later. Wait,” she said,
looking at Peter and Sally. They must wait, she meant, until all these
people had gone.
“I shall come back,” she said, looking at her old friends, Sally and
Peter, who were shaking hands, and Sally, remembering the past no
doubt, was laughing.
But her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness; her eyes not
aglow as they used to be, when she smoked cigars, when she ran down
the passage to fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of clothing on
her, and Ellen Atkins asked, What if the gentlemen had met her? But
everybody forgave her. She stole a chicken from the larder because
she was hungry in the night; she smoked cigars in her bedroom; she
left a priceless book in the punt. But everybody adored her (except
perhaps Papa). It was her warmth; her vitality--she would paint, she
would write. Old women in the village never to this day forgot to
ask after “your friend in the red cloak who seemed so bright.” She
accused Hugh Whitbread, of all people (and there he was, her old friend
Hugh, talking to the Portuguese Ambassador), of kissing her in the
smoking-room to punish her for saying that women should have votes.
Vulgar men did, she said. And Clarissa remembered having to persuade
her not to denounce him at family prayers--which she was capable of
doing with her daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love of
being the centre of everything and creating scenes, and it was bound,
Clarissa used to think, to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her
martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald
man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at
Manchester. And she had five boys!
She and Peter had settled down together. They were talking: it seemed
so familiar--that they should be talking. They would discuss the past.
With the two of them (more even than with Richard) she shared her past;
the garden; the trees; old Joseph Breitkopf singing Brahms without any
voice; the drawing-room wall-paper; the smell of the mats. A part of
this Sally must always be; Peter must always be. But she must leave
them. There were the Bradshaws, whom she disliked. She must go up to
Lady Bradshaw (in grey and silver, balancing like a sea-lion at the
edge of its tank, barking for invitations, Duchesses, the typical
successful man’s wife), she must go up to Lady Bradshaw and say....
But Lady Bradshaw anticipated her.
“We are shockingly late, dear Mrs. Dalloway, we hardly dared to come
in,” she said.
And Sir William, who looked very distinguished, with his grey hair and
blue eyes, said yes; they had not been able to resist the temptation.
He was talking to Richard about that Bill probably, which they wanted
to get through the Commons. Why did the sight of him, talking to
Richard, curl her up? He looked what he was, a great doctor. A man
absolutely at the head of his profession, very powerful, rather worn.
For think what cases came before him--people in the uttermost depths of
misery; people on the verge of insanity; husbands and wives. He had to
decide questions of appalling difficulty. Yet--what she felt was, one
wouldn’t like Sir William to see one unhappy. No; not that man.
“How is your son at Eton?” she asked Lady Bradshaw.
He had just missed his eleven, said Lady Bradshaw, because of the
mumps. His father minded even more than he did, she thought “being,”
she said, “nothing but a great boy himself.”
Clarissa looked at Sir William, talking to Richard. He did not look
like a boy--not in the least like a boy. She had once gone with some
one to ask his advice. He had been perfectly right; extremely sensible.
But Heavens--what a relief to get out to the street again! There was
some poor wretch sobbing, she remembered, in the waiting-room. But
she did not know what it was--about Sir William; what exactly she
disliked. Only Richard agreed with her, “didn’t like his taste, didn’t
like his smell.” But he was extraordinarily able. They were talking
about this Bill. Some case, Sir William was mentioning, lowering his
voice. It had its bearing upon what he was saying about the deferred
effects of shell shock. There must be some provision in the Bill.
Sinking her voice, drawing Mrs. Dalloway into the shelter of a common
femininity, a common pride in the illustrious qualities of husbands and
their sad tendency to overwork, Lady Bradshaw (poor goose--one didn’t
dislike her) murmured how, “just as we were starting, my husband was
called up on the telephone, a very sad case. A young man (that is what
Sir William is telling Mr. Dalloway) had killed himself. He had been
in the army.” Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s
death, she thought.
She went on, into the little room where the Prime Minister had gone
with Lady Bruton. Perhaps there was somebody there. But there was
nobody. The chairs still kept the impress of the Prime Minister
and Lady Bruton, she turned deferentially, he sitting four-square,
authoritatively. They had been talking about India. There was nobody.
The party’s splendour fell to the floor, so strange it was to come in
alone in her finery.
What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A
young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party--the
Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself--but how? Always
her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an
accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from
a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising,
went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his