Mrs. Dalloway
brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had
he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything
more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to
go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They
(all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they
would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed
about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every
day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was
defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the
impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them;
closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an
embrace in death.
But this young man who had killed himself--had he plunged holding his
treasure? “If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy,” she had
said to herself once, coming down in white.
Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion,
and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor yet to her
obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but
capable of some indescribable outrage--forcing your soul, that was
it--if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed
him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she
felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men
like that?
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the
overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this
life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in
the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard
had not been there reading the _Times_, so that she could crouch like a
bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight,
rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished.
But that young man had killed himself.
Somehow it was her disaster--her disgrace. It was her punishment to
see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound
darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had
schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had
wanted success. Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had
walked on the terrace at Bourton.
It was due to Richard; she had never been so happy. Nothing could
be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she
thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf,
this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the
process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun
rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they
were all talking, to look at the sky; or seen it between people’s
shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She
walked to the window.
It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this
country sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains; she
looked. Oh, but how surprising!--in the room opposite the old lady
stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be
a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away
its cheek in beauty. But there it was--ashen pale, raced over quickly
by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen.
She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to
watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to
the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with people still
laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman,
quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock began
striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him;
with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity
him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light!
the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the
words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back
to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like
him--the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had
done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles
dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the
fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and
Peter. And she came in from the little room.
“But where is Clarissa?” said Peter. He was sitting on the sofa with
Sally. (After all these years he really could not call her “Lady
Rosseter.”) “Where’s the woman gone to?” he asked. “Where’s Clarissa?”
Sally supposed, and so did Peter for the matter of that, that there
were people of importance, politicians, whom neither of them knew
unless by sight in the picture papers, whom Clarissa had to be nice
to, had to talk to. She was with them. Yet there was Richard Dalloway
not in the Cabinet. He hadn’t been a success, Sally supposed? For
herself, she scarcely ever read the papers. She sometimes saw his name
mentioned. But then--well, she lived a very solitary life, in the
wilds, Clarissa would say, among great merchants, great manufacturers,
men, after all, who did things. She had done things too!
“I have five sons!” she told him.
Lord, Lord, what a change had come over her! the softness of
motherhood; its egotism too. Last time they met, Peter remembered, had
been among the cauliflowers in the moonlight, the leaves “like rough
bronze” she had said, with her literary turn; and she had picked a
rose. She had marched him up and down that awful night, after the scene
by the fountain; he was to catch the midnight train. Heavens, he had
wept!
That was his old trick, opening a pocket-knife, thought Sally, always
opening and shutting a knife when he got excited. They had been very,
very intimate, she and Peter Walsh, when he was in love with Clarissa,
and there was that dreadful, ridiculous scene over Richard Dalloway
at lunch. She had called Richard “Wickham.” Why not call Richard
“Wickham”? Clarissa had flared up! and indeed they had never seen each
other since, she and Clarissa, not more than half a dozen times perhaps
in the last ten years. And Peter Walsh had gone off to India, and she
had heard vaguely that he had made an unhappy marriage, and she didn’t
know whether he had any children, and she couldn’t ask him, for he had
changed. He was rather shrivelled-looking, but kinder, she felt, and
she had a real affection for him, for he was connected with her youth,
and she still had a little Emily Brontë he had given her, and he was to
write, surely? In those days he was to write.
“Have you written?” she asked him, spreading her hand, her firm and
shapely hand, on her knee in a way he recalled.
“Not a word!” said Peter Walsh, and she laughed.
She was still attractive, still a personage, Sally Seton. But who
was this Rosseter? He wore two camellias on his wedding day--that
was all Peter knew of him. “They have myriads of servants, miles of
conservatories,” Clarissa wrote; something like that. Sally owned it
with a shout of laughter.
“Yes, I have ten thousand a year”--whether before the tax was paid or
after, she couldn’t remember, for her husband, “whom you must meet,”
she said, “whom you would like,” she said, did all that for her.
And Sally used to be in rags and tatters. She had pawned
her grandmother’s ring which Marie Antoinette had given her
great-grandfather to come to Bourton.
Oh yes, Sally remembered; she had it still, a ruby ring which Marie
Antoinette had given her great-grandfather. She never had a penny
to her name in those days, and going to Bourton always meant some
frightful pinch. But going to Bourton had meant so much to her--had
kept her sane, she believed, so unhappy had she been at home. But that
was all a thing of the past--all over now, she said. And Mr. Parry was
dead; and Miss Parry was still alive. Never had he had such a shock in
his life! said Peter. He had been quite certain she was dead. And the
marriage had been, Sally supposed, a success? And that very handsome,
very self-possessed young woman was Elizabeth, over there, by the
curtains, in red.
(She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth,
Willie Titcomb was thinking. Oh how much nicer to be in the country and
do what she liked! She could hear her poor dog howling, Elizabeth was
certain.) She was not a bit like Clarissa, Peter Walsh said.
“Oh, Clarissa!” said Sally.
What Sally felt was simply this. She had owed Clarissa an enormous
amount. They had been friends, not acquaintances, friends, and she
still saw Clarissa all in white going about the house with her hands
full of flowers--to this day tobacco plants made her think of Bourton.
But--did Peter understand?--she lacked something. Lacked what was it?
She had charm; she had extraordinary charm. But to be frank (and she
felt that Peter was an old friend, a real friend--did absence matter?
did distance matter? She had often wanted to write to him, but torn
it up, yet felt he understood, for people understand without things
being said, as one realises growing old, and old she was, had been
that afternoon to see her sons at Eton, where they had the mumps), to
be quite frank then, how could Clarissa have done it?--married Richard
Dalloway? a sportsman, a man who cared only for dogs. Literally, when
he came into the room he smelt of the stables. And then all this? She
waved her hand.
Hugh Whitbread it was, strolling past in his white waistcoat, dim, fat,
blind, past everything he looked, except self-esteem and comfort.
“He’s not going to recognise _us_,” said Sally, and really she hadn’t
the courage--so that was Hugh! the admirable Hugh!
“And what does he do?” she asked Peter.
He blacked the King’s boots or counted bottles at Windsor, Peter told
her. Peter kept his sharp tongue still! But Sally must be frank, Peter
said. That kiss now, Hugh’s.
On the lips, she assured him, in the smoking-room one evening. She went
straight to Clarissa in a rage. Hugh didn’t do such things! Clarissa
said, the admirable Hugh! Hugh’s socks were without exception the most
beautiful she had ever seen--and now his evening dress. Perfect! And
had he children?
“Everybody in the room has six sons at Eton,” Peter told her, except
himself. He, thank God, had none. No sons, no daughters, no wife. Well,
he didn’t seem to mind, said Sally. He looked younger, she thought,
than any of them.
But it had been a silly thing to do, in many ways, Peter said, to marry
like that; “a perfect goose she was,” he said, but, he said, “we had a
splendid time of it,” but how could that be? Sally wondered; what did
he mean? and how odd it was to know him and yet not know a single thing
that had happened to him. And did he say it out of pride? Very likely,
for after all it must be galling for him (though he was an oddity,
a sort of sprite, not at all an ordinary man), it must be lonely at
his age to have no home, nowhere to go to. But he must stay with them
for weeks and weeks. Of course he would; he would love to stay with
them, and that was how it came out. All these years the Dalloways had
never been once. Time after time they had asked them. Clarissa (for
it was Clarissa of course) would not come. For, said Sally, Clarissa
was at heart a snob--one had to admit it, a snob. And it was that
that was between them, she was convinced. Clarissa thought she had
married beneath her, her husband being--she was proud of it--a miner’s
son. Every penny they had he had earned. As a little boy (her voice
trembled) he had carried great sacks.