Mrs. Dalloway
of smoke curved behind and it dropped down, and it soared up and wrote
one letter after another--but what word was it writing?
Lucrezia Warren Smith, sitting by her husband’s side on a seat in
Regent’s Park in the Broad Walk, looked up.
“Look, look, Septimus!” she cried. For Dr. Holmes had told her to make
her husband (who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but
was a little out of sorts) take an interest in things outside himself.
So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed
in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it
was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled
his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the
sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing
goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling
their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking
merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks.
It was toffee; they were advertising toffee, a nursemaid told Rezia.
Together they began to spell t ... o ... f....
“K ... R ...” said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay
Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with
a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine
deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which,
concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed--that the human voice
in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above
all scientific) can quicken trees into life! Happily Rezia put her hand
with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down,
transfixed, or the excitement of the elm trees rising and falling,
rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning
and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave, like plumes on
horses’ heads, feathers on ladies’, so proudly they rose and fell, so
superbly, would have sent him mad. But he would not go mad. He would
shut his eyes; he would see no more.
But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves
being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the
seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made
that statement. The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged
fountains were part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with
black branches. Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces
between them were as significant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly
far away a horn sounded. All taken together meant the birth of a new
religion--
“Septimus!” said Rezia. He started violently. People must notice.
“I am going to walk to the fountain and back,” she said.
For she could stand it no longer. Dr. Holmes might say there was
nothing the matter. Far rather would she that he were dead! She could
not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made
everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts,
blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible. And he would not
kill himself; and she could tell no one. “Septimus has been working too
hard”--that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one
solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now,
and looking back, she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on
the seat, hunched up, staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he
would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not
Septimus now. She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and
he never noticed; and he was happy without her. Nothing could make her
happy without him! Nothing! He was selfish. So men are. For he was not
ill. Dr. Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him. She spread
her hand before her. Look! Her wedding ring slipped--she had grown so
thin. It was she who suffered--but she had nobody to tell.
Far was Italy and the white houses and the room where her sisters sat
making hats, and the streets crowded every evening with people walking,
laughing out loud, not half alive like people here, huddled up in Bath
chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers stuck in pots!
“For you should see the Milan gardens,” she said aloud. But to whom?
There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks,
having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends,
pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hillsides soften
and fall in. But though they are gone, the night is full of them;
robbed of colour, blank of windows, they exist more ponderously, give
out what the frank daylight fails to transmit--the trouble and suspense
of things conglomerated there in the darkness; huddled together in the
darkness; reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls
white and grey, spotting each window-pane, lifting the mist from the
fields, showing the red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more
decked out to the eye; exists again. I am alone; I am alone! she cried,
by the fountain in Regent’s Park (staring at the Indian and his cross),
as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country
reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when
they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not
where--such was her darkness; when suddenly, as if a shelf were shot
forth and she stood on it, she said how she was his wife, married years
ago in Milan, his wife, and would never, never tell that he was mad!
Turning, the shelf fell; down, down she dropped. For he was gone, she
thought--gone, as he threatened, to kill himself--to throw himself
under a cart! But no; there he was; still sitting alone on the seat, in
his shabby overcoat, his legs crossed, staring, talking aloud.
Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations
on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred.
Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited. He listened. A sparrow
perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or
five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and
piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another
sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words,
from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk,
how there is no death.
There was his hand; there the dead. White things were assembling behind
the railings opposite. But he dared not look. Evans was behind the
railings!
“What are you saying?” said Rezia suddenly, sitting down by him.
Interrupted again! She was always interrupting.
Away from people--they must get away from people, he said (jumping
up), right away over there, where there were chairs beneath a tree and
the long slope of the park dipped like a length of green stuff with
a ceiling cloth of blue and pink smoke high above, and there was a
rampart of far irregular houses hazed in smoke, the traffic hummed in
a circle, and on the right, dun-coloured animals stretched long necks
over the Zoo palings, barking, howling. There they sat down under a
tree.
“Look,” she implored him, pointing at a little troop of boys carrying
cricket stumps, and one shuffled, spun round on his heel and shuffled,
as if he were acting a clown at the music hall.
“Look,” she implored him, for Dr. Holmes had told her to make him
notice real things, go to a music hall, play cricket--that was the very
game, Dr. Holmes said, a nice out-of-door game, the very game for her
husband.
“Look,” she repeated.
Look the unseen bade him, the voice which now communicated with him who
was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death,
the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow
blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever,
the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned,
putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal suffering, that
eternal loneliness.
“Look,” she repeated, for he must not talk aloud to himself out of
doors.
“Oh look,” she implored him. But what was there to look at? A few
sheep. That was all.
The way to Regent’s Park Tube station--could they tell her the way to
Regent’s Park Tube station--Maisie Johnson wanted to know. She was only
up from Edinburgh two days ago.
“Not this way--over there!” Rezia exclaimed, waving her aside, lest she
should see Septimus.
Both seemed queer, Maisie Johnson thought. Everything seemed very
queer. In London for the first time, come to take up a post at her
uncle’s in Leadenhall Street, and now walking through Regent’s Park in
the morning, this couple on the chairs gave her quite a turn; the young
woman seeming foreign, the man looking queer; so that should she be
very old she would still remember and make it jangle again among her
memories how she had walked through Regent’s Park on a fine summer’s
morning fifty years ago. For she was only nineteen and had got her way
at last, to come to London; and now how queer it was, this couple she
had asked the way of, and the girl started and jerked her hand, and the
man--he seemed awfully odd; quarrelling, perhaps; parting for ever,
perhaps; something was up, she knew; and now all these people (for she
returned to the Broad Walk), the stone basins, the prim flowers, the
old men and women, invalids most of them in Bath chairs--all seemed,
after Edinburgh, so queer. And Maisie Johnson, as she joined that
gently trudging, vaguely gazing, breeze-kissed company--squirrels
perching and preening, sparrow fountains fluttering for crumbs, dogs
busy with the railings, busy with each other, while the soft warm air
washed over them and lent to the fixed unsurprised gaze with which
they received life something whimsical and mollified--Maisie Johnson
positively felt she must cry Oh! (for that young man on the seat had
given her quite a turn. Something was up, she knew.)
Horror! horror! she wanted to cry. (She had left her people; they had
warned her what would happen.)
Why hadn’t she stayed at home? she cried, twisting the knob of the iron
railing.
That girl, thought Mrs. Dempster (who saved crusts for the squirrels
and often ate her lunch in Regent’s Park), don’t know a thing yet; and
really it seemed to her better to be a little stout, a little slack,
a little moderate in one’s expectations. Percy drank. Well, better to
have a son, thought Mrs. Dempster. She had had a hard time of it, and
couldn’t help smiling at a girl like that. You’ll get married, for
you’re pretty enough, thought Mrs. Dempster. Get married, she thought,
and then you’ll know. Oh, the cooks, and so on. Every man has his ways.
But whether I’d have chosen quite like that if I could have known,
thought Mrs. Dempster, and could not help wishing to whisper a word
to Maisie Johnson; to feel on the creased pouch of her worn old face
the kiss of pity. For it’s been a hard life, thought Mrs. Dempster.
What hadn’t she given to it? Roses; figure; her feet too. (She drew the
knobbed lumps beneath her skirt.)
Roses, she thought sardonically. All trash, m’dear. For really, what
with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and good, life had been
no mere matter of roses, and what was more, let me tell you, Carrie
Dempster had no wish to change her lot with any woman’s in Kentish
Town! But, she implored, pity. Pity, for the loss of roses. Pity she
asked of Maisie Johnson, standing by the hyacinth beds.
Ah, but that aeroplane! Hadn’t Mrs. Dempster always longed to see
foreign parts? She had a nephew, a missionary. It soared and shot. She
always went on the sea at Margate, not out o’ sight of land, but she
had no patience with women who were afraid of water. It swept and fell.