Mrs. Dalloway
Her stomach was in her mouth. Up again. There’s a fine young feller
aboard of it, Mrs. Dempster wagered, and away and away it went, fast
and fading, away and away the aeroplane shot; soaring over Greenwich
and all the masts; over the little island of grey churches, St. Paul’s
and the rest till, on either side of London, fields spread out and
dark brown woods where adventurous thrushes hopping boldly, glancing
quickly, snatched the snail and tapped him on a stone, once, twice,
thrice.
Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright
spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr.
Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man’s
soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the
cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of
thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory--away
the aeroplane shot.
Then, while a seedy-looking nondescript man carrying a leather bag
stood on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and hesitated, for within
was what balm, how great a welcome, how many tombs with banners waving
over them, tokens of victories not over armies, but over, he thought,
that plaguy spirit of truth seeking which leaves me at present without
a situation, and more than that, the cathedral offers company, he
thought, invites you to membership of a society; great men belong to
it; martyrs have died for it; why not enter in, he thought, put this
leather bag stuffed with pamphlets before an altar, a cross, the
symbol of something which has soared beyond seeking and questing and
knocking of words together and has become all spirit, disembodied,
ghostly--why not enter in? he thought and while he hesitated out flew
the aeroplane over Ludgate Circus.
It was strange; it was still. Not a sound was to be heard above the
traffic. Unguided it seemed; sped of its own free will. And now,
curving up and up, straight up, like something mounting in ecstasy, in
pure delight, out from behind poured white smoke looping, writing a T,
an O, an F.
* * * * *
“What are they looking at?” said Clarissa Dalloway to the maid who
opened her door.
The hall of the house was cool as a vault. Mrs. Dalloway raised her
hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the
swish of Lucy’s skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world
and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old
devotions. The cook whistled in the kitchen. She heard the click of the
typewriter. It was her life, and, bending her head over the hall table,
she bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified, saying to
herself, as she took the pad with the telephone message on it, how
moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness
they are, she thought (as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her
eyes only); not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the
more, she thought, taking up the pad, must one repay in daily life to
servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her husband,
who was the foundation of it--of the gay sounds, of the green lights,
of the cook even whistling, for Mrs. Walker was Irish and whistled
all day long--one must pay back from this secret deposit of exquisite
moments, she thought, lifting the pad, while Lucy stood by her, trying
to explain how.
“Mr. Dalloway, ma’am”--
Clarissa read on the telephone pad, “Lady Bruton wishes to know if Mr.
Dalloway will lunch with her to-day.”
“Mr. Dalloway, ma’am, told me to tell you he would be lunching out.”
“Dear!” said Clarissa, and Lucy shared as she meant her to her
disappointment (but not the pang); felt the concord between them; took
the hint; thought how the gentry love; gilded her own future with calm;
and, taking Mrs. Dalloway’s parasol, handled it like a sacred weapon
which a Goddess, having acquitted herself honourably in the field of
battle, sheds, and placed it in the umbrella stand.
“Fear no more,” said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun; for
the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the
moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels
the shock of a passing oar and shivers: so she rocked: so she shivered.
Millicent Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily
amusing, had not asked her. No vulgar jealousy could separate her
from Richard. But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton’s
face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling
of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin
that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as
in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that
she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating
one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense,
such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and
brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only
gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just
turn over the weeds with pearl.
She put the pad on the hall table. She began to go slowly upstairs,
with her hand on the bannisters, as if she had left a party, where
now this friend now that had flashed back her face, her voice; had
shut the door and gone out and stood alone, a single figure against
the appalling night, or rather, to be accurate, against the stare of
this matter-of-fact June morning; soft with the glow of rose petals
for some, she knew, and felt it, as she paused by the open staircase
window which let in blinds flapping, dogs barking, let in, she thought,
feeling herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless, the grinding,
blowing, flowering of the day, out of doors, out of the window, out of
her body and brain which now failed, since Lady Bruton, whose lunch
parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her.
Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went
upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was the
green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the
heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel.
At midday they must disrobe. She pierced the pincushion and laid her
feathered yellow hat on the bed. The sheets were clean, tight stretched
in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would
her bed be. The candle was half burnt down and she had read deep in
Baron Marbot’s _Memoirs_. She had read late at night of the retreat
from Moscow. For the House sat so long that Richard insisted, after her
illness, that she must sleep undisturbed. And really she preferred to
read of the retreat from Moscow. He knew it. So the room was an attic;
the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could
not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her
like a sheet. Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came a moment--for
example on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden--when, through
some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him. And then at
Constantinople, and again and again. She could see what she lacked.
It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which
permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold
contact of man and woman, or of women together. For _that_ she could
dimly perceive. She resented it, had a scruple picked up Heaven knows
where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet
she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not
a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape,
some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was
older, or some accident--like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so
strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly
then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was
a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check
and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to
the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer,
swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture,
which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary
alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she
had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner
meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened.
It was over--the moment. Against such moments (with women too) there
contrasted (as she laid her hat down) the bed and Baron Marbot and the
candle half-burnt. Lying awake, the floor creaked; the lit house was
suddenly darkened, and if she raised her head she could just hear the
click of the handle released as gently as possible by Richard, who
slipped upstairs in his socks and then, as often as not, dropped his
hot-water bottle and swore! How she laughed!
But this question of love (she thought, putting her coat away), this
falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old
days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?
She sat on the floor--that was her first impression of Sally--she sat
on the floor with her arms round her knees, smoking a cigarette. Where
could it have been? The Mannings? The Kinloch-Jones’s? At some party
(where, she could not be certain), for she had a distinct recollection
of saying to the man she was with, “Who is _that_?” And he had told
her, and said that Sally’s parents did not get on (how that shocked
her--that one’s parents should quarrel!). But all that evening she
could not take her eyes off Sally. It was an extraordinary beauty
of the kind she most admired, dark, large-eyed, with that quality
which, since she hadn’t got it herself, she always envied--a sort of
abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything; a quality
much commoner in foreigners than in Englishwomen. Sally always said
she had French blood in her veins, an ancestor had been with Marie
Antoinette, had his head cut off, left a ruby ring. Perhaps that summer
she came to stay at Bourton, walking in quite unexpectedly without a
penny in her pocket, one night after dinner, and upsetting poor Aunt
Helena to such an extent that she never forgave her. There had been
some quarrel at home. She literally hadn’t a penny that night when she
came to them--had pawned a brooch to come down. She had rushed off in
a passion. They sat up till all hours of the night talking. Sally it
was who made her feel, for the first time, how sheltered the life at
Bourton was. She knew nothing about sex--nothing about social problems.
She had once seen an old man who had dropped dead in a field--she had
seen cows just after their calves were born. But Aunt Helena never
liked discussion of anything (when Sally gave her William Morris, it
had to be wrapped in brown paper). There they sat, hour after hour,
talking in her bedroom at the top of the house, talking about life, how
they were to reform the world. They meant to found a society to abolish
private property, and actually had a letter written, though not sent
out. The ideas were Sally’s, of course--but very soon she was just as
excited--read Plato in bed before breakfast; read Morris; read Shelley
by the hour.
Sally’s power was amazing, her gift, her personality. There was her way
with flowers, for instance. At Bourton they always had stiff little
vases all the way down the table. Sally went out, picked hollyhocks,
dahlias--all sorts of flowers that had never been seen together--cut
their heads off, and made them swim on the top of water in bowls.
The effect was extraordinary--coming in to dinner in the sunset. (Of