Mrs. Dalloway
was giving a party), hearing a step on the stairs. She heard a hand
upon the door. She made to hide her dress, like a virgin protecting
chastity, respecting privacy. Now the brass knob slipped. Now the door
opened, and in came--for a single second she could not remember what
he was called! so surprised she was to see him, so glad, so shy, so
utterly taken aback to have Peter Walsh come to her unexpectedly in
the morning! (She had not read his letter.)
“And how are you?” said Peter Walsh, positively trembling; taking both
her hands; kissing both her hands. She’s grown older, he thought,
sitting down. I shan’t tell her anything about it, he thought,
for she’s grown older. She’s looking at me, he thought, a sudden
embarrassment coming over him, though he had kissed her hands. Putting
his hand into his pocket, he took out a large pocket-knife and half
opened the blade.
Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the same check
suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little thinner,
dryer, perhaps, but he looks awfully well, and just the same.
“How heavenly it is to see you again!” she exclaimed. He had his knife
out. That’s so like him, she thought.
He had only reached town last night, he said; would have to go
down into the country at once; and how was everything, how was
everybody--Richard? Elizabeth?
“And what’s all this?” he said, tilting his penknife towards her green
dress.
He’s very well dressed, thought Clarissa; yet he always criticises
_me_.
Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he thought;
here she’s been sitting all the time I’ve been in India; mending her
dress; playing about; going to parties; running to the House and back
and all that, he thought, growing more and more irritated, more and
more agitated, for there’s nothing in the world so bad for some women
as marriage, he thought; and politics; and having a Conservative
husband, like the admirable Richard. So it is, so it is, he thought,
shutting his knife with a snap.
“Richard’s very well. Richard’s at a Committee,” said Clarissa.
And she opened her scissors, and said, did he mind her just finishing
what she was doing to her dress, for they had a party that night?
“Which I shan’t ask you to,” she said. “My dear Peter!” she said.
But it was delicious to hear her say that--my dear Peter! Indeed, it
was all so delicious--the silver, the chairs; all so delicious!
Why wouldn’t she ask him to her party? he asked.
Now of course, thought Clarissa, he’s enchanting! perfectly enchanting!
Now I remember how impossible it was ever to make up my mind--and why
did I make up my mind--not to marry him? she wondered, that awful
summer?
“But it’s so extraordinary that you should have come this morning!” she
cried, putting her hands, one on top of another, down on her dress.
“Do you remember,” she said, “how the blinds used to flap at Bourton?”
“They did,” he said; and he remembered breakfasting alone, very
awkwardly, with her father; who had died; and he had not written to
Clarissa. But he had never got on well with old Parry, that querulous,
weak-kneed old man, Clarissa’s father, Justin Parry.
“I often wish I’d got on better with your father,” he said.
“But he never liked any one who--our friends,” said Clarissa; and could
have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to
marry her.
Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he
thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon
looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken
day. I was more unhappy than I’ve ever been since, he thought. And as
if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little
towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There
above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on
the terrace, in the moonlight.
“Herbert has it now,” she said. “I never go there now,” she said.
Then, just as happens on a terrace in the moonlight, when one person
begins to feel ashamed that he is already bored, and yet as the other
sits silent, very quiet, sadly looking at the moon, does not like to
speak, moves his foot, clears his throat, notices some iron scroll on a
table leg, stirs a leaf, but says nothing--so Peter Walsh did now. For
why go back like this to the past? he thought. Why make him think of it
again? Why make him suffer, when she had tortured him so infernally?
Why?
“Do you remember the lake?” she said, in an abrupt voice, under the
pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her
throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said “lake.”
For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents,
and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood
by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them,
grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a
complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I
have made of it! This!” And what had she made of it? What, indeed?
sitting there sewing this morning with Peter.
She looked at Peter Walsh; her look, passing through all that time
and that emotion, reached him doubtfully; settled on him tearfully;
and rose and fluttered away, as a bird touches a branch and rises and
flutters away. Quite simply she wiped her eyes.
“Yes,” said Peter. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, as if she drew up to the
surface something which positively hurt him as it rose. Stop! Stop!
he wanted to cry. For he was not old; his life was not over; not by
any means. He was only just past fifty. Shall I tell her, he thought,
or not? He would like to make a clean breast of it all. But she is
too cold, he thought; sewing, with her scissors; Daisy would look
ordinary beside Clarissa. And she would think me a failure, which I am
in their sense, he thought; in the Dalloways’ sense. Oh yes, he had no
doubt about that; he was a failure, compared with all this--the inlaid
table, the mounted paper-knife, the dolphin and the candlesticks,
the chair-covers and the old valuable English tinted prints--he was
a failure! I detest the smugness of the whole affair he thought;
Richard’s doing, not Clarissa’s; save that she married him. (Here
Lucy came into the room, carrying silver, more silver, but charming,
slender, graceful she looked, he thought, as she stooped to put it
down.) And this has been going on all the time! he thought; week after
week; Clarissa’s life; while I--he thought; and at once everything
seemed to radiate from him; journeys; rides; quarrels; adventures;
bridge parties; love affairs; work; work, work! and he took out his
knife quite openly--his old horn-handled knife which Clarissa could
swear he had had these thirty years--and clenched his fist upon it.
What an extraordinary habit that was, Clarissa thought; always playing
with a knife. Always making one feel, too, frivolous; empty-minded;
a mere silly chatterbox, as he used. But I too, she thought, and,
taking up her needle, summoned, like a Queen whose guards have fallen
asleep and left her unprotected (she had been quite taken aback by this
visit--it had upset her) so that any one can stroll in and have a look
at her where she lies with the brambles curving over her, summoned
to her help the things she did; the things she liked; her husband;
Elizabeth; her self, in short, which Peter hardly knew now, all to come
about her and beat off the enemy.
“Well, and what’s happened to you?” she said. So before a battle
begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines
on their flanks; their necks curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa,
sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other. His
powers chafed and tossed in him. He assembled from different quarters
all sorts of things; praise; his career at Oxford; his marriage, which
she knew nothing whatever about; how he had loved; and altogether done
his job.
“Millions of things!” he exclaimed, and, urged by the assembly of
powers which were now charging this way and that and giving him the
feeling at once frightening and extremely exhilarating of being rushed
through the air on the shoulders of people he could no longer see, he
raised his hands to his forehead.
Clarissa sat very upright; drew in her breath.
“I am in love,” he said, not to her however, but to some one raised up
in the dark so that you could not touch her but must lay your garland
down on the grass in the dark.
“In love,” he repeated, now speaking rather dryly to Clarissa
Dalloway; “in love with a girl in India.” He had deposited his garland.
Clarissa could make what she would of it.
“In love!” she said. That he at his age should be sucked under in his
little bow-tie by that monster! And there’s no flesh on his neck; his
hands are red; and he’s six months older than I am! her eye flashed
back to her; but in her heart she felt, all the same, he is in love. He
has that, she felt; he is in love.
But the indomitable egotism which for ever rides down the hosts opposed
to it, the river which says on, on, on; even though, it admits, there
may be no goal for us whatever, still on, on; this indomitable egotism
charged her cheeks with colour; made her look very young; very pink;
very bright-eyed as she sat with her dress upon her knee, and her
needle held to the end of green silk, trembling a little. He was in
love! Not with her. With some younger woman, of course.
“And who is she?” she asked.
Now this statue must be brought from its height and set down between
them.
“A married woman, unfortunately,” he said; “the wife of a Major in the
Indian Army.”
And with a curious ironical sweetness he smiled as he placed her in
this ridiculous way before Clarissa.
(All the same, he is in love, thought Clarissa.)
“She has,” he continued, very reasonably, “two small children; a boy
and a girl; and I have come over to see my lawyers about the divorce.”
There they are! he thought. Do what you like with them, Clarissa!
There they are! And second by second it seemed to him that the wife of
the Major in the Indian Army (his Daisy) and her two small children
became more and more lovely as Clarissa looked at them; as if he had
set light to a grey pellet on a plate and there had risen up a lovely
tree in the brisk sea-salted air of their intimacy (for in some ways no
one understood him, felt with him, as Clarissa did)--their exquisite
intimacy.
She flattered him; she fooled him, thought Clarissa; shaping the woman,
the wife of the Major in the Indian Army, with three strokes of a
knife. What a waste! What a folly! All his life long Peter had been
fooled like that; first getting sent down from Oxford; next marrying
the girl on the boat going out to India; now the wife of a Major in the
Indian Army--thank Heaven she had refused to marry him! Still, he was
in love; her old friend, her dear Peter, he was in love.
“But what are you going to do?” she asked him. Oh the lawyers and
solicitors, Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of Lincoln’s Inn, they were
going to do it, he said. And he actually pared his nails with his
pocket-knife.
For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in
irrepressible irritation; it was his silly unconventionality, his
weakness; his lack of the ghost of a notion what any one else was
feeling that annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now at his age,
how silly!
I know all that, Peter thought; I know what I’m up against, he thought,
running his finger along the blade of his knife, Clarissa and Dalloway
and all the rest of them; but I’ll show Clarissa--and then to his utter
surprise, suddenly thrown by those uncontrollable forces thrown through
the air, he burst into tears; wept; wept without the least shame,