Mrs. Dalloway
sitting on the sofa, the tears running down his cheeks.
And Clarissa had leant forward, taken his hand, drawn him to her,
kissed him,--actually had felt his face on hers before she could down
the brandishing of silver flashing--plumes like pampas grass in a
tropic gale in her breast, which, subsiding, left her holding his hand,
patting his knee and, feeling as she sat back extraordinarily at her
ease with him and light-hearted, all in a clap it came over her, If I
had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day!
It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow.
She had gone up into the tower alone and left them blackberrying in
the sun. The door had shut, and there among the dust of fallen plaster
and the litter of birds’ nests how distant the view had looked, and
the sounds came thin and chill (once on Leith Hill, she remembered),
and Richard, Richard! she cried, as a sleeper in the night starts and
stretches a hand in the dark for help. Lunching with Lady Bruton, it
came back to her. He has left me; I am alone for ever, she thought,
folding her hands upon her knee.
Peter Walsh had got up and crossed to the window and stood with his
back to her, flicking a bandanna handkerchief from side to side.
Masterly and dry and desolate he looked, his thin shoulder-blades
lifting his coat slightly; blowing his nose violently. Take me with
you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly upon
some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of
a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had
lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and
it was now over.
Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her things together,
her cloak, her gloves, her opera-glasses, and gets up to go out of the
theatre into the street, she rose from the sofa and went to Peter.
And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power,
as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across
the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the
terrace in the summer sky.
“Tell me,” he said, seizing her by the shoulders. “Are you happy,
Clarissa? Does Richard--”
The door opened.
“Here is my Elizabeth,” said Clarissa, emotionally, histrionically,
perhaps.
“How d’y do?” said Elizabeth coming forward.
The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them
with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent,
inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that.
“Hullo, Elizabeth!” cried Peter, stuffing his handkerchief into his
pocket, going quickly to her, saying “Good-bye, Clarissa” without
looking at her, leaving the room quickly, and running downstairs and
opening the hall door.
“Peter! Peter!” cried Clarissa, following him out on to the landing.
“My party to-night! Remember my party to-night!” she cried, having to
raise her voice against the roar of the open air, and, overwhelmed by
the traffic and the sound of all the clocks striking, her voice crying
“Remember my party to-night!” sounded frail and thin and very far away
as Peter Walsh shut the door.
* * * * *
Remember my party, remember my party, said Peter Walsh as he stepped
down the street, speaking to himself rhythmically, in time with the
flow of the sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben striking
the half-hour. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air.) Oh these
parties, he thought; Clarissa’s parties. Why does she give these
parties, he thought. Not that he blamed her or this effigy of a man
in a tail-coat with a carnation in his buttonhole coming towards him.
Only one person in the world could be as he was, in love. And there
he was, this fortunate man, himself, reflected in the plate-glass
window of a motor-car manufacturer in Victoria Street. All India lay
behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera; a district twice
as big as Ireland; decisions he had come to alone--he, Peter Walsh;
who was now really for the first time in his life, in love. Clarissa
had grown hard, he thought; and a trifle sentimental into the bargain,
he suspected, looking at the great motor-cars capable of doing--how
many miles on how many gallons? For he had a turn for mechanics; had
invented a plough in his district, had ordered wheel-barrows from
England, but the coolies wouldn’t use them, all of which Clarissa knew
nothing whatever about.
The way she said “Here is my Elizabeth!”--that annoyed him. Why not
“Here’s Elizabeth” simply? It was insincere. And Elizabeth didn’t like
it either. (Still the last tremors of the great booming voice shook
the air round him; the half-hour; still early; only half-past eleven
still.) For he understood young people; he liked them. There was always
something cold in Clarissa, he thought. She had always, even as a girl,
a sort of timidity, which in middle age becomes conventionality, and
then it’s all up, it’s all up, he thought, looking rather drearily into
the glassy depths, and wondering whether by calling at that hour he had
annoyed her; overcome with shame suddenly at having been a fool; wept;
been emotional; told her everything, as usual, as usual.
As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the
mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we
stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said to himself; feeling hollowed
out, utterly empty within. Clarissa refused me, he thought. He stood
there thinking, Clarissa refused me.
Ah, said St. Margaret’s, like a hostess who comes into her drawing-room
on the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there already. I am
not late. No, it is precisely half-past eleven, she says. Yet, though
she is perfectly right, her voice, being the voice of the hostess, is
reluctant to inflict its individuality. Some grief for the past holds
it back; some concern for the present. It is half-past eleven, she
says, and the sound of St. Margaret’s glides into the recesses of the
heart and buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something
alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with
a tremor of delight, at rest--like Clarissa herself, thought Peter
Walsh, coming down the stairs on the stroke of the hour in white.
It is Clarissa herself, he thought, with a deep emotion, and an
extraordinarily clear, yet puzzling, recollection of her, as if this
bell had come into the room years ago, where they sat at some moment of
great intimacy, and had gone from one to the other and had left, like a
bee with honey, laden with the moment. But what room? What moment? And
why had he been so profoundly happy when the clock was striking? Then,
as the sound of St. Margaret’s languished, he thought, She has been
ill, and the sound expressed languor and suffering. It was her heart,
he remembered; and the sudden loudness of the final stroke tolled for
death that surprised in the midst of life, Clarissa falling where she
stood, in her drawing-room. No! No! he cried. She is not dead! I am not
old, he cried, and marched up Whitehall, as if there rolled down to
him, vigorous, unending, his future.
He was not old, or set, or dried in the least. As for caring what they
said of him--the Dalloways, the Whitbreads, and their set, he cared not
a straw--not a straw (though it was true he would have, some time or
other, to see whether Richard couldn’t help him to some job). Striding,
staring, he glared at the statue of the Duke of Cambridge. He had been
sent down from Oxford--true. He had been a Socialist, in some sense a
failure--true. Still the future of civilisation lies, he thought, in
the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty
years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent
out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas;
reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of
young men like that, he thought.
A patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came from behind, and with
it a rustling, regular thudding sound, which as it overtook him drummed
his thoughts, strict in step, up Whitehall, without his doing. Boys in
uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched,
their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of
a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude,
fidelity, love of England.
It is, thought Peter Walsh, beginning to keep step with them, a very
fine training. But they did not look robust. They were weedy for the
most part, boys of sixteen, who might, to-morrow, stand behind bowls
of rice, cakes of soap on counters. Now they wore on them unmixed with
sensual pleasure or daily preoccupations the solemnity of the wreath
which they had fetched from Finsbury Pavement to the empty tomb. They
had taken their vow. The traffic respected it; vans were stopped.
I can’t keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up
Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past every one,
in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly,
and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a
pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring
corpse by discipline. One had to respect it; one might laugh; but one
had to respect it, he thought. There they go, thought Peter Walsh,
pausing at the edge of the pavement; and all the exalted statues,
Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the black, the spectacular images of great
soldiers stood looking ahead of them, as if they too had made the
same renunciation (Peter Walsh felt he too had made it, the great
renunciation), trampled under the same temptations, and achieved at
length a marble stare. But the stare Peter Walsh did not want for
himself in the least; though he could respect it in others. He could
respect it in boys. They don’t know the troubles of the flesh yet,
he thought, as the marching boys disappeared in the direction of the
Strand--all that I’ve been through, he thought, crossing the road, and
standing under Gordon’s statue, Gordon whom as a boy he had worshipped;
Gordon standing lonely with one leg raised and his arms crossed,--poor
Gordon, he thought.
And just because nobody yet knew he was in London, except Clarissa,
and the earth, after the voyage, still seemed an island to him, the
strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past eleven in
Trafalgar Square overcame him. What is it? Where am I? And why, after
all, does one do it? he thought, the divorce seeming all moonshine. And
down his mind went flat as a marsh, and three great emotions bowled
over him; understanding; a vast philanthropy; and finally, as if the
result of the others, an irrepressible, exquisite delight; as if inside
his brain by another hand strings were pulled, shutters moved, and
he, having nothing to do with it, yet stood at the opening of endless
avenues, down which if he chose he might wander. He had not felt so
young for years.
He had escaped! was utterly free--as happens in the downfall of habit
when the mind, like an unguarded flame, bows and bends and seems about
to blow from its holding. I haven’t felt so young for years! thought
Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so) from being precisely
what he was, and feeling like a child who runs out of doors, and
sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong window. But she’s
extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar
Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as
she passed Gordon’s statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as
he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he