Mrs. Dalloway
had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black,
but enchanting.
Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his pocket-knife he
started after her to follow this woman, this excitement, which seemed
even with its back turned to shed on him a light which connected them,
which singled him out, as if the random uproar of the traffic had
whispered through hollowed hands his name, not Peter, but his private
name which he called himself in his own thoughts. “You,” she said, only
“you,” saying it with her white gloves and her shoulders. Then the
thin long cloak which the wind stirred as she walked past Dent’s shop
in Cockspur Street blew out with an enveloping kindness, a mournful
tenderness, as of arms that would open and take the tired--
But she’s not married; she’s young; quite young, thought Peter, the
red carnation he had seen her wear as she came across Trafalgar Square
burning again in his eyes and making her lips red. But she waited at
the kerbstone. There was a dignity about her. She was not worldly, like
Clarissa; not rich, like Clarissa. Was she, he wondered as she moved,
respectable? Witty, with a lizard’s flickering tongue, he thought
(for one must invent, must allow oneself a little diversion), a cool
waiting wit, a darting wit; not noisy.
She moved; she crossed; he followed her. To embarrass her was the last
thing he wished. Still if she stopped he would say “Come and have an
ice,” he would say, and she would answer, perfectly simply, “Oh yes.”
But other people got between them in the street, obstructing him,
blotting her out. He pursued; she changed. There was colour in her
cheeks; mockery in her eyes; he was an adventurer, reckless, he
thought, swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last night from
India) a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties,
yellow dressing-gowns, pipes, fishing-rods, in the shop windows; and
respectability and evening parties and spruce old men wearing white
slips beneath their waistcoats. He was a buccaneer. On and on she went,
across Piccadilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her
gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the
feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of finery and whimsy
which dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement, as the light of a
lamp goes wavering at night over hedges in the darkness.
Laughing and delightful, she had crossed Oxford Street and Great
Portland Street and turned down one of the little streets, and now, and
now, the great moment was approaching, for now she slackened, opened
her bag, and with one look in his direction, but not at him, one look
that bade farewell, summed up the whole situation and dismissed it
triumphantly, for ever, had fitted her key, opened the door, and gone!
Clarissa’s voice saying, Remember my party, Remember my party, sang
in his ears. The house was one of those flat red houses with hanging
flower-baskets of vague impropriety. It was over.
Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the
swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms--his
fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this
escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part
of life, he thought--making oneself up; making her up; creating an
exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite
true; all this one could never share--it smashed to atoms.
He turned; went up the street, thinking to find somewhere to sit, till
it was time for Lincoln’s Inn--for Messrs. Hooper and Grateley. Where
should he go? No matter. Up the street, then, towards Regent’s Park.
His boots on the pavement struck out “no matter”; for it was early,
still very early.
It was a splendid morning too. Like the pulse of a perfect heart,
life struck straight through the streets. There was no fumbling--no
hesitation. Sweeping and swerving, accurately, punctually, noiselessly,
there, precisely at the right instant, the motor-car stopped at the
door. The girl, silk-stockinged, feathered, evanescent, but not to him
particularly attractive (for he had had his fling), alighted. Admirable
butlers, tawny chow dogs, halls laid in black and white lozenges with
white blinds blowing, Peter saw through the opened door and approved
of. A splendid achievement in its own way, after all, London; the
season; civilisation. Coming as he did from a respectable Anglo-Indian
family which for at least three generations had administered the
affairs of a continent (it’s strange, he thought, what a sentiment I
have about that, disliking India, and empire, and army as he did),
there were moments when civilisation, even of this sort, seemed dear to
him as a personal possession; moments of pride in England; in butlers;
chow dogs; girls in their security. Ridiculous enough, still there it
is, he thought. And the doctors and men of business and capable women
all going about their business, punctual, alert, robust, seemed to him
wholly admirable, good fellows, to whom one would entrust one’s life,
companions in the art of living, who would see one through. What with
one thing and another, the show was really very tolerable; and he would
sit down in the shade and smoke.
There was Regent’s Park. Yes. As a child he had walked in Regent’s
Park--odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming back
to me--the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more
in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places;
and their fathers--a woman’s always proud of her father. Bourton was a
nice place, a very nice place, but I could never get on with the old
man, he thought. There was quite a scene one night--an argument about
something or other, what, he could not remember. Politics presumably.
Yes, he remembered Regent’s Park; the long straight walk; the little
house where one bought air-balls to the left; an absurd statue with an
inscription somewhere or other. He looked for an empty seat. He did
not want to be bothered (feeling a little drowsy as he did) by people
asking him the time. An elderly grey nurse, with a baby asleep in its
perambulator--that was the best he could do for himself; sit down at
the far end of the seat by that nurse.
She’s a queer-looking girl, he thought, suddenly remembering Elizabeth
as she came into the room and stood by her mother. Grown big; quite
grown-up, not exactly pretty; handsome rather; and she can’t be more
than eighteen. Probably she doesn’t get on with Clarissa. “There’s
my Elizabeth”--that sort of thing--why not “Here’s Elizabeth”
simply?--trying to make out, like most mothers, that things are what
they’re not. She trusts to her charm too much, he thought. She overdoes
it.
The rich benignant cigar smoke eddied coolly down his throat; he
puffed it out again in rings which breasted the air bravely for a
moment; blue, circular--I shall try and get a word alone with Elizabeth
to-night, he thought--then began to wobble into hour-glass shapes and
taper away; odd shapes they take, he thought. Suddenly he closed his
eyes, raised his hand with an effort, and threw away the heavy end of
his cigar. A great brush swept smooth across his mind, sweeping across
it moving branches, children’s voices, the shuffle of feet, and people
passing, and humming traffic, rising and falling traffic. Down, down
he sank into the plumes and feathers of sleep, sank, and was muffled
over.
* * * * *
The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat
beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands
indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights
of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in
twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveller,
haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hemlock
plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the
ride.
By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments
of extraordinary exaltation. Nothing exists outside us except a state
of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for relief, for something
outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these craven
men and women. But if he can conceive of her, then in some sort she
exists, he thinks, and advancing down the path with his eyes upon sky
and branches he rapidly endows them with womanhood; sees with amazement
how grave they become; how majestically, as the breeze stirs them, they
dispense with a dark flutter of the leaves charity, comprehension,
absolution, and then, flinging themselves suddenly aloft, confound the
piety of their aspect with a wild carouse.
Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to
the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping
away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of
roses, or rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder
through floods to embrace.
Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their
faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the solitary
traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to
return, and giving him for substitute a general peace, as if (so he
thinks as he advances down the forest ride) all this fever of living
were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing;
and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from
the troubled sea (he is elderly, past fifty now) as a shape might be
sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands
compassion, comprehension, absolution. So, he thinks, may I never go
back to the lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my book; never
knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away; rather
let me walk straight on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of
her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness with
the rest.
Such are the visions. The solitary traveller is soon beyond the wood;
and there, coming to the door with shaded eyes, possibly to look for
his return, with hands raised, with white apron blowing, is an elderly
woman who seems (so powerful is this infirmity) to seek, over a desert,
a lost son; to search for a rider destroyed; to be the figure of the
mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world. So,
as the solitary traveller advances down the village street where
the women stand knitting and the men dig in the garden, the evening
seems ominous; the figures still; as if some august fate, known to
them, awaited without fear, were about to sweep them into complete
annihilation.
Indoors among ordinary things, the cupboard, the table, the window-sill
with its geraniums, suddenly the outline of the landlady, bending to
remove the cloth, becomes soft with light, an adorable emblem which
only the recollection of cold human contacts forbids us to embrace. She
takes the marmalade; she shuts it in the cupboard.
“There is nothing more to-night, sir?”
But to whom does the solitary traveller make reply?
* * * * *
So the elderly nurse knitted over the sleeping baby in Regent’s Park.
So Peter Walsh snored.
He woke with extreme suddenness, saying to himself, “The death of the
soul.”
“Lord, Lord!” he said to himself out loud, stretching and opening his
eyes. “The death of the soul.” The words attached themselves to some
scene, to some room, to some past he had been dreaming of. It became
clearer; the scene, the room, the past he had been dreaming of.
It was at Bourton that summer, early in the ’nineties, when he was so
passionately in love with Clarissa. There were a great many people