The Voyage Out
that wears one; it’s responsibility. That’s why one pays one’s cook
more than one’s housemaid, I suppose.”
“According to that, one ought to pay one’s nurse double; but one
doesn’t,” said Helen.
“No; but think what a joy to have to do with babies, instead of
saucepans!” said Mrs. Dalloway, looking with more interest at Helen, a
probable mother.
“I’d much rather be a cook than a nurse,” said Helen. “Nothing would
induce me to take charge of children.”
“Mothers always exaggerate,” said Ridley. “A well-bred child is no
responsibility. I’ve travelled all over Europe with mine. You just wrap
’em up warm and put ’em in the rack.”
Helen laughed at that. Mrs. Dalloway exclaimed, looking at Ridley:
“How like a father! My husband’s just the same. And then one talks of
the equality of the sexes!”
“Does one?” said Mr. Pepper.
“Oh, some do!” cried Clarissa. “My husband had to pass an irate lady
every afternoon last session who said nothing else, I imagine.”
“She sat outside the house; it was very awkward,” said Dalloway. “At
last I plucked up courage and said to her, ‘My good creature, you’re
only in the way where you are. You’re hindering me, and you’re doing no
good to yourself.’”
“And then she caught him by the coat, and would have scratched his eyes
out—” Mrs. Dalloway put in.
“Pooh—that’s been exaggerated,” said Richard. “No, I pity them, I
confess. The discomfort of sitting on those steps must be awful.”
“Serve them right,” said Willoughby curtly.
“Oh, I’m entirely with you there,” said Dalloway. “Nobody can condemn
the utter folly and futility of such behaviour more than I do; and as
for the whole agitation, well! may I be in my grave before a woman has
the right to vote in England! That’s all I say.”
The solemnity of her husband’s assertion made Clarissa grave.
“It’s unthinkable,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re a suffragist?” she
turned to Ridley.
“I don’t care a fig one way or t’other,” said Ambrose. “If any creature
is so deluded as to think that a vote does him or her any good, let him
have it. He’ll soon learn better.”
“You’re not a politician, I see,” she smiled.
“Goodness, no,” said Ridley.
“I’m afraid your husband won’t approve of me,” said Dalloway aside, to
Mrs. Ambrose. She suddenly recollected that he had been in Parliament.
“Don’t you ever find it rather dull?” she asked, not knowing exactly
what to say.
Richard spread his hands before him, as if inscriptions were to be read
in the palms of them.
“If you ask me whether I ever find it rather dull,” he said, “I am
bound to say yes; on the other hand, if you ask me what career do you
consider on the whole, taking the good with the bad, the most enjoyable
and enviable, not to speak of its more serious side, of all careers,
for a man, I am bound to say, ‘The Politician’s.’”
“The Bar or politics, I agree,” said Willoughby. “You get more run for
your money.”
“All one’s faculties have their play,” said Richard. “I may be treading
on dangerous ground; but what I feel about poets and artists in general
is this: on your own lines, you can’t be beaten—granted; but off your
own lines—puff—one has to make allowances. Now, I shouldn’t like to
think that any one had to make allowances for me.”
“I don’t quite agree, Richard,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Think of Shelley.
I feel that there’s almost everything one wants in ‘Adonais.’”
“Read ‘Adonais’ by all means,” Richard conceded. “But whenever I hear
of Shelley I repeat to myself the words of Matthew Arnold, ‘What a set!
What a set!’”
This roused Ridley’s attention. “Matthew Arnold? A detestable prig!” he
snapped.
“A prig—granted,” said Richard; “but, I think a man of the world.
That’s where my point comes in. We politicians doubtless seem to you”
(he grasped somehow that Helen was the representative of the arts) “a
gross commonplace set of people; but we see both sides; we may be
clumsy, but we do our best to get a grasp of things. Now your artists
_find_ things in a mess, shrug their shoulders, turn aside to their
visions—which I grant may be very beautiful—and _leave_ things in a
mess. Now that seems to me evading one’s responsibilities. Besides, we
aren’t all born with the artistic faculty.”
“It’s dreadful,” said Mrs. Dalloway, who, while her husband spoke, had
been thinking. “When I’m with artists I feel so intensely the delights
of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures
and music and everything beautiful, and then I go out into the streets
and the first child I meet with its poor, hungry, dirty little face
makes me turn round and say, ‘No, I _can’t_ shut myself up—I _won’t_
live in a world of my own. I should like to stop all the painting and
writing and music until this kind of thing exists no longer.’ Don’t you
feel,” she wound up, addressing Helen, “that life’s a perpetual
conflict?” Helen considered for a moment. “No,” she said. “I don’t
think I do.”
There was a pause, which was decidedly uncomfortable. Mrs. Dalloway
then gave a little shiver, and asked whether she might have her fur
cloak brought to her. As she adjusted the soft brown fur about her neck
a fresh topic struck her.
“I own,” she said, “that I shall never forget the _Antigone_. I saw it
at Cambridge years ago, and it’s haunted me ever since. Don’t you think
it’s quite the most modern thing you ever saw?” she asked Ridley. “It
seemed to me I’d known twenty Clytemnestras. Old Lady Ditchling for
one. I don’t know a word of Greek, but I could listen to it for ever—”
Here Mr. Pepper struck up:
πολλὰ τὰ δεινά, κοὐδὲν ἀν-
θρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.
τοῦτο καὶ πολιοῦ πέραν
πόντου χειμερίῳ νότῳ
χωρεῖ, περιβρυχίοισι
περῶν ὑπ᾽ οἴδμασι.
Mrs. Dalloway looked at him with compressed lips.
“I’d give ten years of my life to know Greek,” she said, when he had
done.
“I could teach you the alphabet in half an hour,” said Ridley, “and
you’d read Homer in a month. I should think it an honour to instruct
you.”
Helen, engaged with Mr. Dalloway and the habit, now fallen into
decline, of quoting Greek in the House of Commons, noted, in the great
commonplace book that lies open beside us as we talk, the fact that all
men, even men like Ridley, really prefer women to be fashionable.
Clarissa exclaimed that she could think of nothing more delightful. For
an instant she saw herself in her drawing-room in Browne Street with a
Plato open on her knees—Plato in the original Greek. She could not help
believing that a real scholar, if specially interested, could slip
Greek into her head with scarcely any trouble.
Ridley engaged her to come to-morrow.
“If only your ship is going to treat us kindly!” she exclaimed, drawing
Willoughby into play. For the sake of guests, and these were
distinguished, Willoughby was ready with a bow of his head to vouch for
the good behaviour even of the waves.
“I’m dreadfully bad; and my husband’s not very good,” sighed Clarissa.
“I am never sick,” Richard explained. “At least, I have only been
actually sick once,” he corrected himself. “That was crossing the
Channel. But a choppy sea, I confess, or still worse, a swell, makes me
distinctly uncomfortable. The great thing is never to miss a meal. You
look at the food, and you say, ‘I can’t’; you take a mouthful, and Lord
knows how you’re going to swallow it; but persevere, and you often
settle the attack for good. My wife’s a coward.”
They were pushing back their chairs. The ladies were hesitating at the
doorway.
“I’d better show the way,” said Helen, advancing.
Rachel followed. She had taken no part in the talk; no one had spoken
to her; but she had listened to every word that was said. She had
looked from Mrs. Dalloway to Mr. Dalloway, and from Mr. Dalloway back
again. Clarissa, indeed, was a fascinating spectacle. She wore a white
dress and a long glittering necklace. What with her clothes, and her
arch delicate face, which showed exquisitely pink beneath hair turning
grey, she was astonishingly like an eighteenth-century masterpiece—a
Reynolds or a Romney. She made Helen and the others look coarse and
slovenly beside her. Sitting lightly upright she seemed to be dealing
with the world as she chose; the enormous solid globe spun round this
way and that beneath her fingers. And her husband! Mr. Dalloway rolling
that rich deliberate voice was even more impressive. He seemed to come
from the humming oily centre of the machine where the polished rods are
sliding, and the pistons thumping; he grasped things so firmly but so
loosely; he made the others appear like old maids cheapening remnants.
Rachel followed in the wake of the matrons, as if in a trance; a
curious scent of violets came back from Mrs. Dalloway, mingling with
the soft rustling of her skirts, and the tinkling of her chains. As she
followed, Rachel thought with supreme self-abasement, taking in the
whole course of her life and the lives of all her friends, “She said we
lived in a world of our own. It’s true. We’re perfectly absurd.”
“We sit in here,” said Helen, opening the door of the saloon.
“You play?” said Mrs. Dalloway to Mrs. Ambrose, taking up the score of
_Tristan_ which lay on the table.
“My niece does,” said Helen, laying her hand on Rachel’s shoulder.
“Oh, how I envy you!” Clarissa addressed Rachel for the first time.
“D’you remember this? Isn’t it divine?” She played a bar or two with
ringed fingers upon the page.
“And then Tristan goes like this, and Isolde—oh!—it’s all too
thrilling! Have you been to Bayreuth?”
“No, I haven’t,” said Rachel.
“Then that’s still to come. I shall never forget my first _Parsifal_—a
grilling August day, and those fat old German women, come in their
stuffy high frocks, and then the dark theatre, and the music beginning,
and one couldn’t help sobbing. A kind man went and fetched me water, I
remember; and I could only cry on his shoulder! It caught me here” (she
touched her throat). “It’s like nothing else in the world! But where’s
your piano?”
“It’s in another room,” Rachel explained.
“But you will play to us?” Clarissa entreated. “I can’t imagine
anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to
music—only that sounds too like a schoolgirl! You know,” she said,
turning to Helen, “I don’t think music’s altogether good for people—I’m
afraid not.”
“Too great a strain?” asked Helen.
“Too emotional, somehow,” said Clarissa. “One notices it at once when a
boy or girl takes up music as a profession. Sir William Broadley told
me just the same thing. Don’t you hate the kind of attitudes people go
into over Wagner—like this—” She cast her eyes to the ceiling, clasped
her hands, and assumed a look of intensity. “It really doesn’t mean
that they appreciate him; in fact, I always think it’s the other way
round. The people who really care about an art are always the least
affected. D’you know Henry Philips, the painter?” she asked.
“I have seen him,” said Helen.
“To look at, one might think he was a successful stockbroker, and not
one of the greatest painters of the age. That’s what I like.”
“There are a great many successful stockbrokers, if you like looking at
them,” said Helen.
Rachel wished vehemently that her aunt would not be so perverse.
“When you see a musician with long hair, don’t you know instinctively
that he’s bad?” Clarissa asked, turning to Rachel. “Watts and
Joachim—they looked just like you and me.”
“And how much nicer they’d have looked with curls!” said Helen. “The
question is, are you going to aim at beauty or are you not?”
“Cleanliness!” said Clarissa, “I do want a man to look clean!”
“By cleanliness you really mean well-cut clothes,” said Helen.
“There’s something one knows a gentleman by,” said Clarissa, “but one
can’t say what it is.”
“Take my husband now, does he look like a gentleman?”