MRS.

DALLOWAY
VIRGINIA WOOLF
 SE

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Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be
taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And
then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning-fresh as if
issued to children on a beach .
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to
her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could
hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged
at Bourton into the open air . How fresh, how calm, stiller than
this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a
wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of
eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing
there at the open window, that something awful was about to
happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke
winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and
looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the
vegetables?" -was that it?-"I prefer men to cauliflowers"-was
that it ? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she
had gone out on to the terrace -Peter Walsh. He would be back
from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for
his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered;
his eyes, his pocketknife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when
millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was! -a
few sayings like this about cabbages.
She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall's van to
pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing
her as one does know people who live next door to one in
Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue
green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very
white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him,
waiting to cross, very upright.
For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over
twenty—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at
night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an
indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart,
affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There!
Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour,
irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we
are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows
why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it
round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the
veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps
(drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt
positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love
life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the
bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motorcars, omnibuses,
vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel
organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high
singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life;
London; this moment of June.
For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for
someone like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her
heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old
Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who
opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John,
her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over. It was
June. The King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere,
though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of
galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh
and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue
morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and
set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose
forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling
young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who,
even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd
woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old
dowagers were shooting out in their motorcars on errands of
mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows
with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green
brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but
one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and
she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion,
being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time
of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and
illuminate; to give her party. But how strange, on entering the
Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy
ducks; the pouched birds waddling; and who should be coming
along with his back against the Government buildings, most
appropriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with the Royal
Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old friend Hugh—the
admirable Hugh!
“Good morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh, rather
extravagantly, for they had known each other as children.
“Where are you off to?”
“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really, it’s
better than walking in the country.”
They had just come up—unfortunately—to see doctors. Other
people came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their
daughters out; the Whitbreads came “to see doctors.” Times
without number Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a
nursing home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good deal out
of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his
very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly
upholstered body (he was almost too well dressed always, but
presumably had to be, with his little job at Court) that his wife
had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as an old
friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite understand without
requiring him to specify. Ah yes, she did of course; what a
nuisance; and felt very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same
time of her hat. Not the right hat for the early morning, was that
it? For Hugh always made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his
hat rather extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a
girl of eighteen, and of course he was coming to her party
tonight, Evelyn absolutely insisted, only a little late he might be
after the party at the Palace to which he had to take one of Jim's
boys-she always felt a little skimpy beside Hugh; schoolgirlish;
but attached to him, partly from having known him always, but
she did think him a good sort in his own way, though Richard was
nearly driven mad by him, and as for Peter Walsh, he had never
to this day forgiven her for liking him.
She could remember scene after scene at Bourton-Peter
furious; Hugh not, of course, his match in any way, but still not a
positive imbecile as Peter made out; not a mere barber's block.
When his old mother wanted him to give up shooting or to take
her to Bath he did it, without a word; he was really unselfish,
and as for saying, as Peter did, that he had no heart, no brain,
nothing but the manners and breeding of an English gentleman,
that was only her dear Peter at his worst; and he could be
intolerable; he could be impossible; but adorable to walk with on
a morning like this.
(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of
Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from
the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly
seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly,
brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved.
To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.)
For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter;
she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it
would come over her, if he were with me now what would he
say?—some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly,
without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of
having cared for people; they came back in the middle of
St. James’s Park on a fine morning—indeed they did. But Peter—
however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass,
and the little girl in pink—Peter never saw a thing of all that. He
would put on his spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It
was the state of the world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s
poetry, people’s characters eternally, and the defects of her own
soul. How he scolded her! How they argued! She would marry a
Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect
hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom), she
had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said.
So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still
making out that she had been right—and she had too—not to
marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence
there must be between people living together day in day out in
the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where
was he this morning for instance? Some committee, she never
asked what.) But with Peter everything had to be shared;
everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came
to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to
break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them
ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her
for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the
anguish: and then the horror of the moment when someone told
her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat
going to India ! Never should she forget all that. Cold, heartless, a
prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared .
But those Indian women did presumably-silly, pretty, flimsy
nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy,
he assured her-perfectly happy, though he had never done a
thing that they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It
made her angry still.
She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment,
looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly.
She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were
this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time
unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at
the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual
sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to
sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very
dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself
clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life
on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she
could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she
scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her
it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she
would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I
am that .

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she

thought , walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up
went her back like a cat's; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath
House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all
lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton-such
hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the wagons plodding
past to market; and driving home across the Park. She
remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine . But
everyone remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in
front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked
herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must
inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did
she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death
ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on
the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter
survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of
the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits
and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid
out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her
on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it
spread ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming
as she looked into Hatchards' shop window? What was she trying
to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she
read in the book spread open:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun

Nor the furious winter's rages.

This late age of world's experience had bred in them all, all men
and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and
endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for
example , of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough,
opening the bazaar .
There were Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge
and Mrs. Asquith's Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all
spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that
seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing
home . Nothing that would serve to amuse her and make that
indescribably dried-up little woman look, as Clarissa came in,
just for a moment cordial; before they settled down for the usual
interminable talk of women's ailments. How much she wanted
it—that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa
thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street,
annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing
things. Much rather would she have been one of those people
like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she
thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply,
not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect
idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no
one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had her
life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could
have looked even differently!
She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady
Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes.
She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately;
rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country
house; very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which she had a
narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a
bird’s. That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands
and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But
often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch
picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—
nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself
invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no
more having of children now, but only this astonishing and
rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street,
this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being
Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning
in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one
roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits
for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.
 “That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is
all,” she repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a
glove shop where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect
gloves. And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by
her shoes and her gloves. He had turned on his bed one morning
in the middle of the War. He had said, “I have had enough.”
Gloves and shoes; she had a passion for gloves; but her own
daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not a straw for either of them.
Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bond Street to a shop
where they kept flowers for her when she gave a party. Elizabeth
really cared for her dog most of all. The whole house this
morning smelt of tar. Still, better poor Grizzle than Miss Kilman;
better distemper and tar and all the rest of it than sitting
mewed in a stuffy bedroom with a prayer book! Better anything,
she was inclined to say. But it might be only a phase, as Richard
said, such as all girls go through. It might be falling in love. But
why with Miss Kilman? who had been badly treated of course;
one must make allowances for that, and Richard said she was
very able, had a really historical mind. Anyhow they were
inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to
Communion; and how she dressed, how she treated people who
came to lunch she did not care a bit, it being her experience that
the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled
their feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the
Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private
inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she, dressed in a
green mackintosh coat. Year in year out she wore that coat; she
perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without
making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she
was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a
cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul
rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from
school during the War—poor, embittered, unfortunate creature!
For it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which
undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that was not
Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with which one
battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us
and suck up half our lifeblood, dominators and tyrants; for no
doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been
uppermost and not the white, she would have loved Miss Kilman!
But not in this world. No.
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal
monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in
the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be
content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute
would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since her illness,
had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her
physical pain, and made all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in
being well, in being loved and making her home delightful rock,
quiver, and bend as if indeed there were a monster grubbing at
the roots, as if the whole panoply of content were nothing but
self love! this hatred!
Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing through the
swing doors of Mulberry’s the florists.
She advanced, light, tall, very upright, to be greeted at once
by button-faced Miss Pym, whose hands were always bright red,
as if they had been stood in cold water with the flowers.
There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac;
and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there
were irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy-garden sweet
smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and
thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but
she looked older, this year, turning her head from side to side
among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her
eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the
delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her
eyes, how fresh, like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in
wicker trays, the roses looked; and dark and prim the red
carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas
spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale-as if it
were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick
sweet peas and roses after the superb summer's day, with its
almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum
lilies, was over; and it was the moment between six and seven
when every flower-roses, carnations, irises, lilac-glows; white,
violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself,
softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey
white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the
evening primroses!
And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing,
nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as
if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her,
trusting her, were a wave which she let flow over her and
surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted
her up and up when-oh! a pistol shot in the street outside !
"Dear, those motorcars, " said Miss Pym, going to the window to
look, and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands
full of sweet peas, as if those motorcars, those tyres of motorcars,
were all her fault .

The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss
Pym go to the window and apologise came from a motorcar
which had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite
Mulberry's shop window. Passersby who, of course, stopped and
stared, had just time to see a face of the very greatest
importance against the dove-grey upholstery, before a male
hand drew the blind and there was nothing to be seen except a
square of dove grey.
Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of
Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent
shop on the other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift,
veil-like upon hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s
sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before
had been utterly disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them
with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit
of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips
gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it
the Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose
face was it? Nobody knew.
Edgar J. Watkiss, with his roll of lead piping round his arm,
said audibly, humorously of course: “The Proime Minister’s
kyar.”
Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass,
heard him.
Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-
nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel
eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes
complete strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its
whip; where will it descend?
Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor
engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an
entire body. The sun became extraordinarily hot because the
motorcar had stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old
ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols; here
a green, here a red parasol opened with a little pop.
Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet
peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed in enquiry.
Everyone looked at the motorcar. Septimus looked. Boys on
bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motorcar
stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a
tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of
everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had
come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames,
terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened
to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought.
Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted
there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what
purpose?
“Let us go on, Septimus,” said his wife, a little woman, with
large eyes in a sallow pointed face; an Italian girl.
But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the motorcar
and the tree pattern on the blinds. Was it the Queen in there—
the Queen going shopping?
The chauffeur, who had been opening something, turning
something, shutting something, got on to the box.
“Come on,” said Lucrezia.
But her husband, for they had been married four, five years
now, jumped, started, and said, “All right!” angrily, as if she had
interrupted him.
People must notice; people must see. People, she thought,
looking at the crowd staring at the motorcar; the English people,
with their children and their horses and their clothes, which she
admired in a way; but they were “people” now, because Septimus
had said, “I will kill myself”; an awful thing to say. Suppose they
had heard him? She looked at the crowd. Help, help! she wanted
to cry out to butchers’ boys and women. Help! Only last autumn
she and Septimus had stood on the Embankment wrapped in the
same cloak and, Septimus reading a paper instead of talking, she
had snatched it from him and laughed in the old man’s face who
saw them! But failure one conceals. She must take him away into
some park.
“Now we will cross,” she said.
She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling. He
would give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only twenty-
four, without friends in England, who had left Italy for his sake, a
piece of bone.
The motorcar with its blinds drawn and an air of inscrutable
reserve proceeded towards Piccadilly, still gazed at, still ruffling
the faces on both sides of the street with the same dark breath of
veneration whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister nobody
knew. The face itself had been seen only once by three people for
a few seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could
be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was
passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-
breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first time
and last, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England,
of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to
curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a
grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this
Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings
mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable
decayed teeth. The face in the motorcar will then be known.
It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway, coming out of
Mulberry’s with her flowers: the Queen. And for a second she
wore a look of extreme dignity standing by the flower shop in the
sunlight while the car passed at a foot’s pace, with its blinds
drawn. The Queen going to some hospital; the Queen opening
some bazaar, thought Clarissa.
The crush was terrific for the time of day. Lords, Ascot,
Hurlingham, what was it? she wondered, for the street was
blocked. The British middle classes sitting sideways on the tops
of omnibuses with parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day
like this, were, she thought, more ridiculous, more unlike
anything there has ever been than one could conceive; and the
Queen herself held up; the Queen herself unable to pass. Clarissa
was suspended on one side of Brook Street; Sir John Buckhurst,
the old Judge on the other, with the car between them (Sir John
had laid down the law for years and liked a well-dressed woman)
when the chauffeur, leaning ever so slightly, said or showed
something to the policeman, who saluted and raised his arm and
jerked his head and moved the omnibus to the side and the car
passed through. Slowly and very silently it took its way.
Clarissa guessed; Clarissa knew of course; she had seen
something white, magical, circular, in the footman's hand, a disc
inscribed with a name the Queen's, the Prince of Wales's, the
Prime Minister's?-which, by force of its own lustre, burnt its way
through (Clarissa saw the car diminishing, disappearing), to
blaze among candelabras, glittering stars, breasts stiff with oak
leaves, Hugh Whitbread and all his colleagues, the gentlemen of
England, that night in Buckingham Palace. And Clarissa, too,
gave a party. She stiffened a little; so she would stand at the top
of her stairs .

The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed
through glove shops and hat shops and tailors' shops on both
sides of Bond Street. For thirty seconds all heads were inclined
the same way-to the window. Choosing a pair of gloves-should
they be to the elbow or above it, lemon or pale grey?-ladies
stopped; when the sentence was finished something had
happened. Something so trifling in single instances that no
mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks
in China, could register the vibration; yet in its fullness rather
formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in all the
hat shops and tailors' shops strangers looked at each other and
thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house in a
back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor, which led
to words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy, which
echoed strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white
underlinen threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings.
For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed
something very profound.
Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James’s
Street. Tall men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men with
their tailcoats and their white slips and their hair raked back
who, for reasons difficult to discriminate, were standing in the
bow window of White’s with their hands behind the tails of their
coats, looking out, perceived instinctively that greatness was
passing, and the pale light of the immortal presence fell upon
them as it had fallen upon Clarissa Dalloway. At once they stood
even straighter, and removed their hands, and seemed ready to
attend their Sovereign, if need be, to the cannon’s mouth, as
their ancestors had done before them. The white busts and the
little tables in the background covered with copies of the Tatler
and bottles of soda water seemed to approve; seemed to indicate
the flowing corn and the manor houses of England; and to return
the frail hum of the motor wheels as the walls of a whispering
gallery return a single voice expanded and made sonorous by the
might of a whole cathedral. Shawled Moll Pratt with her flowers
on the pavement wished the dear boy well (it was the Prince of
Wales for certain) and would have tossed the price of a pot of
beer—a bunch of roses—into St. James’s Street out of sheer
lightheartedness and contempt of poverty had she not seen the
constable’s eye upon her, discouraging an old Irishwoman’s
loyalty. The sentries at St. James’s saluted; Queen Alexandra’s
policeman approved.
 A small crowd, meanwhile, had gathered at the gates of
Buckingham Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of
them, they waited; looked at the Palace itself with the flag
flying; at Victoria, billowing on her mound, admired her shelves
of running water, her geraniums; singled out from the motorcars
in the Mall first this one, then that; bestowed emotion, vainly,
upon commoners out for a drive; recalled their tribute to keep it
unspent while this car passed and that; and all the time let
rumour accumulate in their veins and thrill the nerves in their
thighs at the thought of Royalty looking at them; the Queen
bowing; the Prince saluting; at the thought of the heavenly life
divinely bestowed upon Kings; of the equerries and deep
curtsies; of the Queen's old doll's house; of Princess Mary
married to an Englishman, and the Prince-ah! the Prince! who
took wonderfully, they said, after old King Edward, but was ever
so much slimmer. The Prince lived at St. James's; but he might
come along in the morning to visit his mother .
So Sarah Bletchley said with her baby in her arms, tipping her
foot up and down as though she were by her own fender in
Pimlico, but keeping her eyes on the Mall, while Emily Coates
ranged over the Palace windows and thought of the housemaids,
the innumerable housemaids, the bedrooms, the innumerable
bedrooms. Joined by an elderly gentleman with an Aberdeen
terrier, by men without occupation, the crowd increased. Little
Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with
wax over the deeper sources of life, but could be unsealed
suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing-
poor women waiting to see the Queen go past-poor women, nice
little children, orphans, widows, the War-tut-tut-actually had
tears in his eyes. A breeze flaunting ever so warmly down the
Mall through the thin trees, past the bronze heroes, lifted some
flag flying in the British breast of Mr. Bowley and he raised his
hat as the car turned into the Mall and held it high as the car
approached and let the poor mothers of Pimlico press close to
him, and stood very upright. The car came on.
Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of an
aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it
was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind,
which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making
letters in the sky! Everyone looked up.
Dropping dead down, the aeroplane soared straight up, curved
in a loop, raced, sank, rose, and whatever it did, wherever it
went, out fluttered behind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke
which curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters. But what
letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they
lie still; then they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in
the sky, and the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a
fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y perhaps?
"Blaxo," said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awestricken voice ,
gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her
arms, gazed straight up.
"Kreemo, ” murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleepwalker. With
his hat held out perfectly still in his hand, Mr. Bowley gazed
straight up . All down the Mall people were standing and looking
up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became perfectly
silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading,
then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace , in
this pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound
fading up there among the gulls.
The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it
liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater-
"That's an E, ” said Mrs. Bletchley
-or a dancer-
"It's toffee, " murmured Mr. Bowley-
(and the car went in at the gates and nobody looked at it), and
shutting off the smoke, away and away it rushed, and the smoke
faded and assembled itself round the broad white shapes of the
clouds .
It had gone; it was behind the clouds. There was no sound. The
clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached themselves
moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a
mission of the greatest importance which would never be
revealed, and yet certainly so it was a mission of the greatest
importance . Then suddenly, as a train comes out of a tunnel, the
aeroplane rushed out of the clouds again, the sound boring into
the ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in
Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent's Park, and the bar of
smoke curved behind and it dropped down, and it soared up and
wrote one letter after another -but what word was it writing?
Lucrezia Warren Smith, sitting by her husband's side on a seat
in Regent's Park in the Broad Walk, looked up .
"Look, look, Septimus! " she cried. For Dr. Holmes had told her
to make her husband (who had nothing whatever seriously the
matter with him but was a little out of sorts) take an interest in
things outside himself.
So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me .
Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the
language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite
beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words
languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in
their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness, one shape
after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their
intention to provide him, for nothing, forever, for looking
merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks.
It was toffee ; they were advertising toffee, a nursemaid told
Rezia. Together they began to spell t ... o... f...
 “K... R... " said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say "Kay
Arr" close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with
a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his
spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of
sound which, concussing, broke . A marvellous discovery indeed-
that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one
must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!
Happily Rezia put her hand with a tremendous weight on his
knee so that he was weighted down, transfixed, or the
excitement of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling
with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning and
thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave, like plumes
on horses' heads, feathers on ladies', so proudly they rose and
fell, so superbly, would have sent him mad. But he would not go
mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more .
But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And
the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own
body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch
stretched he, too, made that statement. The sparrows fluttering,
rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern;
the white and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds made
harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as
significant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far away a horn
sounded. All taken together meant the birth of a new religion-
"Septimus! " said Rezia. He started violently. People must
notice .

“I am going to walk to the fountain and back,” she said.

For she could stand it no longer. Dr. Holmes might say there
was nothing the matter. Far rather would she that he were dead!
She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see

her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children

playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were
terrible. And he would not kill himself; and she could tell no one.
“Septimus has been working too hard”—that was all she could say
to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. She
could tell nobody, not even Septimus now, and looking back, she
saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat,
hunched up, staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he
would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he
was not Septimus now. She put on her lace collar. She put on her
new hat and he never noticed; and he was happy without her.
Nothing could make her happy without him! Nothing! He was
selfish. So men are. For he was not ill. Dr. Holmes said there was
nothing the matter with him. She spread her hand before her.
Look! Her wedding ring slipped—she had grown so thin. It was
she who suffered—but she had nobody to tell.
Far was Italy and the white houses and the room where her
sisters sat making hats, and the streets crowded every evening
with people walking, laughing out loud, not half alive like people
here, huddled up in Bath chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers
stuck in pots!
“For you should see the Milan gardens,” she said aloud. But to
whom?
There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its
sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it,
dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers;
bleak hillsides soften and fall in. But though they are gone, the
night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank of windows, they
exist more ponderously, give out what the frank daylight fails to
transmit—the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated
there in the darkness; huddled together in the darkness; reft of
the relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls white and
grey, spotting each windowpane, lifting the mist from the fields,
showing the red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more
decked out to the eye; exists again. I am alone; I am alone! she
cried, by the fountain in Regent's Park (staring at the Indian and
his cross), as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost,
the country reverts to its ancient shape , as the Romans saw it,
lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and
rivers wound they knew not where-such was her darkness; when
suddenly, as if a shelf were shot forth and she stood on it , she
said how she was his wife, married years ago in Milan, his wife,
and would never, never tell that he was mad! Turning, the shelf
fell; down, down she dropped. For he was gone, she thought-
gone, as he threatened, to kill himself-to throw himself under a
cart ! But no; there he was; still sitting alone on the seat, in his
shabby overcoat, his legs crossed, staring, talking aloud.
Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such
revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one
kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited.
He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped
Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on,
drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek
words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow,
they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from
trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk,
how there is no death .

There was his hand; there the dead. White things were
assembling behind the railings opposite. But he dared not look.
Evans was behind the railings!
"What are you saying?" said Rezia suddenly, sitting down by
him.

Interrupted again! She was always interrupting.

Away from people-they must get away from people, he said
(jumping up), right away over there, where there were chairs
beneath a tree and the long slope of the park dipped like a
length of green stuff with a ceiling cloth of blue and pink smoke
high above, and there was a rampart of far, irregular houses
hazed in smoke, the traffic hummed in a circle, and on the right,
dun-coloured animals stretched long necks over the Zoo palings,
barking, howling. There they sat down under a tree .
"Look, " she implored him, pointing at a little troop of boys
carrying cricket stumps, and one shuffled, spun round on his
heel and shuffled, as if he were acting a clown at the music hall.
"Look, " she implored him, for Dr. Holmes had told her to make
him notice real things, go to a music hall, play cricket-that was
the very game, Dr. Holmes said, a nice out-of-door game, the
very game for her husband.
"Look, " she repeated.
Look, the unseen bade him, the voice which now
communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind,
Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come
to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten
only by the sun, forever unwasted, suffering forever, the
scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he
moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal
suffering, that eternal loneliness.
"Look, " she repeated, for he must not talk aloud to himself out
ofdoors.

"Oh, look, " she implored him. But what was there to look at? A
few sheep. That was all .
The way to Regent's Park Tube station-could they tell her the
way to Regent's Park Tube station-Maisie Johnson wanted to
know. She was only up from Edinburgh two days ago.
"Not this way-over there !" Rezia exclaimed, waving her aside,
lest she should see Septimus.
Both seemed queer, Maisie Johnson thought. Everything
seemed very queer. In London for the first time, come to take up
a post at her uncle's in Leadenhall Street, and now walking
through Regent's Park in the morning, this couple on the chairs
gave her quite a turn: the young woman seeming foreign, the
man looking queer; so that should she be very old she would still
remember and make it jangle again among her memories how
she had walked through Regent's Park on a fine summer's
morning fifty years ago. For she was only nineteen and had got
her way at last, to come to London; and now how queer it was,
this couple she had asked the way of, and the girl started and
jerked her hand, and the man-he seemed awfully odd;
quarrelling, perhaps; parting forever, perhaps; something was
up , she knew; and now all these people (for she returned to the
Broad Walk), the stone basins, the prim flowers, the old men and
women, invalids most of them in Bath chairs-all seemed, after
Edinburgh, so queer. And Maisie Johnson, as she joined that
gently trudging, vaguely gazing, breeze-kissed company-
squirrels perching and preening, sparrow fountains fluttering
for crumbs, dogs busy with the railings, busy with each other,
while the soft warm air washed over them and lent to the fixed
unsurprised gaze with which they received life, something
whimsical and mollified-Maisie Johnson positively felt she must
cry Oh! (for that young man on the seat had given her quite a
turn. Something was up, she knew).
Horror! horror! she wanted to cry. (She had left her people;
they had warned her what would happen.)
Why hadn't she stayed at home? she cried, twisting the knob of
the iron railing.
That girl , thought Mrs. Dempster (who saved crusts for the
squirrels and often ate her lunch in Regent's Park), don't know a
thing yet; and really it seemed to her better to be a little stout, a
little slack, a little moderate in one's expectations. Percy drank.
Well, better to have a son, thought Mrs. Dempster. She had had a
hard time of it, and couldn't help smiling at a girl like that.
You'll get married, for you're pretty enough, thought
Mrs. Dempster. Get married, she thought, and then you'll know.
Oh, the cooks, and so on. Every man has his ways. But whether I'd
have chosen quite like that if I could have known, thought
Mrs. Dempster, and could not help wishing to whisper a word to
Maisie Johnson; to feel on the creased pouch of her worn old face
the kiss of pity. For it's been a hard life , thought Mrs. Dempster.
What hadn't she given to it? Roses; figure; her feet too. (She drew
the knobbed lumps beneath her skirt.)
Roses, she thought sardonically. All trash, m'dear. For really,
what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and good,
life had been no mere matter of roses, and what was more , let me
tell you, Carrie Dempster had no wish to change her lot with any
woman's in Kentish Town! But, she implored, pity. Pity, for the
loss of roses. Pity she asked of Maisie Johnson, standing by the
hyacinth beds.
Ah, but that aeroplane ! Hadn't Mrs. Dempster always longed
to see foreign parts? She had a nephew, a missionary. It soared
and shot. She always went on the sea at Margate, not out o' sight
of land, but she had no patience with women who were afraid of
water . It swept and fell. 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 today."
“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 riverbed 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 course Aunt Helena thought it
wicked to treat flowers like that.) Then she forgot her sponge,
and ran along the passage naked. That grim old housemaid, Ellen
Atkins, went about grumbling-"Suppose any of the gentlemen
had seen?" Indeed she did shock people. She was untidy, Papa
said.

The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the

integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for
a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a
quality which could only exist between women, between women
just grown up . It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense
of being in league together, a presentiment of something that
was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a
catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling
which was much more on her side than Sally's. For in those days
she was completely reckless; did the most idiotic things out of
bravado; bicycled round the parapet on the terrace; smoked
cigars. Absurd, she was very absurd. But the charm was
overpowering, to her at least, so that she could remember
standing in her bedroom at the top of the house holding the hot-
water can in her hands and saying aloud, "She is beneath this
roof.... She is beneath this roof! "
No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her now. She could
not even get an echo of her old emotion. But she could remember
going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of
ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she
took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to
do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink
evening light, and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling as
she crossed the hall "if it were now to die 'twere now to be most
happy. " That was her feeling-Othello's feeling, and she felt it,
she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to
feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white
frock to meet Sally Seton!
She was wearing pink gauze-was that possible? She seemed,
anyhow, all light, glowing, like some bird or air ball that has
flown in, attached itself for a moment to a bramble. But nothing
is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being
in love?) as the complete indifference of other people. Aunt
Helena just wandered off after dinner; Papa read the paper.
Peter Walsh might have been there, and old Miss Cummings;
Joseph Breitkopf certainly was, for he came every summer, poor
old man, for weeks and weeks, and pretended to read German
with her, but really played the piano and sang Brahms without
any voice.
All this was only a background for Sally. She stood by the
fireplace talking, in that beautiful voice which made everything
she said sound like a caress, to Papa, who had begun to be
attracted rather against his will (he never got over lending her
one of his books and finding it soaked on the terrace), when
suddenly she said, “What a shame to sit indoors!” and they all
went out on to the terrace and walked up and down. Peter Walsh
and Joseph Breitkopf went on about Wagner. She and Sally fell a
little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole
life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a
flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have
turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was
alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present,
wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond,
something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they
walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the
radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!—
when old Joseph and Peter faced them:
“Stargazing?” said Peter.
It was like running one’s face against a granite wall in the
darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible!
Not for herself. She felt only how Sally was being mauled
already, maltreated; she felt his hostility; his jealousy; his
determination to break into their companionship. All this she
saw as one sees a landscape in a flash of lightning—and Sally
(never had she admired her so much!) gallantly taking her way
unvanquished. She laughed. She made old Joseph tell her the
names of the stars, which he liked doing very seriously. She stood
there: she listened. She heard the names of the stars.
“Oh this horror!” she said to herself, as if she had known all
along that something would interrupt, would embitter her
moment of happiness.
Yet how much she owed Peter Walsh later. Always when she
thought of him she thought of their quarrels for some reason—
because she wanted his good opinion so much, perhaps. She owed
him words: “sentimental,” “civilised”; they started up every day
of her life as if he guarded her. A book was sentimental; an
attitude to life sentimental. “Sentimental,” perhaps she was to
be thinking of the past. What would he think, she wondered,
when he came back?
That she had grown older? Would he say that, or would she see
him thinking when he came back, that she had grown older? It
was true. Since her illness she had turned almost white.
Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as if,
while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her.
She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second
year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July,
August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the
falling drop, Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged
into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there—the
moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all
the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all
the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she
looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman
who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of
herself.
How many million times she had seen her face, and always
with the same imperceptible contraction! She pursed her lips
when she looked in the glass. It was to give her face point . That
was her self-pointed; dartlike; definite . That was her self when
some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts
together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and
composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond,
one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-
point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the
lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who
were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never
showing a sign of all the other sides of her-faults, jealousies,
vanities, suspicions, like this of Lady Bruton not asking her to
lunch; which, she thought (combing her hair finally), is utterly
base ! Now, where was her dress?
Her evening dresses hung in the cupboard. Clarissa, plunging
her hand into the softness, gently detached the green dress and
carried it to the window. She had torn it. Someone had trod on
the skirt. She had felt it give at the Embassy party at the top
among the folds. By artificial light the green shone, but lost its
colour now in the sun. She would mend it . Her maids had too
much to do. She would wear it tonight. She would take her silks,
her scissors, her -what was it?-her thimble, of course, down into
the drawing- room, for she must also write, and see that things
generally were more or less in order .
Strange, she thought, pausing on the landing, and assembling
that diamond shape, that single person, strange how a mistress
knows the very moment, the very temper of her house! Faint
sounds rose in spirals up the well of the stairs; the swish of a
mop; tapping; knocking; a loudness when the front door opened;
a voice repeating a message in the basement; the chink of silver
on a tray; clean silver for the party. All was for the party.
(And Lucy, coming into the drawing-room with her tray held
out, put the giant candlesticks on the mantelpiece, the silver
casket in the middle, turned the crystal dolphin towards the
clock. They would come; they would stand; they would talk in the
mincing tones which she could imitate, ladies and gentlemen. Of
all, her mistress was loveliest-mistress of silver, of linen, of
china, for the sun, the silver, doors off their hinges,
Rumpelmayer's men, gave her a sense , as she laid the paper-
knife on the inlaid table, of something achieved. Behold! Behold!
she said, speaking to her old friends in the baker's shop, where
she had first seen service at Caterham, prying into the glass. She
was Lady Angela, attending Princess Mary, when in came
Mrs. Dalloway.)
"Oh Lucy, " she said, "the silver does look nice!"
"And how, " she said, turning the crystal dolphin to stand
straight, "how did you enjoy the play last night?" "Oh, they had
to go before the end! " she said. "They had to be back at ten! " she
said. "So they don't know what happened," she said. "That does
seem hard luck," she said (for her servants stayed later, if they
asked her). "That does seem rather a shame," she said, taking the
old bald-looking cushion in the middle of the sofa and putting it
in Lucy's arms, and giving her a little push, and crying:
"Take it away! Give it to Mrs. Walker with my compliments !
Take it away! " she cried.
And Lucy stopped at the drawing-room door, holding the
cushion, and said, very shyly, turning a little pink, Couldn't she
help to mend that dress?
But, said Mrs. Dalloway, she had enough on her hands already,
quite enough of her own to do without that .
 “But, thank you, Lucy, oh, thank you,” said Mrs. Dalloway, and
thank you, thank you, she went on saying (sitting down on the
sofa with her dress over her knees, her scissors, her silks), thank
you, thank you, she went on saying in gratitude to her servants
generally for helping her to be like this, to be what she wanted,
gentle, generous-hearted. Her servants liked her. And then this
dress of hers—where was the tear? and now her needle to be
threaded. This was a favourite dress, one of Sally Parker’s, the
last almost she ever made, alas, for Sally had now retired, living
at Ealing, and if ever I have a moment, thought Clarissa (but
never would she have a moment any more), I shall go and see her
at Ealing. For she was a character, thought Clarissa, a real artist.
She thought of little out-of-the-way things; yet her dresses were
never queer. You could wear them at Hatfield; at Buckingham
Palace. She had worn them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace.
Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing
the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds
together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a
summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and
fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more
and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which
lies in the sun on the beach says too, that is all. Fear no more,
says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its
burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and
renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to
the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away
barking and barking.
“Heavens, the front-door bell!” exclaimed Clarissa, staying her
needle. Roused, she listened.
“Mrs. Dalloway will see me,” said the elderly man in the hall.
“Oh yes, she will see me,” he repeated, putting Lucy aside very
benevolently, and running upstairs ever so quickly. “Yes, yes,
yes," he muttered as he ran upstairs. "She will see me. After five
years in India, Clarissa will see me ."
"Who can-what can-" asked Mrs. Dalloway (thinking it was
outrageous to be interrupted at eleven o'clock on the morning of
the day she 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
pocketknife 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 anyone 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 anyone 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 someone
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 forever 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 pocketknife.
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 anyone 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, 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 lighthearted, 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 forever, 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 dumbbells this way and
that.
“Hullo, Elizabeth!” cried Peter, stuffing his handkerchief into
his pocket, going quickly to her, saying “Goodbye, 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 tonight! Remember my party tonight!” 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 tonight!”
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 tailcoat 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 motorcar
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 motorcars 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
wheelbarrows 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 ofyoung 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, tomorrow,
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 everyone, 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 had always had in mind; young, but stately;
merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting.
 Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his pocketknife
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, forever,
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
motorcar 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 tonight, he thought—then began to wobble into
hourglass 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 pygmies, 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
windowsill 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 tonight, 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 there, laughing and talking, sitting round a table
after tea and the room was bathed in yellow light and full of
cigarette smoke. They were talking about a man who had
married his housemaid, one of the neighbouring squires, he had
forgotten his name. He had married his housemaid, and she had
been brought to Bourton to call—an awful visit it had been. She
was absurdly overdressed, “like a cockatoo,” Clarissa had said,
imitating her, and she never stopped talking. On and on she
went, on and on. Clarissa imitated her. Then somebody said—
Sally Seton it was—did it make any real difference to one’s
feelings to know that before they’d married she had had a baby?
(In those days, in mixed company, it was a bold thing to say.) He
could see Clarissa now, turning bright pink; somehow
contracting; and saying, “Oh, I shall never be able to speak to her
again!” Whereupon the whole party sitting round the tea-table
seemed to wobble. It was very uncomfortable.
He hadn’t blamed her for minding the fact, since in those days
a girl brought up as she was, knew nothing, but it was her
manner that annoyed him; timid; hard; something arrogant;
unimaginative; prudish. “The death of the soul.” He had said
that instinctively, ticketing the moment as he used to do—the
death of her soul.
 Everyone wobbled; everyone seemed to bow, as she spoke, and
then to stand up different. He could see Sally Seton, like a child
who has been in mischief, leaning forward, rather flushed,
wanting to talk, but afraid, and Clarissa did frighten people. (She
was Clarissa's greatest friend, always about the place, totally
unlike her, an attractive creature, handsome, dark, with the
reputation in those days of great daring and he used to give her
cigars, which she smoked in her bedroom. She had either been
engaged to somebody or quarrelled with her family and old
Parry disliked them both equally, which was a great bond.) Then
Clarissa, still with an air of being offended with them all, got up ,
made some excuse, and went off, alone. As she opened the door,
in came that great shaggy dog which ran after sheep . She flung
herself upon him, went into raptures. It was as if she said to
Peter-it was all aimed at him, he knew-“I know you thought me
absurd about that woman just now; but see how extraordinarily
sympathetic I am; see how I love my Rob! "
They had always this queer power of communicating without
words. She knew directly he criticised her. Then she would do
something quite obvious to defend herself, like this fuss with the
dog-but it never took him in, he always saw through Clarissa.
Not that he said anything, of course; just sat looking glum. It was
the way their quarrels often began.
She shut the door. At once he became extremely depressed. It
all seemed useless-going on being in love; going on quarrelling;
going on making it up, and he wandered off alone, among
outhouses, stables, looking at the horses. (The place was quite a
humble one; the Parrys were never very well off; but there were
always grooms and stable-boys about-Clarissa loved riding-and
an old coachman-what was his name ?-an old nurse, old Moody,
old Goody, some such name they called her, whom one was taken
to visit in a little room with lots of photographs, lots of
birdcages.)
It was an awful evening! He grew more and more gloomy, not
about that only; about everything. And he couldn't see her;
couldn't explain to her; couldn't have it out. There were always
people about-she'd go on as if nothing had happened. That was
the devilish part of her-this coldness, this woodenness,
something very profound in her, which he had felt again this
morning talking to her; an impenetrability. Yet Heaven knows he
loved her. She had some queer power of fiddling on one's nerves,
turning one's nerves to fiddle- strings, yes.
He had gone in to dinner rather late , from some idiotic idea of
making himself felt, and had sat down by old Miss Parry-Aunt
Helena-Mr . Parry's sister, who was supposed to preside. There
she sat in her white Cashmere shawl, with her head against the
window-a formidable old lady, but kind to him, for he had found
her some rare flower, and she was a great botanist, marching off
in thick boots with a black collecting-box slung between her
shoulders. He sat down beside her, and couldn't speak.
Everything seemed to race past him; he just sat there, eating.
And then halfway through dinner he made himself look across at
Clarissa for the first time . She was talking to a young man on her
right . He had a sudden revelation. "She will marry that man, " he
said to himself. He didn't even know his name .
For of course it was that afternoon, that very afternoon, that
Dalloway had come over; and Clarissa called him "Wickham";
that was the beginning of it all. Somebody had brought him over;
and Clarissa got his name wrong. She introduced him to
everybody as Wickham. At last he said "My name is Dalloway! "-
that was his first view of Richard-a fair young man, rather
awkward, sitting on a deck-chair, and blurting out "My name is
Dalloway ! " Sally got hold of it; always after that she called him
"My name is Dalloway! "
He was a prey to revelations at that time. This one-that she
would marry Dalloway-was blinding-overwhelming at the
moment. There was a sort of-how could he put it? a sort of ease
in her manner to him; something maternal; something gentle .
They were talking about politics. All through dinner he tried to
hear what they were saying.
Afterwards he could remember standing by old Miss Parry's
chair in the drawing-room. Clarissa came up, with her perfect
manners, like a real hostess, and wanted to introduce him to
someone-spoke as if they had never met before, which enraged
him. Yet even then he admired her for it. He admired her
courage; her social instinct; he admired her power of carrying
things through. "The perfect hostess, " he said to her, whereupon
she winced all over . But he meant her to feel it . He would have
done anything to hurt her after seeing her with Dalloway. So she
left him. And he had a feeling that they were all gathered
together in a conspiracy against him-laughing and talking-
behind his back. There he stood by Miss Parry's chair as though
he had been cut out of wood, he talking about wild flowers.
Never, never had he suffered so infernally! He must have
forgotten even to pretend to listen; at last he woke up; he saw
Miss Parry looking rather disturbed, rather indignant, with her
prominent eyes fixed. He almost cried out that he couldn't
attend because he was in Hell! People began going out of the
room. He heard them talking about fetching cloaks; about its
being cold on the water, and so on. They were going boating on
the lake by moonlight-one of Sally's mad ideas. He could hear
her describing the moon. And they all went out. He was left quite
alone .
 "Don't you want to go with them?" said Aunt Helena-old Miss
Parry! -she had guessed. And he turned round and there was
Clarissa again. She had come back to fetch him. He was overcome
by her generosity-her goodness.
"Come along, " she said. "They're waiting. "
He had never felt so happy in the whole of his life! Without a
word they made it up. They walked down to the lake . He had
twenty minutes of perfect happiness. Her voice, her laugh, her
dress (something floating, white, crimson), her spirit, her
adventurousness; she made them all disembark and explore the
island; she startled a hen; she laughed; she sang. And all the
time, he knew perfectly well, Dalloway was falling in love with
her; she was falling in love with Dalloway; but it didn't seem to
matter. Nothing mattered. They sat on the ground and talked-
he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other's minds
without any effort . And then in a second it was over . He said to
himself as they were getting into the boat, "She will marry that
man, " dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious
thing. Dalloway would marry Clarissa .
Dalloway rowed them in. He said nothing. But somehow as
they watched him start, jumping on to his bicycle to ride twenty
miles through the woods, wobbling off down the drive, waving his
hand and disappearing, he obviously did feel, instinctively,
tremendously, strongly, all that; the night; the romance;
Clarissa . He deserved to have her .
For himself, he was absurd. His demands upon Clarissa (he
could see it now) were absurd. He asked impossible things. He
made terrible scenes. She would have accepted him still ,
perhaps, if he had been less absurd. Sally thought so. She wrote
him all that summer long letters; how they had talked of him;
how she had praised him, how Clarissa burst into tears! It was an
extraordinary summer-all letters, scenes, telegrams-arriving
at Bourton early in the morning, hanging about till the servants
were up; appalling tête-à-têtes with old Mr. Parry at breakfast;
Aunt Helena formidable but kind; Sally sweeping him off for
talks in the vegetable garden; Clarissa in bed with headaches.
The final scene, the terrible scene which he believed had
mattered more than anything in the whole of his life (it might be
an exaggeration-but still so it did seem now) happened at three
o'clock in the afternoon of a very hot day. It was a trifle that led
up to it -Sally at lunch saying something about Dalloway, and
calling him “My name is Dalloway"; whereupon Clarissa suddenly
stiffened, coloured, in a way she had, and rapped out sharply,
"We've had enough of that feeble joke." That was all; but for him
it was precisely as if she had said, "I'm only amusing myself with
you; I've an understanding with Richard Dalloway." So he took it.
He had not slept for nights. "It's got to be finished one way or the
other," he said to himself. He sent a note to her by Sally asking
her to meet him by the fountain at three. "Something very
important has happened, " he scribbled at the end of it.
The fountain was in the middle of a little shrubbery, far from
the house, with shrubs and trees all round it. There she came ,
even before the time, and they stood with the fountain between
them, the spout (it was broken) dribbling water incessantly. How
sights fix themselves upon the mind! For example, the vivid
green moss .

She did not move . "Tell me the truth, tell me the truth, " he
kept on saying. He felt as if his forehead would burst. She seemed
contracted, petrified. She did not move. "Tell me the truth, " he
repeated, when suddenly that old man Breitkopf popped his
head in carrying the Times; stared at them; gaped; and went
away. They neither of them moved. "Tell me the truth," he
repeated. He felt that he was grinding against something
physically hard; she was unyielding. She was like iron, like flint,
rigid up the backbone . And when she said, "It's no use. It's no use .
This is the end"-after he had spoken for hours, it seemed, with
the tears running down his cheeks-it was as if she had hit him in
the face. She turned, she left him, went away.
"Clarissa ! " he cried. "Clarissa! " But she never came back. It
was over. He went away that night. He never saw her again.

It was awful, he cried, awful, awful !

Still, the sun was hot . Still, one got over things. Still, life had a
way of adding day to day. Still, he thought, yawning and
beginning to take notice-Regent's Park had changed very little
since he was a boy, except for the squirrels-still, presumably
there were compensations-when little Elise Mitchell, who had
been picking up pebbles to add to the pebble collection which
she and her brother were making on the nursery mantelpiece,
plumped her handful down on the nurse's knee and scudded off
again full tilt into a lady's legs. Peter Walsh laughed out .
But Lucrezia Warren Smith was saying to herself, It's wicked;
why should I suffer? she was asking, as she walked down the
broad path. No; I can't stand it any longer, she was saying, having
left Septimus, who wasn't Septimus any longer, to say hard,
cruel , wicked things, to talk to himself, to talk to a dead man, on
the seat over there; when the child ran full tilt into her, fell flat,
and burst out crying.
That was comforting rather. She stood her upright, dusted her
frock, kissed her .
But for herself she had done nothing wrong; she had loved
Septimus; she had been happy; she had had a beautiful home,
and there her sisters lived still, making hats. Why should she
suffer?
 The child ran straight back to its nurse, and Rezia saw her
scolded, comforted, taken up by the nurse who put down her
knitting, and the kind-looking man gave her his watch to blow
open to comfort her—but why should she be exposed? Why not
left in Milan? Why tortured? Why?
Slightly waved by tears the broad path, the nurse, the man in
grey, the perambulator, rose and fell before her eyes. To be
rocked by this malignant torturer was her lot. But why? She was
like a bird sheltering under the thin hollow of a leaf, who blinks
at the sun when the leaf moves; starts at the crack of a dry twig.
She was exposed; she was surrounded by the enormous trees,
vast clouds of an indifferent world, exposed; tortured; and why
should she suffer? Why?
She frowned; she stamped her foot. She must go back again to
Septimus since it was almost time for them to be going to Sir
William Bradshaw. She must go back and tell him, go back to him
sitting there on the green chair under the tree, talking to
himself, or to that dead man Evans, whom she had only seen once
for a moment in the shop. He had seemed a nice quiet man; a
great friend of Septimus’s, and he had been killed in the War.
But such things happen to everyone. Everyone has friends who
were killed in the War. Everyone gives up something when they
marry. She had given up her home. She had come to live here, in
this awful city. But Septimus let himself think about horrible
things, as she could too, if she tried. He had grown stranger and
stranger. He said people were talking behind the bedroom walls.
Mrs. Filmer thought it odd. He saw things too—he had seen an
old woman’s head in the middle of a fern. Yet he could be happy
when he chose. They went to Hampton Court on top of a bus, and
they were perfectly happy. All the little red and yellow flowers
were out on the grass, like floating lamps he said, and talked and
chattered and laughed, making up stories. Suddenly he said,
“Now we will kill ourselves,” when they were standing by the
river, and he looked at it with a look which she had seen in his
eyes when a train went by, or an omnibus—a look as if something
fascinated him; and she felt he was going from her and she
caught him by the arm. But going home he was perfectly quiet—
perfectly reasonable. He would argue with her about killing
themselves; and explain how wicked people were; how he could
see them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew all
their thoughts, he said; he knew everything. He knew the
meaning of the world, he said.
Then when they got back he could hardly walk. He lay on the
sofa and made her hold his hand to prevent him from falling
down, down, he cried, into the flames! and saw faces laughing at
him, calling him horrible disgusting names, from the walls, and
hands pointing round the screen. Yet they were quite alone. But
he began to talk aloud, answering people, arguing, laughing,
crying, getting very excited and making her write things down.
Perfect nonsense it was; about death; about Miss Isabel Pole. She
could stand it no longer. She would go back.
She was close to him now, could see him staring at the sky,
muttering, clasping his hands. Yet Dr. Holmes said there was
nothing the matter with him. What then had happened—why
had he gone, then, why, when she sat by him, did he start, frown
at her, move away, and point at her hand, take her hand, look at
it terrified?
Was it that she had taken off her wedding ring? “My hand has
grown so thin,” she said. “I have put it in my purse,” she told
him.
He dropped her hand. Their marriage was over, he thought,
with agony, with relief. The rope was cut; he mounted; he was
free, as it was decreed that he, Septimus, the lord of men, should
be free; alone (since his wife had thrown away her wedding ring;
since she had left him), he, Septimus, was alone, called forth in
advance of the mass of men to hear the truth, to learn the
meaning, which now at last, after all the toils of civilisation-
Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin, and now himself-was to
be given whole to.... "To whom?" he asked aloud. "To the Prime
Minister, " the voices which rustled above his head replied. The
supreme secret must be told to the Cabinet; first that trees are
alive; next there is no crime; next love, universal love , he
muttered, gasping, trembling, painfully drawing out these
profound truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an
immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed
by them forever .
No crime; love; he repeated, fumbling for his card and pencil,
when a Skye terrier snuffed his trousers and he started in an
agony of fear . It was turning into a man! He could not watch it
happen! It was horrible, terrible to see a dog become a man! At
once the dog trotted away.
Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant. It spared
him, pardoned his weakness. But what was the scientific
explanation (for one must be scientific above all things)? Why
could he see through bodies, see into the future, when dogs will
become men? It was the heat wave presumably, operating upon a
brain made sensitive by eons of evolution. Scientifically
speaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body was
macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread
like a veil upon a rock.
He lay back in his chair, exhausted but upheld. He lay resting,
waiting, before he again interpreted, with effort, with agony, to
mankind. He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth
thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their
stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music began clanging against the
rocks up here . It is a motor horn down in the street, he
muttered; but up here it cannoned from rock to rock, divided,
met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns (that music
should be visible was a discovery) and became an anthem, an
anthem twined round now by a shepherd boy’s piping (That’s an
old man playing a penny whistle by the public-house, he
muttered) which, as the boy stood still came bubbling from his
pipe, and then, as he climbed higher, made its exquisite plaint
while the traffic passed beneath. This boy’s elegy is played
among the traffic, thought Septimus. Now he withdraws up into
the snows, and roses hang about him—the thick red roses which
grow on my bedroom wall, he reminded himself. The music
stopped. He has his penny, he reasoned it out, and has gone on to
the next public-house.
But he himself remained high on his rock, like a drowned
sailor on a rock. I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down,
he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am
now alive, but let me rest still; he begged (he was talking to
himself again—it was awful, awful!); and as, before waking, the
voices of birds and the sound of wheels chime and chatter in a
queer harmony, grow louder and louder and the sleeper feels
himself drawing to the shores of life, so he felt himself drawing
towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding louder,
something tremendous about to happen.
He had only to open his eyes; but a weight was on them; a fear.
He strained; he pushed; he looked; he saw Regent’s Park before
him. Long streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet. The trees
waved, brandished. We welcome, the world seemed to say; we
accept; we create. Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to
prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the
railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty
sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was
an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving,
flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with
perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and
falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery,
dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now and
again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on
the grass stalks-all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made
out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that
was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere .
"It is time , ” said Rezia .
The word "time" split its husk; poured its riches over him; and
from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without
his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to
attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal
ode to Time . He sang. Evans answered from behind the tree . The
dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There
they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans
himself-
"For God's sake don't come ! " Septimus cried out. For he could
not look upon the dead.
But the branches parted. A man in grey was actually walking
towards them. It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds;
he was not changed. I must tell the whole world, Septimus cried,
raising his hand (as the dead man in the grey suit came nearer),
raising his hand like some colossal figure who has lamented the
fate of man for ages in the desert alone with his hands pressed to
his forehead, furrows of despair on his cheeks, and now sees light
on the desert's edge which broadens and strikes the iron-black
figure (and Septimus half rose from his chair), and with legions
of men prostrate behind him he, the giant mourner, receives for
one moment on his face the whole-

"But I am so unhappy, Septimus," said Rezia trying to make

him sit down.
 The millions lamented; for ages they had sorrowed. He would
turn round, he would tell them in a few moments, only a few
moments more, of this relief, of this joy, of this astonishing
revelation—
“The time, Septimus,” Rezia repeated. “What is the time?”
He was talking, he was starting, this man must notice him. He
was looking at them.
“I will tell you the time,” said Septimus, very slowly, very
drowsily, smiling mysteriously. As he sat smiling at the dead man
in the grey suit the quarter struck—the quarter to twelve.
And that is being young, Peter Walsh thought as he passed
them. To be having an awful scene—the poor girl looked
absolutely desperate—in the middle of the morning. But what
was it about, he wondered, what had the young man in the
overcoat been saying to her to make her look like that; what
awful fix had they got themselves into, both to look so desperate
as that on a fine summer morning? The amusing thing about
coming back to England, after five years, was the way it made,
anyhow the first days, things stand out as if one had never seen
them before; lovers squabbling under a tree; the domestic family
life of the parks. Never had he seen London look so enchanting—
the softness of the distances; the richness; the greenness; the
civilisation, after India, he thought, strolling across the grass.
This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing no
doubt. Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these
alternations of mood; good days, bad days, for no reason
whatever, happiness from a pretty face, downright misery at the
sight of a frump. After India of course one fell in love with every
woman one met. There was a freshness about them; even the
poorest dressed better than five years ago surely; and to his eye
the fashions had never been so becoming; the long black cloaks;
the slimness; the elegance; and then the delicious and
apparently universal habit of paint. Every woman, even the most
respectable , had roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a
knife; curls of Indian ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a
change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place. What did the
young people think about? Peter Walsh asked himself.
Those five years-1918 to 1923-had been, he suspected,
somehow very important. People looked different. Newspapers
seemed different. Now for instance there was a man writing
quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies about water-
closets. That you couldn't have done ten years ago-written quite
openly about water-closets in a respectable weekly. And then
this taking out a stick of rouge, or a powder-puff and making up
in public. On board ship coming home there were lots of young
men and girls-Betty and Bertie he remembered in particular-
carrying on quite openly; the old mother sitting and watching
them with her knitting, cool as a cucumber. The girl would stand
still and powder her nose in front of everyone. And they weren't
engaged; just having a good time; no feelings hurt on either side.
As hard as nails she was-Betty What'shername ; but a thorough
good sort. She would make a very good wife at thirty-she would
marry when it suited her to marry; marry some rich man and
live in a large house near Manchester .
Who was it now who had done that ? Peter Walsh asked
himself, turning into the Broad Walk-married a rich man and
lived in a large house near Manchester? Somebody who had
written him a long, gushing letter quite lately about "blue
hydrangeas. " It was seeing blue hydrangeas that made her think
of him and the old days-Sally Seton, of course! It was Sally
Seton-the last person in the world one would have expected to
marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the
wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!
 But of all that ancient lot, Clarissa's friends-Whitbreads,
Kinderleys, Cunninghams, Kinloch-Jones's-Sally was probably
the best. She tried to get hold of things by the right end anyhow.
She saw through Hugh Whitbread anyhow-the admirable
Hugh -when Clarissa and the rest were at his feet.
"The Whitbreads?" he could hear her saying. "Who are the
Whitbreads? Coal merchants. Respectable tradespeople . "
Hugh she detested for some reason. He thought of nothing but
his own appearance, she said. He ought to have been a Duke . He
would be certain to marry one of the Royal Princesses. And of
course Hugh had the most extraordinary, the most natural, the
most sublime respect for the British aristocracy of any human
being he had ever come across. Even Clarissa had to own that .
Oh, but he was such a dear, so unselfish, gave up shooting to
please his old mother-remembered his aunts' birthdays, and so
on .

Sally, to do her justice, saw through all that. One of the things
he remembered best was an argument one Sunday morning at
Bourton about women's rights (that antediluvian topic), when
Sally suddenly lost her temper, flared up, and told Hugh that he
represented all that was most detestable in British middle-class
life. She told him that she considered him responsible for the
state of "those poor girls in Piccadilly"-Hugh, the perfect
gentleman, poor Hugh!-never did a man look more horrified!
She did it on purpose she said afterwards (for they used to get
together in the vegetable garden and compare notes). "He's read
nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing," he could hear her saying
in that very emphatic voice which carried so much farther than
she knew. The stable boys had more life in them than Hugh, she
said. He was a perfect specimen of the public school type, she
said. No country but England could have produced him. She was
really spiteful, for some reason; had some grudge against him.
Something had happened-he forgot what-in the smoking- room.
He had insulted her-kissed her? Incredible! Nobody believed a
word against Hugh of course. Who could? Kissing Sally in the
smoking-room! If it had been some Honourable Edith or Lady
Violet, perhaps; but not that ragamuffin Sally without a penny to
her name , and a father or a mother gambling at Monte Carlo. For
of all the people he had ever met Hugh was the greatest snob-
the most obsequious-no, he didn't cringe exactly. He was too
much of a prig for that. A first- rate valet was the obvious
comparison-somebody who walked behind carrying suitcases;
could be trusted to send telegrams-indispensable to hostesses.
And he'd found his job-married his Honourable Evelyn; got some
little post at Court, looked after the King's cellars, polished the
Imperial shoe-buckles, went about in knee-breeches and lace
ruffles. How remorseless life is! A little job at Court!
He had married this lady, the Honourable Evelyn, and they
lived hereabouts, so he thought (looking at the pompous houses
overlooking the Park), for he had lunched there once in a house
which had, like all Hugh's possessions, something that no other
house could possibly have-linen cupboards it might have been.
You had to go and look at them-you had to spend a great deal of
time always admiring whatever it was-linen cupboards,
pillowcases, old oak furniture, pictures, which Hugh had picked
up for an old song. But Mrs. Hugh sometimes gave the show away.
She was one of those obscure mouse-like little women who
admire big men. She was almost negligible. Then suddenly she
would say something quite unexpected-something sharp. She
had the relics of the grand manner perhaps. The steam coal was
a little too strong for her-it made the atmosphere thick. And so
there they lived, with their linen cupboards and their old
masters and their pillowcases fringed with real lace at the rate
of five or ten thousand a year presumably, while he, who was two
years older than Hugh, cadged for a job.
At fifty-three he had to come and ask them to put him into
some secretary’s office, to find him some usher’s job teaching
little boys Latin, at the beck and call of some mandarin in an
office, something that brought in five hundred a year; for if he
married Daisy, even with his pension, they could never do on
less. Whitbread could do it presumably; or Dalloway. He didn’t
mind what he asked Dalloway. He was a thorough good sort; a bit
limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort.
Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible
way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of
brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type. He
ought to have been a country gentleman—he was wasted on
politics. He was at his best out of doors, with horses and dogs—
how good he was, for instance, when that great shaggy dog of
Clarissa’s got caught in a trap and had its paw half torn off, and
Clarissa turned faint and Dalloway did the whole thing;
bandaged, made splints; told Clarissa not to be a fool. That was
what she liked him for perhaps—that was what she needed.
“Now, my dear, don’t be a fool. Hold this—fetch that,” all the
time talking to the dog as if it were a human being.
But how could she swallow all that stuff about poetry? How
could she let him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously and
solemnly Richard Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no
decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was
like listening at keyholes (besides the relationship was not one
that he approved). No decent man ought to let his wife visit a
deceased wife’s sister. Incredible! The only thing to do was to
pelt him with sugared almonds—it was at dinner. But Clarissa
sucked it all in; thought it so honest of him; so independent of
him; Heaven knows if she didn’t think him the most original
mind she’d ever met!
That was one of the bonds between Sally and himself. There
was a garden where they used to walk, a walled-in place, with
rosebushes and giant cauliflowers—he could remember Sally
tearing off a rose, stopping to exclaim at the beauty of the
cabbage leaves in the moonlight (it was extraordinary how
vividly it all came back to him, things he hadn’t thought of for
years), while she implored him, half laughing of course, to carry
off Clarissa, to save her from the Hughs and the Dalloways and
all the other “perfect gentlemen” who would “stifle her soul”
(she wrote reams of poetry in those days), make a mere hostess of
her, encourage her worldliness. But one must do Clarissa justice.
She wasn’t going to marry Hugh anyhow. She had a perfectly
clear notion of what she wanted. Her emotions were all on the
surface. Beneath, she was very shrewd—a far better judge of
character than Sally, for instance, and with it all, purely
feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift, of
making a world of her own wherever she happened to be. She
came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a
doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one
remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there
was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything
specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.
No, no, no! He was not in love with her any more! He only felt,
after seeing her that morning, among her scissors and silks,
making ready for the party, unable to get away from the thought
of her; she kept coming back and back like a sleeper jolting
against him in a railway carriage; which was not being in love, of
course; it was thinking of her, criticising her, starting again,
after thirty years, trying to explain her. The obvious thing to say
of her was that she was worldly; cared too much for rank and
society and getting on in the world—which was true in a sense;
she had admitted it to him. (You could always get her to own up
if you took the trouble; she was honest.) What she would say was
that she hated frumps, fogies, failures, like himself presumably;
thought people had no right to slouch about with their hands in
their pockets; must do something, be something; and these great
swells, these Duchesses, these hoary old Countesses one met in
her drawing-room, unspeakably remote as he felt them to be
from anything that mattered a straw, stood for something real to
her. Lady Bexborough, she said once, held herself upright (so did
Clarissa herself; she never lounged in any sense of the word; she
was straight as a dart, a little rigid in fact). She said they had a
kind of courage which the older she grew the more she
respected. In all this there was a great deal of Dalloway, of
course; a great deal of the public-spirited, British Empire, tariff-
reform, governing-class spirit, which had grown on her, as it
tends to do. With twice his wits, she had to see things through his
eyes—one of the tragedies of married life. With a mind of her
own, she must always be quoting Richard—as if one couldn’t know
to a tittle what Richard thought by reading the Morning Post of a
morning! These parties for example were all for him, or for her
idea of him (to do Richard justice he would have been happier
farming in Norfolk). She made her drawing-room a sort of
meeting-place; she had a genius for it. Over and over again he
had seen her take some raw youth, twist him, turn him, wake
him up; set him going. Infinite numbers of dull people
conglomerated round her of course. But odd unexpected people
turned up; an artist sometimes; sometimes a writer; queer fish in
that atmosphere. And behind it all was that network of visiting,
leaving cards, being kind to people; running about with bunches
of flowers, little presents; So-and-so was going to France—must
have an air-cushion; a real drain on her strength; all that
interminable traffic that women of her sort keep up; but she did
it genuinely, from a natural instinct.
Oddly enough, she was one of the most thoroughgoing sceptics
he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make
up to account for her, so transparent in some ways, so
inscrutable in others), possibly she said to herself, As we are a
doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as
a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these
nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at
any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-
prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and
air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the
Gods, shan’t have it all their own way—her notion being that the
Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling
human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved
like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia’s death—that
horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all
Justin Parry’s fault—all his carelessness) before your very eyes, a
girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa
always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn’t so
positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to
blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for
the sake of goodness.
And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to
enjoy (though goodness only knows, she had her reserves; it was a
mere sketch, he often felt, that even he, after all these years,
could make of Clarissa). Anyhow there was no bitterness in her;
none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good
women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with
her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a
perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the
spur of the moment. (Very likely, she would have talked to those
lovers, if she had thought them unhappy.) She had a sense of
comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always
people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she
frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant
parties of hers, talking nonsense, sayings things she didn’t mean,
blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination. There
she would sit at the head of the table taking infinite pains with
some old buffer who might be useful to Dalloway—they knew the
most appalling bores in Europe—or in came Elizabeth and
everything must give way to her. She was at a High School, at the
inarticulate stage last time he was over, a round-eyed, pale-
faced girl, with nothing of her mother in her, a silent stolid
creature, who took it all as a matter of course, let her mother
make a fuss of her, and then said “May I go now?” like a child of
four; going off, Clarissa explained, with that mixture of
amusement and pride which Dalloway himself seemed to rouse
in her, to play hockey. And now Elizabeth was “out,” presumably;
thought him an old fogy, laughed at her mother’s friends. Ah
well, so be it. The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh
thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in
hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever,
but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme
flavour to existence—the power of taking hold of experience, of
turning it round, slowly, in the light.
A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now,
at the age of fifty-three one scarcely needed people any more.
Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant,
now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much indeed.
A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had
acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of
pleasure, every shade of meaning; which both were so much
more solid than they used to be, so much less personal. It was
impossible that he should ever suffer again as Clarissa had made
him suffer . For hours at a time (pray God that one might say
these things without being overheard!), for hours and days he
never thought of Daisy.
Could it be that he was in love with her then, remembering
the misery, the torture, the extraordinary passion of those days?
It was a different thing altogether -a much pleasanter thing-the
truth being, of course, that now she was in love with him. And
that perhaps was the reason why, when the ship actually sailed,
he felt an extraordinary relief, wanted nothing so much as to be
alone; was annoyed to find all her little attentions-cigars, notes,
a rug for the voyage-in his cabin . Everyone if they were honest
would say the same; one doesn't want people after fifty; one
doesn't want to go on telling women they are pretty; that's what
most men of fifty would say, Peter Walsh thought, if they were
honest.
But then these astonishing accesses of emotion-bursting into
tears this morning, what was all that about? What could Clarissa
have thought of him? thought him a fool presumably, not for the
first time . It was jealousy that was at the bottom of it-jealousy
which survives every other passion of mankind, Peter Walsh
thought, holding his pocketknife at arm's length. She had been
meeting Major Orde , Daisy said in her last letter; said it on
purpose he knew; said it to make him jealous; he could see her
wrinkling her forehead as she wrote, wondering what she could
say to hurt him; and yet it made no difference; he was furious!
All this pother of coming to England and seeing lawyers wasn't to
marry her, but to prevent her from marrying anybody else . That
was what tortured him, that was what came over him when he
saw Clarissa so calm, so cold, so intent on her dress or whatever
it was ; realising what she might have spared him, what she had
reduced him to a whimpering, snivelling old ass. But women, he
thought, shutting his pocketknife, don’t know what passion is.
They don’t know the meaning of it to men. Clarissa was as cold as
an icicle. There she would sit on the sofa by his side, let him take
her hand, give him one kiss—Here he was at the crossing.
A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice
bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running
weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning
into

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo—

the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting

from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube
station from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty
pump, like a wind-beaten tree forever barren of leaves which
lets the wind run up and down its branches singing

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo

and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.

Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it was
swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age
of silent sunrise, the battered woman—for she wore a skirt—with
her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood
singing of love—love which has lasted a million years, she sang,
love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had
been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in
May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming,
she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone;
death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and
when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the
earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to
lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high
burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then
the pageant of the universe would be over.
As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent’s Park Tube
station still the earth seemed green and flowery; still, though it
issued from so rude a mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy
too, matted with root fibres and tangled grasses, still the old
bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knotted roots of
infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure, streamed away in
rivulets over the pavement and all along the Marylebone Road,
and down towards Euston, fertilising, leaving a damp stain.
Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had
walked with her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman
with one hand exposed for coppers the other clutching her side,
would still be there in ten million years, remembering how once
she had walked in May, where the sea flows now, with whom it
did not matter—he was a man, oh yes, a man who had loved her.
But the passage of ages had blurred the clarity of that ancient
May day; the bright petalled flowers were hoar and silver
frosted; and she no longer saw, when she implored him (as she
did now quite clearly) “look in my eyes with thy sweet eyes
intently,” she no longer saw brown eyes, black whiskers or
sunburnt face but only a looming shape, a shadow shape, to
which, with the birdlike freshness of the very aged she still
twittered “give me your hand and let me press it gently” (Peter
Walsh couldn’t help giving the poor creature a coin as he
stepped into his taxi), “and if someone should see, what matter
they?” she demanded; and her fist clutched at her side, and she
smiled, pocketing her shilling, and all peering inquisitive eyes
seemed blotted out, and the passing generations—the pavement
was crowded with bustling middle-class people—vanished, like
leaves, to be trodden under, to be soaked and steeped and made
mould of by that eternal spring—

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo

“Poor old woman,” said Rezia Warren Smith, waiting to cross.

Oh poor old wretch!
Suppose it was a wet night? Suppose one’s father, or somebody
who had known one in better days had happened to pass, and
saw one standing there in the gutter? And where did she sleep at
night?
Cheerfully, almost gaily, the invincible thread of sound wound
up into the air like the smoke from a cottage chimney, winding
up clean beech trees and issuing in a tuft of blue smoke among
the topmost leaves. “And if someone should see, what matter
they?”
Since she was so unhappy, for weeks and weeks now, Rezia had
given meanings to things that happened, almost felt sometimes
that she must stop people in the street, if they looked good, kind
people, just to say to them “I am unhappy”; and this old woman
singing in the street “if someone should see, what matter they?”
made her suddenly quite sure that everything was going to be
right. They were going to Sir William Bradshaw; she thought his
name sounded nice; he would cure Septimus at once. And then
there was a brewer’s cart, and the grey horses had upright
bristles of straw in their tails; there were newspaper placards. It
was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.
So they crossed, Mr. and Mrs. Septimus Warren Smith, and was
there, after all, anything to draw attention to them, anything to
make a passerby suspect here is a young man who carries in him
the greatest message in the world, and is, moreover, the
happiest man in the world, and the most miserable? Perhaps
they walked more slowly than other people, and there was
something hesitating, trailing, in the man’s walk, but what more
natural for a clerk, who has not been in the West End on a
weekday at this hour for years, than to keep looking at the sky,
looking at this, that and the other, as if Portland Place were a
room he had come into when the family are away, the
chandeliers being hung in holland bags, and the caretaker, as she
lets in long shafts of dusty light upon deserted, queer-looking
armchairs, lifting one corner of the long blinds, explains to the
visitors what a wonderful place it is, how wonderful, but at the
same time, he thinks, as he looks at chairs and tables, how
strange.
To look at, he might have been a clerk, but of the better sort;
for he wore brown boots; his hands were educated; so, too, his
profile—his angular, big-nosed, intelligent, sensitive profile; but
not his lips altogether, for they were loose; and his eyes (as eyes
tend to be), eyes merely; hazel, large; so that he was, on the
whole, a border case, neither one thing nor the other, might end
with a house at Purley and a motorcar, or continue renting
apartments in back streets all his life; one of those half-
educated, self-educated men whose education is all learnt from
books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening after
the day’s work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by
letter.
As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people
go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the
fields and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a
mere boy, because of his mother; she lied; because he came down
to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he
could see no future for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a
confidant of his little sister, had gone to London leaving an
absurd note behind him, such as great men have written, and the
world has read later when the story of their struggles has
become famous.
London has swallowed up many millions of young men called
Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like
Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish
them. Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences,
again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink
innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this
what could the most observant of friends have said except what a
gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the
morning and finds a new blossom on his plant:—It has flowered;
flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness,
courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a
room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made
him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss
Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.
Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might
give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him
books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as
burns only once in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a red gold
flame infinitely ethereal and insubstantial over Miss Pole; Antony
and Cleopatra; and the Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful,
believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to
her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink; he saw
her, one summer evening, walking in a green dress in a square.
“It has flowered,” the gardener might have said, had he opened
the door; had he come in, that is to say, any night about this
time, and found him writing; found him tearing up his writing;
found him finishing a masterpiece at three o’clock in the
morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting
churches, and fasting one day, drinking another, devouring
Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw.
Something was up, Mr. Brewer knew; Mr. Brewer, managing
clerk at Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and
estate agents; something was up, he thought, and, being paternal
with his young men, and thinking very highly of Smith's abilities,
and prophesying that he would, in ten or fifteen years, succeed
to the leather armchair in the inner room under the skylight
with the deed-boxes round him, "if he keeps his health, " said
Mr. Brewer, and that was the danger-he looked weakly; advised
football, invited him to supper and was seeing his way to
consider recommending a rise of salary, when something
happened which threw out many of Mr. Brewer's calculations,
took away his ablest young fellows, and eventually, so prying and
insidious were the fingers of the European War, smashed a
plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole in the geranium beds, and
utterly ruined the cook's nerves at Mr. Brewer's establishment at
Muswell Hill .
Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France
to save an England which consisted almost entirely of
Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking
in a square . There in the trenches the change which Mr. Brewer
desired when he advised football was produced instantly; he
developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention,
indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name . It was a case of
two dogs playing on a hearthrug; one worrying a paper screw,
snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and then, at the old dog's
ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a
paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. They had to be
together, share with each other, fight with each other , quarrel
with each other. But when Evans (Rezia who had only seen him
once called him “a quiet man," a sturdy red-haired man,
undemonstrative in the company of women), when Evans was
killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from
showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a
friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and
very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had
gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death,
had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to
survive. He was right there. The last shells missed him. He
watched them explode with indifference. When peace came he
was in Milan, billeted in the house of an innkeeper with a
courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the open, daughters
making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he became
engaged one evening when the panic was on him—that he could
not feel.
For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried,
he had, especially in the evening, these sudden thunderclaps of
fear. He could not feel. As he opened the door of the room where
the Italian girls sat making hats, he could see them; could hear
them; they were rubbing wires among coloured beads in saucers;
they were turning buckram shapes this way and that; the table
was all strewn with feathers, spangles, silks, ribbons; scissors
were rapping on the table; but something failed him; he could
not feel. Still, scissors rapping, girls laughing, hats being made
protected him; he was assured of safety; he had a refuge. But he
could not sit there all night. There were moments of waking in
the early morning. The bed was falling; he was falling. Oh for the
scissors and the lamplight and the buckram shapes! He asked
Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two, the gay, the
frivolous, with those little artist’s fingers that she would hold up
and say “It is all in them.” Silk, feathers, what not were alive to
them.
 “It is the hat that matters most,” she would say, when they
walked out together. Every hat that passed, she would examine;
and the cloak and the dress and the way the woman held herself.
Ill-dressing, overdressing she stigmatised, not savagely, rather
with impatient movements of the hands, like those of a painter
who puts from him some obvious well-meant glaring imposture;
and then, generously, but always critically, she would welcome a
shopgirl who had turned her little bit of stuff gallantly, or
praise, wholly, with enthusiastic and professional understanding,
a French lady descending from her carriage, in chinchilla, robes,
pearls.
“Beautiful!” she would murmur, nudging Septimus, that he
might see. But beauty was behind a pane of glass. Even taste
(Rezia liked ices, chocolates, sweet things) had no relish to him.
He put down his cup on the little marble table. He looked at
people outside; happy they seemed, collecting in the middle of
the street, shouting, laughing, squabbling over nothing. But he
could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the
tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over
him—he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for
example, quite easily (“Septimus, do put down your book,” said
Rezia, gently shutting the Inferno), he could add up his bill; his
brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then—that he
could not feel.
“The English are so silent,” Rezia said. She liked it, she said.
She respected these Englishmen, and wanted to see London, and
the English horses, and the tailor-made suits, and could
remember hearing how wonderful the shops were, from an Aunt
who had married and lived in Soho.
It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England
from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be
possible that the world itself is without meaning.
 At the office they advanced him to a post of considerable
responsibility. They were proud of him; he had won crosses. "You
have done your duty; it is up to us-" began Mr. Brewer; and
could not finish, so pleasurable was his emotion. They took
admirable lodgings off the Tottenham Court Road.
Here he opened Shakespeare once more . That boy's business of
the intoxication of language-Antony and Cleopatra-had shrivelled
utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity-the putting on of
clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and
the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message
hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one
generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing,
hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the
same . There Rezia sat at the table trimming hats. She trimmed
hats for Mrs. Filmer's friends; she trimmed hats by the hour. She
looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned, under water, he
thought.
"The English are so serious," she would say, putting her arms
round Septimus, her cheek against his .
Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare .
The business of copulation was filth to him before the end. But,
Rezia said, she must have children. They had been married five
years .

They went to the Tower together; to the Victoria and Albert

Museum; stood in the crowd to see the King open Parliament .
And there were the shops-hat shops, dress shops, shops with
leather bags in the window, where she would stand staring. But
she must have a boy.
She must have a son like Septimus, she said. But nobody could
be like Septimus; so gentle; so serious; so clever. Could she not
read Shakespeare too? Was Shakespeare a difficult author? she
asked .
 One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot
perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful
animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and
vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
He watched her snip, shape, as one watches a bird hop, flit in
the grass, without daring to move a finger. For the truth is (let
her ignore it) that human beings have neither kindness, nor
faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of
the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert
and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the fallen.
They are plastered over with grimaces. There was Brewer at the
office, with his waxed moustache, coral tiepin, white slip, and
pleasurable emotions—all coldness and clamminess within—his
geraniums ruined in the War—his cook’s nerves destroyed; or
Amelia What’shername, handing round cups of tea punctually at
five—a leering, sneering obscene little harpy; and the Toms and
Berties in their starched shirt fronts oozing thick drops of vice.
They never saw him drawing pictures of them naked at their
antics in his notebook. In the street, vans roared past him;
brutality blared out on placards; men were trapped in mines;
women burnt alive; and once a maimed file of lunatics being
exercised or displayed for the diversion of the populace (who
laughed aloud), ambled and nodded and grinned past him, in the
Tottenham Court Road, each half apologetically, yet
triumphantly, inflicting his hopeless woe. And would he go mad?
At tea Rezia told him that Mrs. Filmer’s daughter was
expecting a baby. She could not grow old and have no children!
She was very lonely, she was very unhappy! She cried for the
first time since they were married. Far away he heard her
sobbing; he heard it accurately, he noticed it distinctly; he
compared it to a piston thumping. But he felt nothing.
 His wife was crying, and he felt nothing; only each time she
sobbed in this profound, this silent, this hopeless way, he
descended another step into the pit.
At last, with a melodramatic gesture which he assumed
mechanically and with complete consciousness of its insincerity,
he dropped his head on his hands. Now he had surrendered; now
other people must help him. People must be sent for. He gave in.
Nothing could rouse him. Rezia put him to bed. She sent for a
doctor—Mrs. Filmer’s Dr. Holmes. Dr. Holmes examined him.
There was nothing whatever the matter, said Dr. Holmes. Oh,
what a relief! What a kind man, what a good man! thought Rezia.
When he felt like that he went to the Music Hall, said
Dr. Holmes. He took a day off with his wife and played golf. Why
not try two tabloids of bromide dissolved in a glass of water at
bedtime? These old Bloomsbury houses, said Dr. Holmes, tapping
the wall, are often full of very fine panelling, which the
landlords have the folly to paper over. Only the other day,
visiting a patient, Sir Somebody Something in Bedford Square—
So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except
the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death;
that he did not feel. He had not cared when Evans was killed;
that was worst; but all the other crimes raised their heads and
shook their fingers and jeered and sneered over the rail of the
bed in the early hours of the morning at the prostrate body
which lay realising its degradation; how he had married his wife
without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her; outraged Miss
Isabel Pole, and was so pocked and marked with vice that women
shuddered when they saw him in the street. The verdict of
human nature on such a wretch was death.
Dr. Holmes came again. Large, fresh coloured, handsome,
flicking his boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside—
headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams—nerve symptoms and
nothing more, he said. If Dr. Holmes found himself even half a
pound below eleven stone six, he asked his wife for another plate
of porridge at breakfast. (Rezia would learn to cook porridge.)
But, he continued, health is largely a matter in our own control.
Throw yourself into outside interests; take up some hobby. He
opened Shakespeare-Antony and Cleopatra; pushed Shakespeare
aside. Some hobby, said Dr. Holmes, for did he not owe his own
excellent health (and he worked as hard as any man in London)
to the fact that he could always switch off from his patients on to
old furniture? And what a very pretty comb, if he might say so,
Mrs. Warren Smith was wearing!
When the damned fool came again, Septimus refused to see
him. Did he indeed? said Dr. Holmes, smiling agreeably. Really
he had to give that charming little lady, Mrs. Smith, a friendly
push before he could get past her into her husband's bedroom.
"So you're in a funk, " he said agreeably, sitting down by his
patient's side. He had actually talked of killing himself to his
wife, quite a girl, a foreigner, wasn't she? Didn't that give her a
very odd idea of English husbands? Didn't one owe perhaps a
duty to one's wife? Wouldn't it be better to do something instead
of lying in bed? For he had had forty years' experience behind
him; and Septimus could take Dr. Holmes's word for it-there was
nothing whatever the matter with him. And next time
Dr. Holmes came he hoped to find Smith out of bed and not
making that charming little lady his wife anxious about him.
Human nature , in short, was on him-the repulsive brute, with
the blood- red nostrils. Holmes was on him. Dr. Holmes came
quite regularly every day. Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on
the back of a postcard, human nature is on you. Holmes is on you.
Their only chance was to escape, without letting Holmes know; to
Italy-anywhere , anywhere , away from Dr. Holmes.
 But Rezia could not understand him. Dr. Holmes was such a
kind man. He was so interested in Septimus. He only wanted to
help them, he said. He had four little children and he had asked
her to tea, she told Septimus.
So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill
yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill
himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this
killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife,
uglily, with floods of blood—by sucking a gaspipe? He was too
weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was
quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die
are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity;
a freedom which the attached can never know. Holmes had won
of course; the brute with the red nostrils had won. But even
Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the
edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited
regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.
It was at that moment (Rezia gone shopping) that the great
revelation took place. A voice spoke from behind the screen.
Evans was speaking. The dead were with him.
“Evans, Evans!” he cried.
Mr. Smith was talking aloud to himself, Agnes the servant girl
cried to Mrs. Filmer in the kitchen. “Evans, Evans,” he had said as
she brought in the tray. She jumped, she did. She scuttled
downstairs.
And Rezia came in, with her flowers, and walked across the
room, and put the roses in a vase, upon which the sun struck
directly, and it went laughing, leaping round the room.
She had had to buy the roses, Rezia said, from a poor man in
the street. But they were almost dead already, she said,
arranging the roses.
 So there was a man outside; Evans presumably; and the roses,
which Rezia said were half dead, had been picked by him in the
fields of Greece . “Communication is health; communication is
happiness, communication-" he muttered.
"What are you saying, Septimus?" Rezia asked, wild with
terror, for he was talking to himself.
She sent Agnes running for Dr. Holmes. Her husband, she said,
was mad. He scarcely knew her .
"You brute! You brute! " cried Septimus, seeing human nature ,
that is Dr. Holmes, enter the room .

"Now what's all this about?" said Dr. Holmes in the most amiable
way in the world. “Talking nonsense to frighten your wife?" But
he would give him something to make him sleep. And if they
were rich people, said Dr. Holmes, looking ironically round the
room, by all means let them go to Harley Street; if they had no
confidence in him, said Dr. Holmes, looking not quite so kind.
It was precisely twelve o'clock; twelve by Big Ben; whose stroke
was wafted over the northern part of London; blent with that of
other clocks, mixed in a thin ethereal way with the clouds and
wisps of smoke, and died up there among the seagulls-twelve
o'clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway laid her green dress on her
bed, and the Warren Smiths walked down Harley Street . Twelve
was the hour of their appointment. Probably, Rezia thought, that
was Sir William Bradshaw's house with the grey motorcar in
front of it. The leaden circles dissolved in the air .

Indeed it was-Sir William Bradshaw's motorcar; low,

powerful, grey with plain initials interlocked on the panel, as if
the pomps of heraldry were incongruous, this man being the
ghostly helper, the priest of science; and, as the motorcar was
grey, so to match its sober suavity, grey furs, silver grey rugs
were heaped in it, to keep her ladyship warm while she waited.
For often Sir William would travel sixty miles or more down into
the country to visit the rich, the afflicted, who could afford the
very large fee which Sir William very properly charged for his
advice. Her ladyship waited with the rugs about her knees an
hour or more, leaning back, thinking sometimes of the patient,
sometimes, excusably, of the wall of gold, mounting minute by
minute while she waited; the wall of gold that was mounting
between them and all shifts and anxieties (she had borne them
bravely; they had had their struggles) until she felt wedged on a
calm ocean, where only spice winds blow; respected, admired,
envied, with scarcely anything left to wish for, though she
regretted her stoutness; large dinner-parties every Thursday
night to the profession; an occasional bazaar to be opened;
Royalty greeted; too little time, alas, with her husband, whose
work grew and grew; a boy doing well at Eton; she would have
liked a daughter too; interests she had, however, in plenty; child
welfare; the aftercare of the epileptic, and photography, so that
if there was a church building, or a church decaying, she bribed
the sexton, got the key and took photographs, which were
scarcely to be distinguished from the work of professionals, while
she waited.
Sir William himself was no longer young. He had worked very
hard; he had won his position by sheer ability (being the son of a
shopkeeper); loved his profession; made a fine figurehead at
ceremonies and spoke well—all of which had by the time he was
knighted given him a heavy look, a weary look (the stream of
patients being so incessant, the responsibilities and privileges of
his profession so onerous), which weariness, together with his
grey hairs, increased the extraordinary distinction of his
presence and gave him the reputation (of the utmost importance
in dealing with nerve cases) not merely of lightning skill, and
almost infallible accuracy in diagnosis but of sympathy; tact;
understanding of the human soul. He could see the first moment
they came into the room (the Warren Smiths they were called);
he was certain directly he saw the man; it was a case of extreme
gravity. It was a case of complete breakdown-complete physical
and nervous breakdown, with every symptom in an advanced
stage, he ascertained in two or three minutes (writing answers to
questions, murmured discreetly, on a pink card).
How long had Dr. Holmes been attending him?
Six weeks .

Prescribed a little bromide? Said there was nothing the

matter? Ah yes (those general practitioners! thought Sir
William. It took half his time to undo their blunders. Some were
irreparable).
"You served with great distinction in the War?"
The patient repeated the word "war" interrogatively.
He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A
serious symptom, to be noted on the card.
"The War? " the patient asked. The European War-that little
shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder? Had he served with
distinction? He really forgot. In the War itself he had failed.
"Yes, he served with the greatest distinction," Rezia assured
the doctor; "he was promoted."
"And they have the very highest opinion of you at your
office?" Sir William murmured, glancing at Mr. Brewer's very
generously worded letter. "So that you have nothing to worry
you, no financial anxiety, nothing?"
He had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to
death by human nature .
"I have-I have," he began, " committed a crime-"
"He has done nothing wrong whatever, " Rezia assured the
doctor. If Mr. Smith would wait, said Sir William, he would speak
to Mrs. Smith in the next room. Her husband was very seriously
ill, Sir William said. Did he threaten to kill himself?
Oh, he did, she cried. But he did not mean it, she said. Of
course not. It was merely a question of rest, said Sir William; of
rest, rest, rest; a long rest in bed. There was a delightful home
down in the country where her husband would be perfectly
looked after. Away from her? she asked. Unfortunately, yes; the
people we care for most are not good for us when we are ill. But
he was not mad, was he? Sir William said he never spoke of
“madness”; he called it not having a sense of proportion. But her
husband did not like doctors. He would refuse to go there.
Shortly and kindly Sir William explained to her the state of the
case. He had threatened to kill himself. There was no
alternative. It was a question of law. He would lie in bed in a
beautiful house in the country. The nurses were admirable. Sir
William would visit him once a week. If Mrs. Warren Smith was
quite sure she had no more questions to ask—he never hurried
his patients—they would return to her husband. She had nothing
more to ask—not of Sir William.
So they returned to the most exalted of mankind; the criminal
who faced his judges; the victim exposed on the heights; the
fugitive; the drowned sailor; the poet of the immortal ode; the
Lord who had gone from life to death; to Septimus Warren
Smith, who sat in the armchair under the skylight staring at a
photograph of Lady Bradshaw in Court dress, muttering
messages about beauty.
“We have had our little talk,” said Sir William.
“He says you are very, very ill,” Rezia cried.
“We have been arranging that you should go into a home,”
said Sir William.
“One of Holmes’s homes?” sneered Septimus.
 The fellow made a distasteful impression. For there was in Sir
William, whose father had been a tradesman, a natural respect
for breeding and clothing, which shabbiness nettled; again, more
profoundly, there was in Sir William, who had never had time
for reading, a grudge, deeply buried, against cultivated people
who came into his room and intimated that doctors, whose
profession is a constant strain upon all the highest faculties, are
not educated men.
"One of my homes, Mr. Warren Smith," he said, "where we will
teach you to rest."
And there was just one thing more .
He was quite certain that when Mr. Warren Smith was well he
was the last man in the world to frighten his wife . But he had
talked of killing himself.
"We all have our moments of depression," said Sir William.
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is
on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert.
They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the
thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.
"Impulses came upon him sometimes?" Sir William asked, with
his pencil on a pink card .
That was his own affair, said Septimus.
"Nobody lives for himself alone," said Sir William, glancing at
the photograph of his wife in Court dress.
"And you have a brilliant career before you, " said Sir William.
There was Mr. Brewer's letter on the table. "An exceptionally
brilliant career . "
But if he confessed? If he communicated? Would they let him
off then, his torturers?
“I-I-" he stammered .
But what was his crime? He could not remember it .
"Yes?" Sir William encouraged him. (But it was growing late.)
 Love, trees, there is no crime -what was his message?
He could not remember it .
"I-I- " Septimus stammered .
"Try to think as little about yourself as possible, " said Sir
William kindly. Really, he was not fit to be about.
Was there anything else they wished to ask him? Sir William
would make all arrangements (he murmured to Rezia) and he
would let her know between five and six that evening he
murmured .

"Trust everything to me, " he said, and dismissed them.

Never, never had Rezia felt such agony in her life! She had
asked for help and been deserted! He had failed them! Sir
William Bradshaw was not a nice man.
The upkeep of that motorcar alone must cost him quite a lot,
said Septimus, when they got out into the street .
She clung to his arm. They had been deserted.
But what more did she want?

To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in

this exacting science which has to do with what, after all, we
know nothing about the nervous system, the human brain-a
doctor loses his sense of proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health
we must have; and health is proportion; so that when a man
comes into your room and says he is Christ (a common delusion),
and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they
often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in
bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends,
without books, without messages; six months' rest; until a man
who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve .
Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William's goddess, was
acquired by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon,
begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who
caught salmon herself and took photographs scarcely to be
distinguished from the work of professionals. Worshipping
proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made
England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth,
penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate
their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if
they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women (she
embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home
with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him, his
subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his
patients felt for him the keenest gratitude for insisting that
these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end
of the world, or the advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as
Sir William ordered; Sir William with his thirty years’
experience of these kinds of cases, and his infallible instinct, this
is madness, this sense; in fact, his sense of proportion.
But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a
Goddess even now engaged—in the heat and sands of India, the
mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in
short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true
belief which is her own—is even now engaged in dashing down
shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own
stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on the
wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own
features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde Park
Corner on a tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white
and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through
factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites
out of her way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows
her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively
from her eyes the light of their own. This lady too (Rezia Warren
Smith divined it) had her dwelling in Sir William’s heart, though
concealed, as she mostly is, under some plausible disguise; some
venerable name; love, duty, self sacrifice. How he would work—
how toil to raise funds, propagate reforms, initiate institutions!
But conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick,
and feasts most subtly on the human will. For example, Lady
Bradshaw. Fifteen years ago she had gone under. It was nothing
you could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap;
only the slow sinking, waterlogged, of her will into his. Sweet was
her smile, swift her submission; dinner in Harley Street,
numbering eight or nine courses, feeding ten or fifteen guests of
the professional classes, was smooth and urbane. Only as the
evening wore on a very slight dullness, or uneasiness perhaps, a
nervous twitch, fumble, stumble and confusion indicated, what it
was really painful to believe—that the poor lady lied. Once, long
ago, she had caught salmon freely: now, quick to minister to the
craving which lit her husband’s eye so oilily for dominion, for
power, she cramped, squeezed, pared, pruned, drew back,
peeped through; so that without knowing precisely what made
the evening disagreeable, and caused this pressure on the top of
the head (which might well be imputed to the professional
conversation, or the fatigue of a great doctor whose life, Lady
Bradshaw said, “is not his own but his patients’”) disagreeable it
was: so that guests, when the clock struck ten, breathed in the air
of Harley Street even with rapture; which relief, however, was
denied to his patients.
There in the grey room, with the pictures on the wall, and the
valuable furniture, under the ground glass skylight, they learnt
the extent of their transgressions; huddled up in armchairs, they
watched him go through, for their benefit, a curious exercise
with the arms, which he shot out, brought sharply back to his
hip, to prove (if the patient was obstinate) that Sir William was
master of his own actions, which the patient was not. There some
weakly broke down; sobbed, submitted; others, inspired by
Heaven knows what intemperate madness, called Sir William to
his face a damnable humbug; questioned, even more impiously,
life itself. Why live? they demanded. Sir William replied that life
was good. Certainly Lady Bradshaw in ostrich feathers hung over
the mantelpiece, and as for his income it was quite twelve
thousand a year. But to us, they protested, life has given no such
bounty. He acquiesced. They lacked a sense of proportion. And
perhaps, after all, there is no God? He shrugged his shoulders. In
short, this living or not living is an affair of our own? But there
they were mistaken. Sir William had a friend in Surrey where
they taught, what Sir William frankly admitted was a difficult
art—a sense of proportion. There were, moreover, family
affection; honour; courage; and a brilliant career. All of these
had in Sir William a resolute champion. If they failed him, he
had to support police and the good of society, which, he
remarked very quietly, would take care, down in Surrey, that
these unsocial impulses, bred more than anything by the lack of
good blood, were held in control. And then stole out from her
hiding-place and mounted her throne that Goddess whose lust is
to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of
others the image of herself. Naked, defenceless, the exhausted,
the friendless received the impress of Sir William’s will. He
swooped; he devoured. He shut people up. It was this
combination of decision and humanity that endeared Sir William
so greatly to the relations of his victims.
But Rezia Warren Smith cried, walking down Harley Street,
that she did not like that man.
Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of
Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission,
upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme
advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was
so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a
shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if
it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the
information gratis, that it was half-past one.
Looking up, it appeared that each letter of their names stood
for one of the hours; subconsciously one was grateful to Rigby
and Lowndes for giving one time ratified by Greenwich; and this
gratitude (so Hugh Whitbread ruminated, dallying there in front
of the shop window) naturally took the form later of buying off
Rigby and Lowndes socks or shoes. So he ruminated. It was his
habit. He did not go deeply. He brushed surfaces; the dead
languages, the living, life in Constantinople, Paris, Rome; riding,
shooting, tennis, it had been once. The malicious asserted that he
now kept guard at Buckingham Palace, dressed in silk stockings
and knee-breeches, over what nobody knew. But he did it
extremely efficiently. He had been afloat on the cream of English
society for fifty-five years. He had known Prime Ministers. His
affections were understood to be deep. And if it were true that
he had not taken part in any of the great movements of the time
or held important office, one or two humble reforms stood to his
credit; an improvement in public shelters was one; the
protection of owls in Norfolk another; servant girls had reason to
be grateful to him; and his name at the end of letters to the
Times, asking for funds, appealing to the public to protect, to
preserve, to clear up litter, to abate smoke, and stamp out
immorality in parks, commanded respect.
A magnificent figure he cut too, pausing for a moment (as the
sound of the half-hour died away) to look critically,
magisterially, at socks and shoes; impeccable, substantial, as if he
beheld the world from a certain eminence, and dressed to match;
but realised the obligations which size, wealth, health, entail,
and observed punctiliously even when not absolutely necessary,
little courtesies, old-fashioned ceremonies which gave a quality
to his manner, something to imitate, something to remember
him by, for he would never lunch, for example, with Lady Bruton,
whom he had known these twenty years, without bringing her in
his outstretched hand a bunch of carnations and asking Miss
Brush, Lady Bruton's secretary, after her brother in South Africa,
which, for some reason, Miss Brush, deficient though she was in
every attribute of female charm, so much resented that she said
"Thank you, he's doing very well in South Africa," when, for half
a dozen years, he had been doing badly in Portsmouth.
Lady Bruton herself preferred Richard Dalloway, who arrived
at the next moment. Indeed they met on the doorstep .
Lady Bruton preferred Richard Dalloway of course. He was
made of much finer material . But she wouldn't let them run
down her poor dear Hugh. She could never forget his kindness-
he had been really remarkably kind-she forgot precisely upon
what occasion. But he had been-remarkably kind. Anyhow, the
difference between one man and another does not amount to
much. She had never seen the sense of cutting people up, as
Clarissa Dalloway did-cutting them up and sticking them
together again; not at any rate when one was sixty-two. She took
Hugh's carnations with her angular grim smile. There was
nobody else coming, she said. She had got them there on false
pretences, to help her out of a difficulty-
"But let us eat first, " she said .
And so there began a soundless and exquisite passing to and
fro through swing doors of aproned white-capped maids,
handmaidens not of necessity, but adepts in a mystery or grand
deception practised by hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty to
two, when, with a wave of the hand, the traffic ceases, and there
rises instead this profound illusion in the first place about the
food-how it is not paid for; and then that the table spreads itself
voluntarily with glass and silver, little mats, saucers of red fruit;
films of brown cream mask turbot; in casseroles severed chickens
swim; coloured, undomestic, the fire burns; and with the wine
and the coffee (not paid for) rise jocund visions before musing
eyes; gently speculative eyes; eyes to whom life appears musical,
mysterious; eyes now kindled to observe genially the beauty of
the red carnations which Lady Bruton (whose movements were
always angular) had laid beside her plate, so that Hugh
Whitbread, feeling at peace with the entire universe and at the
same time completely sure of his standing, said, resting his fork,
“Wouldn’t they look charming against your lace?”
Miss Brush resented this familiarity intensely. She thought
him an underbred fellow. She made Lady Bruton laugh.
Lady Bruton raised the carnations, holding them rather stiffly
with much the same attitude with which the General held the
scroll in the picture behind her; she remained fixed, tranced.
Which was she now, the General’s great-granddaughter? great-
great-granddaughter? Richard Dalloway asked himself. Sir
Roderick, Sir Miles, Sir Talbot—that was it. It was remarkable
how in that family the likeness persisted in the women. She
should have been a general of dragoons herself. And Richard
would have served under her, cheerfully; he had the greatest
respect for her; he cherished these romantic views about well-
set-up old women of pedigree, and would have liked, in his good-
humoured way, to bring some young hotheads of his
acquaintance to lunch with her; as if a type like hers could be
bred of amiable tea-drinking enthusiasts! He knew her country.
He knew her people. There was a vine, still bearing, which either
Lovelace or Herrick—she never read a word poetry of herself, but
so the story ran—had sat under. Better wait to put before them
the question that bothered her (about making an appeal to the
public; if so, in what terms and so on), better wait until they have
had their coffee, Lady Bruton thought; and so laid the carnations
down beside her plate.
“How’s Clarissa?” she asked abruptly.
Clarissa always said that Lady Bruton did not like her. Indeed,
Lady Bruton had the reputation of being more interested in
politics than people; of talking like a man; of having had a finger
in some notorious intrigue of the eighties, which was now
beginning to be mentioned in memoirs. Certainly there was an
alcove in her drawing-room, and a table in that alcove, and a
photograph upon that table of General Sir Talbot Moore, now
deceased, who had written there (one evening in the eighties) in
Lady Bruton’s presence, with her cognisance, perhaps advice, a
telegram ordering the British troops to advance upon an
historical occasion. (She kept the pen and told the story.) Thus,
when she said in her offhand way “How’s Clarissa?” husbands had
difficulty in persuading their wives and indeed, however
devoted, were secretly doubtful themselves, of her interest in
women who often got in their husbands’ way, prevented them
from accepting posts abroad, and had to be taken to the seaside
in the middle of the session to recover from influenza.
Nevertheless her inquiry, “How’s Clarissa?” was known by women
infallibly to be a signal from a well-wisher, from an almost silent
companion, whose utterances (half a dozen perhaps in the course
of a lifetime) signified recognition of some feminine comradeship
which went beneath masculine lunch parties and united Lady
Bruton and Mrs. Dalloway, who seldom met, and appeared when
they did meet indifferent and even hostile, in a singular bond.
“I met Clarissa in the Park this morning,” said Hugh
Whitbread, diving into the casserole, anxious to pay himself this
little tribute, for he had only to come to London and he met
everybody at once; but greedy, one of the greediest men she had
ever known, Milly Brush thought, who observed men with
unflinching rectitude, and was capable of everlasting devotion,
to her own sex in particular, being knobbed, scraped, angular,
and entirely without feminine charm.
"D'you know who's in town?" said Lady Bruton suddenly
bethinking her. "Our old friend, Peter Walsh. "
They all smiled. Peter Walsh! And Mr. Dalloway was genuinely
glad, Milly Brush thought; and Mr. Whitbread thought only of his
chicken.

Peter Walsh! All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and

Richard Dalloway, remembered the same thing-how
passionately Peter had been in love; been rejected; gone to India;
come a cropper; made a mess of things; and Richard Dalloway
had a very great liking for the dear old fellow too. Milly Brush
saw that; saw a depth in the brown of his eyes; saw him hesitate;
consider; which interested her, as Mr. Dalloway always
interested her, for what was he thinking, she wondered, about
Peter Walsh?
That Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa; that he would
go back directly after lunch and find Clarissa; that he would tell
her, in so many words, that he loved her. Yes, he would say that.
Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these
silences; and Mr. Dalloway was always so dependable; such a
gentleman too. Now, being forty, Lady Bruton had only to nod, or
turn her head a little abruptly, and Milly Brush took the signal,
however deeply she might be sunk in these reflections of a
detached spirit, of an uncorrupted soul whom life could not
bamboozle, because life had not offered her a trinket of the
slightest value; not a curl, smile, lip, cheek, nose; nothing
whatever; Lady Bruton had only to nod, and Perkins was
instructed to quicken the coffee.
"Yes; Peter Walsh has come back, " said Lady Bruton. It was
vaguely flattering to them all. He had come back, battered,
unsuccessful, to their secure shores. But to help him, they
reflected, was impossible; there was some flaw in his character.
Hugh Whitbread said one might of course mention his name to
So-and-so. He wrinkled lugubriously, consequentially, at the
thought of the letters he would write to the heads of Government
offices about “my old friend, Peter Walsh,” and so on. But it
wouldn’t lead to anything—not to anything permanent, because
of his character.
“In trouble with some woman,” said Lady Bruton. They had all
guessed that that was at the bottom of it.
“However,” said Lady Bruton, anxious to leave the subject, “we
shall hear the whole story from Peter himself.”
(The coffee was very slow in coming.)
“The address?” murmured Hugh Whitbread; and there was at
once a ripple in the grey tide of service which washed round
Lady Bruton day in, day out, collecting, intercepting, enveloping
her in a fine tissue which broke concussions, mitigated
interruptions, and spread round the house in Brook Street a fine
net where things lodged and were picked out accurately,
instantly, by grey-haired Perkins, who had been with Lady
Bruton these thirty years and now wrote down the address;
handed it to Mr. Whitbread, who took out his pocketbook, raised
his eyebrows, and slipping it in among documents of the highest
importance, said that he would get Evelyn to ask him to lunch.
(They were waiting to bring the coffee until Mr. Whitbread
had finished.)
Hugh was very slow, Lady Bruton thought. He was getting fat,
she noticed. Richard always kept himself in the pink of condition.
She was getting impatient; the whole of her being was setting
positively, undeniably, domineeringly brushing aside all this
unnecessary trifling (Peter Walsh and his affairs) upon that
subject which engaged her attention, and not merely her
attention, but that fibre which was the ramrod of her soul, that
essential part of her without which Millicent Bruton would not
have been Millicent Bruton; that project for emigrating young
people of both sexes born of respectable parents and setting
them up with a fair prospect of doing well in Canada. She
exaggerated. She had perhaps lost her sense of proportion.
Emigration was not to others the obvious remedy, the sublime
conception. It was not to them (not to Hugh, or Richard, or even
to devoted Miss Brush) the liberator of the pent egotism, which a
strong martial woman, well nourished, well descended, of direct
impulses, downright feelings, and little introspective power
(broad and simple—why could not everyone be broad and
simple? she asked) feels rise within her, once youth is past, and
must eject upon some object—it may be Emigration, it may be
Emancipation; but whatever it be, this object round which the
essence of her soul is daily secreted, becomes inevitably
prismatic, lustrous, half looking-glass, half precious stone; now
carefully hidden in case people should sneer at it; now proudly
displayed. Emigration had become, in short, largely Lady Bruton.
But she had to write. And one letter to the Times, she used to
say to Miss Brush, cost her more than to organise an expedition
to South Africa (which she had done in the war). After a
morning’s battle beginning, tearing up, beginning again, she
used to feel the futility of her own womanhood as she felt it on
no other occasion, and would turn gratefully to the thought of
Hugh Whitbread who possessed—no one could doubt it—the art
of writing letters to the Times.
A being so differently constituted from herself, with such a
command of language; able to put things as editors like them
put; had passions which one could not call simply greed. Lady
Bruton often suspended judgement upon men in deference to the
mysterious accord in which they, but no woman, stood to the
laws of the universe; knew how to put things; knew what was
said; so that if Richard advised her, and Hugh wrote for her, she
was sure of being somehow right. So she let Hugh eat his soufflé;
asked after poor Evelyn; waited until they were smoking, and
then said,
"Milly, would you fetch the papers?"
And Miss Brush went out, came back; laid papers on the table;
and Hugh produced his fountain pen; his silver fountain pen,
which had done twenty years' service, he said, unscrewing the
cap. It was still in perfect order; he had shown it to the makers;
there was no reason, they said, why it should ever wear out;
which was somehow to Hugh's credit, and to the credit of the
sentiments which his pen expressed (so Richard Dalloway felt) as
Hugh began carefully writing capital letters with rings round
them in the margin, and thus marvellously reduced Lady
Bruton's tangles to sense, to grammar such as the editor of the
Times, Lady Bruton felt, watching the marvellous transformation,
must respect . Hugh was slow. Hugh was pertinacious. Richard
said one must take risks. Hugh proposed modifications in
deference to people's feelings, which, he said rather tartly when
Richard laughed, "had to be considered," and read out “how,
therefore , we are of opinion that the times are ripe ... the
superfluous youth of our ever-increasing population... what we
owe to the dead ... " which Richard thought all stuffing and
bunkum, but no harm in it, of course, and Hugh went on drafting
sentiments in alphabetical order of the highest nobility,
brushing the cigar ash from his waistcoat, and summing up now
and then the progress they had made until, finally, he read out
the draft of a letter which Lady Bruton felt certain was a
masterpiece . Could her own meaning sound like that?
Hugh could not guarantee that the editor would put it in; but
he would be meeting somebody at luncheon.
 Whereupon Lady Bruton, who seldom did a graceful thing,
stuffed all Hugh's carnations into the front of her dress, and
flinging her hands out called him "My Prime Minister! " What she
would have done without them both she did not know. They rose .
And Richard Dalloway strolled off as usual to have a look at the
General's portrait, because he meant, whenever he had a
moment of leisure, to write a history of Lady Bruton's family.
And Millicent Bruton was very proud of her family. But they
could wait, they could wait, she said, looking at the picture;
meaning that her family, of military men, administrators,
admirals, had been men of action, who had done their duty; and
Richard's first duty was to his country, but it was a fine face , she
said; and all the papers were ready for Richard down at
Aldmixton whenever the time came; the Labour Government she
meant. "Ah, the news from India !" she cried.
And then, as they stood in the hall taking yellow gloves from
the bowl on the malachite table and Hugh was offering Miss
Brush with quite unnecessary courtesy some discarded ticket or
other compliment, which she loathed from the depths of her
heart and blushed brick red, Richard turned to Lady Bruton,
with his hat in his hand, and said,
"We shall see you at our party tonight?" whereupon Lady
Bruton resumed the magnificence which letter-writing had
shattered. She might come; or she might not come. Clarissa had
wonderful energy. Parties terrified Lady Bruton. But then, she
was getting old. So she intimated, standing at her doorway;
handsome; very erect; while her chow stretched behind her, and
Miss Brush disappeared into the background with her hands full
of papers.
And Lady Bruton went ponderously, majestically, up to her
room, lay, one arm extended, on the sofa. She sighed, she snored,
not that she was asleep , only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and
heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot June day,
with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies.
Always she went back to those fields down in Devonshire, where
she had jumped the brooks on Patty, her pony, with Mortimer
and Tom, her brothers. And there were the dogs; there were the
rats; there were her father and mother on the lawn under the
trees, with the tea-things out, and the beds of dahlias, the
hollyhocks, the pampas grass; and they, little wretches, always
up to some mischief! stealing back through the shrubbery, so as
not to be seen, all bedraggled from some roguery. What old
nurse used to say about her frocks!
Ah dear, she remembered—it was Wednesday in Brook Street.
Those kind good fellows, Richard Dalloway, Hugh Whitbread, had
gone this hot day through the streets whose growl came up to
her lying on the sofa. Power was hers, position, income. She had
lived in the forefront of her time. She had had good friends;
known the ablest men of her day. Murmuring London flowed up
to her, and her hand, lying on the sofa back, curled upon some
imaginary baton such as her grandfathers might have held,
holding which she seemed, drowsy and heavy, to be commanding
battalions marching to Canada, and those good fellows walking
across London, that territory of theirs, that little bit of carpet,
Mayfair.
And they went further and further from her, being attached to
her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which
would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they
walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached to one’s
body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she
dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the
hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted
with raindrops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept.
 And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread hesitated at the
corner of Conduit Street at the very moment that Millicent
Bruton, lying on the sofa, let the thread snap; snored. Contrary
winds buffeted at the street corner. They looked in at a shop
window; they did not wish to buy or to talk but to part, only with
contrary winds buffeting the street corner, with some sort of
lapse in the tides of the body, two forces meeting in a swirl,
morning and afternoon, they paused. Some newspaper placard
went up in the air, gallantly, like a kite at first, then paused,
swooped, fluttered; and a lady’s veil hung. Yellow awnings
trembled. The speed of the morning traffic slackened, and single
carts rattled carelessly down half-empty streets. In Norfolk, of
which Richard Dalloway was half thinking, a soft warm wind blew
back the petals; confused the waters; ruffled the flowering
grasses. Haymakers, who had pitched beneath hedges to sleep
away the morning toil, parted curtains of green blades; moved
trembling globes of cow parsley to see the sky; the blue, the
steadfast, the blazing summer sky.
Aware that he was looking at a silver two-handled Jacobean
mug, and that Hugh Whitbread admired condescendingly with
airs of connoisseurship a Spanish necklace which he thought of
asking the price of in case Evelyn might like it—still Richard was
torpid; could not think or move. Life had thrown up this
wreckage; shop windows full of coloured paste, and one stood
stark with the lethargy of the old, stiff with the rigidity of the
old, looking in. Evelyn Whitbread might like to buy this Spanish
necklace—so she might. Yawn he must. Hugh was going into the
shop.
“Right you are!” said Richard, following.
Goodness knows he didn’t want to go buying necklaces with
Hugh. But there are tides in the body. Morning meets afternoon.
Borne like a frail shallop on deep, deep floods, Lady Bruton’s
great-grandfather and his memoir and his campaigns in North
America were whelmed and sunk. And Millicent Bruton too. She
went under. Richard didn’t care a straw what became of
Emigration; about that letter, whether the editor put it in or not.
The necklace hung stretched between Hugh’s admirable fingers.
Let him give it to a girl, if he must buy jewels—any girl, any girl
in the street. For the worthlessness of this life did strike Richard
pretty forcibly—buying necklaces for Evelyn. If he’d had a boy
he’d have said, Work, work. But he had his Elizabeth; he adored
his Elizabeth.
“I should like to see Mr. Dubonnet,” said Hugh in his curt
worldly way. It appeared that this Dubonnet had the
measurements of Mrs. Whitbread’s neck, or, more strangely still,
knew her views upon Spanish jewellery and the extent of her
possessions in that line (which Hugh could not remember). All of
which seemed to Richard Dalloway awfully odd. For he never
gave Clarissa presents, except a bracelet two or three years ago,
which had not been a success. She never wore it. It pained him to
remember that she never wore it. And as a single spider’s thread
after wavering here and there attaches itself to the point of a
leaf, so Richard’s mind, recovering from its lethargy, set now on
his wife, Clarissa, whom Peter Walsh had loved so passionately;
and Richard had had a sudden vision of her there at luncheon; of
himself and Clarissa; of their life together; and he drew the tray
of old jewels towards him, and taking up first this brooch then
that ring, “How much is that?” he asked, but doubted his own
taste. He wanted to open the drawing-room door and come in
holding out something; a present for Clarissa. Only what? But
Hugh was on his legs again. He was unspeakably pompous. Really,
after dealing here for thirty-five years he was not going to be
put off by a mere boy who did not know his business. For
Dubonnet, it seemed, was out, and Hugh would not buy anything
until Mr. Dubonnet chose to be in; at which the youth flushed
and bowed his correct little bow. It was all perfectly correct. And
yet Richard couldn’t have said that to save his life! Why these
people stood that damned insolence he could not conceive. Hugh
was becoming an intolerable ass. Richard Dalloway could not
stand more than an hour of his society. And, flicking his bowler
hat by way of farewell, Richard turned at the corner of Conduit
Street eager, yes, very eager, to travel that spider’s thread of
attachment between himself and Clarissa; he would go straight
to her, in Westminster.
But he wanted to come in holding something. Flowers? Yes,
flowers, since he did not trust his taste in gold; any number of
flowers, roses, orchids, to celebrate what was, reckoning things as
you will, an event; this feeling about her when they spoke of
Peter Walsh at luncheon; and they never spoke of it; not for
years had they spoken of it; which, he thought, grasping his red
and white roses together (a vast bunch in tissue paper), is the
greatest mistake in the world. The time comes when it can’t be
said; one’s too shy to say it, he thought, pocketing his sixpence or
two of change, setting off with his great bunch held against his
body to Westminster to say straight out in so many words
(whatever she might think of him), holding out his flowers, “I
love you.” Why not? Really it was a miracle thinking of the war,
and thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them,
shovelled together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle. Here
he was walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words
that he loved her. Which one never does say, he thought. Partly
one’s lazy; partly one’s shy. And Clarissa—it was difficult to think
of her; except in starts, as at luncheon, when he saw her quite
distinctly; their whole life. He stopped at the crossing; and
repeated—being simple by nature, and undebauched, because he
had tramped, and shot; being pertinacious and dogged, having
championed the downtrodden and followed his instincts in the
House of Commons; being preserved in his simplicity yet at the
same time grown rather speechless, rather stiff—he repeated
that it was a miracle that he should have married Clarissa; a
miracle—his life had been a miracle, he thought; hesitating to
cross. But it did make his blood boil to see little creatures of five
or six crossing Piccadilly alone. The police ought to have stopped
the traffic at once. He had no illusions about the London police.
Indeed, he was collecting evidence of their malpractices; and
those costermongers, not allowed to stand their barrows in the
streets; and prostitutes, good Lord, the fault wasn’t in them, nor
in young men either, but in our detestable social system and so
forth; all of which he considered, could be seen considering,
grey, dogged, dapper, clean, as he walked across the Park to tell
his wife that he loved her.
For he would say it in so many words, when he came into the
room. Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels,
he thought, crossing the Green Park and observing with pleasure
how in the shade of the trees whole families, poor families, were
sprawling; children kicking up their legs; sucking milk; paper
bags thrown about, which could easily be picked up (if people
objected) by one of those fat gentlemen in livery; for he was of
opinion that every park, and every square, during the summer
months should be open to children (the grass of the park flushed
and faded, lighting up the poor mothers of Westminster and
their crawling babies, as if a yellow lamp were moved beneath).
But what could be done for female vagrants like that poor
creature, stretched on her elbow (as if she had flung herself on
the earth, rid of all ties, to observe curiously, to speculate boldly,
to consider the whys and the wherefores, impudent, loose-
lipped, humorous), he did not know. Bearing his flowers like a
weapon, Richard Dalloway approached her; intent he passed her;
still there was time for a spark between them—she laughed at
the sight of him, he smiled good-humouredly, considering the
problem of the female vagrant; not that they would ever speak.
But he would tell Clarissa that he loved her, in so many words.
He had, once upon a time, been jealous of Peter Walsh; jealous of
him and Clarissa. But she had often said to him that she had been
right not to marry Peter Walsh; which, knowing Clarissa, was
obviously true; she wanted support. Not that she was weak; but
she wanted support.
As for Buckingham Palace (like an old prima donna facing the
audience all in white) you can’t deny it a certain dignity, he
considered, nor despise what does, after all, stand to millions of
people (a little crowd was waiting at the gate to see the King
drive out) for a symbol, absurd though it is; a child with a box of
bricks could have done better, he thought; looking at the
memorial to Queen Victoria (whom he could remember in her
horn spectacles driving through Kensington), its white mound,
its billowing motherliness; but he liked being ruled by the
descendant of Horsa; he liked continuity; and the sense of
handing on the traditions of the past. It was a great age in which
to have lived. Indeed, his own life was a miracle; let him make no
mistake about it; here he was, in the prime of life, walking to his
house in Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her.
Happiness is this, he thought.
It is this, he said, as he entered Dean’s Yard. Big Ben was
beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour,
irrevocable. Lunch parties waste the entire afternoon, he
thought, approaching his door.
The sound of Big Ben flooded Clarissa’s drawing-room, where
she sat, ever so annoyed, at her writing-table; worried; annoyed.
It was perfectly true that she had not asked Ellie Henderson to
her party; but she had done it on purpose. Now Mrs. Marsham
wrote " she had told Ellie Henderson she would ask Clarissa-Ellie
so much wanted to come ."
But why should she invite all the dull women in London to her
parties ? Why should Mrs. Marsham interfere? And there was
Elizabeth closeted all this time with Doris Kilman. Anything
more nauseating she could not conceive . Prayer at this hour with
that woman. And the sound of the bell flooded the room with its
melancholy wave; which receded, and gathered itself together to
fall once more, when she heard, distractingly, something
fumbling, something scratching at the door. Who at this hour?
Three, good Heavens! Three already! For with overpowering
directness and dignity the clock struck three; and she heard
nothing else; but the door handle slipped round and in came
Richard! What a surprise ! In came Richard, holding out flowers.
She had failed him, once at Constantinople; and Lady Bruton,
whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing,
had not asked her. He was holding out flowers-roses, red and
white roses. (But he could not bring himself to say he loved her;
not in so many words.)
But how lovely, she said, taking his flowers. She understood;
she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa. She put them
in vases on the mantelpiece. How lovely they looked! she said.
And was it amusing, she asked? Had Lady Bruton asked after her?
Peter Walsh was back. Mrs. Marsham had written. Must she ask
Ellie Henderson? That woman Kilman was upstairs.
"But let us sit down for five minutes, " said Richard.
It all looked so empty. All the chairs were against the wall.
What had they been doing? Oh, it was for the party; no, he had
not forgotten the party. Peter Walsh was back. Oh yes; she had
had him. And he was going to get a divorce; and he was in love
with some woman out there. And he hadn't changed in the
slightest . There she was, mending her dress....
 "Thinking of Bourton," she said.
"Hugh was at lunch," said Richard. She had met him too! Well,
he was getting absolutely intolerable . Buying Evelyn necklaces;
fatter than ever; an intolerable ass .
"And it came over me 'I might have married you, " she said,
thinking of Peter sitting there in his little bow-tie; with that
knife, opening it, shutting it. "Just as he always was, you know."
They were talking about him at lunch, said Richard. (But he
could not tell her he loved her. He held her hand. Happiness is
this, he thought.) They had been writing a letter to the Times for
Millicent Bruton. That was about all Hugh was fit for .
"And our dear Miss Kilman?" he asked. Clarissa thought the
roses absolutely lovely; first bunched together; now of their own
accord starting apart .
"Kilman arrives just as we've done lunch," she said. “Elizabeth
turns pink. They shut themselves up. I suppose they're praying."
Lord! He didn't like it; but these things pass over if you let
them.

"In a mackintosh with an umbrella," said Clarissa.

He had not said "I love you"; but he held her hand. Happiness
is this, is this, he thought .
"But why should I ask all the dull women in London to my
parties?" said Clarissa. And if Mrs. Marsham gave a party, did she
invite her guests?
"Poor Ellie Henderson, " said Richard-it was a very odd thing
how much Clarissa minded about her parties, he thought .
But Richard had no notion of the look of a room. However-
what was he going to say?
If she worried about these parties he would not let her give
them. Did she wish she had married Peter? But he must go.
He must be off, he said, getting up. But he stood for a moment
as if he were about to say something; and she wondered what?
Why? There were the roses.
"Some Committee ?" she asked, as he opened the door .
"Armenians, " he said; or perhaps it was "Albanians."
And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between
husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought
Clarissa, watching him open the door; for one would not part
with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one's husband,
without losing one's independence, one's self-respect-
something, after all, priceless.
He returned with a pillow and a quilt.
"An hour's complete rest after luncheon," he said. And he
went .

How like him! He would go on saying "An hour's complete rest

after luncheon" to the end of time, because a doctor had ordered
it once . It was like him to take what doctors said literally; part of
his adorable, divine simplicity, which no one had to the same
extent; which made him go and do the thing while she and Peter
frittered their time away bickering. He was already halfway to
the House of Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, having
settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses. And people would
say, " Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt." She cared much more for her
roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed,
frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard
Richard say so over and over again)-no, she could feel nothing
for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her
roses (didn't that help the Armenians?)-the only flowers she
could bear to see cut. But Richard was already at the House of
Commons; at his Committee, having settled all her difficulties.
But no ; alas, that was not true . He did not see the reasons against
asking Ellie Henderson. She would do it, of course, as he wished
it. Since he had brought the pillows, she would lie down.... But-
but-why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could
discover, desperately unhappy? As a person who has dropped
some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall
blades very carefully, this way and that, and searches here and
there vainly, and at last spies it there at the roots, so she went
through one thing and another; no, it was not Sally Seton saying
that Richard would never be in the Cabinet because he had a
second-class brain (it came back to her); no, she did not mind
that; nor was it to do with Elizabeth either and Doris Kilman;
those were facts. It was a feeling, some unpleasant feeling,
earlier in the day perhaps; something that Peter had said,
combined with some depression of her own, in her bedroom,
taking off her hat; and what Richard had said had added to it,
but what had he said? There were his roses. Her parties! That
was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very unfairly,
laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties. That was it! That
was it!
Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she knew
what it was, she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or Peter at
any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to
have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob,
in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard merely thought it
foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for
her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite
wrong. What she liked was simply life.
“That’s what I do it for,” she said, speaking aloud, to life.
Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the
presence of this thing which she felt to be so obvious became
physically existent; with robes of sound from the street, sunny,
with hot breath, whispering, blowing out the blinds. But suppose
Peter said to her, “Yes, yes, but your parties—what’s the sense of
your parties?” all she could say was (and nobody could be
expected to understand): They’re an offering; which sounded
horribly vague. But who was Peter to make out that life was all
plain sailing?-Peter always in love, always in love with the
wrong woman? What's your love? she might say to him. And she
knew his answer; how it is the most important thing in the world
and no woman possibly understood it. Very well. But could any
man understand what she meant either? about life? She could
not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party
for no reason whatever .

But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these

judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her
own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called
life? Oh, it was very queer . Here was So-and- so in South
Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in
Mayfair . And she felt quite continuously a sense of their
existence ; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and
she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And
it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was
her gift . Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could
not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians
and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked
oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator
was, and she did not know.
All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the
morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread;
then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough.
After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and
no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all;
how, every instant ...
The door opened. Elizabeth knew that her mother was resting.
She came in very quietly. She stood perfectly still. Was it that
some Mongol had been wrecked on the coast of Norfolk (as
Mrs. Hilbery said), had mixed with the Dalloway ladies, perhaps
a hundred years ago? For the Dalloways, in general, were fair-
haired; blue-eyed; Elizabeth, on the contrary, was dark; had
Chinese eyes in a pale face; an Oriental mystery; was gentle,
considerate, still. As a child, she had had a perfect sense of
humour; but now at seventeen, why, Clarissa could not in the
least understand, she had become very serious; like a hyacinth,
sheathed in glossy green, with buds just tinted, a hyacinth which
has had no sun.
She stood quite still and looked at her mother; but the door
was ajar, and outside the door was Miss Kilman, as Clarissa knew;
Miss Kilman in her mackintosh, listening to whatever they said.
Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a mackintosh;
but had her reasons. First, it was cheap; second, she was over
forty; and did not, after all, dress to please. She was poor,
moreover; degradingly poor. Otherwise she would not be taking
jobs from people like the Dalloways; from rich people, who liked
to be kind. Mr. Dalloway, to do him justice, had been kind. But
Mrs. Dalloway had not. She had been merely condescending. She
came from the most worthless of all classes—the rich, with a
smattering of culture. They had expensive things everywhere;
pictures, carpets, lots of servants. She considered that she had a
perfect right to anything that the Dalloways did for her.
She had been cheated. Yes, the word was no exaggeration, for
surely a girl has a right to some kind of happiness? And she had
never been happy, what with being so clumsy and so poor. And
then, just as she might have had a chance at Miss Dolby’s school,
the war came; and she had never been able to tell lies. Miss
Dolby thought she would be happier with people who shared her
views about the Germans. She had had to go. It was true that the
family was of German origin; spelt the name Kiehlman in the
eighteenth century; but her brother had been killed. They
turned her out because she would not pretend that the Germans
were all villains—when she had German friends, when the only
happy days of her life had been spent in Germany! And after all,
she could read history. She had had to take whatever she could
get. Mr. Dalloway had come across her working for the Friends.
He had allowed her (and that was really generous of him) to
teach his daughter history. Also she did a little Extension
lecturing and so on. Then Our Lord had come to her (and here
she always bowed her head). She had seen the light two years
and three months ago. Now she did not envy women like Clarissa
Dalloway; she pitied them.
She pitied and despised them from the bottom of her heart, as
she stood on the soft carpet, looking at the old engraving of a
little girl with a muff. With all this luxury going on, what hope
was there for a better state of things? Instead of lying on a
sofa—“My mother is resting,” Elizabeth had said—she should
have been in a factory; behind a counter; Mrs. Dalloway and all
the other fine ladies!
Bitter and burning, Miss Kilman had turned into a church two
years three months ago. She had heard the Rev. Edward
Whittaker preach; the boys sing; had seen the solemn lights
descend, and whether it was the music, or the voices (she herself
when alone in the evening found comfort in a violin; but the
sound was excruciating; she had no ear), the hot and turbulent
feelings which boiled and surged in her had been assuaged as she
sat there, and she had wept copiously, and gone to call on
Mr. Whittaker at his private house in Kensington. It was the
hand of God, he said. The Lord had shown her the way. So now,
whenever the hot and painful feelings boiled within her, this
hatred of Mrs. Dalloway, this grudge against the world, she
thought of God. She thought of Mr. Whittaker. Rage was
succeeded by calm. A sweet savour filled her veins, her lips
parted, and, standing formidable upon the landing in her
mackintosh, she looked with steady and sinister serenity at
Mrs. Dalloway, who came out with her daughter .
Elizabeth said she had forgotten her gloves. That was because
Miss Kilman and her mother hated each other. She could not
bear to see them together. She ran upstairs to find her gloves.
But Miss Kilman did not hate Mrs. Dalloway. Turning her large
gooseberry-coloured eyes upon Clarissa, observing her small
pink face, her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion,
Miss Kilman felt, Fool! Simpleton! You who have known neither
sorrow nor pleasure; who have trifled your life away! And there
rose in her an overmastering desire to overcome her; to unmask
her. If she could have felled her it would have eased her. But it
was not the body; it was the soul and its mockery that she wished
to subdue; make feel her mastery. If only she could make her
weep; could ruin her; humiliate her; bring her to her knees
crying, You are right! But this was God's will, not Miss Kilman's.
It was to be a religious victory. So she glared; so she glowered.
Clarissa was really shocked. This a Christian-this woman! This
woman had taken her daughter from her! She in touch with
invisible presences! Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without kindness
or grace, she know the meaning of life!
"You are taking Elizabeth to the Stores?" Mrs. Dalloway said.
Miss Kilman said she was. They stood there. Miss Kilman was
not going to make herself agreeable . She had always earned her
living. Her knowledge of modern history was thorough in the
extreme . She did, out of her meagre income, set aside so much
for causes she believed in; whereas this woman did nothing,
believed nothing; brought up her daughter-but here was
Elizabeth, rather out of breath, the beautiful girl.
 So they were going to the Stores. Odd it was, as Miss Kilman
stood there (and stand she did, with the power and taciturnity of
some prehistoric monster armoured for primeval warfare), how,
second by second, the idea of her diminished, how hatred (which
was for ideas, not people) crumbled, how she lost her malignity,
her size, became second by second merely Miss Kilman, in a
mackintosh, whom Heaven knows Clarissa would have liked to
help.
At this dwindling of the monster, Clarissa laughed. Saying
goodbye, she laughed.
Off they went together, Miss Kilman and Elizabeth, downstairs.
With a sudden impulse, with a violent anguish, for this woman
was taking her daughter from her, Clarissa leant over the
bannisters and cried out, “Remember the party! Remember our
party tonight!”
But Elizabeth had already opened the front door; there was a
van passing; she did not answer.
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the
drawing-room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable
they are! For now that the body of Miss Kilman was not before
her, it overwhelmed her—the idea. The cruellest things in the
world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot, domineering,
hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and
unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat, on the landing; love
and religion. Had she ever tried to convert anyone herself? Did
she not wish everybody merely to be themselves? And she
watched out of the window the old lady opposite climbing
upstairs. Let her climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop;
then let her, as Clarissa had often seen her, gain her bedroom,
part her curtains, and disappear again into the background.
Somehow one respected that—that old woman looking out of the
window, quite unconscious that she was being watched. There
was something solemn in it-but love and religion would destroy
that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul. The odious Kilman
would destroy it. Yet it was a sight that made her want to cry.
Love destroyed too. Everything that was fine, everything that
was true went. Take Peter Walsh now. There was a man,
charming, clever, with ideas about everything. If you wanted to
know about Pope, say, or Addison, or just to talk nonsense, what
people were like, what things meant, Peter knew better than
anyone . It was Peter who had helped her; Peter who had lent her
books. But look at the women he loved-vulgar, trivial,
commonplace . Think of Peter in love he came to see her after
all these years, and what did he talk about? Himself. Horrible
passion! she thought. Degrading passion! she thought, thinking of
Kilman and her Elizabeth walking to the Army and Navy Stores.
Big Ben struck the half-hour .
How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old
lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away
from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that
string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. Down,
down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell, making
the moment solemn. She was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by
that sound, to move, to go-but where? Clarissa tried to follow
her as she turned and disappeared, and could still just see her
white cap moving at the back of the bedroom. She was still there,
moving about at the other end of the room. Why creeds and
prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that's the
miracle, that's the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she
could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table. She
could still see her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman
might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but
Clarissa didn't believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of
solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did
religion solve that, or love?
Love—but here the other clock, the clock which always struck
two minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its lap full of
odds and ends, which it dumped down as if Big Ben were all very
well with his majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so just, but
she must remember all sorts of little things besides—
Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices—all sorts of little
things came flooding and lapping and dancing in on the wake of
that solemn stroke which lay flat like a bar of gold on the sea.
Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices. She must
telephone now at once.
Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on the
wake of Big Ben, with its lap full of trifles. Beaten up, broken up
by the assault of carriages, the brutality of vans, the eager
advance of myriads of angular men, of flaunting women, the
domes and spires of offices and hospitals, the last relics of this
lap full of odds and ends seemed to break, like the spray of an
exhausted wave, upon the body of Miss Kilman standing still in
the street for a moment to mutter “It is the flesh.”
It was the flesh that she must control. Clarissa Dalloway had
insulted her. That she expected. But she had not triumphed; she
had not mastered the flesh. Ugly, clumsy, Clarissa Dalloway had
laughed at her for being that; and had revived the fleshly
desires, for she minded looking as she did beside Clarissa. Nor
could she talk as she did. But why wish to resemble her? Why?
She despised Mrs. Dalloway from the bottom of her heart. She
was not serious. She was not good. Her life was a tissue of vanity
and deceit. Yet Doris Kilman had been overcome. She had, as a
matter of fact, very nearly burst into tears when Clarissa
Dalloway laughed at her. “It is the flesh, it is the flesh,” she
muttered (it being her habit to talk aloud), trying to subdue this
turbulent and painful feeling as she walked down Victoria
Street. She prayed to God. She could not help being ugly; she
could not afford to buy pretty clothes. Clarissa Dalloway had
laughed—but she would concentrate her mind upon something
else until she had reached the pillar-box. At any rate she had got
Elizabeth. But she would think of something else; she would think
of Russia; until she reached the pillar-box.
How nice it must be, she said, in the country, struggling, as
Mr. Whittaker had told her, with that violent grudge against the
world which had scorned her, sneered at her, cast her off,
beginning with this indignity—the infliction of her unlovable
body which people could not bear to see. Do her hair as she
might, her forehead remained like an egg, bald, white. No
clothes suited her. She might buy anything. And for a woman, of
course, that meant never meeting the opposite sex. Never would
she come first with anyone. Sometimes lately it had seemed to
her that, except for Elizabeth, her food was all that she lived for;
her comforts; her dinner, her tea; her hot-water bottle at night.
But one must fight; vanquish; have faith in God. Mr. Whittaker
had said she was there for a purpose. But no one knew the agony!
He said, pointing to the crucifix, that God knew. But why should
she have to suffer when other women, like Clarissa Dalloway,
escaped? Knowledge comes through suffering, said
Mr. Whittaker.
She had passed the pillar-box, and Elizabeth had turned into
the cool brown tobacco department of the Army and Navy Stores
while she was still muttering to herself what Mr. Whittaker had
said about knowledge coming through suffering and the flesh.
“The flesh,” she muttered.
What department did she want? Elizabeth interrupted her.
“Petticoats,” she said abruptly, and stalked straight on to the
lift.
 Up they went. Elizabeth guided her this way and that; guided
her in her abstraction as if she had been a great child, an
unwieldy battleship. There were the petticoats, brown, decorous,
striped, frivolous, solid, flimsy; and she chose, in her abstraction,
portentously, and the girl serving thought her mad.
Elizabeth rather wondered, as they did up the parcel, what
Miss Kilman was thinking. They must have their tea, said Miss
Kilman, rousing, collecting herself. They had their tea.
Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kilman could be
hungry. It was her way of eating, eating with intensity, then
looking, again and again, at a plate of sugared cakes on the table
next them; then, when a lady and a child sat down and the child
took the cake, could Miss Kilman really mind it? Yes, Miss Kilman
did mind it. She had wanted that cake—the pink one. The
pleasure of eating was almost the only pure pleasure left her,
and then to be baffled even in that!
When people are happy, they have a reserve, she had told
Elizabeth, upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel
without a tyre (she was fond of such metaphors), jolted by every
pebble, so she would say, staying on after the lesson, standing by
the fireplace with her bag of books, her “satchel,” she called it,
on a Tuesday morning, after the lesson was over. And she talked
too about the war. After all, there were people who did not think
the English invariably right. There were books. There were
meetings. There were other points of view. Would Elizabeth like
to come with her to listen to So-and-so (a most extraordinary
looking old man)? Then Miss Kilman took her to some church in
Kensington and they had tea with a clergyman. She had lent her
books. Law, medicine, politics, all professions are open to women
of your generation, said Miss Kilman. But for herself, her career
was absolutely ruined and was it her fault? Good gracious, said
Elizabeth, no.
 And her mother would come calling to say that a hamper had
come from Bourton and would Miss Kilman like some flowers? To
Miss Kilman she was always very, very nice, but Miss Kilman
squashed the flowers all in a bunch, and hadn’t any small talk,
and what interested Miss Kilman bored her mother, and Miss
Kilman and she were terrible together; and Miss Kilman swelled
and looked very plain. But then Miss Kilman was frightfully
clever. Elizabeth had never thought about the poor. They lived
with everything they wanted—her mother had breakfast in bed
every day; Lucy carried it up; and she liked old women because
they were Duchesses, and being descended from some Lord. But
Miss Kilman said (one of those Tuesday mornings when the lesson
was over), “My grandfather kept an oil and colour shop in
Kensington.” Miss Kilman was quite different from anyone she
knew; she made one feel so small.
Miss Kilman took another cup of tea. Elizabeth, with her
oriental bearing, her inscrutable mystery, sat perfectly upright;
no, she did not want anything more. She looked for her gloves—
her white gloves. They were under the table. Ah, but she must
not go! Miss Kilman could not let her go! this youth, that was so
beautiful, this girl, whom she genuinely loved! Her large hand
opened and shut on the table.
But perhaps it was a little flat somehow, Elizabeth felt. And
really she would like to go.
But said Miss Kilman, “I’ve not quite finished yet.”
Of course, then, Elizabeth would wait. But it was rather stuffy
in here.
“Are you going to the party tonight?” Miss Kilman said.
Elizabeth supposed she was going; her mother wanted her to go.
She must not let parties absorb her, Miss Kilman said, fingering
the last two inches of a chocolate éclair.
 She did not much like parties, Elizabeth said. Miss Kilman
opened her mouth, slightly projected her chin, and swallowed
down the last inches of the chocolate éclair, then wiped her
fingers, and washed the tea round in her cup .
She was about to split asunder, she felt. The agony was so
terrific. If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could
make her hers absolutely and forever and then die; that was all
she wanted. But to sit here, unable to think of anything to say; to
see Elizabeth turning against her; to be felt repulsive even by
her-it was too much; she could not stand it. The thick fingers
curled inwards .
"I never go to parties, " said Miss Kilman, just to keep Elizabeth
from going. "People don't ask me to parties"-and she knew as
she said it that it was this egotism that was her undoing;
Mr. Whittaker had warned her; but she could not help it. She
had suffered so horribly. "Why should they ask me?" she said.
"I'm plain, I'm unhappy." She knew it was idiotic. But it was all
those people passing-people with parcels who despised her-
who made her say it. However, she was Doris Kilman. She had her
degree. She was a woman who had made her way in the world.
Her knowledge of modern history was more than respectable .
"I don't pity myself," she said. "I pity"-she meant to say "your
mother " but no, she could not, not to Elizabeth. "I pity other
people much more ."
Like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate
for an unknown purpose, and stands there longing to gallop
away, Elizabeth Dalloway sat silent. Was Miss Kilman going to say
anything more?
"Don't quite forget me," said Doris Kilman; her voice quivered.
Right away to the end of the field the dumb creature galloped in
terror .

The great hand opened and shut.

 Elizabeth turned her head. The waitress came. One had to pay
at the desk, Elizabeth said, and went off, drawing out, so Miss
Kilman felt, the very entrails in her body, stretching them as she
crossed the room, and then, with a final twist, bowing her head
very politely, she went.
She had gone. Miss Kilman sat at the marble table among the
éclairs, stricken once, twice, thrice by shocks of suffering. She
had gone. Mrs. Dalloway had triumphed. Elizabeth had gone.
Beauty had gone; youth had gone.
So she sat. She got up, blundered off among the little tables,
rocking slightly from side to side, and somebody came after her
with her petticoat, and she lost her way, and was hemmed in by
trunks specially prepared for taking to India; next got among the
accouchement sets and baby linen; through all the commodities
of the world, perishable and permanent, hams, drugs, flowers,
stationery, variously smelling, now sweet, now sour, she lurched;
saw herself thus lurching with her hat askew, very red in the
face, full length in a looking-glass; and at last came out into the
street.
The tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in front of her, the
habitation of God. In the midst of the traffic, there was the
habitation of God. Doggedly she set off with her parcel to that
other sanctuary, the Abbey, where, raising her hands in a tent
before her face, she sat beside those driven into shelter too; the
variously assorted worshippers, now divested of social rank,
almost of sex, as they raised their hands before their faces; but
once they removed them, instantly reverent, middle class,
English men and women, some of them desirous of seeing the
waxworks.
But Miss Kilman held her tent before her face. Now she was
deserted; now rejoined. New worshippers came in from the street
to replace the strollers, and still, as people gazed round and
shuffled past the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, still she barred
her eyes with her fingers and tried in this double darkness, for
the light in the Abbey was bodiless, to aspire above the vanities,
the desires, the commodities, to rid herself both of hatred and of
love . Her hands twitched. She seemed to struggle . Yet to others
God was accessible and the path to Him smooth. Mr. Fletcher,
retired, of the Treasury, Mrs. Gorham, widow of the famous K. C. ,
approached Him simply, and having done their praying, leant
back, enjoyed the music (the organ pealed sweetly), and saw Miss
Kilman at the end of the row, praying, praying, and, being still
on the threshold of their underworld, thought of her
sympathetically as a soul haunting the same territory; a soul cut
out of immaterial substance; not a woman, a soul .
But Mr. Fletcher had to go. He had to pass her, and being
himself neat as a new pin, could not help being a little distressed
by the poor lady's disorder; her hair down; her parcel on the
floor. She did not at once let him pass. But, as he stood gazing
about him, at the white marbles, grey window panes, and
accumulated treasures (for he was extremely proud of the
Abbey), her largeness, robustness, and power as she sat there
shifting her knees from time to time (it was so rough the
approach to her God-so tough her desires) impressed him, as
they had impressed Mrs. Dalloway (she could not get the thought
of her out of her mind that afternoon), the Rev. Edward
Whittaker, and Elizabeth too.
And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was
so nice to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go
home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air . So she would get
on to an omnibus. And already, even as she stood there, in her
very well- cut clothes, it was beginning.... People were beginning
to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns,
running water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a burden
to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she
liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and
she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary compared
with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs.
Buses swooped, settled, were off-garish caravans, glistening
with red and yellow varnish. But which should she get on to? She
had no preferences. Of course, she would not push her way. She
inclined to be passive. It was expression she needed, but her eyes
were fine, Chinese, oriental, and, as her mother said, with such
nice shoulders and holding herself so straight, she was always
charming to look at; and lately, in the evening especially, when
she was interested, for she never seemed excited, she looked
almost beautiful, very stately, very serene. What could she be
thinking? Every man fell in love with her, and she was really
awfully bored. For it was beginning. Her mother could see that-
the compliments were beginning. That she did not care more
about it-for instance for her clothes-sometimes worried
Clarissa, but perhaps it was as well with all those puppies and
guinea pigs about having distemper, and it gave her a charm.
And now there was this odd friendship with Miss Kilman. Well,
thought Clarissa about three o'clock in the morning, reading
Baron Marbot for she could not sleep, it proves she has a heart .
Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently
boarded the omnibus, in front of everybody. She took a seat on
top . The impetuous creature-a pirate-started forward, sprang
away; she had to hold the rail to steady herself, for a pirate it
was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly,
circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger , or
ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and arrogant in
between, and then rushing insolently all sails spread up
Whitehall. And did Elizabeth give one thought to poor Miss
Kilman who loved her without jealousy, to whom she had been a
fawn in the open, a moon in a glade? She was delighted to be
free. The fresh air was so delicious. It had been so stuffy in the
Army and Navy Stores. And now it was like riding, to be rushing
up Whitehall; and to each movement of the omnibus the
beautiful body in the fawn-coloured coat responded freely like a
rider, like the figurehead of a ship, for the breeze slightly
disarrayed her; the heat gave her cheeks the pallor of white
painted wood; and her fine eyes, having no eyes to meet, gazed
ahead, blank, bright, with the staring incredible innocence of
sculpture.
It was always talking about her own sufferings that made Miss
Kilman so difficult. And was she right? If it was being on
committees and giving up hours and hours every day (she hardly
ever saw him in London) that helped the poor, her father did
that, goodness knows—if that was what Miss Kilman meant about
being a Christian; but it was so difficult to say. Oh, she would like
to go a little further. Another penny was it to the Strand? Here
was another penny, then. She would go up the Strand.
She liked people who were ill. And every profession is open to
the women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. So she might be
a doctor. She might be a farmer. Animals are often ill. She might
own a thousand acres and have people under her. She would go
and see them in their cottages. This was Somerset House. One
might be a very good farmer—and that, strangely enough though
Miss Kilman had her share in it, was almost entirely due to
Somerset House. It looked so splendid, so serious, that great grey
building. And she liked the feeling of people working. She liked
those churches, like shapes of grey paper, breasting the stream
of the Strand. It was quite different here from Westminster, she
thought, getting off at Chancery Lane. It was so serious; it was so
busy. In short, she would like to have a profession. She would
become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament, if she
found it necessary, all because of the Strand.
The feet of those people busy about their activities, hands
putting stone to stone, minds eternally occupied not with trivial
chatterings (comparing women to poplars—which was rather
exciting, of course, but very silly), but with thoughts of ships, of
business, of law, of administration, and with it all so stately (she
was in the Temple), gay (there was the river), pious (there was
the Church), made her quite determined, whatever her mother
might say, to become either a farmer or a doctor. But she was, of
course, rather lazy.
And it was much better to say nothing about it. It seemed so
silly. It was the sort of thing that did sometimes happen, when
one was alone—buildings without architects’ names, crowds of
people coming back from the city having more power than single
clergymen in Kensington, than any of the books Miss Kilman had
lent her, to stimulate what lay slumbrous, clumsy, and shy on the
mind’s sandy floor to break surface, as a child suddenly stretches
its arms; it was just that, perhaps, a sigh, a stretch of the arms,
an impulse, a revelation, which has its effects forever, and then
down again it went to the sandy floor. She must go home. She
must dress for dinner. But what was the time?—where was a
clock?
She looked up Fleet Street. She walked just a little way
towards St. Paul’s, shyly, like someone penetrating on tiptoe,
exploring a strange house by night with a candle, on edge lest
the owner should suddenly fling wide his bedroom door and ask
her business, nor did she dare wander off into queer alleys,
tempting by-streets, any more than in a strange house open
doors which might be bedroom doors, or sitting-room doors, or
lead straight to the larder. For no Dalloways came down the
Strand daily; she was a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting.
 In many ways, her mother felt, she was extremely immature,
like a child still, attached to dolls, to old slippers; a perfect baby;
and that was charming. But then, of course, there was in the
Dalloway family the tradition of public service. Abbesses,
principals, head mistresses, dignitaries, in the republic of
women—without being brilliant, any of them, they were that. She
penetrated a little further in the direction of St. Paul’s. She
liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood of this
uproar. It seemed to her good. The noise was tremendous; and
suddenly there were trumpets (the unemployed) blaring,
rattling about in the uproar; military music; as if people were
marching; yet had they been dying—had some woman breathed
her last and whoever was watching, opening the window of the
room where she had just brought off that act of supreme dignity,
looked down on Fleet Street, that uproar, that military music
would have come triumphing up to him, consolatory, indifferent.
It was not conscious. There was no recognition in it of one’s
fortune, or fate, and for that very reason even to those dazed
with watching for the last shivers of consciousness on the faces of
the dying, consoling.
Forgetfulness in people might wound, their ingratitude
corrode, but this voice, pouring endlessly, year in, year out,
would take whatever it might be; this vow; this van; this life; this
procession, would wrap them all about and carry them on, as in
the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a
blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on.
But it was later than she thought. Her mother would not like
her to be wandering off alone like this. She turned back down the
Strand.
A puff of wind (in spite of the heat, there was quite a wind)
blew a thin black veil over the sun and over the Strand. The faces
faded; the omnibuses suddenly lost their glow. For although the
clouds were of mountainous white so that one could fancy
hacking hard chips off with a hatchet, with broad golden slopes,
lawns of celestial pleasure gardens, on their flanks, and had all
the appearance of settled habitations assembled for the
conference of gods above the world, there was a perpetual
movement among them. Signs were interchanged, when, as if to
fulfil some scheme arranged already, now a summit dwindled,
now a whole block of pyramidal size which had kept its station
inalterably advanced into the midst or gravely led the
procession to fresh anchorage. Fixed though they seemed at
their posts, at rest in perfect unanimity, nothing could be
fresher, freer, more sensitive superficially than the snow-white
or gold-kindled surface; to change, to go, to dismantle the
solemn assemblage was immediately possible; and in spite of the
grave fixity, the accumulated robustness and solidity, now they
struck light to the earth, now darkness.
Calmly and competently, Elizabeth Dalloway mounted the
Westminster omnibus.
Going and coming, beckoning, signalling, so the light and
shadow which now made the wall grey, now the bananas bright
yellow, now made the Strand grey, now made the omnibuses
bright yellow, seemed to Septimus Warren Smith lying on the
sofa in the sitting-room; watching the watery gold glow and fade
with the astonishing sensibility of some live creature on the
roses, on the wallpaper. Outside the trees dragged their leaves
like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in
the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing.
Every power poured its treasures on his head, and his hand lay
there on the back of the sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he
was bathing, floating, on the top of the waves, while far away on
shore he heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no more,
says the heart in the body; fear no more.
 He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by some
laughing hint like that gold spot which went round the wall—
there, there, there—her determination to show, by brandishing
her plumes, shaking her tresses, flinging her mantle this way and
that, beautifully, always beautifully, and standing close up to
breathe through her hollowed hands Shakespeare’s words, her
meaning.
Rezia, sitting at the table twisting a hat in her hands, watched
him; saw him smiling. He was happy, then. But she could not bear
to see him smiling. It was not marriage; it was not being one’s
husband to look strange like that, always to be starting, laughing,
sitting hour after hour silent, or clutching her and telling her to
write. The table drawer was full of those writings; about war;
about Shakespeare; about great discoveries; how there is no
death. Lately he had become excited suddenly for no reason (and
both Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw said excitement was
the worst thing for him), and waved his hands and cried out that
he knew the truth! He knew everything! That man, his friend
who was killed, Evans, had come, he said. He was singing behind
the screen. She wrote it down just as he spoke it. Some things
were very beautiful; others sheer nonsense. And he was always
stopping in the middle, changing his mind; wanting to add
something; hearing something new; listening with his hand up.
But she heard nothing.
And once they found the girl who did the room reading one of
these papers in fits of laughter. It was a dreadful pity. For that
made Septimus cry out about human cruelty—how they tear each
other to pieces. The fallen, he said, they tear to pieces. “Holmes
is on us,” he would say, and he would invent stories about
Holmes; Holmes eating porridge; Holmes reading Shakespeare—
making himself roar with laughter or rage, for Dr. Holmes
seemed to stand for something horrible to him. “Human nature,”
he called him. Then there were the visions. He was drowned, he
used to say, and lying on a cliff with the gulls screaming over
him. He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea.
Or he was hearing music. Really it was only a barrel organ or
some man crying in the street. But "Lovely! " he used to cry, and
the tears would run down his cheeks, which was to her the most
dreadful thing of all, to see a man like Septimus, who had fought,
who was brave, crying. And he would lie listening until suddenly
he would cry that he was falling down, down into the flames!
Actually she would look for flames, it was so vivid. But there was
nothing. They were alone in the room. It was a dream, she would
tell him, and so quiet him at last, but sometimes she was
frightened too. She sighed as she sat sewing.
Her sigh was tender and enchanting, like the wind outside a
wood in the evening. Now she put down her scissors; now she
turned to take something from the table. A little stir, a little
crinkling, a little tapping built up something on the table there,
where she sat sewing. Through his eyelashes he could see her
blurred outline; her little black body; her face and hands; her
turning movements at the table, as she took up a reel, or looked
(she was apt to lose things) for her silk. She was making a hat for
Mrs. Filmer's married daughter, whose name was he had
forgotten her name .
"What is the name of Mrs. Filmer's married daughter?" he
asked .

"Mrs. Peters, " said Rezia. She was afraid it was too small, she
said, holding it before her. Mrs. Peters was a big woman; but she
did not like her. It was only because Mrs. Filmer had been so
good to them-"She gave me grapes this morning, " she said that
Rezia wanted to do something to show that they were grateful.
She had come into the room the other evening and found
Mrs. Peters, who thought they were out, playing the
gramophone.
"Was it true?" he asked. She was playing the gramophone?
Yes; she had told him about it at the time; she had found
Mrs. Peters playing the gramophone .
He began, very cautiously, to open his eyes, to see whether a
gramophone was really there . But real things-real things were
too exciting. He must be cautious. He would not go mad. First he
looked at the fashion papers on the lower shelf, then, gradually
at the gramophone with the green trumpet. Nothing could be
more exact. And so, gathering courage, he looked at the
sideboard; the plate of bananas; the engraving of Queen Victoria
and the Prince Consort; at the mantelpiece , with the jar of roses.
None of these things moved. All were still; all were real.
"She is a woman with a spiteful tongue,” said Rezia .
"What does Mr. Peters do?" Septimus asked .
"Ah, " said Rezia, trying to remember. She thought Mrs. Filmer
had said that he travelled for some company. " Just now he is in
Hull, " she said.
"Just now! " She said that with her Italian accent. She said that
herself. He shaded his eyes so that he might see only a little of
her face at a time, first the chin, then the nose, then the
forehead, in case it were deformed, or had some terrible mark on
it. But no, there she was, perfectly natural, sewing, with the
pursed lips that women have, the set, the melancholy expression,
when sewing. But there was nothing terrible about it, he assured
himself, looking a second time, a third time at her face, her
hands, for what was frightening or disgusting in her as she sat
there in broad daylight, sewing? Mrs. Peters had a spiteful
tongue . Mr. Peters was in Hull. Why, then, rage and prophesy?
Why fly scourged and outcast? Why be made to tremble and sob
by the clouds? Why seek truths and deliver messages when Rezia
sat sticking pins into the front of her dress, and Mr. Peters was in
Hull? Miracles, revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling through
the sea, down, down into the flames, all were burnt out, for he
had a sense, as he watched Rezia trimming the straw hat for
Mrs. Peters, of a coverlet of flowers .
"It's too small for Mrs. Peters," said Septimus.
For the first time for days he was speaking as he used to do! Of
course it was-absurdly small, she said. But Mrs. Peters had
chosen it .

He took it out of her hands. He said it was an organ grinder's

monkey's hat .
How it rejoiced her, that! Not for weeks had they laughed like
this together, poking fun privately like married people. What
she meant was that if Mrs. Filmer had come in, or Mrs. Peters or
anybody, they would not have understood what she and
Septimus were laughing at .
"There," she said, pinning a rose to one side of the hat. Never
had she felt so happy! Never in her life !
But that was still more ridiculous, Septimus said. Now the poor
woman looked like a pig at a fair. (Nobody ever made her laugh
as Septimus did.)
What had she got in her work-box? She had ribbons and beads,
tassels, artificial flowers. She tumbled them out on the table . He
began putting odd colours together-for though he had no
fingers, could not even do up a parcel, he had a wonderful eye,
and often he was right, sometimes absurd, of course, but
sometimes wonderfully right .
"She shall have a beautiful hat! " he murmured, taking up this
and that , Rezia kneeling by his side, looking over his shoulder .
Now it was finished-that is to say the design; she must stitch it
together. But she must be very, very careful, he said, to keep it
just as he had made it.
 So she sewed. When she sewed, he thought, she made a sound
like a kettle on the hob; bubbling, murmuring, always busy, her
strong little pointed fingers pinching and poking; her needle
flashing straight . The sun might go in and out, on the tassels, on
the wallpaper, but he would wait, he thought, stretching out his
feet, looking at his ringed sock at the end of the sofa; he would
wait in this warm place, this pocket of still air, which one comes
on at the edge of a wood sometimes in the evening, when,
because of a fall in the ground, or some arrangement of the trees
(one must be scientific above all, scientific), warmth lingers, and
the air buffets the cheek like the wing of a bird.
"There it is, ” said Rezia, twirling Mrs. Peters' hat on the tips of
her fingers. "That'll do for the moment. Later ... " her sentence
bubbled away drip, drip, drip, like a contented tap left running.
It was wonderful. Never had he done anything which made
him feel so proud. It was so real, it was so substantial,
Mrs. Peters ' hat .
"Just look at it, " he said.
Yes, it would always make her happy to see that hat. He had
become himself then, he had laughed then. They had been alone
together. Always she would like that hat .
He told her to try it on.
"But I must look so queer! " she cried, running over to the glass
and looking first this side, then that. Then she snatched it off
again, for there was a tap at the door. Could it be Sir William
Bradshaw? Had he sent already?
No! it was only the small girl with the evening paper.
What always happened, then happened-what happened every
night of their lives. The small girl sucked her thumb at the door;
Rezia went down on her knees; Rezia cooed and kissed; Rezia got
a bag of sweets out of the table drawer. For so it always
happened. First one thing, then another. So she built it up, first
one thing and then another. Dancing, skipping, round and round
the room they went. He took the paper. Surrey was all out, he
read. There was a heat wave . Rezia repeated: Surrey was all out.
There was a heat wave, making it part of the game she was
playing with Mrs. Filmer's grandchild, both of them laughing,
chattering at the same time , at their game . He was very tired. He
was very happy. He would sleep. He shut his eyes. But directly he
saw nothing the sounds of the game became fainter and stranger
and sounded like the cries of people seeking and not finding, and
passing further and further away. They had lost him!
He started up in terror. What did he see? The plate of bananas
on the sideboard. Nobody was there (Rezia had taken the child to
its mother; it was bedtime) . That was it: to be alone forever. That
was the doom pronounced in Milan when he came into the room
and saw them cutting out buckram shapes with their scissors; to
be alone forever .
He was alone with the sideboard and the bananas. He was
alone, exposed on this bleak eminence, stretched out -but not on
a hilltop; not on a crag; on Mrs. Filmer's sitting-room sofa. As for
the visions, the faces, the voices of the dead, where were they?
There was a screen in front of him, with black bulrushes and blue
swallows. Where he had once seen mountains, where he had seen
faces, where he had seen beauty, there was a screen.
"Evans ! " he cried. There was no answer . A mouse had
squeaked, or a curtain rustled. Those were the voices of the
dead. The screen, the coal-scuttle, the sideboard remained to
him. Let him then face the screen, the coal-scuttle and the
sideboard ... but Rezia burst into the room chattering.
Some letter had come. Everybody's plans were changed.
Mrs. Filmer would not be able to go to Brighton after all. There
was no time to let Mrs. Williams know, and really Rezia thought
it very, very annoying, when she caught sight of the hat and
thought ... perhaps ... she ... might just make a little .... Her voice
died out in contented melody.
"Ah, damn! " she cried (it was a joke of theirs, her swearing);
the needle had broken. Hat, child, Brighton, needle . She built it
up; first one thing, then another, she built it up, sewing.
She wanted him to say whether by moving the rose she had
improved the hat. She sat on the end of the sofa .
They were perfectly happy now, she said, suddenly, putting
the hat down. For she could say anything to him now. She could
say whatever came into her head. That was almost the first thing
she had felt about him, that night in the café when he had come
in with his English friends. He had come in, rather shyly, looking
round him, and his hat had fallen when he hung it up. That she
could remember. She knew he was English, though not one of the
large Englishmen her sister admired, for he was always thin; but
he had a beautiful fresh colour; and with his big nose, his bright
eyes, his way of sitting a little hunched, made her think, she had
often told him, of a young hawk, that first evening she saw him,
when they were playing dominoes, and he had come in-of a
young hawk; but with her he was always very gentle. She had
never seen him wild or drunk, only suffering sometimes through
this terrible war, but even so, when she came in, he would put it
all away. Anything, anything in the whole world, any little
bother with her work, anything that struck her to say she would
tell him, and he understood at once . Her own family even were
not the same . Being older than she was and being so clever -how
serious he was, wanting her to read Shakespeare before she
could even read a child's story in English!-being so much more
experienced, he could help her. And she too could help him.
But this hat now. And then (it was getting late) Sir William
Bradshaw .
 She held her hands to her head, waiting for him to say did he
like the hat or not, and as she sat there , waiting, looking down,
he could feel her mind, like a bird, falling from branch to branch,
and always alighting, quite rightly; he could follow her mind, as
she sat there in one of those loose lax poses that came to her
naturally and, if he should say anything, at once she smiled, like
a bird alighting with all its claws firm upon the bough.
But he remembered. Bradshaw said, "The people we are most
fond of are not good for us when we are ill . " Bradshaw said, he
must be taught to rest . Bradshaw said they must be separated.
"Must, " "must, " why "must"? What power had Bradshaw over
him? "What right has Bradshaw to say ' must' to me?" he
demanded.
"It is because you talked of killing yourself, " said Rezia.
(Mercifully, she could now say anything to Septimus.)
So he was in their power! Holmes and Bradshaw were on him!
The brute with the red nostrils was snuffing into every secret
place! "Must" it could say! Where were his papers? the things he
had written?
She brought him his papers, the things he had written, things
she had written for him. She tumbled them out on to the sofa .
They looked at them together. Diagrams, designs, little men and
women brandishing sticks for arms, with wings-were they?-on
their backs; circles traced round shillings and sixpences-the
suns and stars; zigzagging precipices with mountaineers
ascending roped together, exactly like knives and forks; sea
pieces with little faces laughing out of what might perhaps be
waves: the map of the world. Burn them! he cried. Now for his
writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes
to Time; conversations with Shakespeare ; Evans, Evans, Evans-
his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime
Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them!
he cried.
But Rezia laid her hands on them. Some were very beautiful,
she thought. She would tie them up (for she had no envelope)
with a piece of silk.
Even if they took him, she said, she would go with him. They
could not separate them against their wills, she said.
Shuffling the edges straight, she did up the papers, and tied
the parcel almost without looking, sitting beside him, he
thought, as if all her petals were about her. She was a flowering
tree; and through her branches looked out the face of a lawgiver,
who had reached a sanctuary where she feared no one; not
Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle, a triumph, the last and
greatest. Staggering he saw her mount the appalling staircase,
laden with Holmes and Bradshaw, men who never weighed less
than eleven stone six, who sent their wives to Court, men who
made ten thousand a year and talked of proportion; who differed
in their verdicts (for Holmes said one thing, Bradshaw another),
yet judges they were; who mixed the vision and the sideboard;
saw nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. Over them she
triumphed.
“There!” she said. The papers were tied up. No one should get
at them. She would put them away.
And, she said, nothing should separate them. She sat down
beside him and called him by the name of that hawk or crow
which, being malicious and a great destroyer of crops, was
precisely like him. No one could separate them, she said.
Then she got up to go into the bedroom to pack their things,
but hearing voices downstairs and thinking that Dr. Holmes had
perhaps called, ran down to prevent him coming up.
Septimus could hear her talking to Holmes on the staircase.
“My dear lady, I have come as a friend,” Holmes was saying.
 "No. I will not allow you to see my husband, " she said.
He could see her, like a little hen, with her wings spread
barring his passage. But Holmes persevered.
"My dear lady, allow me ... " Holmes said, putting her aside
(Holmes was a powerfully built man).
Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would burst open the
door. Holmes would say, "In a funk, eh?" Holmes would get him.
But no; not Holmes; not Bradshaw. Getting up rather unsteadily,
hopping indeed from foot to foot, he considered Mrs. Filmer's
nice clean bread knife with "Bread " carved on the handle. Ah,
but one mustn't spoil that. The gas fire? But it was too late now.
Holmes was coming. Razors he might have got, but Rezia, who
always did that sort of thing, had packed them. There remained
only the window, the large Bloomsbury-lodging house window,
the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic
business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was
their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia's (for she was with him).
Holmes and Bradshaw like that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.)
But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to
die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings? Coming
down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at
him. Holmes was at the door. "I'll give it you! " he cried, and
flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer's area
railings .
"The coward! " cried Dr. Holmes, bursting the door open. Rezia
ran to the window, she saw; she understood. Dr. Holmes and
Mrs. Filmer collided with each other. Mrs. Filmer flapped her
apron and made her hide her eyes in the bedroom. There was a
great deal of running up and down stairs. Dr. Holmes came in-
white as a sheet, shaking all over, with a glass in his hand. She
must be brave and drink something, he said (What was it?
Something sweet), for her husband was horribly mangled, would
not recover consciousness, she must not see him, must be spared
as much as possible, would have the inquest to go through, poor
young woman. Who could have foretold it? A sudden impulse, no
one was in the least to blame (he told Mrs. Filmer). And why the
devil he did it, Dr. Holmes could not conceive.
It seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that she was
opening long windows, stepping out into some garden. But
where? The clock was striking—one, two, three: how sensible the
sound was; compared with all this thumping and whispering; like
Septimus himself. She was falling asleep. But the clock went on
striking, four, five, six and Mrs. Filmer waving her apron (they
wouldn’t bring the body in here, would they?) seemed part of
that garden; or a flag. She had once seen a flag slowly rippling
out from a mast when she stayed with her aunt at Venice. Men
killed in battle were thus saluted, and Septimus had been
through the War. Of her memories, most were happy.
She put on her hat, and ran through cornfields—where could it
have been?—on to some hill, somewhere near the sea, for there
were ships, gulls, butterflies; they sat on a cliff. In London too,
there they sat, and, half dreaming, came to her through the
bedroom door, rain falling, whisperings, stirrings among dry
corn, the caress of the sea, as it seemed to her, hollowing them in
its arched shell and murmuring to her laid on shore, strewn she
felt, like flying flowers over some tomb.
“He is dead,” she said, smiling at the poor old woman who
guarded her with her honest light-blue eyes fixed on the door.
(They wouldn’t bring him in here, would they?) But Mrs. Filmer
pooh-poohed. Oh no, oh no! They were carrying him away now.
Ought she not to be told? Married people ought to be together,
Mrs. Filmer thought. But they must do as the doctor said.
“Let her sleep,” said Dr. Holmes, feeling her pulse. She saw the
large outline of his body standing dark against the window. So
that was Dr. Holmes.

One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh thought. It is one

of the triumphs of civilisation, as the light high bell of the
ambulance sounded. Swiftly, cleanly, the ambulance sped to the
hospital, having picked up instantly, humanely, some poor devil;
someone hit on the head, struck down by disease, knocked over
perhaps a minute or so ago at one of these crossings, as might
happen to oneself. That was civilisation. It struck him coming
back from the East-the efficiency, the organisation, the
communal spirit of London. Every cart or carriage of its own
accord drew aside to let the ambulance pass. Perhaps it was
morbid; or was it not touching rather, the respect which they
showed this ambulance with its victim inside-busy men
hurrying home yet instantly bethinking them as it passed of
some wife; or presumably how easily it might have been them
there , stretched on a shelf with a doctor and a nurse.... Ah, but
thinking became morbid, sentimental, directly one began
conjuring up doctors, dead bodies; a little glow of pleasure, a sort
of lust, too, over the visual impression warned one not to go on
with that sort of thing any more-fatal to art, fatal to friendship.
True . And yet, thought Peter Walsh, as the ambulance turned
the corner, though the light high bell could be heard down the
next street and still farther as it crossed the Tottenham Court
Road, chiming constantly, it is the privilege of loneliness; in
privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one
saw. It had been his undoing-this susceptibility-in Anglo-Indian
society; not weeping at the right time , or laughing either. I have
that in me, he thought, standing by the pillar-box, which could
now dissolve in tears. Why, Heaven knows. Beauty of some sort
probably, and the weight of the day, which, beginning with that
visit to Clarissa, had exhausted him with its heat, its intensity,
and the drip, drip, of one impression after another down into
that cellar where they stood, deep, dark, and no one would ever
know. Partly for that reason, its secrecy, complete and
inviolable, he had found life like an unknown garden, full of
turns and corners, surprising, yes; really it took one’s breath
away, these moments; there coming to him by the pillar-box
opposite the British Museum one of them, a moment, in which
things came together; this ambulance; and life and death. It was
as if he were sucked up to some very high roof by that rush of
emotion and the rest of him, like a white shell-sprinkled beach,
left bare. It had been his undoing in Anglo-Indian society—this
susceptibility.
Clarissa once, going on top of an omnibus with him somewhere,
Clarissa superficially at least, so easily moved, now in despair,
now in the best of spirits, all aquiver in those days and such good
company, spotting queer little scenes, names, people from the
top of a bus, for they used to explore London and bring back bags
full of treasures from the Caledonian market—Clarissa had a
theory in those days—they had heaps of theories, always
theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they
had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For
how could they know each other? You met every day; then not
for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how
little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up
Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here,
here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere.
She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all
that. So that to know her, or anyone, one must seek out the
people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she
had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the
street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or barns. It
ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of
death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all
her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which
appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen
part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be
recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even
haunting certain places after death. Perhaps-perhaps.
Looking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years
her theory worked to this extent. Brief, broken, often painful as
their actual meetings had been, what with his absences and
interruptions (this morning, for instance, in came Elizabeth, like
a long-legged colt, handsome, dumb, just as he was beginning to
talk to Clarissa), the effect of them on his life was immeasurable .
There was a mystery about it. You were given a sharp, acute ,
uncomfortable grain-the actual meeting; horribly painful as
often as not; yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would
flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste , look about
you, get the whole feel of it and understanding, after years of
lying lost. Thus she had come to him; on board ship; in the
Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things (so Sally Seton,
generous, enthusiastic goose! thought of him when she saw blue
hydrangeas). She had influenced him more than any person he
had ever known. And always in this way coming before him
without his wishing it, cool, ladylike, critical; or ravishing,
romantic, recalling some field or English harvest. He saw her
most often in the country, not in London. One scene after
another at Bourton ....
He had reached his hotel. He crossed the hall, with its mounds
of reddish chairs and sofas, its spike-leaved, withered-looking
plants. He got his key off the hook. The young lady handed him
some letters. He went upstairs-he saw her most often at
Bourton, in the late summer, when he stayed there for a week, or
fortnight even, as people did in those days. First on top of some
hill there she would stand, hands clapped to her hair, her cloak
blowing out, pointing, crying to them-she saw the Severn
beneath. Or in a wood, making the kettle boil-very ineffective
with her fingers; the smoke curtseying, blowing in their faces;
her little pink face showing through; begging water from an old
woman in a cottage, who came to the door to watch them go.
They walked always; the others drove. She was bored driving,
disliked all animals, except that dog. They tramped miles along
roads. She would break off to get her bearings, pilot him back
across country; and all the time they argued, discussed poetry,
discussed people, discussed politics (she was a Radical then);
never noticing a thing except when she stopped, cried out at a
view or a tree, and made him look with her; and so on again,
through stubble fields, she walking ahead, with a flower for her
aunt, never tired of walking for all her delicacy; to drop down on
Bourton in the dusk. Then, after dinner, old Breitkopf would
open the piano and sing without any voice, and they would lie
sunk in armchairs, trying not to laugh, but always breaking down
and laughing, laughing-laughing at nothing. Breitkopf was
supposed not to see. And then in the morning, flirting up and
down like a wagtail in front of the house....
Oh it was a letter from her! This blue envelope; that was her
hand. And he would have to read it. Here was another of those
meetings, bound to be painful! To read her letter needed the
devil of an effort. "How heavenly it was to see him. She must tell
him that ." That was all .
But it upset him. It annoyed him. He wished she hadn't written
it. Coming on top of his thoughts, it was like a nudge in the ribs.
Why couldn't she let him be? After all, she had married
Dalloway, and lived with him in perfect happiness all these
years.
 These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number
of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if
you thought of it, had settled on other people's noses. As for the
cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn't cleanliness, so
much as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be. Some arid
matron made her rounds at dawn sniffing, peering, causing blue-
nosed maids to scour, for all the world as if the next visitor were
a joint of meat to be served on a perfectly clean platter . For
sleep, one bed; for sitting in, one armchair; for cleaning one's
teeth and shaving one's chin, one tumbler, one looking-glass.
Books, letters, dressing-gown, slipped about on the impersonality
of the horsehair like incongruous impertinences. And it was
Clarissa's letter that made him see all this. “Heavenly to see you.
She must say so! " He folded the paper; pushed it away; nothing
would induce him to read it again!
To get that letter to him by six o'clock she must have sat down
and written it directly he left her; stamped it; sent somebody to
the post. It was, as people say, very like her. She was upset by his
visit. She had felt a great deal; had for a moment, when she
kissed his hand, regretted, envied him even, remembered
possibly (for he saw her look it) something he had said-how they
would change the world if she married him perhaps; whereas, it
was this; it was middle age; it was mediocrity; then forced herself
with her indomitable vitality to put all that aside, there being in
her a thread of life which for toughness, endurance, power to
overcome obstacles, and carry her triumphantly through he had
never known the like of. Yes; but there would come a reaction
directly he left the room. She would be frightfully sorry for him;
she would think what in the world she could do to give him
pleasure (short always of the one thing), and he could see her
with the tears running down her cheeks going to her writing
table and dashing off that one line which he was to find greeting
him.... "Heavenly to see you! " And she meant it .
Peter Walsh had now unlaced his boots .
But it would not have been a success, their marriage . The
other thing, after all, came so much more naturally.
It was odd; it was true; lots of people felt it. Peter Walsh, who
had done just respectably, filled the usual posts adequately, was
liked, but thought a little cranky, gave himself airs-it was odd
that he should have had, especially now that his hair was grey, a
contented look; a look of having reserves. It was this that made
him attractive to women, who liked the sense that he was not
altogether manly. There was something unusual about him, or
something behind him. It might be that he was bookish-never
came to see you without taking up the book on the table (he was
now reading, with his bootlaces trailing on the floor); or that he
was a gentleman, which showed itself in the way he knocked the
ashes out of his pipe, and in his manners of course to women. For
it was very charming and quite ridiculous how easily some girl
without a grain of sense could twist him round her finger. But at
her own risk. That is to say, though he might be ever so easy, and
indeed with his gaiety and good-breeding fascinating to be with,
it was only up to a point. She said something -no, no; he saw
through that. He wouldn't stand that-no, no. Then he could
shout and rock and hold his sides together over some joke with
men. He was the best judge of cooking in India. He was a man.
But not the sort of man one had to respect-which was a mercy;
not like Major Simmons, for instance; not in the least like that,
Daisy thought, when, in spite of her two small children, she used
to compare them.
He pulled off his boots. He emptied his pockets. Out came with
his pocketknife a snapshot of Daisy on the verandah; Daisy all in
white, with a fox terrier on her knee; very charming, very dark;
the best he had ever seen of her. It did come, after all, so
naturally; so much more naturally than Clarissa. No fuss. No
bother. No finicking and fidgeting. All plain sailing. And the
dark, adorably pretty girl on the verandah exclaimed (he could
hear her) Of course, of course she would give him everything! she
cried (she had no sense of discretion), everything he wanted! she
cried, running to meet him, whoever might be looking. And she
was only twenty-four. And she had two children. Well, well!
Well indeed he had got himself into a mess at his age. And it
came over him when he woke in the night pretty forcibly.
Suppose they did marry? For him it would be all very well, but
what about her? Mrs. Burgess, a good sort and no chatterbox, in
whom he had confided, thought this absence of his in England,
ostensibly to see lawyers, might serve to make Daisy reconsider,
think what it meant. It was a question of her position,
Mrs. Burgess said; the social barrier; giving up her children.
She'd be a widow with a past one of these days, draggling about
in the suburbs, or more likely, indiscriminate (you know, she
said, what such women get like, with too much paint). But Peter
Walsh pooh-poohed all that. He didn't mean to die yet. Anyhow
she must settle for herself; judge for herself, he thought, padding
about the room in his socks, smoothing out his dress-shirt, for he
might go to Clarissa's party, or he might go to one of the Halls, or
he might settle in and read an absorbing book written by a man
he used to know at Oxford. And if he did retire, that's what he'd
do-write books. He would go to Oxford and poke about in the
Bodleian. Vainly the dark, adorably pretty girl ran to the end of
the terrace; vainly waved her hand; vainly cried she didn't care
a straw what people said. There he was, the man she thought the
world of, the perfect gentleman, the fascinating, the
distinguished (and his age made not the least difference to her),
padding about a room in an hotel in Bloomsbury, shaving,
washing, continuing, as he took up cans, put down razors, to poke
about in the Bodleian, and get at the truth about one or two
little matters that interested him. And he would have a chat
with whoever it might be, and so come to disregard more and
more precise hours for lunch, and miss engagements, and when
Daisy asked him, as she would, for a kiss, a scene, fail to come up
to the scratch (though he was genuinely devoted to her)-in
short it might be happier, as Mrs. Burgess said, that she should
forget him, or merely remember him as he was in August 1922,
like a figure standing at the cross roads at dusk, which grows
more and more remote as the dogcart spins away, carrying her
securely fastened to the back seat, though her arms are
outstretched, and as she sees the figure dwindle and disappear
still she cries out how she would do anything in the world,
anything, anything, anything....
He never knew what people thought. It became more and more
difficult for him to concentrate . He became absorbed; he became
busied with his own concerns; now surly, now gay; dependent on
women, absentminded, moody, less and less able (so he thought
as he shaved) to understand why Clarissa couldn't simply find
them a lodging and be nice to Daisy; introduce her. And then he
could just-just do what? just haunt and hover (he was at the
moment actually engaged in sorting out various keys, papers),
swoop and taste, be alone, in short, sufficient to himself; and yet
nobody of course was more dependent upon others (he buttoned
his waistcoat); it had been his undoing. He could not keep out of
smoking-rooms, liked colonels, liked golf, liked bridge, and above
all women's society, and the fineness of their companionship,
and their faithfulness and audacity and greatness in loving
which though it had its drawbacks seemed to him (and the dark,
adorably pretty face was on top of the envelopes) so wholly
admirable , so splendid a flower to grow on the crest of human
life, and yet he could not come up to the scratch, being always
apt to see round things (Clarissa had sapped something in him
permanently), and to tire very easily of mute devotion and to
want variety in love, though it would make him furious if Daisy
loved anybody else, furious! for he was jealous, uncontrollably
jealous by temperament. He suffered tortures! But where was his
knife; his watch; his seals, his notecase, and Clarissa’s letter
which he would not read again but liked to think of, and Daisy’s
photograph? And now for dinner.
They were eating.
Sitting at little tables round vases, dressed or not dressed,
with their shawls and bags laid beside them, with their air of
false composure, for they were not used to so many courses at
dinner, and confidence, for they were able to pay for it, and
strain, for they had been running about London all day shopping,
sightseeing; and their natural curiosity, for they looked round
and up as the nice-looking gentleman in horn-rimmed spectacles
came in; and their good nature, for they would have been glad to
do any little service, such as lend a timetable or impart useful
information; and their desire, pulsing in them, tugging at them
subterraneously, somehow to establish connections if it were
only a birthplace (Liverpool, for example) in common or friends
of the same name; with their furtive glances, odd silences, and
sudden withdrawals into family jocularity and isolation; there
they sat eating dinner when Mr. Walsh came in and took his seat
at a little table by the curtain.
It was not that he said anything, for being solitary he could
only address himself to the waiter; it was his way of looking at
the menu, of pointing his forefinger to a particular wine, of
hitching himself up to the table, of addressing himself seriously,
not gluttonously to dinner, that won him their respect; which,
having to remain unexpressed for the greater part of the meal,
flared up at the table where the Morrises sat when Mr. Walsh
was heard to say at the end of the meal, “Bartlett pears. " Why he
should have spoken so moderately yet firmly, with the air of a
disciplinarian well within his rights which are founded upon
justice, neither young Charles Morris, nor old Charles, neither
Miss Elaine nor Mrs. Morris knew. But when he said, "Bartlett
pears, " sitting alone at his table, they felt that he counted on
their support in some lawful demand; was champion of a cause
which immediately became their own, so that their eyes met his
eyes sympathetically, and when they all reached the smoking-
room simultaneously, a little talk between them became
inevitable .

It was not very profound-only to the effect that London was

crowded; had changed in thirty years; that Mr. Morris preferred
Liverpool ; that Mrs. Morris had been to the Westminster flower-
show, and that they had all seen the Prince of Wales. Yet,
thought Peter Walsh, no family in the world can compare with
the Morrises; none whatever; and their relations to each other
are perfect, and they don't care a hang for the upper classes, and
they like what they like, and Elaine is training for the family
business, and the boy has won a scholarship at Leeds, and the old
lady (who is about his own age) has three more children at home ;
and they have two motorcars, but Mr. Morris still mends the
boots on Sunday: it is superb, it is absolutely superb, thought
Peter Walsh, swaying a little backwards and forwards with his
liqueur glass in his hand among the hairy red chairs and
ashtrays, feeling very well pleased with himself, for the Morrises
liked him. Yes, they liked a man who said, "Bartlett pears. " They
liked him, he felt.
He would go to Clarissa's party. (The Morrises moved off; but
they would meet again.) He would go to Clarissa's party, because
he wanted to ask Richard what they were doing in India-the
conservative duffers. And what's being acted? And music.... Oh
yes, and mere gossip .
For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who
fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities
threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-
flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep,
inscrutable ; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the
wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush,
scrape, kindle herself, gossiping. What did the Government
mean-Richard Dalloway would know-to do about India?
Since it was a very hot night and the paper boys went by with
placards proclaiming in huge red letters that there was a heat-
wave, wicker chairs were placed on the hotel steps and there ,
sipping, smoking, detached gentlemen sat. Peter Walsh sat there .
One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning.
Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white
apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put
off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh
of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on
the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned;
motorcars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and
here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense
light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and
faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded,
pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was
beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and
rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her
to partnership in her revelry.
For the great revolution of Mr. Willett's summer time had
taken place since Peter Walsh's last visit to England. The
prolonged evening was new to him. It was inspiriting, rather . For
as the young people went by with their despatch-boxes, awfully
glad to be free, proud too, dumbly, of stepping this famous
pavement, joy of a kind, cheap, tinselly, if you like, but all the
same rapture, flushed their faces. They dressed well too; pink
stockings; pretty shoes. They would now have two hours at the
pictures. It sharpened, it refined them, the yellow-blue evening
light; and on the leaves in the square shone lurid, livid—they
looked as if dipped in sea water—the foliage of a submerged city.
He was astonished by the beauty; it was encouraging too, for
where the returned Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds
of them) in the Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of
the world, here was he, as young as ever; envying young people
their summer time and the rest of it, and more than suspecting
from the words of a girl, from a housemaid’s laughter—intangible
things you couldn’t lay your hands on—that shift in the whole
pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed
immovable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed them down,
the women especially, like those flowers Clarissa’s Aunt Helena
used to press between sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré’s
dictionary on top, sitting under the lamp after dinner. She was
dead now. He had heard of her, from Clarissa, losing the sight of
one eye. It seemed so fitting—one of nature’s masterpieces—that
old Miss Parry should turn to glass. She would die like some bird
in a frost gripping her perch. She belonged to a different age,
but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the
horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some
past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this
interminable (he felt for a copper to buy a paper and read about
Surrey and Yorkshire; he had held out that copper millions of
times—Surrey was all out once more)—this interminable life. But
cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. He could
never help reading about cricket. He read the scores in the stop
press first, then how it was a hot day; then about a murder case.
Having done things millions of times enriched them, though it
might be said to take the surface off. The past enriched, and
experience, and having cared for one or two people, and so
having acquired the power which the young lack, of cutting
short, doing what one likes, not caring a rap what people say and
coming and going without any very great expectations (he left
his paper on the table and moved off), which however (and he
looked for his hat and coat) was not altogether true of him, not
tonight, for here he was starting to go to a party, at his age, with
the belief upon him that he was about to have an experience. But
what?
Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the eye. It was not
beauty pure and simple—Bedford Place leading into Russell
Square. It was straightness and emptiness of course; the
symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a piano, a
gramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-making hidden, but
now and again emerging when, through the uncurtained
window, the window left open, one saw parties sitting over
tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men
and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment theirs,
when work was done), stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a
few plants. Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life.
And in the large square where the cabs shot and swerved so
quick, there were loitering couples, dallying, embracing, shrunk
up under the shower of a tree; that was moving; so silent, so
absorbed, that one passed, discreetly, timidly, as if in the
presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would
have been impious. That was interesting. And so on into the flare
and glare.
His light overcoat blew open, he stepped with indescribable
idiosyncrasy, lent a little forward, tripped, with his hands
behind his back and his eyes still a little hawklike; he tripped
through London, towards Westminster, observing.
Was everybody dining out, then? Doors were being opened
here by a footman to let issue a high-stepping old dame, in
buckled shoes, with three purple ostrich feathers in her hair.
Doors were being opened for ladies wrapped like mummies in
shawls with bright flowers on them, ladies with bare heads. And
in respectable quarters with stucco pillars through small front
gardens lightly swathed with combs in their hair (having run up
to see the children), women came; men waited for them, with
their coats blowing open, and the motor started. Everybody was
going out. What with these doors being opened, and the descent
and the start, it seemed as if the whole of London were
embarking in little boats moored to the bank, tossing on the
waters, as if the whole place were floating off in carnival. And
Whitehall was skated over, silver beaten as it was, skated over by
spiders, and there was a sense of midges round the arc lamps; it
was so hot that people stood about talking. And here in
Westminster was a retired Judge, presumably, sitting four square
at his house door dressed all in white. An Anglo-Indian
presumably.
And here a shindy of brawling women, drunken women; here
only a policeman and looming houses, high houses, domed
houses, churches, parliaments, and the hoot of a steamer on the
river, a hollow misty cry. But it was her street, this, Clarissa’s;
cabs were rushing round the corner, like water round the piers
of a bridge, drawn together, it seemed to him, because they bore
people going to her party, Clarissa’s party.
The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the
eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its
china walls unrecorded. The brain must wake now. The body
must contract now, entering the house, the lighted house, where
the door stood open, where the motorcars were standing, and
bright women descending: the soul must brave itself to endure.
He opened the big blade of his pocketknife.

Lucy came running full tilt downstairs, having just nipped in to

the drawing-room to smooth a cover, to straighten a chair, to
pause a moment and feel whoever came in must think how clean,
how bright, how beautifully cared for, when they saw the
beautiful silver, the brass fire-irons, the new chair-covers, and
the curtains of yellow chintz: she appraised each; heard a roar of
voices; people already coming up from dinner; she must fly!
The Prime Minister was coming, Agnes said: so she had heard
them say in the dining-room, she said, coming in with a tray of
glasses. Did it matter, did it matter in the least, one Prime
Minister more or less? It made no difference at this hour of the
night to Mrs. Walker among the plates, saucepans, cullenders,
frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream freezers, pared crusts of
bread, lemons, soup tureens, and pudding basins which, however
hard they washed up in the scullery, seemed to be all on top of
her, on the kitchen table, on chairs, while the fire blared and
roared, the electric lights glared, and still supper had to be laid.
All she felt was, one Prime Minister more or less made not a
scrap of difference to Mrs. Walker.
The ladies were going upstairs already, said Lucy; the ladies
were going up, one by one, Mrs. Dalloway walking last and almost
always sending back some message to the kitchen, “My love to
Mrs. Walker,” that was it one night. Next morning they would go
over the dishes—the soup, the salmon; the salmon, Mrs. Walker
knew, as usual underdone, for she always got nervous about the
pudding and left it to Jenny; so it happened, the salmon was
always underdone. But some lady with fair hair and silver
ornaments had said, Lucy said, about the entrée, was it really
made at home ? But it was the salmon that bothered Mrs. Walker,
as she spun the plates round and round, and pulled in dampers
and pulled out dampers; and there came a burst of laughter from
the dining-room; a voice speaking; then another burst of
laughter-the gentlemen enjoying themselves when the ladies
had gone . The tokay, said Lucy running in. Mr. Dalloway had sent
for the tokay, from the Emperor's cellars, the Imperial Tokay.
It was borne through the kitchen. Over her shoulder Lucy
reported how Miss Elizabeth looked quite lovely; she couldn't
take her eyes off her; in her pink dress, wearing the necklace
Mr. Dalloway had given her. Jenny must remember the dog, Miss
Elizabeth's fox terrier, which, since it bit, had to be shut up and
might, Elizabeth thought, want something. Jenny must remember
the dog. But Jenny was not going upstairs with all those people
about. There was a motor at the door already! There was a ring
at the bell-and the gentlemen still in the dining-room, drinking
tokay!
There, they were going upstairs; that was the first to come ,
and now they would come faster and faster, so that

Mrs. Parkinson (hired for parties) would leave the hall door ajar,
and the hall would be full of gentlemen waiting (they stood
waiting, sleeking down their hair) while the ladies took their
cloaks off in the room along the passage; where Mrs. Barnet
helped them, old Ellen Barnet, who had been with the family for
forty years, and came every summer to help the ladies, and
remembered mothers when they were girls, and though very
unassuming did shake hands; said "milady" very respectfully, yet
had a humorous way with her, looking at the young ladies, and
ever so tactfully helping Lady Lovejoy, who had some trouble
with her underbodice. And they could not help feeling, Lady
Lovejoy and Miss Alice, that some little privilege in the matter of
brush and comb, was awarded them having known
Mrs. Barnet-"thirty years, milady, " Mrs. Barnet supplied her.
Young ladies did not use to rouge, said Lady Lovejoy, when they
stayed at Bourton in the old days. And Miss Alice didn't need
rouge , said Mrs. Barnet, looking at her fondly. There Mrs. Barnet
would sit, in the cloakroom, patting down the furs, smoothing
out the Spanish shawls, tidying the dressing-table, and knowing
perfectly well, in spite of the furs and the embroideries, which
were nice ladies, which were not. The dear old body, said Lady
Lovejoy, mounting the stairs, Clarissa's old nurse .
And then Lady Lovejoy stiffened. "Lady and Miss Lovejoy," she
said to Mr. Wilkins (hired for parties). He had an admirable
manner, as he bent and straightened himself, bent and
straightened himself and announced with perfect impartiality
"Lady and Miss Lovejoy... Sir John and Lady Needham ... Miss
Weld ... Mr. Walsh. " His manner was admirable; his family life
must be irreproachable, except that it seemed impossible that a
being with greenish lips and shaven cheeks could ever have
blundered into the nuisance of children.
"How delightful to see you! " said Clarissa. She said it to
everyone. How delightful to see you! She was at her worst-
effusive , insincere . It was a great mistake to have come. He
should have stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter
Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should have stayed
at home , for he knew no one .
Oh dear, it was going to be a failure; a complete failure,
Clarissa felt it in her bones as dear old Lord Lexham stood there
apologising for his wife who had caught cold at the Buckingham
Palace garden party. She could see Peter out of the tail of her
eye, criticising her, there, in that corner. Why, after all, did she
do these things? Why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire?
Might it consume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders! Better
anything, better brandish one’s torch and hurl it to earth than
taper and dwindle away like some Ellie Henderson! It was
extraordinary how Peter put her into these states just by coming
and standing in a corner. He made her see herself; exaggerate. It
was idiotic. But why did he come, then, merely to criticise? Why
always take, never give? Why not risk one’s one little point of
view? There he was wandering off, and she must speak to him.
But she would not get the chance. Life was that—humiliation,
renunciation. What Lord Lexham was saying was that his wife
would not wear her furs at the garden party because “my dear,
you ladies are all alike”—Lady Lexham being seventy-five at
least! It was delicious, how they petted each other, that old
couple. She did like old Lord Lexham. She did think it mattered,
her party, and it made her feel quite sick to know that it was all
going wrong, all falling flat. Anything, any explosion, any horror
was better than people wandering aimlessly, standing in a bunch
at a corner like Ellie Henderson, not even caring to hold
themselves upright.
Gently the yellow curtain with all the birds of Paradise blew
out and it seemed as if there were a flight of wings into the
room, right out, then sucked back. (For the windows were open.)
Was it draughty, Ellie Henderson wondered? She was subject to
chills. But it did not matter that she should come down sneezing
tomorrow; it was the girls with their naked shoulders she
thought of, being trained to think of others by an old father, an
invalid, late vicar of Bourton, but he was dead now; and her
chills never went to her chest, never. It was the girls she thought
of, the young girls with their bare shoulders, she herself having
always been a wisp of a creature, with her thin hair and meagre
profile; though now, past fifty, there was beginning to shine
through some mild beam, something purified into distinction by
years of self-abnegation but obscured again, perpetually, by her
distressing gentility, her panic fear, which arose from three
hundred pounds' income, and her weaponless state (she could
not earn a penny) and it made her timid, and more and more
disqualified year by year to meet well-dressed people who did
this sort of thing every night of the season, merely telling their
maids "I'll wear so-and- so, " whereas Ellie Henderson ran out
nervously and bought cheap pink flowers, half a dozen, and then
threw a shawl over her old black dress. For her invitation to
Clarissa's party had come at the last moment. She was not quite
happy about it. She had a sort of feeling that Clarissa had not
meant to ask her this year .
Why should she ? There was no reason really, except that they
had always known each other. Indeed, they were cousins. But
naturally they had rather drifted apart, Clarissa being so sought
after. It was an event to her, going to a party. It was quite a treat
just to see the lovely clothes. Wasn't that Elizabeth, grown up,
with her hair done in the fashionable way, in the pink dress? Yet
she could not be more than seventeen. She was very, very
handsome . But girls when they first came out didn't seem to
wear white as they used. (She must remember everything to tell
Edith.) Girls wore straight frocks, perfectly tight, with skirts well
above the ankles. It was not becoming, she thought .
So, with her weak eyesight, Ellie Henderson craned rather
forward, and it wasn't so much she who minded not having
anyone to talk to (she hardly knew anybody there), for she felt
that they were all such interesting people to watch; politicians
presumably; Richard Dalloway's friends; but it was Richard
himself who felt that he could not let the poor creature go on
standing there all the evening by herself.
"Well, Ellie , and how's the world treating you?" he said in his
genial way, and Ellie Henderson, getting nervous and flushing
and feeling that it was extraordinarily nice of him to come and
talk to her, said that many people really felt the heat more than
the cold .
"Yes, they do, " said Richard Dalloway. "Yes."
But what more did one say?
"Hullo, Richard," said somebody, taking him by the elbow, and,
good Lord, there was old Peter, old Peter Walsh. He was
delighted to see him-ever so pleased to see him! He hadn't
changed a bit. And off they went together walking right across
the room, giving each other little pats, as if they hadn't met for a
long time, Ellie Henderson thought, watching them go, certain
she knew that man's face . A tall man, middle aged, rather fine
eyes, dark, wearing spectacles, with a look ofJohn Burrows. Edith
would be sure to know.

The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out again.
And Clarissa saw-she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back, and go on
talking. So it wasn't a failure after all! it was going to be all right
now-her party. It had begun. It had started. But it was still
touch and go. She must stand there for the present. People
seemed to come in a rush .
Colonel and Mrs. Garrod ... Mr. Hugh Whitbread ... Mr. Bowley...
Mrs. Hilbery ... Lady Mary Maddox ... Mr. Quin ... intoned Wilkin.
She had six or seven words with each, and they went on, they
went into the rooms; into something now, not nothing, since
Ralph Lyon had beat back the curtain.
And yet for her own part, it was too much of an effort. She was
not enjoying it. It was too much like being-just anybody,
standing there; anybody could do it; yet this anybody she did a
little admire, couldn't help feeling that she had, anyhow, made
this happen, that it marked a stage, this post that she felt herself
to have become, for oddly enough she had quite forgotten what
she looked like, but felt herself a stake driven in at the top of her
stairs. Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being
something not herself, and that everyone was unreal in one way;
much more real in another. It was, she thought, partly their
clothes, partly being taken out of their ordinary ways, partly the
background, it was possible to say things you couldn't say anyhow
else, things that needed an effort; possible to go much deeper.
But not for her; not yet anyhow.
"How delightful to see you! " she said. Dear old Sir Harry! He
would know everyone .
And what was so odd about it was the sense one had as they
came up the stairs one after another, Mrs. Mount and Celia,
Herbert Ainsty, Mrs. Dakers-oh, and Lady Bruton!
"How awfully good of you to come! " she said, and she meant
it-it was odd how standing there one felt them going on, going
on, some quite old, some ...
What name? Lady Rosseter? But who on earth was Lady
Rosseter?

"Clarissa! " That voice ! It was Sally Seton! Sally Seton! after all
these years! She loomed through a mist. For she hadn't looked
like that, Sally Seton, when Clarissa grasped the hot water can, to
think of her under this roof, under this roof! Not like that !
All on top of each other, embarrassed, laughing, words
tumbled out-passing through London; heard from Clara Haydon;
what a chance of seeing you! So I thrust myself in-without an
invitation ....

One might put down the hot water can quite composedly. The
lustre had gone out of her. Yet it was extraordinary to see her
again, older, happier, less lovely. They kissed each other, first
this cheek, then that, by the drawing- room door, and Clarissa
turned, with Sally's hand in hers, and saw her rooms full, heard
the roar of voices, saw the candlesticks, the blowing curtains, and
the roses which Richard had given her.
"I have five enormous boys," said Sally.
 She had the simplest egotism, the most open desire to be
thought first always, and Clarissa loved her for being still like
that. "I can't believe it! " she cried, kindling all over with
pleasure at the thought of the past .
But alas, Wilkins; Wilkins wanted her; Wilkins was emitting in
a voice of commanding authority as if the whole company must
be admonished and the hostess reclaimed from frivolity, one
name :

"The Prime Minister, " said Peter Walsh .

The Prime Minister? Was it really? Ellie Henderson marvelled.
What a thing to tell Edith!
One couldn't laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might
have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits-poor chap ,
all rigged up in gold lace. And to be fair, as he went his rounds,
first with Clarissa then with Richard escorting him, he did it very
well . He tried to look somebody. It was amusing to watch. Nobody
looked at him. They just went on talking, yet it was perfectly
plain that they all knew, felt to the marrow of their bones, this
majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English
society. Old Lady Bruton, and she looked very fine too, very
stalwart in her lace, swam up, and they withdrew into a little
room which at once became spied upon, guarded, and a sort of
stir and rustle rippled through everyone, openly: the Prime
Minister !

Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh,

standing in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace
and doing homage ! There! That must be-by Jove it was-Hugh
Whitbread, snuffing round the precincts of the great, grown
rather fatter, rather whiter, the admirable Hugh !
He looked always as if he were on duty, thought Peter, a
privileged, but secretive being, hoarding secrets which he would
die to defend, though it was only some little piece of tittle-tattle
dropped by a court footman which would be in all the papers
tomorrow. Such were his rattles, his baubles, in playing with
which he had grown white, come to the verge of old age, enjoying
the respect and affection of all who had the privilege of knowing
this type of the English public school man. Inevitably one made
up things like that about Hugh; that was his style; the style of
those admirable letters which Peter had read thousands of miles
across the sea in the Times, and had thanked God he was out of
that pernicious hubble-bubble if it were only to hear baboons
chatter and coolies beat their wives. An olive-skinned youth
from one of the Universities stood obsequiously by. Him he would
patronise, initiate, teach how to get on. For he liked nothing
better than doing kindnesses, making the hearts of old ladies
palpitate with the joy of being thought of in their age, their
affliction, thinking themselves quite forgotten, yet here was dear
Hugh driving up and spending an hour talking of the past,
remembering trifles, praising the homemade cake, though Hugh
might eat cake with a Duchess any day of his life, and, to look at
him, probably did spend a good deal of time in that agreeable
occupation. The All-judging, the All-merciful, might excuse.
Peter Walsh had no mercy. Villains there must be, and, God
knows, the rascals who get hanged for battering the brains of a
girl out in a train do less harm on the whole than Hugh
Whitbread and his kindness. Look at him now, on tiptoe, dancing
forward, bowing and scraping, as the Prime Minister and Lady
Bruton emerged, intimating for all the world to see that he was
privileged to say something, something private, to Lady Bruton
as she passed. She stopped. She wagged her fine old head. She
was thanking him presumably for some piece of servility. She
had her toadies, minor officials in Government offices who ran
about putting through little jobs on her behalf, in return for
which she gave them luncheon. But she derived from the
eighteenth century. She was all right.
And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room,
prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She
wore earrings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on
the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift
still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed;
turned, caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched
it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature
floating in its element. But age had brushed her; even as a
mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very
clear evening over the waves. There was a breath of tenderness;
her severity, her prudery, her woodenness were all warmed
through now, and she had about her as she said goodbye to the
thick gold-laced man who was doing his best, and good luck to
him, to look important, an inexpressible dignity; an exquisite
cordiality; as if she wished the whole world well, and must now,
being on the very verge and rim of things, take her leave. So she
made him think. (But he was not in love.)
Indeed, Clarissa felt, the Prime Minister had been good to
come. And, walking down the room with him, with Sally there
and Peter there and Richard very pleased, with all those people
rather inclined, perhaps, to envy, she had felt that intoxication
of the moment, that dilatation of the nerves of the heart itself
till it seemed to quiver, steeped, upright;—yes, but after all it
was what other people felt, that; for, though she loved it and felt
it tingle and sting, still these semblances, these triumphs (dear
old Peter, for example, thinking her so brilliant), had a
hollowness; at arm’s length they were, not in the heart; and it
might be that she was growing old, but they satisfied her no
longer as they used; and suddenly, as she saw the Prime Minister
go down the stairs, the gilt rim of the Sir Joshua picture of the
little girl with a muff brought back Kilman with a rush; Kilman
her enemy. That was satisfying; that was real. Ah, how she hated
her—hot, hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power; Elizabeth’s
seducer; the woman who had crept in to steal and defile (Richard
would say, What nonsense!). She hated her: she loved her. It was
enemies one wanted, not friends—not Mrs. Durrant and Clara,
Sir William and Lady Bradshaw, Miss Truelock and Eleanor
Gibson (whom she saw coming upstairs). They must find her if
they wanted her. She was for the party!
There was her old friend Sir Harry.
“Dear Sir Harry!” she said, going up to the fine old fellow who
had produced more bad pictures than any other two
Academicians in the whole of St. John’s Wood (they were always
of cattle, standing in sunset pools absorbing moisture, or
signifying, for he had a certain range of gesture, by the raising of
one foreleg and the toss of the antlers, “the Approach of the
Stranger”—all his activities, dining out, racing, were founded on
cattle standing absorbing moisture in sunset pools).
“What are you laughing at?” she asked him. For Willie Titcomb
and Sir Harry and Herbert Ainsty were all laughing. But no. Sir
Harry could not tell Clarissa Dalloway (much though he liked
her; of her type he thought her perfect, and threatened to paint
her) his stories of the music hall stage. He chaffed her about her
party. He missed his brandy. These circles, he said, were above
him. But he liked her; respected her, in spite of her damnable,
difficult upper-class refinement, which made it impossible to ask
Clarissa Dalloway to sit on his knee. And up came that wandering
will-o’-the-wisp, that vagous phosphorescence, old Mrs. Hilbery,
stretching her hands to the blaze of his laughter (about the Duke
and the Lady), which, as she heard it across the room, seemed to
reassure her on a point which sometimes bothered her if she
woke early in the morning and did not like to call her maid for a
cup of tea: how it is certain we must die.
“They won’t tell us their stories,” said Clarissa.
“Dear Clarissa!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery. She looked tonight,
she said, so like her mother as she first saw her walking in a
garden in a grey hat.
And really Clarissa’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother,
walking in a garden! But alas, she must go.
For there was Professor Brierly, who lectured on Milton,
talking to little Jim Hutton (who was unable even for a party like
this to compass both tie and waistcoat or make his hair lie flat),
and even at this distance they were quarrelling, she could see.
For Professor Brierly was a very queer fish. With all those
degrees, honours, lectureships between him and the scribblers,
he suspected instantly an atmosphere not favourable to his
queer compound; his prodigious learning and timidity; his
wintry charm without cordiality; his innocence blent with
snobbery; he quivered if made conscious by a lady’s unkempt
hair, a youth’s boots, of an underworld, very creditable
doubtless, of rebels, of ardent young people; of would-be
geniuses, and intimated with a little toss of the head, with a
sniff—Humph!—the value of moderation; of some slight training
in the classics in order to appreciate Milton. Professor Brierly
(Clarissa could see) wasn’t hitting it off with little Jim Hutton
(who wore red socks, his black being at the laundry) about
Milton. She interrupted.
She said she loved Bach. So did Hutton. That was the bond
between them, and Hutton (a very bad poet) always felt that
Mrs. Dalloway was far the best of the great ladies who took an
interest in art. It was odd how strict she was. About music she
was purely impersonal. She was rather a prig. But how charming
to look at! She made her house so nice if it weren’t for her
Professors . Clarissa had half a mind to snatch him off and set him
down at the piano in the back room. For he played divinely.
"But the noise !" she said. "The noise ! "
"The sign of a successful party." Nodding urbanely, the
Professor stepped delicately off.
"He knows everything in the whole world about Milton," said
Clarissa.
"Does he indeed?" said Hutton, who would imitate the
Professor throughout Hampstead; the Professor on Milton; the
Professor on moderation; the Professor stepping delicately off.
But she must speak to that couple, said Clarissa, Lord Gayton
and Nancy Blow.
Not that they added perceptibly to the noise of the party. They
were not talking (perceptibly) as they stood side by side by the
yellow curtains. They would soon be off elsewhere, together; and
never had very much to say in any circumstances. They looked;
that was all. That was enough. They looked so clean, so sound,
she with an apricot bloom of powder and paint, but he scrubbed,
rinsed, with the eyes of a bird, so that no ball could pass him or
stroke surprise him. He struck, he leapt, accurately, on the spot.
Ponies' mouths quivered at the end of his reins. He had his
honours, ancestral monuments, banners hanging in the church at
home . He had his duties; his tenants; a mother and sisters; had
been all day at Lord's, and that was what they were talking
about-cricket, cousins, the movies-when Mrs. Dalloway came
up . Lord Gayton liked her most awfully. So did Miss Blow. She
had such charming manners.
"It is angelic-it is delicious ofyou to have come! " she said. She
loved Lord's; she loved youth, and Nancy, dressed at enormous
expense by the greatest artists in Paris, stood there looking as if
her body had merely put forth, of its own accord, a green frill .
"I had meant to have dancing," said Clarissa .
 For the young people could not talk. And why should they?
Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn; carry sugar to ponies; kiss
and caress the snouts of adorable chows; and then, all tingling
and streaming, plunge and swim. But the enormous resources of
the English language, the power it bestows, after all, of
communicating feelings (at their age, she and Peter would have
been arguing all the evening), was not for them. They would
solidify young. They would be good beyond measure to the
people on the estate, but alone, perhaps, rather dull.
"What a pity! " she said. "I had hoped to have dancing."
It was so extraordinarily nice of them to have come! But talk of
dancing! The rooms were packed.
There was old Aunt Helena in her shawl. Alas, she must leave
them-Lord Gayton and Nancy Blow. There was old Miss Parry,
her aunt .

For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive. She
was past eighty. She ascended staircases slowly with a stick. She
was placed in a chair (Richard had seen to it). People who had
known Burma in the ' seventies were always led up to her. Where
had Peter got to? They used to be such friends. For at the
mention of India, or even Ceylon, her eyes (only one was glass)
slowly deepened, became blue, beheld, not human beings-she
had no tender memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys,
Generals, Mutinies-it was orchids she saw, and mountain passes
and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the ' sixties over
solitary peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (startling
blossoms, never beheld before) which she painted in watercolour;
an indomitable Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the War,
say, which dropped a bomb at her very door, from her deep
meditation over orchids and her own figure journeying in the
' sixties in India —but here was Peter .
"Come and talk to Aunt Helena about Burma," said Clarissa .
 And yet he had not had a word with her all the evening!
“We will talk later,” said Clarissa, leading him up to Aunt
Helena, in her white shawl, with her stick.
“Peter Walsh,” said Clarissa.
That meant nothing.
Clarissa had asked her. It was tiring; it was noisy; but Clarissa
had asked her. So she had come. It was a pity that they lived in
London—Richard and Clarissa. If only for Clarissa’s health it
would have been better to live in the country. But Clarissa had
always been fond of society.
“He has been in Burma,” said Clarissa.
Ah. She could not resist recalling what Charles Darwin had
said about her little book on the orchids of Burma.
(Clarissa must speak to Lady Bruton.)
No doubt it was forgotten now, her book on the orchids of
Burma, but it went into three editions before 1870, she told
Peter. She remembered him now. He had been at Bourton (and
he had left her, Peter Walsh remembered, without a word in the
drawing-room that night when Clarissa had asked him to come
boating).
“Richard so much enjoyed his lunch party,” said Clarissa to
Lady Bruton.
“Richard was the greatest possible help,” Lady Bruton replied.
“He helped me to write a letter. And how are you?”
“Oh, perfectly well!” said Clarissa. (Lady Bruton detested
illness in the wives of politicians.)
“And there’s Peter Walsh!” said Lady Bruton (for she could
never think of anything to say to Clarissa; though she liked her.
She had lots of fine qualities; but they had nothing in common—
she and Clarissa. It might have been better if Richard had
married a woman with less charm, who would have helped him
more in his work. He had lost his chance of the Cabinet). “There’s
Peter Walsh!” she said, shaking hands with that agreeable
sinner, that very able fellow who should have made a name for
himself but hadn’t (always in difficulties with women), and, of
course, old Miss Parry. Wonderful old lady!
Lady Bruton stood by Miss Parry’s chair, a spectral grenadier,
draped in black, inviting Peter Walsh to lunch; cordial; but
without small talk, remembering nothing whatever about the
flora or fauna of India. She had been there, of course; had stayed
with three Viceroys; thought some of the Indian civilians
uncommonly fine fellows; but what a tragedy it was—the state of
India! The Prime Minister had just been telling her (old Miss
Parry huddled up in her shawl, did not care what the Prime
Minister had just been telling her), and Lady Bruton would like
to have Peter Walsh’s opinion, he being fresh from the centre,
and she would get Sir Sampson to meet him, for really it
prevented her from sleeping at night, the folly of it, the
wickedness she might say, being a soldier’s daughter. She was an
old woman now, not good for much. But her house, her servants,
her good friend Milly Brush—did he remember her?—were all
there only asking to be used if—if they could be of help, in short.
For she never spoke of England, but this isle of men, this dear,
dear land, was in her blood (without reading Shakespeare), and
if ever a woman could have worn the helmet and shot the arrow,
could have led troops to attack, ruled with indomitable justice
barbarian hordes and lain under a shield noseless in a church, or
made a green grass mound on some primeval hillside, that
woman was Millicent Bruton. Debarred by her sex and some
truancy, too, of the logical faculty (she found it impossible to
write a letter to the Times), she had the thought of Empire always
at hand, and had acquired from her association with that
armoured goddess her ramrod bearing, her robustness of
demeanour, so that one could not figure her even in death
parted from the earth or roaming territories over which, in some
spiritual shape, the Union Jack had ceased to fly. To be not
English even among the dead—no, no! Impossible!
But was it Lady Bruton (whom she used to know)? Was it Peter
Walsh grown grey? Lady Rosseter asked herself (who had been
Sally Seton). It was old Miss Parry certainly—the old aunt who
used to be so cross when she stayed at Bourton. Never should she
forget running along the passage naked, and being sent for by
Miss Parry! And Clarissa! oh Clarissa! Sally caught her by the
arm.
Clarissa stopped beside them.
“But I can’t stay,” she said. “I shall come later. Wait,” she said,
looking at Peter and Sally. They must wait, she meant, until all
these people had gone.
“I shall come back,” she said, looking at her old friends, Sally
and Peter, who were shaking hands, and Sally, remembering the
past no doubt, was laughing.
But her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness; her eyes
not aglow as they used to be, when she smoked cigars, when she
ran down the passage to fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of
clothing on her, and Ellen Atkins asked, What if the gentlemen
had met her? But everybody forgave her. She stole a chicken
from the larder because she was hungry in the night; she smoked
cigars in her bedroom; she left a priceless book in the punt. But
everybody adored her (except perhaps Papa). It was her warmth;
her vitality—she would paint, she would write. Old women in the
village never to this day forgot to ask after “your friend in the
red cloak who seemed so bright.” She accused Hugh Whitbread,
of all people (and there he was, her old friend Hugh, talking to
the Portuguese Ambassador), of kissing her in the smoking-room
to punish her for saying that women should have votes. Vulgar
men did, she said. And Clarissa remembered having to persuade
her not to denounce him at family prayers-which she was
capable of doing with her daring, her recklessness, her
melodramatic love of being the centre of everything and
creating scenes, and it was bound, Clarissa used to think, to end
in some awful tragedy; her death; her martyrdom; instead of
which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man with a
large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at
Manchester . And she had five boys!
She and Peter had settled down together. They were talking: it
seemed so familiar-that they should be talking. They would
discuss the past. With the two of them (more even than with
Richard) she shared her past; the garden; the trees; old Joseph
Breitkopf singing Brahms without any voice; the drawing-room
wallpaper; the smell of the mats. A part of this Sally must always
be; Peter must always be. But she must leave them. There were
the Bradshaws, whom she disliked.
She must go up to Lady Bradshaw (in grey and silver,
balancing like a sea-lion at the edge of its tank, barking for
invitations, Duchesses, the typical successful man's wife), she
must go up to Lady Bradshaw and say ...
But Lady Bradshaw anticipated her.
"We are shockingly late, dear Mrs. Dalloway; we hardly dared
to come in, " she said .
And Sir William, who looked very distinguished, with his grey
hair and blue eyes, said yes; they had not been able to resist the
temptation. He was talking to Richard about that Bill probably,
which they wanted to get through the Commons. Why did the
sight of him, talking to Richard, curl her up? He looked what he
was, a great doctor. A man absolutely at the head of his
profession, very powerful, rather worn. For think what cases
came before him-people in the uttermost depths of misery;
people on the verge of insanity; husbands and wives. He had to
decide questions of appalling difficulty. Yet-what she felt was,
one wouldn't like Sir William to see one unhappy. No; not that
man .

"How is your son at Eton?" she asked Lady Bradshaw.

He had just missed his eleven, said Lady Bradshaw, because of
the mumps. His father minded even more than he did, she
thought, "being,” she said, "nothing but a great boy himself.”
Clarissa looked at Sir William, talking to Richard. He did not
look like a boy-not in the least like a boy.
She had once gone with someone to ask his advice. He had
been perfectly right; extremely sensible. But Heavens-what a
relief to get out to the street again! There was some poor wretch
sobbing, she remembered, in the waiting-room. But she did not
know what it was about Sir William; what exactly she disliked.
Only Richard agreed with her, "didn't like his taste, didn't like
his smell." But he was extraordinarily able. They were talking
about this Bill . Some case, Sir William was mentioning, lowering
his voice. It had its bearing upon what he was saying about the
deferred effects of shell shock. There must be some provision in
the Bill .

Sinking her voice, drawing Mrs. Dalloway into the shelter of a

common femininity, a common pride in the illustrious qualities
of husbands and their sad tendency to overwork, Lady Bradshaw
(poor goose-one didn't dislike her) murmured how, "just as we
were starting, my husband was called up on the telephone, a
very sad case . A young man (that is what Sir William is telling
Mr. Dalloway) had killed himself. He had been in the army." Oh!
thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death, she
thought .
She went on, into the little room where the Prime Minister
had gone with Lady Bruton. Perhaps there was somebody there .
But there was nobody. The chairs still kept the impress of the
Prime Minister and Lady Bruton, she turned deferentially, he
sitting foursquare, authoritatively. They had been talking about
India. There was nobody. The party's splendour fell to the floor,
so strange it was to come in alone in her finery.
What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her
party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at
her party-the Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed
himself-but how? Always her body went through it, when she
was told, first, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her
body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had
flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the
rusty spikes . There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain,
and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he
done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never
anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living
(she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people
kept on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton,
of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that
mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced,
obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies,
chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance . Death was
an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of
reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness
drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace
in death.

But this young man who had killed himself-had he plunged

holding his treasure? "If it were now to die, 'twere now to be
most happy," she had said to herself once, coming down in white .
Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that
passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor,
yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to
women, but capable of some indescribable outrage—forcing your
soul, that was it—if this young man had gone to him, and Sir
William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he
not then have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made
intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that?
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror;
the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s
hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with
serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.
Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there reading the
Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive,
send roaring up that immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to
stick, one thing with another, she must have perished. She had
escaped. But that young man had killed himself.
Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her
punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a
woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here
in her evening dress. She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was
never wholly admirable. She had wanted success, Lady
Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the
terrace at Bourton.
Odd, incredible; she had never been so happy. Nothing could
be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal,
she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the
shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in
the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun
rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton
when they were all talking, to look at the sky; or seen it between
people’s shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could
not sleep. She walked to the window.
It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this
country sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains;
she looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old
lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It
will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky,
turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—ashen pale,
raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The
wind must have risen. She was going to bed, in the room
opposite. It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old
lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see
her? It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting
in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly,
going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking.
The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with
the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him,
with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light!
the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated,
and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She
must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt
somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself.
She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went
on living. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in
the air. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find
Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.

“But where is Clarissa?” said Peter. He was sitting on the sofa

with Sally. (After all these years he really could not call her
“Lady Rosseter.”) “Where’s the woman gone to?” he asked.
“Where’s Clarissa?”
Sally supposed, and so did Peter for the matter of that, that
there were people of importance, politicians, whom neither of
them knew unless by sight in the picture papers, whom Clarissa
had to be nice to, had to talk to. She was with them. Yet there
was Richard Dalloway not in the Cabinet. He hadn't been a
success, Sally supposed? For herself, she scarcely ever read the
papers. She sometimes saw his name mentioned. But then-well,
she lived a very solitary life, in the wilds, Clarissa would say,
among great merchants, great manufacturers, men, after all,
who did things. She had done things too!
"I have five sons! " she told him.
Lord, Lord, what a change had come over her! the softness of
motherhood; its egotism too. Last time they met, Peter
remembered, had been among the cauliflowers in the moonlight,
the leaves "like rough bronze " she had said, with her literary
turn; and she had picked a rose. She had marched him up and
down that awful night, after the scene by the fountain; he was to
catch the midnight train. Heavens, he had wept !
That was his old trick, opening a pocketknife, thought Sally,
always opening and shutting a knife when he got excited. They
had been very, very intimate , she and Peter Walsh, when he was
in love with Clarissa, and there was that dreadful, ridiculous
scene over Richard Dalloway at lunch. She had called Richard
"Wickham. " Why not call Richard "Wickham"? Clarissa had
flared up ! and indeed they had never seen each other since, she
and Clarissa, not more than half a dozen times perhaps in the
last ten years. And Peter Walsh had gone off to India, and she
had heard vaguely that he had made an unhappy marriage, and
she didn't know whether he had any children, and she couldn't
ask him, for he had changed. He was rather shrivelled-looking,
but kinder, she felt, and she had a real affection for him, for he
was connected with her youth, and she still had a little Emily
Brontë he had given her, and he was to write, surely? In those
days he was to write.
"Have you written?" she asked him, spreading her hand, her
firm and shapely hand, on her knee in a way he recalled.
 "Not a word! " said Peter Walsh, and she laughed.
She was still attractive, still a personage, Sally Seton. But who
was this Rosseter? He wore two camellias on his wedding day-
that was all Peter knew of him. "They have myriads of servants,
miles of conservatories, " Clarissa wrote; something like that.
Sally owned it with a shout of laughter.
"Yes, I have ten thousand a year" -whether before the tax was
paid or after, she couldn't remember, for her husband, “whom
you must meet," she said, "whom you would like, " she said, did
all that for her .
And Sally used to be in rags and tatters. She had pawned her
great-grandfather's ring which Marie Antoinette had given
him-had he got it right?-to come to Bourton.
Oh yes, Sally remembered; she had it still, a ruby ring which
Marie Antoinette had given her great-grandfather. She never
had a penny to her name in those days, and going to Bourton
always meant some frightful pinch. But going to Bourton had
meant so much to her-had kept her sane, she believed, so
unhappy had she been at home . But that was all a thing of the
past-all over now, she said. And Mr. Parry was dead; and Miss
Parry was still alive . Never had he had such a shock in his life !
said Peter . He had been quite certain she was dead. And the
marriage had been, Sally supposed, a success? And that very
handsome, very self-possessed young woman was Elizabeth, over
there, by the curtains, in pink.
(She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a
hyacinth, Willie Titcomb was thinking. Oh how much nicer to be
in the country and do what she liked! She could hear her poor
dog howling, Elizabeth was certain.) She was not a bit like
Clarissa , Peter Walsh said.
"Oh, Clarissa ! ” said Sally.
 What Sally felt was simply this. She had owed Clarissa an
enormous amount. They had been friends, not acquaintances,
friends, and she still saw Clarissa all in white going about the
house with her hands full of flowers-to this day tobacco plants
made her think of Bourton. But-did Peter understand?-she
lacked something. Lacked what was it? She had charm; she had
extraordinary charm. But to be frank (and she felt that Peter was
an old friend, a real friend-did absence matter? did distance
matter ? She had often wanted to write to him, but torn it up, yet
felt he understood, for people understand without things being
said, as one realises growing old, and old she was, had been that
afternoon to see her sons at Eton, where they had the mumps), to
be quite frank, then, how could Clarissa have done it?-married
Richard Dalloway? a sportsman, a man who cared only for dogs.
Literally, when he came into the room he smelt of the stables.
And then all this? She waved her hand .
Hugh Whitbread it was, strolling past in his white waistcoat,
dim, fat, blind, past everything he looked, except self-esteem
and comfort .

"He's not going to recognise us," said Sally, and really she
hadn't the courage-so that was Hugh! the admirable Hugh!
"And what does he do?" she asked Peter .
He blacked the King's boots or counted bottles at Windsor,
Peter told her. Peter kept his sharp tongue still! But Sally must
be frank, Peter said . That kiss now, Hugh's.
On the lips, she assured him, in the smoking- room one
evening. She went straight to Clarissa in a rage . Hugh didn't do
such things! Clarissa said, the admirable Hugh! Hugh's socks
were without exception the most beautiful she had ever seen-
and now his evening dress. Perfect! And had he children?
"Everybody in the room has six sons at Eton, " Peter told her,
except himself. He, thank God, had none. No sons, no daughters,
no wife . Well, he didn't seem to mind, said Sally. He looked
younger, she thought, than any of them.
But it had been a silly thing to do, in many ways, Peter said, to
marry like that; "a perfect goose she was," he said, but, he said,
"we had a splendid time of it," but how could that be? Sally
wondered; what did he mean? and how odd it was to know him
and yet not know a single thing that had happened to him. And
did he say it out of pride? Very likely, for after all it must be
galling for him (though he was an oddity, a sort of sprite, not at
all an ordinary man), it must be lonely at his age to have no
home, nowhere to go to. But he must stay with them for weeks
and weeks. Of course he would; he would love to stay with them,
and that was how it came out. All these years the Dalloways had
never been once . Time after time they had asked them. Clarissa
(for it was Clarissa of course) would not come. For, said Sally,
Clarissa was at heart a snob-one had to admit it, a snob . And it
was that that was between them, she was convinced. Clarissa
thought she had married beneath her, her husband being-she
was proud of it-a miner's son. Every penny they had he had
earned. As a little boy (her voice trembled) he had carried great
sacks.

(And so she would go on, Peter felt, hour after hour; the
miner's son; people thought she had married beneath her; her
five sons; and what was the other thing-plants, hydrangeas,
syringas, very, very rare hibiscus lilies that never grow north of
the Suez Canal, but she, with one gardener in a suburb near
Manchester, had beds of them, positively beds! Now all that
Clarissa had escaped, unmaternal as she was.)
A snob was she? Yes, in many ways. Where was she, all this
time? It was getting late .
"Yet, " said Sally, "when I heard Clarissa was giving a party, I
felt I couldn't not come-must see her again (and I'm staying in
Victoria Street, practically next door). So I just came without an
invitation. But, " she whispered, “tell me, do. Who is this?"
It was Mrs. Hilbery, looking for the door. For how late it was
getting! And, she murmured, as the night grew later, as people
went, one found old friends; quiet nooks and corners; and the
loveliest views. Did they know, she asked, that they were
surrounded by an enchanted garden? Lights and trees and
wonderful gleaming lakes and the sky. Just a few fairy lamps,
Clarissa Dalloway had said, in the back garden! But she was a
magician! It was a park.... And she didn't know their names, but
friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs
without words, always the best. But there were so many doors,
such unexpected places, she could not find her way.
"Old Mrs. Hilbery, " said Peter; but who was that? that lady
standing by the curtain all the evening, without speaking? He
knew her face; connected her with Bourton. Surely she used to
cut up underclothes at the large table in the window? Davidson,
was that her name?

"Oh, that is Ellie Henderson," said Sally. Clarissa was really

very hard on her. She was a cousin, very poor. Clarissa was hard
on people.
She was rather, said Peter. Yet, said Sally, in her emotional
way, with a rush of that enthusiasm which Peter used to love her
for, yet dreaded a little now, so effusive she might become -how
generous to her friends Clarissa was! and what a rare quality one
found it, and how sometimes at night or on Christmas Day, when
she counted up her blessings, she put that friendship first. They
were young; that was it. Clarissa was pure-hearted; that was it.
Peter would think her sentimental. So she was . For she had come
to feel that it was the only thing worth saying-what one felt.
Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt .
"But I do not know," said Peter Walsh, "what I feel ."
 Poor Peter, thought Sally. Why did not Clarissa come and talk
to them? That was what he was longing for. She knew it. All the
time he was thinking only of Clarissa, and was fidgeting with his
knife .

He had not found life simple, Peter said. His relations with
Clarissa had not been simple. It had spoilt his life, he said. (They
had been so intimate-he and Sally Seton, it was absurd not to
say it.) One could not be in love twice, he said. And what could
she say? Still, it is better to have loved (but he would think her
sentimental -he used to be so sharp). He must come and stay
with them in Manchester. That is all very true, he said. All very
true . He would love to come and stay with them, directly he had
done what he had to do in London.
And Clarissa had cared for him more than she had ever cared
for Richard. Sally was positive of that .
"No, no, no! ” said Peter (Sally should not have said that-she
went too far). That good fellow-there he was at the end of the
room, holding forth, the same as ever, dear old Richard. Who was
he talking to? Sally asked, that very distinguished-looking man?
Living in the wilds as she did, she had an insatiable curiosity to
know who people were. But Peter did not know. He did not like
his looks, he said, probably a Cabinet Minister. Of them all,
Richard seemed to him the best, he said—the most disinterested.
"But what has he done?" Sally asked. Public work, she
supposed. And were they happy together? Sally asked (she
herself was extremely happy); for, she admitted, she knew
nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for
what can one know even of the people one lives with every day?
she asked. Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful
play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she
had felt that was true of life-one scratched on the wall .
Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she
often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace
which men and women never gave her. But no; he did not like
cabbages; he preferred human beings, Peter said. Indeed, the
young are beautiful, Sally said, watching Elizabeth cross the
room. How unlike Clarissa at her age! Could he make anything of
her? She would not open her lips. Not much, not yet, Peter
admitted. She was like a lily, Sally said, a lily by the side of a
pool. But Peter did not agree that we know nothing. We know
everything, he said; at least he did.
But these two, Sally whispered, these two coming now (and
really she must go, if Clarissa did not come soon), this
distinguished-looking man and his rather common-looking wife
who had been talking to Richard—what could one know about
people like that?
“That they’re damnable humbugs,” said Peter, looking at them
casually. He made Sally laugh.
But Sir William Bradshaw stopped at the door to look at a
picture. He looked in the corner for the engraver’s name. His
wife looked too. Sir William Bradshaw was so interested in art.
When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to
know people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally
was fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl’s of
twenty); now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could
watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of
feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply,
more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas,
perhaps, but one should be glad of it—it went on increasing in his
experience. There was someone in India. He would like to tell
Sally about her. He would like Sally to know her. She was
married, he said. She had two small children. They must all come
to Manchester, said Sally—he must promise before they left.
 "There's Elizabeth, " he said, "she feels not half what we feel,
not yet." "But," said Sally, watching Elizabeth go to her father,
"one can see they are devoted to each other." She could feel it by
the way Elizabeth went to her father.
For her father had been looking at her, as he stood talking to
the Bradshaws, and he had thought to himself who is that lovely
girl? And suddenly he realised that it was his Elizabeth, and he
had not recognised her, she looked so lovely in her pink frock!
Elizabeth had felt him looking at her as she talked to Willie
Titcomb. So she went to him and they stood together, now that
the party was almost over, looking at the people going, and the
rooms getting emptier and emptier, with things scattered on the
floor. Even Ellie Henderson was going, nearly last of all, though
no one had spoken to her, but she had wanted to see everything,
to tell Edith. And Richard and Elizabeth were rather glad it was
over, but Richard was proud of his daughter. And he had not
meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her. He had
looked at her, he said, and he had wondered, who is that lovely
girl? and it was his daughter! That did make her happy. But her
poor dog was howling.
"Richard has improved. You are right," said Sally. "I shall go
and talk to him. I shall say goodnight. What does the brain
matter, " said Lady Rosseter, getting up, “compared with the
heart?"

"I will come," said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is
this terror ? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it
that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was .
 SE

Mrs. Dalloway
was published in 1925 by
VIRGINIA WOOLF .

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