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Title:      Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Author:     Virginia Woolf
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Date first posted:          November 2002
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Mrs. Dalloway
Author:     Virginia Woolf




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 pocket-knife, 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, motor cars,
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 some
one 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 motor
cars 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 to-night, 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 some one 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 any one 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 some one, 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 waggons plodding past to
market; and driving home across the Park.  She remembered once
throwing a shilling into the Serpentine.  But every one 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 the 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 life-blood, 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 motor cars," 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 motor cars, those tyres of motor
cars, were all HER fault.



The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss Pym go
to the window and apologise came from a motor car which had drawn
to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry's shop
window.  Passers-by 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 motor car 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.  Every one looked at the motor car.
Septimus looked.  Boys on bicycles sprang off.  Traffic
accumulated.  And there the motor car 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 motor car 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 motor car; 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 motor car 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 and last
time, 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 motor car 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 fulness 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 tail-
coats and their white slips and their hair raked back who, for
reasons difficult to discriminate, were standing in the bow window
of Brooks'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
syphons 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 light-heartedness
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 motor cars 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!  Every one 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?

"Glaxo," said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice, gazing
straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed
straight up.

"Kreemo," murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-walker.  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, for ever, 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 window-pane, 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, for ever
unwasted, suffering for ever, 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 of
doors.

"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 for ever, 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 to-day."

"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
river-bed 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:

"Star-gazing?" 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, after all, how much she owed to him 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.  Some one 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 to-night.  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
pocket-knife and half opened the blade.

Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the same
check suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little
thinner, dryer, perhaps, but he looks awfully well, and just the
same.

"How heavenly it is to see you again!" she exclaimed.  He had his
knife out.  That's so like him, she thought.

He had only reached town last night, he said; would have to go down
into the country at once; and how was everything, how was
everybody--Richard?  Elizabeth?

"And what's all this?" he said, tilting his pen-knife towards her
green dress.

He's very well dressed, thought Clarissa; yet he always criticises
ME.

Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he
thought; here she's been sitting all the time I've been in India;
mending her dress; playing about; going to parties; running to the
House and back and all that, he thought, growing more and more
irritated, more and more agitated, for there's nothing in the world
so bad for some women as marriage, he thought; and politics; and
having a Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard.  So it
is, so it is, he thought, shutting his knife with a snap.

"Richard's very well.  Richard's at a Committee," said Clarissa.

And she opened her scissors, and said, did he mind her just
finishing what she was doing to her dress, for they had a party
that night?

"Which I shan't ask you to," she said.  "My dear Peter!" she said.

But it was delicious to hear her say that--my dear Peter!  Indeed,
it was all so delicious--the silver, the chairs; all so delicious!

Why wouldn't she ask him to her party? he asked.

Now of course, thought Clarissa, he's enchanting! perfectly
enchanting!  Now I remember how impossible it was ever to make up
my mind--and why did I make up my mind--not to marry him? she
wondered, that awful summer?

"But it's so extraordinary that you should have come this morning!"
she cried, putting her hands, one on top of another, down on her
dress.

"Do you remember," she said, "how the blinds used to flap at
Bourton?"

"They did," he said; and he remembered breakfasting alone, very
awkwardly, with her father; who had died; and he had not written to
Clarissa.  But he had never got on well with old Parry, that
querulous, weak-kneed old man, Clarissa's father, Justin Parry.

"I often wish I'd got on better with your father," he said.

"But he never liked any one who--our friends," said Clarissa; and
could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had
wanted to marry her.

Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he
thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a
moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from
the sunken day.  I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he
thought.  And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace
he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it;
let it fall.  There above them it hung, that moon.  She too seemed
to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.

"Herbert has it now," she said.  "I never go there now," she said.

Then, just as happens on a terrace in the moonlight, when one
person begins to feel ashamed that he is already bored, and yet as
the other sits silent, very quiet, sadly looking at the moon, does
not like to speak, moves his foot, clears his throat, notices some
iron scroll on a table leg, stirs a leaf, but says nothing--so
Peter Walsh did now.  For why go back like this to the past? he
thought.  Why make him think of it again?  Why make him suffer,
when she had tortured him so infernally?  Why?

"Do you remember the lake?" she said, in an abrupt voice, under the
pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of
her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said
"lake."  For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between
her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her
parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which,
as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it
became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them
and said, "This is what I have made of it!  This!"  And what had
she made of it?  What, indeed? sitting there sewing this morning
with Peter.

She looked at Peter Walsh; her look, passing through all that time
and that emotion, reached him doubtfully; settled on him tearfully;
and rose and fluttered away, as a bird touches a branch and rises
and flutters away.  Quite simply she wiped her eyes.

"Yes," said Peter.  "Yes, yes, yes," he said, as if she drew up to
the surface something which positively hurt him as it rose.  Stop!
Stop! he wanted to cry.  For he was not old; his life was not over;
not by any means.  He was only just past fifty.  Shall I tell her,
he thought, or not?  He would like to make a clean breast of it
all.  But she is too cold, he thought; sewing, with her scissors;
Daisy would look ordinary beside Clarissa.  And she would think me
a failure, which I am in their sense, he thought; in the Dalloways'
sense.  Oh yes, he had no doubt about that; he was a failure,
compared with all this--the inlaid table, the mounted paper-knife,
the dolphin and the candlesticks, the chair-covers and the old
valuable English tinted prints--he was a failure!  I detest the
smugness of the whole affair, he thought; Richard's doing, not
Clarissa's; save that she married him.  (Here Lucy came into the
room, carrying silver, more silver, but charming, slender, graceful
she looked, he thought, as she stooped to put it down.)  And this
has been going on all the time! he thought; week after week;
Clarissa's life; while I--he thought; and at once everything seemed
to radiate from him; journeys; rides; quarrels; adventures; bridge
parties; love affairs; work; work, work! and he took out his knife
quite openly--his old horn-handled knife which Clarissa could swear
he had had these thirty years--and clenched his fist upon it.

What an extraordinary habit that was, Clarissa thought; always
playing with a knife.  Always making one feel, too, frivolous;
empty-minded; a mere silly chatterbox, as he used.  But I too, she
thought, and, taking up her needle, summoned, like a Queen whose
guards have fallen asleep and left her unprotected (she had been
quite taken aback by this visit--it had upset her) so that any one
can stroll in and have a look at her where she lies with the
brambles curving over her, summoned to her help the things she did;
the things she liked; her husband; Elizabeth; her self, in short,
which Peter hardly knew now, all to come about her and beat off the
enemy.

"Well, and what's happened to you?" she said.  So before a battle
begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light
shines on their flanks; their necks curve.  So Peter Walsh and
Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each
other.  His powers chafed and tossed in him.  He assembled from
different quarters all sorts of things; praise; his career at
Oxford; his marriage, which she knew nothing whatever about; how he
had loved; and altogether done his job.

"Millions of things!" he exclaimed, and, urged by the assembly of
powers which were now charging this way and that and giving him the
feeling at once frightening and extremely exhilarating of being
rushed through the air on the shoulders of people he could no
longer see, he raised his hands to his forehead.

Clarissa sat very upright; drew in her breath.

"I am in love," he said, not to her however, but to some one raised
up in the dark so that you could not touch her but must lay your
garland down on the grass in the dark.

"In love," he repeated, now speaking rather dryly to Clarissa
Dalloway; "in love with a girl in India."  He had deposited his
garland.  Clarissa could make what she would of it.

"In love!" she said.  That he at his age should be sucked under in
his little bow-tie by that monster!  And there's no flesh on his
neck; his hands are red; and he's six months older than I am! her
eye flashed back to her; but in her heart she felt, all the same,
he is in love.  He has that, she felt; he is in love.

But the indomitable egotism which for ever rides down the hosts
opposed to it, the river which says on, on, on; even though, it
admits, there may be no goal for us whatever, still on, on; this
indomitable egotism charged her cheeks with colour; made her look
very young; very pink; very bright-eyed as she sat with her dress
upon her knee, and her needle held to the end of green silk,
trembling a little.  He was in love!  Not with her.  With some
younger woman, of course.

"And who is she?" she asked.

Now this statue must be brought from its height and set down
between them.

"A married woman, unfortunately," he said; "the wife of a Major in
the Indian Army."

And with a curious ironical sweetness he smiled as he placed her in
this ridiculous way before Clarissa.

(All the same, he is in love, thought Clarissa.)

"She has," he continued, very reasonably, "two small children; a
boy and a girl; and I have come over to see my lawyers about the
divorce."

There they are! he thought.  Do what you like with them, Clarissa!
There they are!  And second by second it seemed to him that the
wife of the Major in the Indian Army (his Daisy) and her two small
children became more and more lovely as Clarissa looked at them; as
if he had set light to a grey pellet on a plate and there had risen
up a lovely tree in the brisk sea-salted air of their intimacy (for
in some ways no one understood him, felt with him, as Clarissa
did)--their exquisite intimacy.

She flattered him; she fooled him, thought Clarissa; shaping the
woman, the wife of the Major in the Indian Army, with three strokes
of a knife.  What a waste!  What a folly!  All his life long Peter
had been fooled like that; first getting sent down from Oxford;
next marrying the girl on the boat going out to India; now the wife
of a Major in the Indian Army--thank Heaven she had refused to
marry him!  Still, he was in love; her old friend, her dear Peter,
he was in love.

"But what are you going to do?" she asked him.  Oh the lawyers and
solicitors, Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of Lincoln's Inn, they were
going to do it, he said.  And he actually pared his nails with his
pocket-knife.

For Heaven's sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in
irrepressible irritation; it was his silly unconventionality, his
weakness; his lack of the ghost of a notion what any one else was
feeling that annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now at his
age, how silly!

I know all that, Peter thought; I know what I'm up against, he
thought, running his finger along the blade of his knife, Clarissa
and Dalloway and all the rest of them; but I'll show Clarissa--and
then to his utter surprise, suddenly thrown by those uncontrollable
forces thrown through the air, he burst into tears; wept; wept
without the least shame, sitting on the sofa, the tears running
down his cheeks.

And Clarissa had leant forward, taken his hand, drawn him to her,
kissed him,--actually had felt his face on hers before she could
down the brandishing of silver flashing--plumes like pampas grass
in a tropic gale in her breast, which, subsiding, left her
holding his hand, patting his knee and, feeling as she sat back
extraordinarily at her ease with him and light-hearted, all in a
clap it came over her, If I had married him, this gaiety would have
been mine all day!

It was all over for her.  The sheet was stretched and the bed
narrow.  She had gone up into the tower alone and left them
blackberrying in the sun.  The door had shut, and there among the
dust of fallen plaster and the litter of birds' nests how distant
the view had looked, and the sounds came thin and chill (once on
Leith Hill, she remembered), and Richard, Richard! she cried, as a
sleeper in the night starts and stretches a hand in the dark for
help.  Lunching with Lady Bruton, it came back to her.  He has left
me; I am alone for ever, she thought, folding her hands upon her
knee.

Peter Walsh had got up and crossed to the window and stood with his
back to her, flicking a bandanna handkerchief from side to side.
Masterly and dry and desolate he looked, his thin shoulder-blades
lifting his coat slightly; blowing his nose violently.  Take me
with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting
directly upon some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as
if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving
were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run
away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over.

Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her things
together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera-glasses, and gets up to
go out of the theatre into the street, she rose from the sofa and
went to Peter.

And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the
power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she
came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at
Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.

"Tell me," he said, seizing her by the shoulders.  "Are you happy,
Clarissa?  Does Richard--"

The door opened.

"Here is my Elizabeth," said Clarissa, emotionally, histrionically,
perhaps.

"How d'y do?" said Elizabeth coming forward.

The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them
with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent,
inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that.

"Hullo, Elizabeth!" cried Peter, stuffing his handkerchief into his
pocket, going quickly to her, saying "Good-bye, Clarissa" without
looking at her, leaving the room quickly, and running downstairs
and opening the hall door.

"Peter!  Peter!" cried Clarissa, following him out on to the
landing.  "My party to-night!  Remember my party to-night!" she
cried, having to raise her voice against the roar of the open air,
and, overwhelmed by the traffic and the sound of all the clocks
striking, her voice crying "Remember my party to-night!" sounded
frail and thin and very far away as Peter Walsh shut the door.



Remember my party, remember my party, said Peter Walsh as he
stepped down the street, speaking to himself rhythmically, in time
with the flow of the sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben
striking the half-hour.  (The leaden circles dissolved in the air.)
Oh these parties, he thought; Clarissa's parties.  Why does she
give these parties, he thought.  Not that he blamed her or this
effigy of a man in a tail-coat with a carnation in his buttonhole
coming towards him.  Only one person in the world could be as he
was, in love.  And there he was, this fortunate man, himself,
reflected in the plate-glass window of a motor-car manufacturer in
Victoria Street.  All India lay behind him; plains, mountains;
epidemics of cholera; a district twice as big as Ireland; decisions
he had come to alone--he, Peter Walsh; who was now really for the
first time in his life, in love.  Clarissa had grown hard, he
thought; and a trifle sentimental into the bargain, he suspected,
looking at the great motor-cars capable of doing--how many miles on
how many gallons?  For he had a turn for mechanics; had invented a
plough in his district, had ordered wheel-barrows from England, but
the coolies wouldn't use them, all of which Clarissa knew nothing
whatever about.

The way she said "Here is my Elizabeth!"--that annoyed him.  Why
not "Here's Elizabeth" simply?  It was insincere.  And Elizabeth
didn't like it either.  (Still the last tremors of the great
booming voice shook the air round him; the half-hour; still early;
only half-past eleven still.)  For he understood young people; he
liked them.  There was always something cold in Clarissa, he
thought.  She had always, even as a girl, a sort of timidity, which
in middle age becomes conventionality, and then it's all up, it's
all up, he thought, looking rather drearily into the glassy depths,
and wondering whether by calling at that hour he had annoyed her;
overcome with shame suddenly at having been a fool; wept; been
emotional; told her everything, as usual, as usual.

As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on
the mind.  Effort ceases.  Time flaps on the mast.  There we stop;
there we stand.  Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the
human frame.  Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said to himself;
feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within.  Clarissa refused me,
he thought.  He stood there thinking, Clarissa refused me.

Ah, said St. Margaret's, like a hostess who comes into her drawing-
room on the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there
already.  I am not late.  No, it is precisely half-past eleven, she
says.  Yet, though she is perfectly right, her voice, being the
voice of the hostess, is reluctant to inflict its individuality.
Some grief for the past holds it back; some concern for the
present.  It is half-past eleven, she says, and the sound of St.
Margaret's glides into the recesses of the heart and buries itself
in ring after ring of sound, like something alive which wants to
confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a tremor of
delight, at rest--like Clarissa herself, thought Peter Walsh,
coming down the stairs on the stroke of the hour in white.  It is
Clarissa herself, he thought, with a deep emotion, and an
extraordinarily clear, yet puzzling, recollection of her, as if
this bell had come into the room years ago, where they sat at some
moment of great intimacy, and had gone from one to the other and
had left, like a bee with honey, laden with the moment.  But what
room?  What moment?  And why had he been so profoundly happy when
the clock was striking?  Then, as the sound of St. Margaret's
languished, he thought, She has been ill, and the sound expressed
languor and suffering.  It was her heart, he remembered; and the
sudden loudness of the final stroke tolled for death that surprised
in the midst of life, Clarissa falling where she stood, in her
drawing-room.  No!  No! he cried.  She is not dead!  I am not old,
he cried, and marched up Whitehall, as if there rolled down to him,
vigorous, unending, his future.

He was not old, or set, or dried in the least.  As for caring what
they said of him--the Dalloways, the Whitbreads, and their set, he
cared not a straw--not a straw (though it was true he would have,
some time or other, to see whether Richard couldn't help him to
some job).  Striding, staring, he glared at the statue of the Duke
of Cambridge.  He had been sent down from Oxford--true.  He had
been a Socialist, in some sense a failure--true.  Still the future
of civilisation lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like
that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their
love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the
way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science;
reading philosophy.  The future lies in the hands of young men like
that, he thought.

A patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came from behind, and
with it a rustling, regular thudding sound, which as it overtook
him drummed his thoughts, strict in step, up Whitehall, without his
doing.  Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes
ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an
expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a
statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England.

It is, thought Peter Walsh, beginning to keep step with them, a
very fine training.  But they did not look robust.  They were weedy
for the most part, boys of sixteen, who might, to-morrow, stand
behind bowls of rice, cakes of soap on counters.  Now they wore on
them unmixed with sensual pleasure or daily preoccupations the
solemnity of the wreath which they had fetched from Finsbury
Pavement to the empty tomb.  They had taken their vow.  The traffic
respected it; vans were stopped.

I can't keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up
Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past every
one, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms
uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been
laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a
stiff yet staring corpse by discipline.  One had to respect it; one
might laugh; but one had to respect it, he thought.  There they go,
thought Peter Walsh, pausing at the edge of the pavement; and all
the exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the black, the
spectacular images of great soldiers stood looking ahead of them,
as if they too had made the same renunciation (Peter Walsh felt he
too had made it, the great renunciation), trampled under the same
temptations, and achieved at length a marble stare.  But the stare
Peter Walsh did not want for himself in the least; though he could
respect it in others.  He could respect it in boys.  They don't
know the troubles of the flesh yet, he thought, as the marching
boys disappeared in the direction of the Strand--all that I've been
through, he thought, crossing the road, and standing under Gordon's
statue, Gordon whom as a boy he had worshipped; Gordon standing
lonely with one leg raised and his arms crossed,--poor Gordon, he
thought.

And just because nobody yet knew he was in London, except Clarissa,
and the earth, after the voyage, still seemed an island to him, the
strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past eleven
in Trafalgar Square overcame him.  What is it?  Where am I?  And
why, after all, does one do it? he thought, the divorce seeming all
moonshine.  And down his mind went flat as a marsh, and three great
emotions bowled over him; understanding; a vast philanthropy; and
finally, as if the result of the others, an irrepressible,
exquisite delight; as if inside his brain by another hand strings
were pulled, shutters moved, and he, having nothing to do with it,
yet stood at the opening of endless avenues, down which if he chose
he might wander.  He had not felt so young for years.

He had escaped! was utterly free--as happens in the downfall of
habit when the mind, like an unguarded flame, bows and bends and
seems about to blow from its holding.  I haven't felt so young for
years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so)
from being precisely what he was, and feeling like a child who runs
out of doors, and sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the
wrong window.  But she's extraordinarily attractive, he thought,
as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the
Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon's statue,
seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil
after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in
mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but
enchanting.

Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his pocket-knife he
started after her to follow this woman, this excitement, which
seemed even with its back turned to shed on him a light which
connected them, which singled him out, as if the random uproar of
the traffic had whispered through hollowed hands his name, not
Peter, but his private name which he called himself in his own
thoughts.  "You," she said, only "you," saying it with her white
gloves and her shoulders.  Then the thin long cloak which the wind
stirred as she walked past Dent's shop in Cockspur Street blew out
with an enveloping kindness, a mournful tenderness, as of arms that
would open and take the tired--

But she's not married; she's young; quite young, thought Peter, the
red carnation he had seen her wear as she came across Trafalgar
Square burning again in his eyes and making her lips red.  But she
waited at the kerbstone.  There was a dignity about her.  She was
not worldly, like Clarissa; not rich, like Clarissa.  Was she, he
wondered as she moved, respectable?  Witty, with a lizard's
flickering tongue, he thought (for one must invent, must allow
oneself a little diversion), a cool waiting wit, a darting wit; not
noisy.

She moved; she crossed; he followed her.  To embarrass her was the
last thing he wished.  Still if she stopped he would say "Come and
have an ice," he would say, and she would answer, perfectly simply,
"Oh yes."

But other people got between them in the street, obstructing him,
blotting her out.  He pursued; she changed.  There was colour in
her cheeks; mockery in her eyes; he was an adventurer, reckless, he
thought, swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last night from
India) a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned
proprieties, yellow dressing-gowns, pipes, fishing-rods, in the
shop windows; and respectability and evening parties and spruce old
men wearing white slips beneath their waistcoats.  He was a
buccaneer.  On and on she went, across Piccadilly, and up Regent
Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders
combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in
the windows to make the spirit of finery and whimsy which dwindled
out of the shops on to the pavement, as the light of a lamp goes
wavering at night over hedges in the darkness.

Laughing and delightful, she had crossed Oxford Street and Great
Portland Street and turned down one of the little streets, and now,
and now, the great moment was approaching, for now she slackened,
opened her bag, and with one look in his direction, but not at him,
one look that bade farewell, summed up the whole situation and
dismissed it triumphantly, for ever, had fitted her key, opened the
door, and gone!  Clarissa's voice saying, Remember my party,
Remember my party, sang in his ears.  The house was one of those
flat red houses with hanging flower-baskets of vague impropriety.
It was over.

Well, I've had my fun; I've had it, he thought, looking up at the
swinging baskets of pale geraniums.  And it was smashed to atoms--
his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented,
this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better
part of life, he thought--making oneself up; making her up;
creating an exquisite amusement, and something more.  But odd it
was, and quite true; all this one could never share--it smashed to
atoms.

He turned; went up the street, thinking to find somewhere to sit,
till it was time for Lincoln's Inn--for Messrs. Hooper and
Grateley.  Where should he go?  No matter.  Up the street, then,
towards Regent's Park.  His boots on the pavement struck out "no
matter"; for it was early, still very early.

It was a splendid morning too.  Like the pulse of a perfect heart,
life struck straight through the streets.  There was no fumbling--
no hesitation.  Sweeping and swerving, accurately, punctually,
noiselessly, there, precisely at the right instant, the motor-car
stopped at the door.  The girl, silk-stockinged, feathered,
evanescent, but not to him particularly attractive (for he had had
his fling), alighted.  Admirable butlers, tawny chow dogs, halls
laid in black and white lozenges with white blinds blowing, Peter
saw through the opened door and approved of.  A splendid
achievement in its own way, after all, London; the season;
civilisation.  Coming as he did from a respectable Anglo-Indian
family which for at least three generations had administered the
affairs of a continent (it's strange, he thought, what a sentiment
I have about that, disliking India, and empire, and army as he
did), there were moments when civilisation, even of this sort,
seemed dear to him as a personal possession; moments of pride in
England; in butlers; chow dogs; girls in their security.
Ridiculous enough, still there it is, he thought.  And the doctors
and men of business and capable women all going about their
business, punctual, alert, robust, seemed to him wholly admirable,
good fellows, to whom one would entrust one's life, companions in
the art of living, who would see one through.  What with one thing
and another, the show was really very tolerable; and he would sit
down in the shade and smoke.

There was Regent's Park.  Yes.  As a child he had walked in
Regent's Park--odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps
coming back to me--the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for
women live much more in the past than we do, he thought.  They
attach themselves to places; and their fathers--a woman's always
proud of her father.  Bourton was a nice place, a very nice place,
but I could never get on with the old man, he thought.  There was
quite a scene one night--an argument about something or other,
what, he could not remember.  Politics presumably.

Yes, he remembered Regent's Park; the long straight walk; the
little house where one bought air-balls to the left; an absurd
statue with an inscription somewhere or other.  He looked for an
empty seat.  He did not want to be bothered (feeling a little
drowsy as he did) by people asking him the time.  An elderly grey
nurse, with a baby asleep in its perambulator--that was the best he
could do for himself; sit down at the far end of the seat by that
nurse.

She's a queer-looking girl, he thought, suddenly remembering
Elizabeth as she came into the room and stood by her mother.  Grown
big; quite grown-up, not exactly pretty; handsome rather; and she
can't be more than eighteen.  Probably she doesn't get on with
Clarissa.  "There's my Elizabeth"--that sort of thing--why not
"Here's Elizabeth" simply?--trying to make out, like most mothers,
that things are what they're not.  She trusts to her charm too
much, he thought.  She overdoes it.

The rich benignant cigar smoke eddied coolly down his throat; he
puffed it out again in rings which breasted the air bravely for a
moment; blue, circular--I shall try and get a word alone with
Elizabeth to-night, he thought--then began to wobble into hour-
glass shapes and taper away; odd shapes they take, he thought.
Suddenly he closed his eyes, raised his hand with an effort, and
threw away the heavy end of his cigar.  A great brush swept smooth
across his mind, sweeping across it moving branches, children's
voices, the shuffle of feet, and people passing, and humming
traffic, rising and falling traffic.  Down, down he sank into the
plumes and feathers of sleep, sank, and was muffled over.



The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat
beside her, began snoring.  In her grey dress, moving her hands
indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the
rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise
in twilight in woods made of sky and branches.  The solitary
traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of
great hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at
the end of the ride.

By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with
moments of extraordinary exaltation.  Nothing exists outside us
except a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for relief,
for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these
ugly, these craven men and women.  But if he can conceive of her,
then in some sort she exists, he thinks, and advancing down the
path with his eyes upon sky and branches he rapidly endows them
with womanhood; sees with amazement how grave they become; how
majestically, as the breeze stirs them, they dispense with a dark
flutter of the leaves charity, comprehension, absolution, and then,
flinging themselves suddenly aloft, confound the piety of their
aspect with a wild carouse.

Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit
to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens
lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face
like bunches of roses, or rise to the surface like pale faces which
fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.

Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put
their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the
solitary traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth,
the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace,
as if (so he thinks as he advances down the forest ride) all this
fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things
merged in one thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches as
it is, had risen from the troubled sea (he is elderly, past fifty
now) as a shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down
from her magnificent hands compassion, comprehension, absolution.
So, he thinks, may I never go back to the lamplight; to the
sitting-room; never finish my book; never knock out my pipe; never
ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away; rather let me walk straight on
to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me
on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness with the rest.

Such are the visions.  The solitary traveller is soon beyond the
wood; and there, coming to the door with shaded eyes, possibly to
look for his return, with hands raised, with white apron blowing,
is an elderly woman who seems (so powerful is this infirmity) to
seek, over a desert, a lost son; to search for a rider destroyed;
to be the figure of the mother whose sons have been killed in the
battles of the world.  So, as the solitary traveller advances down
the village street where the women stand knitting and the men dig
in the garden, the evening seems ominous; the figures still; as if
some august fate, known to them, awaited without fear, were about
to sweep them into complete annihilation.

Indoors among ordinary things, the cupboard, the table, the window-
sill with its geraniums, suddenly the outline of the landlady,
bending to remove the cloth, becomes soft with light, an adorable
emblem which only the recollection of cold human contacts forbids
us to embrace.  She takes the marmalade; she shuts it in the
cupboard.

"There is nothing more to-night, sir?"

But to whom does the solitary traveller make reply?



So the elderly nurse knitted over the sleeping baby in Regent's
Park.  So Peter Walsh snored.

He woke with extreme suddenness, saying to himself, "The death of
the soul."

"Lord, Lord!" he said to himself out loud, stretching and opening
his eyes.  "The death of the soul."  The words attached themselves
to some scene, to some room, to some past he had been dreaming of.
It became clearer; the scene, the room, the past he had been
dreaming of.

It was at Bourton that summer, early in the 'nineties, when he was
so passionately in love with Clarissa.  There were a great many
people 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
over-dressed, "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.

Every one wobbled; every one 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 bird-cages.)

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 half-way 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 some one--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 every one.  Every one has friends who were killed
in the War.  Every one 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 for ever.

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,