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 re-
membered; 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 in-
fluenza) 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, build-
ing 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; Lon-
don; 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 econom-
ise, 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 appropri-
ately, 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 Whit-
breads came "to see doctors." Times without number Clarissa had visited
Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn wasa good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell
of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly up-
holstered 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 ail-
ment, 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 in-
sisted, 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 imbe-
cile 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 in-
tolerable; he could be impossible; but adorable to walk with on a morn-
ing 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 vi-
tality 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 ofthe 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 mo-
ment 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 as-
sured 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 her-
self 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 ab-
sorbing; 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 housewith the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and re-
membered 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 Ser-
pentine. 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 her-
self, 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, be-
cause 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. In-
stead 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 of-
ten 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 astonish-
ing 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 sea-
son; 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 re-
peated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove shop where, be-
fore 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 herexperience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes);
dulled their feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russi-
ans, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive tor-
ture, 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 grub-
bing 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 talk-
ing 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 roseslooked; 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 or-
ange; 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, non-
sense, 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 uphol-
stery, 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, fall-
ing 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 aud-
ibly, humorously of course: "The Proime Minister's kyar."
