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 ap-
prehensive 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 out-
side 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 chil-
dren 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 Embank-
ment 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 in-
to 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 anti-
quaries, 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 con-
ceive; 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 po-
liceman, 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 si-
lently 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 di-
minishing, 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 in-
stances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting
shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its fulness rather for-
midable 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 at-
tend 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 back-
ground 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, dis-
couraging an old Irishwoman's loyalty. The sentries at St. James's sa-
luted; 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; be-
stowed 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 win-
dows 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 in-
creased. 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 wait-
ing 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 aero-
plane 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 ex-
traordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck el-
even 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 import-
ance which would never be revealed, and yet certainly so it was—a mis-
sion 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 anoth-
er—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 in-
deed 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. To-
gether 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 atmo-
spheric 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 ex-
citement 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 noth-
ing 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 no-
ticed; 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 walk-
ing, 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, hav-
ing 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 conglomer-
ated there in the darkness; huddled together in the darkness; reft of the
relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls white and grey, spot-
ting 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 Ro-
mans 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 shedropped. 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 revela-
tions 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 an-
other 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 be-
hind 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 suffer-
ing, 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 wo-
man 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; part-
ing 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 com-
pany—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 mod-
erate 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; fig-
ure; 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 fad-
ing, 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. Bent-
ley, 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 wav-
ing 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 de-
light, 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 disap-
pointment (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.
