He was talking, he was starting, this man must notice him. He was
looking at them.
"I will tell you the time," said Septimus, very slowly, very drowsily,
smiling mysteriously. As he sat smiling at the dead man in the grey suit
the quarter struck—the quarter to twelve.
And that is being young, Peter Walsh thought as he passed them. To
be having an awful scene—the poor girl looked absolutely desperate—in
the middle of the morning. But what was it about, he wondered, what
had the young man in the overcoat been saying to her to make her look
like that; what awful fix had they got themselves into, both to look so
desperate as that on a fine summer morning? The amusing thing about
coming back to England, after five years, was the way it made, anyhow
the first days, things stand out as if one had never seen them before; lov-
ers squabbling under a tree; the domestic family life of the parks. Never
had he seen London look so enchanting—the softness of the distances;
the richness; the greenness; the civilisation, after India, he thought,
strolling across the grass.
This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing no doubt. Still
at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood;
good days, bad days, for no reason whatever, happiness from a pretty
face, downright misery at the sight of a frump. After India of course one
fell in love with every woman one met. There was a freshness about
them; even the poorest dressed better than five years ago surely; and to
his eye the fashions had never been so becoming; the long black cloaks;
the slimness; the elegance; and then the delicious and apparently univer-
sal habit of paint. Every woman, even the most respectable, had roses
blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife; curls of Indian ink; there was
design, art, everywhere; a change of some sort had undoubtedly taken
place. What did the young people think about? Peter Walsh asked
himself.
Those five years—1918 to 1923—had been, he suspected, somehow
very important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed different.
Now for instance there was a man writing quite openly in one of the re-
spectable weeklies about water-closets. That you couldn't have done ten
years ago—written quite openly about water-closets in a respectable
weekly. And then this taking out a stick of rouge, or a powder-puff and
making up in public. On board ship coming home there were lots of
young men and girls—Betty and Bertie he remembered in particu-
lar—carrying on quite openly; the old mother sitting and watching them
with her knitting, cool as a cucumber. The girl would stand still and powder her nose in front of every one. And they weren't engaged; just
having a good time; no feelings hurt on either side. As hard as nails she
was—Betty What'shername—; but a thorough good sort. She would
make a very good wife at thirty—she would marry when it suited her to
marry; marry some rich man and live in a large house near Manchester.
Who was it now who had done that? Peter Walsh asked himself, turn-
ing into the Broad Walk,—married a rich man and lived in a large house
near Manchester? Somebody who had written him a long, gushing letter
quite lately about "blue hydrangeas." It was seeing blue hydrangeas that
made her think of him and the old days—Sally Seton, of course! It was
Sally Seton—the last person in the world one would have expected to
marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the wild, the
daring, the romantic Sally!
But of all that ancient lot, Clarissa's friends—Whitbreads, Kinderleys,
Cunninghams, Kinloch-Jones's—Sally was probably the best. She tried to
get hold of things by the right end anyhow. She saw through Hugh
Whitbread anyhow—the admirable Hugh—when Clarissa and the rest
were at his feet.
"The Whitbreads?" he could hear her saying. "Who are the Whit-
breads? Coal merchants. Respectable tradespeople."
Hugh she detested for some reason. He thought of nothing but his
own appearance, she said. He ought to have been a Duke. He would be
certain to marry one of the Royal Princesses. And of course Hugh had
the most extraordinary, the most natural, the most sublime respect for
the British aristocracy of any human being he had ever come across.
Even Clarissa had to own that. Oh, but he was such a dear, so unselfish,
gave up shooting to please his old mother—remembered his aunts' birth-
days, and so on.
Sally, to do her justice, saw through all that. One of the things he re-
membered best was an argument one Sunday morning at Bourton about
women's rights (that antediluvian topic), when Sally suddenly lost her
temper, flared up, and told Hugh that he represented all that was most
detestable in British middle-class life. She told him that she considered
him responsible for the state of "those poor girls in Piccadilly"—Hugh,
the perfect gentleman, poor Hugh!—never did a man look more horri-
fied! She did it on purpose she said afterwards (for they used to get to-
gether in the vegetable garden and compare notes). "He's read nothing,
thought nothing, felt nothing," he could hear her saying in that very em-
phatic voice which carried so much farther than she knew. The stable
boys had more life in them than Hugh, she said. He was a perfect specimen of the public school type, she said. No country but England
could have produced him. She was really spiteful, for some reason; had
some grudge against him. Something had happened—he forgot
what—in the smoking-room. He had insulted her—kissed her? Incred-
ible! Nobody believed a word against Hugh of course. Who could? Kiss-
ing Sally in the smoking-room! If it had been some Honourable Edith or
Lady Violet, perhaps; but not that ragamuffin Sally without a penny to
her name, and a father or a mother gambling at Monte Carlo. For of all
the people he had ever met Hugh was the greatest snob—the most ob-
sequious—no, he didn't cringe exactly. He was too much of a prig for
that. A first-rate valet was the obvious comparison—somebody who
walked behind carrying suit cases; could be trusted to send tele-
grams—indispensable to hostesses. And he'd found his job—married his
Honourable Evelyn; got some little post at Court, looked after the King's
cellars, polished the Imperial shoe-buckles, went about in knee-breeches
and lace ruffles. How remorseless life is! A little job at Court!
He had married this lady, the Honourable Evelyn, and they lived here-
abouts, so he thought (looking at the pompous houses overlooking the
Park), for he had lunched there once in a house which had, like all
Hugh's possessions, something that no other house could possibly
have—linen cupboards it might have been. You had to go and look at
them—you had to spend a great deal of time always admiring whatever
it was—linen cupboards, pillow-cases, old oak furniture, pictures, which
Hugh had picked up for an old song. But Mrs. Hugh sometimes gave the
show away. She was one of those obscure mouse-like little women who
admire big men. She was almost negligible. Then suddenly she would
say something quite unexpected—something sharp. She had the relics of
the grand manner perhaps. The steam coal was a little too strong for
her—it made the atmosphere thick. And so there they lived, with their
linen cupboards and their old masters and their pillow-cases fringed
with real lace at the rate of five or ten thousand a year presumably, while
he, who was two years older than Hugh, cadged for a job.
At fifty-three he had to come and ask them to put him into some
secretary's office, to find him some usher's job teaching little boys Latin,
at the beck and call of some mandarin in an office, something that
brought in five hundred a year; for if he married Daisy, even with his
pension, they could never do on less. Whitbread could do it presumably;
or Dalloway. He didn't mind what he asked Dalloway. He was a thor-
ough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough
good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of bril-
liancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type. He ought to have
been a country gentleman—he was wasted on politics. He was at his best
out of doors, with horses and dogs—how good he was, for instance,
when that great shaggy dog of Clarissa's got caught in a trap and had its
paw half torn off, and Clarissa turned faint and Dalloway did the whole
thing; bandaged, made splints; told Clarissa not to be a fool. That was
what she liked him for perhaps—that was what she needed. "Now, my
dear, don't be a fool. Hold this—fetch that," all the time talking to the
dog as if it were a human being.
But how could she swallow all that stuff about poetry? How could she
let him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously and solemnly Richard
Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to read
Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes (besides
the relationship was not one that he approved). No decent man ought to
let his wife visit a deceased wife's sister. Incredible! The only thing to do
was to pelt him with sugared almonds—it was at dinner. But Clarissa
sucked it all in; thought it so honest of him; so independent of him;
Heaven knows if she didn't think him the most original mind she'd ever
met!
That was one of the bonds between Sally and himself. There was a
garden where they used to walk, a walled-in place, with rose-bushes and
giant cauliflowers—he could remember Sally tearing off a rose, stopping
to exclaim at the beauty of the cabbage leaves in the moonlight (it was
extraordinary how vividly it all came back to him, things he hadn't
thought of for years,) while she implored him, half laughing of course, to
carry off Clarissa, to save her from the Hughs and the Dalloways and all
the other "perfect gentlemen" who would "stifle her soul" (she wrote
reams of poetry in those days), make a mere hostess of her, encourage
her worldliness. But one must do Clarissa justice. She wasn't going to
marry Hugh anyhow. She had a perfectly clear notion of what she
wanted. Her emotions were all on the surface. Beneath, she was very
shrewd—a far better judge of character than Sally, for instance, and with
it all, purely feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that woman's gift, of
making a world of her own wherever she happened to be. She came into
a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of
people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was
striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her;
she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there
she was.
No, no, no! He was not in love with her any more! He only felt, after
seeing her that morning, among her scissors and silks, making ready for
the party, unable to get away from the thought of her; she kept coming
back and back like a sleeper jolting against him in a railway carriage;
which was not being in love, of course; it was thinking of her, criticising
her, starting again, after thirty years, trying to explain her. The obvious
thing to say of her was that she was worldly; cared too much for rank
and society and getting on in the world—which was true in a sense; she
had admitted it to him. (You could always get her to own up if you took
the trouble; she was honest.) What she would say was that she hated
frumps, fogies, failures, like himself presumably; thought people had no
right to slouch about with their hands in their pockets; must do
something, be something; and these great swells, these Duchesses, these
hoary old Countesses one met in her drawing-room, unspeakably remote
as he felt them to be from anything that mattered a straw, stood for
something real to her. Lady Bexborough, she said once, held herself up-
right (so did Clarissa herself; she never lounged in any sense of the
word; she was straight as a dart, a little rigid in fact). She said they had a
kind of courage which the older she grew the more she respected. In all
this there was a great deal of Dalloway, of course; a great deal of the
public-spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, governing-class spirit,
which had grown on her, as it tends to do. With twice his wits, she had
to see things through his eyes—one of the tragedies of married life. With
a mind of her own, she must always be quoting Richard—as if one
couldn't know to a tittle what Richard thought by reading the Morning
Post of a morning! These parties for example were all for him, or for her
idea of him (to do Richard justice he would have been happier farming
in Norfolk). She made her drawing-room a sort of meeting-place; she
had a genius for it. Over and over again he had seen her take some raw
youth, twist him, turn him, wake him up; set him going. Infinite num-
bers of dull people conglomerated round her of course. But odd unex-
pected people turned up; an artist sometimes; sometimes a writer; queer
fish in that atmosphere. And behind it all was that network of visiting,
leaving cards, being kind to people; running about with bunches of
flowers, little presents; So-and-so was going to France—must have an
air-cushion; a real drain on her strength; all that interminable traffic that
women of her sort keep up; but she did it genuinely, from a natural
instinct.
Oddly enough, she was one of the most thoroughgoing sceptics he had
ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly
she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship
(her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were
fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us,
at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners
(Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be
as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan't have it all
their own way,—her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance
of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if,
all the same, you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after
Sylvia's death—that horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a
falling tree (all Justin Parry's fault—all his carelessness) before your very
eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa al-
ways said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn't so positive
perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so
she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy
(though goodness only knows, she had her reserves; it was a mere
sketch, he often felt, that even he, after all these years, could make of
Clarissa). Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of
moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practic-
ally everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of
tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she
made up on the spur of the moment. (Very likely, she would have talked
to those lovers, if she had thought them unhappy.) She had a sense of
comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people,
to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away,
lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense,
sayings things she didn't mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her
discrimination. There she would sit at the head of the table taking infin-
ite pains with some old buffer who might be useful to Dalloway—they
knew the most appalling bores in Europe—or in came Elizabeth and
everything must give way to her. She was at a High School, at the inartic-
ulate stage last time he was over, a round-eyed, pale-faced girl, with
nothing of her mother in her, a silent stolid creature, who took it all as a
matter of course, let her mother make a fuss of her, and then said "May I
go now?" like a child of four; going off, Clarissa explained, with that mix-
ture of amusement and pride which Dalloway himself seemed to rouse
in her, to play hockey. And now Elizabeth was "out," presumably;
thought him an old fogy, laughed at her mother's friends. Ah well, so be it. The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of
Regent's Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the pas-
sions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power
which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold
of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the
age of fifty-three one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every
moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in
Regent's Park, was enough. Too much indeed. A whole lifetime was too
short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour;
to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning; which both
were so much more solid than they used to be, so much less personal. It
was impossible that he should ever suffer again as Clarissa had made
him suffer. For hours at a time (pray God that one might say these things
without being overheard!), for hours and days he never thought of
Daisy.
Could it be that he was in love with her then, remembering the misery,
the torture, the extraordinary passion of those days? It was a different
thing altogether—a much pleasanter thing—the truth being, of course,
that now she was in love with him. And that perhaps was the reason
why, when the ship actually sailed, he felt an extraordinary relief,
wanted nothing so much as to be alone; was annoyed to find all her little
attentions—cigars, notes, a rug for the voyage—in his cabin. Every one if
they were honest would say the same; one doesn't want people after
fifty; one doesn't want to go on telling women they are pretty; that's
what most men of fifty would say, Peter Walsh thought, if they were
honest.
But then these astonishing accesses of emotion—bursting into tears
this morning, what was all that about? What could Clarissa have thought
of him? thought him a fool presumably, not for the first time. It was jeal-
ousy that was at the bottom of it—jealousy which survives every other
passion of mankind, Peter Walsh thought, holding his pocket-knife at
arm's length. She had been meeting Major Orde, Daisy said in her last
letter; said it on purpose he knew; said it to make him jealous; he could
see her wrinkling her forehead as she wrote, wondering what she could
say to hurt him; and yet it made no difference; he was furious! All this
pother of coming to England and seeing lawyers wasn't to marry her, but
to prevent her from marrying anybody else. That was what tortured him,
that was what came over him when he saw Clarissa so calm, so cold, so
intent on her dress or whatever it was; realising what she might have spared him, what she had reduced him to—a whimpering, snivelling old
ass. But women, he thought, shutting his pocket-knife, don't know what
passion is. They don't know the meaning of it to men. Clarissa was as
cold as an icicle. There she would sit on the sofa by his side, let him take
her hand, give him one kiss—Here he was at the crossing.
A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up
without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly
and with an absence of all human meaning into
ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo—
the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from
the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent's Park Tube station from a
tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten
tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its
branches singing
ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo
and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.
Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp,
through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise,
the battered woman—for she wore a skirt—with her right hand exposed,
her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love—love which has las-
ted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years
ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she
crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer
days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had
gone; death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and
when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth,
now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her
side a bunch of purple-heather, there on her high burial place which the
last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe
would be over.
As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent's Park Tube station
still the earth seemed green and flowery; still, though it issued from so
rude a mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root
fibres and tangled grasses, still the old bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure,
streamed away in rivulets over the pavement and all along the Maryle-
bone Road, and down towards Euston, fertilising, leaving a damp stain.
Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked
with her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand
exposed for coppers the other clutching her side, would still be there in
ten million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where
the sea flows now, with whom it did not matter—he was a man, oh yes,
a man who had loved her. But the passage of ages had blurred the clarity
of that ancient May day; the bright petalled flowers were hoar and silver
frosted; and she no longer saw, when she implored him (as she did now
quite clearly) "look in my eyes with thy sweet eyes intently," she no
longer saw brown eyes, black whiskers or sunburnt face but only a loom-
ing shape, a shadow shape, to which, with the bird-like freshness of the
very aged she still twittered "give me your hand and let me press it
gently" (Peter Walsh couldn't help giving the poor creature a coin as he
stepped into his taxi), "and if some one should see, what matter they?"
she demanded; and her fist clutched at her side, and she smiled, pocket-
ing her shilling, and all peering inquisitive eyes seemed blotted out, and
the passing generations—the pavement was crowded with bustling
middle-class people—vanished, like leaves, to be trodden under, to be
soaked and steeped and made mould of by that eternal spring—
ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo
"Poor old woman," said Rezia Warren Smith, waiting to cross.
Oh poor old wretch!
Suppose it was a wet night? Suppose one's father, or somebody who
had known one in better days had happened to pass, and saw one stand-
ing there in the gutter? And where did she sleep at night?
Cheerfully, almost gaily, the invincible thread of sound wound up into
the air like the smoke from a cottage chimney, winding up clean beech
trees and issuing in a tuft of blue smoke among the topmost leaves. "And
if some one should see, what matter they?"
Since she was so unhappy, for weeks and weeks now, Rezia had given
meanings to things that happened, almost felt sometimes that she must
stop people in the street, if they looked good, kind people, just to say to
them "I am unhappy"; and this old woman singing in the street "if some
one should see, what matter they?" made her suddenly quite sure that everything was going to be right. They were going to Sir William Brad-
shaw; she thought his name sounded nice; he would cure Septimus at
once. And then there was a brewer's cart, and the grey horses had up-
right bristles of straw in their tails; there were newspaper placards. It
was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.
So they crossed, Mr. and Mrs. Septimus Warren Smith, and was there,
after all, anything to draw attention to them, anything to make a passer-
by suspect here is a young man who carries in him the greatest message
in the world, and is, moreover, the happiest man in the world, and the
most miserable? Perhaps they walked more slowly than other people,
and there was something hesitating, trailing, in the man's walk, but what
more natural for a clerk, who has not been in the West End on a weekday
at this hour for years, than to keep looking at the sky, looking at this, that
and the other, as if Portland Place were a room he had come into when
the family are away, the chandeliers being hung in holland bags, and the
caretaker, as she lets in long shafts of dusty light upon deserted, queer-
looking armchairs, lifting one corner of the long blinds, explains to the
visitors what a wonderful place it is; how wonderful, but at the same
time, he thinks, as he looks at chairs and tables, how strange.
To look at, he might have been a clerk, but of the better sort; for he
wore brown boots; his hands were educated; so, too, his profile—his
angular, big-nosed, intelligent, sensitive profile; but not his lips altogeth-
er, for they were loose; and his eyes (as eyes tend to be), eyes merely;
hazel, large; so that he was, on the whole, a border case, neither one
thing nor the other, might end with a house at Purley and a motor car, or
continue renting apartments in back streets all his life; one of those half-
educated, self-educated men whose education is all learnt from books
borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening after the day's work,
on the advice of well-known authors consulted by letter.
As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go
through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields and
the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy, because
of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the fiftieth time
with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future for a poet in
Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister, had gone to Lon-
don leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great men have written,
and the world has read later when the story of their struggles has be-
come famous.
London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith;
thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston
Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in
two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile.
But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except
what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morn-
ing and finds a new blossom on his plant:—It has flowered; flowered
from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness,
the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road),
made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself,
made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo
Road upon Shakespeare.
Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give
him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote
him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once in a
lifetime, without heat, flickering a red gold flame infinitely ethereal and
insubstantial over Miss Pole; Antony and Cleopatra; and the Waterloo
Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed
of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in
red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking in a green dress in a
square. "It has flowered," the gardener might have said, had he opened
the door; had he come in, that is to say, any night about this time, and
found him writing; found him tearing up his writing; found him finish-
ing a masterpiece at three o'clock in the morning and running out to pace
the streets, and visiting churches, and fasting one day, drinking another,
devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard
Shaw.
Something was up, Mr. Brewer knew; Mr. Brewer, managing clerk at
Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents;
something was up, he thought, and, being paternal with his young men,
and thinking very highly of Smith's abilities, and prophesying that he
would, in ten or fifteen years, succeed to the leather arm-chair in the in-
ner room under the skylight with the deed-boxes round him, "if he keeps
his health," said Mr. Brewer, and that was the danger—he looked
weakly; advised football, invited him to supper and was seeing his way
to consider recommending a rise of salary, when something happened
which threw out many of Mr. Brewer's calculations, took away his ablest
young fellows, and eventually, so prying and insidious were the fingers
of the European War, smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole in
the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook's nerves at Mr. Brewer's
establishment at Muswell Hill.
