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Title: Mrs. Dalloway

Author: Virginia Woolf

Release date: October 13, 2023 [eBook #71865]
Most recently updated: August 4, 2026

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1925

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS.
DALLOWAY ***

BY VIRGINIA WOOLF

Fiction

THE VOYAGE OUT
NIGHT AND DAY
JACOB’S ROOM
MRS. DALLOWAY
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
ORLANDO
THE WAVES
THE YEARS
BETWEEN THE ACTS
A HAUNTED HOUSE

Biography

FLUSH
ROGER FRY

Criticism, etc.

THE COMMON READER
THE SECOND COMMON READER
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
THREE GUINEAS
THE DEATH OF THE MOTH
THE MOMENT AND OTHER ESSAYS

MRS. DALLOWAY
by

VIRGINIA WOOLF

HBMC

New York

HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC.

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC.
RENEWED BY LEONARD WOOLF

All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.

Twenty-third printing

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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, awestricken 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 penknife towards her green dress.
He’s very well dressed, thought Clarissa; yet he always criticises me.
Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he thought; here
she’s been sitting all the time I’ve been in India; mending her dress; playing
about; going to parties; running to the House and back and all that, he
thought, growing more and more irritated, more and more agitated, for
there’s nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage, he
thought; and politics; and having a Conservative husband, like the
admirable Richard. So it is, so it is, he thought, shutting his knife with a
snap.
“Richard’s very well. Richard’s at a Committee,” said Clarissa.
And she opened her scissors, and said, did he mind her just finishing what
she was doing to her dress, for they had a party that night?
“Which I shan’t ask you to,” she said. “My dear Peter!” she said.
But it was delicious to hear her say that—my dear Peter! Indeed, it was all
so delicious—the silver, the chairs; all so delicious!
Why wouldn’t she ask him to her party? he asked.
Now of course, thought Clarissa, he’s enchanting! perfectly enchanting!
Now I remember how impossible it was ever to make up my mind—and
why did I make up my mind—not to marry him? she wondered, that awful
summer?
“But it’s so extraordinary that you should have come this morning!” she
cried, putting her hands, one on top of another, down on her dress.

“Do you remember,” she said, “how the blinds used to flap at Bourton?”
“They did,” he said; and he remembered breakfasting alone, very
awkwardly, with her father; who had died; and he had not written to
Clarissa. But he had never got on well with old Parry, that querulous, weak-
kneed old man, Clarissa’s father, Justin Parry.
“I often wish I’d got on better with your father,” he said.
“But he never liked 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, Evans sang, among the orchids.
There they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans
himself—
“For God’s sake don’t come!” Septimus cried out. For he could not look
upon the dead.
But the branches parted. A man in grey was actually walking towards them.
It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not changed. I
must tell the whole world, Septimus cried, raising his hand (as the dead man
in the grey suit came nearer), raising his hand like some colossal figure who
has lamented the fate of man for ages in the desert alone with his hands
pressed to his forehead, furrows of despair on his cheeks, and now sees
light on the desert’s edge which broadens and strikes the iron-black figure
(and Septimus half rose from his chair), and with legions of men prostrate
behind him he, the giant mourner, receives for one moment on his face the
whole—
“But I am so unhappy, Septimus,” said Rezia trying to make him sit down.
The millions lamented; for ages they had sorrowed. He would turn round,
he would tell them in a few moments, only a few moments more, of this

relief, of this joy, of this astonishing revelation—
“The time, Septimus,” Rezia repeated. “What is the time?”
He was talking, he was starting, this man must notice him. He was looking
at them.
“I will tell you the time,” said Septimus, very slowly, very drowsily, smiling
mysteriously. As he sat smiling at the dead man in the grey suit the quarter
struck—the quarter to twelve.
And that is being young, Peter Walsh thought as he passed them. To be
having an awful scene—the poor girl looked absolutely desperate—in the
middle of the morning. But what was it about, he wondered, what had the
young man in the overcoat been saying to her to make her look like that;
what awful fix had they got themselves into, both to look so desperate as
that on a fine summer morning? The amusing thing about coming back to
England, after five years, was the way it made, anyhow the first days, things
stand out as if one had never seen them before; lovers squabbling under a
tree; the domestic family life of the parks. Never had he seen London look
so enchanting—the softness of the distances; the richness; the greenness;
the civilisation, after India, he thought, strolling across the grass.
This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing no doubt. Still at his
age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood; good days,
bad days, for no reason whatever, happiness from a pretty face, downright
misery at the sight of a frump. After India of course one fell in love with
every woman one met. There was a freshness about them; even the poorest
dressed better than five years ago surely; and to his eye the fashions had
never been so becoming; the long black cloaks; the slimness; the elegance;
and then the delicious and apparently universal habit of paint. Every
woman, even the most respectable, had roses blooming under glass; lips cut
with a knife; curls of Indian ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a
change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place. What did the young
people think about? Peter Walsh asked himself.
Those five years—1918 to 1923—had been, he suspected, somehow very
important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed different. Now for
instance there was a man writing quite openly in one of the respectable
weeklies about water-closets. That you couldn’t have done ten years ago—

written quite openly about water-closets in a respectable weekly. And then
this taking out a stick of rouge, or a powder-puff and making up in public.
On board ship coming home there were lots of young men and girls—Betty
and Bertie he remembered in particular—carrying on quite openly; the old
mother sitting and watching them with her knitting, cool as a cucumber. The
girl would stand still and powder her nose in front of 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, turning
into the Broad Walk,—married a rich man and lived in a large house near
Manchester? Somebody who had written him a long, gushing letter quite
lately about “blue hydrangeas.” It was seeing blue hydrangeas that made
her think of him and the old days—Sally Seton, of course! It was Sally
Seton—the last person in the world one would have expected to marry a
rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the wild, the daring, the
romantic Sally!
But of all that ancient lot, Clarissa’s friends—Whitbreads, Kinderleys,
Cunninghams, Kinloch-Jones’s—Sally was probably the best. She tried to
get hold of things by the right end anyhow. She saw through Hugh
Whitbread anyhow—the admirable Hugh—when Clarissa and the rest were
at his feet.
“The Whitbreads?” he could hear her saying. “Who are the Whitbreads?
Coal merchants. Respectable tradespeople.”
Hugh she detested for some reason. He thought of nothing but his own
appearance, she said. He ought to have been a Duke. He would be certain to
marry one of the Royal Princesses. And of course Hugh had the most
extraordinary, the most natural, the most sublime respect for the British
aristocracy of any human being he had ever come across. Even Clarissa had
to own that. Oh, but he was such a dear, so unselfish, gave up shooting to
please his old mother—remembered his aunts’ birthdays, and so on.
Sally, to do her justice, saw through all that. One of the things he
remembered best was an argument one Sunday morning at Bourton about

women’s rights (that antediluvian topic), when Sally suddenly lost her
temper, flared up, and told Hugh that he represented all that was most
detestable in British middle-class life. She told him that she considered him
responsible for the state of “those poor girls in Piccadilly”—Hugh, the
perfect gentleman, poor Hugh!—never did a man look more horrified! She
did it on purpose she said afterwards (for they used to get together in the
vegetable garden and compare notes). “He’s read nothing, thought nothing,
felt nothing,” he could hear her saying in that very emphatic voice which
carried so much farther than she knew. The stable boys had more life in
them than Hugh, she said. He was a perfect specimen of the public school
type, she said. No country but England could have produced him. She was
really spiteful, for some reason; had some grudge against him. Something
had happened—he forgot what—in the smoking-room. He had insulted her
—kissed her? Incredible! Nobody believed a word against Hugh of course.
Who could? Kissing Sally in the smoking-room! If it had been some
Honourable Edith or Lady Violet, perhaps; but not that ragamuffin Sally
without a penny to her name, and a father or a mother gambling at Monte
Carlo. For of all the people he had ever met Hugh was the greatest snob—
the most obsequious—no, he didn’t cringe exactly. He was too much of a
prig for that. A first-rate valet was the obvious comparison—somebody who
walked behind carrying suit cases; could be trusted to send telegrams—
indispensable to hostesses. And he’d found his job—married his
Honourable Evelyn; got some little post at Court, looked after the King’s
cellars, polished the Imperial shoe-buckles, went about in knee-breeches
and lace ruffles. How remorseless life is! A little job at Court!
He had married this lady, the Honourable Evelyn, and they lived
hereabouts, so he thought (looking at the pompous houses overlooking the
Park), for he had lunched there once in a house which had, like all Hugh’s
possessions, something that no other house could possibly have—linen
cupboards it might have been. You had to go and look at them—you had to
spend a great deal of time always admiring whatever it was—linen
cupboards, 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 thorough good sort; a bit limited; a
bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he
did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination,
without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type.
He ought to have been a country gentleman—he was wasted on politics. He
was at his best out of doors, with horses and dogs—how good he was, for
instance, when that great shaggy dog of Clarissa’s got caught in a trap and
had its paw half torn off, and Clarissa turned faint and Dalloway did the
whole thing; bandaged, made splints; told Clarissa not to be a fool. That
was what she liked him for perhaps—that was what she needed. “Now, my
dear, don’t be a fool. Hold this—fetch that,” all the time talking to the dog
as if it were a human being.
But how could she swallow all that stuff about poetry? How could she let
him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously and solemnly Richard
Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to read
Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes (besides the
relationship was not one that he approved). No decent man ought to let his
wife visit a deceased wife’s sister. Incredible! The only thing to do was to
pelt him with sugared almonds—it was at dinner. But Clarissa sucked it all
in; thought it so honest of him; so independent of him; Heaven knows if she
didn’t think him the most original mind she’d ever met!
That was one of the bonds between Sally and himself. There was a garden
where they used to walk, a walled-in place, with 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 upright (so did Clarissa herself; she never lounged in any sense
of the word; she was straight as a dart, a little rigid in fact). She said they
had a kind of courage which the older she grew the more she respected. In
all this there was a great deal of Dalloway, of course; a great deal of the
public-spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, governing-class spirit, which
had grown on her, as it tends to do. With twice his wits, she had to see
things through his eyes—one of the tragedies of married life. With a mind
of her own, she must always be quoting Richard—as if one couldn’t know
to a tittle what Richard thought by reading the Morning Post of a morning!

These parties for example were all for him, or for her idea of him (to do
Richard justice he would have been happier farming in Norfolk). She made
her drawing-room a sort of meeting-place; she had a genius for it. Over and
over again he had seen her take some raw youth, twist him, turn him, wake
him up; set him going. Infinite numbers of dull people conglomerated round
her of course. But odd unexpected people turned up; an artist sometimes;
sometimes a writer; queer fish in that atmosphere. And behind it all was that
network of visiting, leaving cards, being kind to people; running about with
bunches of flowers, little presents; So-and-so was going to France—must
have an air-cushion; a real drain on her strength; all that interminable traffic
that women of her sort keep up; but she did it genuinely, from a natural
instinct.
Oddly enough, she was one of the most thoroughgoing sceptics he had ever
met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for her,
so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly she said to
herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite
reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these
nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do
our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again);
decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we
possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way,—
her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting,
thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same,
you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia’s death—that
horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin
Parry’s fault—all his carelessness) before your very eyes, a girl too on the
verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to
turn one bitter. Later she wasn’t so positive perhaps; she thought there were
no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of
doing good for the sake of goodness.
And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy
(though goodness only knows, she had her reserves; it was a mere sketch,
he often felt, that even he, after all these years, could make of Clarissa).
Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue
which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If
you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in

a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of
the moment. (Very likely, she would have talked to those lovers, if she had
thought them unhappy.) She had a sense of comedy that was really
exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the
inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving
these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn’t
mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination. There she
would sit at the head of the table taking infinite pains with some old buffer
who might be useful to Dalloway—they knew the most appalling bores in
Europe—or in came Elizabeth and everything must give way to her. She
was at a High School, at the inarticulate stage last time he was over, a
round-eyed, pale-faced girl, with nothing of her mother in her, a silent stolid
creature, who took it all as a matter of course, let her mother make a fuss of
her, and then said “May I go now?” like a child of four; going off, Clarissa
explained, with that mixture of amusement and pride which Dalloway
himself seemed to rouse in her, to play hockey. And now Elizabeth was
“out,” presumably; thought him an old fogy, laughed at her mother’s
friends. Ah well, so be it. The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh
thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was
simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—
at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the
power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the age of
fifty-three one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment
of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park,
was enough. Too much indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out,
now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every
ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning; which both were so much more
solid than they used to be, so much less personal. It was impossible that he
should ever suffer again as Clarissa had made him suffer. For hours at a
time (pray God that one might say these things without being overheard!),
for hours and days he never thought of Daisy.
Could it be that he was in love with her then, remembering the misery, the
torture, the extraordinary passion of those days? It was a different thing
altogether—a much pleasanter thing—the truth being, of course, that now
she was in love with him. And that perhaps was the reason why, when the

ship actually sailed, he felt an extraordinary relief, wanted nothing so much
as to be alone; was annoyed to find all her little attentions—cigars, notes, a
rug for the voyage—in his cabin. 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 jealousy
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 lasted a
million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her
lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with
her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming,
she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s
enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid
her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere
cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple
heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun
caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.
As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent’s Park Tube station still the
earth seemed green and flowery; still, though it issued from so rude a
mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fibres and
tangled grasses, still the old bubbling burbling song, soaking through the
knotted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure, streamed away in
rivulets over the pavement and all along the Marylebone Road, and down
towards Euston, fertilising, leaving a damp stain.

Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked with
her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand exposed
for coppers the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten million
years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the sea flows
now, with whom it did not matter—he was a man, oh yes, a man who had
loved her. But the passage of ages had blurred the clarity of that ancient
May day; the bright petalled flowers were hoar and silver frosted; and she
no longer saw, when she implored him (as she did now quite clearly) “look
in my eyes with thy sweet eyes intently,” she no longer saw brown eyes,
black whiskers or sunburnt face but only a looming shape, a shadow shape,
to which, with the 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, pocketing her shilling, and all peering inquisitive eyes
seemed blotted out, and the passing generations—the pavement was
crowded with bustling middle-class people—vanished, like leaves, to be
trodden under, to be soaked and steeped and made mould of by that eternal
spring—

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo

“Poor old woman,” said Rezia Warren Smith, waiting to cross.
Oh poor old wretch!
Suppose it was a wet night? Suppose one’s father, or somebody who had
known one in better days had happened to pass, and saw one standing there
in the gutter? And where did she sleep at night?
Cheerfully, almost gaily, the invincible thread of sound wound up into the
air like the smoke from a cottage chimney, winding up clean beech trees
and issuing in a tuft of blue smoke among the topmost leaves. “And if 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 Bradshaw; she thought
his name sounded nice; he would cure Septimus at once. And then there
was a brewer’s cart, and the grey horses had upright bristles of straw in
their tails; there were newspaper placards. It was a silly, silly dream, being
unhappy.
So they crossed, Mr. and Mrs. Septimus Warren Smith, and was there, after
all, anything to draw attention to them, anything to make a 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 arm-chairs, lifting
one corner of the long blinds, explains to the visitors what a wonderful
place it is; how wonderful, but at the same time, he thinks, as he looks at
chairs and tables, how strange.
To look at, he might have been a clerk, but of the better sort; for he wore
brown boots; his hands were educated; so, too, his profile—his angular, big-
nosed, intelligent, sensitive profile; but not his lips altogether, for they were
loose; and his eyes (as eyes tend to be), eyes merely; hazel, large; so that he
was, on the whole, a border case, neither one thing nor the other, might end
with a house at Purley and a 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 London leaving an absurd
note behind him, such as great men have written, and the world has read
later when the story of their struggles has become famous.
London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith;
thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their
parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston Road,
there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two
years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all
this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a
gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and
finds a new blossom on his plant:—It has flowered; flowered from vanity,
ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds,
which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and
stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love
with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.
Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him a
taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him
scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once in a lifetime,
without heat, flickering a red gold flame infinitely ethereal and insubstantial
over Miss Pole; Antony and Cleopatra; and the Waterloo Road. He thought
her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems
to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink; he saw her, one
summer evening, walking in a green dress in a square. “It has flowered,”
the gardener might have said, had he opened the door; had he come in, that
is to say, any night about this time, and found him writing; found him
tearing up his writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o’clock in
the morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and
fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The
History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw.
Something was up, Mr. Brewer knew; Mr. Brewer, managing clerk at
Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents;
something was up, he thought, and, being paternal with his young men, and
thinking very highly of Smith’s abilities, and prophesying that he would, in
ten or fifteen years, succeed to the leather arm-chair in the inner room under
the skylight with the deed-boxes round him, “if he keeps his health,” said
Mr. Brewer, and that was the danger—he looked weakly; advised football,

invited him to supper and was seeing his way to consider recommending a
rise of salary, when something happened which threw out many of Mr.
Brewer’s calculations, took away his ablest young fellows, and eventually,
so prying and insidious were the fingers of the European War, smashed a
plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole in the geranium beds, and utterly
ruined the cook’s nerves at Mr. Brewer’s establishment at Muswell Hill.
Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an
England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss
Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches the
change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football was produced
instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention,
indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name. It was a case of two dogs
playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying a paper screw, snarling, snapping,
giving a pinch, now and then, at the old dog’s ear; the other lying
somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a paw, turning and growling good-
temperedly. They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each
other, quarrel with each other. But when Evans (Rezia who had only seen
him once called him “a quiet man,” a sturdy red-haired man,
undemonstrative in the company of women), when Evans was killed, just
before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or
recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself
upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was
sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War,
death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive.
He was right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode
with indifference. When peace came he was in Milan, billeted in the house
of an innkeeper with a courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the open,
daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he became
engaged one evening when the panic was on him—that he could not feel.
For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried, he had,
especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not
feel. As he opened the door of the room where the Italian girls sat making
hats, he could see them; could hear them; they were rubbing wires among
coloured beads in saucers; they were turning buckram shapes this way and
that; the table was all strewn with feathers, spangles, silks, ribbons; scissors
were rapping on the table; but something failed him; he could not feel. Still,

scissors rapping, girls laughing, hats being made protected him; he was
assured of safety; he had a refuge. But he could not sit there all night. There
were moments of waking in the early morning. The bed was falling; he was
falling. Oh for the scissors and the lamplight and the buckram shapes! He
asked Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two, the gay, the frivolous,
with those little artist’s fingers that she would hold up and say “It is all in
them.” Silk, feathers, what not were alive to them.
“It is the hat that matters most,” she would say, when they walked out
together. Every hat that passed, she would examine; and the cloak and the
dress and the way the woman held herself. Ill-dressing, over-dressing she
stigmatised, not savagely, rather with impatient movements of the hands,
like those of a painter who puts from him some obvious well-meant glaring
imposture; and then, generously, but always critically, she would welcome a
shop-girl who had turned her little bit of stuff gallantly, or praise, wholly,
with enthusiastic and professional understanding, a French lady descending
from her carriage, in chinchilla, robes, pearls.
“Beautiful!” she would murmur, nudging Septimus, that he might see. But
beauty was behind a pane of glass. Even taste (Rezia liked ices, chocolates,
sweet things) had no relish to him. He put down his cup on the little marble
table. He looked at people outside; happy they seemed, collecting in the
middle of the street, shouting, laughing, squabbling over nothing. But he
could not taste, he could not feel. In the tea-shop among the tables and the
chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him—he could not feel. He
could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily (“Septimus, do
put down your book,” said Rezia, gently shutting the Inferno), he could add
up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then—that
he could not feel.
“The English are so silent,” Rezia said. She liked it, she said. She respected
these Englishmen, and wanted to see London, and the English horses, and
the tailor-made suits, and could remember hearing how wonderful the shops
were, from an Aunt who had married and lived in Soho.
It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train
window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is
without meaning.

At the office they advanced him to a post of considerable responsibility.
They were proud of him; he had won crosses. “You have done your duty; it
is up to us—” began Mr. Brewer; and could not finish, so pleasurable was
his emotion. They took admirable lodgings off the Tottenham Court Road.
Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business of the
intoxication of language—Antony and Cleopatra—had shrivelled utterly.
How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the getting
of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed
to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal
which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred,
despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same. There Rezia sat at
the table trimming hats. She trimmed hats for Mrs. Filmer’s friends; she
trimmed hats by the hour. She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned,
under water, he thought.
“The English are so serious,” she would say, putting her arms round
Septimus, her cheek against his.
Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business
of copulation was filth to him before the end. But, Rezia said, she must
have children. They had been married five years.
They went to the Tower together; to the Victoria and Albert Museum; stood
in the crowd to see the King open Parliament. And there were the shops—
hat shops, dress shops, shops with leather bags in the window, where she
would stand staring. But she must have a boy.
She must have a son like Septimus, she said. But nobody could be like
Septimus; so gentle; so serious; so clever. Could she not read Shakespeare
too? Was Shakespeare a difficult author? she asked.
One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate
suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting
emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now
that.
He watched her snip, shape, as one watches a bird hop, flit in the grass,
without daring to move a finger. For the truth is (let her ignore it) that
human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what
serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their

packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They
desert the fallen. They are plastered over with grimaces. There was Brewer
at the office, with his waxed moustache, coral tie-pin, white slip, and
pleasurable emotions—all coldness and clamminess within,—his geraniums
ruined in the War—his cook’s nerves destroyed; or Amelia What’shername,
handing round cups of tea punctually at five—a leering, sneering obscene
little harpy; and the Toms and Berties in their starched shirt fronts oozing
thick drops of vice. They never saw him drawing pictures of them naked at
their antics in his notebook. In the street, vans roared past him; brutality
blared out on placards; men were trapped in mines; women burnt alive; and
once a maimed file of lunatics being exercised or displayed for the
diversion of the populace (who laughed aloud), ambled and nodded and
grinned past him, in the Tottenham Court Road, each half apologetically,
yet triumphantly, inflicting his hopeless woe. And would he go mad?
At tea Rezia told him that Mrs. Filmer’s daughter was expecting a baby. She
could not grow old and have no children! She was very lonely, she was very
unhappy! She cried for the first time since they were married. Far away he
heard her sobbing; he heard it accurately, he noticed it distinctly; he
compared it to a piston thumping. But he felt nothing.
His wife was crying, and he felt nothing; only each time she sobbed in this
profound, this silent, this hopeless way, he descended another step into the
pit.
At last, with a melodramatic gesture which he assumed mechanically and
with complete consciousness of its insincerity, he dropped his head on his
hands. Now he had surrendered; now other people must help him. People
must be sent for. He gave in.
Nothing could rouse him. Rezia put him to bed. She sent for a doctor—Mrs.
Filmer’s Dr. Holmes. Dr. Holmes examined him. There was nothing
whatever the matter, said Dr. Holmes. Oh, what a relief! What a kind man,
what a good man! thought Rezia. When he felt like that he went to the
Music Hall, said Dr. Holmes. He took a day off with his wife and played
golf. Why not try two tabloids of bromide dissolved in a glass of water at
bedtime? These old Bloomsbury houses, said Dr. Holmes, tapping the wall,
are often full of very fine panelling, which the landlords have the folly to

paper over. Only the other day, visiting a patient, Sir Somebody Something
in Bedford Square—
So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for
which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel. He
had not cared when Evans was killed; that was worst; but all the other
crimes raised their heads and shook their fingers and jeered and sneered
over the rail of the bed in the early hours of the morning at the prostrate
body which lay realising its degradation; how he had married his wife
without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her; outraged Miss Isabel Pole,
and was so pocked and marked with vice that women shuddered when they
saw him in the street. The verdict of human nature on such a wretch was
death.
Dr. Holmes came again. Large, fresh coloured, handsome, flicking his
boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside—headaches,
sleeplessness, fears, dreams—nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said. If
Dr. Holmes found himself even half a pound below eleven stone six, he
asked his wife for another plate of porridge at breakfast. (Rezia would learn
to cook porridge.) But, he continued, health is largely a matter in our own
control. Throw yourself into outside interests; take up some hobby. He
opened Shakespeare—Antony and Cleopatra; pushed Shakespeare aside.
Some hobby, said Dr. Holmes, for did he not owe his own excellent health
(and he worked as hard as any man in London) to the fact that he could
always switch off from his patients on to old furniture? And what a very
pretty comb, if he might say so, Mrs. Warren Smith was wearing!
When the damned fool came again, Septimus refused to see him. Did he
indeed? said Dr. Holmes, smiling agreeably. Really he had to give that
charming little lady, Mrs. Smith, a friendly push before he could get past
her into her husband’s bedroom.
“So you’re in a funk,” he said agreeably, sitting down by his patient’s side.
He had actually talked of killing himself to his wife, quite a girl, a foreigner,
wasn’t she? Didn’t that give her a very odd idea of English husbands?
Didn’t one owe perhaps a duty to one’s wife? Wouldn’t it be better to do
something instead of lying in bed? For he had had forty years’ experience
behind him; and Septimus could take Dr. Holmes’s word for it—there was
nothing whatever the matter with him. And next time Dr. Holmes came he

hoped to find Smith out of bed and not making that charming little lady his
wife anxious about him.
Human nature, in short, was on him—the repulsive brute, with the blood-
red nostrils. Holmes was on him. Dr. Holmes came quite regularly every
day. Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a postcard, human
nature is on you. Holmes is on you. Their only chance was to escape,
without letting Holmes know; to Italy—anywhere, anywhere, away from
Dr. Holmes.
But Rezia could not understand him. Dr. Holmes was such a kind man. He
was so interested in Septimus. He only wanted to help them, he said. He
had four little children and he had asked her to tea, she told Septimus.
So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill
yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food
was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about
it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood,—by sucking a gaspipe?
He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he
was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are
alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom
which the attached can never know. Holmes had won of course; the brute
with the red nostrils had won. But even Holmes himself could not touch this
last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at
the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the
world.
It was at that moment (Rezia gone shopping) that the great revelation took
place. A voice spoke from behind the screen. Evans was speaking. The dead
were with him.
“Evans, Evans!” he cried.
Mr. Smith was talking aloud to himself, Agnes the servant girl cried to Mrs.
Filmer in the kitchen. “Evans, Evans,” he had said as she brought in the
tray. She jumped, she did. She scuttled downstairs.
And Rezia came in, with her flowers, and walked across the room, and put
the roses in a vase, upon which the sun struck directly, and it went laughing,
leaping round the room.

She had had to buy the roses, Rezia said, from a poor man in the street. But
they were almost dead already, she said, arranging the roses.
So there was a man outside; Evans presumably; and the roses, which Rezia
said were half dead, had been picked by him in the fields of Greece.
“Communication is health; communication is happiness, communication—”
he muttered.
“What are you saying, Septimus?” Rezia asked, wild with terror, for he was
talking to himself.
She sent Agnes running for Dr. Holmes. Her husband, she said, was mad.
He scarcely knew her.
“You brute! You brute!” cried Septimus, seeing human nature, that is Dr.
Holmes, enter the room.
“Now what’s all this about?” said Dr. Holmes in the most amiable way in
the world. “Talking nonsense to frighten your wife?” But he would give
him something to make him sleep. And if they were rich people, said Dr.
Holmes, looking ironically round the room, by all means let them go to
Harley Street; if they had no confidence in him, said Dr. Holmes, looking
not quite so kind.
It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben; whose stroke was
wafted over the northern part of London; blent with that of other clocks,
mixed in a thin ethereal way with the clouds and wisps of smoke, and died
up there among the seagulls—twelve o’clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway
laid her green dress on her bed, and the Warren Smiths walked down Harley
Street. Twelve was the hour of their appointment. Probably, Rezia thought,
that was Sir William Bradshaw’s house with the grey motor car in front of
it. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
Indeed it was—Sir William Bradshaw’s motor car; low, powerful, grey with
plain initials interlocked on the panel, as if the pomps of heraldry were
incongruous, this man being the ghostly helper, the priest of science; and, as
the motor car was grey, so to match its sober suavity, grey furs, silver grey
rugs were heaped in it, to keep her ladyship warm while she waited. For
often Sir William would travel sixty miles or more down into the country to
visit the rich, the afflicted, who could afford the very large fee which Sir
William very properly charged for his advice. Her ladyship waited with the

rugs about her knees an hour or more, leaning back, thinking sometimes of
the patient, sometimes, excusably, of the wall of gold, mounting minute by
minute while she waited; the wall of gold that was mounting between them
and all shifts and anxieties (she had borne them bravely; they had had their
struggles) until she felt wedged on a calm ocean, where only spice winds
blow; respected, admired, envied, with scarcely anything left to wish for,
though she regretted her stoutness; large dinner-parties every Thursday
night to the profession; an occasional bazaar to be opened; Royalty greeted;
too little time, alas, with her husband, whose work grew and grew; a boy
doing well at Eton; she would have liked a daughter too; interests she had,
however, in plenty; child welfare; the after-care of the epileptic, and
photography, so that if there was a church building, or a church decaying,
she bribed the sexton, got the key and took photographs, which were
scarcely to be distinguished from the work of professionals, while she
waited.
Sir William himself was no longer young. He had worked very hard; he had
won his position by sheer ability (being the son of a shopkeeper); loved his
profession; made a fine figurehead at ceremonies and spoke well—all of
which had by the time he was knighted given him a heavy look, a weary
look (the stream of patients being so incessant, the responsibilities and
privileges of his profession so onerous), which weariness, together with his
grey hairs, increased the extraordinary distinction of his presence and gave
him the reputation (of the utmost importance in dealing with nerve cases)
not merely of lightning skill, and almost infallible accuracy in diagnosis but
of sympathy; tact; understanding of the human soul. He could see the first
moment they came into the room (the Warren Smiths they were called); he
was certain directly he saw the man; it was a case of extreme gravity. It was
a case of complete breakdown—complete physical and nervous breakdown,
with every symptom in an advanced stage, he ascertained in two or three
minutes (writing answers to questions, murmured discreetly, on a pink
card).
How long had Dr. Holmes been attending him?
Six weeks.
Prescribed a little bromide? Said there was nothing the matter? Ah yes
(those general practitioners! thought Sir William. It took half his time to

undo their blunders. Some were irreparable).
“You served with great distinction in the War?”
The patient repeated the word “war” interrogatively.
He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious
symptom, to be noted on the card.
“The War?” the patient asked. The European War—that little shindy of
schoolboys with gunpowder? Had he served with distinction? He really
forgot. In the War itself he had failed.
“Yes, he served with the greatest distinction,” Rezia assured the doctor; “he
was promoted.”
“And they have the very highest opinion of you at your office?” Sir William
murmured, glancing at Mr. Brewer’s very generously worded letter. “So
that you have nothing to worry you, no financial anxiety, nothing?”
He had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by
human nature.
“I have—I have,” he began, “committed a crime—”
“He has done nothing wrong whatever,” Rezia assured the doctor. If Mr.
Smith would wait, said Sir William, he would speak to Mrs. Smith in the
next room. Her husband was very seriously ill, Sir William said. Did he
threaten to kill himself?
Oh, he did, she cried. But he did not mean it, she said. Of course not. It was
merely a question of rest, said Sir William; of rest, rest, rest; a long rest in
bed. There was a delightful home down in the country where her husband
would be perfectly looked after. Away from her? she asked. Unfortunately,
yes; the people we care for most are not good for us when we are ill. But he
was not mad, was he? Sir William said he never spoke of “madness”; he
called it not having a sense of proportion. But her husband did not like
doctors. He would refuse to go there. Shortly and kindly Sir William
explained to her the state of the case. He had threatened to kill himself.
There was no alternative. It was a question of law. He would lie in bed in a
beautiful house in the country. The nurses were admirable. Sir William
would visit him once a week. If Mrs. Warren Smith was quite sure she had

no more questions to ask—he never hurried his patients—they would return
to her husband. She had nothing more to ask—not of Sir William.
So they returned to the most exalted of mankind; the criminal who faced his
judges; the victim exposed on the heights; the fugitive; the drowned sailor;
the poet of the immortal ode; the Lord who had gone from life to death; to
Septimus Warren Smith, who sat in the arm-chair under the skylight staring
at a photograph of Lady Bradshaw in Court dress, muttering messages
about beauty.
“We have had our little talk,” said Sir William.
“He says you are very, very ill,” Rezia cried.
“We have been arranging that you should go into a home,” said Sir William.
“One of Holmes’s homes?” sneered Septimus.
The fellow made a distasteful impression. For there was in Sir William,
whose father had been a tradesman, a natural respect for breeding and
clothing, which shabbiness nettled; again, more profoundly, there was in Sir
William, who had never had time for reading, a grudge, deeply buried,
against cultivated people who came into his room and intimated that
doctors, whose profession is a constant strain upon all the highest faculties,
are not educated men.
“One of my homes, Mr. Warren Smith,” he said, “where we will teach you
to rest.”
And there was just one thing more.
He was quite certain that when Mr. Warren Smith was well he was the last
man in the world to frighten his wife. But he had talked of killing himself.
“We all have our moments of depression,” said Sir William.
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you.
Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly
screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied.
Human nature is remorseless.
“Impulses came upon him sometimes?” Sir William asked, with his pencil
on a pink card.

That was his own affair, said Septimus.
“Nobody lives for himself alone,” said Sir William, glancing at the
photograph of his wife in Court dress.
“And you have a brilliant career before you,” said Sir William. There was
Mr. Brewer’s letter on the table. “An exceptionally brilliant career.”
But if he confessed? If he communicated? Would they let him off then, his
torturers?
“I—I—” he stammered.
But what was his crime? He could not remember it.
“Yes?” Sir William encouraged him. (But it was growing late.)
Love, trees, there is no crime—what was his message?
He could not remember it.
“I—I—” Septimus stammered.
“Try to think as little about yourself as possible,” said Sir William kindly.
Really, he was not fit to be about.
Was there anything else they wished to ask him? Sir William would make
all arrangements (he murmured to Rezia) and he would let her know
between five and six that evening he murmured.
“Trust everything to me,” he said, and dismissed them.
Never, never had Rezia felt such agony in her life! She had asked for help
and been deserted! He had failed them! Sir William Bradshaw was not a
nice man.
The upkeep of that motor car alone must cost him quite a lot, said Septimus,
when they got out into the street.
She clung to his arm. They had been deserted.
But what more did she want?
To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in this exacting
science which has to do with what, after all, we know nothing about—the
nervous system, the human brain—a doctor loses his sense of proportion, as
a doctor he fails. Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that

when a man comes into your room and says he is Christ (a common
delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they
often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in
solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without
messages; six months’ rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone
six comes out weighing twelve.
Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess, was acquired by Sir
William walking hospitals, catching salmon, begetting one son in Harley
Street by Lady Bradshaw, who caught salmon herself and took photographs
scarcely to be distinguished from the work of professionals. Worshipping
proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England
prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it
impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his
sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were
women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home
with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him, his
subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients felt for
him the keenest gratitude for insisting that these prophetic Christs and
Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the advent of God,
should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered; Sir William with his thirty
years’ experience of these kinds of cases, and his infallible instinct, this is
madness, this sense; in fact, his sense of proportion.
But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even
now engaged—in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of
Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the devil
tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own—is even now
engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their
place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on
the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own
features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde Park Corner on a tub
she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially
disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help,
but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, or
dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch
submissively from her eyes the light of their own. This lady too (Rezia
Warren Smith divined it) had her dwelling in Sir William’s heart, though

concealed, as she mostly is, under some plausible disguise; some venerable
name; love, duty, self sacrifice. How he would work—how toil to raise
funds, propagate reforms, initiate institutions! But conversion, fastidious
Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human
will. For example, Lady Bradshaw. Fifteen years ago she had gone under. It
was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap;
only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his. Sweet was her
smile, swift her submission; dinner in Harley Street, numbering eight or
nine courses, feeding ten or fifteen guests of the professional classes, was
smooth and urbane. Only as the evening wore on a very slight dulness, or
uneasiness perhaps, a nervous twitch, fumble, stumble and confusion
indicated, what it was really painful to believe—that the poor lady lied.
Once, long ago, she had caught salmon freely: now, quick to minister to the
craving which lit her husband’s eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she
cramped, squeezed, pared, pruned, drew back, peeped through; so that
without knowing precisely what made the evening disagreeable, and caused
this pressure on the top of the head (which might well be imputed to the
professional conversation, or the fatigue of a great doctor whose life, Lady
Bradshaw said, “is not his own but his patients’”) disagreeable it was: so
that guests, when the clock struck ten, breathed in the air of Harley Street
even with rapture; which relief, however, was denied to his patients.
There in the grey room, with the pictures on the wall, and the valuable
furniture, under the ground glass skylight, they learnt the extent of their
transgressions; huddled up in arm-chairs, they watched him go through, for
their benefit, a curious exercise with the arms, which he shot out, brought
sharply back to his hip, to prove (if the patient was obstinate) that Sir
William was master of his own actions, which the patient was not. There
some weakly broke down; sobbed, submitted; others, inspired by Heaven
knows what intemperate madness, called Sir William to his face a damnable
humbug; questioned, even more impiously, life itself. Why live? they
demanded. Sir William replied that life was good. Certainly Lady Bradshaw
in ostrich feathers hung over the mantelpiece, and as for his income it was
quite twelve thousand a year. But to us, they protested, life has given no
such bounty. He acquiesced. They lacked a sense of proportion. And
perhaps, after all, there is no God? He shrugged his shoulders. In short, this
living or not living is an affair of our own? But there they were mistaken.
Sir William had a friend in Surrey where they taught, what Sir William

frankly admitted was a difficult art—a sense of proportion. There were,
moreover, family affection; honour; courage; and a brilliant career. All of
these had in Sir William a resolute champion. If they failed him, he had to
support police and the good of society, which, he remarked very quietly,
would take care, down in Surrey, that these unsocial impulses, bred more
than anything by the lack of good blood, were held in control. And then
stole out from her hiding-place and mounted her throne that Goddess whose
lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others
the image of herself. Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless
received the impress of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He
shut people up. It was this combination of decision and humanity that
endeared Sir William so greatly to the relations of his victims.
But Rezia Warren Smith cried, walking down Harley Street, that she did not
like that man.
Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street
nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and
pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until
the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock,
suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and
fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give
the information gratis, that it was half-past one.
Looking up, it appeared that each letter of their names stood for one of the
hours; subconsciously one was grateful to Rigby and Lowndes for giving
one time ratified by Greenwich; and this gratitude (so Hugh Whitbread
ruminated, dallying there in front of the shop window), naturally took the
form later of buying off Rigby and Lowndes socks or shoes. So he
ruminated. It was his habit. He did not go deeply. He brushed surfaces; the
dead languages, the living, life in Constantinople, Paris, Rome; riding,
shooting, tennis, it had been once. The malicious asserted that he now kept
guard at Buckingham Palace, dressed in silk stockings and knee-breeches,
over what nobody knew. But he did it extremely efficiently. He had been
afloat on the cream of English society for fifty-five years. He had known
Prime Ministers. His affections were understood to be deep. And if it were
true that he had not taken part in any of the great movements of the time or
held important office, one or two humble reforms stood to his credit; an
improvement in public shelters was one; the protection of owls in Norfolk

another; servant girls had reason to be grateful to him; and his name at the
end of letters to the Times, asking for funds, appealing to the public to
protect, to preserve, to clear up litter, to abate smoke, and stamp out
immorality in parks, commanded respect.
A magnificent figure he cut too, pausing for a moment (as the sound of the
half hour died away) to look critically, magisterially, at socks and shoes;
impeccable, substantial, as if he beheld the world from a certain eminence,
and dressed to match; but realised the obligations which size, wealth,
health, entail, and observed punctiliously even when not absolutely
necessary, little courtesies, old-fashioned ceremonies which gave a quality
to his manner, something to imitate, something to remember him by, for he
would never lunch, for example, with Lady Bruton, whom he had known
these twenty years, without bringing her in his outstretched hand a bunch of
carnations and asking Miss Brush, Lady Bruton’s secretary, after her
brother in South Africa, which, for some reason, Miss Brush, deficient
though she was in every attribute of female charm, so much resented that
she said “Thank you, he’s doing very well in South Africa,” when, for half a
dozen years, he had been doing badly in Portsmouth.
Lady Bruton herself preferred Richard Dalloway, who arrived at the next
moment. Indeed they met on the doorstep.
Lady Bruton preferred Richard Dalloway of course. He was made of much
finer material. But she wouldn’t let them run down her poor dear Hugh. She
could never forget his kindness—he had been really remarkably kind—she
forgot precisely upon what occasion. But he had been—remarkably kind.
Anyhow, the difference between one man and another does not amount to
much. She had never seen the sense of cutting people up, as Clarissa
Dalloway did—cutting them up and sticking them together again; not at any
rate when one was sixty-two. She took Hugh’s carnations with her angular
grim smile. There was nobody else coming, she said. She had got them
there on false pretences, to help her out of a difficulty—
“But let us eat first,” she said.
And so there began a soundless and exquisite passing to and fro through
swing doors of aproned white-capped maids, handmaidens not of necessity,
but adepts in a mystery or grand deception practised by hostesses in
Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when, with a wave of the hand, the traffic

ceases, and there rises instead this profound illusion in the first place about
the food—how it is not paid for; and then that the table spreads itself
voluntarily with glass and silver, little mats, saucers of red fruit; films of
brown cream mask turbot; in casseroles severed chickens swim; coloured,
undomestic, the fire burns; and with the wine and the coffee (not paid for)
rise jocund visions before musing eyes; gently speculative eyes; eyes to
whom life appears musical, mysterious; eyes now kindled to observe
genially the beauty of the red carnations which Lady Bruton (whose
movements were always angular) had laid beside her plate, so that Hugh
Whitbread, feeling at peace with the entire universe and at the same time
completely sure of his standing, said, resting his fork,
“Wouldn’t they look charming against your lace?”
Miss Brush resented this familiarity intensely. She thought him an
underbred fellow. She made Lady Bruton laugh.
Lady Bruton raised the carnations, holding them rather stiffly with much the
same attitude with which the General held the scroll in the picture behind
her; she remained fixed, tranced. Which was she now, the General’s great-
grand-daughter? great-great-grand-daughter? Richard Dalloway asked
himself. Sir Roderick, Sir Miles, Sir Talbot—that was it. It was remarkable
how in that family the likeness persisted in the women. She should have
been a general of dragoons herself. And Richard would have served under
her, cheerfully; he had the greatest respect for her; he cherished these
romantic views about well-set-up old women of pedigree, and would have
liked, in his good-humoured way, to bring some young hot-heads of his
acquaintance to lunch with her; as if a type like hers could be bred of
amiable tea-drinking enthusiasts! He knew her country. He knew her
people. There was a vine, still bearing, which either Lovelace or Herrick—
she never read a word of poetry herself, but so the story ran—had sat under.
Better wait to put before them the question that bothered her (about making
an appeal to the public; if so, in what terms and so on), better wait until they
have had their coffee, Lady Bruton thought; and so laid the carnations down
beside her plate.
“How’s Clarissa?” she asked abruptly.
Clarissa always said that Lady Bruton did not like her. Indeed, Lady Bruton
had the reputation of being more interested in politics than people; of

talking like a man; of having had a finger in some notorious intrigue of the
eighties, which was now beginning to be mentioned in memoirs. Certainly
there was an alcove in her drawing-room, and a table in that alcove, and a
photograph upon that table of General Sir Talbot Moore, now deceased,
who had written there (one evening in the eighties) in Lady Bruton’s
presence, with her cognisance, perhaps advice, a telegram ordering the
British troops to advance upon an historical occasion. (She kept the pen and
told the story.) Thus, when she said in her offhand way “How’s Clarissa?”
husbands had difficulty in persuading their wives and indeed, however
devoted, were secretly doubtful themselves, of her interest in women who
often got in their husbands’ way, prevented them from accepting posts
abroad, and had to be taken to the seaside in the middle of the session to
recover from influenza. Nevertheless her inquiry, “How’s Clarissa?” was
known by women infallibly, to be a signal from a well-wisher, from an
almost silent companion, whose utterances (half a dozen perhaps in the
course of a lifetime) signified recognition of some feminine comradeship
which went beneath masculine lunch parties and united Lady Bruton and
Mrs. Dalloway, who seldom met, and appeared when they did meet
indifferent and even hostile, in a singular bond.
“I met Clarissa in the Park this morning,” said Hugh Whitbread, diving into
the casserole, anxious to pay himself this little tribute, for he had only to
come to London and he met everybody at once; but greedy, one of the
greediest men she had ever known, Milly Brush thought, who observed men
with unflinching rectitude, and was capable of everlasting devotion, to her
own sex in particular, being knobbed, scraped, angular, and entirely without
feminine charm.
“D’you know who’s in town?” said Lady Bruton suddenly bethinking her.
“Our old friend, Peter Walsh.”
They all smiled. Peter Walsh! And Mr. Dalloway was genuinely glad, Milly
Brush thought; and Mr. Whitbread thought only of his chicken.
Peter Walsh! All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and Richard
Dalloway, remembered the same thing—how passionately Peter had been in
love; been rejected; gone to India; come a cropper; made a mess of things;
and Richard Dalloway had a very great liking for the dear old fellow too.
Milly Brush saw that; saw a depth in the brown of his eyes; saw him

hesitate; consider; which interested her, as Mr. Dalloway always interested
her, for what was he thinking, she wondered, about Peter Walsh?
That Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa; that he would go back
directly after lunch and find Clarissa; that he would tell her, in so many
words, that he loved her. Yes, he would say that.
Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences; and
Mr. Dalloway was always so dependable; such a gentleman too. Now, being
forty, Lady Bruton had only to nod, or turn her head a little abruptly, and
Milly Brush took the signal, however deeply she might be sunk in these
reflections of a detached spirit, of an uncorrupted soul whom life could not
bamboozle, because life had not offered her a trinket of the slightest value;
not a curl, smile, lip, cheek, nose; nothing whatever; Lady Bruton had only
to nod, and Perkins was instructed to quicken the coffee.
“Yes; Peter Walsh has come back,” said Lady Bruton. It was vaguely
flattering to them all. He had come back, battered, unsuccessful, to their
secure shores. But to help him, they reflected, was impossible; there was
some flaw in his character. Hugh Whitbread said one might of course
mention his name to So-and-so. He wrinkled lugubriously, consequentially,
at the thought of the letters he would write to the heads of Government
offices about “my old friend, Peter Walsh,” and so on. But it wouldn’t lead
to anything—not to anything permanent, because of his character.
“In trouble with some woman,” said Lady Bruton. They had all guessed that
that was at the bottom of it.
“However,” said Lady Bruton, anxious to leave the subject, “we shall hear
the whole story from Peter himself.”
(The coffee was very slow in coming.)
“The address?” murmured Hugh Whitbread; and there was at once a ripple
in the grey tide of service which washed round Lady Bruton day in, day out,
collecting, intercepting, enveloping her in a fine tissue which broke
concussions, mitigated interruptions, and spread round the house in Brook
Street a fine net where things lodged and were picked out accurately,
instantly, by grey-haired Perkins, who had been with Lady Bruton these
thirty years and now wrote down the address; handed it to Mr. Whitbread,
who took out his pocket-book, raised his eyebrows, and slipping it in

among documents of the highest importance, said that he would get Evelyn
to ask him to lunch.
(They were waiting to bring the coffee until Mr. Whitbread had finished.)
Hugh was very slow, Lady Bruton thought. He was getting fat, she noticed.
Richard always kept himself in the pink of condition. She was getting
impatient; the whole of her being was setting positively, undeniably,
domineeringly brushing aside all this unnecessary trifling (Peter Walsh and
his affairs) upon that subject which engaged her attention, and not merely
her attention, but that fibre which was the ramrod of her soul, that essential
part of her without which Millicent Bruton would not have been Millicent
Bruton; that project for emigrating young people of both sexes born of
respectable parents and setting them up with a fair prospect of doing well in
Canada. She exaggerated. She had perhaps lost her sense of proportion.
Emigration was not to others the obvious remedy, the sublime conception. It
was not to them (not to Hugh, or Richard, or even to devoted Miss Brush)
the liberator of the pent egotism, which a strong martial woman, well
nourished, well descended, of direct impulses, downright feelings, and little
introspective power (broad and simple—why could not every one be broad
and simple? she asked) feels rise within her, once youth is past, and must
eject upon some object—it may be Emigration, it may be Emancipation; but
whatever it be, this object round which the essence of her soul is daily
secreted, becomes inevitably prismatic, lustrous, half looking-glass, half
precious stone; now carefully hidden in case people should sneer at it; now
proudly displayed. Emigration had become, in short, largely Lady Bruton.
But she had to write. And one letter to the Times, she used to say to Miss
Brush, cost her more than to organise an expedition to South Africa (which
she had done in the war). After a morning’s battle beginning, tearing up,
beginning again, she used to feel the futility of her own womanhood as she
felt it on no other occasion, and would turn gratefully to the thought of
Hugh Whitbread who possessed—no one could doubt it—the art of writing
letters to the Times.
A being so differently constituted from herself, with such a command of
language; able to put things as editors like them put; had passions which
one could not call simply greed. Lady Bruton often suspended judgement
upon men in deference to the mysterious accord in which they, but no

woman, stood to the laws of the universe; knew how to put things; knew
what was said; so that if Richard advised her, and Hugh wrote for her, she
was sure of being somehow right. So she let Hugh eat his soufflé; asked
after poor Evelyn; waited until they were smoking, and then said,
“Milly, would you fetch the papers?”
And Miss Brush went out, came back; laid papers on the table; and Hugh
produced his fountain pen; his silver fountain pen, which had done twenty
years’ service, he said, unscrewing the cap. It was still in perfect order; he
had shown it to the makers; there was no reason, they said, why it should
ever wear out; which was somehow to Hugh’s credit, and to the credit of the
sentiments which his pen expressed (so Richard Dalloway felt) as Hugh
began carefully writing capital letters with rings round them in the margin,
and thus marvellously reduced Lady Bruton’s tangles to sense, to grammar
such as the editor of the Times, Lady Bruton felt, watching the marvellous
transformation, must respect. Hugh was slow. Hugh was pertinacious.
Richard said one must take risks. Hugh proposed modifications in deference
to people’s feelings, which, he said rather tartly when Richard laughed,
“had to be considered,” and read out “how, therefore, we are of opinion that
the times are ripe ... the superfluous youth of our ever-increasing population
... what we owe to the dead ...” which Richard thought all stuffing and
bunkum, but no harm in it, of course, and Hugh went on drafting sentiments
in alphabetical order of the highest nobility, brushing the cigar ash from his
waistcoat, and summing up now and then the progress they had made until,
finally, he read out the draft of a letter which Lady Bruton felt certain was a
masterpiece. Could her own meaning sound like that?
Hugh could not guarantee that the editor would put it in; but he would be
meeting somebody at luncheon.
Whereupon Lady Bruton, who seldom did a graceful thing, stuffed all
Hugh’s carnations into the front of her dress, and flinging her hands out
called him “My Prime Minister!” What she would have done without them
both she did not know. They rose. And Richard Dalloway strolled off as
usual to have a look at the General’s portrait, because he meant, whenever
he had a moment of leisure, to write a history of Lady Bruton’s family.
And Millicent Bruton was very proud of her family. But they could wait,
they could wait, she said, looking at the picture; meaning that her family, of

military men, administrators, admirals, had been men of action, who had
done their duty; and Richard’s first duty was to his country, but it was a fine
face, she said; and all the papers were ready for Richard down at Aldmixton
whenever the time came; the Labour Government she meant. “Ah, the news
from India!” she cried.
And then, as they stood in the hall taking yellow gloves from the bowl on
the malachite table and Hugh was offering Miss Brush with quite
unnecessary courtesy some discarded ticket or other compliment, which she
loathed from the depths of her heart and blushed brick red, Richard turned
to Lady Bruton, with his hat in his hand, and said,
“We shall see you at our party to-night?” whereupon Lady Bruton resumed
the magnificence which letter-writing had shattered. She might come; or
she might not come. Clarissa had wonderful energy. Parties terrified Lady
Bruton. But then, she was getting old. So she intimated, standing at her
doorway; handsome; very erect; while her chow stretched behind her, and
Miss Brush disappeared into the background with her hands full of papers.
And Lady Bruton went ponderously, majestically, up to her room, lay, one
arm extended, on the sofa. She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep,
only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the
sunshine this hot June day, with the bees going round and about and the
yellow butterflies. Always she went back to those fields down in
Devonshire, where she had jumped the brooks on Patty, her pony, with
Mortimer and Tom, her brothers. And there were the dogs; there were the
rats; there were her father and mother on the lawn under the trees, with the
tea-things out, and the beds of dahlias, the hollyhocks, the pampas grass;
and they, little wretches, always up to some mischief! stealing back through
the shrubbery, so as not to be seen, all bedraggled from some roguery. What
old nurse used to say about her frocks!
Ah dear, she remembered—it was Wednesday in Brook Street. Those kind
good fellows, Richard Dalloway, Hugh Whitbread, had gone this hot day
through the streets whose growl came up to her lying on the sofa. Power
was hers, position, income. She had lived in the forefront of her time. She
had had good friends; known the ablest men of her day. Murmuring London
flowed up to her, and her hand, lying on the sofa back, curled upon some
imaginary baton such as her grandfathers might have held, holding which

she seemed, drowsy and heavy, to be commanding battalions marching to
Canada, and those good fellows walking across London, that territory of
theirs, that little bit of carpet, Mayfair.
And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin
thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch,
get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one’s friends
were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread,
which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the
hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted with rain-
drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept.
And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread hesitated at the corner of
Conduit Street at the very moment that Millicent Bruton, lying on the sofa,
let the thread snap; snored. Contrary winds buffeted at the street corner.
They looked in at a shop window; they did not wish to buy or to talk but to
part, only with contrary winds buffeting the street corner, with some sort of
lapse in the tides of the body, two forces meeting in a swirl, morning and
afternoon, they paused. Some newspaper placard went up in the air,
gallantly, like a kite at first, then paused, swooped, fluttered; and a lady’s
veil hung. Yellow awnings trembled. The speed of the morning traffic
slackened, and single carts rattled carelessly down half-empty streets. In
Norfolk, of which Richard Dalloway was half thinking, a soft warm wind
blew back the petals; confused the waters; ruffled the flowering grasses.
Haymakers, who had pitched beneath hedges to sleep away the morning
toil, parted curtains of green blades; moved trembling globes of cow parsley
to see the sky; the blue, the steadfast, the blazing summer sky.
Aware that he was looking at a silver two-handled Jacobean mug, and that
Hugh Whitbread admired condescendingly with airs of connoisseurship a
Spanish necklace which he thought of asking the price of in case Evelyn
might like it—still Richard was torpid; could not think or move. Life had
thrown up this wreckage; shop windows full of coloured paste, and one
stood stark with the lethargy of the old, stiff with the rigidity of the old,
looking in. Evelyn Whitbread might like to buy this Spanish necklace—so
she might. Yawn he must. Hugh was going into the shop.
“Right you are!” said Richard, following.

Goodness knows he didn’t want to go buying necklaces with Hugh. But
there are tides in the body. Morning meets afternoon. Borne like a frail
shallop on deep, deep floods, Lady Bruton’s great-grandfather and his
memoir and his campaigns in North America were whelmed and sunk. And
Millicent Bruton too. She went under. Richard didn’t care a straw what
became of Emigration; about that letter, whether the editor put it in or not.
The necklace hung stretched between Hugh’s admirable fingers. Let him
give it to a girl, if he must buy jewels—any girl, any girl in the street. For
the worthlessness of this life did strike Richard pretty forcibly—buying
necklaces for Evelyn. If he’d had a boy he’d have said, Work, work. But he
had his Elizabeth; he adored his Elizabeth.
“I should like to see Mr. Dubonnet,” said Hugh in his curt worldly way. It
appeared that this Dubonnet had the measurements of Mrs. Whitbread’s
neck, or, more strangely still, knew her views upon Spanish jewellery and
the extent of her possessions in that line (which Hugh could not remember).
All of which seemed to Richard Dalloway awfully odd. For he never gave
Clarissa presents, except a bracelet two or three years ago, which had not
been a success. She never wore it. It pained him to remember that she never
wore it. And as a single spider’s thread after wavering here and there
attaches itself to the point of a leaf, so Richard’s mind, recovering from its
lethargy, set now on his wife, Clarissa, whom Peter Walsh had loved so
passionately; and Richard had had a sudden vision of her there at luncheon;
of himself and Clarissa; of their life together; and he drew the tray of old
jewels towards him, and taking up first this brooch then that ring, “How
much is that?” he asked, but doubted his own taste. He wanted to open the
drawing-room door and come in holding out something; a present for
Clarissa. Only what? But Hugh was on his legs again. He was unspeakably
pompous. Really, after dealing here for thirty-five years he was not going to
be put off by a mere boy who did not know his business. For Dubonnet, it
seemed, was out, and Hugh would not buy anything until Mr. Dubonnet
chose to be in; at which the youth flushed and bowed his correct little bow.
It was all perfectly correct. And yet Richard couldn’t have said that to save
his life! Why these people stood that damned insolence he could not
conceive. Hugh was becoming an intolerable ass. Richard Dalloway could
not stand more than an hour of his society. And, flicking his bowler hat by
way of farewell, Richard turned at the corner of Conduit Street eager, yes,

very eager, to travel that spider’s thread of attachment between himself and
Clarissa; he would go straight to her, in Westminster.
But he wanted to come in holding something. Flowers? Yes, flowers, since
he did not trust his taste in gold; any number of flowers, roses, orchids, to
celebrate what was, reckoning things as you will, an event; this feeling
about her when they spoke of Peter Walsh at luncheon; and they never
spoke of it; not for years had they spoken of it; which, he thought, grasping
his red and white roses together (a vast bunch in tissue paper), is the
greatest mistake in the world. The time comes when it can’t be said; one’s
too shy to say it, he thought, pocketing his sixpence or two of change,
setting off with his great bunch held against his body to Westminster to say
straight out in so many words (whatever she might think of him), holding
out his flowers, “I love you.” Why not? Really it was a miracle thinking of
the war, and thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them,
shovelled together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle. Here he was
walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved
her. Which one never does say, he thought. Partly one’s lazy; partly one’s
shy. And Clarissa—it was difficult to think of her; except in starts, as at
luncheon, when he saw her quite distinctly; their whole life. He stopped at
the crossing; and repeated—being simple by nature, and undebauched,
because he had tramped, and shot; being pertinacious and dogged, having
championed the down-trodden and followed his instincts in the House of
Commons; being preserved in his simplicity yet at the same time grown
rather speechless, rather stiff—he repeated that it was a miracle that he
should have married Clarissa; a miracle—his life had been a miracle, he
thought; hesitating to cross. But it did make his blood boil to see little
creatures of five or six crossing Piccadilly alone. The police ought to have
stopped the traffic at once. He had no illusions about the London police.
Indeed, he was collecting evidence of their malpractices; and those
costermongers, not allowed to stand their barrows in the streets; and
prostitutes, good Lord, the fault wasn’t in them, nor in young men either,
but in our detestable social system and so forth; all of which he considered,
could be seen considering, grey, dogged, dapper, clean, as he walked across
the Park to tell his wife that he loved her.
For he would say it in so many words, when he came into the room.
Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought,

crossing the Green Park and observing with pleasure how in the shade of
the trees whole families, poor families, were sprawling; children kicking up
their legs; sucking milk; paper bags thrown about, which could easily be
picked up (if people objected) by one of those fat gentlemen in livery; for
he was of opinion that every park, and every square, during the summer
months should be open to children (the grass of the park flushed and faded,
lighting up the poor mothers of Westminster and their crawling babies, as if
a yellow lamp were moved beneath). But what could be done for female
vagrants like that poor creature, stretched on her elbow (as if she had flung
herself on the earth, rid of all ties, to observe curiously, to speculate boldly,
to consider the whys and the wherefores, impudent, loose-lipped,
humorous), he did not know. Bearing his flowers like a weapon, Richard
Dalloway approached her; intent he passed her; still there was time for a
spark between them—she laughed at the sight of him, he smiled good-
humouredly, considering the problem of the female vagrant; not that they
would ever speak. But he would tell Clarissa that he loved her, in so many
words. He had, once upon a time, been jealous of Peter Walsh; jealous of
him and Clarissa. But she had often said to him that she had been right not
to marry Peter Walsh; which, knowing Clarissa, was obviously true; she
wanted support. Not that she was weak; but she wanted support.
As for Buckingham Palace (like an old prima donna facing the audience all
in white) you can’t deny it a certain dignity, he considered, nor despise what
does, after all, stand to millions of people (a little crowd was waiting at the
gate to see the King drive out) for a symbol, absurd though it is; a child
with a box of bricks could have done better, he thought; looking at the
memorial to Queen Victoria (whom he could remember in her horn
spectacles driving through Kensington), its white mound, its billowing
motherliness; but he liked being ruled by the descendant of Horsa; he liked
continuity; and the sense of handing on the traditions of the past. It was a
great age in which to have lived. Indeed, his own life was a miracle; let him
make no mistake about it; here he was, in the prime of life, walking to his
house in Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her. Happiness is this he
thought.
It is this, he said, as he entered Dean’s Yard. Big Ben was beginning to
strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. Lunch parties
waste the entire afternoon, he thought, approaching his door.

The sound of Big Ben flooded Clarissa’s drawing-room, where she sat, ever
so annoyed, at her writing-table; worried; annoyed. It was perfectly true that
she had not asked Ellie Henderson to her party; but she had done it on
purpose. Now Mrs. Marsham wrote “she had told Ellie Henderson she
would ask Clarissa—Ellie so much wanted to come.”
But why should she invite all the dull women in London to her parties?
Why should Mrs. Marsham interfere? And there was Elizabeth closeted all
this time with Doris Kilman. Anything more nauseating she could not
conceive. Prayer at this hour with that woman. And the sound of the bell
flooded the room with its melancholy wave; which receded, and gathered
itself together to fall once more, when she heard, distractingly, something
fumbling, something scratching at the door. Who at this hour? Three, good
Heavens! Three already! For with overpowering directness and dignity the
clock struck three; and she heard nothing else; but the door handle slipped
round and in came Richard! What a surprise! In came Richard, holding out
flowers. She had failed him, once at Constantinople; and Lady Bruton,
whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked
her. He was holding out flowers—roses, red and white roses. (But he could
not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.)
But how lovely, she said, taking his flowers. She understood; she
understood without his speaking; his Clarissa. She put them in vases on the
mantelpiece. How lovely they looked! she said. And was it amusing, she
asked? Had Lady Bruton asked after her? Peter Walsh was back. Mrs.
Marsham had written. Must she ask Ellie Henderson? That woman Kilman
was upstairs.
“But let us sit down for five minutes,” said Richard.
It all looked so empty. All the chairs were against the wall. What had they
been doing? Oh, it was for the party; no, he had not forgotten, the party.
Peter Walsh was back. Oh yes; she had had him. And he was going to get a
divorce; and he was in love with some woman out there. And he hadn’t
changed in the slightest. There she was, mending her dress....
“Thinking of Bourton,” she said.
“Hugh was at lunch,” said Richard. She had met him too! Well, he was
getting absolutely intolerable. Buying Evelyn necklaces; fatter than ever; an

intolerable ass.
“And it came over me ‘I might have married you,’” she said, thinking of
Peter sitting there in his little bow-tie; with that knife, opening it, shutting
it. “Just as he always was, you know.”
They were talking about him at lunch, said Richard. (But he could not tell
her he loved her. He held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought.) They had
been writing a letter to the Times for Millicent Bruton. That was about all
Hugh was fit for.
“And our dear Miss Kilman?” he asked. Clarissa thought the roses
absolutely lovely; first bunched together; now of their own accord starting
apart.
“Kilman arrives just as we’ve done lunch,” she said. “Elizabeth turns pink.
They shut themselves up. I suppose they’re praying.”
Lord! He didn’t like it; but these things pass over if you let them.
“In a mackintosh with an umbrella,” said Clarissa.
He had not said “I love you”; but he held her hand. Happiness is this, is this,
he thought.
“But why should I ask all the dull women in London to my parties?” said
Clarissa. And if Mrs. Marsham gave a party, did she invite her guests?
“Poor Ellie Henderson,” said Richard—it was a very odd thing how much
Clarissa minded about her parties, he thought.
But Richard had no notion of the look of a room. However—what was he
going to say?
If she worried about these parties he would not let her give them. Did she
wish she had married Peter? But he must go.
He must be off, he said, getting up. But he stood for a moment as if he were
about to say something; and she wondered what? Why? There were the
roses.
“Some Committee?” she asked, as he opened the door.
“Armenians,” he said; or perhaps it was “Albanians.”

And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife
a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the
door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from
one’s husband, without losing one’s independence, one’s self-respect—
something, after all, priceless.
He returned with a pillow and a quilt.
“An hour’s complete rest after luncheon,” he said. And he went.
How like him! He would go on saying “An hour’s complete rest after
luncheon” to the end of time, because a doctor had ordered it once. It was
like him to take what doctors said literally; part of his adorable, divine
simplicity, which no one had to the same extent; which made him go and do
the thing while she and Peter frittered their time away bickering. He was
already half-way to the House of Commons, to his Armenians, his
Albanians, having settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses. And people
would say, “Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt.” She cared much more for her
roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the
victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over
again)—no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the
Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)—the
only flowers she could bear to see cut. But Richard was already at the
House of Commons; at his Committee, having settled all her difficulties.
But no; alas, that was not true. He did not see the reasons against asking
Ellie Henderson. She would do it, of course, as he wished it. Since he had
brought the pillows, she would lie down.... But—but—why did she
suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy?
As a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass
and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way and that, and searches here
and there vainly, and at last spies it there at the roots, so she went through
one thing and another; no, it was not Sally Seton saying that Richard would
never be in the Cabinet because he had a second-class brain (it came back
to her); no, she did not mind that; nor was it to do with Elizabeth either and
Doris Kilman; those were facts. It was a feeling, some unpleasant feeling,
earlier in the day perhaps; something that Peter had said, combined with
some depression of her own, in her bedroom, taking off her hat; and what
Richard had said had added to it, but what had he said? There were his
roses. Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very

unfairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties. That was it! That was
it!
Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she knew what it was,
she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she
enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great
names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard
merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was
bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong.
What she liked was simply life.
“That’s what I do it for,” she said, speaking aloud, to life.
Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the presence of this
thing which she felt to be so obvious became physically existent; with robes
of sound from the street, sunny, with hot breath, whispering, blowing out
the blinds. But suppose Peter said to her, “Yes, yes, but your parties—
what’s the sense of your parties?” all she could say was (and nobody could
be expected to understand): They’re an offering; which sounded horribly
vague. But who was Peter to make out that life was all plain sailing?—Peter
always in love, always in love with the wrong woman? What’s your love?
she might say to him. And she knew his answer; how it is the most
important thing in the world and no woman possibly understood it. Very
well. But could any man understand what she meant either? about life? She
could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no
reason whatever.
But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how
superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it
mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-
and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody
else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their
existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if
only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to
combine, to create; but to whom?
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift.
Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write,
even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success;

hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day,
ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.
All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk
in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these
roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!—that it must
end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all;
how, every instant....
The door opened. Elizabeth knew that her mother was resting. She came in
very quietly. She stood perfectly still. Was it that some Mongol had been
wrecked on the coast of Norfolk (as Mrs. Hilbery said), had mixed with the
Dalloway ladies, perhaps, a hundred years ago? For the Dalloways, in
general, were fair-haired; blue-eyed; Elizabeth, on the contrary, was dark;
had Chinese eyes in a pale face; an Oriental mystery; was gentle,
considerate, still. As a child, she had had a perfect sense of humour; but
now at seventeen, why, Clarissa could not in the least understand, she had
become very serious; like a hyacinth, sheathed in glossy green, with buds
just tinted, a hyacinth which has had no sun.
She stood quite still and looked at her mother; but the door was ajar, and
outside the door was Miss Kilman, as Clarissa knew; Miss Kilman in her
mackintosh, listening to whatever they said.
Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a mackintosh; but had her
reasons. First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty; and did not, after
all, dress to please. She was poor, moreover; degradingly poor. Otherwise
she would not be taking jobs from people like the Dalloways; from rich
people, who liked to be kind. Mr. Dalloway, to do him justice, had been
kind. But Mrs. Dalloway had not. She had been merely condescending. She
came from the most worthless of all classes—the rich, with a smattering of
culture. They had expensive things everywhere; pictures, carpets, lots of
servants. She considered that she had a perfect right to anything that the
Dalloways did for her.
She had been cheated. Yes, the word was no exaggeration, for surely a girl
has a right to some kind of happiness? And she had never been happy, what
with being so clumsy and so poor. And then, just as she might have had a
chance at Miss Dolby’s school, the war came; and she had never been able

to tell lies. Miss Dolby thought she would be happier with people who
shared her views about the Germans. She had had to go. It was true that the
family was of German origin; spelt the name Kiehlman in the eighteenth
century; but her brother had been killed. They turned her out because she
would not pretend that the Germans were all villains—when she had
German friends, when the only happy days of her life had been spent in
Germany! And after all, she could read history. She had had to take
whatever she could get. Mr. Dalloway had come across her working for the
Friends. He had allowed her (and that was really generous of him) to teach
his daughter history. Also she did a little Extension lecturing and so on.
Then Our Lord had come to her (and here she always bowed her head). She
had seen the light two years and three months ago. Now she did not envy
women like Clarissa Dalloway; she pitied them.
She pitied and despised them from the bottom of her heart, as she stood on
the soft carpet, looking at the old engraving of a little girl with a muff. With
all this luxury going on, what hope was there for a better state of things?
Instead of lying on a sofa—“My mother is resting,” Elizabeth had said—
she should have been in a factory; behind a counter; Mrs. Dalloway and all
the other fine ladies!
Bitter and burning, Miss Kilman had turned into a church two years three
months ago. She had heard the Rev. Edward Whittaker preach; the boys
sing; had seen the solemn lights descend, and whether it was the music, or
the voices (she herself when alone in the evening found comfort in a violin;
but the sound was excruciating; she had no ear), the hot and turbulent
feelings which boiled and surged in her had been assuaged as she sat there,
and she had wept copiously, and gone to call on Mr. Whittaker at his private
house in Kensington. It was the hand of God, he said. The Lord had shown
her the way. So now, whenever the hot and painful feelings boiled within
her, this hatred of Mrs. Dalloway, this grudge against the world, she thought
of God. She thought of Mr. Whittaker. Rage was succeeded by calm. A
sweet savour filled her veins, her lips parted, and, standing formidable upon
the landing in her mackintosh, she looked with steady and sinister serenity
at Mrs. Dalloway, who came out with her daughter.
Elizabeth said she had forgotten her gloves. That was because Miss Kilman
and her mother hated each other. She could not bear to see them together.
She ran upstairs to find her gloves.

But Miss Kilman did not hate Mrs. Dalloway. Turning her large gooseberry-
coloured eyes upon Clarissa, observing her small pink face, her delicate
body, her air of freshness and fashion, Miss Kilman felt, Fool! Simpleton!
You who have known neither sorrow nor pleasure; who have trifled your
life away! And there rose in her an overmastering desire to overcome her; to
unmask her. If she could have felled her it would have eased her. But it was
not the body; it was the soul and its mockery that she wished to subdue;
make feel her mastery. If only she could make her weep; could ruin her;
humiliate her; bring her to her knees crying, You are right! But this was
God’s will, not Miss Kilman’s. It was to be a religious victory. So she
glared; so she glowered.
Clarissa was really shocked. This a Christian—this woman! This woman
had taken her daughter from her! She in touch with invisible presences!
Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without kindness or grace, she know the
meaning of life!
“You are taking Elizabeth to the Stores?” Mrs. Dalloway said.
Miss Kilman said she was. They stood there. Miss Kilman was not going to
make herself agreeable. She had always earned her living. Her knowledge
of modern history was thorough in the extreme. She did out of her meagre
income set aside so much for causes she believed in; whereas this woman
did nothing, believed nothing; brought up her daughter—but here was
Elizabeth, rather out of breath, the beautiful girl.
So they were going to the Stores. Odd it was, as Miss Kilman stood there
(and stand she did, with the power and taciturnity of some prehistoric
monster armoured for primeval warfare), how, second by second, the idea
of her diminished, how hatred (which was for ideas, not people) crumbled,
how she lost her malignity, her size, became second by second merely Miss
Kilman, in a mackintosh, whom Heaven knows Clarissa would have liked
to help.
At this dwindling of the monster, Clarissa laughed. Saying good-bye, she
laughed.
Off they went together, Miss Kilman and Elizabeth, downstairs.
With a sudden impulse, with a violent anguish, for this woman was taking
her daughter from her, Clarissa leant over the bannisters and cried out,

“Remember the party! Remember our party to-night!”
But Elizabeth had already opened the front door; there was a van passing;
she did not answer.
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing-room,
tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are! For now that the
body of Miss Kilman was not before her, it overwhelmed her—the idea.
The cruelest things in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot,
domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and
unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat, on the landing; love and
religion. Had she ever tried to convert any one herself? Did she not wish
everybody merely to be themselves? And she watched out of the window
the old lady opposite climbing upstairs. Let her climb upstairs if she wanted
to; let her stop; then let her, as Clarissa had often seen her, gain her
bedroom, part her curtains, and disappear again into the background.
Somehow one respected that—that old woman looking out of the window,
quite unconscious that she was being watched. There was something
solemn in it—but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the
privacy of the soul. The odious Kilman would destroy it. Yet it was a sight
that made her want to cry.
Love destroyed too. Everything that was fine, everything that was true
went. Take Peter Walsh now. There was a man, charming, clever, with ideas
about everything. If you wanted to know about Pope, say, or Addison, or
just to talk nonsense, what people were like, what things meant, Peter knew
better than any one. It was Peter who had helped her; Peter who had lent her
books. But look at the women he loved—vulgar, trivial, commonplace.
Think of Peter in love—he came to see her after all these years, and what
did he talk about? Himself. Horrible passion! she thought. Degrading
passion! she thought, thinking of Kilman and her Elizabeth walking to the
Army and Navy Stores.
Big Ben struck the half-hour.
How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old lady (they
had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as
if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had
something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the
finger fell making the moment solemn. She was forced, so Clarissa

imagined, by that sound, to move, to go—but where? Clarissa tried to
follow her as she turned and disappeared, and could still just see her white
cap moving at the back of the bedroom. She was still there moving about at
the other end of the room. Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes?
when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery; that old lady,
she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-
table. She could still see her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman might
say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t
believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this:
here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
Love—but here the other clock, the clock which always struck two minutes
after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its lap full of odds and ends, which it
dumped down as if Big Ben were all very well with his majesty laying
down the law, so solemn, so just, but she must remember all sorts of little
things besides—Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices—all sorts
of little things came flooding and lapping and dancing in on the wake of
that solemn stroke which lay flat like a bar of gold on the sea. Mrs.
Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices. She must telephone now at
once.
Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on the wake of Big
Ben, with its lap full of trifles. Beaten up, broken up by the assault of
carriages, the brutality of vans, the eager advance of myriads of angular
men, of flaunting women, the domes and spires of offices and hospitals, the
last relics of this lap full of odds and ends seemed to break, like the spray of
an exhausted wave, upon the body of Miss Kilman standing still in the
street for a moment to mutter “It is the flesh.”
It was the flesh that she must control. Clarissa Dalloway had insulted her.
That she expected. But she had not triumphed; she had not mastered the
flesh. Ugly, clumsy, Clarissa Dalloway had laughed at her for being that;
and had revived the fleshly desires, for she minded looking as she did
beside Clarissa. Nor could she talk as she did. But why wish to resemble
her? Why? She despised Mrs. Dalloway from the bottom of her heart. She
was not serious. She was not good. Her life was a tissue of vanity and
deceit. Yet Doris Kilman had been overcome. She had, as a matter of fact,
very nearly burst into tears when Clarissa Dalloway laughed at her. “It is
the flesh, it is the flesh,” she muttered (it being her habit to talk aloud)

trying to subdue this turbulent and painful feeling as she walked down
Victoria Street. She prayed to God. She could not help being ugly; she
could not afford to buy pretty clothes. Clarissa Dalloway had laughed—but
she would concentrate her mind upon something else until she had reached
the pillar-box. At any rate she had got Elizabeth. But she would think of
something else; she would think of Russia; until she reached the pillar-box.
How nice it must be, she said, in the country, struggling, as Mr. Whittaker
had told her, with that violent grudge against the world which had scorned
her, sneered at her, cast her off, beginning with this indignity—the infliction
of her unlovable body which people could not bear to see. Do her hair as
she might, her forehead remained like an egg, bald, white. No clothes suited
her. She might buy anything. And for a woman, of course, that meant never
meeting the opposite sex. Never would she come first with any one.
Sometimes lately it had seemed to her that, except for Elizabeth, her food
was all that she lived for; her comforts; her dinner, her tea; her hot-water
bottle at night. But one must fight; vanquish; have faith in God. Mr.
Whittaker had said she was there for a purpose. But no one knew the agony!
He said, pointing to the crucifix, that God knew. But why should she have
to suffer when other women, like Clarissa Dalloway, escaped? Knowledge
comes through suffering, said Mr. Whittaker.
She had passed the pillar-box, and Elizabeth had turned into the cool brown
tobacco department of the Army and Navy Stores while she was still
muttering to herself what Mr. Whittaker had said about knowledge coming
through suffering and the flesh. “The flesh,” she muttered.
What department did she want? Elizabeth interrupted her.
“Petticoats,” she said abruptly, and stalked straight on to the lift.
Up they went. Elizabeth guided her this way and that; guided her in her
abstraction as if she had been a great child, an unwieldy battleship. There
were the petticoats, brown, decorous, striped, frivolous, solid, flimsy; and
she chose, in her abstraction, portentously, and the girl serving thought her
mad.
Elizabeth rather wondered, as they did up the parcel, what Miss Kilman was
thinking. They must have their tea, said Miss Kilman, rousing, collecting
herself. They had their tea.

Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kilman could be hungry. It was
her way of eating, eating with intensity, then looking, again and again, at a
plate of sugared cakes on the table next them; then, when a lady and a child
sat down and the child took the cake, could Miss Kilman really mind it?
Yes, Miss Kilman did mind it. She had wanted that cake—the pink one. The
pleasure of eating was almost the only pure pleasure left her, and then to be
baffled even in that!
When people are happy, they have a reserve, she had told Elizabeth, upon
which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre (she was fond
of such metaphors), jolted by every pebble, so she would say staying on
after the lesson standing by the fireplace with her bag of books, her
“satchel,” she called it, on a Tuesday morning, after the lesson was over.
And she talked too about the war. After all, there were people who did not
think the English invariably right. There were books. There were meetings.
There were other points of view. Would Elizabeth like to come with her to
listen to So-and-so (a most extraordinary looking old man)? Then Miss
Kilman took her to some church in Kensington and they had tea with a
clergyman. She had lent her books. Law, medicine, politics, all professions
are open to women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. But for herself,
her career was absolutely ruined and was it her fault? Good gracious, said
Elizabeth, no.
And her mother would come calling to say that a hamper had come from
Bourton and would Miss Kilman like some flowers? To Miss Kilman she
was always very, very nice, but Miss Kilman squashed the flowers all in a
bunch, and hadn’t any small talk, and what interested Miss Kilman bored
her mother, and Miss Kilman and she were terrible together; and Miss
Kilman swelled and looked very plain. But then Miss Kilman was
frightfully clever. Elizabeth had never thought about the poor. They lived
with everything they wanted,—her mother had breakfast in bed every day;
Lucy carried it up; and she liked old women because they were Duchesses,
and being descended from some Lord. But Miss Kilman said (one of those
Tuesday mornings when the lesson was over), “My grandfather kept an oil
and colour shop in Kensington.” Miss Kilman made one feel so small.
Miss Kilman took another cup of tea. Elizabeth, with her oriental bearing,
her inscrutable mystery, sat perfectly upright; no, she did not want anything
more. She looked for her gloves—her white gloves. They were under the

table. Ah, but she must not go! Miss Kilman could not let her go! this
youth, that was so beautiful, this girl, whom she genuinely loved! Her large
hand opened and shut on the table.
But perhaps it was a little flat somehow, Elizabeth felt. And really she
would like to go.
But said Miss Kilman, “I’ve not quite finished yet.”
Of course, then, Elizabeth would wait. But it was rather stuffy in here.
“Are you going to the party to-night?” Miss Kilman said. Elizabeth
supposed she was going; her mother wanted her to go. She must not let
parties absorb her, Miss Kilman said, fingering the last two inches of a
chocolate éclair.
She did not much like parties, Elizabeth said. Miss Kilman opened her
mouth, slightly projected her chin, and swallowed down the last inches of
the chocolate éclair, then wiped her fingers, and washed the tea round in her
cup.
She was about to split asunder, she felt. The agony was so terrific. If she
could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely
and forever and then die; that was all she wanted. But to sit here, unable to
think of anything to say; to see Elizabeth turning against her; to be felt
repulsive even by her—it was too much; she could not stand it. The thick
fingers curled inwards.
“I never go to parties,” said Miss Kilman, just to keep Elizabeth from
going. “People don’t ask me to parties”—and she knew as she said it that it
was this egotism that was her undoing; Mr. Whittaker had warned her; but
she could not help it. She had suffered so horribly. “Why should they ask
me?” she said. “I’m plain, I’m unhappy.” She knew it was idiotic. But it
was all those people passing—people with parcels who despised her, who
made her say it. However, she was Doris Kilman. She had her degree. She
was a woman who had made her way in the world. Her knowledge of
modern history was more than respectable.
“I don’t pity myself,” she said. “I pity”—she meant to say “your mother”
but no, she could not, not to Elizabeth. “I pity other people,” she said,
“more.”

Like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate for an
unknown purpose, and stands there longing to gallop away, Elizabeth
Dalloway sat silent. Was Miss Kilman going to say anything more?
“Don’t quite forget me,” said Doris Kilman; her voice quivered. Right away
to the end of the field the dumb creature galloped in terror.
The great hand opened and shut.
Elizabeth turned her head. The waitress came. One had to pay at the desk,
Elizabeth said, and went off, drawing out, so Miss Kilman felt, the very
entrails in her body, stretching them as she crossed the room, and then, with
a final twist, bowing her head very politely, she went.
She had gone. Miss Kilman sat at the marble table among the éclairs,
stricken once, twice, thrice by shocks of suffering. She had gone. Mrs.
Dalloway had triumphed. Elizabeth had gone. Beauty had gone, youth had
gone.
So she sat. She got up, blundered off among the little tables, rocking
slightly from side to side, and somebody came after her with her petticoat,
and she lost her way, and was hemmed in by trunks specially prepared for
taking to India; next got among the accouchement sets, and baby linen;
through all the commodities of the world, perishable and permanent, hams,
drugs, flowers, stationery, variously smelling, now sweet, now sour she
lurched; saw herself thus lurching with her hat askew, very red in the face,
full length in a looking-glass; and at last came out into the street.
The tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in front of her, the habitation of
God. In the midst of the traffic, there was the habitation of God. Doggedly
she set off with her parcel to that other sanctuary, the Abbey, where, raising
her hands in a tent before her face, she sat beside those driven into shelter
too; the variously assorted worshippers, now divested of social rank, almost
of sex, as they raised their hands before their faces; but once they removed
them, instantly reverent, middle class, English men and women, some of
them desirous of seeing the wax works.
But Miss Kilman held her tent before her face. Now she was deserted; now
rejoined. New worshippers came in from the street to replace the strollers,
and still, as people gazed round and shuffled past the tomb of the Unknown
Warrior, still she barred her eyes with her fingers and tried in this double

darkness, for the light in the Abbey was bodiless, to aspire above the
vanities, the desires, the commodities, to rid herself both of hatred and of
love. Her hands twitched. She seemed to struggle. Yet to others God was
accessible and the path to Him smooth. Mr. Fletcher, retired, of the
Treasury, Mrs. Gorham, widow of the famous K.C., approached Him
simply, and having done their praying, leant back, enjoyed the music (the
organ pealed sweetly), and saw Miss Kilman at the end of the row, praying,
praying, and, being still on the threshold of their underworld, thought of her
sympathetically as a soul haunting the same territory; a soul cut out of
immaterial substance; not a woman, a soul.
But Mr. Fletcher had to go. He had to pass her, and being himself neat as a
new pin, could not help being a little distressed by the poor lady’s disorder;
her hair down; her parcel on the floor. She did not at once let him pass. But,
as he stood gazing about him, at the white marbles, grey window panes, and
accumulated treasures (for he was extremely proud of the Abbey), her
largeness, robustness, and power as she sat there shifting her knees from
time to time (it was so rough the approach to her God—so tough her
desires) impressed him, as they had impressed Mrs. Dalloway (she could
not get the thought of her out of her mind that afternoon), the Rev. Edward
Whittaker, and Elizabeth too.
And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so nice to be
out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It was so
nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an omnibus. And already,
even as she stood there, in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning....
People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn,
hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a
burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she
liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to go
to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the
country with her father and the dogs.
Buses swooped, settled, were off—garish caravans, glistening with red and
yellow varnish. But which should she get on to? She had no preferences. Of
course, she would not push her way. She inclined to be passive. It was
expression she needed, but her eyes were fine, Chinese, oriental, and, as her
mother said, with such nice shoulders and holding herself so straight, she
was always charming to look at; and lately, in the evening especially, when

she was interested, for she never seemed excited, she looked almost
beautiful, very stately, very serene. What could she be thinking? Every man
fell in love with her, and she was really awfully bored. For it was
beginning. Her mother could see that—the compliments were beginning.
That she did not care more about it—for instance for her clothes—
sometimes worried Clarissa, but perhaps it was as well with all those
puppies and guinea pigs about having distemper, and it gave her a charm.
And now there was this odd friendship with Miss Kilman. Well, thought
Clarissa about three o’clock in the morning, reading Baron Marbot for she
could not sleep, it proves she has a heart.
Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently boarded the
omnibus, in front of everybody. She took a seat on top. The impetuous
creature—a pirate—started forward, sprang away; she had to hold the rail to
steady herself, for a pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down
ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger, or
ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and arrogant in between, and then
rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall. And did Elizabeth give one
thought to poor Miss Kilman who loved her without jealousy, to whom she
had been a fawn in the open, a moon in a glade? She was delighted to be
free. The fresh air was so delicious. It had been so stuffy in the Army and
Navy Stores. And now it was like riding, to be rushing up Whitehall; and to
each movement of the omnibus the beautiful body in the fawn-coloured
coat responded freely like a rider, like the figurehead of a ship, for the
breeze slightly disarrayed her; the heat gave her cheeks the pallor of white
painted wood; and her fine eyes, having no eyes to meet, gazed ahead,
blank, bright, with the staring incredible innocence of sculpture.
It was always talking about her own sufferings that made Miss Kilman so
difficult. And was she right? If it was being on committees and giving up
hours and hours every day (she hardly ever saw him in London) that helped
the poor, her father did that, goodness knows,—if that was what Miss
Kilman meant about being a Christian; but it was so difficult to say. Oh, she
would like to go a little further. Another penny was it to the Strand? Here
was another penny then. She would go up the Strand.
She liked people who were ill. And every profession is open to the women
of your generation, said Miss Kilman. So she might be a doctor. She might
be a farmer. Animals are often ill. She might own a thousand acres and have

people under her. She would go and see them in their cottages. This was
Somerset House. One might be a very good farmer—and that, strangely
enough though Miss Kilman had her share in it, was almost entirely due to
Somerset House. It looked so splendid, so serious, that great grey building.
And she liked the feeling of people working. She liked those churches, like
shapes of grey paper, breasting the stream of the Strand. It was quite
different here from Westminster, she thought, getting off at Chancery Lane.
It was so serious; it was so busy. In short, she would like to have a
profession. She would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into
Parliament, if she found it necessary, all because of the Strand.
The feet of those people busy about their activities, hands putting stone to
stone, minds eternally occupied not with trivial chatterings (comparing
women to poplars—which was rather exciting, of course, but very silly),
but with thoughts of ships, of business, of law, of administration, and with it
all so stately (she was in the Temple), gay (there was the river), pious (there
was the Church), made her quite determined, whatever her mother might
say, to become either a farmer or a doctor. But she was, of course, rather
lazy.
And it was much better to say nothing about it. It seemed so silly. It was the
sort of thing that did sometimes happen, when one was alone—buildings
without architects’ names, crowds of people coming back from the city
having more power than single clergymen in Kensington, than any of the
books Miss Kilman had lent her, to stimulate what lay slumbrous, clumsy,
and shy on the mind’s sandy floor to break surface, as a child suddenly
stretches its arms; it was just that, perhaps, a sigh, a stretch of the arms, an
impulse, a revelation, which has its effects for ever, and then down again it
went to the sandy floor. She must go home. She must dress for dinner. But
what was the time?—where was a clock?
She looked up Fleet Street. She walked just a little way towards St. Paul’s,
shyly, like some one penetrating on tiptoe, exploring a strange house by
night with a candle, on edge lest the owner should suddenly fling wide his
bedroom door and ask her business, nor did she dare wander off into queer
alleys, tempting bye-streets, any more than in a strange house open doors
which might be bedroom doors, or sitting-room doors, or lead straight to the
larder. For no Dalloways came down the Strand daily; she was a pioneer, a
stray, venturing, trusting.

In many ways, her mother felt, she was extremely immature, like a child
still, attached to dolls, to old slippers; a perfect baby; and that was
charming. But then, of course, there was in the Dalloway family the
tradition of public service. Abbesses, principals, head mistresses,
dignitaries, in the republic of women—without being brilliant, any of them,
they were that. She penetrated a little further in the direction of St. Paul’s.
She liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar.
It seemed to her good. The noise was tremendous; and suddenly there were
trumpets (the unemployed) blaring, rattling about in the uproar; military
music; as if people were marching; yet had they been dying—had some
woman breathed her last and whoever was watching, opening the window
of the room where she had just brought off that act of supreme dignity,
looked down on Fleet Street, that uproar, that military music would have
come triumphing up to him, consolatory, indifferent.
It was not conscious. There was no recognition in it of one fortune, or fate,
and for that very reason even to those dazed with watching for the last
shivers of consciousness on the faces of the dying, consoling. Forgetfulness
in people might wound, their ingratitude corrode, but this voice, pouring
endlessly, year in year out, would take whatever it might be; this vow; this
van; this life; this procession, would wrap them all about and carry them on,
as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue
petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on.
But it was later than she thought. Her mother would not like her to be
wandering off alone like this. She turned back down the Strand.
A puff of wind (in spite of the heat, there was quite a wind) blew a thin
black veil over the sun and over the Strand. The faces faded; the omnibuses
suddenly lost their glow. For although the clouds were of mountainous
white so that one could fancy hacking hard chips off with a hatchet, with
broad golden slopes, lawns of celestial pleasure gardens, on their flanks,
and had all the appearance of settled habitations assembled for the
conference of gods above the world, there was a perpetual movement
among them. Signs were interchanged, when, as if to fulfil some scheme
arranged already, now a summit dwindled, now a whole block of pyramidal
size which had kept its station inalterably advanced into the midst or
gravely led the procession to fresh anchorage. Fixed though they seemed at
their posts, at rest in perfect unanimity, nothing could be fresher, freer, more

sensitive superficially than the snow-white or gold-kindled surface; to
change, to go, to dismantle the solemn assemblage was immediately
possible; and in spite of the grave fixity, the accumulated robustness and
solidity, now they struck light to the earth, now darkness.
Calmly and competently, Elizabeth Dalloway mounted the Westminster
omnibus.
Going and coming, beckoning, signalling, so the light and shadow which
now made the wall grey, now the bananas bright yellow, now made the
Strand grey, now made the omnibuses bright yellow, seemed to Septimus
Warren Smith lying on the sofa in the sitting-room; watching the watery
gold glow and fade with the astonishing sensibility of some live creature on
the roses, on the wall-paper. Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets
through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and
through the waves came the voices of birds singing. Every power poured its
treasures on his head, and his hand lay there on the back of the sofa, as he
had seen his hand lie when he was bathing, floating, on the top of the
waves, while far away on shore he heard dogs barking and barking far
away. Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no more.
He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by some laughing hint
like that gold spot which went round the wall—there, there, there—her
determination to show, by brandishing her plumes, shaking her tresses,
flinging her mantle this way and that, beautifully, always beautifully, and
standing close up to breathe through her hollowed hands Shakespeare’s
words, her meaning.
Rezia, sitting at the table twisting a hat in her hands, watched him; saw him
smiling. He was happy then. But she could not bear to see him smiling. It
was not marriage; it was not being one’s husband to look strange like that,
always to be starting, laughing, sitting hour after hour silent, or clutching
her and telling her to write. The table drawer was full of those writings;
about war; about Shakespeare; about great discoveries; how there is no
death. Lately he had become excited suddenly for no reason (and both Dr.
Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw said excitement was the worst thing for
him), and waved his hands and cried out that he knew the truth! He knew
everything! That man, his friend who was killed, Evans, had come, he said.
He was singing behind the screen. She wrote it down just as he spoke it.

Some things were very beautiful; others sheer nonsense. And he was always
stopping in the middle, changing his mind; wanting to add something;
hearing something new; listening with his hand up.
But she heard nothing.
And once they found the girl who did the room reading one of these papers
in fits of laughter. It was a dreadful pity. For that made Septimus cry out
about human cruelty—how they tear each other to pieces. The fallen, he
said, they tear to pieces. “Holmes is on us,” he would say, and he would
invent stories about Holmes; Holmes eating porridge; Holmes reading
Shakespeare—making himself roar with laughter or rage, for Dr. Holmes
seemed to stand for something horrible to him. “Human nature,” he called
him. Then there were the visions. He was drowned, he used to say, and
lying on a cliff with the gulls screaming over him. He would look over the
edge of the sofa down into the sea. Or he was hearing music. Really it was
only a barrel organ or some man crying in the street. But “Lovely!” he used
to cry, and the tears would run down his cheeks, which was to her the most
dreadful thing of all, to see a man like Septimus, who had fought, who was
brave, crying. And he would lie listening until suddenly he would cry that
he was falling down, down into the flames! Actually she would look for
flames, it was so vivid. But there was nothing. They were alone in the room.
It was a dream, she would tell him and so quiet him at last, but sometimes
she was frightened too. She sighed as she sat sewing.
Her sigh was tender and enchanting, like the wind outside a wood in the
evening. Now she put down her scissors; now she turned to take something
from the table. A little stir, a little crinkling, a little tapping built up
something on the table there, where she sat sewing. Through his eyelashes
he could see her blurred outline; her little black body; her face and hands;
her turning movements at the table, as she took up a reel, or looked (she
was apt to lose things) for her silk. She was making a hat for Mrs. Filmer’s
married daughter, whose name was—he had forgotten her name.
“What is the name of Mrs. Filmer’s married daughter?” he asked.
“Mrs. Peters,” said Rezia. She was afraid it was too small, she said, holding
it before her. Mrs. Peters was a big woman; but she did not like her. It was
only because Mrs. Filmer had been so good to them. “She gave me grapes
this morning,” she said—that Rezia wanted to do something to show that

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

For the first time for days he was speaking as he used to do! Of course it
was—absurdly small, she said. But Mrs. Peters had chosen it.
He took it out of her hands. He said it was an organ grinder’s monkey’s hat.
How it rejoiced her that! Not for weeks had they laughed like this together,
poking fun privately like married people. What she meant was that if Mrs.
Filmer had come in, or Mrs. Peters or anybody they would not have
understood what she and Septimus were laughing at.
“There,” she said, pinning a rose to one side of the hat. Never had she felt
so happy! Never in her life!
But that was still more ridiculous, Septimus said. Now the poor woman
looked like a pig at a fair. (Nobody ever made her laugh as Septimus did.)
What had she got in her work-box? She had ribbons and beads, tassels,
artificial flowers. She tumbled them out on the table. He began putting odd
colours together—for though he had no fingers, could not even do up a
parcel, he had a wonderful eye, and often he was right, sometimes absurd,
of course, but sometimes wonderfully right.
“She shall have a beautiful hat!” he murmured, taking up this and that,
Rezia kneeling by his side, looking over his shoulder. Now it was finished
—that is to say the design; she must stitch it together. But she must be very,
very careful, he said, to keep it just as he had made it.
So she sewed. When she sewed, he thought, she made a sound like a kettle
on the hob; bubbling, murmuring, always busy, her strong little pointed
fingers pinching and poking; her needle flashing straight. The sun might go
in and out, on the tassels, on the wall-paper, but he would wait, he thought,
stretching out his feet, looking at his ringed sock at the end of the sofa; he
would wait in this warm place, this pocket of still air, which one comes on
at the edge of a wood sometimes in the evening, when, because of a fall in
the ground, or some arrangement of the trees (one must be scientific above
all, scientific), warmth lingers, and the air buffets the cheek like the wing of
a bird.
“There it is,” said Rezia, twirling Mrs. Peters’ hat on the tips of her fingers.
“That’ll do for the moment. Later ...” her sentence bubbled away drip, drip,
drip, like a contented tap left running.

It was wonderful. Never had he done anything which made him feel so
proud. It was so real, it was so substantial, Mrs. Peters’ hat.
“Just look at it,” he said.
Yes, it would always make her happy to see that hat. He had become
himself then, he had laughed then. They had been alone together. Always
she would like that hat.
He told her to try it on.
“But I must look so queer!” she cried, running over to the glass and looking
first this side then that. Then she snatched it off again, for there was a tap at
the door. Could it be Sir William Bradshaw? Had he sent already?
No! it was only the small girl with the evening paper.
What always happened, then happened—what happened every night of
their lives. The small girl sucked her thumb at the door; Rezia went down
on her knees; Rezia cooed and kissed; Rezia got a bag of sweets out of the
table drawer. For so it always happened. First one thing, then another. So
she built it up, first one thing and then another. Dancing, skipping, round
and round the room they went. He took the paper. Surrey was all out, he
read. There was a heat wave. Rezia repeated: Surrey was all out. There was
a heat wave, making it part of the game she was playing with Mrs. Filmer’s
grandchild, both of them laughing, chattering at the same time, at their
game. He was very tired. He was very happy. He would sleep. He shut his
eyes. But directly he saw nothing the sounds of the game became fainter
and stranger and sounded like the cries of people seeking and not finding,
and passing further and further away. They had lost him!
He started up in terror. What did he see? The plate of bananas on the
sideboard. Nobody was there (Rezia had taken the child to its mother. It was
bedtime). That was it: to be alone forever. That was the doom pronounced
in Milan when he came into the room and saw them cutting out buckram
shapes with their scissors; to be alone forever.
He was alone with the sideboard and the bananas. He was alone, exposed
on this bleak eminence, stretched out—but not on a hill-top; not on a crag;
on Mrs. Filmer’s sitting-room sofa. As for the visions, the faces, the voices
of the dead, where were they? There was a screen in front of him, with

black bulrushes and blue swallows. Where he had once seen mountains,
where he had seen faces, where he had seen beauty, there was a screen.
“Evans!” he cried. There was no answer. A mouse had squeaked, or a
curtain rustled. Those were the voices of the dead. The screen, the coal-
scuttle, the sideboard remained to him. Let him then face the screen, the
coal-scuttle and the sideboard ... but Rezia burst into the room chattering.
Some letter had come. Everybody’s plans were changed. Mrs. Filmer would
not be able to go to Brighton after all. There was no time to let Mrs.
Williams know, and really Rezia thought it very, very annoying, when she
caught sight of the hat and thought ... perhaps ... she ... might just make a
little.... Her voice died out in contented melody.
“Ah, damn!” she cried (it was a joke of theirs, her swearing), the needle had
broken. Hat, child, Brighton, needle. She built it up; first one thing, then
another, she built it up, sewing.
She wanted him to say whether by moving the rose she had improved the
hat. She sat on the end of the sofa.
They were perfectly happy now, she said, suddenly, putting the hat down.
For she could say anything to him now. She could say whatever came into
her head. That was almost the first thing she had felt about him, that night
in the café when he had come in with his English friends. He had come in,
rather shyly, looking round him, and his hat had fallen when he hung it up.
That she could remember. She knew he was English, though not one of the
large Englishmen her sister admired, for he was always thin; but he had a
beautiful fresh colour; and with his big nose, his bright eyes, his way of
sitting a little hunched made her think, she had often told him, of a young
hawk, that first evening she saw him, when they were playing dominoes,
and he had come in—of a young hawk; but with her he was always very
gentle. She had never seen him wild or drunk, only suffering sometimes
through this terrible war, but even so, when she came in, he would put it all
away. Anything, anything in the whole world, any little bother with her
work, anything that struck her to say she would tell him, and he understood
at once. Her own family even were not the same. Being older than she was
and being so clever—how serious he was, wanting her to read Shakespeare
before she could even read a child’s story in English!—being so much more
experienced, he could help her. And she too could help him.

But this hat now. And then (it was getting late) Sir William Bradshaw.
She held her hands to her head, waiting for him to say did he like the hat or
not, and as she sat there, waiting, looking down, he could feel her mind, like
a bird, falling from branch to branch, and always alighting, quite rightly; he
could follow her mind, as she sat there in one of those loose lax poses that
came to her naturally and, if he should say anything, at once she smiled,
like a bird alighting with all its claws firm upon the bough.
But he remembered Bradshaw said, “The people we are most fond of are
not good for us when we are ill.” Bradshaw said, he must be taught to rest.
Bradshaw said they must be separated.
“Must,” “must,” why “must”? What power had Bradshaw over him? “What
right has Bradshaw to say ‘must’ to me?” he demanded.
“It is because you talked of killing yourself,” said Rezia. (Mercifully, she
could now say anything to Septimus.)
So he was in their power! Holmes and Bradshaw were on him! The brute
with the red nostrils was snuffing into every secret place! “Must” it could
say! Where were his papers? the things he had written?
She brought him his papers, the things he had written, things she had
written for him. She tumbled them out on to the sofa. They looked at them
together. Diagrams, designs, little men and women brandishing sticks for
arms, with wings—were they?—on their backs; circles traced round
shillings and sixpences—the suns and stars; zigzagging precipices with
mountaineers ascending roped together, exactly like knives and forks; sea
pieces with little faces laughing out of what might perhaps be waves: the
map of the world. Burn them! he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead
sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with
Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans—his messages from the dead; do not cut
down trees; tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the
world. Burn them! he cried.
But Rezia laid her hands on them. Some were very beautiful, she thought.
She would tie them up (for she had no envelope) with a piece of silk.
Even if they took him, she said, she would go with him. They could not
separate them against their wills, she said.

Shuffling the edges straight, she did up the papers, and tied the parcel
almost without looking, sitting beside him, he thought, as if all her petals
were about her. She was a flowering tree; and through her branches looked
out the face of a lawgiver, who had reached a sanctuary where she feared no
one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle, a triumph, the last and greatest.
Staggering he saw her mount the appalling staircase, laden with Holmes
and Bradshaw, men who never weighed less than eleven stone six, who sent
their wives to Court, men who made ten thousand a year and talked of
proportion; who different in their verdicts (for Holmes said one thing,
Bradshaw another), yet judges they were; who mixed the vision and the
sideboard; saw nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. “Must” they said. Over
them she triumphed.
“There!” she said. The papers were tied up. No one should get at them. She
would put them away.
And, she said, nothing should separate them. She sat down beside him and
called him by the name of that hawk or crow which being malicious and a
great destroyer of crops was precisely like him. No one could separate
them, she said.
Then she got up to go into the bedroom to pack their things, but hearing
voices downstairs and thinking that Dr. Holmes had perhaps called, ran
down to prevent him coming up.
Septimus could hear her talking to Holmes on the staircase.
“My dear lady, I have come as a friend,” Holmes was saying.
“No. I will not allow you to see my husband,” she said.
He could see her, like a little hen, with her wings spread barring his
passage. But Holmes persevered.
“My dear lady, allow me....” Holmes said, putting her aside (Holmes was a
powerfully built man).
Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would burst open the door. Holmes
would say “In a funk, eh?” Holmes would get him. But no; not Holmes; not
Bradshaw. Getting up rather unsteadily, hopping indeed from foot to foot,
he considered Mrs. Filmer’s nice clean bread knife with “Bread” carved on
the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t spoil that. The gas fire? But it was too late

now. Holmes was coming. Razors he might have got, but Rezia, who
always did that sort of thing, had packed them. There remained only the
window, the large Bloomsbury-lodging house window, the tiresome, the
troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and
throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she
was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw like that sort of thing. (He sat on the
sill.) But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die.
Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings—what did they want?
Coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him.
Holmes was at the door. “I’ll give it you!” he cried, and flung himself
vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings.
“The coward!” cried Dr. Holmes, bursting the door open. Rezia ran to the
window, she saw; she understood. Dr. Holmes and Mrs. Filmer collided
with each other. Mrs. Filmer flapped her apron and made her hide her eyes
in the bedroom. There was a great deal of running up and down stairs. Dr.
Holmes came in—white as a sheet, shaking all over, with a glass in his
hand. She must be brave and drink something, he said (What was it?
Something sweet), for her husband was horribly mangled, would not
recover consciousness, she must not see him, must be spared as much as
possible, would have the inquest to go through, poor young woman. Who
could have foretold it? A sudden impulse, no one was in the least to blame
(he told Mrs. Filmer). And why the devil he did it, Dr. Holmes could not
conceive.
It seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that she was opening long
windows, stepping out into some garden. But where? The clock was
striking—one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared with all
this thumping and whispering; like Septimus himself. She was falling
asleep. But the clock went on striking, four, five, six and Mrs. Filmer
waving her apron (they wouldn’t bring the body in here, would they?)
seemed part of that garden; or a flag. She had once seen a flag slowly
rippling out from a mast when she stayed with her aunt at Venice. Men
killed in battle were thus saluted, and Septimus had been through the War.
Of her memories, most were happy.
She put on her hat, and ran through cornfields—where could it have been?
—on to some hill, somewhere near the sea, for there were ships, gulls,
butterflies; they sat on a cliff. In London too, there they sat, and, half

dreaming, came to her through the bedroom door, rain falling, whisperings,
stirrings among dry corn, the caress of the sea, as it seemed to her,
hollowing them in its arched shell and murmuring to her laid on shore,
strewn she felt, like flying flowers over some tomb.
“He is dead,” she said, smiling at the poor old woman who guarded her
with her honest light-blue eyes fixed on the door. (They wouldn’t bring him
in here, would they?) But Mrs. Filmer pooh-poohed. Oh no, oh no! They
were carrying him away now. Ought she not to be told? Married people
ought to be together, Mrs. Filmer thought. But they must do as the doctor
said.
“Let her sleep,” said Dr. Holmes, feeling her pulse. She saw the large
outline of his body standing dark against the window. So that was Dr.
Holmes.
One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh thought. It is one of the
triumphs of civilisation, as the light high bell of the ambulance sounded.
Swiftly, cleanly the ambulance sped to the hospital, having picked up
instantly, humanely, some poor devil; some one hit on the head, struck
down by disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so ago at one of these
crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was civilisation. It struck him
coming back from the East—the efficiency, the organisation, the communal
spirit of London. Every cart or carriage of its own accord drew aside to let
the ambulance pass. Perhaps it was morbid; or was it not touching rather,
the respect which they showed this ambulance with its victim inside—busy
men hurrying home yet instantly bethinking them as it passed of some wife;
or presumably how easily it might have been them there, stretched on a
shelf with a doctor and a nurse.... Ah, but thinking became morbid,
sentimental, directly one began conjuring up doctors, dead bodies; a little
glow of pleasure, a sort of lust too over the visual impression warned one
not to go on with that sort of thing any more—fatal to art, fatal to
friendship. True. And yet, thought Peter Walsh, as the ambulance turned the
corner though the light high bell could be heard down the next street and
still farther as it crossed the Tottenham Court Road, chiming constantly, it is
the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. One
might weep if no one saw. It had been his undoing—this susceptibility—in
Anglo-Indian society; not weeping at the right time, or laughing either. I
have that in me, he thought standing by the pillar-box, which could now

dissolve in tears. Why, Heaven knows. Beauty of some sort probably, and
the weight of the day, which beginning with that visit to Clarissa had
exhausted him with its heat, its intensity, and the drip, drip, of one
impression after another down into that cellar where they stood, deep, dark,
and no one would ever know. Partly for that reason, its secrecy, complete
and inviolable, he had found life like an unknown garden, full of turns and
corners, surprising, yes; really it took one’s breath away, these moments;
there coming to him by the pillar-box opposite the British Museum one of
them, a moment, in which things came together; this ambulance; and life
and death. It was as if he were sucked up to some very high roof by that
rush of emotion and the rest of him, like a white shell-sprinkled beach, left
bare. It had been his undoing in Anglo-Indian society—this susceptibility.
Clarissa once, going on top of an omnibus with him somewhere, Clarissa
superficially at least, so easily moved, now in despair, now in the best of
spirits, all aquiver in those days and such good company, spotting queer
little scenes, names, people from the top of a bus, for they used to explore
London and bring back bags full of treasures from the Caledonian market—
Clarissa had a theory in those days—they had heaps of theories, always
theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of
dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they
know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It
was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said,
sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere;
not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere.
She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that
to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them;
even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to,
some woman in the street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or
barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death,
allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that
since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary
compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the
unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or
that, or even haunting certain places after death ... perhaps—perhaps.
Looking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years her theory
worked to this extent. Brief, broken, often painful as their actual meetings

had been what with his absences and interruptions (this morning, for
instance, in came Elizabeth, like a long-legged colt, handsome, dumb, just
as he was beginning to talk to Clarissa) the effect of them on his life was
immeasurable. There was a mystery about it. You were given a sharp, acute,
uncomfortable grain—the actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not;
yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed
its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and
understanding, after years of lying lost. Thus she had come to him; on board
ship; in the Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things (so Sally Seton,
generous, enthusiastic goose! thought of him when she saw blue
hydrangeas). She had influenced him more than any person he had ever
known. And always in this way coming before him without his wishing it,
cool, lady-like, critical; or ravishing, romantic, recalling some field or
English harvest. He saw her most often in the country, not in London. One
scene after another at Bourton....
He had reached his hotel. He crossed the hall, with its mounds of reddish
chairs and sofas, its spike-leaved, withered-looking plants. He got his key
off the hook. The young lady handed him some letters. He went upstairs—
he saw her most often at Bourton, in the late summer, when he stayed there
for a week, or fortnight even, as people did in those days. First on top of
some hill there she would stand, hands clapped to her hair, her cloak
blowing out, pointing, crying to them—she saw the Severn beneath. Or in a
wood, making the kettle boil—very ineffective with her fingers; the smoke
curtseying, blowing in their faces; her little pink face showing through;
begging water from an old woman in a cottage, who came to the door to
watch them go. They walked always; the others drove. She was bored
driving, disliked all animals, except that dog. They tramped miles along
roads. She would break off to get her bearings, pilot him back across
country; and all the time they argued, discussed poetry, discussed people,
discussed politics (she was a Radical then); never noticing a thing except
when she stopped, cried out at a view or a tree, and made him look with
her; and so on again, through stubble fields, she walking ahead, with a
flower for her aunt, never tired of walking for all her delicacy; to drop down
on Bourton in the dusk. Then, after dinner, old Breitkopf would open the
piano and sing without any voice, and they would lie sunk in arm-chairs,
trying not to laugh, but always breaking down and laughing, laughing—

laughing at nothing. Breitkopf was supposed not to see. And then in the
morning, flirting up and down like a wagtail in front of the house....
Oh it was a letter from her! This blue envelope; that was her hand. And he
would have to read it. Here was another of those meetings, bound to be
painful! To read her letter needed the devil of an effort. “How heavenly it
was to see him. She must tell him that.” That was all.
But it upset him. It annoyed him. He wished she hadn’t written it. Coming
on top of his thoughts, it was like a nudge in the ribs. Why couldn’t she let
him be? After all, she had married Dalloway, and lived with him in perfect
happiness all these years.
These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people
had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it,
had settled on other people’s noses. As for the cleanliness which hit him in
the face, it wasn’t cleanliness, so much as bareness, frigidity; a thing that
had to be. Some arid matron made her rounds at dawn sniffing, peering,
causing blue-nosed maids to scour, for all the world as if the next visitor
were a joint of meat to be served on a perfectly clean platter. For sleep, one
bed; for sitting in, one arm-chair; for cleaning one’s teeth and shaving one’s
chin, one tumbler, one looking-glass. Books, letters, dressing-gown, slipped
about on the impersonality of the horsehair like incongruous impertinences.
And it was Clarissa’s letter that made him see all this. “Heavenly to see
you. She must say so!” He folded the paper; pushed it away; nothing would
induce him to read it again!
To get that letter to him by six o’clock she must have sat down and written
it directly he left her; stamped it; sent somebody to the post. It was, as
people say, very like her. She was upset by his visit. She had felt a great
deal; had for a moment, when she kissed his hand, regretted, envied him
even, remembered possibly (for he saw her look it) something he had said
—how they would change the world if she married him perhaps; whereas, it
was this; it was middle age; it was mediocrity; then forced herself with her
indomitable vitality to put all that aside, there being in her a thread of life
which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome obstacles, and carry
her triumphantly through he had never known the like of. Yes; but there
would come a reaction directly he left the room. She would be frightfully
sorry for him; she would think what in the world she could do to give him

pleasure (short always of the one thing) and he could see her with the tears
running down her cheeks going to her writing-table and dashing off that one
line which he was to find greeting him.... “Heavenly to see you!” And she
meant it.
Peter Walsh had now unlaced his boots.
But it would not have been a success, their marriage. The other thing, after
all, came so much more naturally.
It was odd; it was true; lots of people felt it. Peter Walsh, who had done just
respectably, filled the usual posts adequately, was liked, but thought a little
cranky, gave himself airs—it was odd that he should have had, especially
now that his hair was grey, a contented look; a look of having reserves. It
was this that made him attractive to women who liked the sense that he was
not altogether manly. There was something unusual about him, or
something behind him. It might be that he was bookish—never came to see
you without taking up the book on the table (he was now reading, with his
bootlaces trailing on the floor); or that he was a gentleman, which showed
itself in the way he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and in his manners of
course to women. For it was very charming and quite ridiculous how easily
some girl without a grain of sense could twist him round her finger. But at
her own risk. That is to say, though he might be ever so easy, and indeed
with his gaiety and good-breeding fascinating to be with, it was only up to a
point. She said something—no, no; he saw through that. He wouldn’t stand
that—no, no. Then he could shout and rock and hold his sides together over
some joke with men. He was the best judge of cooking in India. He was a
man. But not the sort of man one had to respect—which was a mercy; not
like Major Simmons, for instance; not in the least like that, Daisy thought,
when, in spite of her two small children, she used to compare them.
He pulled off his boots. He emptied his pockets. Out came with his pocket-
knife a snapshot of Daisy on the verandah; Daisy all in white, with a fox-
terrier on her knee; very charming, very dark; the best he had ever seen of
her. It did come, after all so naturally; so much more naturally than Clarissa.
No fuss. No bother. No finicking and fidgeting. All plain sailing. And the
dark, adorably pretty girl on the verandah exclaimed (he could hear her). Of
course, of course she would give him everything! she cried (she had no
sense of discretion) everything he wanted! she cried, running to meet him,

whoever might be looking. And she was only twenty-four. And she had two
children. Well, well!
Well indeed he had got himself into a mess at his age. And it came over him
when he woke in the night pretty forcibly. Suppose they did marry? For him
it would be all very well, but what about her? Mrs. Burgess, a good sort and
no chatterbox, in whom he had confided, thought this absence of his in
England, ostensibly to see lawyers might serve to make Daisy reconsider,
think what it meant. It was a question of her position, Mrs. Burgess said; the
social barrier; giving up her children. She’d be a widow with a past one of
these days, draggling about in the suburbs, or more likely, indiscriminate
(you know, she said, what such women get like, with too much paint). But
Peter Walsh pooh-poohed all that. He didn’t mean to die yet. Anyhow she
must settle for herself; judge for herself, he thought, padding about the
room in his socks smoothing out his dress-shirt, for he might go to
Clarissa’s party, or he might go to one of the Halls, or he might settle in and
read an absorbing book written by a man he used to know at Oxford. And if
he did retire, that’s what he’d do—write books. He would go to Oxford and
poke about in the Bodleian. Vainly the dark, adorably pretty girl ran to the
end of the terrace; vainly waved her hand; vainly cried she didn’t care a
straw what people said. There he was, the man she thought the world of, the
perfect gentleman, the fascinating, the distinguished (and his age made not
the least difference to her), padding about a room in an hotel in
Bloomsbury, shaving, washing, continuing, as he took up cans, put down
razors, to poke about in the Bodleian, and get at the truth about one or two
little matters that interested him. And he would have a chat with whoever it
might be, and so come to disregard more and more precise hours for lunch,
and miss engagements, and when Daisy asked him, as she would, for a kiss,
a scene, fail to come up to the scratch (though he was genuinely devoted to
her)—in short it might be happier, as Mrs. Burgess said, that she should
forget him, or merely remember him as he was in August 1922, like a figure
standing at the cross roads at dusk, which grows more and more remote as
the dog-cart spins away, carrying her securely fastened to the back seat,
though her arms are outstretched, and as she sees the figure dwindle and
disappear still she cries out how she would do anything in the world,
anything, anything, anything....

He never knew what people thought. It became more and more difficult for
him to concentrate. He became absorbed; he became busied with his own
concerns; now surly, now gay; dependent on women, absent-minded,
moody, less and less able (so he thought as he shaved) to understand why
Clarissa couldn’t simply find them a lodging and be nice to Daisy;
introduce her. And then he could just—just do what? just haunt and hover
(he was at the moment actually engaged in sorting out various keys,
papers), swoop and taste, be alone, in short, sufficient to himself; and yet
nobody of course was more dependent upon others (he buttoned his
waistcoat); it had been his undoing. He could not keep out of smoking-
rooms, liked colonels, liked golf, liked bridge, and above all women’s
society, and the fineness of their companionship, and their faithfulness and
audacity and greatness in loving which though it had its drawbacks seemed
to him (and the dark, adorably pretty face was on top of the envelopes) so
wholly admirable, so splendid a flower to grow on the crest of human life,
and yet he could not come up to the scratch, being always apt to see round
things (Clarissa had sapped something in him permanently), and to tire very
easily of mute devotion and to want variety in love, though it would make
him furious if Daisy loved anybody else, furious! for he was jealous,
uncontrollably jealous by temperament. He suffered tortures! But where
was his knife; his watch; his seals, his note-case, and Clarissa’s letter which
he would not read again but liked to think of, and Daisy’s photograph? And
now for dinner.
They were eating.
Sitting at little tables round vases, dressed or not dressed, with their shawls
and bags laid beside them, with their air of false composure, for they were
not used to so many courses at dinner, and confidence, for they were able to
pay for it, and strain, for they had been running about London all day
shopping, sightseeing; and their natural curiosity, for they looked round and
up as the nice-looking gentleman in horn-rimmed spectacles came in, and
their good nature, for they would have been glad to do any little service,
such as lend a time-table or impart useful information, and their desire,
pulsing in them, tugging at them subterraneously, somehow to establish
connections if it were only a birthplace (Liverpool, for example) in
common or friends of the same name; with their furtive glances, odd
silences, and sudden withdrawals into family jocularity and isolation; there

they sat eating dinner when Mr. Walsh came in and took his seat at a little
table by the curtain.
It was not that he said anything, for being solitary he could only address
himself to the waiter; it was his way of looking at the menu, of pointing his
forefinger to a particular wine, of hitching himself up to the table, of
addressing himself seriously, not gluttonously to dinner, that won him their
respect; which, having to remain unexpressed for the greater part of the
meal, flared up at the table where the Morrises sat when Mr. Walsh was
heard to say at the end of the meal, “Bartlett pears.” Why he should have
spoken so moderately yet firmly, with the air of a disciplinarian well within
his rights which are founded upon justice, neither young Charles Morris,
nor old Charles, neither Miss Elaine nor Mrs. Morris knew. But when he
said, “Bartlett pears,” sitting alone at his table, they felt that he counted on
their support in some lawful demand; was champion of a cause which
immediately became their own, so that their eyes met his eyes
sympathetically, and when they all reached the smoking-room
simultaneously, a little talk between them became inevitable.
It was not very profound—only to the effect that London was crowded; had
changed in thirty years; that Mr. Morris preferred Liverpool; that Mrs.
Morris had been to the Westminster flower-show, and that they had all seen
the Prince of Wales. Yet, thought Peter Walsh, no family in the world can
compare with the Morrises; none whatever; and their relations to each other
are perfect, and they don’t care a hang for the upper classes, and they like
what they like, and Elaine is training for the family business, and the boy
has won a scholarship at Leeds, and the old lady (who is about his own age)
has three more children at home; and they have two motor cars, but Mr.
Morris still mends the boots on Sunday: it is superb, it is absolutely superb,
thought Peter Walsh, swaying a little backwards and forwards with his
liqueur glass in his hand among the hairy red chairs and ash-trays, feeling
very well pleased with himself, for the Morrises liked him. Yes, they liked a
man who said, “Bartlett pears.” They liked him, he felt.
He would go to Clarissa’s party. (The Morrises moved off; but they would
meet again.) He would go to Clarissa’s party, because he wanted to ask
Richard what they were doing in India—the conservative duffers. And
what’s being acted? And music.... Oh yes, and mere gossip.

For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who fish-like
inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between
the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into
gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and
sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush,
scrape, kindle herself, gossiping. What did the Government mean—Richard
Dalloway would know—to do about India?
Since it was a very hot night and the paper boys went by with placards
proclaiming in huge red letters that there was a heat-wave, wicker chairs
were placed on the hotel steps and there, sipping, smoking, detached
gentlemen sat. Peter Walsh sat there. One might fancy that day, the London
day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress
and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off
stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of
exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too
shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting,
succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of
the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it
paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed,
of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but
London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky,
pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.
For the great revolution of Mr. Willett’s summer time had taken place since
Peter Walsh’s last visit to England. The prolonged evening was new to him.
It was inspiriting, rather. For as the young people went by with their
despatch-boxes, awfully glad to be free, proud too, dumbly, of stepping this
famous pavement, joy of a kind, cheap, tinselly, if you like, but all the same
rapture, flushed their faces. They dressed well too; pink stockings; pretty
shoes. They would now have two hours at the pictures. It sharpened, it
refined them, the yellow-blue evening light; and on the leaves in the square
shone lurid, livid—they looked as if dipped in sea water—the foliage of a
submerged city. He was astonished by the beauty; it was encouraging too,
for where the returned Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds of them)
in the Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world, here was
he, as young as ever; envying young people their summer time and the rest
of it, and more than suspecting from the words of a girl, from a housemaid’s

laughter—intangible things you couldn’t lay your hands on—that shift in
the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed
immovable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed them down, the women
especially, like those flowers Clarissa’s Aunt Helena used to press between
sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré’s dictionary on top, sitting under
the lamp after dinner. She was dead now. He had heard of her, from
Clarissa, losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so fitting—one of nature’s
masterpieces—that old Miss Parry should turn to glass. She would die like
some bird in a frost gripping her perch. She belonged to a different age, but
being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-
white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this
adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable (he felt for a copper to
buy a paper and read about Surrey and Yorkshire—he had held out that
copper millions of times. Surrey was all out once more)—this interminable
life. But cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. He could never
help reading about cricket. He read the scores in the stop press first, then
how it was a hot day; then about a murder case. Having done things
millions of times enriched them, though it might be said to take the surface
off. The past enriched, and experience, and having cared for one or two
people, and so having acquired the power which the young lack, of cutting
short, doing what one likes, not caring a rap what people say and coming
and going without any very great expectations (he left his paper on the table
and moved off), which however (and he looked for his hat and coat) was
not altogether true of him, not to-night, for here he was starting to go to a
party, at his age, with the belief upon him that he was about to have an
experience. But what?
Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the eye. It was not beauty pure and
simple—Bedford Place leading into Russell Square. It was straightness and
emptiness of course; the symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit
up, a piano, a gramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-making hidden,
but now and again emerging when, through the uncurtained window, the
window left open, one saw parties sitting over tables, young people slowly
circling, conversations between men and women, maids idly looking out (a
strange comment theirs, when work was done), stockings drying on top
ledges, a parrot, a few plants. Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness,
this life. And in the large square where the cabs shot and swerved so quick,
there were loitering couples, dallying, embracing, shrunk up under the

shower of a tree; that was moving; so silent, so absorbed, that one passed,
discreetly, timidly, as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to
interrupt which would have been impious. That was interesting. And so on
into the flare and glare.
His light overcoat blew open, he stepped with indescribable idiosyncrasy,
leant a little forward, tripped, with his hands behind his back and his eyes
still a little hawklike; he tripped through London, towards Westminster,
observing.
Was everybody dining out, then? Doors were being opened here by a
footman to let issue a high-stepping old dame, in buckled shoes, with three
purple ostrich feathers in her hair. Doors were being opened for ladies
wrapped like mummies in shawls with bright flowers on them, ladies with
bare heads. And in respectable quarters with stucco pillars through small
front gardens lightly swathed with combs in their hair (having run up to see
the children), women came; men waited for them, with their coats blowing
open, and the motor started. Everybody was going out. What with these
doors being opened, and the descent and the start, it seemed as if the whole
of London were embarking in little boats moored to the bank, tossing on the
waters, as if the whole place were floating off in carnival. And Whitehall
was skated over, silver beaten as it was, skated over by spiders, and there
was a sense of midges round the arc lamps; it was so hot that people stood
about talking. And here in Westminster was a retired Judge, presumably,
sitting four square at his house door dressed all in white. An Anglo-Indian
presumably.
And here a shindy of brawling women, drunken women; here only a
policeman and looming houses, high houses, domed houses, churches,
parliaments, and the hoot of a steamer on the river, a hollow misty cry. But
it was her street, this, Clarissa’s; cabs were rushing round the corner, like
water round the piers of a bridge, drawn together, it seemed to him because
they bore people going to her party, Clarissa’s party.
The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a
cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded.
The brain must wake now. The body must contract now, entering the house,
the lighted house, where the door stood open, where the motor cars were

standing, and bright women descending: the soul must brave itself to
endure. He opened the big blade of his pocket-knife.

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

It was borne through the kitchen. Over her shoulder Lucy reported how
Miss Elizabeth looked quite lovely; she couldn’t take her eyes off her; in
her pink dress, wearing the necklace Mr. Dalloway had given her. Jenny
must remember the dog, Miss Elizabeth’s fox-terrier, which, since it bit, had
to be shut up and might, Elizabeth thought, want something. Jenny must
remember the dog. But Jenny was not going upstairs with all those people
about. There was a motor at the door already! There was a ring at the bell—
and the gentlemen still in the dining-room, drinking tokay!
There, they were going upstairs; that was the first to come, and now they
would come faster and faster, so that Mrs. Parkinson (hired for parties)
would leave the hall door ajar, and the hall would be full of gentlemen
waiting (they stood waiting, sleeking down their hair) while the ladies took
their cloaks off in the room along the passage; where Mrs. Barnet helped
them, old Ellen Barnet, who had been with the family for forty years, and
came every summer to help the ladies, and remembered mothers when they
were girls, and though very unassuming did shake hands; said “milady”
very respectfully, yet had a humorous way with her, looking at the young
ladies, and ever so tactfully helping Lady Lovejoy, who had some trouble
with her underbodice. And they could not help feeling, Lady Lovejoy and
Miss Alice, that some little privilege in the matter of brush and comb, was
awarded them having known Mrs. Barnet—“thirty years, milady,” Mrs.
Barnet supplied her. Young ladies did not use to rouge, said Lady Lovejoy,
when they stayed at Bourton in the old days. And Miss Alice didn’t need
rouge, said Mrs. Barnet, looking at her fondly. There Mrs. Barnet would sit,
in the cloakroom, patting down the furs, smoothing out the Spanish shawls,
tidying the dressing-table, and knowing perfectly well, in spite of the furs
and the embroideries, which were nice ladies, which were not. The dear old
body, said Lady Lovejoy, mounting the stairs, Clarissa’s old nurse.
And then Lady Lovejoy stiffened. “Lady and Miss Lovejoy,” she said to
Mr. Wilkins (hired for parties). He had an admirable manner, as he bent and
straightened himself, bent and straightened himself and announced with
perfect impartiality “Lady and Miss Lovejoy ... Sir John and Lady
Needham ... Miss Weld ... Mr. Walsh.” His manner was admirable; his
family life must be irreproachable, except that it seemed impossible that a
being with greenish lips and shaven cheeks could ever have blundered into
the nuisance of children.

“How delightful to see you!” said Clarissa. She said it to every one. How
delightful to see you! She was at her worst—effusive, insincere. It was a
great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and read his
book, thought Peter Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should
have stayed at home, for he knew no one.
Oh dear, it was going to be a failure; a complete failure, Clarissa felt it in
her bones as dear old Lord Lexham stood there apologising for his wife
who had caught cold at the Buckingham Palace garden party. She could see
Peter out of the tail of her eye, criticising her, there, in that corner. Why,
after all, did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in
fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders! Better anything,
better brandish one’s torch and hurl it to earth than taper and dwindle away
like some Ellie Henderson! It was extraordinary how Peter put her into
these states just by coming and standing in a corner. He made her see
herself; exaggerate. It was idiotic. But why did he come, then, merely to
criticise? Why always take, never give? Why not risk one’s one little point
of view? There he was wandering off, and she must speak to him. But she
would not get the chance. Life was that—humiliation, renunciation. What
Lord Lexham was saying was that his wife would not wear her furs at the
garden party because “my dear, you ladies are all alike”—Lady Lexham
being seventy-five at least! It was delicious, how they petted each other,
that old couple. She did like old Lord Lexham. She did think it mattered,
her party, and it made her feel quite sick to know that it was all going
wrong, all falling flat. Anything, any explosion, any horror was better than
people wandering aimlessly, standing in a bunch at a corner like Ellie
Henderson, not even caring to hold themselves upright.
Gently the yellow curtain with all the birds of Paradise blew out and it
seemed as if there were a flight of wings into the room, right out, then
sucked back. (For the windows were open.) Was it draughty, Ellie
Henderson wondered? She was subject to chills. But it did not matter that
she should come down sneezing to-morrow; it was the girls with their
naked shoulders she thought of, being trained to think of others by an old
father, an invalid, late vicar of Bourton, but he was dead now; and her chills
never went to her chest, never. It was the girls she thought of, the young
girls with their bare shoulders, she herself having always been a wisp of a
creature, with her thin hair and meagre profile; though now, past fifty, there

was beginning to shine through some mild beam, something purified into
distinction by years of self-abnegation but obscured again, perpetually, by
her distressing gentility, her panic fear, which arose from three hundred
pounds’ income, and her weaponless state (she could not earn a penny) and
it made her timid, and more and more disqualified year by year to meet
well-dressed people who did this sort of thing every night of the season,
merely telling their maids “I’ll wear so and so,” whereas Ellie Henderson
ran out nervously and bought cheap pink flowers, half a dozen, and then
threw a shawl over her old black dress. For her invitation to Clarissa’s party
had come at the last moment. She was not quite happy about it. She had a
sort of feeling that Clarissa had not meant to ask her this year.
Why should she? There was no reason really, except that they had always
known each other. Indeed, they were cousins. But naturally they had rather
drifted apart, Clarissa being so sought after. It was an event to her, going to
a party. It was quite a treat just to see the lovely clothes. Wasn’t that
Elizabeth, grown up, with her hair done in the fashionable way, in the pink
dress? Yet she could not be more than seventeen. She was very, very
handsome. But girls when they first came out didn’t seem to wear white as
they used. (She must remember everything to tell Edith.) Girls wore straight
frocks, perfectly tight, with skirts well above the ankles. It was not
becoming, she thought.
So, with her weak eyesight, Ellie Henderson craned rather forward, and it
wasn’t so much she who minded not having any one to talk to (she hardly
knew anybody there), for she felt that they were all such interesting people
to watch; politicians presumably; Richard Dalloway’s friends; but it was
Richard himself who felt that he could not let the poor creature go on
standing there all the evening by herself.
“Well, Ellie, and how’s the world treating you?” he said in his genial way,
and Ellie Henderson, getting nervous and flushing and feeling that it was
extraordinarily nice of him to come and talk to her, said that many people
really felt the heat more than the cold.
“Yes, they do,” said Richard Dalloway. “Yes.”
But what more did one say?

“Hullo, Richard,” said somebody, taking him by the elbow, and, good Lord,
there was old Peter, old Peter Walsh. He was delighted to see him—ever so
pleased to see him! He hadn’t changed a bit. And off they went together
walking right across the room, giving each other little pats, as if they hadn’t
met for a long time, Ellie Henderson thought, watching them go, certain she
knew that man’s face. A tall man, middle aged, rather fine eyes, dark,
wearing spectacles, with a look of John Burrows. Edith would be sure to
know.
The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out again. And Clarissa
saw—she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back, and go on talking. So it wasn’t a
failure after all! it was going to be all right now—her party. It had begun. It
had started. But it was still touch and go. She must stand there for the
present. People seemed to come in a rush.
Colonel and Mrs. Garrod ... Mr. Hugh Whitbread ... Mr. Bowley ... Mrs.
Hilbery ... Lady Mary Maddox ... Mr. Quin ... intoned Wilkin. She had six
or seven words with each, and they went on, they went into the rooms; into
something now, not nothing, since Ralph Lyon had beat back the curtain.
And yet for her own part, it was too much of an effort. She was not
enjoying it. It was too much like being—just anybody, standing there;
anybody could do it; yet this anybody she did a little admire, couldn’t help
feeling that she had, anyhow, made this happen, that it marked a stage, this
post that she felt herself to have become, for oddly enough she had quite
forgotten what she looked like, but felt herself a stake driven in at the top of
her stairs. Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being
something not herself, and that every one was unreal in one way; much
more real in another. It was, she thought, partly their clothes, partly being
taken out of their ordinary ways, partly the background, it was possible to
say things you couldn’t say anyhow else, things that needed an effort;
possible to go much deeper. But not for her; not yet anyhow.
“How delightful to see you!” she said. Dear old Sir Harry! He would know
every one.
And what was so odd about it was the sense one had as they came up the
stairs one after another, Mrs. Mount and Celia, Herbert Ainsty, Mrs. Dakers
—oh and Lady Bruton!

“How awfully good of you to come!” she said, and she meant it—it was
odd how standing there one felt them going on, going on, some quite old,
some....
What name? Lady Rosseter? But who on earth was Lady Rosseter?
“Clarissa!” That voice! It was Sally Seton! Sally Seton! after all these
years! She loomed through a mist. For she hadn’t looked like that, Sally
Seton, when Clarissa grasped the hot water can, to think of her under this
roof, under this roof! Not like that!
All on top of each other, embarrassed, laughing, words tumbled out—
passing through London; heard from Clara Haydon; what a chance of
seeing you! So I thrust myself in—without an invitation....
One might put down the hot water can quite composedly. The lustre had
gone out of her. Yet it was extraordinary to see her again, older, happier,
less lovely. They kissed each other, first this cheek then that, by the
drawing-room door, and Clarissa turned, with Sally’s hand in hers, and saw
her rooms full, heard the roar of voices, saw the candlesticks, the blowing
curtains, and the roses which Richard had given her.
“I have five enormous boys,” said Sally.
She had the simplest egotism, the most open desire to be thought first
always, and Clarissa loved her for being still like that. “I can’t believe it!”
she cried, kindling all over with pleasure at the thought of the past.
But alas, Wilkins; Wilkins wanted her; Wilkins was emitting in a voice of
commanding authority as if the whole company must be admonished and
the hostess reclaimed from frivolity, one name:
“The Prime Minister,” said Peter Walsh.
The Prime Minister? Was it really? Ellie Henderson marvelled. What a
thing to tell Edith!
One couldn’t laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might have stood
him behind a counter and bought biscuits—poor chap, all rigged up in gold
lace. And to be fair, as he went his rounds, first with Clarissa then with
Richard escorting him, he did it very well. He tried to look somebody. It
was amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him. They just went on talking,
yet it was perfectly plain that they all knew, felt to the marrow of their

bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English
society. Old Lady Bruton, and she looked very fine too, very stalwart in her
lace, swam up, and they withdrew into a little room which at once became
spied upon, guarded, and a sort of stir and rustle rippled through every one,
openly: the Prime Minister!
Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh, standing in
the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homage!
There! That must be, by Jove it was, Hugh Whitbread, snuffing round the
precincts of the great, grown rather fatter, rather whiter, the admirable
Hugh!
He looked always as if he were on duty, thought Peter, a privileged, but
secretive being, hoarding secrets which he would die to defend, though it
was only some little piece of tittle-tattle dropped by a court footman, which
would be in all the papers to-morrow. Such were his rattles, his baubles, in
playing with which he had grown white, come to the verge of old age,
enjoying the respect and affection of all who had the privilege of knowing
this type of the English public school man. Inevitably one made up things
like that about Hugh; that was his style; the style of those admirable letters
which Peter had read thousands of miles across the sea in the Times, and
had thanked God he was out of that pernicious hubble-bubble if it were only
to hear baboons chatter and coolies beat their wives. An olive-skinned
youth from one of the Universities stood obsequiously by. Him he would
patronise, initiate, teach how to get on. For he liked nothing better than
doing kindnesses, making the hearts of old ladies palpitate with the joy of
being thought of in their age, their affliction, thinking themselves quite
forgotten, yet here was dear Hugh driving up and spending an hour talking
of the past, remembering trifles, praising the home-made cake, though
Hugh might eat cake with a Duchess any day of his life, and, to look at him,
probably did spend a good deal of time in that agreeable occupation. The
All-judging, the All-merciful, might excuse. Peter Walsh had no mercy.
Villains there must be, and God knows the rascals who get hanged for
battering the brains of a girl out in a train do less harm on the whole than
Hugh Whitbread and his kindness. Look at him now, on tiptoe, dancing
forward, bowing and scraping, as the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton
emerged, intimating for all the world to see that he was privileged to say
something, something private, to Lady Bruton as she passed. She stopped.

She wagged her fine old head. She was thanking him presumably for some
piece of servility. She had her toadies, minor officials in Government
offices who ran about putting through little jobs on her behalf, in return for
which she gave them luncheon. But she derived from the eighteenth
century. She was all right.
And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing,
sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She wore ear-rings, and a
silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her
tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in
the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman’s
dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a
creature floating in its element. But age had brushed her; even as a mermaid
might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over
the waves. There was a breath of tenderness; her severity, her prudery, her
woodenness were all warmed through now, and she had about her as she
said good-bye to the thick gold-laced man who was doing his best, and
good luck to him, to look important, an inexpressible dignity; an exquisite
cordiality; as if she wished the whole world well, and must now, being on
the very verge and rim of things, take her leave. So she made him think.
(But he was not in love.)
Indeed, Clarissa felt, the Prime Minister had been good to come. And,
walking down the room with him, with Sally there and Peter there and
Richard very pleased, with all those people rather inclined, perhaps, to
envy, she had felt that intoxication of the moment, that dilatation of the
nerves of the heart itself till it seemed to quiver, steeped, upright;—yes, but
after all it was what other people felt, that; for, though she loved it and felt
it tingle and sting, still these semblances, these triumphs (dear old Peter, for
example, thinking her so brilliant), had a hollowness; at arm’s length they
were, not in the heart; and it might be that she was growing old but they
satisfied her no longer as they used; and suddenly, as she saw the Prime
Minister go down the stairs, the gilt rim of the Sir Joshua picture of the little
girl with a muff brought back Kilman with a rush; Kilman her enemy. That
was satisfying; that was real. Ah, how she hated her—hot, hypocritical,
corrupt; with all that power; Elizabeth’s seducer; the woman who had crept
in to steal and defile (Richard would say, What nonsense!). She hated her:
she loved her. It was enemies one wanted, not friends—not Mrs. Durrant

and Clara, Sir William and Lady Bradshaw, Miss Truelock and Eleanor
Gibson (whom she saw coming upstairs). They must find her if they wanted
her. She was for the party!
There was her old friend Sir Harry.
“Dear Sir Harry!” she said, going up to the fine old fellow who had
produced more bad pictures than any other two Academicians in the whole
of St. John’s Wood (they were always of cattle, standing in sunset pools
absorbing moisture, or signifying, for he had a certain range of gesture, by
the raising of one foreleg and the toss of the antlers, “the Approach of the
Stranger”—all his activities, dining out, racing, were founded on cattle
standing absorbing moisture in sunset pools).
“What are you laughing at?” she asked him. For Willie Titcomb and Sir
Harry and Herbert Ainsty were all laughing. But no. Sir Harry could not tell
Clarissa Dalloway (much though he liked her; of her type he thought her
perfect, and threatened to paint her) his stories of the music hall stage. He
chaffed her about her party. He missed his brandy. These circles, he said,
were above him. But he liked her; respected her, in spite of her damnable,
difficult upper-class refinement, which made it impossible to ask Clarissa
Dalloway to sit on his knee. And up came that wandering will-o’-the-wisp,
that vagulous phosphorescence, old Mrs. Hilbery, stretching her hands to
the blaze of his laughter (about the Duke and the Lady), which, as she heard
it across the room, seemed to reassure her on a point which sometimes
bothered her if she woke early in the morning and did not like to call her
maid for a cup of tea; how it is certain we must die.
“They won’t tell us their stories,” said Clarissa.
“Dear Clarissa!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery. She looked to-night, she said, so
like her mother as she first saw her walking in a garden in a grey hat.
And really Clarissa’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother, walking in a
garden! But alas, she must go.
For there was Professor Brierly, who lectured on Milton, talking to little Jim
Hutton (who was unable even for a party like this to compass both tie and
waistcoat or make his hair lie flat), and even at this distance they were
quarrelling, she could see. For Professor Brierly was a very queer fish. With
all those degrees, honours, lectureships between him and the scribblers he

suspected instantly an atmosphere not favourable to his queer compound;
his prodigious learning and timidity; his wintry charm without cordiality;
his innocence blent with snobbery; he quivered if made conscious by a
lady’s unkempt hair, a youth’s boots, of an underworld, very creditable
doubtless, of rebels, of ardent young people; of would-be geniuses, and
intimated with a little toss of the head, with a sniff—Humph!—the value of
moderation; of some slight training in the classics in order to appreciate
Milton. Professor Brierly (Clarissa could see) wasn’t hitting it off with little
Jim Hutton (who wore red socks, his black being at the laundry) about
Milton. She interrupted.
She said she loved Bach. So did Hutton. That was the bond between them,
and Hutton (a very bad poet) always felt that Mrs. Dalloway was far the
best of the great ladies who took an interest in art. It was odd how strict she
was. About music she was purely impersonal. She was rather a prig. But
how charming to look at! She made her house so nice if it weren’t for her
Professors. Clarissa had half a mind to snatch him off and set him down at
the piano in the back room. For he played divinely.
“But the noise!” she said. “The noise!”
“The sign of a successful party.” Nodding urbanely, the Professor stepped
delicately off.
“He knows everything in the whole world about Milton,” said Clarissa.
“Does he indeed?” said Hutton, who would imitate the Professor throughout
Hampstead; the Professor on Milton; the Professor on moderation; the
Professor stepping delicately off.
But she must speak to that couple, said Clarissa, Lord Gayton and Nancy
Blow.
Not that they added perceptibly to the noise of the party. They were not
talking (perceptibly) as they stood side by side by the yellow curtains. They
would soon be off elsewhere, together; and never had very much to say in
any circumstances. They looked; that was all. That was enough. They
looked so clean, so sound, she with an apricot bloom of powder and paint,
but he scrubbed, rinsed, with the eyes of a bird, so that no ball could pass
him or stroke surprise him. He struck, he leapt, accurately, on the spot.
Ponies’ mouths quivered at the end of his reins. He had his honours,

ancestral monuments, banners hanging in the church at home. He had his
duties; his tenants; a mother and sisters; had been all day at Lords, and that
was what they were talking about—cricket, cousins, the movies—when
Mrs. Dalloway came up. Lord Gayton liked her most awfully. So did Miss
Blow. She had such charming manners.
“It is angelic—it is delicious of you to have come!” she said. She loved
Lords; she loved youth, and Nancy, dressed at enormous expense by the
greatest artists in Paris, stood there looking as if her body had merely put
forth, of its own accord, a green frill.
“I had meant to have dancing,” said Clarissa.
For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace,
swing, be up at dawn; carry sugar to ponies; kiss and caress the snouts of
adorable chows; and then all tingling and streaming, plunge and swim. But
the enormous resources of the English language, the power it bestows, after
all, of communicating feelings (at their age, she and Peter would have been
arguing all the evening), was not for them. They would solidify young.
They would be good beyond measure to the people on the estate, but alone,
perhaps, rather dull.
“What a pity!” she said. “I had hoped to have dancing.”
It was so extraordinarily nice of them to have come! But talk of dancing!
The rooms were packed.
There was old Aunt Helena in her shawl. Alas, she must leave them—Lord
Gayton and Nancy Blow. There was old Miss Parry, her aunt.
For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive. She was past
eighty. She ascended staircases slowly with a stick. She was placed in a
chair (Richard had seen to it). People who had known Burma in the
’seventies were always led up to her. Where had Peter got to? They used to
be such friends. For at the mention of India, or even Ceylon, her eyes (only
one was glass) slowly deepened, became blue, beheld, not human beings—
she had no tender memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals,
Mutinies—it was orchids she saw, and mountain passes and herself carried
on the backs of coolies in the ’sixties over solitary peaks; or descending to
uproot orchids (startling blossoms, never beheld before) which she painted
in water-colour; an indomitable Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the

War, say, which dropped a bomb at her very door, from her deep meditation
over orchids and her own figure journeying in the ’sixties in India—but
here was Peter.
“Come and talk to Aunt Helena about Burma,” said Clarissa.
And yet he had not had a word with her all the evening!
“We will talk later,” said Clarissa, leading him up to Aunt Helena, in her
white shawl, with her stick.
“Peter Walsh,” said Clarissa.
That meant nothing.
Clarissa had asked her. It was tiring; it was noisy; but Clarissa had asked
her. So she had come. It was a pity that they lived in London—Richard and
Clarissa. If only for Clarissa’s health it would have been better to live in the
country. But Clarissa had always been fond of society.
“He has been in Burma,” said Clarissa.
Ah. She could not resist recalling what Charles Darwin had said about her
little book on the orchids of Burma.
(Clarissa must speak to Lady Bruton.)
No doubt it was forgotten now, her book on the orchids of Burma, but it
went into three editions before 1870, she told Peter. She remembered him
now. He had been at Bourton (and he had left her, Peter Walsh remembered,
without a word in the drawing-room that night when Clarissa had asked him
to come boating).
“Richard so much enjoyed his lunch party,” said Clarissa to Lady Bruton.
“Richard was the greatest possible help,” Lady Bruton replied. “He helped
me to write a letter. And how are you?”
“Oh, perfectly well!” said Clarissa. (Lady Bruton detested illness in the
wives of politicians.)
“And there’s Peter Walsh!” said Lady Bruton (for she could never think of
anything to say to Clarissa; though she liked her. She had lots of fine
qualities; but they had nothing in common—she and Clarissa. It might have
been better if Richard had married a woman with less charm, who would

have helped him more in his work. He had lost his chance of the Cabinet).
“There’s Peter Walsh!” she said, shaking hands with that agreeable sinner,
that very able fellow who should have made a name for himself but hadn’t
(always in difficulties with women), and, of course, old Miss Parry.
Wonderful old lady!
Lady Bruton stood by Miss Parry’s chair, a spectral grenadier, draped in
black, inviting Peter Walsh to lunch; cordial; but without small talk,
remembering nothing whatever about the flora or fauna of India. She had
been there, of course; had stayed with three Viceroys; thought some of the
Indian civilians uncommonly fine fellows; but what a tragedy it was—the
state of India! The Prime Minister had just been telling her (old Miss Parry
huddled up in her shawl, did not care what the Prime Minister had just been
telling her), and Lady Bruton would like to have Peter Walsh’s opinion, he
being fresh from the centre, and she would get Sir Sampson to meet him,
for really it prevented her from sleeping at night, the folly of it, the
wickedness she might say, being a soldier’s daughter. She was an old
woman now, not good for much. But her house, her servants, her good
friend Milly Brush—did he remember her?—were all there only asking to
be used if—if they could be of help, in short. For she never spoke of
England, but this isle of men, this dear, dear land, was in her blood (without
reading Shakespeare), and if ever a woman could have worn the helmet and
shot the arrow, could have led troops to attack, ruled with indomitable
justice barbarian hordes and lain under a shield noseless in a church, or
made a green grass mound on some primeval hillside, that woman was
Millicent Bruton. Debarred by her sex and some truancy, too, of the logical
faculty (she found it impossible to write a letter to the Times), she had the
thought of Empire always at hand, and had acquired from her association
with that armoured goddess her ramrod bearing, her robustness of
demeanour, so that one could not figure her even in death parted from the
earth or roaming territories over which, in some spiritual shape, the Union
Jack had ceased to fly. To be not English even among the dead—no, no!
Impossible!
But was it Lady Bruton (whom she used to know)? Was it Peter Walsh
grown grey? Lady Rosseter asked herself (who had been Sally Seton). It
was old Miss Parry certainly—the old aunt who used to be so cross when
she stayed at Bourton. Never should she forget running along the passage

naked, and being sent for by Miss Parry! And Clarissa! oh Clarissa! Sally
caught her by the arm.
Clarissa stopped beside them.
“But I can’t stay,” she said. “I shall come later. Wait,” she said, looking at
Peter and Sally. They must wait, she meant, until all these people had gone.
“I shall come back,” she said, looking at her old friends, Sally and Peter,
who were shaking hands, and Sally, remembering the past no doubt, was
laughing.
But her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness; her eyes not aglow as
they used to be, when she smoked cigars, when she ran down the passage to
fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of clothing on her, and Ellen Atkins
asked, What if the gentlemen had met her? But everybody forgave her. She
stole a chicken from the larder because she was hungry in the night; she
smoked cigars in her bedroom; she left a priceless book in the punt. But
everybody adored her (except perhaps Papa). It was her warmth; her vitality
—she would paint, she would write. Old women in the village never to this
day forgot to ask after “your friend in the red cloak who seemed so bright.”
She accused Hugh Whitbread, of all people (and there he was, her old
friend Hugh, talking to the Portuguese Ambassador), of kissing her in the
smoking-room to punish her for saying that women should have votes.
Vulgar men did, she said. And Clarissa remembered having to persuade her
not to denounce him at family prayers—which she was capable of doing
with her daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love of being the centre
of everything and creating scenes, and it was bound, Clarissa used to think,
to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her martyrdom; instead of which
she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man with a large buttonhole
who owned, it was said, cotton mills at Manchester. And she had five boys!
She and Peter had settled down together. They were talking: it seemed so
familiar—that they should be talking. They would discuss the past. With the
two of them (more even than with Richard) she shared her past; the garden;
the trees; old Joseph Breitkopf singing Brahms without any voice; the
drawing-room wall-paper; the smell of the mats. A part of this Sally must
always be; Peter must always be. But she must leave them. There were the
Bradshaws, whom she disliked. She must go up to Lady Bradshaw (in grey
and silver, balancing like a sea-lion at the edge of its tank, barking for

invitations, Duchesses, the typical successful man’s wife), she must go up
to Lady Bradshaw and say....
But Lady Bradshaw anticipated her.
“We are shockingly late, dear Mrs. Dalloway, we hardly dared to come in,”
she said.
And Sir William, who looked very distinguished, with his grey hair and
blue eyes, said yes; they had not been able to resist the temptation. He was
talking to Richard about that Bill probably, which they wanted to get
through the Commons. Why did the sight of him, talking to Richard, curl
her up? He looked what he was, a great doctor. A man absolutely at the head
of his profession, very powerful, rather worn. For think what cases came
before him—people in the uttermost depths of misery; people on the verge
of insanity; husbands and wives. He had to decide questions of appalling
difficulty. Yet—what she felt was, one wouldn’t like Sir William to see one
unhappy. No; not that man.
“How is your son at Eton?” she asked Lady Bradshaw.
He had just missed his eleven, said Lady Bradshaw, because of the mumps.
His father minded even more than he did, she thought “being,” she said,
“nothing but a great boy himself.”
Clarissa looked at Sir William, talking to Richard. He did not look like a
boy—not in the least like a boy. She had once gone with some one to ask
his advice. He had been perfectly right; extremely sensible. But Heavens—
what a relief to get out to the street again! There was some poor wretch
sobbing, she remembered, in the waiting-room. But she did not know what
it was—about Sir William; what exactly she disliked. Only Richard agreed
with her, “didn’t like his taste, didn’t like his smell.” But he was
extraordinarily able. They were talking about this Bill. Some case, Sir
William was mentioning, lowering his voice. It had its bearing upon what
he was saying about the deferred effects of shell shock. There must be some
provision in the Bill.
Sinking her voice, drawing Mrs. Dalloway into the shelter of a common
femininity, a common pride in the illustrious qualities of husbands and their
sad tendency to overwork, Lady Bradshaw (poor goose—one didn’t dislike
her) murmured how, “just as we were starting, my husband was called up

on the telephone, a very sad case. A young man (that is what Sir William is
telling Mr. Dalloway) had killed himself. He had been in the army.” Oh!
thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought.
She went on, into the little room where the Prime Minister had gone with
Lady Bruton. Perhaps there was somebody there. But there was nobody.
The chairs still kept the impress of the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton, she
turned deferentially, he sitting four-square, authoritatively. They had been
talking about India. There was nobody. The party’s splendour fell to the
floor, so strange it was to come in alone in her finery.
What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young
man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party—the Bradshaws
talked of death. He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went
through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress
flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had
flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty
spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a
suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the
Bradshaws talked of it at her party!
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more.
But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back;
the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she
had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A
thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced,
obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This
he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to
communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which,
mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was
alone. There was an embrace in death.
But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his
treasure? “If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy,” she had said
to herself once, coming down in white.
Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion, and
had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil,
without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some
indescribable outrage—forcing your soul, that was it—if this young man

had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his
power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made
intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that?
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the
overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life,
to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of
her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there
reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive,
send roaring up that immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing
with another, she must have perished. But that young man had killed
himself.
Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see
sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness,
and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had schemed; she had
pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success. Lady
Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at
Bourton.
It was due to Richard; she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow
enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought,
straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done
with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it,
with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had
she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; or seen
it between people’s shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could
not sleep. She walked to the window.
It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country sky,
this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but
how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her!
She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought,
it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—
ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her.
The wind must have risen. She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It
was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the
room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with
people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old

woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock
began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him;
with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with
all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house
was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her,
Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an
extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who
had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The
clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel
the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must
assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little
room.
“But where is Clarissa?” said Peter. He was sitting on the sofa with Sally.
(After all these years he really could not call her “Lady Rosseter.”)
“Where’s the woman gone to?” he asked. “Where’s Clarissa?”
Sally supposed, and so did Peter for the matter of that, that there were
people of importance, politicians, whom neither of them knew unless by
sight in the picture papers, whom Clarissa had to be nice to, had to talk to.
She was with them. Yet there was Richard Dalloway not in the Cabinet. He
hadn’t been a success, Sally supposed? For herself, she scarcely ever read
the papers. She sometimes saw his name mentioned. But then—well, she
lived a very solitary life, in the wilds, Clarissa would say, among great
merchants, great manufacturers, men, after all, who did things. She had
done things too!
“I have five sons!” she told him.
Lord, Lord, what a change had come over her! the softness of motherhood;
its egotism too. Last time they met, Peter remembered, had been among the
cauliflowers in the moonlight, the leaves “like rough bronze” she had said,
with her literary turn; and she had picked a rose. She had marched him up
and down that awful night, after the scene by the fountain; he was to catch
the midnight train. Heavens, he had wept!
That was his old trick, opening a pocket-knife, thought Sally, always
opening and shutting a knife when he got excited. They had been very, very
intimate, she and Peter Walsh, when he was in love with Clarissa, and there
was that dreadful, ridiculous scene over Richard Dalloway at lunch. She

had called Richard “Wickham.” Why not call Richard “Wickham”? Clarissa
had flared up! and indeed they had never seen each other since, she and
Clarissa, not more than half a dozen times perhaps in the last ten years. And
Peter Walsh had gone off to India, and she had heard vaguely that he had
made an unhappy marriage, and she didn’t know whether he had any
children, and she couldn’t ask him, for he had changed. He was rather
shrivelled-looking, but kinder, she felt, and she had a real affection for him,
for he was connected with her youth, and she still had a little Emily Brontë
he had given her, and he was to write, surely? In those days he was to write.
“Have you written?” she asked him, spreading her hand, her firm and
shapely hand, on her knee in a way he recalled.
“Not a word!” said Peter Walsh, and she laughed.
She was still attractive, still a personage, Sally Seton. But who was this
Rosseter? He wore two camellias on his wedding day—that was all Peter
knew of him. “They have myriads of servants, miles of conservatories,”
Clarissa wrote; something like that. Sally owned it with a shout of laughter.
“Yes, I have ten thousand a year”—whether before the tax was paid or after,
she couldn’t remember, for her husband, “whom you must meet,” she said,
“whom you would like,” she said, did all that for her.
And Sally used to be in rags and tatters. She had pawned her grandmother’s
ring which Marie Antoinette had given her great-grandfather to come to
Bourton.
Oh yes, Sally remembered; she had it still, a ruby ring which Marie
Antoinette had given her great-grandfather. She never had a penny to her
name in those days, and going to Bourton always meant some frightful
pinch. But going to Bourton had meant so much to her—had kept her sane,
she believed, so unhappy had she been at home. But that was all a thing of
the past—all over now, she said. And Mr. Parry was dead; and Miss Parry
was still alive. Never had he had such a shock in his life! said Peter. He had
been quite certain she was dead. And the marriage had been, Sally
supposed, a success? And that very handsome, very self-possessed young
woman was Elizabeth, over there, by the curtains, in red.
(She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth, Willie
Titcomb was thinking. Oh how much nicer to be in the country and do what

she liked! She could hear her poor dog howling, Elizabeth was certain.) She
was not a bit like Clarissa, Peter Walsh said.
“Oh, Clarissa!” said Sally.
What Sally felt was simply this. She had owed Clarissa an enormous
amount. They had been friends, not acquaintances, friends, and she still saw
Clarissa all in white going about the house with her hands full of flowers—
to this day tobacco plants made her think of Bourton. But—did Peter
understand?—she lacked something. Lacked what was it? She had charm;
she had extraordinary charm. But to be frank (and she felt that Peter was an
old friend, a real friend—did absence matter? did distance matter? She had
often wanted to write to him, but torn it up, yet felt he understood, for
people understand without things being said, as one realises growing old,
and old she was, had been that afternoon to see her sons at Eton, where they
had the mumps), to be quite frank then, how could Clarissa have done it?—
married Richard Dalloway? a sportsman, a man who cared only for dogs.
Literally, when he came into the room he smelt of the stables. And then all
this? She waved her hand.
Hugh Whitbread it was, strolling past in his white waistcoat, dim, fat, blind,
past everything he looked, except self-esteem and comfort.
“He’s not going to recognise us,” said Sally, and really she hadn’t the
courage—so that was Hugh! the admirable Hugh!
“And what does he do?” she asked Peter.
He blacked the King’s boots or counted bottles at Windsor, Peter told her.
Peter kept his sharp tongue still! But Sally must be frank, Peter said. That
kiss now, Hugh’s.
On the lips, she assured him, in the smoking-room one evening. She went
straight to Clarissa in a rage. Hugh didn’t do such things! Clarissa said, the
admirable Hugh! Hugh’s socks were without exception the most beautiful
she had ever seen—and now his evening dress. Perfect! And had he
children?
“Everybody in the room has six sons at Eton,” Peter told her, except
himself. He, thank God, had none. No sons, no daughters, no wife. Well, he
didn’t seem to mind, said Sally. He looked younger, she thought, than any
of them.

But it had been a silly thing to do, in many ways, Peter said, to marry like
that; “a perfect goose she was,” he said, but, he said, “we had a splendid
time of it,” but how could that be? Sally wondered; what did he mean? and
how odd it was to know him and yet not know a single thing that had
happened to him. And did he say it out of pride? Very likely, for after all it
must be galling for him (though he was an oddity, a sort of sprite, not at all
an ordinary man), it must be lonely at his age to have no home, nowhere to
go to. But he must stay with them for weeks and weeks. Of course he
would; he would love to stay with them, and that was how it came out. All
these years the Dalloways had never been once. Time after time they had
asked them. Clarissa (for it was Clarissa of course) would not come. For,
said Sally, Clarissa was at heart a snob—one had to admit it, a snob. And it
was that that was between them, she was convinced. Clarissa thought she
had married beneath her, her husband being—she was proud of it—a
miner’s son. Every penny they had he had earned. As a little boy (her voice
trembled) he had carried great sacks.
(And so she would go on, Peter felt, hour after hour; the miner’s son; people
thought she had married beneath her; her five sons; and what was the other
thing—plants, hydrangeas, syringas, very, very rare hibiscus lilies that
never grow north of the Suez Canal, but she, with one gardener in a suburb
near Manchester, had beds of them, positively beds! Now all that Clarissa
had escaped, unmaternal as she was.)
A snob was she? Yes, in many ways. Where was she, all this time? It was
getting late.
“Yet,” said Sally, “when I heard Clarissa was giving a party, I felt I couldn’t
not come—must see her again (and I’m staying in Victoria Street,
practically next door). So I just came without an invitation. But,” she
whispered, “tell me, do. Who is this?”
It was Mrs. Hilbery, looking for the door. For how late it was getting! And,
she murmured, as the night grew later, as people went, one found old
friends; quiet nooks and corners; and the loveliest views. Did they know,
she asked, that they were surrounded by an enchanted garden? Lights and
trees and wonderful gleaming lakes and the sky. Just a few fairy lamps,
Clarissa Dalloway had said, in the back garden! But she was a magician! It
was a park.... And she didn’t know their names, but friends she knew they

were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best. But
there were so many doors, such unexpected places, she could not find her
way.
“Old Mrs. Hilbery,” said Peter; but who was that? that lady standing by the
curtain all the evening, without speaking? He knew her face; connected her
with Bourton. Surely she used to cut up underclothes at the large table in
the window? Davidson, was that her name?
“Oh, that is Ellie Henderson,” said Sally. Clarissa was really very hard on
her. She was a cousin, very poor. Clarissa was hard on people.
She was rather, said Peter. Yet, said Sally, in her emotional way, with a rush
of that enthusiasm which Peter used to love her for, yet dreaded a little now,
so effusive she might become—how generous to her friends Clarissa was!
and what a rare quality one found it, and how sometimes at night or on
Christmas Day, when she counted up her blessings, she put that friendship
first. They were young; that was it. Clarissa was pure-hearted; that was it.
Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel
that it was the only thing worth saying—what one felt. Cleverness was silly.
One must say simply what one felt.
“But I do not know,” said Peter Walsh, “what I feel.”
Poor Peter, thought Sally. Why did not Clarissa come and talk to them?
That was what he was longing for. She knew it. All the time he was thinking
only of Clarissa, and was fidgeting with his knife.
He had not found life simple, Peter said. His relations with Clarissa had not
been simple. It had spoilt his life, he said. (They had been so intimate—he
and Sally Seton, it was absurd not to say it.) One could not be in love twice,
he said. And what could she say? Still, it is better to have loved (but he
would think her sentimental—he used to be so sharp). He must come and
stay with them in Manchester. That is all very true, he said. All very true.
He would love to come and stay with them, directly he had done what he
had to do in London.
And Clarissa had cared for him more than she had ever cared for Richard.
Sally was positive of that.
“No, no, no!” said Peter (Sally should not have said that—she went too far).
That good fellow—there he was at the end of the room, holding forth, the

same as ever, dear old Richard. Who was he talking to? Sally asked, that
very distinguished-looking man? Living in the wilds as she did, she had an
insatiable curiosity to know who people were. But Peter did not know. He
did not like his looks, he said, probably a Cabinet Minister. Of them all,
Richard seemed to him the best, he said—the most disinterested.
“But what has he done?” Sally asked. Public work, she supposed. And were
they happy together? Sally asked (she herself was extremely happy); for,
she admitted, she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as
one does, for what can one know even of the people one lives with every
day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play
about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was
true of life—one scratched on the wall. Despairing of human relationships
(people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her
flowers a peace which men and women never gave her. But no; he did not
like cabbages; he preferred human beings, Peter said. Indeed, the young are
beautiful, Sally said, watching Elizabeth cross the room. How unlike
Clarissa at her age! Could he make anything of her? She would not open
her lips. Not much, not yet, Peter admitted. She was like a lily, Sally said, a
lily by the side of a pool. But Peter did not agree that we know nothing. We
know everything, he said; at least he did.

But these two, Sally whispered, these two coming now (and really she must
go, if Clarissa did not come soon), this distinguished-looking man and his
rather common-looking wife who had been talking to Richard—what could
one know about people like that?
“That they’re damnable humbugs,” said Peter, looking at them casually. He
made Sally laugh.
But Sir William Bradshaw stopped at the door to look at a picture. He
looked in the corner for the engraver’s name. His wife looked too. Sir
William Bradshaw was so interested in art.
When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know
people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was fifty-five,
in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl’s of twenty); now that one
was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and
one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally.
She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said,
alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it—it went on increasing in his
experience. There was some one in India. He would like to tell Sally about
her. He would like Sally to know her. She was married, he said. She had
two small children. They must all come to Manchester, said Sally—he must
promise before they left.
There’s Elizabeth, he said, she feels not half what we feel, not yet. But, said
Sally, watching Elizabeth go to her father, one can see they are devoted to
each other. She could feel it by the way Elizabeth went to her father.
For her father had been looking at her, as he stood talking to the Bradshaws,
and he had thought to himself, Who is that lovely girl? And suddenly he
realised that it was his Elizabeth, and he had not recognised her, she looked
so lovely in her pink frock! Elizabeth had felt him looking at her as she
talked to Willie Titcomb. So she went to him and they stood together, now
that the party was almost over, looking at the people going, and the rooms
getting emptier and emptier, with things scattered on the floor. Even Ellie
Henderson was going, nearly last of all, though no one had spoken to her,
but she had wanted to see everything, to tell Edith. And Richard and
Elizabeth were rather glad it was over, but Richard was proud of his
daughter. And he had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her.

He had looked at her, he said, and he had wondered, Who is that lovely
girl? and it was his daughter! That did make her happy. But her poor dog
was howling.
“Richard has improved. You are right,” said Sally. “I shall go and talk to
him. I shall say good-night. What does the brain matter,” said Lady
Rosseter, getting up, “compared with the heart?”
“I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror?
what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with
extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.

THE END

Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without
notice. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been
standardized. The following printer errors have been
changed.
CHANGED FROM TO
“word poetry of “word of poetry
Page 159:
herself” herself”
“leant a little
Page 248: “lent a little forward”
forward”
All other inconsistencies are as in the original.

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