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Mrs. Dalloway · Mrs. Dalloway

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  Missus Dalloway by Virginia Wolf, Chapter one. Missus Dolloway said she would buy
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  the flowers herself, for Lucy had her work cut out for her. The
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  doors would be taken off their hinges. Rumpelmeyer's men were coming. And then
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  thought Clarissa Dollaway, what a morning, fresh as if issued to children on
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  a beach, What a lark, what a plunge? For so it had
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  always seemed to her when with a little squeak of the hinges, which she
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  could hear now she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Burton into
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  the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this? Of
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  course, the air was in the early morning like the flap of a wave,
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  the kiss of a wave, chill and sharp, and yet for a
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  girl of eighteen, as she then was solemn, feeling as she did,
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  standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen,
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  looking at the flowers, at the trees, with the smoke winding off them,
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  and the rooks rising, falling, standing and looking until Peter Walsh said,
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  musing among the vegetables. Was that it I prefer men to call the
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  flowers? Was that it He must have said it at breakfast one morning,
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  when she had gone out on to the terrace. Peter Walsh he would be
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  back from India one of these days, June or July. She forgot which,
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  for his letters were awfully dull. It was his sayings. One remember
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  his eyes, his pocket knife, his smile, his grumpiness, And when
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  millions of things had utterly vanished, how strange it was a few sayings like
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  this about cabbages. She stiffened a little on the curb, waiting for Dirtnall's
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  van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her, knowing her
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  as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster. A
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  touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue, green light,
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  vivacious, though she was over fifty and grown very white since her illness.
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  There she perched, never seeing him waiting to cross. Very upright for
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  having lived in Westminster, how many years now over twenty one feels even in
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  the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive a
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  particular hush or solemnity, an indescribable pause, a suspense. But that might
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  be her heart affected, they said by influenza before Big Ben strikes. There
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  out it boomed, first a warning musical, then the hour irrevocable, the
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  leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought,
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  crossing Victoria Street, for Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how
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  one sees it so making it up, building it round one, tumbling it,
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  creating it every moment afresh. But the veriest frumps, the most dejected
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  of misery, sitting on doorsteps drink their downfall, do the same can't be
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  dealt with. She felt positive by acts of Parliament for that very reason.
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  They love life in people's eyes. In the swing, tramp and trudge,
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  in the bellow and the uproar, the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses,
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  vans, sandwich men, shuffling and swinging brass bands, barrel organs in the
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  triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what
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  she loved life London, this moment of June, For it was the middle
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  of June. The war was over, except for some one like missus Foxcroft
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  at the embassy last night, eating her heart out, be because that nice
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  boy was killed, and now the old manor house must go to a cousin,
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  or Lady Baxborough, who opened a bazaar, they said, with the
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  telegram in her hand, John, her favorite killed. But it was over,
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  thank Heaven. Over it was June. The King and Queen were at
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  the palace, and everywhere, though it was still so early, there was
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  a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats, lords,
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  ascot ran, a law, and all the rest of it, wrapped
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  in the soft mesh of the gray blue morning air, which, as the
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  day wore on, would unwind them and set down on their lawns and pitches.
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  The bouncing ponies, whose fore feet just struck the ground, and up
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  they sprung. The whirling young men and laughing girls, and their transparent muslins,
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  who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd
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  wooly dogs for a run. And even now at this hour, discreet old
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  dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery, and the
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  shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old
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  sea green brooches in eighteenth century settings to tempt Americans. But one must economize,
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  not buy things rashly for Elizabeth, and she too, loving it as
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  she did, with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it.
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  Since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she too
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  was going that very night to kindle and illuminate, to give her party.
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  But how strange on entering the park, the silence, the mist, the
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  hum, the slow swimming happy ducks, the pouched birds waddling, and who
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  should be coming along with his back against the government buildings, most appropriately carrying
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  a despatch box stamped with the Royal arms. Who but Hugh Whitbread, her
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  old friend, Hugh, the admirable Hugh. Good morning to you, Clarissa,
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  said Hugh, rather extravagantly, for they had known each other as children.
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  Where are you off to? I love walking in London, said missus
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  Dollaway. Really it's better than walking in the country. They had just come
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  up, unfortunately, to see doctors. Other people came to see pictures,
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  go to the opera, take their daughters out, But the Whitbreads came to
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  see doctors times without number. Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home
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  was Evelyn. Ill Again, Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts,
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  said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well
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  covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body. He was almost too
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  well dressed always, but presumably had to be with his little job at court,
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  that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as
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  an old friend Clarissa Dallaway would quite understand without requiring him to specify. Ah,
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  yes, she did, of course, what a nuisance, and felt
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  very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same time of her hat not the right
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  hat for the early morning? Was that it for if Hugh always made her
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  feel as he bustled on, raising his hat rather extravagantly and assuring her that
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  she might be a girl of eighteen, and of course he was coming to
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  her party tonight. Evelyn absolutely insisted only a little late he might be after
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  the party at the Palace to which he had to take one of Jim's boys.
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  She always felt a little skimpy beside Hugh, schoolgirlish, but attached to
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  him partly from having known him always, But she did think him a good
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  sort in his own way, though Richard was nearly driven mad by him.
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  And as for Peter Walsh, he had never to this day forgiven her for
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  liking him. She could remember seen after seen at Burton, Peter furious Hugh,
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  not of course his match in any way, but still not upon positive
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  imbecile as Peter made out, not a mere barber's block. When his old
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  mother wanted him to give up shooting or to take her to bath, he
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  did it without a word. He was really unselfish. And as for saying
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  as Peter did that he had no heart, no brain, nothing but the
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  manners and breeding of an English gentleman. That was only her dear Peter at
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  his worst. And he could be intolerable, he could be impossible, but
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  adorable to walk with. On a morning like this, June had drawn out
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  every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young.
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  Messages were passing from the fleet to the Admiralty, Arlington Street and Piccadilly
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  seemed to chafe the very air in the park and lift its leaves hotly,
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  brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved to dance to ride.
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  She had adored all that, for they might be parted for hundreds of
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  years, she and Peter. She never wrote a letter, and his were
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  dry sticks. But suddenly it would come over her. If he were with
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  me. Now, what would he say? Some days, some sights,
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  bringing him back to her, calmly, without the old bitterness, which perhaps
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  was the reward of having cared for people. They came back in the middle
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  of Saint James's Park on a fine morning, indeed they did. But Peter,
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  however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass,
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  and the little girl in pink Peter never saw a thing of all that he
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  would put on his spectacles. If she told him too, he would look.
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  It was the state of the world that interested him, Wagner, Pope's
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  poetry, people's characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul. How
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  he scolded her, How they argued she would marry a prime minister and stand
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  at the top of a staircase. The perfect hostess, he called her.
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  She had cried over it in her bedroom. She had the makings of the
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  perfect hostess, he said. So she would still find herself arguing in Saint
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  James's Park, still making out that she had been right, and she had
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  too not to marry him, For in marriage a little license, a little
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  independence, there must be between people living together day in day out, in
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  the same house, which Richard gave her, and she him, where was
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  he this morning? For instance? Some committee? She never asked what.
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  But with Peter everything had to be shared, everything gone into and it was
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  intolerable. And when it came to that scene in the little garden by the
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  fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed,
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  both of them ruined. She was convinced, though she had borne about with
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  her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart, the grief, the
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  anguish, and then the horror of the moment when someone told her at a
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  concert that he had married a woman he met on the boat going to India.
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  Never should she forget all that, cold heartless a prude, he called
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  her. Never could she understand how he cared, But those Indian women did,
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  presumably silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops. And she wasted her pity,
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  for he was quite happy, he assured her, perfectly happy, though he
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  had never done a thing that they talked of his whole life had been a
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  failure. It made her angry. Still she had reached the park gates.
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  She stood for a moment looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly. She would not
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  say of any one in the world now that they were this, or were
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  that. She felt very young at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced
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  like a knife through everything at the same time was outside looking on. She
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  had a perpetual sense as she watched the taxi cabs of being out out,
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  far out to sea and alone. She always had the feeling that it was
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  very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself
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  clever or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on
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  the few twigs of knowledge Fraeuleine Daniels gave them. She could not think.
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  She knew nothing, no language, no history. She scarcely read a book
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  now except memoirs in bed, and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing all
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  this, the cabs passing, and she would not say of Peter, She
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  would not say of herself, I am this, I am that. Her
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  only gift was knowing people, almost by instinct, she thought walking on.
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  If you put her in a room with someone up went her back like a
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  cat's or she purred. Devonshire House, bath House, the house with the
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  China cockatoo. She had seen them all lit up once and remembered Sylvia fred
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  Sally Seaton, such hosts of people and dancing all night, and the wagons
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  plotting past to market and driving home across the park. She remembered once throwing
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  a shilling into the serpentine, but everyone remembered what she loved? Was this
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  here now in front of her, the fat lady in the cab? Did
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  it matter, then, she asked herself, walking toward Bond Street. Did
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  it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without
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  her? Did she resent it? Or did it not become consoling to believe
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  that death ended absolutely? But that somehow, in the streets of London,
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  on the edge zbb and flow of things, here there she survived, Peter
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  survived, lived in each other, she being part. She was positive of
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  the trees at home, of the house there ugly rambling all to bits and
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  pieces, as it was part of people she had never met, being laid
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  out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on
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  their branches, as she had seen the trees lift the mist. But it
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  spread ever so far her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as
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  she looked into Hatchard's shop window. What was she trying to recover? What
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  image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread
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  open? Fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winter's
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  rages. This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all,
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  all men and women, a well of tears, tears and sorrows, courage
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  and endurance, a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example,
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  of the woman she admired most, Lady Besborough opening the bazaar. There were
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  Jurek's jaunts and jollities. There were Soapy Sponge and missus Asquith's memoirs, and
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  big game shooting in Nigeria, all spread open. Ever so many books there
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  were, but none that seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn whitbred and her
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  nursing home, Nothing that would serve to amuse her and make that indescribably dried
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  up little woman. Look as Clarissa came in, just for a moment cordial
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  before they settled down for the usual interminable talk of women's ailments. How much
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  she wanted it that people should look pleased. As she came in, Clarissa
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  thought and turned and walked back toward Bond Street, annoyed because it was silly
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  to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather, would she have been
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  one of those people like Richard, who did things for themselves, whereas she
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  thought, waiting to cross, half the time, she did things not simply,
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  not for themselves, but to make people think this or that. Perfect
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  idiocy she knew. And now the policeman held up his hand, for no
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  one was ever for a second taken in. Oh, if she could have
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  had her life over again, she thought, stepping on to the pavement,
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  could have looked even differently. She would have been, in the first place,
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  dark like Lady Besborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes.
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  She would have been like Lady Becksborough, slow and stately, rather large,
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  interested in politics, like a man with a country house, very dignified,
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  very sincere, instead of which she had a narrow pea stick figure,
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  a ridiculous little face beaked like a bird's that she held herself well, was
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  true, and had nice hands and feet, and dressed well, considering that
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  she spent little but often. Now this body she wore, she stopped to
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  look at a Dutch picture. This body, with all its capacities, seemed
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  nothing, nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible,
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  unseen, unknown, there being no more marrying, no more having of
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  children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of
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  them up Bond Street, This being missus Dalloway, not even Clarissa anymore,
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  This being Missus Richard Dolloway. Bond Street fascinated her. Bond Street, early
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  in the morning, in the season, its flags flying, its shops,
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  no splash, no glitter, one roll of tweed in the shop where her
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  father had bought his suits for fifty years. A few pearls salmon on an
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  ice block, that is all, she said, looking at the fishmongers,
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  That is all, she repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of
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  a glove shop, where before the war you could buy almost perfect gloves.
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  And her old uncle William used to say, a lady is known by her
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  shoes and her gloves. He had turned on his bed one morning in the
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  middle of the war, he had said, I have had enough gloves and
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  shoes. She had a passion for gloves, but her own daughter her Elizabeth
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  cared not a straw for either of them. End of chapter one, chapter
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  two. Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bone Street to
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  a shop where they kept flowers for her when she gave a party. Elizabeth
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  really cared for her dog most of all. The whole house this morning smelt
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  of tar. Still better poor Grizzle than miss Kelman. Better distemper and tar
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  and all the rest of it than sitting nude in a stuffy bedroom with a
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  prayer book. Bet anything, she was inclined to say. But it might
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  be only a phase, as Richard said, such as all girls go through.
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  It might be falling in love. But why with miss Kilman, who
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  had been badly treated? Of course, one must make allowances for that,
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  And Richard said she was very able, had a really historical mind. Anyhow,
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  they were inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to communion,
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  And now she dressed. How she treated people who came to lunch,
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  She did not care a bit, it being her experience that the religious ecstasy
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  made people callous. So dead causes dulled their feelings. For Miss Kilman would
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  do anything for the Russians, starved her sell for the Austrians, but in
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  private inflicted positive torture. So insensitive she was dressed in a green Macintosh coat.
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  Year in, year out. She wore that coat. She perspired.
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  She was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority,
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  your inferiority. How poor or she was, how rich you were, how
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  she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed, or a rug,
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  or whatever it might be. All is so rusted with that grievance,
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  sticking in it her dismissal from school during the war, Poor, embittered,
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  unfortunate creature. For it was not her one hated, but the idea of
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  her, which undoubtedly had gathered into itself a great deal that was not.
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  Miss Kilman had become one of those specters with which one battle was in the
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  night, one of those specters who stand astride us and suck up half our
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  life blood, dominators and tyrants. For no doubt, with another throw of
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  the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would
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  have loved Miss Kilmen. But not in this world. No, it rasped
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  her, though, to have stirring about this brutal monster. Dear twigs cracked,
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  king, and few hoofs planted down in the depths of that leaf encumbered
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  forest. The soul never to be content, quite or quite secure, for
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  at any moment the brute would be stirring. This hatred, which, especially
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  since the illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in a
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  spine, gave her physical pain, and made all pleasure and beauty, in
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  friendship, in being well, in being loved, and making a home delightful,
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  rock quiver and bend. As indeed there were a monster grubbing at the
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  roots, as if the whole panoply of content were nothing but self love.
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  This hatred nonsense, nonsense, she cried to herself, Pushing through the swing
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  doors of mulberries, the florists. She advanced, light, tall, very
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  upright, to be greeted at once by button faced Miss Pym, whose hands
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  were always bright red, as if they had been stood in cold watered the
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  flowers. There were flowers, dulphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac,
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  and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses, there were irises.
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  Ah, yes, so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she
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  stood talking to Miss Pim, who owed her help and thought her kind for
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  kind she had been years ago, very kind, But she looked older this
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  year, turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and
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  nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in after the street
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  uproar the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness, and then opening her eyes,
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  how fresh like frilled linen, clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays.
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  The roses looked and dark and primed, the red carnations holding the heads up,
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  and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet snow white
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  pale as if it were the evening, and girls and muslin frocks came out
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  to pick sweet peas and roses. After the superb summer's day with its almost
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  blue black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its aarum lilies, was
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  over. And it was the moment between six and seven when every flower,
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  roses, carnations, irises, lilac glows white, violet, red, deep
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  orange. Every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the
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  misty beds. How she loved the gray white mouths spinning in and out,
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  over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses. And as she began to
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  go with Miss Pim from jar to jar, choosing nonsense, nonsense, she
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  said to herself more and more gently, as it is beauty, this scent,
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  this color, and Miss Pym, liking her, trusted her were a
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  wave which she let flow over her and surmounted that hatred, that monster,
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  surmounted all, and it lifted her up and up. When oh, a
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  pistol shot in the street outside, And dear those motor cars, said miss
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  Pim, going to the window to look, and coming back and smiling apologetically
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  with their hands full of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those
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  tires of motor cars, were all her falls. The violent explosion which made
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  missus Danaway jump and Miss Pim go to the window and apologize, came from
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  a motor car which had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulbery's
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  shop window. Passers by, who of course stopped and stared, had just
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  time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove gray upholstery.
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  Before a male hand drew the blind and there was nothing to be seen
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  except a square of dove gray it. Rumors were at once in circulation from
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  the middle of Bond Street, Oxford Street, on one side, to Atkinson's
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  then shop on the other, passing invisibly, inaudibly like a cloud, swift,
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  veil like upon the hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud,
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  sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which his second before had been utterly disorderly,
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  But now mystery had brushed them with her wing. They had heard the voice
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  of authority. The spirit of religion was abroad, with her eyes bandaged tight
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  and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had been seen?
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  Was it the Prince of Wales's, the Queen's, the Prime Minister's, Whose
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  face was it? And nobody knew? Edgar J. Watkiss, with his
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  roll of lead piping round his arm, said audibly humorously, of course the
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  poor Minister's car scept Miss Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass,
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  heard him to Miss Warren Smith, aged about thirty pale faced, beak nosed,
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  wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes, which had
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  that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The world
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  has raised its whip, where will it descend? Everything had come to a
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  standstill. The throb of the motor engine sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through
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  an entire body. The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped
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  outside Mulberry's shop window. Old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black
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  parasols. Here a green, here a red parasol opened with a little pop.
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  Missus Dollaway coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas,
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  looked out with her little pink face pursed in inquiry. Everyone looked at the
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  motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off, Traffic accumulated,
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  and there the motor car stood with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious
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  pattern like a tree, Sepnimus thought, And this gradual drawing together of everything
• 31:11
  to one center before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to
• 31:15
  the surface and was about to burst into flames. Terrified him. The world
• 31:22
  wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am
• 31:26
  blocking the way, he thought, Was he not being looked at and pointed
• 31:32
  at? Was he not awaited there, rooted to the pavement for a purpose?
• 31:37
  But for what purpose? Let us go on, Septimus, said his
• 31:42
  wife. A little woman with large eyes and a sallow pointed face, an
• 31:48
  Italian girl. But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the motor car and
• 31:53
  the tree pattern on the blinds. Was it the queen in there? The
• 31:57
  queen going shopping? The chauffeur who had been opening something, turning something,
• 32:04
  shutting something, got on to the box. Come on, said Lucrezia.
• 32:09
  But her husband, for they had been married four five years now, jumped
• 32:15
  started and said all right, angrily, as if she had interrupted him.
• 32:21
  People must notice, people must see people, she thought, looking at the
• 32:25
  crowd staring at the motor car, the English people with their children and their
• 32:30
  horses and their clothes, which she had admired in a way. But they
• 32:35
  were people now, Because Septimists said, I will kill myself, an awful
• 32:40
  thing to say. Suppose they had hurt him. She looked at the crowd.
• 32:47
  Help. Help. She wanted to cry out the butcher's boys and women
• 32:52
  help. On the last autumn, she and Septimus stood on the embankment,
• 32:55
  wrapped in the same cloak, and Septimus reading instead of talking. She had
• 33:01
  snatched it from him and laughed in the old man's face. Who saw them?
• 33:06
  But failure one conceals. She must take him away into some park.
• 33:12
  Now we will cross, She said she had a right to his arm,
• 33:15
  though it was without feeling he would give her, who was so simple,
• 33:21
  so impulsive, only twenty four without friends in England, who had left Italy
• 33:27
  for his sake a piece of bone. The motor car, with his blind
• 33:31
  drawn and an air of inscrutable reserve, proceeded towards Piccadilly, still gazed at,
• 33:37
  still ruffling, the faces on both sides of the street of the same
• 33:40
  dark breath of veneration, Whether for Queen, Prince or Prime minister. Nobody
• 33:45
  knew the face itself had been seen only once by three people for a few
• 33:51
  seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute, but there could be no
• 33:55
  doubt that greatness was seated within Greatness was passing hidden down Bond Street, removed
• 34:04
  only by hand's breadth from ordinary people, who might, now for the first
• 34:07
  and last time, be within speaking distance of the Majesty of England, of
• 34:13
  the enduring symbol of the state, which will be known to curious antiquaries sifting
• 34:16
  the ruins of time. When London is a grass grown path, and all
• 34:21
  those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding
• 34:25
  rings mixed up in their dust, and the girl's stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth.
• 34:30
  The face in the motor car will then be known. It is probably
• 34:35
  the Queen, thought missus Dollaway, coming out of Moulbery's with the flowers.
• 34:39
  The Queen, and for a second she wore a look of extreme dignity,
• 34:44
  standing by the flower shop in the sunlight, where the car passed at a
• 34:46
  foot's pace with his blinds drawn. The Queen going to some hospital, the
• 34:52
  Queen opening some bazaar, thought Clarissa. The crush was terrific for the time
• 34:59
  of day. Lord's ascot Hurlingham. What was it, she wondered, for
• 35:04
  the street was blocked, the British middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of
• 35:08
  omnibuses with parsels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day like this
• 35:14
  were she thought, more ridiculous, more unlike anything there has ever been,
• 35:20
  than one could conceive, and the Queen herself held up. The Queen herself
• 35:25
  unable to pass. Clarissa was suspended on one side of Brook Street, Sir
• 35:31
  John Buckhurst, the old judge, on the other, with the car between
• 35:35
  them. Sir John had laid down the law for years and liked a well
• 35:37
  dressed woman. When the chauffeur, leaning ever so slightly, said or showed
• 35:44
  something to the policeman, who saluted and raised his arm and jerked his head
• 35:47
  and moved the omnibus to the side, and the car passed through, slowly
• 35:52
  and very silently. It took its way, Clarissa guessed. Clarissa knew,
• 35:58
  of course, she had seen something white, magical, circular in the footman's
• 36:02
  hand, a disk inscribed with a name, the Queens, the Prince of
• 36:07
  Wales as the prime Ministers, which, by force of its own luster,
• 36:13
  burnt its way through. Clarissa saw the car diminishing, disappearing to blaze among
• 36:17
  cattilabras, glittering stars, breast stiff with oak leaves, hue, white bread,
• 36:23
  and all his colleagues, the gentlemen of England that night in Buckingham Palace,
• 36:30
  and Clarissa too gave a party. She stiffened a little so she would
• 36:35
  stand at the top of the stairs. The car had gone, but it
• 36:40
  had left a slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailor's
• 36:45
  shops on both sides of Bond Street. For thirty seconds, all heads were
• 36:50
  inclined the same way to the window, choosing a pair of gloves, should
• 36:57
  they be to the elbow or above it? Lemon or pale? Gray Lady
• 37:00
  stopped when the sentence was finished. Something had happened, something so trifling in
• 37:07
  single instances that no mathematical though capable of a transmitting shocks in China, could
• 37:12
  register the vibration, yet in its fullness, rather formidable, and its common
• 37:17
  appeal emotional, For in all the hat shops and tailor's shops, strangers looked
• 37:22
  at each other and thought of the dead of the flag of Empire. In
• 37:29
  a public house in a back street, a colonial insulted the house of Windsor,
• 37:32
  which led to words, broken beer glasses and a general shindy, which
• 37:38
  echoed strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen threaded with
• 37:43
  pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface agitation of the passing car
• 37:49
  as it sunk graced something very profound. Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned
• 37:55
  down Saint James Street. Tall men, men of robust physique, well dressed
• 38:01
  men with their tail coats and their white slips, and their hair raked back
• 38:06
  coop for reasons difficult to discriminate, were standing on the bare window of Brookses,
• 38:12
  with the hands behind the tails of their coats, looking out. Perceived
• 38:15
  instinctively that greatness was passing, and the pale light of the immortal presence fell
• 38:22
  upon them as it had fallen upon Clarissa Dallaway. At once. They stood
• 38:25
  even straighter and removed their hands, and seemed ready to attend their sovereign,
• 38:30
  if need be, to the cannon's mouth, as their ancestors had done before
• 38:35
  them. The white busts and the little tables in the background, covered with
• 38:39
  copies of the tattler and siphons of soda water seemed to approve, seemed to
• 38:45
  indicate. The flowing corn, and the manor houses of England, and to
• 38:50
  return the frail harm of the motor wheels as the walls of a whispering gallery
• 38:53
  return a single voice, expanded and made sonorous by the might of a whole
• 38:58
  cathedral. Old More pratted with her flowers on the pavement, wished the dear
• 39:02
  boy. Well, it was the Prince of Wales, for certain, and
• 39:07
  would have tossed the price of a pot of beer a bunch of roses into
• 39:09
  Saint james Street out of sheer light, heartenedness and contempt of poverty, had
• 39:15
  she not seen the Constable's eye upon her, discouraging an old irishman's loyalty,
• 39:21
  the sentries that Saint James's saluted Queen Alexandra's policeman approved. A small crowd meanwhile,
• 39:29
  had gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace, listlessly yet confidently, poor
• 39:35
  people all of them. They waited, looked at the palace itself, with
• 39:38
  the flag flying, at Victoria billowing on her mound, admired her shelves of
• 39:45
  running water, her geraniums singled out from the motor cars, and them all
• 39:49
  first, This one than that bestowed emotion vainly upon commoners out for a drive
• 39:55
  recalled their tribute, to keep it unspent while this car passed that, and
• 40:00
  all the time let rumor accumulate in their veins and thrill the nerves and their
• 40:06
  thighs at the thought of royalty looking at them, the Queen bowing, the
• 40:10
  Prince saluting as the thoughts of the heavenly life Deville bestowed upon kings of the
• 40:16
  equerries and deep curtsies of the Queen's old doll's house of Princess Mary married to
• 40:22
  an Englishman, and the Prince Ah, the Prince who took wonderfully, they
• 40:28
  said, after old King Edward, but was never so much slimmer. The
• 40:32
  Prince lived at Saint James's, but he might come along in the morning to
• 40:37
  visit his mother, so Sarah Blutchely said, with her baby in her arms,
• 40:42
  tipping her foot up and down as though she were by her own fender
• 40:45
  in Pimlico, but keeping her eyes on them all while Emily Coats ranged over
• 40:51
  the palace windows, and the thought of the housemaids, the innumerable housemaids.
• 40:55
  The bedrooms see innumerable bedroom joined by an elderly gentleman with an Aberdeen terrier by
• 41:04
  men without occupation the crowd increased. Little mister Bowley, who had rooms in
• 41:09
  the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life, but
• 41:14
  could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally by this sort of thing. Poor
• 41:20
  women waiting to see the queen go past, poor women, nice little children,
• 41:24
  orphans, widows the wall. Tut Tut actually had tears in his eyes.
• 41:30
  A breeze flaunting ever so warmly down the mall, through the thin trees,
• 41:36
  past the bronze heroes lifted some flag flying in the British breast of mister
• 41:40
  Bowley, and he raised his hat as the car turned into the mall,
• 41:45
  and held it high as the car approached, and let the poor mothers of
• 41:49
  Pimlico press close to him, and stood very upright. The car came on
• 41:55
  suddenly, and missus Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of an
• 42:00
  aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was, coming
• 42:05
  over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted,
• 42:09
  actually writing something making letters in the sky. Everyone looked up, dropping
• 42:16
  dead down. The aeroplane sawed straight up, curved in a loop raced sank
• 42:23
  rose, and whatever it did, wherever it went out fluttered behind it a
• 42:29
  thick, ruffled bar of white smoke, which curled and wreathed upon the sky
• 42:34
  in letters. But what letters? A sea? Was it? An e?
• 42:40
  That an l? Only for a moment did they lie still? Then
• 42:45
  they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the
• 42:49
  aeroplane shot further away, and again, in a fresh space of sky began
• 42:53
  writing a k an e. Why perhaps glare go? Said Missus Coates in
• 43:01
  a strained, awe stricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby,
• 43:07
  lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up. Creamo murmured Missus
• 43:14
  Bletchley like a sleepwalker, with his hat held out perfectly still in his hand.
• 43:20
  Mister Burley gazed straight up all down the mall, people were standing and
• 43:24
  looking up into the sky. As they looked, the whole world became perfectly
• 43:30
  silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one goal leading,
• 43:37
  then another. And in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor,
• 43:43
  in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there
• 43:47
  among the gulls the aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it lightd swiftly,
• 43:55
  freely, like a skater. That's an said Missus Bletchley, or a
• 44:02
  dancer. It's toffee, murmured mister Bowleigh. And the car went in at
• 44:08
  the gates, and nobody looked at it, and shutting off the smoke.
• 44:13
  Away and away it rushed, and the smoke faded and assembled itself round the
• 44:17
  broad white shapes of the clouds it had gone. It was behind the clouds,
• 44:23
  there was no sound. The clouds to which the letters E. G
• 44:29
  or L had attached themselves, moved freely, as if destined to cross from
• 44:34
  west to east on a mission of the greatest importance which will never be revealed.
• 44:38
  And yet certainly so it was a mission of the correctst importance. Then
• 44:45
  suddenly, as a train comes out of a tunnel, the aeroplane rushed out
• 44:50
  of the clouds again, the sound boring into the ears of all people in
• 44:53
  the mall, in the Green Park and Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in
• 44:58
  Regent's Park, and the bar smoke curved behind, and it dropped down,
• 45:02
  and it soared up and wrote one letter after another, but what word was
• 45:07
  it writing? Lucrezia Warren Smith, sitting by a husband's side on a seat
• 45:14
  in Regent's Park in the Broadwalk, looked up, Look, Look, Septimus.
• 45:20
  She cried for doctor Holmes had told her to make a husband who had
• 45:24
  nothing whatever seriously the matter with him, but was a little out of thoughts,
• 45:29
  taken interest in things outside himself, so thought Septimus, looking up,
• 45:35
  They are signaling to me, not indeed in actual words, that is,
• 45:40
  he could not read the language yet, but it was plain enough. This
• 45:45
  beauty, this exquisite beauty. And tears filled his eyes as he looked at
• 45:52
  the smoke, words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in
• 45:57
  their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness, one shape after another of unimaginable beauty,
• 46:05
  and signaling their intention to provide him for nothing, for ever, for looking
• 46:09
  merely with beauty more beauty. Tears ran down his cheeks. It was toffee.
• 46:19
  They were advertising toffee, a nursemaid Toldreesia. Together they began to spell
• 46:25
  t oh f k ah, said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say
• 46:37
  k r close to his ear, deeply, softly like a mellow organ,
• 46:45
  but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which harasped his spine
• 46:49
  deliciously and sent her running up into his brain waves, a sound which concussing
• 46:54
  broke a marvelous discovery, indeed, that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions,
• 47:02
  for one, must be scientific above all, scientific can quicken trees into
• 47:08
  life. Happily, Loresia put her hand with a tremendous weight on his knee,
• 47:14
  so that he was weighted down, transfixed. Or the excitement of the
• 47:17
  elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling, with all their leaves alight,
• 47:22
  and the color thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow
• 47:27
  wave, like plumes on horses heads, feathers on ladies. So proudly they
• 47:32
  rose and felt so superbly would have sent him mad. But he would not
• 47:38
  go mad. He would shut his eyes, he would see no more.
• 47:46
  End of chapter two, Chapter three. But they beckoned, leaves were alive,
• 47:52
  trees were alive, and the leaves, being connected by millions of fibers,
• 47:58
  with his own body there in the seat, fanned it up and down.
• 48:02
  When the branch stretched. He to maid that statement. The sparrows fluttering,
• 48:07
  rising and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern. The white
• 48:14
  and blue barred with black branches. Sounds made harmonies with premeditation. The spaces
• 48:20
  between them were as significant as the sounds. A child cried brightly far away,
• 48:27
  a horn sounded. All taken together meant the birth of a new religion,
• 48:32
  Septimus said Rezia. He started violently. People must notice, I'm going
• 48:39
  to walk to the fountain and back, she said, for she could stand
• 48:45
  it no longer. Doctor Holmes might say there was nothing the matter. Far
• 48:51
  Rather would she that he were dead. She could not sit beside him when
• 48:55
  he stared so and did not see her, and made everything terrible. Sky
• 49:00
  and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles falling down. All
• 49:06
  were terrible. And he would not kill himself. And she could tell no
• 49:12
  one Septimus has been working too hard. That was all she could say to
• 49:16
  her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought she could tell
• 49:22
  nobody, not even Septimus. Now, And looking back, she saw him
• 49:27
  sitting in his shabby overcoat, alone on the seat, hunched up, staring,
• 49:32
  And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself,
• 49:37
  But septimists had fought. He was brave. He was not septimist. Now
• 49:42
  she put on her lace collar, she put on her new hat, and
• 49:45
  he never noticed. And he was happy without her. Nothing could make her
• 49:50
  happy without him. Nothing he was selfish. So men are for he was
• 49:55
  not ill. Doctor Holmes said, there was no thing the matter with him.
• 50:01
  She spread her hand before her look. Her wedding ring slipped. She
• 50:06
  had grown so thin. It was she who suffered, But she had nobody
• 50:12
  to tell. Far was Italy, and the white houses in the room where
• 50:16
  her sisters sat making hats, and the streets crowded every evening, with people
• 50:23
  walking, laughing out loud, not half alive, like people here huddled up
• 50:30
  in bath chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers stuck in pots. For
• 50:36
  you should see the Milan gardens, she said aloud, but to whom there
• 50:40
  was nobody. Her words faded, So a rocket fades, its sparks,
• 50:46
  having grazed their way into the night, surrendered to it. Dark descends pours
• 50:52
  over the outlines of houses and towers, Bleak hill sides soften and fall in.
• 51:00
  But though they are gone, the night is full of them, Robbed
• 51:04
  of color, blank of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what
• 51:09
  the frank daylight fails to transmit, the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there
• 51:16
  in the darkness, huddled together in the darkness, reft of the relief which
• 51:22
  dawn brings. When washing the walls white and gray, spotting each window pane,
• 51:30
  lifting the mist from the fields, showing the red brown cows peacefully grazing.
• 51:36
  All is once more decked out to the eye exists again. I am
• 51:43
  alone, I am alone, she cried by the fountain in Regent's Park,
• 51:49
  staring at the Indian and Is cross. As perhaps at midnight, when all
• 51:54
  boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans
• 52:00
  saw it, lying cloudy when they landed, and the hills had no names,
• 52:06
  and rivers wound. They knew not where. Such was her darkness.
• 52:12
  When suddenly, as if a shelf were shot forth, and she stood on
• 52:16
  it, she said how she was his wife, married years ago in Milan,
• 52:22
  his wife, and would never never tell that he was mad. Turning,
• 52:28
  the shelf fell down down she dropped, for he was gone, she
• 52:32
  thought gone, as he threatened to kill himself, to throw himself under a
• 52:37
  cart. But know there he was still sitting alone on the seat in his
• 52:43
  shabby overcoat, his legs crossed, staring, talking aloud. Men must not
• 52:50
  cut down trees. There is a god, he noted. Such revelations on
• 52:55
  the backs of envelopes changed the world. No one kills from hatred, naked
• 53:01
  known. He wrote it down. He waited, He listened. A sparrow
• 53:07
  perched on the railing opposite, chirped Septimus, septimus, four or five times
• 53:14
  over, and went on, drawing its notes out to sing freshly and piercingly
• 53:19
  in Greek words, how there is no crime. And joined by another sparrow,
• 53:23
  they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees,
• 53:28
  in the meatter of life, beyond a river, where the dead walk,
• 53:31
  how there is no death. There was his hand there. The dead white
• 53:37
  things were assembling behind the railings opposite, but he dared not look. Evans
• 53:44
  was behind the railings. What are you saying, said Rezia, suddenly sitting
• 53:49
  down by him, interrupted again. She was always interrupting. Away from people.
• 53:55
  They must get away from people, he said, jumping up right away
• 54:00
  over there where there were chairs beneath a tree, and the long slope of
• 54:05
  the park dipped like a length of green stuff, with a ceiling cloth of
• 54:09
  blue and pink smoke high above. And there was a rampart of far irregular
• 54:15
  houses hazed in smoke. The traffic hummed in a circle, and on the
• 54:21
  right dun colored animals stretched long necks over the zoo palings, barking, howling.
• 54:29
  There they sat down under a tree. Look, she implored him,
• 54:34
  pointing at a little troop of boys carrying cricket stumps, and one shuffled,
• 54:39
  spun round on his heel and shuffled as if he were acting a clown at
• 54:45
  the music hall. Look, she implored him, for Doctor Holmes had told
• 54:51
  her to make him notice real things. Go to a music hall, play
• 54:54
  cricket. That was the very game, doctor Holmes, said, A nice
• 54:59
  out of door game, the very game for her husband. Look, she
• 55:04
  repeated, Look, the unseen bait him. The voice which now communicated with
• 55:10
  him, who was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately take him from
• 55:15
  life to death, the lord who had come to renew society, who lay
• 55:22
  like a coverlet a snow blanket, smitten only by the sun, forever,
• 55:25
  unrested, suffering, forever, the escapegoat, the eternal sufferer. But he
• 55:31
  did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of
• 55:35
  his hand, that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness. Look, she repeated,
• 55:42
  for he must not talk aloud to himself out of doors. Oh look,
• 55:45
  she implored him. But what was there to look at? A few
• 55:50
  sheep that was all the way to Regent's Park tube station. Could they tell
• 55:57
  her the way to Regent's Park tubes? Mazie Johnson wanted to know. She
• 56:02
  was only up from Edinburgh two days ago. Not this way over there,
• 56:08
  Rezia exclaimed, waving her aside lest she should see Septimus. Both seemed queer.
• 56:17
  Mazie Johnson thought everything, Seeing very queer in London for the first time,
• 56:23
  come to take up a post at her uncle's in Ludenhall Street, and
• 56:28
  now walking through Regent's Park in the morning. This couple on the chairs gave
• 56:34
  her quite a turn, the young woman seeming foreign, the man looking queer.
• 56:38
  So that should she be very old, she would still remember and make
• 56:43
  it jangle again among her memories how she had walked through Regent's Park on a
• 56:47
  fine summer's morning fifty years ago. For she was only nineteen and had got
• 56:54
  her way at last to come to London. And now how queer it was
• 56:59
  this coup. She had asked the way of, and the girl started and
• 57:02
  jerked her hand, and the man he seemed awfully odd, quarreling, perhaps
• 57:08
  parting forever. Perhaps something was up, she knew. And now all these
• 57:14
  people she returned to the broad walk, the stone basins, the prim flowers,
• 57:20
  the old men and women invalids, most of them in bath chairs,
• 57:24
  all seemed after Edinburgh, so queer. And Maizie Johnson as she joined that
• 57:30
  gently trudging, vaguely gazing breeze kissed company, squirrels perching and preening, sparrow
• 57:37
  fountains fluttering for crumbs, dogs busy with the railings, busy with each other
• 57:44
  by the soft, warm air washed over them, and lent to the fixed,
• 57:47
  unsurprised gaze with which they received life, something whimsical and mollified. Maizie
• 57:53
  Johnson positively felt she must cry, Oh, for that young man on the
• 57:59
  seat had given her quite a turn. Something was up, she knew.
• 58:04
  Horror, horror, she wanted to cry. She had left her people.
• 58:07
  They'd warned her what would happen. Why hadn't she stayed at home, she
• 58:13
  cried, twisting the nod of the iron railing that girl, thought Missus Dempster,
• 58:19
  who saved crests for the squirrels and often ate her lunch in Regent's Park,
• 58:22
  don't know a thing yet. And really it seemed to her better to
• 58:27
  be a little stout, a little slack, a little moderate in one's expectations.
• 58:32
  Percy drank were better to have a son, thought Missus Dempster. She
• 58:37
  had had a hard time of it, and couldn't help smiling at a girl
• 58:40
  like that. You'll get married for your pretty enough, thought Missus Dempster.
• 58:45
  Get married, she thought, and then you'll know, oh the cooks and
• 58:49
  so on. Every man has his ways. But whether I'd have chosen quite
• 58:53
  like that if I could have known, thought Missus Dempster, And could not
• 58:57
  help wishing to whisper a word to Maisie Johnson, to feel on the creased
• 59:01
  pouch of her morn old face, the kiss of pity. For it's been
• 59:05
  a hard life, thought Missus Dempster. What hadn't she given to it?
• 59:08
  Roses figure her feet too. She drew the knob lumps beneath her skirt.
• 59:15
  Roses, she thought sardonically, all trash, my dear, For really,
• 59:19
  what with eating, drinking and mating, the bad days in good life had
• 59:22
  been no mere matter of roses. And what was more, let me tell
• 59:27
  you, Carrie Dempster had no wish to change her lot with any woman's in
• 59:30
  Kentish town. But she implored pity, pity for the loss of roses.
• 59:36
  Pity she asked of Maizie Johnson standing by the highacynthe beds ah. But that
• 59:43
  aeroplane hadn't. Missus Dempster always longed to see foreign parts. She had a
• 59:47
  nephew, a missionary, its sword and shot. She always went on the
• 59:52
  sea at Margaret, not out of sight of land. But she had no
• 59:57
  patience with women who were afraid of water. It swept and fell, her
• 1:00:00
  stomach was in her mouth. Up again, there's a fine young fellow aboard
• 1:00:05
  of it. Missus Dempster raged in our way, and away it went fast
• 1:00:09
  and fading away in a way aeroplane shot, soaring over Greenwich, and all
• 1:00:15
  the masts over the little island of Gray Churches. Saint Paul's and the expressed
• 1:00:20
  hill on either side of London Fields spread out in dark brown woods, where
• 1:00:23
  adventurous thrushes hopping boldly, glancing quickly snaps the snail and tapped him on a
• 1:00:30
  stone, once, twice, thrice, Away and away, aeroplane shot,
• 1:00:35
  till it was nothing but a bright spark, an aspiration, a concentration of
• 1:00:39
  symbol. So it seemed to mister Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf
• 1:00:45
  at Greenwich, of man soul of his determination, thought mister Bentley, sweeping
• 1:00:50
  round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house,
• 1:00:53
  by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, a Mendelian theory.
• 1:01:00
  Away the aeroplane shot. Then, while a seedy looking, non descript man
• 1:01:05
  carrying a leather bag stood on the steps of Saint Paul's Cathedral and hesitated,
• 1:01:09
  for within was what balm? How great a welcome, How many tombs with
• 1:01:14
  banners waving over them, tookens of victories, not over armies, but over
• 1:01:19
  he thought, that plaguey spirit of truth seeking, which leaves me at present
• 1:01:22
  without a situation. And more than that, the cathedral offers company, he
• 1:01:27
  thought, invites you to membership of a society. Great men belonged to it,
• 1:01:31
  Martyrs have died for it. Why not enter in? He thought,
• 1:01:35
  put his leather bag stuffed with pamphlets before an altar across a symbol of something
• 1:01:39
  which has soared beyond seeking and questing and knocking of words together, and has
• 1:01:45
  become all spirit, disembodied, ghostly. Why not enter in? He thought,
• 1:01:49
  And while he hesitated, out threw the aeroplane over Bludgate's circuits. It
• 1:01:54
  was strange, it was still not a sound was to be heard above the
• 1:01:58
  traffic. Guided it seemed, sped of his own free will, and now
• 1:02:02
  curving up and up, straight up, like something mounting in ecstasy, in
• 1:02:07
  pure delight. Out from behind poured white smoke, looping writing a T an
• 1:02:13
  O an F. What are they looking at? Said Clarissa Dollaway to the
• 1:02:19
  maid who opened her door. The hall of the house was cool, as
• 1:02:22
  of ault. Missus Dollaway raised her hand to her eyes, and as the
• 1:02:28
  maid shut the door to and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she
• 1:02:32
  felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the
• 1:02:37
  familiar veils and the response to old devotions. The cook whistled in the kitchen,
• 1:02:43
  she heard the click of the typewriter. It was her life, and
• 1:02:46
  bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt
• 1:02:51
  blessed and purified, saying to herself as she took the pad with the telephone
• 1:02:55
  message on it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of life,
• 1:03:00
  Flowers of darkness they are, she thought, as if some lovely rose
• 1:03:04
  had blossomed for her eyes. Only not for a moment did she believe in
• 1:03:08
  God. But all the more, she thought, taking up the pad,
• 1:03:12
  must one repay in daily life. Two servants, Yes, to dogs and
• 1:03:16
  canaries, above all to Richard, her husband, who was the foundation of
• 1:03:21
  it, of the gay sounds, of the green lights of the cook,
• 1:03:24
  even whistling for it. Missus Walker was irish and whistled all day long.
• 1:03:30
  One must pay back from this secret, depositive, exquisite moments, she thought,
• 1:03:35
  lifting the pad, while Lucy stood by her, trying to explain how
• 1:03:39
  mister Dollaway Man Clarissa read on the telephone pad. Lady Bruton wishes to know
• 1:03:45
  if mister Galloway will lunch with her today. Mister Dollaway man told me to
• 1:03:52
  tell you he would be lunching out. Dear, said Clarissa, and Lucy
• 1:03:58
  shared as she meant her to her disappointment, but not the pang felt the
• 1:04:03
  concord between them took the hint thought how the gentry love gilded her own future
• 1:04:09
  with calm and taking Missus Delaway's parasol, handled it like a sacred weapon which
• 1:04:15
  a goddess, having acquitted herself honorably in the field of battle sheds, and
• 1:04:19
  placed it in the umbrella. Stand. Fear no more, said Clarissa.
• 1:04:24
  Fear no more. The heat of the sun, for the shock of Lady
• 1:04:28
  Bruden asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood
• 1:04:33
  shiver as a plant on the river bed feels the shock of a passing or
• 1:04:39
  and shivers. So she rocked, so she shivered. Milicent Pruden, whose
• 1:04:45
  lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. No
• 1:04:50
  vulgar jealousy could separate her from Richard. But she feared time itself, and
• 1:04:57
  read on Lady Bruton's face as if it had been a dial cut in impassive
• 1:05:01
  stone. The dwindling of light, how year by year her share was sliced,
• 1:05:06
  how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of
• 1:05:12
  absorbing, as in the youthful years. The colors salts, tones of existence,
• 1:05:17
  so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she
• 1:05:20
  stood, hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing room, in exquisite
• 1:05:26
  suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging, while the sea darkens
• 1:05:30
  and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threatened to break but only gently
• 1:05:35
  split their surface, roll and conceal, and in crest as they just turn
• 1:05:40
  over the weeds with pearl. She put the pad on the hall table.
• 1:05:45
  She began to go slowly upstairs, with her hand on the banisters, as
• 1:05:49
  if she had left a party where now this friend, now that had flashed
• 1:05:55
  back her face her voice, had shut the door and gone out, and
• 1:05:59
  stood alone angle figure against the appalling night, or rather, to be accurate,
• 1:06:03
  against the stair of this matter of fact, June morning soft with a
• 1:06:08
  glow of rose petals. For some she knew and felt it as she paused
• 1:06:13
  by the open staircase window, which led in blinds, flapping dogs, barking,
• 1:06:17
  let in, she thought, feeling herself suddenly shriveled, aged, restless
• 1:06:24
  and grinding, blowing, flowering of the day, out of doors, out
• 1:06:27
  of the window, out of her body and brain, which now failed.
• 1:06:30
  Since Lady Bruton, whose launch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had
• 1:06:34
  not asked her like a nun withdrawing or a child exploring a tower, she
• 1:06:41
  went upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was
• 1:06:45
  the green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the heart
• 1:06:49
  of life. An attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel at
• 1:06:55
  midday. They must as robe. She pierced the pincushion and later feathered yellow
• 1:07:00
  hat on the bed. The sheets were clean, tight, stretched in a
• 1:07:03
  broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be.
• 1:07:11
  The Canada was half burned down, and she had read deep in Barren
• 1:07:15
  Marbeau's memoirs. She had read late at night of the Retreat from Moscow,
• 1:07:19
  for the house sat so long that Richard insisted, after her illness, that
• 1:07:25
  she must sleep undisturbed. And really she preferred to read of the Retreat from
• 1:07:30
  Moscow. He knew it. So the room was an attic, the bed
• 1:07:34
  narrow, and lying there reading, for she slept badly. She could not
• 1:07:39
  dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth, which clung to her like a sheet lovely
• 1:07:45
  in girlhood. Suddenly there came a moment, for example, on the river
• 1:07:49
  beneath the woods at Cleeveden, when through some contraction of this cold spirit she
• 1:07:56
  had failed him. And then at Constantinople, and again and again she could
• 1:08:01
  see what she lacked. It was not beauty, it was not mind.
• 1:08:05
  It was something central which permeated, something warm, which broke up surfaces and
• 1:08:12
  rippled the cold contact of men and woman, or of women together. For
• 1:08:16
  that she could dimly proceed. She resented it had a scruple picked up heaven
• 1:08:21
  knows where, or as she felt sent by nature, who was invariably wise.
• 1:08:27
  Yet she could not resist, sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman,
• 1:08:31
  not a girl, of a woman confessing as to her. They often
• 1:08:35
  did some scrape, some folly, And whether it was pity or their beauty,
• 1:08:42
  or that she was older, or some accident like a faint scent or
• 1:08:45
  a violin next door. So strange is the power of sounds. At certain
• 1:08:50
  moments. She did undoubtedly then feel what in felt only for a moment,
• 1:08:56
  but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, tinge like a blush
• 1:09:00
  which one tried to check, and then as it spread, one yielded to
• 1:09:04
  its expansion and rushed to the farthest verge, and there quivered and felt the
• 1:09:10
  world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture,
• 1:09:16
  which split its thin skin and gust and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the
• 1:09:23
  cracks and sores. Then, for that moment she had seen an illumination,
• 1:09:28
  a match burning in a crocus, and in our meaning almost expressed. But
• 1:09:32
  the close withdrew, the heart softened. It was over the moment. Against
• 1:09:40
  such moments with women too, there contrasted. As she laid her hat down,
• 1:09:45
  the bed and barren marbos and the gandle half burnt. Lying awake,
• 1:09:50
  the floor creaked, the lid house was suddenly darkened, and if she raised
• 1:09:56
  her head she could just hear the click of the handle released as gently as
• 1:10:00
  possible by Richard, who slipped upstairs in his socks, and then as often
• 1:10:04
  as not dropped his hot water bottle and swore. How she laughed. But
• 1:10:10
  this question of love, she thought, putting her coat away, this falling
• 1:10:15
  in love with women, take Sally seton her relation in the old days with
• 1:10:19
  Sally Seedon, had not that, after all, been loved. She sat
• 1:10:24
  on the floor. That was her first impression of Sally. She sat on
• 1:10:28
  the floor with her arms round her knees, smoking a cigarette. Where could
• 1:10:31
  it have been the Mannings the kin locked Jones's at some party where she could
• 1:10:38
  not be certain, for she had a distinct recollection of saying to the man
• 1:10:42
  she was with, who is that? And he had told her and said
• 1:10:45
  that Sally's parents did not get on. How that shocked her, that one's
• 1:10:50
  parents should quarrel. But all that evening she could not take her eyes off
• 1:10:55
  Sally. It was an extraordinary beauty, of the kind she most admired,
• 1:11:00
  dark, large eyed, with that quality which, since she hadn't got it
• 1:11:04
  herself, she always ended a sort of abandonment, as if she could say
• 1:11:10
  anything, do anything, a quality much commoner in foreigners than in English women.
• 1:11:16
  Sally always said she had French blood in her veins. An ancestor had
• 1:11:20
  been with Nelie Antoinette had his head cut off, left a ruby ring.
• 1:11:26
  Perhaps that summer she came to stay at Bourton, walking in quite unexpectedly without
• 1:11:31
  a penny in her pocket one night after dinner, and upsetting poor Aunt Helena
• 1:11:39
  to such an extent that she never forgave her. There had been some quarrel
• 1:11:43
  at home. She literally hadn't a penny that night. When she came to
• 1:11:47
  them, had bound approach to come down, she had rushed off in a
• 1:11:50
  passion. They sat up till all hours of the night talking. Sally it
• 1:11:57
  was who made her feel for the first time sheltered. The life at Bourton
• 1:12:01
  was. She knew nothing about sex, nothing about social problems. She had
• 1:12:08
  once seen an old man who had dropped dead in a field. She had
• 1:12:11
  seen cows just after their calves were born. But Aunt Helena never liked discussion
• 1:12:16
  of anything. When Sally gave her William Morris, it had to be wrapped
• 1:12:21
  in brown paper. There they sat hour after hour talking in her bedroom at
• 1:12:27
  the top of the house, talking about life, how they were to reform
• 1:12:30
  the world. They meant to found a society to abolish private property, and
• 1:12:36
  actually had a letter written, though not sent out the ideas were Sally's,
• 1:12:41
  of course, but very soon she was just as excited red plate too.
• 1:12:45
  In bed before breakfast, read Morris read Shelley by the hour. Sally's power
• 1:12:50
  was amazing, her gift, her personality. There was her way with flowers.
• 1:12:56
  For instance, at Bruton they always had stiff little vase all the way
• 1:13:00
  down the table. Sally went out, but tolly hawks, dahlias, all
• 1:13:04
  sorts of flowers that had never been seen together, cut their heads off and
• 1:13:09
  made them swim on the top of water in bowls. The effect was extraordinary.
• 1:13:14
  Coming into dinner in the sunset, of course, Aunt Helena thought it
• 1:13:17
  wicked to treat flowers like that. Then she forgot her sponge and ran along
• 1:13:23
  the passage naked. That grim old housemaid Ellen Atkins went about grumbling, supposing
• 1:13:29
  any of the gentlemen had seen. Indeed, she did shock people. She
• 1:13:32
  was untidy, Papa said. The strange thing on looking back was the purity,
• 1:13:39
  the integrity of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling
• 1:13:44
  for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a
• 1:13:47
  quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up. It
• 1:13:53
  was protected on her side sprang from a sense of being in league together,
• 1:13:58
  a presentiment of something that was bound to part them. They spoke of marriage
• 1:14:01
  always as a catastrophe, which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling,
• 1:14:08
  which was much more on her side than Sally's, for in those days she
• 1:14:12
  was completely reckless, did the most idiotic things out of bravado, bicycled round
• 1:14:17
  the parapet on the terrace, smoked cigars. Absurd, She was very absurd,
• 1:14:24
  but the charm was overpowering to her, at least so that she could
• 1:14:28
  remember standing in her bedroom at the top of the house, holding the hot
• 1:14:32
  water can in her hands and saying aloud, she is beneath this roof,
• 1:14:36
  she is beneath this roof. No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her.
• 1:14:43
  Now she could not even get an echo of her old emotion, but
• 1:14:47
  she could remember going cold with excitement and doing her hair any kind of ecstasy.
• 1:14:53
  Now the old feeling began to come back to her as she took out
• 1:14:57
  her hairpins, laid them on the dressing table, began to do her hair
• 1:15:00
  with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing
• 1:15:05
  and going downstairs and feeling as she crossed the hall. If it were now
• 1:15:11
  to die, towere now to be most happy. That was her feeling,
• 1:15:15
  Othellow's feeling, and she felt it. She was convinced as strongly as Shakespeare
• 1:15:19
  meant a fellow to feel it. All because she was coming down to dinner
• 1:15:25
  in a white frock to meet Sally Seaton. She was wearing peak gauze.
• 1:15:30
  Was that possible, she seemed anyhow, all light glowing like some bird or
• 1:15:35
  air ball that has flown in attached itself for a moment to a bramble.
• 1:15:40
  But nothing is so strange when one is in love. And what was this
• 1:15:44
  except being in love? As the complete indifference of other people. Aunt Helena
• 1:15:49
  just wandered off after dinner. Papa read the paper, Peter Walsh might have
• 1:15:55
  been there, and old miss Cummings Joseph bright Cough certainly was where he came
• 1:16:00
  every summer, poor old man for weeks and weeks, and pretended to read
• 1:16:02
  German with her, but really played the piano and sang Brahms without any voice.
• 1:16:09
  All this was only a background for Sally. She stood by the fireplace,
• 1:16:14
  talking in that beautiful voice, which made everything she said sound like a
• 1:16:17
  caress to Papa, who had begun to be attracted rather against his will.
• 1:16:23
  He never got over lending her one of his books and finding it soaked on
• 1:16:28
  the terrace. When suddenly she said, what a shame to sit indoors,
• 1:16:31
  And they all went out on to the terrace and walked up and down.
• 1:16:35
  Peter Walsh and Joseph Britkof went on about Wagner. She and Sally felt a
• 1:16:41
  little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life. Passing
• 1:16:45
  a stone urn with flowers in it, Sally stopped, picked a flower,
• 1:16:51
  kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down.
• 1:16:56
  The others disappeared. There she was alone with Sally, and she felt that
• 1:17:00
  she had been given a present wrapped up and told just to keep it,
• 1:17:03
  not to look at it. A diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up,
• 1:17:09
  which as they walked up and up and down, she uncovered or the
• 1:17:12
  radiance burnt through the revelation, the religious feeling. When Old Joseph and Peter
• 1:17:16
  faced them star gazing, said Peter, it was like running one's face against
• 1:17:21
  the granite wall in the darkness. It was shocking it was horrible, not
• 1:17:27
  for herself. She felt only how Sally was being mauled, already maltreated.
• 1:17:31
  She felt his hostility, his jealousy, his determination to break into their companionship.
• 1:17:40
  All this she saw as one seize a landscape in a flash of lightning.
• 1:17:45
  And Sally never had she admired her so much, coundantly taking her away
• 1:17:49
  unvanquished, she laughed. She made old Joseph tell her the names of the
• 1:17:55
  stars, which she liked, doing very seriously. She stood there, listened
• 1:18:00
  she heard the names of the stars. Oh, this horror, she said
• 1:18:03
  to herself, as if she had known all along that something would interrupt,
• 1:18:08
  would embitter her moment of happiness. Yet, after all, how much she
• 1:18:13
  owed to him. Later, always when she thought of him, she thought
• 1:18:16
  of their quarrels, for some reason, because she wanted his good opinion so
• 1:18:20
  much. Perhaps she owed him words sentimental, civilized. They started up every
• 1:18:28
  day of her life, as if he guarded her. A book was sentimental,
• 1:18:32
  an attitude to life sentimental, sentimental. Perhaps she was to be thinking
• 1:18:38
  of the past. What would he think, she wondered, when he came
• 1:18:42
  back that she had grown older? Would he say that, or would she
• 1:18:45
  see him, thinking when he came back that she had grown older. It
• 1:18:49
  was true, since her illness, she had turned almost white. Laying her
• 1:18:54
  brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as if while she
• 1:18:58
  mused the icy clall had had the chance to fix in her. She was
• 1:19:01
  not old yet, She had just broken into her fifty second year. Months
• 1:19:06
  and months of it were still untouched June July August, each still remained almost
• 1:19:14
  whole, and as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa, crossing to
• 1:19:17
  the dressing table, plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it
• 1:19:23
  there, the moment of this June morning, on which was the pressure of
• 1:19:27
  all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing table, and all
• 1:19:30
  the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her. At one point, as
• 1:19:33
  she looked into the glass, seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who
• 1:19:39
  was that very night to give a party of Clarissa dollaway of herself. How
• 1:19:44
  many million times she had seen her face, and always with the same imperceptible
• 1:19:48
  contraction. She pursed her lips when she looked in the glass. It was
• 1:19:54
  to give her face point that was herself, pointed dart like definite that was
• 1:19:59
  herself in some effort, some call on her to be herself, drew the
• 1:20:02
  parts together. She alone knew how different, how incompatible, and composed so
• 1:20:09
  for the world only into one center, one diamond, one woman who sat
• 1:20:14
  in her drawing room and made a meeting point of radiancy, no doubt in
• 1:20:17
  some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to. Perhaps she
• 1:20:21
  had helped young people who were grateful to her, had tried to be the
• 1:20:25
  same, always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her
• 1:20:30
  faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions like this of Lady Bruton not asking her
• 1:20:36
  to lunch, which she thought combing her hair finally is utterly base. Now
• 1:20:43
  where was her dress? Her evening dresses hung in the cupboard. Clarissa,
• 1:20:46
  plunging her hand into the softness, gently detached the green dress and carried it
• 1:20:51
  to the window. She had torn it. Someone had trod on the skirt.
• 1:20:56
  She had felt that give at the embassy party at the top among the
• 1:21:00
  folds. By artificial light, the green shone, but lost its color.
• 1:21:04
  Now in the sun, she would mend it. Her maids had too much
• 1:21:09
  to do. She would wear it to night. She would take her silks,
• 1:21:13
  her scissors, her what was it her thimble, of course, down
• 1:21:15
  into the drawing room, for she must also write and see that things generally
• 1:21:20
  were more or less in order. Strange, she thought, pausing on the
• 1:21:26
  landing and assembling that diamond shape, that single person. Strange, how a
• 1:21:30
  mistress knows the very moment, the very temper of her house. Faint sounds
• 1:21:36
  rose and sparrows up the well of the stairs, the swish of a mop
• 1:21:41
  tapping, knocking, a loudness when the front door opened, a voice repeating
• 1:21:45
  a message in the basement, the chink of silver on a tray, glean
• 1:21:49
  silver for the party. All was for the party. And Lucy, coming
• 1:21:54
  into the drawing room with her tray held out, put the giant candlesticks on
• 1:21:58
  the mantel piece the silver casket in the middle, turned the crystal dolphin towards
• 1:22:03
  the clock. They would come, They would stand, They would talk in
• 1:22:06
  the mincing tones which she could imitate. Ladies and gentlemen of all her mistress
• 1:22:12
  was loveliest mistress of silver, of linen, of china. For the sun,
• 1:22:16
  the silver doors off their hinges, rumple Meyer's men gave her a sense
• 1:22:21
  as she laid the paper knife on the inlaid table of something achieved. Behold,
• 1:22:27
  Behold, she said, speaking to her old friends in the baker's shop
• 1:22:31
  where she had first seen service at Cadaram, crying into the glass. She
• 1:22:35
  was Lady Angela attending Princess Mary, when in came Missus Dollaway. Oh,
• 1:22:42
  Lucy, she said, the silver does look nice. And how she said,
• 1:22:45
  turning the crystal dolphin to stand straight, How did you enjoy the play
• 1:22:49
  last night? Oh, they had to go before the inn, she said.
• 1:22:53
  They had to be back at ten, she said, So they don't
• 1:22:56
  know what happened, she said. That does seem hard luck, she said,
• 1:23:00
  or a servants stayed later if they asked her. That does seem rather
• 1:23:03
  ashamed, she said, taking the old, bald looking cushion in the middle
• 1:23:08
  of the sofa and putting it in Lucy's arms and giving her a little push,
• 1:23:12
  and crying, take it away, give it to missus Walker with my
• 1:23:15
  compliments. Take it away, she cried, And Lucy stopped at the drawing
• 1:23:18
  room door, holding the cushion and said, very shyly, turning a little
• 1:23:23
  pink couldn't she help to mend that dress, but said missus Delaware. She
• 1:23:28
  had enough on her hands already, quite enough of her own to do without
• 1:23:30
  that. But thank you, Lucy, Oh, thank you, said missus
• 1:23:33
  delaway. And thank you, thank you, she went on saying, sitting
• 1:23:38
  down on the sofa with her dress over her knees, her scissors, her
• 1:23:41
  silks. Thank you, thank you, she went on saying, in gratitude
• 1:23:45
  to her servants generally for helping her to be like this, to be what
• 1:23:48
  she wanted, gentle, generous hearted. Her servants liked her. And then
• 1:23:53
  this dress of hers, where it was the tear, and now her needle
• 1:23:56
  to be threaded. This was a favorite dress, one of Sally Parker's,
• 1:24:00
  the last almost she ever made. Alas for Sally had now retired, living
• 1:24:04
  at Ealing. And if ever I have a moment, thought Clarissa, whenever
• 1:24:09
  would she have a moment anymore, I shall go and see her at Ealing.
• 1:24:13
  For she was a character, thought Clarissa, real artist, she thought
• 1:24:16
  a little out of the way things. Yet her dresses were never queer.
• 1:24:20
  You could wear them at Hatfield at Buckingham Palace. She had worn them at
• 1:24:24
  Hatfield at Buckingham palace quiet descended on her, calm content as her needle,
• 1:24:30
  drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and
• 1:24:34
  attached them very lightly to the belt. So on a summer and stay,
• 1:24:39
  waves collect overbalance and fall, collect and fall, and the whole world seems
• 1:24:44
  to be saying that is all more and more ponderously, until even the heart
• 1:24:47
  in the body, which lies in the sun on the beach, says to
• 1:24:50
  that is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more,
• 1:24:55
  says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively
• 1:24:59
  for all sorrows, and renews begins, collects let's fall, and the body
• 1:25:03
  alone listens to the passing, b the waves breaking, the dog barking far
• 1:25:09
  away, barking and barking. Heavens the front door bell, exclaimed Clarissa,
• 1:25:13
  staying her needle roused, she listened. Missus Dollaway will see me, said
• 1:25:17
  the elderly man in the hall. Oh, yes, she will see me,
• 1:25:21
  he repeated, putting Lucy aside, very benevolently and running upstairs ever so
• 1:25:27
  quickly. Yes, yes, yes, he muttered as he ran upstairs.
• 1:25:30
  She will see me after five years in India. Clarissa will see me.
• 1:25:34
  Who can? What can? Asked missus Dollaway, thinking it was outrageous to
• 1:25:40
  be interrupted. At eleven o'clock on the morning of the day she was giving
• 1:25:44
  a party. Hearing a step on the stairs, she heard a hand upon
• 1:25:47
  the door. She made to hide her dress like her virgin, protecting chastity,
• 1:25:53
  respecting privacy. Now the glass knob slipped. Now the door opened,
• 1:25:58
  and in came. For a single second, she could not remember what he
• 1:26:01
  was called. So surprised she was to see him, so glad, so
• 1:26:04
  shy, so utterly taken aback to have Peter Walsh come to her unexpectedly in
• 1:26:10
  the morning. She had not read his letter. And how are you,
• 1:26:14
  said Peter Walsh, positively trembling, taking both her hands, kissing both her
• 1:26:18
  hands. She's grown older, he thought, sitting down. I shan't tell
• 1:26:23
  her anything about it, he thought, for she's grown older. She's looking
• 1:26:27
  at me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him. Though he
• 1:26:30
  had kissed her hands. Putting his hand into his pocket, he took out
• 1:26:34
  a large pocket knife and half opened the blade. Exactly the same thought Clarissa
• 1:26:40
  the same queer, look, the same check suit, a little out of
• 1:26:43
  the straight. His face is a little thinner, dryer perhaps, but he
• 1:26:46
  looks softfully well and just the same. How heavenly it is to see you
• 1:26:50
  again, she claimed. He had his knife out. That's so like him.
• 1:26:54
  She thought. He'd only reached town last night, he said, it
• 1:26:57
  would have to go down into the country once. And how was everything?
• 1:27:01
  How was everybody? Richard Elizabeth? And what's all this? He said,
• 1:27:05
  tilting his pen knife towards her green dress. He's very well dressed, thought
• 1:27:10
  Clarissa, Yet he always criticizes me. Here she is mending her dress,
• 1:27:15
  mending her dress as usual, he thought. Here she's been sitting all the
• 1:27:18
  time I've been in India, mending her dress, playing about going to parties,
• 1:27:23
  running to the house and back and all that, he thought, growing
• 1:27:26
  more and more irritated, more and more agitated. For there's nothing in the
• 1:27:30
  world so bad for some women as marriage, she thought, and politics,
• 1:27:32
  and having a conservative husband like the admirable Richard. So it is, so
• 1:27:36
  it is, he thought, shutting his knife with us. Nap, rich
• 1:27:41
  is very well riches at a committee, said Clarissa, And she opened her
• 1:27:44
  scissors and said, did he mind her just finishing what she was doing to
• 1:27:47
  her dress? For they had a party that night, which I shan't ask
• 1:27:51
  you too, She said, My dear Peter, she said, But it
• 1:27:55
  was delicious to hear her say that, my dear Peter. Indeed, it
• 1:27:58
  was all so delicious. The silver, the chairs also delicious. Why wouldn't
• 1:28:02
  she ask him to our party? He asked? Now, of course,
• 1:28:05
  thought Clarissa, he's enchanting, perfectly enchanting. Now I remember how impossible it
• 1:28:12
  was never to make up my mind. And why did I make up my
• 1:28:15
  mind not to marry him? She wondered, that awful summer. But it's
• 1:28:18
  so extraordinary that you should have come this morning, she cried, putting her
• 1:28:21
  hands one on top of another, down on her dress. Do you remember,
• 1:28:26
  she said, how the blinds used to flap at Burton? They did,
• 1:28:30
  he said, And he remembered breakfasting alone, very awkwardly with her father,
• 1:28:33
  who had died, and he had not written to Clarissa. But he
• 1:28:36
  had never got on well with old Perry, that querulous, weak neat old
• 1:28:41
  man Courissa's father, Justin Perry. I often wish I'd got on better with
• 1:28:45
  your father, he said, But he never liked anyone who our friends,
• 1:28:48
  said Clarissa, and could have bitten her tongue for it, thus reminding Peter
• 1:28:53
  that he'd wanted to marry her. Of course I did, thought Peter.
• 1:28:56
  It almost broke my heart to he thought, and was overcome with his own
• 1:28:59
  gripen, which rose like a moon, looked at from a terrace, ghastly
• 1:29:02
  beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more happy than I've ever
• 1:29:06
  been since, he thought, And as if in truth, he were sitting
• 1:29:10
  there on the terrace, he edged a little towards Clarissa, put his hand
• 1:29:14
  out, raised it, let it fall there above them it hung that moon.
• 1:29:17
  She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace in the moonlight.
• 1:29:20
  Herbert has it now, she said. I never go there now,
• 1:29:24
  she said, And just as happens on a terrace in the moonlight, when
• 1:29:28
  one person begins to feel ashamed that he is already bored, and yet as
• 1:29:31
  the other sits silent, very quiet, sadly looking at the moon, does
• 1:29:34
  not like to speak, moves his foot, clears his throat, notices some
• 1:29:39
  iron scroll on the table, leg stirs a leaf, but says nothing,
• 1:29:42
  so Peter Walsh did now, For why go back like this to the past,
• 1:29:45
  he thought, Why make him think of it again? Why make him
• 1:29:47
  suffer when she had tortured him so infernally? Why do you remember the lake?
• 1:29:53
  She said in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which
• 1:29:56
  caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff and contracted her lips
• 1:30:00
  and a spasm as she said lake. For she was a child throwing bread
• 1:30:02
  to the ducks between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman
• 1:30:06
  coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her
• 1:30:11
  arms, which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her
• 1:30:14
  arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she
• 1:30:16
  put down by them, and said, this is what I had made of
• 1:30:18
  it? This and what had she made of it? But indeed, sitting
• 1:30:23
  there sewing this morning with Peter, she looked at Peter Walsh, her look
• 1:30:27
  passing through all that time, and that emotion reached him doubtfully, settled on
• 1:30:30
  him tearfully, and rose and fluttered away as a bird touches a branch and
• 1:30:34
  rises and flutters away. Quite simply. She wiped her eyes, yes,
• 1:30:39
  said Peter. Yes, yes, yes, he said, as if she
• 1:30:42
  drew up to the surface, something which positively hurt him as a rose.
• 1:30:45
  Stop. Stop, he wanted to cry, for he was not old.
• 1:30:48
  His life was not over, not by any means. He was only just
• 1:30:51
  past fifty. Shall I tell her, he thought? Or not? He
• 1:30:55
  would like to make a clean breast of it all. But she is too
• 1:30:58
  cold, he thought. With her scissors, Daisy would look ordinarate beside Clarissa,
• 1:31:03
  and she would think me a failure, which I am in their sense,
• 1:31:06
  he thought. In the Dollaway's sense, Oh yes, he had no
• 1:31:10
  doubt about that. He was a failure. Compared with all this, the
• 1:31:13
  inlaid table, the mounted paper knife, the dolphin and the candlesticks, the
• 1:31:16
  chair covers, and the ild valuable English tempted Prince. He was a failure.
• 1:31:21
  I detest the smugness of the whole affair, he thought, Richard's doing,
• 1:31:26
  not Clarissa's, save that she married him. Here Lucy came into the
• 1:31:30
  room carrying silver, more silver, but charming, slender, graceful she looked,
• 1:31:33
  he thought, as she stooped to put it down. And this has
• 1:31:36
  been going on all the time, he thought, week after week, Clarissa's
• 1:31:40
  life while I, he thought, and at once everything seemed to radiate from
• 1:31:44
  him, journeys, rides, quarrels, adventures, bridge parties, love,
• 1:31:47
  affairs, work, work, work. And he took out his knife,
• 1:31:49
  quite openly, his old horn handled knife, which Clarissa could square he had
• 1:31:55
  had these thirty years, and clenched his fists upon it. What an extraordinary
• 1:31:59
  habit that was, Clarissa thought, always playing with a knife, always making
• 1:32:02
  one feel too frivolous, empty minded, a mere silly chatterbox, as he
• 1:32:08
  used. But I too, she thought, and taking up her needle,
• 1:32:11
  summoned like a queen whose guards have fallen asleep and left her unprotected. She
• 1:32:15
  had been quite taken aback by this visit. It had upset her so that
• 1:32:18
  anyone can stroll in and have a look at her where she lies with the
• 1:32:21
  brambles curving over her, summoned to her help, the things she did,
• 1:32:26
  the things she liked, her husband, Elizabeth, herself in short, which
• 1:32:29
  Peter hardly knew now, all to come about and beat off the enemy.
• 1:32:33
  Well, and what's happened to you? She said? So before a battle
• 1:32:36
  begins, the horses by the ground tossed their heads. The light shines on
• 1:32:41
  their flanks their next curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by
• 1:32:45
  side on the blue sofa, challenged each other. His powers chafed and tossed
• 1:32:48
  in him. He assembled from different quarters of all sorts of things praise his
• 1:32:53
  career at Oxford, his marriage, which she knew nothing whatever about, how
• 1:32:57
  he had loved and altogether done his job of Chapter three, Chapter four,
• 1:33:05
  millions of things, he exclaimed and urged by the assembly of powers which were
• 1:33:14
  now charging this way and that, and giving him the feeling, at once
• 1:33:18
  frightening and extremely exhilarating, of being rushed through the air on the shoulders of
• 1:33:26
  people he could no longer see. He raised his hands to his forehead.
• 1:33:33
  Clarissa sat very upright, drew in her breath. I am in love,
• 1:33:41
  he said, not to her, however, but do someone raised up in
• 1:33:45
  the dark so that you could not touch her, but must lay your garland
• 1:33:50
  down on the grass in the dark. In love, he repeated, now
• 1:33:57
  speaking rather dryly to Clarissa delaway in love with a girl in India. He
• 1:34:05
  had deposited his garland. Clarissa could make what she would of it in love.
• 1:34:14
  She said that he at his age should be sucked under in his little
• 1:34:19
  bow tie by that monster. And there's no flesh on his neck, his
• 1:34:26
  hands are red, and he's six months older than I am. Her eye
• 1:34:31
  flashed back to her. But in her heart she felt all the same.
• 1:34:36
  He is in love. He has that, she felt, He is in
• 1:34:44
  love. But the indomitable egotism which forever rides down the hosts opposed to it,
• 1:34:53
  the river which says on on on, even though it admits there may
• 1:35:00
  be no goal for us, whatever, Still on on. This indomitable egotism
• 1:35:08
  charged her cheeks with color, made her look very young, very pink,
• 1:35:14
  very bright eyed, as she sat with her dress upon her knee and her
• 1:35:19
  needle held to the end of green silk, trembling a little. He was
• 1:35:26
  in love, not with her, with some younger woman, of course.
• 1:35:31
  And who is she, she asked, Now this statue must be brought from
• 1:35:38
  its height, and sat down between them. A married woman, Unfortunately,
• 1:35:43
  he said, the wife of a major in the Indian army. And with
• 1:35:47
  a curious, ironical sweetness he smiled as he placed her in this ridiculous way.
• 1:35:56
  Before Clarissa, all the same he is in love, thought Clarissa.
• 1:36:01
  She has, he continued, very reasonably, two small children, a boy
• 1:36:08
  and a girl, and I have come over to see my lawyers about the
• 1:36:13
  divorce. There they are, he thought, Do what you like with them,
• 1:36:17
  Clarissa, there they are, And second by second it seemed to him
• 1:36:24
  that the wife of the major in the Indian Army, his Daisy, and
• 1:36:29
  her two small children became more and more lovely as Clarissa looked at them,
• 1:36:34
  as if he had set light to a gray pellet on a plate, and
• 1:36:39
  there had risen up a lovely tree in the brisk sea. Salted air of
• 1:36:45
  their intimacy, For in some ways no one understood him felt with him as
• 1:36:50
  Clarissa did. Their exquisite intimacy. She flattered him. She fooled him,
• 1:36:59
  thought Clarissa, shaping the woman, the wife of the major in the Indian
• 1:37:02
  Army, with three strokes of a knife. What a waste, what a
• 1:37:06
  folly. All his life long Peter had been fooled like that, first getting
• 1:37:12
  sent down from Oxford, next marrying the girl on the boat going out to
• 1:37:16
  India. Now the wife of a major in the Indian Army. Thank heaven,
• 1:37:21
  she refused to marry him. Still he was in love, her old
• 1:37:26
  friend, her dear Peter. He was in love. But what are you
• 1:37:30
  going to do, she asked him. Oh, the lawyers and solicitors,
• 1:37:33
  Messrs Hooper, and greatly of Lincoln's Inn. They were going to do it,
• 1:37:39
  he said, And he actually pared his nails with his pocket knife.
• 1:37:44
  For Heaven's sake, leave your knife alone, she cried to herself in irrepressible
• 1:37:48
  irritation. It was his silly unconventionality, his weakness, his lack of the
• 1:37:55
  ghost of a notion, what anyone else was feeling that annoyed her, had
• 1:38:00
  always annoyed her, And now at his age, How silly I know all
• 1:38:03
  that, Peter thought, I know what I'm up against, he thought,
• 1:38:08
  running his finger along the blade of his knife. Clarissa and Delaway and all
• 1:38:13
  the rest of him. But I'll show Clarissa. And then, to his
• 1:38:15
  utter surprise, suddenly thrown by those uncontrollable forces, thrown through the air,
• 1:38:21
  he burst into tears, wept, wept without the least Shane sitting on the
• 1:38:27
  sofa, the tears running down his cheeks, and Clarissa had leant forward,
• 1:38:32
  taking his hand, drawn him to her, kissed him, actually had felt
• 1:38:38
  his face on hers before she good down. The brandishing of silver, flashing
• 1:38:44
  plumes like pampas grass in a tropic gale in her breast, which subsiding left
• 1:38:49
  her holding his hand, patting his knee, and feeling as she sat back
• 1:38:54
  extraordinarily at her ease with him and light hearted. All in a clap,
• 1:38:59
  it came over her. If I had married him, this gaiety would have
• 1:39:02
  been mine all day. It was all over for her. The sheet was
• 1:39:08
  stretched in the bed, narrow. She had gone up into the tower alone
• 1:39:13
  and left them blackberrying in the sun. The door had shut, and there
• 1:39:17
  among the dust had fallen plaster and the litter of bird's nests. How distant
• 1:39:23
  the view had looked, and the sounds came thin and chill. Once on
• 1:39:28
  Leith Hill she remembered and Richard, Richard. She cried, as a sleeper
• 1:39:31
  in the night starts and stretches a hand in the dark for help. Lunching
• 1:39:38
  with Lady Bruton, he came back to her. He has left me.
• 1:39:42
  I'm alone forever, she thought, folding her hands upon her knee. Peter
• 1:39:46
  Walsh had got up and crossed to the window and stood with his back to
• 1:39:50
  her, flicking a bandanna handkerchief from side to side, mastily and dry and
• 1:39:57
  desolate. He looked his thin shoulder blade, lifting his coat slightly, blowing
• 1:40:01
  his nose violently. Take me with you, Clarissa thought, impulsively, as
• 1:40:06
  if he were starting directly upon some great voyage. And then next moment it
• 1:40:12
  was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and
• 1:40:15
  moving were now over, and she had lived a lifetime in them, and
• 1:40:18
  had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over.
• 1:40:23
  Now it was time to move. And as a woman gathers her things together,
• 1:40:27
  her cloak, her gloves, her upper glasses, and gets up to
• 1:40:30
  go out of the theater into the street. She rose from the sofa and
• 1:40:34
  went to Peter. And it was awfully strange, She thought, how she
• 1:40:39
  still had the power as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power
• 1:40:44
  as she came across the room to make the moon, which he detested,
• 1:40:48
  rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky. Tell me, he
• 1:40:54
  said, seizing her by the shoulders. Are you happy, Clarissa, does,
• 1:40:58
  Richard? The door open? Here is my Elizabeth said, Clarissa,
• 1:41:02
  emotionally, histrionically, perhaps, how do you do, said Elizabeth, coming
• 1:41:08
  forward. The sound of big Ben striking the half hour struck out between them
• 1:41:13
  with extraordinary vigor, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate
• 1:41:17
  were swinging dumbbells this way and that. Hello, Elizabeth cried Peter, stuffing
• 1:41:23
  his handkerchief into his pocket, going quickly to her, saying good bye,
• 1:41:28
  Clarissa, without looking at her, leaving the room quickly and running downstairs and
• 1:41:31
  opening the hall door Peter. Peter cried Clissa, following him out on to
• 1:41:38
  the landing, my party to night, Remember my party to night, she
• 1:41:42
  cried, having to raise her voice against the roar of the open air,
• 1:41:45
  and overwhelmed by the traffic and the sound of all the clocks striking. Her
• 1:41:49
  voice, crying, remember my party to night, sounded frail and thin and
• 1:41:54
  very far away as Peter Washed shut the door. Remember my party, Remember
• 1:41:59
  my party, said Peter Wash as he stepped down the street, speaking to
• 1:42:02
  himself rhythmically in time with the flow of the sound, the direct, downright
• 1:42:08
  sound of Big Ben striking the half hour. The leaden circles dissolved in the
• 1:42:12
  air. Oh these parties, he thought, Clarissa's parties. Why does she
• 1:42:15
  give these parties? He thought, not that he blamed her. Or hear
• 1:42:19
  this effigy of a man in a tail coat with a carnation in his buttonhole
• 1:42:24
  coming towards him. Only one person in the world could be as he was
• 1:42:28
  in love. And there he was, this fortunate man, himself reflected in
• 1:42:31
  the playglass window of a motor car manufacturer in Victoria Street, All India lay
• 1:42:39
  behind him, plains, mountains, epidemics of cholera, a district twice as
• 1:42:44
  big as Ireland. Decisions he had come to alone, he Peter Walsh,
• 1:42:47
  who was now really for the first time in his life in love. Clarissa
• 1:42:51
  had grown hard, he thought, and a trifle sentimental. Into the bargain,
• 1:42:57
  he suspected, looking at the great motor cars, capable of doing how
• 1:43:00
  many miles on how many gallons fo He had returned four mechanics, had invented
• 1:43:05
  a plow in his district, had ordered wheelbears from England, but the Coolies
• 1:43:11
  wouldn't use them, all of which Clarissa knew nothing whatever about the way.
• 1:43:15
  She said, here is my Elizabeth. That annoyed him. Why not here's
• 1:43:18
  Elizabeth simply. It was insincere, and Elizabeth didn't like it either. Still,
• 1:43:24
  the last tremors of the great booming voice shook the air round him.
• 1:43:29
  The half hour, still early, only half past eleven. Still before he
• 1:43:31
  understood young people, he liked them. There was always something cold. And
• 1:43:35
  Clarissa, he thought, she had always, even as a girl, a
• 1:43:40
  sort of timidity which in middle age becomes conventionality, and then it's all up.
• 1:43:45
  It's all up, he thought, looking rather drearly into the glassy depths,
• 1:43:49
  and wondering whether by calling at that hour he had annoyed her. Overcome
• 1:43:55
  with shame suddenly at having been a fool, wept, been emotional, told
• 1:43:59
  her everything as usual, as usual. As a cloud crosses the sun,
• 1:44:03
  Silence falls on London and falls on the mind. Effort ceases, time flaps
• 1:44:10
  on the mast. There we stop. There we stand rigid. The skeleton
• 1:44:15
  of habit alone upholds the human frame where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said
• 1:44:20
  to himself, feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within. Clarissa refused me,
• 1:44:26
  he thought, he stood there thinking, Clarissa refused me. Ah said,
• 1:44:31
  Saint Margaret's like a hostess. Who comes into her drawing room on the very
• 1:44:35
  stroke of the hour and finds her guests there already. I'm not late,
• 1:44:40
  No, it is precisely half past eleven, she says. Yet, though
• 1:44:45
  she is perfectly right, her voice, being the voice of the hostess,
• 1:44:48
  is reluctant to inflict its individuality. Some grief for the past holds it back,
• 1:44:56
  some concern for the present. It is half past eleven, she says,
• 1:45:00
  And the sound of Saint Margaret's glides into the recesses of the heart and
• 1:45:03
  buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something alive, which wants
• 1:45:09
  to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be with a tremor of delight
• 1:45:14
  at rest, like Clarissa herself, thought Peter Walsh, coming down the stairs
• 1:45:17
  on the stroke of the hour, in white. It is Clarissa herself,
• 1:45:21
  he thought, with a deep emotion and an extraordinarily clear, yet puzzling recollection
• 1:45:27
  of her, as if this bell had come into the room years ago where
• 1:45:30
  they sat at some moment of great intimacy, and had gone from one to
• 1:45:34
  the other, and had left like a bee with honey laden with the moment.
• 1:45:40
  But what room, what moment? And why had he been so profoundly
• 1:45:43
  happy when the clock was striking. Then, as the sound of Saint Margaret's
• 1:45:47
  languished, he thought, she has been ill, and the sound expressed languor
• 1:45:51
  and suffering. It was her heart, he remembered, and the sudden loudness
• 1:45:57
  of the final stroke told for death that surprised in the midst of life,
• 1:46:00
  Clarissa falling where she stood in her drawing room. No, no, he
• 1:46:05
  cried, she is not dead. I'm not old, he cried, and
• 1:46:09
  marched up Whitehall, as if there rolled down to him, vigorous, unending
• 1:46:13
  his future. He was not old, or set or dried in the least
• 1:46:16
  as for caring what they said of him, the delawayes, the wit breads,
• 1:46:21
  And there set he cared not a straw, Not a straw. Though
• 1:46:26
  it was true he would have some time or other to see whether Richard couldn't
• 1:46:30
  help him to some job. Striding staring, he glared at the statue of
• 1:46:33
  the Duke of Cambridge. He had been sent down from Oxford. True he
• 1:46:38
  had been a socialist in some sense of failure. True, still, the
• 1:46:42
  future of civilization lies, he thought, in the hands of young men,
• 1:46:45
  like that of young men such as he was thirty years ago, with their
• 1:46:49
  love of abstract principles, getting books sent out to them all the way from
• 1:46:54
  London to a peak in the Himalayas, reading science, reading philosophy, the
• 1:46:59
  future life in the hands of young men like that, he thought. A
• 1:47:01
  patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came from behind, and with
• 1:47:06
  it a rustling, regular thudding sound, which, as it overtook him,
• 1:47:11
  drummed his thoughts strict in step up Whitehall without his doing, boys in uniform
• 1:47:15
  carrying guns marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff,
• 1:47:20
  and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round
• 1:47:25
  the base of a statue, praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of
• 1:47:30
  England. It is thought Peter Walsh, beginning to keep step with them,
• 1:47:33
  a very fine training. But they did not look robust. They were weedy
• 1:47:38
  for the most part, boys of sixteen, who might tomorrow stand behind bowls
• 1:47:43
  of rice, cakes of soap on counters. Now they wore on them,
• 1:47:46
  unmixed with sensual pleasure or daily preoccupations. The solemnity of the wreath which they
• 1:47:53
  had fetched from Finsbury pavement to the empty tomb. They had taken their vow.
• 1:47:58
  The traffic respected it, vans were stopped. I can't keep up with
• 1:48:02
  them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up Whitehall, And sure enough
• 1:48:06
  on they marched past him, past everyone in their steady way, as if
• 1:48:11
  one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life with its varieties, as
• 1:48:15
  their reticences had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths, and drugged
• 1:48:20
  into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline. One had to respect it.
• 1:48:26
  One might laugh, but one had to respect it, he thought. There
• 1:48:29
  they go, thought Peter Walsh, pausing at the edge of the pavement,
• 1:48:32
  and all the exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the Black,
• 1:48:38
  the spectacular images of great soldiers stood looking ahead of them, as if they
• 1:48:42
  too had made the same renunciation. Peter Walsh felt he too had made it,
• 1:48:47
  the great renunciation, trampled under the same temptations, and achieved at length
• 1:48:53
  a marble stare. But the stare Peter Walsh did not want for himself in
• 1:48:57
  the least, though he could respect it inns, he could respect it in
• 1:49:00
  boys, they don't know the troubles of the flesh, yet, he thought,
• 1:49:04
  as the marching boys disappeared in the direction of the strand all that I've
• 1:49:09
  been through, he thought, crossing the road and standing under Gordon's statue,
• 1:49:13
  Gordon, whom as a boy he had worshiped, Gordon standing lonely with one
• 1:49:17
  leg raised and his arms crossed. Poor Gordon, he thought. And just
• 1:49:23
  because nobody yet knew he was in London except Clarissa, and the earth after
• 1:49:27
  the voyage still seemed an island to him. The strangeness of standing alone,
• 1:49:30
  alive, unknown, at half past eleven in Trafalgar's Square overcame him. Wit
• 1:49:36
  is it? Where am I? And why, after all does one do
• 1:49:39
  it? He thought, the divorce seeming all moonshine and down, His mind
• 1:49:44
  went flat as a marsh, and three great emotions bold over him, understanding,
• 1:49:49
  a vast philanthropy, and finally, as if the result of the other's
• 1:49:54
  an irrepressible exquisite delight, as if insat his brain by another hand, strings
• 1:49:59
  were pulled, shutters moved, and he, having nothing to do with it,
• 1:50:01
  yet stood at the opening of endless avenues, down which, if he
• 1:50:05
  chose, he might wander. He had not felt so young for years he
• 1:50:11
  had escaped, was utterly free, as happens in the downfall of habit,
• 1:50:15
  when the mind, like an unguarded flame, bows and bends and seems about
• 1:50:19
  to blow from its holding. I haven't felt so young for years, thought
• 1:50:24
  Peter, escaping, only of course, for an hour or so from being
• 1:50:28
  precisely what he was and feeding like a child who runs out of doors and
• 1:50:31
  sees as he runs his old nurse waving at the wrong window. But she's
• 1:50:36
  extraordinarily attractive, he thought. As walking across Forfalgar Square in the direction of
• 1:50:42
  the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon's statue,
• 1:50:46
  seemed Peter Walsh thought susceptible as he was to shed bale after vail, until
• 1:50:53
  she became the very woman he had always had in mind, young but stately,
• 1:50:57
  merry but discreet, black but in cha Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his
• 1:51:02
  pocket knife, he started after her. To follow this woman, this excitement,
• 1:51:06
  which seemed even with its back, turned to shed on him a light
• 1:51:11
  which connected them, which singled him out, as if the random uproar of
• 1:51:15
  the traffic had whispered through hollowed hands. His name not Peter, but his
• 1:51:18
  private name, which he called himself in his own thoughts you, she said,
• 1:51:24
  only you, saying it with her white gloves and her shoulders. Then
• 1:51:28
  the thin, long cloak, which the wind stirred as she walked past dense
• 1:51:31
  shop and Cockspur Street, blew out with an enveloping kindness, a mournful tenderness,
• 1:51:38
  as of arms that would open and take the tired. But she's not
• 1:51:41
  married. She's young, quite young, thought Peter. The red carnation he
• 1:51:45
  had seen her wear as she came across Trafalgar Square, burning again in his
• 1:51:50
  eyes and making her lips red. But she waited at the curbstone. There
• 1:51:56
  was a dignity about her. She was not worldly like Clarissa, not rich
• 1:52:00
  like Clarissa. Was she, he wondered? As she moved, respectable,
• 1:52:03
  witty with the lizard's flickering tongue, he thought, For one must invent,
• 1:52:09
  must allow one's self a little diversion, a cool, waiting wit, a
• 1:52:13
  darting wit. Not noisy. She moved, she crossed. He followed her.
• 1:52:17
  To embarrass her was the last thing he wished. Still, if she
• 1:52:20
  stopped, he would say, come and have an ice, he would say,
• 1:52:24
  and she would answer perfectly, simply, oh yes. But other people
• 1:52:28
  who got between them and the street, obstructing him, blotting her out.
• 1:52:31
  He pursued, she changed. There was color in her cheeks, mockery in
• 1:52:35
  her eyes. He was an adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift,
• 1:52:40
  daring, indeed, landed as he was last night from India, a romantic
• 1:52:45
  buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties, yellow dressing, gowns, pipes,
• 1:52:49
  fishing rods in the shop windows, and respectability and evening parties, and
• 1:52:55
  spruce old men wearing white slips beneath their waistcoats. As a buccaneer. On
• 1:53:00
  and on she went across Piccadilly and up Regent Street ahead of him, her
• 1:53:04
  cloak, her gloves, her shoulders, combining with the fringes and the laces
• 1:53:09
  and the feather boas in the windows, to make the spirit of finery and
• 1:53:13
  whimsy which dwindle out of the shops on to the pavement as the light of
• 1:53:16
  a lamp goes, wavering at night over hedges in the darkness. Laughing and
• 1:53:21
  delighted, she had crossed Oxford Street and Great Portland Street and turned down one
• 1:53:27
  of the little streets, and now and now the great moment was approaching.
• 1:53:30
  For now she slackened, opened her bag, and with one look in his
• 1:53:34
  direction, but not at him, one look that bade farewell, summed up
• 1:53:40
  the whole situation and dismissed it triumphantly. Forever had fitted her key opened the
• 1:53:45
  door and gone. Clarissa's voice saying, remember my party, Remember my party,
• 1:53:50
  sang in his ears. The house was one of those flat red houses
• 1:53:55
  with hanging flower baskets of vague impropriety. It was over. Well, I've
• 1:54:00
  had my fun. I've had it, he thought, looking up at the
• 1:54:02
  swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to Adams. His fun,
• 1:54:08
  for it was half made up, as he knew very well invented his
• 1:54:12
  escapade with the girl. Made up as one makes up the better part of
• 1:54:15
  life, he thought, making one's self up, making her up, creating
• 1:54:19
  an exquisite amusement and something more. But ought it was and quite true,
• 1:54:25
  all this one could never share. It's smashed to Adams. He turned went
• 1:54:30
  up the street, thinking to find somewhere to sit till it was time for
• 1:54:34
  Lincoln's Inn, for Asia's Hooper and greatly. Where's should he go? No
• 1:54:39
  matter up the street, then towards Regent's Park, his boots on the pavement
• 1:54:44
  struck out no matter who It was early, still very early. It was
• 1:54:47
  a splendid morning too, Like the pulse of a perfect heart. Life struck
• 1:54:51
  straight through the streets. There was no fumbling, no hesitation, sweeping and
• 1:54:57
  swerving accurately, punctually, noiselessly, precisely at the right instant. The motor
• 1:55:02
  car stopped at the door. The girl silk stocking feathered, evanescent, but
• 1:55:08
  not to him particularly attractive. Free it had his fling alighted admirable Butler's tawny
• 1:55:15
  child dog's halls laid in black and white lozenges, with white blinds blowing.
• 1:55:19
  Peter saw through the opened door and approved out. I spended achievement in its
• 1:55:25
  own way, after all, London, the season civilization, Coming as he
• 1:55:30
  did, from a respectable Anglo Indian family, which for at least three generations
• 1:55:34
  had administered the affairs of a continent. It's strange, he thought, what
• 1:55:39
  a sentiment I have about that? Disliking India and Empire and army as he
• 1:55:44
  did. There were moments when civilization even of this sort seemed dear to him
• 1:55:48
  as a personal possession. Moments of pride in England, in Butler's childdogs,
• 1:55:54
  girls in their security. Ridiculous enough. Still there it is, he thought.
• 1:55:59
  And the doctors and men a business and capable women, all going about
• 1:56:01
  their business, punctual, alert, robust, seemed to him wholly admirable.
• 1:56:06
  Good fellows to whom one would entrust one's life, Companions in the art of
• 1:56:12
  living, who would see one through what with one thing and another. The
• 1:56:15
  show was really very tolerable, and he would sit down in the shade and
• 1:56:19
  smoke. There was Regent's Park. Yes, as a child he had walked
• 1:56:25
  in Regent's Park. Ah, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps
• 1:56:29
  coming back to me, the result of seeing Clarissa. Perhaps, for women
• 1:56:32
  live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attached
• 1:56:36
  themselves to places and their fathers. A woman's always proud of their father.
• 1:56:42
  Burton was a nice place, a very nice place. But I could never
• 1:56:45
  get on with the old man, he thought. There was quite a scene
• 1:56:48
  one night in argument about something or other what he could not remember politics,
• 1:56:54
  presumably, Yes, he remembered Regent's Park, The long straight walk the little
• 1:56:59
  house where one bought our balls, to the left, an absurd statue with
• 1:57:02
  an inscription somewhere or other. He looked for an empty seat. He did
• 1:57:06
  not want to be bothered, feeling a little drowsy as he did by people
• 1:57:11
  asking him the time. An elderly gray nurse with a baby asleep in its
• 1:57:15
  perambulator. That was the best he could do for himself. Sit down at
• 1:57:19
  the far end of the seat by that nurse. She's a queer looking girl,
• 1:57:24
  he thought, suddenly remembering Elizabeth as she came into the room and stood
• 1:57:28
  by her mother. Grown big, quite grown up, not exactly pretty handsome,
• 1:57:32
  rather, and she can't be more than eighteen. Probably she doesn't get
• 1:57:36
  on with Clarissa. There's my Elizabeth, that sort of thing. Why not.
• 1:57:41
  Here's Elizabeth simply trying to make out, like most mothers, that things
• 1:57:44
  are what they are. Not. She trusts to her charm too much,
• 1:57:47
  she thought, she overdoes it. The rich, benignant cigar smoke eddied coolly
• 1:57:53
  down his throat. He puffed it out again in rings which breast of the
• 1:57:57
  air bravely. For a moment, Blue, I shall try and get a
• 1:58:00
  word alone with Elizabeth to night, he thought, then began to wobble into
• 1:58:05
  our glass shapes and tape her away. Odd shapes they take, he thought.
• 1:58:10
  Suddenly he closed his eyes, raised his hand with an effort, and
• 1:58:14
  threw away the heavy end of his cigar. A great brush swept smooth across
• 1:58:18
  his mind, sweeping across it, moving branches, children's voices, the shuffle
• 1:58:23
  of feet and people, passing and humming, traffic rising and falling, traffic
• 1:58:28
  down down. He sank into the plumes and feathers of sleep, sank and
• 1:58:33
  was muffled over. The gray nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh on the
• 1:58:39
  hot sea beside her began snoring in her gray dress, moving her hands indefatigably
• 1:58:45
  yet quietly. She seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like
• 1:58:48
  one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and
• 1:58:54
  branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturbed the ferns, and
• 1:58:59
  devastator of great hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at
• 1:59:02
  the end of the ride. By conviction an atheist, perhaps he is taken
• 1:59:09
  by surprise with moments of extraordinary exaltation. Nothing exists outside us except a state
• 1:59:15
  of mind. He thinks, a desire for solace, for relief, for
• 1:59:18
  something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these craven men
• 1:59:23
  and women. If he can conceive of her, then in some sort she
• 1:59:28
  exists, he thinks, and, advancing down the path with his eyes upon
• 1:59:30
  sky and branches, he rapidly endowsed them with womanhood, sees with amazement how
• 1:59:36
  grave they become, how majestically. As the breeze stirs them, they dispense
• 1:59:41
  with a dark flutter of the leaves, charity, comprehension, absolution, and
• 1:59:46
  then thinging themselves suddenly aloft, confound the piety of their aspect with the wild
• 1:59:53
  carouse. Such are the visions which proffer great corneocopius full of fruit to the
• 1:59:58
  solitary traveler, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green
• 2:00:03
  sea waves, or are dashed in his face, like bunches of roses,
• 2:00:08
  arise to the surface, like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.
• 2:00:14
  Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up paced beside, put their faces
• 2:00:17
  in front of the actual thing, often overpowering the solitary traveler and taking away
• 2:00:24
  from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving
• 2:00:28
  him for substitute a general peace. As if, so, he thinks,
• 2:00:30
  as he advances down the forest. Right, all this fever of living were
• 2:00:34
  simplicity itself, and myriads of things merged in one thing, And this figure,
• 2:00:40
  made of sky and branches, as it is, had risen from the
• 2:00:44
  troubled sea. He is elderly past fifty now, as a shape might be
• 2:00:47
  sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands. Compassion,
• 2:00:54
  comprehension, absolution, So he thinks, May I never go back to
• 2:00:58
  the lamplight, to this sitting room, Never finish my book, never knock
• 2:01:01
  out my pipe, never ring for missus donnert to clear away. Rather,
• 2:01:05
  let me walk straight on to this great figure, who will, with a
• 2:01:10
  toss of her head, mount me on her streamers, and let me blow
• 2:01:13
  to nothingness with the rest. Such are the visions. The solitary traveler is
• 2:01:16
  soon beyond the wood, and they are coming to the door with shaded eyes,
• 2:01:20
  possibly to look for his return, with hands raised with white apron blowing.
• 2:01:26
  Is an elderly woman who seems so powerful is this infirmity to seek over
• 2:01:30
  a desert, a lost sun, to search for a writer destroyed, to
• 2:01:34
  be the figure of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of
• 2:01:39
  the world. So as the solitary traveler advances down the village street, where
• 2:01:44
  the women stand knitting and the men dig in the garden, the evening seems
• 2:01:47
  ominous. The figure is still, as if some august fate known to them
• 2:01:53
  awaited without fear. We're about to sweep them into complete annihilation. Indoors,
• 2:01:58
  among ordinary things, the cupboard, the table, the window, still with
• 2:02:01
  his germanium. Suddenly the outline of the landlady, bending to remove the cloth,
• 2:02:06
  becomes soft with light, an adorable emblem which only the recollection of cold
• 2:02:11
  human contact forbids us to embrace. She takes the marmalade, she shuts it
• 2:02:15
  in the cupboard. There's nothing more tonight, sir. But to whom does
• 2:02:19
  the solitary traveler make reply? So the elderly nurse knitted over the sleeping baby
• 2:02:26
  in reach in his park. So Peter Walsh snored in the chapter four Chapter
• 2:02:33
  five, he woke with extreme suddenness, saying to himself, the death of
• 2:02:41
  the soul. Lord, Lord, He said to himself out loud, stretching
• 2:02:46
  and opening his eyes, the death of the soul. The words attach themselves
• 2:02:54
  to some scene, to some room, who some past he had been dreaming
• 2:03:00
  of. It became clearer, the scene, the room, the past he
• 2:03:06
  had been dreaming of. It was aunt Burton that summer early in the nineties,
• 2:03:13
  when he was so passionately in love with Clarissa. There were a great
• 2:03:18
  many people there, laughing and talking, sitting round a table after tea,
• 2:03:25
  in the room with spathed and yellow light and full of cigarette smoke. They
• 2:03:31
  were talking about a man who had married his housemaid, one of the neighboring
• 2:03:36
  squires. He had forgotten his name. He had married his housemaid, and
• 2:03:43
  she had been brought to Burton to call an awful visit. It had been
• 2:03:49
  she was absurdly overdressed, like a cockatoo, Clarissa had said, imitating her,
• 2:03:57
  and she never stopped talking. On and on she went on and on.
• 2:04:03
  Clarissa imitated her. Then somebody said, Sally seedon it was. Did
• 2:04:10
  it make any real difference to one's feeling to know that before they'd married she
• 2:04:17
  had had a baby. In those days in mixed company, it was a
• 2:04:24
  bold thing to say. He could see Clarissa now turning bright pink, somehow
• 2:04:30
  contracting and saying, oh, I shall never be able to speak to her
• 2:04:36
  again. Whereupon the whole party sitting round the tea table seemed to wobble.
• 2:04:44
  It was very uncomfortable. He hadn't blamed her for minding the fact, since
• 2:04:50
  in those days the girl brought up as she was knew nothing. But it
• 2:04:58
  was her manner that annoyed him. Timid, hard, something irrogant, unimaginative,
• 2:05:05
  prudish. The death of the soul, he had said that, instinctively,
• 2:05:13
  ticketing the moment as he used to do, the death of her soul.
• 2:05:18
  Everyone wobbled, Everyone seemed to bow as she spoke, and then to
• 2:05:26
  stand up different. He could see Sally Seaton like a child who has been
• 2:05:32
  in mischief, leaning forward rather flushed, wanting to talk, but afraid.
• 2:05:41
  And Clarissa did frighten people. She was Clarissa's greatest friend, all is about
• 2:05:47
  the place, totally unlike her, an attractive creature, handsome, dark with
• 2:05:55
  the reputation in those days of Greek daring, and he used to give her
• 2:06:00
  cigars, which she smoked in her bedroom. She had either been engaged to
• 2:06:08
  somebody or quarreled with your family, and old Perry disliked them both equally,
• 2:06:15
  which was a great bond. Then Clarissa, still with an air of being
• 2:06:21
  offended with them all, got up, made some excuse and went off alone.
• 2:06:30
  As she opened the door, in came that great shaggy dog, which
• 2:06:35
  ran after sheep. She flung herself upon him, went into raptures. It
• 2:06:43
  was as if she said to Peter. It was all aimed at him.
• 2:06:47
  He knew, I know you thought me absurd about that woman just now,
• 2:06:54
  But see how extraordinarily sympathetic I am. See how I I love my rob.
• 2:07:01
  They had always been this queer power of communicating without words. She knew
• 2:07:09
  directly he criticized her. Then she would do something quite obvious to defend herself,
• 2:07:16
  like this fuss with the dog. But it never took him in.
• 2:07:20
  He always saw through Clarissa. Not that he said anything, of course,
• 2:07:27
  just sat looking glum. It was the way their quarrels often began. She
• 2:07:33
  shut the door at once. He became extremely depressed. It all seemed useless,
• 2:07:41
  going on being in love, going on quarreling, going on making it
• 2:07:48
  up. And he wandered off alone among outhouses stables, looking at the horses.
• 2:07:57
  The place was quite a humble one, and Perry's were never very well
• 2:08:01
  off. But there were always grooms and stable boys about. Clarissa loved riding,
• 2:08:09
  And an old coachman what was his name, an old nurse, old
• 2:08:16
  moody, old goody, some such name they called her, whom one was
• 2:08:22
  taken to visit, in a little room with lots of photographs, lots of
• 2:08:28
  birdcages. It was an awful evening. He grew more and more gloomy,
• 2:08:35
  not about that, only about everything. And he couldn't see her, couldn't
• 2:08:41
  explain to her, couldn't have it out. There were always people about.
• 2:08:48
  She'd go on as if nothing had happened. That was the devilish part of
• 2:08:54
  her, this coldness, this woodedness, something very profound in her, which
• 2:09:01
  he had fell again this morning talking to her, an impenitability. Yet Heaven
• 2:09:09
  knows he loved her. She had some queer power of fiddling on one's nerves,
• 2:09:16
  turning one's nerves to fiddle strings. Yes, he had gone in to
• 2:09:22
  dinner rather late from some idiotic idea of making himself felt, and had sat
• 2:09:30
  down by old miss Perry, Aunt Helena, mister Perry's sister, who was
• 2:09:35
  supposed to preside there. She sat in her white cashmere shawl with her head
• 2:09:43
  against the window. A formidable old lady, but kind to him, for
• 2:09:48
  he had found her some rare flower, and she was a great botanist,
• 2:09:54
  marching off in thick boots with a black collecting box slung between her shoulders.
• 2:10:03
  He sat down beside her and couldn't speak. Everything seemed to race past him.
• 2:10:09
  He just sat there, eating, And then halfway through dinner he made
• 2:10:16
  himself look across at Clarissa for the first time. She was talking to a
• 2:10:22
  young man on her right. He had a sudden revelation. She will marry
• 2:10:28
  that man, he said to himself. He didn't even know his name,
• 2:10:33
  for of course, it was that afternoon, that very afternoon that Delaware had
• 2:10:41
  come over and Clarissa called him Wickham. That was the beginning of it all.
• 2:10:48
  Somebody had brought him over and Clarissa got his name wrong. She introduced
• 2:10:54
  him to everybody as Wickham. At last, he said, my name is
• 2:11:01
  Delaway, That was his first view of Richard, a fair young man,
• 2:11:09
  rather awkward, sitting on a deck chair, blurting out, my name is
• 2:11:15
  Dollaway. Sally got hold of it always after that she called him my name
• 2:11:22
  is Delaware. He was a prey to revelations at that time. This one
• 2:11:28
  that she would marry Delaway was blinding overwhelming. At the moment. There was
• 2:11:35
  a sort of how could he put it, a sort of ease in her
• 2:11:39
  manner to him, something maternal, something gentle. They were talking about politics
• 2:11:48
  all through dinner. He tried to hear what they were saying. Afterwards,
• 2:11:54
  he could remember standing by old Miss Perry's chair in the draw ingram. Flissa
• 2:12:01
  came up with her perfect manners, like a real hostess, and wanted to
• 2:12:07
  introduce him to someone. Spoke as if they had never met before, which
• 2:12:13
  enraged him, Yet even then he admired her for it. He admired her
• 2:12:20
  courage, her social instinct. He admired her power of carrying things through.
• 2:12:26
  The perfect hostess, he said to her, whereupon she winced all over.
• 2:12:33
  But he meant her to feel it. He would have done anything to hurt
• 2:12:37
  her after seeing her with Delaway, So she left him and he had a
• 2:12:45
  feeling that they were all gathered together in a conspiracy against him, laughing and
• 2:12:52
  talking behind his back. There he stood by Miss Perry's chair, as though
• 2:12:58
  he had then cut out of wood. He talked about wildflowers. Never,
• 2:13:05
  never had he suffered so infernally. He must have forgotten even to pretend to
• 2:13:13
  listen. At last he woke up. He saw Miss Perry looking rather disturbed,
• 2:13:18
  rather indignant, with her prominent eyes fixed. He almost cried out that
• 2:13:26
  he couldn't attend because he was in hell. People began going out of the
• 2:13:31
  room. He heard them talking about fetching cloaks, about its being cold on
• 2:13:39
  the water, and so on. They were going boating on the lake by
• 2:13:43
  moonlight, one of Sally's mad ideas. He could hear her describing the moon,
• 2:13:50
  and they all went out. He was left quite alone. Don't you
• 2:13:56
  want to go with them? Said Aunt Helena old Miss Perry. She had
• 2:14:01
  guessed, And he turned round and there was Clarissa again. She had come
• 2:14:07
  back to fetch him. He was overcome by her generosity, her goodness.
• 2:14:16
  Come along, she said, they're waiting. He had never felt so happy
• 2:14:20
  in the whole of his life. Without a word. They made it up.
• 2:14:26
  They walked down to the lake. He had twenty minutes of perfect happiness.
• 2:14:33
  Her voice, her laugh, her dress, something floating white crimson,
• 2:14:41
  her spirit, her adventurousness. She made them all disembark and explore the island.
• 2:14:48
  She startled a hand, she laughed, she sang, and all the
• 2:14:54
  time he knew perfectly well Bellaway was falling in love with her. She was
• 2:15:01
  falling in love with Delaway. But it didn't seem to matter. Nothing mattered.
• 2:15:07
  They sat on the ground and talked Dean Clarissa. They went in and
• 2:15:13
  out of each other's minds without any effort, and then in a second it
• 2:15:20
  was over. He said to himself, as they were getting into the boat,
• 2:15:26
  she will marry that man Dully without any resentment. But it was an
• 2:15:33
  obvious thing Delaway would marry Clarissa. Delaway rode them in. He said nothing,
• 2:15:43
  but somehow, as they watched him start jumping onto his bicycle to ride
• 2:15:50
  twenty miles through the woods, wobbling off down the drive, waving his hand
• 2:15:56
  and disappearing, he obviously did feel instinctively, tremendously strongly all that the night,
• 2:16:07
  the romance Clarissa. He deserved to have her for himself. He was
• 2:16:15
  absurd. His demands upon Clarissa, he could see it now, were absurd.
• 2:16:22
  He asked impossible things, he made terrible scenes. She would have accepted
• 2:16:28
  him still, perhaps if he had en less absurd, Sally thought so.
• 2:16:35
  She wrote him all that summer, long letters, how they had talked of
• 2:16:39
  him, how she had praised him. How Clarissa burst into tears. It
• 2:16:46
  was an extraordinary summer, all letters, scenes, telegrams. Writing at Burton
• 2:16:54
  early in the morning, hanging about till the servants were up, appalling Tata,
• 2:17:03
  tates with old mister Perry at breakfast, Aunt Helena, formidable but kind,
• 2:17:09
  Sally sweeping him off for talks in the vegetable garden, Clarissa in bed
• 2:17:16
  with headaches. The final scene, the terrible scene, which he believed had
• 2:17:24
  mattered more than anything in the whole of his life. That might be an
• 2:17:28
  exaggeration, but still so it did seem now, happened at three o'clock in
• 2:17:35
  the afternoon of a very hot day. It was a trifle that led up
• 2:17:43
  to it, Sally at lunch saying something about Delaway and calling him, my
• 2:17:50
  name is Delaware, whereupon Clarissa suddenly stiffened, colored in a way she had,
• 2:17:58
  and wrapped out sharply. We've had enough of that feeble joke. That
• 2:18:03
  was all. But for him it was precisely as if she had said,
• 2:18:11
  I'm only amusing myself with you. I've an understanding with Richard Delaware. So
• 2:18:18
  he took it. He had not slept for nights. It's got to be
• 2:18:24
  finished, one way or the other, he said to himself. He sent
• 2:18:28
  a note to her by Sally, asking her to meet him by the fountain
• 2:18:35
  at three. Something very important has happened, he scribbled at the end of
• 2:18:41
  it. The fountain was in the middle of a little shrubbery far from the
• 2:18:46
  house, with shrubs and trees all round it. There she came even before
• 2:18:54
  the time, and they stood with the fountain between them. The spout it
• 2:18:58
  was broken, dribbling water incessantly. How sights fixed themselves upon the mind,
• 2:19:07
  for example, the vivid green moss. She did not move. Tell me
• 2:19:13
  the truth. Tell me the truth, he kept on, saying. He
• 2:19:18
  felt as if his forehead would burst. She seemed contracted, petrified. She
• 2:19:26
  did not move. Tell me the truth, he repeated. When suddenly that
• 2:19:31
  old man bright Cough popped his head in carrying the times, stared at them,
• 2:19:39
  gaped and went away. They neither of them moved. Tell me the
• 2:19:45
  truth, he repeated. He felt that he was grinding against something physically hard.
• 2:19:52
  She was unyielding. She was like iron, like flint, rigid up
• 2:19:58
  the back. And when she said, it's no use, it's no use.
• 2:20:05
  This is the end. After he had spoken for hours, it seemed,
• 2:20:11
  with the tears running down his cheeks, it was as if she had
• 2:20:16
  hit him in the face. She turned, she left him, went away.
• 2:20:22
  Clarissa. He cried, Clarissa, but she never came back. It
• 2:20:28
  was over. He went away that night. He never saw her again.
• 2:20:33
  It was awful, he cried, awful, awful. Still, the sun
• 2:20:41
  was hot. Still one got over things. Still, life had a way
• 2:20:48
  of adding day to day. Still, he thought, yawning and beginning to
• 2:20:54
  take notice. Regent's Park has changed very little since he was a boy,
• 2:21:01
  except for the squirrels. Still, presumably there were compensations. When little Elsie
• 2:21:09
  Mitchell, who had been picking up pebbles to add to the pebble collection which
• 2:21:16
  she and her brother were making on the nursery mantelpiece, plumped her handful down
• 2:21:22
  on the nurse's knee and scudded off again, full tilt into a lady's legs.
• 2:21:31
  Peter Walsh laughed out, but Lucretia Warren Smith was saying to herself,
• 2:21:39
  it's wicked? Why should I suffer? She was asking, as she walked
• 2:21:45
  down the broad path. No, I can't stand it any longer, she
• 2:21:50
  was saying, having left Septimus. Who wasn't Septimus any longer? To say
• 2:21:56
  hard crawl wicked thing? To talk to himself, to talk to a dead
• 2:22:03
  man on the seat over there? When the child ran full tilt into her
• 2:22:11
  fell flat and burst out crying that was comforting. Rather, she stood her
• 2:22:18
  upright, dusting her frog kissed her. But for herself, she had done
• 2:22:24
  nothing wrong. She had loved Syptimus, she had been happy, she had
• 2:22:30
  had a beautiful home, and there her sisters lived, still making hats.
• 2:22:37
  Why should she suffer? The child ran straight back to its nurse, and
• 2:22:43
  Resia saw her scolded, comforted, taken up by the nurse who put down
• 2:22:50
  her knitting, and the kind looking man gave her his watch to blow open
• 2:22:58
  to comforter. Why should she be exposed? Why not left in the land?
• 2:23:05
  Why tortured? Why slightly waved by tears, the broad path, the
• 2:23:11
  nurse, the man in gray, the perambulator rose and fell before her eyes.
• 2:23:20
  To be rocked by this malignant torturer was her lot. But why she
• 2:23:26
  was like a bird sheltering under the thin hollow of a leaf, who blinks
• 2:23:31
  at the sun when the leaf moves, starts at the crack of a dry
• 2:23:37
  twig. She was exposed. She was surrounded by the enormous trees, vast
• 2:23:46
  clouds of an indifferent world. Exposed, tortured, and why should she suffer?
• 2:23:54
  Why she frowned. She stamped her foot us to go back again to
• 2:24:01
  Septimus, since it was almost time for them to be going to Sir William
• 2:24:07
  Bradshaw. She must go back and tell him, go back to him sitting
• 2:24:13
  there on the green chair under the tree, talking to himself, or to
• 2:24:18
  the dead man Evans, whom she had only seen once for a moment in
• 2:24:24
  the shop. He had seemed a nice, quiet man, a great friend
• 2:24:31
  of Septimus's, and he had been killed in the war. But such things
• 2:24:37
  happened to everyone. Everyone has friends who were killed in the war. Everyone
• 2:24:43
  gives up something when they marry. She had given up her home. She
• 2:24:50
  had come to live here in this awful city. But Septimus let himself think
• 2:24:56
  about horrible things, as she could too if she tried. He had grown
• 2:25:03
  stranger and stranger. He said. People were talking behind the bedroom walls.
• 2:25:11
  Missus Filmer thought it odd. She saw things too. He had seen an
• 2:25:18
  old woman's head in the middle of a fern. Yet he could be happy
• 2:25:24
  when he chose. They went to Hampton Court on top of a bus,
• 2:25:30
  and they were perfectly happy. All the little red and yellow flowers were out
• 2:25:37
  on the grass like floating lamps. He said, and talked and chattered and
• 2:25:43
  laughed, making up stories. Suddenly he said, now we will kill ourselves.
• 2:25:52
  When they were standing by the river, and he looked at it with
• 2:25:56
  a look which she had seen in his eyes. When the train went by,
• 2:26:01
  or an omnibus, they looked as if something fascinated him, and she
• 2:26:07
  felt he was going from her, and she caught him by the arm.
• 2:26:13
  But going home, he was perfectly quiet, perfectly reasonable. He would argue
• 2:26:20
  with her about killing themselves, and explain how wicked people were, how he
• 2:26:28
  could see them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew
• 2:26:35
  all their thoughts he said, he knew everything, He knew the meaning of
• 2:26:41
  the world, he said. Then when they got back, he could hardly
• 2:26:46
  talk. He lay on the sofa and made her hold his hand to prevent
• 2:26:52
  him from falling down. Down. He cried into the flames, and saw
• 2:27:01
  faces laughing at him, calling him horrible, disgusting names from the walls,
• 2:27:07
  and hands pointing round the screen. Yet they were quite alone, But he
• 2:27:15
  began to talk aloud, answering, people, arguing, laughing, crying,
• 2:27:22
  getting very exciting, and making her right things down, perfect nonsense. It
• 2:27:28
  was about death, about miss Isabel Poll. She could stand it no longer.
• 2:27:37
  She would go back. She was close to him now, could see
• 2:27:41
  him staring at the sky, muttering what, clasping his hands. Yet doctor
• 2:27:48
  Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him. What then had happened?
• 2:27:54
  Why had he gone then? Why when she sat by him did he start
• 2:28:01
  frown at her? Move away and point at her hand, take her hand,
• 2:28:07
  looking at it terrified. Was it that she had taken off her wedding
• 2:28:13
  ring. My hand has grown so thin, she said, I have put
• 2:28:20
  it in my purse, she told him. He dropped her hand. Their
• 2:28:26
  marriage was over, he thought, with agony. With relief, the rope
• 2:28:31
  was cut. He mounted. He was free, as it was decreed that
• 2:28:39
  he, Septimus, the Lord of men, should be free alone. Since
• 2:28:46
  his wife had thrown away her redding wing, since she had left him,
• 2:28:52
  he Septimus was alone, called forth in advance of the mass of men to
• 2:28:58
  hear the truth, to learn the meaning which, now, at last,
• 2:29:05
  after all the toils of civilization, Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin,
• 2:29:13
  and now himself, was to be give a whole to whom He asked aloud
• 2:29:22
  to the Prime Minister, the voices which rustled about his head replied, the
• 2:29:28
  supreme secret must be told to the cabinet. First, the trees are alive.
• 2:29:37
  Next, there is no crime. Next love, universal love, he
• 2:29:45
  muttered, gasping, trembling, painfully, drawing out these profound truths which needed
• 2:29:52
  so deep, were they so difficult in an immense effort to speak out.
• 2:30:00
  But the world was entirely changed by them. Forever no crime, Love,
• 2:30:07
  he repeated, fumbling for his card and pencil. When a sky terrier snuffed
• 2:30:15
  his trousers and he started in an agony of fear. It was turning into
• 2:30:22
  a man. He could not watch it. Happen. It was horrible,
• 2:30:26
  terrible to see a dog become a man. At once the dog trotted away.
• 2:30:35
  Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant. That spared him, hardened his
• 2:30:43
  weakness. But what was the scientific explanation? For one must be scientific of
• 2:30:52
  of all things. Why could he see through bodies, see into the future,
• 2:30:58
  and dogs will become men? It was the heat wave, presumably operating
• 2:31:05
  upon a brain made sensitive by ants of evolution. Scientifically speaking, the flesh
• 2:31:15
  was melted off the world. His body macerated until only the nerve fibers were
• 2:31:22
  left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock. He lay back
• 2:31:28
  in his chair, exhausted, but upheld. He lay resting, waiting before
• 2:31:35
  he again interpreted with effort, with agony to mankind. He lay very high
• 2:31:45
  on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers
• 2:31:52
  grew through his flesh, their stiff leaves rustled by his head, music and
• 2:32:00
  clanging against the rocks. Up Here, it is a motor horn down in
• 2:32:05
  the street, he muttered. But up here it cannoned from rock to rock,
• 2:32:11
  divided, met in shocks of sound, which rose in smooth columns.
• 2:32:18
  That musa should be visible was a discovery and became an anthem, an anthem
• 2:32:28
  twined round now by a shepherd boy's piping. That's an old man playing a
• 2:32:35
  penny whistle by the public house, he muttered, which, as the boy
• 2:32:41
  stood still, came bubbling from his pipe, and then, as he climbed
• 2:32:46
  higher, made its exquisite pliant. While the traffic passed beneath. This boy's
• 2:32:54
  elegy is played among the traffic, thought Septimus. Now he withdraws up into
• 2:33:03
  the snows, and roses hang about him, the thick red roses which grow
• 2:33:09
  on my bedroom wall, he reminded himself. The music stopped. He has
• 2:33:16
  his penny, he reasoned it out, and has gone on to the next
• 2:33:22
  public house. But he himself remained high on his rock, like a drowned
• 2:33:28
  sailor on a rock. I leaned over the edge of the boat and fell
• 2:33:33
  down, he thought, I went under the sea. I have been dead,
• 2:33:39
  and yet I am now alive. But let me rest still, he
• 2:33:46
  begged. He was talking to himself again. It was awful, awful,
• 2:33:52
  and as before, waking, the voices of birds and the sound of wheels,
• 2:33:58
  chime and chatter into a clear harmony, grow louder and louder, and
• 2:34:05
  the sleeper feels himself drawing to the shores of life. So he felt himself
• 2:34:13
  drawing towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding louder, Something tremendous
• 2:34:22
  about to happen. He had only to open his eyes, but a weight
• 2:34:28
  was on them of fear. He strained, he pushed, He looked.
• 2:34:35
  He saw Regent's Park before him. Long streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet.
• 2:34:43
  The trees waved brandished. We welcomed, the world seemed to say.
• 2:34:50
  We accept. We create beauty, the world seemed to say, and as
• 2:34:58
  if to prove it scientifically, Wherever he looked, at the houses, at
• 2:35:03
  the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly.
• 2:35:11
  To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy.
• 2:35:20
  Up in the sky, swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out,
• 2:35:28
  round and round, yet always with perfect control, as if elastics held
• 2:35:35
  them, and the flies rising and falling, and the sun spotting. Now
• 2:35:41
  this leaf, now that in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold, in
• 2:35:48
  pure good temper, and now and again some chime, it might be a
• 2:35:54
  motor horne tinkling divinely on the grass stalks. All of this, calm and
• 2:36:01
  reasonable, as it was, made out of ordinary things, as it was,
• 2:36:07
  was the truth. Now beauty that was the truth. Now beauty was
• 2:36:15
  everywhere. It is Time, said Fresia. The word Time split its husk,
• 2:36:24
  poured its riches over him, and from his lips fell like shells,
• 2:36:31
  like shavings from a plane, without his making them hard, quite imperishable words,
• 2:36:39
  and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to time,
• 2:36:46
  an immortal ode to time, he sang. Evans answered, from behind the
• 2:36:54
  tree the dead, where invessily Evans sang among the orchids. There they waited
• 2:37:03
  till the war was over, And now dead. Now Evans himself, for
• 2:37:09
  God's sakes, don't come, Septimus cried out, for he could not look
• 2:37:15
  upon the dead. But the branches parted. A man in gray was actually
• 2:37:22
  walking toward them. It was Evans, but no mud was on him,
• 2:37:28
  no wounds. He was not changed. I must tell the whole story,
• 2:37:33
  Septimus cried, raising his hand, as the dead man in the gray suit
• 2:37:41
  came near raising his hand like some colossal figure who has lamented the fate of
• 2:37:50
  man or ages in the desert, alone with his hands pressed to his forehead,
• 2:37:58
  furrows of despair on his cheeks, and now sees light on the desert's
• 2:38:03
  edge, which broadens and strikes the iron clad figure. And Septimus hath rose
• 2:38:11
  from his chair, and with legions of men prostrate behind him, he,
• 2:38:18
  the giant mourner, receives for one moment on his face, the whole.
• 2:38:26
  But I am so unhappy, Septimus, said Rizia, trying to make him
• 2:38:33
  sit down. The millions lamented for ages they had sorrowed. He would turn
• 2:38:39
  around, he would tell them in a few moments, only a few moments
• 2:38:43
  more, of his relief, of this joy, of this astonishing revelation.
• 2:38:52
  The time Septimus Rizio repeated, what is the time? He was taught looking?
• 2:39:00
  He was starting This man must notice him, he was looking at them.
• 2:39:05
  I will tell you the time, said Septanus, very slowly, very
• 2:39:11
  drowsily, smiling mysteriously as he sat smiling at the dead man in the gray
• 2:39:20
  suit. The quarter struck the quarter to twelve, and that is being young,
• 2:39:28
  Peter Walsh thought, as he passed them to be having an awful scene.
• 2:39:33
  The poor girl looked absolutely desperate in the middle of the morning. But
• 2:39:41
  what was it about, he wondered. What had the young man in the
• 2:39:46
  overcoat been saying to her to make her look like that? What awful fix
• 2:39:52
  had they got themselves into, both to look so desperate as that find summer
• 2:40:00
  morning. The amusing thing about coming back to England after five years was the
• 2:40:07
  way it made anyhow, the first days things stand out as if one had
• 2:40:15
  never seen them before. Lovers squabbling under a tree, the domestic family life
• 2:40:22
  of the parks. Never had he seen London so enchanting, the softness of
• 2:40:31
  the distances, the richness, the greenness, the civilization. After India,
• 2:40:39
  he thought, strolling across the grass, This susceptibility to impressions had been his
• 2:40:48
  undoing, no doubt. Still at his age he had like a boy or
• 2:40:54
  a girl, even these alternations of mood, good days, bad days,
• 2:41:01
  for no reason whatever, happiness from a pretty face, downright misery at the
• 2:41:09
  sight of a frump. After India, of course, one fell in love
• 2:41:16
  with every woman one met. There was a freshness about them, Even the
• 2:41:22
  poorest dressed better than five years ago, surely than to his eye the fashions
• 2:41:31
  had never been so becoming, the long black coats, the slimness, the
• 2:41:37
  elegance, and then the delicious and apparently universal habit of paint. Every woman,
• 2:41:48
  even the most respectable, had roses blooming under glass, lips cut with
• 2:41:56
  a knife, curls of India ink. There was a design art everywhere.
• 2:42:03
  A change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place. What did the young people
• 2:42:11
  think about? Peter Walsh asked himself. Those five years nineteen eighteen to nineteen
• 2:42:20
  twenty three had been He suspected somehow very important people looked different. Newspapers seemed
• 2:42:33
  different now. For instance, there was a man writing quite openly in one
• 2:42:41
  of the respectable weeklies about water clauses that you couldn't have done that ten years
• 2:42:50
  ago, written quite openly about water clauses in a respectable weekly, and then
• 2:42:58
  sis taking out of a stick of rouge or a powder puff and making up
• 2:43:05
  in public. On board ship coming home, there were lots of young men
• 2:43:11
  and girls, Betty and Bertie, he remembered, in particular, carrying on
• 2:43:18
  quite openly, the old mother sitting and watching them with her knitting cool as
• 2:43:26
  a cucumber. The girl would stand still and powder her nose in front of
• 2:43:33
  everyone, and they weren't engaged, just having a good time. No feelings
• 2:43:39
  hurt on either side. As hard as nails. She was Betty what's her
• 2:43:48
  name? But a thorough good sort. She would make a very good wife.
• 2:43:54
  At thirty she would marry when it serted her to marry some rich man
• 2:44:01
  and lived in a large house near Manchester. Who was it now who had
• 2:44:09
  done that? Peter Walsh asked himself, turning into the broad Walk. Married
• 2:44:16
  a rich man and living in a large house near Manchester, somebody who had
• 2:44:24
  written him a long, grushing letter quite lately about the Blue Hyde Ranges.
• 2:44:31
  It was seeing blue high ranges that made her think of him in the old
• 2:44:37
  days. Sally seton. Of course, it was Sally Seton, the last
• 2:44:43
  person in the world who would have expected to marry a rich man and live
• 2:44:50
  in a large house near Manchester. The wild, the daring, the romantic.
• 2:45:01
  But of all that ancient lot, Clarissa's friends, Whitbreads, King Gerle's,
• 2:45:09
  Cunningham's think clock Jones, Sally was probably the best. She tried to
• 2:45:16
  get hold of things by the right end anywhow she saw through Hugh Whitbread.
• 2:45:22
  Anyhow, the admirable Hugh. When Clarissa and the rest were at his feet,
• 2:45:31
  the whitbreads, he could hear her say, who are the whitbreads?
• 2:45:37
  Coal merchants, respectable tradespeople. Hugh she detested for some reason. He thought
• 2:45:46
  of nothing but his own appearance. She said, he ought to have been
• 2:45:50
  a duke. He would be certain to marry one of the royal princesses.
• 2:45:56
  And of course Hugh had the most extra mary, the most natural, the
• 2:46:03
  most sublime respect for the Pritish aristocracy of any human being he had ever come
• 2:46:11
  across. Even Clarissa had to own that. Oh, but he was such
• 2:46:18
  a dear, so unselfish, gave up shooting to please his old mother,
• 2:46:24
  remembering his aunt's birthday, and so on. Sally, to do her justice,
• 2:46:33
  saw through all that. One of the things he remembered best was an
• 2:46:37
  argument one Sunday morning at Burton about women's rights, that antediluvian topic, when
• 2:46:46
  Sally suddenly lost her temper, flared up and told Hugh that he represented all
• 2:46:56
  that was most detestable in British middle class life. She told him that she
• 2:47:03
  considered him responsible for the state of those poor girls in Piccadilly. Hugh,
• 2:47:11
  the perfect gentleman, Poor Hugh. Never did a man look more horrified.
• 2:47:20
  She did it on purpose, she said afterwards, for they used to get
• 2:47:24
  together in the vegetable garden and compare notes. He's read nothing, thought nothing,
• 2:47:31
  felt nothing. He could hear her saying, in that very emphatic voice
• 2:47:37
  which carried so much farther as she knew. The stable boys had more life
• 2:47:43
  in them than Hugh. She said he was a perfect specimen of the public
• 2:47:50
  school type. She said, no country but England would have produced him.
• 2:47:58
  She was really spiteful for some reason, had some grudge against him. Something
• 2:48:03
  had happened. He forgot what. In the smoking room he had insulted her,
• 2:48:11
  kissed her incredible. Nobody believed a word against Hugh. Of course,
• 2:48:18
  who could kissy Sally in the smoking room. It had been some honorable Edith
• 2:48:26
  or Lady Violet, perhaps, but not that ragmuffin Sally without a penny to
• 2:48:33
  her name and a father or a mother gambling at Monte Carlow. For all
• 2:48:41
  the people he had ever met, who was the greatest snob, the most
• 2:48:48
  obsequious? No, he didn't cringe exactly. He was too much of a
• 2:48:54
  prig for that. A first rate ballet was the obvious comparrison. Somebody who
• 2:49:01
  walked behind carrying suitcases could be trusted to send telegrams indispensable to hostesses. And
• 2:49:11
  he'd found his job. Married, Honorable Evelent, got some little post at
• 2:49:18
  court, looked after the king's sellers, polished the imperial shoe buckles, went
• 2:49:26
  about in knee bitches and lace ruffles. How remorseless life is a little job
• 2:49:33
  at court. He had married this lady, the Honorable Evelyn, and they
• 2:49:41
  lived hereabouts, so he thought, looking at the papas houses, overlooking the
• 2:49:48
  park where he had lunched there once in a house which had, like all
• 2:49:54
  Hugh's possessions, something that no other house could possibly have. Comforts it might
• 2:50:01
  have been. You had to go and look at them. You had to
• 2:50:05
  spend a great deal of time, always admiring whatever it was. Linen cupboards,
• 2:50:13
  pillowcases, old oak furniture, pictures which you had picked up for an
• 2:50:20
  old song. But missus Hughes sometimes gave the show away. She was one
• 2:50:26
  of those obscure, mouselike little women who admire big men. She was almost
• 2:50:35
  negligible. Then suddenly she would say something quite unexpected, something sharp. She
• 2:50:41
  had the relics of the grand manner. Perhaps the steam coal was a little
• 2:50:48
  too strong for her, that made the atmosphere's thick. And so there they
• 2:50:54
  lived, with their linen cupboards and their old masters, and their pillowcases fringed
• 2:51:01
  with real lace, at the rate of five or ten thousand a year,
• 2:51:07
  presumably, while he, who was two years older than Hugh, paged for
• 2:51:15
  a job. At fifty three, he had come and asked them to put
• 2:51:20
  him into some secretary's office, to find him some usher's job, teaching little
• 2:51:28
  boys Latin at the peck and call of some Mandarin in an office, something
• 2:51:35
  that brought in five hundred a year, or if he married Daisy, even
• 2:51:41
  with his pension, they could never do on less quitbread could do it,
• 2:51:48
  presumably, or delaway he didn't mind what he asked, Delaware. He was
• 2:51:56
  a thorough good sport, a bit limited, a bit in the head,
• 2:52:01
  yes, but a thorough good sword. Whatever he took up, he did
• 2:52:07
  in the same matter of fact, sensible way, without a touch of imagination,
• 2:52:15
  without a spark of britancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type.
• 2:52:22
  He ought to have been a country gentleman. He was wasted on politics.
• 2:52:28
  He was at his best out of doors with horses and dogs. How
• 2:52:33
  good he was. For instance, when that great shaggy dog of Clarissa's got
• 2:52:41
  caught in a trap and had its paw half torn off, and Clarissa turned
• 2:52:48
  faint, and Dellaway did the whole thing banaged, made splints, told Clarissa
• 2:52:56
  not to be a fool. That was what she liked him for. Perhaps
• 2:53:01
  that was what she needed. Now, my dear, don't be a fool.
• 2:53:07
  Hold this, fetch that all the time, talking to the dog as
• 2:53:13
  if it were a human being. But how could she swallow all that stuff
• 2:53:18
  about poetry? How could she let him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously and
• 2:53:26
  solemnly? Richard Dollaway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man
• 2:53:35
  ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at key holes. Besides,
• 2:53:43
  the relationship was not one that he approved. No decent man ought to
• 2:53:50
  let his wife visit a deceased wife's sister. Incredible. The only thing to
• 2:53:56
  do was to pelt him with sugared almonds. It was at dinner, but
• 2:54:03
  Clorissa sucked it all in, thought it so honest of him, so independent
• 2:54:11
  of him. Heaven knows, as she didn't think of him the most original
• 2:54:18
  mind she had ever met. That was one of the bonds between Sally and
• 2:54:24
  himself. It was a garden where they used to walk, a walled in
• 2:54:30
  place with rose bushes and giant callflowers. He could remember Sally tearing off a
• 2:54:37
  rose, stopping to exclaim at the beauty of the cabbage leaves in the moonlight.
• 2:54:46
  It was extraordinary, how vividly it all came back to him, things
• 2:54:50
  he hadn't thought of for years. While she implored him, half laughing of
• 2:54:56
  course, to carry off Clarissa, to save her from the Hues and the
• 2:55:03
  Delawares and all the other perfect gentleman who would stifle her soul. She wrote
• 2:55:11
  reams of poetry in those days, making mere hostess of her encourage her worldliness.
• 2:55:20
  But one must do Clarissa justice. She wasn't going to marry Hugh anyhow.
• 2:55:28
  She had a perfectly clear notion of what she wanted. Her emotions were
• 2:55:33
  all on the surface. Beneath she was very shrewd, A far better judge
• 2:55:41
  of character than Sally, for instance, and with it fall purely feminine,
• 2:55:46
  with that extraordinary gift, that woman's gift of making a world of her own
• 2:55:54
  wherever she happened to be. She came into a room, she stood as
• 2:56:01
  he had often seen her, in a doorway, with lots of people around
• 2:56:07
  her. But it was Clarissa, one remembered, not that she was striking,
• 2:56:15
  not beautiful at all. There was nothing picturesque about her. She never
• 2:56:20
  said anything specially clever. There she was, however, there she was.
• 2:56:30
  End of chapter five, Chapter six. No, no, no, He
• 2:56:35
  was not in love with her anymore. He only felt after seeing her that
• 2:56:41
  morning among her scissors and silks, making ready for the party, unable to
• 2:56:46
  get away from the thought of her. She kept coming back and back,
• 2:56:50
  like a sleeper, jolting against him in a railway carriage. Which was not
• 2:56:56
  being in love, of course, It was thinking of her her, starting
• 2:57:01
  again after thirty years, trying to explain her. The obvious thing to say
• 2:57:05
  of her was that she was worldly, cared too much for rank and society
• 2:57:11
  in getting on in the world, which was true in a sense. She
• 2:57:15
  had admitted it to him. You could always get her to own up if
• 2:57:18
  you took the trouble. She was honest. What she would say was that
• 2:57:22
  she hated frumps Bogey's failures. Like himself, presumably thought people had no right
• 2:57:28
  to slouch about with their hands in their pockets. Must do something, be
• 2:57:33
  something, And these great swells, these duchesses, these hoary old countesses,
• 2:57:39
  one met in her drawing room, unspeakably remote, as he felt them to
• 2:57:43
  be, from anything that mattered. A straw stood for something real to her,
• 2:57:48
  Lady Bexborough, she said, once held herself upright. So did Clarissa
• 2:57:54
  herself. She never lounged in any sense of the word. She was straight
• 2:57:58
  as a dart alone little rigid. In fact, she said, they had
• 2:58:03
  a kind of courage, which the older she grew, the more she respected.
• 2:58:07
  In all this, there was a great deal of dollaway, of course,
• 2:58:11
  a great deal of the public spirited British empire, tear reform, governing
• 2:58:16
  class spirit, which had grown on her. As it tends to do,
• 2:58:20
  with twice his wits. She had to see things through his eyes, one
• 2:58:24
  of the tragedies of married life. With a mind of her own, she
• 2:58:30
  must always be quoting Richard as if one couldn't know to a tittle what Richard
• 2:58:35
  thought by reading the morning post of a morning These parties, for example,
• 2:58:39
  were all for him, or for her idea of him to do richer justice.
• 2:58:45
  He would have been happier farming in Norfolk. She made her drawing room
• 2:58:50
  a sort of meeting place. She had a genius for it. Over and
• 2:58:54
  over again he had seen her take some raw youth, twist him, turn
• 2:58:58
  him, wake him up, set him going. Infinite numbers of dull people
• 2:59:03
  conglomerated round her, of course, but odd and expected people turned up an
• 2:59:09
  artists, sometimes sometimes a writer, queer fish in that atmosphere, and behind
• 2:59:16
  it all was that network of visiting, leaving cards, being kind to people,
• 2:59:20
  running about with bunches of flowers, little presents. So and so was
• 2:59:24
  going to France. Must have an air cushion, a real drain on her
• 2:59:30
  strength, all that interminable traffic that women of her sort keep up. But
• 2:59:35
  she did it genuinely from a natural instinct. Oddly enough, she was one
• 2:59:41
  of the most thorough going skeptics he had ever met, And possibly this was
• 2:59:46
  a theory he used to make up to account for her. So transparent in
• 2:59:48
  some ways, so inscrutable in others. Possibly, she said to herself,
• 2:59:54
  as we are a doomed race chained to a sinking ship. Her favorite reading
• 2:59:58
  as a girl was Hwsley and Tindle, and they were fond of these nautical
• 3:00:03
  metaphors. As the whole thing is a bad joke. Let us, at
• 3:00:07
  any rate do our part mitigate the sufferings of our fellow prisoners. Huxley again,
• 3:00:13
  decorate the dungeons with flowers and air cushions, be as decent as we
• 3:00:16
  possibly can. Those ruffians. The gods shan't have it all their own way,
• 3:00:22
  her notion being that the gods, who never lost a chance of herding,
• 3:00:26
  thwarting, and spoiling human lives, were seriously put out if all the
• 3:00:31
  same you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia's death,
• 3:00:39
  That horrible affair to see your own sister killed by a falling tree, all
• 3:00:43
  just in Perry's fall, all his carelessness before your very eyes. A girl
• 3:00:48
  too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always
• 3:00:52
  said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later, she wasn't so positive.
• 3:00:58
  Perhaps she thought there were no gods, No one was to blame,
• 3:01:03
  and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
• 3:01:09
  And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy,
• 3:01:13
  though Goodness only knows she had her reserves. It was a mere sketch.
• 3:01:18
  He often felt that even he, after all these years, could make
• 3:01:22
  of Clarissa. Anyhow, there was no bitterness in her, none of that
• 3:01:26
  sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically
• 3:01:31
  everything. If he walked with her in Hyde Park, now it was a
• 3:01:35
  bed of tulips, Now a child in a perambulator, Now, some absurd
• 3:01:41
  little drama she made up on the spur of the moment. Very likely she
• 3:01:45
  would have talked to those lovers if she had thought them unhappy. She had
• 3:01:50
  a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always,
• 3:01:54
  people to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her
• 3:01:58
  time away lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers talking nonsense,
• 3:02:05
  saying things she didn't mean, lunting the edge of her mind, losing her
• 3:02:09
  discrimination. There she would sit at the head of the table, taking infinite
• 3:02:15
  pains with some old buffer who might be useful to Dolloway. They knew the
• 3:02:20
  most appalling boars in Europe. For in came Elizabeth, and everything must give
• 3:02:24
  way to her. She was at a high school at the inarticulate stage.
• 3:02:30
  Last time he was over, a round eyed, pale faced girl with nothing
• 3:02:35
  of her mother in her, a silent, stolid creature who took it all
• 3:02:39
  as a matter of course, let her mother make a fuss of her,
• 3:02:43
  and then said, may I go now, like a child of four going
• 3:02:46
  off, Clarissa explained, with that mixture of amusement and pride which Dollaway himself
• 3:02:52
  seemed to rouse in her to play hockey. And now Elizabeth was out,
• 3:02:58
  presumably, thought him in old old Fogy laughed at her mother's friends. Ah
• 3:03:03
  well, so be it the compensation of growing old. Peter Walsh thought,
• 3:03:07
  coming out of Regent's Park and holding his hat in hand, was simply this
• 3:03:13
  that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained at last
• 3:03:18
  the power which adds the supreme flavor to existence, the power of taking hold
• 3:03:22
  of experience, of turning it round slowly in the light. A terrible confession.
• 3:03:28
  It was he put his hat on again. But now, at the
• 3:03:31
  age of fifty three, one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself,
• 3:03:37
  every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant now
• 3:03:41
  in the sun in Regent's Park was enough, too much. Indeed, a
• 3:03:48
  whole lifetime was too short to bring out. Now that one had acquired the
• 3:03:52
  power, the full flavor, to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade
• 3:03:56
  of meaning, which both were so much more solid than they used to be,
• 3:04:01
  so much less personal, it was impossible that he should ever suffer again
• 3:04:05
  as Clarissa had made him suffer for hours at a time, prayed God that
• 3:04:11
  one might say these things without being overheard. For hours and days he never
• 3:04:16
  thought of Daisy. Could it be that he was in love with her?
• 3:04:20
  Then, remembering the misery, the torture, the extraordinary passion of those days,
• 3:04:24
  it was a different thing altogether, a much pleasanter thing, the truth
• 3:04:30
  being, of course, that now she was in love with him, and
• 3:04:33
  that perhaps was the reason why, when the ship actually sailed, he felt
• 3:04:39
  an extraordinary relief. Wanting nothing so much as to be alone, was annoyed
• 3:04:43
  to find all her little attentions. Cigars notes a rug for the voyage in
• 3:04:48
  his cabin. Every one, if they were honest, would say the same.
• 3:04:54
  One doesn't want people after fifty one, doesn't want to go on telling
• 3:04:58
  women they are pretty. That's what most men of fifty would say, Peter
• 3:05:01
  Walsh thought, if they were honest. But then these astonishing accesses of emotion
• 3:05:09
  bursting into tears this morning. What was all that about? What could Clarissa
• 3:05:13
  have thought of him? Thought him a fool? Presumably not for the first
• 3:05:18
  time. It was jealousy that was at the bottom of it, jealousy which
• 3:05:22
  survives every other passion of mankind, Peter Walsh thought, holding his pocket knife
• 3:05:28
  at arm's length. She had been meeting Major Ord Daisy said in her last
• 3:05:33
  letter, said it on purpose, he knew, said it to make him
• 3:05:35
  jealous. He could see her wrinkling her forehead as she wrote, wondering what
• 3:05:41
  she could say to hurt him, And yet it made no difference. He
• 3:05:43
  was furious. All this pother of coming to England and seeing lawyers wasn't to
• 3:05:50
  marry her, but to prevent her from marrying anybody else. That was what
• 3:05:54
  tortured him. That was what came over him when he saw Clarissa, so
• 3:05:58
  calm, so cold, so intent on her dress or whatever it was.
• 3:06:03
  Realizing what she might have spared him, what she had reduced him to a
• 3:06:07
  whimpering, sniffling old ass. But woman, he thought, shutting his pocket
• 3:06:13
  and knife. Don't know what passion is. They don't know the meaning of
• 3:06:16
  it. To men, Clarissa was as cold as any icicle. There she
• 3:06:22
  would sit on the sofa by his side, let him take her hand,
• 3:06:26
  give him one kiss. Here he was at the crossing, a sound interrupted
• 3:06:31
  him, a frail, quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction,
• 3:06:37
  vigor beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly, and with an absence of
• 3:06:41
  all human meaning into e um bah um so who sweep to em oh?
• 3:06:50
  The voice of no age or sex, The voice of an ancient spring spouting
• 3:06:54
  from the earth, which issued just opposite Regent's Park to station, from a
• 3:07:01
  tall, quivering shape like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a
• 3:07:05
  wind beaten tree, forever barren of leaves, which lets the wind run up
• 3:07:09
  and down its branches, singing ye um bah um soh who sweet to em
• 3:07:16
  oh? And rocks and creeks and moans in the eternal breeze through all ages,
• 3:07:22
  when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age
• 3:07:26
  of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise. The battered woman,
• 3:07:31
  for she wore a skirt, with her right hand exposed, her left
• 3:07:35
  clutching at her side, stood singing of love, Love which has lasted a
• 3:07:41
  million years. She sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago
• 3:07:46
  her lover, who had been dead, these sentries had walked. She crooned
• 3:07:50
  with her in may. But in the course of ages, long as summer
• 3:07:54
  days and flaming she remembered, with nothing but red asters he had gone.
• 3:08:00
  Death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills. And when at last she laid
• 3:08:05
  her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth now become a mere cinder of
• 3:08:11
  ice, she implored the gods to lay her side a bunch of purple heather
• 3:08:16
  there on her high burial place, which the last rays of the last sun
• 3:08:20
  caressed, for then the pageant of the universe would be over. As the
• 3:08:26
  ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent's Park tube station, still the earth seemed green
• 3:08:31
  and flowery, Still though it issued from so rude a mouth, a mere
• 3:08:37
  hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fibers and tangled grasses.
• 3:08:43
  Still, the old bubbling, burbling song, soaking through the knotted roots
• 3:08:48
  of infinite ages and skeletons and treasure streamed away in rivulets over the pavement,
• 3:08:54
  and all along the merry lay Bone Road and down towards Euston, fertilizing,
• 3:09:00
  leaving a damp stain. Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had
• 3:09:05
  walked with her lover this rusty pump, this spattered old woman with one hand
• 3:09:11
  exposed for coppers, the other clutching her side, would still be there in
• 3:09:16
  ten million years, remembering how once she had walked in May where the sea
• 3:09:20
  flows. Now with whom it did not matter. He was a man,
• 3:09:24
  oh yes, a man who had loved her. But the passage of ages
• 3:09:28
  had blurred the clarity of that ancient May day. The bright petalled flowers were
• 3:09:33
  hoar and silver frosted, and she no longer saw when she implored him,
• 3:09:39
  as she did now quite clearly, look in my eyes with thy sweet eyes
• 3:09:43
  intently. She no longer saw brown eyes, black whiskers, or sun burnt
• 3:09:48
  face, but only a looming shape, a shadow shape to which, with
• 3:09:54
  the bird like freshness of the very aged, she still twittered, Give me
• 3:09:58
  your hand and let me press it gently. Peter Walsh couldn't help giving the
• 3:10:03
  poor creature a coin as he stepped into his taxi. And if some one
• 3:10:07
  should see, what matter they? She demanded, and her fist clutched at
• 3:10:13
  her side, and she smiled, pocketing her shilling, and all peering,
• 3:10:18
  inquisitive eyes seemed blotted out. In the passing generations, the pavement was crowded
• 3:10:24
  with bustling middle class people, vanished like leaves to be trodden under, to
• 3:10:30
  be soaked and steeped and made mold of by that eternal spring. Ye um
• 3:10:35
  bah um so who sweet to em? Oh poor old woman, said Razio
• 3:10:43
  warnsmith, waiting to cross, Oh poor old wretch. Suppose it was a
• 3:10:50
  wet night. Suppose one's father or somebody who had known one in better days,
• 3:10:56
  had happened to pass and saw one standing there in the gutter, And
• 3:11:00
  where did she sleep at night? Cheerfully, almost gaily, the invincible thread
• 3:11:05
  of sound wound up into the air, like the smoke from a cottage chimney.
• 3:11:09
  Winding up clean beech trees and issuing in a tuft of blue smoke among
• 3:11:15
  the topmost leaves. And if some one should see, what matter they?
• 3:11:20
  Since she was so unhappy for weeks and weeks now Razia had given meanings to
• 3:11:26
  things that happened, almost felt sometimes that she must stop people in the street
• 3:11:31
  if they looked good, kind people, just to say to them, I
• 3:11:35
  am unhappy. And this old woman singing in the street, if some one
• 3:11:39
  should see what matter? They made her suddenly quite sure that everything was going
• 3:11:45
  to be right. They were going to Sir William Bradshaw. She thought his
• 3:11:48
  name sounded nice. He would cure Septimus at once. And then there was
• 3:11:54
  a brewer's cart, and the gray horses had upright bristles of straw in their
• 3:11:58
  tails. There were newspaper placards. It was a silly, silly dream,
• 3:12:03
  being unhappy. So they crossed mister and missus Septimus Warren Smith. And was
• 3:12:11
  there, after all, anything to draw attention to them, anything to make
• 3:12:16
  a passer by? Suspect here is a young man who carries in him the
• 3:12:20
  greatest message in the world, and is moreover the happiest man in the world.
• 3:12:24
  And the most miserable. Perhaps they walked more slowly than other people,
• 3:12:31
  and there was something hesitating, trailing in the man's walk. But what more
• 3:12:35
  natural for a clerk who has not been in the West End on a week
• 3:12:39
  day at this hour for years than to keep looking at the sky, looking
• 3:12:43
  at this, that and the other, as if Portland Place were a room
• 3:12:48
  he had come into when the family are away, the chandeliers being hung in
• 3:12:52
  Holland bags, and the caretaker, as she lets in long shafts of dusty
• 3:12:58
  light upon deserted, queer looking arm chairs, lifting one corner of the long
• 3:13:03
  blinds, explains to the visitors, what a wonderful place it is, how
• 3:13:07
  wonderful. But at the same time he thinks, as he looks at chairs
• 3:13:11
  and tables, how strange to look at. He might have been a clerk,
• 3:13:18
  but of the better sort, for he wore brown boots, his hands
• 3:13:22
  were educated, so too his profile, his angular, big nosed, intelligent,
• 3:13:28
  sensitive profile. But not his lips altogether, for they were loose,
• 3:13:33
  and his eyes, as eyes tend to be, eyes merely hazel, large,
• 3:13:39
  so that he was on the whole a border case. Neither one thing
• 3:13:43
  nor the other might end with a house at Pearley and a motor car,
• 3:13:48
  or continue renting apartments in back streets all his life, one of those half
• 3:13:52
  educated, self educated men whose education is all learnt from books borrowed from public
• 3:13:58
  library, reading in the evening after the day's work on the advice of well
• 3:14:05
  known authors, consulted by letter. As for the other experiences, the solitary
• 3:14:11
  ones which people go through alone in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking
• 3:14:16
  the fields and the streets of London, he had them. Had left home
• 3:14:20
  a mere boy, because of his mother, she lied, because he came
• 3:14:24
  down to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands unwashed, because he could
• 3:14:31
  see no future for a poet in Stroud, and so making a confidant of
• 3:14:35
  his little sister, had gone to London, leaving an absurd note behind him,
• 3:14:41
  such as great men have written and the world has read. Later,
• 3:14:45
  when the story of their struggles has become famous, London has swallowed up many
• 3:14:50
  millions of young men called Smith thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus,
• 3:14:58
  with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston road,
• 3:15:03
  there were experiences again, experiences such as changed a face in two years
• 3:15:09
  from a pink, innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile.
• 3:15:15
  But of all this, what could the most observant of friends have said,
• 3:15:20
  except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and
• 3:15:24
  finds a new blossom on his plant. It has flowered, flowered from vanity,
• 3:15:30
  ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual
• 3:15:35
  seeds, which all modeled up in a room off the Euston Road, made
• 3:15:41
  him shy and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall
• 3:15:45
  in love with Miss Isabel Pohle, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.
• 3:15:52
  Was he not like Keats, she asked, and reflected how she might give
• 3:15:56
  him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest let him books, wrote
• 3:16:01
  him scraps of letters, and lit in him such a fire as burns only
• 3:16:05
  once in a lifetime without heat, lickering, a red gold flame, infinitely
• 3:16:11
  at the reel and insubstantial over Miss Pole, Antony and Cleopatra and the Waterloo
• 3:16:16
  Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise, dreamed of her,
• 3:16:22
  wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in
• 3:16:26
  red ink. He saw her one summer evening, walking in a green dress
• 3:16:31
  in a square it has flowered, the gardener might have said, had he
• 3:16:37
  opened the door, had he come in, that is to say, any
• 3:16:41
  night about this time. And found him writing, found him tearing up his
• 3:16:45
  writing, found him finishing a masterpiece at three o'clock in the morning, and
• 3:16:50
  running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and fasting one day,
• 3:16:54
  drinking another devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, the History of Civilsation, and Bernard
• 3:17:01
  Shaw. Something was up, mister Brewer knew. Mister Brewer managing clerk as
• 3:17:07
  Sibleys and aerosmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents. Something was
• 3:17:13
  up, he thought, and being paternal with his young men, and thinking
• 3:17:18
  very highly of Smith's abilities, and prophesying that he would in ten or fifteen
• 3:17:24
  years succeed to the leather arm chair in the inner room, under the skylight,
• 3:17:28
  with the deed boxes round him, if he keeps his health, said
• 3:17:31
  mister Brewer, And that was the danger. He looked weakly advised Football invited
• 3:17:37
  him to supper, and was seeing his way to consider recommending a rise of
• 3:17:41
  salary. When something happened which threw out many of mister Brewer's calculations, took
• 3:17:48
  away his ablest young fellows, and eventually, so prying and insidious were the
• 3:17:54
  fingers of the European War smashed a plaster cast of series, plowed a in
• 3:18:00
  the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook's nerves. At mister Brewer's establishment
• 3:18:05
  at Muswell Hill, Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went
• 3:18:11
  to France to save in England, which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays.
• 3:18:18
  And Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress, walking in a square there in
• 3:18:22
  the trenches. The change which mister Brewer desired when he advised football was produced.
• 3:18:28
  Instantly. He developed manliness, he was promoted, He drew the attention,
• 3:18:35
  indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name. It was a
• 3:18:39
  case of two dogs playing on a hearth rug, one worrying a paper screw,
• 3:18:43
  snarling, snapping, giving a pinch now and then at the old dog's
• 3:18:48
  ear, the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a paw,
• 3:18:54
  turning and growling good temperedly. They had to be together share with each
• 3:18:58
  other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other. But when Evans,
• 3:19:05
  Rezia, who had only seen him once, called him a quiet man,
• 3:19:07
  a sturdy, red haired man, undemonstrative in the company of women.
• 3:19:13
  When Evans was killed just before the armistice in Italy, Septimus, far from
• 3:19:18
  showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated
• 3:19:24
  himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably, the war had taught him.
• 3:19:30
  It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show friendship, European war,
• 3:19:35
  death had won, promotion, was still under thirty, and was bound
• 3:19:39
  to survive. He was right there. The last shells missed him. He
• 3:19:43
  watched them explode with indifference. When peace came, he was in milan villeted
• 3:19:50
  in the house of an innkeeper, with a courtyard, flowers and tubs,
• 3:19:54
  little tables in the open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the
• 3:19:58
  young younger daughter. He became engaged one evening when the panic was on him
• 3:20:03
  that he could not feel for now that it was all over, truth signed,
• 3:20:09
  and the dead buried. He had especially in the evening, these sudden
• 3:20:15
  thunderclaps of fear he could not feel. As he opened the door of the
• 3:20:20
  room where the Italian girls sat making hats. He could see them, could
• 3:20:24
  hear them. They were rubbing wires among colored beads and saucers. They were
• 3:20:30
  turning buckram shapes this way and that. The table was all strewn with feathers,
• 3:20:35
  spangles, silks, ribbons. Scissors were wrapping on the table. But
• 3:20:39
  something failed him. He could not feel. Still, scissors, rapping,
• 3:20:45
  girls, laughing, hats being made protected him. He was assured of safety.
• 3:20:50
  He had a refuge. But he could not sit there all night.
• 3:20:54
  There were moments of waking. In the early morning, the bed was falling.
• 3:20:58
  He was falling. Oh for the scissors and the lamplight and the Buckraham
• 3:21:03
  shapes. He asked Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two,
• 3:21:07
  the gay, the frivolous, with those little artist's fingers that she would hold
• 3:21:13
  up and say, it is all in them, silk, feathers, what
• 3:21:16
  not were alive to them. It is the hat that matters most, she
• 3:21:20
  would say. When they walked out together. Every hat that passed she would
• 3:21:26
  examine, and the cloak and the dress, and the way the woman held
• 3:21:30
  herself ill dressing over dressing she stigmatized, not savagely, rather with impatient movements
• 3:21:37
  of the hands, like those of a painter who puts from him some obvious
• 3:21:41
  well meant glaring imposture. And then generously, but always critically, she would
• 3:21:48
  welcome a shop girl who had turned her little bit of stuff gallantly, or
• 3:21:52
  praise Holy with enthusiastic and professional understanding. A French lady descending from her carriage
• 3:21:58
  in chinchilla robes pearls beautiful, she would murmur, nudging Septimus that he might
• 3:22:07
  see. But beauty was behind a pane of glass. Even taste, Razio
• 3:22:11
  liked ices, chocolates, sweet things had no relish to him. He put
• 3:22:16
  down his cup on the little marble table. He looked at people outside,
• 3:22:22
  happy they seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing,
• 3:22:26
  squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel.
• 3:22:31
  In the tea shop, among the tables and the chattering waiters, the
• 3:22:35
  appalling fear came over him. He could not feel. He could reason,
• 3:22:41
  He could read Dante, for example, quite easily. Septimus, do put
• 3:22:46
  down your books, said Razia, gently, shutting the inferno he could add
• 3:22:50
  up his bill. His brain was perfect. It must be the fault of
• 3:22:54
  the world then, that he could not feel. The English are so silent,
• 3:22:58
  raisious. She liked it, she said. She respected those englishmen,
• 3:23:03
  and wanted to see London and the English horses, and the tailor made suits,
• 3:23:09
  and could remember hearing how wonderful the shops were from an aunt who had
• 3:23:13
  married and lived in Soho. It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking
• 3:23:18
  at England from the train window as they left New Haven, it might be
• 3:23:22
  possible that the world itself is without meaning. At the office they advanced him
• 3:23:28
  to a post of considerable responsibility. They were proud of him. He had
• 3:23:33
  won crosses. You have done your duty. It is up to us,
• 3:23:37
  began mister Brewer, and could not finish, so pleasurable was his emotion.
• 3:23:43
  They took admirable lodgings of the Tottenham Court Road. Here he opened Shakespeare once
• 3:23:50
  more, that boy's business of the intoxication of language, Antony and Cleopatra had
• 3:23:56
  shriveled utterly. How Shakespeare loathed to you humanity, the putting on of clothes,
• 3:24:01
  the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth, and the belly.
• 3:24:05
  This was now revealed to Septimus. The message hidden in the beauty of
• 3:24:11
  words. The secret signal which one generation passes under disguise to the next,
• 3:24:16
  is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same, Escalus the same.
• 3:24:24
  There Rasia sat at the table, trimming hats. She trimmed hats for Missus
• 3:24:28
  Filmer's friends. She trimmed hats by the hour. She looked pale, mysterious,
• 3:24:33
  like a lily drowned under water. He thought the English are so serious,
• 3:24:39
  she would say, putting her arms round Septimus. Her cheek against his
• 3:24:45
  love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was
• 3:24:50
  filth to him before the end. But Rasia said she must have children.
• 3:24:54
  They had been married five years. They went to the tower together, to
• 3:25:00
  the Victoria and Albert Museum, stood in the crowd to see the King open
• 3:25:05
  Parliament. And there were the shops, hat shops, just shops, shops
• 3:25:09
  with leather bags in the window where she would stand staring. But she must
• 3:25:13
  have a boy, She must have a son like Septimus, she said.
• 3:25:18
  But nobody could be like Septimus, so gentle, so serious, so clever.
• 3:25:24
  Could she not read Shakespeare too. Was Shakespeare a difficult author? She
• 3:25:28
  asked, one cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate
• 3:25:33
  suffering or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions,
• 3:25:39
  but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, Now that
• 3:25:46
  he watched her snip shape as one watches a bird hop lit in the grass,
• 3:25:50
  without daring to move a finger. For the truth is let her ignore
• 3:25:54
  it, that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity on
• 3:26:00
  what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs,
• 3:26:05
  Their packs scour the desert and vanish, screaming into the wilderness. They desert,
• 3:26:09
  the fallen. They are plastered over with grimaces. There was Brewer at
• 3:26:15
  the office, with his waxed mustache, coral tiepin, white slip, and
• 3:26:20
  pleasurable emotions, all coldness and clamminess within his geraniums ruined in the war,
• 3:26:26
  his cook's nerves destroyed. Or Amelia what's her name, handing round cups of
• 3:26:33
  tea punctually at five, a leering, sneering, obscene, little happy,
• 3:26:39
  and the toms and the birdies in their starched shirt fronts oozing thick drops of
• 3:26:43
  vice. They never saw him drawing pictures of them naked at their antics in
• 3:26:48
  his notebook. In the street, bands roared past him, Brutality blared out
• 3:26:54
  on placards, men were trapped in mines, women burnt alive, and once
• 3:26:58
  a made file of lunatics being exercised or displayed for the diversion of the populace,
• 3:27:05
  who laughed aloud, ambled and nodded and grinned past him in the Tottenham
• 3:27:11
  Court Road, each half apologetically yet triumphantly inflicting his hopeless woe. And would
• 3:27:18
  he go mad? At Tea Rezzia told him that Missus Filmer's daughter was expecting
• 3:27:24
  a baby. She could not grow old and have no children. She was
• 3:27:28
  very lonely, she was very unhappy. She cried for the first time since
• 3:27:33
  they were married. Far away, he heard her sobbing. He heard it
• 3:27:37
  accurately, He noticed it distinctly. He compared it to a piston thumping.
• 3:27:43
  But he felt nothing. His wife was crying, and he felt nothing.
• 3:27:48
  Only each time she sobbed in this profound, this silent, this hopeless way,
• 3:27:54
  he descended another step into the pit. At last, with a melodramatic
• 3:27:58
  gush, which he assumed mechanically and with complete consciousness of its insincerity. He
• 3:28:05
  dropped his head on his hands. Now he had surrendered. Now other people
• 3:28:09
  must help him. People must be sent for he gave in. Nothing could
• 3:28:16
  rouse him. Rasia put him to bed. She sent for a doctor,
• 3:28:20
  Missus Filmer's doctor Holmes. Doctor Holmes examined him. There was nothing whatever the
• 3:28:26
  matter, said doctor Holmes. Oh, what a relief, What a kind
• 3:28:31
  man, what a good man? About Razia. When he felt like that,
• 3:28:35
  he went to the music hall, said doctor Holmes. He took a
• 3:28:37
  day off with his wife and played golf. Why not try two tabloids of
• 3:28:41
  bromide dissolved in a glass of water at bedtime. These old Bloomsbury houses,
• 3:28:48
  said doctor Holmes, tapping the wall, are often full of very fine paneling,
• 3:28:54
  which the landlords have the folly to paper over. Only the other day
• 3:28:58
  visiting a patient served somebody something in Bedford Square. So there was no excuse,
• 3:29:05
  nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned
• 3:29:11
  him to death. That he did not feel. He had not cared when
• 3:29:15
  Evans was killed. That was worst, But all the other crimes raised to
• 3:29:18
  their heads and shook their fingers, and jeered and sneered over the rail of
• 3:29:24
  the bed in the early hours of the morning at the prostrate body which lay,
• 3:29:28
  realizing its degradation. How he had married his wife without loving her,
• 3:29:33
  had lied to her, seduced her, outraged Miss Isabel Pole, and was
• 3:29:39
  so packed and marked with vice that women shuddered when they saw him in the
• 3:29:43
  street. The verdict of human nature on such a wretch was death. Doctor
• 3:29:48
  Holmes came again, large, fresh colored, handsome, licking his boots,
• 3:29:54
  looking in the glass. He brushed it all aside headaches, sleeplessness, fears,
• 3:30:01
  dreams, nerve symptoms, and nothing more. He said. If doctor
• 3:30:05
  Holmes found himself even half a pound below eleven stone six, he asked his
• 3:30:09
  wife for another plate of porridge at breakfast. Razia would learn to cook porridge.
• 3:30:16
  But he continued, health is largely a matter in our own control.
• 3:30:20
  Throw yourself into outside interests. Take up some hobby. He opened Shakespeare,
• 3:30:24
  Antony and Cleopatra pushed Shakespeare aside, some hobby, said doctor Holmes, Or
• 3:30:31
  did he not owe his own excellent health? And he worked as hard as
• 3:30:35
  any man in London to the fact that he could always switch off from his
• 3:30:39
  patience on to old furniture. And what a very pretty comb, if he
• 3:30:43
  might say so, Missus Warnsmith was wearing. When the damned fool came again,
• 3:30:50
  Septimus refused to see him, did he, indeed, said doctor Holmes,
• 3:30:54
  smiling agreeably. Really he had to give that charming little lady, Missus
• 3:30:58
  Smith a friendly push before he could get past her into her husband's bedroom.
• 3:31:05
  So you're in a funk, he said, agreeably, sitting down by his
• 3:31:07
  patient's side. He had actually talked of killing himself to his wife. Quite
• 3:31:13
  a girl a foreigner, wasn't she didn't that give her a very odd idea
• 3:31:16
  of English husband's didn't want? Oh, perhaps a duty to one's wife.
• 3:31:22
  Would it be better to do something instead of lying in bed? For he
• 3:31:26
  had had forty years experience behind him, and Septimus could take doctor Holmes's word
• 3:31:31
  for it. There was nothing whatever the matter with him, And next time
• 3:31:35
  doctor Holmes came he hoped to find Smith out of bed and not making that
• 3:31:41
  charming little lady his wife anxious about him. Human nature, in short,
• 3:31:46
  was on him, repulsive brute with the blood red nostrils Holmes was on him.
• 3:31:52
  Doctor Holmes came quite regularly every day. Once he stumbled, Septimus wrote
• 3:31:58
  on the back of a postcard, human nature is on you. Holmes is
• 3:32:01
  on you. Their only chance was to escape without letting Holmes know, to
• 3:32:07
  Italy, anywhere, anywhere away from doctor Holmes. But Razia could not understand
• 3:32:13
  him. Doctor Holmes was such a kind man, He was so interested in
• 3:32:18
  Septimus. He only wanted to help them. He said he had four little
• 3:32:22
  children, and he had asked her to tea. She told Septimus, So
• 3:32:26
  he was deserted. The whole world was clamoring, kill yourself, kill yourself
• 3:32:33
  for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Fod
• 3:32:37
  was pleasant, the sun hot, and this killing oneself? How does one
• 3:32:41
  set about it? With a table knife, ug lily with floods of blood,
• 3:32:46
  by sucking a gas pipe? He was too weak, he could scarcely
• 3:32:50
  raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned,
• 3:32:56
  deserted, as those who are about to die are alone. There was a
• 3:33:00
  luxury in it, in isolation, full of sublimity, a freedom which the
• 3:33:03
  attached can never know. Holmes had won. Of course, the brute with
• 3:33:09
  the red nostrils had won. But even Holmes himself could not touch this last
• 3:33:13
  relic, straying on the edge of the world, this outcast who gazed back
• 3:33:18
  at the inhabited regions, who lay like a drowned sailor on the shore of
• 3:33:22
  the world. It was at that moment, Rasi, a gun shopping,
• 3:33:26
  that the great revelation took place. A voice spoke from behind the screen.
• 3:33:31
  Evans was speaking, the dead were with him. End of Chapter six,
• 3:33:37
  Chapter seven, Evans Evans, he cried, mister Smith was talking aloud to
• 3:33:45
  himself. Agnes, the servant girl cried to missus Filmer in the kitchen,
• 3:33:50
  Evans Evans, he had said. As she brought in the tray, she
• 3:33:54
  jumped, she did. She scuttled downstairs, and Rasia came in with her
• 3:34:01
  flowers, and walked across the room and put the roses in a vase,
• 3:34:07
  upon which the sun struck directly, and it went laughing, leaping round the
• 3:34:13
  room. She had had to buy the roses, Rasia said, from a
• 3:34:18
  poor man in the street. But they were almost dead already, she said,
• 3:34:22
  arranging the roses. So there was a man outside Evans presumably, and
• 3:34:30
  the roses, which Rasia said were half dead, had been picked by him
• 3:34:35
  in the fields of Greece. Communication is health, communication is happiness. Communication,
• 3:34:41
  He muttered, what are you saying, Septimus, Rasia asked, wild
• 3:34:48
  with terror, for he was talking to himself. She sat, Agnes,
• 3:34:52
  running for doctor Holmes. Her husband, she said, was mad. He
• 3:34:56
  scarcely knew her. You brute, you brute, cried Septimus, seeing human
• 3:35:01
  nature that is doctor Holmes. Enter the room. Now what's this all about?
• 3:35:09
  Said doctor Holmes, in the most amiable way in the world, talking
• 3:35:13
  nonsense to frighten your wife. But he would give him something to make him
• 3:35:18
  sleep. And if they were rich people, said doctor Holmes, looking ironically
• 3:35:24
  round the room, by all means, let them go to Harley Street.
• 3:35:28
  If they had no confidence in him, said doctor Holmes, looking not quite
• 3:35:33
  so kind. It was precisely twelve o'clock twelve by Big Ben, whose stroke
• 3:35:41
  was wafted over the northern part of London, blent with that of other clocks,
• 3:35:46
  mixed in a thin ethereal way with the clouds and wisps of smoke,
• 3:35:52
  and died up there among the seagulls. Twelve o'clock struck as Clarissa Dollaway laid
• 3:35:58
  her green dress on her bed, and the warren Smith's walked down Harley Street.
• 3:36:05
  Twelve was the hour of their appointment. Probably Razia thought that was Sir
• 3:36:09
  William Bradshaw's house, with the gray motor car in front of it, the
• 3:36:15
  leaden circles dissolved in the air. Indeed, it was Sir William Bradshaw's motor
• 3:36:22
  car, low, powerful, gray, with Plaine initials interlocked on the panel,
• 3:36:28
  as if the pomps of heraldry were incongruous, this man being the ghostly
• 3:36:33
  helper, the priest of science. And as the motor car was gray,
• 3:36:39
  so to match its sober suavity, gray furs, silver gray rugs were heaped
• 3:36:45
  in it to keep her ladyship warm while she waited for Often Sir William would
• 3:36:50
  travel sixty miles or more down into the country to visit the rich the afflicted,
• 3:36:58
  who could afford the very large which Sir William very properly charged for his
• 3:37:03
  advice. Her Ladyship waited with the rugs about her knees an hour or more,
• 3:37:09
  leaning back, thinking sometimes of the patient, sometimes excusably of the wall
• 3:37:16
  of gold mounting minute by minute while she waited the wall of gold that was
• 3:37:20
  mounting between them, and all shifts and anxieties she had borne them bravely.
• 3:37:26
  They had had their struggles until she felt wedged on a calm ocean where only
• 3:37:31
  spice winds blow, respected, admired, envied, with scarcely anything left to
• 3:37:37
  wish for, though she regretted her stoutness. Large dinner parties every Thursday night
• 3:37:43
  to the profession, an occasional bazaar to be opened. Royalty greeted too little
• 3:37:50
  time. Alas with her husband, whose work grew and grew a boy doing
• 3:37:56
  well at eton, she would have liked a daughter too. Interests she had,
• 3:38:01
  however, in plenty, child welfare, the after care of the epileptic,
• 3:38:07
  and photography, so that if there was a church building or a church
• 3:38:11
  decaying, she bribed the sexton, got the key, and took photographs,
• 3:38:16
  which were scarcely to be distinguished from the work of professionals. While she waited,
• 3:38:24
  Sir William himself was no longer young. He had worked very hard.
• 3:38:28
  He had won his position by sheer ability, being the son of a shopkeeper,
• 3:38:33
  loved his profession, made a fine figurehead at ceremonies and spoke well,
• 3:38:39
  all of which had, by the time he was knighted, given him a
• 3:38:43
  heavy look, a weary look, the stream of patience being so incessant,
• 3:38:48
  the responsibilities and privileges of his profession so onerous, which weariness, together with
• 3:38:54
  his gray hairs, increased the extraordinary distinction of his presence, and gave him
• 3:39:01
  the reputation of the utmost importance in dealing with nerve cases, not merely of
• 3:39:07
  lightning skill and almost infalliable accuracy in diagnosis, but of sympathy, tact,
• 3:39:13
  understanding of the human soul. He could see the first moment they came into
• 3:39:18
  the room, the Warren Smiths, they were called. He was certain directly
• 3:39:22
  he saw the man. It was a case of extreme gravity. It was
• 3:39:26
  a case of complete breakdown, complete physical and nervous breakdown, with every symptom
• 3:39:33
  in an advanced stage. He is certained in two or three minutes writing answers
• 3:39:39
  to questions murmured discreetly on a pink card. How long had doctor Holmes been
• 3:39:46
  attending him? Six weeks? Prescribed a little bromide said there was nothing the
• 3:39:52
  matter. Ah, yes, those general practitioners, thought Sir William. It
• 3:39:58
  took half his time to undo their blos some were irreparable. You served with
• 3:40:03
  great distinction in the war. The patient repeated the word war interrogatively. He
• 3:40:11
  was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind, a serious symptom to be
• 3:40:18
  noted on the card the war. The patient asked the European War that little
• 3:40:24
  shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder. Had he served with distinction? He really forgot
• 3:40:31
  in the war itself he had failed. Yes, he served with the greatest
• 3:40:35
  distinction. Rasia assured the doctor. He was promoted. And they have the
• 3:40:41
  very highest opinion of you at your office, Sir William murmured, glancing at
• 3:40:46
  mister Brewer's very generously worded letter, So that you have nothing to worry you,
• 3:40:52
  no financial anxiety, nothing. He had committed an appalling crime and been
• 3:40:58
  condemned to death by human nature. I have I have he began committed a
• 3:41:05
  crime. He has done nothing wrong whatever, Rasia assured the doctor. If
• 3:41:11
  mister Smith would wait, said Sir William, he would speak to missus Smith
• 3:41:16
  in the next room. Her husband was very seriously ill, Sir William said.
• 3:41:22
  Did he threaten to kill himself? Oh? He did, she cried,
• 3:41:28
  But he did not mean it, she said, of course not.
• 3:41:31
  It was merely a question of rest, said Sir William, of rest,
• 3:41:35
  rest, rest, a long rest in bed. There was a delightful home
• 3:41:41
  down in the country where her husband would be perfectly looked after, away from
• 3:41:46
  her. She asked, unfortunately, Yes, the people we care for most
• 3:41:50
  are not good for us when we are ill. But he was not mad,
• 3:41:56
  was he? Sir William said, he never spoke of madness. He
• 3:42:00
  called it not having a sense of proportion. But her husband did not like
• 3:42:05
  doctors. He would refuse to go there. Shortly and kindly, Sir William
• 3:42:09
  explained to her the state of the case. He had threatened to kill himself.
• 3:42:15
  There was no alternative. It was a question of law. He would
• 3:42:18
  lie in bed in a beautiful house in the country. The nurses were admirable.
• 3:42:24
  Sir William would visit him once a week. If Missus Warren Smith was
• 3:42:30
  quite sure she had no more questions to ask. He never hurried his patience.
• 3:42:35
  They would return to her husband. She had nothing more to ask,
• 3:42:39
  not of Sir William. So they returned to the most exalted of mankind,
• 3:42:45
  the criminal who faced his judges. The victim exposed on the heights, the
• 3:42:50
  fugitive, the drowned sailor, the poet of the immortal ode, the lord
• 3:42:56
  who had gone from life to death. To Septimus Warren Smith, who sat
• 3:43:00
  in the arm chair under the skylight, staring at a photograph of Lady Bradshaw
• 3:43:05
  in court dress, muttering messages about beauty. We have had our little talk,
• 3:43:11
  said Sir William. He says you are very very ill. Razia cried.
• 3:43:18
  We have been arranging that you should go into a home, said Sir
• 3:43:20
  William, one of Holmes's homes, sneered Septimus. The fellow made a distasteful
• 3:43:28
  impression. For there was in Sir William, whose father had been a tradesman,
• 3:43:33
  a natural respect for breeding and clothing, which shabbiness nettled. Again more
• 3:43:39
  profoundly, there was in Sir William, who had never had time for reading,
• 3:43:43
  a grudge deeply buried against cultivated people who came into his room and intimated
• 3:43:52
  that doctor's whose profession is a constant strain upon all the highest faculties, are
• 3:43:58
  not educated men of my homes. Mister Warren Smith, he said, where
• 3:44:03
  we will teach you to rest? And there was just one thing more.
• 3:44:07
  He was quite certain that when mister Warren Smith was well, he was the
• 3:44:11
  last man in the world to frighten his wife. But he had talked of
• 3:44:16
  killing himself. We all have our moments of depression, said Sir William.
• 3:44:22
  Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself. Human nature is on you.
• 3:44:28
  Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert, they fly screaming
• 3:44:33
  into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is
• 3:44:39
  remorseless. Impulses came upon him sometimes, Sir William asked, with his pencil
• 3:44:46
  on a pink card. That was his own affair, said Septimus. Nobody
• 3:44:50
  lives for himself alone, said Sir William, glancing at the photograph of his
• 3:44:56
  wife in court dress. And you have a brilliant career before you, said
• 3:45:01
  Sir William. There was mister Brewer's letter on the table, an exceptionally brilliant
• 3:45:07
  career. But if he confessed, if he communicated, would they let him
• 3:45:13
  off? Then his torturers I I, he stammered, But what was his
• 3:45:18
  crime? He could not remember it. Yes, Sir William encouraged him,
• 3:45:22
  but it was growing late. Love trees. There is no crime. What
• 3:45:28
  was his message? He could not remember it. I I, Septimus stammered.
• 3:45:35
  Try to think as little about yourself as possible, said Sir William kindly.
• 3:45:41
  Really he was not fit to be about. Was there anything else they
• 3:45:46
  wished to ask him? Sir William would make all the arrangements, he murmured,
• 3:45:50
  to Raiseia, and he would let her know between five and six that
• 3:45:54
  evening, he murmured. Trust everything to me, he said, and dismiss
• 3:46:00
  them. Never never had Razia felt such agony in her life. She had
• 3:46:05
  asked for help and been deserted. He had failed them. Sir William Bradshaw
• 3:46:11
  was not a nice man. The upkeep of that motor car alone must cost
• 3:46:16
  him quite a lot, said Septimus. When they got out into the street,
• 3:46:20
  she clung to his arm. They had been deserted, But what more
• 3:46:26
  did she want to his patience? He gave three quarters of an hour.
• 3:46:31
  And if in this exacting science, which has to do with what? After
• 3:46:37
  all, we know nothing about the nervous system the human brain. A doctor
• 3:46:41
  loses his sense of proportion as a doctor, he fails. Health we must
• 3:46:46
  have, and health is proportion, so that when a man comes into your
• 3:46:50
  room and says he's Christ a common delusion, and has a message as they
• 3:46:56
  mostly have, and threatens as they often do, to kill himself. You
• 3:47:01
  invoke proportion order rest in bed, rest, in solitude, silence, and
• 3:47:07
  rest, rest without friends, without books, without messages, six months rest
• 3:47:13
  until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve Proportion
• 3:47:22
  divine proportion. Sir William's goddess was acquired by Sir William, walking hospitals,
• 3:47:28
  catching salmon, begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who caught
• 3:47:35
  Samon herself and took photographs scarcely to be distinguished from the work of professionals Worshiping
• 3:47:41
  proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself, but made England prosper secluded her
• 3:47:48
  lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to
• 3:47:56
  propagate their views until they two shared his sense of proportion, his if they
• 3:48:01
  were men, Lady Bradshaw's if they were women. She embroidered, knitted,
• 3:48:07
  spent four nights out of seven at home with her son, so that not
• 3:48:11
  only did his colleagues respect him, his subordinates fear him, but the friends
• 3:48:16
  and relations of his patients fell for him. The keenest gratitude for insisting that
• 3:48:22
  these prophetic Christs and Christuses who prophesied the end of the world or the advent
• 3:48:28
  of God, should drink milk and bed as Sir William ordered. Sir William,
• 3:48:33
  with his thirty years experience of these kinds of cases, and his infallible
• 3:48:39
  instinct, this is madness, this sense, in fact, his sense of
• 3:48:43
  proportion. But proportion has a sister, less, smiling, more formidable,
• 3:48:50
  a goddess, even now engaged in the heat and sands of India, the
• 3:48:56
  mud and swamp of Africa, the pearliws of London, wherever, in short,
• 3:49:01
  the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which
• 3:49:05
  is her own, is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols,
• 3:49:11
  and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her
• 3:49:16
  name, and she feasts on the wills of the weekly, loving to impress,
• 3:49:22
  to impose, adoring her own features. Stamped on the face of the
• 3:49:26
  populace at Hyde Park Corner, on a tub she stands preaching shrouds herself in
• 3:49:33
  white and walks, penitentially disguised as brotherly love, through factories and parliaments,
• 3:49:39
  offers help, the desires power smites out of her way. Roughly, the
• 3:49:45
  dissension or dissatisfied bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively
• 3:49:52
  from her eyes the light of their own. This lady, too, Razia
• 3:49:56
  Warren Smith divined, it had her dwelling in Sir William's heart, though concealed
• 3:50:03
  as she mostly is, under some plausible disguise, some venerable name, love,
• 3:50:09
  duty, self sacrifice. How he would work, how toil to raise
• 3:50:15
  funds, propagate reforms, initiate institutions, but conversions. Fastidious goddess Love's blood
• 3:50:22
  better than brick, and feasts most subtily on the human will. For example,
• 3:50:28
  Lady Bradshaw, fifteen years ago she had gone under. It was nothing
• 3:50:35
  you could put your finger on. There had been no scene, no snap,
• 3:50:39
  Only the slow sinking water logged of her will into his sweet was her
• 3:50:45
  smile, swift, her submission. Dinner in Harley Street, numbering eight or
• 3:50:50
  nine courses, feeding ten or fifteen guests of the professional classes, was smooth
• 3:50:56
  and urbane, only as the evening war or on a very slight dullness or
• 3:51:01
  uneasiness, perhaps a nervous twitch, fumble, stumble, and confusion indicated what
• 3:51:09
  it was really painful to believe that the poor lady lied once long ago she
• 3:51:15
  had caught samon freely. Now quick to minister to the craving which lit her
• 3:51:20
  husband's eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she cramped, squeezed,
• 3:51:26
  pared, pruned, drew back, peeped through, so that without knowing precisely
• 3:51:33
  what made the evening disagreeable and caused this pressure on the top of the head,
• 3:51:39
  which might well be imputed to the professional conversation or the fatigue of a
• 3:51:43
  great doctor, whose life, Lady Bradshaw said, is not his own,
• 3:51:48
  but his patience disagreeable. It was so that guests, when the clock struck
• 3:51:54
  ten breathed in the air of Harley Street, even with rapture, which relief,
• 3:52:00
  however, was denied to his patients. There in the gray room,
• 3:52:05
  with the pictures on the wall and the valuable furniture under the ground glass skylight,
• 3:52:11
  they learned the extent of their transgressions. Huddled up in armchairs, they
• 3:52:16
  watched him go through for their benefit a curious exercise with the arms, which
• 3:52:22
  he shot out brought sharply back to his hip to prove, if the patient
• 3:52:28
  was obstinate, that Sir William was master of his own actions, which the
• 3:52:33
  patient was not. There some weekly broke down, sobbed, submitted. Others,
• 3:52:39
  inspired by heaven knows what intemperate madness, called Sir William to his face
• 3:52:46
  a damnable humbug, questioned, even more impiously, life itself. Why live,
• 3:52:52
  they demanded Sir William replied that life was good, certainly Lady Bradshaw in
• 3:53:00
  ostrich feathers hung over the mantelpiece, and as for his income, it was
• 3:53:05
  quite twelve thousand a year. But to us, they protested, life has
• 3:53:09
  given no such bounty. He acquiesced they lacked a sense of proportion, and
• 3:53:16
  perhaps, after all, there is no God. He shrugged his shoulders.
• 3:53:22
  In short, this living or not living is an affair of our own.
• 3:53:26
  But there they were mistaken. Sir William had a friend in Surrey, where
• 3:53:31
  they taught what Sir William frankly admitted was a difficult art, a sense of
• 3:53:35
  proportion. There were moreover family, affection, honor, courage, and a
• 3:53:43
  brilliant career. All of these had in Sir william a resolute champion. If
• 3:53:48
  they failed him, he had to support police and the good of society,
• 3:53:54
  which he remarked, very quietly, would take care down in Surrey. That
• 3:53:58
  these unsocial imam pulses bread more than anything by the lack of good blood,
• 3:54:03
  were held in control. And then stole out from her hiding place and mounted
• 3:54:09
  her throne. That goddess whose lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly
• 3:54:15
  in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself, naked, defenseless, the
• 3:54:20
  exhausted, the friendless, received the impress of Sir William's will. He swooped,
• 3:54:26
  he devoured, He shut people up. It was this combination of decision
• 3:54:31
  and humanity that endeared Sir Williams so greatly to the relations of his victims.
• 3:54:39
  But Razia Warren Smith cried walking down Harley Street that she did not like that
• 3:54:43
  man shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing. The clocks of Harley Street.
• 3:54:50
  Nibbled at the June Day Counseled submission, upheld authority and pointed out in chorus
• 3:54:58
  the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was
• 3:55:03
  so far diminished that a commercial clock suspended above a shop in Oxford Street announced
• 3:55:11
  genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs Rigby and Lounds
• 3:55:16
  to give the information gradis that it was half past one. Looking up,
• 3:55:22
  it appeared that each letter of their names stood for one of the hours.
• 3:55:28
  Subconsciously, one was grateful to Rigby and Lowns for giving one time, ratified
• 3:55:33
  by Greenwich. And this gratitude so he Whitbread ruminated. Daling there in front
• 3:55:39
  of the shop window naturally took the form later of buying off Rigby and Louns
• 3:55:46
  socks or shoes, So he ruminated. It was his habit. He did
• 3:55:52
  not go deeply. He brushed surfaces, the dead, languages, the living
• 3:55:56
  life in Constantinople, Paris, writing, shooting tennis. It had been once
• 3:56:05
  the Malicious asserted that he now kept guard at Buckingham Palace, dressed in silk
• 3:56:09
  stockings and knee breeches. Over what nobody knew, but he did it extremely
• 3:56:16
  efficiently. He had been afloat on the cream of English society for fifty five
• 3:56:22
  years. He had known prime ministers his affections were understood to be deep,
• 3:56:26
  and if it were true that he had not taken part in any of the
• 3:56:31
  great movements of the time or held important office, one or two humble reforms
• 3:56:37
  stood to his credit. An improvement in public shelters was one, the protection
• 3:56:41
  of owls in Norfolk. Another servant girls had reason to be grateful to him
• 3:56:46
  and his name at the end of letters to the Times asking for funds,
• 3:56:50
  appealing to the public to protect, to preserve, to clear up litter,
• 3:56:56
  to abate smoke, and stamp out immorality. In parts commanded respect a magnificent
• 3:57:03
  figure. He cut two, pausing for a moment as the sound of the
• 3:57:07
  half hour died away, to look critically magisterially at socks and shoes, impeccable,
• 3:57:15
  substantial, as if he beheld the world from a certain eminence, and
• 3:57:20
  dressed to match. But realized the obligations which size, wealth, health entail,
• 3:57:26
  and observed punctiliously even when not absolutely necessary. Little courtesies, old fashioned
• 3:57:35
  ceremonies, which gave a quality to his manner, something to imitate, something
• 3:57:39
  to remember him by. For he would never lunch, for example, with
• 3:57:45
  Lady Bruton, whom he had known these twenty years without bringing her in his
• 3:57:50
  outstretched hand a bunch of carnations and asking Miss Brush, Lady Bruton's secretary,
• 3:57:56
  after her brother in South Africa, which for some reason Miss Brush deficient,
• 3:58:01
  though she was in every attribute of female charm, so much resented that she
• 3:58:07
  said, thank you, he's doing very well in South Africa, when for
• 3:58:11
  half a dozen years he had been doing badly. In Portsmouth. Lady Bruton
• 3:58:18
  herself preferred Richard Dolloway, who arrived at the next moment. Indeed they met
• 3:58:24
  on the doorstep. Lady Bruton preferred Richard Dolloway. Of course he was made
• 3:58:30
  of much finer material, but she wouldn't let them run down her. Poor
• 3:58:35
  dear Hugh. She could never forget his kindness. He had been really remarkably
• 3:58:39
  kind, she forgot precisely upon what occasion, But he had been remarkably kind.
• 3:58:46
  Anyhow, the difference between one man and another does not amount to much.
• 3:58:52
  She had never seen the sense of cutting people up, as Clarissa Dollaway
• 3:58:56
  did, cutting them up and sticking them together again, Not at any rate.
• 3:59:01
  When one was sixty two, she took Hugh's carnations with her angular grimm
• 3:59:07
  smile. There was nobody else coming, she said. She had got them
• 3:59:11
  there on false pretenses to help her out of a difficulty. But let us
• 3:59:16
  eat first, she said. And so there began a soundless and exquisite passing
• 3:59:22
  to and fro through swing doors of aproned, white capped maids, handmaidens not
• 3:59:28
  of necessity but adepts in a mystery or grand deception practiced by hostesses in Mayfair
• 3:59:37
  from one thirty to two, when with a wave of the hand the traffic
• 3:59:41
  seizes and their rises instead. This profound illusion in the first place, about
• 3:59:46
  the food, how it is not paid for, and then that the table
• 3:59:52
  spreads itself voluntarily with glass and silver little mats, saucers of red fruit,
• 3:59:58
  films of brown cream, masked turbot in Castle's severed chicken swim colored undomestic,
• 4:00:05
  the fire burns, and with the wine and the coffee not paid for ries
• 4:00:11
  jockund visions before musing eyes gently speculative eyes, eyes to whom life appears musical,
• 4:00:18
  mysterious eyes now kindled to observe genially the beauty of the red carnations which
• 4:00:26
  Lady Bruton, whose movements were always angular, had laid beside her plate,
• 4:00:31
  so that Hugh Whitbread, feeling at peace with the entire universe and at the
• 4:00:35
  same time completely sure of his standing, said, resting his fork, wouldn't
• 4:00:41
  they look charming against your lace? Miss Brush resented this familiarity intensely. She
• 4:00:48
  thought him an underbred fellow. She made Lady Bruton laugh. Lady Bruton raised
• 4:00:54
  the carnations, holding them rather stiffly, with much the same attitude with which
• 4:01:00
  the General held the scroll in the picture behind her. She remained fixed tranced.
• 4:01:07
  Which was she now the General's great granddaughter, great great granddaughter? Richard
• 4:01:13
  Dolloway asked himself, Sir Roderick, Sir Miles, Sir Talbot, that was
• 4:01:18
  it? It was remarkable how in that family the likeness persisted in the woman.
• 4:01:24
  She should have been a general of dragoons herself, and Richard would have
• 4:01:30
  served under her cheerfully. He had the greatest respect for her. He cherished
• 4:01:35
  these romantic views about well set up old women of pedigree, and would have
• 4:01:41
  liked, in his good humored way, to bring some young hot heads of
• 4:01:45
  his acquaintance to lunch with her, as if a type like hers could be
• 4:01:48
  bred of amiable tea drinking enthusiasts. He knew her country, he knew her
• 4:01:54
  people. There was a vine still bearing which either Lovelace or her She never
• 4:02:01
  read a word poetry of herself, but so the story ran had sat under.
• 4:02:07
  Better wait to put before them the question that bothered her about making an
• 4:02:11
  appeal to the public, If so, in what terms, and so on?
• 4:02:16
  Better wait until they have had their coffee, Lady Bruton thought, and
• 4:02:20
  so laid the carnations down beside her plate. How's Clarissa, she asked,
• 4:02:26
  abruptly. Clarissa always said that Lady Bruton did not like her. Indeed,
• 4:02:31
  Lady Bruton had the reputation of being more interested in politics than people, of
• 4:02:37
  talking like a man, of having had a finger in some notorious intrigue of
• 4:02:43
  the eighties, which was now beginning to be mentioned in memoirs. Certainly,
• 4:02:48
  there was an alcove in her drawing room, and a table in that alcove,
• 4:02:52
  and a photograph upon that table of General Sir Talbot Moore, now deceased,
• 4:02:58
  who had writ in there one evening in the eighties, in Lady Bruton's
• 4:03:03
  presence, with her cognizance, perhaps advice, a telegram ordering the British troops
• 4:03:09
  to advance upon a historical occasion, she kept the pen and told the story.
• 4:03:16
  Thus when she said in her offhand way, House Clarissa, husbands had
• 4:03:20
  difficulty in persuading their wives, and indeed, however devoted, were secretly doubtful
• 4:03:26
  themselves of her interest in women, who often got in their husband's way,
• 4:03:31
  prevented them from accepting posts abroad, and had to be taken to the seaside
• 4:03:35
  in the middle of the session to recover from influenza. Nevertheless, her inquiry
• 4:03:41
  House Clarissa was known by women infallibly to be a signal from a well wisher,
• 4:03:48
  from an almost silent companion, whose utterances half a dozen perhaps in the
• 4:03:52
  course of a lifetime, signified recognition of some feminine comradeship which went beneath me
• 4:04:00
  masculine lunch parties, and united Lady Bruton and Missus Dellaway, who seldom met,
• 4:04:05
  and appeared when they did meet, indifferent and even hostile. In a
• 4:04:09
  singular bond end of chapter seven, Chapter eight, I met Clarissa in the
• 4:04:18
  park this morning, said he whbread, diving into the castle, anxious to
• 4:04:24
  pay himself this little tribute, for he had only to come to London,
• 4:04:28
  and he met everybody at once were greedy, one of the greediest men she
• 4:04:31
  had ever known. Malie Bush thought, who observed men with unflinching rectitude,
• 4:04:37
  and was capable of everlasting devotion to her own sex, in particular being gnobbed,
• 4:04:43
  scraped angular, and entirely without feminine charm. Do you know who's in
• 4:04:50
  town? Said Lady Brutin, suddenly bethinking her our old friend Peter Walsh.
• 4:04:56
  They all smiled. Peter Walsh, and mister Dollaway was genuinely glad, Milly
• 4:05:01
  Brush thought, and mister Whitbred thought only of his chicken. Peter Walsh.
• 4:05:07
  All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and Richard Dolloway remembered the same
• 4:05:13
  thing, how passionately Peter had been in love, been rejected, gone to
• 4:05:18
  India, come a cropper, made a mess of things. And Richard Dolloway
• 4:05:22
  had a very great liking for the dear old fellow too. Milly Bush saw
• 4:05:28
  that saw a depth in the brown of his eyes, saw him hesitate consider
• 4:05:33
  which interested her, as mister Dollaway always interested her. For what was he
• 4:05:37
  thinking? She wondered about Peter Walsh, that Peter Walsh had been in love
• 4:05:43
  with Clarissa. That he would go back directly after lunch and find Clarissa,
• 4:05:48
  that he would tell her in so many words that he loved her. Yes,
• 4:05:52
  he would say that Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with
• 4:05:58
  these silences. And mister Dolaway was always so dependable, such a gentleman too.
• 4:06:05
  Now being forty, Lady Bruton had only to nod or turn her head
• 4:06:09
  a little abruptly, and Milly Brush took the signal. However deeply she might
• 4:06:13
  be sunk in these reflections of a detached spirit, of an uncorrupted soul,
• 4:06:18
  whom life could not be amboozle, because life had not offered her a trinket
• 4:06:24
  of the slightest value, not a curl, smile, lip, cheek,
• 4:06:28
  nose, nothing whatever. Lady Brutin had only to nod, and Perkins was
• 4:06:33
  instructed to quicken the coffee. Yes, Peter Walsh has come back, said
• 4:06:39
  Lady Bruton. It was vaguely flattering to them all. He had come back,
• 4:06:45
  battered, unsuccessful, to their secure shores. But to help him,
• 4:06:48
  they reflected, was impossible. There was some flaw in his character. Hugh
• 4:06:54
  Whipred, said one might, of course mention his name to so and so.
• 4:06:58
  He wrinkled looke lubriously consequentially at the thought of the letters. He would
• 4:07:03
  write to the heads of government offices about my old friend Peter Walsh and so
• 4:07:07
  on. But it wouldn't lead to anything, not to anything permanent, because
• 4:07:13
  of his character in trouble with some woman, said Lady Bruton. They had
• 4:07:18
  all guessed that that was at the bottom of it. However, said Lady
• 4:07:22
  Bruton, anxious to leave the subject, we shall hear the whole story from
• 4:07:26
  Peter himself. The coffee was very slow in coming the address, murmured Hugh
• 4:07:33
  Whipbread, and there was at once a ripple in the gray tide of service,
• 4:07:37
  which washed round Lady Bruton day in, day out, collecting, intercepting,
• 4:07:43
  enveloping her in a fine tissue, which broke concussions, mitigated interruptions,
• 4:07:50
  and spread round the house in Brook Street, a fine net where things lodged
• 4:07:54
  and were picked out accurately instantly by gray haired Perkins, who had been with
• 4:08:00
  Lady Bruton these thirty years, and now wrote down the address, handed it
• 4:08:05
  to mister Whitbred, who took out his pocket book, raised his eyebrows and
• 4:08:09
  slipped it in among documents of the highest importance, said that he would get
• 4:08:15
  Evelyn to ask him to lunch. They were waiting to bring the coffee until
• 4:08:20
  mister Whitbred had finished. Hugh was very slow. Lady Brutin thought he was
• 4:08:26
  getting fat. She noticed Richard always kept himself in the pink of condition.
• 4:08:31
  She was getting impatient. The whole of her being was setting positively, undeniably
• 4:08:37
  domineeringly, brushing aside all this unnecessary trifling Peter Walsh and his affairs upon the
• 4:08:45
  subject which engaged her attention, and not merely her attention, but that fiber
• 4:08:50
  which was the ramrod of her soul, that essential part of her, without
• 4:08:54
  which Milicin Bruton would not have been Milicent Bruton. That project for Emma,
• 4:09:00
  degrading young people of both sexes, born of respectable parents and setting them up
• 4:09:05
  with a fair prospect of doing well in Canada, she exaggerated, She had
• 4:09:09
  perhaps lost her sense of proportion. Emigration was not to others the obvious remedy,
• 4:09:16
  the sublime conception. It was not to them, not to Hugh or
• 4:09:20
  Richard, or even devoted Miss Brush, the liberator of the pent egotism,
• 4:09:26
  which a strong martial woman, well nourished, well descended of direct impulses,
• 4:09:33
  downright feelings, and a little introspective power. Broad and simple. Why could
• 4:09:39
  not everyone be broad and simple? She asked, Feels rise within her One's
• 4:09:43
  youth is past and must eject upon some object. It may be emigration,
• 4:09:50
  it may be emancipation. But whatever it be, this object around which the
• 4:09:54
  essence of her soul is daily secreted, becomes inevitably prismatic, lustrous, half
• 4:10:01
  looking glass, half precious stone, now carefully hidden in case people should sneer
• 4:10:07
  at it, now proudly displayed. Emigration had become, in short largely Lady
• 4:10:13
  Bruton. But she had to write, and one letter to the Times,
• 4:10:18
  she used to say to Miss Brush cost her more than to organize an expedition
• 4:10:24
  to South Africa, which she had done in the war. After a morning's
• 4:10:28
  battle beginning, tearing up, beginning again, she used to feel the futility
• 4:10:33
  of her own womanhood as she felt it on no other occasion, and would
• 4:10:37
  turn gratefully to the thought of Hugh Whitbread, who possessed no one could doubt
• 4:10:41
  it the art of writing letters to the Times, a being so differently constituted
• 4:10:48
  from herself, with such a command of language, able to put things as
• 4:10:54
  editors like them put, had passions which one could not call simply greed.
• 4:10:58
  Lady Bruton often suspended judgment upon men in deference to the mysterious accord in which
• 4:11:05
  they But no woman stood to the laws of the universe, knew how to
• 4:11:09
  put things, knew what was said, so that if Richard advised her and
• 4:11:13
  Hugh wrote for her, she was sure of being somehow right. So she
• 4:11:18
  let Hugh eat his Soufflee asked after poor Evelyn, waited until they were smoking,
• 4:11:24
  and then said, Milly, will you fetch the papers? And miss
• 4:11:28
  Brush went out, came back, laid papers on the table, and Hugh
• 4:11:33
  produced his fountain pen, his silver fountain pen, which had done twenty years
• 4:11:37
  service. He said, unscrewing the cap. It was still in perfect order.
• 4:11:43
  He had shown it to the maker's There was no reason, they said,
• 4:11:46
  why it should ever wear out, which was somehow to Hugh's credit and
• 4:11:50
  to the credit of the sentiments which his pen expressed. So Richard Dollowy felt
• 4:11:56
  as Hugh began carefully writing capital letters with rings them in the margin, and
• 4:12:01
  thus marvelously reduced Lady Bruton's tangles to scents, to grammar, such as the
• 4:12:07
  editor of the Times. Lady Bruton felt, watching the marvelous transformation, must
• 4:12:13
  respect. Hugh was slow, he was pertinacious. Richard said one must take
• 4:12:20
  risks. Hugh proposed modifications in deference to people's feelings, which he said rather
• 4:12:26
  tartly, when Richard laughed, had to be considered and read out, how
• 4:12:31
  therefore we are of opinion that the Times are ripe the superfluous youth of our
• 4:12:37
  ever increasing population. What we owe to the dead? Which Richard thought all
• 4:12:43
  stuffing and buncom but no harm in it, of course. And Hugh went
• 4:12:46
  on drafting sentiments in alphabetical order of the highest nobility, brushing the cigar ash
• 4:12:54
  from his waistcoat, and summing up now and then the progress they had made,
• 4:12:58
  until he read out the draft of a letter, which Lady Bruton felt
• 4:13:03
  certain was a masterpiece. Could her own meaning sound like that? Hugh could
• 4:13:09
  not guarantee that the editor would put it in, but he would be meeting
• 4:13:13
  somebody at luncheon. Whereupon Lady Bruton, who seldom did a graceful thing,
• 4:13:20
  stuffed all Hugh's carnations into the front of her dress, and flinging her hands
• 4:13:24
  out, called him my Prime Minister. What she would have done without them?
• 4:13:30
  Both she did not know. They rose, and Richard Delaware strolled off,
• 4:13:35
  as usual to have a look at the general's portrait, because he meant
• 4:13:39
  whenever he had a moment of leisure to write a history of Lady Bruton's family.
• 4:13:45
  And Milicent Bruton was very proud of her family. But they could wait.
• 4:13:50
  They could wait, she said, looking at the picture, meaning that
• 4:13:52
  her family of military men, administrators, admirals had been men of action who
• 4:14:00
  had done their duty, and Richard's first duty was to his country. But
• 4:14:05
  it was a fine face, she said, and all the papers were ready
• 4:14:09
  for Richard down at Outmixton whenever the time came the labor government. She meant
• 4:14:15
  ah the news from India, she cried. And then as they stood in
• 4:14:20
  the hall taking yellow gloves from the bowl on the malachite table, and Hugh
• 4:14:24
  was offering Miss Brush with quite unnecessary courtesy, some discarded ticket or other compliment,
• 4:14:31
  which she loathed from the depths of her heart, and blushed brick read.
• 4:14:35
  Richard turned to Lady Brutin with his hat in his hand, and said,
• 4:14:41
  we shall see you at our party to night, whereupon Lady Brutan resumed
• 4:14:46
  the magnificence which letter writing had shattered. She might come, or she might
• 4:14:50
  not come. Clarissa had wonderful energy parties terrified Lady Brutin, But then she
• 4:14:58
  was getting old. So she intimated standing at her doorway, handsome, very
• 4:15:03
  erect, while her trouse stretched behind her, and Miss Brush disappeared into the
• 4:15:09
  background with her hands full of papers. And Lady Bruton went ponderously majestically up
• 4:15:18
  to her room, lay one arm extended on the sofa. She sighed,
• 4:15:22
  she snormed, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy. Drowsy
• 4:15:28
  and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot June day,
• 4:15:33
  with the bees going round and about, and the yellow butterflies. Always
• 4:15:37
  she went back to those fields down in Devonshire, where she had jumped the
• 4:15:41
  brooks on Patty her pony, with Mortimer and Tom, her brothers. And
• 4:15:48
  there were the dogs, there were the rats. There were her father and
• 4:15:52
  mother on the lawn under the trees, with the tea things out, and
• 4:15:56
  the bed of Dahlia's, the hollyhocks, the pampas grass, and they little
• 4:16:03
  wretches always up to some mischief, stealing back through the shrubbery so as not
• 4:16:08
  to be seen, all bedraggled from some roguery. What old nurse used to
• 4:16:12
  say about her frocks, Ah dear, she remembered. It was Wednesday in
• 4:16:18
  Brooks Street. Those kind good fellows, Richard Delaway, Hugh Whitbread had gone
• 4:16:25
  this hot day through the streets, whose growl came up to her lying on
• 4:16:30
  the sofa. Power was hers position, income, She had lived in the
• 4:16:34
  forefront of her time. She had had good friends, known, the ablest
• 4:16:38
  men of her day, murmuring London flowed up to her, and her hand
• 4:16:45
  lying on the sofa, back curled upon some imaginary bhuton such as her grandfather's
• 4:16:49
  might have held, holding which she seemed drowsy and heavy to be commanding battalions
• 4:16:56
  marching to Canada. And those good fellows walking across London that territory of theirs,
• 4:17:03
  that little bit of carpet made fair. And they went further and further
• 4:17:08
  from her, being attached to her by a thin thread, since they had
• 4:17:12
  lunched with her, which would stretch and stretch get thinner and thinner as they
• 4:17:18
  walked across London, as if one's friends were attached to one's body after lunching
• 4:17:23
  with them by a thin thread, which, as she dozed there became hazy
• 4:17:29
  with the sound of bells striking the hour or ringing to service. As a
• 4:17:33
  single spider's thread is blotted with rain drops and burdened SAgs down. So she
• 4:17:40
  slept, and Richard Delaway and Hugh Whipbread hesitated at the corner of Conduit Street,
• 4:17:47
  at the very moment that Milicica and Brutin, lying on the sofa,
• 4:17:52
  let the thread snap snored. Contrary winds buffeted at the street corner. They
• 4:17:57
  looked in at a shop window. They did not wish to buy or talk,
• 4:18:02
  but to part only with contrary winds buffeting the street corner with some sort
• 4:18:07
  of laps in the tides of the body. Two horses meeting in a swirl
• 4:18:12
  morning and afternoon they paused some newspaper placard went up in the air gallantly like
• 4:18:19
  a kite at first, then paused, swooped, fluttered, and a lady's
• 4:18:25
  veil hung. Yellow awnings trembled. The speed of the morning traffic slackened,
• 4:18:32
  and single carts rattled carelessly down half empty streets in Norfolk, of which Richard
• 4:18:37
  Dollaway was half thinking. A soft, warm wind blew back the petals,
• 4:18:44
  confused, the waters ruffled the flowering grasses. Haymakers, who had pitched beneath
• 4:18:51
  hedges to sleep away the morning toil parted curtains of green blades, moved trembling
• 4:18:56
  globes of cow Parsley to see the sky, the blue, the steadfast,
• 4:19:02
  the blazing summer sky. Aware that he was looking at a silver two handled
• 4:19:07
  jacoby and mug, and that Hugh Whipread admired condescendingly with airs of a connoisseurship,
• 4:19:15
  a Spanish necklace, which he thought of asking the price of in case
• 4:19:18
  Evelyn might like it. Still, Richard was torpid, could not think or
• 4:19:23
  move. Life had thrown up this wreckage shop, windows full of colored paste,
• 4:19:30
  and once stood stark with the lethargy of the old, stiff, with
• 4:19:33
  the rigidity of the old. Looking in Evelyn Whipfred might like to buy this
• 4:19:40
  Spanish necklace, so she might Yon he must. Hugh was going into the
• 4:19:45
  shop, right you are, said Richard, following goodness knows he didn't want
• 4:19:51
  to go buying necklaces with Hugh. But there are tides in the body.
• 4:19:56
  Morning meats afternoon borne like a frail shallow on deep deep floods. Lady Bruton's
• 4:20:03
  great grandfather and his memoir and his campaigns in North America were whelmed and sunk.
• 4:20:08
  And Milicent Bruton too, she went under. Richard didn't care a straw
• 4:20:14
  what became of emigration about that letter, whether the editor put it in or
• 4:20:18
  not. The necklace hung stretched between Hugh's admirable fingers. Let him give it
• 4:20:25
  to a girl if he must buy jewels, any girl, any girl in
• 4:20:29
  the street. For the worthlessness of this life did strike Richard pretty forcibly buying
• 4:20:36
  necklaces for Evelyn. If he'd had a boy, he'd have said, work,
• 4:20:40
  work. But he had his Elizabeth. He adored his Elizabeth. I
• 4:20:45
  should like to see mister Dubeney, said Hugh in his curt worldly way.
• 4:20:51
  It appeared that this Dubonnet had the measurements of Missus Whitbread's neck, or more
• 4:20:56
  strangely, still knew her views upon Spanish jewelry and the extent of her possessions.
• 4:21:02
  In that line which Hugh could not remember, all of which seemed to
• 4:21:07
  Richard Dollaway awfully awed, for he never gave Clarissa presents, except a bracelet
• 4:21:12
  two or three years ago, which had not been a success. She never
• 4:21:17
  wore it. It pained him to remember that she never wore it. And
• 4:21:22
  as a single spider's thread, after wavering here and there, attaches itself to
• 4:21:26
  the point of belief, so Richard's mind, recovering from its lethargy, set
• 4:21:32
  now on his wife, Clarissa, whom Peter Walsh had loved so passionately.
• 4:21:37
  And Richard had had a sudden vision of her there at luncheon, of himself
• 4:21:41
  and Clarissa, of their life together. And he drew the tray of old
• 4:21:45
  jewels toward him, and taking up first this brooch than that ring. How
• 4:21:51
  much is that? He asked, but doubted his own taste. He wanted
• 4:21:56
  to open the drawing room door and come in holding out something, a present.
• 4:22:00
  Poor Clarissa, only what. But Hugh was on his legs again.
• 4:22:06
  He was unspeakably pompous. Really, after dealing here for thirty five years,
• 4:22:11
  he was not going to be put off by a mere boy who did not
• 4:22:15
  know his business. For Dubenay, it seemed was out, and Hugh would
• 4:22:18
  not buy anything until mister Dubenay chose to be in, at which the youth
• 4:22:23
  blushed and bowed his correct little bow. It was all perfectly correct, and
• 4:22:30
  yet Richard couldn't have said that to save his life. Why these people stood
• 4:22:34
  that damned insolence? He could not conceive. Hugh was becoming an intolerable ass.
• 4:22:41
  Richard Delaway could not stand more than an hour of his society, and
• 4:22:47
  licking his bowler hat by way of farewell, Richard turned at the corner of
• 4:22:51
  Conduit Street, eager, yes, very eager to travel that spider's thread of
• 4:22:56
  attachment between himself and Clarissa. He would go straight to her in Westminster,
• 4:23:03
  but he wanted to come in holding something flowers, yes, flowers, since
• 4:23:08
  he did not trust his taste in gold, any number of flowers, roses
• 4:23:14
  orchids, to celebrate what was reckoning things, as he will in events,
• 4:23:18
  this feeling about her when they spoke of Peter Walsh at luncheon, and they
• 4:23:23
  never spoke of it, not for years had they spoken of it, which
• 4:23:27
  he thought, grasping his red and white roses together, a vast bunch in
• 4:23:32
  tissue paper is the greatest mistake in the world. The time comes when it
• 4:23:37
  can't be said. One's too shy to say it, he thought, pocketing
• 4:23:41
  his sixpence or two of change, setting off with his great bunch held against
• 4:23:45
  his body to Westminster, to say, straight out, in so many words,
• 4:23:51
  whatever she might think of him, holding out his flowers, I love
• 4:23:55
  you. Why not, Really it was a miracle. Thinking of the war
• 4:23:59
  and thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shoveled together,
• 4:24:04
  already half forgotten, it was a miracle. Here he was, walking
• 4:24:08
  across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her,
• 4:24:14
  which one never does say. He thought, partly one's lazy, partly one's
• 4:24:18
  shy, and Clarissa, it was difficult to think of her except in starts,
• 4:24:25
  as at luncheon, when he saw her quite distinctly their whole life.
• 4:24:30
  He stopped at the crossing and repeated, being simple by nature and undebauched,
• 4:24:34
  because he had tramped and shot, being pertinacious and dogged, having championed the
• 4:24:41
  down trodden, and followed his instincts in the House of Commons, being preserved
• 4:24:47
  in his simplicity, yet at the same time grown rather speechless, rather stiff.
• 4:24:52
  He repeated that it was a miracle that he should have married Clarissa,
• 4:24:56
  a miracle. His life had been a miracle, he thought, hesitating to
• 4:25:00
  cross. But it did make his blood boil to see little creatures of five
• 4:25:04
  or six crossing Piccadilly alone. The police ought to have stopped the traffic at
• 4:25:11
  once. He had no illusions about the London police. Indeed, he was
• 4:25:15
  collecting evidence of their malpractices, and those cost or mongers not allowed to stand
• 4:25:22
  their barrows in the streets, and prostitutes, Good Lord, the fault was
• 4:25:26
  it in them, nor in young men either, but in our detestable social
• 4:25:32
  system, and so forth, all of which he considered could be seen considering
• 4:25:37
  gray dogged, dapper clean as he walked across the park to tell his wife
• 4:25:42
  that he loved her, for he would say it in so many words when
• 4:25:47
  he came into the room. Because it is a thousand pities never to say
• 4:25:52
  what one feels, he thought, crossing the green park and observing with pleasure
• 4:25:56
  how in the shade of the trees whole family, poor families were sprawling,
• 4:26:03
  children kicking up their legs, sucking milk, paper bags thrown about, which
• 4:26:07
  could easily be picked up if people objected by one of those fat gentlemen in
• 4:26:12
  livery. For he was of opinion that every park and every square during the
• 4:26:18
  summer months should be opened to children. The grass of the park flushed and
• 4:26:22
  faded, lighting up the poor mothers of Westminster and their crawling babies, as
• 4:26:27
  if a yellow lamp were moved beneath. But what could be done for female
• 4:26:32
  vagrance? Like that poor creature stretched on her elbow, as if she had
• 4:26:36
  flung herself on the earth. Rid of all ties, to observe curiously,
• 4:26:41
  to speculate boldly, to consider the wise and the wherefores impudent, loose lived
• 4:26:47
  humorous he did not know. Bearing his flowers like a weapon. Richard Delaway
• 4:26:52
  approached her intent he passed her. Still there was time for a spark between
• 4:26:57
  them. She laughed at the sight of him. He smiled good, humoredly,
• 4:27:02
  considering the problems of the female vagrant, Not that they would ever speak,
• 4:27:07
  but he would tell Clarissa that he loved her. In so many words,
• 4:27:11
  he had once upon a time been jealous of Peter Walsh, jealous of
• 4:27:15
  him and Clarissa, But she had often said to him that she had been
• 4:27:21
  right not to marry Peter Walsh, which, knowing Clarissa, was obviously true.
• 4:27:26
  She wanted support, not that she was weak, but she wanted support.
• 4:27:32
  As for Buckingham Palace, like an old prima donna facing the audience all
• 4:27:37
  in white. You can't deny it a certain dignity, he considered, nor
• 4:27:41
  despise. What does, after all, stand to millions of people. A
• 4:27:45
  little crowd was waiting at the gate to see the King drive out for a
• 4:27:48
  symbol. Absurd though it is. A child with a box of bricks could
• 4:27:53
  have done better, he thought, looking at the memorial to Queen Victoria,
• 4:27:57
  whom he could remember in her horned spectacles, driving through Kensington, its white
• 4:28:03
  mound, its billowing motherliness. But he liked being ruled by the descendant of
• 4:28:08
  Horsaw. He liked continuity and the sense of handing on the traditions of the
• 4:28:14
  past. It was a great age in which to have lived. Indeed,
• 4:28:18
  his own life was a miracle, let him make no mistake about it.
• 4:28:22
  Here he was in the prime of life, walking to his house in Westminster
• 4:28:26
  to tell Clarissa that he loved her happiness is this, he thought. It
• 4:28:32
  is this, he said, as he entered Dean's yard. Big Ben was
• 4:28:36
  beginning to strike, first the warning musical, then the hour irrevocable lunch parties
• 4:28:42
  waste the entire afternoon, he thought, approaching his door. The sound of
• 4:28:48
  big Ben flooded Clarissa's drawing room, where she sat ever so annoyed, at
• 4:28:52
  her writing table, worried, annoyed. It was perfectly true that she had
• 4:28:57
  not asked Ellie Henderson to her party, but she had done it on purpose.
• 4:29:03
  Now, missus Marsham wrote, she had told Ellie Henderson she would ask
• 4:29:07
  Clarissa. Ellie so much wanted to come. But why should she invite all
• 4:29:11
  the dull women in London to her parties? Why should missus Marsham interfere?
• 4:29:17
  And there was Elizabeth clausetued all this time with Doris Kilman anything more nauseating.
• 4:29:23
  She could not conceive prayer at this hour with that woman. And the sound
• 4:29:29
  of the bell flooded the room with its melancholy wave, which receded and gathered
• 4:29:34
  itself together to fall once more. When she heard distractingly something fumbling, something
• 4:29:41
  scratching at the door. Who at this hour, three good heavens, three
• 4:29:45
  already for with overpowering directness and dignity. The clock struck three, and she
• 4:29:52
  heard nothing else but the door handle slipped round, and in came Richard.
• 4:29:56
  What a surprise. In came Richard, holding out flowers. She had failed
• 4:30:02
  him once at Constantinople, and Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to
• 4:30:07
  be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. He was holding out flowers,
• 4:30:11
  roses, red and white roses, but he could not bring himself to say
• 4:30:15
  he loved her, not in so many words. But how lovely, she
• 4:30:21
  said. Taking his flowers she understood, She understood, without his speaking his
• 4:30:26
  clarissa. She put them in vases on the mantelpiece. How lovely they looked,
• 4:30:32
  she said. And was it amusing? She asked? Had Lady Bruton
• 4:30:36
  asked after her? Peter Walsh was back? Missus Marsham had written? Must
• 4:30:41
  she ask Ellie Henderson that woman Killman was upstairs. But let us sit down
• 4:30:48
  for five minutes, said Richard. It all looked so empty, All the
• 4:30:53
  chairs were against the wall. What had they been doing? Oh it was
• 4:30:57
  for the party. No, he had not forgotten the party Peter Walsh was
• 4:31:03
  back. Oh, yes, she had had him, and he was going
• 4:31:07
  to get a divorce, and he was in love with some woman out there,
• 4:31:11
  and he hadn't changed in the slightest There she was mending her dress,
• 4:31:17
  thinking of Borton, she said he was at lunch, said Richard. She
• 4:31:21
  had met him too, while he was getting absolutely intolerable, buying Evelyn necklaces
• 4:31:26
  better than ever an intolerable ass. And it came over me. I might
• 4:31:33
  have married you, she said, thinking of Peter sitting there in his little
• 4:31:37
  bow tie with that knife opening it, shutting it, just as he always
• 4:31:42
  was. You know. They were talking about him at lunch, said Richard,
• 4:31:48
  But he could not tell her he loved her. He held her hand.
• 4:31:52
  Happiness is this? He thought. They had been writing a letter to
• 4:31:55
  the Times for Milicent Bruton. That was about all. He was fitful.
• 4:32:00
  And our dear miss Kilman, he asked. Clarissa thought the Roses absolutely lovely,
• 4:32:06
  first bunch together now of their own accord, starting apart. Kilman arrives
• 4:32:11
  just as we've done lunch, she said. Elizabeth turns pink. They shut
• 4:32:17
  themselves up. I suppose they're praying. Lord. He didn't like it.
• 4:32:22
  But these things pass over if you let them in a mackintosh with an umbrella,
• 4:32:26
  said Clarissa. He had not said I love you, but he held
• 4:32:30
  her hand. Happiness is this? Is this, he thought? But why
• 4:32:34
  should I ask all the dull women in London to my parties? Said Clarissa.
• 4:32:40
  And if missus Marsham gave a party, did she invite her guests?
• 4:32:45
  Poor Ellie Henderson, said Richard. It was a very odd thing, how
• 4:32:48
  much Clarissa minded about her parties, he thought. But Richard had no notion
• 4:32:55
  of the look of a room. However, what was he going to say
• 4:32:59
  if if you worried about these parties he would not let her give them?
• 4:33:03
  Did she wish she had married Peter? But he must go. He must
• 4:33:07
  be off, he said, getting up. But he stood for a moment
• 4:33:11
  as if he were about to say something, And she wondered what why there
• 4:33:15
  were the roses some committee, she asked, as he opened the door.
• 4:33:21
  Are Manians? He said, or perhaps it was Albanians. And there is
• 4:33:26
  a dignity in people, a solitude even between husband and wife, a gulf,
• 4:33:32
  and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door,
• 4:33:37
  For one would not part with it oneself, or take it against his
• 4:33:41
  will from one's husband without losing one's independence, one's self respect, something after
• 4:33:47
  all priceless. He returned with a pillow and a quilt. In hour's complete
• 4:33:53
  rest after luncheon, he said, and he went. How like him he
• 4:33:59
  would go on, say, in hour's complete rest after luncheon, to the
• 4:34:03
  end of time, because a doctor had ordered it once. It was like
• 4:34:07
  him to take what doctors said literally, part of his adorable divine simplicity,
• 4:34:11
  which no one had to the same extent, which made him go and do
• 4:34:15
  the thing. While she and Peter furthered their time away bickering, he was
• 4:34:21
  already halfway to the House of Commons to his Armenians, his Albanians, having
• 4:34:26
  settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses, and people would say,
• 4:34:33
  Clarissa Dalaway is spoilt. She cared much more for her roses than for
• 4:34:37
  the Armenians, hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of
• 4:34:44
  cruelty and injustice. She had heard Richard say so over and over again.
• 4:34:48
  No, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians,
• 4:34:53
  But she loved her roses. Didn't that help the Armenians the only flowers
• 4:34:59
  she could bear to see cut. But Richard was already at the House of
• 4:35:03
  Commons at his committee, having settled all her difficulties. But no, alas
• 4:35:10
  that was not true, he did not see the reasons against asking Ellie Henderson.
• 4:35:15
  She would do it, of course, as he wished it, since
• 4:35:18
  he had brought the pillows. She would lie down. But why did she
• 4:35:23
  suddenly feel for no reason that she could discover desperately unhappy as a person who
• 4:35:30
  has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall
• 4:35:34
  blades very carefully this way and that, and searches here and there vainly,
• 4:35:40
  and at last spies it there at the roots. So she went through one
• 4:35:44
  thing and another. No, it was not Sally's Sutton saying that Richard would
• 4:35:48
  never be in the cabinet because he had a second class brain. It came
• 4:35:53
  back to her. No, she did not mind that, Nor was it
• 4:35:57
  to do with Elizabeth either, and Doris Killman. Those were facts. It
• 4:36:03
  was a feeling, some unpleasant feeling earlier in the day, perhaps something that
• 4:36:07
  Peter had said, combined with some depression of her own in her bedroom,
• 4:36:14
  taking off her hat, and what Richard had said had added to it.
• 4:36:17
  But what had he said? There were his roses, her parties. That
• 4:36:22
  was it, her parties. Both of them criticized her very unfairly, laughed
• 4:36:26
  at her very unjustly for her parties. That was it? That was it?
• 4:36:33
  Well, how is she going to defend herself now that she knew what
• 4:36:37
  it was? She felt perfectly happy, they thought, or Peter at any
• 4:36:41
  rate, thought that she enjoyed imposing herself, liked to have famous people about
• 4:36:45
  her great names. Was simply a snob in short while, Peter might think
• 4:36:52
  so. Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew
• 4:36:56
  it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And
• 4:37:00
  both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life. That's what I
• 4:37:04
  do it for, she said, speaking aloud to life. Since she was
• 4:37:10
  lying on the sofa, cloistered exempt, the presence of this thing, which
• 4:37:14
  she felt to be so obvious, became physically existent, with robes of sound
• 4:37:19
  from the street, sunny, with hot breath whispering, blowing out the blinds.
• 4:37:26
  But suppose Peter said to her, yes, yes, But your parties.
• 4:37:30
  What's the sense of your parties? All she could say was and nobody
• 4:37:34
  could be expected to understand. They're an offering, which sounded horribly vague.
• 4:37:40
  But who was Peter to make out that life was all plain sailing? Peter
• 4:37:45
  always in love, always in love with the wrong woman. What's your love?
• 4:37:48
  She might say to him, And she knew his answer, how it
• 4:37:52
  is the most important thing in the world, and no woman possibly understood it
• 4:37:57
  very well. But would any man understand what she meant either about life?
• 4:38:03
  She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for
• 4:38:07
  no reason whatever, but to go deeper beneath what people said. And these
• 4:38:14
  judgments has superficial, how fragmentary they are in her own mind. Now what
• 4:38:19
  did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it
• 4:38:22
  was very clear. Here was so and so in South Kensington, someone up
• 4:38:27
  in Bayswater, and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt
• 4:38:33
  quite continuously a sense of their existence. And she felt what a waste,
• 4:38:38
  and she felt what a pity, And she felt if only they could be
• 4:38:41
  brought together. So she did it. And it was an offering to combine,
• 4:38:47
  to create, but to whom in offering, for the sake of offering.
• 4:38:52
  Perhaps anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had She of the
• 4:38:56
  slightest importance, could not think, write, even play the piano. She
• 4:39:02
  muddled Armenians and Turks, loved success, hated discomfort, must be liked,
• 4:39:08
  talked oceans of nonsense, And to this day asked her what the equator was,
• 4:39:14
  and she did not know all the same. That one day should follow
• 4:39:18
  another Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, That one should wake up in
• 4:39:23
  the morning, see the sky walk in the park, meet Hugh where bread.
• 4:39:29
  Then suddenly in came Peter, Then these roses. It was enough after
• 4:39:34
  that, how unbelievable death was, that it must end, and no one
• 4:39:40
  in the whole world would know how she had loved it all how, every
• 4:39:44
  instant the door opened, Elizabeth knew that her mother was resting. She came
• 4:39:51
  in very quietly. She had stood perfectly still. Was it that some mongol
• 4:39:56
  had been wrecked on the coast of Norfolk, as Missus Hilbury said, had
• 4:40:02
  mixed with the Galloway ladies perhaps a hundred years ago. For the Gallaways in
• 4:40:07
  general wore fair haired, blue eyed Elizabeth on the contrary was dark, had
• 4:40:12
  Chinese eyes in a pale face, an oriental mystery, was gentle, considerate.
• 4:40:18
  Still, as a child she had had a perfect sense of humor.
• 4:40:23
  But now, at seventeen, why Clarissa could not in the least understand she
• 4:40:29
  had become very serious, like a hyacinth, sheathed in glossy green with buds,
• 4:40:34
  dressed tinted a hyacinth which has no sun. She stood quite still and
• 4:40:41
  looked at her mother. But the door was ajar, and outside the door
• 4:40:45
  was miss Kilman. As Clarissa knew, Miss Kilman in her macintosh, listening
• 4:40:49
  to whatever they said. Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing and wore
• 4:40:56
  a macintosh. But had her reasons. First, it was cheap. Second,
• 4:41:02
  she was over forty and did not, after all, dressed to please.
• 4:41:07
  She was poor, moreover, degradingly poor. Otherwise she would not be
• 4:41:11
  taking jobs from people of the Dolaways, from rich people who liked to be
• 4:41:17
  kind. Mister Dollaway to do him justice had been kind, but missus Dollaway
• 4:41:22
  had not. She had been merely condescending. She came from the most worthless
• 4:41:27
  of all classes, the rich, with a smattering of culture. They had
• 4:41:33
  expensive things everywhere, pictures, carpets, lots of servants. She considered that
• 4:41:38
  she had a perfect right to anything that the Dollaways did for her. She
• 4:41:44
  had been cheated. Thus the word was no exaggeration, for surely a girl
• 4:41:48
  has a right to some kind of happiness, and she had never been happy,
• 4:41:53
  what with being so clumsy and so poor. And then just as she
• 4:41:57
  might have had a chance at Miss Dolby's school, the war came, and
• 4:42:03
  she had never been able to tell lies. Miss Dolby thought she would be
• 4:42:07
  happier with people who shared her views about the Germans. She had had to
• 4:42:11
  go. It was true that the family was of German origin, spelt the
• 4:42:17
  name Kielmann in the eighteenth century, but her brother had been killed. They
• 4:42:22
  turned her out because she would not pretend that the Germans were all villains.
• 4:42:26
  When she had German friends, when the only happy days of her life had
• 4:42:30
  been spent in Germany, and after all she could read history, she had
• 4:42:36
  had to take whatever she could get. Mister Delaway had come across her working
• 4:42:41
  for the friends. He had allowed her, and that was really generous of
• 4:42:45
  him to teach his daughter history. Also, she did a little extension luxury
• 4:42:49
  and so on. Then our Lord had come to her, and here she
• 4:42:55
  always bowed her head. She had seen the light two years and three months
• 4:42:59
  ago. Now she did not envy women like Clarissa Dollaway. She pitied them.
• 4:43:04
  She pitied and despised them from the bottom of her heart as she stood
• 4:43:10
  on the soft carpet looking at the old engraving of a little girl with a
• 4:43:14
  muff, With all this luxury going on, what hope was there for a
• 4:43:18
  better state of things? Instead of lying on the sofa, my mother is
• 4:43:22
  resting, Elizabeth had said she should have been in a factory behind a counter.
• 4:43:27
  Missus Galloway and all the other fine ladies, bitter and burning. Miss
• 4:43:33
  Kilman had turned into a church two years three months ago. She had heard
• 4:43:38
  the Reverend Edward Whittaker preach, the boys singing, had seen the solemn lights
• 4:43:45
  descend, and whether it was the music or the voices, she herself,
• 4:43:49
  when alone in the evening, found comfort in a violin. But the sound
• 4:43:53
  was excruciating. She had no ear. The hot and turbulent feelings which boiled
• 4:44:00
  and surged in her had been assuaged as she sat there, and she had
• 4:44:04
  wept copiously and gone to call on mister Whittaker at his private house in Kensington.
• 4:44:11
  It was the hand of God, he said. The Lord had shown
• 4:44:15
  her the way. So now whenever the hot and painful feelings boiled within her,
• 4:44:21
  this hatred of missus Dollaway, this grudge against the world, she thought
• 4:44:25
  of God. She thought of mister Whittaker. Rage was succeeded by calm.
• 4:44:30
  A sweet savor filled her veins, her lips parted, and standing formidable upon
• 4:44:36
  the landing in her mackintosh, she looked with steady and sinister serenity at Missus
• 4:44:41
  Doallaway, who came out with her daughter. End of chapter eight. Chapter
• 4:44:48
  nine, Elizabeth said she had forgotten her gloves. That was because Miss Kilman
• 4:44:55
  and her mother hated each other. She could not bear to see them together.
• 4:45:00
  She ran upstairs to find her gloves. But miss Kilman did not hate
• 4:45:03
  Missus Dollaway. Turning her large, gooseberry colored eyes upon Clarissa, observing her
• 4:45:11
  small pink face, her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion,
• 4:45:15
  Miss Kilman felt cool, simpleton, you who have known neither sorrow nor pleasure,
• 4:45:22
  who have trifled your life away? And there rose in her in overmastering
• 4:45:27
  desire, to overcome her, to unmask her. If she could have filled
• 4:45:33
  her, it would have eased her. But it was not the body.
• 4:45:36
  It was the soul and its mockery that she wished to subdue, make feel
• 4:45:41
  her mastery. If only she could make her weep, could ruin her,
• 4:45:45
  humiliate her, bring her to her knees, crying, you are right.
• 4:45:49
  But this was God's will, not Miss Kilman's. It was to be a
• 4:45:55
  religious victory. So she glared, so she glowered. Clarissa was really shocked.
• 4:46:02
  This is a Christian, this woman, This woman had taken her daughter
• 4:46:06
  from her. She in touch with invisible presences, heavy, ugly commonplace,
• 4:46:12
  without kindness or grace. She know the meaning of life. You are taking
• 4:46:18
  Elizabeth to the stores, missus Dollaway said, Miss Kilman said, she was.
• 4:46:25
  They stood there. Miss Kilman was not going to make herself agreeable.
• 4:46:30
  She had always earned her living. Her knowledge of modern history was thorough in
• 4:46:34
  the extreme. She did out of her meager income, set aside so much
• 4:46:40
  for causes she believed in, whereas this woman did nothing, believed, nothing,
• 4:46:45
  brought up her daughter. But here was Elizabeth, rather out of breath,
• 4:46:49
  the beautiful girl, So they were going to the stores. Aught.
• 4:46:55
  It was as Miss Kilman stood there, and stand she did, with the
• 4:47:00
  power and taciturnity of some prehistoric monster armored for primeval warfare. How, second
• 4:47:07
  by second the idea of her diminished. How hatred, which was for ideas,
• 4:47:12
  not people, crumbled, How she lost her malignity, her size became
• 4:47:18
  second by second, merely Miss Kilmen in a Mackintosh, who, heaven knows
• 4:47:25
  Clarissa would have liked to help at this dwindling of the monster. Clarissa laughed,
• 4:47:32
  saying good bye, She laughed off. They went together, Miss Kilman
• 4:47:37
  and Elizabeth downstairs. With a sudden impulse, with a violent anguish, for
• 4:47:42
  this woman was taking her daughter from her. Clarisa leant over the banisters and
• 4:47:48
  cried out, remember the party, Remember our party to night. But Elizabeth
• 4:47:53
  had already opened the front door. There was a van passing. She did
• 4:47:57
  not answer. Love and religion, thought Clarisa, going back into the drawing
• 4:48:03
  room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are. For
• 4:48:10
  now that the body of Miss Kilman was not before her, it overwhelmed her.
• 4:48:14
  The idea the cruelest things in the world she thought, seeing them clumsy,
• 4:48:18
  hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous,
• 4:48:26
  dressed in a Macintosh coat on the landing love and religion. Had she
• 4:48:32
  ever tried to convert anyone herself? Did she not wish everybody merely to be
• 4:48:37
  themselves? And she watched out of the window the old lady opposite climbing upstairs.
• 4:48:44
  Let her climb upstairs. If she wanted to let her stop, then
• 4:48:48
  let her, as Clarissa had often seen her gain her bedroom, part her
• 4:48:52
  curtains, and disappear again into the background. Somehow one respected that that old
• 4:48:59
  woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious that she was being watched.
• 4:49:03
  There was something solemn in it. But love and religion would destroy that.
• 4:49:07
  Whatever it was, the privacy of the soul, the odious kilman would destroy
• 4:49:12
  it. Yet it was a sight that made her want to cry. Love
• 4:49:18
  destroyed too. Everything that was fine, everything that was true, went Take
• 4:49:22
  Peter Walsh. Now there was a man, charming, clever, with ideas
• 4:49:27
  about everything. If he wanted to know about Pope Say or Addison, or
• 4:49:33
  just to talk nonsense, what people were like, what things meant. Peter
• 4:49:38
  knew better than anyone. It was Peter who had helped her, Peter who
• 4:49:42
  had lent her books. But look at the woman he loved. Vulgar,
• 4:49:48
  trivial commonplace. Think of Peter in love. He came to see her after
• 4:49:52
  all these years, And what did he talk about himself? Horrible? Passion,
• 4:49:57
  she thought. Passion, she thought, thinking of Kilman and her Elizabeth
• 4:50:03
  walking to the Army and Navy stores. Big Ben struck the half hour.
• 4:50:11
  How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touch it, to see the
• 4:50:15
  old lady they had been neighbors ever so many years. Move away from the
• 4:50:21
  window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string, gigantic
• 4:50:26
  as it was, it had something to do with her, down down into
• 4:50:30
  the midst of ordinary things. The finger fell, making the moment solemn.
• 4:50:36
  She was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound to move to go.
• 4:50:41
  But where Clarissa tried to follow her as she turned and disappeared, and
• 4:50:47
  could still just see her white cap moving at the back of the bedroom.
• 4:50:52
  She was still there, moving about at the other end of the room.
• 4:50:56
  Why creeds and prayers and macintoshes, When thought Clarissa, that's the miracle,
• 4:51:03
  that's the mystery that old lady she meant, whom she could see going from
• 4:51:07
  chest of drawers to dressing table. She could still see her. And the
• 4:51:14
  supreme mystery, which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say
• 4:51:18
  he had solved. But Clarissa didn't believe either of them had the ghost of
• 4:51:22
  an idea of solving was simply this. Here was one room, there another
• 4:51:29
  Did religion solve that? Or love love? But here the other clock,
• 4:51:34
  the clock which always struck two minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with
• 4:51:40
  its lap full of odds and ends, which it dumped down, as if
• 4:51:44
  Big Ben were all very well with his majesty laying down the law, so
• 4:51:49
  solemn, so just. But she must remember all sorts of little things besides
• 4:51:56
  Missus Marsham Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices. All sorts of little things came
• 4:52:02
  flooding and laughing and dancing in on the wake of that solemn stroke, which
• 4:52:07
  lay flat like a bar of gold on the sea. Missus Marsham Ellie Henderson,
• 4:52:11
  glasses for ices. She must telephone now at once, volubly, troublously.
• 4:52:19
  The late clock sounded, coming in on the wake of big ben with
• 4:52:23
  its lap full of trifles, eaten up, broken up by the assault of
• 4:52:29
  carriages, the brutality of vans, the eager advance of myriads of angular men,
• 4:52:34
  of flaunting women, the domes and spires of offices and hospitals, The
• 4:52:41
  last relics of this lap full of odds and ends seemed to break like the
• 4:52:45
  spray of an exhausted wave, upon the body of miss Killman, standing still
• 4:52:51
  in the street for a moment to mutter, It is the flesh. It
• 4:52:56
  was the flesh that she must control. Clarissa Delaway had insulted her that she
• 4:53:02
  expected, but she had not triumphed. She had not mastered the flesh.
• 4:53:07
  Ugly clumsy Clarissa Dolaway had laughed at her for being that, and had revived
• 4:53:12
  the fleshly desires. For she minded looking as she did beside Clarissa, Nor
• 4:53:18
  could she talk as she did. But why wish to resemble her? Why
• 4:53:23
  she despised missus Dollaway from the bottom of her heart. She was not serious,
• 4:53:29
  She was not good. Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.
• 4:53:33
  Yet Doris Killman had been overcome. She had, as a matter of
• 4:53:37
  fact, very nearly burst into tears when Clarissa Dollaway laughed at her. It
• 4:53:44
  is the flesh, It is the flesh, she muttered, it being her
• 4:53:48
  habit to talk aloud, trying to subdue this turbulent and painful feeling. As
• 4:53:52
  she walked down Victoria Street, she prayed to God. She could not help
• 4:53:57
  being ugly. She could not afford to buy pretty clothes. Clarissa Dellaway had
• 4:54:03
  laughed, But she would concentrate her mind upon something else until she had reached
• 4:54:07
  the pillar box. At any rate, she had got Elizabeth, but she
• 4:54:11
  would think of something else. She would think of Russia until she reached the
• 4:54:15
  pillar box. How nice it must be, she said, in the country,
• 4:54:22
  struggling, as mister Whittaker had told her, with that violent grudge against
• 4:54:26
  the world which had scorned her, sneered at her, cast her off,
• 4:54:30
  beginning with this indignity, the infliction of her unlovable body, which people could
• 4:54:37
  not bear to see. Do her hair as she might, her forehead remained
• 4:54:41
  like an egg, bald white. No clothes suited her. She might buy
• 4:54:47
  anything, and for a woman, of course, that meant never meeting the
• 4:54:51
  opposite sex. Never would she come first with anyone. Sometimes lately it had
• 4:54:56
  seemed to her that except for Elizabeth, her food was all that she lived
• 4:55:02
  for, her comforts, her dinner, her tea, her hot water bottle
• 4:55:07
  at night. But one must fight, vanquish, have faith in God.
• 4:55:12
  Mister Whittaker had said. She was there for a purpose, But no one
• 4:55:17
  knew the agony, he said, pointing to the crucifix, that God knew.
• 4:55:22
  But why should she have to suffer when other women, like Clarissa Dollaway
• 4:55:26
  escaped? Knowledge comes through suffering, said mister Whittaker. She had passed the
• 4:55:33
  pillar box, and Elizabeth had turned into the cool brown tobacco department of the
• 4:55:37
  Army and Navy stores. While she was still muttering to herself what mister Whittaker
• 4:55:42
  had said about knowledge coming through suffering and the flesh. The flesh, she
• 4:55:48
  muttered, what department did she want? Elizabeth interrupted her petticoats, she said
• 4:55:55
  abruptly, and stopped straight on to the lift up they went. Elizabeth guided
• 4:56:02
  her this way, and that guided her in her abstraction, as if she
• 4:56:06
  had been a great child in unwieldy battleship. There were the petticoats, brown,
• 4:56:11
  decorous, striped frivolous, solid whimsy, and she chose in her abstraction
• 4:56:18
  portentously, and the girl serving thought her mad. Elizabeth rather wondered as they
• 4:56:26
  did up the parcel what Miss Kilman was thinking. They must have her tea,
• 4:56:30
  said Miss Kilmen, rousing, collecting herself. They had their tea.
• 4:56:37
  Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kilmen could be hungry. It was her way of
• 4:56:41
  eating, eating with intensity, then looking again and again at a plate of
• 4:56:47
  sugar cakes on the table next to them. Then when a lady and a
• 4:56:51
  child sat down and the child took the cake, could Miss Kilman really mind
• 4:56:56
  it? Yes, Miss Kilmen did mind it. She had wanted that cake,
• 4:57:00
  the pink one. The pleasure of eating was almost the only pure pleasure
• 4:57:04
  left her. And then to be baffled even in that when people are happy,
• 4:57:11
  they have a reserve, she had told Elizabeth upon which to draw.
• 4:57:15
  Whereas she was like a wheel without attire, she was fond of such metaphors,
• 4:57:21
  jolted by every pebble, so she would say, staying on after the
• 4:57:26
  lesson, standing by the fireplace with her bag of books, her satchel,
• 4:57:30
  she called it. On a Tuesday morning, after the lesson, was over,
• 4:57:34
  and she talked too about the war. After all, there were people
• 4:57:38
  who did not think the English invariably right. There were books, there were
• 4:57:44
  meetings, there were other points of view. Would Elizabeth liked to come with
• 4:57:48
  her to listen to so and so, a most extraordinary looking old man.
• 4:57:53
  Then Miss Kilman took her to some church in Kensington, and they had t
• 4:57:59
  with a clergyman. She had lent her books, law, medicine, politics.
• 4:58:03
  All professions are open to women of your generation, said miss Kilman.
• 4:58:08
  But for herself her career was absolutely ruined, and was it her fault?
• 4:58:12
  Good gracious, said Elizabeth. No. And her mother would come calling to
• 4:58:18
  say that a hamper had come from Bertain, and would miss Kilman like some
• 4:58:22
  flowers to miss Kilman. She was always very very nice, But Miss Kilman
• 4:58:29
  squashed the flowers all in a bunch and hadn't any small talk, and what
• 4:58:33
  interested? Miss Kilman bored her mother. And Miss Kilmen and she were terrible
• 4:58:37
  together, and Miss Kilman swelled and looked very plain. But then Miss Kilman
• 4:58:44
  was frightfully clever. Elizabeth had never thought about the poor. They lived with
• 4:58:48
  everything they wanted. Her mother had breakfast in bed every day, Lucy carried
• 4:58:53
  it up, and she liked old women because they were duchesses and being descended
• 4:58:59
  from some lord. But miss Kilman said, one of those Tuesday mornings,
• 4:59:03
  when the lesson was over, my grandfather kept an oil and color shop in
• 4:59:07
  Kensington. Miss Kilman made one feel so small. Miss Kilman took another cup
• 4:59:15
  of tea. Elizabeth, with her oriental bearing, her inscrutable mystery, sat
• 4:59:21
  perfectly upright. No, she did not want anything more. She looked for
• 4:59:25
  her gloves, her white gloves. They were under the table. Ah,
• 4:59:30
  but she must not go. Miss Kilman could not let her go. This
• 4:59:33
  youth that was so beautiful, this girl whom she genuinely loved. Her large
• 4:59:38
  hand opened and shut on the table. But perhaps it was a little flat
• 4:59:44
  somehow Elizabeth felt, And really she would like to go, But said miss
• 4:59:49
  Kilmen, I've not quite finished yet. Of course, then Elizabeth would wait.
• 4:59:56
  But it was rather stuffy in here. Are you going to to the
• 5:00:00
  party tonight? Miss Kilman said. Elizabeth supposed she was going. Her mother
• 5:00:04
  wanted her to go. She must not let parties absorb her, Miss Kilman
• 5:00:08
  said, fingering the last two inches of a chocolate a Claire. She did
• 5:00:14
  not much like parties, Elizabeth said. Miss Kilman opened her mouth, slightly,
• 5:00:18
  projected her chin, and swallowed down the last inches of the chocolate.
• 5:00:23
  A Claire then wiped her fingers and washed the tea round in her cup.
• 5:00:30
  She was about to split asunder. She felt the agony was so terrific.
• 5:00:34
  If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could
• 5:00:37
  make her hers absolutely and forever, and then die, that was all she
• 5:00:42
  wanted. But to sit here, unable to think of anything to say,
• 5:00:48
  to see Elizabeth turning against her, to be felt repulsive even by her.
• 5:00:52
  It was too much. She could not stand it. The thick fingers curled
• 5:00:56
  inwards. I never go to parties, said miss Kilman, just to keep
• 5:01:03
  Elizabeth from going. People don't ask me to parties. And she knew as
• 5:01:07
  she said it, that it was this egotism that was her undoing. Mister
• 5:01:11
  Whittaker had warned her, but she could not help it. She had suffered
• 5:01:15
  so horribly. Why should they ask me, she said, I'm plain,
• 5:01:19
  I'm unhappy. She knew it was idiotic, but it was all those people
• 5:01:25
  passing people with parcels who despised her, who made her say it. However,
• 5:01:30
  she was Doris Kilman. She had her degree, She was a woman
• 5:01:34
  who had made her way in the world. Her knowledge of modern history was
• 5:01:40
  more than respectable. I don't pity myself, she said. I pity She
• 5:01:45
  meant to say, your mother, but no she could not. Not to
• 5:01:48
  Elizabeth, I pity other people, she said, more like some dumb creature
• 5:01:56
  who has been brought up to a gate for an unknown purpose and stands there,
• 5:02:00
  longing to gallop away. Elizabeth gallaway, sat silent. Was Miss Kilman
• 5:02:06
  going to say anything more? Don't quite forget me, said Doris Kilman,
• 5:02:11
  her voice quivered right away to the end of the field. The dumb creature
• 5:02:15
  galloped in terror. The great hand opened and shut. Elizabeth turned her head.
• 5:02:22
  The waitress came. One had to pay at the desk, Elizabeth said,
• 5:02:26
  and went off, drawing out so Miss Kilman felt the very internals in
• 5:02:33
  her body, stretching them as she crossed the room, and then, with
• 5:02:37
  a final twist, bowing her head very politely, she went. She had
• 5:02:42
  gone. Miss Kilman sat at the marble table among the auclairs, stricken once
• 5:02:48
  twice thrice by shocks of supper. She had gone, Missus Dollaway had triumph.
• 5:02:56
  Elizabeth had gone, Beauty had gone, had gone. So she sat.
• 5:03:03
  She got up, blundered off among the little tables, rocking slightly from
• 5:03:07
  side to side, and somebody came after her with her petticoat, and she
• 5:03:12
  lost her way and was hemmed in by chunks specially prepared for taking to India.
• 5:03:18
  Through all the accouschemont sets and baby linen, through all the commodities of
• 5:03:25
  the world, perishable and permanent, hams, drugs, flowers stationary, variously
• 5:03:33
  smelling now sweet, now sour. She lurched, saw herself thus lurching with
• 5:03:38
  her hat askew very red in the face, whole length in a looking glass,
• 5:03:44
  and at last came out into the street. The tower of Westminster Cathedral
• 5:03:49
  rose in front of her, the habitation of God. In the midst of
• 5:03:55
  the traffic, there was the habitation of God. Doggedly, she set off
• 5:04:00
  with her parcel to that other sanctuary, the abbey, where, raising her
• 5:04:03
  hands in a tent before her face, she sat beside those driven into shelter
• 5:04:08
  too, the variously assorted worshippers, now divested of social rank, almost of
• 5:04:15
  sex, as they raised their hands before their faces, But once they removed
• 5:04:21
  them instantly reverent middle class english men and women, some of them desires of
• 5:04:26
  seeing the wax works. But Miss Kilman held her tent before her face.
• 5:04:33
  Now she was deserted, now rejoined. New worshippers came in from the street
• 5:04:38
  to replace the strollers, And still as the people gazed round and shuffled past
• 5:04:45
  the tomb of the unknown warrior, still she barred her eyes from her fingers
• 5:04:49
  and tried, in this double darkness, for the light in the abbey was
• 5:04:53
  bodyless to aspire above the vanities, the desires, the commodities, to rid
• 5:05:00
  herself both of hatred and of love. Her hands twitched, she seemed to
• 5:05:04
  struggle. Yet to others God was accessible and the path to him smooth.
• 5:05:11
  Mister Fletcher retired of the treasure. Missus Gorm, widow of the famous Casey,
• 5:05:18
  approached him simply, and, having done their praying, leant back.
• 5:05:22
  Enjoyed the music. The organ pealed sweetly, and saw Miss Kilman at the
• 5:05:26
  end of the row, praying, praying, and being still on the threshold
• 5:05:33
  of their underworld. Thought of her sympathetically as a soul haunting the same territory,
• 5:05:38
  A soul cut out of immaterial substance, not a woman a soul.
• 5:05:45
  But mister Fletcher had to go, He had to pass her, and being
• 5:05:48
  himself meet as a new pin, could not help being a little distressed by
• 5:05:53
  the poor lady's disorder, her hair down, her parcel on the floor.
• 5:05:59
  She didn't not at once let him pass, but as he stood gazing about
• 5:06:03
  him at the white marbles, gray window panes, and accumulated treasures, for
• 5:06:10
  he was extremely proud of the abbey, her largeness, robustness, and power.
• 5:06:15
  As she sat there, shifting her knees from time to time, it
• 5:06:18
  was so roughly approached to her God, so tough. Her desires impressed him,
• 5:06:23
  as they had impressed Missus Dollaway. She could not get the thought of
• 5:06:27
  her out of her mind. That afternoon, the Reverend Edward Whittaker and Elizabeth
• 5:06:33
  too, and Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so
• 5:06:41
  nice to be out of doors, she thought, perhaps she need not go
• 5:06:44
  home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air,
• 5:06:48
  so she would get on to an omnibus. And already, even as she
• 5:06:52
  stood there in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning, people were
• 5:06:57
  beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dog hyacinths, bonds, running
• 5:07:03
  water, and garden lilies, and it made her life a burden to her,
• 5:07:08
  for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in
• 5:07:11
  the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to
• 5:07:15
  go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the
• 5:07:21
  country with her father and the dogs. Buses swooped, settled were off garish
• 5:07:29
  caravans, glistening with red and yellow varnish. But which should she get onto?
• 5:07:33
  She had no preferences. Of course, she would not push her way.
• 5:07:38
  She inclined to be passive. It was expression she needed, for her
• 5:07:42
  eyes were fine Chinese, oriental, and as her mother said, with such
• 5:07:48
  nice shoulders and holding herself so straight. She was always charming to look at,
• 5:07:53
  and lately in the evening, especially when she was interested, for she
• 5:07:59
  never seemed excited. She looked almost beautiful, very stately, very serene.
• 5:08:04
  What could she be thinking? Every man fell in love with her and she
• 5:08:08
  was really awfully bored, For it was beginning. Her mother could see that
• 5:08:14
  the compliments were beginning that she did not care more about it. For instance,
• 5:08:18
  for her clothes sometimes worried Clarissa. But perhaps it was as well with
• 5:08:23
  all those puppies and guinea pigs about having distemper, and it gave her a
• 5:08:29
  charm. And now there was this odd friendship with miss Kilman, well thought
• 5:08:33
  Clarissa about three o'clock in the morning, reading baron Margaret, for she could
• 5:08:38
  not sleep. It proves she has a heart. Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and
• 5:08:45
  most competently boarded the omnibus in front of everybody. She took a seat on
• 5:08:51
  top. The impetuous creature a pirate, started forward, sprang away. She
• 5:08:56
  had to hold the rail to steady herself a pirate. It was reckless,
• 5:09:02
  unscrupulous, bearing down, ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, woldly, snatching a passenger
• 5:09:08
  or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel like and arrogant in between, and then
• 5:09:14
  rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall. And did Elizabeth give one thought to
• 5:09:19
  poor miss Kilman, who loved her without jealousy, to whom she had been
• 5:09:23
  a fawn in the open, a moon in a glade. She was delighted
• 5:09:27
  to be free. The fresh air was so delicious. It had been so
• 5:09:32
  stuffy in the army and Navy stores, and now it was like riding,
• 5:09:37
  to be rushing up Whitehall, and to each movement of the omnibus, the
• 5:09:41
  beautiful body in the fawn colored coat responded freely like a rider, like the
• 5:09:47
  figurehead of a ship. Where the breeze slightly disarrayed her. The heat gave
• 5:09:52
  her cheeks the pallor of white painted wood, and her fine eyes, having
• 5:09:56
  no eyes to meet, gazed ahead blank with the steering incredible innocence of sculpture.
• 5:10:04
  It was always talking about her own sufferings that made Miss Kilman so difficult.
• 5:10:10
  And was she right if it was being on committees and giving up hours
• 5:10:15
  and hours every day. She hardly ever saw him in London that helped the
• 5:10:18
  poor. Her father did that. Goodness knows if that was what Miss Kilman
• 5:10:23
  meant about being a Christian. But it was so difficult to say, Oh,
• 5:10:27
  she would like to go a little further. Another penny was it to
• 5:10:30
  the strand? Here was another penny, then she would go up the strand.
• 5:10:37
  She liked people who were ill, and every profession is open to the
• 5:10:41
  women of your generation. Said miss Kilman. So she might be a doctor.
• 5:10:45
  She might be a farmer. Animals are often ill. She might own
• 5:10:49
  a thousand acres and have people under her. She would go and see them
• 5:10:55
  in their cottages. This was Somerset House. One might be a very good
• 5:11:00
  farmer. And that, strangely enough, though Miss Kilman had her share in
• 5:11:03
  it was almost entirely due to Somerset House. It looked so splendid, so
• 5:11:10
  serious, that great gray building. And she liked the feeling of people working.
• 5:11:15
  She liked those churches, like shapes of gray paper breasting the stream of
• 5:11:21
  the strand. It was quite different here from Westminster, she thought, getting
• 5:11:25
  off at Chancery Lane. It was so serious, it was so busy.
• 5:11:30
  In short, she'd like to have a profession. She would become a doctor,
• 5:11:34
  a farmer, possibly go into Parliament if she found it necessary, all
• 5:11:38
  because of the strand, the feet of those people busy about their activities,
• 5:11:45
  hands putting stone to stone, mines eternally occupied not with trivial chatteries comparing women
• 5:11:52
  to poplars, which was rather exciting, of course, but very silly,
• 5:11:56
  but with thoughts of ships, of business, of law, of administration,
• 5:12:02
  and with it also stately. She was in the temple gay it was the
• 5:12:06
  river, pious there was the church made her quite determined, whatever her mother
• 5:12:11
  might say, to become either a farmer or a doctor. But she was,
• 5:12:15
  of course rather lazy, and it was much better to say nothing about
• 5:12:22
  it. It seemed so silly. It was the sort of thing that did
• 5:12:26
  sometimes happen when one was alone. Buildings without architects, names, crowds of
• 5:12:30
  people coming back from the city, having more power than single clergymen in Kensington
• 5:12:37
  than any of the books. Miss Coleman had lent her to stimulate what lay
• 5:12:41
  lumbers, clumsy and shy on the mine's sandy floor, to break surface as
• 5:12:47
  a child suddenly stretches its arms. It was just that, perhaps a sigh,
• 5:12:52
  a stretch of the arms, an impulse, a revelation which has its
• 5:12:56
  effects forever and then again, and went to the sandy floor. She must
• 5:13:03
  go home, she must dress for dinner. But what was the time?
• 5:13:07
  Where was the clock? She looked up Bleat Street. She walked just a
• 5:13:12
  little way towards Saint Paul's, shyly, like someone penetrating on tiptoe, exploring
• 5:13:18
  a strange house by night with a candle on edge, lest the owner should
• 5:13:23
  suddenly fling wide his bedroom door and ask her business. Nor did she dare
• 5:13:29
  wander off into queer alleys, tempting by streets any more than in a strange
• 5:13:34
  house open doors, which might be bedroom doors or sitting room doors, or
• 5:13:38
  lead straight to the larder. For no Dolaways came down the stair and daily.
• 5:13:45
  She was a pioneer, astray, venturing, trusting in many ways.
• 5:13:51
  Her mother felt she was extremely immature, like a child, still attached to
• 5:13:56
  dolls, to old slippers, a perfect baby, and that was charming.
• 5:14:00
  But then, of course, there was in the Delaway family the tradition of
• 5:14:06
  public service abbesses, principles, head mistresses, dignitaries in the republic of women.
• 5:14:14
  Without being brilliant, any of them. They were that she penetrated a
• 5:14:18
  little further in the direction of Saint Paul's. She liked the geniality, sisterhood,
• 5:14:25
  motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar. It seemed to her good. The
• 5:14:29
  noise was tremendous, and suddenly there were trumpets, the unemployed blaring, rattling
• 5:14:34
  about in the uproar, military music, as if people were marching. Yet
• 5:14:41
  had they been dying had some woman breathed her last, and whoever was watching,
• 5:14:45
  opening the window of the room where she had just brought off that act
• 5:14:49
  of supreme dignity, looked down on Fleet Street, that uproar, that military
• 5:14:56
  music would have come triumphing up to him, consolatory, indifferent. It was
• 5:15:03
  not conscious. There was no recognition in it of one fortune or fate.
• 5:15:07
  And for that very reason, even to those dazed with watching for the last
• 5:15:11
  shivers of consciousness on the faces of the dye, consoling forgetfulness in people might
• 5:15:18
  wound their ingratitude corrode. But this voice, pouring endlessly year in, year
• 5:15:25
  out, would take whatever it might be, this vow, this van,
• 5:15:30
  this light, this procession, would wrap them all about and carry them on,
• 5:15:34
  as in the rough stream of a glacier, the ice holds a splinter
• 5:15:38
  of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on.
• 5:15:45
  But it was later than she thought. Her mother would not like her
• 5:15:48
  to be wandering off alone like this. She turned back down the strand.
• 5:15:55
  A puff of wind in spite of the heat, there was quite a wind
• 5:15:59
  blew a thin black veil over the sun and over the strand. The faces
• 5:16:03
  faded. The omnibuses suddenly lost their glow. For although the clouds were of
• 5:16:10
  mountainous white, so that one could fancy hacking hardships off with a hatchet,
• 5:16:15
  with broad golden slopes, lawns of celestial pleasure gardens on their flanks, and
• 5:16:22
  had all the appearance of settled habitations assembled for the conference of gods above the
• 5:16:26
  world. There was a perpetual movement among them. Signs were interchanged, when,
• 5:16:33
  as if to fulfill some scheme arranged already, Now a summit dwindled.
• 5:16:38
  Now a whole block of puremiddle size, which had kept its station inalterably advanced
• 5:16:45
  into the mist or gravely led the procession to fresh anchorage. Fixed though they
• 5:16:49
  seemed at their posts at rest in perfect unanimity, nothing could be fresher,
• 5:16:56
  freer, more sensitive, superficially than the white or gold kindled surface. To
• 5:17:03
  change, to go to dismantle the solemn assemblage was immediately possible, And in
• 5:17:08
  spite of the grave fixity, the accumulated robustness and solidity, Now they struck
• 5:17:15
  light to the earth, now darkness. Calmly and competently, Elizabeth Dallaway mounted
• 5:17:22
  the Westminster Omnibus, going and coming beckoning, signaling. So the light and
• 5:17:29
  shadow which now made the wall gray, now the banana's bright yellow, now
• 5:17:33
  made the strained gray. Now made to the omnibuses bright yellow, seemed to
• 5:17:40
  Septimus Warren Smith, lying on the sofa in the sitting room, watching the
• 5:17:45
  watery gold glow and fade with the astonishing sensibility of some live creature on the
• 5:17:51
  roses on the wallpaper. Outside, the trees dragged their leaves like next through
• 5:17:56
  the depths of the air. The sound of water was in the room,
• 5:18:00
  and through the waves came the voices of birds singing, every power bard its
• 5:18:04
  treasures on his head, and his hand lay there on the back of the
• 5:18:08
  sofa, as he had seen his hand lying when he was bathing, floating
• 5:18:14
  on the top of the waves. While far away on the shore he heard
• 5:18:18
  dolls barking and barking, far away. Here no more, says the heart
• 5:18:22
  in the body. You no more. End of chapter nine, Chapter ten
• 5:18:27
  of Missus Stallaway. He was not afraid. At every moment, nature signified
• 5:18:33
  by some laughing hint, like that gold spot which went round the wall.
• 5:18:38
  There there there her determination to show, by brandishing her plumes, shaking her
• 5:18:45
  tresses, flinging her mantle this way and that, beautifully, always beautifully,
• 5:18:52
  and standing close up to breathe through her hollowed hands Shakespeare's words, her meaning.
• 5:19:00
  Rezzia, sitting at the table, twisting her hat in her hands,
• 5:19:03
  watched him, saw him smiling. He was happy then, but he could
• 5:19:07
  not bear to seem smiling. It was not marriage, It was not being
• 5:19:12
  one's husband to look strange like that, always be starting laughing, sitting hour
• 5:19:18
  after hour silent, or clutching her and telling her to write. The table
• 5:19:22
  drawer was full of those writings about war, about Shakespeare, about great discoveries,
• 5:19:30
  how there is no death. Lately he had become excited suddenly for no
• 5:19:33
  reason, and both doctor Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw said excitement was the worst
• 5:19:40
  things for him, and waved his hands and cried out that he knew the
• 5:19:45
  truth, he knew everything. That man, his friend who has killed Evans,
• 5:19:49
  had come, he said. He was singing behind the screen. She
• 5:19:55
  wrote it down just as he spoke it. Some things were very beautiful,
• 5:19:59
  others shared nonsense, and he was always stopping in the middle, changing his
• 5:20:03
  mind, wanting to add something, hearing something new, listening with his hand
• 5:20:08
  up, but she heard nothing. And once they found the girl who did
• 5:20:17
  the room reading one of these papers in fits of laughter. It was a
• 5:20:21
  dreadful pity, for that made Septimus cry out about human cruelty. How they
• 5:20:26
  tear each other to pieces, the fallen, he said, they tear to
• 5:20:30
  pieces. Holmes is on us, he would say, And he would invent
• 5:20:34
  stories about homes, Holmes eating porridge, Holmes reading Shakespeare, making himself roar
• 5:20:41
  with laughter or rage. For doctor Holmes seemed to stand for something horrible to
• 5:20:47
  him, human nature, he called him. Then there were the visions he
• 5:20:52
  was drowned, he used to say, and lying on a cliff with the
• 5:20:56
  girls screaming over him. He would look over the edge of the sofa down
• 5:21:02
  into the sea. Or he was hearing music. Really it was only a
• 5:21:06
  barrel organ, or some man crying in the street. But lovely, he
• 5:21:10
  used to cry, and the tears would run down his cheek, which was
• 5:21:14
  to her the most dreadful thing of all to see a man like Septimus,
• 5:21:18
  who had fought, who was brave, crying. And he would lie listening
• 5:21:23
  until suddenly he would cry that he was falling down, down, into the
• 5:21:29
  flames. Actually, she would look for flames. It was so vivid,
• 5:21:33
  but there was nothing. They were alone in the room. It was a
• 5:21:37
  dream, she would tell him, and so quiet him at last. But
• 5:21:41
  sometimes she was frightened too. She sighed as she sat sewing. Her sigh
• 5:21:48
  was tender and enchanting, like the wind outside a wood in the evening.
• 5:21:53
  Now she put down her scissors. Now she turned to take something from the
• 5:21:57
  table. A little stir, a little crinkling, a little tapping, built
• 5:22:03
  up something on the table there where she sat sewing. Through his eyelashes,
• 5:22:08
  he could see her blurred outline, a little black body, her face and
• 5:22:14
  hands, her turning movements at the table as she took up a reel,
• 5:22:18
  or looked she was apt to loose things for her silk. She was making
• 5:22:23
  a hat for Missus Philmos's married daughter, whose name was He had forgotten her
• 5:22:30
  name. What's the name of Missus Philmos's married daughter, he asked. Missus
• 5:22:37
  Peters said razier. She was afraid it was too small, she said,
• 5:22:42
  holding it before her. Missus Peters was a big woman, but she did
• 5:22:47
  not like her. It was only because Missus Filmer had been so good to
• 5:22:51
  them. She gave me grapes this morning. She said that Razia wanted to
• 5:22:56
  do something to show that they were grateful. She had come into the room
• 5:23:00
  the other evening and found Missus Peters, who thought they were out playing the
• 5:23:03
  gramophone. Was it true, he asked, she was playing the gramophone.
• 5:23:10
  Yes, she had told him about it at the time she had found Missus
• 5:23:15
  Peters playing the gramophone. He began very cautiously to open his eyes to see
• 5:23:22
  whether a gramophone was really there. But real things, real things were too
• 5:23:26
  exciting. He must be cautious. He would not go mad. First he
• 5:23:32
  looked at the fashion papers on the lower shelf, then gradually at the gramophone
• 5:23:37
  with the green trumpet. Nothing could be more exact, and so, gathering
• 5:23:44
  courage, he looked at the sideboard, the plate of bananas, the engraving
• 5:23:48
  of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, at the mantelpiece with the jar of
• 5:23:53
  roses. None of these things moved, all was still, All were real.
• 5:24:00
  She is a woman with a spiteful tongue, said Razia. What does
• 5:24:06
  mister Peters do Septimus ask ah, said Razia, trying to remember she thought
• 5:24:11
  Missus Filmer had said that he traveled for some company, and now he is
• 5:24:17
  in Hull, she said, as now, she said with her Italian accent.
• 5:24:22
  She said that herself. He shaded his eyes so that he might only
• 5:24:26
  see a little of her face at a time, first the chin, then
• 5:24:30
  the nose, then the forehead, in case it were deformed or had some
• 5:24:36
  terrible mark on it. But no, there she was perfectly natural, sewing
• 5:24:41
  with the pursed lip that women have, the set, the melancholy expression when
• 5:24:47
  sewing. But there was nothing terrible about it, he assured himself, looking
• 5:24:51
  a second time, third time at her face, her hands, for what
• 5:24:56
  was frightening or disgusting in her? As she sat there in daylight sewing,
• 5:25:03
  Missus Peters had a spiteful tongue. Mister Peters was in horror. Why then,
• 5:25:08
  rage and prophecy, wi fliscouraged and outcast? Why be made to tremble
• 5:25:15
  and sob by the clouds? Why seek truth and deliver messages? When Rezzia
• 5:25:19
  sat sticking pins into the front of her dress, and mister Peters was in
• 5:25:25
  herr miracles, revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling through the sea, down
• 5:25:33
  down into the flames, all were burnt out for he had a sense as
• 5:25:38
  he watched Razzia trimming the straw hat for Missus Peters of a coverlet of flowers.
• 5:25:45
  It's too small for Missus Peters, said Septimus, for the first time
• 5:25:52
  for days. He was speaking as he used to do. Of course,
• 5:25:56
  it was absurdly small, she said, but Missus Peters had chosen it.
• 5:26:02
  He took it out of her hands. He said, it was an organ
• 5:26:04
  grinders monkey's hat. How it rejoiced to that. Not for weeks had they
• 5:26:11
  laughed like this together, poking fun privately like married people. What she meant
• 5:26:17
  was that if Missus Filmer had come in, or Missus Peters, or anybody,
• 5:26:21
  that would not have understood what she and Septimus were laughing at. There,
• 5:26:26
  she said, pinning a rose to one side of the hat. Never
• 5:26:30
  had she felt so happy, never in her life. But that was still
• 5:26:36
  more ridiculous, Septimus said, Now the poor woman looked like a pig at
• 5:26:40
  a fair. Nobody ever made her life. First, Septimus did what had
• 5:26:48
  she got in her workbox? She had ribbons and beads, tassels, artificial
• 5:26:53
  flowers. She tumbled them out on the table. He began putting odd colors
• 5:26:59
  together, For though he had no fingers, could not even do up a
• 5:27:03
  parcel, he had a wonderful eye, and often he was right. Sometimes
• 5:27:07
  absurd, of course, but sometimes wonderfully right. She shall have a beautiful
• 5:27:15
  hat, he murmured, taking up this and that resy kneeling by his side,
• 5:27:19
  looking over his shoulder. Now it was finished, that is to say,
• 5:27:23
  the design. She must stit it together. But she must be very,
• 5:27:27
  very careful, he said, to keep it just as he had made
• 5:27:32
  it. So she sewed. When she sewed, he thought, she made
• 5:27:37
  a sound like a kettle on the hob, bubbling, murmuring, always busy,
• 5:27:42
  her strong little pointed fingers, pinching and poking, her needle flashing straight.
• 5:27:48
  The sun might go in and out on the tassels on the wallpaper.
• 5:27:52
  But he would wait, he thought, stretching out his feet, looking at
• 5:27:56
  his ringed sock. At this end of the sofa, He would wait in
• 5:28:00
  the warm place, this pocket of ear which one comes on at the edge
• 5:28:04
  of the woods, sometimes in the evening, when because of a fall in
• 5:28:08
  the ground or some arrangement of the trees. One must be scientific above all,
• 5:28:15
  scientific warmth. The lingers and the ear buffets the cheek like the wing
• 5:28:21
  of a bird. There it is, said Rassier, twirling Missus Peters's hat
• 5:28:26
  on the tip on her fingers. Thou'll do for the moment. Later her
• 5:28:30
  sentence bubbled away, drip drip, drip, like a contented tap left running.
• 5:28:37
  It was wonderful. Never had he done anything which made him feel so
• 5:28:41
  proud. It was so real, it was so substantial, Missus Peters's hat.
• 5:28:48
  Just look at it, he said. Yes, it would always make
• 5:28:56
  her happy to see that hat. He had become himself. Then he had
• 5:29:00
  laughed. Then they had been alone together always she would like that. Told
• 5:29:06
  her to try it on. But I must look so queer, she cried,
• 5:29:11
  running over to the glass and looking first this side, then that,
• 5:29:15
  then snatched it off again, for there was a tap at the door.
• 5:29:19
  Could it be Sir William Bradshaw, had he sent already? No, it
• 5:29:26
  was only the small girl with the evening paper. What always happened, then
• 5:29:32
  happened, what happened every night of their lives. The small girl sucked her
• 5:29:37
  thumb at the door. Rasia went down on her knees. Rasia cooed and
• 5:29:41
  kissed. Rosier got a bag of sweets out of the table drawer. For
• 5:29:45
  so it always happened, first one thing, then another. So she built
• 5:29:51
  it up, first one thing and then another, dancing, skipping round and
• 5:29:56
  round the room they went. He took the the paper. Surrey was all
• 5:30:00
  out. He read, there was a heat wave. Rezzia repeated, Surrey
• 5:30:06
  was all out. There was a heat wave, making it part of the
• 5:30:10
  game. She was playing with Missus Filmoth's grandchild, both of them laughing,
• 5:30:15
  chattering at the same time. At the game. He was very tired,
• 5:30:18
  he was very happy. He would sleep. He shut his eyes, but
• 5:30:22
  directly he saw nothing. The sounds of the game became fainter and stranger,
• 5:30:26
  and sounded like the cries of people seeking and not finding, and passing further
• 5:30:32
  and further away. They had lost him. He started up in terror.
• 5:30:38
  What did he see? They played the bananas on the sideboard. Nobody was
• 5:30:42
  there. Rezzie had taken a child to its mother. It was bedtime.
• 5:30:48
  That was it to be alone forever. He was alone with the sideboard and
• 5:30:53
  the bananas. He was alone, exposed on this bleak eminence stretched out,
• 5:31:00
  but not on a hilltop, not on a crag, on Missus Filmore's sitting
• 5:31:03
  room sofa. As for the visions, the faces, the voices of the
• 5:31:07
  dead, where were they? There was a screen in front of him with
• 5:31:12
  black bulrushes and blue swallows. Where he had once seen mountains, where he
• 5:31:17
  had once seen faces, where he had seen beauty, There was a screen,
• 5:31:23
  Evans, He cried, There was no answer. A mouse had squeaked,
• 5:31:29
  or a curtain rustled. Those were the voices of the dead. The
• 5:31:33
  screen, the coal scuttle, the sideboard remained to him. Let him then
• 5:31:38
  face the screen, the coal scuttle, and the sideboard. But Resier burst
• 5:31:45
  into the room chattering. Some letter had come. Everybody's plans were changed.
• 5:31:51
  Missus Fillmo would not be able to go to Brighton after all. There was
• 5:31:56
  no time to let Missus Williams know. And really, Ressia thought it was
• 5:32:00
  very, very annoying. When she caught sight of the hat and thought perhaps
• 5:32:06
  she might just make a little Her voice died out in the contented melody.
• 5:32:15
  Ah damn, she cried, it was a joke of this, her swearing
• 5:32:19
  the needle had broken hat child brightened needle. She built it up, first
• 5:32:26
  one thing, then another. She built it up, sewing. She wanted
• 5:32:32
  him to say whether by moving the rose she had improved the hat. She
• 5:32:36
  sat at the end of the sofa. They were perfectly happy now, she
• 5:32:41
  said, suddenly, putting the hat down, for she could say anything to
• 5:32:45
  him. Now, she could say whatever came into her head. That was
• 5:32:48
  almost the first thing she had felt about him that night in the cafe,
• 5:32:52
  when he had come in with his English friends. He had come in rather
• 5:32:56
  shyly, looking around him, and his hat had fallen when he hung it
• 5:33:00
  up. That she could remember. She knew he was English, though not
• 5:33:04
  one of the large englishmen her sister admired, for he was always thin,
• 5:33:10
  but he had a beautiful fresh color, and with his big nose, his
• 5:33:14
  bright eyes, his way of sitting a little hunched made her think she had
• 5:33:18
  often told him of a young hawk. That first evening she saw him when
• 5:33:23
  they were playing dominoes, and he had come in of a young hawk.
• 5:33:27
  But with her he was always very gentle. She had never seen him wild
• 5:33:33
  or drunk, only suffering sometimes through this terrible war. But even so when
• 5:33:38
  she came in, he would put it all away, anything, anything in
• 5:33:42
  the whole world, any little bother with her work, anything that struck her
• 5:33:48
  to say. She would tell him, and he understood at once her own
• 5:33:52
  family even were not the same. Being older than she was, and being
• 5:33:56
  so clever, how serious he was wanting her to read Shakespeare before she could
• 5:34:02
  even read a child's story in English. Being so much more experienced, he
• 5:34:07
  could help her, and she too could help him. But this hat now,
• 5:34:15
  and then it was getting late, Sir William Bradshaw. She held her
• 5:34:22
  hands to her head, waiting for him to say did he like the hat
• 5:34:26
  or not? And as she sat there waiting, looking down, he could
• 5:34:30
  feel her mind like a bird falling from branch to branch, and always alighting
• 5:34:37
  quite rightly. He could follow her mind as she sat there in one of
• 5:34:41
  those loose lex poses that came to her naturally. And if he should say
• 5:34:47
  anything at once, she smiled like a bird alighting with all its claws firm
• 5:34:52
  upon the bow. But he remembered. Bradshaw said, the people we are
• 5:34:57
  most fond of not good for us when we are ill. Bradshaw said he
• 5:35:03
  must be taught to rest. Bradshaw said they must be separated, must must?
• 5:35:10
  Why must? What power had Bradshaw over him? What right has Bradshaw
• 5:35:15
  to save? Must to me? He demanded it is because you talked of
• 5:35:18
  killing yourself, said Rezia mercifully. She could now say anything to Septimus.
• 5:35:26
  So he was in their power. Holmes and Bradshaw on him. The brute
• 5:35:30
  with the red nostrils were snaffering into every secret place. Must it could say?
• 5:35:37
  Where were his papers, the things he had written? She brought him
• 5:35:42
  his papers, the things he had written, things she had written for him.
• 5:35:47
  She tumbled them out on the sofa. They looked at them together,
• 5:35:51
  diagrams, designs, little men and women brandishing sticks for arms with wings were
• 5:35:57
  they on their backs, Circles traced round, shillings and sixpences, the suns
• 5:36:04
  and stars, zigzagging precipices, with mountaineers ascending rope together exactly like knives and
• 5:36:11
  forks, sea pieces with little faces, laughing out what might perhaps be waves,
• 5:36:18
  the map of the world. Burn them, he cried. Now,
• 5:36:22
  for his writings, how the deads sing behind a rhododendron, bushes, oades
• 5:36:27
  to time, conversations with Shakespeare, evens, evens evens His messages from the
• 5:36:36
  Dead do not cut down trees, tell of the Prime Minister, universal love,
• 5:36:41
  the meaning of the world. Burn them, he cried. But Razia
• 5:36:47
  laid her hands on them, somewhat very beautiful. She thought she would tie
• 5:36:52
  them up, for she had no envelope with a piece of silk. Even
• 5:36:56
  if they took him, she said she would go with him. They could
• 5:36:59
  not separate them against their wills, she said, Shuffling their edges straight,
• 5:37:04
  She did up the papers and tied the parcel, almost without looking. Sitting
• 5:37:08
  beside him, he thought, as if all her petals were about her,
• 5:37:14
  she was a flowering tree, and through her branches looked out the face of
• 5:37:18
  a lawgiver who had reached a sanctuary where she feared no one, not homes,
• 5:37:23
  not Bradshaw. A miracle, a triumph, the last and greatest staggering.
• 5:37:30
  He saw her mount the appalling staircase laden with homes and Bradshaw men who
• 5:37:36
  never weighed less than eleven stone six, who sent their wives to court,
• 5:37:41
  Men who made ten thousand a year and talked of proportion, who different in
• 5:37:45
  their verdicts. For Holmes said one thing, Bradshaw said another. At judges
• 5:37:52
  they were who mixed the vision and the sideboard, saw nothing clear, yet
• 5:37:56
  ruled, yet inflicted, must they said them? She triumphed there, she
• 5:38:03
  said, the papers were tied up, no one should get at them.
• 5:38:06
  She would put them away, and she said nothing should separate them. She
• 5:38:11
  sat down beside him and called him by the name of that awkwor crow,
• 5:38:15
  which, being malicious and a great destroyer of crops, was precisely like him.
• 5:38:21
  No one could separate them, she said. Then she got up to
• 5:38:25
  go into the bedroom to pack their things. But hearing voices downstairs, and
• 5:38:30
  thinking that doctor Holmes had perhaps called, ran down to prevent him coming up,
• 5:38:36
  Septimus could hear her talking to Holmes on the staircase. My dear lady,
• 5:38:41
  I have come as a friend, Holmes was saying, No, I
• 5:38:44
  will not allow you to see my husband. She said. He could see
• 5:38:48
  her like a little hen with her wings spread, barring his passage. But
• 5:38:52
  Holmes persevered, My dear lady, allow me, Homers said, putting her
• 5:38:56
  aside. Holmes was a powerfully Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would burst open
• 5:39:03
  the door. Holmes would say, in a funk, eh, Holmes would
• 5:39:07
  get him. But no, not Holmes. Not Bradshaw getting up rather unsteadily,
• 5:39:12
  hopping indeed from foot to foot, he considered missus Filmer's nice clean bread
• 5:39:18
  knife with bread carved on the handle. Ah, but one mustn't spoil that
• 5:39:23
  the gas fire. But it was too late. Now Holmes was coming.
• 5:39:27
  Raisors he might have got, but Rezzio, who always did the sort of
• 5:39:32
  thing, had packed them. There remained only the window the large Bloomsbury lodging
• 5:39:37
  house. The tiresome, the troublesome and rather melodramatic business of opening the window
• 5:39:42
  and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his,
• 5:39:48
  or Rezius for shoes with him. Holmes and Bradshaw like that sort of thing.
• 5:39:52
  He sat on the sill, but he would wait till the very last
• 5:39:56
  moment. He did not want to die. Life good. The sun was
• 5:40:00
  hot. Only human beings, what did they want? Coming down the staircase
• 5:40:06
  opposite, old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door.
• 5:40:10
  I'll give it to you, he cried, and flung himself vigorously violently
• 5:40:15
  down onto Missus Filmer's area's railings. The coward cried doctor Holmes, bursting the
• 5:40:21
  door open. Rasie ran to the window. She saw she understood. Doctor
• 5:40:26
  Holmes and Missus Filmer collided with each other. Missus Filmer flapped her apron and
• 5:40:32
  made her hide her eyes in the bedroom. There was a great deal of
• 5:40:36
  running up and down stairs. Doctor Holmes came in white as a sheet,
• 5:40:41
  shaking all over, with a glass in his hand. She must be brave
• 5:40:44
  and drink something, he said, What was it? Something sweet? For
• 5:40:48
  her husband was horribly mangled, would not recover consciousness. She must not see
• 5:40:53
  him, must be spared as much as possible, would have the inquest to
• 5:40:57
  go through, poor young woman, who could have foretold it? A sudden
• 5:41:03
  impulse. No one was in the least to blame, he told Missus Filmer,
• 5:41:07
  And why the devil he did it? Doctor Holmes could not conceive.
• 5:41:11
  It seemed to her she drank the sweet stuff that was opening long windows,
• 5:41:17
  stepping out in some garden, but where the clock was striking one, two
• 5:41:22
  three, How sensible the sound was compared with all this thumping and whispering like
• 5:41:29
  Septimus himself. She was falling asleep, But the clock went on striking four,
• 5:41:34
  five, six, and Missus Philmer waving her apron. They wouldn't bring
• 5:41:40
  the body in hair, would they seem part of that garden? Or a
• 5:41:42
  flag? She had once seen a flag slowly rippling out of her mask when
• 5:41:48
  she stayed with her aunt at Venice. Men killed in battle were thus saluted,
• 5:41:52
  and Septimus had been through the wall of her memories. Most were happy.
• 5:41:59
  She put on her hat and ran through cornfields where could it have been?
• 5:42:03
  On to some hills, somewhere near the sea, for there were ships,
• 5:42:07
  gulls, butterflies. They sat on a cliff in London too. There
• 5:42:12
  they sat, and half dreaming, came to her through the bedroom door,
• 5:42:17
  rain falling, whisperings, stirrings among dry corn, the crest of the sea,
• 5:42:22
  as it seemed to her, hollowing them in its arch shell, and
• 5:42:26
  murmuring to her. Laid on shore stronge, She felt like flying flowers over
• 5:42:32
  some tomb. He is dead, she said, smiling at the poor woman
• 5:42:37
  who guarded her with her honest light, blue eyes fixed on the door.
• 5:42:41
  They wouldn't bring him in here, would they. But missus Philma poo pooed,
• 5:42:45
  Oh no, oh, no, they were carrying him away. Now.
• 5:42:48
  What she not to be told? Married people ought to be together,
• 5:42:52
  missus Filma thought. But they must do as the doctor said. Let her
• 5:42:56
  sleep, said doctor Holmes, feeling her pulse, he saw the large outline
• 5:43:00
  of his body standing dark against the window. So that was doctor Holmes,
• 5:43:07
  one of the triumphs of civilization. Peter Walsh thought, it is one of
• 5:43:12
  the triumphs of civilization. As the light high bell of the ambulance sounded,
• 5:43:17
  swiftly, cleanly, the ambulance sped to the hospital, having picked up instantly,
• 5:43:22
  humanely, some poor devil, someone hit on the head, struck down
• 5:43:27
  by disease, not over perhaps a minute ago, at one of these crossings,
• 5:43:33
  as might happen to oneself. That was civilization. It struck him,
• 5:43:37
  coming back to the east, the efficiency, the organization, the communal spirit
• 5:43:42
  of London. Every cart or carriage of its own accord drew aside to let
• 5:43:48
  the ambulance past. Perhaps it was morbid, or was it not touching?
• 5:43:52
  Rather the respect which they showed, this ambulance with its victim inside, busy
• 5:43:57
  men hurrying home, yet instantly bethinking them as it passed off, some wife,
• 5:44:03
  or presumably how easily it might have been them there stretched on a shelf
• 5:44:08
  with a doctor and a nurse. Ah. But thinking became morbid, sentimental.
• 5:44:15
  Directly one began conjuring up doctors, dead bodies. A little glow of
• 5:44:21
  pleasure, a sort of lust too over their visual impression. Wanted one not
• 5:44:25
  to go on with that sort of thing anymore. Fatal to art, fatal
• 5:44:30
  to friendship. True, and yet, thought Peter Walsh, as the ambulance
• 5:44:34
  turned the corner through the light high bell, he could be heard down the
• 5:44:38
  next street, and still farther as it crossed the Tottenham Court Road, chiming
• 5:44:44
  constantly. It is the privilege of loneliness. In privacy, one may do
• 5:44:48
  as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw it had been his
• 5:44:52
  undoing, the susceptibility in Anglo Indian society not weeping at the right time,
• 5:44:59
  or life laughing either. I have that in me, he thought, standing
• 5:45:03
  by the pillar box, which can now dissolve in tears. Why Heaven knows,
• 5:45:07
  beauty of some sort probably, and the weight of the day, which,
• 5:45:11
  beginning with their visit to Clarissa, had exhausted him with its heat,
• 5:45:15
  its intensity, and their drip of one impression after another into the cellar,
• 5:45:21
  where they stood deep dark, and no one would ever know. Partly for
• 5:45:26
  that reason its secrecy, complete and involuble. He had found life like an
• 5:45:32
  unknown garden full of turns and corners, surprisingly. Yes, really, what
• 5:45:37
  took one's breath away? These moments there coming to him by the pillar box
• 5:45:41
  opposite the British Museum, one of them a moment in which things came together,
• 5:45:47
  this ambulance and life and death. It was as if he were sucked
• 5:45:51
  up to some very high roof by the rush of emotion, and the rest
• 5:45:55
  of him like a white shell of sprinkled beach left beer. It had been
• 5:46:00
  undoing an Anglo Indian society, this susceptibility, Clarissa once going on top of
• 5:46:07
  an omnibus with him somewhere, Clarissa superficiently at least so easily moved now in
• 5:46:12
  despair, now in the best of spirits, all equivering those days, and
• 5:46:18
  such good company bought in queer little scenes names people from the top of a
• 5:46:22
  bus, for they used to explore London and bring back bags full of treasures
• 5:46:26
  from the Caledonian market. Clarissa had a theory in those days. They had
• 5:46:33
  heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to
• 5:46:37
  explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction not knowing people, not being known,
• 5:46:42
  for how could they know each other? You met every day, then,
• 5:46:47
  not for six months or years, it was unsatisfactory. They agreed. How
• 5:46:52
  little one new people, she said, Sitting on the bus going up the
• 5:46:55
  Shaftbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere, not here here, here, and
• 5:47:00
  she tapped the back of the seat, but everywhere, she waved her hand
• 5:47:04
  going up Shaftbury Avenue. She was all that, so that to know her
• 5:47:08
  or anyone, one must seek out the people who completed them, even the
• 5:47:12
  places our affinities she had with the people she had never spoken to, some
• 5:47:18
  women in the street, some man behind a counter, even trees or barns.
• 5:47:23
  It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death,
• 5:47:27
  allowed her to believe, or say that she believed, for all her skepticism,
• 5:47:33
  that since our operations, the part of us which appears are so momentarily
• 5:47:37
  compared with each other, the unseen part of us which spreads wide, the
• 5:47:42
  unseen might survive, but recovered, somehow, attached to this person or that,
• 5:47:48
  or even haunting certain places after death, perhaps perhaps looking back over the
• 5:47:56
  long friendship of almost thirty years, her theory worked to this extent, brief,
• 5:48:02
  broken, often painful, as their actual meetings had been. What his
• 5:48:06
  absences and interruptions. This morning, for instance, in came Elizabeth like a
• 5:48:11
  long laid colt, handsome, dumb, just as he was beginning to talk
• 5:48:15
  to Carrissa. The effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was
• 5:48:21
  a mystery about it. You were given a sharp, acute and comfortable grain,
• 5:48:25
  the actual meeting horribly painful, as often not yet in absence, in
• 5:48:30
  the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open and shedd its scent.
• 5:48:36
  Let you touch, taste, look about, you give the whole feel
• 5:48:38
  of it, an understanding after years of lying lost. Thus she had to
• 5:48:44
  come to him on board ship in the himalayas suggested by the oddest thing.
• 5:48:48
  So Sally Saturn, generous, enthusiastic goose thought of him when she saw blue
• 5:48:55
  hydrogenes. She had influenced him more than any other person he had, and
• 5:49:00
  always in this way, coming before him without his wishing it cool, ladylike,
• 5:49:07
  critical or ravishing, romantic, recalling some field or English harvest. He
• 5:49:12
  saw her most often in a country, not in London. One scene after
• 5:49:17
  another in Boughton, end of chapter ten, Chapter eleven, he had reached
• 5:49:26
  his hotel. He crossed the hall with its mounds of reddish chairs and sofas,
• 5:49:33
  its spike leaved, withered looking plants. He got his key off the
• 5:49:37
  hook, the young lady handed him some letters. He went upstairs. He
• 5:49:44
  saw her most often at Burton in the late summer, when he stayed there
• 5:49:48
  for a week or fortnight, even as people did in those days. First
• 5:49:53
  on top of some hill there she would stand, hands clapped to her hair,
• 5:50:00
  her cloak blowing out, pointing, crying to them. She saw the
• 5:50:04
  severn beneath or in a wood, making the kettle boil very ineffective with her
• 5:50:11
  fingers, the smoke curtsying, blowing in their faces, her little pink face
• 5:50:18
  showing through, begging water from an old woman in a cottage who came to
• 5:50:23
  the door to watch them go. They walked always, the others drove.
• 5:50:30
  She was bored driving, disliked all animals except that dog. They tramped miles
• 5:50:37
  along roads. She would break off to get her bearings, pilot him back
• 5:50:42
  across country, and all the time they argued, discussed poetry, disgust people,
• 5:50:49
  disgusted politics. She was a radical then, never noticing a thing except
• 5:50:56
  when she stopped, cried out at a view or a tree, and made
• 5:51:02
  him look with her, and so on again through stubble fields, she walking
• 5:51:07
  ahead with a flower for her aunt, never tired of walking, for all
• 5:51:14
  her delicacy to drop down on Burton in the dusk. Then after dinner,
• 5:51:22
  Old bright Cough would open the piano and sing without any voice, and they
• 5:51:26
  would lie sunk in armchairs, trying not to laugh, but always breaking down
• 5:51:33
  and laughing, laughing, laughing at nothing bright Cough was supposed not to see.
• 5:51:41
  And then in the morning, flirting up and down like a wagtail in
• 5:51:45
  front of the house. Oh, it was a letter from her, this
• 5:51:51
  blue envelope that was her hand, and he would have to read it.
• 5:51:56
  Here was another of those meetings, bound to be painful to read. Her
• 5:52:00
  letter needed the devil of an effort, how heavenly it was to see him.
• 5:52:06
  She must tell him that that was all. But it upset him,
• 5:52:11
  It annoyed him. He wished she hadn't written it. Coming on top of
• 5:52:15
  his thoughts. It was like a nudge in the ribs. Why couldn't she
• 5:52:21
  let him be? After all, she had married Dollaway and lived with him
• 5:52:25
  in perfect happiness all these years. These hotels are not consoling places, far
• 5:52:33
  from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs.
• 5:52:37
  Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other
• 5:52:41
  people's noses. As for the cleanliness which hit him in the face, it
• 5:52:48
  wasn't cleanliness so much as barrenness, frigidity, a thing that had to be
• 5:52:56
  some arid matron made her rounds at dawn, sniffing, peering, causing blue
• 5:53:02
  nosed maids to scour for all the world, as if the next visitor were
• 5:53:07
  a joint of meat to be served on a perfectly clean platter. For sleep,
• 5:53:12
  one bed for sitting in, one armchair for cleaning one's teeth and shaving
• 5:53:18
  one's chin, one tumbler, one looking glass, books, letters, dressing
• 5:53:26
  gown, slipped about on the impersonality of the horsehair like incongruous impertinences. And
• 5:53:33
  it was Clarissa's letter that made him see all this heavenly to see you,
• 5:53:38
  she must say. So, He folded the paper, pushed it away.
• 5:53:44
  Nothing would induce him to read it again. To get that letter to him
• 5:53:49
  by six o'clock, she must have sat down and written it directly. He
• 5:53:53
  left her, stamped it, sent somebody to the post. It was,
• 5:53:59
  as people say, very like her. She was upset by his visit.
• 5:54:04
  She had felt a great deal had for a moment when she kissed his hand,
• 5:54:11
  regretted, envied him, even remembered, possibly for he saw her look
• 5:54:17
  it something he had said, how they would change the world if she married
• 5:54:22
  him. Perhaps whereas it was this, it was middle age, it was
• 5:54:30
  mediocrity. Then forced herself, with her indomitable vitality, to put all that
• 5:54:37
  aside, there being in her a thread of life which for toughness, endurance,
• 5:54:44
  power to overcome obstacles and carry her triumphantly through. He had never known
• 5:54:49
  the like of yes, But there would come a reaction directly he left the
• 5:54:56
  room. She would be frightfully sorry for him. She would think what in
• 5:55:00
  the world she could do to give him pleasure, short always of the one
• 5:55:07
  thing. And he could see her, with the tears running down her cheeks,
• 5:55:11
  going to her writing table and dashing off that one line which he was
• 5:55:17
  to find, greeting him heavenly to see you, And she meant it.
• 5:55:22
  Peter Walsh had now unlaced his boots, but it would not have been a
• 5:55:27
  success. Their marriage. The other thing, after all, came so much
• 5:55:33
  more naturally. It was odd it was true. Lots of people felt it.
• 5:55:41
  Peter Walsh, who had done just respectably, filled the usual posts adequately,
• 5:55:48
  was liked, but thought a little cranky, gave himself airs. It
• 5:55:53
  was odd that he should have had, especially now that his hair was gray.
• 5:55:59
  A contented look, a look of having reserves. It was this that
• 5:56:04
  made him attractive to women, who liked the sense that he was not altogether
• 5:56:11
  manly. There was something unusual about him, or something behind him. It
• 5:56:17
  might be that he was bookish, never came to see you without taking up
• 5:56:22
  the book on the table he was now reading with his bootlaces trailing on the
• 5:56:26
  floor, Or that he was a gentleman, which showed itself in the way
• 5:56:33
  he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and in his manners, of
• 5:56:37
  course, to women, for it was very charming and quite ridiculous, how
• 5:56:42
  easily some girl without a grain of sense could twist him round her finger.
• 5:56:48
  But at her own risk, that is to say, though he might be
• 5:56:53
  ever so easy, and indeed, with his gaiety and good breeding, fascinating
• 5:57:00
  to be with. It was only up to a point she said something,
• 5:57:06
  No. No. He saw through that he wouldn't stand that no. No.
• 5:57:11
  Then he could shout and rock and hold his sides together over some joke
• 5:57:17
  with men. He was the best judge of cooking in India. He was
• 5:57:21
  a man, but not the sort of man one had to respect, which
• 5:57:26
  was a mercy, Not like Major Simmons, for instance, not in the
• 5:57:30
  least like that, Daisy thought, when, in spite of her two small
• 5:57:36
  children she used to compare them. He pulled off his boots, he emptied
• 5:57:41
  his pockets. Out came with his pocket knife, a snapshot of Daisy on
• 5:57:47
  the verandah, Daisy all in white with a fox terrier on her knee,
• 5:57:52
  very charming, very dark, the best he had ever seen of her.
• 5:57:59
  It did come, after all, so naturally, so much more naturally than
• 5:58:03
  Clarissa. No fuss, no bother, no finicking and fidgeting, all plain
• 5:58:11
  sailing and the dark, adorably pretty girl on the veranda, exclaimed he could
• 5:58:18
  hear her. Of course, of course she would give him everything, she
• 5:58:22
  cried, She had no sense of discretion, everything he wanted, she cried,
• 5:58:29
  running to meet him whoever might be looking. And she was only twenty
• 5:58:33
  four, and she had two children. Well well, well, indeed,
• 5:58:41
  he had got himself into a mess. At his age, and it came
• 5:58:47
  over him when he woke in the night pretty forcibly. Suppose they did marry
• 5:58:52
  for him, it would be all very well. But what about her,
• 5:58:57
  missus Burgess, a good sort and no chatterbox in whom he had confided.
• 5:59:03
  Thought this absence of his in England, ostensibly to see lawyers, might serve
• 5:59:10
  to make Daisy reconsider think what it meant. It was a question of her
• 5:59:15
  position, missus Burgess, said, the social barrier, giving up her children.
• 5:59:22
  She'd be a widow with a past one of these days, draggling about
• 5:59:26
  in the suburbs, or more likely indiscriminate, you know, she said,
• 5:59:32
  what such women get like with too much paint. But Peter Walsh pooh poohed
• 5:59:37
  all that he didn't mean to die yet. Anyhow, she must settle for
• 5:59:42
  herself, judge for herself, he thought, patting about the room in his
• 5:59:48
  socks, smoothing out his dress shirt. For he might go to Clarissa's party,
• 5:59:53
  or he might go to one of the halls, or he might settle
• 5:59:57
  in and read an absorbing book written by a man he used to know at
• 6:00:02
  Oxford. And if he did retire, that's what he'd do, write books,
• 6:00:08
  he would go to Oxford and poke about in the Bodlian. Vainly,
• 6:00:14
  the dark, adorably pretty girl ran to the end of the terrace, vainly
• 6:00:18
  waved her hand, vainly cried. She didn't care a straw what people said.
• 6:00:25
  There. He was the man she thought, the world of the perfect
• 6:00:29
  gentleman, the fascinating, the distinguished, and his age made not the least
• 6:00:34
  difference to her patting about a room in an hotel in Bloomsbury, shaving washing,
• 6:00:42
  continuing as he took up cans, put down razors, to poke about
• 6:00:48
  in the Bodlian and get at the truth about one or two little matters that
• 6:00:53
  interested him. And he would have a chat with whoever it might be,
• 6:01:00
  and so come to disregard more and more precise hours for lunch and mise engagements.
• 6:01:06
  And when Daisy asked him as she would for a kiss, a scene
• 6:01:11
  failed to come up to the scratch, though he was genuinely devoted to her.
• 6:01:17
  In short, it might be happier as missus Burgess said that she should
• 6:01:21
  forget him or merely remember him as he was in August nineteen twenty two,
• 6:01:26
  like a figure standing at the cross roads at dusk, which grows more and
• 6:01:32
  more remote as the dog cart spins away, carrying her securely fastened to the
• 6:01:37
  back seat, though her arms are outstretched, and as she sees the figure
• 6:01:44
  dwindle and disappear, still she cries out how she would do anything in the
• 6:01:48
  world, anything, anything, anything. He never knew what people thought.
• 6:01:57
  It became more and more difficult for him to concentrate. He became absorbed.
• 6:02:03
  He became busied with his own concerns, now surly, now gay, dependent
• 6:02:11
  on women, absent, minded, moody, less and less able. So
• 6:02:17
  he thought as he shaved, to understand why Clarissa couldn't simply find them a
• 6:02:22
  lodging and be nice to Daisy, introduce her, and then he could just
• 6:02:29
  just do what, just haunt and hover. He was at the moment,
• 6:02:34
  actually engaged in sorting out various keys, papers, swoop and taste, be
• 6:02:41
  alone, in short, sufficient to himself, and yet nobody, of course,
• 6:02:48
  was more dependent upon others. He buttoned his waistcoat. It had been
• 6:02:53
  his undoing. He could not keep out of smoking rooms, liked kerrentals,
• 6:03:00
  liked golf, liked bridge and above all women's society and the fineness of their
• 6:03:07
  companionship, and their faithfulness and audacity and greatness and loving, which, though
• 6:03:15
  it had its drawbacks, seemed to him. And the dark, adorably pretty
• 6:03:19
  face was on top of the envelopes, so wholly admirable, so splendid a
• 6:03:26
  flower to grow on the crest of human life, And yet he could not
• 6:03:32
  come up to the scratch, being always apt to see round things. Clarissa
• 6:03:37
  had sapped something in him permanently, and to tire very easily of mute devotion,
• 6:03:45
  and to want variety in love, though it would make him furious if
• 6:03:48
  Daisy loved anybody else, furious, for he was jealous, uncontrollably jealous by
• 6:03:56
  temperament. He suffered tortures. But where was his knife, his watch,
• 6:04:02
  his seals, his note case, and Clarissa's letter, which he would not
• 6:04:06
  read again but liked to think of, and Daisy's photograph? And now for
• 6:04:12
  dinner. They were eating, sitting at little tables round vases, dressed or
• 6:04:21
  not dressed, with their shawls and bags laid beside them, with their air
• 6:04:26
  of false composure, for they were not used to so many courses at dinner,
• 6:04:32
  and confidence, for they were able to pay for it and strain for
• 6:04:37
  they had been running about London all day, shopping, sight seeing, and
• 6:04:42
  their natural curiosity, for they looked round and up as the nice looking gentlemen
• 6:04:48
  in horn rimmed spectacles came in, and their good nature, for they would
• 6:04:52
  have been glad to do any little service such as lend a timetable or impart
• 6:04:59
  useful in from me, and their desire pulsing in them, tugging at them
• 6:05:04
  subterraneously somehow to establish connections if it were only a birthplace Liverpool, for example,
• 6:05:14
  in common or friends of the same name, with their furtive glances,
• 6:05:18
  odd silences and sudden withdrawals into family, jocularity and isolation. There they sat
• 6:05:27
  eating dinner when mister Walsh came in and took his seat at a little table
• 6:05:33
  by the curtain. It was not that he said anything, for being solitary,
• 6:05:40
  he could only address himself to the waiter. It was his way of
• 6:05:45
  looking at the menu, of pointing his forefinger to a particular wine, of
• 6:05:51
  hitching himself up to the table, of addressing himself seriously, not gluttonously,
• 6:05:56
  to dinner, that won him their respect, which, having to remain unexpressed
• 6:06:02
  for the greater part of the meal, flared up at the table where the
• 6:06:06
  Morrises sat. When mister Walsh was heard to say, at the end of
• 6:06:11
  the meal, Bartlet Pears, why he should have spoken so moderately yet firmly,
• 6:06:19
  with the air of a disciplinarian, well within his rights which are founded
• 6:06:23
  upon justice. Neither Young Charles Morris nor Old Charles, neither Miss Elaine nor
• 6:06:30
  Missus Morris knew. But when he said Bartlet Pears, sitting alone at his
• 6:06:37
  table, they felt that he counted on their support in some lawful demand,
• 6:06:44
  was champion of a cause which immediately became their own. So that their eyes
• 6:06:48
  met his eyes sympathetically. And when they all reached the smoking room simultaneously,
• 6:06:55
  a little talk between them became inevitable. It was not very profound, only
• 6:07:02
  to the effect that London was crowded, had changed in thirty years, that
• 6:07:07
  mister Morris preferred Liverpool, that Missus Morris had been to the Westminster Flower Show,
• 6:07:14
  and that they had all seen the Prince of Wales. Yet, thought
• 6:07:19
  Peter Walsh, no family in the world can compare with the Morrises, none
• 6:07:25
  whatever. And their relations to each other are perfect, and they don't care
• 6:07:30
  a hang for the upper classes. And they like what they like, and
• 6:07:33
  Elaine is training for the family business, and the boy has won a scholarship
• 6:07:38
  at Leeds. And the old lady, who is about his own age,
• 6:07:44
  has three more children at home, and they have two motor cars. But
• 6:07:49
  mister Morris still mends the boots on Sunday. It is superb. It is
• 6:07:55
  absolutely superb, thought Peter Walsh, swaying a little backs and forwards with his
• 6:08:00
  liquor glass in his hand, among the hairy red chairs and ash trays,
• 6:08:06
  feeling very well pleased with himself. For the Morrises liked him. Yes,
• 6:08:11
  they liked a man who said bartlet pears. They liked him. He felt
• 6:08:18
  he would go to Clarissa's party. The Morrises moved off, but they would
• 6:08:23
  meet again. He would go to Clarissa's party because he wanted to ask Richard
• 6:08:30
  what they were doing in India, the conservative duffers, and what's being acted
• 6:08:37
  and music, oh yes, and mere gossip. For this is the truth
• 6:08:44
  about our soul, he thought, our self. Who fish like inhabits deep
• 6:08:49
  seas and plies among obscurities, threading her way between the bowls of giant weeds
• 6:08:57
  over sun flickered spaces, and on and on into gloom, cold, deep,
• 6:09:04
  inscrutable. Suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind wrinkled
• 6:09:11
  waves. That is, has a positive need to brush, scrape kindle herself,
• 6:09:19
  gossiping what did the government mean? Richard Dallaway would know to do about
• 6:09:26
  India? Since it was a very hot night, and the paper boys went
• 6:09:30
  by with placards proclaiming in huge red letters that there was a heat wave.
• 6:09:37
  Wickered chairs were placed on the hotel steps, and there, sipping, smoking,
• 6:09:44
  detached gentlemen sat. Peter Walsh sat there. One might fancy that day,
• 6:09:52
  the London day was just beginning, like a woman who had slipped off
• 6:09:57
  her print dress and white a apron to array herself in blue and pearls.
• 6:10:03
  The day changed, put off, stuff took gauze, changed to evening,
• 6:10:11
  and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes tumbling petticoats on the
• 6:10:18
  floor, it too shed dust, heat color. The traffic thinned, motor
• 6:10:26
  cars tinkling darting succeeded the lumber of vans, and here and there among the
• 6:10:33
  thick foliage of the squares, an intense light hung I resign the evening seemed
• 6:10:41
  to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, molded
• 6:10:48
  pointed of hotel, flat and block of shops. I fade. She was
• 6:10:55
  beginning I disappear. But London would have none of it, and rushed her
• 6:11:02
  bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry,
• 6:11:10
  for the great revolution of mister Willet's summer time had taken place since Peter
• 6:11:15
  Walsh's last visit to England. The prolonged evening was new to him. It
• 6:11:22
  was in spiriting rather, for as the young people went by with their despatch
• 6:11:27
  boxes, awfully glad to be free, proud too dumbly of stepping this famous
• 6:11:34
  pavement, joy of a kind, cheap, tensely if you like. But
• 6:11:40
  all the same rapture flushed their faces. They dressed well too, pink stockings,
• 6:11:48
  pretty shoes. They would now have two hours at the pictures. It
• 6:11:52
  sharpened, it refined them. The yellow blue evening light, and on the
• 6:11:57
  leaves in the square show lurid, livid. They looked as if dipped in
• 6:12:03
  seawater, the foliage of a submerged city. He was astonished by the beauty
• 6:12:11
  It was encouraging too, for where the returned Anglo Indians sat, by rights,
• 6:12:18
  he knew crowds of them in the Oriental Club, biliously summing up the
• 6:12:23
  ruin of the world. Here was he as young as ever, envying young
• 6:12:30
  people there summer time and the rest of it, and more than suspecting from
• 6:12:34
  the words of a girl from a housemaid's laughter. Intangible things you couldn't lay
• 6:12:40
  your hands on, that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation, which in his
• 6:12:45
  youth had seemed immovable, on top of them, it had pressed, weighed
• 6:12:52
  them down, The women, especially like those flowers Clarissa's aunt Helena, used
• 6:12:57
  to press between sheets of gray blotting paper with Littrey's Dictionary on top, sitting
• 6:13:04
  under the lamp after dinner. She was dead now, he had heard of
• 6:13:10
  her from Clarissa, losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so fitting
• 6:13:17
  one of nature's masterpieces, that old miss Perry should turn to glass. She
• 6:13:22
  would die like some bird in a frost, gripping her perch. She belonged
• 6:13:30
  to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always
• 6:13:36
  stand up on the horizon, stone white eminent, like a lighthouse. Marking
• 6:13:41
  some past stage on this adventurous, long long voyage, this interminable. He
• 6:13:48
  felt for a copper, to buy a paper and read about Surrey and Yorkshire.
• 6:13:52
  He had held out that copper millions of times. Surrey was all out
• 6:13:56
  once more, this interminable lfe. But cricket was no mere game. Cricket
• 6:14:03
  was important. He could never help reading about cricket. He read the scores
• 6:14:08
  in the stop press, first, and then how it was a hot day,
• 6:14:12
  then about a murder case. Having done things millions of times enriched them,
• 6:14:18
  though it might be said to take the surface off the past, enriched
• 6:14:23
  and experience, and having cared for one or two people, and so having
• 6:14:30
  acquired the power which the young lack of cutting short, doing what one likes,
• 6:14:36
  not caring a rap what people say, and coming and going without any
• 6:14:41
  very great expectations. He left his paper on the table and moved off,
• 6:14:47
  which, however, and he looked for his hat and coat, was not
• 6:14:51
  altogether true of him, not tonight, for here he was starting to go
• 6:14:56
  to a party, had his age, with the belief upon him that he
• 6:15:00
  was about to have an experience. But what beauty anyhow, not the crude
• 6:15:10
  beauty of the eye. It was not beauty, pure and simple Bedford Place
• 6:15:15
  leading into Russell Square. It was straitness and emptiness, of course, the
• 6:15:22
  symmetry of a corridor. But it was also windows lit up, a piano,
• 6:15:29
  a gramophone sounding, a sense of pleasure making hidden but now and again
• 6:15:34
  emerging when through the uncurtained window, the window left open, one saw parties
• 6:15:41
  sitting over tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men and women,
• 6:15:49
  maids idly looking out a strange comment theirs when work was done, stockings drying
• 6:15:56
  on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants, absorbing, mysterious of
• 6:16:03
  infinite richness this life. And in the large square where the cabs shot and
• 6:16:11
  swerved so quick, there were loitering couples dallying, embracing, shrunk up under
• 6:16:18
  the shower of a tree that was moving, so silent, so absorbed,
• 6:16:26
  that one passed discreetly, timidly, as if in the presence of some sacred
• 6:16:32
  ceremony to interrupt, which would have been impious, that was interesting, and
• 6:16:38
  so on into the flare and glare. His light overcoat blew open. He
• 6:16:45
  stepped with indescribable idiosyncrasy, leant a little forward tripped with his hands behind his
• 6:16:53
  back and his eyes still a little hawklike. He tripped through London towards Westminster.
• 6:17:00
  Observing was everybody dining out. Then Doors were being opened here by a
• 6:17:07
  footman to let issue a high stepping old dame in buckled shoes with three purple
• 6:17:14
  ostrich feathers in her hair. Doors were being opened for ladies wrapped like mummies,
• 6:17:21
  in shawls with bright flowers on them, Ladies with bare heads and in
• 6:17:26
  respectable quarters with stucco pillars through small front gardens, lightly swathed with combs in
• 6:17:33
  their hair. Having run up to see the children, women came, men
• 6:17:40
  waited for them with their coats blowing open, and the motor started. Everybody
• 6:17:47
  was going out. What with these doors being opened, and the descent and
• 6:17:52
  the start, it seemed as if the whole of London were embarking in little
• 6:17:57
  boats moored to the bank, tossing on the waters, as if the whole
• 6:18:03
  place were floating off in carnival. And Whitehall was skated over silver beaten as
• 6:18:10
  it was skated over by spiders, and there was a sense of midges round
• 6:18:15
  the arc lamps. It was so hot that people stood about talking And here
• 6:18:22
  in Westminster was a retired judge, presumably, sitting four square at his house
• 6:18:29
  door, dressed all in white, an Anglo Indian presumably. And here a
• 6:18:36
  shindy of brawling women, drunken women. Here only a policeman, and looming
• 6:18:41
  houses, high houses, domed houses, churches, parliaments, and the hoot
• 6:18:48
  of a steamer on the river, a hollow, misty cry. But it
• 6:18:52
  was her street, this, Clarissa's cabs were rushing round the corner water,
• 6:19:00
  round the piers of a bridge, drawn together, it seemed to him,
• 6:19:03
  because they bore people going to her party, Clarissa's party. The cold stream
• 6:19:11
  of visual impressions failed him now, as if the eye were a cup that
• 6:19:17
  overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded. The brain must
• 6:19:25
  wake now, the body must contract. Now, entering the house, the
• 6:19:30
  lighted house, where the door stood open, where the motor cars were standing,
• 6:19:36
  and bright women descending, the soul must brave itself to endure. He
• 6:19:41
  opened the big blade of his pocket knife. Lucy came running full tilt downstairs,
• 6:19:49
  having just nipped into the drawing room to smooth a cover, to straighten
• 6:19:53
  a chair, to pause a moment and feel whoever came in must think how
• 6:19:59
  cl how bright, how beautifully cared for. When they saw the beautiful silver,
• 6:20:06
  the brass fire irons, the new chair covers, and the curtains of
• 6:20:10
  yellow chintz, she appraised each heard a roar of voices, people already coming
• 6:20:15
  up from dinner. She must fly. The Prime Minister was coming, Agnes
• 6:20:21
  said, so, she had heard them say in the dining room, she
• 6:20:25
  said, coming in with a tray of glasses. Did it matter? Did
• 6:20:30
  it matter in the least one prime minister more or less? It made no
• 6:20:33
  difference at this hour of the night to missus Walker. Among the plates,
• 6:20:38
  sauce pans, colanders, frying pans, chicken and aspec ice cream, freezers,
• 6:20:45
  pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup tureens, and pudding basins,
• 6:20:48
  which, however hard they washed up in the scullery, seemed to be all
• 6:20:53
  on top of her on the kitchen table, on chairs, while the fire
• 6:20:59
  blared and roared, the electric lights glared, and still supper had to be
• 6:21:03
  laid. All she felt was one prime minister more or less made not a
• 6:21:08
  scrap of difference to missus Walker. The ladies were going upstairs already, said
• 6:21:15
  Lucy. The ladies were going up one by one, Missus Dollaway walking last,
• 6:21:22
  and almost always sending back some message to the kitchen, My love to
• 6:21:26
  missus Walker. That was it. One night. Next morning they would go
• 6:21:32
  over the dishes, the soup, the salmon, the salmon. Missus Walker
• 6:21:37
  knew as usual underdone, for she always got nervous about the pudding and left
• 6:21:42
  it to Jenny. So it happened the salmon was always underdone. But some
• 6:21:48
  lady with fair hair and silver ornaments had said, Lucy said about the entree,
• 6:21:55
  was it really made at home? But it was the salmon that bothered
• 6:21:59
  miss Walker as she spun the plates round and round, and pulled in dampers
• 6:22:04
  and pulled out dampers. And there came a burst of laughter from the dining
• 6:22:08
  room, a voice speaking, then another burst of laughter, the gentlemen enjoying
• 6:22:15
  themselves. When the ladies had gone, the tow kay, said Lucy,
• 6:22:19
  running in. Mister Dollaway had sent for the toukay from the Emperor's cellars,
• 6:22:26
  the Imperial tokay. It was borne through the kitchen over her shoulder. Lucy
• 6:22:32
  reported how Miss Elizabeth looked quite lovely. She couldn't take her eyes off her
• 6:22:37
  in her pink dress, wearing the necklace mister Dolloway had given her. Jenny
• 6:22:42
  must remember the dog, miss Elizabeth's fox terrier, which since it bit,
• 6:22:48
  had to be shut up, and might Elizabeth thought want something. Jenny must
• 6:22:53
  remember the dog. But Jenny was not going upstairs with all those people about.
• 6:23:00
  There was a motor at the door. Already, there was a ring
• 6:23:03
  at the bell, and the gentlemen still in the dining room drinking tokay.
• 6:23:10
  There they were going upstairs. That was the first to come, and now
• 6:23:15
  they would come faster and faster, so that Missus Parkinson, hired for parties,
• 6:23:19
  would leave the hall door ajar, and the hall would be full of
• 6:23:23
  gentlemen waiting. They stood waiting, sleeking down their hair, while the ladies
• 6:23:30
  took their cloaks off in the room along the passage where Missus Barnett helped them.
• 6:23:36
  Old Ellen Barnett, who had been with the family for forty years and
• 6:23:40
  came every summer to help the ladies, and remembered mothers when they were girls,
• 6:23:45
  And though very unassuming, did shake hands, said milady very respectfully,
• 6:23:52
  yet had a humorous way with her, looking at the young ladies, and
• 6:23:56
  ever so tactfully helping Lady Lovejoy, who had some trouble with her underbodice.
• 6:24:03
  And they could not help feeling, Lady Lovejoy and miss Alice that some little
• 6:24:07
  privilege in the matter of brush and comb was awarded them. Having known Missus
• 6:24:12
  Barnett thirty years, My lady, Missus Barnett supplied her. Young ladies did
• 6:24:18
  not used to rouge, said Lady Lovejoy when they stayed at Burton in the
• 6:24:23
  old days. And miss Alice didn't need rouge, said Missus Barnett, looking
• 6:24:29
  at her fondly. There Missus Barnett would sit in the cloak room, patting
• 6:24:34
  down the furs, smoothing out the Spanish shawls, tidying the dressing table,
• 6:24:40
  and knowing perfectly well in spite of the furs and the embroideries, which were
• 6:24:45
  nice ladies, which were not the dear old body, said Lady Lovejoy,
• 6:24:52
  mounting the stairs Clarissa's old nurse, and then Lady Lovejoy stiffened Lady and miss
• 6:25:00
  Lovejoy. She said to mister Wilkins, hired for parties. He had an
• 6:25:07
  admirable manner as he bent and straightened himself, bent and straightened himself, and
• 6:25:11
  announced with perfect impartiality, Lady and Miss Lovejoy Sir John and Lady Needham,
• 6:25:21
  Miss Weld. Mister Walsh, his manner was admirable. His family life must
• 6:25:27
  be irreproachable, except that it seemed impossible that a being with greenish lips and
• 6:25:34
  shaven cheeks could ever have blundered into the nuisance of children. How delightful to
• 6:25:41
  see you, said Clarissa. She said it to everyone, How delightful to
• 6:25:47
  see you. She was at her worst, effusive, insincere. It was
• 6:25:52
  a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and read
• 6:25:56
  his book, thought Peter Walsh. Should have gone to a music hall.
• 6:26:00
  He should have stayed at home, for he knew no one. Oh dear,
• 6:26:04
  it was going to be a failure, a complete failure. Clarissa felt
• 6:26:08
  it in her bones. As dear old Lord Lexam stood there apologizing for his
• 6:26:15
  wife, who had caught cold at the Buckingham Palace garden party. She could
• 6:26:18
  see Peter out of the tail of her eye, criticizing her there in that
• 6:26:23
  corner. Why after all did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles and
• 6:26:30
  stand drenched in fire. Might it consume her anyhow? Burn her to cinders?
• 6:26:37
  Better anything better brandish one's torch and hurl it to earth than taper and
• 6:26:44
  dwindle away like some Ellie Henderson, It was extraordinary how Peter put her into
• 6:26:51
  these states just by coming and standing in a corner. He made her see
• 6:26:56
  herself exaggerate. It was idiotic. But why did he come then merely to
• 6:27:03
  criticize? Why always take, never give? Why not risk one's one little
• 6:27:10
  point of view? There he was wandering off, and she must speak to
• 6:27:15
  him, but she would not get the chance. Life was that humiliation?
• 6:27:22
  Renunciation? What Lord Lexam was saying was that his wife would not wear her
• 6:27:27
  furs at the garden party, because my dear you ladies are all alike Lady
• 6:27:33
  Lexam, being seventy five at least, it was delicious how they petti each
• 6:27:38
  other, that old couple. She did like old Lord Lexam. She did
• 6:27:45
  think it mattered her party, and it made her feel quite sick to know
• 6:27:49
  that it was all going wrong, all falling flat, anything, any explosion,
• 6:27:56
  any horror was better than people wandering aimlessly, standing in a bunch at
• 6:28:00
  a corner like Ellie Henderson, not even caring to hold themselves upright gently.
• 6:28:08
  The yellow curtain with all the birds of paradise, blew out, and it
• 6:28:14
  seemed as if there were a flight of wings into the room, right out,
• 6:28:18
  then sucked back, for the windows were open. Was it drafty?
• 6:28:23
  Ellie Henderson wondered. She was subject to chills, but it did not matter
• 6:28:30
  that she should come down sneezing tomorrow. It was the girls with their naked
• 6:28:34
  shoulders. She thought of, being trained to think of others by an old
• 6:28:38
  father, an invalid late Vicar of Burton, but he was dead now,
• 6:28:45
  and her chills never went to her chest. Never. It was the girls,
• 6:28:49
  she thought of, the young girls with their bare shoulders, She herself
• 6:28:55
  having always been a wisp of a creature, with her thin hair and meager
• 6:29:00
  profile, though now past fifty, there was beginning to shine through some mild
• 6:29:07
  beam, something purified into distinction by years of self abnegation, but obscured again
• 6:29:15
  perpetually by her distressing gentility, her panic fear, which arose from three hundred
• 6:29:22
  pounds income, and her weaponless state. She could not earn a penny,
• 6:29:27
  and it made her timid and more and more disqualified, year by year to
• 6:29:33
  meet well dressed people who did this sort of thing every night of the season,
• 6:29:38
  merely telling their maids, I'll wear so and so, Whereas Ellie Henderson
• 6:29:45
  ran out nervously and bought cheap pink flowers half a dozen and then threw a
• 6:29:49
  shawl over her old black dress for her. Invitation to Clarissa's party had come
• 6:29:56
  at the last moment. She was not quite happy about it. She had
• 6:30:00
  a sort of feeling that Clarissa had not meant to ask her this year.
• 6:30:07
  Why should she? There was no reason, really, except that they had
• 6:30:11
  always known each other, indeed they were cousins, but naturally they had rather
• 6:30:18
  drifted apart. Clarissa being so sought after, it was an event to her
• 6:30:25
  going to a party. It was quite a treat just to see the lovely
• 6:30:29
  clothes. Wasn't that Elizabeth grown up with her hair done in the fashionable way
• 6:30:36
  in the pink dress. Yet she could not be more than seventeen. She
• 6:30:41
  was very, very handsome. But girls when they first came out didn't seem
• 6:30:47
  to wear white as they used. She must remember everything to tell Edith.
• 6:30:52
  Girls wore straight frocks, perfectly tight, with skirts well above the ankles.
• 6:31:00
  It was not becoming, she thought so with her weak eyesight, Ellie Henderson
• 6:31:07
  craned rather forward. And it wasn't so much she who minded not having anyone
• 6:31:12
  to talk to. She hardly knew anybody there, for she felt that they
• 6:31:18
  were all such interesting people to watch, politicians, presumably Richard Dallaway's friends.
• 6:31:26
  But it was Richard himself who felt that he could not let the poor creature
• 6:31:30
  go on standing there all the evening by herself. End of chapter eleven,
• 6:31:41
  Chapter twelve. Well, Ellie, how's the world treating you? He said
• 6:31:48
  in his genial way, And Ellie Henderson, getting nervous and flushing, and
• 6:31:55
  feeling that it was extraordinarily nice of him to come and talked to her,
• 6:32:00
  said that many people really felt the heat more than the cold. Yes they
• 6:32:07
  do, said Richard, delaware. Yes, But what more did one say?
• 6:32:15
  Hello? Richard said, somebody taking him by the elbow, And good
• 6:32:21
  lord, there was old Peter, Old Peter Walsh. He was delighted to
• 6:32:27
  see him, ever so pleased to see him. He hadn't changed a bit.
• 6:32:33
  And off they went together, walking right across the room, giving each
• 6:32:38
  other little pats, as if they hadn't met for a long time. Ellie
• 6:32:45
  Henderson thought, watching them go, certain she knew that man's face, a
• 6:32:51
  tall man, middle aged, rather fine eyes, dark wearing spectacles, and
• 6:32:59
  a look of John Burrows. Edith would be sure to know. The curtain,
• 6:33:04
  with its flight of birds of paradise, blew out again. And Clarissa
• 6:33:11
  saw she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back and go on talking. So it
• 6:33:18
  wasn't a failure after all. It was going to be all right now her
• 6:33:22
  party it had begun, it had started, but it was still touch and
• 6:33:30
  go. She must stand there for the present. People seemed to come in
• 6:33:36
  a rush. Colonel and Missus Garret, mister Hugh Whitbread, mister Bowley,
• 6:33:44
  Missus Hillbury, Lady Mary Meddox, mister quinn intoned Wilkin. She had six
• 6:33:52
  or seven words with each, and they went on. They went into the
• 6:33:59
  rooms into something now not nothing, since Ralph Lyon had beat back the curtain.
• 6:34:07
  And yet for her own part it was too much of an effort.
• 6:34:12
  She was not enjoying it. It was too much like being just anybody standing
• 6:34:19
  there. Anybody could do it. Yet this anybody, she did a little
• 6:34:26
  admire, couldn't help feeling that she had anyhow made this happen, that it
• 6:34:33
  marked a stage, this post, that she felt herself to have become.
• 6:34:37
  Oddly enough, she had quite forgotten what she looked like, but felt herself
• 6:34:45
  a stake driven in at the top of her stairs. Every time she gave
• 6:34:52
  a party, she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that
• 6:34:57
  everyone was unreal in one way, much more real in another. It was,
• 6:35:06
  she thought, partly their clothes, partly being taken out of their ordinary
• 6:35:12
  ways, partly the background. It was possible to say things you couldn't say
• 6:35:21
  anyhow else, things that needed an effort, possibly to go much deeper,
• 6:35:27
  but not for her, not yet anyhow, How delightful to see you,
• 6:35:34
  she said, dear old sir Harry. He would know everyone. And what
• 6:35:41
  was so odd about it? It was the sense one had as they came
• 6:35:47
  up the stairs one after another, Missus mount and Celia herbert Ainsty, Missus
• 6:35:56
  Dacre's, oh, and Lady Broughton. How awfully good of you to come,
• 6:36:03
  she said, and she meant it. It was on how standing there
• 6:36:07
  when felt them going on going on, some quite old some what name Lady
• 6:36:17
  Rossiter? But who on earth was Lady Rossiter? Clarissa that voice. It
• 6:36:23
  was Sally seton, Sally Seaton, after all these years, she loomed through
• 6:36:30
  a mist, for she hadn't looked like that. Sally seton when Clarissa grasped
• 6:36:37
  the hot water can, to think of him under this roof, under this
• 6:36:44
  roof, not like that, All on top of each other, embarrassed,
• 6:36:51
  laughing words tumbled out, passing through London, heard from Clara Hayden, what
• 6:36:59
  a chance of seeing you? So I thrust myself in without an invitation,
• 6:37:07
  one might put down the hot water can. Quite composedly. The luster had
• 6:37:14
  gone out of her, yet it was extraordinary to see her again, older,
• 6:37:22
  happier, less lovely. They kissed each other, first this cheek,
• 6:37:27
  then that by the drawing room door, and Calissa turned with Sally's hand in
• 6:37:33
  hers, and saw her rooms full, heard the roar of voices, saw
• 6:37:41
  the cattle sticks, the blowing curtains, and the roses which Richard had given
• 6:37:48
  her. I have five enormous boys, said Sally. She had the simplest
• 6:37:56
  egotism, the most open to be thought first always, and Clarissa loved her
• 6:38:04
  for being still like fat. I can't believe it, she cried, kindling
• 6:38:11
  all over with pleasure at the thought of the past. But alas Wilkins,
• 6:38:18
  Wilkins wanted her. Wilkins was emitting a voice of commanding authority, as if
• 6:38:26
  the whole company must be admonished and the hostess reclaimed from frivolity. One name,
• 6:38:37
  the Prime Minister, said, Peter Walsh, the Prime Minister, Was
• 6:38:44
  it really Ellie Henderson marveled, What a thing to tell Edith. One couldn't
• 6:38:52
  laugh at him. He looked so ordinary you might have stood in behind a
• 6:38:59
  cotton brought biscuits. Poor chap all rigged up in gold lace, and to
• 6:39:07
  be fair, as he went his rounds, first with Clarissa, then with
• 6:39:12
  Richard escorting him, he did it very well. He tried to look somebody.
• 6:39:21
  It was amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him. They just went
• 6:39:26
  on talking that it was perfectly plain that they all knew, felt to the
• 6:39:33
  morrow of their bones, this majesty passing, this symbol of what they all
• 6:39:40
  stood for English society. Old lady Breton, and she looked very fine,
• 6:39:48
  too, very stalwart in her lace. Swam up and they withdrew into a
• 6:39:55
  little room, which at once became spied upon. Heard and a sort of
• 6:40:02
  stir and Russell rippled through everyone openly, the Prime Minister, Lord Lord,
• 6:40:12
  the snobbery of the English, thought Peter Walsh, standing in the corner,
• 6:40:18
  How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homage there. That must
• 6:40:27
  be I jove. It was Hugh Whitbread, snuffing around the precincts of the
• 6:40:34
  great grown, rather fetter, rather wider, the admirable hue. He looked
• 6:40:42
  always as if he were on duty, thought Peter, a privileged but secretive
• 6:40:49
  being, hoarding secrets which he would die to defend, though it was only
• 6:40:56
  some little piece of tittle tattle dropped by a court foot, one which would
• 6:41:03
  be in all the papers tomorrow. Such were his rattles, his bobbles in
• 6:41:11
  playing with which he had grown white, come to the verge of old age,
• 6:41:18
  enjoying the respect and affection of all who had the privilege of knowing this
• 6:41:26
  type of the English public school man. Inevitably one made up things like that
• 6:41:34
  about Hugh. That was his style, the style of those admirable letters which
• 6:41:41
  Peter had read thousands of miles across the sea in the times, and had
• 6:41:49
  thanked God he was out of that pernicious hubble bubbble. If it were only
• 6:41:56
  to hear baboons chatter and cool beat their wives and olive skin the youth from
• 6:42:04
  one of the universities stood obsequiously by him, he would patronize, initiate,
• 6:42:12
  teach how to get on, For he liked nothing better than doing kindnesses,
• 6:42:18
  making the hearts of old ladies palpitate with the joy of being thought of in
• 6:42:26
  their age their affliction, thinking themselves quite forgotten that here was dear Hugh,
• 6:42:34
  driving up and spending an hour talking of the past, remembering trifles, praising
• 6:42:41
  the homemade cake. Though Hugh might eat cake with a duchess any day of
• 6:42:48
  his life, and to look at him probably did spend a good deal of
• 6:42:55
  time in that avariable occupation. They all judging, they all merciful, might
• 6:43:03
  excuse Peter Walsh had no mercy villains there must be, And God knows the
• 6:43:11
  rascals who get hanged for battering the brains of a girl out in a train
• 6:43:19
  do less harm on the whole than Hugh whitbread and his kindness. Look at
• 6:43:26
  him now on tiptoe, dancing forward, bowing and scraping as the Prime Minister
• 6:43:34
  and Lady Breton emerged, intimating for all the world to see that he was
• 6:43:41
  privileged to say something something private to Lady Breton. As she passed, she
• 6:43:48
  stopped. She wagged her fine old head. She was thanking him, presumably
• 6:43:56
  for some piece of servility toadies, minor officials in government offices who ran about
• 6:44:06
  putting through little jobs on her behalf, in return for which she gave them
• 6:44:14
  luncheon. But she derived from the eighteenth century. She was all right,
• 6:44:21
  and now Clarissa escorted her prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling with
• 6:44:29
  the stateliness of her gray hair. She wore ear rings and a silver green
• 6:44:36
  mermaid's dress. While lopping on the waves and braiding her dresses. She seemed,
• 6:44:44
  having that ift still to be to exist to sum it all up in
• 6:44:49
  the moment. As she passed, turned caught her scarf in some other woman's
• 6:44:56
  dress, unhitched it laugh all with the most perfect ease and air of a
• 6:45:03
  creature floating in its element. But age had brushed her, even as a
• 6:45:11
  mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over
• 6:45:19
  the waves, there was a breath of tenderness, Her severity her prudery,
• 6:45:26
  her woodenness were all warm through now, and she had about her as she
• 6:45:34
  said goodbye to the thick, gold laced man who was doing his best,
• 6:45:41
  and good luck to him, to look important as inexpressible dignity, an exquisite
• 6:45:49
  cordiality, as if she wished the whole world well, and must now,
• 6:45:56
  being on the very verge and rein of things, take or leave. So
• 6:46:03
  she made him think, but he was not in love. Indeed, Clarissa
• 6:46:11
  felt the Prime Minister had been good to come, and walking down the room
• 6:46:17
  with him, with Sally there, and Peter there, and Richard very pleased
• 6:46:23
  with all those people rather inclined, perhaps to envy. She had felt that
• 6:46:30
  intoxication of the moment, that diletation of the nerves of the heart itself,
• 6:46:38
  till it seemed to quiver, steeped upright. Yes, but after all it
• 6:46:45
  was what other people felt that for though she loved it and felt it tingle
• 6:46:52
  and sting. Still, these semblances, these triumphs, dear old Peter,
• 6:47:00
  for example, thinking are so brilliant, had a hollowness at arm's length.
• 6:47:07
  They were not in the heart. And it might be that she was growing
• 6:47:12
  old but they satisfied her no longer as they used. And suddenly, as
• 6:47:19
  she saw the Prime Minister go downstairs, the guilt rim of the Sir Joshua
• 6:47:26
  picture of the little girl with a muff brought back Kilman with a rush Calman
• 6:47:33
  her enemy. That was satisfying, That was real. Ah, how she
• 6:47:41
  hated her, hot, hypocritical, corrupt, with all that power, Elizabeth's
• 6:47:48
  seducer, the woman who had crept in to steal and defile Richard, would
• 6:47:56
  say, what nonsense. She hated her, She loved her. It was
• 6:48:03
  enemies one wanted, not friends, Not missus Durant and Clara, Sir William
• 6:48:11
  and Lady Brashaw, Miss Truelocke and Eleanor Gibson, whom she saw coming upstairs.
• 6:48:19
  They must find her if they wanted her. She was for the party.
• 6:48:26
  There was her old friend, Sir Harry. Dear Sir Harry, she
• 6:48:32
  said, going up to the fine old fellow, who had produced more bad
• 6:48:37
  pictures than any other. Two acadamicians in the whole of Saint John's Wood.
• 6:48:45
  They were always of cattle, standing in sunset pools, absorbing moisture or signifying,
• 6:48:53
  For he had a certain range of gesture by the raising of one foreleg
• 6:49:00
  and the toss of Antler's the approach of the stranger. All his activities,
• 6:49:07
  dining out racing were founded on cattle standing, absorbing moisture in sunset pools.
• 6:49:17
  What are you laughing at? She asked him for Willie Titcomb and Sir Harry
• 6:49:22
  and Herbert Ainsty were all laughing. But no, Sir Harry could not tell
• 6:49:30
  Clarissa Delaway much. Though he liked her of her type, he thought her
• 6:49:36
  perfect, and threatened to paint her his stories of the music hall stage.
• 6:49:44
  He chafed her about her party. He missed his brandy. These circles,
• 6:49:51
  he said, were above him. But he liked her, respected her in
• 6:49:56
  spite of her damnable difficult upper class refinement, which made it impossible to ask
• 6:50:06
  Clarissa Delaware to sit on his knee. And up came that wandering will of
• 6:50:12
  the wisps, that Vagulis's phosphorescence. Old Missus Hilbury, stretching her hands to
• 6:50:22
  the blaze of his laughter about the Duke and the Lady, which, as
• 6:50:27
  she heard it across the room, seemed to reassure her on a point which
• 6:50:34
  sometimes bothered her. If she woke up early in the morning and did not
• 6:50:41
  like to call her maid for a cup of tea. How it is certain
• 6:50:47
  we must die. They won't tell us their stories, said Clarissa. Dear
• 6:50:52
  Clarissa, exclaimed, Missus Hilbury. She looked tonight, she said, so
• 6:51:00
  like her mother as she first saw her, walking in a garden in a
• 6:51:06
  gray hat. And really Clarissa's eyes filled with tears, her mother walking in
• 6:51:14
  a garden, But alas she must go. For there was Professor Brierly,
• 6:51:22
  who lectured on Milton, talking to little John Hutton, who was unable,
• 6:51:29
  even for a party like this, to compass both Tye and Westcotte, or
• 6:51:33
  make his hair lie flat. And even at this distance they were quarreling,
• 6:51:40
  she could see, for Professor Brierly was a very queer fish, with all
• 6:51:47
  those degrees, honors, lectureships between him and the scribblers, he suspected instantly
• 6:51:56
  in atmosphere not favorable to his queer compound, his prodigious learning and timidity,
• 6:52:07
  his wintry charm without cordiality, his innocence blent with snobbery. He quivered if
• 6:52:15
  made conscious by a ladies uncomped hair, a youth's boots of an underworld,
• 6:52:23
  very creditable, doubtless of rebels of ardent young people of would be geniuses,
• 6:52:33
  and intimated, with a little toss of the head with a sniff, the
• 6:52:40
  value of moderation of some slight training in the classics in order to appreciate Milton,
• 6:52:49
  Professor Brierly Clarissa could see, wasn't hitting it off the little Jim Hutton,
• 6:52:56
  the war red sox, his black being in the laundry. About Milton,
• 6:53:03
  she interrupted, She said she loved Bach, so did Hutton. That
• 6:53:11
  was the bond between them. And Hutton, a very bad poet, always
• 6:53:17
  felt that Missus Delaway was far the best of the great ladies who took an
• 6:53:22
  interest in art. It was odd how strict she was about music. She
• 6:53:30
  was purely impersonal. She was rather a prig, But how charming to look
• 6:53:37
  at. She made her a house so nice. If it weren't for her,
• 6:53:41
  Professors, Clavissa had half a mind to snatch him off and set him
• 6:53:48
  down at the piano in the back of the room, for he played divinely.
• 6:53:55
  But the noise, she said, the noise the sign of a successful
• 6:54:00
  party. Nodding urbanly, the professor stepped delicately off. He knows everything in
• 6:54:08
  the whole world about Milton, said Clarissa, does he indeed, said Hutton,
• 6:54:17
  who would imitate the Professor throughout Hampstead, the Professor on Milton, the
• 6:54:25
  Professor on moderation, the Professor stepping delicately off. But she must speak to
• 6:54:33
  that couple, said Clarissa. Lord Gayton and Nancy Lowe, not that they
• 6:54:41
  added perceptibly to the noise of the party. They were not talking perceptibly as
• 6:54:48
  they stood side by side by the yellow curtains. They would soon be off
• 6:54:55
  elsewhere together, and never had very much to say in any circumstances. They
• 6:55:02
  looked. That was all that was enough. They looked so clean, so
• 6:55:08
  sound. She with an apricot bloom of powder and paint. But he scrubbed,
• 6:55:17
  rinsed with the eyes of a bird, so that no ball could pass
• 6:55:22
  him or stroke surprise him. He struck, He leaped accurately on the spot.
• 6:55:30
  Pony's mouths quivered. At the end of his reigns, he had his
• 6:55:34
  honors, ancestral monuments banners hanging in the church at home, he had his
• 6:55:44
  duties, his tenants, a mother and sisters, had been all day at
• 6:55:51
  Lord's and that was what they were talking about, cricket cousins the movies.
• 6:55:59
  When this Delaware came up, Lord Gayton liked her most awfully, so did
• 6:56:06
  Miss Blow. She had such charming manners. It is angelic. It is
• 6:56:12
  delicious of you to have come, she said. She loved lords, she
• 6:56:18
  loved youth, and Nancy, dressed at enormous expense by the greatest artists in
• 6:56:26
  Paris, stood there, looking as if her body had merely put forth of
• 6:56:33
  its own accord a green frill. I had meant to have dancing, said
• 6:56:41
  Clarissa. For the young people could not talk, and why should they shout,
• 6:56:48
  embrace, swing, be up at dawn, carry sugar to ponies,
• 6:56:52
  kiss and caress the snouts of adorable chowls, and then all tingling and streaming,
• 6:57:02
  plunge and swim. But the enormous resources of the English language, the
• 6:57:08
  power it bestows after all of communicating feelings. At their age, she and
• 6:57:17
  Peter would have been arguing all evening was not for them. They would solidify
• 6:57:25
  young, they would be good beyond measure to the people on the estate,
• 6:57:30
  but alone, perhaps rather dull. What a pity, she said, I
• 6:57:37
  had hoped to have dancing. It was so extraordinarily nice of them to have
• 6:57:45
  come. But talk of dancing, the rooms were packed. There was old
• 6:57:51
  Aunt Helena in her shawl, alas she must leave them, Lord Gayton and
• 6:57:59
  Nancy Ball. There was old Miss Perry, her aunt. For Miss Helena
• 6:58:04
  Parry was not dead. Miss Perry was alive. She was past eighty.
• 6:58:11
  She ascended staircases slowly with a stick. She was placed in a chair.
• 6:58:18
  Richard had seen to it. People who had Mount Burma in the seventies were
• 6:58:25
  always led up to her. Where had Peter got to that used to be
• 6:58:30
  such friends? And at the mention of India or Salon her eyes only one
• 6:58:40
  was glass, slowly deepened, became blue, beheld not human beings. She
• 6:58:48
  had no tender memories, no proud illusions about viceroys, generals, mutinies.
• 6:58:57
  It was Orchid's she saw, and mountain passes, and herself carried on the
• 6:59:04
  backs of coolies in the sixties over solitary peaks, or descending to a broake,
• 6:59:14
  orchids startling blossoms never beheld before, which she painted in watercolor, an
• 6:59:22
  indomitable englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the war, say which dropped a bomb
• 6:59:30
  at her very door from her deep meditation over orchids and her own figure journeying
• 6:59:41
  in the sixties in India. But here was Peter. Come and talk to
• 6:59:48
  Aunt Helena about Burma, said Clarissa, And yet he had not said a
• 6:59:55
  word with her all evening. We will talk later, said Clarissa, leading
• 7:00:00
  him up to Aunt Helena in her white shawl with her stick. Peter Walsh,
• 7:00:07
  said Clarissa. That meant nothing. Clarissa had asked her. It was
• 7:00:15
  tiring, it was noisy, but Clarissa had asked her, so she had
• 7:00:21
  come. It was a pity that they lived in London, Richard and Clarissa.
• 7:00:27
  If only for Clarissa's health, it would have been better to live in
• 7:00:33
  the country. But Clarissa had always been fond of a society. He has
• 7:00:40
  been in Burma, said Clarissa. Ah. She could not resist recalling what
• 7:00:48
  Charles Darwin had said about her little book on the Orchids of Burma. End
• 7:00:55
  of chapter twelveteen. Clarissa must speak to Lady Broughton, no doubt it was
• 7:01:06
  forgotten now her Hook on the Orchids of Burma. But it went into three
• 7:01:12
  editions before eighteen seventy, She told Peter she remembered him now he had been
• 7:01:22
  edwordened, and he had left her. Peter Walsh remembered without a word,
• 7:01:27
  in the drawing room that night, when Clarissa had asked him to come voting.
• 7:01:34
  Richard so much enjoyed his lunch party, said Clarissa to Lady Broughton.
• 7:01:41
  Richard was the greatest possible help. Lady Bruton replied, He helped me to
• 7:01:48
  write a letter. And how are you. Oh, perfectly well, said
• 7:01:55
  Clarissa. Lady Bruton detested illness in the world lives of politicians. And there's
• 7:02:03
  Peter Walsh, said Lady butin for she could never think of anything to say
• 7:02:08
  to Clarissa, though she liked her. She had lots of fine qualities,
• 7:02:15
  but they had nothing in common, she and Clarissa. It might have been
• 7:02:22
  better if Richard had married a woman with less charm, who would have helped
• 7:02:27
  him more in his work. He had lost his chance of the cabinet.
• 7:02:33
  There's Peter Walsh, she said, shaking hands with that agreeable sinner, that
• 7:02:41
  very able foll who should have made a name for himself but hadn't. Always
• 7:02:48
  in difficulties with women, and of course old Miss Perry, wonderful old lady
• 7:02:57
  Lady Bruton stood by Miss Perry's chair, a spectral grenadier draped in black,
• 7:03:06
  inviting Peter Walsh to lunch, cordial but without small talk. Remembered nothing whatever
• 7:03:15
  about the flora or Fona of India. She had been there, of course,
• 7:03:22
  had stayed with three viceroys. Thought some of the Indian civilians uncommonly fine
• 7:03:30
  fellows. But what a tragedy it was the state of India the Prime Minister
• 7:03:37
  had just been telling her. Old Miss Perry, huddled up in her shawl,
• 7:03:42
  did not care what the Prime Minister had just been telling her. And
• 7:03:48
  Lady Briton would like to have Peter Walsh's opinion, he being fresh from the
• 7:03:55
  center, and she would get Sir Sampson to meet him, for really it
• 7:04:00
  prevented her from sleeping at night. The folly of it, the wickedness,
• 7:04:06
  she might say, being a soldier's daughter. She was an old woman now,
• 7:04:12
  not good for much. But her house, her servants, her good
• 7:04:18
  friend Millie Brush did he remember her, were all there only asking to be
• 7:04:26
  used, if if they could be of help. In short, for she
• 7:04:30
  never spoke of England, but this isle of men, this dear, dear
• 7:04:36
  land was in her blood. Without reading Shakespeare. And if ever a woman
• 7:04:44
  could have worn the helmet and shot the arrow could have led the troops to
• 7:04:49
  attack ruled with indomitable justice barbarian hordes, or laying under a shield noseless in
• 7:05:00
  a church, or made a green grass mound of some primeval hillside. That
• 7:05:08
  woman was mellicent, broken, debarred by her sex and s truancy too.
• 7:05:17
  Of the logical faculty. She found it impossible to write a letter to the
• 7:05:23
  Times. She had the thought of empire always at hand, and had acquired
• 7:05:32
  from her association with that armored goddess, her Ramrod, bearing her robustness of
• 7:05:41
  demeanor, so that one could not figure her even in death, parted from
• 7:05:48
  the earth, or roaming territories over which, in some spiritual shape the Union
• 7:05:56
  Jack had ceased to fly. You be not English even among the dead?
• 7:06:03
  No, No, impossible. But was it Lady Bruton whom she used to
• 7:06:11
  know? Was it Peter Walsh? Grown gray? Lady Roster asked herself,
• 7:06:18
  who had been Sally Seaton? It was old miss Perry, certainly, the
• 7:06:23
  old aunt who used to be so cross when she stayed at Burton. Never
• 7:06:30
  should she forget running along the passage naked and being sent for by miss Perry
• 7:06:38
  and Clarissa, Oh, Clarissa. Sally caught her by the arm. Clarissa
• 7:06:47
  stopped beside them. But I can't stay, she said, I shall come
• 7:06:52
  later. Wait, she said, looking at Peter and Sally. They must
• 7:06:57
  wait. She met until all these people had gone. I shall come back,
• 7:07:04
  she said, looking at her old friends Sally and Peter, who were
• 7:07:11
  shaking hands, and Sally, remembering the past, no doubt, was laughing.
• 7:07:18
  But her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness, her eyes not
• 7:07:25
  a glow as it used to be when she smoked cigars. When she ran
• 7:07:30
  down the passage to fetch her sponged bag without a stitch of clothing, Otter
• 7:07:37
  and Ellen Attens asked what if the gentleman had met her? But everybody forgave
• 7:07:45
  her. She stole a chicken from the larger because she was hungry. In
• 7:07:52
  the night, she smoked cigars in her bedroom. She left a priceless book,
• 7:08:00
  the Punt, But everybody adored her, except perhaps Papa. It was
• 7:08:07
  her warmth, her vitality. She would paint. She would write old women
• 7:08:15
  in the village. Never to this day forgot to ask after your friend in
• 7:08:22
  the red cloak, who seemed so bright. She accused Hugh Whitbread, of
• 7:08:27
  all people. And there he was, her old friend, Hugh, talking
• 7:08:33
  to the Portuguese ambassador of kissing her in the smoking room to punish her for
• 7:08:41
  saying that women should have votes older men did, she said, And Clarissa
• 7:08:49
  remembered having to persuade her not to denounce him as family prayers, which she
• 7:08:57
  was capable of doing. With her daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love
• 7:09:04
  of being the center of everything and creating scenes. And it was bound Claressa
• 7:09:12
  used to think to end in some awful tragedy, her death, her martyrdom,
• 7:09:21
  instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a balved man with
• 7:09:27
  a large buttonhole who owned it was said Cotton Mills at Manchester, and she
• 7:09:34
  had five boys. She and Peter had settled down together. They were talking.
• 7:09:44
  It seemed so familiar that they should be talking. They would discuss the
• 7:09:49
  past with the two of them, more even than with Richard. She shared
• 7:09:56
  her past the garden, the trees, Joseph Brake Off singing Brahms without any
• 7:10:03
  voice, the drawing room, wallpaper, the smell, the mats a part
• 7:10:11
  of this. Sally must always be, Peter must always be. But she
• 7:10:18
  must leave them. There were the Bradshaws, whom she disliked. She must
• 7:10:25
  go up to Lady Bradshaw in gray and silver, balancing like a sea lion
• 7:10:33
  at the edge of its tank, barking for invitations. Duchesses the typical successful
• 7:10:40
  man's wife. She must go up to lead Bradshaw and say, But Lady
• 7:10:48
  Bradshaw anticipated her. We are shockingly late, dear missus dellaway. We hardly
• 7:10:56
  dared to come in, she said, And Sir William, who looked very
• 7:11:00
  distinguished with his gray hair and blue eyes, said yes. They had not
• 7:11:07
  been able to resist the temptation. He was talking to Richard about that bill,
• 7:11:15
  probably which they wanted to get through the Commons. Why did the sight
• 7:11:21
  of him talking to Richard curl her up? He looked what he was,
• 7:11:26
  a great doctor, a man absolutely at the head of his profession, very
• 7:11:33
  powerful, rather worn. For think what cases came before him, People in
• 7:11:41
  the utmost depths of misery, people on the verge of insanity, husbands and
• 7:11:48
  wives. He had to decide questions of appalling difficulty. Yet what she felt
• 7:11:56
  was one wouldn't lie, Sir William to see one unhappy. No, not
• 7:12:03
  that man. How was your son at Eton, she asked Lady Bradshaw.
• 7:12:11
  He had just missed his eleven, said Lady Bradshaw, because of the mumps.
• 7:12:18
  His father minded even more than he did, she thought, being she
• 7:12:22
  said, nothing but a great boy himself. Clarissa looked at Sir William talking
• 7:12:30
  to Richard. He did not look like a boy, not in the least
• 7:12:37
  like a boy. She had once gone with someone to ask his advice.
• 7:12:44
  He had been perfectly, extremely sensible. But heavens want other relief. To
• 7:12:51
  get out to the street again. There was some poor wretch sobbing, she
• 7:12:56
  remembered in the waiting room. She did not know what it was about,
• 7:13:03
  Sir William, what exactly she disliked? Only Richard agreed with her. Didn't
• 7:13:11
  like his taste, didn't like his smell, but he was extraordinarily able.
• 7:13:18
  They were talking about this bill, some case, Sir William was mentioning,
• 7:13:26
  lowering his voice. It had its bearing upon what he was saying about the
• 7:13:32
  deferred effects of shell shock. There must be some provision in the bill,
• 7:13:38
  sinking her voice, drawing Missus Delaway into the shelter of a common femininity,
• 7:13:48
  a common pride in the illustrious qualities of husbands and their sad tendency to overwork.
• 7:13:56
  Lady Broadshaw, poor goo one didn't dislike her murdered. Now, just
• 7:14:04
  as we were starting, my husband was called up on the telephone. A
• 7:14:11
  very sad case. A young man, that is what Sir William is telling.
• 7:14:17
  Mister Galloway had killed himself. He had been in the army, Oh,
• 7:14:22
  thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death, she
• 7:14:29
  thought. She went on into the little room where the Prime Minister had gone
• 7:14:37
  with Lady Bruton. Perhaps there was somebody there, but there was nobody.
• 7:14:44
  The chairs still kept the impress of the Prime Minister and Lady Broughton. She
• 7:14:51
  turned deferentially, he sitting for square authoritatively. They had been talking about India.
• 7:15:02
  There was nobody. The party's splendor fell to the floor. So strange
• 7:15:08
  it was to come in here alone in her finery. What business had the
• 7:15:15
  Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself,
• 7:15:22
  and they talked of it at her party. The Bradshaws talked of death.
• 7:15:30
  He had killed himself, but how all was her body went through it
• 7:15:36
  first? When she was told suddenly of an accident, her dress flamed,
• 7:15:42
  her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window up, had flashed
• 7:15:49
  the ground through him, blundering, bruising with the rusty spikes. There he
• 7:15:57
  lay with a thud, thud thud in his brain, and then a suffocation
• 7:16:06
  of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it?
• 7:16:11
  And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party. She had once thrown a
• 7:16:18
  shilling into the serpentine, never anything more, but he had flung it away.
• 7:16:26
  They went on living. She would have to go back. The rooms
• 7:16:30
  were still crowded. People kept on coming. They all day. She had
• 7:16:37
  been thinking of Burten, of Peter, of sealing. They would grow old.
• 7:16:45
  A thing there was that mattered, the thing breathed about with chatter,
• 7:16:52
  defaced, obscure in her own life, let drop every day in corruption lies
• 7:17:00
  chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt
• 7:17:08
  to communicate people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center, which mystically evaded them.
• 7:17:18
  Closeness drew apart, rapture faded, one was alone. There was an
• 7:17:27
  embrace in death. But this young man who had killed himself, had he
• 7:17:34
  plunged holding his treasure? If it were now to die, for now to
• 7:17:41
  be most happy, she had said to herself, once coming down in white
• 7:17:48
  or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion,
• 7:17:56
  had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, the great doctor, that to her obscurely
• 7:18:03
  evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of
• 7:18:11
  some indiscoverable outrage, forcing your soul. That was it that this young man
• 7:18:19
  had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him like that with his
• 7:18:26
  power. Might he not then have said? Indeed she filled it. Now
• 7:18:33
  life is made intolerable. They make life in trouble men life that then she
• 7:18:41
  had felt it. Only this morning there was the terror, the overwhelming incapacity
• 7:18:49
  one's parents giving it into one's hands, this life to be lived to the
• 7:18:56
  end, to be walked with serenely. There was in the depths of her
• 7:19:03
  heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often, if Richard had not
• 7:19:10
  been there reading the times, so that he could crouch like a bird and
• 7:19:15
  gradually revive since roaring up, that immeasurable delight would in stick, to stick
• 7:19:25
  one thing with another, she must have perished. But that young man had
• 7:19:32
  killed himself. Somehow. It was her disaster, her disgrace. It was
• 7:19:40
  her punishment to see sink and despair, hear a man there o woman in
• 7:19:48
  this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.
• 7:19:56
  She had schemed, she had filter. She was never wholly admirable. She
• 7:20:03
  had wanted success, Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she
• 7:20:10
  had walked on the terrace at Burton, it was due to Richard. She
• 7:20:15
  had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough, nothing last too
• 7:20:22
  long, No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, push
• 7:20:30
  again, one book on the shelf, than having done with the triumphs of
• 7:20:34
  youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it with a
• 7:20:41
  shock of delight as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a
• 7:20:48
  time she had gone at Burton when they were all talking to look at the
• 7:20:55
  sky, or seen it between people's shoulders dinner, seen it in London when
• 7:21:03
  she could not sleep. She walked to the window. It held foolish as
• 7:21:10
  the idea was something of her own. In this country sky, this sky
• 7:21:18
  above Westminster, she parted the curtains. She looked, Oh, but how
• 7:21:25
  surprising. In the room opposite, the old lady stared straight at her.
• 7:21:33
  She was going to bed, and the sky, it'll be a solid sky.
• 7:21:37
  She had thought it will be the dusty sky turning away its cheek and
• 7:21:45
  beauty. But there it was ashen pale raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds.
• 7:21:55
  That was new to her. The wind must have risen. She was
• 7:21:59
  going to bed. In the room opposite. It was fascinating to watch her
• 7:22:04
  moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window.
• 7:22:12
  Could she see her? That was fascinating. With people still laughing and
• 7:22:18
  shouting in the drawing room, to watch that old woman quite quietly going to
• 7:22:26
  bed. She pulled the blind. Now the clock began striking. The young
• 7:22:33
  man had killed himself, but she did not pity him. With the clock
• 7:22:41
  striking day hour one, two three, she did not pity him. With
• 7:22:48
  all this going on there, the old lady had put out her light.
• 7:22:55
  The whole house was dark. Now with this going on, she repeated,
• 7:23:00
  and the words came to her fear no more the heat of the sun.
• 7:23:07
  She must go back to them. What an extraordinary night. She felt somehow
• 7:23:15
  very like him, with the man who had killed himself. She felt glad
• 7:23:21
  that he had done it, thrown it away. The clock was striking,
• 7:23:26
  the leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty,
• 7:23:33
  made her feel the fun. She must go back, She must assemble,
• 7:23:40
  She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little world.
• 7:23:47
  But where's Clarissa? Said Peter. He was sitting on the soface with
• 7:23:52
  Sally. After all these years, he really could not call her lady Rossiter.
• 7:24:00
  Where's the woman gone to? He asked, where's Clarissa? Sally supposed,
• 7:24:07
  and so did Peter. For the matter. At that that there were
• 7:24:11
  people of importance, politicians whom neither of them knew, the lists by sight,
• 7:24:21
  and the picture papers, whom Clarissa had to be nice to, had
• 7:24:26
  to talk to. She was with them. Yet there was Richard Bellaway,
• 7:24:33
  not in the cabinet. He hadn't been a success, Sally supposed. For
• 7:24:38
  herself. She scarcely ever read the papers. She sometimes saw his name mentioned,
• 7:24:47
  But then well, she lived a very solitary life in the wilds.
• 7:24:53
  Clarissa would say, among great merchants, great manufact jurors, men, after
• 7:25:02
  all, who did things. She had done things too. I have five
• 7:25:08
  sons, She told him, Lord Lord, what a change had come over
• 7:25:15
  her, the softness of motherhood. It's egotism too. Last time they met,
• 7:25:22
  Peter remembered had been among the Calthors in the moonlight. Believes like rough
• 7:25:30
  bronze, she had said, with her literary turn, and she had picked
• 7:25:36
  a rose. She had marched him up and down that awful night after the
• 7:25:42
  scene by the fountain. He was to catch the midnight train. Heavens,
• 7:25:49
  he had wept. That was his old trick, opening a pocket knife.
• 7:25:56
  Thought selling allway was opening and shutting a knife when he got excited. They
• 7:26:03
  had been very very intimate, she and Peter Walsh when he was in love
• 7:26:10
  with Clarissa. And there was that dreadful, ridiculous scene over Richard Dollaway at
• 7:26:18
  lunch she had called Richard Wickham, why not call Richard Wigham? Solissa had
• 7:26:26
  flared up, And indeed they had never seen each other since. She and
• 7:26:33
  Clissa not more than half a dozen times, perhaps in the last ten years.
• 7:26:40
  And Peter Walsh had gone off to India, and she had heard vaguely
• 7:26:45
  that he had made an unhappy marriage, and she didn't know whether he had
• 7:26:52
  any children, and she couldn't ask him, for he had changed. He
• 7:26:57
  was rather shriveled, working, but kinder, she felt, and she had
• 7:27:03
  a real affection for him, for he was connected with her youth, and
• 7:27:08
  she still had a little Emily Bronte he had given her. And he was
• 7:27:15
  to write, surely in those days he was to write. Have you written?
• 7:27:22
  She asked him, spreading her hand at her firm and shape the hand
• 7:27:27
  on her knee in a way. He recalled. Not a word, said
• 7:27:33
  Peter Walsh, and she laughed. She was still attractive, still a personage,
• 7:27:41
  Sally Seaton. But who was this lassiter? He wore two comedions on
• 7:27:48
  his winding day. That was all Peter knew of him. They have myriads
• 7:27:53
  of servants, miles of conservatories. Clisso wrote something like that. Sally owned
• 7:28:03
  it with a shout of laughter. Yes, I have ten thousand a year,
• 7:28:08
  whether before the tax was paid or after. She couldn't remember. For
• 7:28:14
  her husband. Whom you must meet, she said, whom you would like?
• 7:28:19
  She said, did all that for her, and Sally used to be
• 7:28:26
  in rags and tenors. She had pawned her grandmother's ring which Marie Antoinette had
• 7:28:33
  given her great grandfather to come to Burton. Oh, yes, Sally remembered.
• 7:28:41
  She had it still, a ruby ring which Marie Antoinette had given her
• 7:28:48
  great grandfather. She never had a penny to her name in those days,
• 7:28:53
  and going to Burton always meant some frightful Inching to Burton had meant so much
• 7:29:03
  to her, had kept her saying. She believed so unhappy had she been
• 7:29:08
  at home. But that was all a thing of the past, all over
• 7:29:15
  now, she said. And mister Perry was dead and miss Perry was still
• 7:29:21
  alive. Never had he had such a shock in his life, said Peter.
• 7:29:26
  He had been quite certain she was dead, and the marriage had been
• 7:29:33
  selly supposed for success. And that very handsome, very self possessed woman was
• 7:29:41
  Elizabeth over there by the curtains in red. She was like a poplar,
• 7:29:48
  She was like a riverer, She was like a Hyacinthe really tick. Kombe
• 7:29:52
  was thinking, Oh, how much nicer to be in the country and do
• 7:30:00
  what she liked. She could hear her poor dog hollowing. Elizabeth was certain
• 7:30:07
  she was not a bit like Clarissa. Peter Wolfe said, Oh, Clarissa,
• 7:30:14
  said Sally. What Sally felt was simply this. She had owed Clarissa
• 7:30:21
  an enormous amount. They had been friends, not acquaintances, friends, And
• 7:30:27
  she saw, and she still saw Clarissa, all in white, going about
• 7:30:33
  the house with her hands full of flowers through this day. Tobacco plants made
• 7:30:41
  her think of Burton. But did Peter understand? She lacked something lacked?
• 7:30:48
  What was it she had charmed? She had extraordinary charm, but to be
• 7:30:56
  frank? And she felt that Peter was an old friend, a real friend.
• 7:31:02
  Did absence Madden? Did distance matter? She had often wanted to write
• 7:31:08
  to him, but torn it up. Yet felt he understood. For people
• 7:31:15
  understand without things being said, as one realizes, growing old and old she
• 7:31:22
  was had been that afternoon to see her sons at Eton, where they had
• 7:31:29
  a mons to be quite frank? Then how could Colossa have done it?
• 7:31:36
  Married Richard Delaware, the sportsman man who cared only for dogs. Literally,
• 7:31:44
  when it came into the room, he smelt of the stables. And then
• 7:31:49
  all this she waved her hands Pugh whickbread. It was strolling past in his
• 7:31:57
  white brest of damn fat blind, has everything he looked except self esteem and
• 7:32:07
  comfort. He's not going to recognize us, said Sally. And really she
• 7:32:14
  hadn't the courage. So that was Hugh, the admirable of Hugh. And
• 7:32:21
  what does he do, she asked Peter. He blacked the king's boots or
• 7:32:26
  counted bottles at Windsor. Peter told her. Peter kept his sharp palm.
• 7:32:33
  Still, Sally must be frank. Peter said that Tiss now hughes on the
• 7:32:41
  lips, she assured him. In the smoking room. One evening, she
• 7:32:47
  went straight to Clarissa in a rage. Hugh didn't do such things, Clarissa
• 7:32:55
  said, the admirabih Hugh's socks were, without a exception, the most beautiful
• 7:33:02
  she had ever seen, and now his evening dress perfect. And he had
• 7:33:08
  children. Everybody in the room has six sons at Eton, Peter told her,
• 7:33:17
  except himself. He thanked God, he had none, no sons,
• 7:33:22
  no daughter's, no wife. Well he didn't seem to mind, said Selley.
• 7:33:29
  He looked younger, she thought, than any of them. But it
• 7:33:33
  had been a silly thing to do in many ways, Peter said to Mary
• 7:33:38
  like that the perfect goose she was, he said, But he said,
• 7:33:45
  we had a splendid time of it. But how could that be? Selly
• 7:33:49
  wondered what did he mean? And how odd it was to know him and
• 7:33:56
  yet not know a single thing had happened to him, and didn't say it
• 7:34:03
  out of pride. Very likely, for after all, it must be galling
• 7:34:10
  for him, though he was an oddity, a sort of sprite, not
• 7:34:15
  at all an ordinary man. It must be lonely at his age to have
• 7:34:22
  no home, nowhere to go, but he must stay with them for weeks
• 7:34:29
  and weeks. Of course he would, he would love to stay with him.
• 7:34:33
  And that was how it came out. All these years, the Delawares
• 7:34:40
  had never been once. Time after time they had asked them, Clarissa,
• 7:34:47
  for it was Clarissa, of course, would not come, or said Sally.
• 7:34:52
  Clarissa was at heart a stop. One had to admit it now,
• 7:35:00
  and it was that that was between them. She was convinced. Solissa thought
• 7:35:07
  she had married beneath her, her husband being. She was proud of it.
• 7:35:14
  The miner's son, every penny they had he had earned as a little
• 7:35:19
  boy. Her voice trembled. He had carried great sacks, and so she
• 7:35:26
  would go on, Peter felt hour after hour the miner's son. People thought
• 7:35:34
  she had married beneath her her five sons. And what was the other thing?
• 7:35:41
  Plants, hygrangees, syringas, very very rare, paviscous lillies that never
• 7:35:49
  grow north of thisuz canal. But she, with one gardener in a suburb
• 7:35:57
  near Manchester, had beds of them, positively beds. Now all that Clarissa
• 7:36:06
  had escaped unmaternal as she was a snob? Was she? Yes? In
• 7:36:14
  many ways? Where was she all this time? It was hitting late yet,
• 7:36:21
  said Sally. When I heard Clarissa was giving a party, I felt
• 7:36:26
  I couldn't not come, must see her again, And I'm staying in Victoria
• 7:36:33
  Street practically next door, so I just came without an invitation. But she
• 7:36:41
  whispered, tell me do who is this? It was missus Hilbury looking for
• 7:36:48
  the door for how late it was fitting, and she murmured as the night
• 7:36:55
  through. Later, as people went, one found o friends, quiet nooks
• 7:37:02
  and corners and the loveliest views. Did they know? She asked that they
• 7:37:08
  were surrounded by an enchanted garden. Lights and trees, and wonderful gleaming lakes
• 7:37:18
  and the sky, just a few fairy lamps illicit Dollaway had set in the
• 7:37:25
  back garden, But she was a magician. It was a park, and
• 7:37:32
  she didn't know their names, but friends, she knew. They were friends
• 7:37:37
  without names. Songs without words always the best. But there were so many
• 7:37:45
  doors, such unexpected places, she could not find her way. Old missus
• 7:37:52
  Hilbury, said Peter. But who was that that lady standing by the curtain
• 7:38:00
  all the evening without speaking? He knew of her face, connected her with
• 7:38:07
  Burton? Surely she used to cut up underclothes at the large table in the
• 7:38:14
  window, Davidson. Was that her name? Oh, that is Ellie Henderson,
• 7:38:19
  said Sally. Clarissa was really very hard on her. She was a
• 7:38:26
  cousin, very poor. Clarissa was hard on people. She was, rather,
• 7:38:33
  said Peter. Yet said Sally in her emotional way, with a rush
• 7:38:41
  of that enthusiasm which Peter used to love her for, yet dreaded a little
• 7:38:47
  now so effusive she might become. How generous to her friends Clarissa was,
• 7:38:55
  And a butt of bare quality one found it. And how sometimes night or
• 7:39:00
  on Christmas Day, when she counted up her blessings. She put that friendship
• 7:39:07
  first. They were young, that was it. So Lissa was pure hearted,
• 7:39:15
  that was it. Peter would think her sentimental. So she was,
• 7:39:21
  for she had come to feel that that was the only thing worth saying what
• 7:39:26
  one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.
• 7:39:34
  But I do not know, said Peter Walls, what I feel? Poor
• 7:39:40
  Peter thought, silly. Why did not Clarissa come and talk to them?
• 7:39:45
  That was what he was longing for. He knew it all the time.
• 7:39:51
  He was thinking only of Clarissa and was fidgeting with his knife. He had
• 7:39:57
  not found life, Peter said. His relations with Clarissa had not been simple.
• 7:40:06
  It had spoilt his life. He said. They had been so intimate,
• 7:40:11
  he and Sally Seaton. It was absurd not to say it. Lung
• 7:40:18
  could not be in love twice, he said, And what could she say?
• 7:40:23
  Still? It is better to have loved. But he would think her
• 7:40:27
  sentimental. He used to be so sharp. He must come and stay with
• 7:40:33
  him in Manchester. That is all very true, he said, all very
• 7:40:41
  true. He would love to come and stay with him. Directly, he
• 7:40:47
  had done what he had to do in London, and Melissa had cared for
• 7:40:53
  him more than she had ever cared for Richard. Sally was pause positive of
• 7:41:00
  that. No, no, no, said Peter. Sally should not have
• 7:41:07
  said that she went too far, That good fellow. There he was at
• 7:41:12
  the end of the room, holding forth the same as ever, Dear Old
• 7:41:18
  Richard, who was he talking to? Celly asked that very distinguished looking man
• 7:41:25
  living in the wild as she did. She had an insatiable curiosity to know
• 7:41:32
  who people were. But Peter did not go. He did not like his
• 7:41:37
  looks, he said, probably a cabinet minister. Of them all, Richard
• 7:41:45
  seemed to him the best, he said, the most disinterested. But what
• 7:41:51
  has he done? Sally asked? Public work, she supposed, and were
• 7:41:56
  they happy together? She herself was extremely happy, for she admitted she knew
• 7:42:04
  nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions as one does. But what can
• 7:42:11
  one know even of the people who lives with every day? She asked?
• 7:42:18
  Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man
• 7:42:25
  who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was
• 7:42:30
  true of life. One scratched on the wall, despairing of human relationships people
• 7:42:40
  were so difficult. She often went into her garden and dropt from her flowers
• 7:42:47
  a piece which men and women never gave her. But no, he did
• 7:42:53
  not like cabbages. He preferred human beings, Peter said. Indeed, the
• 7:43:00
  young or beautiful, Sally said, watching Elizabeth cross the room, how unlike
• 7:43:08
  Calorissa at her age, could he make anything of her? She would not
• 7:43:15
  open her lips, not much, not yet, Peter admitted. She was
• 7:43:22
  like a lilly. Sally said, well, lilly by the side of a
• 7:43:26
  pool. But Peter did not agree that we know nothing. We know everything,
• 7:43:33
  he said, at least he did. But these two, Sally whispered,
• 7:43:40
  these two coming now, and really she must go if Clorissa did not
• 7:43:45
  go soon, This distinguished looking man and his rather common looking wife, who
• 7:43:53
  had been talking to Richard. What could one know about people like that?
• 7:44:00
  That their damnable humbugs, said Peter, looking at them casually. He made
• 7:44:07
  Sally laugh. But Sir William Bradshall stopped at the door to look at a
• 7:44:15
  picture. He looked in the corner for the engraver's name. His wife looked
• 7:44:22
  too. Sir William Bradshaw was so interested in art when one was young,
• 7:44:30
  said Peter, one was too much excited to know people. Now that one
• 7:44:36
  was old, fifty two to be precise, Sally was fifty five in body,
• 7:44:42
  she said, but her heart was like the girls of twenty. Now
• 7:44:48
  that one was mature, then, said Peter, one could watch, one
• 7:44:55
  could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling. He said,
• 7:45:00
  no, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply,
• 7:45:07
  more passionately. Every year it increased, he said, the less. Perhaps
• 7:45:15
  if one should be glad of it, it went on increasing in his experience.
• 7:45:21
  There was someone in India he would like to tell Sally about her.
• 7:45:26
  He would like Sally to know her. She was married, he said,
• 7:45:32
  she had two small children. Then mustaalcome to Manchester, said Sally. He
• 7:45:38
  must promise before they left. There's Elizabeth, he said. She feels not
• 7:45:45
  half what we feel. Not yet, but said Sally. Watching Elizabeth go
• 7:45:52
  to her father, let to see they are devoted to each other. She
• 7:45:59
  could feel it by the way Elizabeth went to her father. For her father
• 7:46:04
  had been looking at her as he stood talking to the virtuous, and he
• 7:46:10
  had thought to himself, who is that lovely girl? And suddenly he realized
• 7:46:18
  that it was his Elizabeth, and he had not recognized her. She looked
• 7:46:22
  so lovely in her pink frock. Elizabeth had felt him looking at her as
• 7:46:30
  she talked to Willie titcom so she went to him and they stood together,
• 7:46:37
  now that the party was almost over, looking at the people going, and
• 7:46:42
  the rooms fitting emptier and emptier, with things scattered on the floor. Even
• 7:46:51
  Ellie Henderson was going nearly last of all, though no one had spoken to
• 7:46:56
  her, but she had wanted to see everything to tell Edith and Richard and
• 7:47:03
  Elizabeth were rather glad it was over. But Richard was proud of his daughter,
• 7:47:11
  and he had not meant to tell her, but he could not help
• 7:47:15
  telling her. He had looked at her, he said, and he had
• 7:47:18
  wondered, who is that lovely girl? And it was his daughter that did
• 7:47:26
  make her happy, But her poor dog was howling. Richard has improved.
• 7:47:33
  You were right, said Sally. I shall go and talk to him.
• 7:47:38
  I shall say good night. What does the brain matter, said ladsy Lassiter,
• 7:47:45
  getting up compared with the heart. I will come, said Peter,
• 7:47:51
  But he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? What is
• 7:47:56
  this ecstasy? He thought to himself. What is it that fills me with
• 7:48:03
  extraordinary excitement? It is for listen he sent. For there she was.
• 7:48:11
  End of Chapter thirteen and of Missus Dollaway by Virginia Wolfe