Mrs Dalloway (31 page)

‘But I do not know,' said Peter Walsh, ‘what I feel.'

Poor Peter, thought Sally. Why did not Clarissa come and talk to them? That was what he was longing for. She knew it. All the time he was thinking only of Clarissa, and was fidgeting with his knife.

He had not found life simple, Peter said. His relations with Clarissa had not been simple. It had spoilt his life, he said. (They had been so intimate – he and Sally Seton, it was absurd not to say it.) One could not be in love twice, he said. And what could she say? Still, it is better to have loved (but he would think her sentimental – he used to be so sharp). He must come and stay with them in Manchester. That is all very true, he said. All very true. He would love to come and stay with them, directly he had done what he had to do in London.

And Clarissa had cared for him more than she had ever cared for Richard, Sally was positive of that.

‘No, no, no!' said Peter (Sally should not have said that – she went too far). That good fellow – there he was
at the end of the room, holding forth, the same as ever, dear old Richard. Who was he talking to? Sally asked, that very distinguished-looking man? Living in the wilds as she did, she had an insatiable curiosity to know who people were. But Peter did not know. He did not like his looks, he said, probably a Cabinet Minister. Of them all, Richard seemed to him the best, he said – the most disinterested.

‘But what has he done?' Sally asked. Public work, she supposed. And were they happy together? Sally asked (she herself was extremely happy); for, she admitted, she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life – one scratched on the wall. Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her. But no; he did not like cabbages; he preferred human beings, Peter said. Indeed, the young are beautiful, Sally said, watching Elizabeth cross the room. How unlike Clarissa at her age! Could he make anything of her? She would not open her lips. Not much, not yet, Peter admitted. She was like a lily, Sally said, a lily by the side of a pool. But Peter did not agree that we know nothing. We know everything, he said; at least he did.

But these two, Sally whispered, these two coming now (and really she must go, if Clarissa did not come soon), this distinguished-looking man and his rather common-looking wife who had been talking to Richard – what could one know about people like that?

‘That they're damnable humbugs,' said Peter, looking at them casually. He made Sally laugh.

But Sir William Bradshaw stopped at the door to look at a picture. He looked in the corner for the engraver's name. His wife looked too. Sir William Bradshaw was so interested in art.

When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl's of twenty); now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it – it went on increasing in his experience. There was some one in India. He would like to tell Sally about her. He would like Sally to know her. She was married, he said. She had two small children. They must all come to Manchester, said Sally – he must promise before they left.

‘There's Elizabeth,' he said, ‘she feels not half what we feel, not yet.' ‘But,' said Sally, watching Elizabeth go to her father, ‘one can see they are devoted to each other.' She could feel it by the way Elizabeth went to her father.

For her father had been looking at her, as he stood talking to the Bradshaws, and he had thought to himself, who is that lovely girl? And suddenly he realised that it was his Elizabeth, and he had not recognised her, she looked so lovely in her pink frock! Elizabeth had felt him looking at her as she talked to Willie Titcomb. So she went to him and they stood together, now that the party was almost over, looking at the people going,
and the rooms getting emptier and emptier, with things scattered on the floor. Even Ellie Henderson was going, nearly last of all, though no one had spoken to her, but she had wanted to see everything, to tell Edith. And Richard and Elizabeth were rather glad it was over, but Richard was proud of his daughter. And he had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her. He had looked at her, he said, and he had wondered, who is that lovely girl? and it was his daughter! That did make her happy. But her poor dog was howling.

‘Richard has improved. You are right,' said Sally. ‘I shall go and talk to him. I shall say good-night. What does the brain matter,' said Lady Rosseter, getting up, ‘compared with the heart?'

‘I will come,' said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?

It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was.

 

THE END

1.
Bourton
: the country house where Clarissa Parry had grown up, probably located in the west country since Peter Walsh remembers her looking down at the Severn river. See
p. 168
.

2.
grown very white since her illness
: Scrope Purvis refers to her hair. In ‘Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street' she is seen as ‘strangely white-haired for her pink cheeks' (Susan Dick, ed.:
The Complete Shorter Fiction
, p. 206). See also
p. 39
.

3.
Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh
: Lords is the cricket ground at St John's Wood, home to the Marylebone Cricket Club. A week of horse-racing at Ascot in June culminates in Cup day; Woolf described it as marking ‘the highest tide of the finest societies greatest season – all superlatives that mean little to me' (
Diary
, II, 17 June 1920, p. 48). Ranelagh, like Hurlingham (see
p. 18
), was a London polo club. On Bank Holiday Monday, 24 May 1920, Leonard and Virginia went to watch polo at Hurlingham Park and her account of it is distantly echoed in the passage that follows (
Diary
, II, pp. 41–2).

4.
Messages
. . .
the Fleet to the Admiralty
: at the top of the Mall stands Admiralty Arch, put up in 1887 to connect the Old Admiralty with the New. A recently installed radio mast on the roof of the new building kept the authorities in touch with the British fleet at sea. In
Jacob's Room
(1922) ‘The wires of the Admiralty shivered with some far-away communication' (Penguin Books 1992, p. 151).

5.
Wagner, Pope's poetry
: the operas of Richard Wagner
(1813–83) represent an extreme of high romanticism, in contrast to the formal, urbane and neo-classical poetry of Alexander Pope (1688–1744). The presence of the musician Joseph Breitkopf seems to have occasioned the discussion of Wagner – see
p. 38
.

6.
Devonshire House, Bath House
: walking up Piccadilly, Clarissa would have passed Bath House, on the corner of Bolton Street, and Devonshire House on the corner of Berkeley Street, the town house of the Duke of Devonshire until 1919.

7.
throwing a shilling into the Serpentine
: her gesture is recalled at the end of the novel in relation to Septimus's act of sacrifice (
pp. 202
,
204
), and is paralleled by the childhood memory of throwing bread to the ducks,
p. 46
.

8.
Hatchards' shop window
: Hatchards' is a bookshop in Piccadilly, opened in 1757 and still in business. In the book in the window, she reads the first two lines of the song from Shakespeare's
Cymbeline
(IV. ii. 258–9). This is the dirge sung over the grave of ‘Fidele' who is actually the fugitive Imogen, in a drugged trance-state. The words ‘fear no more' recur through the novel and come to be associated with the rhythm of the heart beat. They are repeated by Clarissa at
pp. 23
,
32
and
204
, and by Septimus Smith at
p. 153
(see also Introduction,
p. xxx
).

9.
Jorrocks . . . Nigeria
:
Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities
(1838) is the best known of R. S. Surtees' comic novels of English sporting life;
Soapy Sponge
(i.e.
Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour
, 1853), is a later novel of the same type. Margot Asquith's
Memoirs
(entitled
Autobiography
) were published in October 1920; excerpts from them appeared in August in the
Sunday Times
, and Woolf gossiped with her friend Lady Cecil about ‘Mrs Asquith and her inaccuracies' (
Diary
, II, 19 August 1920, p. 60).
Big Game Shooting in Nigeria
is apparently an invented title, but in keeping with the other hunting, sporting and society books in Hatchards' window.

10.
Grizzle
: Grizzle was the name of Woolf's own dog in the twenties. In
MD
it is Elizabeth's fox-terrier (see
p. 182
). Distemper is a disease of dogs, sometimes treated with tar.

11.
a pistol shot in the street outside
: a car has backfired, causing a sound like a gun going off.

12.
the Prince of Wales's, the Queen's, the Prime Minister's
: at this time, Edward was Prince of Wales, later to become (very briefly) Edward VIII, while King George V's consort was Queen Mary (see note to
p. 21
, note 20 below). On the identity of the Prime Minister, see Introduction,
p. xv
; he later puts in an undistinguished appearance at Clarissa's party (see
p. 188
).

13.
Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham
: see note 3 above.

14.
stiff with oak leaves
: oak leaves are military badges worn by servicemen mentioned in dispatches (the implication may be that the wearers had fought in the First World War without distinguishing themselves).

15.
the House of Windsor
: i.e. the British royal family. A shindy is a fuss or brawl. Septimus later thinks of the European war as ‘that little shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder' (
p. 105
).

16.
White's
: Woolf originally put ‘Brooks's' – this club, built by Henry Holland in 1777–8, occupies no. 60, St James's Street. Woolf subsequently changed this to ‘White's' Club, on the other side, at no. 37, when she found that Brooks's did not have a bow window, whereas White's did (see Note on the Text).

17.
the Tatler
: in 1923 this was a magazine devoted to the activities of high society, though Woolf may also have recalled that the essayist Richard Steele, who lodged next to White's in 1709, had written many of the original numbers.

18.
St. James's . . . Queen Alexandra's policeman approved
: i.e. the sentries at St James's Palace where ‘the Prince [of Wales] lived'. Queen Alexandra was the widow of Edward VII,
and the mother of King George V (who came to the throne in 1910). She died in 1925.

19.
Victoria, billowing on her mound
: the memorial to Queen Victoria in front of Buckingham Palace was designed by Sir Thomas Brock and unveiled by George V in 1911.

20.
the Queen's old doll's house
. . .: Queen Mary's magnificent doll's house is now exhibited at Windsor Castle. At this time the royal family consisted of George V, Queen Mary, and their four sons of whom Edward was the eldest and heir to the throne. Their only daughter, Princess Mary, had married ‘an Englishman', Henry Lascelles, in 1922. Later Clarissa's maid Lucy imagines herself as attending Princess Mary (
p. 41
).

21.
Little Mr. Bowley
. . .
the Albany
: Mr Bowley had earlier appeared in chapter 13 of Woolf's previous novel,
Jacob's Room
, where he takes Clara Durrant and her dog for a walk: ‘kind little Bowley – Bowley who had rooms in the Albany, Bowley who wrote letters to the
Times
. . .' (1922, Penguin Books 1992, p. 145). The Albany is an eighteenth-century mansion on the north side of Piccadilly, close to Burlington House, converted into bachelor chambers in 1802; it became a fashionable address for men of letters throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

22.
The sound of an aeroplane . . . in the sky!
: see Introduction,
pp. xxiii
–
xxiv
.

23.
its ancient shape . . . such was her darkness
: in Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
(1902) the narrator Marlow imagines the Roman conquest of the Thames valley: ‘When the Romans first came here . . . darkness was here yesterday.' (Penguin books, 1989 p. 30) Woolf's essay ‘Mr Conrad: A Conversation' was published in the
Nation & Athenaeum
, 1 September 1923 (
Essays
III, pp. 376–9).

24.
in Greek words
: after her first suicide attempt in 1904, Woolf imagined she heard the birds singing in Greek (Bell:
VW
I, p. 90).

25.
the Mendelian theory
: named after Gregor Mendel (1822–84) who founded the modern science of genetics.

26.
a child exploring a tower
: enlarged upon later – see
p. 51
and accompanying note.

27.
Baron Marbot's Memoirs
: Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcelin, Baron de Marbot (1782–1854) was an officer in Napoleon's army. His
Memoirs
were translated into English several times. Phyllis Rose argues that the book is a metaphor for Clarissa's frigidity. According to Rose, Clarissa's ‘choice of reading matter (the retreat from Moscow) suggests her enjoyment of the pattern of aggressors repelled, of a city resisting takeover by a foreign tyrant and triumphing partly by sheer will to maintain its integrity and partly because of the coldness of its winters.' (
Woman of Letters
, O.U.P., 1978, p. 144) – see Introduction,
p. xxxiv
. On a more literal level, Clarissa's reading matter is not at all what we might expect from her self-description as a badly educated, frivolous woman.