Chapter 1 — Chapter 1

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers
herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The
doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s
men were coming. And then, thought
Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if
issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had
always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak
of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had
burst open the French windows and plunged at
Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm,
stiller than this of course, the air was in the early
morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a
wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen
as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing
there at the open window, that something awful
was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the
trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks
rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter
Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was
that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that
it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning
when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter
Walsh. He would be back from India one of these
days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters
were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered;
his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his
grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly
vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like
this about cabbages.

She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for
Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope
Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know
people who live next door to one in Westminster);
a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green,
light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and
grown very white since her illness. There she
perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very
upright.

For having lived in Westminster—how many
years now? over twenty,—one feels even in the
midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa
was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an
indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might
be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before
Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed.
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.
The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools
we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For
Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one
sees it so, making it up, building it round one,
tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but
the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries
sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the
same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts
of Parliament for that very reason: they love life.
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge;
in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor
cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and
swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the
triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing
of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved;
life; London; this moment of June.

For it was the middle of June. The War was
over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the
Embassy last night eating her heart out because that
nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House
must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who
opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in
her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was
over; thank Heaven—over. It was June. The
King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere,
though it was still so early, there was a beating,
a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket
bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it;
wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning
air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them,
and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing
ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground
and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and
laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even
now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd
woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this
hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in
their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the
shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with
their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green
brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt
Americans (but one must economise, not buy things
rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she
did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part
of it, since her people were courtiers once in the
time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very
night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party.
But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence;
the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks;
the pouched birds waddling; and who should be
coming along with his back against the Government
buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch
box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh
Whitbread; her old friend Hugh—the admirable
Hugh!

“Good-morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh,
rather extravagantly, for they had known each other
as children. “Where are you off to?”

“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway.
“Really it’s better than walking in the country.”

They had just come up—unfortunately—to see
doctors. Other people came to see pictures; go to
the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads
came “to see doctors.” Times without number
Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing
home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good
deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind
of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely
handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he
was almost too well dressed always, but presumably
had to be, with his little job at Court) that his wife
had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which,
as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite
understand without requiring him to specify. Ah
yes, she did of course; what a nuisance; and felt
very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same time
of her hat. Not the right hat for the early morning,
was that it? For Hugh always made her feel,
as he bustled on, raising his hat rather extravagantly
and assuring her that she might be a girl of
eighteen, and of course he was coming to her party
to-night, Evelyn absolutely insisted, only a little late
he might be after the party at the Palace to which
he had to take one of Jim’s boys,—she always felt
a little skimpy beside Hugh; schoolgirlish; but attached
to him, partly from having known him
always, but she did think him a good sort in his
own way, though Richard was nearly driven mad
by him, and as for Peter Walsh, he had never to
this day forgiven her for liking him.

She could remember scene after scene at Bourton—Peter
furious; Hugh not, of course, his match
in any way, but still not a positive imbecile as Peter
made out; not a mere barber’s block. When his
old mother wanted him to give up shooting or to
take her to Bath he did it, without a word; he was
really unselfish, and as for saying, as Peter did, that
he had no heart, no brain, nothing but the manners
and breeding of an English gentleman, that was
only her dear Peter at his worst; and he could be
intolerable; he could be impossible; but adorable
to walk with on a morning like this.

(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The
mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages
were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty.
Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the
very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly,
on waves of that divine vitality which
Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored
all that.)

For they might be parted for hundreds of years,
she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were
dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her,
If he were with me now what would he say?—some
days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly,
without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the
reward of having cared for people; they came back
in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morning—indeed
they did. But Peter—however beautiful
the day might be, and the trees and the grass,
and the little girl in pink—Peter never saw a thing
of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she
told him to; he would look. It was the state of the
world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry,
people’s characters eternally, and the defects of her
own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued!
She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the
top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her
(she had cried over it in her bedroom), she had the
makings of the perfect hostess, he said.

So she would still find herself arguing in St.
James’s Park, still making out that she had been
right—and she had too—not to marry him. For in
marriage a little licence, a little independence there
must be between people living together day in day
out in the same house; which Richard gave her,
and she him. (Where was he this morning for instance?
Some committee, she never asked what.)
But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything
gone into. And it was intolerable, and when
it came to that scene in the little garden by the
fountain, she had to break with him or they would
have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was
convinced; though she had borne about with her
for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the
grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment
when some one told her at a concert that he
had married a woman met on the boat going to
India! Never should she forget all that! Cold,
heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she
understand how he cared. But those Indian women
did presumably—silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops.
And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy,
he assured her—perfectly happy, though he had
never done a thing that they talked of; his whole
life had been a failure. It made her angry still.

She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a
moment, looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly.

She would not say of any one in the world now
that they were this or were that. She felt very
young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She
sliced like a knife through everything; at the same
time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual
sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out,
out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the
feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even
one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or
much out of the ordinary. How she had got through
life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels
gave them she could not think. She knew nothing;
no language, no history; she scarcely read a book
now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was
absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing;
and she would not say of Peter, she would not say
of herself, I am this, I am that.

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct,
she thought, walking on. If you put her in
a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s;
or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the
house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them
all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally
Seton—such hosts of people; and dancing all night;
and the waggons plodding past to market; and driving
home across the Park. She remembered once
throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every
one remembered; what she loved was this, here,
now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did
it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards
Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably
cease completely; all this must go on without her;
did she resent it; or did it not become consoling
to believe that death ended absolutely? but that
somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and
flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived,
lived in each other, she being part, she was
positive, of the trees at home; of the house there,
ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part
of people she had never met; being laid out like a
mist between the people she knew best, who lifted
her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift
the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.
But what was she dreaming as she looked into
Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to
recover? What image of white dawn in the country,
as she read in the book spread open:

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in
them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears
and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly
upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of
the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough,
opening the bazaar.

There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there
were Soapy Sponge and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs
and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread open.
Ever so many books there were; but none that
seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread
in her nursing home. Nothing that would serve to
amuse her and make that indescribably dried-up
little woman look, as Clarissa came in, just for a
moment cordial; before they settled down for the
usual interminable talk of women’s ailments. How
much she wanted it—that people should look pleased
as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and
walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because
it was silly to have other reasons for doing things.
Much rather would she have been one of those
people like Richard who did things for themselves,
whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time
she did things not simply, not for themselves; but
to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy
she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand)
for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if
she could have had her life over again! she thought,
stepping on to the pavement, could have looked even
differently!

Jaunts and Jollities

Soapy Sponge

Memoirs

Big Game Shooting in Nigeria

She would have been, in the first place, dark like
Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather
and beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady
Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested
in politics like a man; with a country house;
very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which she
had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little
face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself
well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and
dressed well, considering that she spent little. But
often now this body she wore (she stopped to look
at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities,
seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the
oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown;
there being no more marrying, no more having
of children now, but only this astonishing and
rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up
Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even
Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in
the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops;
no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop
where her father had bought his suits for fifty years;
a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s.
“That is all,” she repeated, pausing for
a moment at the window of a glove shop where, before
the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves.
And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is
known by her shoes and her gloves. He had turned
on his bed one morning in the middle of the War.
He had said, “I have had enough.” Gloves and
shoes; she had a passion for gloves; but her own
daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not a straw for either
of them.

Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bond
Street to a shop where they kept flowers for her
when she gave a party. Elizabeth really cared for
her dog most of all. The whole house this morning
smelt of tar. Still, better poor Grizzle than
Miss Kilman; better distemper and tar and all the
rest of it than sitting mewed in a stuffy bedroom
with a prayer book! Better anything, she was inclined
to say. But it might be only a phase, as
Richard said, such as all girls go through. It might
be falling in love. But why with Miss Kilman? who
had been badly treated of course; one must make
allowances for that, and Richard said she was very
able, had a really historical mind. Anyhow they
were inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter,
went to Communion; and how she dressed, how she
treated people who came to lunch she did not care
a bit, it being her experience that the religious
ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled
their feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything
for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians,
but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive
was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat.
Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired;
she was never in the room five minutes without making
you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how
poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived
in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or
whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that
grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from school
during the War—poor embittered unfortunate creature!
For it was not her one hated but the idea
of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself
a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had become
one of those spectres with which one battles in the
night; one of those spectres who stand astride us
and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and
tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the
dice, had the black been uppermost and not the
white, she would have loved Miss Kilman! But not
in this world. No.

It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in
her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and
feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered
forest, the soul; never to be content
quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute
would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since
her illness, had power to make her feel scraped,
hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made
all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well,
in being loved and making her home delightful rock,
quiver, and bend as if indeed there were a monster
grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of
content were nothing but self love! this hatred!

Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing
through the swing doors of Mulberry’s the florists.

She advanced, light, tall, very upright, to be
greeted at once by button-faced Miss Pym, whose
hands were always bright red, as if they had been
stood in cold water with the flowers.

There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas,
bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations.
There were roses; there were irises. Ah
yes—so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet
smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed
her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had
been years ago; very kind, but she looked older,
this year, turning her head from side to side among
the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with
her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar,
the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And
then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen
clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses
looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding
their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading
in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale—as
if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks
came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the
superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black
sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies
was over; and it was the moment between six and
seven when every flower—roses, carnations, irises,
lilac—glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every
flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in
the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white
moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over
the evening primroses!

And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar
to jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself,
more and more gently, as if this beauty, this
scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting
her, were a wave which she let flow over her
and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount
it all; and it lifted her up and up when—oh! a
pistol shot in the street outside!

“Dear, those motor cars,” said Miss Pym, going
to the window to look, and coming back and smiling
apologetically with her hands full of sweet peas, as
if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were
all her fault.

her

The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway
jump and Miss Pym go to the window and
apologise came from a motor car which had drawn
to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry’s
shop window. Passers-by who, of course,
stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of
the very greatest importance against the dove-grey
upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and
there was nothing to be seen except a square of
dove grey.

Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the
middle of Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side,
to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other, passing invisibly,
inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon
hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden
sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second
before had been utterly disorderly. But now mystery
had brushed them with her wing; they had
heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion
was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her
lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had
been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the
Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it?
Nobody knew.

Edgar J. Watkiss, with his roll of lead piping
round his arm, said audibly, humorously of course:
“The Proime Minister’s kyar.”

Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable
to pass, heard him.

Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced,
beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a
shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that
look of apprehension in them which makes complete
strangers apprehensive too. The world has
raised its whip; where will it descend?

Everything had come to a standstill. The throb
of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly
drumming through an entire body. The sun became
extraordinarily hot because the motor car had
stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies
on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols;
here a green, here a red parasol opened with
a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window
with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with
her little pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one
looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys
on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And
there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and
upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus
thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything
to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror
had come almost to the surface and was about to
burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered
and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was
he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not
weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose?
But for what purpose?

“Let us go on, Septimus,” said his wife, a little
woman, with large eyes in a sallow pointed face; an
Italian girl.

But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the
motor car and the tree pattern on the blinds. Was
it the Queen in there—the Queen going shopping?

The chauffeur, who had been opening something,
turning something, shutting something, got on to
the box.

“Come on,” said Lucrezia.

But her husband, for they had been married four,
five years now, jumped, started, and said, “All
right!” angrily, as if she had interrupted him.

People must notice; people must see. People, she
thought, looking at the crowd staring at the motor
car; the English people, with their children and
their horses and their clothes, which she admired
in a way; but they were “people” now, because
Septimus had said, “I will kill myself”; an awful
thing to say. Suppose they had heard him? She
looked at the crowd. Help, help! she wanted to cry
out to butchers’ boys and women. Help! Only
last autumn she and Septimus had stood on the
Embankment wrapped in the same cloak and, Septimus
reading a paper instead of talking, she had
snatched it from him and laughed in the old man’s
face who saw them! But failure one conceals. She
must take him away into some park.

“Now we will cross,” she said.

She had a right to his arm, though it was without
feeling. He would give her, who was so simple,
so impulsive, only twenty-four, without friends in
England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece
of bone.

The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air
of inscrutable reserve proceeded towards Piccadilly,
still gazed at, still ruffling the faces on both sides
of the street with the same dark breath of veneration
whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister
nobody knew. The face itself had been seen only
once by three people for a few seconds. Even the
sex was now in dispute. But there could be no
doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness
was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed
only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who
might now, for the first and last time, be within
speaking distance of the majesty of England, of
the enduring symbol of the state which will be
known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of
time, when London is a grass-grown path and all
those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday
morning are but bones with a few wedding rings
mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of
innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor
car will then be known.

It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway,
coming out of Mulberry’s with her flowers;
the Queen. And for a second she wore a look of
extreme dignity standing by the flower shop in the
sunlight while the car passed at a foot’s pace, with
its blinds drawn. The Queen going to some hospital;
the Queen opening some bazaar, thought
Clarissa.

The crush was terrific for the time of day.
Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham, what was it? she wondered,
for the street was blocked. The British
middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses
with parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on
a day like this, were, she thought, more ridiculous,
more unlike anything there has ever been than one
could conceive; and the Queen herself held up;
the Queen herself unable to pass. Clarissa was suspended
on one side of Brook Street; Sir John Buckhurst,
the old Judge on the other, with the car between
them (Sir John had laid down the law for
years and liked a well-dressed woman) when the
chauffeur, leaning ever so slightly, said or showed
something to the policeman, who saluted and raised
his arm and jerked his head and moved the omnibus
to the side and the car passed through. Slowly and
very silently it took its way.

Clarissa guessed; Clarissa knew of course; she
had seen something white, magical, circular, in the
footman’s hand, a disc inscribed with a name,—the
Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s?—which,
by force of its own lustre, burnt
its way through (Clarissa saw the car diminishing,
disappearing), to blaze among candelabras, glittering
stars, breasts stiff with oak leaves, Hugh Whitbread
and all his colleagues, the gentlemen of England,
that night in Buckingham Palace. And
Clarissa, too, gave a party. She stiffened a little;
so she would stand at the top of her stairs.

The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple
which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and
tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond Street. For
thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same
way—to the window. Choosing a pair of gloves—should
they be to the elbow or above it, lemon or
pale grey?—ladies stopped; when the sentence was
finished something had happened. Something so
trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument,
though capable of transmitting shocks in
China, could register the vibration; yet in its fulness
rather formidable and in its common appeal
emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailors’ shops
strangers looked at each other and thought of the
dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house in
a back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor
which led to words, broken beer glasses, and a
general shindy, which echoed strangely across the
way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen
threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings.
For the surface agitation of the passing car as it
sunk grazed something very profound.

Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St.
James’s Street. Tall men, men of robust physique,
well-dressed men with their tail-coats and their
white slips and their hair raked back who, for
reasons difficult to discriminate, were standing in
the bow window of Brooks’s with their hands behind
the tails of their coats, looking out, perceived
instinctively that greatness was passing, and the pale
light of the immortal presence fell upon them as it
had fallen upon Clarissa Dalloway. At once they
stood even straighter, and removed their hands, and
seemed ready to attend their Sovereign, if need be,
to the cannon’s mouth, as their ancestors had done
before them. The white busts and the little tables
in the background covered with copies of the Tatler
and syphons of soda water seemed to approve;
seemed to indicate the flowing corn and the manor
houses of England; and to return the frail hum of
the motor wheels as the walls of a whispering gallery
return a single voice expanded and made sonorous
by the might of a whole cathedral. Shawled
Moll Pratt with her flowers on the pavement wished
the dear boy well (it was the Prince of Wales for
certain) and would have tossed the price of a pot
of beer—a bunch of roses—into St. James’s Street
out of sheer light-heartedness and contempt of poverty
had she not seen the constable’s eye upon her,
discouraging an old Irishwoman’s loyalty. The
sentries at St. James’s saluted; Queen Alexandra’s
policeman approved.

Tatler

A small crowd meanwhile had gathered at the
gates of Buckingham Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently,
poor people all of them, they waited;
looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at
Victoria, billowing on her mound, admired her
shelves of running water, her geraniums; singled
out from the motor cars in the Mall first this one,
then that; bestowed emotion, vainly, upon commoners
out for a drive; recalled their tribute to
keep it unspent while this car passed and that; and
all the time let rumour accumulate in their veins and
thrill the nerves in their thighs at the thought of
Royalty looking at them; the Queen bowing; the
Prince saluting; at the thought of the heavenly life
divinely bestowed upon Kings; of the equerries and
deep curtsies; of the Queen’s old doll’s house; of
Princess Mary married to an Englishman, and the
Prince—ah! the Prince! who took wonderfully,
they said, after old King Edward, but was ever so
much slimmer. The Prince lived at St. James’s;
but he might come along in the morning to visit his
mother.

So Sarah Bletchley said with her baby in her
arms, tipping her foot up and down as though she
were by her own fender in Pimlico, but keeping her
eyes on the Mall, while Emily Coates ranged over
the Palace windows and thought of the housemaids,
the innumerable housemaids, the bedrooms, the innumerable
bedrooms. Joined by an elderly gentleman
with an Aberdeen terrier, by men without occupation,
the crowd increased. Little Mr. Bowley,
who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with
wax over the deeper sources of life but could be
unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally,
by this sort of thing—poor women waiting to see
the Queen go past—poor women, nice little children,
orphans, widows, the War—tut-tut—actually had
tears in his eyes. A breeze flaunting ever so warmly
down the Mall through the thin trees, past the
bronze heroes, lifted some flag flying in the British
breast of Mr. Bowley and he raised his hat as the
car turned into the Mall and held it high as the car
approached; and let the poor mothers of Pimlico
press close to him, and stood very upright. The car
came on.

Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky.
The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the
ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the
trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which
curled and twisted, actually writing something!
making letters in the sky! Every one looked up.

Dropping dead down the aeroplane soared
straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose,
and whatever it did, wherever it went, out fluttered
behind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke which
curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters. But
what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only
for a moment did they lie still; then they moved
and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and
the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a
fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y
perhaps?

“Glaxo,” said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awestricken
voice, gazing straight up, and her baby,
lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up.

“Kreemo,” murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a
sleep-walker. With his hat held out perfectly still
in his hand, Mr. Bowley gazed straight up. All
down the Mall people were standing and looking up
into the sky. As they looked the whole world became
perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed
the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in
this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor,
in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound
fading up there among the gulls.

The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped
exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater—

“That’s an E,” said Mrs. Bletchley—
or a dancer—

“It’s toffee,” murmured Mr. Bowley—
(and the car went in at the gates and nobody looked
at it), and shutting off the smoke, away and away
it rushed, and the smoke faded and assembled itself
round the broad white shapes of the clouds.

It had gone; it was behind the clouds. There
was no sound. The clouds to which the letters E,
G, or L had attached themselves moved freely, as
if destined to cross from West to East on a mission
of the greatest importance which would never be revealed,
and yet certainly so it was—a mission of
the greatest importance. Then suddenly, as a train
comes out of a tunnel, the aeroplane rushed out of
the clouds again, the sound boring into the ears of
all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly,
in Regent Street, in Regent’s Park, and the
bar of smoke curved behind and it dropped down,
and it soared up and wrote one letter after another—but
what word was it writing?

Lucrezia Warren Smith, sitting by her husband’s
side on a seat in Regent’s Park in the Broad Walk,
looked up.

“Look, look, Septimus!” she cried. For Dr.
Holmes had told her to make her husband (who
had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him
but was a little out of sorts) take an interest in
things outside himself.

So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling
to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is,
he could not read the language yet; but it was
plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and
tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words
languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing
upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing
goodness one shape after another of unimaginable
beauty and signalling their intention to provide
him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely,
with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his
cheeks.

It was toffee; they were advertising toffee, a
nursemaid told Rezia. Together they began to
spell t ... o ... f....

“K ... R ...” said the nursemaid, and Septimus
heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear,
deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a
roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which
rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up
into his brain waves of sound which, concussing,
broke. A marvellous discovery indeed—that the
human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for
one must be scientific, above all scientific) can
quicken trees into life! Happily Rezia put her
hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that
he was weighted down, transfixed, or the excitement
of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling
with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning
and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow
wave, like plumes on horses’ heads, feathers on
ladies’, so proudly they rose and fell, so superbly,
would have sent him mad. But he would not go
mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no
more.

But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were
alive. And the leaves being connected by millions
of fibres with his own body, there on the seat,
fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched
he, too, made that statement. The sparrows fluttering,
rising, and falling in jagged fountains were
part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with
black branches. Sounds made harmonies with premeditation;
the spaces between them were as significant
as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far
away a horn sounded. All taken together meant
the birth of a new religion—

“Septimus!” said Rezia. He started violently.
People must notice.

“I am going to walk to the fountain and back,”
she said.

For she could stand it no longer. Dr. Holmes
might say there was nothing the matter. Far rather
would she that he were dead! She could not sit
beside him when he stared so and did not see her
and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children
playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling
down; all were terrible. And he would not kill himself;
and she could tell no one. “Septimus has been
working too hard”—that was all she could say to
her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she
thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus
now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in his
shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up,
staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he
would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was
brave; he was not Septimus now. She put on her
lace collar. She put on her new hat and he never
noticed; and he was happy without her. Nothing
could make her happy without him! Nothing! He
was selfish. So men are. For he was not ill. Dr.
Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him.
She spread her hand before her. Look! Her wedding
ring slipped—she had grown so thin. It was
she who suffered—but she had nobody to tell.

Far was Italy and the white houses and the room
where her sisters sat making hats, and the streets
crowded every evening with people walking, laughing
out loud, not half alive like people here, huddled
up in Bath chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers
stuck in pots!

“For you should see the Milan gardens,” she said
aloud. But to whom?

There was nobody. Her words faded. So a
rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way
into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours
over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hillsides
soften and fall in. But though they are gone,
the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank
of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out
what the frank daylight fails to transmit—the
trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there
in the darkness; huddled together in the darkness;
reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing
the walls white and grey, spotting each window-pane,
lifting the mist from the fields, showing the
red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more
decked out to the eye; exists again. I am alone; I
am alone! she cried, by the fountain in Regent’s
Park (staring at the Indian and his cross), as perhaps
at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the
country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans
saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the
hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not
where—such was her darkness; when suddenly, as
if a shelf were shot forth and she stood on it, she
said how she was his wife, married years ago in
Milan, his wife, and would never, never tell that
he was mad! Turning, the shelf fell; down, down
she dropped. For he was gone, she thought—gone,
as he threatened, to kill himself—to throw himself
under a cart! But no; there he was; still sitting
alone on the seat, in his shabby overcoat, his legs
crossed, staring, talking aloud.