Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  And now the whole thing had vanished. The dress, the room, the love, the pity, the scrolloping looking-glass, and the canary’s cage — all had vanished, and here she was in a corner of Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room, suffering tortures, woken wide awake to reality.

  But it was all so paltry, weak-blooded, and petty-minded to care so much at her age with two children, to be still so utterly dependent on people’s opinions and not have principles or convictions, not to be able to say as other people did, “There’s Shakespeare! There’s death! We’re all weevils in a captain’s biscuit” — or whatever it was that people did say.

  She faced herself straight in the glass; she pecked at her left shoulder; she issued out into the room, as if spears were thrown at her yellow dress from all sides. But instead of looking fierce or tragic, as Rose Shaw would have done — Rose would have looked like Boadicea — she looked foolish and self-conscious, and simpered like a schoolgirl and slouched across the room, positively slinking, as if she were a beaten mongrel, and looked at a picture, an engraving. As if one went to a party to look at a picture! Everybody knew why she did it — it was from shame, from humiliation.

  “Now the fly’s in the saucer,” she said to herself, “right in the middle, and can’t get out, and the milk,” she thought, rigidly staring at the picture, “is sticking its wings together.”

  “It’s so old-fashioned,” she said to Charles Burt, making him stop (which by itself he hated) on his way to talk to some one else.

  She meant, or she tried to make herself think that she meant, that it was the picture and not her dress, that was old-fashioned. And one word of praise, one word of affection from Charles would have made all the difference to her at the moment. If he had only said, “Mabel, you’re looking charming to-night!” it would have changed her life. But then she ought to have been truthful and direct. Charles said nothing of the kind, of course. He was malice itself. He always saw through one, especially if one were feeling particularly mean, paltry, or feeble-minded.

  “Mabel’s got a new dress!” he said, and the poor fly was absolutely shoved into the middle of the saucer. Really, he would like her to drown, she believed. He had no heart, no fundamental kindness, only a veneer of friendliness. Miss Milan was much more real, much kinder. If only one could feel that and stick to it, always. “Why,” she asked herself — replying to Charles much too pertly, letting him see that she was out of temper, or “ruffled” as he called it (“Rather ruffled?” he said and went on to laugh at her with some woman over there)— “Why,” she asked herself, “can’t I feel one thing always, feel quite sure that Miss Milan is right, and Charles wrong and stick to it, feel sure about the canary and pity and love and not be whipped all round in a second by coming into a room full of people?” It was her odious, weak, vacillating character again, always giving at the critical moment and not being seriously interested in conchology, etymology, botany, archeology, cutting up potatoes and watching them fructify like Mary Dennis, like Violet Searle.

  Then Mrs. Holman, seeing her standing there, bore down upon her. Of course a thing like a dress was beneath Mrs. Holman’s notice, with her family always tumbling downstairs or having the scarlet fever. Could Mabel tell her if Elmthorpe was ever let for August and September? Oh, it was a conversation that bored her unutterably! — it made her furious to be treated like a house agent or a messenger boy, to be made use of. Not to have value, that was it, she thought, trying to grasp something hard, something real, while she tried to answer sensibly about the bathroom and the south aspect and the hot water to the top of the house; and all the time she could see little bits of her yellow dress in the round looking-glass which made them all the size of boot-buttons or tadpoles; and it was amazing to think how much humiliation and agony and self-loathing and effort and passionate ups and downs of feeling were contained in a thing the size of a threepenny bit. And what was still odder, this thing, this Mabel Waring, was separate, quite disconnected; and though Mrs. Holman (the black button) was leaning forward and telling her how her eldest boy had strained his heart running, she could see her, too, quite detached in the looking-glass, and it was impossible that the black dot, leaning forward, gesticulating, should make the yellow dot, sitting solitary, self-centred, feel what the black dot was feeling, yet they pretended.

  “So impossible to keep boys quiet” — that was the kind of thing one said.

  And Mrs. Holman, who could never get enough sympathy and snatched what little there was greedily, as if it were her right (but she deserved much more for there was her little girl who had come down this morning with a swollen knee-joint), took this miserable offering and looked at it suspiciously, grudgingly, as if it were a halfpenny when it ought to have been a pound and put it away in her purse, must put up with it, mean and miserly though it was, times being hard, so very hard; and on she went, creaking, injured Mrs. Holman, about the girl with the swollen joints. Ah, it was tragic, this greed, this clamour of human beings, like a row of cormorants, barking and flapping their wings for sympathy — it was tragic, could one have felt it and not merely pretended to feel it!

  But in her yellow dress to-night she could not wring out one drop more; she wanted it all, all for herself. She knew (she kept on looking into the glass, dipping into that dreadfully showing-up blue pool) that she was condemned, despised, left like this in a backwater, because of her being like this a feeble, vacillating creature; and it seemed to her that the yellow dress was a penance which she had deserved, and if she had been dressed like Rose Shaw, in lovely, clinging green with a ruffle of swansdown, she would have deserved that; and she thought that there was no escape for her — none whatever. But it was not her fault altogether, after all. It was being one of a family of ten; never having money enough, always skimping and paring; and her mother carrying great cans, and the linoleum worn on the stair edges, and one sordid little domestic tragedy after another — nothing catastrophic, the sheep farm failing, but not utterly; her eldest brother marrying beneath him but not very much — there was no romance, nothing extreme about them all. They petered out respectably in seaside resorts; every watering-place had one of her aunts even now asleep in some lodging with the front windows not quite facing the sea. That was so like them — they had to squint at things always. And she had done the same — she was just like her aunts. For all her dreams of living in India, married to some hero like Sir Henry Lawrence, some empire builder (still the sight of a native in a turban filled her with romance), she had failed utterly. She had married Hubert, with his safe, permanent underling’s job in the Law Courts, and they managed tolerably in a smallish house, without proper maids, and hash when she was alone or just bread and butter, but now and then — Mrs. Holman was off, thinking her the most dried-up, unsympathetic twig she had ever met, absurdly dressed, too, and would tell every one about Mabel’s fantastic appearance — now and then, thought Mabel Waring, left alone on the blue sofa, punching the cushion in order to look occupied, for she would not join Charles Burt and Rose Shaw, chattering like magpies and perhaps laughing at her by the fireplace — now and then, there did come to her delicious moments, reading the other night in bed, for instance, or down by the sea on the sand in the sun, at Easter — let her recall it — a great tuft of pale sand-grass standing all twisted like a shock of spears against the sky, which was blue like a smooth china egg, so firm, so hard, and then the melody of the waves— “Hush, hush,” they said, and the children’s shouts paddling — yes, it was a divine moment, and there she lay, she felt, in the hand of the Goddess who was the world; rather a hard-hearted, but very beautiful Goddess, a little lamb laid on the altar (one did think these silly things, and it didn’t matter so long as one never said them). And also with Hubert sometimes she had quite unexpectedly — carving the mutton for Sunday lunch, for no reason, opening a letter, coming into a room — divine moments, when she said to herself (for she would never say this to anybody else), “This is it. This has happened. This is it!” And the other way about it w
as equally surprising — that is, when everything was arranged — music, weather, holidays, every reason for happiness was there — then nothing happened at all. One wasn’t happy. It was flat, just flat, that was all.

  Her wretched self again, no doubt! She had always been a fretful, weak, unsatisfactory mother, a wobbly wife, lolling about in a kind of twilight existence with nothing very clear or very bold, or more one thing than another, like all her brothers and sisters, except perhaps Herbert — they were all the same poor water-veined creatures who did nothing. Then in the midst of this creeping, crawling life, suddenly she was on the crest of a wave. That wretched fly — where had she read the story that kept coming into her mind about the fly and the saucer? — struggled out. Yes, she had those moments. But now that she was forty, they might come more and more seldom. By degrees she would cease to struggle any more. But that was deplorable! That was not to be endured! That made her feel ashamed of herself!

  She would go to the London Library to-morrow. She would find some wonderful, helpful, astonishing book, quite by chance, a book by a clergyman, by an American no one had ever heard of; or she would walk down the Strand and drop, accidentally, into a hall where a miner was telling about the life in the pit, and suddenly she would become a new person. She would be absolutely transformed. She would wear a uniform; she would be called Sister Somebody; she would never give a thought to clothes again. And for ever after she would be perfectly clear about Charles Burt and Miss Milan and this room and that room; and it would be always, day after day, as if she were lying in the sun or carving the mutton. It would be it!

  So she got up from the blue sofa, and the yellow button in the looking-glass got up too, and she waved her hand to Charles and Rose to show them she did not depend on them one scrap, and the yellow button moved out of the looking-glass, and all the spears were gathered into her breast as she walked towards Mrs. Dalloway and said “Good night.”

  “But it’s top early to go,” said Mrs. Dalloway, who was always so charming.

  “I’m afraid I must,” said Mabel Waring. “But,” she added in her weak, wobbly voice which only sounded ridiculous when she tried to strengthen it, “I have enjoyed myself enormously.”

  ‘I have enjoyed myself,” she said to Mr. Dalloway, whom she met on the stairs.

  “Lies, lies, lies!” she said to herself, going downstairs, and “Right in the saucer!” she said to herself as she thanked Mrs. Barnet for helping her and wrapped herself, round and round and round, in the Chinese cloak she had worn these twenty years.

  HAPPINESS

  As Stuart Elton stooped and flicked off his trousers a white thread, the trivial act accompanied as it was by a slide and avalanche of sensation, seemed like a petal falling from a rose, and Stuart Elton straightening himself to resume his conversation with Mrs Sutton felt that he was compact of many petals laid firmly and closely on top of each other all reddened, all warmed through, all tinged with this inexplicable glow. So that when he stooped a petal fell. When he was young he had not felt it - no - now aged forty-five, he had only to stoop, to flick a thread off his trousers, and it rushed down all through him, this beautiful orderly sense of life, this slide, this avalanche of sensation, to be at one, when he stood up again adjusted — but what was she saying?

  Mrs Sutton (still being dragged by the hair over the stubble and up and down the ploughed land of early middle age) was saying that managers wrote to her, even made appointments to see her, but nothing came of it. What made it so difficult for her was that she had naturally no connections with the stage, her father, all her people, being just country people. (It was then that Stuart Elton flicked the thread off.) She stopped; she felt rebuked. Yes, Stuart Elton had what she wanted, she felt, as he stooped. And when he stood up again, she apologised — she talked too much about herself she said — and added, ‘You seem to me far the happiest person I know.’

  It chimed oddly with what he had been thinking and that sense of the soft downward rush of life and its orderly readjustment, that sense of the falling petal and the complete rose. But was it ‘happiness’? No. The big word did not seem to fit it, did not seem to refer to this state of being curled in rosy flakes round a bright light. Anyhow said Mrs Sutton, he was of all her friends the one she envied most. He seemed to have everything; she nothing. They counted — each had money enough; she a husband and children; he was a bachelor; she was thirty-five; he forty-five; she had never been ill in her life and he was a positive martyr, he said, to some internal complaint — longed to eat lobster all day long and could not touch it. There she exclaimed! as if she had her fingers on it. Even his illness was a joke to him. Was it balancing one thing against another, she asked? Was it a sense of proportion, was it? Was what, he asked, knowing quite well what she meant, but warding off this harum scarum ravaging woman with her hasty ways[,] with her grievances and her vigour, skirmishing and scrimmaging[,] who might knock over and destroy this very valuable possession, this sense of being — two figures flashed into his mind simultaneously - a flag in a breeze, a trout in a stream - poised, balanced, in a current of clean fresh clear bright lucid tingling impinging sensation which like the air or the stream held him upright so that if he moved a hand, stooped or said anything he dislodged the pressure of the innumerable atoms of happiness which closed and held him up again.

  ‘Nothing matters to you,’ said Mrs Sutton. ‘Nothing changes you,’ she said awkwardly making dashes and splashes about him like a man dabbing putty here there trying to cement bricks together while he stood there very silent, very cryptic, very demure; trying to get something from him, a clue, a key, a guide, envying him, resenting him, and feeling that if she with her emotional range, her passion, her capacity, her gifts had that added, she could straight off be the rival of Mrs Siddons herself.’ He would not tell her; he must tell her.

  ‘I went to Kew this afternoon,’ he said, bending his knee and flicking it again not that there was a white thread there, but to make sure, by repeating the act, that his machine was in order, as it was.

  So if one were being pursued through a forest by wolves one would tear off little bits of clothing and break off biscuits and throw them to the unhappy wolves, feeling almost, but not quite secure oneself, on one’s high swift safe sledge.

  With this whole pack of famished wolves in pursuit, now worrying the little bit of biscuit he had thrown them, - those words, ‘I went to Kew this afternoon’ — Stuart Elton raced swiftly ahead of them back to Kew, to the magnolia tree, to the lake, to the river, holding up his hand, to keep them off. Among them (for now the world seemed full of howling wolves) he remembered people asking him to dinner and lunch, now accepted now not, and his sense there on the sunny stretch of grass at Kew of mastery, even as he could swing his stick so he could choose, this that, go here, there, break off bits of biscuit and toss them to the wolves, read this, look at that, meet him or her, alight at some good fellow’s rooms— ‘To Kew alone?’ Mrs Sutton repeated. ‘By yourself?’

  Ah! the wolf yapped in his ear. Ah! he sighed, as he had for one instant thinking of the past sighed ah by the lake that afternoon, by some woman stitching white stuff under a tree with geese waddling past, he had sighed, seeing the usual sight, lovers, arm in arm, where there was now this peace, this health once there had been ruin storm despair; so again this wolf Mrs Sutton reminded him; alone; yes quite alone; but he recovered, as he had recovered then, as the young people passed, grasping this, this, whatever it was and held it tight and walked on, pitying them.

  ‘Quite alone,’ Mrs Sutton repeated. That was what she could not conceive she said, with a despairing swoop of her dark bright haired head - being happy, quite alone.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  In happiness there is always this terrific exaltation. It is not high spirits; nor rapture; nor praise, fame or health (he could not walk two miles without feeling done up) it is a mystic state, a trance, an ecstasy which, for all that he was atheistical, sceptical, unbaptised and all the rest of i
t, had[,] he suspected[,] some affinity with the ecstasy that turned men priests, sent women in the prime of life trudging the streets with starched cyclamen-like frills about their faces, and set lips and stony eyes; but with this difference; them it prisoned; him it set free. It freed him from all dependence upon anyone upon anything.

  Mrs Sutton felt that too, as she waited for him to speak.

  Yes he would stop his sledge, get out, let the wolves crowd all about him, he would pat their poor rapacious muzzles.

  ‘Kew was lovely — full of flowers — magnolias azaleas,’ he could never remember names he told her.

  It was nothing that they could destroy. No; but if it came so inexplicably, so it might go, he had felt, leaving Kew, walking on the river bank up to Richmond. Why, some branch might fall; the colour might change; green turn blue; or a leaf shake; and that would be enough; yes; that would be enough to shiver, shatter, utterly destroy this amazing thing this miracle, this treasure which was his had been his was his must always be his, he thought getting restive and anxious and without thinking about Mrs Sutton he left her instantly and walked across the room and picked up a paper knife. Yes; it was all right. He had it still.