“We sit in here,” said Helen, opening the door of the saloon.
“You play?” said Mrs. Dalloway to Mrs. Ambrose, taking up the score of Tristan which lay on the table.
“My niece does,” said Helen, laying her hand on Rachel’s shoulder.
“Oh, how I envy you!” Clarissa addressed Rachel for the first time. “D’you remember this? Isn’t it divine?” She played a bar or two with ringed fingers upon the page.
“And then Tristan goes like this, and Isolde—oh!—it’s all too thrilling! Have you been to Bayreuth?”
“No, I haven’t,” said Rachel. “Then that’s still to come. I shall never forget my first Parsifal—a grilling August day, and those fat old German women, come in their stuffy high frocks, and then the dark theatre, and the music beginning, and one couldn’t help sobbing. A kind man went and fetched me water, I remember; and I could only cry on his shoulder! It caught me here” (she touched her throat). “It’s like nothing else in the world! But where’s your piano?” “It’s in another room,” Rachel explained.
“But you will play to us?” Clarissa entreated. “I can’t imagine anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music—only that sounds too like a schoolgirl! You know,” she said, turning to Helen, “I don’t think music’s altogether good for people—I’m afraid not.”
“Too great a strain?” asked Helen.
“Too emotional, somehow,” said Clarissa. “One notices it at once when a boy or girl takes up music as a profession. Sir William Broadley told me just the same thing. Don’t you hate the kind of attitudes people go into over Wagner—like this—” She cast her eyes to the ceiling, clasped her hands, and assumed a look of intensity. “It really doesn’t mean that they appreciate him; in fact, I always think it’s the other way round. The people who really care about an art are always the least affected. D’you know Henry Philips, the painter?” she asked.
“I have seen him,” said Helen.
“To look at, one might think he was a successful stockbroker, and not one of the greatest painters of the age. That’s what I like.”
“There are a great many successful stockbrokers, if you like looking at them,” said Helen.
Rachel wished vehemently that her aunt would not be so perverse.
“When you see a musician with long hair, don’t you know instinctively that he’s bad?” Clarissa asked, turning to Rachel. “Watts and Joachim—they looked just like you and me.”
“And how much nicer they’d have looked with curls!” said Helen. “The question is, are you going to aim at beauty or are you not?”
“Cleanliness!” said Clarissa, “I do want a man to look clean!”
“By cleanliness you really mean well-cut clothes,” said Helen.
“There’s something one knows a gentleman by,” said Clarissa, “but one can’t say what it is.”
“Take my husband now, does he look like a gentleman?”
The question seemed to Clarissa in extraordinarily bad taste. “One of the things that can’t be said,” she would have put it. She could find no answer, but a laugh.
“Well, anyhow,” she said, turning to Rachel, “I shall insist upon your playing to me to-morrow.”
There was that in her manner that made Rachel love her.
Mrs. Dalloway hid a tiny yawn, a mere dilation of the nostrils.
“D’you know,” she said, “I’m extraordinarily sleepy. It’s the sea air. I think I shall escape.”
A man’s voice, which she took to be that of Mr. Pepper, strident in discussion, and advancing upon the saloon, gave her the alarm.
“Good-night—good-night!” she said. “Oh, I know my way—do pray for calm! Good-night!”
Her yawn must have been the image of a yawn. Instead of letting her mouth droop, dropping all her clothes in a bunch as though they depended on one string, and stretching her limbs to the utmost end of her berth, she merely changed her dress for a dressing-gown, with innumerable frills, and wrapping her feet in a rug, sat down with a writing-pad on her knee. Already this cramped little cabin was the dressing room of a lady of quality. There were bottles containing liquids; there were trays, boxes, brushes, pins. Evidently not an inch of her person lacked its proper instrument. The scent which had intoxicated Rachel pervaded the air. Thus established, Mrs. Dalloway began to write. A pen in her hands became a thing one caressed paper with, and she might have been stroking and tickling a kitten as she wrote:
Picture us, my dear, afloat in the very oddest ship you can imagine. It’s not the ship, so much as the people. One does come across queer sorts as one travels. I must say I find it hugely amusing. There’s the manager of the line—called Vinrace—a nice big Englishman, doesn’t say much—you know the sort. As for the rest—they might have come trailing out of an old number of Punch. They’re like people playing croquet in the ’sixties. How long they’ve all been shut up in this ship I don’t know—years and years I should say—but one feels as though one had boarded a little separate world, and they’d never been on shore, or done ordinary things in their lives. It’s what I’ve always said about literary people—they’re far the hardest of any to get on with. The worst of it is, these people—a man and his wife and a niece—might have been, one feels, just like everybody else, if they hadn’t got swallowed up by Oxford or Cambridge or some such place, and been made cranks of. The man’s really delightful (if he’d cut his nails), and the woman has quite a fine face, only she dresses, of course, in a potato sack, and wears her hair like a Liberty shopgirl’s. They talk about art, and think us such poops for dressing in the evening. However, I can’t help that; I’d rather die than come in to dinner without changing—wouldn’t you? It matters ever so much more than the soup. (It’s odd how things like that do matter so much more than what’s generally supposed to matter. I’d rather have my head cut off than wear flannel next the skin.) Then there’s a nice shy girl—poor thing—I wish one could rake her out before it’s too late. She has quite nice eyes and hair, only, of course, she’ll get funny too. We ought to start a society for broadening the minds of the young—much more useful than missionaries, Hester! Oh, I’d forgotten there’s a dreadful little thing called Pepper. He’s just like his name. He’s indescribably insignificant, and rather queer in his temper, poor dear. It’s like sitting down to dinner with an ill-conditioned fox-terrier, only one can’t comb him out, and sprinkle him with powder, as one would one’s dog. It’s a pity, sometimes, one can’t treat people like dogs! The great comfort is that we’re away from newspapers, so that Richard will have a real holiday this time. Spain wasn’t a holiday…
“You coward!” said Richard, almost filling the room with his sturdy figure.
“I did my duty at dinner!” cried Clarissa.
“You’ve let yourself in for the Greek alphabet, anyhow.”
“Oh, my dear! Who is Ambrose?”
“I gather that he was a Cambridge don; lives