The Complete Novels - 9 Books in One Edition. Virginia Woolf

Grice wished to know if it was convenient,” etc. She followed him. Ridley, who had prowled unheeded, started forward, stopped, and, with a gesture of disgust, strode off to his study. The sleeping politician was left in Rachel’s charge. She read a sentence, and took a look at him. In sleep he looked like a coat hanging at the end of a bed; there were all the wrinkles, and the sleeves and trousers kept their shape though no longer filled out by legs and arms. You can then best judge the age and state of the coat. She looked him all over until it seemed to her that he must protest.

      He was a man of forty perhaps; and here there were lines round his eyes, and there curious clefts in his cheeks. Slightly battered he appeared, but dogged and in the prime of life.

      “Sisters and a dormouse and some canaries,” Rachel murmured, never taking her eyes off him. “I wonder, I wonder” she ceased, her chin upon her hand, still looking at him. A bell chimed behind them, and Richard raised his head. Then he opened his eyes which wore for a second the queer look of a shortsighted person’s whose spectacles are lost. It took him a moment to recover from the impropriety of having snored, and possibly grunted, before a young lady. To wake and find oneself left alone with one was also slightly disconcerting.

      “I suppose I’ve been dozing,” he said. “What’s happened to everyone? Clarissa?”

      “Mrs. Dalloway has gone to look at Mr. Grice’s fish,” Rachel replied.

      “I might have guessed,” said Richard. “It’s a common occurrence. And how have you improved the shining hour? Have you become a convert?”

      “I don’t think I’ve read a line,” said Rachel.

      “That’s what I always find. There are too many things to look at. I find nature very stimulating myself. My best ideas have come to me out of doors.”

      “When you were walking?”

      “Walking—riding—yachting—I suppose the most momentous conversations of my life took place while perambulating the great court at Trinity. I was at both universities. It was a fad of my father’s. He thought it broadening to the mind. I think I agree with him. I can remember—what an age ago it seems!—settling the basis of a future state with the present Secretary for India. We thought ourselves very wise. I’m not sure we weren’t. We were happy, Miss Vinrace, and we were young—gifts which make for wisdom.”

      “Have you done what you said you’d do?” she asked.

      “A searching question! I answer—Yes and No. If on the one hand I have not accomplished what I set out to accomplish—which of us does!—on the other I can fairly say this: I have not lowered my ideal.”

      He looked resolutely at a sea-gull, as though his ideal flew on the wings of the bird.

      “But,” said Rachel, “what is your ideal?”

      “There you ask too much, Miss Vinrace,” said Richard playfully.

      She could only say that she wanted to know, and Richard was sufficiently amused to answer.

      “Well, how shall I reply? In one word—Unity. Unity of aim, of dominion, of progress. The dispersion of the best ideas over the greatest area.”

      “The English?”

      “I grant that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most men, their records cleaner. But, good Lord, don’t run away with the idea that I don’t see the drawbacks—horrors—unmentionable things done in our very midst! I’m under no illusions. Few people, I suppose, have fewer illusions than I have. Have you ever been in a factory, Miss Vinrace!—No, I suppose not—I may say I hope not.

      As for Rachel, she had scarcely walked through a poor street, and always under the escort of father, maid, or aunts.

      “I was going to say that if you’d ever seen the kind of thing that’s going on round you, you’d understand what it is that makes me and men like me politicians. You asked me a moment ago whether I’d done what I set out to do. Well, when I consider my life, there is one fact I admit that I’m proud of; owing to me some thousands of girls in Lancashire—and many thousands to come after them—can spend an hour every day in the open air which their mothers had to spend over their looms. I’m prouder of that, I own, than I should be of writing Keats and Shelley into the bargain!”

      It became painful to Rachel to be one of those who write Keats and Shelley. She liked Richard Dalloway, and warmed as he warmed. He seemed to mean what he said.

      “I know nothing!” she exclaimed.

      “It’s far better that you should know nothing,” he said paternally, “and you wrong yourself, I’m sure. You play very nicely, I’m told, and I’ve no doubt you’ve read heaps of learned books.”

      Elderly banter would no longer check her.

      “You talk of unity,” she said. “You ought to make me understand.”

      “I never allow my wife to talk politics,” he said seriously. “For this reason. It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals. If I have preserved mine, as I am thankful to say that in great measure I have, it is due to the fact that I have been able to come home to my wife in the evening and to find that she has spent her day in calling, music, play with the children, domestic duties—what you will; her illusions have not been destroyed. She gives me courage to go on. The strain of public life is very great,” he added.

      This made him appear a battered martyr, parting every day with some of the finest gold, in the service of mankind.

      “I can’t think,” Rachel exclaimed, “how any one does it!”

      “Explain, Miss Vinrace,” said Richard. “This is a matter I want to clear up.”

      His kindness was genuine, and she determined to take the chance he gave her, although to talk to a man of such worth and authority made her heart beat.

      “It seems to me like this,” she began, doing her best first to recollect and then to expose her shivering private visions.

      “There’s an old widow in her room, somewhere, let us suppose in the suburbs of Leeds.”

      Richard bent his head to show that he accepted the widow.

      “In London you’re spending your life, talking, writing things, getting bills through, missing what seems natural. The result of it all is that she goes to her cupboard and finds a little more tea, a few lumps of sugar, or a little less tea and a newspaper. Widows all over the country I admit do this. Still, there’s the mind of the widow—the affections; those you leave untouched. But you waste you own.”

      “If the widow goes to her cupboard and finds it bare,” Richard answered, “her spiritual outlook we may admit will be affected. If I may pick holes in your philosophy, Miss Vinrace, which has its merits, I would point out that a human being is not a set of compartments, but an organism. Imagination, Miss Vinrace; use your imagination; that’s where you young Liberals fail. Conceive the world as a whole. Now for your second point; when you assert that in trying to set the house in order for the benefit of the young generation I am wasting my higher capabilities, I totally disagree with you. I can conceive no more exalted aim—to be the citizen of the Empire. Look at it in this way, Miss Vinrace; conceive the state as a complicated machine; we citizens are parts of that machine; some fulfil more important duties; others (perhaps I am one of them) serve only to connect some obscure parts of the mechanism, concealed from the public eye. Yet if the meanest screw fails in its task, the proper working of the whole is imperilled.”

      It was impossible to combine the image of a lean black widow, gazing out of her window, and longing for some one to talk to, with the image of a vast machine, such as one sees at South Kensington, thumping, thumping, thumping. The attempt at communication had been a failure.

      “We don’t seem to understand each other,” she said.

      “Shall I say something that will make you very angry?” he replied.