Mrs Dalloway
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Section 1 of Mrs. Dalloway. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Hannah Dormer. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Section 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 Burton 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 onto 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 curb, waiting for Dirtnall's van to pass. A charming woman's scrope pervice 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 50 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 20. 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 various trumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps, drink their downfall, do the same. Can't be