by Virginia Woolf
 |
| The New Dress |
Mabel had her first serious suspicion that something was wrong as she
took her cloak off and Mrs. Barnet, while handing her the mirror and touching
the brushes and thus drawing her attention, perhaps rather markedly, to all the
appliances for tidying and improving hair, complexion, clothes, which existed
on the dressing table, confirmed the suspicion—that it was not right, not quite
right, which growing stronger as she went upstairs and springing at her, with
conviction as she greeted Clarissa Dalloway, she went straight to the far end
of the room, to a shaded corner where a looking-glass hung and looked. No! It
was not RIGHT. And at once the misery which she always tried to hide, the
profound dissatisfaction—the sense she had had, ever since she was a child, of
being inferior to other people—set upon her, relentlessly, remorselessly, with
an intensity which she could not beat off, as she would when she woke at night
at home, by reading Borrow or Scott; for oh these men, oh these women, all were
thinking—"What's Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous
new dress!"—their eyelids flickering as they came up and then their lids
shutting rather tight. It was her own appalling inadequacy; her cowardice; her
mean, water-sprinkled blood that depressed her. And at once the whole of the
room where, for ever so many hours, she had planned with the little dressmaker
how it was to go, seemed sordid, repulsive; and her own drawing-room so shabby,
and herself, going out, puffed up with vanity as she touched the letters on the
hall table and said: "How dull!" to show off—all this now seemed
unutterably silly, paltry, and provincial. All this had been absolutely
destroyed, shown up, exploded, the moment she came into Mrs. Dalloway's
drawing-room.
What she had
thought that evening when, sitting over the teacups, Mrs. Dalloway's invitation
came, was that, of course, she could not be fashionable. It was absurd to
pretend it even—fashion meant cut, meant style, meant thirty guineas at
least—but why not be original? Why not be herself, anyhow? And, getting up, she
had taken that old fashion book of her mother's, a Paris fashion book of the time
of the Empire, and had thought how much prettier, more dignified, and more
womanly they were then, and so set herself—oh, it was foolish—trying to be like
them, pluming herself in fact, upon being modest and old-fashioned, and very
charming, giving herself up, no doubt about it, to an orgy of self-love, which
deserved to be chastised, and so rigged herself out like this.
But she dared not
look in the glass. She could not face the whole horror—the pale yellow,
idiotically old-fashioned silk dress with its long skirt and its high sleeves
and its waist and all the things that looked so charming in the fashion book,
but not on her, not among all these ordinary people. She felt like a
dressmaker's dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into.
"But, my dear,
it's perfectly charming!" Rose Shaw said, looking her up and down with
that little satirical pucker of the lips which she expected—Rose herself being
dressed in the height of the fashion, precisely like everybody else, always.
We are all like flies
trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer, Mabel thought, and repeated the
phrase as if she were crossing herself, as if she were trying to find some
spell to annul this pain, to make this agony endurable. Tags of Shakespeare,
lines from books she had read ages ago, suddenly came to her when she was in
agony, and she repeated them over and over again. "Flies trying to
crawl," she repeated. If she could say that over often enough and make
herself see the flies, she would become numb, chill, frozen, dumb. Now she
could see flies crawling slowly out of a saucer of milk with their wings stuck
together; and she strained and strained (standing in front of the
looking-glass, listening to Rose Shaw) to make herself see Rose Shaw and all
the other people there as flies, trying to hoist themselves out of something,
or into something, meagre, insignificant, toiling flies. But she could not see
them like that, not other people. She saw herself like that—she was a fly, but
the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing,
fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer.
(Envy and spite, the most detestable of the vices, were her chief faults.)
"I feel like
some dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly," she said, making Robert
Haydon stop just to hear her say that, just to reassure herself by furbishing
up a poor weak-kneed phrase and so showing how detached she was, how witty,
that she did not feel in the least out of anything. And, of course, Robert
Haydon answered something, quite polite, quite insincere, which she saw through
instantly, and said to herself, directly he went (again from some book),
"Lies, lies, lies!" For a party makes things either much more real,
or much less real, she thought; she saw in a flash to the bottom of Robert
Haydon's heart; she saw through everything. She saw the truth. THIS was true,
this drawing-room, this self, and the other false. Miss Milan's little workroom
was really terribly hot, stuffy, sordid. It smelt of clothes and cabbage cooking;
and yet, when Miss Milan put the glass in her hand, and she looked at herself
with the dress on, finished, an extraordinary bliss shot through her heart.
Suffused with light, she sprang into existence. Rid of cares and wrinkles, what
she had dreamed of herself was there—a beautiful woman. just for a second (she
had not dared look longer, Miss Milan wanted to know about the length of the
skirt), there looked at her, framed in the scrolloping mahogany, a grey-white,
mysteriously smiling, charming girl, the core of herself, the soul of herself;
and it was not vanity only, not only self-love that made her think it good,
tender, and true. Miss Milan said that the skirt could not well be longer; if
anything the skirt, said Miss Milan, puckering her forehead, considering with
all her wits about her, must be shorter; and she felt, suddenly, honestly, full
of love for Miss Milan, much, much fonder of Miss Milan than of any one in the
whole world, and could have cried for pity that she should be crawling on the floor
with her mouth full of pins, and her face red and her eyes bulging—that one
human being should be doing this for another, and she saw them all as human
beings merely, and herself going off to her party, and Miss Milan pulling the
cover over the canary's cage, or letting him pick a hemp-seed from between her
lips, and the thought of it, of this side of human nature and its patience and
its endurance and its being content with such miserable, scanty, sordid, little
pleasures filled her eyes with tears.
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 was 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.
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