Дом с привидениями. Уровень 2 / A Haunted House

“I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”

“Yes?”

“Though why buy newspapers? Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war! I don’t see why we have a snail on our wall.”

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

The New Dress

Mrs. Barnet handed her the mirror. Mabel took her cloak off. She had her first serious suspicion that something was wrong. Thus she confirmed the suspicion. It was not right, not quite right. She went upstairs. She greeted Clarissa Dalloway. She went straight to the far end of the room, to the corner. There a looking-glass hung. She looked. No! It was not right. And at once the misery, the profound dissatisfaction met her, relentlessly. She always tried to hide it.

When she woke at night at home, when she was reading Borrow or Scott; these men, these women were thinking “What’s Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!” Her own cowardice, her mean blood depressed her. And at once the room seemed sordid. It was repulsive. Her own drawing-room seemed shabby. She touched the letters on the hall table. She said: “How dull!” All this now seemed unutterably silly, paltry, and provincial. She came into Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room. All this was absolutely destroyed.

That evening she was sitting over the teacups. Mrs. Dalloway’s invitation came. She decided not to be fashionable. It was absurd to pretend it even. Fashion meant style. Fashion meant thirty guineas at least. Why not be original? Why not be herself, anyhow? And she took her mother’s old fashion book[24 - fashion book – модный журнал]. It was a Paris fashion book of the time of the Empire.

But she dared not look in the glass. She did not face the whole horror—the pale yellow, idiotically old-fashioned silk dress. This dress was with its long skirt and its high sleeves and its waist. All these things looked so charming in the fashion book, but not on her, not among all these ordinary people. She felt like a dressmaker’s dummy.

“But, my dear, it’s perfectly charming!” Rose Shaw said.

We are all like flies which are trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer. Mabel repeated this phrase. She was trying to find some spell to annul this pain. She was trying to make this agony endurable. Tags of Shakespeare, lines from books suddenly came to her. She was in agony. She repeated them over and over again. “Flies which are trying to crawl,” she repeated. Now she saw flies which were crawling slowly out of a saucer of milk. The other people there are like flies. They are trying to hoist themselves out of something, or into something, meagre, insignificant, toiling flies. She saw them like that, not other people. She saw herself like that. She was a fly. The others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects. They were dancing, fluttering, skimming. She alone dragged herself up out of the saucer.

“I feel like some dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly,” she said to Robert Haydon.

She wanted to reassure herself. And, of course, Robert Haydon answered something quite polite, quite insincere. And she said to herself (again from some book), “Lies, lies, lies!”

She saw 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. Miss Milan put the glass in her hand. Then she looked at herself with the dress on. An extraordinary bliss shot through her heart.

She became a beautiful woman. Just for a second, a grey-white, mysterious, charming girl looked at her. It was the core of herself. It was the soul of herself. And she felt, suddenly, honestly, full of love for Miss Milan. She felt much fonder of Miss Milan than of anyone in the whole world.

And then everything vanished. The dress, the room, the love, the pity, the looking-glass, and the canary’s cage—all vanished. Here she was in a corner of Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room.

But it was all so paltry to care so much at her age with two children, to be so dependent on people’s opinions. It was all so paltry not to have principles or convictions. It was all so paltry 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.”

She came into the room. But she looked foolish and self-conscious. She simpered like a schoolgirl. She slouched across the room, like a mongrel.

“Now the fly’s in the saucer,” she said to herself, “right in the middle. It can’t get out. The milk is sticking its wings together.”

“It’s so old-fashioned,” she said to Charles Burt.

He stopped on his way to talk to someone else.

She meant the picture and not her dress, that was old-fashioned. And one word of praise, one word of affection from Charles can change everything. “Mabel, you’re looking charming tonight!”

Charles said nothing of the kind, of course. He was malice itself.

“Mabel’s got a new dress!” he said.

The poor fly was absolutely shoved into the middle of the saucer. Really, he had no heart. He had no kindness, only a veneer of friendliness. Miss Milan was much more real. Miss Milan was much kinder.

“Why,” she asked herself, “can’t I feel one thing always? Why can’t I feel quite sure that Miss Milan is right? Why can’t I feel Charles wrong and stick to it? Why can’t I feel sure about the canary? Why can’t I feel pity and love in a room full of people?”

It was her odious, weak character again. She can’t be seriously interested in conchology, etymology, botany and archeology, like Mary Dennis, like Violet Searle.

Then Mrs. Holman saw her. Of course a thing like a dress was beneath Mrs. Holman’s notice. Not to have value, that was it, she thought. All the time she saw little bits of her yellow dress in the round looking-glass. It was amazing to think how much humiliation and agony and effort and passion were contained in this thing. Ah, this greed was tragic. It was like a row of cormorants. It was tragic!

In her yellow dress tonight she knew that she was condemned. She was despised. It seemed to her that the yellow dress was a penance. She deserved this penance. But it was not her fault, after all. They were ten in the family. They never had enough money. Her mother carried great cans. She was just like her aunts. She wanted to live in India. She wanted to marry to some hero like Sir Henry Lawrence. She wanted to marry some builder in a turban.

She married Hubert, with his job in the Law Courts. They live in a small house. They live without proper maids. She is a fretful, weak, unsatisfactory mother and a wobbly wife, like all her brothers and sisters. Except perhaps Herbert. That wretched fly—where did she read the story about the fly and the saucer? Yes, she had those moments. But now she is forty. By degrees she will cease to struggle anymore. But that is deplorable!

She will go to the London Library tomorrow. She will find some wonderful, helpful, astonishing book. A book by a clergyman, by an American. Or she will walk down the Strand. She will enter a hall. A miner will tell about the life in the pit. Suddenly she will become a new person. She will be absolutely transformed. She will wear a uniform. She will be called Sister Somebody. She will never think about clothes again.

She got up from the blue sofa. The yellow button in the looking-glass got up too. She waved her hand to Charles and Rose. She did not depend on them. The yellow button moved out of the looking-glass. She walked towards Mrs. Dalloway and said,

“Good night.”

“But it’s too early to go,” said Mrs. Dalloway. She was always charming.

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

“I enjoyed myself,” she said to Mr. Dalloway. She met him on the stairs.

“Lies, lies, lies!” she said to herself. “Right in the saucer!” she said to herself as she thanked Mrs. Barnet.

The Shooting Party

She got in. She put her suit case in the rack, and the brace of pheasants on top of it. Then she sat down in the corner. The train was rattling through the midlands. The fog came in. She opened the door. She enlarged the carriage. M. M.—those were the initials on the suit case. M. M. was staying the week-end with a shooting party. She was telling over the story now. She was lying back in her corner. She did not shut her eyes. But clearly she did not see the man opposite. She did not see the coloured photograph of York Minster. But she heard them. For as she gazed, her lips moved. Now and then she smiled. And she was handsome; tawny; but scarred on the jaw. The scar lengthened when she smiled. She was dressed out of fashion as women dressed, years ago, in pictures. She did not seem exactly a guest, nor yet a maid. She had only a suitcase and the pheasants. She listened to what they were saying. She said “Chk.” Then she smiled.

“Chk,” said Miss Antonia.

Then she pinched her glasses on her nose. The damp leaves fell across the long windows of the gallery. Then the trees in the Park shivered.

“Chk,” Miss Antonia sniffed again.

The wind sighed. The room was draughty. Now and then a ripple, like a reptile, ran under the carpet. On the carpet lay panels of green and yellow. The sun rested there. Then the sun moved. Miss Antonia looked up as the light strengthened. Her forefathers—the Rashleighs—owned vast lands, so they said. Over there. Up the Amazons. Freebooter. Voyagers. Captives. Maidens. Miss Antonia grinned. The finger of the sun rested on a silver frame. Then on a photograph; on an egg-shaped baldish head; on a lip; and the name “Edward”.

“The King,” Miss Antonia muttered, “had the Blue Room.”

They were driving the pheasants out in the King’s Ride, across the noses of the guns. The birds spurted up from the underwood like heavy rockets. Reddish purple rockets. Then they faded. They dispersed gently.

In the road, a cart stood. Soft warm bodies, with limp claws, and still lustrous eyes. The birds seemed alive. They looked relaxed and comfortable. Then the Squire cursed and raised his gun.

Miss Antonia stitched on. Now and then a tongue of flame reached the grey log. Miss Antonia looked up for a moment, as a dog stares at a flame. Then the flame sank. She stitched again.

Then, silently, the enormously high door opened. Two lean men came in. They drew a table over the hole in the carpet. They went out. They came in. They laid a cloth upon the table. They went out. They came in. They brought a green baize basket of knives and forks; and glasses. They brought sugar casters; and salt cellars; and bread. They brought a silver vase with three chrysanthemums in it. Miss Antonia stitched on.

Again the door opened. A little dog trotted in, a spaniel. It paused. And then old Miss Rashleigh entered. A white shawl clouded her baldness. She hobbled. She crossed the room. She hunched herself in the high-backed chair by the fireside. Miss Antonia stitched on.

“They are shooting,” she said at last.