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 OTHER ANNOTATED BOOKS FROM W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

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by Lewis Carroll, edited with an introduction and notes by Martin Gardner

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The Annotated Christmas Carol

by Charles Dickens, edited with an introduction and notes by Michael Patrick Hearn

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volumes I, II, and III

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with an introduction by John LeCarré, edited with a
preface and notes by Leslie S. Klinger

The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales

edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar

The Annotated Brothers Grimm

by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, with an introduction by A. S. Byatt, edited with a
preface and notes by Maria Tatar

The Annotated Hunting of the Snark

by Lewis Carroll, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik, edited with notes by Martin
Gardner

The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin

by Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited with an introduction and notes by Henry Louis
Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins

The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen

translated by Maria Tatar and Julie Allen, with an introduction and notes by Maria
Tatar
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by Frances Hodgson Burnett, edited with an introduction and notes by Gretchen
Holbrook Gerzina

The New Annotated Dracula

by Bram Stoker, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman, edited with a preface and
notes by Leslie S. Klinger

The Annotated Wind in the Willows

by Kenneth Grahame, with an introduction by Brian Jacques, edited with a preface
and notes by Annie Gauger

The Annotated Peter Pan

by J. M. Barrie, edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar

The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

with an introduction by Alan Moore, edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie S.
Klinger

The New Annotated Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley, with an introduction by Guillermo del Toro and an afterword by
Anne K. Mellor, edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger

The Annotated African American Folktales

edited with a foreword, introduction, and notes by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria
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The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham

with an introduction by Victor LaValle, edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie
S. Klinger
Virginia Woolf outdoors at Garsington, smoking, June 1923. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s
House photographs, MS Thr 564, [67]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.)
To DD
Virginia Woolf, black-and-white photograph of portrait painted by Vanessa Bell,
1934. (Monk’s House photographs, MS Thr 564, [77]. Houghton Library, Harvard
College Library)
 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Mrs. Dalloway

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WORKS CONSULTED
Virginia Woolf, photographed by Man Ray, 1935. (Granger Historical Picture
Archive / Alamy)
 INTRODUCTION

I.

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S Mrs. Dalloway, first published in 1925, traces a

single summer day in the lives of two people whose paths never
cross: Clarissa Dalloway, just over fifty, elegant, charming, and self-
possessed, the wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative member of
Parliament; and Septimus Warren Smith, a solitary ex-soldier, a
prophetic man haunted by visions he cannot explain to his
anguished wife Lucrezia. Clarissa spends the day preparing for the
party she will give later that night—buying flowers, managing
servants, mending a dress, and receiving her old suitor, Peter Walsh,
whose sudden reappearance in her life recalls her to the passion and
freedom of their youth. While she and Peter reminisce, Septimus is
in Regent’s Park hallucinating. Given to thoughts of suicide, he visits
an unsympathetic doctor at his wife’s insistence. He throws himself
from a window in the early evening, and several hours later, word
that “a young man had killed himself” reaches Clarissa at her party.
Clarissa observes her guests and sees that they are oblivious to
the disaster, the disgrace of death. She walks into an empty room,
and in a moment of astonishing reverie, considers what her life has
been—what any life must be: “the terror; the overwhelming
incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be
lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths
of her heart an awful fear.” Against this fear, her love of life rushes
from her with a sense of triumph, with the rapture of existence—the
sheer joy of being alive to experience all that the world still has to
offer someone like her. She returns to her party, where Peter Walsh
waits, eager to see her for the second time that day. “What is this
terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that
fills me with extraordinary excitement?” She enters the room. “It is
Clarissa, he said. For there she was.” The novel ends.

II.

I READ Mrs. Dalloway for the first time when I was maybe ten or
eleven, too young to make much sense of it. It was summer. I was
away from home, though I cannot recall where or why exactly—only
that the mornings spread upon a countryside very green and bright,
and that the days were hot, and longer than one felt they had any
right to be. What I do remember, with a clarity that startles me, is a
letter I received and opened with excitement, a letter I kept for
many years. It was written on a sheet of paper torn from a
composition notebook, with obvious care taken not to jag the edges.
The writer was a friend from school, a boy to whom I had mailed my
copy of Mrs. Dalloway after I finished so he could read it too. With
the novel, I must have enclosed a letter of my own offering him
some explanation, some insistence that he not only read Mrs.
Dalloway but read my copy of it, and see something of us reflected
in the pages I had annotated—most likely, the scenes about being
young and half in love. Once he had read it, he was indignant and
excited. “You were wrong,” he wrote. “We’re not Mrs. Dalloway and
Peter Walsh. We are Jake Barnes and Lady Ashley from ‘The Sun
Also Rises’ by one Ernest Hemingway. Don’t jump to conclusions
halfway through. Read the book to the end . . . the very end.”
The self-seriousness of this exchange has been leveled by time,
by the sheepishness and irony that this absurdly heady flirtation now
summons. Reading the letter today, I feel embarrassed on behalf of
our younger selves, for whatever childish misunderstanding had led
us to believe that our relationship was well represented by either
Clarissa and Peter, the repressed upper-class English wife and the
dull, mawkish civil servant she refused to marry, or Lady Bret Ashley
and Jake Barnes, the sexually liberated English divorcee and the
impotent American journalist she loved too much to shake loose. Yet
I confess to feeling some distant admiration for the readers we had
been. I believe we had intuited something essential about novels,
and about Mrs. Dalloway in particular, when we sought some
continuity between our lives and the lives we read about in fiction. It
must have seemed possible, even desirable to us, that her fictional
characters would help us relieve “the pressure of an emotion” and
feel the shape of a thought; would offer us a glimpse of the ever-
deepening “colors, salts, tones of existence” that Woolf described in
Clarissa’s meditations on youth and its discoveries. In creating Peter
and Clarissa, she had laid a narrow spit of land between our lives
and her art, on which she had scattered a procession of moods and
postures, scraps of conversation that allowed us not just to endow
her characters with the semblance of reality but to try on parts of it
as our own.
Mrs. Dalloway let me sense what I would come to understand
only later, that a fictional character is a marvelously and perplexingly
hybrid creature. She is a piece of writing, and as such, is made up
“of words, of images, of imaginings,” writes John Frow. But she also
requires the pretense of existence: the belief, however wide-eyed or
fantastical, that from behind these words, or from within their
vaporous trail, there rises a distinctly human shape. It is this shape
who beckons to her readers, who swiftly and assuredly ushers them
into her world as fellow travelers. It is she who extends the
invitation to her party. So charmed are we by her presence—how is
it that people can spring from nothing more than marks on a page?
—that we are insensible to the fact that she is but the middleman,
brokering a more far-flung relationship. Behind her stands our true
hostess: the writer, exceptionally well-disguised.
This is, at least, how Woolf imagined the relationship between
readers, writers, and characters in her 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and
Mrs. Brown,” which she wrote at the same time as Mrs. Dalloway,
and which gives expression to the same philosophy of character as
the novel. Characters were to serve as a “common meeting-place”
between the writer and her reader. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”
cast the writer and the reader as two strangers getting to know one
another in a distant, impersonal way, learning through characters
how to calibrate each other’s sensibilities and thoughts. In Woolf’s
view, their fellowship was like the rapport that “the perfect hostess”
(Peter’s memorable description of Clarissa) cultivated with an
unknown guest—the kind of guest who arrives at a party alone,
unannounced and empty-handed, and must be coaxed into
conversation with others, those whom the hostess can rely on to be
courteous and entertaining, lest he begin to trail her from room to
room. “Both in life and in literature, it is necessary to have some
means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown
guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the
other,” Woolf wrote. “The writer must get into touch with his reader
by putting before him something which he recognises, which
therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to
cooperate in the far more difficult business of intimacy.”
So stimulated, the reader learns how to be the writer’s
accomplice in what Woolf called the art of “character-reading”: a
practice of observing, of speculating about, people, both in life and
in fiction. The adept character-reader was one who fixed people with
a powerful, sympathetic, and searching gaze; who seized on their
unobtrusive moments—their small habits, their humble memories,
their incessant chatter—to grasp the full force of their spirit, their
being. Character-reading was an everyday talent, imminently useful
and even necessary. “Indeed, it would be impossible to live for a
year without disaster unless one practiced character-reading and had
some skill in the art,” Woolf wrote. “Our marriages, our friendships
depend on it; our business largely depends on it; everyday questions
arise which can only be solved by its help.” Though character-
reading could smooth the social tribulations of adult life, Woolf held
it to be, first and foremost, the art of the young. They drew on it for
“friendships and other adventures and experiments” that were less
frequently embarked on in middle or old age, when character-
reading retreated from its inventiveness, its candid curiosity, and
became a dutiful, pragmatic exercise, a way to avoid
misunderstandings and arguments.
The novelist was distinct among adults. She was a perpetual
youth, preoccupied with the lives of others long after it was either
necessary or prudent. Character-reading clutched at her first as “an
absorbing pursuit,” then as an obsession. Like all obsessions, it
demanded expression. To become a writer was to transform oneself
from a reader of character, gazing at those around her with avid,
gleaming eyes, to a creator of character, turning her observations
into words, conjectures, fantasies. In life as in literature, she bathed
ordinary people in the glow of her generous, affectionate
imagination; remained attentive to the shadows and shades of their
personalities. She did not seek to understand people completely, to
master them. She knew all too well the disordered currents of
emotion that ate away at the smooth and steady tracts of the mind,
that no one, no matter how charming or successful or self-
possessed, ever existed as a complete and wholly integrated self.
Suppose, then, that there was something supremely appropriate
in my friend and I coming to Mrs. Dalloway in the dark, too ignorant
to grasp its characters’ relations fully, but capable of perceiving, with
a sudden clap of recognition, that the possibilities and frustrations
lighting their minds—excitement, defensiveness, fear; the inability to
know another person with certainty—were also lighting ours.
Suppose Woolf had created them with an eye to dissolving the
boundary between fiction and life, revealing to us that the patterns
of thought and feeling arranged by the novel were already
embedded in the trivial occurrences of our daily lives (though they
may not have seemed trivial to us at the time). This was the
explanation that Erich Auerbach ventured as to why Woolf’s writing
overflowed with such “good and genuine love but also, in its
feminine way, with irony, amorphous sadness, and doubt in life.” Her
characters, for all the particularities of their nationality, their race
and their class, offered an admirably collective and unifying vision of
humankind. They modeled “nothing less than the wealth of reality
and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves
without prejudice,” Auerbach wrote. “To be sure, what happens in
that moment—be it outer or inner processes—concerns in a very
personal way the individual who lives in it, but it also (and for that
very reason) concerns the elementary things which men in general
have in common”: confusion, undoubtedly, but also the enigmatic
beauty that could be dug out of minor, random, half-forgotten
events.
Virginia Woolf outdoors holding a walking stick, Cornwall, 1916. (Virginia Woolf
Monk’s House photograph album, MH-2, MS Thr 559, [21]. Houghton Library,
Harvard College Library)
 I do not think that Auerbach is right in referring to this sense of
shared life, in all its hope and all its melancholy, as a distinctly
feminine way of seeing the world. But I do believe that only Woolf’s
characters could have shown us the common ground where life and
fiction meet: not at fixed points in time and space, but in the
recesses of our minds. Had we selected a novel by Flaubert, we
might have been mesmerized by the scenes he set, every spoon in
every tearoom polished, every grain of sand in the folds of Emma
Bovary’s dress discolored and rough. Had we selected a novel by
Dickens, we might have flung ourselves into his grand, spirited plots,
the action rising, falling, cresting and breaking, then carrying us,
along with Pip and Estella, to the end of the book in the most
orderly and satisfying manner. Woolf prided herself less on detail and
plot than on the creation of characters, who, for all their physical
indeterminacy and psychological inconstancy, their worldly
insignificance, had minds that felt “real, true, and convincing,” she
wrote in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” She burrowed deep into their
processes of thought, and, so submerged, illuminated the
astonishing perceptions and sensations concealed therein. From
them, she extracted not just a stream of consciousness but an
unlimited capacity for life—a vitality that could only have been hinted
at by the lines of eyes and noses, by little speeches and long
silences. One could scarcely imagine stepping into these depths of
intimacy with Hemingway’s terse, battered brood. (Though who
knows what sort of intimacies my friend had imagined.)
It is perhaps too obvious to insist that Mrs. Dalloway is about a
character—for there she is in the title, which Woolf changed from “At
Home, or The Party” to “The Hours,” before settling on “Mrs.
Dalloway.” (Woolf also considered “The Life of a Lady,” “A Lady,” “A
Ladies Portrait,” and “A Lady of Fashion”—titles that alluded to Henry
James’s The Portrait of a Lady, arguably the greatest novel of
consciousness and character.) But Mrs. Dalloway is also a novel that
thinks with extraordinary precision and virtuosity about what modern
novelists mean when they talk about character: how characters are
born; how they age and grow; how they navigate the world of the
novel, bumping into the people and the objects that constitute it;
how they reach for one another in moments of terror and joy, and,
finding nothing solid to hold on to, shrink back, unfurling the
dazzling intricacies of their thoughts like the petals of the flowers
Clarissa Dalloway sees at the florist’s shop, each burning in solitude,
“softly, purely in the misty beds.” The intimacy we are offered with
her characters comes at the expense of the intimacy they cannot
offer each other. So, in one of my favorite scenes in the novel (I
must have asked my friend to attend to it closely), Peter and Clarissa
sit in her drawing room, she with her sewing needle, he with his
pocket knife, with all the recriminations of the past thirty years
hanging between them, walling them off from each other, leaving
each no choice but to turn inward, showing the reader, and the
reader alone, the memories that still twinge and wound. So
Septimus sits in the park, and the light of the sun dancing across the
leaves overwhelms him—a feeling he can express to Lucrezia only in
frightening, nonsensical murmur. But to the reader he offers an ode
to truth and beauty.
Many years after my first reading, the great pleasure of
annotating Mrs. Dalloway has been to follow the thread of character-
reading through the novel, trying to impress its importance not on
one or two readers in the past, but on many in the present. Looking
beyond Peter and Clarissa, looking beyond the text to the history of
its creation, we discover that the thread never slackens or snaps. We
find it wound tightly around the novel’s origins: Woolf’s decision to
turn Clarissa Dalloway, a minor character in her first novel, The
Voyage Out (1915), into the main character of her story “Mrs.
Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923)—and then, discovering that Clarissa
clamored for more life, Woolf’s slow and almost unwilling surrender
to the novel. We find it stitched through her largest revision to the
story: the creation of Septimus as Clarissa’s double, so as to entwine
the story of an aging, wealthy, vivacious woman with this story of
the First World War and its deadly consequences. Her most famous
diary entry about Mrs. Dalloway presents her two characters as
representing the metaphysical and political extremes that most
intrigued her: “I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want
to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most
intense.” Yet as soon as she voiced this, she retracted it. “But here I
may be posing,” she wrote. There is no doubt her characters are
shot with history: that, as Alex Zwerdling observes, Woolf used her
fiction to contemplate the death throes of the British Empire and to
satirize its “hierarchies of class and sex, its complacency, its moral
obtuseness.” But the greatness of her novel comes from its refusal
“to judge simply and divide the world into heroes and villains.” Her
characters remain irreducibly, unconventionally themselves, which
means they remain eternally available to show us “the life of feeling
in every human being.”
The place to pick up the thread of character-reading is where
Woolf tells us it originates: in life, with the early adventures and
experiments that compelled her to attend to her family and friends
with the same concentrated gaze she turned on the novels she read,
and later, the novels she wrote. She mined her life for her fiction,
though not in any obvious way. What she sought was not the crude,
tangled stuff of gossip. She was after “the slipperiness of the soul.”
She wanted the novels to heave with deep, conflicted emotion, with
love and with hate; with longing, irritation, regret, relief, madness,
and the wonder of being alive to experience it all. At the same time,
she believed the writer should absent herself, her person, from the
scene of representation. “I think writing must be formal,” she wrote
in her diary while editing Mrs. Dalloway in the winter of 1924. “If
one lets the mind run loose, it becomes egotistical: personal, which I
detest.” Yet she did not see how, if she were to play the hostess, she
could avoid revealing some of herself, the idiosyncratic bent of her
imagination. “The irregular fire must be there; & perhaps to loose it,
one must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that,”
she wrote. In creating her characters, she let her readers peep at
her character, with all its passions and contradictions.

III.
EVEN A HASTY GLANCE at the life of Adeline Virginia Stephen will reveal
that her beginning was irregular, at once enchanted and turbulent.
Born on January 25, 1882, she was the second daughter to alight
upon the union of Leslie Stephen, a historian and biographer, and
Julia Duckworth, a woman far too charming, according to family
friend Henry James, to have become “the receptacle” of Leslie
Stephen’s “ineffable and impossible taciturnity and dreariness.” Both
of Virginia’s parents had been married and widowed once before.
Both had brought older children with them to their new marriage.
With Leslie came a daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen; with Julia,
two sons, George and Gerald Duckworth, and a daughter, Stella. To
these four, Leslie and Julia added Vanessa in 1879, Thoby in 1880,
Virginia in 1882, and Adrian in 1883. They grew their family mostly
through carelessness and good fortune, at a time when violent
coughs and raging fevers frequently cut short the lives of young
children—and so, when they finished, judged themselves lucky not
to have “lost” any of theirs along the way.
Julia Duckworth Stephen and Sir Leslie Stephen sitting on a couch reading;
Virginia Woolf sitting behind the arm of the couch looking at her parents, Talland
House, St Ives (Cornwall), 1893. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photograph album,
MH-3, MS Thr 560, [2]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)

In a family cluttered with children, “Little ’Ginia” stood out from

the start, a baby with red hair and large green eyes. She was an
apprehensive character; intensely responsive and quick to anger;
always pleading nervousness or fear; and refusing to submit to her
parents’ caresses, unless to get her way. Her knack for telling stories
was apparent early on, in the letter she wrote to her mother at age
five or six “about an old man of 70 who got his legs caute in the
weels of the train”; in the tale she told her father before bed, “a long
rigmarole about a crow and a book.” She could be comical, eccentric
even. Her family nicknamed her “the Goat” for her bleating little
laugh and accident-proneness. Photographs from her childhood
show a small round girl with a high forehead and heavy eyes. Later,
they depict an adolescent with a moody jaw and large thin ears.
Hers was a face that needed time to grow into the supercilious
elegance many would come to associate with it.

Top row, from left to right: Leslie Stephen, Lady Albutt, Julia Duckworth Stephen.
Next to Gerald Duckworth is Sir Clifford Albutt. Bottom row, from left to right:
Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Adrian Stephen. St Ives (Cornwall), 1892. (Virginia
Woolf Monk’s House photograph album, MH-5, MS Thr 562, [5]. Houghton Library,
Harvard College Library)
Hayle from Lelant, Cornwall, Alfred East. Oil on panel, 1891–92. (Birmingham
Museums Trust)

Virginia’s winters were spent in the darkness and chill of London,

at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington. Summers were passed at
Talland House, Leslie Stephen’s “pocket-paradise” in Cornwall—a
large, shabby, stucco house, with disorderly gardens that sloped to
the shore and iron-railed balconies that overlooked, first, St Ives Bay,
and then, if one were to raise one’s eyes to the horizon, the Celtic
Sea. (The sound of the waves breaking, their powerful, rhythmic
indifference to the human beings standing on the shore—Woolf
would recall this scene and its sensations in all her novels.) For the
Stephen children, as for Clarissa Dalloway, summer was a season of
intense happiness. Carriage rides, moth hunts, fireworks, games of
cricket, billiards and charades, swimming and boating competitions,
putting on plays—all their joy and amusement was recorded in “The
Hyde Park Gate News,” the newspaper Virginia and Vanessa wrote
and circulated to their neighbors. By the time Virginia was ten, she,
Thoby, Vanessa, and Adrian had banded together as the family’s
“Explorers and revolutionists,” casting off their half-siblings as the
“consenting and approving Victorians.”

Facade of Talland House, St Ives (Cornwall), undated. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s

House photograph album, MH-5, MS Thr 562, [1d]. Houghton Library, Harvard
College Library)

From an early age, “the Victorian” would signify all that was dull,
antiquated, and prim to her, in life as well as in the literature. Her
half-siblings often appeared to her not as full-fleshed characters but
as types—the musty and predictable figures one would find
throughout all her fiction, and especially in Mrs. Dalloway. There was
unctuous Gerald and loathsome, ignorant George, who, when
Virginia turned seventeen, would start slipping into her room at night
to fondle her. (One can see the two of them peeping out from
behind “the admirable” Hugh Whitbread, Clarissa Dalloway’s
pompous, sexually abusive friend.) There was kind, dreamy Stella,
whom one often found sitting in a corner, her golden head bent over
her white dresses and doilies; and who, like Clarissa’s sister Sylvia,
would die young and tragically. There was Laura—a “little wretch,”
according to Leslie Stephen; “backward” and “wicked” and prone to
“dreadful fits of passion.” Cherished at first, she was afflicted by an
unidentified mental illness and institutionalized when Virginia was
eleven. When she created Septimus Smith nearly thirty years later,
she insisted that, for all his delusions, he was no “degenerate.” She
had more sympathy for him than for her half-sister, the squealing,
stammering, “vacant-eyed girl” she recalled in her memoirs.
Of all her siblings, it was Vanessa whom Virginia loved best. It
was “Nessa” who took care of her—who bathed her and rubbed her
back with scents to calm her nerves, and put her to bed in clean
sheets; who guarded her, amused her, and encouraged her to read
and to write. Their mother was often away, nursing sick and dying
family members, or too unwell herself to rise from bed. Their father,
a self-absorbed and resolutely tortured figure, spent most of his time
fretting over work and money. Though Leslie read aloud to Virginia
in the evenings, selecting his favorite passages from Shakespeare,
Milton, Hawthorne, and Austen, the exact shape and substance of
his daughters’ intellectual development was left to them to decide.
The boys had their public schools, then Cambridge. Vanessa, who
would become a painter and interior designer, took it upon herself to
enroll in art classes at Sir Arthur Cope’s Art School. Virginia’s
education was more haphazard: some courses in Greek and history
at King’s College, private Latin lessons with Clara Pater, the sister of
the English essayist Walter Pater. Despite her schooling, and despite
her family’s “very communicative, literate, letter writing” life, Virginia
sometimes presented herself as appallingly uneducated, ignorant
even. All her life, she claimed, she was nothing more than “a
common reader”—the title she would give to the essay collection she
drafted while writing Mrs. Dalloway.
Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell as young girls with cricket bat and ball at St Ives
(Cornwall), c. 1893–94. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photographs, MS Thr 564,
[50]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)

Still, it is true that most of the knowledge Virginia gleaned during

her childhood came from the books she squirreled from her father’s
library. She turned their pages with a discipline so fierce, so
relentless, that it concerned Leslie just as much as it astonished him.
It was not unusual for her to read three or four books at once,
“gobbling” her “beloved Macaulay,” Lamb, Pepys, and Montaigne,
savoring the novels of the Brontë sisters, Eliot, and Trollope as the
purest and deepest pleasure she could imagine. If her
autodidacticism had the effect of making her violently single-minded
and contemptuous of authority—particularly when disguised as male
benevolence or reason—then it also endowed her with a sense of
intellectual self-sufficiency. She arrived in adolescence convinced that
the curiosity that burned in her mind, the loving particularity of her
imagination, would light her queer, crooked path through the world.
She was thirteen when, on May 5, 1895, her mother died of
influenza. Some twenty-nine years later, while writing Mrs. Dalloway,
she recalled Julia’s death in her diary: “I think it happened early on a
Sunday morning, & I looked out of the nursery window & saw old Dr
Seton walking away with his hands behind his back, as if to say It is
finished, & then the doves descending, to peck in the road, I
suppose, with a fall & descent of infinite peace.” After Julia’s death,
the remaining members of the Stephen family plunged into a period
of oppressive mourning that stretched for nine unhappy years, from
1895 to 1904. Leslie turned theatrical. He took to wandering the
house with his arms outstretched, proclaiming his undying love for
Julia and demanding that his daughters care for him with the same
selflessness their mother had shown. Embarrassed by their father’s
emotional excesses, the Stephen children learned to smother their
own feelings of grief. Her mother’s last words to her—“Hold yourself
straight, little Goat”—lodged deep into Virginia’s being, as did her
fear of both sentimentality and stoicism. Shrinking from her father
and her siblings, she never spoke of Julia if she could help it. “Used
to sit up in my room raging—at father, at George. And read and read
and read,” she would later recall. She read to console and to distract
herself. Books, she wrote, were “a mercy.”

Virginia Woolf and Sir Leslie Stephen. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photograph
album, MH-1, MS Thr 557, [180]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)

Virginia never stopped reading—not when Stella died in 1897

during an operation; nor when Leslie was diagnosed with bowel
cancer in 1902; nor in the two excruciating years it took him to die.
After his death, she set her books aside and had her first breakdown
in the spring of 1904. “All that summer she was mad,” her nephew
Quentin Bell later recalled, in his infamous, bitterly contested
account of her illness. Refusing food, refusing sleep, she started to
hear voices. A chorus of birds chirped in Greek outside her bedroom
window. (Twenty years later, the sparrows in Regent’s Park would
“sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words” to Septimus Smith.) She
answered them in a thick stream of gibberish that frightened her
siblings. The doctors who came exasperated her. She responded to
their orders—sleep, rest, isolation from those she loved—with
threats, behaving viciously toward her nurses. When she tried to
commit suicide for the first time, she threw herself from a first-story
window. Unlike “the large Bloomsbury lodging-house window” from
which Septimus would plummet in Mrs. Dalloway, her window was
too low for the fall to cause any lasting injuries.
“All the voices I used to hear telling me to do all kinds of wild
things have gone—and Nessa says they were always only my
imagination,” Virginia wrote to her friend Violet Dickinson in
September of 1904. By the autumn, when she had recovered
enough to read and write again, it was in Bloomsbury, in the house
her siblings had rented in Gordon Square after leaving their family
home in Kensington. Orphaned, they adopted a new group of friends
—the earnest, witty, liberated young men who had been at
Cambridge with Thoby and now found themselves drawn to the
Stephen family’s “odd new Bloomsbury life.” Outside the house were
the great squares of London with their rows of pale, lamp-lit trees;
Regent’s Park and the London Zoo; and an old blind woman who had
claimed a narrow strip of Oxford Street and stooped there all day
long, singing above the sound of the omnibuses coming and going.
(All this Woolf would memorialize in Mrs. Dalloway’s London.) Inside,
on Thursday and Friday evenings, one could find an equally spirited
gathering of painters, critics, novelists, aspiring politicians, and
economists; for there, scattered about the sitting room, were Clive
Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Desmond MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey,
John Maynard Keynes, and, before he left for Ceylon to do the
bidding of the British Empire, Leonard Woolf. Virginia referred to
them simply as her “group.”
Oxford Circus, c. 1920. (UK Photo and Social History Archive)
Piccadilly Circus, Jacques-Emile Blanche. Oil on panel, c. 1900. (York Art Gallery)

Both Virginia’s admirers and her detractors would come to call

her circle of friends “the Bloomsbury group.” Over time, the freedom
and creativity associated with Bloomsbury—its postimpressionist art,
its socialist politics, its sexual liberties—would assume unreal
proportions, eclipsing the very real tensions within it. Many have
wondered what it must have been like for Virginia, to be one of the
few women in the sitting room at Gordon Square, the only person
who had neither attended Cambridge nor slept with anyone who
had. Certainly, she admired the spontaneity of the group’s talk, the
burst of activity they brought to her life after years of grief had left
her feeling raw and inert. But she also scorned these young men,
whose chatter only skimmed the surface of life, who aped
intelligence instead of embracing it fully, she felt. At times they
struck her as perfect specimens of “the public school type”: the term
she used to describe a man whose path through life—a bedroom at
Eton, a study at Oxford or Cambridge, a place in London society—
betrayed an entitlement she found despicable. “No country but
England could have produced him,” proclaims Sally Seton, Clarissa
Dalloway’s girlhood friend and lover, of “the public school type.” For
Virginia, the roar and splendor of Bloomsbury concealed the social
circumstances that made its genius, an overwhelmingly male genius,
possible.
She returned to writing at twenty-three, partly out of pride, but
mostly out of wonder at the struggles of modern fiction, working as
a book critic for the Guardian, the National Review, and the Times
Literary Supplement, eager to testify “to the great fun & pleasure my
habit of reading has given me.” She started to journey around the
countryside, learning to train her eye on every stray sign of life, like
a spaniel flushing the fields. In Norfolk, she threaded together
impressions of “thatched cottages—sign posts—tiny villages—great
waggons heaped with corn—sagacious dogs, farmers’ carts.” Peering
down the white bluffs of Cornwall, she wondered why the sea
seemed to her, as it did to so many others, “a symbol of their
mother England.” England intrigued her, with its strange, ancient,
romantic ruins and faraway outposts in mysterious lands; its rigid,
stony-hearted royals and its dingy, disagreeable servants. (“The fact
is the lower classes are detestable,” Woolf would write in her diary in
1920—a prejudice she harbored and took great care to ironize in
Mrs. Dalloway.) Her fascination with the nation’s character would
shape all her work, tinging her portraits of the English with nostalgia
and contempt, satire and snobbery. In 1905, she made her first
attempt at novel writing with Melymbrosia, later published as The
Voyage Out, and containing her earliest sketch of Clarissa and
Richard Dalloway.
Plowing in Norfolk, c. 1900. (UK Photo and Social History Archive)
The harbor at St Ives, c. 1920. (UK Photo and Social History Archive)

In her newfound state of happiness, Virginia was not prepared to

lose two siblings almost at once: first Thoby, who died late in 1906,
after contracting typhoid during a family holiday to Greece; then, in
1907, Vanessa, to marriage, to Clive Bell and their artistic union. The
siblings who remained, Virginia and Adrian, moved to a house in
Fitzroy Square and lived together for two uneasy years. Theirs was
an unhappy relationship: Adrian found that his older sister was
fussier and more demanding than he had anticipated. She judged
him unambitious, lachrymose. In 1909, incapable of tolerating each
other’s company any longer, they moved to 38 Brunswick Square
and acquired three tenants, or as Virginia called them, “inmates”:
Keynes and Grant (then lovers), and, a little later, Leonard Woolf,
who had returned to England in June 1911 for a year of leave from
his administrative duties in Ceylon. She served the inmates breakfast
at 9 a.m., lunch at 1 p.m., tea at 4:30 p.m., and dinner at 8 p.m.
“Trays will be placed in the halls punctually at these hours,” Virginia
wrote in the tenancy agreement she drew up for Leonard, who
moved into one of the upstairs rooms and paid the Stephen family
35 shillings a week. “Inmates are requested to carry up their own
trays; and to put the dirty plates on them and carry them down
again as soon as the meal is finished.”
None of Virginia’s biographers presents a particularly compelling
account of how and why the lodger fell in love with his landlord.
Some accuse their mutual friend Lytton Strachey of meddling. In
1910, he wrote to Leonard, then still in Ceylon, informing him that
the cool, virginal Virginia Stephen needed a man to come claim her:
“If you came & proposed she’ld accept you. She really would.”
Others claim Vanessa went to great lengths to impress upon Leonard
Virginia’s vulnerability, her need for constant care. Primed to fall in
love with her, he did so after only a handful of encounters: a
weekend spent walking the Downs with her outside a friend’s home
in Firle, telling her about the seven years he spent in Ceylon
“governing natives, inventing ploughs, shooting tigers”; a
performance of Wagner’s Siegfried in Covent Garden; a trip to the
Russian ballet. “I see it will be the beginning of hopelessness,” he
wrote to Strachey on November 1, 1911. “To be in love with her—
isn’t that a danger?”
By Virginia’s own admission, she could fall only half in love with
him. The other half of herself she had pledged to her writing.
Besides, she believed in maintaining some distance in the relations
between husband and wife. Her letters to him express a need for
privacy and self-preservation—the same language Clarissa Dalloway
would reach for when describing her decision to marry Richard (“And
there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and
wife a gulf . . .”) instead of Peter (“But with Peter everything had to
be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable . . .”). She
would later describe Leonard to her friends as a “penniless Jew,” a
foreigner to her English eyes; dark, thin, and tightly wound; fearfully
caring and extraordinarily tender. That she found him sexually
unappealing, that she felt nothing when he kissed her, would have
surprised no one who knew her. Though she refused to call herself a
“Sapphist”—the late Victorian term for a lesbian—all her life she had
felt more attracted to women than to men, particularly women older
than her. “She resented it, had a scruple picked up Heaven knows
where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet
she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman,
not a girl,” Clarissa would think, a thought that could have doubled
as Woolf’s confession of her own proclivities.
Leonard Woolf and Bella Sidney Woolf sitting outdoors in front of a tree, Sri Lanka.
(Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photograph album, MH-1, MS Thr 557, [126a].
Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)

Their wedding on August 10, 1912, was unremarkable, attended

by large thunderstorms and a few inattentive guests. The marriage,
however, became the cause of much eager speculation. Her family
and their friends gossiped about her need for constant nursing and
the excessive control he exercised over her sleep, diet, and
schedule. (“He would go on saying ‘An hour’s complete rest after
luncheon’ to the end of time,” Clarissa Dalloway would think of
Richard’s caregiving.) Everyone from Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband,
to Vita Sackville-West, the writer who would become Virginia’s lover
shortly after Mrs. Dalloway was published, shared stories about
Virginia’s sexual frigidity and Leonard’s heroic restraint, a sacrifice he
claimed to have made, according to their friends, because he
believed “she was a genius.” But alongside these vicious rumors was
the London literary scene’s quiet admiration for the Woolfs’
partnership as editors and owners of the Hogarth Press, which they
set up in 1917 “to publish at low prices short works of merit, in
prose or poetry, which could not, because of their merits, appeal to
a very large public.” Whatever Leonard may or may not have been to
her—and we can never know the precise nature of their relationship
—he was her first and most exacting critic. Her “Mongoose,” she
called him, always bristling at her side with worry and affection. She
would come to believe that his dependability was all that stood
between her and madness.
For the first three years of their marriage, she veered in and out
of illness. She exhausted herself finishing The Voyage Out, and
found herself confined to her bed first in London, then at Asheham,
the country home she and Leonard purchased near the old chalk
quarry in Lewes. In March 1913, the novel was accepted for
publication by Gerald Duckworth and Company, the publishing house
her half-brother founded in 1898. Its release was delayed until
March 1915, the year after the First World War began, the same
month the British army fought the Battle of Neuve Chapelle and the
British navy joined the assault missions on the Dardanelles. Like all
her friends, Virginia identified as a pacifist, and could not understand
the madness and folly that drove men to slaughter one another—the
“appalling crime” that ex-soldier Septimus Smith believes he has
committed in Mrs. Dalloway, and for which he has “been condemned
to death by human nature.” She detested the fear that forced her to
creep through the alleyways of London, hiding from the German
airplanes circling overhead. The faces she met must have mirrored
her own: pinched, frightened, hungry.
Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf at Dalingridge Place, photographic postcard by
George Duckworth, July 23, 1912. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photographs, MS
Thr 564, [58]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
wonderful ride in the history of the West. It took place in 1851, and
the hero was F. X. Aubrey, who made a wager of $1,000 that he
would ride alone from Santa Fè, New Mexico, to Independence,
Missouri, in six days. The distance is not quite 800 miles.
With the grim resolve to win or die in the attempt, Aubrey sent half
a dozen of his toughest and fleetest ponies ahead, and had them
stationed at different points, to be used by him as he came up to
where they were waiting. He galloped out of Santa Fè at a sweeping
pace, smilingly bowing in response to the cheers of his friends who
had gathered to see him start. Several undertook to accompany him
part of the way, but his pace was so tremendous that he soon left all
behind. He did not stop for rest at any point of that terrible ride.
Arriving at a station, he halted just long enough to change horses,
when he was off again at the same furious speed. He snatched a
few bits of bread and meat, and ate them without drawing rein.
Nature could not be denied, and he must have slept for hours at a
time while automatically spurring his animal and holding his seat in
the saddle.
The terrific strain killed several of his best horses, but he dashed
into Independence, just five days and nineteen hours after leaving
Santa Fè. He had to be carried into the hotel, where he lay in a
stupor for forty-eight hours. But for his superb constitution and
health, he must have succumbed. In the course of a few days,
however, he fully recovered, having given an exhibition which will
stand for many a day as a record beyond the reach of any horseman
of the plains.
 CHAPTER II
A QUARREL

I have tried to give you an idea of the scene in the town of St.
Joseph, Missouri, on that afternoon in April, 1860, when Alexander
Carlyle, the first Pony Express rider, dashed out of the stables and
galloped full speed down the street to the ferry, amid the huzzahs of
the excited multitudes.
You will recall the hint I dropped as to the appearance of the
young man. He was a consumptive, and had to give up the trying
work at the end of two months. Half a year later he died and was
succeeded by John Frye. This daring fellow afterward became a
member of General Blunt’s Union scouts, and was killed in 1863, in a
hand to hand fight with a squad of “Arkansas Rangers,” after he had
slain five of them.
Among the crowds swarming in St. Joe were three persons of
whom I shall have considerable to tell you. Alden Payne was a lusty,
bright-witted youth, seventeen years old, whose home was on a
small farm, two or three miles from the town. His father owned the
place, and he and his wife were industrious and thrifty. The couple,
however, caught the gold fever, though the discovery of the precious
metal in California was more than ten years old and the excitement
had largely died out. They decided to sell the property and go
overland to the Pacific slope. Their two children were Alden and
“Vixey,” a sweet girl, eight years younger than her brother. In
addition, Mr. Payne had a colored youth who had been turned over
to him when an infant by his widowed mother, she having consented
to become the wife of a big, lazy darky, with no love for other folks’
children.
Jethro Mix, although a year younger than Alden, was half a head
taller, several inches bigger around, and more than twenty pounds
heavier. It cannot be said he was bright, but he was strong, fond of
every member of the family, indolent, and a good servant when
forced to work.
Mr. Payne sold his property to Otis Martin, his brother-in-law.
While making preparations to join an emigrant train soon to start
across the plains, an unexpected obstacle appeared. Mr. Martin
refused to pay over the purchase money, unless Payne kept charge
and took care of the place until the following spring. At first, the
owner believed he would have to put off his western journey until the
time named, but a compromise was reached. Naturally because the
delay impended, the couple were more anxious than before to start
on the long, dangerous journey. They decided to do so, taking Vixey
with them, but leaving Alden and the colored youth, Jethro, to look
after the property until the middle of the following April, when they
would turn it over to Mr. Martin, and follow the family across the
plains.
It was the keenest of disappointments to the two youths, who, if
possible, were more eager to start on the two-thousand-mile journey
than were the adults; but this disappointment was greatly softened
by the knowledge that the delay was only for a few months. The
assurance that it was much better to set out in the spring than in the
autumn had not a feather’s weight with them: they would have been
glad to head westward in the midst of a December snowstorm.
It should be added regarding Alden and Jethro that, having spent
their lives on what might be called the frontier, they had used every
privilege which came within their reach. Both were fine horsemen,
and Alden had no superior among the young men in the
neighborhood as a hunter and marksman. The two spent every hour
they could command in roaming through the forests, some of which
were miles distant. While the colored youth did well when all the
circumstances are remembered, he was by no means the equal of
his young master in courage or in skill with the rifle.
Alden, accompanied by Jethro, walked into St. Joe and joined the
spectators who were waiting to see Carlyle start on his ride of a
hundred and thirty miles westward. They had known of his intention
for several days. The enterprise bore so close a relation to their own
plans that they felt peculiar interest in it.
“Gorry! ain’t it queer, Al?” asked his companion, after the gaily
bedecked rider had dashed by on his way to the ferry.
“Isn’t what queer?” inquired his companion, in turn.
“Why, dat Alec Carlyle am gwine ober de same road dat we’re
gwine to go ober in a day or two.”
“There’s nothing strange in that.”
“Why couldn’t we fetched down our war steeds and gone wid
him?”
“He wouldn’t allow it; we should be too much in his way, and we
couldn’t keep up with him for more than a few miles.”
“Dunno ’bout dat; Jilk and Firebug don’t take de dust ob any other
animiles.”
Jethro thus alluded to the horse owned by himself and the mare
which was the favorite of his master.
“That may be so, Jeth, but we expect to ride our horses all the way
to California, while Alec will change his every ten or twelve miles.”
“Can’t we do de same?”
“How?”
“Why, ebery ten miles I’ll get into de saddle ob Firebug, and you
kin get into de saddle ob Jilk: dat will be changing hosses.”
Alden looked at Jethro. The colored lad tried to keep a sober face,
but had to duck his head and chuckle. He might be slow-witted, but
he was not in earnest in making his proposition.
Alden made a feint of chastising the African, who caught hold of
his flapping hat to keep it on and dived three or four paces away.
Just then several cheers came from the ferry, and Alden withdrew
his attention from his companion. Thus he stood, his back toward the
negro, when it suddenly seemed to him that a runaway horse had
collided with his shoulder.
 The blow knocked Alden toward the middle of the street, his hat
falling, as he strove desperately to keep his feet and barely
succeeded. The next instant, as he replaced his hat, he turned
hurriedly around to learn the cause of the shock.
A youth about his own age and size had violently bumped him.
Alden was quick tempered and flamed with anger. The young man,
whom he had never seen before, said something, but in his blind
rage our friend did not catch the words.
“What do you mean by doing that?” he demanded, doubling his
fists and striding toward the stranger, whose smile added oil to the
flames. The other held his ground and seemed to catch the hot
resentment of Alden.
“I can’t say I meant anything in particular, my red-faced friend;
what are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll mighty soon show you,” replied Alden, who, without an
instant’s hesitation, launched his right fist at the face of the other; but
he neatly dodged the blow and delivered so stinging a one on the
cheek of Alden that he reeled for several paces. The single repulse
did not scare the assailant, however, but made him more cautious.
His antagonist was lithe and active, and coolly awaited the second
assault, which you may be sure was not as blind as before.
The Express Rider having gone upon the ferry boat, the attention
of the crowd was shifted to the two youths, confronting each other
with doubled fists and savage countenances.
“A fight! a fight!” was shouted, and men and boys swarmed around
the couple, taking care to keep far enough back to give them plenty
of room.
It was quickly evident that he whom Alden had attacked was a
stranger to every one in the crowd. None the less, it was equally
evident that some sympathized with him, although the majority were
with Alden.
“Give it to him, Payne! Knock him out!”
 “Look out for yourself!” called a tall man to the unknown; “Alden is
a fighter from Fight Town, at the head of Fight River; keep your eye
peeled!”
“I’ll help you soak him!” added Jethro, bounding to the side of his
master, putting up his big hands, see-sawing with them, ducking his
head, and making several feints from a safe distance.
“Keep out of the way!” commanded Alden; “I don’t want your help.”
“Can’t get along widout me; you knock him ober and I’ll stomp on
him and smash—”
His impatient master made a vigorous sweep with his hand which
tumbled Jethro on his back, with his shoes kicking toward the sky.
“All right!” exclaimed the African, clambering to his feet; “den I’ll
help de oder feller.”
And he ran across and assumed a fighting attitude.
“It’s time to teach Al some sense—”
But the stranger was equally impatient, and made a similar back-
handed stroke which sent the colored lad down again.
“Keep away or you’ll get hurt,” he warned.
“Gorrynation! if dat’s de way I’m treated I’ll lick bofe of you!”
And in order the better to carry out his threat, he began fiercely
doffing his coat. He made a great pretense of hurrying, but, before
he could shed the garment, a man standing near seized him by the
arm and yanked him back with a force that came near throwing him
to the ground again.
“What’s the matter with you, Mix? ’tend to your own business.”
This same person afterward remarked:
“I noticed that it didn’t take much pulling to keep that darky out of
the muss.”
The briers being cleared from the path, the two combatants now
came together. The stranger did not retreat, when Alden quickly but
guardedly approached, and after a couple of feints landed a blow fair
and square on his cheek that staggered him. He held his feet,
however, and advanced again. The two would have closed the next
minute, with the result in doubt, but an unlooked for interruption
came. A loud voice demanded:
“What do you mean, Ross?”
And without waiting for an answer, a tall man, with bearded face
and dressed in rough homespun, strode forward. With his right hand
he flung back the youth whom he had addressed, and in the same
moment did the same to Alden with the other hand. His black eyes
shone with anger.
“You young fools! I ought to spank both of you, and I’ll do it, if
either strikes another blow. Off with you, Ross!”
If the youth called “Ross” felt no fear of Alden Payne, he held the
man in awe. He dropped his hands, though they remained clenched,
and tried to make excuse.
“He attacked me, uncle; haven’t I a right to defend myself?”
“How is that?” sternly asked the man, turning upon Alden.
“He pushed me almost off my feet, and instead of apologizing,
added an insulting remark.”
“He is speaking false,” said the nephew.
“Probably you are right,” commented the man, who evidently had
faith in the veracity of his nephew, “but there has been enough of
this; come with me.”
“I hope you will let us fight it out,” said Alden, keenly regretting the
interference; “I should like to give him a lesson in speaking the truth.”
“Please let us finish,” pleaded the other, with a beseeching look to
his relative. Certainly there was no questioning the courage of either
young man.
“Yes; let ’em settle it,” added one of the bystanders, uttering the
sentiments of the spectators; “the fight will be a thing of beauty.”
 Others joined in the request, but the man paid no heed. He did not
lay his hand on his nephew, but merely said, “Come,” and strode off
in the direction of the river. The youth walked reluctantly after him.
Looking back at Alden, he paused a moment, shook his fist and said:
“We’ll meet again some day and have it out.”
“That will suit me down to the ground,” replied Alden, emphasizing
his words also with a gesture of his fist.
“Gorrynation!” said Jethro, after the stranger was at a distance,
“but it was lucky for bofe of you dat dese four men held me back.
When I git mad, I’m orful, and if I’d got at you, dere wouldn’t anyting
been left ’cept a couple of grease spots.”
This boast caused uproarious laughter. Jethro looked around in
the faces of the crowd and asked reprovingly:
“What you all laughing at? What’s de matter wid you, Tony Burke?
If yo’ doan’ shet up straight off, I’ll frow you down so hard you’ll make
a bulge on toder side de yarth.”
This warning was addressed to a lad about the size of Alden. He
was a clerk in a St. Joe grocery store, and known to everybody. His
merriment was more boisterous than anybody else’s. The instant the
threat was uttered, however, his face became sober. He took a step
forward.
“Are you talking to me?” he demanded, and an instant hush fell on
the bystanders.
“Yas, I is; doan’ you hyar me? Is you deef? You’s getting too sassy,
Tone Burke; you need taking down a peg or two, and I’m de gemman
dat am gwine to doot.”
“I’m your apple tart; put up your fists.”
“Who said anyting ’bout fists? I was talking ’bout wrastlin’; if your
head warn’t so thick you’d understood me.”
“Very well; I prefer fists, but I’ll wrestle.”
“Fus’ holt!” shouted Jethro, his face lighting up with a grin at the
advantage thus gained by his promptness.
 “Suit yourself,” calmly replied the other.
Both were right-handed. Jethro because of his call secured the
choice as to which side he should take, when they made ready for
the struggle. Naturally, he placed himself on the left of his antagonist,
and slipped the right arm behind his neck, with the hand over the
farther shoulder. The white youth assumed a reverse position,
making his left arm take the place of the other’s right.
Thus the right hand of the white youth and the left hand of the
African were free. The two loosely gripped hands in front, for be it
remembered the method described was the old fashioned way of
wrestling, and is still popular in many parts of the country.
Alden Payne’s anger was wafted aside by the new turn of matters,
and the eyes of all were fixed upon the couple. Alden took upon
himself the duty of umpire.
“Are you ready, Tony?” he called.
“Ready,” was the reply.
“Ready, Jeth?”
“Ise allers ready; you oughter know dat, Al—”
Before he could end his sentence, his big feet shot upward as high
as his head had been a moment before. The white youth with fine
dexterity flung off the grasp of Jethro in the same instant, and he
went down on his back with an impact that seemed to shake the
earth and forced a loud grunt from him.
“First fall for Tony!” called Alden; “change holds!”
“Dat warn’t fair,” protested Jethro, as he clambered to his feet.
“Why wasn’t it fair?” asked the umpire.
“I warn’t ready.”
“You said you were; change holds.”
“I won’t wrestle if I’ve got to use my left arm.”
“That’s the rule of the game; you must do it.”
 “I’m satisfied,” said the grinning Tony, who, before Jethro could
back out, slid his left arm behind the burly neck of the African. In the
same instant, the struggle was renewed with all the cunning, power
and skill of which the two were masters.
Tony did not find his task as easy as before. Jethro was certainly a
powerful youth, fully the equal of the other, but was slower of
movement. He baffled two or three attempts to take him unawares,
and then tried hard to lift Tony clear so as to fling him helpless to the
ground. The white youth skillfully prevented. Then Jethro placed one
foot behind the knees of the other, intending to force him over. It was
a fatal mistake, for it left Jethro standing on one foot only. In the
twinkling of an eye, as may be said, he went down precisely as
before, and with as terrific a bump. But he grinned as he climbed to
his feet and called out triumphantly:
“Dat’s de way I allers fetches ’em; I frows myself on my back and
dey’re gone!”
 CHAPTER III
WESTWARD BOUND

T he “Southern Overland Mail” was the first transcontinental stage

line in this country, and probably the longest continuous run ever
operated in the world. It lacked 241 miles of an even three thousand.
The terminal points were St. Louis and San Francisco. From each of
these cities a coach started at the same hour, the first setting out on
September 15, 1858. In order to avoid the stupendous snows in the
Rocky Mountains, the course was made far to the southward, by way
of El Paso, Yuma and Los Angeles. At first the schedule time was
twenty-five days, soon shortened by two days. The quickest run ever
made was twenty-one days.
This enterprise required more than a hundred Concord coaches,
1,000 horses, 500 mules, 150 drivers and 600 other employes. It led
through flaming deserts for nearly half the way, where the deadly
sandstorm, the torturing thirst and the sleepless enmity of Indians
were a constant menace to the traveler. The vast scheme was that of
John Butterfield, who did more than any other man in his peculiar
conquest of the West.
For upward of two years and a half this line was in operation. Then
came the Civil War, which compelled the course to shift farther north,
and combat the Arctic cold and snows. The new route was from St.
Joe to Placerville, the start being made from each of those points on
July 1, 1861. The opening of the Pony Express was really intended
to force this change of route, so as to make it lead through Denver
and Salt Lake City. Ben Holladay had a stage route running tri-
weekly to Denver and weekly to Salt Lake. He secured the mail
contract from the Missouri River to Salt Lake, while the old southern
route folks covered the run between Salt Lake City and Sacramento.
As regards the freighting business, the figures are beyond
comprehension. The regular size of one of the freighting trains was
twenty-five “prairie schooners,” each with from six to twelve yoke of
oxen. The immense Conestoga or Pittsburg or Pennsylvania wagons
were often six feet deep and seventeen feet long, flaring out from the
bottom to the round covered top. They cost from a thousand to
fifteen hundred dollars apiece; the mules, which had to be of the
best, ranged from $500 to $1,000 a pair. Thus a ten-mule team was
sometimes worth $7,000 per wagon, without including provisions,
salaries and minor items. At one time, the single firm of Russell,
Majors & Waddell had in service 6,250 of these huge wagons, and
75,000 oxen, more than were operating in all the rest of the United
States.
Since our interest henceforward lies with the Pony Express, a few
more preliminary words must be given to that unique enterprise. It
has been said that the shortest time trip made by the Butterfield
route was twenty-one days between San Francisco and New York.
The Pony Express immediately cut this time in half, an achievement
which ranks among the greatest of the last century.[A]
[A] In 1859, Ben Holladay had sixteen large steamers running
between San Francisco and Panama, Oregon, China and Japan,
operated 5,000 miles of daily stage coaches, with 500 coaches
and express wagons, 500 freight wagons, 5,000 horses and
mules with oxen beyond counting. His harness alone cost
$55,000 and his feed bill $1,000,000 annually. The government
paid him a million dollars each year in mail contracts. He was
greatly crippled in 1864–66 by the Indians, who burned many of
his stations and killed scores of employees. In the latter part of
1866, Holladay sold out all his interests to Wells Fargo & Co.
In order to meet the demand upon the originators of the system it
was necessary to have nearly five hundred horses specially fitted for
the work. Along the long, dangerous route, one hundred and ninety
stations were established, and eighty sober, skilful, daring riders
were hired. They had to be of light weight, since every pound
counted. At certain stretches, where the danger was not great from
Indians, the riders carried only their revolvers and knives, in order to
save the weight of a rifle. The mail pouches, as has been stated,
were not permitted to weigh more than twenty pounds. The most
famous of the Pony Express riders was William F. Cody, or “Buffalo
Bill.” This remarkable man was found when weighed at a certain time
to tip the scales at a hundred and sixty pounds. This, according to
regulations, debarred him from service as a rider, but because of his
fine qualities, an exception was made in his case.
Each rider had to cover a third of a hundred miles on the average.
He used three ponies in doing so, but conditions often arose in which
horse and rider had greatly to exceed this amount of work.
In the month of May, 1860, a caravan of emigrants was slowly
making its way through what was then the Territory of Nebraska. It
was following the southern bank of the Platte River, and was still
more than a hundred miles from Julesburg, just over the border in
Colorado. The train was smaller than most of those which crossed
the plains during those years when the lure of gold still drew men
and their families from every quarter of the globe. The outfit
consisted of six Conestoga wagons, each with six span of oxen, no
mules, eight horses and twelve men, two-thirds of them with wives
and from one to five children. In addition to the men, two youths, not
quite grown, rode with them. One was Alden Payne and the other his
African servant, Jethro Mix.
The head of the party, which was bound to California, was Abner
Fleming—a middle-aged man, with a wife, but no children. He was
an old acquaintance of Hugh Payne, the father of Alden, and willingly
took the two youths under his charge while making the long journey.
They were strong, willing to work, of cheerful minds, fine horsemen,
and, as I have said, each knew how to use a rifle.
During the months of waiting, after the departure of Mr. Payne,
wife and daughter, for the Pacific coast, our young friends had plenty
of time in which to prepare for the undertaking. Of course, they saw
to it that they had plenty of ammunition. Their rifles were muzzle-
loaders, with percussion caps, but they used the conical bullet, and
Alden had learned long before to shoot from the saddle with his
horse on a run. Jethro Mix did well while standing, but he insisted
that it was too “blamed bothersome” to hit anything when his horse
was trotting or galloping.
 The extra clothing and few necessary articles were placed in the
wagon of Mr. Fleming, and, as was the custom, each vehicle carried
quite a lot of provisions, though the owners counted on shooting a
good deal of game on the way—an expectation that was not
disappointed.
Among the men making up the company was only one in whom
we feel special interest. He was a massive fellow, six feet in height,
of vast frame and prodigious strength. His heavy beard was grizzled,
but under his shaggy brows the little gray eyes seemed at times to
sparkle with fire. He wore a sombrero, with a fringed hunting shirt,
leggings and moccasins, and rode a powerful, bony Indian horse,
larger than any animal in the train. The beast was not only tough and
strong, but capable of good speed and great endurance.
None of the acquaintances of this singular person had ever heard
him called by any other name than “Shagbark.” It was known that he
was a native of the Ozark region, and had spent years with the
American Fur Company, as trapper and hunter. From some cause he
quarreled with those above him, and left their employ three or four
years before we find him acting as guide for the emigrant train of
Abner Fleming.
Shagbark had trapped many winters far up among the wild
solitudes of the Rockies, and was so familiar with the overland route
that none could be better qualified than he to lead a party over the
plains. It may seem odd that though he had spent so much time in
the West, and was there during the height of the gold excitement, he
never passed beyond Salt Lake City. Many of his old friends urged
him to join them in a trip to the diggings, but the stubborn old fellow
shook his head. He preferred to fight Indians and cold and hunger for
the sake of a few peltries, whose sale brought enough to support him
in idleness between trapping seasons.
Shagbark was a peculiar character. He was fond of smoking a
brier wood pipe, and often rode for hours without speaking a word to
anyone, or giving the slightest attention when addressed. Mr.
Fleming had hired him as a guide to Salt Lake, where it would be
necessary to engage some one to take his place. When the trapper
was asked to name his charge he growled:
“One hundred dollars a month in gold and found.”
“Very well; I am willing to pay you each month in advance.”
“I want it when it’s airned; ye’d be a fool to pay it afore.”
Nothing more was said on the subject. Shagbark crumpled up
some dry fragments from a plug of tobacco, in the palm of his hand,
punched them into the bowl of his pipe, switched a match along the
side of his buckskins, applied the tiny flame, and rode to the head of
the company without another word.
He always carried a long-barrelled rifle across his saddle in front,
with a formidable Colt’s revolver at his hip. A keen hunting knife was
an indispensable part of his equipment. Beyond telling Fleming and
his companions that they were sure to have plenty of trouble before
reaching Salt Lake, he made no further reference to the matter. He
generally kept some distance in advance of the company and
maintained a sharp watch of the country on all sides.
Shagbark was a man of moods. The second night after crossing
the Missouri, when the wagons had been placed in a circle, the
animals allowed to browse on the luxuriant grass, so well guarded
that they could not wander afield, he came back and sat down
among the group that were eating from the food spread on a blanket.
He was so talkative that all were astonished. He laughed, chuckled,
and went so far as to relate some of his strange experiences in the
wild regions of the Northwest. He took special notice of Alden Payne.
Sitting beside him, cross-legged on the ground, he asked the youth
his name, where he was from and how he came to be with the party
heading for the other side of the continent.
“I rather like yer looks, younker,” added the grim old trapper; “I
hope ye’ll git through right side up and scoop more gold than yer
hoss can carry.”
“I haven’t any idea of that,” replied Alden, proud that he should
have caught the pleased attention of this veteran of the plains.
 The conversation went on with no particular point to it, and before
it was late, the guard was set for the night, while the others turned in
to sleep. Shagbark explained that they were not yet far enough out
on the plains to be in much danger, though he had had more than
one scrap with the redskins still farther to the east. But he insisted
that a strict watch should be set each night. The training was needed
in view of what was sure to come later on.
Having had so pleasant a chat with Shagbark, Alden naturally
expected pleasant attention from him. He waited till the man had
lighted his pipe and ridden a hundred yards ahead, when the youth
twitched the rein of Firebug and galloped up beside him.
“Good morning, Shagbark; it looks as if we shall have another fine
day.”
The guide puffed his pipe without answering or so much as
glancing at the young man. Alden said a few more things, but he
might as well have addressed a boulder, for all the notice they
received from the guide. Mortified and resentful, the lad checked his
mare and held her until joined by Jethro and the others.
“He’s the queerest man I ever saw,” he said to the African; “I can’t
get a word out of him.”
“Ob course not; I found dat out de fust day, when I axed him how
old he was, what war de name ob his fader and mother, wheder he
was married or engaged and who he war gwine to wote fur as
President, and some more sich trifles.”
“I don’t wonder that he paid no attention to you. I shall let him
alone after this.”
Three nights later, however, Shagbark was overtaken again by
one of his genial moods, and won the good opinion of all by his
jollity. He chatted with Alden as if they had always been the closest
of friends, but the youth was alert. The next morning found the guide
as glum as ever. He took his place well beyond the train, with the
blue whiffs drifting first over one shoulder and then over the other,
and Alden did not intrude.
 Thus matters stood on the afternoon of a bright day, when the
company was slowly making its way westward along the Platte River.
The oxen plodded on, easily dragging the heavy loads, for traveling
was much better than it would be found farther on. The country was
level, and every morning seemed to bring a deepening of color and
an increase of verdure. So long as this lasted the animals would not
have to forage or draw upon the moderate supply of hay and grain
that had been brought from the States.
Few of the men kept their saddles throughout the day. It was too
tiresome for horses and riders. The latter sometimes walked for
hours, or climbed into the lumbering wagons and rode behind the
oxen. The children, of whom there were more than a score of
different ages, delighted to play hide and seek, chasing one another
over the prairie and then tumbling into the rear of the vehicles, where
their merry shouts were smothered by the canvas covers which hid
them from sight.
Alden and Jethro had tramped for two hours and were again in the
saddle, their horses on a walk. Alden was surprised when, as they
gathered up the reins, his companion heaved a profound sigh. He
did not speak, and a few minutes later repeated the inspiration.
Glancing across, the perplexed youth asked:
“What’s the matter with you, Jeth?”
“I wish I could tell,” he answered, with a more prodigious intake
than before.
“What’s to hinder you?” said the other, not a little amused.
“I’m carryin’ an orful secret.”
“Seems to weigh you down a good deal; do you wish to tell me?”
“Dat’s what I oughter do, but I hain’t got de courage, Al; it’s been
on my mind two, free times, and I started in to let you know, but I’se
afeard.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Ob you.”
 It was hard for Alden to restrain his laughter. He had not the
remotest idea of what was in the mind of Jethro, and it must be
confessed felt little curiosity to know. Understanding the fellow as he
did, he could not believe that the “secret” which was bearing so
heavily upon him, was of any account.
“I’ll promise not to punish you, no matter what it is.”
“But you doan’ know what it am.”
“Of course; that’s why I’m inviting you to tell me.”
“But when I do tell, den what?”
“Haven’t I promised that no matter what it is, I shan’t punish you,
provided you make a clean breast of it.”
“You wouldn’t say dat if you knowed.”
“Have you killed anybody, Jethro?” asked Alden in the most
solemn voice he could assume.
“Bress your heart, no! what put dat sarcumflexous idee in your
head?”
“Have you been stealing anything?”
“Neber stole even a watermillion in all my life.”
“Because, when you were round, the owners watched their
property too closely to give you a chance.”
Jethro’s eyes seemed to bulge more than ever. He said in a husky
undertone:
“Al, it am wuss dan dem two tings togeder.”
“Ah, I know, then, what it is.”
“WHAT?”
“You have been smoking cigarettes; you look pale round the gills.”
“Pshaw! what’s de matter wid you?” muttered Jethro disgustedly;
“you talk as if you didn’t hab no sense.”
 “I am trying to suit my words to you. See here, Jeth, I am tired of
all this; if you wish to tell me anything, I have assured you there is
nothing to fear in the way of consequences from me. If that doesn’t
satisfy you, keep the matter to yourself.”
“If dat’s de way you talks, I’ll hab to wait a while; daresn’t
unburden my mind now; mebbe I’ll let you know to-night.”
“I don’t care enough to ask it.”
And yet, strange as it may seem, Jethro Mix did carry a secret,
which, had he made it known to his friend, would have had a marked
effect upon his subsequent life.
 CHAPTER IV
THE DANGER CLOUD

T he emigrant train to which our young friends belonged ran into

bad weather, while crossing northeastern Kansas, and again
before reaching Fort Kearny, in Nebraska. A cold, drizzling rain set in
which made people and animals so uncomfortable that a halt of
nearly two days was made. The oxen and horses cropped the lush
grass which grew exuberantly, and their masters spent most of the
time in the big covered wagons, where they were protected from the
chilling storm. Some read the few books and newspapers brought
with them, a number played cards, smoked and exchanged
reminiscences, yawned and longed for the skies to clear.
During the whole period, Shagbark was in one of his grumpy
moods, and rarely passed a word with any one. One night he told Mr.
Fleming the weather would clear before morning. He proved to be
right, as every one expected, and the cavalcade resumed its
plodding tramp westward.
Then for days the weather was perfect. The sun shone from the
clear blue heavens, unflecked except here and there by a rift of
snowy cloud. The air was bright and clear, with just enough
crispness to make walking or riding pleasant. The country was level
or rolling. The eye, wandering over every point of the compass,
caught no misty mountain range or peak, and the work of the patient
oxen was play compared to what it would be when they should have
entered the rougher regions farther toward the setting sun.
The course most of the time was in sight of the Platte River, which,
swollen by the melting snows near the headwaters and the recent
rains, was a broad, majestic stream. Yet there were times during the
summer drought, when one could pick his way across dry shod.
More than once, as the company went into camp, they saw the
twinkling fires of another party who had also halted for the night.