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Empire Unbound: France and the Muslim Mediterranean, 1880-1918 Gavin Murray-Miller full chapter instant download
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 26/03/22, SPi
Empire Unbound
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 26/03/22, SPi
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 26/03/22, SPi
Empire Unbound
France and the Muslim Mediterranean,
1880–1918
G AV I N M U R R AY-M I L L E R
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Acknowledgments
I began writing this book just prior to the events that would fundamentally
change the interactions and daily rhythms of the way we live. I found it slightly
odd to be writing about individuals who crossed borders and circulated across
ambiguous spaces at a moment when the world was shutting down, borders were
closing, and governments were restricting the movement of citizens to combat
the spread of a global pandemic. The globe-hopping and freedom of movement
we had taken for granted as part of our modern lives suddenly ground to a halt,
presenting a new world characterized by isolation and estrangement that was
incompatible with the ways in which most of us chose to conduct our lives.
The various lockdowns that were implemented during the pandemic made
travel difficult but provided ample opportunities to write a book. Writing may be
a reclusive activity by its very nature, but no book is written alone. Over the
course of researching and writing this book I benefited from the input and sup-
port of others who deserve recognition.
I began this book in Sofia, where I spent a three-month period as a research
fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS). I would like to thank Diana
Mishkova for her warm welcome in Bulgaria and the support offered by the
research center throughout my stay. The colloquia hosted by the institute were
informative and helped in developing many of the themes addressed in this book.
I would also like to thank Simeon Evstatiev, the chair of Arabic and Semitic stud-
ies at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski for the discussions on Islamic history
we had over dinners. During my stay, Robert Appelbaum, a visiting fellow from
Uppsala University, and Stoyan Shivarov from Sofia University provided much-
needed sociability and discussion during a moment when the world seemed to
have stopped and all of us were confined indoors.
This book was finished with the generous support of a research fellowship
awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and hosted by the Universität
Leipzig. The assistance offered by Matthias Middell at the Global and European
Studies Institute during my year in Leipzig was particularly helpful in the completion
of this book. The Research Center Global Dynamics and SFB 1199 collaborative
research center focused on Processes of Spatialization Under the Global Condition
at the university offered a stimulating environment in which to contemplate topics
associated with empire, transnational migration, and globalization.
Along the way, I also benefited from support provided by the State Academic
University for the Humanities (GAUGN) in Moscow. Research for this book was
carried out while serving as a fellow on a project hosted by GAUGN. The many
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 26/03/22, SPi
viii Acknowledgments
talks and discussions with Evgeniya Prusskaya on colonial North Africa during
my trips to Moscow were invaluable. I would also like to thank Alexandre
Tchoudinov at the Institute of World History who always ensured my visits to
Moscow were hospitable.
In addition, I owe a debt to Julia Clancy-Smith at the University of Arizona,
Alexei Miller at the European University at St. Petersburg, and Arthur Asseraf at
the University of Cambridge for their help while working on this book.
The various trips to France and Tunisia that fed directly into the writing of this
book were also financed by Cardiff University. I am grateful to my colleagues in
the School of History, Archaeology, and Religion for their continual friendship
and support over the years.
As ever, this book would not have been possible without the constant support
of my family and wife Lara. They were the ones who made the seclusion of these
past years bearable and provided a constant reminder that the isolation imposed
on us through outside forces could never completely efface the sociability and
attachments that make us who we are.
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Contents
List of Mapsxi
Introduction: France, Empire, and the Muslim Mediterranean 1
1. Power Politics and the Imperial Mediterranean 13
2. Territorialization and Mobility in the Mediterranean 43
3. Pan-Islamism and Ottoman Imperialism 70
4. Paris, a Trans-Imperial Metropole 98
5. Fragile Empires 124
6. Imagining French North Africa 154
7. Trans-Imperial Islam in the Crucible of War 189
8. Imperial Entanglements and the Making of the Post-Ottoman
Mediterranean221
Conclusion: Entangled Histories and Fractured Pasts254
Works Cited261
Index282
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List of Maps
Italy
Spain
Turkey
Tunisia
Syria
Algeria Lebanon
Morocco
Libya Egypt
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Ottoman
Empire
Spanish
Morocco
British
Occupied
Egypt
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Introduction
France, Empire, and the Muslim Mediterranean
Léon Pervinquière was the first to admit he had grown accustomed to the
“immense solitude” of the south-eastern Tunisian landscape. A noted geologist
and paleontologist, he had spent a significant amount of time in the region during
the mid-1890s while carrying out a series of geological surveys commissioned by
the government to determine the natural resource wealth of France’s protectorate.
Now, in the spring of 1911, he found himself traveling through the region on
camel, headed to the oasis town of Ghadames in the Nalut area of Ottoman
Tripolitania. Pervinquière had been called in to resolve a longstanding border
dispute between the French and Ottoman Sublime Porte regarding the Tunisian–
Libyan frontier. For over fifteen years, authorities had been attempting in vain to
agree on the administrative boundary separating France’s protectorate from the
Ottoman vilayet. Stubborn officials were not the only obstacle to progress. Local
Tuareg populations and Chaamba tribesmen routinely crossed the frontier, carry-
ing out raids and freely settling lands to the consternation of authorities. Caravan
merchants circulated through the borderland with little regard for administrative
jurisdiction or the taxes demanded by local officials. The French had attempted to
halt these migrations by erecting a series of “small posts” along the length of bor-
der running from Ghadames in the south to Ben Gardane on the Mediterranean
coast in the north, but the gesture proved futile. People ignored the markers, con-
ducting their lives as usual. The French Tunisian administration had asked
Pervinquière to study the topography and demarcate an authoritative boundary
line separating Tunisia from Tripolitania. Pervinquière was aware of the chal-
lenges that awaited him as he headed toward Ghadames, noting the “complete
anarchy” that seemed to reign throughout the region.1
What might appear a mundane detail in a period characterized by dramatic
imperial conquests and explorations says a great deal about empire. North Africa
came under European rule in progressive stages during the long nineteenth cen
tury. By the outbreak of the First World War, France was in possession of a large
and primarily Arabo-Berber Muslim empire stretching across Morocco, Algeria,
and Tunisia. Spain possessed a sliver of northern Morocco while Britain had
Empire Unbound: France and the Muslim Mediterranean, 1880–1918. Gavin Murray-Miller, Oxford University Press.
© Gavin Murray-Miller 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192863119.003.0001
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2 Empire Unbound
2 Notable exceptions are: Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest,
Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia 1800–1904) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2013); Andrew Arsan, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in
French West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
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Mediterranean world.3 The colonial state was an artificial construct that did not
necessarily conform to the different geographic relationships and geographies
of North African native populations.4 “French North Africa,” itself an imperial
geographic imaginary, was an interconnected space through which ideas and
people constantly circulated in all directions. An intra-imperial perspective can
help better clarify the many linkages and relationships that conditioned the
evolution of the French Empire at both the administrative-political level and the
level of Maghrebi society.5 Yet “French North Africa” never existed in a vacuum
either. It was perennially subject to the broader push and pull of regional dynamics.
Trans-imperial connections and power rivalries exercised an important influence
on French colonial policies and impacted events on the ground, sometimes in
dramatic ways. Situating France’s North African empire within the broader
trajectories of European and Ottoman imperialism brings into relief the various
webs of communication and movement that were constantly at work beneath the
colonial state.
As a geographic concept, “the Mediterranean” was largely a European creation.
It acquired consistency through references to the sea’s Classical past, its geog
raphy, and a vision of the region as a frontline in an ongoing struggle between
competing Christian and Islamic civilizations.6 Europeans of the nineteenth cen
tury were not ignorant of the diversity found among Mediterranean societies.
Nonetheless, they persisted in seeing it as a space fractured along stark cultural
and religious boundaries.7 Recent reappraisals have argued for a more nuanced
understanding of the sea and its surrounding coastal regions. What is often
deemed the “new” Mediterranean history has characterized the sea as a poly
morphous zone of encounters shaped by multiple influences and interconnec-
tions that transcend borders—cultural, national, or otherwise.8 While this shift is
3 James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 30–31.
4 Arthur Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 20.
5 Arsan, Interlopers of Empire, 16.
6 Rolf Petri, “The Mediterranean Metaphor in Early Geopolitical Writings,” History: The Journal of
the Historical Association, 101:348 (December 2016): 671–91; Karen Öktem, “The Ambivalent Sea:
Regionalizing the Mediterranean Differently,” in Dimitar Bechev and Kalypso Nicolaidis, eds.,
Mediterranean Frontiers: Borders, Conflicts, and Memory in a Transnational World (London: I. B. Tauris,
2010), 19–20; Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard, “Introduction,” in Patricia M. E. Lorcin and
Todd Shepard, eds., French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2016), 3–8.
7 For example, see the description given in Paul-Albert Simmone, La Tunisie et la civilisation (Paris:
Michel Lévy, 1867), 3–6.
8 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, “The Mediterranean and the New Thalassology,” The
American Historical Review, 111:3 (June 2006): 722–40; Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou,
“The Sea, Its People and Their Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Maurizio Isabella and
Konstantina Zanou, eds., Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long 19th Century
(London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 1–3; Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an
Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Ilham Khuri-Makdisi,
The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkley: University of
California Press, 2013).
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4 Empire Unbound
a welcome one and has drawn attention to the Mediterranean’s complex history,
it remains possible to trace the contours of a more expansive idea of the
Mediterranean region still further. This requires looking beyond the region’s
internal diversity to take account of its connections to places such as continental
Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Subcontinental Asia. It also entails positioning
the Mediterranean within international economic and migratory flows linked to
processes of imperialism, labor, and global capitalism.9 The Ottoman world of
which the Mediterranean was a part sat at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, and
Asia. While European powers attempted to constrain these broader trans-regional
ties as they built their empires during the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
their efforts often met with mixed results. Established genealogies of trade, reli-
gious and family networks, and interregional relationships persisted to operate
below or alongside the colonial regimes that imposed themselves on North Africa
and the eastern Mediterranean.10
These contrasting geographies also shed light on the imbricative histories that
shaped colonial encounters. As European states extended their reach across the
southern and eastern Mediterranean, they not only became entangled in existing
social and cultural networks. They also had to contend with the administrative,
social, and cultural legacies that continued to exercise an influence on the ground.
Authorities were forced to work through nomads, itinerant merchants, tribal
leaders, and religious authorities in building and managing their empires. Examining
empire “from the margins” as well as from the centers of power provides a more
balanced perspective that takes account of the actual practices of empire-building
and administration.11 Quite often, histories of colonialism present the age of
European empire as a definitive break, structuring chronological narratives in
accordance with pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods. This schema
neglects the fact that the Maghreb and Mediterranean were subject to multiple
and overlapping “historicities” that did not easily conform to stark categories of
“colonizer” and “colonized.” In many cases, indigenous, Ottoman, and European
influences built upon and co-existed with one another through a process of
historical accretion.12 French, British, and other European colonial officials were
9 Edmund Burke III, “Toward a Comparative History of the Modern Mediterranean, 1750–1919,”
Journal of World History, 23:4 (December 2010): 911–12.
10 James Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle
East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006). For an example of the trans-imperial connections that characterized Islamic societies,
see: Engseng Ho, “Empire Through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat,” Comparative Studies
in Society and History, 46 (April 2004): 210–46.
11 Robert S. G. Fletcher, British Imperialism and the “Tribal Question”: Desert Administration and
Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–10.
12 M’hamed Oualdi, “Une Succession d’Empires: Les Historicités d’une société maghrébine
(1860–1930),” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 4:72 (2017): 1057–79; Mohamed Lazhar Ghabri,
“L’Historiographie tunisienne de la période moderne et contemporaine et la problème de la
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 25/03/22, SPi
aware of the deep social and historical ties that bound colonial populations to
exterior territories and expressed anxieties over the ways in which the Ottoman
Empire attempted to exploit these in order to make its presence felt in the colonies
and protectorates under their control. In many instances, colonial officials either
worked through indigenous legal and administrative structures or adapted them
to suit their own needs. The Ottoman past was never effaced, providing channels
through which colonial subjects were able to exercise influence and operate under
more recent colonial administrations.13
Taking note of these legacies and the connections they nurtured across imper
ial divides can broaden understandings of the Mediterranean, both in terms of
the geographic space in which empire-building occurred as well as the historical
continuities that influenced imperial projects. In a more specific sense, placing
the French Empire in this Mediterranean context sketches a broader purview in
which to consider how France built and sustained its presence in the region.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, France, like other European powers,
attempted to forge a “Muslim” imperium extending from Morocco to Syria.14
Both “French North Africa” and the Muslim Mediterranean were products of a
growing imperial mentality in the country as diverse groups of intellectuals, pro-
imperial factions, diplomats, and colonial officials turned their attention to ques-
tions of empire-building. These groups were often small and ideologically diverse.
Questions of empire and colonial expansion did not preoccupy metropolitan
opinion for the most part, and only in rare instances did colonial issues intersect
with moral general discussions on national politics taking place in the metropole.
By and large, French metropolitans remained grossly ignorant of their overseas
empire and thought little, if at all, of the colonial empire vis-à-vis the nation.15 Be
that as it may, there did exist circles composed of experts, pundits, lobbyists,
financiers, and political elites—what has often been referred to as the parti
colonial—which did take an interest in imperial affairs and leave their mark on
French colonial policy.16 Imperial policymaking developed a particular fixation
on the Muslim Mediterranean and wider Islamic world over the course of the
periodisation,” in Abdelhamid Hénia, Mohamed- Hédi Chérif, and Hichem Abdessamad, eds.,
Itinéraire d’un historien et d’une historiographie (Tunis: Centre de Publications Universitaire, 2008),
177–86; Isabelle Grangaud and M’hamed Oualdi, “Tout est-il colonial dans le Maghreb? Ce que les
travaux des histoiriens modernistes peuvent apporter,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine,
2:62–63 (2016): 133–56.
13 M’hamed Oualdi, “Provincializing and Forgetting Ottoman Administrative Legacies: Sons and
Grandsons of Beys’ Mamluks Facing French Administrators of Tunisia (1890s–1930s),” Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 34:2 (2014): 418–31.
14 David Motadel, ed., Islam and the European Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
15 Didier Guignard, L’Abus de pouvoir dans l’Algérie coloniale (1880–1914): Visibilité et singularité
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2014).
16 Charles-Robert Ageron, France coloniale ou parti colonial? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1978); L. Abrams and J. D. Miller, “Who Were the French Colonists? A Reassessment of the
Parti Colonial, 1890–1914,” The Historical Journal, 19:3 (1976): 685–725.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Mrs. Dalloway
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, 1925
Biography
FLUSH
ROGER FRY
Criticism, etc.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
HBMC
New York
Twenty-third printing
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men
and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and
endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for
example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough,
opening the bazaar.
There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge
and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all
spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed
exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home.
Nothing that would serve to amuse her and make that indescribably
dried-up little woman look, as Clarissa came in, just for a moment
cordial; before they settled down for the usual interminable talk of
women’s ailments. How much she wanted it—that people should
look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and
walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to
have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have
been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves,
whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things
not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that;
perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand)
for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had
her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could
have looked even differently!
She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough,
with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have
been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large;
interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified,
very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a
ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well
was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well,
considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore
(she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its
capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest
sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no
more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this
astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up
Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more;
this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the
season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of
tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty
years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.
“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is all,” she
repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove shop
where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves. And her
old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her
gloves. He had turned on his bed one morning in the middle of the
War. He had said, “I have had enough.” Gloves and shoes; she had
a passion for gloves; but her own daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not
a straw for either of them.
Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bond Street to a shop where
they kept flowers for her when she gave a party. Elizabeth really
cared for her dog most of all. The whole house this morning smelt of
tar. Still, better poor Grizzle than Miss Kilman; better distemper and
tar and all the rest of it than sitting mewed in a stuffy bedroom with a
prayer book! Better anything, she was inclined to say. But it might be
only a phase, as Richard said, such as all girls go through. It might
be falling in love. But why with Miss Kilman? who had been badly
treated of course; one must make allowances for that, and Richard
said she was very able, had a really historical mind. Anyhow they
were inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to
Communion; and how she dressed, how she treated people who
came to lunch she did not care a bit, it being her experience that the
religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their
feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved
herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so
insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in
year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the
room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your
inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a
slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all
her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from
school during the War—poor embittered unfortunate creature! For it
was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had
gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had
become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night;
one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-
blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the
dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would
have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal
monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the
depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content
quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring,
this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make
her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made
all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and
making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed there
were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of
content were nothing but self love! this hatred!
Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing through the
swing doors of Mulberry’s the florists.
She advanced, light, tall, very upright, to be greeted at once by
button-faced Miss Pym, whose hands were always bright red, as if
they had been stood in cold water with the flowers.
There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and
carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were
irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as
she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her
kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked
older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises
and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed,
snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite
coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen
clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark
and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the
sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale
—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick
sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost
blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was
over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every
flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red,
deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in
the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in
and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!
And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing,
nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if
this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting
her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that
hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when
—oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!
“Dear, those motor cars,” said Miss Pym, going to the window to
look, and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full
of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars,
were all her fault.
The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss
Pym go to the window and apologise came from a motor car which
had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry’s
shop window. Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had
just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the
dove-grey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and there
was nothing to be seen except a square of dove grey.
Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond
Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the
other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon
hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and
stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly
disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they
had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with
her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew
whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the
Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody knew.
Edgar J. Watkiss, with his roll of lead piping round his arm, said
audibly, humorously of course: “The Proime Minister’s kyar.”
Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass, heard
him.
Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed,
wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which
had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete
strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will
it descend?
Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines
sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body.
The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had
stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of
omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red
parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the
window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little
pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car.
Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated.
And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a
curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual
drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if
some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst
into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and
threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he
thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not
weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what
purpose?
“Let us go on, Septimus,” said his wife, a little woman, with large
eyes in a sallow pointed face; an Italian girl.
But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the motor car and the
tree pattern on the blinds. Was it the Queen in there—the Queen
going shopping?
The chauffeur, who had been opening something, turning something,
shutting something, got on to the box.
“Come on,” said Lucrezia.
But her husband, for they had been married four, five years now,
jumped, started, and said, “All right!” angrily, as if she had interrupted
him.
People must notice; people must see. People, she thought, looking
at the crowd staring at the motor car; the English people, with their
children and their horses and their clothes, which she admired in a
way; but they were “people” now, because Septimus had said, “I will
kill myself”; an awful thing to say. Suppose they had heard him? She
looked at the crowd. Help, help! she wanted to cry out to butchers’
boys and women. Help! Only last autumn she and Septimus had
stood on the Embankment wrapped in the same cloak and, Septimus
reading a paper instead of talking, she had snatched it from him and
laughed in the old man’s face who saw them! But failure one
conceals. She must take him away into some park.
“Now we will cross,” she said.
She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling. He would
give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only twenty-four, without
friends in England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece of bone.
The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air of inscrutable reserve
proceeded towards Piccadilly, still gazed at, still ruffling the faces on
both sides of the street with the same dark breath of veneration
whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister nobody knew. The face
itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds.
Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that
greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down
Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people
who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking
distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the
state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of
time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying
along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a
few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of
innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be
known.
It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway, coming out of
Mulberry’s with her flowers; the Queen. And for a second she wore a
look of extreme dignity standing by the flower shop in the sunlight
while the car passed at a foot’s pace, with its blinds drawn. The
Queen going to some hospital; the Queen opening some bazaar,
thought Clarissa.
The crush was terrific for the time of day. Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham,
what was it? she wondered, for the street was blocked. The British
middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with
parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day like this, were, she
thought, more ridiculous, more unlike anything there has ever been
than one could conceive; and the Queen herself held up; the Queen
herself unable to pass. Clarissa was suspended on one side of
Brook Street; Sir John Buckhurst, the old Judge on the other, with
the car between them (Sir John had laid down the law for years and
liked a well-dressed woman) when the chauffeur, leaning ever so
slightly, said or showed something to the policeman, who saluted
and raised his arm and jerked his head and moved the omnibus to
the side and the car passed through. Slowly and very silently it took
its way.
Clarissa guessed; Clarissa knew of course; she had seen something
white, magical, circular, in the footman’s hand, a disc inscribed with a
name,—the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s?—
which, by force of its own lustre, burnt its way through (Clarissa saw
the car diminishing, disappearing), to blaze among candelabras,
glittering stars, breasts stiff with oak leaves, Hugh Whitbread and all
his colleagues, the gentlemen of England, that night in Buckingham
Palace. And Clarissa, too, gave a party. She stiffened a little; so she
would stand at the top of her stairs.
The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through
glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond
Street. For thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same way—to
the window. Choosing a pair of gloves—should they be to the elbow
or above it, lemon or pale grey?—ladies stopped; when the sentence
was finished something had happened. Something so trifling in
single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of
transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its
fulness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in
all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other
and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house in a
back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor which led to
words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed
strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen
threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface
agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very
profound.
Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James’s Street. Tall
men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men with their tail-coats
and their white slips and their hair raked back who, for reasons
difficult to discriminate, were standing in the bow window of Brooks’s
with their hands behind the tails of their coats, looking out, perceived
instinctively that greatness was passing, and the pale light of the
immortal presence fell upon them as it had fallen upon Clarissa
Dalloway. At once they stood even straighter, and removed their