Peter Walsh

“ The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hemlock plants, looking up suddenly, sees the giant figure at the end of the ride. ”

“ Elizabeth; her self, in short, which Peter hardly knew now, all to come about her and beat off the enemy.
‘Well, and what’s happened to you?’ she said. So before a battle begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other. His powers chafed and tossed in him. He assembled from different quarters all sorts of things; praise; his career at Oxford ”

“ I haven't felt so young for years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so) from being precisely what he was, and feeling like a child who runs out of doors, and sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong window. But she's extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon's statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was) , to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately ”

“ As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said to himself; feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within. Clarissa refused me, he thought. He stood there thinking, Clarissa refused me.
Ah, said St. Margaret's, like a hostess who comes into her drawing-room on the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there already. I am not late. No, it is precisely half-past eleven, she says. ”

“ Ah, but thinking became morbid, sentimental, directly one began conjuring up doctors, dead bodies; a little glow of pleasure, a sort of lust, too, over the visual impression warned one not to go on with that sort of thing any more—fatal to art, fatal to friendship. True. And yet, thought Peter Walsh, as the ambulance turned the corner, though the light high bell could be heard down the next street and still farther as it crossed the Tottenham Court Road, chiming constantly, it is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw. ”

“ But Peter Walsh pooh-poohed all that. He didn’t mean to die yet. Anyhow, she must settle for herself; judge for herself, he thought, padding about the room in his socks, smoothing out his dress-shirt for he might go to Clarissa’s party, or he might go to one of the Halls, or he might settle in and read an absorbing book written by a man he used to know at Oxford. And if he did retire, that’s what he’d do—write books. He would go to Oxford and poke about in the Bodleian.* Vainly the dark, adorably pretty girl ran to the end of the terrace ”

“ The All-judging, the All-merciful, might excuse. Peter Walsh had no mercy. Villains there must be, and God knows the rascals who get hanged for battering the brains of a girl out in a train do less harm on the whole than Hugh Whitbread and his kindness. Look at him now, on tiptoe, dancing forward, bowing and scraping, as the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton emerged, intimating for all the world to see that he was privileged to say something, something private, to Lady Bruton as she passed. ”

“ Yet, though she is perfectly right, her voice, being the voice of the hostess, is reluctant to inflict its individuality. Some grief for the past holds it back; some concern for the present. It is half-past eleven, she says, and the sound of St. Margaret's glides into the recesses of the heart and buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a tremor of delight, at rest—like Clarissa herself, thought Peter Walsh, coming down the stairs on the stroke of the hour in white. ”

“ Peter Walsh is another ‘cranky’ (p. 132) character. When Clarissa first sees him she notices that he has ‘the same queer look’ (p. 34) he has always had, and no sooner has Peter kissed Clarissa’s hands than he withdraws ‘a large pocket-knife and half opened the blade’ (p. 34) . ‘What an extraordinary habit that was, Clarissa thought; always playing with a knife’ (p. 37) . Two pages further on he ‘run [s] his finger along the blade of his knife’ (p. 39) while talking to Clarissa before, ‘to his utter surprise’, he bursts into tears. ”

“ He's turning out a perfect busybody, and he's getting as artful as they make 'em. I never would have believed it of Peter. Never."
Hartley waited.
"I met Cap'n Walsh the other night," said Trimblett; "we hadn't seen each other for years, and we went into the Golden Fleece to have a drink. You know what Walsh is when he's ashore. And he's a man that won't be beaten. He had had four tries to get a 'cocktail' right that he had tasted in New York, and while he was superintending the mixing of the fifth I slipped out. The others were all right as far as I could judge; but that's Walsh all over." ”

“ ‘And there’s Peter Walsh!’ said Lady Bruton (for she could never think of anything to say to Clarissa; though she liked her. She had lots of fine qualities; but they had nothing in common—she and Clarissa. ”

“ It was a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should have stayed at home, for he knew no one. ”

“ Only one person in the world could be as he was, in love. And there he was, this fortunate man, himself, reflected in the plate-glass window of a motor-car manufacturer in Victoria Street.* All India lay behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera; a district twice as big as Ireland; decisions he had come to alone—he, Peter Walsh; who was now really for the first time in his life in love. Clarissa had grown hard, he thought; and a trifle sentimental into the bargain, he suspected, looking at the great motor cars capable of doing—how many miles on how many gallons? ”

“ Still, life had a way of adding day to day. Still, he thought, yawning and beginning to take notice—Regent’s Park had changed very little since he was a boy, except for the squirrels—still, presumably there were compensations—when little Elise Mitchell, who had been picking up pebbles to add to the pebble collection which she and her brother were making on the nursery mantelpiece, plumped her handful down on the nurse’s knee and scudded off again full tilt into a lady’s legs. Peter Walsh laughed out. ”

“ In these various ways, Woolf drives home her sense of the War’s ongoing tragic aftermath, its refusal to leave hold of the living, the persistence of memory.
A profound sense of absence is felt not only by those characters who have lost brothers, sons, and comrades in battle. Peter Walsh, for example, has spent most of his life ‘overcome with . . . grief’ (p. 36) because of Clarissa’s rejection of him in favour of Richard Dalloway, and Clarissa herself has ‘borne about her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief’ (p. 7) of having broken with Peter. ”

“ All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and Richard Dalloway, remembered the same thing—how passionately Peter had been in love; been rejected; gone to India; come a cropper; made a mess of things; and Richard Dalloway had a very great liking for the dear old fellow too. Milly Brush saw that; saw a depth in the brown of his eyes; saw him hesitate; consider; which interested [Pg 162] her, as Mr. Dalloway always interested her, for what was he thinking, she wondered, about Peter Walsh?
That Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa; that he would go back directly after lunch and find Clarissa ”

“ That evening, on his arrival at Clarissa’s party, he opens up ‘the big blade of his pocket-knife’ (p. 140) before entering her house. One can be certain that if Septimus had a proclivity to caress knives in the presence of women Holmes would have been ‘on him’ (p. 78) even more rapidly, and Woolf seems at pains to contrast the disturbing behaviour which is tolerated as eccentric within the ‘governing-class’ (p. 65) with the socially harmless behaviour which is deemed insane and quasi-criminal lower down the social scale.
Peter Walsh likes to see himself as an ‘adventurer . ”

“ She would not look out of place among the ‘Tall men, men of robust physique’ (p. 15; emphasis added) who peer out of the windows of White’s and other gentlemen’s clubs, while it is wholly ironic, in view of Septimus’s treatment at the hands of Holmes and Bradshaw, that ‘the doctors and men of business and capable women all going about their business, punctual, alert, robust’ (p. 47; emphasis added) seem ‘wholly admirable’ to Peter Walsh, ‘good fellows, to whom one would entrust one’s life, companions in the art of living, who would see one through’ (p. 47) . ”

“ And Mr Parry was dead; and Miss Parry was still alive. Never had he had such a shock in his life! said Peter. He had been quite certain she was dead. And the marriage had been, Sally supposed, a success? And that very handsome, very self-possessed young woman was Elizabeth, over there, by the curtains, in pink.
(She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth, Willie Titcomb was thinking. Oh how much nicer to be in the country and do what she liked! She could hear the poor dog howling, Elizabeth was certain.) She was not a bit like Clarissa, Peter Walsh said. ”

“ She would make a very good wife at thirty—she would marry when it suited her to marry; marry some rich man and live in a large house near Manchester.
Who was it now who had done that? Peter Walsh asked himself, turning into the Broad Walk,—married a rich man and lived in a large house near Manchester? Somebody who had written him a long, gushing letter quite lately about "blue hydrangeas." It was seeing blue hydrangeas that made her think of him and the old days—Sally Seton, of course! ”

“ The Prime Minister had just been telling her (old Miss Parry, huddled up in her shawl, did not care what the Prime Minister had just been telling her) , and Lady Bruton would like to have Peter Walsh’s opinion, he being fresh from the centre, and she would get Sir Sampson to meet him, for really it prevented her from sleeping at night, the folly of it, the wickedness she might say, being a soldier’s daughter. She was an old woman now, not good for much. ”

“ In contrast to her coldness towards Peter Walsh and her husband, Sally’s kiss almost makes the earth move for Clarissa—‘The whole world might have turned upside down!’—and she has never forgotten that ‘infinitely precious’ (p. ”

“ No vestige remains of the shell of Parian marble which encircled it, while the statues were torn off to be used as missiles against the Goths, and later as cannon balls.
162
ST. PETER’S, ROME, ITALY. This is the largest and most magnificent of all Christian temples. It is built on the supposed site of the burial-place of St. Peter. As early as A. D. 90 an oratory was raised on the spot; in 306 this was followed by a basilica. The present edifice was begun in 1506, and after employing the talents of Bramante, Michel Angelo and other architects, was dedicated by Urban III in 1626. ”

“ The lamps were crocus-coloured against black barges that might have been loaded with yellow primroses so did they hint, through their darkness, at the yellow haze around them.
The silence was melodious; the long line of dark houses watched like prisoners from behind their iron bars. They might expect, it seemed, the Spring to burst through the flagstones at their feet.
Peter's heart was lightened of all its burden. He shared the glory, the intoxication of the promise that was on every side of him. On such a night great ambitions, great ideals, great lovers were created. ”

“ He drank in his excitement many whiskies and sodas and soon the white room with its books was like the inside of a golden shell. The old man opposite him grew in size—his face was ever larger and larger, his shirt front bulged and bulged—his hand raised to emphasise some point was tremendous as the hand of a God. Peter felt that he himself was growing smaller and smaller, would soon, in the depths of that mighty arm-chair disappear altogether but that opposite him two mighty burning eyes held him. ”

“ As it fell for the last time a group of historical personages from the operetta cast hovered about him with congratulatory whispers. One or two were in the secret, but the rest were not. Mr. Harry, as stage manager, waved them off.
"Clear the boards for the next scene," he whispered hoarsely. "Here, Kiscadden, you'll have to hurry and dress. You cross the Delaware in ten minutes." With a hand on George Washington's shoulder he marched him off. "That was splendid, Peter," Mr. Harry whispered, as he shunted him into the butler's pantry. "Not a soul suspected. You stay here until you are wanted." ”

“ What a delicious accent he has! You must bring him to Red Towers, Mr. Jasper. I feel that he really belongs to me more than to you; we have discovered that we are distant connections. It seems that his grandmother, the third Lady Kiscadden, was a McGarrah before she married. My own family name was McGarrah, and——"
Peter put his hand over his mouth to stifle his feelings, and reeled toward the kitchen porch.
An hour later, when supper was finished, Miss Ethel and Mr. Harry Jasper slipped away from the guests and turned toward the kitchen. ”