Saturday 30 October
It will be when may I come & see you!—too true a prophecy, though made in the damp & solitude of
Rodmell. Monday, Ozzie Dickinson, Wednesday, Lady Colefax, Thursday Morgan to meet Abel Chevalley, dine
Wells to meet Arnold Bennett, Friday to Monday Long Barn. So the week slips or sticks through my fingers;
rage misery joy, dulness elation mix: I am the usual battlefield of emotions; alternately think of buying chairs &
clothes; plod with some method revising To the Lighthouse; quarrel with Nelly (who was to catch the afternoon
train today because I told a lie about a telephone) & so we go on. Maurice Baring & the Sitwells send me their
books; Leonard forges ahead, now doing what he calls "correspondence"; the Press creaks a little at its hinges;
Mrs C[artwright]. has absconded with my spectacles: I find Buggers bores; like the normal male; & should now
be developing my book for the Press. All these things shoulder each other out across the screen of my brain.
At intervals, I begin to think (I note this, as I am going to watch for the advent of a book) of a solitary woman
musing[?] a book of ideas about life. This has intruded only once or twice, & very vaguely: it is a dramatisation
of my mood at Rodmell. It is to be an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we
aren't there.
Among external things, we were at Cambridge for the week end; kept warm at the Bull—& there's a
good subject—The Hotel. Many people from Macclesfield talking about motor cars. Mothers, to me pathetic,
looking half shyly at their sons, as if deprecating their age. A whole life opened to me: father, mother, son,
daughter. Father alone has wine. An enormous man, like an advertisement of Power: sits in chair. Daddy you'll
be miserable in it says girl, herself bovine. Mother a mere wisp; sits with eyes shut; had spent hours driving up
writing characters of maids. Shall I remember any of this?
Then Gosse introducing Vita at Royal —— something. I never saw the whole hierarchy of lit. so
plainly exposed. Gosse the ornament on the tea pot: beneath him file on file of old stout widows whose husbands
had been professors, beetle specialists doubtless, meritorious dons; & these good people, ruminating tea, &
reflecting all the depths of the suburbs tinctured with literature, dear Vita told them were "The Hollow Men."
Her address was read in sad sulky tones like those of a schoolboy; her pendulous rich society face, glowing out
under a black hat at the end of the smoky dismal room, looked very ancestral & like a picture under glass in a
gallery. She was fawned upon by the little dapper grocer Gosse, who kept spinning round on his heel to address
her compliments & to scarify Bolshevists; in an ironical voice which seemed to ward off what might be said of
him; & to be drawing round the lot of them thicker & thicker, the red plush curtains of respectability. There was
Vita, who was too innocent to see it, Guedalla, & Drinkwater. I dont regret my wildest, foolishest, utterance, if it
gave the least crack to this respectability. But needless to say, no word of mine has had any effect whatever.
Gosse will survive us all. Now how does he do it? Yet he seemed to me, with his irony & his scraping, somehow
uneasy. A kind of black doormat got up & appeared to be Lady Gosse. So home, with Dotty in a rage, because
she was palmed off with Plank. She did contrive to get here though in the end. One night I went in with Vita
after the play. She was lying asleep at Mount Street, in a flat at the top of the house: large pale furniture about
dimly seen—a dog on her bed. She woke up chattering & hysterical. Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf My God!
Virginia Woolf is in the room. For Gods Sake Vita dont turn the lights on. No light you fool! But I cant see to
get the allella, mumbled Vita. She got it though. We sat & drank. Dusky shapes of glasses & things, a room I had
never seen; a woman I scarcely knew; Vita there between us, intimate wi' both; flattery, extravagance, complete
inner composure on my part, & so home.