Mrs. Dalloway
brutality blared out on placards; men were trapped in mines; women
burnt alive; and once a maimed file of lunatics being exercised or
displayed for the diversion of the populace (who laughed aloud), ambled
and nodded and grinned past him, in the Tottenham Court Road, each half
apologetically, yet triumphantly, inflicting his hopeless woe. And
would _he_ go mad?
At tea Rezia told him that Mrs. Filmer’s daughter was expecting a baby.
_She_ could not grow old and have no children! She was very lonely, she
was very unhappy! She cried for the first time since they were married.
Far away he heard her sobbing; he heard it accurately, he noticed it
distinctly; he compared it to a piston thumping. But he felt nothing.
His wife was crying, and he felt nothing; only each time she sobbed in
this profound, this silent, this hopeless way, he descended another
step into the pit.
At last, with a melodramatic gesture which he assumed mechanically and
with complete consciousness of its insincerity, he dropped his head
on his hands. Now he had surrendered; now other people must help him.
People must be sent for. He gave in.
Nothing could rouse him. Rezia put him to bed. She sent for a
doctor--Mrs. Filmer’s Dr. Holmes. Dr. Holmes examined him. There was
nothing whatever the matter, said Dr. Holmes. Oh, what a relief! What
a kind man, what a good man! thought Rezia. When he felt like that he
went to the Music Hall, said Dr. Holmes. He took a day off with his
wife and played golf. Why not try two tabloids of bromide dissolved
in a glass of water at bedtime? These old Bloomsbury houses, said
Dr. Holmes, tapping the wall, are often full of very fine panelling,
which the landlords have the folly to paper over. Only the other day,
visiting a patient, Sir Somebody Something in Bedford Square--
So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the sin
for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not
feel. He had not cared when Evans was killed; that was worst; but all
the other crimes raised their heads and shook their fingers and jeered
and sneered over the rail of the bed in the early hours of the morning
at the prostrate body which lay realising its degradation; how he had
married his wife without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her;
outraged Miss Isabel Pole, and was so pocked and marked with vice that
women shuddered when they saw him in the street. The verdict of human
nature on such a wretch was death.
Dr. Holmes came again. Large, fresh coloured, handsome, flicking his
boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside--headaches,
sleeplessness, fears, dreams--nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said.
If Dr. Holmes found himself even half a pound below eleven stone six,
he asked his wife for another plate of porridge at breakfast. (Rezia
would learn to cook porridge.) But, he continued, health is largely a
matter in our own control. Throw yourself into outside interests; take
up some hobby. He opened Shakespeare--_Antony and Cleopatra_; pushed
Shakespeare aside. Some hobby, said Dr. Holmes, for did he not owe his
own excellent health (and he worked as hard as any man in London) to
the fact that he could always switch off from his patients on to old
furniture? And what a very pretty comb, if he might say so, Mrs. Warren
Smith was wearing!
When the damned fool came again, Septimus refused to see him. Did he
indeed? said Dr. Holmes, smiling agreeably. Really he had to give that
charming little lady, Mrs. Smith, a friendly push before he could get
past her into her husband’s bedroom.
“So you’re in a funk,” he said agreeably, sitting down by his patient’s
side. He had actually talked of killing himself to his wife, quite a
girl, a foreigner, wasn’t she? Didn’t that give her a very odd idea
of English husbands? Didn’t one owe perhaps a duty to one’s wife?
Wouldn’t it be better to do something instead of lying in bed? For he
had had forty years’ experience behind him; and Septimus could take Dr.
Holmes’s word for it--there was nothing whatever the matter with him.
And next time Dr. Holmes came he hoped to find Smith out of bed and not
making that charming little lady his wife anxious about him.
Human nature, in short, was on him--the repulsive brute, with the
blood-red nostrils. Holmes was on him. Dr. Holmes came quite regularly
every day. Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a postcard,
human nature is on you. Holmes is on you. Their only chance was to
escape, without letting Holmes know; to Italy--anywhere, anywhere, away
from Dr. Holmes.
But Rezia could not understand him. Dr. Holmes was such a kind man. He
was so interested in Septimus. He only wanted to help them, he said.
He had four little children and he had asked her to tea, she told
Septimus.
So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself,
kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their
sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how
does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of
blood,--by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise
his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted,
as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an
isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never
know. Holmes had won of course; the brute with the red nostrils had
won. But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying
on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited
regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.
It was at that moment (Rezia gone shopping) that the great revelation
took place. A voice spoke from behind the screen. Evans was speaking.
The dead were with him.
“Evans, Evans!” he cried.
Mr. Smith was talking aloud to himself, Agnes the servant girl cried to
Mrs. Filmer in the kitchen. “Evans, Evans,” he had said as she brought
in the tray. She jumped, she did. She scuttled downstairs.
And Rezia came in, with her flowers, and walked across the room, and
put the roses in a vase, upon which the sun struck directly, and it
went laughing, leaping round the room.
She had had to buy the roses, Rezia said, from a poor man in the
street. But they were almost dead already, she said, arranging the
roses.
So there was a man outside; Evans presumably; and the roses, which
Rezia said were half dead, had been picked by him in the fields
of Greece. “Communication is health; communication is happiness,
communication--” he muttered.
“What are you saying, Septimus?” Rezia asked, wild with terror, for he
was talking to himself.
She sent Agnes running for Dr. Holmes. Her husband, she said, was mad.
He scarcely knew her.
“You brute! You brute!” cried Septimus, seeing human nature, that is
Dr. Holmes, enter the room.
“Now what’s all this about?” said Dr. Holmes in the most amiable way in
the world. “Talking nonsense to frighten your wife?” But he would give
him something to make him sleep. And if they were rich people, said Dr.
Holmes, looking ironically round the room, by all means let them go
to Harley Street; if they had no confidence in him, said Dr. Holmes,
looking not quite so kind.
It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben; whose stroke was
wafted over the northern part of London; blent with that of other
clocks, mixed in a thin ethereal way with the clouds and wisps of
smoke, and died up there among the seagulls--twelve o’clock struck
as Clarissa Dalloway laid her green dress on her bed, and the Warren
Smiths walked down Harley Street. Twelve was the hour of their
appointment. Probably, Rezia thought, that was Sir William Bradshaw’s
house with the grey motor car in front of it. The leaden circles
dissolved in the air.
Indeed it was--Sir William Bradshaw’s motor car; low, powerful, grey
with plain initials interlocked on the panel, as if the pomps of
heraldry were incongruous, this man being the ghostly helper, the
priest of science; and, as the motor car was grey, so to match its
sober suavity, grey furs, silver grey rugs were heaped in it, to
keep her ladyship warm while she waited. For often Sir William would
travel sixty miles or more down into the country to visit the rich,
the afflicted, who could afford the very large fee which Sir William
very properly charged for his advice. Her ladyship waited with the
rugs about her knees an hour or more, leaning back, thinking sometimes
of the patient, sometimes, excusably, of the wall of gold, mounting
minute by minute while she waited; the wall of gold that was mounting
between them and all shifts and anxieties (she had borne them bravely;
they had had their struggles) until she felt wedged on a calm ocean,
where only spice winds blow; respected, admired, envied, with scarcely
anything left to wish for, though she regretted her stoutness; large
dinner-parties every Thursday night to the profession; an occasional
bazaar to be opened; Royalty greeted; too little time, alas, with her
husband, whose work grew and grew; a boy doing well at Eton; she would
have liked a daughter too; interests she had, however, in plenty; child
welfare; the after-care of the epileptic, and photography, so that
if there was a church building, or a church decaying, she bribed the
sexton, got the key and took photographs, which were scarcely to be
distinguished from the work of professionals, while she waited.
Sir William himself was no longer young. He had worked very hard; he
had won his position by sheer ability (being the son of a shopkeeper);
loved his profession; made a fine figurehead at ceremonies and spoke
well--all of which had by the time he was knighted given him a heavy
look, a weary look (the stream of patients being so incessant, the
responsibilities and privileges of his profession so onerous), which
weariness, together with his grey hairs, increased the extraordinary
distinction of his presence and gave him the reputation (of the utmost
importance in dealing with nerve cases) not merely of lightning skill,
and almost infallible accuracy in diagnosis but of sympathy; tact;
understanding of the human soul. He could see the first moment they
came into the room (the Warren Smiths they were called); he was certain
directly he saw the man; it was a case of extreme gravity. It was a
case of complete breakdown--complete physical and nervous breakdown,
with every symptom in an advanced stage, he ascertained in two or three
minutes (writing answers to questions, murmured discreetly, on a pink
card).
How long had Dr. Holmes been attending him?
Six weeks.
Prescribed a little bromide? Said there was nothing the matter? Ah yes
(those general practitioners! thought Sir William. It took half his
time to undo their blunders. Some were irreparable).
“You served with great distinction in the War?”
The patient repeated the word “war” interrogatively.
He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious
symptom, to be noted on the card.
“The War?” the patient asked. The European War--that little shindy of
schoolboys with gunpowder? Had he served with distinction? He really
forgot. In the War itself he had failed.
“Yes, he served with the greatest distinction,” Rezia assured the
doctor; “he was promoted.”
“And they have the very highest opinion of you at your office?” Sir
William murmured, glancing at Mr. Brewer’s very generously worded
letter. “So that you have nothing to worry you, no financial anxiety,
nothing?”
He had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by
human nature.
“I have--I have,” he began, “committed a crime--”
“He has done nothing wrong whatever,” Rezia assured the doctor. If Mr.
Smith would wait, said Sir William, he would speak to Mrs. Smith in