Mrs. Dalloway
the next room. Her husband was very seriously ill, Sir William said.
Did he threaten to kill himself?
Oh, he did, she cried. But he did not mean it, she said. Of course not.
It was merely a question of rest, said Sir William; of rest, rest,
rest; a long rest in bed. There was a delightful home down in the
country where her husband would be perfectly looked after. Away from
her? she asked. Unfortunately, yes; the people we care for most are not
good for us when we are ill. But he was not mad, was he? Sir William
said he never spoke of “madness”; he called it not having a sense of
proportion. But her husband did not like doctors. He would refuse to go
there. Shortly and kindly Sir William explained to her the state of the
case. He had threatened to kill himself. There was no alternative. It
was a question of law. He would lie in bed in a beautiful house in the
country. The nurses were admirable. Sir William would visit him once a
week. If Mrs. Warren Smith was quite sure she had no more questions to
ask--he never hurried his patients--they would return to her husband.
She had nothing more to ask--not of Sir William.
So they returned to the most exalted of mankind; the criminal who
faced his judges; the victim exposed on the heights; the fugitive; the
drowned sailor; the poet of the immortal ode; the Lord who had gone
from life to death; to Septimus Warren Smith, who sat in the arm-chair
under the skylight staring at a photograph of Lady Bradshaw in Court
dress, muttering messages about beauty.
“We have had our little talk,” said Sir William.
“He says you are very, very ill,” Rezia cried.
“We have been arranging that you should go into a home,” said Sir
William.
“One of Holmes’s homes?” sneered Septimus.
The fellow made a distasteful impression. For there was in Sir William,
whose father had been a tradesman, a natural respect for breeding and
clothing, which shabbiness nettled; again, more profoundly, there was
in Sir William, who had never had time for reading, a grudge, deeply
buried, against cultivated people who came into his room and intimated
that doctors, whose profession is a constant strain upon all the
highest faculties, are not educated men.
“One of _my_ homes, Mr. Warren Smith,” he said, “where we will teach
you to rest.”
And there was just one thing more.
He was quite certain that when Mr. Warren Smith was well he was the
last man in the world to frighten his wife. But he had talked of
killing himself.
“We all have our moments of depression,” said Sir William.
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you.
Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly
screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied.
Human nature is remorseless.
“Impulses came upon him sometimes?” Sir William asked, with his pencil
on a pink card.
That was his own affair, said Septimus.
“Nobody lives for himself alone,” said Sir William, glancing at the
photograph of his wife in Court dress.
“And you have a brilliant career before you,” said Sir William. There
was Mr. Brewer’s letter on the table. “An exceptionally brilliant
career.”
But if he confessed? If he communicated? Would they let him off then,
his torturers?
“I--I--” he stammered.
But what was his crime? He could not remember it.
“Yes?” Sir William encouraged him. (But it was growing late.)
Love, trees, there is no crime--what was his message?
He could not remember it.
“I--I--” Septimus stammered.
“Try to think as little about yourself as possible,” said Sir William
kindly. Really, he was not fit to be about.
Was there anything else they wished to ask him? Sir William would make
all arrangements (he murmured to Rezia) and he would let her know
between five and six that evening he murmured.
“Trust everything to me,” he said, and dismissed them.
Never, never had Rezia felt such agony in her life! She had asked for
help and been deserted! He had failed them! Sir William Bradshaw was
not a nice man.
The upkeep of that motor car alone must cost him quite a lot, said
Septimus, when they got out into the street.
She clung to his arm. They had been deserted.
But what more did she want?
To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in this
exacting science which has to do with what, after all, we know nothing
about--the nervous system, the human brain--a doctor loses his sense
of proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health we must have; and health
is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is
Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and
threatens, as they often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion;
order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without
friends, without books, without messages; six months’ rest; until a man
who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve.
Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess, was acquired
by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon, begetting one
son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who caught salmon herself
and took photographs scarcely to be distinguished from the work
of professionals. Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only
prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics,
forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the
unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of
proportion--his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women
(she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home
with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him, his
subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients
felt for him the keenest gratitude for insisting that these prophetic
Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the
advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered; Sir
William with his thirty years’ experience of these kinds of cases, and
his infallible instinct, this is madness, this sense; in fact, his
sense of proportion.
But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess
even now engaged--in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of
Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the
devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own--is even
now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up
in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and
she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose,
adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde
Park Corner on a tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white
and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories
and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites out of her
way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing
on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the
light of their own. This lady too (Rezia Warren Smith divined it) had
her dwelling in Sir William’s heart, though concealed, as she mostly
is, under some plausible disguise; some venerable name; love, duty,
self sacrifice. How he would work--how toil to raise funds, propagate
reforms, initiate institutions! But conversion, fastidious Goddess,
loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human
will. For example, Lady Bradshaw. Fifteen years ago she had gone under.
It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene,
no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his.
Sweet was her smile, swift her submission; dinner in Harley Street,
numbering eight or nine courses, feeding ten or fifteen guests of the
professional classes, was smooth and urbane. Only as the evening wore
on a very slight dulness, or uneasiness perhaps, a nervous twitch,
fumble, stumble and confusion indicated, what it was really painful to
believe--that the poor lady lied. Once, long ago, she had caught salmon
freely: now, quick to minister to the craving which lit her husband’s
eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she cramped, squeezed, pared,
pruned, drew back, peeped through; so that without knowing precisely
what made the evening disagreeable, and caused this pressure on the
top of the head (which might well be imputed to the professional
conversation, or the fatigue of a great doctor whose life, Lady
Bradshaw said, “is not his own but his patients’”) disagreeable it
was: so that guests, when the clock struck ten, breathed in the air of
Harley Street even with rapture; which relief, however, was denied to
his patients.
There in the grey room, with the pictures on the wall, and the valuable
furniture, under the ground glass skylight, they learnt the extent of
their transgressions; huddled up in arm-chairs, they watched him go
through, for their benefit, a curious exercise with the arms, which he
shot out, brought sharply back to his hip, to prove (if the patient
was obstinate) that Sir William was master of his own actions, which
the patient was not. There some weakly broke down; sobbed, submitted;
others, inspired by Heaven knows what intemperate madness, called Sir
William to his face a damnable humbug; questioned, even more impiously,
life itself. Why live? they demanded. Sir William replied that life
was good. Certainly Lady Bradshaw in ostrich feathers hung over the
mantelpiece, and as for his income it was quite twelve thousand a
year. But to us, they protested, life has given no such bounty. He
acquiesced. They lacked a sense of proportion. And perhaps, after all,
there is no God? He shrugged his shoulders. In short, this living or
not living is an affair of our own? But there they were mistaken. Sir
William had a friend in Surrey where they taught, what Sir William
frankly admitted was a difficult art--a sense of proportion. There
were, moreover, family affection; honour; courage; and a brilliant
career. All of these had in Sir William a resolute champion. If they
failed him, he had to support police and the good of society, which,
he remarked very quietly, would take care, down in Surrey, that these
unsocial impulses, bred more than anything by the lack of good blood,
were held in control. And then stole out from her hiding-place and
mounted her throne that Goddess whose lust is to override opposition,
to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself.
Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress
of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up. It
was this combination of decision and humanity that endeared Sir William
so greatly to the relations of his victims.
But Rezia Warren Smith cried, walking down Harley Street, that she did
not like that man.
Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of
Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld
authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense
of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a
commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced,
genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and
Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one.
Looking up, it appeared that each letter of their names stood for
one of the hours; subconsciously one was grateful to Rigby and
Lowndes for giving one time ratified by Greenwich; and this gratitude
(so Hugh Whitbread ruminated, dallying there in front of the shop
window), naturally took the form later of buying off Rigby and Lowndes
socks or shoes. So he ruminated. It was his habit. He did not go
deeply. He brushed surfaces; the dead languages, the living, life in
Constantinople, Paris, Rome; riding, shooting, tennis, it had been