Mrs. Dalloway
feel her mind, like a bird, falling from branch to branch, and always
alighting, quite rightly; he could follow her mind, as she sat there
in one of those loose lax poses that came to her naturally and, if he
should say anything, at once she smiled, like a bird alighting with
all its claws firm upon the bough.
But he remembered Bradshaw said, “The people we are most fond of are
not good for us when we are ill.” Bradshaw said, he must be taught to
rest. Bradshaw said they must be separated.
“Must,” “must,” why “must”? What power had Bradshaw over him? “What
right has Bradshaw to say ‘must’ to me?” he demanded.
“It is because you talked of killing yourself,” said Rezia.
(Mercifully, she could now say anything to Septimus.)
So he was in their power! Holmes and Bradshaw were on him! The brute
with the red nostrils was snuffing into every secret place! “Must” it
could say! Where were his papers? the things he had written?
She brought him his papers, the things he had written, things she had
written for him. She tumbled them out on to the sofa. They looked at
them together. Diagrams, designs, little men and women brandishing
sticks for arms, with wings--were they?--on their backs; circles
traced round shillings and sixpences--the suns and stars; zigzagging
precipices with mountaineers ascending roped together, exactly like
knives and forks; sea pieces with little faces laughing out of what
might perhaps be waves: the map of the world. Burn them! he cried.
Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes;
odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans--his
messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister.
Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried.
But Rezia laid her hands on them. Some were very beautiful, she
thought. She would tie them up (for she had no envelope) with a piece
of silk.
Even if they took him, she said, she would go with him. They could not
separate them against their wills, she said.
Shuffling the edges straight, she did up the papers, and tied the
parcel almost without looking, sitting beside him, he thought, as if
all her petals were about her. She was a flowering tree; and through
her branches looked out the face of a lawgiver, who had reached a
sanctuary where she feared no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle,
a triumph, the last and greatest. Staggering he saw her mount the
appalling staircase, laden with Holmes and Bradshaw, men who never
weighed less than eleven stone six, who sent their wives to Court, men
who made ten thousand a year and talked of proportion; who different
in their verdicts (for Holmes said one thing, Bradshaw another), yet
judges they were; who mixed the vision and the sideboard; saw nothing
clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. “Must” they said. Over them she
triumphed.
“There!” she said. The papers were tied up. No one should get at them.
She would put them away.
And, she said, nothing should separate them. She sat down beside him
and called him by the name of that hawk or crow which being malicious
and a great destroyer of crops was precisely like him. No one could
separate them, she said.
Then she got up to go into the bedroom to pack their things, but
hearing voices downstairs and thinking that Dr. Holmes had perhaps
called, ran down to prevent him coming up.
Septimus could hear her talking to Holmes on the staircase.
“My dear lady, I have come as a friend,” Holmes was saying.
“No. I will not allow you to see my husband,” she said.
He could see her, like a little hen, with her wings spread barring his
passage. But Holmes persevered.
“My dear lady, allow me....” Holmes said, putting her aside (Holmes was
a powerfully built man).
Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would burst open the door. Holmes
would say “In a funk, eh?” Holmes would get him. But no; not Holmes;
not Bradshaw. Getting up rather unsteadily, hopping indeed from foot to
foot, he considered Mrs. Filmer’s nice clean bread knife with “Bread”
carved on the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t spoil that. The gas fire?
But it was too late now. Holmes was coming. Razors he might have got,
but Rezia, who always did that sort of thing, had packed them. There
remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury-lodging house window,
the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of
opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of
tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw
like that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But he would wait till
the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun
hot. Only human beings--what did _they_ want? Coming down the staircase
opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door.
“I’ll give it you!” he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently
down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings.
“The coward!” cried Dr. Holmes, bursting the door open. Rezia ran
to the window, she saw; she understood. Dr. Holmes and Mrs. Filmer
collided with each other. Mrs. Filmer flapped her apron and made her
hide her eyes in the bedroom. There was a great deal of running up
and down stairs. Dr. Holmes came in--white as a sheet, shaking all
over, with a glass in his hand. She must be brave and drink something,
he said (What was it? Something sweet), for her husband was horribly
mangled, would not recover consciousness, she must not see him, must be
spared as much as possible, would have the inquest to go through, poor
young woman. Who could have foretold it? A sudden impulse, no one was
in the least to blame (he told Mrs. Filmer). And why the devil he did
it, Dr. Holmes could not conceive.
It seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that she was opening
long windows, stepping out into some garden. But where? The clock
was striking--one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared
with all this thumping and whispering; like Septimus himself. She was
falling asleep. But the clock went on striking, four, five, six and
Mrs. Filmer waving her apron (they wouldn’t bring the body in here,
would they?) seemed part of that garden; or a flag. She had once seen a
flag slowly rippling out from a mast when she stayed with her aunt at
Venice. Men killed in battle were thus saluted, and Septimus had been
through the War. Of her memories, most were happy.
She put on her hat, and ran through cornfields--where could it have
been?--on to some hill, somewhere near the sea, for there were ships,
gulls, butterflies; they sat on a cliff. In London too, there they sat,
and, half dreaming, came to her through the bedroom door, rain falling,
whisperings, stirrings among dry corn, the caress of the sea, as it
seemed to her, hollowing them in its arched shell and murmuring to her
laid on shore, strewn she felt, like flying flowers over some tomb.
“He is dead,” she said, smiling at the poor old woman who guarded her
with her honest light-blue eyes fixed on the door. (They wouldn’t bring
him in here, would they?) But Mrs. Filmer pooh-poohed. Oh no, oh no!
They were carrying him away now. Ought she not to be told? Married
people ought to be together, Mrs. Filmer thought. But they must do as
the doctor said.
“Let her sleep,” said Dr. Holmes, feeling her pulse. She saw the large
outline of his body standing dark against the window. So that was Dr.
Holmes.
One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh thought. It is one of
the triumphs of civilisation, as the light high bell of the ambulance
sounded. Swiftly, cleanly the ambulance sped to the hospital, having
picked up instantly, humanely, some poor devil; some one hit on the
head, struck down by disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so
ago at one of these crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was
civilisation. It struck him coming back from the East--the efficiency,
the organisation, the communal spirit of London. Every cart or carriage
of its own accord drew aside to let the ambulance pass. Perhaps it was
morbid; or was it not touching rather, the respect which they showed
this ambulance with its victim inside--busy men hurrying home yet
instantly bethinking them as it passed of some wife; or presumably
how easily it might have been them there, stretched on a shelf with a
doctor and a nurse.... 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. It had been his
undoing--this susceptibility--in Anglo-Indian society; not weeping
at the right time, or laughing either. I have that in me, he thought
standing by the pillar-box, which could now dissolve in tears. Why,
Heaven knows. Beauty of some sort probably, and the weight of the day,
which beginning with that visit to Clarissa had exhausted him with
its heat, its intensity, and the drip, drip, of one impression after
another down into that cellar where they stood, deep, dark, and no one
would ever know. Partly for that reason, its secrecy, complete and
inviolable, he had found life like an unknown garden, full of turns
and corners, surprising, yes; really it took one’s breath away, these
moments; there coming to him by the pillar-box opposite the British
Museum one of them, a moment, in which things came together; this
ambulance; and life and death. It was as if he were sucked up to some
very high roof by that rush of emotion and the rest of him, like a
white shell-sprinkled beach, left bare. It had been his undoing in
Anglo-Indian society--this susceptibility.
Clarissa once, going on top of an omnibus with him somewhere, Clarissa
superficially at least, so easily moved, now in despair, now in the
best of spirits, all aquiver in those days and such good company,
spotting queer little scenes, names, people from the top of a bus, for
they used to explore London and bring back bags full of treasures from
the Caledonian market--Clarissa had a theory in those days--they had
heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to
explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people;
not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every
day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they
agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus
going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here,
here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She
waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that
to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed
them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never
spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter--even
trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her
horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for
all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which
appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of
us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow
attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after
death ... perhaps--perhaps.
Looking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years her
theory worked to this extent. Brief, broken, often painful as their
actual meetings had been what with his absences and interruptions