this morning, what was all that about? What could Clarissa have thought
of him? thought him a fool presumably, not for the first time. It was
jealousy that was at the bottom of it--jealousy which survives every
other passion of mankind, Peter Walsh thought, holding his pocket-knife
at arm’s length. She had been meeting Major Orde, Daisy said in her
last letter; said it on purpose he knew; said it to make him jealous;
he could see her wrinkling her forehead as she wrote, wondering what
she could say to hurt him; and yet it made no difference; he was
furious! All this pother of coming to England and seeing lawyers wasn’t
to marry her, but to prevent her from marrying anybody else. That was
what tortured him, that was what came over him when he saw Clarissa so
calm, so cold, so intent on her dress or whatever it was; realising
what she might have spared him, what she had reduced him to--a
whimpering, snivelling old ass. But women, he thought, shutting his
pocket-knife, don’t know what passion is. They don’t know the meaning
of it to men. Clarissa was as cold as an icicle. There she would sit
on the sofa by his side, let him take her hand, give him one kiss--Here
he was at the crossing.
A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up
without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly
and with an absence of all human meaning into
ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo--
the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting
from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube station
from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a
wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up
and down its branches singing
ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo
and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.
Through all ages--when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp,
through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise,
the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed,
her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has
lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of
years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked,
she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer
days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had
gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and
when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth,
now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her
side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which
the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the
universe would be over.
As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent’s Park Tube station
still the earth seemed green and flowery; still, though it issued from
so rude a mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root
fibres and tangled grasses, still the old bubbling burbling song,
soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and
treasure, streamed away in rivulets over the pavement and all along the
Marylebone Road, and down towards Euston, fertilising, leaving a damp
stain.
Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked with her
lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand exposed
for coppers the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten
million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the
sea flows now, with whom it did not matter--he was a man, oh yes, a man
who had loved her. But the passage of ages had blurred the clarity of
that ancient May day; the bright petalled flowers were hoar and silver
frosted; and she no longer saw, when she implored him (as she did now
quite clearly) “look in my eyes with thy sweet eyes intently,” she
no longer saw brown eyes, black whiskers or sunburnt face but only a
looming shape, a shadow shape, to which, with the bird-like freshness
of the very aged she still twittered “give me your hand and let me
press it gently” (Peter Walsh couldn’t help giving the poor creature a
coin as he stepped into his taxi), “and if some one should see, what
matter they?” she demanded; and her fist clutched at her side, and she
smiled, pocketing her shilling, and all peering inquisitive eyes seemed
blotted out, and the passing generations--the pavement was crowded with
bustling middle-class people--vanished, like leaves, to be trodden
under, to be soaked and steeped and made mould of by that eternal
spring--
ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo
“Poor old woman,” said Rezia Warren Smith, waiting to cross.
Oh poor old wretch!
Suppose it was a wet night? Suppose one’s father, or somebody who had
known one in better days had happened to pass, and saw one standing
there in the gutter? And where did she sleep at night?
Cheerfully, almost gaily, the invincible thread of sound wound up into
the air like the smoke from a cottage chimney, winding up clean beech
trees and issuing in a tuft of blue smoke among the topmost leaves.
“And if some one should see, what matter they?”
Since she was so unhappy, for weeks and weeks now, Rezia had given
meanings to things that happened, almost felt sometimes that she must
stop people in the street, if they looked good, kind people, just to
say to them “I am unhappy”; and this old woman singing in the street
“if some one should see, what matter they?” made her suddenly quite
sure that everything was going to be right. They were going to Sir
William Bradshaw; she thought his name sounded nice; he would cure
Septimus at once. And then there was a brewer’s cart, and the grey
horses had upright bristles of straw in their tails; there were
newspaper placards. It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.
So they crossed, Mr. and Mrs. Septimus Warren Smith, and was there,
after all, anything to draw attention to them, anything to make a
passer-by suspect here is a young man who carries in him the greatest
message in the world, and is, moreover, the happiest man in the world,
and the most miserable? Perhaps they walked more slowly than other
people, and there was something hesitating, trailing, in the man’s
walk, but what more natural for a clerk, who has not been in the West
End on a weekday at this hour for years, than to keep looking at the
sky, looking at this, that and the other, as if Portland Place were a
room he had come into when the family are away, the chandeliers being
hung in holland bags, and the caretaker, as she lets in long shafts of
dusty light upon deserted, queer-looking arm-chairs, lifting one corner
of the long blinds, explains to the visitors what a wonderful place
it is; how wonderful, but at the same time, he thinks, as he looks at
chairs and tables, how strange.
To look at, he might have been a clerk, but of the better sort; for he
wore brown boots; his hands were educated; so, too, his profile--his
angular, big-nosed, intelligent, sensitive profile; but not his lips
altogether, for they were loose; and his eyes (as eyes tend to be),
eyes merely; hazel, large; so that he was, on the whole, a border case,
neither one thing nor the other, might end with a house at Purley and a
motor car, or continue renting apartments in back streets all his life;
one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all
learnt from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening
after the day’s work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by
letter.
As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go
through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields
and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy,
because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the
fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future
for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister,
had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great
men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their
struggles has become famous.
London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith;
thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which
their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston
Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face
in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted,
hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have
said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door
in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant:--It has flowered;
flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage,
laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the
Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve
himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the
Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.
Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him
a taste of _Antony and Cleopatra_ and the rest; lent him books; wrote
him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once
in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a red gold flame infinitely
ethereal and insubstantial over Miss Pole; _Antony and Cleopatra_; and
the Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably
wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject,
she corrected in red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking in a
green dress in a square. “It has flowered,” the gardener might have
said, had he opened the door; had he come in, that is to say, any
night about this time, and found him writing; found him tearing up his
writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o’clock in the
morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and
fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, _The
History of Civilisation_, and Bernard Shaw.
Something was up, Mr. Brewer knew; Mr. Brewer, managing clerk at
Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents;
something was up, he thought, and, being paternal with his young men,
and thinking very highly of Smith’s abilities, and prophesying that he
would, in ten or fifteen years, succeed to the leather arm-chair in the
inner room under the skylight with the deed-boxes round him, “if he
keeps his health,” said Mr. Brewer, and that was the danger--he looked
weakly; advised football, invited him to supper and was seeing his way
to consider recommending a rise of salary, when something happened
which threw out many of Mr. Brewer’s calculations, took away his ablest
young fellows, and eventually, so prying and insidious were the fingers
of the European War, smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole
in the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook’s nerves at Mr.
Brewer’s establishment at Muswell Hill.
Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save
an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and
Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the
trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football
was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he
drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by
name. It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying
a paper screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and then, at
the old dog’s ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire,
raising a paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. They had to be
together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with
each other. But when Evans (Rezia who had only seen him once called
him “a quiet man,” a sturdy red-haired man, undemonstrative in the
company of women), when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in
Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here
was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very
little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He
had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had
won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive. He was
right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with
indifference. When peace came he was in Milan, billeted in the house of
an innkeeper with a courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the
open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he
became engaged one evening when the panic was on him--that he could not
feel.
For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried,
he had, especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of
fear. He could not feel. As he opened the door of the room where the
Italian girls sat making hats, he could see them; could hear them;
they were rubbing wires among coloured beads in saucers; they were
turning buckram shapes this way and that; the table was all strewn
with feathers, spangles, silks, ribbons; scissors were rapping on the
table; but something failed him; he could not feel. Still, scissors
rapping, girls laughing, hats being made protected him; he was assured
of safety; he had a refuge. But he could not sit there all night. There
were moments of waking in the early morning. The bed was falling; he
was falling. Oh for the scissors and the lamplight and the buckram
shapes! He asked Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two, the
gay, the frivolous, with those little artist’s fingers that she would
hold up and say “It is all in them.” Silk, feathers, what not were
alive to them.
“It is the hat that matters most,” she would say, when they walked
out together. Every hat that passed, she would examine; and the cloak
and the dress and the way the woman held herself. Ill-dressing,
over-dressing she stigmatised, not savagely, rather with impatient
movements of the hands, like those of a painter who puts from him
some obvious well-meant glaring imposture; and then, generously, but
always critically, she would welcome a shop-girl who had turned her
little bit of stuff gallantly, or praise, wholly, with enthusiastic and
professional understanding, a French lady descending from her carriage,
in chinchilla, robes, pearls.
“Beautiful!” she would murmur, nudging Septimus, that he might see.
But beauty was behind a pane of glass. Even taste (Rezia liked ices,
chocolates, sweet things) had no relish to him. He put down his cup
on the little marble table. He looked at people outside; happy they
seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing,
squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. In
the tea-shop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling
fear came over him--he could not feel. He could reason; he could read,
Dante for example, quite easily (“Septimus, do put down your book,”
said Rezia, gently shutting the _Inferno_), he could add up his bill;
his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then--that he
could not feel.
“The English are so silent,” Rezia said. She liked it, she said. She
respected these Englishmen, and wanted to see London, and the English
horses, and the tailor-made suits, and could remember hearing how
wonderful the shops were, from an Aunt who had married and lived in
Soho.
It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the
train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the
world itself is without meaning.
At the office they advanced him to a post of considerable
responsibility. They were proud of him; he had won crosses. “You have
done your duty; it is up to us--” began Mr. Brewer; and could not
finish, so pleasurable was his emotion. They took admirable lodgings
off the Tottenham Court Road.
Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business of the
intoxication of language--_Antony and Cleopatra_--had shrivelled
utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity--the putting on of clothes,
the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly!
This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of
words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise,
to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus
(translated) the same. There Rezia sat at the table trimming hats. She
trimmed hats for Mrs. Filmer’s friends; she trimmed hats by the hour.
She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned, under water, he
thought.
“The English are so serious,” she would say, putting her arms round
Septimus, her cheek against his.
Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business
of copulation was filth to him before the end. But, Rezia said, she
must have children. They had been married five years.
They went to the Tower together; to the Victoria and Albert Museum;
stood in the crowd to see the King open Parliament. And there were the
shops--hat shops, dress shops, shops with leather bags in the window,
where she would stand staring. But she must have a boy.
She must have a son like Septimus, she said. But nobody could be
like Septimus; so gentle; so serious; so clever. Could she not read
Shakespeare too? Was Shakespeare a difficult author? she asked.
One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate
suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no
lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this
way, now that.
He watched her snip, shape, as one watches a bird hop, flit in the
grass, without daring to move a finger. For the truth is (let her
ignore it) that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor
charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming
into the wilderness. They desert the fallen. They are plastered
over with grimaces. There was Brewer at the office, with his waxed
moustache, coral tie-pin, white slip, and pleasurable emotions--all
coldness and clamminess within,--his geraniums ruined in the War--his
cook’s nerves destroyed; or Amelia What’shername, handing round cups
of tea punctually at five--a leering, sneering obscene little harpy;
and the Toms and Berties in their starched shirt fronts oozing thick
drops of vice. They never saw him drawing pictures of them naked at
their antics in his notebook. In the street, vans roared past him;
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.