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
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
once. The malicious asserted that he now kept guard at Buckingham
Palace, dressed in silk stockings and knee-breeches, over what nobody
knew. But he did it extremely efficiently. He had been afloat on the
cream of English society for fifty-five years. He had known Prime
Ministers. His affections were understood to be deep. And if it were
true that he had not taken part in any of the great movements of the
time or held important office, one or two humble reforms stood to
his credit; an improvement in public shelters was one; the protection
of owls in Norfolk another; servant girls had reason to be grateful
to him; and his name at the end of letters to the _Times_, asking for
funds, appealing to the public to protect, to preserve, to clear up
litter, to abate smoke, and stamp out immorality in parks, commanded
respect.
A magnificent figure he cut too, pausing for a moment (as the sound of
the half hour died away) to look critically, magisterially, at socks
and shoes; impeccable, substantial, as if he beheld the world from a
certain eminence, and dressed to match; but realised the obligations
which size, wealth, health, entail, and observed punctiliously even
when not absolutely necessary, little courtesies, old-fashioned
ceremonies which gave a quality to his manner, something to imitate,
something to remember him by, for he would never lunch, for example,
with Lady Bruton, whom he had known these twenty years, without
bringing her in his outstretched hand a bunch of carnations and asking
Miss Brush, Lady Bruton’s secretary, after her brother in South Africa,
which, for some reason, Miss Brush, deficient though she was in every
attribute of female charm, so much resented that she said “Thank you,
he’s doing very well in South Africa,” when, for half a dozen years, he
had been doing badly in Portsmouth.
Lady Bruton herself preferred Richard Dalloway, who arrived at the next
moment. Indeed they met on the doorstep.
Lady Bruton preferred Richard Dalloway of course. He was made of
much finer material. But she wouldn’t let them run down her poor
dear Hugh. She could never forget his kindness--he had been really
remarkably kind--she forgot precisely upon what occasion. But he
had been--remarkably kind. Anyhow, the difference between one man
and another does not amount to much. She had never seen the sense
of cutting people up, as Clarissa Dalloway did--cutting them up and
sticking them together again; not at any rate when one was sixty-two.
She took Hugh’s carnations with her angular grim smile. There was
nobody else coming, she said. She had got them there on false
pretences, to help her out of a difficulty--
“But let us eat first,” she said.
And so there began a soundless and exquisite passing to and fro
through swing doors of aproned white-capped maids, handmaidens not
of necessity, but adepts in a mystery or grand deception practised
by hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when, with a wave of
the hand, the traffic ceases, and there rises instead this profound
illusion in the first place about the food--how it is not paid for; and
then that the table spreads itself voluntarily with glass and silver,
little mats, saucers of red fruit; films of brown cream mask turbot; in
casseroles severed chickens swim; coloured, undomestic, the fire burns;
and with the wine and the coffee (not paid for) rise jocund visions
before musing eyes; gently speculative eyes; eyes to whom life appears
musical, mysterious; eyes now kindled to observe genially the beauty
of the red carnations which Lady Bruton (whose movements were always
angular) had laid beside her plate, so that Hugh Whitbread, feeling at
peace with the entire universe and at the same time completely sure of
his standing, said, resting his fork,
“Wouldn’t they look charming against your lace?”
Miss Brush resented this familiarity intensely. She thought him an
underbred fellow. She made Lady Bruton laugh.
Lady Bruton raised the carnations, holding them rather stiffly with
much the same attitude with which the General held the scroll in the
picture behind her; she remained fixed, tranced. Which was she now,
the General’s great-grand-daughter? great-great-grand-daughter? Richard
Dalloway asked himself. Sir Roderick, Sir Miles, Sir Talbot--that was
it. It was remarkable how in that family the likeness persisted in the
women. She should have been a general of dragoons herself. And Richard
would have served under her, cheerfully; he had the greatest respect
for her; he cherished these romantic views about well-set-up old women
of pedigree, and would have liked, in his good-humoured way, to bring
some young hot-heads of his acquaintance to lunch with her; as if a
type like hers could be bred of amiable tea-drinking enthusiasts! He
knew her country. He knew her people. There was a vine, still bearing,
which either Lovelace or Herrick--she never read a word of poetry
herself, but so the story ran--had sat under. Better wait to put before
them the question that bothered her (about making an appeal to the
public; if so, in what terms and so on), better wait until they have
had their coffee, Lady Bruton thought; and so laid the carnations down
beside her plate.
“How’s Clarissa?” she asked abruptly.
Clarissa always said that Lady Bruton did not like her. Indeed, Lady
Bruton had the reputation of being more interested in politics than
people; of talking like a man; of having had a finger in some notorious
intrigue of the eighties, which was now beginning to be mentioned
in memoirs. Certainly there was an alcove in her drawing-room, and
a table in that alcove, and a photograph upon that table of General
Sir Talbot Moore, now deceased, who had written there (one evening in
the eighties) in Lady Bruton’s presence, with her cognisance, perhaps
advice, a telegram ordering the British troops to advance upon an
historical occasion. (She kept the pen and told the story.) Thus, when
she said in her offhand way “How’s Clarissa?” husbands had difficulty
in persuading their wives and indeed, however devoted, were secretly
doubtful themselves, of her interest in women who often got in their
husbands’ way, prevented them from accepting posts abroad, and had to
be taken to the seaside in the middle of the session to recover from
influenza. Nevertheless her inquiry, “How’s Clarissa?” was known by
women infallibly, to be a signal from a well-wisher, from an almost
silent companion, whose utterances (half a dozen perhaps in the course
of a lifetime) signified recognition of some feminine comradeship which
went beneath masculine lunch parties and united Lady Bruton and Mrs.
Dalloway, who seldom met, and appeared when they did meet indifferent
and even hostile, in a singular bond.