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 Sep-
timus, 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 exact-
ing 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 pro-
portion; 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, penal-
ised 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 re-
lations 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 in-
stitutions! 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 im-
puted to the professional conversation, or the fatigue of a great doctor
whose life, Lady Bradshaw said, "is not his own but his patients'") dis-
agreeable 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. Cer-
tainly 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 Sur-
rey where they taught, what Sir William frankly admitted was a difficult
art—a sense of proportion. There were, moreover, family affection; hon-
our; courage; and a brilliant career. All of these had in Sir William a res-
olute 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 re-
ceived 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 propor-
tion, 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 forgiving one time ratified by Greenwich; and this gratitude (so Hugh
Whitbread ruminated, dallying there in front of the shop window), nat-
urally 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 as-
serted that he now kept guard at Buckingham Palace, dressed in silk
stockings and knee-breeches, over what nobody knew. But he did it ex-
tremely 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 shel-
ters 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, com-
manded 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 abso-
lutely 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 secret-
ary, 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 remark-
ably 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 cut-
ting 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, rest-
ing his fork,
"Wouldn't they look charming against your lace?"
Miss Brush resented this familiarity intensely. She thought him an un-
derbred 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 pic-
ture 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 wo-
men. 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 poetry of herself, but so the story ran—had sat under. Better wait to put before them the ques-
tion 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 oc-
casion. (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 them-
selves, 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. Neverthe-
less her inquiry, "How's Clarissa?" was known by women infallibly, to be
a signal from a well-wisher, from an almost silent companion, whose ut-
terances (half a dozen perhaps in the course of a lifetime) signified recog-
nition 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.
"I met Clarissa in the Park this morning," said Hugh Whitbread, diving
into the casserole, anxious to pay himself this little tribute, for he had
only to come to London and he met everybody at once; but greedy, one
of the greediest men she had ever known, Milly Brush thought, who ob-
served men with unflinching rectitude, and was capable of everlasting
devotion, to her own sex in particular, being knobbed, scraped, angular,
and entirely without feminine charm.
"D'you know who's in town?" said Lady Bruton suddenly bethinking
her. "Our old friend, Peter Walsh."
They all smiled. Peter Walsh! And Mr. Dalloway was genuinely glad,
Milly Brush thought; and Mr. Whitbread thought only of his chicken.
Peter Walsh! All three, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and Richard
Dalloway, remembered the same thing—how passionately Peter had been in love; been rejected; gone to India; come a cropper; made a mess
of things; and Richard Dalloway had a very great liking for the dear old
fellow too. Milly Brush saw that; saw a depth in the brown of his eyes;
saw him hesitate; consider; which interested her, as Mr. Dalloway al-
ways interested her, for what was he thinking, she wondered, about
Peter Walsh?
That Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa; that he would go
back directly after lunch and find Clarissa; that he would tell her, in so
many words, that he loved her. Yes, he would say that.
Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences;
and Mr. Dalloway was always so dependable; such a gentleman too.
Now, being forty, Lady Bruton had only to nod, or turn her head a little
abruptly, and Milly Brush took the signal, however deeply she might be
sunk in these reflections of a detached spirit, of an uncorrupted soul
whom life could not bamboozle, because life had not offered her a
trinket of the slightest value; not a curl, smile, lip, cheek, nose; nothing
whatever; Lady Bruton had only to nod, and Perkins was instructed to
quicken the coffee.
"Yes; Peter Walsh has come back," said Lady Bruton. It was vaguely
flattering to them all. He had come back, battered, unsuccessful, to their
secure shores. But to help him, they reflected, was impossible; there was
some flaw in his character. Hugh Whitbread said one might of course
mention his name to So-and-so. He wrinkled lugubriously, consequen-
tially, at the thought of the letters he would write to the heads of Govern-
ment offices about "my old friend, Peter Walsh," and so on. But it
wouldn't lead to anything—not to anything permanent, because of his
character.
"In trouble with some woman," said Lady Bruton. They had all
guessed that that was at the bottom of it.
"However," said Lady Bruton, anxious to leave the subject, "we shall
hear the whole story from Peter himself."
(The coffee was very slow in coming.)
"The address?" murmured Hugh Whitbread; and there was at once a
ripple in the grey tide of service which washed round Lady Bruton day
in, day out, collecting, intercepting, enveloping her in a fine tissue which
broke concussions, mitigated interruptions, and spread round the house
in Brook Street a fine net where things lodged and were picked out ac-
curately, instantly, by grey-haired Perkins, who had been with Lady
Bruton these thirty years and now wrote down the address; handed it to
Mr. Whitbread, who took out his pocket-book, raised his eyebrows, and slipping it in among documents of the highest importance, said that he
would get Evelyn to ask him to lunch.
(They were waiting to bring the coffee until Mr. Whitbread had
finished.)
Hugh was very slow, Lady Bruton thought. He was getting fat, she no-
ticed. Richard always kept himself in the pink of condition. She was get-
ting impatient; the whole of her being was setting positively, undeniably,
domineeringly brushing aside all this unnecessary trifling (Peter Walsh
and his affairs) upon that subject which engaged her attention, and not
merely her attention, but that fibre which was the ramrod of her soul,
that essential part of her without which Millicent Bruton would not have
been Millicent Bruton; that project for emigrating young people of both
sexes born of respectable parents and setting them up with a fair pro-
spect of doing well in Canada. She exaggerated. She had perhaps lost her
sense of proportion. Emigration was not to others the obvious remedy,
the sublime conception. It was not to them (not to Hugh, or Richard, or
even to devoted Miss Brush) the liberator of the pent egotism, which a
strong martial woman, well nourished, well descended, of direct im-
pulses, downright feelings, and little introspective power (broad and
simple—why could not every one be broad and simple? she asked) feels
rise within her, once youth is past, and must eject upon some object—it
may be Emigration, it may be Emancipation; but whatever it be, this ob-
ject round which the essence of her soul is daily secreted, becomes inevit-
ably prismatic, lustrous, half looking-glass, half precious stone; now
carefully hidden in case people should sneer at it; now proudly dis-
played. Emigration had become, in short, largely Lady Bruton.
But she had to write. And one letter to the Times, she used to say to
Miss Brush, cost her more than to organise an expedition to South Africa
(which she had done in the war). After a morning's battle beginning,
tearing up, beginning again, she used to feel the futility of her own wo-
manhood as she felt it on no other occasion, and would turn gratefully to
the thought of Hugh Whitbread who possessed—no one could doubt
it—the art of writing letters to the Times.
A being so differently constituted from herself, with such a command
of language; able to put things as editors like them put; had passions
which one could not call simply greed. Lady Bruton often suspended
judgement upon men in deference to the mysterious accord in which
they, but no woman, stood to the laws of the universe; knew how to put
things; knew what was said; so that if Richard advised her, and Hugh
wrote for her, she was sure of being somehow right. So she let Hugh eathis soufflé; asked after poor Evelyn; waited until they were smoking, and
then said,
"Milly, would you fetch the papers?"
And Miss Brush went out, came back; laid papers on the table; and
Hugh produced his fountain pen; his silver fountain pen, which had
done twenty years' service, he said, unscrewing the cap. It was still in
perfect order; he had shown it to the makers; there was no reason, they
said, why it should ever wear out; which was somehow to Hugh's credit,
and to the credit of the sentiments which his pen expressed (so Richard
Dalloway felt) as Hugh began carefully writing capital letters with rings
round them in the margin, and thus marvellously reduced Lady Bruton's
tangles to sense, to grammar such as the editor of the Times, Lady Bruton
felt, watching the marvellous transformation, must respect. Hugh was
slow. Hugh was pertinacious. Richard said one must take risks. Hugh
proposed modifications in deference to people's feelings, which, he said
rather tartly when Richard laughed, "had to be considered," and read out
"how, therefore, we are of opinion that the times are ripe … the superflu-
ous youth of our ever-increasing population … what we owe to the
dead … " which Richard thought all stuffing and bunkum, but no harm
in it, of course, and Hugh went on drafting sentiments in alphabetical or-
der of the highest nobility, brushing the cigar ash from his waistcoat, and
summing up now and then the progress they had made until, finally, he
read out the draft of a letter which Lady Bruton felt certain was a master-
piece. Could her own meaning sound like that?
Hugh could not guarantee that the editor would put it in; but he
would be meeting somebody at luncheon.
Whereupon Lady Bruton, who seldom did a graceful thing, stuffed all
Hugh's carnations into the front of her dress, and flinging her hands out
called him "My Prime Minister!" What she would have done without
them both she did not know. They rose. And Richard Dalloway strolled
off as usual to have a look at the General's portrait, because he meant,
whenever he had a moment of leisure, to write a history of Lady Bruton's
family.
And Millicent Bruton was very proud of her family. But they could
wait, they could wait, she said, looking at the picture; meaning that her
family, of military men, administrators, admirals, had been men of ac-
tion, who had done their duty; and Richard's first duty was to his coun-
try, but it was a fine face, she said; and all the papers were ready for
Richard down at Aldmixton whenever the time came; the Labour
Government she meant. "Ah, the news from India!" she cried.
And then, as they stood in the hall taking yellow gloves from the bowl
on the malachite table and Hugh was offering Miss Brush with quite un-
necessary courtesy some discarded ticket or other compliment, which
she loathed from the depths of her heart and blushed brick red, Richard
turned to Lady Bruton, with his hat in his hand, and said,
"We shall see you at our party to-night?" whereupon Lady Bruton re-
sumed the magnificence which letter-writing had shattered. She might
come; or she might not come. Clarissa had wonderful energy. Parties ter-
rified Lady Bruton. But then, she was getting old. So she intimated,
standing at her doorway; handsome; very erect; while her chow
stretched behind her, and Miss Brush disappeared into the background
with her hands full of papers.
And Lady Bruton went ponderously, majestically, up to her room, lay,
one arm extended, on the sofa. She sighed, she snored, not that she was
asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover
in the sunshine this hot June day, with the bees going round and about
and the yellow butterflies. Always she went back to those fields down in
Devonshire, where she had jumped the brooks on Patty, her pony, with
Mortimer and Tom, her brothers. And there were the dogs; there were
the rats; there were her father and mother on the lawn under the trees,
with the tea-things out, and the beds of dahlias, the hollyhocks, the pam-
pas grass; and they, little wretches, always up to some mischief! stealing
back through the shrubbery, so as not to be seen, all bedraggled from
some roguery. What old nurse used to say about her frocks!
Ah dear, she remembered—it was Wednesday in Brook Street. Those
kind good fellows, Richard Dalloway, Hugh Whitbread, had gone this
hot day through the streets whose growl came up to her lying on the
sofa. Power was hers, position, income. She had lived in the forefront of
her time. She had had good friends; known the ablest men of her day.
Murmuring London flowed up to her, and her hand, lying on the sofa
back, curled upon some imaginary baton such as her grandfathers might
have held, holding which she seemed, drowsy and heavy, to be com-
manding battalions marching to Canada, and those good fellows walk-
ing across London, that territory of theirs, that little bit of carpet,
Mayfair.
And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a
thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and
stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one's
friends were attached to one's body, after lunching with them, by a thin
thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells,striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider's thread is blot-
ted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept.
And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread hesitated at the corner of
Conduit Street at the very moment that Millicent Bruton, lying on the
sofa, let the thread snap; snored. Contrary winds buffeted at the street
corner. They looked in at a shop window; they did not wish to buy or to
talk but to part, only with contrary winds buffeting the street corner,
with some sort of lapse in the tides of the body, two forces meeting in a
swirl, morning and afternoon, they paused. Some newspaper placard
went up in the air, gallantly, like a kite at first, then paused, swooped,
fluttered; and a lady's veil hung. Yellow awnings trembled. The speed of
the morning traffic slackened, and single carts rattled carelessly down
half-empty streets. In Norfolk, of which Richard Dalloway was half
thinking, a soft warm wind blew back the petals; confused the waters;
ruffled the flowering grasses. Haymakers, who had pitched beneath
hedges to sleep away the morning toil, parted curtains of green blades;
moved trembling globes of cow parsley to see the sky; the blue, the
steadfast, the blazing summer sky.
Aware that he was looking at a silver two-handled Jacobean mug, and
that Hugh Whitbread admired condescendingly with airs of connois-
seurship a Spanish necklace which he thought of asking the price of in
case Evelyn might like it—still Richard was torpid; could not think or
move. Life had thrown up this wreckage; shop windows full of coloured
paste, and one stood stark with the lethargy of the old, stiff with the ri-
gidity of the old, looking in. Evelyn Whitbread might like to buy this
Spanish necklace—so she might. Yawn he must. Hugh was going into
the shop.
"Right you are!" said Richard, following.
Goodness knows he didn't want to go buying necklaces with Hugh.
But there are tides in the body. Morning meets afternoon. Borne like a
frail shallop on deep, deep floods, Lady Bruton's great-grandfather and
his memoir and his campaigns in North America were whelmed and
sunk. And Millicent Bruton too. She went under. Richard didn't care a
straw what became of Emigration; about that letter, whether the editor
put it in or not. The necklace hung stretched between Hugh's admirable
fingers. Let him give it to a girl, if he must buy jewels—any girl, any girl
in the street. For the worthlessness of this life did strike Richard pretty
forcibly—buying necklaces for Evelyn. If he'd had a boy he'd have said,
Work, work. But he had his Elizabeth; he adored his Elizabeth.
