Section twenty four. 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 law giver who had reached
a sanctuary where she feared no one, not homes, not Bradshaw. A
miracle, a triumph, the last and greatest staggering he saw her mount the
appalling staircase, laden with homes 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 home
said one thing, Bradshaw another. Yet judges they were, who mixed the
vision and the sideboard, saw nothing clear, yet ruled. Yet inflict it
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 doctor
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. Oh, homes would
get him. But no, not homes. Not Bradshaw getting up rather unsteadily,
hopping, indeed from foot to foot, he considered missus 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 Riescha, 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 Risha's, for she was with him. Holmes and Bradshaw liked
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 to you, he cried,
and flung himself vigorously violently down on to Missus Filmer's area railings. The coward
cried Doctor Holmes, bursting the door open. Risha ran to the window.
She saw she understood. Doctor Holmes and Missus Filmer collided with each other.
Missus Filmer flapped her apron and made her hide her eyes. In the bedroom.
There was a great deal of running up and downstairs. Doctor 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 Missus Filmer. And why the devil he did it?
Doctor 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 Missus 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 wall of her memories. Most were happy. She
put on her hat and ran through cornfields Where could it have been, onto
some hill somewhere near the sea, For there were ships, gulls, butterfli
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
the honest light blue eyes fixed on the door. They wouldn't bring him in
here, would they. But missus Filmer poo pooed, Oh no, oh,
no, they were carrying him away. Now, ought she not to
be told? Married people ought to be together, missus Filmer thought, But
they must do as the doctor said. Let her sloop, said doctor Holmes.
Feeling her pulse, she saw the large outline of his body standing dark
against the window. So that was doctor Holmes. One of the triumphs of
civilization. Peter Walsh thought, it is one of the triumphs of civilization,
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,
someone 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 civilization, It struck him, coming back from the
east, the efficiency, the organization, 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 docs, 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 anymore. Fatal to art, fatal to friendship.
True, and yet, thought Peter Walsh, as the ambulance turned to 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 of war 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 a quiver 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 Shaftsbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere, not
here, hear, hear, and she tapped the back of the seat,
but everywhere she waved her hand going up Shaftsbury Avenue, she was all that
so that to know her or anyone 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 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 skepticism, that since her 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 the actual meetings had been,
what with his absences and interruptions. This morning, for instance, in
came Elizabeth like a long legged, cult handsome dumb just as he was beginning
to talk to Clarissa. The effect of them on his life was immeasurable.
There was a mystery about it. You were given a sharp, acute,
uncomfortable grain, the actual meeting horribly painful, as often as not, yet
in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open,
shed its scent, Let you touch, taste, look about, you
get the whole feel of it, and understanding after years of lying lost.
Thus she had come to him on board ship in the himalayas suggested by the
oddest things. So Sally Seaton, generous, enthusiastic goose thought of him when
she saw blue hydrangers. She had influenced him more than any person he had
ever known, and always in this way, coming before him without his wishing
it cool, ladylike, critical or ravishing, romantic, recalling some field or
English harvest. He saw her most often in the country, not in London.
One scene after another at Burton, end of section twenty four, read
by Hannah Drma, London, twenty fourth of October twenty twenty one. S