Sounds around Septimus are amplified and richly suggestive. The movement of Septimus' sight and sound experiencings are wave-like: the smoke languishes, melts; sounds converge, then break; the light on the elm leaves rises and falls. This water imagery has been used before. It punctuated Mrs. Dalloway's morning walk and the journeys back and forth from her past to the present. The rising and falling is the rhythm of waves and it is also the same rhythm of a throb, the beat of a heart — the beat of the individual heart and the beat of our primeval mother, the sea. The rhythm beckons mightily to Septimus; the metaphorical rhythm of the great Unconscious, of the sea, is like a siren's song to Septimus' unconscious, and the remnant of his rationality fights to preserve itself. He pleads with himself that he will not go mad. Septimus is struggling to be the master of his own destiny, just as Clarissa is still struggling (in a parallel, though much less intense way) to be master of her destiny.
We draw away from Septimus' intense inner conflicts and Lucrezia's fears, and catch a glimpse of the Smiths from another side — from Maisie Johnson's point of view. Like Lucrezia, she is foreign to London. She is Scottish, just down from Edinburgh, and the men and women and the "prim" flowers of London — all the things that thrilled Clarissa — seem odd to Maisie. Especially odd are the Smiths, she thinks. Then we look at Maisie through Mrs. Dempster's eyes. We observe old Mr. Bently. The scene is blurring. Life has gone awry for most of the people we have met since Clarissa Dalloway stepped out of her house this morning to go shopping for flowers. The scene ends with the sky-writing airplane still noiselessly spilling blurred letters onto the sky. What do they say? They might say "toffee" but the message is still incomplete. We can interpret its blurred image any way we choose, just as Clarissa, Septimus, Lucrezia, and Maisie, Mrs. Dempster, and Mr. Bently can each decide differently about London, Londoners, and life. Human beings interpret moments of reality variously; we have seen several striking instances through the perceptions of the sane, the insane, the foreigner, the newcomer, and the elderly.
