Night and Day by Virginia Woolf (websites to read books for free .TXT) 📖

later

lunched in the Strand, cutting her meat firmly into small pieces, but

giving her fellow-diners no further cause to judge her eccentric. Her

soliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emerging

suddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when she had

to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or to

choose a turning. “To know the truth—to accept without bitterness”—

those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no one

could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in front

of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford, save that the name of Ralph

occurred frequently in very strange connections, as if, having spoken

it, she wished, superstitiously, to cancel it by adding some other

word that robbed the sentence with his name in it of any meaning.

 

Those champions of the cause of women, Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal, did

not perceive anything strange in Mary’s behavior, save that she was

almost half an hour later than usual in coming back to the office.

Happily, their own affairs kept them busy, and she was free from their

inspection. If they had surprised her they would have found her lost,

apparently, in admiration of the large hotel across the square, for,

after writing a few words, her pen rested upon the paper, and her mind

pursued its own journey among the sun-blazoned windows and the drifts

of purplish smoke which formed her view. And, indeed, this background

was by no means out of keeping with her thoughts. She saw to the

remote spaces behind the strife of the foreground, enabled now to gaze

there, since she had renounced her own demands, privileged to see the

larger view, to share the vast desires and sufferings of the mass of

mankind. She had been too lately and too roughly mastered by facts to

take an easy pleasure in the relief of renunciation; such satisfaction

as she felt came only from the discovery that, having renounced

everything that made life happy, easy, splendid, individual, there

remained a hard reality, unimpaired by one’s personal adventures,

remote as the stars, unquenchable as they are.

 

While Mary Datchet was undergoing this curious transformation from the

particular to the universal, Mrs. Seal remembered her duties with

regard to the kettle and the gas-fire. She was a little surprised to

find that Mary had drawn her chair to the window, and, having lit the

gas, she raised herself from a stooping posture and looked at her. The

most obvious reason for such an attitude in a secretary was some kind

of indisposition. But Mary, rousing herself with an effort, denied

that she was indisposed.

 

“I’m frightfully lazy this afternoon,” she added, with a glance at her

table. “You must really get another secretary, Sally.”

 

The words were meant to be taken lightly, but something in the tone of

them roused a jealous fear which was always dormant in Mrs. Seal’s

breast. She was terribly afraid that one of these days Mary, the young

woman who typified so many rather sentimental and enthusiastic ideas,

who had some sort of visionary existence in white with a sheaf of

lilies in her hand, would announce, in a jaunty way, that she was

about to be married.

 

“You don’t mean that you’re going to leave us?” she said.

 

“I’ve not made up my mind about anything,” said Mary—a remark which

could be taken as a generalization.

 

Mrs. Seal got the teacups out of the cupboard and set them on the

table.

 

“You’re not going to be married, are you?” she asked, pronouncing the

words with nervous speed.

 

“Why are you asking such absurd questions this afternoon, Sally?” Mary

asked, not very steadily. “Must we all get married?”

 

Mrs. Seal emitted a most peculiar chuckle. She seemed for one moment

to acknowledge the terrible side of life which is concerned with the

emotions, the private lives, of the sexes, and then to sheer off from

it with all possible speed into the shades of her own shivering

virginity. She was made so uncomfortable by the turn the conversation

had taken, that she plunged her head into the cupboard, and endeavored

to abstract some very obscure piece of china.

 

“We have our work,” she said, withdrawing her head, displaying cheeks

more than usually crimson, and placing a jam-pot emphatically upon the

table. But, for the moment, she was unable to launch herself upon one

of those enthusiastic, but inconsequent, tirades upon liberty,

democracy, the rights of the people, and the iniquities of the

Government, in which she delighted. Some memory from her own past or

from the past of her sex rose to her mind and kept her abashed. She

glanced furtively at Mary, who still sat by the window with her arm

upon the sill. She noticed how young she was and full of the promise

of womanhood. The sight made her so uneasy that she fidgeted the cups

upon their saucers.

 

“Yes—enough work to last a lifetime,” said Mary, as if concluding

some passage of thought.

 

Mrs. Seal brightened at once. She lamented her lack of scientific

training, and her deficiency in the processes of logic, but she set

her mind to work at once to make the prospects of the cause appear as

alluring and important as she could. She delivered herself of an

harangue in which she asked a great many rhetorical questions and

answered them with a little bang of one fist upon another.

 

“To last a lifetime? My dear child, it will last all our lifetimes. As

one falls another steps into the breach. My father, in his generation,

a pioneer—I, coming after him, do my little best. What, alas! can one

do more? And now it’s you young women—we look to you—the future

looks to you. Ah, my dear, if I’d a thousand lives, I’d give them all

to our cause. The cause of women, d’you say? I say the cause of

humanity. And there are some”—she glanced fiercely at the window—

“who don’t see it! There are some who are satisfied to go on, year

after year, refusing to admit the truth. And we who have the vision—

the kettle boiling over? No, no, let me see to it—we who know the

truth,” she continued, gesticulating with the kettle and the teapot.

Owing to these encumbrances, perhaps, she lost the thread of her

discourse, and concluded, rather wistfully, “It’s all so SIMPLE.” She

referred to a matter that was a perpetual source of bewilderment to

her—the extraordinary incapacity of the human race, in a world where

the good is so unmistakably divided from the bad, of distinguishing

one from the other, and embodying what ought to be done in a few

large, simple Acts of Parliament, which would, in a very short time,

completely change the lot of humanity.

 

“One would have thought,” she said, “that men of University training,

like Mr. Asquith—one would have thought that an appeal to reason

would not be unheard by them. But reason,” she reflected, “what is

reason without Reality?”

 

Doing homage to the phrase, she repeated it once more, and caught the

ear of Mr. Clacton, as he issued from his room; and he repeated it a

third time, giving it, as he was in the habit of doing with Mrs.

Seal’s phrases, a dryly humorous intonation. He was well pleased with

the world, however, and he remarked, in a flattering manner, that he

would like to see that phrase in large letters at the head of a

leaflet.

 

“But, Mrs. Seal, we have to aim at a judicious combination of the

two,” he added in his magisterial way to check the unbalanced

enthusiasm of the women. “Reality has to be voiced by reason before it

can make itself felt. The weak point of all these movements, Miss

Datchet,” he continued, taking his place at the table and turning to

Mary as usual when about to deliver his more profound cogitations, “is

that they are not based upon sufficiently intellectual grounds. A

mistake, in my opinion. The British public likes a pellet of reason in

its jam of eloquence—a pill of reason in its pudding of sentiment,”

he said, sharpening the phrase to a satisfactory degree of literary

precision.

 

His eyes rested, with something of the vanity of an author, upon the

yellow leaflet which Mary held in her hand. She rose, took her seat at

the head of the table, poured out tea for her colleagues, and gave her

opinion upon the leaflet. So she had poured out tea, so she had

criticized Mr. Clacton’s leaflets a hundred times already; but now it

seemed to her that she was doing it in a different spirit; she had

enlisted in the army, and was a volunteer no longer. She had renounced

something and was now—how could she express it?;—not quite “in the

running” for life. She had always known that Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal

were not in the running, and across the gulf that separated them she

had seen them in the guise of shadow people, flitting in and out of

the ranks of the living—eccentrics, undeveloped human beings, from

whose substance some essential part had been cut away. All this had

never struck her so clearly as it did this afternoon, when she felt

that her lot was cast with them for ever. One view of the world

plunged in darkness, so a more volatile temperament might have argued

after a season of despair, let the world turn again and show another,

more splendid, perhaps. No, Mary thought, with unflinching loyalty to

what appeared to her to be the true view, having lost what is best, I

do not mean to pretend that any other view does instead. Whatever

happens, I mean to have no presences in my life. Her very words had a

sort of distinctness which is sometimes produced by sharp, bodily

pain. To Mrs. Seal’s secret jubilation the rule which forbade

discussion of shop at tea-time was overlooked. Mary and Mr. Clacton

argued with a cogency and a ferocity which made the little woman feel

that something very important—she hardly knew what—was taking place.

She became much excited; one crucifix became entangled with another,

and she dug a considerable hole in the table with the point of her

pencil in order to emphasize the most striking heads of the discourse;

and how any combination of Cabinet Ministers could resist such

discourse she really did not know.

 

She could hardly bring herself to remember her own private instrument

of justice—the typewriter. The telephone-bell rang, and as she

hurried off to answer a voice which always seemed a proof of

importance by itself, she felt that it was at this exact spot on the

surface of the globe that all the subterranean wires of thought and

progress came together. When she returned, with a message from the

printer, she found that Mary was putting on her hat firmly; there was

something imperious and dominating in her attitude altogether.

 

“Look, Sally,” she said, “these letters want copying. These I’ve not

looked at. The question of the new census will have to be gone into

carefully. But I’m going home now. Good night, Mr. Clacton; good

night, Sally.”

 

“We are very fortunate in our secretary, Mr. Clacton,” said Mrs. Seal,

pausing with her hand on the papers, as the door shut behind Mary. Mr.

Clacton himself had been vaguely impressed by something in Mary’s

behavior towards him. He envisaged a time even when it would become

necessary to tell her that there could not be two masters in one

office—but she was certainly able, very able, and in touch with a

group of very clever young men. No doubt they had suggested to her

some of her new ideas.

 

He signified his assent to