Night and Day Page 20

  CHAPTER XX

  Happily for Mary Datchet she returned to the office to find that by someobscure Parliamentary maneuver the vote had once more slipped beyond theattainment of women. Mrs. Seal was in a condition bordering upon frenzy.The duplicity of Ministers, the treachery of mankind, the insult towomanhood, the setback to civilization, the ruin of her life's work, thefeelings of her father's daughter--all these topics were discussed inturn, and the office was littered with newspaper cuttings branded withthe blue, if ambiguous, marks of her displeasure. She confessed herselfat fault in her estimate of human nature.

  "The simple elementary acts of justice," she said, waving her handtowards the window, and indicating the foot-passengers and omnibusesthen passing down the far side of Russell Square, "are as far beyondthem as they ever were. We can only look upon ourselves, Mary, aspioneers in a wilderness. We can only go on patiently putting the truthbefore them. It isn't THEM," she continued, taking heart from her sightof the traffic, "it's their leaders. It's those gentlemen sitting inParliament and drawing four hundred a year of the people's money. If wehad to put our case to the people, we should soon have justice done tous. I have always believed in the people, and I do so still. But--" Sheshook her head and implied that she would give them one more chance,and if they didn't take advantage of that she couldn't answer for theconsequences.

  Mr. Clacton's attitude was more philosophical and better supported bystatistics. He came into the room after Mrs. Seal's outburst and pointedout, with historical illustrations, that such reverses had happened inevery political campaign of any importance. If anything, his spiritswere improved by the disaster. The enemy, he said, had taken theoffensive; and it was now up to the Society to outwit the enemy. He gaveMary to understand that he had taken the measure of their cunning, andhad already bent his mind to the task which, so far as she could makeout, depended solely upon him. It depended, so she came to think,when invited into his room for a private conference, upon a systematicrevision of the card-index, upon the issue of certain new lemon-coloredleaflets, in which the facts were marshaled once more in a very strikingway, and upon a large scale map of England dotted with little pinstufted with differently colored plumes of hair according to theirgeographical position. Each district, under the new system, had itsflag, its bottle of ink, its sheaf of documents tabulated and filedfor reference in a drawer, so that by looking under M or S, as thecase might be, you had all the facts with respect to the Suffrageorganizations of that county at your fingers' ends. This would require agreat deal of work, of course.

  "We must try to consider ourselves rather in the light of a telephoneexchange--for the exchange of ideas, Miss Datchet," he said; and takingpleasure in his image, he continued it. "We should consider ourselvesthe center of an enormous system of wires, connecting us up with everydistrict of the country. We must have our fingers upon the pulse of thecommunity; we want to know what people all over England are thinking; wewant to put them in the way of thinking rightly." The system, of course,was only roughly sketched so far--jotted down, in fact, during theChristmas holidays.

  "When you ought to have been taking a rest, Mr. Clacton," said Marydutifully, but her tone was flat and tired.

  "We learn to do without holidays, Miss Datchet," said Mr. Clacton, witha spark of satisfaction in his eye.

  He wished particularly to have her opinion of the lemon-colored leaflet.According to his plan, it was to be distributed in immense quantitiesimmediately, in order to stimulate and generate, "to generate andstimulate," he repeated, "right thoughts in the country before themeeting of Parliament."

  "We have to take the enemy by surprise," he said. "They don't let thegrass grow under their feet. Have you seen Bingham's address to hisconstituents? That's a hint of the sort of thing we've got to meet, MissDatchet."

  He handed her a great bundle of newspaper cuttings, and, begging her togive him her views upon the yellow leaflet before lunch-time, he turnedwith alacrity to his different sheets of paper and his different bottlesof ink.

  Mary shut the door, laid the documents upon her table, and sank herhead on her hands. Her brain was curiously empty of any thought. Shelistened, as if, perhaps, by listening she would become merged againin the atmosphere of the office. From the next room came the rapidspasmodic sounds of Mrs. Seal's erratic typewriting; she, doubtless, wasalready hard at work helping the people of England, as Mr. Clactonput it, to think rightly; "generating and stimulating," those were hiswords. She was striking a blow against the enemy, no doubt, who didn'tlet the grass grow beneath their feet. Mr. Clacton's words repeatedthemselves accurately in her brain. She pushed the papers wearily overto the farther side of the table. It was no use, though; something orother had happened to her brain--a change of focus so that near thingswere indistinct again. The same thing had happened to her once before,she remembered, after she had met Ralph in the gardens of Lincoln's InnFields; she had spent the whole of a committee meeting in thinking aboutsparrows and colors, until, almost at the end of the meeting, her oldconvictions had all come back to her. But they had only come back, shethought with scorn at her feebleness, because she wanted to use them tofight against Ralph. They weren't, rightly speaking, convictions at all.She could not see the world divided into separate compartments of goodpeople and bad people, any more than she could believe so implicitly inthe rightness of her own thought as to wish to bring the populationof the British Isles into agreement with it. She looked at thelemon-colored leaflet, and thought almost enviously of the faith whichcould find comfort in the issue of such documents; for herself she wouldbe content to remain silent for ever if a share of personal happinesswere granted her. She read Mr. Clacton's statement with a curiousdivision of judgment, noting its weak and pompous verbosity on the onehand, and, at the same time, feeling that faith, faith in an illusion,perhaps, but, at any rate, faith in something, was of all gifts the mostto be envied. An illusion it was, no doubt. She looked curiously roundher at the furniture of the office, at the machinery in which shehad taken so much pride, and marveled to think that once thecopying-presses, the card-index, the files of documents, had all beenshrouded, wrapped in some mist which gave them a unity and a generaldignity and purpose independently of their separate significance.The ugly cumbersomeness of the furniture alone impressed her now. Herattitude had become very lax and despondent when the typewriter stoppedin the next room. Mary immediately drew up to the table, laid hands onan unopened envelope, and adopted an expression which might hide herstate of mind from Mrs. Seal. Some instinct of decency required that sheshould not allow Mrs. Seal to see her face. Shading her eyes with herfingers, she watched Mrs. Seal pull out one drawer after another in hersearch for some envelope or leaflet. She was tempted to drop her fingersand exclaim:

  "Do sit down, Sally, and tell me how you manage it--how you manage, thatis, to bustle about with perfect confidence in the necessity of yourown activities, which to me seem as futile as the buzzing of a belatedblue-bottle." She said nothing of the kind, however, and the presence ofindustry which she preserved so long as Mrs. Seal was in the room servedto set her brain in motion, so that she dispatched her morning's workmuch as usual. At one o'clock she was surprised to find how efficientlyshe had dealt with the morning. As she put her hat on she determinedto lunch at a shop in the Strand, so as to set that other piece ofmechanism, her body, into action. With a brain working and a bodyworking one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out forthe hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was consciousof being.

  She considered her case as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. Sheput to herself a series of questions. Would she mind, for example, ifthe wheels of that motor-omnibus passed over her and crushed herto death? No, not in the least; or an adventure with thatdisagreeable-looking man hanging about the entrance of the Tube station?No; she could not conceive fear or excitement. Did suffering in any formappall her? No, suffering was neither good nor bad. And this essentialthing? In the eyes of every single person she detected a flame;
as if aspark in the brain ignited spontaneously at contact with the thingsthey met and drove them on. The young women looking into the milliners'windows had that look in their eyes; and elderly men turning over booksin the second-hand book-shops, and eagerly waiting to hear what theprice was--the very lowest price--they had it, too. But she carednothing at all for clothes or for money either. Books she shrank from,for they were connected too closely with Ralph. She kept on her wayresolutely through the crowd of people, among whom she was so much of analien, feeling them cleave and give way before her.

  Strange thoughts are bred in passing through crowded streets should thepassenger, by chance, have no exact destination in front of him, muchas the mind shapes all kinds of forms, solutions, images when listeninginattentively to music. From an acute consciousness of herself as anindividual, Mary passed to a conception of the scheme of things inwhich, as a human being, she must have her share. She half held avision the vision shaped and dwindled. She wished she had a pencil anda piece of paper to help her to give a form to this conception whichcomposed itself as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. But if shetalked to any one, the conception might escape her. Her vision seemed tolay out the lines of her life until death in a way which satisfiedher sense of harmony. It only needed a persistent effort of thought,stimulated in this strange way by the crowd and the noise, to climb thecrest of existence and see it all laid out once and for ever. Alreadyher suffering as an individual was left behind her. Of this process,which was to her so full of effort, which comprised infinitely swiftand full passages of thought, leading from one crest to another, as sheshaped her conception of life in this world, only two articulatewords escaped her, muttered beneath her breath--"Not happiness--nothappiness."

  She sat down on a seat opposite the statue of one of London's heroesupon the Embankment, and spoke the words aloud. To her they representedthe rare flower or splinter of rock brought down by a climber in proofthat he has stood for a moment, at least, upon the highest peak ofthe mountain. She had been up there and seen the world spread to thehorizon. It was now necessary to alter her course to some extent,according to her new resolve. Her post should be in one of those exposedand desolate stations which are shunned naturally by happy people. Shearranged the details of the new plan in her mind, not without a grimsatisfaction.

  "Now," she said to herself, rising from her seat, "I'll think of Ralph."

  Where was he to be placed in the new scale of life? Her exalted moodseemed to make it safe to handle the question. But she was dismayed tofind how quickly her passions leapt forward the moment she sanctionedthis line of thought. Now she was identified with him and rethought histhoughts with complete self-surrender; now, with a sudden cleavage ofspirit, she turned upon him and denounced him for his cruelty.

  "But I refuse--I refuse to hate any one," she said aloud; chose themoment to cross the road with circumspection, and ten minutes laterlunched in the Strand, cutting her meat firmly into small pieces, butgiving her fellow-diners no further cause to judge her eccentric. Hersoliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emergingsuddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when shehad to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, orto choose a turning. "To know the truth--to accept withoutbitterness"--those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances,for no one could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmuredin front of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford, save that the nameof Ralph occurred frequently in very strange connections, as if, havingspoken it, she wished, superstitiously, to cancel it by adding someother 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, didnot perceive anything strange in Mary's behavior, save that she wasalmost half an hour later than usual in coming back to the office.Happily, their own affairs kept them busy, and she was free from theirinspection. 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 mindpursued its own journey among the sun-blazoned windows and the drifts ofpurplish smoke which formed her view. And, indeed, this background wasby no means out of keeping with her thoughts. She saw to the remotespaces behind the strife of the foreground, enabled now to gaze there,since she had renounced her own demands, privileged to see the largerview, 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 aneasy pleasure in the relief of renunciation such satisfaction as shefelt came only from the discovery that, having renounced everythingthat made life happy, easy, splendid, individual, there remained a hardreality, unimpaired by one's personal adventures, remote as the stars,unquenchable as they are.

  While Mary Datchet was undergoing this curious transformation from theparticular to the universal, Mrs. Seal remembered her duties with regardto the kettle and the gas-fire. She was a little surprised to find thatMary had drawn her chair to the window, and, having lit the gas, sheraised herself from a stooping posture and looked at her. The mostobvious reason for such an attitude in a secretary was some kind ofindisposition. But Mary, rousing herself with an effort, denied that shewas indisposed.

  "I'm frightfully lazy this afternoon," she added, with a glance at hertable. "You must really get another secretary, Sally."

  The words were meant to be taken lightly, but something in the toneof them roused a jealous fear which was always dormant in Mrs. Seal'sbreast. She was terribly afraid that one of these days Mary, the youngwoman who typified so many rather sentimental and enthusiastic ideas,who had some sort of visionary existence in white with a sheaf of liliesin her hand, would announce, in a jaunty way, that she was about to bemarried.

  "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 whichcould 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 thewords with nervous speed.

  "Why are you asking such absurd questions this afternoon, Sally?" Maryasked, not very steadily. "Must we all get married?"

  Mrs. Seal emitted a most peculiar chuckle. She seemed for one momentto acknowledge the terrible side of life which is concerned with theemotions, the private lives, of the sexes, and then to sheer off from itwith 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 abstractsome very obscure piece of china.

  "We have our work," she said, withdrawing her head, displaying cheeksmore than usually crimson, and placing a jam-pot emphatically upon thetable. But, for the moment, she was unable to launch herself upon one ofthose enthusiastic, but inconsequent, tirades upon liberty, democracy,the rights of the people, and the iniquities of the Government, in whichshe delighted. Some memory from her own past or from the past of her sexrose 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 howyoung she was and full of the promise of womanhood. The sight made herso uneasy that she fidgeted the cups upon their saucers.

  "Yes--enough work to last a lifetime," said Mary, as if concluding somepassage of thought.

  Mrs. Seal brightened at once. She lamented her lack of scientifictraining, and her deficiency in the processes of logic, but she sether mind to work at once to make the prospects of the cause appearas alluring and important as she could. She delivered herself of anharangue in which she asked a great many rhetorical questions andanswered them with a little bang of one fist upon another.

  "To last a lifetime? My dear child, it will last all our lifetimes. Asone falls another steps into the breach. My father, in his generation, apioneer--I, coming after him, do my little best. What, alas! can one domore? And now it's you young women-
-we look to you--the future looksto you. Ah, my dear, if I'd a thousand lives, I'd give them all to ourcause. The cause of women, d'you say? I say the cause of humanity. Andthere 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 toadmit 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 theseencumbrances, perhaps, she lost the thread of her discourse, andconcluded, rather wistfully, "It's all so SIMPLE." She referred toa matter that was a perpetual source of bewilderment to her--theextraordinary incapacity of the human race, in a world where the goodis so unmistakably divided from the bad, of distinguishing one from theother, and embodying what ought to be done in a few large, simple Actsof Parliament, which would, in a very short time, completely change thelot 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 wouldnot be unheard by them. But reason," she reflected, "what is reasonwithout Reality?"

  Doing homage to the phrase, she repeated it once more, and caught theear of Mr. Clacton, as he issued from his room; and he repeated it athird time, giving it, as he was in the habit of doing with Mrs. Seal'sphrases, a dryly humorous intonation. He was well pleased with theworld, however, and he remarked, in a flattering manner, that he wouldlike 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 ofthe women. "Reality has to be voiced by reason before it can makeitself felt. The weak point of all these movements, Miss Datchet," hecontinued, taking his place at the table and turning to Mary as usualwhen about to deliver his more profound cogitations, "is that theyare not based upon sufficiently intellectual grounds. A mistake, inmy opinion. The British public likes a pellet of reason in its jamof 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 theyellow leaflet which Mary held in her hand. She rose, took her seat atthe head of the table, poured out tea for her colleagues, and gaveher opinion upon the leaflet. So she had poured out tea, so she hadcriticized Mr. Clacton's leaflets a hundred times already; but nowit seemed to her that she was doing it in a different spirit; she hadenlisted in the army, and was a volunteer no longer. She had renouncedsomething and was now--how could she express it?--not quite "in therunning" for life. She had always known that Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Sealwere not in the running, and across the gulf that separated them shehad seen them in the guise of shadow people, flitting in and out of theranks of the living--eccentrics, undeveloped human beings, from whosesubstance some essential part had been cut away. All this had neverstruck her so clearly as it did this afternoon, when she felt thather lot was cast with them for ever. One view of the world plungedin darkness, so a more volatile temperament might have argued aftera season of despair, let the world turn again and show another, moresplendid, perhaps. No, Mary thought, with unflinching loyalty to whatappeared to her to be the true view, having lost what is best, I do notmean 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 ofdistinctness which is sometimes produced by sharp, bodily pain. To Mrs.Seal's secret jubilation the rule which forbade discussion of shop attea-time was overlooked. Mary and Mr. Clacton argued with a cogencyand a ferocity which made the little woman feel that something veryimportant--she hardly knew what--was taking place. She became muchexcited; one crucifix became entangled with another, and she dug aconsiderable hole in the table with the point of her pencil in orderto emphasize the most striking heads of the discourse; and how anycombination of Cabinet Ministers could resist such discourse she reallydid not know.

  She could hardly bring herself to remember her own private instrument ofjustice--the typewriter. The telephone-bell rang, and as she hurried offto 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 thatall the subterranean wires of thought and progress came together. Whenshe returned, with a message from the printer, she found that Mary wasputting on her hat firmly; there was something imperious and dominatingin her attitude altogether.

  "Look, Sally," she said, "these letters want copying. These I've notlooked at. The question of the new census will have to be gone intocarefully. 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'sbehavior towards him. He envisaged a time even when it would becomenecessary to tell her that there could not be two masters in oneoffice--but she was certainly able, very able, and in touch with a groupof very clever young men. No doubt they had suggested to her some of hernew ideas.

  He signified his assent to Mrs. Seal's remark, but observed, with aglance at the clock, which showed only half an hour past five:

  "If she takes the work seriously, Mrs. Seal--but that's just what someof your clever young ladies don't do." So saying he returned to hisroom, and Mrs. Seal, after a moment's hesitation, hurried back to herlabors.