Night and Day
mistress well, don’t you, Sailor? You see that wicked men don’t break
into her larder when she’s out at _her_ work—helping poor souls who
have lost their way.... But we’re late—we must begin!” and scattering
the rest of the water indiscriminately over the floor, she hurried Mary
into the committee-room.
CHAPTER XIV
Mr. Clacton was in his glory. The machinery which he had perfected and
controlled was now about to turn out its bi-monthly product, a
committee meeting; and his pride in the perfect structure of these
assemblies was great. He loved the jargon of committee-rooms; he loved
the way in which the door kept opening as the clock struck the hour, in
obedience to a few strokes of his pen on a piece of paper; and when it
had opened sufficiently often, he loved to issue from his inner chamber
with documents in his hands, visibly important, with a preoccupied
expression on his face that might have suited a Prime Minister
advancing to meet his Cabinet. By his orders the table had been
decorated beforehand with six sheets of blotting-paper, with six pens,
six ink-pots, a tumbler and a jug of water, a bell, and, in deference
to the taste of the lady members, a vase of hardy chrysanthemums. He
had already surreptitiously straightened the sheets of blotting-paper
in relation to the ink-pots, and now stood in front of the fire engaged
in conversation with Miss Markham. But his eye was on the door, and
when Mary and Mrs. Seal entered, he gave a little laugh and observed to
the assembly which was scattered about the room:
“I fancy, ladies and gentlemen, that we are ready to commence.”
So speaking, he took his seat at the head of the table, and arranging
one bundle of papers upon his right and another upon his left, called
upon Miss Datchet to read the minutes of the previous meeting. Mary
obeyed. A keen observer might have wondered why it was necessary for
the secretary to knit her brows so closely over the tolerably
matter-of-fact statement before her. Could there be any doubt in her
mind that it had been resolved to circularize the provinces with
Leaflet No. 3, or to issue a statistical diagram showing the proportion
of married women to spinsters in New Zealand; or that the net profits
of Mrs. Hipsley’s Bazaar had reached a total of five pounds eight
shillings and twopence half-penny?
Could any doubt as to the perfect sense and propriety of these
statements be disturbing her? No one could have guessed, from the look
of her, that she was disturbed at all. A pleasanter and saner woman
than Mary Datchet was never seen within a committee-room. She seemed a
compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine; less poetically
speaking, she showed both gentleness and strength, an indefinable
promise of soft maternity blending with her evident fitness for honest
labor. Nevertheless, she had great difficulty in reducing her mind to
obedience; and her reading lacked conviction, as if, as was indeed the
case, she had lost the power of visualizing what she read. And directly
the list was completed, her mind floated to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and
the fluttering wings of innumerable sparrows. Was Ralph still enticing
the bald-headed cock-sparrow to sit upon his hand? Had he succeeded?
Would he ever succeed? She had meant to ask him why it is that the
sparrows in Lincoln’s Inn Fields are tamer than the sparrows in Hyde
Park—perhaps it is that the passers-by are rarer, and they come to
recognize their benefactors. For the first half-hour of the committee
meeting, Mary had thus to do battle with the skeptical presence of
Ralph Denham, who threatened to have it all his own way. Mary tried
half a dozen methods of ousting him. She raised her voice, she
articulated distinctly, she looked firmly at Mr. Clacton’s bald head,
she began to write a note. To her annoyance, her pencil drew a little
round figure on the blotting-paper, which, she could not deny, was
really a bald-headed cock-sparrow. She looked again at Mr. Clacton;
yes, he was bald, and so are cock-sparrows. Never was a secretary
tormented by so many unsuitable suggestions, and they all came, alas!
with something ludicrously grotesque about them, which might, at any
moment, provoke her to such flippancy as would shock her colleagues for
ever. The thought of what she might say made her bite her lips, as if
her lips would protect her.
But all these suggestions were but flotsam and jetsam cast to the
surface by a more profound disturbance, which, as she could not
consider it at present, manifested its existence by these grotesque
nods and beckonings. Consider it, she must, when the committee was
over. Meanwhile, she was behaving scandalously; she was looking out of
the window, and thinking of the color of the sky, and of the
decorations on the Imperial Hotel, when she ought to have been
shepherding her colleagues, and pinning them down to the matter in
hand. She could not bring herself to attach more weight to one project
than to another. Ralph had said—she could not stop to consider what he
had said, but he had somehow divested the proceedings of all reality.
And then, without conscious effort, by some trick of the brain, she
found herself becoming interested in some scheme for organizing a
newspaper campaign. Certain articles were to be written; certain
editors approached. What line was it advisable to take? She found
herself strongly disapproving of what Mr. Clacton was saying. She
committed herself to the opinion that now was the time to strike hard.
Directly she had said this, she felt that she had turned upon Ralph’s
ghost; and she became more and more in earnest, and anxious to bring
the others round to her point of view. Once more, she knew exactly and
indisputably what is right and what is wrong. As if emerging from a
mist, the old foes of the public good loomed ahead of her—capitalists,
newspaper proprietors, anti-suffragists, and, in some ways most
pernicious of all, the masses who take no interest one way or
another—among whom, for the time being, she certainly discerned the
features of Ralph Denham. Indeed, when Miss Markham asked her to
suggest the names of a few friends of hers, she expressed herself with
unusual bitterness:
“My friends think all this kind of thing useless.” She felt that she
was really saying that to Ralph himself.
“Oh, they’re that sort, are they?” said Miss Markham, with a little
laugh; and with renewed vigor their legions charged the foe.
Mary’s spirits had been low when she entered the committee-room; but
now they were considerably improved. She knew the ways of this world;
it was a shapely, orderly place; she felt convinced of its right and
its wrong; and the feeling that she was fit to deal a heavy blow
against her enemies warmed her heart and kindled her eye. In one of
those flights of fancy, not characteristic of her but tiresomely
frequent this afternoon, she envisaged herself battered with rotten
eggs upon a platform, from which Ralph vainly begged her to descend.
But—
“What do I matter compared with the cause?” she said, and so on. Much
to her credit, however teased by foolish fancies, she kept the surface
of her brain moderate and vigilant, and subdued Mrs. Seal very
tactfully more than once when she demanded, “Action!—everywhere!—at
once!” as became her father’s daughter.
The other members of the committee, who were all rather elderly people,
were a good deal impressed by Mary, and inclined to side with her and
against each other, partly, perhaps, because of her youth. The feeling
that she controlled them all filled Mary with a sense of power; and she
felt that no work can equal in importance, or be so exciting as, the
work of making other people do what you want them to do. Indeed, when
she had won her point she felt a slight degree of contempt for the
people who had yielded to her.
The committee now rose, gathered together their papers, shook them
straight, placed them in their attache-cases, snapped the locks firmly
together, and hurried away, having, for the most part, to catch trains,
in order to keep other appointments with other committees, for they
were all busy people. Mary, Mrs. Seal, and Mr. Clacton were left alone;
the room was hot and untidy, the pieces of pink blotting-paper were
lying at different angles upon the table, and the tumbler was half full
of water, which some one had poured out and forgotten to drink.
Mrs. Seal began preparing the tea, while Mr. Clacton retired to his
room to file the fresh accumulation of documents. Mary was too much
excited even to help Mrs. Seal with the cups and saucers. She flung up
the window and stood by it, looking out. The street lamps were already
lit; and through the mist in the square one could see little figures
hurrying across the road and along the pavement, on the farther side.
In her absurd mood of lustful arrogance, Mary looked at the little
figures and thought, “If I liked I could make you go in there or stop
short; I could make you walk in single file or in double file; I could
do what I liked with you.” Then Mrs. Seal came and stood by her.
“Oughtn’t you to put something round your shoulders, Sally?” Mary
asked, in rather a condescending tone of voice, feeling a sort of pity
for the enthusiastic ineffective little woman. But Mrs. Seal paid no
attention to the suggestion.
“Well, did you enjoy yourself?” Mary asked, with a little laugh.
Mrs. Seal drew a deep breath, restrained herself, and then burst out,
looking out, too, upon Russell Square and Southampton Row, and at the
passers-by, “Ah, if only one could get every one of those people into
this room, and make them understand for five minutes! But they _must_
see the truth some day.... If only one could _make_ them see it....”
Mary knew herself to be very much wiser than Mrs. Seal, and when Mrs.
Seal said anything, even if it was what Mary herself was feeling, she
automatically thought of all that there was to be said against it. On
this occasion her arrogant feeling that she could direct everybody
dwindled away.
“Let’s have our tea,” she said, turning back from the window and
pulling down the blind. “It was a good meeting—didn’t you think so,
Sally?” she let fall, casually, as she sat down at the table. Surely
Mrs. Seal must realize that Mary had been extraordinarily efficient?
“But we go at such a snail’s pace,” said Sally, shaking her head
impatiently.
At this Mary burst out laughing, and all her arrogance was dissipated.
“You can afford to laugh,” said Sally, with another shake of her head,
“but I can’t. I’m fifty-five, and I dare say I shall be in my grave by
the time we get it—if we ever do.”
“Oh, no, you won’t be in your grave,” said Mary, kindly.
“It’ll be such a great day,” said Mrs. Seal, with a toss of her locks.
“A great day, not only for us, but for civilization. That’s what I
feel, you know, about these meetings. Each one of them is a step
onwards in the great march—humanity, you know. We do want the people
after us to have a better time of it—and so many don’t see it. I wonder
how it is that they don’t see it?”
She was carrying plates and cups from the cupboard as she spoke, so
that her sentences were more than usually broken apart. Mary could not
help looking at the odd little priestess of humanity with something
like admiration. While she had been thinking about herself, Mrs. Seal
had thought of nothing but her vision.
“You mustn’t wear yourself out, Sally, if you want to see the great
day,” she said, rising and trying to take a plate of biscuits from Mrs.
Seal’s hands.
“My dear child, what else is my old body good for?” she exclaimed,
clinging more tightly than before to her plate of biscuits. “Shouldn’t
I be proud to give everything I have to the cause?—for I’m not an