Night and Day
He handed her a great bundle of newspaper cuttings, and, begging her to
give him her views upon the yellow leaflet before lunch-time, he turned
with alacrity to his different sheets of paper and his different
bottles of ink.
Mary shut the door, laid the documents upon her table, and sank her
head on her hands. Her brain was curiously empty of any thought. She
listened, as if, perhaps, by listening she would become merged again in
the atmosphere of the office. From the next room came the rapid
spasmodic sounds of Mrs. Seal’s erratic typewriting; she, doubtless,
was already hard at work helping the people of England, as Mr. Clacton
put it, to think rightly; “generating and stimulating,” those were his
words. She was striking a blow against the enemy, no doubt, who didn’t
let the grass grow beneath their feet. Mr. Clacton’s words repeated
themselves accurately in her brain. She pushed the papers wearily over
to the farther side of the table. It was no use, though; something or
other had happened to her brain—a change of focus so that near things
were indistinct again. The same thing had happened to her once before,
she remembered, after she had met Ralph in the gardens of Lincoln’s Inn
Fields; she had spent the whole of a committee meeting in thinking
about sparrows and colors, until, almost at the end of the meeting, her
old convictions had all come back to her. But they had only come back,
she thought with scorn at her feebleness, because she wanted to use
them to fight against Ralph. They weren’t, rightly speaking,
convictions at all. She could not see the world divided into separate
compartments of good people and bad people, any more than she could
believe so implicitly in the rightness of her own thought as to wish to
bring the population of the British Isles into agreement with it. She
looked at the lemon-colored leaflet, and thought almost enviously of
the faith which could find comfort in the issue of such documents; for
herself she would be content to remain silent for ever if a share of
personal happiness were granted her. She read Mr. Clacton’s statement
with a curious division of judgment, noting its weak and pompous
verbosity on the one hand, 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 most to be envied. An illusion it was, no doubt.
She looked curiously round her at the furniture of the office, at the
machinery in which she had taken so much pride, and marveled to think
that once the copying-presses, the card-index, the files of documents,
had all been shrouded, wrapped in some mist which gave them a unity and
a general dignity and purpose independently of their separate
significance. The ugly cumbersomeness of the furniture alone impressed
her now. Her attitude had become very lax and despondent when the
typewriter stopped in the next room. Mary immediately drew up to the
table, laid hands on an unopened envelope, and adopted an expression
which might hide her state of mind from Mrs. Seal. Some instinct of
decency required that she should not allow Mrs. Seal to see her face.
Shading her eyes with her fingers, she watched Mrs. Seal pull out one
drawer after another in her search for some envelope or leaflet. She
was tempted to drop her fingers and exclaim:
“Do sit down, Sally, and tell me how you manage it—how you manage, that
is, to bustle about with perfect confidence in the necessity of your
own activities, which to me seem as futile as the buzzing of a belated
blue-bottle.” She said nothing of the kind, however, and the presence
of industry which she preserved so long as Mrs. Seal was in the room
served to set her brain in motion, so that she dispatched her morning’s
work much as usual. At one o’clock she was surprised to find how
efficiently she had dealt with the morning. As she put her hat on she
determined to lunch at a shop in the Strand, so as to set that other
piece of mechanism, her body, into action. With a brain working and a
body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out
for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was
conscious of being.
She considered her case as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. She
put to herself a series of questions. Would she mind, for example, if
the wheels of that motor-omnibus passed over her and crushed her to
death? No, not in the least; or an adventure with that
disagreeable-looking man hanging about the entrance of the Tube
station? No; she could not conceive fear or excitement. Did suffering
in any form appall her? No, suffering was neither good nor bad. And
this essential thing? In the eyes of every single person she detected a
flame; as if a spark in the brain ignited spontaneously at contact with
the things they met and drove them on. The young women looking into the
milliners’ windows had that look in their eyes; and elderly men turning
over books in the second-hand book-shops, and eagerly waiting to hear
what the price was—the very lowest price—they had it, too. But she
cared nothing at all for clothes or for money either. Books she shrank
from, for they were connected too closely with Ralph. She kept on her
way resolutely through the crowd of people, among whom she was so much
of an alien, feeling them cleave and give way before her.
Strange thoughts are bred in passing through crowded streets should the
passenger, by chance, have no exact destination in front of him, much
as the mind shapes all kinds of forms, solutions, images when listening
inattentively to music. From an acute consciousness of herself as an
individual, Mary passed to a conception of the scheme of things in
which, as a human being, she must have her share. She half held a
vision; the vision shaped and dwindled. She wished she had a pencil and
a piece of paper to help her to give a form to this conception which
composed itself as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. But if she
talked to any one, the conception might escape her. Her vision seemed
to lay out the lines of her life until death in a way which satisfied
her sense of harmony. It only needed a persistent effort of thought,
stimulated in this strange way by the crowd and the noise, to climb the
crest of existence and see it all laid out once and for ever. Already
her suffering as an individual was left behind her. Of this process,
which was to her so full of effort, which comprised infinitely swift
and full passages of thought, leading from one crest to another, as she
shaped her conception of life in this world, only two articulate words
escaped her, muttered beneath her breath—“Not happiness—not happiness.”
She sat down on a seat opposite the statue of one of London’s heroes
upon the Embankment, and spoke the words aloud. To her they represented
the rare flower or splinter of rock brought down by a climber in proof
that he has stood for a moment, at least, upon the highest peak of the
mountain. She had been up there and seen the world spread to the
horizon. It was now necessary to alter her course to some extent,
according to her new resolve. Her post should be in one of those
exposed and desolate stations which are shunned naturally by happy
people. She arranged the details of the new plan in her mind, not
without a grim satisfaction.
“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 mood
seemed to make it safe to handle the question. But she was dismayed to
find how quickly her passions leapt forward the moment she sanctioned
this line of thought. Now she was identified with him and rethought his
thoughts with complete self-surrender; now, with a sudden cleavage of
spirit, she turned upon him and denounced him for his cruelty.
“But I refuse—I refuse to hate any one,” she said aloud; chose the
moment to cross the road with circumspection, and ten minutes 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