Night and Day
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 Mrs. Seal’s remark, but observed, with a
glance at the clock, which showed only half an hour past five:
“If she takes the work seriously, Mrs. Seal—but that’s just what some
of your clever young ladies don’t do.” So saying he returned to his
room, and Mrs. Seal, after a moment’s hesitation, hurried back to her
labors.
CHAPTER XXI
Mary walked to the nearest station and reached home in an incredibly
short space of time, just so much, indeed, as was needed for the
intelligent understanding of the news of the world as the “Westminster
Gazette” reported it. Within a few minutes of opening her door, she was
in trim for a hard evening’s work. She unlocked a drawer and took out a
manuscript, which consisted of a very few pages, entitled, in a
forcible hand, “Some Aspects of the Democratic State.” The aspects
dwindled out in a criss-cross of blotted lines in the very middle of a
sentence, and suggested that the author had been interrupted, or
convinced of the futility of proceeding, with her pen in the air....
Oh, yes, Ralph had come in at that point. She scored that sheet very
effectively, and, choosing a fresh one, began at a great rate with a
generalization upon the structure of human society, which was a good
deal bolder than her custom. Ralph had told her once that she couldn’t
write English, which accounted for those frequent blots and insertions;
but she put all that behind her, and drove ahead with such words as
came her way, until she had accomplished half a page of generalization
and might legitimately draw breath. Directly her hand stopped her brain
stopped too, and she began to listen. A paper-boy shouted down the
street; an omnibus ceased and lurched on again with the heave of duty
once more shouldered; the dullness of the sounds suggested that a fog
had risen since her return, if, indeed, a fog has power to deaden
sound, of which fact, she could not be sure at the present moment. It
was the sort of fact Ralph Denham knew. At any rate, it was no concern
of hers, and she was about to dip a pen when her ear was caught by the
sound of a step upon the stone staircase. She followed it past Mr.
Chippen’s chambers; past Mr. Gibson’s; past Mr. Turner’s; after which
it became her sound. A postman, a washerwoman, a circular, a bill—she
presented herself with each of these perfectly natural possibilities;
but, to her surprise, her mind rejected each one of them impatiently,
even apprehensively. The step became slow, as it was apt to do at the
end of the steep climb, and Mary, listening for the regular sound, was
filled with an intolerable nervousness. Leaning against the table, she
felt the knock of her heart push her body perceptibly backwards and
forwards—a state of nerves astonishing and reprehensible in a stable
woman. Grotesque fancies took shape. Alone, at the top of the house, an
unknown person approaching nearer and nearer—how could she escape?
There was no way of escape. She did not even know whether that oblong
mark on the ceiling was a trap-door to the roof or not. And if she got
on to the roof—well, there was a drop of sixty feet or so on to the
pavement. But she sat perfectly still, and when the knock sounded, she
got up directly and opened the door without hesitation. She saw a tall
figure outside, with something ominous to her eyes in the look of it.
“What do you want?” she said, not recognizing the face in the fitful
light of the staircase.
“Mary? I’m Katharine Hilbery!”
Mary’s self-possession returned almost excessively, and her welcome was
decidedly cold, as if she must recoup herself for this ridiculous waste
of emotion. She moved her green-shaded lamp to another table, and
covered “Some Aspects of the Democratic State” with a sheet of
blotting-paper.
“Why can’t they leave me alone?” she thought bitterly, connecting
Katharine and Ralph in a conspiracy to take from her even this hour of
solitary study, even this poor little defence against the world. And,
as she smoothed down the sheet of blotting-paper over the manuscript,
she braced herself to resist Katharine, whose presence struck her, not
merely by its force, as usual, but as something in the nature of a
menace.
“You’re working?” said Katharine, with hesitation, perceiving that she
was not welcome.
“Nothing that matters,” Mary replied, drawing forward the best of the
chairs and poking the fire.