Night and Day, Virginia Woolf [10 ebook reader txt] 📗
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be delivered with unexampled originality. Such was the scheme as a
whole; and in contemplation of it she would become quite flushed and
excited, and have to remind herself of all the details that intervened
between her and success.
The door would open, and Mr. Clacton would come in to search for a
certain leaflet buried beneath a pyramid of leaflets. He was a thin,
sandy-haired man of about thirty-five, spoke with a Cockney accent,
and had about him a frugal look, as if nature had not dealt generously
with him in any way, which, naturally, prevented him from dealing
generously with other people. When he had found his leaflet, and
offered a few jocular hints upon keeping papers in order, the
typewriting would stop abruptly, and Mrs. Seal would burst into the
room with a letter which needed explanation in her hand. This was a
more serious interruption than the other, because she never knew
exactly what she wanted, and half a dozen requests would bolt from
her, no one of which was clearly stated. Dressed in plum-colored
velveteen, with short, gray hair, and a face that seemed permanently
flushed with philanthropic enthusiasm, she was always in a hurry, and
always in some disorder. She wore two crucifixes, which got themselves
entangled in a heavy gold chain upon her breast, and seemed to Mary
expressive of her mental ambiguity. Only her vast enthusiasm and her
worship of Miss Markham, one of the pioneers of the society, kept her
in her place, for which she had no sound qualification.
So the morning wore on, and the pile of letters grew, and Mary felt,
at last, that she was the center ganglion of a very fine network of
nerves which fell over England, and one of these days, when she
touched the heart of the system, would begin feeling and rushing
together and emitting their splendid blaze of revolutionary fireworks
—for some such metaphor represents what she felt about her work, when
her brain had been heated by three hours of application.
Shortly before one o’clock Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal desisted from
their labors, and the old joke about luncheon, which came out
regularly at this hour, was repeated with scarcely any variation of
words. Mr. Clacton patronized a vegetarian restaurant; Mrs. Seal
brought sandwiches, which she ate beneath the plane-trees in Russell
Square; while Mary generally went to a gaudy establishment,
upholstered in red plush, near by, where, much to the vegetarian’s
disapproval, you could buy steak, two inches thick, or a roast section
of fowl, swimming in a pewter dish.
“The bare branches against the sky do one so much GOOD,” Mrs. Seal
asserted, looking out into the Square.
“But one can’t lunch off trees, Sally,” said Mary.
“I confess I don’t know how you manage it, Miss Datchet,” Mr. Clacton
remarked. “I should sleep all the afternoon, I know, if I took a heavy
meal in the middle of the day.”
“What’s the very latest thing in literature?” Mary asked, good-humoredly pointing to the yellow-covered volume beneath Mr. Clacton’s
arm, for he invariably read some new French author at lunch-time, or
squeezed in a visit to a picture gallery, balancing his social work
with an ardent culture of which he was secretly proud, as Mary had
very soon divined.
So they parted and Mary walked away, wondering if they guessed that
she really wanted to get away from them, and supposing that they had
not quite reached that degree of subtlety. She bought herself an
evening paper, which she read as she ate, looking over the top of it
again and again at the queer people who were buying cakes or imparting
their secrets, until some young woman whom she knew came in, and she
called out, “Eleanor, come and sit by me,” and they finished their
lunch together, parting on the strip of pavement among the different
lines of traffic with a pleasant feeling that they were stepping once
more into their separate places in the great and eternally moving
pattern of human life.
But, instead of going straight back to the office to-day, Mary turned
into the British Museum, and strolled down the gallery with the shapes
of stone until she found an empty seat directly beneath the gaze of
the Elgin marbles. She looked at them, and seemed, as usual, borne up
on some wave of exaltation and emotion, by which her life at once
became solemn and beautiful—an impression which was due as much,
perhaps, to the solitude and chill and silence of the gallery as to
the actual beauty of the statues. One must suppose, at least, that her
emotions were not purely esthetic, because, after she had gazed at the
Ulysses for a minute or two, she began to think about Ralph Denham. So
secure did she feel with these silent shapes that she almost yielded
to an impulse to say “I am in love with you” aloud. The presence of
this immense and enduring beauty made her almost alarmingly conscious
of her desire, and at the same time proud of a feeling which did not
display anything like the same proportions when she was going about
her daily work.
She repressed her impulse to speak aloud, and rose and wandered about
rather aimlessly among the statues until she found herself in another
gallery devoted to engraved obelisks and winged Assyrian bulls, and
her emotion took another turn. She began to picture herself traveling
with Ralph in a land where these monsters were couchant in the sand.
“For,” she thought to herself, as she gazed fixedly at some
information printed behind a piece of glass, “the wonderful thing
about you is that you’re ready for anything; you’re not in the least
conventional, like most clever men.”
And she conjured up a scene of herself on a camel’s back, in the
desert, while Ralph commanded a whole tribe of natives.
“That is what you can do,” she went on, moving on to the next statue.
“You always make people do what you want.”
A glow spread over her spirit, and filled her eyes with brightness.
Nevertheless, before she left the Museum she was very far from saying,
even in the privacy of her own mind, “I am in love with you,” and that
sentence might very well never have framed itself. She was, indeed,
rather annoyed with herself for having allowed such an ill-considered
breach of her reserve, weakening her powers of resistance, she felt,
should this impulse return again. For, as she walked along the street
to her office, the force of all her customary objections to being in
love with any one overcame her. She did not want to marry at all. It
seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing love
into touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship, such as hers
was with Ralph, which, for two years now, had based itself upon common
interests in impersonal topics, such as the housing of the poor, or
the taxation of land values.
But the afternoon spirit differed intrinsically from the morning
spirit. Mary found herself watching the flight of a bird, or making
drawings of the branches of the plane-trees upon her blotting-paper.
People came in to see Mr. Clacton on business, and a seductive smell
of cigarette smoke issued from his room. Mrs. Seal wandered about with
newspaper cuttings, which seemed to her either “quite splendid” or
“really too bad for words.” She used to paste these into books, or
send them to her friends, having first drawn a broad bar in blue
pencil down the margin, a proceeding which signified equally and
indistinguishably the depths of her reprobation or the heights of her
approval.
About four o’clock on that same afternoon Katharine Hilbery was
walking up Kingsway. The question of tea presented itself. The street
lamps were being lit already, and as she stood still for a moment
beneath one of them, she tried to think of some neighboring
drawing-room where there would be firelight and talk congenial to her
mood. That mood, owing to the spinning traffic and the evening veil of
unreality, was ill-adapted to her home surroundings. Perhaps, on the
whole, a shop was the best place in which to preserve this queer sense
of heightened existence. At the same time she wished to talk.
Remembering Mary Datchet and her repeated invitations, she crossed the
road, turned into Russell Square, and peered about, seeking for
numbers with a sense of adventure that was out of all proportion to
the deed itself. She found herself in a dimly lighted hall, unguarded
by a porter, and pushed open the first swing door. But the office-boy
had never heard of Miss Datchet. Did she belong to the S.R.F.R.?
Katharine shook her head with a smile of dismay. A voice from within
shouted, “No. The S.G.S.—top floor.”
Katharine mounted past innumerable glass doors, with initials on them,
and became steadily more and more doubtful of the wisdom of her
venture. At the top she paused for a moment to breathe and collect
herself. She heard the typewriter and formal professional voices
inside, not belonging, she thought, to any one she had ever spoken to.
She touched the bell, and the door was opened almost immediately by
Mary herself. Her face had to change its expression entirely when she
saw Katharine.
“You!” she exclaimed. “We thought you were the printer.” Still holding
the door open, she called back, “No, Mr. Clacton, it’s not
Penningtons. I should ring them up again—double three double eight,
Central. Well, this is a surprise. Come in,” she added. “You’re just
in time for tea.”
The light of relief shone in Mary’s eyes. The boredom of the afternoon
was dissipated at once, and she was glad that Katharine had found them
in a momentary press of activity, owing to the failure of the printer
to send back certain proofs.
The unshaded electric light shining upon the table covered with papers
dazed Katharine for a moment. After the confusion of her twilight
walk, and her random thoughts, life in this small room appeared
extremely concentrated and bright. She turned instinctively to look
out of the window, which was uncurtained, but Mary immediately
recalled her.
“It was very clever of you to find your way,” she said, and Katharine
wondered, as she stood there, feeling, for the moment, entirely
detached and unabsorbed, why she had come. She looked, indeed, to
Mary’s eyes strangely out of place in the office. Her figure in the
long cloak, which took deep folds, and her face, which was composed
into a mask of sensitive apprehension, disturbed Mary for a moment
with a sense of the presence of some one who was of another world,
and, therefore, subversive of her world. She became immediately
anxious that Katharine should be impressed by the importance of her
world, and hoped that neither Mrs. Seal nor Mr. Clacton would appear
until the impression of importance had been received. But in this she
was disappointed. Mrs. Seal burst into the room holding a kettle in
her hand, which she set upon the stove, and then, with inefficient
haste, she set light to the gas, which flared up, exploded, and went
out.
“Always the way, always the way,” she muttered. “Kit Markham is the
only person who knows how to deal with the thing.”
Mary had to go to her help, and together they spread the table, and
apologized for the disparity between the cups and the plainness of the
food.
“If we had known Miss Hilbery was coming, we should have bought a
cake,” said Mary, upon which Mrs. Seal looked at Katharine for the
first time, suspiciously, because she was a person who needed cake.
Here Mr. Clacton opened the door, and came in, holding a typewritten
letter in
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