Night and Day, Virginia Woolf [10 ebook reader txt] 📗

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