Chapter XX

by Virginia Woolf

　　Happily for Mary Datchet she returned to the office to find that bysome obscure Parliamentary maneuver the vote had once more slippedbeyond the attainment of women. Mrs. Seal was in a condition borderingupon frenzy. The duplicity of Ministers, the treachery of mankind, theinsult to womanhood, the setback to civilization, the ruin of herlife's work, the feelings of her father's daughter--all these topicswere discussed in turn, and the office was littered with newspapercuttings branded with the blue, if ambiguous, marks of herdispleasure. She confessed herself at fault in her estimate of humannature."The simple elementary acts of justice," she said, waving her handtowards the window, and indicating the foot-passengers and omnibusesthen passing down the far side of Russell Square, "are as far beyondthem as they ever were. We can only look upon ourselves, Mary, aspioneers in a wilderness. We can only go on patiently putting thetruth before them. It isn't them," she continued, taking heart fromher sight of the traffic, "it's their leaders. It's those gentlemensitting in Parliament and drawing four hundred a year of the people'smoney. If we had to put our case to the people, we should soon havejustice done to us. I have always believed in the people, and I do sostill. But--" She shook her head and implied that she would give themone more chance, and if they didn't take advantage of that shecouldn't answer for the consequences.Mr. Clacton's attitude was more philosophical and better supported bystatistics. He came into the room after Mrs. Seal's outburst andpointed out, with historical illustrations, that such reverses hadhappened in every political campaign of any importance. If anything,his spirits were improved by the disaster. The enemy, he said, hadtaken the offensive; and it was now up to the Society to outwit theenemy. He gave Mary to understand that he had taken the measure oftheir cunning, and had already bent his mind to the task which, so faras she could make out, depended solely upon him. It depended, so shecame to think, when invited into his room for a private conference,upon a systematic revision of the card-index, upon the issue ofcertain new lemon-colored leaflets, in which the facts were marshaledonce more in a very striking way, and upon a large scale map ofEngland dotted with little pins tufted with differently colored plumesof hair according to their geographical position. Each district, underthe new system, had its flag, its bottle of ink, its sheaf ofdocuments tabulated and filed for reference in a drawer, so that bylooking under M or S, as the case might be, you had all the facts withrespect to the Suffrage organizations of that county at your fingers'ends. This would require a great deal of work, of course."We must try to consider ourselves rather in the light of a telephoneexchange--for the exchange of ideas, Miss Datchet," he said; andtaking pleasure in his image, he continued it. "We should considerourselves the center of an enormous system of wires, connecting us upwith every district of the country. We must have our fingers upon thepulse of the community; we want to know what people all over Englandare thinking; we want to put them in the way of thinking rightly." Thesystem, of course, was only roughly sketched so far--jotted down, infact, during the Christmas holidays."When you ought to have been taking a rest, Mr. Clacton," said Marydutifully, but her tone was flat and tired."We learn to do without holidays, Miss Datchet," said Mr. Clacton,with a spark of satisfaction in his eye.He wished particularly to have her opinion of the lemon-coloredleaflet. According to his plan, it was to be distributed in immensequantities immediately, in order to stimulate and generate, "togenerate and stimulate," he repeated, "right thoughts in the countrybefore the meeting of Parliament.""We have to take the enemy by surprise," he said. "They don't let thegrass grow under their feet. Have you seen Bingham's address to hisconstituents? That's a hint of the sort of thing we've got to meet,Miss Datchet."He handed her a great bundle of newspaper cuttings, and, begging herto give him her views upon the yellow leaflet before lunch-time, heturned with alacrity to his different sheets of paper and hisdifferent bottles of ink.Mary shut the door, laid the documents upon her table, and sank herhead on her hands. Her brain was curiously empty of any thought. Shelistened, as if, perhaps, by listening she would become merged againin the atmosphere of the office. From the next room came the rapidspasmodic sounds of Mrs. Seal's erratic typewriting; she, doubtless,was already hard at work helping the people of England, as Mr. Clactonput it, to think rightly; "generating and stimulating," those were hiswords. She was striking a blow against the enemy, no doubt, who didn'tlet the grass grow beneath their feet. Mr. Clacton's words repeatedthemselves accurately in her brain. She pushed the papers wearily overto the farther side of the table. It was no use, though; something orother had happened to her brain--a change of focus so that near thingswere indistinct again. The same thing had happened to her once before,she remembered, after she had met Ralph in the gardens of Lincoln'sInn Fields; she had spent the whole of a committee meeting in thinkingabout sparrows and colors, until, almost at the end of the meeting,her old convictions had all come back to her. But they had only comeback, she thought with scorn at her feebleness, because she wanted touse them to fight against Ralph. They weren't, rightly speaking,convictions at all. She could not see the world divided into separatecompartments of good people and bad people, any more than she couldbelieve so implicitly in the rightness of her own thought as to wishto bring the population of the British Isles into agreement with it.She looked at the lemon-colored leaflet, and thought almost enviouslyof 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 shareof personal happiness were granted her. She read Mr. Clacton'sstatement with a curious division of judgment, noting its weak andpompous verbosity on the one hand, and, at the same time, feeling thatfaith, faith in an illusion, perhaps, but, at any rate, faith insomething, was of all gifts the most to be envied. An illusion it was,no doubt. She looked curiously round her at the furniture of theoffice, at the machinery in which she had taken so much pride, andmarveled to think that once the copying-presses, the card-index, thefiles of documents, had all been shrouded, wrapped in some mist whichgave them a unity and a general dignity and purpose independently oftheir separate significance. The ugly cumbersomeness of the furniturealone impressed her now. Her attitude had become very lax anddespondent when the typewriter stopped in the next room. Maryimmediately 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 watchedMrs. Seal pull out one drawer after another in her search for someenvelope 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 ofyour own activities, which to me seem as futile as the buzzing of abelated blue-bottle." She said nothing of the kind, however, and thepresence of industry which she preserved so long as Mrs. Seal was inthe room served to set her brain in motion, so that she dispatched hermorning's work much as usual. At one o'clock she was surprised to findhow efficiently she had dealt with the morning. As she put her hat onshe determined to lunch at a shop in the Strand, so as to set thatother piece of mechanism, her body, into action. With a brain workingand a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never befound out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, thatone was conscious of being.She considered her case as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. Sheput to herself a series of questions. Would she mind, for example, ifthe wheels of that motor-omnibus passed over her and crushed her todeath? No, not in the least; or an adventure with that disagreeable-looking man hanging about the entrance of the Tube station? No; shecould not conceive fear or excitement. Did suffering in any formappall her? No, suffering was neither good nor bad. And this essentialthing? In the eyes of every single person she detected a flame; as ifa spark in the brain ignited spontaneously at contact with the thingsthey met and drove them on. The young women looking into themilliners' windows had that look in their eyes; and elderly menturning over books in the second-hand book-shops, and eagerly waitingto 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. Booksshe shrank from, for they were connected too closely with Ralph. Shekept on her way resolutely through the crowd of people, among whom shewas so much of an alien, feeling them cleave and give way before her.Strange thoughts are bred in passing through crowded streets shouldthe passenger, by chance, have no exact destination in front of him,much as the mind shapes all kinds of forms, solutions, images whenlistening inattentively to music. From an acute consciousness ofherself as an individual, Mary passed to a conception of the scheme ofthings in which, as a human being, she must have her share. She halfheld a vision; the vision shaped and dwindled. She wished she had apencil and a piece of paper to help her to give a form to thisconception which composed itself as she walked down the Charing CrossRoad. 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 away which satisfied her sense of harmony. It only needed a persistenteffort of thought, stimulated in this strange way by the crowd and thenoise, to climb the crest of existence and see it all laid out onceand for ever. Already her suffering as an individual was left behindher. Of this process, which was to her so full of effort, whichcomprised infinitely swift and full passages of thought, leading fromone crest to another, as she shaped her conception of life in thisworld, only two articulate words escaped her, muttered beneath herbreath--"Not happiness--not happiness."She sat down on a seat opposite the statue of one of London's heroesupon the Embankment, and spoke the words aloud. To her theyrepresented the rare flower or splinter of rock brought down by aclimber in proof that he has stood for a moment, at least, upon thehighest peak of the mountain. She had been up there and seen the worldspread to the horizon. It was now necessary to alter her course tosome extent, according to her new resolve. Her post should be in oneof those exposed and desolate stations which are shunned naturally byhappy 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 ofRalph."Where was he to be placed in the new scale of life? Her exalted moodseemed to make it safe to handle the question. But she was dismayed tofind how quickly her passions leapt forward the moment she sanctionedthis line of thought. Now she was identified with him and rethoughthis thoughts with complete self-surrender; now, with a sudden cleavageof spirit, she turned upon him and denounced him for his cruelty."But I refuse--I refuse to hate any one," she said aloud; chose themoment to cross the road with circumspection, and ten minutes laterlunched in the Strand, cutting her meat firmly into small pieces, butgiving her fellow-diners no further cause to judge her eccentric. Hersoliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emergingsuddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when she hadto exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or tochoose a turning. "To know the truth--to accept without bitterness"--those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no onecould have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in frontof the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford, save that the name of Ralphoccurred frequently in very strange connections, as if, having spokenit, she wished, superstitiously, to cancel it by adding some otherword that robbed the sentence with his name in it of any meaning.Those champions of the cause of women, Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal, didnot perceive anything strange in Mary's behavior, save that she wasalmost half an hour later than usual in coming back to the office.Happily, their own affairs kept them busy, and she was free from theirinspection. 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 mindpursued its own journey among the sun-blazoned windows and the driftsof purplish smoke which formed her view. And, indeed, this backgroundwas by no means out of keeping with her thoughts. She saw to theremote spaces behind the strife of the foreground, enabled now to gazethere, since she had renounced her own demands, privileged to see thelarger view, to share the vast desires and sufferings of the mass ofmankind. She had been too lately and too roughly mastered by facts totake an easy pleasure in the relief of renunciation; such satisfactionas she felt came only from the discovery that, having renouncedeverything that made life happy, easy, splendid, individual, thereremained 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 theparticular to the universal, Mrs. Seal remembered her duties withregard to the kettle and the gas-fire. She was a little surprised tofind that Mary had drawn her chair to the window, and, having lit thegas, she raised herself from a stooping posture and looked at her. Themost obvious reason for such an attitude in a secretary was some kindof indisposition. But Mary, rousing herself with an effort, deniedthat she was indisposed."I'm frightfully lazy this afternoon," she added, with a glance at hertable. "You must really get another secretary, Sally."The words were meant to be taken lightly, but something in the tone ofthem roused a jealous fear which was always dormant in Mrs. Seal'sbreast. She was terribly afraid that one of these days Mary, the youngwoman who typified so many rather sentimental and enthusiastic ideas,who had some sort of visionary existence in white with a sheaf oflilies in her hand, would announce, in a jaunty way, that she wasabout 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 whichcould be taken as a generalization.Mrs. Seal got the teacups out of the cupboard and set them on thetable."You're not going to be married, are you?" she asked, pronouncing thewords with nervous speed."Why are you asking such absurd questions this afternoon, Sally?" Maryasked, not very steadily. "Must we all get married?"Mrs. Seal emitted a most peculiar chuckle. She seemed for one momentto acknowledge the terrible side of life which is concerned with theemotions, the private lives, of the sexes, and then to sheer off fromit with all possible speed into the shades of her own shiveringvirginity. She was made so uncomfortable by the turn the conversationhad taken, that she plunged her head into the cupboard, and endeavoredto abstract some very obscure piece of china."We have our work," she said, withdrawing her head, displaying cheeksmore than usually crimson, and placing a jam-pot emphatically upon thetable. But, for the moment, she was unable to launch herself upon oneof those enthusiastic, but inconsequent, tirades upon liberty,democracy, the rights of the people, and the iniquities of theGovernment, in which she delighted. Some memory from her own past orfrom the past of her sex rose to her mind and kept her abashed. Sheglanced furtively at Mary, who still sat by the window with her armupon the sill. She noticed how young she was and full of the promiseof womanhood. The sight made her so uneasy that she fidgeted the cupsupon their saucers."Yes--enough work to last a lifetime," said Mary, as if concludingsome passage of thought.Mrs. Seal brightened at once. She lamented her lack of scientifictraining, and her deficiency in the processes of logic, but she sether mind to work at once to make the prospects of the cause appear asalluring and important as she could. She delivered herself of anharangue in which she asked a great many rhetorical questions andanswered them with a little bang of one fist upon another."To last a lifetime? My dear child, it will last all our lifetimes. Asone falls another steps into the breach. My father, in his generation,a pioneer--I, coming after him, do my little best. What, alas! can onedo more? And now it's you young women--we look to you--the futurelooks to you. Ah, my dear, if I'd a thousand lives, I'd give them allto our cause. The cause of women, d'you say? I say the cause ofhumanity. And there are some"--she glanced fiercely at the window--"who don't see it! There are some who are satisfied to go on, yearafter 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 thetruth," she continued, gesticulating with the kettle and the teapot.Owing to these encumbrances, perhaps, she lost the thread of herdiscourse, and concluded, rather wistfully, "It's all so simple." Shereferred to a matter that was a perpetual source of bewilderment toher--the extraordinary incapacity of the human race, in a world wherethe good is so unmistakably divided from the bad, of distinguishingone from the other, and embodying what ought to be done in a fewlarge, 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 reasonwould not be unheard by them. But reason," she reflected, "what isreason without Reality?"Doing homage to the phrase, she repeated it once more, and caught theear of Mr. Clacton, as he issued from his room; and he repeated it athird time, giving it, as he was in the habit of doing with Mrs.Seal's phrases, a dryly humorous intonation. He was well pleased withthe world, however, and he remarked, in a flattering manner, that hewould like to see that phrase in large letters at the head of aleaflet."But, Mrs. Seal, we have to aim at a judicious combination of thetwo," he added in his magisterial way to check the unbalancedenthusiasm of the women. "Reality has to be voiced by reason before itcan make itself felt. The weak point of all these movements, MissDatchet," he continued, taking his place at the table and turning toMary as usual when about to deliver his more profound cogitations, "isthat they are not based upon sufficiently intellectual grounds. Amistake, in my opinion. The British public likes a pellet of reason inits jam of eloquence--a pill of reason in its pudding of sentiment,"he said, sharpening the phrase to a satisfactory degree of literaryprecision.His eyes rested, with something of the vanity of an author, upon theyellow leaflet which Mary held in her hand. She rose, took her seat atthe head of the table, poured out tea for her colleagues, and gave heropinion upon the leaflet. So she had poured out tea, so she hadcriticized Mr. Clacton's leaflets a hundred times already; but now itseemed to her that she was doing it in a different spirit; she hadenlisted in the army, and was a volunteer no longer. She had renouncedsomething and was now--how could she express it?;--not quite "in therunning" for life. She had always known that Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Sealwere not in the running, and across the gulf that separated them shehad seen them in the guise of shadow people, flitting in and out ofthe ranks of the living--eccentrics, undeveloped human beings, fromwhose substance some essential part had been cut away. All this hadnever struck her so clearly as it did this afternoon, when she feltthat her lot was cast with them for ever. One view of the worldplunged in darkness, so a more volatile temperament might have arguedafter a season of despair, let the world turn again and show another,more splendid, perhaps. No, Mary thought, with unflinching loyalty towhat appeared to her to be the true view, having lost what is best, Ido not mean to pretend that any other view does instead. Whateverhappens, I mean to have no presences in my life. Her very words had asort of distinctness which is sometimes produced by sharp, bodilypain. To Mrs. Seal's secret jubilation the rule which forbadediscussion of shop at tea-time was overlooked. Mary and Mr. Clactonargued with a cogency and a ferocity which made the little woman feelthat 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 herpencil in order to emphasize the most striking heads of the discourse;and how any combination of Cabinet Ministers could resist suchdiscourse she really did not know.She could hardly bring herself to remember her own private instrumentof justice--the typewriter. The telephone-bell rang, and as shehurried off to answer a voice which always seemed a proof ofimportance by itself, she felt that it was at this exact spot on thesurface of the globe that all the subterranean wires of thought andprogress came together. When she returned, with a message from theprinter, she found that Mary was putting on her hat firmly; there wassomething imperious and dominating in her attitude altogether."Look, Sally," she said, "these letters want copying. These I've notlooked at. The question of the new census will have to be gone intocarefully. But I'm going home now. Good night, Mr. Clacton; goodnight, 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'sbehavior towards him. He envisaged a time even when it would becomenecessary to tell her that there could not be two masters in oneoffice--but she was certainly able, very able, and in touch with agroup of very clever young men. No doubt they had suggested to hersome of her new ideas.He signified his assent to Mrs. Seal's remark, but observed, with aglance at the clock, which showed only half an hour past five:"If she takes the work seriously, Mrs. Seal--but that's just what someof your clever young ladies don't do." So saying he returned to hisroom, and Mrs. Seal, after a moment's hesitation, hurried back to herlabors.