Night and Day - Virginia Woolf (best novels for beginners txt) 📗

Of all the hours of an ordinary working week-day, which are the

pleasantest to look forward to and to look back upon? If a single

instance is of use in framing a theory, it may be said that the

minutes between nine-twenty-five and nine-thirty in the morning had a

singular charm for Mary Datchet. She spent them in a very enviable

frame of mind; her contentment was almost unalloyed. High in the air

as her flat was, some beams from the morning sun reached her even in

November, striking straight at curtain, chair, and carpet, and

painting there three bright, true spaces of green, blue, and purple,

upon which the eye rested with a pleasure which gave physical warmth

to the body.

There were few mornings when Mary did not look up, as she bent to lace

her boots, and as she followed the yellow rod from curtain to

breakfast-table she usually breathed some sigh of thankfulness that

her life provided her with such moments of pure enjoyment. She was

robbing no one of anything, and yet, to get so much pleasure from

simple things, such as eating one’s breakfast alone in a room which

had nice colors in it, clean from the skirting of the boards to the

corners of the ceiling, seemed to suit her so thoroughly that she used

at first to hunt about for some one to apologize to, or for some flaw

in the situation. She had now been six months in London, and she could

find no flaw, but that, as she invariably concluded by the time her

boots were laced, was solely and entirely due to the fact that she had

her work. Every day, as she stood with her dispatch-box in her hand at

the door of her flat, and gave one look back into the room to see that

everything was straight before she left, she said to herself that she

was very glad that she was going to leave it all, that to have sat

there all day long, in the enjoyment of leisure, would have been

intolerable.

Out in the street she liked to think herself one of the workers who,

at this hour, take their way in rapid single file along all the broad

pavements of the city, with their heads slightly lowered, as if all

their effort were to follow each other as closely as might be; so that

Mary used to figure to herself a straight rabbit-run worn by their

unswerving feet upon the pavement. But she liked to pretend that she

was indistinguishable from the rest, and that when a wet day drove her

to the Underground or omnibus, she gave and took her share of crowd

and wet with clerks and typists and commercial men, and shared with

them the serious business of winding-up the world to tick for another

four-and-twenty hours.

Thus thinking, on the particular morning in question, she made her

away across Lincoln’s Inn Fields and up Kingsway, and so through

Southampton Row until she reached her office in Russell Square. Now

and then she would pause and look into the window of some bookseller

or flower shop, where, at this early hour, the goods were being

arranged, and empty gaps behind the plate glass revealed a state of

undress. Mary felt kindly disposed towards the shopkeepers, and hoped

that they would trick the midday public into purchasing, for at this

hour of the morning she ranged herself entirely on the side of the

shopkeepers and bank clerks, and regarded all who slept late and had

money to spend as her enemy and natural prey. And directly she had

crossed the road at Holborn, her thoughts all came naturally and

regularly to roost upon her work, and she forgot that she was,

properly speaking, an amateur worker, whose services were unpaid, and

could hardly be said to wind the world up for its daily task, since

the world, so far, had shown very little desire to take the boons

which Mary’s society for woman’s suffrage had offered it.

She was thinking all the way up Southampton Row of notepaper and

foolscap, and how an economy in the use of paper might be effected

(without, of course, hurting Mrs. Seal’s feelings), for she was

certain that the great organizers always pounce, to begin with, upon

trifles like these, and build up their triumphant reforms upon a basis

of absolute solidity; and, without acknowledging it for a moment, Mary

Datchet was determined to be a great organizer, and had already doomed

her society to reconstruction of the most radical kind. Once or twice

lately, it is true, she had started, broad awake, before turning into

Russell Square, and denounced herself rather sharply for being already

in a groove, capable, that is, of thinking the same thoughts every

morning at the same hour, so that the chestnut-colored brick of the

Russell Square houses had some curious connection with her thoughts

about office economy, and served also as a sign that she should get

into trim for meeting Mr. Clacton, or Mrs. Seal, or whoever might be

beforehand with her at the office. Having no religious belief, she was

the more conscientious about her life, examining her position from

time to time very seriously, and nothing annoyed her more than to find

one of these bad habits nibbling away unheeded at the precious

substance. What was the good, after all, of being a woman if one

didn’t keep fresh, and cram one’s life with all sorts of views and

experiments? Thus she always gave herself a little shake, as she

turned the corner, and, as often as not, reached her own door

whistling a snatch of a Somersetshire ballad.

The suffrage office was at the top of one of the large Russell Square

houses, which had once been lived in by a great city merchant and his

family, and was now let out in slices to a number of societies which

displayed assorted initials upon doors of ground glass, and kept, each

of them, a typewriter which clicked busily all day long. The old

house, with its great stone staircase, echoed hollowly to the sound of

typewriters and of errand-boys from ten to six. The noise of different

typewriters already at work, disseminating their views upon the

protection of native races, or the value of cereals as foodstuffs,

quickened Mary’s steps, and she always ran up the last flight of steps

which led to her own landing, at whatever hour she came, so as to get

her typewriter to take its place in competition with the rest.

She sat herself down to her letters, and very soon all these

speculations were forgotten, and the two lines drew themselves between

her eyebrows, as the contents of the letters, the office furniture,

and the sounds of activity in the next room gradually asserted their

sway upon her. By eleven o’clock the atmosphere of concentration was

running so strongly in one direction that any thought of a different

order could hardly have survived its birth more than a moment or so.

The task which lay before her was to organize a series of

entertainments, the profits of which were to benefit the society,

which drooped for want of funds. It was her first attempt at

organization on a large scale, and she meant to achieve something

remarkable. She meant to use the cumbrous machine to pick out this,

that, and the other interesting person from the muddle of the world,

and to set them for a week in a pattern which must catch the eyes of

Cabinet Ministers, and the eyes once caught, the old arguments were