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

to

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