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

class="calibre1">pioneers in a wilderness. We can only go on patiently putting the

truth before them. It isn’t THEM,” she continued, taking heart from

her sight of the traffic, “it’s their leaders. It’s those gentlemen

sitting in Parliament and drawing four hundred a year of the people’s

money. If we had to put our case to the people, we should soon have

justice done to us. I have always believed in the people, and I do so

still. But—” She shook her head and implied that she would give them

one more chance, and if they didn’t take advantage of that she

couldn’t answer for the consequences.

 

Mr. Clacton’s attitude was more philosophical and better supported by

statistics. He came into the room after Mrs. Seal’s outburst and

pointed out, with historical illustrations, that such reverses had

happened in every political campaign of any importance. If anything,

his spirits were improved by the disaster. The enemy, he said, had

taken the offensive; and it was now up to the Society to outwit the

enemy. He gave Mary to understand that he had taken the measure of

their cunning, and had already bent his mind to the task which, so far

as she could make out, depended solely upon him. It depended, so she

came to think, when invited into his room for a private conference,

upon a systematic revision of the card-index, upon the issue of

certain new lemon-colored leaflets, in which the facts were marshaled

once more in a very striking way, and upon a large scale map of

England dotted with little pins tufted with differently colored plumes

of hair according to their geographical position. Each district, under

the new system, had its flag, its bottle of ink, its sheaf of

documents tabulated and filed for reference in a drawer, so that by

looking under M or S, as the case might be, you had all the facts with

respect 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 telephone

exchange—for the exchange of ideas, Miss Datchet,” he said; and

taking pleasure in his image, he continued it. “We should consider

ourselves the center of an enormous system of wires, connecting us up

with every district of the country. We must have our fingers upon the

pulse of the community; we want to know what people all over England

are thinking; we want to put them in the way of thinking rightly.” The

system, of course, was only roughly sketched so far—jotted down, in

fact, during the Christmas holidays.

 

“When you ought to have been taking a rest, Mr. Clacton,” said Mary

dutifully, 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-colored

leaflet. According to his plan, it was to be distributed in immense

quantities immediately, in order to stimulate and generate, “to

generate and stimulate,” he repeated, “right thoughts in the country

before the meeting of Parliament.”

 

“We have to take the enemy by surprise,” he said. “They don’t let the

grass grow under their feet. Have you seen Bingham’s address to his

constituents? 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 her

to give him her views upon the yellow leaflet before lunch-time, he

turned with alacrity to his different sheets of paper and his

different bottles of ink.

 

Mary shut the door, laid the documents upon her table, and sank her

head on her hands. Her brain was curiously empty of any thought. She

listened, as if, perhaps, by listening she would become merged again

in the atmosphere of the office. From the next room came the rapid

spasmodic sounds of Mrs. Seal’s erratic typewriting; she, doubtless,

was already hard at work helping the people of England, as Mr. Clacton

put it, to think rightly; “generating and stimulating,” those were his

words. She was striking a blow against the enemy, no doubt, who didn’t

let the grass grow beneath their feet. Mr. Clacton’s words repeated

themselves accurately in her brain. She pushed the papers wearily over

to the farther side of the table. It was no use, though; something or

other had happened to her brain—a change of focus so that near things

were indistinct again. The same thing had happened to her once before,

she remembered, after she had met Ralph in the gardens of Lincoln’s

Inn Fields; she had spent the whole of a committee meeting in thinking

about sparrows and colors, until, almost at the end of the meeting,

her old convictions had all come back to her. But they had only come

back, she thought with scorn at her feebleness, because she wanted to

use them to fight against Ralph. They weren’t, rightly speaking,

convictions at all. She could not see the world divided into separate

compartments of good people and bad people, any more than she could

believe so implicitly in the rightness of her own thought as to wish

to bring the population of the British Isles into agreement with it.

She looked at the lemon-colored leaflet, and thought almost enviously

of 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 share

of personal happiness were granted her. She read Mr. Clacton’s

statement with a curious division of judgment, noting its weak and

pompous verbosity on the one hand, and, at the same time, feeling that

faith, faith in an illusion, perhaps, but, at any rate, faith in

something, was of all gifts the most to be envied. An illusion it was,

no doubt. She looked curiously round her at the furniture of the

office, at the machinery in which she had taken so much pride, and

marveled to think that once the copying-presses, the card-index, the

files of documents, had all been shrouded, wrapped in some mist which

gave them a unity and a general dignity and purpose independently of

their separate significance. The ugly cumbersomeness of the furniture

alone impressed her now. Her attitude had become very lax and

despondent when the typewriter stopped in the next room. Mary

immediately 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 watched

Mrs. Seal pull out one drawer after another in her search for some

envelope 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 of

your own activities, which to me seem as futile as the buzzing of a

belated blue-bottle.” She said nothing of the kind, however, and the

presence of industry which she preserved so long as Mrs. Seal was in

the room served to set her brain in motion, so that she dispatched her

morning’s work much as usual. At one o’clock she was surprised to find

how efficiently she had dealt with the morning. As she put her hat on

she determined to lunch at a shop in the Strand, so as to set that

other piece of mechanism, her body, into action. With a brain working

and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be

found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that

one was conscious of being.

 

She considered her case as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. She

put to herself a series of questions. Would she mind, for example, if

the wheels of that motor-omnibus passed over her and crushed her to

death? No, not in the least; or an adventure with that disagreeable-looking man hanging about the entrance of the Tube station? No; she

could not conceive fear or excitement. Did suffering in any form

appall her? No, suffering was neither good nor bad. And this essential

thing? In the eyes of every single person she detected a flame; as if

a spark in the brain ignited spontaneously at contact with the things

they met and drove them on. The young women looking into the

milliners’ windows had that look in their eyes; and elderly men

turning over books in the second-hand book-shops, and eagerly waiting

to 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. Books

she shrank from, for they were connected too closely with Ralph. She

kept on her way resolutely through the crowd of people, among whom she

was so much of an alien, feeling them cleave and give way before her.

 

Strange thoughts are bred in passing through crowded streets should

the passenger, by chance, have no exact destination in front of him,

much as the mind shapes all kinds of forms, solutions, images when

listening inattentively to music. From an acute consciousness of

herself as an individual, Mary passed to a conception of the scheme of

things in which, as a human being, she must have her share. She half

held a vision; the vision shaped and dwindled. She wished she had a

pencil and a piece of paper to help her to give a form to this

conception which composed itself as she walked down the Charing Cross

Road. 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 a

way which satisfied her sense of harmony. It only needed a persistent

effort of thought, stimulated in this strange way by the crowd and the

noise, to climb the crest of existence and see it all laid out once

and for ever. Already her suffering as an individual was left behind

her. Of this process, which was to her so full of effort, which

comprised infinitely swift and full passages of thought, leading from

one crest to another, as she shaped her conception of life in this

world, only two articulate words escaped her, muttered beneath her

breath—“Not happiness—not happiness.”

 

She sat down on a seat opposite the statue of one of London’s heroes

upon the Embankment, and spoke the words aloud. To her they

represented the rare flower or splinter of rock brought down by a

climber in proof that he has stood for a moment, at least, upon the

highest peak of the mountain. She had been up there and seen the world

spread to the horizon. It was now necessary to alter her course to

some extent, according to her new resolve. Her post should be in one

of those exposed and desolate stations which are shunned naturally by

happy 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 of

Ralph.”

 

Where was he to be placed in the new scale of life? Her exalted mood

seemed to make it safe to handle the question. But she was dismayed to

find how quickly her passions leapt forward the moment she sanctioned

this line of thought. Now she was identified with him and rethought

his thoughts with complete self-surrender; now, with a sudden cleavage

of spirit, she turned upon him and denounced him for his cruelty.

 

“But I refuse—I refuse to hate any one,” she said aloud; chose the

moment to cross the road with circumspection, and ten minutes