Night and Day

V >> Virginia Woolf >> Night and Day

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The tramp of their boots upon the dry road seemed to asseverate
nothing, nothing, nothing. Mary thought that this silence was the
silence of relief; his depression she ascribed to the fact that he had
seen Katharine and parted from her, leaving her in the company of
William Rodney. She could not blame him for loving Katharine, but
that, when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him--that
seemed to her the cruellest treachery. Their old friendship and its
firm base upon indestructible qualities of character crumbled, and her
whole past seemed foolish, herself weak and credulous, and Ralph
merely the shell of an honest man. Oh, the past--so much made up of
Ralph; and now, as she saw, made up of something strange and false and
other than she had thought it. She tried to recapture a saying she had
made to help herself that morning, as Ralph paid the bill for
luncheon; but she could see him paying the bill more vividly than she
could remember the phrase. Something about truth was in it; how to see
the truth is our great chance in this world.

"If you don't want to marry me," Ralph now began again, without
abruptness, with diffidence rather, "there is no need why we should
cease to see each other, is there? Or would you rather that we should
keep apart for the present?"

"Keep apart? I don't know--I must think about it."

"Tell me one thing, Mary," he resumed; "have I done anything to make
you change your mind about me?"

She was immensely tempted to give way to her natural trust in him,
revived by the deep and now melancholy tones of his voice, and to tell
him of her love, and of what had changed it. But although it seemed
likely that she would soon control her anger with him, the certainty
that he did not love her, confirmed by every word of his proposal,
forbade any freedom of speech. To hear him speak and to feel herself
unable to reply, or constrained in her replies, was so painful that
she longed for the time when she should be alone. A more pliant woman
would have taken this chance of an explanation, whatever risks
attached to it; but to one of Mary's firm and resolute temperament
there was degradation in the idea of self-abandonment; let the waves
of emotion rise ever so high, she could not shut her eyes to what she
conceived to be the truth. Her silence puzzled Ralph. He searched his
memory for words or deeds that might have made her think badly of him.
In his present mood instances came but too quickly, and on top of them
this culminating proof of his baseness--that he had asked her to marry
him when his reasons for such a proposal were selfish and
half-hearted.

"You needn't answer," he said grimly. "There are reasons enough, I
know. But must they kill our friendship, Mary? Let me keep that, at
least."

"Oh," she thought to herself, with a sudden rush of anguish which
threatened disaster to her self-respect, "it has come to this--to
this--when I could have given him everything!"

"Yes, we can still be friends," she said, with what firmness she could
muster.

"I shall want your friendship," he said. He added, "If you find it
possible, let me see you as often as you can. The oftener the better.
I shall want your help."

She promised this, and they went on to talk calmly of things that had
no reference to their feelings--a talk which, in its constraint, was
infinitely sad to both of them.

One more reference was made to the state of things between them late
that night, when Elizabeth had gone to her room, and the two young men
had stumbled off to bed in such a state of sleep that they hardly felt
the floor beneath their feet after a day's shooting.

Mary drew her chair a little nearer to the fire, for the logs were
burning low, and at this time of night it was hardly worth while to
replenish them. Ralph was reading, but she had noticed for some time
that his eyes instead of following the print were fixed rather above
the page with an intensity of gloom that came to weigh upon her mind.
She had not weakened in her resolve not to give way, for reflection
had only made her more bitterly certain that, if she gave way, it
would be to her own wish and not to his. But she had determined that
there was no reason why he should suffer if her reticence were the
cause of his suffering. Therefore, although she found it painful, she
spoke:

"You asked me if I had changed my mind about you, Ralph," she said. "I
think there's only one thing. When you asked me to marry you, I don't
think you meant it. That made me angry--for the moment. Before, you'd
always spoken the truth."

Ralph's book slid down upon his knee and fell upon the floor. He
rested his forehead on his hand and looked into the fire. He was
trying to recall the exact words in which he had made his proposal to
Mary.

"I never said I loved you," he said at last.

She winced; but she respected him for saying what he did, for this,
after all, was a fragment of the truth which she had vowed to live by.

"And to me marriage without love doesn't seem worth while," she said.

"Well, Mary, I'm not going to press you," he said. "I see you don't
want to marry me. But love--don't we all talk a great deal of nonsense
about it? What does one mean? I believe I care for you more genuinely
than nine men out of ten care for the women they're in love with. It's
only a story one makes up in one's mind about another person, and one
knows all the time it isn't true. Of course one knows; why, one's
always taking care not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not to
see them too often, or to be alone with them for too long together.
It's a pleasant illusion, but if you're thinking of the risks of
marriage, it seems to me that the risk of marrying a person you're in
love with is something colossal."

"I don't believe a word of that, and what's more you don't, either,"
she replied with anger. "However, we don't agree; I only wanted you to
understand." She shifted her position, as if she were about to go. An
instinctive desire to prevent her from leaving the room made Ralph
rise at this point and begin pacing up and down the nearly empty
kitchen, checking his desire, each time he reached the door, to open
it and step out into the garden. A moralist might have said that at
this point his mind should have been full of self-reproach for the
suffering he had caused. On the contrary, he was extremely angry, with
the confused impotent anger of one who finds himself unreasonably but
efficiently frustrated. He was trapped by the illogicality of human
life. The obstacles in the way of his desire seemed to him purely
artificial, and yet he could see no way of removing them. Mary's
words, the tone of her voice even, angered him, for she would not help
him. She was part of the insanely jumbled muddle of a world which
impedes the sensible life. He would have liked to slam the door or
break the hind legs of a chair, for the obstacles had taken some such
curiously substantial shape in his mind.

"I doubt that one human being ever understands another," he said,
stopping in his march and confronting Mary at a distance of a few
feet.

"Such damned liars as we all are, how can we? But we can try. If you
don't want to marry me, don't; but the position you take up about
love, and not seeing each other--isn't that mere sentimentality? You
think I've behaved very badly," he continued, as she did not speak.
"Of course I behave badly; but you can't judge people by what they do.
You can't go through life measuring right and wrong with a foot-rule.
That's what you're always doing, Mary; that's what you're doing now."

She saw herself in the Suffrage Office, delivering judgment, meting
out right and wrong, and there seemed to her to be some justice in the
charge, although it did not affect her main position.

"I'm not angry with you," she said slowly. "I will go on seeing you,
as I said I would."

It was true that she had promised that much already, and it was
difficult for him to say what more it was that he wanted--some
intimacy, some help against the ghost of Katharine, perhaps, something
that he knew he had no right to ask; and yet, as he sank into his
chair and looked once more at the dying fire it seemed to him that he
had been defeated, not so much by Mary as by life itself. He felt
himself thrown back to the beginning of life again, where everything
has yet to be won; but in extreme youth one has an ignorant hope. He
was no longer certain that he would triumph.

CHAPTER XX

Happily for Mary Datchet she returned to the office to find that by
some obscure Parliamentary maneuver the vote had once more slipped
beyond the attainment of women. Mrs. Seal was in a condition bordering
upon frenzy. The duplicity of Ministers, the treachery of mankind, the
insult to womanhood, the setback to civilization, the ruin of her
life's work, the feelings of her father's daughter--all these topics
were discussed in turn, and the office was littered with newspaper
cuttings branded with the blue, if ambiguous, marks of her
displeasure. She confessed herself at fault in her estimate of human
nature.

"The simple elementary acts of justice," she said, waving her hand
towards the window, and indicating the foot-passengers and omnibuses
then passing down the far side of Russell Square, "are as far beyond
them as they ever were. We can only look upon ourselves, Mary, as
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 later
lunched in the Strand, cutting her meat firmly into small pieces, but
giving her fellow-diners no further cause to judge her eccentric. Her
soliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emerging
suddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when she had
to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or to
choose a turning. "To know the truth--to accept without bitterness"--
those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no one
could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in front
of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford, save that the name of Ralph
occurred frequently in very strange connections, as if, having spoken
it, she wished, superstitiously, to cancel it by adding some other
word that robbed the sentence with his name in it of any meaning.

Those champions of the cause of women, Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal, did
not perceive anything strange in Mary's behavior, save that she was
almost half an hour later than usual in coming back to the office.
Happily, their own affairs kept them busy, and she was free from their
inspection. 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 mind
pursued its own journey among the sun-blazoned windows and the drifts
of purplish smoke which formed her view. And, indeed, this background
was by no means out of keeping with her thoughts. She saw to the
remote spaces behind the strife of the foreground, enabled now to gaze
there, since she had renounced her own demands, privileged to see the
larger view, to share the vast desires and sufferings of the mass of
mankind. She had been too lately and too roughly mastered by facts to
take an easy pleasure in the relief of renunciation; such satisfaction
as she felt came only from the discovery that, having renounced
everything that made life happy, easy, splendid, individual, there
remained 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 the
particular to the universal, Mrs. Seal remembered her duties with
regard to the kettle and the gas-fire. She was a little surprised to
find that Mary had drawn her chair to the window, and, having lit the
gas, she raised herself from a stooping posture and looked at her. The
most obvious reason for such an attitude in a secretary was some kind
of indisposition. But Mary, rousing herself with an effort, denied
that she was indisposed.

"I'm frightfully lazy this afternoon," she added, with a glance at her
table. "You must really get another secretary, Sally."

The words were meant to be taken lightly, but something in the tone of
them roused a jealous fear which was always dormant in Mrs. Seal's
breast. She was terribly afraid that one of these days Mary, the young
woman who typified so many rather sentimental and enthusiastic ideas,
who had some sort of visionary existence in white with a sheaf of
lilies in her hand, would announce, in a jaunty way, that she was
about 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 which
could be taken as a generalization.

Mrs. Seal got the teacups out of the cupboard and set them on the
table.

"You're not going to be married, are you?" she asked, pronouncing the
words with nervous speed.

"Why are you asking such absurd questions this afternoon, Sally?" Mary
asked, not very steadily. "Must we all get married?"

Mrs. Seal emitted a most peculiar chuckle. She seemed for one moment
to acknowledge the terrible side of life which is concerned with the
emotions, the private lives, of the sexes, and then to sheer off from
it with all possible speed into the shades of her own shivering
virginity. She was made so uncomfortable by the turn the conversation
had taken, that she plunged her head into the cupboard, and endeavored
to abstract some very obscure piece of china.

"We have our work," she said, withdrawing her head, displaying cheeks
more than usually crimson, and placing a jam-pot emphatically upon the
table. But, for the moment, she was unable to launch herself upon one
of those enthusiastic, but inconsequent, tirades upon liberty,
democracy, the rights of the people, and the iniquities of the
Government, in which she delighted. Some memory from her own past or
from the past of her sex rose to her mind and kept her abashed. She
glanced furtively at Mary, who still sat by the window with her arm
upon the sill. She noticed how young she was and full of the promise
of womanhood. The sight made her so uneasy that she fidgeted the cups
upon their saucers.

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