initials upon doors of ground glass, and kept, each
of them, a typewriter which clicked busily all day long.
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Virginia Woolf
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 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
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Night and Day
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
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Virginia Woolf
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
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Night and Day
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
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Virginia Woolf
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 con
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Night and Day
centrated 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 his hand, which he was reading
aloud.
“Salford’s affiliated,” he said.
“Well done, Salford!” Mrs. Seal exclaimed enthusiastically,
thumping the teapot which she held upon the table,
in token of applause.
“Yes, these provincial centers seem to be coming into
line at last,” said Mr. Clacton, and then Mary introduced
him to Miss Hilbery, and he asked her, in a very formal
manner, if she were interested “in our work.”
