way in which the door kept opening as the clock struck
the hour, in obedience to a few strokes of his pen on a
piece of paper; and when it had opened sufficiently often,
he loved to issue from his inner chamber with documents
in his hands, visibly important, with a preoccupied
expression on his face that might have suited a Prime
Minister advancing to meet his Cabinet. By his orders the
table had been decorated beforehand with six sheets of
blotting-paper, with six pens, six ink-pots, a tumbler and
a jug of water, a bell, and, in deference to the taste of
the lady members, a vase of hardy chrysanthemums. He
had already surreptitiously straightened the sheets of
blotting-paper in relation to the ink-pots, and now stood
in front of the fire engaged in conversation with Miss
Markham. But his eye was on the door, and when Mary
and Mrs. Seal entered, he gave a little laugh and observed
to the assembly which was scattered about the
room:
“I fancy, ladies and gentlemen, that we are ready to
commence.”
So speaking, he took his seat at the head of the table,
and arranging one bundle of papers upon his right and
another upon his left, called upon Miss Datchet to read
the minutes of the previous meeting. Mary obeyed. A keen
observer might have wondered why it was necessary for
the secretary to knit her brows so closely over the tolerably
matter-of-fact statement before her. Could there be
any doubt in her mind that it had been resolved to circularize
the provinces with Leaflet No. 3, or to issue a statistical
diagram showing the proportion of married women
to spinsters in New Zealand; or that the net profits of
Mrs. Hipsley’s Bazaar had reached a total of five pounds
eight shillings and twopence half-penny?
Could any doubt as to the perfect sense and propriety
of these statements be disturbing her? No one could have
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guessed, from the look of her, that she was disturbed at
all. A pleasanter and saner woman than Mary Datchet
was never seen within a committee-room. She seemed a
compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine;
less poetically speaking, she showed both gentleness and
strength, an indefinable promise of soft maternity blending
with her evident fitness for honest labor. Nevertheless,
she had great difficulty in reducing her mind to
obedience; and her reading lacked conviction, as if, as
was indeed the case, she had lost the power of visualizing
what she read. And directly the list was completed,
her mind floated to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the fluttering
wings of innumerable sparrows. Was Ralph still enticing
the bald-headed cock-sparrow to sit upon his hand?
Had he succeeded? Would he ever succeed? She had meant
to ask him why it is that the sparrows in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields are tamer than the sparrows in Hyde Park—perhaps
it is that the passers-by are rarer, and they come to
recognize their benefactors. For the first half-hour of the
committee meeting, Mary had thus to do battle with the
skeptical presence of Ralph Denham, who threatened to
have it all his own way. Mary tried half a dozen methods
of ousting him. She raised her voice, she articulated distinctly,
she looked firmly at Mr. Clacton’s bald head, she
began to write a note. To her annoyance, her pencil drew
a little round figure on the blotting-paper, which, she
could not deny, was really a bald-headed cock-sparrow.
She looked again at Mr. Clacton; yes, he was bald, and so
are cock-sparrows. Never was a secretary tormented by
so many unsuitable suggestions, and they all came, alas!
with something ludicrously grotesque about them, which
might, at any moment, provoke her to such flippancy as
would shock her colleagues for ever. The thought of what
she might say made her bite her lips, as if her lips would
protect her.
But all these suggestions were but flotsam and jetsam
cast to the surface by a more profound disturbance, which,
as she could not consider it at present, manifested its
existence by these grotesque nods and beckonings. Consider
it, she must, when the committee was over. Meanwhile,
she was behaving scandalously; she was looking
out of the window, and thinking of the color of the sky,
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and of the decorations on the Imperial Hotel, when she
ought to have been shepherding her colleagues, and pinning
them down to the matter in hand. She could not
bring herself to attach more weight to one project than
to another. Ralph had said—she could not stop to consider
what he had said, but he had somehow divested the
proceedings of all reality. And then, without conscious
effort, by some trick of the brain, she found herself becoming
interested in some scheme for organizing a newspaper
campaign. Certain articles were to be written; certain
editors approached. What line was it advisable to
take? She found herself strongly disapproving of what
Mr. Clacton was saying. She committed herself to the
opinion that now was the time to strike hard. Directly
she had said this, she felt that she had turned upon Ralph’s
ghost; and she became more and more in earnest, and
anxious to bring the others round to her point of view.
Once more, she knew exactly and indisputably what is
right and what is wrong. As if emerging from a mist, the
old foes of the public good loomed ahead of her—capitalists,
newspaper proprietors, anti-suffragists, and, in
some ways most pernicious of all, the masses who take
no interest one way or another—among whom, for the
time being, she certainly discerned the features of Ralph
Denham. Indeed, when Miss Markham asked her to suggest
the names of a few friends of hers, she expressed
herself with unusual bitterness:
“My friends think all this kind of thing useless.” She
felt that she was really saying that to Ralph himself.
“Oh, they’re that sort, are they?” said Miss Markham,
with a little laugh; and with renewed vigor their legions
charged the foe.
Mary’s spirits had been low when she entered the committee-
room; but now they were considerably improved.
She knew the ways of this world; it was a shapely, orderly
place; she felt convinced of its right and its wrong; and
the feeling that she was fit to deal a heavy blow against
her enemies warmed her heart and kindled her eye. In
one of those flights of fancy, not characteristic of her but
tiresomely frequent this afternoon, she envisaged herself
battered with rotten eggs upon a platform, from which
Ralph vainly begged her to descend. But—
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“What do I matter compared with the cause?” she said,
and so on. Much to her credit, however teased by foolish
fancies, she kept the surface of her brain moderate and
vigilant, and subdued Mrs. Seal very tactfully more than
once when she demanded, “Action!—everywhere!—at
once!” as became her father’s daughter.
The other members of the committee, who were all rather
elderly people, were a good deal impressed by Mary, and
inclined to side with her and against each other, partly,
perhaps, because of her youth. The feeling that she controlled
them all filled Mary with a sense of power; and
she felt that no work can equal in importance, or be so
exciting as, the work of making other people do what you
want them to do. Indeed, when she had won her point
she felt a slight degree of contempt for the people who
had yielded to her.
The committee now rose, gathered together their papers,
shook them straight, placed them in their attache-
cases, snapped the locks firmly together, and hurried away,
having, for the most part, to catch trains, in order to
keep other appointments with other committees, for they
were all busy people. Mary, Mrs. Seal, and Mr. Clacton
were left alone; the room was hot and untidy, the pieces
of pink blotting-paper were lying at different angles upon
the table, and the tumbler was half full of water, which
some one had poured out and forgotten to drink.
Mrs. Seal began preparing the tea, while Mr. Clacton
retired to his room to file the fresh accumulation of documents.
Mary was too much excited even to help Mrs. Seal
with the cups and saucers. She flung up the window and
stood by it, looking out. The street lamps were already
lit; and through the mist in the square one could see
little figures hurrying across the road and along the pavement,
on the farther side. In her absurd mood of lustful
arrogance, Mary looked at the little figures and thought,
“If I liked I could make you go in there or stop short; I
could make you walk in single file or in double file; I
could do what I liked with you.” Then Mrs. Seal came and
stood by her.
“Oughtn’t you to put something round your shoulders,
Sally?” Mary asked, in rather a condescending tone of
voice, feeling a sort of pity for the enthusiastic ineffec
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tive little woman. But Mrs. Seal paid no attention to the
suggestion.
“Well, did you enjoy yourself?” Mary asked, with a little
laugh.
Mrs. Seal drew a deep breath, restrained herself, and
then burst out, looking out, too, upon Russell Square
and Southampton Row, and at the passers-by, “Ah, if only
one could get every one of those people into this room,
and make them understand for five minutes! But they
must see the truth some day… . If only one could MAKE
them see it… .”
Mary knew herself to be very much wiser than Mrs. Seal,
and when Mrs. Seal said anything, even if it was what Mary
herself was feeling, she automatically thought of all that
there was to be said against it. On this occasion her arrogant
feeling that she could direct everybody dwindled away.
“Let’s have our tea,” she said, turning back from the
window and pulling down the blind. “It was a good meeting—
didn’t you think so, Sally?” she let fall, casually, as
she sat down at the table. Surely Mrs. Seal must realize
that Mary had been extraordinarily efficient?
“But we go at such a snail’s pace,” said Sally, shaking
her head impatiently.
At this Mary burst out laughing, and all her arrogance
was dissipated.
“You can afford to laugh,” said Sally, with another shake
of her head, “but I can’t. I’m fifty-five, and I dare say I
shall be in my grave by the time we get it—if we ever do.”
“Oh, no, you won’t be in your grave,” said Mary, kindly.
“It’ll be such a great day,” said Mrs. Seal, with a toss of
her locks. “A great day, not only for us, but for civilization.
That’s what I feel, you know, about these meetings.
Each one of them is a step onwards in the great march—
humanity, you know. We do want the people after us to
have a better time of it—and so many don’t see it. I
wonder how it is that they don’t see it?”
She was carrying plates and cups from the cupboard as
she spoke, so that her sentences were more than usually
broken apart. Mary could not help looking at the odd
little priestess of humanity with something like admiration.
While she had been thinking about herself, Mrs.
Seal had thought of nothing but her vision.
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“You mustn’t wear yourself out, Sally, if you want to
see the great day,” she said, rising and trying to take a
plate of biscuits from Mrs. Seal’s hands.
“My dear child, what else is my old body good for?” she
exclaimed, clinging more tightly than before to her plate
of biscuits. “Shouldn’t I be proud to give everything I
have to the cause?—for I’m not an intelligence like you.
There were domestic circumstances—I’d like to tell you
one of these days—so I say foolish things. I lose my
head, you know. You don’t. Mr. Clacton doesn’t. It’s a
great mistake, to lose one’s head. But my heart’s in the
right place. And I’m so glad Kit has a big dog, for I didn’t
think her looking well.”
They had their tea, and went over many of the points
that had been raised in the committee rather more intimately
than had been possible then; and they all felt an
agreeable sense of being in some way behind the scenes;
of having their hands upon strings which, when pulled,
would completely change the pageant exhibited daily to
those who read the newspapers. Although their views were
very different, this sense united them and made them
almost cordial in their manners to each other.
Mary, however, left the tea-party rather early, desiring
both to be alone, and then to hear some music at the
Queen’s Hall. She fully intended to use her loneliness to
think out her position with regard to Ralph; but although
she walked back to the Strand with this end in view, she
found her mind uncomfortably full of different trains of
thought. She started one and then another. They seemed
even to take their color from the street she happened to
be in. Thus the vision of humanity appeared to be in
some way connected with Bloomsbury, and faded distinctly
by the time she crossed the main road; then a
belated organ-grinder in Holborn set her thoughts dancing
incongruously; and by the time she was crossing the
great misty square of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, she was cold
and depressed again, and horribly clear-sighted. The dark
removed the stimulus of human companionship, and a
tear actually slid down her cheek, accompanying a sudden
conviction within her that she loved Ralph, and that
he didn’t love her. All dark and empty now was the path
where they had walked that morning, and the sparrows
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silent in the bare trees. But the lights in her own building
soon cheered her; all these different states of mind
were submerged in the deep flood of desires, thoughts,
perceptions, antagonisms, which washed perpetually at
the base of her being, to rise into prominence in turn
when the conditions of the upper world were favorable.
She put off the hour of clear thought until Christmas,
