“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.
220
Virginia Woolf
“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
221
Night and Day
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 bluebottle.”
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
222
Virginia Woolf
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
223
Night and Day
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,
224
Virginia Woolf
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 secre
225
Night and Day
tary, 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,
