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,1 save that the name of Ralph occurred frequently in very strange connexions, 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 behaviour, 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?’ 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 endeavoured 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.
‘Yes—enough work to last a lifetime,’ said Mary, as if concluding some passage of thought.
Mrs Seal brightened at once. She lamented her lack of scientific training, and her deficiency in the processes of logic, but she set her mind to work at once to make the prospects of the cause appear as alluring and important as she could. She delivered herself of an harangue in which she asked a great many rhetorical questions and answered them with a little bang of one fist upon another.
‘To last a lifetime? My dear child, it will last all our lifetimes. As one falls another steps into the breach. My father, in his generation, a pioneer—I, coming after him, do my little best. What, alas! can one do more? And now it’s you young women—we look to you—the future looks to you. Ah, my dear, if I’d a thousand lives, I’d give them all to our cause. The cause of women, d’you say? I say the cause of humanity. And there are some‘—she glanced fiercely at the window—‘who don’t see it! There are some who are satisfied to go on, year after year, refusing to admit the truth. And we who have the vision—the kettle boiling over? No, no, let me see to it—we who know the truth,’ she continued, gesticulating with the kettle and the teapot. Owing to these encumbrances, perhaps, she lost the thread of her discourse, and concluded, rather wistfully, ‘It’s all so
‘One would have thought,’ she said, ‘that men of University training, like Mr Asquith—one would have thought
