"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 SIMPLE." She referred to a matter that was a perpetual source of bewilderment to her--the extraordinary incapacity of the human race, in a world where the good is so unmistakably divided from the bad, of distinguishing one from the other, and embodying what ought to be done in a few large, simple Acts of Parliament, which would, in a very short time, completely change the lot of humanity.
"One would have thought," she said, "that men of University training, like Mr. Asquith--one would have thought that an appeal to reason would not be unheard by them. But reason," she reflected, "what is reason without Reality?"Doing homage to the phrase, she repeated it once more, and caught the ear of Mr. Clacton, as he issued from his room; and he repeated it a third time, giving it, as he was in the habit of doing with Mrs.
Seal's phrases, a dryly humorous intonation. He was well pleased with the world, however, and he remarked, in a flattering manner, that he would like to see that phrase in large letters at the head of a leaflet.
"But, Mrs. Seal, we have to aim at a judicious combination of the two," he added in his magisterial way to check the unbalanced enthusiasm of the women. "Reality has to be voiced by reason before it can make itself felt. The weak point of all these movements, Miss Datchet," he continued, taking his place at the table and turning to Mary as usual when about to deliver his more profound cogitations, "is that they are not based upon sufficiently intellectual grounds. Amistake, in my opinion. The British public likes a pellet of reason in its jam of eloquence--a pill of reason in its pudding of sentiment,"he said, sharpening the phrase to a satisfactory degree of literary precision.
His eyes rested, with something of the vanity of an author, upon the yellow leaflet which Mary held in her hand. She rose, took her seat at the head of the table, poured out tea for her colleagues, and gave her opinion upon the leaflet. So she had poured out tea, so she had criticized Mr. Clacton's leaflets a hundred times already; but now it seemed to her that she was doing it in a different spirit; she had enlisted in the army, and was a volunteer no longer. She had renounced something and was now--how could she express it?;--not quite "in the running" for life. She had always known that Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal were not in the running, and across the gulf that separated them she had seen them in the guise of shadow people, flitting in and out of the ranks of the living--eccentrics, undeveloped human beings, from whose substance some essential part had been cut away. All this had never struck her so clearly as it did this afternoon, when she felt that her lot was cast with them for ever. One view of the world plunged in darkness, so a more volatile temperament might have argued after a season of despair, let the world turn again and show another, more splendid, perhaps. No, Mary thought, with unflinching loyalty to what appeared to her to be the true view, having lost what is best, Ido not mean to pretend that any other view does instead. Whatever happens, I mean to have no presences in my life. Her very words had a sort of distinctness which is sometimes produced by sharp, bodily pain. To Mrs. Seal's secret jubilation the rule which forbade discussion of shop at tea-time was overlooked. Mary and Mr. Clacton argued with a cogency and a ferocity which made the little woman feel that something very important--she hardly knew what--was taking place.
She became much excited; one crucifix became entangled with another, and she dug a considerable hole in the table with the point of her pencil in order to emphasize the most striking heads of the discourse;and how any combination of Cabinet Ministers could resist such discourse she really did not know.
She could hardly bring herself to remember her own private instrument of justice--the typewriter. The telephone-bell rang, and as she hurried off to answer a voice which always seemed a proof of importance by itself, she felt that it was at this exact spot on the surface of the globe that all the subterranean wires of thought and progress came together. When she returned, with a message from the printer, she found that Mary was putting on her hat firmly; there was something imperious and dominating in her attitude altogether.
"Look, Sally," she said, "these letters want copying. These I've not looked at. The question of the new census will have to be gone into carefully. But I'm going home now. Good night, Mr. Clacton; good night, Sally.""We are very fortunate in our secretary, Mr. Clacton," said Mrs. Seal, pausing with her hand on the papers, as the door shut behind Mary. Mr.
Clacton himself had been vaguely impressed by something in Mary's behavior towards him. He envisaged a time even when it would become necessary to tell her that there could not be two masters in one office--but she was certainly able, very able, and in touch with a group of very clever young men. No doubt they had suggested to her some of her new ideas.
He signified his assent to Mrs. Seal's remark, but observed, with a glance at the clock, which showed only half an hour past five:
"If she takes the work seriously, Mrs. Seal--but that's just what some of your clever young ladies don't do." So saying he returned to his room, and Mrs. Seal, after a moment's hesitation, hurried back to her labors.
