Night and Day - Virginia Woolf (best novels for beginners txt) 📗

CHAPTER I

It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other

young ladies of her class, Katharine Hilbery was pouring out tea.

Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining

parts leapt over the little barrier of day which interposed between

Monday morning and this rather subdued moment, and played with the

things one does voluntarily and normally in the daylight. But although

she was silent, she was evidently mistress of a situation which was

familiar enough to her, and inclined to let it take its way for the

six hundredth time, perhaps, without bringing into play any of her

unoccupied faculties. A single glance was enough to show that Mrs.

Hilbery was so rich in the gifts which make tea-parties of elderly

distinguished people successful, that she scarcely needed any help

from her daughter, provided that the tiresome business of teacups and

bread and butter was discharged for her.

 

Considering that the little party had been seated round the tea-table

for less than twenty minutes, the animation observable on their

faces, and the amount of sound they were producing collectively, were

very creditable to the hostess. It suddenly came into Katharine’s mind

that if some one opened the door at this moment he would think that

they were enjoying themselves; he would think, “What an extremely nice

house to come into!” and instinctively she laughed, and said something

to increase the noise, for the credit of the house presumably, since

she herself had not been feeling exhilarated. At the very same moment,

rather to her amusement, the door was flung open, and a young man

entered the room. Katharine, as she shook hands with him, asked him,

in her own mind, “Now, do you think we’re enjoying ourselves

enormously?” … “Mr. Denham, mother,” she said aloud, for she saw

that her mother had forgotten his name.

 

That fact was perceptible to Mr. Denham also, and increased the

awkwardness which inevitably attends the entrance of a stranger into a

room full of people much at their ease, and all launched upon

sentences. At the same time, it seemed to Mr. Denham as if a thousand

softly padded doors had closed between him and the street outside. A

fine mist, the etherealized essence of the fog, hung visibly in the

wide and rather empty space of the drawing-room, all silver where the

candles were grouped on the tea-table, and ruddy again in the

firelight. With the omnibuses and cabs still running in his head, and

his body still tingling with his quick walk along the streets and in

and out of traffic and foot-passengers, this drawing-room seemed very

remote and still; and the faces of the elderly people were mellowed,

at some distance from each other, and had a bloom on them owing to the

fact that the air in the drawing-room was thickened by blue grains of

mist. Mr. Denham had come in as Mr. Fortescue, the eminent novelist,

reached the middle of a very long sentence. He kept this suspended

while the newcomer sat down, and Mrs. Hilbery deftly joined the

severed parts by leaning towards him and remarking:

 

“Now, what would you do if you were married to an engineer, and had to

live in Manchester, Mr. Denham?”

 

“Surely she could learn Persian,” broke in a thin, elderly gentleman.

“Is there no retired schoolmaster or man of letters in Manchester with

whom she could read Persian?”

 

“A cousin of ours has married and gone to live in Manchester,”

Katharine explained. Mr. Denham muttered something, which was indeed

all that was required of him, and the novelist went on where he had

left off. Privately, Mr. Denham cursed himself very sharply for having

exchanged the freedom of the street for this sophisticated drawing-room, where, among other disagreeables, he certainly would not appear

at his best. He glanced round him, and saw that, save for Katharine,

they were all over forty, the only consolation being that Mr.

Fortescue was a considerable celebrity, so that tomorrow one might be

glad to have met him.

 

“Have you ever been to Manchester?” he asked Katharine.

 

“Never,” she replied.

 

“Why do you object to it, then?”

 

Katharine stirred her tea, and seemed to speculate, so Denham thought,

upon the duty of filling somebody else’s cup, but she was really

wondering how she was going to keep this strange young man in harmony

with the rest. She observed that he was compressing his teacup, so

that there was danger lest the thin china might cave inwards. She

could see that he was nervous; one would expect a bony young man with

his face slightly reddened by the wind, and his hair not altogether

smooth, to be nervous in such a party. Further, he probably disliked

this kind of thing, and had come out of curiosity, or because her

father had invited him—anyhow, he would not be easily combined with

the rest.

 

“I should think there would be no one to talk to in Manchester,” she

replied at random. Mr. Fortescue had been observing her for a moment

or two, as novelists are inclined to observe, and at this remark he

smiled, and made it the text for a little further speculation.

 

“In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Katharine decidedly

hits the mark,” he said, and lying back in his chair, with his opaque

contemplative eyes fixed on the ceiling, and the tips of his fingers

pressed together, he depicted, first the horrors of the streets of

Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the

town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live,

and then the professors and the miserable young students devoted to

the more strenuous works of our younger dramatists, who would visit

her, and how her appearance would change by degrees, and how she would

fly to London, and how Katharine would have to lead her about, as one

leads an eager dog on a chain, past rows of clamorous butchers’ shops,

poor dear creature.

 

“Oh, Mr. Fortescue,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, as he finished, “I had

just written to say how I envied her! I was thinking of the big

gardens and the dear old ladies in mittens, who read nothing but the

“Spectator,” and snuff the candles. Have they ALL disappeared? I told

her she would find the nice things of London without the horrid

streets that depress one so.”

 

“There is the University,” said the thin gentleman, who had previously

insisted upon the existence of people knowing Persian.

 

“I know there are moors there, because I read about them in a book the

other day,” said Katharine.

 

“I am grieved and amazed at the ignorance of my family,” Mr. Hilbery

remarked. He was an elderly man, with a pair of oval, hazel eyes which

were rather bright for his time of life, and relieved the heaviness of

his face. He played constantly with a little green stone attached to

his watch-chain, thus displaying long and very sensitive fingers, and

had a habit of moving his head hither and thither very quickly without

altering the position of his large and rather corpulent body, so that

he seemed to be providing himself incessantly with food for amusement

and reflection with the least possible expenditure of energy. One

might suppose that he had passed the time of life when his ambitions

were personal, or that he had gratified them as far as he was likely

to do, and now employed his considerable acuteness rather to observe

and reflect than to attain any result.

 

Katharine, so Denham decided, while Mr. Fortescue built up another

rounded structure of words, had a likeness to each of her parents, but

these elements were rather oddly blended. She had the quick, impulsive

movements of her mother, the lips parting often to speak, and closing

again; and the dark oval eyes of her father brimming with light upon a

basis of sadness, or, since she was too young to have acquired a

sorrowful point of view, one might say that the basis was not sadness

so much as a spirit given to contemplation and self-control. Judging

by her hair, her coloring, and the shape of her features, she was

striking, if not actually beautiful. Decision and composure stamped

her, a combination of qualities that produced a very marked character,

and one that was not calculated to put a young man, who scarcely knew

her, at his ease. For the rest, she was tall; her dress was of some

quiet color, with old yellow-tinted lace for ornament, to which the

spark of an ancient jewel gave its one red gleam. Denham noticed that,

although silent, she kept sufficient control of the situation to

answer immediately her mother appealed to her for help, and yet it was

obvious to him that she attended only with the surface skin of her

mind. It struck him that her position at the tea-table, among all

these elderly people, was not without its difficulties, and he checked

his inclination to find her, or her attitude, generally antipathetic

to him. The talk had passed over Manchester, after dealing with it

very generously.

 

“Would it be the Battle of Trafalgar or the Spanish Armada,

Katharine?” her mother demanded.

 

“Trafalgar, mother.”

 

“Trafalgar, of course! How stupid of me! Another cup of tea, with a

thin slice of lemon in it, and then, dear Mr. Fortescue, please

explain my absurd little puzzle. One can’t help believing gentlemen

with Roman noses, even if one meets them in omnibuses.”

 

Mr. Hilbery here interposed so far as Denham was concerned, and talked

a great deal of sense about the solicitors’ profession, and the

changes which he had seen in his lifetime. Indeed, Denham properly

fell to his lot, owing to the fact that an article by Denham upon some

legal matter, published by Mr. Hilbery in his Review, had brought them

acquainted. But when a moment later Mrs. Sutton Bailey was announced,

he turned to her, and Mr. Denham found himself sitting silent,

rejecting possible things to say, beside Katharine, who was silent

too. Being much about the same age and both under thirty, they were

prohibited from the use of a great many convenient phrases which

launch conversation into smooth waters. They were further silenced by

Katharine’s rather malicious determination not to help this young man,

in whose upright and resolute bearing she detected something hostile

to her surroundings, by any of the usual feminine amenities. They

therefore sat silent, Denham controlling his desire to say something

abrupt and explosive, which should shock her into life. But Mrs.

Hilbery was immediately sensitive to any silence in the drawing-room,

as of a dumb note in a sonorous scale, and leaning across the table

she observed, in the curiously tentative detached manner which always

gave her phrases the likeness of butterflies flaunting from one sunny

spot to another, “D’you know, Mr. Denham, you remind me so much of

dear Mr. Ruskin… . Is it his tie, Katharine, or his hair, or the

way he sits in his chair? Do tell me, Mr. Denham, are you an admirer

of Ruskin? Some one, the other day, said to me, ‘Oh, no, we