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

he sighed and stretched

his hand for a book lying on the table by his side.

 

Directly the door opened he closed the book, and the eyes of father

and mother both rested on Katharine as she came towards them. The

sight seemed at once to give them a motive which they had not had

before. To them she appeared, as she walked towards them in her light

evening dress, extremely young, and the sight of her refreshed them,

were it only because her youth and ignorance made their knowledge of

the world of some value.

 

“The only excuse for you, Katharine, is that dinner is still later

than you are,” said Mr. Hilbery, putting down his spectacles.

 

“I don’t mind her being late when the result is so charming,” said

Mrs. Hilbery, looking with pride at her daughter. “Still, I don’t know

that I LIKE your being out so late, Katharine,” she continued. “You

took a cab, I hope?”

 

Here dinner was announced, and Mr. Hilbery formally led his wife

downstairs on his arm. They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed,

the prettiness of the dinner-table merited that compliment. There was

no cloth upon the table, and the china made regular circles of deep

blue upon the shining brown wood. In the middle there was a bowl of

tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh

that the narrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball.

From the surrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers

surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them

testified in the great man’s own handwriting that he was yours

sincerely or affectionately or for ever. The father and daughter would

have been quite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence,

or with a few cryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not

be understood by the servants. But silence depressed Mrs. Hilbery, and

far from minding the presence of maids, she would often address

herself to them, and was never altogether unconscious of their

approval or disapproval of her remarks. In the first place she called

them to witness that the room was darker than usual, and had all the

lights turned on.

 

“That’s more cheerful,” she exclaimed. “D’you know, Katharine, that

ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried

to make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them,

you know, that I spilt the tea—and he made an epigram about that!”

 

“Which ridiculous goose?” Katharine asked her father.

 

“Only one of my geese, happily, makes epigrams—Augustus Pelham, of

course,” said Mrs. Hilbery.

 

“I’m not sorry that I was out,” said Katharine.

 

“Poor Augustus!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “But we’re all too hard on

him. Remember how devoted he is to his tiresome old mother.”

 

“That’s only because she is his mother. Any one connected with

himself—”

 

“No, no, Katharine—that’s too bad. That’s—what’s the word I mean,

Trevor, something long and Latin—the sort of word you and Katharine

know—”

 

Mr. Hilbery suggested “cynical.”

 

“Well, that’ll do. I don’t believe in sending girls to college, but I

should teach them that sort of thing. It makes one feel so dignified,

bringing out these little allusions, and passing on gracefully to the

next topic. But I don’t know what’s come over me—I actually had to

ask Augustus the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with, as you were

out, Katharine, and Heaven knows what he mayn’t put down about me in

his diary.”

 

“I wish,” Katharine started, with great impetuosity, and checked

herself. Her mother always stirred her to feel and think quickly, and

then she remembered that her father was there, listening with

attention.

 

“What is it you wish?” he asked, as she paused.

 

He often surprised her, thus, into telling him what she had not meant

to tell him; and then they argued, while Mrs. Hilbery went on with her

own thoughts.

 

“I wish mother wasn’t famous. I was out at tea, and they would talk to

me about poetry.”

 

“Thinking you must be poetical, I see—and aren’t you?”

 

“Who’s been talking to you about poetry, Katharine?” Mrs. Hilbery

demanded, and Katharine was committed to giving her parents an account

of her visit to the Suffrage office.

 

“They have an office at the top of one of the old houses in Russell

Square. I never saw such queer-looking people. And the man discovered

I was related to the poet, and talked to me about poetry. Even Mary

Datchet seems different in that atmosphere.”

 

“Yes, the office atmosphere is very bad for the soul,” said Mr.

Hilbery.

 

“I don’t remember any offices in Russell Square in the old days, when

Mamma lived there,” Mrs. Hilbery mused, “and I can’t fancy turning one

of those noble great rooms into a stuffy little Suffrage office.

Still, if the clerks read poetry there must be something nice about

them.”

 

“No, because they don’t read it as we read it,” Katharine insisted.

 

“But it’s nice to think of them reading your grandfather, and not

filling up those dreadful little forms all day long,” Mrs. Hilbery

persisted, her notion of office life being derived from some chance

view of a scene behind the counter at her bank, as she slipped the

sovereigns into her purse.

 

“At any rate, they haven’t made a convert of Katharine, which was what

I was afraid of,” Mr. Hilbery remarked.

 

“Oh no,” said Katharine very decidedly, “I wouldn’t work with them for

anything.”

 

“It’s curious,” Mr. Hilbery continued, agreeing with his daughter,

“how the sight of one’s fellow-enthusiasts always chokes one off. They

show up the faults of one’s cause so much more plainly than one’s

antagonists. One can be enthusiastic in one’s study, but directly one

comes into touch with the people who agree with one, all the glamor

goes. So I’ve always found,” and he proceeded to tell them, as he

peeled his apple, how he committed himself once, in his youthful days,

to make a speech at a political meeting, and went there ablaze with

enthusiasm for the ideals of his own side; but while his leaders

spoke, he became gradually converted to the other way of thinking, if

thinking it could be called, and had to feign illness in order to

avoid making a fool of himself—an experience which had sickened him

of public meetings.

 

Katharine listened and felt as she generally did when her father, and

to some extent her mother, described their feelings, that she quite

understood and agreed with them, but, at the same time, saw something

which they did not see, and always felt some disappointment when they

fell short of her vision, as they always did. The plates succeeded

each other swiftly and noiselessly in front of her, and the table was

decked for dessert, and as the talk murmured on in familiar grooves,

she sat there, rather like a judge, listening to her parents, who did,

indeed, feel it very pleasant when they made her laugh.

 

Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious

little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually,

though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood

over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance.

Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port,

which were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr.

Hilbery, and simultaneously Mrs. Hilbery and Katharine left the room.

All the years they had lived together they had never seen Mr. Hilbery

smoke his cigar or drink his port, and they would have felt it

unseemly if, by chance, they had surprised him as he sat there. These

short, but clearly marked, periods of separation between the sexes

were always used for an intimate postscript to what had been said at

dinner, the sense of being women together coming out most strongly

when the male sex was, as if by some religious rite, secluded from the

female. Katharine knew by heart the sort of mood that possessed her as

she walked upstairs to the drawing-room, her mother’s arm in hers; and

she could anticipate the pleasure with which, when she had turned on

the lights, they both regarded the drawing-room, fresh swept and set

in order for the last section of the day, with the red parrots

swinging on the chintz curtains, and the armchairs warming in the

blaze. Mrs. Hilbery stood over the fire, with one foot on the fender,

and her skirts slightly raised.

 

“Oh, Katharine,” she exclaimed, “how you’ve made me think of Mamma and

the old days in Russell Square! I can see the chandeliers, and the

green silk of the piano, and Mamma sitting in her cashmere shawl by

the window, singing till the little ragamuffin boys outside stopped to

listen. Papa sent me in with a bunch of violets while he waited round

the corner. It must have been a summer evening. That was before things

were hopeless… .”

 

As she spoke an expression of regret, which must have come frequently

to cause the lines which now grew deep round the lips and eyes,

settled on her face. The poet’s marriage had not been a happy one. He

had left his wife, and after some years of a rather reckless

existence, she had died, before her time. This disaster had led to

great irregularities of education, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery might be

said to have escaped education altogether. But she had been her

father’s companion at the season when he wrote the finest of his

poems. She had sat on his knee in taverns and other haunts of drunken

poets, and it was for her sake, so people said, that he had cured

himself of his dissipation, and become the irreproachable literary

character that the world knows, whose inspiration had deserted him. As

Mrs. Hilbery grew old she thought more and more of the past, and this

ancient disaster seemed at times almost to prey upon her mind, as if

she could not pass out of life herself without laying the ghost of her

parent’s sorrow to rest.

 

Katharine wished to comfort her mother, but it was difficult to do

this satisfactorily when the facts themselves were so much of a

legend. The house in Russell Square, for example, with its noble

rooms, and the magnolia-tree in the garden, and the sweet-voiced

piano, and the sound of feet coming down the corridors, and other

properties of size and romance—had they any existence? Yet why should

Mrs. Alardyce live all alone in this gigantic mansion, and, if she did

not live alone, with whom did she live? For its own sake, Katharine

rather liked this tragic story, and would have been glad to hear the

details of it, and to have been able to discuss them frankly. But this

it became less and less possible to do, for though Mrs. Hilbery was

constantly reverting to the story, it was always in this tentative and

restless fashion, as though by a touch here and there she could set

things straight which had been crooked these sixty years. Perhaps,

indeed, she no longer knew what the truth was.

 

“If they’d lived now,” she concluded, “I feel it wouldn’t have

happened. People aren’t so set upon tragedy as they were then. If my

father had been able to go round the world, or if she’d had a rest

cure, everything would have come right. But what could I do? And then

they had bad friends, both of them, who made mischief. Ah, Katharine,

when you marry, be quite, quite sure that you love your husband!”

 

The tears stood in Mrs. Hilbery’s eyes.