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

CHAPTER VIII

She took her letters up to her room with her, having persuaded her

mother to go to bed directly Mr. Hilbery left them, for so long as she

sat in the same room as her mother, Mrs. Hilbery might, at any moment,

ask for a sight of the post. A very hasty glance through many sheets

had shown Katharine that, by some coincidence, her attention had to be

directed to many different anxieties simultaneously. In the first

place, Rodney had written a very full account of his state of mind,

which was illustrated by a sonnet, and he demanded a reconsideration

of their position, which agitated Katharine more than she liked. Then

there were two letters which had to be laid side by side and compared

before she could make out the truth of their story, and even when she

knew the facts she could not decide what to make of them; and finally

she had to reflect upon a great many pages from a cousin who found

himself in financial difficulties, which forced him to the uncongenial

occupation of teaching the young ladies of Bungay to play upon the

violin.

 

But the two letters which each told the same story differently were

the chief source of her perplexity. She was really rather shocked to

find it definitely established that her own second cousin, Cyril

Alardyce, had lived for the last four years with a woman who was not

his wife, who had borne him two children, and was now about to bear

him another. This state of things had been discovered by Mrs. Milvain,

her aunt Celia, a zealous inquirer into such matters, whose letter was

also under consideration. Cyril, she said, must be made to marry the

woman at once; and Cyril, rightly or wrongly, was indignant with such

interference with his affairs, and would not own that he had any cause

to be ashamed of himself. Had he any cause to be ashamed of himself,

Katharine wondered; and she turned to her aunt again.

 

“Remember,” she wrote, in her profuse, emphatic statement, “that he

bears your grandfather’s name, and so will the child that is to be

born. The poor boy is not so much to blame as the woman who deluded

him, thinking him a gentleman, which he IS, and having money, which he

has NOT.”

 

“What would Ralph Denham say to this?” thought Katharine, beginning to

pace up and down her bedroom. She twitched aside the curtains, so

that, on turning, she was faced by darkness, and looking out, could

just distinguish the branches of a plane-tree and the yellow lights of

some one else’s windows.

 

“What would Mary Datchet and Ralph Denham say?” she reflected, pausing

by the window, which, as the night was warm, she raised, in order to

feel the air upon her face, and to lose herself in the nothingness of

night. But with the air the distant humming sound of far-off crowded

thoroughfares was admitted to the room. The incessant and tumultuous

hum of the distant traffic seemed, as she stood there, to represent

the thick texture of her life, for her life was so hemmed in with the

progress of other lives that the sound of its own advance was

inaudible. People like Ralph and Mary, she thought, had it all their

own way, and an empty space before them, and, as she envied them, she

cast her mind out to imagine an empty land where all this petty

intercourse of men and women, this life made up of the dense crossings

and entanglements of men and women, had no existence whatever. Even

now, alone, at night, looking out into the shapeless mass of London,

she was forced to remember that there was one point and here another

with which she had some connection. William Rodney, at this very

moment, was seated in a minute speck of light somewhere to the east of

her, and his mind was occupied, not with his book, but with her. She

wished that no one in the whole world would think of her. However,

there was no way of escaping from one’s fellow-beings, she concluded,

and shut the window with a sigh, and returned once more to her

letters.

 

She could not doubt but that William’s letter was the most genuine she

had yet received from him. He had come to the conclusion that he could

not live without her, he wrote. He believed that he knew her, and

could give her happiness, and that their marriage would be unlike

other marriages. Nor was the sonnet, in spite of its accomplishment,

lacking in passion, and Katharine, as she read the pages through

again, could see in what direction her feelings ought to flow,

supposing they revealed themselves. She would come to feel a humorous

sort of tenderness for him, a zealous care for his susceptibilities,

and, after all, she considered, thinking of her father and mother,

what is love?

 

Naturally, with her face, position, and background, she had experience

of young men who wished to marry her, and made protestations of love,

but, perhaps because she did not return the feeling, it remained

something of a pageant to her. Not having experience of it herself,

her mind had unconsciously occupied itself for some years in dressing

up an image of love, and the marriage that was the outcome of love,

and the man who inspired love, which naturally dwarfed any examples

that came her way. Easily, and without correction by reason, her

imagination made pictures, superb backgrounds casting a rich though

phantom light upon the facts in the foreground. Splendid as the waters

that drop with resounding thunder from high ledges of rock, and plunge

downwards into the blue depths of night, was the presence of love she

dreamt, drawing into it every drop of the force of life, and dashing

them all asunder in the superb catastrophe in which everything was

surrendered, and nothing might be reclaimed. The man, too, was some

magnanimous hero, riding a great horse by the shore of the sea. They

rode through forests together, they galloped by the rim of the sea.

But waking, she was able to contemplate a perfectly loveless marriage,

as the thing one did actually in real life, for possibly the people

who dream thus are those who do the most prosaic things.

 

At this moment she was much inclined to sit on into the night,

spinning her light fabric of thoughts until she tired of their

futility, and went to her mathematics; but, as she knew very well, it

was necessary that she should see her father before he went to bed.

The case of Cyril Alardyce must be discussed, her mother’s illusions

and the rights of the family attended to. Being vague herself as to

what all this amounted to, she had to take counsel with her father.

She took her letters in her hand and went downstairs. It was past

eleven, and the clocks had come into their reign, the grandfather’s

clock in the hall ticking in competition with the small clock on the

landing. Mr. Hilbery’s study ran out behind the rest of the house, on

the ground floor, and was a very silent, subterranean place, the sun

in daytime casting a mere abstract of light through a skylight upon

his books and the large table, with its spread of white papers, now

illumined by a green reading-lamp. Here Mr. Hilbery sat editing his

review, or placing together documents by means of which it could be

proved that Shelley had written “of” instead of “and,” or that the inn

in which Byron had slept was called the “Nag’s Head” and not the

“Turkish Knight,” or that the Christian name of Keats’s uncle had been

John rather than Richard, for he knew more minute details about these

poets than any man in England, probably, and was preparing an edition

of Shelley which scrupulously observed the poet’s system of

punctuation. He saw the humor of these researches, but that did not

prevent him from carrying them out with the utmost scrupulosity.

 

He was lying back comfortably in a deep armchair smoking a cigar, and

ruminating the fruitful question as to whether Coleridge had wished to

marry Dorothy Wordsworth, and what, if he had done so, would have been

the consequences to him in particular, and to literature in general.

When Katharine came in he reflected that he knew what she had come

for, and he made a pencil note before he spoke to her. Having done

this, he saw that she was reading, and he watched her for a moment

without saying anything. She was reading “Isabella and the Pot of

Basil,” and her mind was full of the Italian hills and the blue

daylight, and the hedges set with little rosettes of red and white

roses. Feeling that her father waited for her, she sighed and said,

shutting her book:

 

“I’ve had a letter from Aunt Celia about Cyril, father… . It seems

to be true—about his marriage. What are we to do?”

 

“Cyril seems to have been behaving in a very foolish manner,” said Mr.

Hilbery, in his pleasant and deliberate tones.

 

Katharine found some difficulty in carrying on the conversation, while

her father balanced his finger-tips so judiciously, and seemed to

reserve so many of his thoughts for himself.

 

“He’s about done