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

Katharine disliked telling her mother about Cyril’s misbehavior quite

as much as her father did, and for much the same reasons. They both

shrank, nervously, as people fear the report of a gun on the stage,

from all that would have to be said on this occasion. Katharine,

moreover, was unable to decide what she thought of Cyril’s

misbehavior. As usual, she saw something which her father and mother

did not see, and the effect of that something was to suspend Cyril’s

behavior in her mind without any qualification at all. They would

think whether it was good or bad; to her it was merely a thing that

had happened.

When Katharine reached the study, Mrs. Hilbery had already dipped her

pen in the ink.

“Katharine,” she said, lifting it in the air, “I’ve just made out such

a queer, strange thing about your grandfather. I’m three years and six

months older than he was when he died. I couldn’t very well have been

his mother, but I might have been his elder sister, and that seems to

me such a pleasant fancy. I’m going to start quite fresh this morning,

and get a lot done.”

She began her sentence, at any rate, and Katharine sat down at her own

table, untied the bundle of old letters upon which she was working,

smoothed them out absent-mindedly, and began to decipher the faded

script. In a minute she looked across at her mother, to judge her

mood. Peace and happiness had relaxed every muscle in her face; her

lips were parted very slightly, and her breath came in smooth,

controlled inspirations like those of a child who is surrounding

itself with a building of bricks, and increasing in ecstasy as each

brick is placed in position. So Mrs. Hilbery was raising round her the

skies and trees of the past with every stroke of her pen, and

recalling the voices of the dead. Quiet as the room was, and

undisturbed by the sounds of the present moment, Katharine could fancy

that here was a deep pool of past time, and that she and her mother

were bathed in the light of sixty years ago. What could the present

give, she wondered, to compare with the rich crowd of gifts bestowed

by the past? Here was a Thursday morning in process of manufacture;

each second was minted fresh by the clock upon the mantelpiece. She

strained her ears and could just hear, far off, the hoot of a

motor-car and the rush of wheels coming nearer and dying away again,

and the voices of men crying old iron and vegetables in one of the

poorer streets at the back of the house. Rooms, of course, accumulate

their suggestions, and any room in which one has been used to carry on

any particular occupation gives off memories of moods, of ideas, of

postures that have been seen in it; so that to attempt any different

kind of work there is almost impossible.

Katharine was unconsciously affected, each time she entered her

mother’s room, by all these influences, which had had their birth

years ago, when she was a child, and had something sweet and solemn

about them, and connected themselves with early memories of the

cavernous glooms and sonorous echoes of the Abbey where her

grandfather lay buried. All the books and pictures, even the chairs

and tables, had belonged to him, or had reference to him; even the

china dogs on the mantelpiece and the little shepherdesses with their

sheep had been bought by him for a penny a piece from a man who used

to stand with a tray of toys in Kensington High Street, as Katharine

had often heard her mother tell. Often she had sat in this room, with

her mind fixed so firmly on those vanished figures that she could

almost see the muscles round their eyes and lips, and had given to

each his own voice, with its tricks of accent, and his coat and his

cravat. Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among them, an

invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than

with her own friends, because she knew their secrets and possessed a

divine foreknowledge of their destiny. They had been so unhappy, such

muddlers, so wrong-headed, it seemed to her. She could have told them

what to do, and what not to do. It was a melancholy fact that they

would pay no heed to her, and were bound to come to grief in their own

antiquated way. Their behavior was often grotesquely irrational; their

conventions monstrously absurd; and yet, as she brooded upon them, she

felt so closely attached to them that it was useless to try to pass

judgment upon them. She very nearly lost consciousness that she was a

separate being, with a future of her own. On a morning of slight

depression, such as this, she would try to find some sort of clue to

the muddle which their old letters presented; some reason which seemed

to make it worth while to them; some aim which they kept steadily in

view—but she was interrupted.

Mrs. Hilbery had risen from her table, and was standing looking out of

the window at a string of barges swimming up the river.

Katharine watched her. Suddenly Mrs. Hilbery turned abruptly, and

exclaimed:

“I really believe I’m bewitched! I only want three sentences, you see,

something quite straightforward and commonplace, and I can’t find

‘em.”

She began to pace up and down the room, snatching up her duster; but

she was too much annoyed to find any relief, as yet, in polishing the

backs of books.

“Besides,” she said, giving the sheet she had written to Katharine, “I

don’t believe this’ll do. Did your grandfather ever visit the

Hebrides, Katharine?” She looked in a strangely beseeching way at her

daughter. “My mind got running on the Hebrides, and I couldn’t help

writing a little description of them. Perhaps it would do at the

beginning of a chapter. Chapters often begin quite differently from

the way they go on, you know.” Katharine read what her mother had

written. She might have been a schoolmaster criticizing a child’s

essay. Her face gave Mrs. Hilbery, who watched it anxiously, no ground

for hope.

“It’s very beautiful,” she stated, “but, you see, mother, we ought to

go from point to point—”

“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “And that’s just what I can’t

do. Things keep coming into my head. It isn’t that I don’t know

everything and feel everything (who did know him, if I didn’t?), but I

can’t put it down, you see. There’s a kind of blind spot,” she said,

touching her forehead, “there. And when I can’t sleep o’ nights, I

fancy I shall die without having done it.”

From exultation she had passed to the depths of depression which the

imagination of her