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

death aroused. The depression communicated itself

to Katharine. How impotent they were, fiddling about all day long with

papers! And the clock was striking eleven and nothing done! She

watched her mother, now rummaging in a great brass-bound box which

stood by her table, but she did not go to her help. Of course,

Katharine reflected, her mother had now lost some paper, and they

would waste the rest of the morning looking for it. She cast her eyes

down in irritation, and read again her mother’s musical sentences

about the silver gulls, and the roots of little pink flowers washed by

pellucid streams, and the blue mists of hyacinths, until she was

struck by her mother’s silence. She raised her eyes. Mrs. Hilbery had

emptied a portfolio containing old photographs over her table, and was

looking from one to another.

 

“Surely, Katharine,” she said, “the men were far handsomer in those

days than they are now, in spite of their odious whiskers? Look at old

John Graham, in his white waistcoat—look at Uncle Harley. That’s

Peter the manservant, I suppose. Uncle John brought him back from

India.”

 

Katharine looked at her mother, but did not stir or answer. She had

suddenly become very angry, with a rage which their relationship made

silent, and therefore doubly powerful and critical. She felt all the

unfairness of the claim which her mother tacitly made to her time and

sympathy, and what Mrs. Hilbery took, Katharine thought bitterly, she

wasted. Then, in a flash, she remembered that she had still to tell

her about Cyril’s misbehavior. Her anger immediately dissipated

itself; it broke like some wave that has gathered itself high above

the rest; the waters were resumed into the sea again, and Katharine

felt once more full of peace and solicitude, and anxious only that her

mother should be protected from pain. She crossed the room

instinctively, and sat on the arm of her mother’s chair. Mrs. Hilbery

leant her head against her daughter’s body.

 

“What is nobler,” she mused, turning over the photographs, “than to be

a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty? How have the

young women of your generation improved upon that, Katharine? I can

see them now, sweeping over the lawns at Melbury House, in their

flounces and furbelows, so calm and stately and imperial (and the

monkey and the little black dwarf following behind), as if nothing

mattered in the world but to be beautiful and kind. But they did more

than we do, I sometimes think. They WERE, and that’s better than

doing. They seem to me like ships, like majestic ships, holding on

their way, not shoving or pushing, not fretted by little things, as we

are, but taking their way, like ships with white sails.”

 

Katharine tried to interrupt this discourse, but the opportunity did

not come, and she could not forbear to turn over the pages of the

album in which the old photographs were stored. The faces of these men

and women shone forth wonderfully after the hubbub of living faces,

and seemed, as her mother had said, to wear a marvelous dignity and

calm, as if they had ruled their kingdoms justly and deserved great

love. Some were of almost incredible beauty, others were ugly enough

in a forcible way, but none were dull or bored or insignificant. The

superb stiff folds of the crinolines suited the women; the cloaks and

hats of the gentlemen seemed full of character. Once more Katharine

felt the serene air all round her, and seemed far off to hear the

solemn beating of the sea upon the shore. But she knew that she must

join the present on to this past.

 

Mrs. Hilbery was rambling on, from story to story.

 

“That’s Janie Mannering,” she said, pointing to a superb, white-haired

dame, whose satin robes seemed strung with pearls. “I must have told

you how she found her cook drunk under the kitchen table when the

Empress was coming to dinner, and tucked up her velvet sleeves (she

always dressed like an Empress herself), cooked the whole meal, and

appeared in the drawing-room as if she’d been sleeping on a bank of

roses all day. She could do anything with her hands—they all could—

make a cottage or embroider a petticoat.

 

“And that’s Queenie Colquhoun,” she went on, turning the pages, “who

took her coffin out with her to Jamaica, packed with lovely shawls and

bonnets, because you couldn’t get coffins in Jamaica, and she had a

horror of dying there (as she did), and being devoured by the white

ants. And there’s Sabine, the loveliest of them all; ah! it was like a

star rising when she came into the room. And that’s Miriam, in her

coachman’s cloak, with all the little capes on, and she wore great

top-boots underneath. You young people may say you’re unconventional,

but you’re nothing compared with her.”

 

Turning the page, she came upon the picture of a very masculine,

handsome lady, whose head the photographer had adorned with an

imperial crown.

 

“Ah, you wretch!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed, “what a wicked old despot

you were, in your day! How we all bowed down before you! ‘Maggie,’ she

used to say, ‘if it hadn’t been for me, where would you be now?’ And

it was true; she brought them together, you know. She said to my

father, ‘Marry her,’ and he did; and she said to poor little Clara,

‘Fall down and worship him,’ and she did; but she got up again, of

course. What else could one expect? She was a mere child—eighteen—

and half dead with fright, too. But that old tyrant never repented.

She used to say that she had given them three perfect months, and no

one had a right to more; and I sometimes think, Katharine, that’s

true, you know. It’s more than most of us have, only we have to

pretend, which was a thing neither of them could ever do. I fancy,”

Mrs. Hilbery mused, “that there was a kind of sincerity in those days

between men and women which, with all your outspokenness, you haven’t

got.”

 

Katharine again tried to interrupt. But Mrs. Hilbery had been

gathering impetus from her recollections, and was now in high spirits.

 

“They must have been good friends at heart,” she resumed, “because she

used to sing his songs. Ah, how did it go?” and Mrs. Hilbery, who had

a very sweet voice, trolled out a famous lyric of her father’s which

had been set to an absurdly and charmingly sentimental air by some

early Victorian composer.

 

“It’s the vitality of them!” she concluded, striking her fist against

the table. “That’s what we haven’t got! We’re virtuous, we’re earnest,

we go to meetings, we pay the poor their wages, but we don’t live as

they lived. As often as not, my father wasn’t in bed three nights out

of the seven, but always fresh as paint in the morning. I hear him

now, come singing up the stairs to the nursery, and tossing the loaf

for breakfast on his sword-stick, and then off we went for a day’s

pleasuring—Richmond, Hampton Court, the Surrey Hills. Why shouldn’t

we go, Katharine? It’s going to be a fine day.”

 

At this moment, just as Mrs. Hilbery was examining the weather from

the window, there was a knock at the door. A slight, elderly lady came

in, and was saluted by Katharine, with very evident dismay, as “Aunt

Celia!” She was dismayed because she guessed why Aunt Celia had come.

It was certainly in order to discuss the case of Cyril and the woman

who was not his wife, and owing to her procrastination Mrs. Hilbery

was quite unprepared. Who could be more unprepared? Here she was,

suggesting that all three of them should go on a jaunt to Blackfriars

to inspect the site of Shakespeare’s theater, for the weather was

hardly settled enough for the country.

 

To this proposal Mrs. Milvain listened with a patient smile, which

indicated that for many years she had accepted such eccentricities in

her sister-in-law with bland philosophy. Katharine took up her

position at some distance, standing with her foot on the fender, as

though by so doing she could get a better view of the matter. But, in

spite of her aunt’s presence, how unreal the whole question of Cyril

and his morality appeared! The difficulty, it now seemed, was not to

break the news gently to Mrs. Hilbery, but to make her understand it.

How was one to lasso her mind, and tether it to this minute,

unimportant spot? A matter-of-fact statement seemed best.

 

“I think Aunt Celia has come to talk about Cyril, mother,” she said

rather brutally. “Aunt Celia has discovered that Cyril is married. He

has a wife and children.”

 

“No, he is NOT married,” Mrs. Milvain interposed, in low tones,

addressing herself to Mrs. Hilbery. “He has two children, and another

on the way.”

 

Mrs. Hilbery looked from one to the other in bewilderment.

 

“We thought it better to wait until it was proved before we told you,”

Katharine added.

 

“But I met Cyril only a fortnight ago at the National Gallery!” Mrs.

Hilbery exclaimed. “I don’t believe a word of it,” and she tossed her

head with a smile on her lips at Mrs. Milvain, as though she could

quite understand her mistake, which was a very natural mistake, in the

case of a childless woman, whose husband was something very dull in

the Board of Trade.

 

“I didn’t WISH to believe it, Maggie,” said Mrs. Milvain. “For a long

time I COULDN’T believe it. But now I’ve seen, and I HAVE to believe

it.”

 

“Katharine,” Mrs. Hilbery demanded, “does your father know of this?”

 

Katharine nodded.

 

“Cyril married!” Mrs. Hilbery repeated. “And never telling us a word,

though we’ve had him in our house since he was a child—noble

William’s son! I can’t believe my ears!”

 

Feeling that the burden of proof was laid upon her, Mrs. Milvain now

proceeded with her story. She was elderly and fragile, but her

childlessness seemed always to impose these painful duties on her, and

to revere the family, and to keep it in repair, had now become the

chief object of her life. She told her story in a low, spasmodic, and

somewhat broken voice.

 

“I have suspected for some time that he was not happy. There were new

lines on his face. So I went to his rooms, when I knew he was engaged

at the poor men’s college. He lectures there—Roman law, you know, or

it may be Greek. The landlady said Mr. Alardyce only slept there about

once a fortnight now. He looked so ill, she said. She had seen him

with a young person. I suspected something directly. I went to his

room, and there was an envelope on the mantelpiece, and a letter with

an address in Seton Street, off the Kennington Road.”

 

Mrs. Hilbery fidgeted rather restlessly, and hummed fragments of her

tune, as if to interrupt.

 

“I went to Seton Street,” Aunt Celia continued firmly. “A very low

place—lodging-houses, you know, with canaries in the window. Number

seven just like all the others. I rang, I knocked; no one came. I went

down the area. I am certain I saw some one inside—children—a cradle.

But no reply—no reply.” She sighed, and looked straight in front of

her with a glazed expression in her half-veiled blue eyes.

 

“I stood in the street,” she resumed, “in case I could catch a sight

of one of them. It seemed a very long time. There were rough men

singing in the public-house round the corner. At last the door opened,

and some one—it must have been the woman herself—came right past me.

There was only the