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

usual clearness and

firmness, “writes for the Review. He is a lawyer.”

 

“The clean-shaven lips, showing the expression of the mouth! I

recognize them at once. I always feel at home with lawyers, Mr.

Denham—”

 

“They used to come about so much in the old days,” Mrs. Milvain

interposed, the frail, silvery notes of her voice falling with the

sweet tone of an old bell.

 

“You say you live at Highgate,” she continued. “I wonder whether you

happen to know if there is an old house called Tempest Lodge still in

existence—an old white house in a garden?”

 

Ralph shook his head, and she sighed.

 

“Ah, no; it must have been pulled down by this time, with all the

other old houses. There were such pretty lanes in those days. That was

how your uncle met your Aunt Emily, you know,” she addressed

Katharine. “They walked home through the lanes.”

 

“A sprig of May in her bonnet,” Mrs. Cosham ejaculated, reminiscently.

 

“And next Sunday he had violets in his buttonhole. And that was how we

guessed.”

 

Katharine laughed. She looked at Ralph. His eyes were meditative, and

she wondered what he found in this old gossip to make him ponder so

contentedly. She felt, she hardly knew why, a curious pity for him.

 

“Uncle John—yes, ‘poor John,’ you always called him. Why was that?”

she asked, to make them go on talking, which, indeed, they needed

little invitation to do.

 

“That was what his father, old Sir Richard, always called him. Poor

John, or the fool of the family,” Mrs. Milvain hastened to inform

them. “The other boys were so brilliant, and he could never pass his

examinations, so they sent him to India—a long voyage in those days,

poor fellow. You had your own room, you know, and you did it up. But

he will get his knighthood and a pension, I believe,” she said,

turning to Ralph, “only it is not England.”

 

“No,” Mrs. Cosham confirmed her, “it is not England. In those days we

thought an Indian Judgeship about equal to a county-court judgeship at

home. His Honor—a pretty title, but still, not at the top of the

tree. However,” she sighed, “if you have a wife and seven children,

and people nowadays very quickly forget your father’s name—well, you

have to take what you can get,” she concluded.

 

“And I fancy,” Mrs. Milvain resumed, lowering her voice rather

confidentially, “that John would have done more if it hadn’t been for

his wife, your Aunt Emily. She was a very good woman, devoted to him,

of course, but she was not ambitious for him, and if a wife isn’t

ambitious for her husband, especially in a profession like the law,

clients soon get to know of it. In our young days, Mr. Denham, we used

to say that we knew which of our friends would become judges, by

looking at the girls they married. And so it was, and so, I fancy, it

always will be. I don’t think,” she added, summing up these scattered

remarks, “that any man is really happy unless he succeeds in his

profession.”

 

Mrs. Cosham approved of this sentiment with more ponderous sagacity

from her side of the tea-table, in the first place by swaying her

head, and in the second by remarking:

 

“No, men are not the same as women. I fancy Alfred Tennyson spoke the

truth about that as about many other things. How I wish he’d lived to

write ‘The Prince’—a sequel to ‘The Princess’! I confess I’m almost

tired of Princesses. We want some one to show us what a good man can

be. We have Laura and Beatrice, Antigone and Cordelia, but we have no

heroic man. How do you, as a poet, account for that, Mr. Denham?”

 

“I’m not a poet,” said Ralph good-humoredly. “I’m only a solicitor.”

 

“But you write, too?” Mrs. Cosham demanded, afraid lest she should be

balked of her priceless discovery, a young man truly devoted to

literature.

 

“In my spare time,” Denham reassured her.

 

“In your spare time!” Mrs. Cosham echoed. “That is a proof of

devotion, indeed.” She half closed her eyes, and indulged herself in a

fascinating picture of a briefless barrister lodged in a garret,

writing immortal novels by the light of a farthing dip. But the

romance which fell upon the figures of great writers and illumined

their pages was no false radiance in her case. She carried her pocket

Shakespeare about with her, and met life fortified by the words of the

poets. How far she saw Denham, and how far she confused him with some

hero of fiction, it would be hard to say. Literature had taken

possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably,

with certain characters in the old novels, for she came out, after a

pause, with:

 

“Um—um—Pendennis—Warrington—I could never forgive Laura,” she

pronounced energetically, “for not marrying George, in spite of

everything. George Eliot did the very same thing; and Lewes was a

little frog-faced man, with the manner of a dancing master. But

Warrington, now, had everything in his favor; intellect, passion,

romance, distinction, and the connection was a mere piece of

undergraduate folly. Arthur, I confess, has always seemed to me a bit

of a fop; I can’t imagine how Laura married him. But you say you’re a

solicitor, Mr. Denham. Now there are one or two things I should like

to ask you—about Shakespeare—” She drew out her small, worn volume

with some difficulty, opened it, and shook it in the air. “They say,

nowadays, that Shakespeare was a lawyer. They say, that accounts for

his knowledge of human nature. There’s a fine example for you, Mr.

Denham. Study your clients, young man, and the world will be the

richer one of these days, I have no doubt. Tell me, how do we come out

of it, now; better or worse than you expected?”

 

Thus called upon to sum up the worth of human nature in a few words,

Ralph answered unhesitatingly:

 

“Worse, Mrs. Cosham, a good deal worse. I’m afraid the ordinary man is

a bit of a rascal—”

 

“And the ordinary woman?”

 

“No, I don’t like the ordinary woman either—”

 

Ah, dear me, I’ve no doubt that’s very true, very true.” Mrs. Cosham

sighed. “Swift would have agreed with you, anyhow—” She looked at

him, and thought that there were signs of distinct power in his brow.

He would do well, she thought, to devote himself to satire.

 

“Charles Lavington, you remember, was a solicitor,” Mrs. Milvain

interposed, rather resenting the waste of time involved in talking

about fictitious people when you might be talking about real people.

“But you wouldn’t remember him, Katharine.”

 

“Mr. Lavington? Oh, yes, I do,” said Katharine, waking from other

thoughts with her little start. “The summer we had a house near Tenby.

I remember the field and the pond with the tadpoles, and making

haystacks with Mr. Lavington.”

 

“She is right. There WAS a pond with tadpoles,” Mrs. Cosham

corroborated. “Millais made studies of it for ‘Ophelia.’ Some say that

is the best picture he ever painted—”

 

“And I remember the dog chained up in the yard, and the dead snakes

hanging in the toolhouse.”

 

“It was at Tenby that you were chased by the bull,” Mrs. Milvain

continued. “But that you couldn’t remember, though it’s true you were

a wonderful child. Such eyes she had, Mr. Denham! I used to say to her

father, ‘She’s watching us, and summing us all up in her little mind.’

And they had a nurse in those days,” she went on, telling her story

with charming solemnity to Ralph, “who was a good woman, but engaged

to a sailor. When she ought to have been attending to the baby, her

eyes were on the sea. And Mrs. Hilbery allowed this girl—Susan her

name was—to have him to stay in the village. They abused her

goodness, I’m sorry to say, and while they walked in the lanes, they

stood the perambulator alone in a field where there was a bull. The

animal became enraged by the red blanket in the perambulator, and

Heaven knows what might have happened if a gentleman had not been

walking by in the nick of time, and rescued Katharine in his arms!”

 

“I think the bull was only a cow, Aunt Celia,” said Katharine.

 

“My darling, it was a great red Devonshire bull, and not long after it

gored a man to death and had to be destroyed. And your mother forgave

Susan—a thing I could never have done.”

 

“Maggie’s sympathies were entirely with Susan and the sailor, I am

sure,” said Mrs. Cosham, rather tartly. “My sister-in-law,” she

continued, “has laid her burdens upon Providence at every crisis in

her life, and Providence, I must confess, has responded nobly, so

far—”

 

“Yes,” said Katharine, with a laugh, for she liked the rashness which

irritated the rest of the family. “My mother’s bulls always turn into

cows at the critical moment.”

 

“Well,” said Mrs. Milvain, “I’m glad you have some one to protect you

from bulls now.”

 

“I can’t imagine William protecting any one from bulls,” said

Katharine.

 

It happened that Mrs. Cosham had once more produced her pocket volume

of Shakespeare, and was consulting Ralph upon an obscure passage in

“Measure for Measure.” He did not at once seize the meaning of what

Katharine and her aunt were saying; William, he supposed, referred to

some small cousin, for he now saw Katharine as a child in a pinafore;

but, nevertheless, he was so much distracted that his eye could hardly

follow the words on the paper. A moment later he heard them speak

distinctly of an engagement ring.

 

“I like rubies,” he heard Katharine say.

 

“To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendant world… .”

 

Mrs. Cosham intoned; at the same instant “Rodney” fitted itself to

“William” in Ralph’s mind. He felt convinced that Katharine was

engaged to Rodney. His first sensation was one of violent rage with

her for having deceived him throughout the visit, fed him with

pleasant old wives’ tales, let him see her as a child playing in a

meadow, shared her youth with him, while all the time she was a

stranger entirely, and engaged to marry Rodney.

 

But was it possible? Surely it was not possible. For in his eyes she

was still a child. He paused so long over the book that Mrs. Cosham

had time to look over his shoulder and ask her niece:

 

“And have you settled upon a house yet, Katharine?”

 

This convinced him of the truth of the monstrous idea. He looked up at

once and said:

 

“Yes, it’s a difficult passage.”

 

His voice had changed so much, he spoke with such curtness and even

with such contempt, that Mrs. Cosham looked at him fairly puzzled.

Happily she belonged to a generation which expected uncouthness in its

men, and she merely felt convinced that this Mr. Denham was very, very

clever. She took back her Shakespeare, as Denham seemed to have no

more to say, and secreted it once more about her person with the

infinitely pathetic resignation of the old.

 

“Katharine’s engaged to William Rodney,” she said, by way of filling

in the pause; “a very old friend of ours. He has a wonderful knowledge

of literature, too—wonderful.” She nodded her head rather vaguely.

“You should meet each other.”

 

Denham’s one wish was to leave the house as soon as he could; but the

elderly ladies had risen, and were proposing to visit Mrs. Hilbery in

her bedroom, so that any move on his part was impossible. At the same