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

the character of the room’s

owner was a large perch, placed in the window to catch the air and

sun, upon which a tame and, apparently, decrepit rook hopped dryly

from side to side. The bird, encouraged by a scratch behind the ear,

settled upon Denham’s shoulder. He lit his gas-fire and settled down

in gloomy patience to await his dinner. After sitting thus for some

minutes a small girl popped her head in to say,

 

“Mother says, aren’t you coming down, Ralph? Uncle Joseph—”

 

“They’re to bring my dinner up here,” said Ralph, peremptorily;

whereupon she vanished, leaving the door ajar in her haste to be gone.

After Denham had waited some minutes, in the course of which neither

he nor the rook took their eyes off the fire, he muttered a curse, ran

downstairs, intercepted the parlor-maid, and cut himself a slice of

bread and cold meat. As he did so, the dining-room door sprang open, a

voice exclaimed “Ralph!” but Ralph paid no attention to the voice, and

made off upstairs with his plate. He set it down in a chair opposite

him, and ate with a ferocity that was due partly to anger and partly

to hunger. His mother, then, was determined not to respect his wishes;

he was a person of no importance in his own family; he was sent for

and treated as a child. He reflected, with a growing sense of injury,

that almost every one of his actions since opening the door of his

room had been won from the grasp of the family system. By rights, he

should have been sitting downstairs in the drawing-room describing his

afternoon’s adventures, or listening to the afternoon’s adventures of

other people; the room itself, the gas-fire, the armchair—all had

been fought for; the wretched bird, with half its feathers out and one

leg lamed by a cat, had been rescued under protest; but what his

family most resented, he reflected, was his wish for privacy. To dine

alone, or to sit alone after dinner, was flat rebellion, to be fought

with every weapon of underhand stealth or of open appeal. Which did he

dislike most—deception or tears? But, at any rate, they could not rob

him of his thoughts; they could not make him say where he had been or

whom he had seen. That was his own affair; that, indeed, was a step

entirely in the right direction, and, lighting his pipe, and cutting

up the remains of his meal for the benefit of the rook, Ralph calmed

his rather excessive irritation and settled down to think over his

prospects.

 

This particular afternoon was a step in the right direction, because

it was part of his plan to get to know people beyond the family

circuit, just as it was part of his plan to learn German this autumn,

and to review legal books for Mr. Hilbery’s “Critical Review.” He had

always made plans since he was a small boy; for poverty, and the fact

that he was the eldest son of a large family, had given him the habit

of thinking of spring and summer, autumn and winter, as so many stages

in a prolonged campaign. Although he was still under thirty, this

forecasting habit had marked two semicircular lines above his

eyebrows, which threatened, at this moment, to crease into their

wonted shapes. But instead of settling down to think, he rose, took a

small piece of cardboard marked in large letters with the word OUT,

and hung it upon the handle of his door. This done, he sharpened a

pencil, lit a reading-lamp and opened his book. But still he hesitated

to take his seat. He scratched the rook, he walked to the window; he

parted the curtains, and looked down upon the city which lay, hazily

luminous, beneath him. He looked across the vapors in the direction of

Chelsea; looked fixedly for a moment, and then returned to his chair.

But the whole thickness of some learned counsel’s treatise upon Torts

did not screen him satisfactorily. Through the pages he saw a drawing-room, very empty and spacious; he heard low voices, he saw women’s

figures, he could even smell the scent of the cedar log which flamed

in the grate. His mind relaxed its tension, and seemed to be giving

out now what it had taken in unconsciously at the time. He could

remember Mr. Fortescue’s exact words, and the rolling emphasis with

which he delivered them, and he began to repeat what Mr. Fortescue had

said, in Mr. Fortescue’s own manner, about Manchester. His mind then

began to wander about the house, and he wondered whether there were

other rooms like the drawing-room, and he thought, inconsequently, how

beautiful the bathroom must be, and how leisurely it was—the life of

these well-kept people, who were, no doubt, still sitting in the same

room, only they had changed their clothes, and little Mr. Anning was

there, and the aunt who would mind if the glass of her father’s

picture was broken. Miss Hilbery had changed her dress (“although

she’s wearing such a pretty one,” he heard her mother say), and she

was talking to Mr. Anning, who was well over forty, and bald into the

bargain, about books. How peaceful and spacious it was; and the peace

possessed him so completely that his muscles slackened, his book

drooped from his hand, and he forgot that the hour of work was wasting

minute by minute.

 

He was roused by a creak upon the stair. With a guilty start he

composed himself, frowned and looked intently at the fifty-sixth page

of his volume. A step paused outside his door, and he knew that the

person, whoever it might be, was considering the placard, and debating

whether to honor its decree or not. Certainly, policy advised him to

sit still in autocratic silence, for no custom can take root in a

family unless every breach of it is punished severely for the first

six months or so. But Ralph was conscious of a distinct wish to be

interrupted, and his disappointment was perceptible when he heard the

creaking sound rather farther down the stairs, as if his visitor had

decided to withdraw. He rose, opened the door with unnecessary

abruptness, and waited on the landing. The person stopped

simultaneously half a flight downstairs.

 

“Ralph?” said a voice, inquiringly.

 

“Joan?”

 

“I was coming up, but I saw your notice.”

 

“Well, come along in, then.” He concealed his desire beneath a tone as

grudging as he could make it.

 

Joan came in, but she was careful to show, by standing upright with

one hand upon the mantelpiece, that she was only there for a definite

purpose, which discharged, she would go.

 

She was older than Ralph by some three or four years. Her face was

round but worn, and expressed that tolerant but anxious good humor

which is the special attribute of elder sisters in large families. Her

pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph’s, save in expression, for whereas

he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to

be in the habit of considering everything from many different points

of view. This made her appear his elder by more years than existed in

fact between them. Her gaze rested for a moment or two upon the rook.

She then said, without any preface:

 

“It’s about Charles and Uncle John’s offer… . Mother’s been

talking to me. She says she can’t afford to pay for him after this

term. She says she’ll have to ask for an overdraft as it is.”

 

“That’s simply not true,” said Ralph.

 

“No. I thought not. But she won’t believe me when I say it.”

 

Ralph, as if he could foresee the length of this familiar argument,

drew up a chair for his sister and sat down himself.

 

“I’m not interrupting?” she inquired.

 

Ralph shook his head, and for a time they sat silent. The lines curved

themselves in semicircles above their eyes.

 

“She doesn’t understand that one’s got to take risks,” he observed,

finally.

 

“I believe mother would take risks if she knew that Charles was the

sort of boy to profit by it.”

 

“He’s got brains, hasn’t he?” said Ralph. His tone had taken on that

shade of pugnacity which suggested to his sister that some personal

grievance drove him to take the line he did. She wondered what it

might be, but at once recalled her mind, and assented.

 

“In some ways he’s fearfully backward, though, compared with what you

were at his age. And he’s difficult at home, too. He makes Molly slave

for him.”

 

Ralph made a sound which belittled this particular argument. It was

plain to Joan that she had struck one of her brother’s perverse moods,

and he was going to oppose whatever his mother said. He called her

“she,” which was a proof of it. She sighed involuntarily, and the sigh

annoyed Ralph, and he exclaimed with irritation:

 

“It’s pretty hard lines to stick a boy into an office at seventeen!”

 

“Nobody WANTS to stick him into an office,” she said.

 

She, too, was becoming annoyed. She had spent the whole of the

afternoon discussing wearisome details of education and expense with

her mother, and she had come to her brother for help, encouraged,

rather irrationally, to expect help by the fact that he had been out

somewhere, she didn’t know and didn’t mean to ask where, all the

afternoon.

 

Ralph was fond of his sister, and her irritation made him think how

unfair it was that all these burdens should be laid on her shoulders.

 

“The truth is,” he observed gloomily, “that I ought to have accepted

Uncle John’s offer. I should have been making six hundred a year by

this time.”

 

“I don’t think that for a moment,” Joan replied quickly, repenting of

her annoyance. “The question, to my mind, is, whether we couldn’t cut

down our expenses in some way.”

 

“A smaller house?”

 

“Fewer servants, perhaps.”

 

Neither brother nor sister spoke with much conviction, and after

reflecting for a moment what these proposed reforms in a strictly

economical household meant, Ralph announced very decidedly:

 

“It’s out of the question.”

 

It was out of the question that she should put any more household work

upon herself. No, the hardship must fall on him, for he was determined

that his family should have as many chances of distinguishing

themselves as other families had—as the Hilberys had, for example. He

believed secretly and rather defiantly, for it was a fact not capable

of proof, that there was something very remarkable about his family.

 

“If mother won’t run risks—”

 

“You really can’t expect her to sell out again.”

 

“She ought to look upon it as an investment; but if she won’t, we must

find some other way, that’s all.”

 

A threat was contained in this sentence, and Joan knew, without

asking, what the threat was. In the course of his professional life,

which now extended over six or seven years, Ralph had saved, perhaps,

three or four hundred pounds. Considering the sacrifices he had made

in order to put by this sum it always amazed Joan to find that he used

it to gamble with, buying shares and selling them again, increasing it

sometimes, sometimes diminishing it, and always running the risk of

losing every penny of it in a day’s disaster. But although she

wondered, she could not help loving him the better for his odd

combination of Spartan self-control and what appeared to her romantic

and childish folly. Ralph interested her more than any one else in the

world, and she often broke off in the middle of one of these economic

discussions, in spite of their gravity, to consider some fresh