Night and Day - Virginia Woolf (best novels for beginners txt) 📗
- Author: Virginia Woolf
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of his character.
“I think you’d be foolish to risk your money on poor old Charles,” she
observed. “Fond as I am of him, he doesn’t seem to me exactly
brilliant… . Besides, why should you be sacrificed?”
“My dear Joan,” Ralph exclaimed, stretching himself out with a gesture
of impatience, “don’t you see that we’ve all got to be sacrificed?
What’s the use of denying it? What’s the use of struggling against it?
So it always has been, so it always will be. We’ve got no money and we
never shall have any money. We shall just turn round in the mill every
day of our lives until we drop and die, worn out, as most people do,
when one comes to think of it.”
Joan looked at him, opened her lips as if to speak, and closed them
again. Then she said, very tentatively:
“Aren’t you happy, Ralph?”
“No. Are you? Perhaps I’m as happy as most people, though. God knows
whether I’m happy or not. What is happiness?”
He glanced with half a smile, in spite of his gloomy irritation, at
his sister. She looked, as usual, as if she were weighing one thing
with another, and balancing them together before she made up her mind.
“Happiness,” she remarked at length enigmatically, rather as if she
were sampling the word, and then she paused. She paused for a
considerable space, as if she were considering happiness in all its
bearings. “Hilda was here to-day,” she suddenly resumed, as if they
had never mentioned happiness. “She brought Bobbie—he’s a fine boy
now.” Ralph observed, with an amusement that had a tinge of irony in
it, that she was now going to sidle away quickly from this dangerous
approach to intimacy on to topics of general and family interest.
Nevertheless, he reflected, she was the only one of his family with
whom he found it possible to discuss happiness, although he might very
well have discussed happiness with Miss Hilbery at their first
meeting. He looked critically at Joan, and wished that she did not
look so provincial or suburban in her high green dress with the faded
trimming, so patient, and almost resigned. He began to wish to tell
her about the Hilberys in order to abuse them, for in the miniature
battle which so often rages between two quickly following impressions
of life, the life of the Hilberys was getting the better of the life
of the Denhams in his mind, and he wanted to assure himself that there
was some quality in which Joan infinitely surpassed Miss Hilbery. He
should have felt that his own sister was more original, and had
greater vitality than Miss Hilbery had; but his main impression of
Katharine now was of a person of great vitality and composure; and at
the moment he could not perceive what poor dear Joan had gained from
the fact that she was the granddaughter of a man who kept a shop, and
herself earned her own living. The infinite dreariness and sordidness
of their life oppressed him in spite of his fundamental belief that,
as a family, they were somehow remarkable.
“Shall you talk to mother?” Joan inquired. “Because, you see, the
thing’s got to be settled, one way or another. Charles must write to
Uncle John if he’s going there.”
Ralph sighed impatiently.
“I suppose it doesn’t much matter either way,” he exclaimed. “He’s
doomed to misery in the long run.”
A slight flush came into Joan’s cheek.
“You know you’re talking nonsense,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt any one
to have to earn their own living. I’m very glad I have to earn mine.”
Ralph was pleased that she should feel this, and wished her to
continue, but he went on, perversely enough.
“Isn’t that only because you’ve forgotten how to enjoy yourself? You
never have time for anything decent—”
“As for instance?”
“Well, going for walks, or music, or books, or seeing interesting
people. You never do anything that’s really worth doing any more than
I do.”
“I always think you could make this room much nicer, if you liked,”
she observed.
“What does it matter what sort of room I have when I’m forced to spend
all the best years of my life drawing up deeds in an office?”
“You said two days ago that you found the law so interesting.”
“So it is if one could afford to know anything about it.”
(“That’s Herbert only just going to bed now,” Joan interposed, as a
door on the landing slammed vigorously. “And then he won’t get up in
the morning.”)
Ralph looked at the ceiling, and shut his lips closely together. Why,
he wondered, could Joan never for one moment detach her mind from the
details of domestic life? It seemed to him that she was getting more
and more enmeshed in them, and capable of shorter and less frequent
flights into the outer world, and yet she was only thirty-three.
“D’you ever pay calls now?” he asked abruptly.
“I don’t often have the time. Why do you ask?”
“It might be a good thing, to get to know new people, that’s all.”
“Poor Ralph!” said Joan suddenly, with a smile. “You think your
sister’s getting very old and very dull—that’s it, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think anything of the kind,” he said stoutly, but he flushed.
“But you lead a dog’s life, Joan. When you’re not working in an
office, you’re worrying over the rest of us. And I’m not much good to
you, I’m afraid.”
Joan rose, and stood for a moment warming her hands, and, apparently,
meditating as to whether she should say anything more or not. A
feeling of great intimacy united the brother and sister, and the
semicircular lines above their eyebrows disappeared. No, there was
nothing more to be said on either side. Joan brushed her brother’s
head with her hand as she passed him, murmured good night, and left
the room. For some minutes after she had gone Ralph lay quiescent,
resting his head on his hand, but gradually his eyes filled with
thought, and the line reappeared on his brow, as the pleasant
impression of companionship and ancient sympathy waned, and he was
left to think on alone.
After a time he opened his book, and read on steadily, glancing once
or twice at his watch, as if he had set himself a task to be
accomplished in a certain measure of time. Now and then he heard
voices in the house, and the closing of bedroom doors, which showed
that the building, at the top of which he sat, was inhabited in every
one of its cells. When midnight struck, Ralph shut his book, and with
a candle in his hand, descended to the ground floor, to ascertain that
all lights were extinct and all doors locked. It was a threadbare,
well-worn house that he thus examined, as if the inmates had grazed
down all luxuriance and plenty to the verge of decency; and in the
night, bereft of life, bare places and ancient blemishes were
unpleasantly visible. Katharine Hilbery, he thought, would condemn it
off-hand.
Denham had accused Katharine Hilbery of belonging to one of the most
distinguished families in England, and if any one will take the
trouble to consult Mr. Galton’s “Hereditary Genius,” he will find that
this assertion is not far from the truth. The Alardyces, the Hilberys,
the Millingtons, and the Otways seem to prove that intellect is a
possession which can be tossed from one member of a certain group to
another almost indefinitely, and with apparent certainty that the
brilliant gift will be safely caught and held by nine out of ten of
the privileged race. They had been conspicuous judges and admirals,
lawyers and servants of the State for some years before the richness
of the soil culminated in the rarest flower that any family can boast,
a great writer, a poet eminent among the poets of England, a Richard
Alardyce; and having produced him, they proved once more the amazing
virtues of their race by proceeding unconcernedly again with their
usual task of breeding distinguished men. They had sailed with Sir
John Franklin to the North Pole, and ridden with Havelock to the
Relief of Lucknow, and when they were not lighthouses firmly based on
rock for the guidance of their generation, they were steady,
serviceable candles, illuminating the ordinary chambers of daily life.
Whatever profession you looked at, there was a Warburton or an
Alardyce, a Millington or a Hilbery somewhere in authority and
prominence.
It may be said, indeed, that English society being what it is, no very
great merit is required, once you bear a well-known name, to put you
into a position where it is easier on the whole to be eminent than
obscure. And if this is true of the sons, even the daughters, even in
the nineteenth century, are apt to become people of importance—
philanthropists and educationalists if they are spinsters, and the
wives of distinguished men if they marry. It is true that there were
several lamentable exceptions to this rule in the Alardyce group,
which seems to indicate that the cadets of such houses go more rapidly
to the bad than the children of ordinary fathers and mothers, as if it
were somehow a relief to them. But, on the whole, in these first years
of the twentieth century, the Alardyces and their relations were
keeping their heads well above water. One finds them at the tops of
professions, with letters after their names; they sit in luxurious
public offices, with private secretaries attached to them; they write
solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great
universities, and when one of them dies the chances are that another
of them writes his biography.
Now the source of this nobility was, of course, the poet, and his
immediate descendants, therefore, were invested with greater luster
than the collateral branches. Mrs. Hilbery, in virtue of her position
as the only child of the poet, was spiritually the head of the family,
and Katharine, her daughter, had some superior rank among all the
cousins and connections, the more so because she was an only child.
The Alardyces had married and intermarried, and their offspring were
generally profuse, and had a way of meeting regularly in each other’s
houses for meals and family celebrations which had acquired a semi-sacred character, and were as regularly observed as days of feasting
and fasting in the Church.
In times gone by, Mrs. Hilbery had known all the poets, all the
novelists, all the beautiful women and distinguished men of her time.
These being now either dead or secluded in their infirm glory, she
made her house a meeting-place for her own relations, to whom she
would lament the passing of the great days of the nineteenth century,
when every department of letters and art was represented in England by
two or three illustrious names. Where are their successors? she would
ask, and the absence of any poet or painter or novelist of the true
caliber at the present day was a text upon which she liked to
ruminate, in a sunset mood of benignant reminiscence, which it would
have been hard to disturb had there been need. But she was far from
visiting their inferiority upon the younger generation. She welcomed
them very heartily to her house, told them her stories, gave them
sovereigns and ices and good advice, and weaved round them romances
which had generally no likeness to the truth.
The quality of her birth oozed into Katharine’s consciousness from a
dozen different sources as soon as she was able to perceive anything.
Above her
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