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

Katharine, you’ll look back on these days afterwards;

you’ll remember all the silly things you’ve said; and you’ll find that

your life has been built on them. The best of life is built on what we

say when we’re in love. It isn’t nonsense, Katharine,” she urged,

“it’s the truth, it’s the only truth.”

 

Katharine was on the point of interrupting her mother, and then she

was on the point of confiding in her. They came strangely close

together sometimes. But, while she hesitated and sought for words not

too direct, her mother had recourse to Shakespeare, and turned page

after page, set upon finding some quotation which said all this about

love far, far better than she could. Accordingly, Katharine did

nothing but scrub one of her circles an intense black with her pencil,

in the midst of which process the telephone-bell rang, and she left

the room to answer it.

 

When she returned, Mrs. Hilbery had found not the passage she wanted,

but another of exquisite beauty as she justly observed, looking up for

a second to ask Katharine who that was?

 

“Mary Datchet,” Katharine replied briefly.

 

“Ah—I half wish I’d called you Mary, but it wouldn’t have gone with

Hilbery, and it wouldn’t have gone with Rodney. Now this isn’t the

passage I wanted. (I never can find what I want.) But it’s spring;

it’s the daffodils; it’s the green fields; it’s the birds.”

 

She was cut short in her quotation by another imperative

telephone-bell. Once more Katharine left the room.

 

“My dear child, how odious the triumphs of science are!” Mrs. Hilbery

exclaimed on her return. “They’ll be linking us with the moon

next—but who was that?”

 

“William,” Katharine replied yet more briefly.

 

“I’ll forgive William anything, for I’m certain that there aren’t any

Williams in the moon. I hope he’s coming to luncheon?”

 

“He’s coming to tea.”

 

“Well, that’s better than nothing, and I promise to leave you alone.”

 

“There’s no need for you to do that,” said Katharine.

 

She swept her hand over the faded sheet, and drew herself up squarely

to the table as if she refused to waste time any longer. The gesture

was not lost upon her mother. It hinted at the existence of something

stern and unapproachable in her daughter’s character, which struck

chill upon her, as the sight of poverty, or drunkenness, or the logic

with which Mr. Hilbery sometimes thought good to demolish her

certainty of an approaching millennium struck chill upon her. She went

back to her own table, and putting on her spectacles with a curious

expression of quiet humility, addressed herself for the first time

that morning to the task before her. The shock with an unsympathetic

world had a sobering effect on her. For once, her industry surpassed

her daughter’s. Katharine could not reduce the world to that

particular perspective in which Harriet Martineau, for instance, was a

figure of solid importance, and possessed of a genuine relationship to

this figure or to that date. Singularly enough, the sharp call of the

telephone-bell still echoed in her ear, and her body and mind were in

a state of tension, as if, at any moment, she might hear another

summons of greater interest to her than the whole of the nineteenth

century. She did not clearly realize what this call was to be; but

when the ears have got into the habit of listening, they go on

listening involuntarily, and thus Katharine spent the greater part of

the morning in listening to a variety of sounds in the back streets of

Chelsea. For the first time in her life, probably, she wished that

Mrs. Hilbery would not keep so closely to her work. A quotation from

Shakespeare would not have come amiss. Now and again she heard a sigh

from her mother’s table, but that was the only proof she gave of her

existence, and Katharine did not think of connecting it with the

square aspect of her own position at the table, or, perhaps, she would

have thrown her pen down and told her mother the reason of her

restlessness. The only writing she managed to accomplish in the course

of the morning was one letter, addressed to her cousin, Cassandra

Otway—a rambling letter, long, affectionate, playful and commanding

all at once. She bade Cassandra put her creatures in the charge of a

groom, and come to them for a week or so. They would go and hear some

music together. Cassandra’s dislike of rational society, she said, was

an affectation fast hardening into a prejudice, which would, in the

long run, isolate her from all interesting people and pursuits. She

was finishing the sheet when the sound she was anticipating all the

time actually struck upon her ears. She jumped up hastily, and slammed

the door with a sharpness which made Mrs. Hilbery start. Where was

Katharine off to? In her preoccupied state she had not heard the bell.

 

The alcove on the stairs, in which the telephone was placed, was

screened for privacy by a curtain of purple velvet. It was a pocket

for superfluous possessions, such as exist in most houses which harbor

the wreckage of three generations. Prints of great-uncles, famed for

their prowess in the East, hung above Chinese teapots, whose sides

were riveted by little gold stitches, and the precious teapots, again,

stood upon bookcases containing the complete works of William Cowper

and Sir Walter Scott. The thread of sound, issuing from the telephone,

was always colored by the surroundings which received it, so it seemed

to Katharine. Whose voice was now going to combine with them, or to

strike a discord?

 

“Whose voice?” she asked herself, hearing a man inquire, with great

determination, for her number. The unfamiliar voice now asked for Miss

Hilbery. Out of all the welter of voices which crowd round the far end

of the telephone, out of the enormous range of possibilities, whose

voice, what possibility, was this? A pause gave her time to ask

herself this question. It was solved next moment.

 

“I’ve looked out the train… . Early on Saturday afternoon

would suit me best… . I’m Ralph Denham… . But I’ll write

it down… .”

 

With more than the usual sense of being impinged upon the point of a

bayonet, Katharine replied:

 

“I think I could come. I’ll look at my engagements… . Hold on.”

 

She dropped the machine, and looked fixedly at the print of the

great-uncle who had not ceased to gaze, with an air of amiable

authority, into a world which, as yet, beheld no symptoms of the

Indian Mutiny. And yet, gently swinging against the wall, within the

black tube, was a voice which recked nothing of Uncle James, of China

teapots, or of red velvet curtains. She watched the oscillation of the

tube, and at the same moment became conscious of the individuality of

the house in which she stood; she heard the soft domestic sounds of

regular existence upon staircases and floors above her head, and

movements through the wall in the house next door. She had no very

clear vision of Denham himself, when she lifted the telephone to her

lips and replied that she thought Saturday would suit her. She hoped

that he would not say good-bye at once, although she felt no

particular anxiety to attend to what he was saying, and began, even

while he spoke, to think of her own upper room, with its books, its

papers pressed between the leaves of dictionaries, and the table that

could be cleared for work. She replaced the instrument, thoughtfully;

her restlessness was assuaged; she finished her letter to Cassandra

without difficulty, addressed the envelope, and fixed the stamp with

her usual quick decision.

 

A bunch of anemones caught Mrs. Hilbery’s eye when they had finished

luncheon. The blue and purple and white of the bowl, standing in a

pool of variegated light on a polished Chippendale table in the

drawing-room window, made her stop dead with an exclamation of

pleasure.

 

“Who is lying ill in bed, Katharine?” she demanded. “Which of our

friends wants cheering up? Who feels that they’ve been forgotten and

passed over, and that nobody wants them? Whose water rates are

overdue, and the cook leaving in a temper without waiting for her

wages? There was somebody I know—” she concluded, but for the moment

the name of this desirable acquaintance escaped her. The best

representative of the forlorn company whose day would be brightened by

a bunch of anemones was, in Katharine’s opinion, the widow of a

general living in the Cromwell Road. In default of the actually

destitute and starving, whom she would much have preferred, Mrs.

Hilbery was forced to acknowledge her claims, for though in

comfortable circumstances, she was extremely dull, unattractive,

connected in some oblique fashion with literature, and had been

touched to the verge of tears, on one occasion, by an afternoon call.

 

It happened that Mrs. Hilbery had an engagement elsewhere, so that the

task of taking the flowers to the Cromwell Road fell upon Katharine.

She took her letter to Cassandra with her, meaning to post it in the

first pillar-box she came to. When, however, she was fairly out of

doors, and constantly invited by pillar-boxes and post-offices to slip

her envelope down their scarlet throats, she forbore. She made absurd

excuses, as that she did not wish to cross the road, or that she was

certain to pass another post-office in a more central position a

little farther on. The longer she held the letter in her hand,

however, the more persistently certain questions pressed upon her, as

if from a collection of voices in the air. These invisible people

wished to be informed whether she was engaged to William Rodney, or

was the engagement broken off? Was it right, they asked, to invite

Cassandra for a visit, and was William Rodney in love with her, or

likely to fall in love? Then the questioners paused for a moment, and

resumed as if another side of the problem had just come to their

notice. What did Ralph Denham mean by what he said to you last night?

Do you consider that he is in love with you? Is it right to consent to

a solitary walk with him, and what advice are you going to give him

about his future? Has William Rodney cause to be jealous of your

conduct, and what do you propose to do about Mary Datchet? What are

you going to do? What does honor require you to do? they repeated.

 

“Good Heavens!” Katharine exclaimed, after listening to all these

remarks, “I suppose I ought to make up my mind.”

 

But the debate was a formal skirmishing, a pastime to gain breathing-space. Like all people brought up in a tradition, Katharine was able,

within ten minutes or so, to reduce any moral difficulty to its

traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers. The book of

wisdom lay open, if not upon her mother’s knee, upon the knees of many

uncles and aunts. She had only to consult them, and they would at once

turn to the right page and read out an answer exactly suited to one in

her position. The rules which should govern the behavior of an

unmarried woman are written in red ink, graved upon marble, if, by

some freak of nature, it should fall out that the unmarried woman has

not the same writing scored upon her heart. She was ready to believe

that some people are fortunate enough to reject, accept, resign, or

lay down their lives at the bidding of traditional authority; she

could envy them; but in her case the questions became phantoms

directly she tried seriously to find an answer, which proved that the

traditional answer would be of no