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

use to her individually. Yet it had

served so many people, she thought, glancing at the rows of houses on

either side of her, where families, whose incomes must be between a

thousand and fifteen-hundred a year lived, and kept, perhaps, three

servants, and draped their windows with curtains which were always

thick and generally dirty, and must, she thought, since you could only

see a looking-glass gleaming above a sideboard on which a dish of

apples was set, keep the room inside very dark. But she turned her

head away, observing that this was not a method of thinking the matter

out.

 

The only truth which she could discover was the truth of what she

herself felt—a frail beam when compared with the broad illumination

shed by the eyes of all the people who are in agreement to see

together; but having rejected the visionary voices, she had no choice

but to make this her guide through the dark masses which confronted

her. She tried to follow her beam, with an expression upon her face

which would have made any passer-by think her reprehensibly and almost

ridiculously detached from the surrounding scene. One would have felt

alarmed lest this young and striking woman were about to do something

eccentric. But her beauty saved her from the worst fate that can

befall a pedestrian; people looked at her, but they did not laugh. To

seek a true feeling among the chaos of the unfeelings or half-feelings

of life, to recognize it when found, and to accept the consequences of

the discovery, draws lines upon the smoothest brow, while it quickens

the light of the eyes; it is a pursuit which is alternately

bewildering, debasing, and exalting, and, as Katharine speedily found,

her discoveries gave her equal cause for surprise, shame, and intense

anxiety. Much depended, as usual, upon the interpretation of the word

love; which word came up again and again, whether she considered

Rodney, Denham, Mary Datchet, or herself; and in each case it seemed

to stand for something different, and yet for something unmistakable

and something not to be passed by. For the more she looked into the

confusion of lives which, instead of running parallel, had suddenly

intersected each other, the more distinctly she seemed to convince

herself that there was no other light on them than was shed by this

strange illumination, and no other path save the one upon which it

threw its beams. Her blindness in the case of Rodney, her attempt to

match his true feeling with her false feeling, was a failure never to

be sufficiently condemned; indeed, she could only pay it the tribute

of leaving it a black and naked landmark unburied by attempt at

oblivion or excuse.

 

With this to humiliate there was much to exalt. She thought of three

different scenes; she thought of Mary sitting upright and saying, “I’m

in love—I’m in love”; she thought of Rodney losing his self-consciousness among the dead leaves, and speaking with the abandonment

of a child; she thought of Denham leaning upon the stone parapet and

talking to the distant sky, so that she thought him mad. Her mind,

passing from Mary to Denham, from William to Cassandra, and from

Denham to herself—if, as she rather doubted, Denham’s state of mind

was connected with herself—seemed to be tracing out the lines of some

symmetrical pattern, some arrangement of life, which invested, if not

herself, at least the others, not only with interest, but with a kind

of tragic beauty. She had a fantastic picture of them upholding

splendid palaces upon their bent backs. They were the lantern-bearers,

whose lights, scattered among the crowd, wove a pattern, dissolving,

joining, meeting again in combination. Half forming such conceptions

as these in her rapid walk along the dreary streets of South

Kensington, she determined that, whatever else might be obscure, she

must further the objects of Mary, Denham, William, and Cassandra. The

way was not apparent. No course of action seemed to her indubitably

right. All she achieved by her thinking was the conviction that, in

such a cause, no risk was too great; and that, far from making any

rules for herself or others, she would let difficulties accumulate

unsolved, situations widen their jaws unsatiated, while she maintained

a position of absolute and fearless independence. So she could best

serve the people who loved.

 

Read in the light of this exaltation, there was a new meaning in the

words which her mother had penciled upon the card attached to the

bunch of anemones. The door of the house in the Cromwell Road opened;

gloomy vistas of passage and staircase were revealed; such light as

there was seemed to be concentrated upon a silver salver of

visiting-cards, whose black borders suggested that the widow’s friends

had all suffered the same bereavement. The parlor-maid could hardly be

expected to fathom the meaning of the grave tone in which the young

lady proffered the flowers, with Mrs. Hilbery’s love; and the door

shut upon the offering.

 

The sight of a face, the slam of a door, are both rather destructive

of exaltation in the abstract; and, as she walked back to Chelsea,

Katharine had her doubts whether anything would come of her resolves.

If you cannot make sure of people, however, you can hold fairly fast

to figures, and in some way or other her thought about such problems

as she was wont to consider worked in happily with her mood as to her

friends’ lives. She reached home rather late for tea.

 

On the ancient Dutch chest in the hall she perceived one or two hats,

coats, and walking-sticks, and the sound of voices reached her as she

stood outside the drawing-room door. Her mother gave a little cry as

she came in; a cry which conveyed to Katharine the fact that she was

late, that the teacups and milk-jugs were in a conspiracy of

disobedience, and that she must immediately take her place at the head

of the table and pour out tea for the guests. Augustus Pelham, the

diarist, liked a calm atmosphere in which to tell his stories; he

liked attention; he liked to elicit little facts, little stories,

about the past and the great dead, from such distinguished characters

as Mrs. Hilbery for the nourishment of his diary, for whose sake he

frequented tea-tables and ate yearly an enormous quantity of buttered

toast. He, therefore, welcomed Katharine with relief, and she had

merely to shake hands with Rodney and to greet the American lady who

had come to be shown the relics, before the talk started again on the

broad lines of reminiscence and discussion which were familiar to her.

 

Yet, even with this thick veil between them, she could not help

looking at Rodney, as if she could detect what had happened to him

since they met. It was in vain. His clothes, even the white slip, the

pearl in his tie, seemed to intercept her quick glance, and to

proclaim the futility of such inquiries of a discreet, urbane

gentleman, who balanced his cup of tea and poised a slice of bread and

butter on the edge of the saucer. He would not meet her eye, but that

could be accounted for by his activity in serving and helping, and the

polite alacrity with which he was answering the questions of the

American visitor.

 

It was certainly a sight to daunt any one coming in with a head full

of theories about love. The voices of the invisible questioners were

reinforced by the scene round the table, and sounded with a tremendous

self-confidence, as if they had behind them the common sense of twenty

generations, together with the immediate approval of Mr. Augustus

Pelham, Mrs. Vermont Bankes, William Rodney, and, possibly, Mrs.

Hilbery herself. Katharine set her teeth, not entirely in the

metaphorical sense, for her hand, obeying the impulse towards definite

action, laid firmly upon the table beside her an envelope which she

had been grasping all this time in complete forgetfulness. The address

was uppermost, and a moment later she saw William’s eye rest upon it

as he rose to fulfil some duty with a plate. His expression instantly

changed. He did what he was on the point of doing, and then looked at

Katharine with a look which revealed enough of his confusion to show

her that he was not entirely represented by his appearance. In a

minute or two he proved himself at a loss with Mrs. Vermont Bankes,

and Mrs. Hilbery, aware of the silence with her usual quickness,

suggested that, perhaps, it was now time that Mrs. Bankes should be

shown “our things.”

 

Katharine accordingly rose, and led the way to the little inner room

with the pictures and the books. Mrs. Bankes and Rodney followed her.

 

She turned on the lights, and began directly in her low, pleasant

voice: “This table is my grandfather’s writing-table. Most of the

later poems were written at it. And this is his pen—the last pen he

ever used.” She took it in her hand and paused for the right number of

seconds. “Here,” she continued, “is the original manuscript of the

‘Ode to Winter.’ The early manuscripts are far less corrected than the

later ones, as you will see directly… . Oh, do take it yourself,”

she added, as Mrs. Bankes asked, in an awestruck tone of voice, for

that privilege, and began a preliminary unbuttoning of her white kid

gloves.

 

“You are wonderfully like your grandfather, Miss Hilbery,” the

American lady observed, gazing from Katharine to the portrait,

“especially about the eyes. Come, now, I expect she writes poetry

herself, doesn’t she?” she asked in a jocular tone, turning to

William. “Quite one’s ideal of a poet, is it not, Mr. Rodney? I cannot

tell you what a privilege I feel it to be standing just here with the

poet’s granddaughter. You must know we think a great deal of your

grandfather in America, Miss Hilbery. We have societies for reading

him aloud. What! His very own slippers!” Laying aside the manuscript,

she hastily grasped the old shoes, and remained for a moment dumb in

contemplation of them.

 

While Katharine went on steadily with her duties as show-woman, Rodney

examined intently a row of little drawings which he knew by heart

already. His disordered state of mind made it necessary for him to

take advantage of these little respites, as if he had been out in a

high wind and must straighten his dress in the first shelter he

reached. His calm was only superficial, as he knew too well; it did

not exist much below the surface of tie, waistcoat, and white slip.

 

On getting out of bed that morning he had fully made up his mind to

ignore what had been said the night before; he had been convinced, by

the sight of Denham, that his love for Katharine was passionate, and

when he addressed her early that morning on the telephone, he had

meant his cheerful but authoritative tones to convey to her the fact

that, after a night of madness, they were as indissolubly engaged as

ever. But when he reached his office his torments began. He found a

letter from Cassandra waiting for him. She had read his play, and had

taken the very first opportunity to write and tell him what she

thought of it. She knew, she wrote, that her praise meant absolutely

nothing; but still, she had sat up all night; she thought this, that,

and the other; she was full of enthusiasm most elaborately scratched

out in places, but enough was written plain to gratify William’s

vanity exceedingly. She was quite intelligent enough to say the right

things, or, even more charmingly, to hint at them. In other ways, too,

it was a very charming letter. She told him about her music, and about