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

over, as far as memory served

them, the different aspects of Rodney’s drama. She said nothing that

jarred upon him, and untrained daring had the power to stimulate

experience to such an extent that Rodney was frequently seen to hold

his fork suspended before him, while he debated the first principles

of the art. Mrs. Hilbery thought to herself that she had never seen

him to such advantage; yes, he was somehow different; he reminded her

of some one who was dead, some one who was distinguished—she had

forgotten his name.

 

Cassandra’s voice rose high in its excitement.

 

“You’ve not read ‘The Idiot’!” she exclaimed.

 

“I’ve read ‘War and Peace’,” William replied, a little testily.

 

“‘WAR AND PEACE’!” she echoed, in a tone of derision.

 

“I confess I don’t understand the Russians.”

 

“Shake hands! Shake hands!” boomed Uncle Aubrey from across the table.

“Neither do I. And I hazard the opinion that they don’t themselves.”

 

The old gentleman had ruled a large part of the Indian Empire, but he

was in the habit of saying that he had rather have written the works

of Dickens. The table now took possession of a subject much to its

liking. Aunt Eleanor showed premonitory signs of pronouncing an

opinion. Although she had blunted her taste upon some form of

philanthropy for twenty-five years, she had a fine natural instinct

for an upstart or a pretender, and knew to a hairbreadth what

literature should be and what it should not be. She was born to the

knowledge, and scarcely thought it a matter to be proud of.

 

“Insanity is not a fit subject for fiction,” she announced positively.

 

“There’s the well-known case of Hamlet,” Mr. Hilbery interposed, in

his leisurely, half-humorous tones.

 

“Ah, but poetry’s different, Trevor,” said Aunt Eleanor, as if she had

special authority from Shakespeare to say so. “Different altogether.

And I’ve never thought, for my part, that Hamlet was as mad as they

make out. What is your opinion, Mr. Peyton?” For, as there was a

minister of literature present in the person of the editor of an

esteemed review, she deferred to him.

 

Mr. Peyton leant a little back in his chair, and, putting his head

rather on one side, observed that that was a question that he had

never been able to answer entirely to his satisfaction. There was much

to be said on both sides, but as he considered upon which side he

should say it, Mrs. Hilbery broke in upon his judicious meditations.

 

“Lovely, lovely Ophelia!” she exclaimed. “What a wonderful power it

is—poetry! I wake up in the morning all bedraggled; there’s a yellow

fog outside; little Emily turns on the electric light when she brings

me my tea, and says, ‘Oh, ma’am, the water’s frozen in the cistern,

and cook’s cut her finger to the bone.’ And then I open a little green

book, and the birds are singing, the stars shining, the flowers

twinkling—” She looked about her as if these presences had suddenly

manifested themselves round her dining-room table.

 

“Has the cook cut her finger badly?” Aunt Eleanor demanded, addressing

herself naturally to Katharine.

 

“Oh, the cook’s finger is only my way of putting it,” said Mrs.

Hilbery. “But if she had cut her arm off, Katharine would have sewn it

on again,” she remarked, with an affectionate glance at her daughter,

who looked, she thought, a little sad. “But what horrid, horrid

thoughts,” she wound up, laying down her napkin and pushing her chair

back. “Come, let us find something more cheerful to talk about

upstairs.”

 

Upstairs in the drawing-room Cassandra found fresh sources of

pleasure, first in the distinguished and expectant look of the room,

and then in the chance of exercising her divining-rod upon a new

assortment of human beings. But the low tones of the women, their

meditative silences, the beauty which, to her at least, shone even

from black satin and the knobs of amber which encircled elderly necks,

changed her wish to chatter to a more subdued desire merely to watch

and to whisper. She entered with delight into an atmosphere in which

private matters were being interchanged freely, almost in

monosyllables, by the older women who now accepted her as one of

themselves. Her expression became very gentle and sympathetic, as if

she, too, were full of solicitude for the world which was somehow

being cared for, managed and deprecated by Aunt Maggie and Aunt

Eleanor. After a time she perceived that Katharine was outside the

community in some way, and, suddenly, she threw aside her wisdom and

gentleness and concern and began to laugh.

 

“What are you laughing at?” Katharine asked.

 

A joke so foolish and unfilial wasn’t worth explaining.

 

“It was nothing—ridiculous—in the worst of taste, but still, if you

half shut your eyes and looked—” Katharine half shut her eyes and

looked, but she looked in the wrong direction, and Cassandra laughed

more than ever, and was still laughing and doing her best to explain

in a whisper that Aunt Eleanor, through half-shut eyes, was like the

parrot in the cage at Stogdon House, when the gentlemen came in and

Rodney walked straight up to them and wanted to know what they were

laughing at.

 

“I utterly refuse to tell you!” Cassandra replied, standing up

straight, clasping her hands in front of her, and facing him. Her

mockery was delicious to him. He had not even for a second the fear

that she had been laughing at him. She was laughing because life was

so adorable, so enchanting.

 

“Ah, but you’re cruel to make me feel the barbarity of my sex,” he

replied, drawing his feet together and pressing his finger-tips upon

an imaginary opera-hat or malacca cane. “We’ve been discussing all

sorts of dull things, and now I shall never know what I want to know

more than anything in the world.”

 

“You don’t deceive us for a minute!” she cried. “Not for a second. We

both know that you’ve been enjoying yourself immensely. Hasn’t he,

Katharine?”

 

“No,” she replied, “I think he’s speaking the truth. He doesn’t care

much for politics.”

 

Her words, though spoken simply, produced a curious change in the

light, sparkling atmosphere. William at once lost his look of

animation and said seriously:

 

“I detest politics.”

 

“I don’t think any man has the right to say that,” said Cassandra,

almost severely.

 

“I agree. I mean that I detest politicians,” he corrected himself

quickly.

 

“You see, I believe Cassandra is what they call a Feminist,” Katharine

went on. “Or rather, she was a Feminist six months ago, but it’s no

good supposing that she is now what she was then. That is one of her

greatest charms in my eyes. One never can tell.” She smiled at her as

an elder sister might smile.

 

“Katharine, you make one feel so horribly small!” Cassandra exclaimed.

 

“No, no, that’s not what she means,” Rodney interposed. “I quite agree

that women have an immense advantage over us there. One misses a lot

by attempting to know things thoroughly.”

 

“He knows Greek thoroughly,” said Katharine. “But then he also knows a

good deal about painting, and a certain amount about music. He’s very

cultivated—perhaps the most cultivated person I know.”

 

“And poetry,” Cassandra added.

 

“Yes, I was forgetting his play,” Katharine remarked, and turning her

head as though she saw something that needed her attention in a far

corner of the room, she left them.

 

For a moment they stood silent, after what seemed a deliberate

introduction to each other, and Cassandra watched her crossing the

room.

 

“Henry,” she said next moment, “would say that a stage ought to be no

bigger than this drawing-room. He wants there to be singing and

dancing as well as acting—only all the opposite of Wagner—you

understand?”

 

They sat down, and Katharine, turning when she reached the window, saw

William with his hand raised in gesticulation and his mouth open, as

if ready to speak the moment Cassandra ceased.

 

Katharine’s duty, whether it was to pull a curtain or move a chair,

was either forgotten or discharged, but she continued to stand by the

window without doing anything. The elderly people were all grouped

together round the fire. They seemed an independent, middle-aged

community busy with its own concerns. They were telling stories very

well and listening to them very graciously. But for her there was no

obvious employment.

 

“If anybody says anything, I shall say that I’m looking at the river,”

she thought, for in her slavery to her family traditions, she was

ready to pay for her transgression with some plausible falsehood. She

pushed aside the blind and looked at the river. But it was a dark

night and the water was barely visible. Cabs were passing, and couples

were loitering slowly along the road, keeping as close to the railings

as possible, though the trees had as yet no leaves to cast shadow upon

their embraces. Katharine, thus withdrawn, felt her loneliness. The

evening had been one of pain, offering her, minute after minute,

plainer proof that things would fall out as she had foreseen. She had

faced tones, gestures, glances; she knew, with her back to them, that

William, even now, was plunging deeper and deeper into the delight of

unexpected understanding with Cassandra. He had almost told her that

he was finding it infinitely better than he could have believed. She

looked out of the window, sternly determined to forget private

misfortunes, to forget herself, to forget individual lives. With her

eyes upon the dark sky, voices reached her from the room in which she

was standing. She heard them as if they came from people in another

world, a world antecedent to her world, a world that was the prelude,

the antechamber to reality; it was as if, lately dead, she heard the

living talking. The dream nature of our life had never been more

apparent to her, never had life been more certainly an affair of four

walls, whose objects existed only within the range of lights and

fires, beyond which lay nothing, or nothing more than darkness. She

seemed physically to have stepped beyond the region where the light of

illusion still makes it desirable to possess, to love, to struggle.

And yet her melancholy brought her no serenity. She still heard the

voices within the room. She was still tormented by desires. She wished

to be beyond their range. She wished inconsistently enough that she

could find herself driving rapidly through the streets; she was even

anxious to be with some one who, after a moment’s groping, took a

definite shape and solidified into the person of Mary Datchet. She

drew the curtains so that the draperies met in deep folds in the

middle of the window.

 

“Ah, there she is,” said Mr. Hilbery, who was standing swaying affably

from side to side, with his back to the fire. “Come here, Katharine. I

couldn’t see where you’d got to—our children,” he observed

parenthetically, “have their uses—I want you to go to my study,

Katharine; go to the third shelf on the right-hand side of the door;

take down ‘Trelawny’s Recollections of Shelley’; bring it to me. Then,

Peyton, you will have to admit to the assembled company that you have

been mistaken.”

 

“‘Trelawny’s Recollections of Shelley.’ The third shelf on the right

of the door,” Katharine repeated. After all, one does not check

children in their play, or rouse sleepers from their dreams. She

passed William and Cassandra on her way to the door.

 

“Stop, Katharine,” said William, speaking almost as if he were

conscious of her against his will. “Let me go.” He rose, after a

second’s hesitation, and she understood that it cost him an