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

effort.

She knelt one knee upon the sofa where Cassandra sat, looking down at

her cousin’s face, which still moved with the speed of what she had

been saying.

 

“Are you—happy?” she asked.

 

“Oh, my dear!” Cassandra exclaimed, as if no further words were

needed. “Of course, we disagree about every subject under the sun,”

she exclaimed, “but I think he’s the cleverest man I’ve ever met—and

you’re the most beautiful woman,” she added, looking at Katharine, and

as she looked her face lost its animation and became almost melancholy

in sympathy with Katharine’s melancholy, which seemed to Cassandra the

last refinement of her distinction.

 

“Ah, but it’s only ten o’clock,” said Katharine darkly.

 

“As late as that! Well—?” She did not understand.

 

“At twelve my horses turn into rats and off I go. The illusion fades.

But I accept my fate. I make hay while the sun shines.” Cassandra

looked at her with a puzzled expression.

 

“Here’s Katharine talking about rats, and hay, and all sorts of odd

things,” she said, as William returned to them. He had been quick.

“Can you make her out?”

 

Katharine perceived from his little frown and hesitation that he did

not find that particular problem to his taste at present. She stood

upright at once and said in a different tone:

 

“I really am off, though. I wish you’d explain if they say anything,

William. I shan’t be late, but I’ve got to see some one.”

 

“At this time of night?” Cassandra exclaimed.

 

“Whom have you got to see?” William demanded.

 

“A friend,” she remarked, half turning her head towards him. She knew

that he wished her to stay, not, indeed, with them, but in their

neighborhood, in case of need.

 

“Katharine has a great many friends,” said William rather lamely,

sitting down once more, as Katharine left the room.

 

She was soon driving quickly, as she had wished to drive, through the

lamplit streets. She liked both light and speed, and the sense of

being out of doors alone, and the knowledge that she would reach Mary

in her high, lonely room at the end of the drive. She climbed the

stone steps quickly, remarking the queer look of her blue silk skirt

and blue shoes upon the stone, dusty with the boots of the day, under

the light of an occasional jet of flickering gas.

 

The door was opened in a second by Mary herself, whose face showed not

only surprise at the sight of her visitor, but some degree of

embarrassment. She greeted her cordially, and, as there was no time

for explanations, Katharine walked straight into the sitting-room, and

found herself in the presence of a young man who was lying back in a

chair and holding a sheet of paper in his hand, at which he was

looking as if he expected to go on immediately with what he was in the

middle of saying to Mary Datchet. The apparition of an unknown lady in

full evening dress seemed to disturb him. He took his pipe from his

mouth, rose stiffly, and sat down again with a jerk.

 

“Have you been dining out?” Mary asked.

 

“Are you working?” Katharine inquired simultaneously.

 

The young man shook his head, as if he disowned his share in the

question with some irritation.

 

“Well, not exactly,” Mary replied. “Mr. Basnett had brought some

papers to show me. We were going through them, but we’d almost

done… . Tell us about your party.”

 

Mary had a ruffled appearance, as if she had been running her fingers

through her hair in the course of her conversation; she was dressed

more or less like a Russian peasant girl. She sat down again in a

chair which looked as if it had been her seat for some hours; the

saucer which stood upon the arm contained the ashes of many

cigarettes. Mr. Basnett, a very young man with a fresh complexion and

a high forehead from which the hair was combed straight back, was one

of that group of “very able young men” suspected by Mr. Clacton,

justly as it turned out, of an influence upon Mary Datchet. He had

come down from one of the Universities not long ago, and was now

charged with the reformation of society. In connection with the rest

of the group of very able young men he had drawn up a scheme for the

education of labor, for the amalgamation of the middle class and the

working class, and for a joint assault of the two bodies, combined in

the Society for the Education of Democracy, upon Capital. The scheme

had already reached the stage in which it was permissible to hire an

office and engage a secretary, and he had been deputed to expound the

scheme to Mary, and make her an offer of the Secretaryship, to which,

as a matter of principle, a small salary was attached. Since seven

o’clock that evening he had been reading out loud the document in

which the faith of the new reformers was expounded, but the reading

was so frequently interrupted by discussion, and it was so often

necessary to inform Mary “in strictest confidence” of the private

characters and evil designs of certain individuals and societies that

they were still only half-way through the manuscript. Neither of them

realized that the talk had already lasted three hours. In their

absorption they had forgotten even to feed the fire, and yet both Mr.

Basnett in his exposition, and Mary in her interrogation, carefully

preserved a kind of formality calculated to check the desire of the

human mind for irrelevant discussion. Her questions frequently began,

“Am I to understand—” and his replies invariably represented the

views of some one called “we.”

 

By this time Mary was almost persuaded that she, too, was included in

the “we,” and agreed with Mr. Basnett in believing that “our” views,

“our” society, “our” policy, stood for something quite definitely

segregated from the main body of society in a circle of superior

illumination.

 

The appearance of Katharine in this atmosphere was extremely

incongruous, and had the effect of making Mary remember all sorts of

things that she had been glad to forget.

 

“You’ve been dining out?” she asked again, looking, with a little

smile, at the blue silk and the pearl-sewn shoes.

 

“No, at home. Are you starting something new?” Katharine hazarded,

rather hesitatingly, looking at the papers.

 

“We are,” Mr. Basnett replied. He said no more.

 

“I’m thinking of leaving our friends in Russell Square,” Mary

explained.

 

“I see. And then you will do something else.”

 

“Well, I’m afraid I like working,” said Mary.

 

“Afraid,” said Mr. Basnett, conveying the impression that, in his

opinion, no sensible person could be afraid of liking to work.

 

“Yes,” said Katharine, as if he had stated this opinion aloud. “I

should like to start something—something off one’s own bat—that’s

what I should like.”

 

“Yes, that’s the fun,” said Mr. Basnett, looking at her for the first

time rather keenly, and refilling his pipe.

 

“But you can’t limit work—that’s what I mean,” said Mary. “I mean

there are other sorts of work. No one works harder than a woman with

little children.”

 

“Quite so,” said Mr. Basnett. “It’s precisely the women with babies we

want to get hold of.” He glanced at his document, rolled it into a

cylinder between his fingers, and gazed into the fire. Katharine felt

that in this company anything that one said would be judged upon its

merits; one had only to say what one thought, rather barely and

tersely, with a curious assumption that the number of things that

could properly be thought about was strictly limited. And Mr. Basnett

was only stiff upon the surface; there was an intelligence in his face

which attracted her intelligence.

 

“When will the public know?” she asked.

 

“What d’you mean—about us?” Mr. Basnett asked, with a little smile.

 

“That depends upon many things,” said Mary. The conspirators looked

pleased, as if Katharine’s question, with the belief in their

existence which it implied, had a warming effect upon them.

 

“In starting a society such as we wish to start (we can’t say any more

at present),” Mr. Basnett began, with a little jerk of his head,

“there are two things to remember—the Press and the public. Other

societies, which shall be nameless, have gone under because they’ve

appealed only to cranks. If you don’t want a mutual admiration

society, which dies as soon as you’ve all discovered each other’s

faults, you must nobble the Press. You must appeal to the public.”

 

“That’s the difficulty,” said Mary thoughtfully.

 

“That’s where she comes in,” said Mr. Basnett, jerking his head in

Mary’s direction. “She’s the only one of us who’s a capitalist. She

can make a whole-time job of it. I’m tied to an office; I can only

give my spare time. Are you, by any chance, on the look-out for a

job?” he asked Katharine, with a queer mixture of distrust and

deference.

 

“Marriage is her job at present,” Mary replied for her.

 

“Oh, I see,” said Mr. Basnett. He made allowances for that; he and his

friends had faced the question of sex, along with all others, and

assigned it an honorable place in their scheme of life. Katharine felt

this beneath the roughness of his manner; and a world entrusted to the

guardianship of Mary Datchet and Mr. Basnett seemed to her a good

world, although not a romantic or beautiful place or, to put it

figuratively, a place where any line of blue mist softly linked tree

to tree upon the horizon. For a moment she thought she saw in his

face, bent now over the fire, the features of that original man whom

we still recall every now and then, although we know only the clerk,

barrister, Governmental official, or workingman variety of him. Not

that Mr. Basnett, giving his days to commerce and his spare time to

social reform, would long carry about him any trace of his

possibilities of completeness; but, for the moment, in his youth and

ardor, still speculative, still uncramped, one might imagine him the

citizen of a nobler state than ours. Katharine turned over her small

stock of information, and wondered what their society might be going

to attempt. Then she remembered that she was hindering their business,

and rose, still thinking of this society, and thus thinking, she said

to Mr. Basnett:

 

“Well, you’ll ask me to join when the time comes, I hope.”

 

He nodded, and took his pipe from his mouth, but, being unable to

think of anything to say, he put it back again, although he would have

been glad if she had stayed.

 

Against her wish, Mary insisted upon taking her downstairs, and then,

as there was no cab to be seen, they stood in the street together,

looking about them.

 

“Go back,” Katharine urged her, thinking of Mr. Basnett with his

papers in his hand.

 

“You can’t wander about the streets alone in those clothes,” said

Mary, but the desire to find a cab was not her true reason for

standing beside Katharine for a minute or two. Unfortunately for her

composure, Mr. Basnett and his papers seemed to her an incidental

diversion of life’s serious purpose compared with some tremendous fact

which manifested itself as she stood alone with Katharine. It may have

been their common womanhood.

 

“Have you seen Ralph?” she asked suddenly, without preface.

 

“Yes,” said Katharine directly, but she did not remember when or where

she had seen him. It took her a moment or two to remember why Mary

should ask her if she had seen Ralph.

 

“I believe I’m jealous,”