Night and Day - Virginia Woolf (best novels for beginners txt) 📗
- Author: Virginia Woolf
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her, and she, he felt certain, would despise them all, and this, too,
would help him. He felt himself becoming more and more merciless
towards her. By such courageous measures any one, he thought, could
end the absurd passions which were the cause of so much pain and
waste. He could foresee a time when his experiences, his discovery,
and his triumph were made available for younger brothers who found
themselves in the same predicament. He looked at his watch, and
remarked that the gardens would soon be closed.
“Anyhow,” he added, “I think we’ve seen enough for one afternoon.
Where have the others got to?” He looked over his shoulder, and,
seeing no trace of them, remarked at once:
“We’d better be independent of them. The best plan will be for you to
come back to tea with me.”
“Why shouldn’t you come with me?” she asked.
“Because we’re next door to Highgate here,” he replied promptly.
She assented, having very little notion whether Highgate was next door
to Regent’s Park or not. She was only glad to put off her return to
the family tea-table in Chelsea for an hour or two. They proceeded
with dogged determination through the winding roads of Regent’s Park,
and the Sunday-stricken streets of the neighborhood, in the direction
of the Tube station. Ignorant of the way, she resigned herself
entirely to him, and found his silence a convenient cover beneath
which to continue her anger with Rodney.
When they stepped out of the train into the still grayer gloom of
Highgate, she wondered, for the first time, where he was taking her.
Had he a family, or did he live alone in rooms? On the whole she was
inclined to believe that he was the only son of an aged, and possibly
invalid, mother. She sketched lightly, upon the blank vista down which
they walked, the little white house and the tremulous old lady rising
from behind her tea-table to greet her with faltering words about “my
son’s friends,” and was on the point of asking Ralph to tell her what
she might expect, when he jerked open one of the infinite number of
identical wooden doors, and led her up a tiled path to a porch in the
Alpine style of architecture. As they listened to the shaking of the
bell in the basement, she could summon no vision to replace the one so
rudely destroyed.
“I must warn you to expect a family party,” said Ralph. “They’re
mostly in on Sundays. We can go to my room afterwards.”
“Have you many brothers and sisters?” she asked, without concealing
her dismay.
“Six or seven,” he replied grimly, as the door opened.
While Ralph took off his coat, she had time to notice the ferns and
photographs and draperies, and to hear a hum, or rather a babble, of
voices talking each other down, from the sound of them. The rigidity
of extreme shyness came over her. She kept as far behind Denham as she
could, and walked stiffly after him into a room blazing with unshaded
lights, which fell upon a number of people, of different ages, sitting
round a large dining-room table untidily strewn with food, and
unflinchingly lit up by incandescent gas. Ralph walked straight to the
far end of the table.
“Mother, this is Miss Hilbery,” he said.
A large elderly lady, bent over an unsatisfactory spirit-lamp, looked
up with a little frown, and observed:
“I beg your pardon. I thought you were one of my own girls. Dorothy,”
she continued on the same breath, to catch the servant before she left
the room, “we shall want some more methylated spirits—unless the lamp
itself is out of order. If one of you could invent a good
spirit-lamp—” she sighed, looking generally down the table, and then
began seeking among the china before her for two clean cups for the
newcomers.
The unsparing light revealed more ugliness than Katharine had seen in
one room for a very long time. It was the ugliness of enormous folds
of brown material, looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which
depended balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen
with black school-texts. Her eye was arrested by crossed scabbards of
fretted wood upon the dull green wall, and whereever there was a high
flat eminence, some fern waved from a pot of crinkled china, or a
bronze horse reared so high that the stump of a tree had to sustain
his forequarters. The waters of family life seemed to rise and close
over her head, and she munched in silence.
At length Mrs. Denham looked up from her teacups and remarked:
“You see, Miss Hilbery, my children all come in at different hours and
want different things. (The tray should go up if you’ve done,
Johnnie.) My boy Charles is in bed with a cold. What else can you
expect?—standing in the wet playing football. We did try drawing-room
tea, but it didn’t do.”
A boy of sixteen, who appeared to be Johnnie, grumbled derisively both
at the notion of drawing-room tea and at the necessity of carrying a
tray up to his brother. But he took himself off, being enjoined by his
mother to mind what he was doing, and shut the door after him.
“It’s much nicer like this,” said Katharine, applying herself with
determination to the dissection of her cake; they had given her too
large a slice. She knew that Mrs. Denham suspected her of critical
comparisons. She knew that she was making poor progress with her cake.
Mrs. Denham had looked at her sufficiently often to make it clear to
Katharine that she was asking who this young woman was, and why Ralph
had brought her to tea with them. There was an obvious reason, which
Mrs. Denham had probably reached by this time. Outwardly, she was
behaving with rather rusty and laborious civility. She was making
conversation about the amenities of Highgate, its development and
situation.
“When I first married,” she said, “Highgate was quite separate from
London, Miss Hilbery, and this house, though you wouldn’t believe it,
had a view of apple orchards. That was before the Middletons built
their house in front of us.”
“It must be a great advantage to live at the top of a hill,” said
Katharine. Mrs. Denham agreed effusively, as if her opinion of
Katharine’s sense had risen.
“Yes, indeed, we find it very healthy,” she said, and she went on, as
people who live in the suburbs so often do, to prove that it was
healthier, more convenient, and less spoilt than any suburb round
London. She spoke with such emphasis that it was quite obvious that
she expressed unpopular views, and that her children disagreed with
her.
“The ceiling’s fallen down in the pantry again,” said Hester, a girl
of eighteen, abruptly.
“The whole house will be down one of these days,” James muttered.
“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Denham. “It’s only a little bit of plaster—I
don’t see how any house could be expected to stand the wear and tear
you give it.” Here some family joke exploded, which Katharine could
not follow. Even Mrs. Denham laughed against her will.
“Miss Hilbery’s thinking us all so rude,” she added reprovingly. Miss
Hilbery smiled and shook her head, and was conscious that a great many
eyes rested upon her, for a moment, as if they would find pleasure in
discussing her when she was gone. Owing, perhaps, to this critical
glance, Katharine decided that Ralph Denham’s family was commonplace,
unshapely, lacking in charm, and fitly expressed by the hideous nature
of their furniture and decorations. She glanced along a mantelpiece
ranged with bronze chariots, silver vases, and china ornaments that
were either facetious or eccentric.
She did not apply her judgment consciously to Ralph, but when she
looked at him, a moment later, she rated him lower than at any other
time of their acquaintanceship.
He had made no effort to tide over the discomforts of her
introduction, and now, engaged in argument with his brother,
apparently forgot her presence. She must have counted upon his support
more than she realized, for this indifference, emphasized, as it was,
by the insignificant commonplace of his surroundings, awoke her, not
only to that ugliness, but to her own folly. She thought of one scene
after another in a few seconds, with that shudder which is almost a
blush. She had believed him when he spoke of friendship. She had
believed in a spiritual light burning steadily and steadfastly behind
the erratic disorder and incoherence of life. The light was now gone
out, suddenly, as if a sponge had blotted it. The litter of the table
and the tedious but exacting conversation of Mrs. Denham remained:
they struck, indeed, upon a mind bereft of all defences, and, keenly
conscious of the degradation which is the result of strife whether
victorious or not, she thought gloomily of her loneliness, of life’s
futility, of the barren prose of reality, of William Rodney, of her
mother, and the unfinished book.
Her answers to Mrs. Denham were perfunctory to the verge of rudeness,
and to Ralph, who watched her narrowly, she seemed further away than
was compatible with her physical closeness. He glanced at her, and
ground out further steps in his argument, determined that no folly
should remain when this experience was over. Next moment, a silence,
sudden and complete, descended upon them all. The silence of all these
people round the untidy table was enormous and hideous; something
horrible seemed about to burst from it, but they endured it
obstinately. A second later the door opened and there was a stir of
relief; cries of “Hullo, Joan! There’s nothing left for you to eat,”
broke up the oppressive concentration of so many eyes upon the
table-cloth, and set the waters of family life dashing in brisk little
waves again. It was obvious that Joan had some mysterious and
beneficent power upon her family. She went up to Katharine as if she
had heard of her, and was very glad to see her at last. She explained
that she had been visiting an uncle who was ill, and that had kept
her. No, she hadn’t had any tea, but a slice of bread would do. Some
one handed up a hot cake, which had been keeping warm in the fender;
she sat down by her mother’s side, Mrs. Denham’s anxieties seemed to
relax, and every one began eating and drinking, as if tea had begun
over again. Hester voluntarily explained to Katharine that she was
reading to pass some examination, because she wanted more than
anything in the whole world to go to Newnham.
“Now, just let me hear you decline ‘amo’—I love,” Johnnie demanded.
“No, Johnnie, no Greek at meal-times,” said Joan, overhearing him
instantly. “She’s up at all hours of the night over her books, Miss
Hilbery, and I’m sure that’s not the way to pass examinations,” she
went on, smiling at Katharine, with the worried humorous smile of the
elder sister whose younger brothers and sisters have become almost
like children of her own.
“Joan, you don’t really think that ‘amo’ is Greek?” Ralph
asked.
“Did I say Greek? Well, never mind. No dead languages at tea-time. My
dear boy, don’t trouble to make me any toast—”
“Or if you do, surely there’s the toasting-fork somewhere?” said Mrs.
Denham, still cherishing the belief that the bread-knife could be
spoilt. “Do one of you ring and ask for one,” she said, without any
conviction that she would be obeyed. “But is Ann coming to be with
Uncle Joseph?” she continued. “If so, surely they had better send Amy
to
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