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

one resumed

life after a morning among the dead, proved to be of an utterly thin

and inferior composition.

 

The worst of it was that she had no aptitude for literature. She did

not like phrases. She had even some natural antipathy to that process

of self-examination, that perpetual effort to understand one’s own

feeling, and express it beautifully, fitly, or energetically in

language, which constituted so great a part of her mother’s existence.

She was, on the contrary, inclined to be silent; she shrank from

expressing herself even in talk, let alone in writing. As this

disposition was highly convenient in a family much given to the

manufacture of phrases, and seemed to argue a corresponding capacity

for action, she was, from her childhood even, put in charge of

household affairs. She had the reputation, which nothing in her manner

contradicted, of being the most practical of people. Ordering meals,

directing servants, paying bills, and so contriving that every clock

ticked more or less accurately in time, and a number of vases were

always full of fresh flowers was supposed to be a natural endowment of

hers, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery often observed that it was poetry the

wrong side out. From a very early age, too, she had to exert herself

in another capacity; she had to counsel and help and generally sustain

her mother. Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to

sustain herself if the world had been what the world is not. She was

beautifully adapted for life in another planet. But the natural genius

she had for conducting affairs there was of no real use to her here.

Her watch, for example, was a constant source of surprise to her, and

at the age of sixty-five she was still amazed at the ascendancy which

rules and reasons exerted over the lives of other people. She had

never learnt her lesson, and had constantly to be punished for her

ignorance. But as that ignorance was combined with a fine natural

insight which saw deep whenever it saw at all, it was not possible to

write Mrs. Hilbery off among the dunces; on the contrary, she had a

way of seeming the wisest person in the room. But, on the whole, she

found it very necessary to seek support in her daughter.

 

Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as

yet, no title and very little recognition, although the labor of mill

and factory is, perhaps, no more severe and the results of less

benefit to the world. She lived at home. She did it very well, too.

Any one coming to the house in Cheyne Walk felt that here was an

orderly place, shapely, controlled—a place where life had been

trained to show to the best advantage, and, though composed of

different elements, made to appear harmonious and with a character of

its own. Perhaps it was the chief triumph of Katharine’s art that Mrs.

Hilbery’s character predominated. She and Mr. Hilbery appeared to be a

rich background for her mother’s more striking qualities.

 

Silence being, thus, both natural to her and imposed upon her, the

only other remark that her mother’s friends were in the habit of

making about it was that it was neither a stupid silence nor an

indifferent silence. But to what quality it owed its character, since

character of some sort it had, no one troubled themselves to inquire.

It was understood that she was helping her mother to produce a great

book. She was known to manage the household. She was certainly

beautiful. That accounted for her satisfactorily. But it would have

been a surprise, not only to other people but to Katharine herself, if

some magic watch could have taken count of the moments spent in an

entirely different occupation from her ostensible one. Sitting with

faded papers before her, she took part in a series of scenes such as

the taming of wild ponies upon the American prairies, or the conduct

of a vast ship in a hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or in

others more peaceful, but marked by her complete emancipation from her

present surroundings and, needless to say, by her surpassing ability

in her new vocation. When she was rid of the pretense of paper and

pen, phrase-making and biography, she turned her attention in a more

legitimate direction, though, strangely enough, she would rather have

confessed her wildest dreams of hurricane and prairie than the fact

that, upstairs, alone in her room, she rose early in the morning or

sat up late at night to … work at mathematics. No force on earth

would have made her confess that. Her actions when thus engaged were

furtive and secretive, like those of some nocturnal animal. Steps had

only to sound on the staircase, and she slipped her paper between the

leaves of a great Greek dictionary which she had purloined from her

father’s room for this purpose. It was only at night, indeed, that she

felt secure enough from surprise to concentrate her mind to the

utmost.

 

Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively

wish to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that

in her mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would

not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude,

the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation,

and vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little

unseemly in thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that

made her feel wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut

her desires away from view and cherish them with extraordinary

fondness. Again and again she was thinking of some problem when she

should have been thinking of her grandfather. Waking from these

trances, she would see that her mother, too, had lapsed into some

dream almost as visionary as her own, for the people who played their

parts in it had long been numbered among the dead. But, seeing her own

state mirrored in her mother’s face, Katharine would shake herself

awake with a sense of irritation. Her mother was the last person she

wished to resemble, much though she admired her. Her common sense

would assert itself almost brutally, and Mrs. Hilbery, looking at her

with her odd sidelong glance, that was half malicious and half tender,

would liken her to “your wicked old Uncle Judge Peter, who used to be

heard delivering sentence of death in the bathroom. Thank Heaven,

Katharine, I’ve not a drop of HIM in me!”