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

class="calibre1">so far, at least, as four of the audience were concerned.

 

No doubt the actors and the authors would have been surprised to learn

in what shape their efforts reached those particular eyes and ears;

but they could not have denied that the effect as a whole was

tremendous. The hall resounded with brass and strings, alternately of

enormous pomp and majesty, and then of sweetest lamentation. The reds

and creams of the background, the lyres and harps and urns and skulls,

the protuberances of plaster, the fringes of scarlet plush, the

sinking and blazing of innumerable electric lights, could scarcely

have been surpassed for decorative effect by any craftsman of the

ancient or modern world.

 

Then there was the audience itself, bare-shouldered, tufted and

garlanded in the stalls, decorous but festal in the balconies, and

frankly fit for daylight and street life in the galleries. But,

however they differed when looked at separately, they shared the same

huge, lovable nature in the bulk, which murmured and swayed and

quivered all the time the dancing and juggling and love-making went on

in front of it, slowly laughed and reluctantly left off laughing, and

applauded with a helter-skelter generosity which sometimes became

unanimous and overwhelming. Once William saw Katharine leaning forward

and clapping her hands with an abandonment that startled him. Her

laugh rang out with the laughter of the audience.

 

For a second he was puzzled, as if this laughter disclosed something

that he had never suspected in her. But then Cassandra’s face caught

his eye, gazing with astonishment at the buffoon, not laughing, too

deeply intent and surprised to laugh at what she saw, and for some

moments he watched her as if she were a child.

 

The performance came to an end, the illusion dying out first here and

then there, as some rose to put on their coats, others stood upright

to salute “God Save the King,” the musicians folded their music and

encased their instruments, and the lights sank one by one until the

house was empty, silent, and full of great shadows. Looking back over

her shoulder as she followed Ralph through the swing doors, Cassandra

marveled to see how the stage was already entirely without romance.

But, she wondered, did they really cover all the seats in brown

holland every night?

 

The success of this entertainment was such that before they separated

another expedition had been planned for the next day. The next day was

Saturday; therefore both William and Ralph were free to devote the

whole afternoon to an expedition to Greenwich, which Cassandra had

never seen, and Katharine confused with Dulwich. On this occasion

Ralph was their guide. He brought them without accident to Greenwich.

 

What exigencies of state or fantasies of imagination first gave birth

to the cluster of pleasant places by which London is surrounded is

matter of indifference now that they have adapted themselves so

admirably to the needs of people between the ages of twenty and thirty

with Saturday afternoons to spend. Indeed, if ghosts have any interest

in the affections of those who succeed them they must reap their

richest harvests when the fine weather comes again and the lovers, the

sightseers, and the holiday-makers pour themselves out of trains and

omnibuses into their old pleasure-grounds. It is true that they go,

for the most part, unthanked by name, although upon this occasion

William was ready to give such discriminating praise as the dead

architects and painters received seldom in the course of the year.

They were walking by the river bank, and Katharine and Ralph, lagging

a little behind, caught fragments of his lecture. Katharine smiled at

the sound of his voice; she listened as if she found it a little

unfamiliar, intimately though she knew it; she tested it. The note of

assurance and happiness was new. William was very happy. She learnt

every hour what sources of his happiness she had neglected. She had

never asked him to teach her anything; she had never consented to read

Macaulay; she had never expressed her belief that his play was second

only to the works of Shakespeare. She followed dreamily in their wake,

smiling and delighting in the sound which conveyed, she knew, the

rapturous and yet not servile assent of Cassandra.

 

Then she murmured, “How can Cassandra—” but changed her sentence to

the opposite of what she meant to say and ended, “how could she

herself have been so blind?” But it was unnecessary to follow out such

riddles when the presence of Ralph supplied her with more interesting

problems, which somehow became involved with the little boat crossing

the river, the majestic and careworn City, and the steamers homecoming

with their treasury, or starting in search of it, so that infinite

leisure would be necessary for the proper disentanglement of one from

the other. He stopped, moreover, and began inquiring of an old boatman

as to the tides and the ships. In thus talking he seemed different,

and even looked different, she thought, against the river, with the

steeples and towers for background. His strangeness, his romance, his

power to leave her side and take part in the affairs of men, the

possibility that they should together hire a boat and cross the river,

the speed and wildness of this enterprise filled her mind and inspired

her with such rapture, half of love and half of adventure, that

William and Cassandra were startled from their talk, and Cassandra

exclaimed, “She looks as if she were offering up a sacrifice! Very

beautiful,” she added quickly, though she repressed, in deference to

William, her own wonder that the sight of Ralph Denham talking to a

boatman on the banks of the Thames could move any one to such an

attitude of adoration.

 

That afternoon, what with tea and the curiosities of the Thames tunnel

and the unfamiliarity of the streets, passed so quickly that the only

method of prolonging it was to plan another expedition for the

following day. Hampton Court was decided upon, in preference to

Hampstead, for though Cassandra had dreamt as a child of the brigands

of Hampstead, she had now transferred her affections completely and

for ever to William III. Accordingly, they arrived at Hampton Court

about lunch-time on a fine Sunday morning. Such unity marked their

expressions of admiration for the red-brick building that they might

have come there for no other purpose than to assure each other that

this palace was the stateliest palace in the world. They walked up and

down the Terrace, four abreast, and fancied themselves the owners of

the place, and calculated the amount of good to the world produced

indubitably by such a tenancy.

 

“The only hope for us,” said Katharine, “is that William shall die,

and Cassandra shall be given rooms as the widow of a distinguished

poet.”

 

“Or—” Cassandra began, but checked herself from the liberty of

envisaging Katharine as the widow of a distinguished lawyer. Upon

this, the third day of junketing, it was tiresome to have to restrain

oneself even from such innocent excursions of fancy. She dared not

question William; he was inscrutable; he never seemed even to follow

the other couple with curiosity when they separated, as they

frequently did, to name a plant, or examine a fresco. Cassandra was

constantly studying their backs. She noticed how sometimes the impulse

to move came from Katharine, and sometimes from Ralph; how, sometimes,

they walked slow, as if in profound intercourse, and sometimes fast,

as if in passionate. When they came together again nothing could be

more unconcerned than their manner.

 

“We have been wondering whether they ever catch a fish …” or, “We

must leave time to visit the Maze.” Then, to puzzle her further,

William and Ralph filled in all interstices of meal-times or railway

journeys with perfectly good-tempered arguments; or they discussed

politics, or they told stories, or they did sums together upon the

backs of old envelopes to prove something. She suspected that

Katharine was absent-minded, but it was impossible to tell. There were

moments when she felt so young and inexperienced that she almost

wished herself back with the silkworms at Stogdon House, and not

embarked upon this bewildering intrigue.

 

These moments, however, were only the necessary shadow or chill which

proved the substance of her bliss, and did not damage the radiance

which seemed to rest equally upon the whole party. The fresh air of

spring, the sky washed of clouds and already shedding warmth from its

blue, seemed the reply vouchsafed by nature to the mood of her chosen

spirits. These chosen spirits were to be found also among the deer,

dumbly basking, and among the fish, set still in mid-stream, for they

were mute sharers in a benignant state not needing any exposition by

the tongue. No words that Cassandra could come by expressed the

stillness, the brightness, the air of expectancy which lay upon the

orderly beauty of the grass walks and gravel paths down which they

went walking four abreast that Sunday afternoon. Silently the shadows

of the trees lay across the broad sunshine; silence wrapt her heart in

its folds. The quivering stillness of the butterfly on the half-opened

flower, the silent grazing of the deer in the sun, were the sights her

eye rested upon and received as the images of her own nature laid open

to happiness and trembling in its ecstasy.

 

But the afternoon wore on, and it became time to leave the gardens. As

they drove from Waterloo to Chelsea, Katharine began to have some

compunction about her father, which, together with the opening of

offices and the need of working in them on Monday, made it difficult

to plan another festival for the following day. Mr. Hilbery had taken

their absence, so far, with paternal benevolence, but they could not

trespass upon it indefinitely. Indeed, had they known it, he was

already suffering from their absence, and longing for their return.

 

He had no dislike of solitude, and Sunday, in particular, was

pleasantly adapted for letter-writing, paying calls, or a visit to his

club. He was leaving the house on some such suitable expedition

towards tea-time when he found himself stopped on his own doorstep by

his sister, Mrs. Milvain. She should, on hearing that no one was at

home, have withdrawn submissively, but instead she accepted his

half-hearted invitation to come in, and he found himself in the

melancholy position of being forced to order tea for her and sit in

the drawing-room while she drank it. She speedily made it plain that

she was only thus exacting because she had come on a matter of

business. He was by no means exhilarated at the news.

 

“Katharine is out this afternoon,” he remarked. “Why not come round

later and discuss it with her—with us both, eh?”

 

“My dear Trevor, I have particular reasons for wishing to talk to you

alone… . Where is Katharine?”

 

“She’s out with her young man, naturally. Cassandra plays the part of

chaperone very usefully. A charming young woman that—a great favorite

of mine.” He turned his stone between his fingers, and conceived

different methods of leading Celia away from her obsession, which, he

supposed, must have reference to the domestic affairs of Cyril as

usual.

 

“With Cassandra,” Mrs. Milvain repeated significantly. “With

Cassandra.”

 

“Yes, with Cassandra,” Mr. Hilbery agreed urbanely, pleased at the

diversion. “I think they said they were going to Hampton Court, and I

rather believe they were taking a protege of mine, Ralph Denham, a

very clever fellow, too, to amuse Cassandra. I thought the arrangement

very suitable.” He was prepared to dwell at some length upon this safe

topic, and trusted that Katharine would come in before he had done

with it.

 

“Hampton Court always seems to me an ideal spot for engaged couples.

There’s