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

last of them died away, there was

a firm knocking on her own door, and she rose and opened it. She

returned to the room, with a look of steady pleasure in her eyes, and

she was talking to Ralph Denham, who followed her.

 

“Alone?” he said, as if he were pleasantly surprised by that fact.

 

“I am sometimes alone,” she replied.

 

“But you expect a great many people,” he added, looking round him.

“It’s like a room on the stage. Who is it to-night?”

 

“William Rodney, upon the Elizabethan use of metaphor. I expect a good

solid paper, with plenty of quotations from the classics.”

 

Ralph warmed his hands at the fire, which was flapping bravely in the

grate, while Mary took up her stocking again.

 

“I suppose you are the only woman in London who darns her own

stockings,” he observed.

 

“I’m only one of a great many thousands really,” she replied, “though

I must admit that I was thinking myself very remarkable when you came

in. And now that you’re here I don’t think myself remarkable at all.

How horrid of you! But I’m afraid you’re much more remarkable than I

am. You’ve done much more than I’ve done.”

 

“If that’s your standard, you’ve nothing to be proud of,” said Ralph

grimly.

 

“Well, I must reflect with Emerson that it’s being and not doing that

matters,” she continued.

 

“Emerson?” Ralph exclaimed, with derision. “You don’t mean to say you

read Emerson?”

 

“Perhaps it wasn’t Emerson; but why shouldn’t I read Emerson?” she

asked, with a tinge of anxiety.

 

“There’s no reason that I know of. It’s the combination that’s odd—

books and stockings. The combination is very odd.” But it seemed to

recommend itself to him. Mary gave a little laugh, expressive of

happiness, and the particular stitches that she was now putting into

her work appeared to her to be done with singular grace and felicity.

She held out the stocking and looked at it approvingly.

 

“You always say that,” she said. “I assure you it’s a common

‘combination,’ as you call it, in the houses of the clergy. The only

thing that’s odd about me is that I enjoy them both—Emerson and the

stocking.”

 

A knock was heard, and Ralph exclaimed:

 

“Damn those people! I wish they weren’t coming!”

 

“It’s only Mr. Turner, on the floor below,” said Mary, and she felt

grateful to Mr. Turner for having alarmed Ralph, and for having given

a false alarm.

 

“Will there be a crowd?” Ralph asked, after a pause.

 

“There’ll be the Morrises and the Crashaws, and Dick Osborne, and

Septimus, and all that set. Katharine Hilbery is coming, by the way,

so William Rodney told me.”

 

“Katharine Hilbery!” Ralph exclaimed.

 

“You know her?” Mary asked, with some surprise.

 

“I went to a tea-party at her house.”

 

Mary pressed him to tell her all about it, and Ralph was not at all

unwilling to exhibit proofs of the extent of his knowledge. He

described the scene with certain additions and exaggerations which

interested Mary very much.

 

“But, in spite of what you say, I do admire her,” she said. “I’ve only

seen her once or twice, but she seems to me to be what one calls a

‘personality.’”

 

“I didn’t mean to abuse her. I only felt that she wasn’t very

sympathetic to me.”

 

“They say she’s going to marry that queer creature Rodney.”

 

“Marry Rodney? Then she must be more deluded than I thought her.”

 

“Now that’s my door, all right,” Mary exclaimed, carefully putting her

wools away, as a succession of knocks reverberated unnecessarily,

accompanied by a sound of people stamping their feet and laughing. A

moment later the room was full of young men and women, who came in

with a peculiar look of expectation, exclaimed “Oh!” when they saw

Denham, and then stood still, gaping rather foolishly.

 

The room very soon contained between twenty and thirty people, who

found seats for the most part upon the floor, occupying the

mattresses, and hunching themselves together into triangular shapes.

They were all young and some of them seemed to make a protest by their

hair and dress, and something somber and truculent in the expression

of their faces, against the more normal type, who would have passed

unnoticed in an omnibus or an underground railway. It was notable that

the talk was confined to groups, and was, at first, entirely spasmodic

in character, and muttered in undertones as if the speakers were

suspicious of their fellow-guests.

 

Katharine Hilbery came in rather late, and took up a position on the

floor, with her back against the wall. She looked round quickly,

recognized about half a dozen people, to whom she nodded, but failed

to see Ralph, or, if so, had already forgotten to attach any name to

him. But in a second these heterogeneous elements were all united by

the voice of Mr. Rodney, who suddenly strode up to the table, and

began very rapidly in high-strained tones:

 

“In undertaking to speak of the Elizabethan use of metaphor in

poetry—”

 

All the different heads swung slightly or steadied themselves into a

position in which they could gaze straight at the speaker’s face, and

the same rather solemn expression was visible on all of them. But, at

the same time, even the faces that were most exposed to view, and

therefore most tautly under control, disclosed a sudden impulsive

tremor which, unless directly checked, would have developed into an

outburst of laughter. The first sight of Mr. Rodney was irresistibly

ludicrous. He was very red in the face, whether from the cool November

night or nervousness, and every movement, from the way he wrung his

hands to the way he jerked his head to right and left, as though a

vision drew him now to the door, now to the window, bespoke his

horrible discomfort under the stare of so many eyes. He was

scrupulously well dressed, and a pearl in the center of his tie seemed

to give him a touch of aristocratic opulence. But the rather prominent

eyes and the impulsive stammering manner, which seemed to indicate a

torrent of ideas intermittently pressing for utterance and always

checked in their course by a clutch of nervousness, drew no pity, as

in the case of a more imposing personage, but a desire to laugh, which

was, however, entirely lacking in malice. Mr. Rodney was evidently so

painfully conscious of the oddity of his appearance, and his very

redness and the starts to which his body was liable gave such proof of

his own discomfort, that there was something endearing in this

ridiculous susceptibility, although most people would probably have

echoed Denham’s private exclamation, “Fancy marrying a creature like

that!”

 

His paper was carefully written out, but in spite of this precaution

Mr. Rodney managed to turn over two sheets instead of one, to choose

the wrong sentence where two were written together, and to discover

his own handwriting suddenly illegible. When he found himself

possessed of a coherent passage, he shook it at his audience almost

aggressively, and then fumbled for another. After a distressing search

a fresh discovery would be made, and produced in the same way, until,

by means of repeated attacks, he had stirred his audience to a degree

of animation quite remarkable in these gatherings. Whether they were

stirred by his enthusiasm for poetry or by the contortions which a

human being was going through for their benefit, it would be hard to

say. At length Mr. Rodney sat down impulsively in the middle of a

sentence, and, after a pause of bewilderment, the audience expressed

its relief at being able to laugh aloud in a decided outburst of

applause.

 

Mr. Rodney acknowledged this with a wild glance round him, and,

instead of waiting to answer questions, he jumped up, thrust himself

through the seated bodies into the corner where Katharine was sitting,

and exclaimed, very audibly:

 

“Well, Katharine, I hope I’ve made a big enough fool of myself even

for you! It was terrible! terrible! terrible!”

 

“Hush! You must answer their questions,” Katharine whispered,

desiring, at all costs, to keep him quiet. Oddly enough, when the

speaker was no longer in front of them, there seemed to be much that

was suggestive in what he had said. At any rate, a pale-faced young

man with sad eyes was already on his feet, delivering an accurately

worded speech with perfect composure. William Rodney listened with a

curious lifting of his upper lip, although his face was still

quivering slightly with emotion.

 

“Idiot!” he whispered. “He’s misunderstood every word I said!”

 

“Well then, answer him,” Katharine whispered back.

 

“No, I shan’t! They’d only laugh at me. Why did I let you persuade me

that these sort of people care for literature?” he continued.

 

There was much to be said both for and against Mr. Rodney’s paper. It

had been crammed with assertions that such-and-such passages, taken

liberally from English, French, and Italian, are the supreme pearls of

literature. Further, he was fond of using metaphors which, compounded

in the study, were apt to sound either cramped or out of place as he

delivered them in fragments. Literature was a fresh garland of spring

flowers, he said, in which yew-berries and the purple nightshade

mingled with the various tints of the anemone; and somehow or other

this garland encircled marble brows. He had read very badly some very

beautiful quotations. But through his manner and his confusion of

language there had emerged some passion of feeling which, as he spoke,

formed in the majority of the audience a little picture or an idea

which each now was eager to give expression to. Most of the people

there proposed to spend their lives in the practice either of writing

or painting, and merely by looking at them it could be seen that, as

they listened to Mr. Purvis first, and then to Mr. Greenhalgh, they

were seeing something done by these gentlemen to a possession which

they thought to be their own. One person after another rose, and, as

with an ill-balanced axe, attempted to hew out his conception of art a

little more clearly, and sat down with the feeling that, for some

reason which he could not grasp, his strokes had gone awry. As they

sat down they turned almost invariably to the person sitting next

them, and rectified and continued what they had just said in public.

Before long, therefore, the groups on the mattresses and the groups on

the chairs were all in communication with each other, and Mary

Datchet, who had begun to darn stockings again, stooped down and

remarked to Ralph:

 

“That was what I call a first-rate paper.”

 

Both of them instinctively turned their eyes in the direction of the

reader of the paper. He was lying back against the wall, with his eyes

apparently shut, and his chin sunk upon his collar. Katharine was

turning over the pages of his manuscript as if she were looking for

some passage that had particularly struck her, and had a difficulty in

finding it.

 

“Let’s go and tell him how much we liked it,” said Mary, thus

suggesting an action which Ralph was anxious to take, though without

her he would have been too proud to do it, for he suspected that he

had more interest in Katharine than she had in him.

 

“That was a very interesting paper,” Mary began, without any shyness,

seating herself on the floor opposite to Rodney and Katharine. “Will

you lend me the manuscript to read in peace?”

 

Rodney, who had opened his eyes on their approach, regarded her for a

moment in suspicious silence.

 

“Do you say that