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

merely to disguise the fact of my ridiculous

failure?” he asked.

 

Katharine looked up from her reading with a smile.

 

“He says he doesn’t mind what we think of him,” she remarked. “He says

we don’t care a rap for art of any kind.”

 

“I asked her to pity me, and she teases me!” Rodney exclaimed.

 

“I don’t intend to pity you, Mr. Rodney,” Mary remarked, kindly, but

firmly. “When a paper’s a failure, nobody says anything, whereas now,

just listen to them!”

 

The sound, which filled the room, with its hurry of short syllables,

its sudden pauses, and its sudden attacks, might be compared to some

animal hubbub, frantic and inarticulate.

 

“D’you think that’s all about my paper?” Rodney inquired, after a

moment’s attention, with a distinct brightening of expression.

 

“Of course it is,” said Mary. “It was a very suggestive paper.”

 

She turned to Denham for confirmation, and he corroborated her.

 

“It’s the ten minutes after a paper is read that proves whether it’s

been a success or not,” he said. “If I were you, Rodney, I should be

very pleased with myself.”

 

This commendation seemed to comfort Mr. Rodney completely, and he

began to bethink him of all the passages in his paper which deserved

to be called “suggestive.”

 

“Did you agree at all, Denham, with what I said about Shakespeare’s

later use of imagery? I’m afraid I didn’t altogether make my meaning

plain.”

 

Here he gathered himself together, and by means of a series of

frog-like jerks, succeeded in bringing himself close to Denham.

 

Denham answered him with the brevity which is the result of having

another sentence in the mind to be addressed to another person. He

wished to say to Katharine: “Did you remember to get that picture

glazed before your aunt came to dinner?” but, besides having to answer

Rodney, he was not sure that the remark, with its assertion of

intimacy, would not strike Katharine as impertinent. She was listening

to what some one in another group was saying. Rodney, meanwhile, was

talking about the Elizabethan dramatists.

 

He was a curious-looking man since, upon first sight, especially if he

chanced to be talking with animation, he appeared, in some way,

ridiculous; but, next moment, in repose, his face, with its large

nose, thin cheeks and lips expressing the utmost sensibility, somehow

recalled a Roman head bound with laurel, cut upon a circle of semi-transparent reddish stone. It had dignity and character. By profession

a clerk in a Government office, he was one of those martyred spirits

to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost

intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they

must attempt to practise it themselves, and they are generally endowed

with very little facility in composition. They condemn whatever they

produce. Moreover, the violence of their feelings is such that they

seldom meet with adequate sympathy, and being rendered very sensitive

by their cultivated perceptions, suffer constant slights both to their

own persons and to the thing they worship. But Rodney could never

resist making trial of the sympathies of any one who seemed favorably

disposed, and Denham’s praise had stimulated his very susceptible

vanity.

 

“You remember the passage just before the death of the Duchess?” he

continued, edging still closer to Denham, and adjusting his elbow and

knee in an incredibly angular combination. Here, Katharine, who had

been cut off by these maneuvers from all communication with the outer

world, rose, and seated herself upon the window-sill, where she was

joined by Mary Datchet. The two young women could thus survey the

whole party. Denham looked after them, and made as if he were tearing

handfuls of grass up by the roots from the carpet. But as it fell in

accurately with his conception of life that all one’s desires were

bound to be frustrated, he concentrated his mind upon literature, and

determined, philosophically, to get what he could out of that.

 

Katharine was pleasantly excited. A variety of courses was open to

her. She knew several people slightly, and at any moment one of them

might rise from the floor and come and speak to her; on the other

hand, she might select somebody for herself, or she might strike into

Rodney’s discourse, to which she was intermittently attentive. She was

conscious of Mary’s body beside her, but, at the same time, the

consciousness of being both of them women made it unnecessary to speak

to her. But Mary, feeling, as she had said, that Katharine was a

“personality,” wished so much to speak to her that in a few moments

she did.

 

“They’re exactly like a flock of sheep, aren’t they?” she said,

referring to the noise that rose from the scattered bodies beneath

her.

 

Katharine turned and smiled.

 

“I wonder what they’re making such a noise about?” she said.

 

“The Elizabethans, I suppose.”

 

“No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the Elizabethans.

There! Didn’t you hear them say, ‘Insurance Bill’?”

 

“I wonder why men always talk about politics?” Mary speculated. “I

suppose, if we had votes, we should, too.”

 

“I dare say we should. And you spend your life in getting us votes,

don’t you?”

 

“I do,” said Mary, stoutly. “From ten to six every day I’m at it.”

 

Katharine looked at Ralph Denham, who was now pounding his way through

the metaphysics of metaphor with Rodney, and was reminded of his talk

that Sunday afternoon. She connected him vaguely with Mary.

 

“I suppose you’re one of the people who think we should all have

professions,” she said, rather distantly, as if feeling her way among

the phantoms of an unknown world.

 

“Oh dear no,” said Mary at once.

 

“Well, I think I do,” Katharine continued, with half a sigh. “You will

always be able to say that you’ve done something, whereas, in a crowd

like this, I feel rather melancholy.”

 

“In a crowd? Why in a crowd?” Mary asked, deepening the two lines

between her eyes, and hoisting herself nearer to Katharine upon the

window-sill.

 

“Don’t you see how many different things these people care about? And

I want to beat them down—I only mean,” she corrected herself, “that I

want to assert myself, and it’s difficult, if one hasn’t a

profession.”

 

Mary smiled, thinking that to beat people down was a process that

should present no difficulty to Miss Katharine Hilbery. They knew each

other so slightly that the beginning of intimacy, which Katharine

seemed to initiate by talking about herself, had something solemn in

it, and they were silent, as if to decide whether to proceed or not.

They tested the ground.

 

“Ah, but I want to trample upon their prostrate bodies!” Katharine

announced, a moment later, with a laugh, as if at the train of thought

which had led her to this conclusion.

 

“One doesn’t necessarily trample upon people’s bodies because one runs

an office,” Mary remarked.

 

“No. Perhaps not,” Katharine replied. The conversation lapsed, and

Mary saw Katharine looking out into the room rather moodily with

closed lips, the desire to talk about herself or to initiate a

friendship having, apparently, left her. Mary was struck by her

capacity for being thus easily silent, and occupied with her own

thoughts. It was a habit that spoke of loneliness and a mind thinking

for itself. When Katharine remained silent Mary was slightly

embarrassed.

 

“Yes, they’re very like sheep,” she repeated, foolishly.

 

“And yet they are very clever—at least,” Katharine added, “I suppose

they have all read Webster.”

 

“Surely you don’t think that a proof of cleverness? I’ve read Webster,

I’ve read Ben Jonson, but I don’t think myself clever—not exactly, at

least.”

 

“I think you must be very clever,” Katharine observed.

 

“Why? Because I run an office?”

 

“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking how you live alone in this

room, and have parties.”

 

Mary reflected for a second.

 

“It means, chiefly, a power of being disagreeable to one’s own family,

I think. I have that, perhaps. I didn’t want to live at home, and I

told my father. He didn’t like it… . But then I have a sister, and

you haven’t, have you?”

 

“No, I haven’t any sisters.”

 

“You are writing a life of your grandfather?” Mary pursued.

 

Katharine seemed instantly to be confronted by some familiar thought

from which she wished to escape. She replied, “Yes, I am helping my

mother,” in such a way that Mary felt herself baffled, and put back

again into the position in which she had been at the beginning of

their talk. It seemed to her that Katharine possessed a curious power

of drawing near and receding, which sent alternate emotions through

her far more quickly than was usual, and kept her in a condition of

curious alertness. Desiring to classify her, Mary bethought her of the

convenient term “egoist.”

 

“She’s an egoist,” she said to herself, and stored that word up to

give to Ralph one day when, as it would certainly fall out, they were

discussing Miss Hilbery.

 

“Heavens, what a mess there’ll be tomorrow morning!” Katharine

exclaimed. “I hope you don’t sleep in this room, Miss Datchet?”

 

Mary laughed.

 

“What are you laughing at?” Katharine demanded.

 

“I won’t tell you.”

 

“Let me guess. You were laughing because you thought I’d changed the

conversation?”

 

“No.”

 

“Because you think—” She paused.

 

“If you want to know, I was laughing at the way you said Miss

Datchet.”

 

“Mary, then. Mary, Mary, Mary.”

 

So saying, Katharine drew back the curtain in order, perhaps, to

conceal the momentary flush of pleasure which is caused by coming

perceptibly nearer to another person.

 

“Mary Datchet,” said Mary. “It’s not such an imposing name as

Katharine Hilbery, I’m afraid.”

 

They both looked out of the window, first up at the hard silver moon,

stationary among a hurry of little grey-blue clouds, and then down

upon the roofs of London, with all their upright chimneys, and then

below them at the empty moonlit pavement of the street, upon which the

joint of each paving-stone was clearly marked out. Mary then saw

Katharine raise her eyes again to the moon, with a contemplative look

in them, as though she were setting that moon against the moon of

other nights, held in memory. Some one in the room behind them made a

joke about star-gazing, which destroyed their pleasure in it, and they

looked back into the room again.

 

Ralph had been watching for this moment, and he instantly produced his

sentence.

 

“I wonder, Miss Hilbery, whether you remembered to get that picture

glazed?” His voice showed that the question was one that had been

prepared.

 

“Oh, you idiot!” Mary exclaimed, very nearly aloud, with a sense that

Ralph had said something very stupid. So, after three lessons in Latin

grammar, one might correct a fellow student, whose knowledge did not

embrace the ablative of “mensa.”

 

“Picture—what picture?” Katharine asked. “Oh, at home, you mean—that

Sunday afternoon. Was it the day Mr. Fortescue came? Yes, I think I

remembered it.”

 

The three of them stood for a moment awkwardly silent, and then Mary

left them in order to see that the great pitcher of coffee was

properly handled, for beneath all her education she preserved the

anxieties of one who owns china.

 

Ralph could think of nothing further to say; but could one have

stripped off his mask of flesh, one would have seen that his will-power was rigidly set upon a single object—that Miss Hilbery should

obey him. He wished her to stay there until, by some measures not yet

apparent