Night and Day by Virginia Woolf (websites to read books for free .TXT) 📖

The young man shut the door with a sharper slam than any visitor had

used that afternoon, and walked up the street at a great pace, cutting

the air with his walking-stick. He was glad to find himself outside

that drawing-room, breathing raw fog, and in contact with unpolished

people who only wanted their share of the pavement allowed them. He

thought that if he had had Mr. or Mrs. or Miss Hilbery out here he

would have made them, somehow, feel his superiority, for he was chafed

by the memory of halting awkward sentences which had failed to give

even the young woman with the sad, but inwardly ironical eyes a hint

of his force. He tried to recall the actual words of his little

outburst, and unconsciously supplemented them by so many words of

greater expressiveness that the irritation of his failure was somewhat

assuaged. Sudden stabs of the unmitigated truth assailed him now and

then, for he was not inclined by nature to take a rosy view of his

conduct, but what with the beat of his foot upon the pavement, and the

glimpse which half-drawn curtains offered him of kitchens, dining-rooms, and drawing-rooms, illustrating with mute power different

scenes from different lives, his own experience lost its sharpness.

His own experience underwent a curious change. His speed slackened,

his head sank a little towards his breast, and the lamplight shone now

and again upon a face grown strangely tranquil. His thought was so

absorbing that when it became necessary to verify the name of a

street, he looked at it for a time before he read it; when he came to

a crossing, he seemed to have to reassure himself by two or three

taps, such as a blind man gives, upon the curb; and, reaching the

Underground station, he blinked in the bright circle of light, glanced

at his watch, decided that he might still indulge himself in darkness,

and walked straight on.

And yet the thought was the thought with which he had started. He was

still thinking about the people in the house which he had left; but

instead of remembering, with whatever accuracy he could, their looks

and sayings, he had consciously taken leave of the literal truth. A

turn of the street, a firelit room, something monumental in the

procession of the lamp-posts, who shall say what accident of light or

shape had suddenly changed the prospect within his mind, and led him

to murmur aloud:

“She’ll do… . Yes, Katharine Hilbery’ll do… . I’ll take

Katharine Hilbery.”

As soon as he had said this, his pace slackened, his head fell, his

eyes became fixed. The desire to justify himself, which had been so

urgent, ceased to torment him, and, as if released from constraint, so

that they worked without friction or bidding, his faculties leapt

forward and fixed, as a matter of course, upon the form of Katharine

Hilbery. It was marvellous how much they found to feed upon,

considering the destructive nature of Denham’s criticism in her

presence. The charm, which he had tried to disown, when under the

effect of it, the beauty, the character, the aloofness, which he had

been determined not to feel, now possessed him wholly; and when, as

happened by the nature of things, he had exhausted his memory, he went

on with his imagination. He was conscious of what he was about, for in

thus dwelling upon Miss Hilbery’s qualities, he showed a kind of

method, as if he required this vision of her for a particular purpose.

He increased her height, he darkened her hair; but physically there

was not much to change in her. His most daring liberty was taken with

her mind, which, for reasons of his own, he desired to be exalted and

infallible, and of such independence that it was only in the case of

Ralph Denham that it swerved from its high, swift flight, but where he

was concerned, though fastidious at first, she finally swooped from

her eminence to crown him with her approval. These delicious details,

however, were to be worked out in all their ramifications at his

leisure; the main point was that Katharine Hilbery would do; she would

do for weeks, perhaps for months. In taking her he had provided

himself with something the lack of which had left a bare place in his

mind for a considerable time. He gave a sigh of satisfaction; his

consciousness of his actual position somewhere in the neighborhood of

Knightsbridge returned to him, and he was soon speeding in the train

towards Highgate.

Although thus supported by the knowledge of his new possession of

considerable value, he was not proof against the familiar thoughts

which the suburban streets and the damp shrubs growing in front

gardens and the absurd names painted in white upon the gates of those

gardens suggested to him. His walk was uphill, and his mind dwelt

gloomily upon the house which he approached, where he would find six

or seven brothers and sisters, a widowed mother, and, probably, some

aunt or uncle sitting down to an unpleasant meal under a very bright

light. Should he put in force the threat which, two weeks ago, some

such gathering had wrung from him—the terrible threat that if

visitors came on Sunday he should dine alone in his room? A glance in

the direction of Miss Hilbery determined him to make his stand this

very night, and accordingly, having let himself in, having verified

the presence of Uncle Joseph by means of a bowler hat and a very large

umbrella, he gave his orders to the maid, and went upstairs to his

room.

He went up a great many flights of stairs, and he noticed, as he had

very seldom noticed, how the carpet became steadily shabbier, until it

ceased altogether, how the walls were discolored, sometimes by

cascades of damp, and sometimes by the outlines of picture-frames

since removed, how the paper flapped loose at the corners, and a great

flake of plaster had fallen from the ceiling. The room itself was a

cheerless one to return to at this inauspicious hour. A flattened sofa

would, later in the evening, become a bed; one of the tables concealed

a washing apparatus; his clothes and boots were disagreeably mixed

with books which bore the gilt of college arms; and, for decoration,

there hung upon the wall photographs of bridges and cathedrals and

large, unprepossessing groups of insufficiently clothed young men,

sitting in rows one above another upon stone steps. There was a look

of meanness and shabbiness in the furniture and curtains, and nowhere

any sign of luxury or even of a cultivated taste, unless the cheap

classics in the bookcase were a sign of an effort in that direction.

The only object that threw any light upon