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