Night and Day

V >> Virginia Woolf >> Night and Day

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CHAPTER XXIV

The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt towards
the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet
flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring
to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly colored and
sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. Lives frozen by
age, so far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which
neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid,
reflecting the shapes and colors of the present, as well as the shapes
and colors of the past. In the case of Mrs. Hilbery, these early
spring days were chiefly upsetting inasmuch as they caused a general
quickening of her emotional powers, which, as far as the past was
concerned, had never suffered much diminution. But in the spring her
desire for expression invariably increased. She was haunted by the
ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the
combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favorite
authors. She made them for herself on scraps of paper, and rolled them
on her tongue when there seemed no occasion for such eloquence. She
was upheld in these excursions by the certainty that no language could
outdo the splendor of her father's memory, and although her efforts
did not notably further the end of his biography, she was under the
impression of living more in his shade at such times than at others.
No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English
birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport
themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of
the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets
exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly
affected against her better judgment by her mother's enthusiasm. Not
that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a
study of Shakespeare's sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter
of her grandfather's biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous
jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way,
among other things, of writing Shakespeare's sonnets; the idea, struck
out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of
privately printed manuals within the next few days for her
instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature;
she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at
least as good as other people's facts, and all her fancy for the time
being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon. She had a plan, she told
Katharine, when, rather later than usual, Katharine came into the room
the morning after her walk by the river, for visiting Shakespeare's
tomb. Any fact about the poet had become, for the moment, of far
greater interest to her than the immediate present, and the certainty
that there was existing in England a spot of ground where Shakespeare
had undoubtedly stood, where his very bones lay directly beneath one's
feet, was so absorbing to her on this particular occasion that she
greeted her daughter with the exclamation:

"D'you think he ever passed this house?"

The question, for the moment, seemed to Katharine to have reference to
Ralph Denham.

"On his way to Blackfriars, I mean," Mrs. Hilbery continued, "for you
know the latest discovery is that he owned a house there."

Katharine still looked about her in perplexity, and Mrs. Hilbery
added:

"Which is a proof that he wasn't as poor as they've sometimes said. I
should like to think that he had enough, though I don't in the least
want him to be rich."

Then, perceiving her daughter's expression of perplexity, Mrs. Hilbery
burst out laughing.

"My dear, I'm not talking about YOUR William, though that's another
reason for liking him. I'm talking, I'm thinking, I'm dreaming of MY
William--William Shakespeare, of course. Isn't it odd," she mused,
standing at the window and tapping gently upon the pane, "that for all
one can see, that dear old thing in the blue bonnet, crossing the road
with her basket on her arm, has never heard that there was such a
person? Yet it all goes on: lawyers hurrying to their work, cabmen
squabbling for their fares, little boys rolling their hoops, little
girls throwing bread to the gulls, as if there weren't a Shakespeare
in the world. I should like to stand at that crossing all day long and
say: 'People, read Shakespeare!'"

Katharine sat down at her table and opened a long dusty envelope. As
Shelley was mentioned in the course of the letter as if he were alive,
it had, of course, considerable value. Her immediate task was to
decide whether the whole letter should be printed, or only the
paragraph which mentioned Shelley's name, and she reached out for a
pen and held it in readiness to do justice upon the sheet. Her pen,
however, remained in the air. Almost surreptitiously she slipped a
clean sheet in front of her, and her hand, descending, began drawing
square boxes halved and quartered by straight lines, and then circles
which underwent the same process of dissection.

"Katharine! I've hit upon a brilliant idea!" Mrs. Hilbery
exclaimed--"to lay out, say, a hundred pounds or so on copies of
Shakespeare, and give them to working men. Some of your clever friends
who get up meetings might help us, Katharine. And that might lead to a
playhouse, where we could all take parts. You'd be Rosalind--but
you've a dash of the old nurse in you. Your father's Hamlet, come to
years of discretion; and I'm--well, I'm a bit of them all; I'm quite a
large bit of the fool, but the fools in Shakespeare say all the clever
things. Now who shall William be? A hero? Hotspur? Henry the Fifth?
No, William's got a touch of Hamlet in him, too. I can fancy that
William talks to himself when he's alone. Ah, Katharine, you must say
very beautiful things when you're together!" she added wistfully, with
a glance at her daughter, who had told her nothing about the dinner
the night before.

"Oh, we talk a lot of nonsense," said Katharine, hiding her slip of
paper as her mother stood by her, and spreading the old letter about
Shelley in front of her.

"It won't seem to you nonsense in ten years' time," said Mrs. Hilbery.
"Believe me, Katharine, you'll look back on these days afterwards;
you'll remember all the silly things you've said; and you'll find that
your life has been built on them. The best of life is built on what we
say when we're in love. It isn't nonsense, Katharine," she urged,
"it's the truth, it's the only truth."

Katharine was on the point of interrupting her mother, and then she
was on the point of confiding in her. They came strangely close
together sometimes. But, while she hesitated and sought for words not
too direct, her mother had recourse to Shakespeare, and turned page
after page, set upon finding some quotation which said all this about
love far, far better than she could. Accordingly, Katharine did
nothing but scrub one of her circles an intense black with her pencil,
in the midst of which process the telephone-bell rang, and she left
the room to answer it.

When she returned, Mrs. Hilbery had found not the passage she wanted,
but another of exquisite beauty as she justly observed, looking up for
a second to ask Katharine who that was?

"Mary Datchet," Katharine replied briefly.

"Ah--I half wish I'd called you Mary, but it wouldn't have gone with
Hilbery, and it wouldn't have gone with Rodney. Now this isn't the
passage I wanted. (I never can find what I want.) But it's spring;
it's the daffodils; it's the green fields; it's the birds."

She was cut short in her quotation by another imperative
telephone-bell. Once more Katharine left the room.

"My dear child, how odious the triumphs of science are!" Mrs. Hilbery
exclaimed on her return. "They'll be linking us with the moon
next--but who was that?"

"William," Katharine replied yet more briefly.

"I'll forgive William anything, for I'm certain that there aren't any
Williams in the moon. I hope he's coming to luncheon?"

"He's coming to tea."

"Well, that's better than nothing, and I promise to leave you alone."

"There's no need for you to do that," said Katharine.

She swept her hand over the faded sheet, and drew herself up squarely
to the table as if she refused to waste time any longer. The gesture
was not lost upon her mother. It hinted at the existence of something
stern and unapproachable in her daughter's character, which struck
chill upon her, as the sight of poverty, or drunkenness, or the logic
with which Mr. Hilbery sometimes thought good to demolish her
certainty of an approaching millennium struck chill upon her. She went
back to her own table, and putting on her spectacles with a curious
expression of quiet humility, addressed herself for the first time
that morning to the task before her. The shock with an unsympathetic
world had a sobering effect on her. For once, her industry surpassed
her daughter's. Katharine could not reduce the world to that
particular perspective in which Harriet Martineau, for instance, was a
figure of solid importance, and possessed of a genuine relationship to
this figure or to that date. Singularly enough, the sharp call of the
telephone-bell still echoed in her ear, and her body and mind were in
a state of tension, as if, at any moment, she might hear another
summons of greater interest to her than the whole of the nineteenth
century. She did not clearly realize what this call was to be; but
when the ears have got into the habit of listening, they go on
listening involuntarily, and thus Katharine spent the greater part of
the morning in listening to a variety of sounds in the back streets of
Chelsea. For the first time in her life, probably, she wished that
Mrs. Hilbery would not keep so closely to her work. A quotation from
Shakespeare would not have come amiss. Now and again she heard a sigh
from her mother's table, but that was the only proof she gave of her
existence, and Katharine did not think of connecting it with the
square aspect of her own position at the table, or, perhaps, she would
have thrown her pen down and told her mother the reason of her
restlessness. The only writing she managed to accomplish in the course
of the morning was one letter, addressed to her cousin, Cassandra
Otway--a rambling letter, long, affectionate, playful and commanding
all at once. She bade Cassandra put her creatures in the charge of a
groom, and come to them for a week or so. They would go and hear some
music together. Cassandra's dislike of rational society, she said, was
an affectation fast hardening into a prejudice, which would, in the
long run, isolate her from all interesting people and pursuits. She
was finishing the sheet when the sound she was anticipating all the
time actually struck upon her ears. She jumped up hastily, and slammed
the door with a sharpness which made Mrs. Hilbery start. Where was
Katharine off to? In her preoccupied state she had not heard the bell.

The alcove on the stairs, in which the telephone was placed, was
screened for privacy by a curtain of purple velvet. It was a pocket
for superfluous possessions, such as exist in most houses which harbor
the wreckage of three generations. Prints of great-uncles, famed for
their prowess in the East, hung above Chinese teapots, whose sides
were riveted by little gold stitches, and the precious teapots, again,
stood upon bookcases containing the complete works of William Cowper
and Sir Walter Scott. The thread of sound, issuing from the telephone,
was always colored by the surroundings which received it, so it seemed
to Katharine. Whose voice was now going to combine with them, or to
strike a discord?

"Whose voice?" she asked herself, hearing a man inquire, with great
determination, for her number. The unfamiliar voice now asked for Miss
Hilbery. Out of all the welter of voices which crowd round the far end
of the telephone, out of the enormous range of possibilities, whose
voice, what possibility, was this? A pause gave her time to ask
herself this question. It was solved next moment.

"I've looked out the train. . . . Early on Saturday afternoon
would suit me best. . . . I'm Ralph Denham. . . . But I'll write
it down. . . ."

With more than the usual sense of being impinged upon the point of a
bayonet, Katharine replied:

"I think I could come. I'll look at my engagements. . . . Hold on."

She dropped the machine, and looked fixedly at the print of the
great-uncle who had not ceased to gaze, with an air of amiable
authority, into a world which, as yet, beheld no symptoms of the
Indian Mutiny. And yet, gently swinging against the wall, within the
black tube, was a voice which recked nothing of Uncle James, of China
teapots, or of red velvet curtains. She watched the oscillation of the
tube, and at the same moment became conscious of the individuality of
the house in which she stood; she heard the soft domestic sounds of
regular existence upon staircases and floors above her head, and
movements through the wall in the house next door. She had no very
clear vision of Denham himself, when she lifted the telephone to her
lips and replied that she thought Saturday would suit her. She hoped
that he would not say good-bye at once, although she felt no
particular anxiety to attend to what he was saying, and began, even
while he spoke, to think of her own upper room, with its books, its
papers pressed between the leaves of dictionaries, and the table that
could be cleared for work. She replaced the instrument, thoughtfully;
her restlessness was assuaged; she finished her letter to Cassandra
without difficulty, addressed the envelope, and fixed the stamp with
her usual quick decision.

A bunch of anemones caught Mrs. Hilbery's eye when they had finished
luncheon. The blue and purple and white of the bowl, standing in a
pool of variegated light on a polished Chippendale table in the
drawing-room window, made her stop dead with an exclamation of
pleasure.

"Who is lying ill in bed, Katharine?" she demanded. "Which of our
friends wants cheering up? Who feels that they've been forgotten and
passed over, and that nobody wants them? Whose water rates are
overdue, and the cook leaving in a temper without waiting for her
wages? There was somebody I know--" she concluded, but for the moment
the name of this desirable acquaintance escaped her. The best
representative of the forlorn company whose day would be brightened by
a bunch of anemones was, in Katharine's opinion, the widow of a
general living in the Cromwell Road. In default of the actually
destitute and starving, whom she would much have preferred, Mrs.
Hilbery was forced to acknowledge her claims, for though in
comfortable circumstances, she was extremely dull, unattractive,
connected in some oblique fashion with literature, and had been
touched to the verge of tears, on one occasion, by an afternoon call.

It happened that Mrs. Hilbery had an engagement elsewhere, so that the
task of taking the flowers to the Cromwell Road fell upon Katharine.
She took her letter to Cassandra with her, meaning to post it in the
first pillar-box she came to. When, however, she was fairly out of
doors, and constantly invited by pillar-boxes and post-offices to slip
her envelope down their scarlet throats, she forbore. She made absurd
excuses, as that she did not wish to cross the road, or that she was
certain to pass another post-office in a more central position a
little farther on. The longer she held the letter in her hand,
however, the more persistently certain questions pressed upon her, as
if from a collection of voices in the air. These invisible people
wished to be informed whether she was engaged to William Rodney, or
was the engagement broken off? Was it right, they asked, to invite
Cassandra for a visit, and was William Rodney in love with her, or
likely to fall in love? Then the questioners paused for a moment, and
resumed as if another side of the problem had just come to their
notice. What did Ralph Denham mean by what he said to you last night?
Do you consider that he is in love with you? Is it right to consent to
a solitary walk with him, and what advice are you going to give him
about his future? Has William Rodney cause to be jealous of your
conduct, and what do you propose to do about Mary Datchet? What are
you going to do? What does honor require you to do? they repeated.

"Good Heavens!" Katharine exclaimed, after listening to all these
remarks, "I suppose I ought to make up my mind."

But the debate was a formal skirmishing, a pastime to gain breathing-
space. Like all people brought up in a tradition, Katharine was able,
within ten minutes or so, to reduce any moral difficulty to its
traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers. The book of
wisdom lay open, if not upon her mother's knee, upon the knees of many
uncles and aunts. She had only to consult them, and they would at once
turn to the right page and read out an answer exactly suited to one in
her position. The rules which should govern the behavior of an
unmarried woman are written in red ink, graved upon marble, if, by
some freak of nature, it should fall out that the unmarried woman has
not the same writing scored upon her heart. She was ready to believe
that some people are fortunate enough to reject, accept, resign, or
lay down their lives at the bidding of traditional authority; she
could envy them; but in her case the questions became phantoms
directly she tried seriously to find an answer, which proved that the
traditional answer would be of no use to her individually. Yet it had
served so many people, she thought, glancing at the rows of houses on
either side of her, where families, whose incomes must be between a
thousand and fifteen-hundred a year lived, and kept, perhaps, three
servants, and draped their windows with curtains which were always
thick and generally dirty, and must, she thought, since you could only
see a looking-glass gleaming above a sideboard on which a dish of
apples was set, keep the room inside very dark. But she turned her
head away, observing that this was not a method of thinking the matter
out.

The only truth which she could discover was the truth of what she
herself felt--a frail beam when compared with the broad illumination
shed by the eyes of all the people who are in agreement to see
together; but having rejected the visionary voices, she had no choice
but to make this her guide through the dark masses which confronted
her. She tried to follow her beam, with an expression upon her face
which would have made any passer-by think her reprehensibly and almost
ridiculously detached from the surrounding scene. One would have felt
alarmed lest this young and striking woman were about to do something
eccentric. But her beauty saved her from the worst fate that can
befall a pedestrian; people looked at her, but they did not laugh. To
seek a true feeling among the chaos of the unfeelings or half-feelings
of life, to recognize it when found, and to accept the consequences of
the discovery, draws lines upon the smoothest brow, while it quickens
the light of the eyes; it is a pursuit which is alternately
bewildering, debasing, and exalting, and, as Katharine speedily found,
her discoveries gave her equal cause for surprise, shame, and intense
anxiety. Much depended, as usual, upon the interpretation of the word
love; which word came up again and again, whether she considered
Rodney, Denham, Mary Datchet, or herself; and in each case it seemed
to stand for something different, and yet for something unmistakable
and something not to be passed by. For the more she looked into the
confusion of lives which, instead of running parallel, had suddenly
intersected each other, the more distinctly she seemed to convince
herself that there was no other light on them than was shed by this
strange illumination, and no other path save the one upon which it
threw its beams. Her blindness in the case of Rodney, her attempt to
match his true feeling with her false feeling, was a failure never to
be sufficiently condemned; indeed, she could only pay it the tribute
of leaving it a black and naked landmark unburied by attempt at
oblivion or excuse.

With this to humiliate there was much to exalt. She thought of three
different scenes; she thought of Mary sitting upright and saying, "I'm
in love--I'm in love"; she thought of Rodney losing his self-
consciousness among the dead leaves, and speaking with the abandonment
of a child; she thought of Denham leaning upon the stone parapet and
talking to the distant sky, so that she thought him mad. Her mind,
passing from Mary to Denham, from William to Cassandra, and from
Denham to herself--if, as she rather doubted, Denham's state of mind
was connected with herself--seemed to be tracing out the lines of some
symmetrical pattern, some arrangement of life, which invested, if not
herself, at least the others, not only with interest, but with a kind
of tragic beauty. She had a fantastic picture of them upholding
splendid palaces upon their bent backs. They were the lantern-bearers,
whose lights, scattered among the crowd, wove a pattern, dissolving,
joining, meeting again in combination. Half forming such conceptions
as these in her rapid walk along the dreary streets of South
Kensington, she determined that, whatever else might be obscure, she
must further the objects of Mary, Denham, William, and Cassandra. The
way was not apparent. No course of action seemed to her indubitably
right. All she achieved by her thinking was the conviction that, in
such a cause, no risk was too great; and that, far from making any
rules for herself or others, she would let difficulties accumulate
unsolved, situations widen their jaws unsatiated, while she maintained
a position of absolute and fearless independence. So she could best
serve the people who loved.

Read in the light of this exaltation, there was a new meaning in the
words which her mother had penciled upon the card attached to the
bunch of anemones. The door of the house in the Cromwell Road opened;
gloomy vistas of passage and staircase were revealed; such light as
there was seemed to be concentrated upon a silver salver of
visiting-cards, whose black borders suggested that the widow's friends
had all suffered the same bereavement. The parlor-maid could hardly be
expected to fathom the meaning of the grave tone in which the young
lady proffered the flowers, with Mrs. Hilbery's love; and the door
shut upon the offering.

The sight of a face, the slam of a door, are both rather destructive
of exaltation in the abstract; and, as she walked back to Chelsea,
Katharine had her doubts whether anything would come of her resolves.
If you cannot make sure of people, however, you can hold fairly fast
to figures, and in some way or other her thought about such problems
as she was wont to consider worked in happily with her mood as to her
friends' lives. She reached home rather late for tea.

On the ancient Dutch chest in the hall she perceived one or two hats,
coats, and walking-sticks, and the sound of voices reached her as she
stood outside the drawing-room door. Her mother gave a little cry as
she came in; a cry which conveyed to Katharine the fact that she was
late, that the teacups and milk-jugs were in a conspiracy of
disobedience, and that she must immediately take her place at the head
of the table and pour out tea for the guests. Augustus Pelham, the
diarist, liked a calm atmosphere in which to tell his stories; he
liked attention; he liked to elicit little facts, little stories,
about the past and the great dead, from such distinguished characters
as Mrs. Hilbery for the nourishment of his diary, for whose sake he
frequented tea-tables and ate yearly an enormous quantity of buttered
toast. He, therefore, welcomed Katharine with relief, and she had
merely to shake hands with Rodney and to greet the American lady who
had come to be shown the relics, before the talk started again on the
broad lines of reminiscence and discussion which were familiar to her.

Yet, even with this thick veil between them, she could not help
looking at Rodney, as if she could detect what had happened to him
since they met. It was in vain. His clothes, even the white slip, the
pearl in his tie, seemed to intercept her quick glance, and to
proclaim the futility of such inquiries of a discreet, urbane
gentleman, who balanced his cup of tea and poised a slice of bread and
butter on the edge of the saucer. He would not meet her eye, but that
could be accounted for by his activity in serving and helping, and the
polite alacrity with which he was answering the questions of the
American visitor.

It was certainly a sight to daunt any one coming in with a head full
of theories about love. The voices of the invisible questioners were
reinforced by the scene round the table, and sounded with a tremendous
self-confidence, as if they had behind them the common sense of twenty
generations, together with the immediate approval of Mr. Augustus
Pelham, Mrs. Vermont Bankes, William Rodney, and, possibly, Mrs.
Hilbery herself. Katharine set her teeth, not entirely in the
metaphorical sense, for her hand, obeying the impulse towards definite
action, laid firmly upon the table beside her an envelope which she
had been grasping all this time in complete forgetfulness. The address
was uppermost, and a moment later she saw William's eye rest upon it
as he rose to fulfil some duty with a plate. His expression instantly
changed. He did what he was on the point of doing, and then looked at
Katharine with a look which revealed enough of his confusion to show
her that he was not entirely represented by his appearance. In a
minute or two he proved himself at a loss with Mrs. Vermont Bankes,
and Mrs. Hilbery, aware of the silence with her usual quickness,
suggested that, perhaps, it was now time that Mrs. Bankes should be
shown "our things."

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