Night and Day

V >> Virginia Woolf >> Night and Day

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"My dear," Cassandra exclaimed, shaking the book at her cousin, "my
whole life's changed from this moment! I must write the man's name
down at once, or I shall forget--"

Whose name, what book, which life was changed Katharine proceeded to
ascertain. She began to lay aside her clothes hurriedly, for she was
very late.

"May I sit and watch you?" Cassandra asked, shutting up her book. "I
got ready on purpose."

"Oh, you're ready, are you?" said Katharine, half turning in the midst
of her operations, and looking at Cassandra, who sat, clasping her
knees, on the edge of the bed.

"There are people dining here," she said, taking in the effect of
Cassandra from a new point of view. After an interval, the
distinction, the irregular charm, of the small face with its long
tapering nose and its bright oval eyes were very notable. The hair
rose up off the forehead rather stiffly, and, given a more careful
treatment by hairdressers and dressmakers, the light angular figure
might possess a likeness to a French lady of distinction in the
eighteenth century.

"Who's coming to dinner?" Cassandra asked, anticipating further
possibilities of rapture.

"There's William, and, I believe, Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Aubrey."

"I'm so glad William is coming. Did he tell you that he sent me his
manuscript? I think it's wonderful--I think he's almost good enough
for you, Katharine."

"You shall sit next to him and tell him what you think of him."

"I shan't dare do that," Cassandra asserted.

"Why? You're not afraid of him, are you?"

"A little--because he's connected with you."

Katharine smiled.

"But then, with your well-known fidelity, considering that you're
staying here at least a fortnight, you won't have any illusions left
about me by the time you go. I give you a week, Cassandra. I shall see
my power fading day by day. Now it's at the climax; but to-morrow
it'll have begun to fade. What am I to wear, I wonder? Find me a blue
dress, Cassandra, over there in the long wardrobe."

She spoke disconnectedly, handling brush and comb, and pulling out the
little drawers in her dressing-table and leaving them open. Cassandra,
sitting on the bed behind her, saw the reflection of her cousin's face
in the looking-glass. The face in the looking-glass was serious and
intent, apparently occupied with other things besides the straightness
of the parting which, however, was being driven as straight as a Roman
road through the dark hair. Cassandra was impressed again by
Katharine's maturity; and, as she enveloped herself in the blue dress
which filled almost the whole of the long looking-glass with blue
light and made it the frame of a picture, holding not only the
slightly moving effigy of the beautiful woman, but shapes and colors
of objects reflected from the background, Cassandra thought that no
sight had ever been quite so romantic. It was all in keeping with the
room and the house, and the city round them; for her ears had not yet
ceased to notice the hum of distant wheels.

They went downstairs rather late, in spite of Katharine's extreme
speed in getting ready. To Cassandra's ears the buzz of voices inside
the drawing-room was like the tuning up of the instruments of the
orchestra. It seemed to her that there were numbers of people in the
room, and that they were strangers, and that they were beautiful and
dressed with the greatest distinction, although they proved to be
mostly her relations, and the distinction of their clothing was
confined, in the eyes of an impartial observer, to the white waistcoat
which Rodney wore. But they all rose simultaneously, which was by
itself impressive, and they all exclaimed, and shook hands, and she
was introduced to Mr. Peyton, and the door sprang open, and dinner was
announced, and they filed off, William Rodney offering her his
slightly bent black arm, as she had secretly hoped he would. In short,
had the scene been looked at only through her eyes, it must have been
described as one of magical brilliancy. The pattern of the
soup-plates, the stiff folds of the napkins, which rose by the side of
each plate in the shape of arum lilies, the long sticks of bread tied
with pink ribbon, the silver dishes and the sea-colored champagne
glasses, with the flakes of gold congealed in their stems--all these
details, together with a curiously pervasive smell of kid gloves,
contributed to her exhilaration, which must be repressed, however,
because she was grown up, and the world held no more for her to marvel
at.

The world held no more for her to marvel at, it is true; but it held
other people; and each other person possessed in Cassandra's mind some
fragment of what privately she called "reality." It was a gift that
they would impart if you asked them for it, and thus no dinner-party
could possibly be dull, and little Mr. Peyton on her right and William
Rodney on her left were in equal measure endowed with the quality
which seemed to her so unmistakable and so precious that the way
people neglected to demand it was a constant source of surprise to
her. She scarcely knew, indeed, whether she was talking to Mr. Peyton
or to William Rodney. But to one who, by degrees, assumed the shape of
an elderly man with a mustache, she described how she had arrived in
London that very afternoon, and how she had taken a cab and driven
through the streets. Mr. Peyton, an editor of fifty years, bowed his
bald head repeatedly, with apparent understanding. At least, he
understood that she was very young and pretty, and saw that she was
excited, though he could not gather at once from her words or remember
from his own experience what there was to be excited about. "Were
there any buds on the trees?" he asked. "Which line did she travel
by?"

He was cut short in these amiable inquiries by her desire to know
whether he was one of those who read, or one of those who look out of
the window? Mr. Peyton was by no means sure which he did. He rather
thought he did both. He was told that he had made a most dangerous
confession. She could deduce his entire history from that one fact. He
challenged her to proceed; and she proclaimed him a Liberal Member of
Parliament.

William, nominally engaged in a desultory conversation with Aunt
Eleanor, heard every word, and taking advantage of the fact that
elderly ladies have little continuity of conversation, at least with
those whom they esteem for their youth and their sex, he asserted his
presence by a very nervous laugh.

Cassandra turned to him directly. She was enchanted to find that,
instantly and with such ease, another of these fascinating beings was
offering untold wealth for her extraction.

"There's no doubt what YOU do in a railway carriage, William," she
said, making use in her pleasure of his first name. "You never ONCE
look out of the window; you read ALL the time."

"And what facts do you deduce from that?" Mr. Peyton asked.

"Oh, that he's a poet, of course," said Cassandra. "But I must confess
that I knew that before, so it isn't fair. I've got your manuscript
with me," she went on, disregarding Mr. Peyton in a shameless way.
"I've got all sorts of things I want to ask you about it."

William inclined his head and tried to conceal the pleasure that her
remark gave him. But the pleasure was not unalloyed. However
susceptible to flattery William might be, he would never tolerate it
from people who showed a gross or emotional taste in literature, and
if Cassandra erred even slightly from what he considered essential in
this respect he would express his discomfort by flinging out his hands
and wrinkling his forehead; he would find no pleasure in her flattery
after that.

"First of all," she proceeded, "I want to know why you chose to write
a play?"

"Ah! You mean it's not dramatic?"

"I mean that I don't see what it would gain by being acted. But then
does Shakespeare gain? Henry and I are always arguing about
Shakespeare. I'm certain he's wrong, but I can't prove it because I've
only seen Shakespeare acted once in Lincoln. But I'm quite positive,"
she insisted, "that Shakespeare wrote for the stage."

"You're perfectly right," Rodney exclaimed. "I was hoping you were on
that side. Henry's wrong--entirely wrong. Of course, I've failed, as
all the moderns fail. Dear, dear, I wish I'd consulted you before."

From this point they proceeded to go over, as far as memory served
them, the different aspects of Rodney's drama. She said nothing that
jarred upon him, and untrained daring had the power to stimulate
experience to such an extent that Rodney was frequently seen to hold
his fork suspended before him, while he debated the first principles
of the art. Mrs. Hilbery thought to herself that she had never seen
him to such advantage; yes, he was somehow different; he reminded her
of some one who was dead, some one who was distinguished--she had
forgotten his name.

Cassandra's voice rose high in its excitement.

"You've not read 'The Idiot'!" she exclaimed.

"I've read 'War and Peace'," William replied, a little testily.

"'WAR AND PEACE'!" she echoed, in a tone of derision.

"I confess I don't understand the Russians."

"Shake hands! Shake hands!" boomed Uncle Aubrey from across the table.
"Neither do I. And I hazard the opinion that they don't themselves."

The old gentleman had ruled a large part of the Indian Empire, but he
was in the habit of saying that he had rather have written the works
of Dickens. The table now took possession of a subject much to its
liking. Aunt Eleanor showed premonitory signs of pronouncing an
opinion. Although she had blunted her taste upon some form of
philanthropy for twenty-five years, she had a fine natural instinct
for an upstart or a pretender, and knew to a hairbreadth what
literature should be and what it should not be. She was born to the
knowledge, and scarcely thought it a matter to be proud of.

"Insanity is not a fit subject for fiction," she announced positively.

"There's the well-known case of Hamlet," Mr. Hilbery interposed, in
his leisurely, half-humorous tones.

"Ah, but poetry's different, Trevor," said Aunt Eleanor, as if she had
special authority from Shakespeare to say so. "Different altogether.
And I've never thought, for my part, that Hamlet was as mad as they
make out. What is your opinion, Mr. Peyton?" For, as there was a
minister of literature present in the person of the editor of an
esteemed review, she deferred to him.

Mr. Peyton leant a little back in his chair, and, putting his head
rather on one side, observed that that was a question that he had
never been able to answer entirely to his satisfaction. There was much
to be said on both sides, but as he considered upon which side he
should say it, Mrs. Hilbery broke in upon his judicious meditations.

"Lovely, lovely Ophelia!" she exclaimed. "What a wonderful power it
is--poetry! I wake up in the morning all bedraggled; there's a yellow
fog outside; little Emily turns on the electric light when she brings
me my tea, and says, 'Oh, ma'am, the water's frozen in the cistern,
and cook's cut her finger to the bone.' And then I open a little green
book, and the birds are singing, the stars shining, the flowers
twinkling--" She looked about her as if these presences had suddenly
manifested themselves round her dining-room table.

"Has the cook cut her finger badly?" Aunt Eleanor demanded, addressing
herself naturally to Katharine.

"Oh, the cook's finger is only my way of putting it," said Mrs.
Hilbery. "But if she had cut her arm off, Katharine would have sewn it
on again," she remarked, with an affectionate glance at her daughter,
who looked, she thought, a little sad. "But what horrid, horrid
thoughts," she wound up, laying down her napkin and pushing her chair
back. "Come, let us find something more cheerful to talk about
upstairs."

Upstairs in the drawing-room Cassandra found fresh sources of
pleasure, first in the distinguished and expectant look of the room,
and then in the chance of exercising her divining-rod upon a new
assortment of human beings. But the low tones of the women, their
meditative silences, the beauty which, to her at least, shone even
from black satin and the knobs of amber which encircled elderly necks,
changed her wish to chatter to a more subdued desire merely to watch
and to whisper. She entered with delight into an atmosphere in which
private matters were being interchanged freely, almost in
monosyllables, by the older women who now accepted her as one of
themselves. Her expression became very gentle and sympathetic, as if
she, too, were full of solicitude for the world which was somehow
being cared for, managed and deprecated by Aunt Maggie and Aunt
Eleanor. After a time she perceived that Katharine was outside the
community in some way, and, suddenly, she threw aside her wisdom and
gentleness and concern and began to laugh.

"What are you laughing at?" Katharine asked.

A joke so foolish and unfilial wasn't worth explaining.

"It was nothing--ridiculous--in the worst of taste, but still, if you
half shut your eyes and looked--" Katharine half shut her eyes and
looked, but she looked in the wrong direction, and Cassandra laughed
more than ever, and was still laughing and doing her best to explain
in a whisper that Aunt Eleanor, through half-shut eyes, was like the
parrot in the cage at Stogdon House, when the gentlemen came in and
Rodney walked straight up to them and wanted to know what they were
laughing at.

"I utterly refuse to tell you!" Cassandra replied, standing up
straight, clasping her hands in front of her, and facing him. Her
mockery was delicious to him. He had not even for a second the fear
that she had been laughing at him. She was laughing because life was
so adorable, so enchanting.

"Ah, but you're cruel to make me feel the barbarity of my sex," he
replied, drawing his feet together and pressing his finger-tips upon
an imaginary opera-hat or malacca cane. "We've been discussing all
sorts of dull things, and now I shall never know what I want to know
more than anything in the world."

"You don't deceive us for a minute!" she cried. "Not for a second. We
both know that you've been enjoying yourself immensely. Hasn't he,
Katharine?"

"No," she replied, "I think he's speaking the truth. He doesn't care
much for politics."

Her words, though spoken simply, produced a curious change in the
light, sparkling atmosphere. William at once lost his look of
animation and said seriously:

"I detest politics."

"I don't think any man has the right to say that," said Cassandra,
almost severely.

"I agree. I mean that I detest politicians," he corrected himself
quickly.

"You see, I believe Cassandra is what they call a Feminist," Katharine
went on. "Or rather, she was a Feminist six months ago, but it's no
good supposing that she is now what she was then. That is one of her
greatest charms in my eyes. One never can tell." She smiled at her as
an elder sister might smile.

"Katharine, you make one feel so horribly small!" Cassandra exclaimed.

"No, no, that's not what she means," Rodney interposed. "I quite agree
that women have an immense advantage over us there. One misses a lot
by attempting to know things thoroughly."

"He knows Greek thoroughly," said Katharine. "But then he also knows a
good deal about painting, and a certain amount about music. He's very
cultivated--perhaps the most cultivated person I know."

"And poetry," Cassandra added.

"Yes, I was forgetting his play," Katharine remarked, and turning her
head as though she saw something that needed her attention in a far
corner of the room, she left them.

For a moment they stood silent, after what seemed a deliberate
introduction to each other, and Cassandra watched her crossing the
room.

"Henry," she said next moment, "would say that a stage ought to be no
bigger than this drawing-room. He wants there to be singing and
dancing as well as acting--only all the opposite of Wagner--you
understand?"

They sat down, and Katharine, turning when she reached the window, saw
William with his hand raised in gesticulation and his mouth open, as
if ready to speak the moment Cassandra ceased.

Katharine's duty, whether it was to pull a curtain or move a chair,
was either forgotten or discharged, but she continued to stand by the
window without doing anything. The elderly people were all grouped
together round the fire. They seemed an independent, middle-aged
community busy with its own concerns. They were telling stories very
well and listening to them very graciously. But for her there was no
obvious employment.

"If anybody says anything, I shall say that I'm looking at the river,"
she thought, for in her slavery to her family traditions, she was
ready to pay for her transgression with some plausible falsehood. She
pushed aside the blind and looked at the river. But it was a dark
night and the water was barely visible. Cabs were passing, and couples
were loitering slowly along the road, keeping as close to the railings
as possible, though the trees had as yet no leaves to cast shadow upon
their embraces. Katharine, thus withdrawn, felt her loneliness. The
evening had been one of pain, offering her, minute after minute,
plainer proof that things would fall out as she had foreseen. She had
faced tones, gestures, glances; she knew, with her back to them, that
William, even now, was plunging deeper and deeper into the delight of
unexpected understanding with Cassandra. He had almost told her that
he was finding it infinitely better than he could have believed. She
looked out of the window, sternly determined to forget private
misfortunes, to forget herself, to forget individual lives. With her
eyes upon the dark sky, voices reached her from the room in which she
was standing. She heard them as if they came from people in another
world, a world antecedent to her world, a world that was the prelude,
the antechamber to reality; it was as if, lately dead, she heard the
living talking. The dream nature of our life had never been more
apparent to her, never had life been more certainly an affair of four
walls, whose objects existed only within the range of lights and
fires, beyond which lay nothing, or nothing more than darkness. She
seemed physically to have stepped beyond the region where the light of
illusion still makes it desirable to possess, to love, to struggle.
And yet her melancholy brought her no serenity. She still heard the
voices within the room. She was still tormented by desires. She wished
to be beyond their range. She wished inconsistently enough that she
could find herself driving rapidly through the streets; she was even
anxious to be with some one who, after a moment's groping, took a
definite shape and solidified into the person of Mary Datchet. She
drew the curtains so that the draperies met in deep folds in the
middle of the window.

"Ah, there she is," said Mr. Hilbery, who was standing swaying affably
from side to side, with his back to the fire. "Come here, Katharine. I
couldn't see where you'd got to--our children," he observed
parenthetically, "have their uses--I want you to go to my study,
Katharine; go to the third shelf on the right-hand side of the door;
take down 'Trelawny's Recollections of Shelley'; bring it to me. Then,
Peyton, you will have to admit to the assembled company that you have
been mistaken."

"'Trelawny's Recollections of Shelley.' The third shelf on the right
of the door," Katharine repeated. After all, one does not check
children in their play, or rouse sleepers from their dreams. She
passed William and Cassandra on her way to the door.

"Stop, Katharine," said William, speaking almost as if he were
conscious of her against his will. "Let me go." He rose, after a
second's hesitation, and she understood that it cost him an effort.
She knelt one knee upon the sofa where Cassandra sat, looking down at
her cousin's face, which still moved with the speed of what she had
been saying.

"Are you--happy?" she asked.

"Oh, my dear!" Cassandra exclaimed, as if no further words were
needed. "Of course, we disagree about every subject under the sun,"
she exclaimed, "but I think he's the cleverest man I've ever met--and
you're the most beautiful woman," she added, looking at Katharine, and
as she looked her face lost its animation and became almost melancholy
in sympathy with Katharine's melancholy, which seemed to Cassandra the
last refinement of her distinction.

"Ah, but it's only ten o'clock," said Katharine darkly.

"As late as that! Well--?" She did not understand.

"At twelve my horses turn into rats and off I go. The illusion fades.
But I accept my fate. I make hay while the sun shines." Cassandra
looked at her with a puzzled expression.

"Here's Katharine talking about rats, and hay, and all sorts of odd
things," she said, as William returned to them. He had been quick.
"Can you make her out?"

Katharine perceived from his little frown and hesitation that he did
not find that particular problem to his taste at present. She stood
upright at once and said in a different tone:

"I really am off, though. I wish you'd explain if they say anything,
William. I shan't be late, but I've got to see some one."

"At this time of night?" Cassandra exclaimed.

"Whom have you got to see?" William demanded.

"A friend," she remarked, half turning her head towards him. She knew
that he wished her to stay, not, indeed, with them, but in their
neighborhood, in case of need.

"Katharine has a great many friends," said William rather lamely,
sitting down once more, as Katharine left the room.

She was soon driving quickly, as she had wished to drive, through the
lamp-lit streets. She liked both light and speed, and the sense of
being out of doors alone, and the knowledge that she would reach Mary
in her high, lonely room at the end of the drive. She climbed the
stone steps quickly, remarking the queer look of her blue silk skirt
and blue shoes upon the stone, dusty with the boots of the day, under
the light of an occasional jet of flickering gas.

The door was opened in a second by Mary herself, whose face showed not
only surprise at the sight of her visitor, but some degree of
embarrassment. She greeted her cordially, and, as there was no time
for explanations, Katharine walked straight into the sitting-room, and
found herself in the presence of a young man who was lying back in a
chair and holding a sheet of paper in his hand, at which he was
looking as if he expected to go on immediately with what he was in the
middle of saying to Mary Datchet. The apparition of an unknown lady in
full evening dress seemed to disturb him. He took his pipe from his
mouth, rose stiffly, and sat down again with a jerk.

"Have you been dining out?" Mary asked.

"Are you working?" Katharine inquired simultaneously.

The young man shook his head, as if he disowned his share in the
question with some irritation.

"Well, not exactly," Mary replied. "Mr. Basnett had brought some
papers to show me. We were going through them, but we'd almost
done. . . . Tell us about your party."

Mary had a ruffled appearance, as if she had been running her fingers
through her hair in the course of her conversation; she was dressed
more or less like a Russian peasant girl. She sat down again in a
chair which looked as if it had been her seat for some hours; the
saucer which stood upon the arm contained the ashes of many
cigarettes. Mr. Basnett, a very young man with a fresh complexion and
a high forehead from which the hair was combed straight back, was one
of that group of "very able young men" suspected by Mr. Clacton,
justly as it turned out, of an influence upon Mary Datchet. He had
come down from one of the Universities not long ago, and was now
charged with the reformation of society. In connection with the rest
of the group of very able young men he had drawn up a scheme for the
education of labor, for the amalgamation of the middle class and the
working class, and for a joint assault of the two bodies, combined in
the Society for the Education of Democracy, upon Capital. The scheme
had already reached the stage in which it was permissible to hire an
office and engage a secretary, and he had been deputed to expound the
scheme to Mary, and make her an offer of the Secretaryship, to which,
as a matter of principle, a small salary was attached. Since seven
o'clock that evening he had been reading out loud the document in
which the faith of the new reformers was expounded, but the reading
was so frequently interrupted by discussion, and it was so often
necessary to inform Mary "in strictest confidence" of the private
characters and evil designs of certain individuals and societies that
they were still only half-way through the manuscript. Neither of them
realized that the talk had already lasted three hours. In their
absorption they had forgotten even to feed the fire, and yet both Mr.
Basnett in his exposition, and Mary in her interrogation, carefully
preserved a kind of formality calculated to check the desire of the
human mind for irrelevant discussion. Her questions frequently began,
"Am I to understand--" and his replies invariably represented the
views of some one called "we."

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