Night and Day

V >> Virginia Woolf >> Night and Day

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What was she doing now, he wondered, as he addressed the envelope to
his wife. He could not control the telephone. He could not play the
spy. She might be making any arrangements she chose. Yet the thought
did not disturb him so much as the strange, unpleasant, illicit
atmosphere of the whole scene with the young people the night before.
His sense of discomfort was almost physical.

Had he known it, Katharine was far enough withdrawn, both physically
and spiritually, from the telephone. She sat in her room with the
dictionaries spreading their wide leaves on the table before her, and
all the pages which they had concealed for so many years arranged in a
pile. She worked with the steady concentration that is produced by the
successful effort to think down some unwelcome thought by means of
another thought. Having absorbed the unwelcome thought, her mind went
on with additional vigor, derived from the victory; on a sheet of
paper lines of figures and symbols frequently and firmly written down
marked the different stages of its progress. And yet it was broad
daylight; there were sounds of knocking and sweeping, which proved
that living people were at work on the other side of the door, and the
door, which could be thrown open in a second, was her only protection
against the world. But she had somehow risen to be mistress in her own
kingdom, assuming her sovereignty unconsciously.

Steps approached her unheard. It is true that they were steps that
lingered, divagated, and mounted with the deliberation natural to one
past sixty whose arms, moreover, are full of leaves and blossoms; but
they came on steadily, and soon a tap of laurel boughs against the
door arrested Katharine's pencil as it touched the page. She did not
move, however, and sat blank-eyed as if waiting for the interruption
to cease. Instead, the door opened. At first, she attached no meaning
to the moving mass of green which seemed to enter the room
independently of any human agency. Then she recognized parts of her
mother's face and person behind the yellow flowers and soft velvet of
the palm-buds.

"From Shakespeare's tomb!" exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, dropping the entire
mass upon the floor, with a gesture that seemed to indicate an act of
dedication. Then she flung her arms wide and embraced her daughter.

"Thank God, Katharine!" she exclaimed. "Thank God!" she repeated.

"You've come back?" said Katharine, very vaguely, standing up to
receive the embrace.

Although she recognized her mother's presence, she was very far from
taking part in the scene, and yet felt it to be amazingly appropriate
that her mother should be there, thanking God emphatically for unknown
blessings, and strewing the floor with flowers and leaves from
Shakespeare's tomb.

"Nothing else matters in the world!" Mrs. Hilbery continued. "Names
aren't everything; it's what we feel that's everything. I didn't want
silly, kind, interfering letters. I didn't want your father to tell
me. I knew it from the first. I prayed that it might be so."

"You knew it?" Katharine repeated her mother's words softly and
vaguely, looking past her. "How did you know it?" She began, like a
child, to finger a tassel hanging from her mother's cloak.

"The first evening you told me, Katharine. Oh, and thousands of times
--dinner-parties--talking about books--the way he came into the room--
your voice when you spoke of him."

Katharine seemed to consider each of these proofs separately. Then she
said gravely:

"I'm not going to marry William. And then there's Cassandra--"

"Yes, there's Cassandra," said Mrs. Hilbery. "I own I was a little
grudging at first, but, after all, she plays the piano so beautifully.
Do tell me, Katharine," she asked impulsively, "where did you go that
evening she played Mozart, and you thought I was asleep?"

Katharine recollected with difficulty.

"To Mary Datchet's," she remembered.

"Ah!" said Mrs. Hilbery, with a slight note of disappointment in her
voice. "I had my little romance--my little speculation." She looked at
her daughter. Katharine faltered beneath that innocent and penetrating
gaze; she flushed, turned away, and then looked up with very bright
eyes.

"I'm not in love with Ralph Denham," she said.

"Don't marry unless you're in love!" said Mrs. Hilbery very quickly.
"But," she added, glancing momentarily at her daughter, "aren't there
different ways, Katharine--different--?"

"We want to meet as often as we like, but to be free," Katharine
continued.

"To meet here, to meet in his house, to meet in the street." Mrs.
Hilbery ran over these phrases as if she were trying chords that did
not quite satisfy her ear. It was plain that she had her sources of
information, and, indeed, her bag was stuffed with what she called
"kind letters" from the pen of her sister-in-law.

"Yes. Or to stay away in the country," Katharine concluded.

Mrs. Hilbery paused, looked unhappy, and sought inspiration from the
window.

"What a comfort he was in that shop--how he took me and found the
ruins at once--how SAFE I felt with him--"

"Safe? Oh, no, he's fearfully rash--he's always taking risks. He wants
to throw up his profession and live in a little cottage and write
books, though he hasn't a penny of his own, and there are any number
of sisters and brothers dependent on him."

"Ah, he has a mother?" Mrs. Hilbery inquired.

"Yes. Rather a fine-looking old lady, with white hair." Katharine
began to describe her visit, and soon Mrs. Hilbery elicited the facts
that not only was the house of excruciating ugliness, which Ralph bore
without complaint, but that it was evident that every one depended on
him, and he had a room at the top of the house, with a wonderful view
over London, and a rook.

"A wretched old bird in a corner, with half its feathers out," she
said, with a tenderness in her voice that seemed to commiserate the
sufferings of humanity while resting assured in the capacity of Ralph
Denham to alleviate them, so that Mrs. Hilbery could not help
exclaiming:

"But, Katharine, you ARE in love!" at which Katharine flushed, looked
startled, as if she had said something that she ought not to have
said, and shook her head.

Hastily Mrs. Hilbery asked for further details of this extraordinary
house, and interposed a few speculations about the meeting between
Keats and Coleridge in a lane, which tided over the discomfort of the
moment, and drew Katharine on to further descriptions and
indiscretions. In truth, she found an extraordinary pleasure in being
thus free to talk to some one who was equally wise and equally
benignant, the mother of her earliest childhood, whose silence seemed
to answer questions that were never asked. Mrs. Hilbery listened
without making any remark for a considerable time. She seemed to draw
her conclusions rather by looking at her daughter than by listening to
her, and, if cross-examined, she would probably have given a highly
inaccurate version of Ralph Denham's life-history except that he was
penniless, fatherless, and lived at Highgate--all of which was much in
his favor. But by means of these furtive glances she had assured
herself that Katharine was in a state which gave her, alternately, the
most exquisite pleasure and the most profound alarm.

She could not help ejaculating at last:

"It's all done in five minutes at a Registry Office nowadays, if you
think the Church service a little florid--which it is, though there
are noble things in it."

"But we don't want to be married," Katharine replied emphatically, and
added, "Why, after all, isn't it perfectly possible to live together
without being married?"

Again Mrs. Hilbery looked discomposed, and, in her trouble, took up
the sheets which were lying upon the table, and began turning them
over this way and that, and muttering to herself as she glanced:

"A plus B minus C equals 'x y z'. It's so dreadfully ugly, Katharine.
That's what I feel--so dreadfully ugly."

Katharine took the sheets from her mother's hand and began shuffling
them absent-mindedly together, for her fixed gaze seemed to show that
her thoughts were intent upon some other matter.

"Well, I don't know about ugliness," she said at length.

"But he doesn't ask it of you?" Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. "Not that
grave young man with the steady brown eyes?"

"He doesn't ask anything--we neither of us ask anything."

"If I could help you, Katharine, by the memory of what I felt--"

"Yes, tell me what you felt."

Mrs. Hilbery, her eyes growing blank, peered down the enormously long
corridor of days at the far end of which the little figures of herself
and her husband appeared fantastically attired, clasping hands upon a
moonlit beach, with roses swinging in the dusk.

"We were in a little boat going out to a ship at night," she began.
"The sun had set and the moon was rising over our heads. There were
lovely silver lights upon the waves and three green lights upon the
steamer in the middle of the bay. Your father's head looked so grand
against the mast. It was life, it was death. The great sea was round
us. It was the voyage for ever and ever."

The ancient fairy-tale fell roundly and harmoniously upon Katharine's
ears. Yes, there was the enormous space of the sea; there were the
three green lights upon the steamer; the cloaked figures climbed up on
deck. And so, voyaging over the green and purple waters, past the
cliffs and the sandy lagoons and through pools crowded with the masts
of ships and the steeples of churches--here they were. The river
seemed to have brought them and deposited them here at this precise
point. She looked admiringly at her mother, that ancient voyager.

"Who knows," exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, continuing her reveries, "where
we are bound for, or why, or who has sent us, or what we shall
find--who knows anything, except that love is our faith--love--" she
crooned, and the soft sound beating through the dim words was heard by
her daughter as the breaking of waves solemnly in order upon the vast
shore that she gazed upon. She would have been content for her mother
to repeat that word almost indefinitely--a soothing word when uttered
by another, a riveting together of the shattered fragments of the
world. But Mrs. Hilbery, instead of repeating the word love, said
pleadingly:

"And you won't think those ugly thoughts again, will you, Katharine?"
at which words the ship which Katharine had been considering seemed to
put into harbor and have done with its seafaring. Yet she was in great
need, if not exactly of sympathy, of some form of advice, or, at
least, of the opportunity of setting forth her problems before a third
person so as to renew them in her own eyes.

"But then," she said, ignoring the difficult problem of ugliness, "you
knew you were in love; but we're different. It seems," she continued,
frowning a little as she tried to fix the difficult feeling, "as if
something came to an end suddenly--gave out--faded--an illusion--as if
when we think we're in love we make it up--we imagine what doesn't
exist. That's why it's impossible that we should ever marry. Always to
be finding the other an illusion, and going off and forgetting about
them, never to be certain that you cared, or that he wasn't caring for
some one not you at all, the horror of changing from one state to the
other, being happy one moment and miserable the next--that's the
reason why we can't possibly marry. At the same time," she continued,
"we can't live without each other, because--" Mrs. Hilbery waited
patiently for the sentence to be completed, but Katharine fell silent
and fingered her sheet of figures.

"We have to have faith in our vision," Mrs. Hilbery resumed, glancing
at the figures, which distressed her vaguely, and had some connection
in her mind with the household accounts, "otherwise, as you say--" She
cast a lightning glance into the depths of disillusionment which were,
perhaps, not altogether unknown to her.

"Believe me, Katharine, it's the same for every one--for me, too--for
your father," she said earnestly, and sighed. They looked together
into the abyss and, as the elder of the two, she recovered herself
first and asked:

"But where is Ralph? Why isn't he here to see me?"

Katharine's expression changed instantly.

"Because he's not allowed to come here," she replied bitterly.

Mrs. Hilbery brushed this aside.

"Would there be time to send for him before luncheon?" she asked.

Katharine looked at her as if, indeed, she were some magician. Once
more she felt that instead of being a grown woman, used to advise and
command, she was only a foot or two raised above the long grass and
the little flowers and entirely dependent upon the figure of
indefinite size whose head went up into the sky, whose hand was in
hers, for guidance.

"I'm not happy without him," she said simply.

Mrs. Hilbery nodded her head in a manner which indicated complete
understanding, and the immediate conception of certain plans for the
future. She swept up her flowers, breathed in their sweetness, and,
humming a little song about a miller's daughter, left the room.

The case upon which Ralph Denham was engaged that afternoon was not
apparently receiving his full attention, and yet the affairs of the
late John Leake of Dublin were sufficiently confused to need all the
care that a solicitor could bestow upon them, if the widow Leake and
the five Leake children of tender age were to receive any pittance at
all. But the appeal to Ralph's humanity had little chance of being
heard to-day; he was no longer a model of concentration. The partition
so carefully erected between the different sections of his life had
been broken down, with the result that though his eyes were fixed upon
the last Will and Testament, he saw through the page a certain
drawing-room in Cheyne Walk.

He tried every device that had proved effective in the past for
keeping up the partitions of the mind, until he could decently go
home; but a little to his alarm he found himself assailed so
persistently, as if from outside, by Katharine, that he launched forth
desperately into an imaginary interview with her. She obliterated a
bookcase full of law reports, and the corners and lines of the room
underwent a curious softening of outline like that which sometimes
makes a room unfamiliar at the moment of waking from sleep. By
degrees, a pulse or stress began to beat at regular intervals in his
mind, heaping his thoughts into waves to which words fitted
themselves, and without much consciousness of what he was doing, he
began to write on a sheet of draft paper what had the appearance of a
poem lacking several words in each line. Not many lines had been set
down, however, before he threw away his pen as violently as if that
were responsible for his misdeeds, and tore the paper into many
separate pieces. This was a sign that Katharine had asserted herself
and put to him a remark that could not be met poetically. Her remark
was entirely destructive of poetry, since it was to the effect that
poetry had nothing whatever to do with her; all her friends spent
their lives in making up phrases, she said; all his feeling was an
illusion, and next moment, as if to taunt him with his impotence, she
had sunk into one of those dreamy states which took no account
whatever of his existence. Ralph was roused by his passionate attempts
to attract her attention to the fact that he was standing in the
middle of his little private room in Lincoln's Inn Fields at a
considerable distance from Chelsea. The physical distance increased
his desperation. He began pacing in circles until the process sickened
him, and then took a sheet of paper for the composition of a letter
which, he vowed before he began it, should be sent that same evening.

It was a difficult matter to put into words; poetry would have done it
better justice, but he must abstain from poetry. In an infinite number
of half-obliterated scratches he tried to convey to her the
possibility that although human beings are woefully ill-adapted for
communication, still, such communion is the best we know; moreover,
they make it possible for each to have access to another world
independent of personal affairs, a world of law, of philosophy, or
more strangely a world such as he had had a glimpse of the other
evening when together they seemed to be sharing something, creating
something, an ideal--a vision flung out in advance of our actual
circumstances. If this golden rim were quenched, if life were no
longer circled by an illusion (but was it an illusion after all?),
then it would be too dismal an affair to carry to an end; so he wrote
with a sudden spurt of conviction which made clear way for a space and
left at least one sentence standing whole. Making every allowance for
other desires, on the whole this conclusion appeared to him to justify
their relationship. But the conclusion was mystical; it plunged him
into thought. The difficulty with which even this amount was written,
the inadequacy of the words, and the need of writing under them and
over them others which, after all, did no better, led him to leave off
before he was at ail satisfied with his production, and unable to
resist the conviction that such rambling would never be fit for
Katharine's eye. He felt himself more cut off from her than ever. In
idleness, and because he could do nothing further with words, he began
to draw little figures in the blank spaces, heads meant to resemble
her head, blots fringed with flames meant to represent--perhaps the
entire universe. From this occupation he was roused by the message
that a lady wished to speak to him. He had scarcely time to run his
hands through his hair in order to look as much like a solicitor as
possible, and to cram his papers into his pocket, already overcome
with shame that another eye should behold them, when he realized that
his preparations were needless. The lady was Mrs. Hilbery.

"I hope you're not disposing of somebody's fortune in a hurry," she
remarked, gazing at the documents on his table, "or cutting off an
entail at one blow, because I want to ask you to do me a favor. And
Anderson won't keep his horse waiting. (Anderson is a perfect tyrant,
but he drove my dear father to the Abbey the day they buried him.) I
made bold to come to you, Mr. Denham, not exactly in search of legal
assistance (though I don't know who I'd rather come to, if I were in
trouble), but in order to ask your help in settling some tiresome
little domestic affairs that have arisen in my absence. I've been to
Stratford-on-Avon (I must tell you all about that one of these days),
and there I got a letter from my sister-in-law, a dear kind goose who
likes interfering with other people's children because she's got none
of her own. (We're dreadfully afraid that she's going to lose the
sight of one of her eyes, and I always feel that our physical ailments
are so apt to turn into mental ailments. I think Matthew Arnold says
something of the same kind about Lord Byron.) But that's neither here
nor there."

The effect of these parentheses, whether they were introduced for that
purpose or represented a natural instinct on Mrs. Hilbery's part to
embellish the bareness of her discourse, gave Ralph time to perceive
that she possessed all the facts of their situation and was come,
somehow, in the capacity of ambassador.

"I didn't come here to talk about Lord Byron," Mrs. Hilbery continued,
with a little laugh, "though I know that both you and Katharine,
unlike other young people of your generation, still find him worth
reading." She paused. "I'm so glad you've made Katharine read poetry,
Mr. Denham!" she exclaimed, "and feel poetry, and look poetry! She
can't talk it yet, but she will--oh, she will!"

Ralph, whose hand was grasped and whose tongue almost refused to
articulate, somehow contrived to say that there were moments when he
felt hopeless, utterly hopeless, though he gave no reason for this
statement on his part.

"But you care for her?" Mrs. Hilbery inquired.

"Good God!" he exclaimed, with a vehemence which admitted of no
question.

"It's the Church of England service you both object to?" Mrs. Hilbery
inquired innocently.

"I don't care a damn what service it is," Ralph replied.

"You would marry her in Westminster Abbey if the worst came to the
worst?" Mrs. Hilbery inquired.

"I would marry her in St. Paul's Cathedral," Ralph replied. His doubts
upon this point, which were always roused by Katharine's presence, had
vanished completely, and his strongest wish in the world was to be
with her immediately, since every second he was away from her he
imagined her slipping farther and farther from him into one of those
states of mind in which he was unrepresented. He wished to dominate
her, to possess her.

"Thank God!" exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery. She thanked Him for a variety of
blessings: for the conviction with which the young man spoke; and not
least for the prospect that on her daughter's wedding-day the noble
cadences, the stately periods, the ancient eloquence of the marriage
service would resound over the heads of a distinguished congregation
gathered together near the very spot where her father lay quiescent
with the other poets of England. The tears filled her eyes; but she
remembered simultaneously that her carriage was waiting, and with dim
eyes she walked to the door. Denham followed her downstairs.

It was a strange drive. For Denham it was without exception the most
unpleasant he had ever taken. His only wish was to go as straightly
and quickly as possible to Cheyne Walk; but it soon appeared that Mrs.
Hilbery either ignored or thought fit to baffle this desire by
interposing various errands of her own. She stopped the carriage at
post-offices, and coffee-shops, and shops of inscrutable dignity where
the aged attendants had to be greeted as old friends; and, catching
sight of the dome of St. Paul's above the irregular spires of Ludgate
Hill, she pulled the cord impulsively, and gave directions that
Anderson should drive them there. But Anderson had reasons of his own
for discouraging afternoon worship, and kept his horse's nose
obstinately towards the west. After some minutes, Mrs. Hilbery
realized the situation, and accepted it good-humoredly, apologizing to
Ralph for his disappointment.

"Never mind," she said, "we'll go to St. Paul's another day, and it
may turn out, though I can't promise that it WILL, that he'll take us
past Westminster Abbey, which would be even better."

Ralph was scarcely aware of what she went on to say. Her mind and body
both seemed to have floated into another region of quick-sailing
clouds rapidly passing across each other and enveloping everything in
a vaporous indistinctness. Meanwhile he remained conscious of his own
concentrated desire, his impotence to bring about anything he wished,
and his increasing agony of impatience.

Suddenly Mrs. Hilbery pulled the cord with such decision that even
Anderson had to listen to the order which she leant out of the window
to give him. The carriage pulled up abruptly in the middle of
Whitehall before a large building dedicated to one of our Government
offices. In a second Mrs. Hilbery was mounting the steps, and Ralph
was left in too acute an irritation by this further delay even to
speculate what errand took her now to the Board of Education. He was
about to jump from the carriage and take a cab, when Mrs. Hilbery
reappeared talking genially to a figure who remained hidden behind
her.

"There's plenty of room for us all," she was saying. "Plenty of room.
We could find space for FOUR of you, William," she added, opening the
door, and Ralph found that Rodney had now joined their company. The
two men glanced at each other. If distress, shame, discomfort in its
most acute form were ever visible upon a human face, Ralph could read
them all expressed beyond the eloquence of words upon the face of his
unfortunate companion. But Mrs. Hilbery was either completely unseeing
or determined to appear so. She went on talking; she talked, it seemed
to both the young men, to some one outside, up in the air. She talked
about Shakespeare, she apostrophized the human race, she proclaimed
the virtues of divine poetry, she began to recite verses which broke
down in the middle. The great advantage of her discourse was that it
was self-supporting. It nourished itself until Cheyne Walk was reached
upon half a dozen grunts and murmurs.

"Now," she said, alighting briskly at her door, "here we are!"

There was something airy and ironical in her voice and expression as
she turned upon the doorstep and looked at them, which filled both
Rodney and Denham with the same misgivings at having trusted their
fortunes to such an ambassador; and Rodney actually hesitated upon the
threshold and murmured to Denham:

"You go in, Denham. I . . ." He was turning tail, but the door opening
and the familiar look of the house asserting its charm, he bolted in
on the wake of the others, and the door shut upon his escape. Mrs.
Hilbery led the way upstairs. She took them to the drawing-room. The
fire burnt as usual, the little tables were laid with china and
silver. There was nobody there.

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