Night and Day

V >> Virginia Woolf >> Night and Day

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Mr. Clacton cleared his throat and looked at each of the young ladies
in turn. He was a good deal struck by the appearance and manner of
Miss Hilbery, which seemed to him to place her among those cultivated
and luxurious people of whom he used to dream. Mary, on the other
hand, was more of his own sort, and a little too much inclined to
order him about. He picked up crumbs of dry biscuit and put them into
his mouth with incredible rapidity.

"You don't belong to our society, then?" said Mrs. Seal.

"No, I'm afraid I don't," said Katharine, with such ready candor that
Mrs. Seal was nonplussed, and stared at her with a puzzled expression,
as if she could not classify her among the varieties of human beings
known to her.

"But surely " she began.

"Mrs. Seal is an enthusiast in these matters," said Mr. Clacton,
almost apologetically. "We have to remind her sometimes that others
have a right to their views even if they differ from our own. . . .
"Punch" has a very funny picture this week, about a Suffragist and an
agricultural laborer. Have you seen this week's "Punch," Miss
Datchet?"

Mary laughed, and said "No."

Mr. Clacton then told them the substance of the joke, which, however,
depended a good deal for its success upon the expression which the
artist had put into the people's faces. Mrs. Seal sat all the time
perfectly grave. Directly he had done speaking she burst out:

"But surely, if you care about the welfare of your sex at all, you
must wish them to have the vote?"

"I never said I didn't wish them to have the vote," Katharine
protested.

"Then why aren't you a member of our society?" Mrs. Seal demanded.

Katharine stirred her spoon round and round, stared into the swirl of
the tea, and remained silent. Mr. Clacton, meanwhile, framed a
question which, after a moment's hesitation, he put to Katharine.

"Are you in any way related, I wonder, to the poet Alardyce? His
daughter, I believe, married a Mr. Hilbery."

"Yes; I'm the poet's granddaughter," said Katharine, with a little
sigh, after a pause; and for a moment they were all silent.

"The poet's granddaughter!" Mrs. Seal repeated, half to herself, with
a shake of her head, as if that explained what was otherwise
inexplicable.

The light kindled in Mr. Clacton's eye.

"Ah, indeed. That interests me very much," he said. "I owe a great
debt to your grandfather, Miss Hilbery. At one time I could have
repeated the greater part of him by heart. But one gets out of the way
of reading poetry, unfortunately. You don't remember him, I suppose?"

A sharp rap at the door made Katharine's answer inaudible. Mrs. Seal
looked up with renewed hope in her eyes, and exclaiming:

"The proofs at last!" ran to open the door. "Oh, it's only Mr.
Denham!" she cried, without any attempt to conceal her disappointment.
Ralph, Katharine supposed, was a frequent visitor, for the only person
he thought it necessary to greet was herself, and Mary at once
explained the strange fact of her being there by saying:

"Katharine has come to see how one runs an office."

Ralph felt himself stiffen uncomfortably, as he said:

"I hope Mary hasn't persuaded you that she knows how to run an
office?"

"What, doesn't she?" said Katharine, looking from one to the other.

At these remarks Mrs. Seal began to exhibit signs of discomposure,
which displayed themselves by a tossing movement of her head, and, as
Ralph took a letter from his pocket, and placed his finger upon a
certain sentence, she forestalled him by exclaiming in confusion:

"Now, I know what you're going to say, Mr. Denham! But it was the day
Kit Markham was here, and she upsets one so--with her wonderful
vitality, always thinking of something new that we ought to be doing
and aren't--and I was conscious at the time that my dates were mixed.
It had nothing to do with Mary at all, I assure you."

"My dear Sally, don't apologize," said Mary, laughing. "Men are such
pedants--they don't know what things matter, and what things don't."

"Now, Denham, speak up for our sex," said Mr. Clacton in a jocular
manner, indeed, but like most insignificant men he was very quick to
resent being found fault with by a woman, in argument with whom he was
fond of calling himself "a mere man." He wished, however, to enter
into a literary conservation with Miss Hilbery, and thus let the
matter drop.

"Doesn't it seem strange to you, Miss Hilbery," he said, "that the
French, with all their wealth of illustrious names, have no poet who
can compare with your grandfather? Let me see. There's Chenier and
Hugo and Alfred de Musset--wonderful men, but, at the same time,
there's a richness, a freshness about Alardyce--"

Here the telephone bell rang, and he had to absent himself with a
smile and a bow which signified that, although literature is
delightful, it is not work. Mrs. Seal rose at the same time, but
remained hovering over the table, delivering herself of a tirade
against party government. "For if I were to tell you what I know of
back-stairs intrigue, and what can be done by the power of the purse,
you wouldn't credit me, Mr. Denham, you wouldn't, indeed. Which is why
I feel that the only work for my father's daughter--for he was one of
the pioneers, Mr. Denham, and on his tombstone I had that verse from
the Psalms put, about the sowers and the seed. . . . And what wouldn't
I give that he should be alive now, seeing what we're going to see--"
but reflecting that the glories of the future depended in part upon
the activity of her typewriter, she bobbed her head, and hurried back
to the seclusion of her little room, from which immediately issued
sounds of enthusiastic, but obviously erratic, composition.

Mary made it clear at once, by starting a fresh topic of general
interest, that though she saw the humor of her colleague, she did not
intend to have her laughed at.

"The standard of morality seems to me frightfully low," she observed
reflectively, pouring out a second cup of tea, "especially among women
who aren't well educated. They don't see that small things matter, and
that's where the leakage begins, and then we find ourselves in
difficulties--I very nearly lost my temper yesterday," she went on,
looking at Ralph with a little smile, as though he knew what happened
when she lost her temper. "It makes me very angry when people tell me
lies--doesn't it make you angry?" she asked Katharine.

"But considering that every one tells lies," Katharine remarked,
looking about the room to see where she had put down her umbrella and
her parcel, for there was an intimacy in the way in which Mary and
Ralph addressed each other which made her wish to leave them. Mary, on
the other hand, was anxious, superficially at least, that Katharine
should stay and so fortify her in her determination not to be in love
with Ralph.

Ralph, while lifting his cup from his lips to the table, had made up
his mind that if Miss Hilbery left, he would go with her.

"I don't think that I tell lies, and I don't think that Ralph tells
lies, do you, Ralph?" Mary continued.

Katharine laughed, with more gayety, as it seemed to Mary, than she
could properly account for. What was she laughing at? At them,
presumably. Katharine had risen, and was glancing hither and thither,
at the presses and the cupboards, and all the machinery of the office,
as if she included them all in her rather malicious amusement, which
caused Mary to keep her eyes on her straightly and rather fiercely, as
if she were a gay-plumed, mischievous bird, who might light on the
topmost bough and pick off the ruddiest cherry, without any warning.
Two women less like each other could scarcely be imagined, Ralph
thought, looking from one to the other. Next moment, he too, rose, and
nodding to Mary, as Katharine said good-bye, opened the door for her,
and followed her out.

Mary sat still and made no attempt to prevent them from going. For a
second or two after the door had shut on them her eyes rested on the
door with a straightforward fierceness in which, for a moment, a
certain degree of bewilderment seemed to enter; but, after a brief
hesitation, she put down her cup and proceeded to clear away the
tea-things.

The impulse which had driven Ralph to take this action was the result
of a very swift little piece of reasoning, and thus, perhaps, was not
quite so much of an impulse as it seemed. It passed through his mind
that if he missed this chance of talking to Katharine, he would have
to face an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room again,
demanding an explanation of his cowardly indecision. It was better, on
the whole, to risk present discomfiture than to waste an evening
bandying excuses and constructing impossible scenes with this
uncompromising section of himself. For ever since he had visited the
Hilberys he had been much at the mercy of a phantom Katharine, who
came to him when he sat alone, and answered him as he would have her
answer, and was always beside him to crown those varying triumphs
which were transacted almost every night, in imaginary scenes, as he
walked through the lamplit streets home from the office. To walk with
Katharine in the flesh would either feed that phantom with fresh food,
which, as all who nourish dreams are aware, is a process that becomes
necessary from time to time, or refine it to such a degree of thinness
that it was scarcely serviceable any longer; and that, too, is
sometimes a welcome change to a dreamer. And all the time Ralph was
well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not represented in his
dreams at all, so that when he met her he was bewildered by the fact
that she had nothing to do with his dream of her.

When, on reaching the street, Katharine found that Mr. Denham
proceeded to keep pace by her side, she was surprised and, perhaps, a
little annoyed. She, too, had her margin of imagination, and to-night
her activity in this obscure region of the mind required solitude. If
she had had her way, she would have walked very fast down the
Tottenham Court Road, and then sprung into a cab and raced swiftly
home. The view she had had of the inside of an office was of the
nature of a dream to her. Shut off up there, she compared Mrs. Seal,
and Mary Datchet, and Mr. Clacton to enchanted people in a bewitched
tower, with the spiders' webs looping across the corners of the room,
and all the tools of the necromancer's craft at hand; for so aloof and
unreal and apart from the normal world did they seem to her, in the
house of innumerable typewriters, murmuring their incantations and
concocting their drugs, and flinging their frail spiders' webs over
the torrent of life which rushed down the streets outside.

She may have been conscious that there was some exaggeration in this
fancy of hers, for she certainly did not wish to share it with Ralph.
To him, she supposed, Mary Datchet, composing leaflets for Cabinet
Ministers among her typewriters, represented all that was interesting
and genuine; and, accordingly, she shut them both out from all share
in the crowded street, with its pendant necklace of lamps, its lighted
windows, and its throng of men and women, which exhilarated her to
such an extent that she very nearly forgot her companion. She walked
very fast, and the effect of people passing in the opposite direction
was to produce a queer dizziness both in her head and in Ralph's,
which set their bodies far apart. But she did her duty by her
companion almost unconsciously.

"Mary Datchet does that sort of work very well. . . . She's
responsible for it, I suppose?"

"Yes. The others don't help at all. . . . Has she made a convert of
you?"

"Oh no. That is, I'm a convert already."

"But she hasn't persuaded you to work for them?"

"Oh dear no--that wouldn't do at all."

So they walked on down the Tottenham Court Road, parting and coming
together again, and Ralph felt much as though he were addressing the
summit of a poplar in a high gale of wind.

"Suppose we get on to that omnibus?" he suggested.

Katharine acquiesced, and they climbed up, and found themselves alone
on top of it.

"But which way are you going?" Katharine asked, waking a little from
the trance into which movement among moving things had thrown her.

"I'm going to the Temple," Ralph replied, inventing a destination on
the spur of the moment. He felt the change come over her as they sat
down and the omnibus began to move forward. He imagined her
contemplating the avenue in front of them with those honest sad eyes
which seemed to set him at such a distance from them. But the breeze
was blowing in their faces; it lifted her hat for a second, and she
drew out a pin and stuck it in again,--a little action which seemed,
for some reason, to make her rather more fallible. Ah, if only her hat
would blow off, and leave her altogether disheveled, accepting it from
his hands!

"This is like Venice," she observed, raising her hand. "The motor-
cars, I mean, shooting about so quickly, with their lights."

"I've never seen Venice," he replied. "I keep that and some other
things for my old age."

"What are the other things?" she asked.

"There's Venice and India and, I think, Dante, too."

She laughed.

"Think of providing for one's old age! And would you refuse to see
Venice if you had the chance?"

Instead of answering her, he wondered whether he should tell her
something that was quite true about himself; and as he wondered, he
told her.

"I've planned out my life in sections ever since I was a child, to
make it last longer. You see, I'm always afraid that I'm missing
something--"

"And so am I!" Katharine exclaimed. "But, after all," she added, "why
should you miss anything?"

"Why? Because I'm poor, for one thing," Ralph rejoined. "You, I
suppose, can have Venice and India and Dante every day of your life."

She said nothing for a moment, but rested one hand, which was bare of
glove, upon the rail in front of her, meditating upon a variety of
things, of which one was that this strange young man pronounced Dante
as she was used to hearing it pronounced, and another, that he had,
most unexpectedly, a feeling about life that was familiar to her.
Perhaps, then, he was the sort of person she might take an interest
in, if she came to know him better, and as she had placed him among
those whom she would never want to know better, this was enough to
make her silent. She hastily recalled her first view of him, in the
little room where the relics were kept, and ran a bar through half her
impressions, as one cancels a badly written sentence, having found the
right one.

"But to know that one might have things doesn't alter the fact that
one hasn't got them," she said, in some confusion. "How could I go to
India, for example? Besides," she began impulsively, and stopped
herself. Here the conductor came round, and interrupted them. Ralph
waited for her to resume her sentence, but she said no more.

"I have a message to give your father," he remarked. "Perhaps you
would give it him, or I could come--"

"Yes, do come," Katharine replied.

"Still, I don't see why you shouldn't go to India," Ralph began, in
order to keep her from rising, as she threatened to do.

But she got up in spite of him, and said good-bye with her usual air
of decision, and left him with a quickness which Ralph connected now
with all her movements. He looked down and saw her standing on the
pavement edge, an alert, commanding figure, which waited its season to
cross, and then walked boldly and swiftly to the other side. That
gesture and action would be added to the picture he had of her, but at
present the real woman completely routed the phantom one.

CHAPTER VII

And little Augustus Pelham said to me, 'It's the younger generation
knocking at the door,' and I said to him, 'Oh, but the younger
generation comes in without knocking, Mr. Pelham.' Such a feeble
little joke, wasn't it, but down it went into his notebook all the
same."

"Let us congratulate ourselves that we shall be in the grave before
that work is published," said Mr. Hilbery.

The elderly couple were waiting for the dinner-bell to ring and for
their daughter to come into the room. Their arm-chairs were drawn up
on either side of the fire, and each sat in the same slightly crouched
position, looking into the coals, with the expressions of people who
have had their share of experiences and wait, rather passively, for
something to happen. Mr. Hilbery now gave all his attention to a piece
of coal which had fallen out of the grate, and to selecting a
favorable position for it among the lumps that were burning already.
Mrs. Hilbery watched him in silence, and the smile changed on her lips
as if her mind still played with the events of the afternoon.

When Mr. Hilbery had accomplished his task, he resumed his crouching
position again, and began to toy with the little green stone attached
to his watch-chain. His deep, oval-shaped eyes were fixed upon the
flames, but behind the superficial glaze seemed to brood an observant
and whimsical spirit, which kept the brown of the eye still unusually
vivid. But a look of indolence, the result of skepticism or of a taste
too fastidious to be satisfied by the prizes and conclusions so easily
within his grasp, lent him an expression almost of melancholy. After
sitting thus for a time, he seemed to reach some point in his thinking
which demonstrated its futility, upon which he sighed and stretched
his hand for a book lying on the table by his side.

Directly the door opened he closed the book, and the eyes of father
and mother both rested on Katharine as she came towards them. The
sight seemed at once to give them a motive which they had not had
before. To them she appeared, as she walked towards them in her light
evening dress, extremely young, and the sight of her refreshed them,
were it only because her youth and ignorance made their knowledge of
the world of some value.

"The only excuse for you, Katharine, is that dinner is still later
than you are," said Mr. Hilbery, putting down his spectacles.

"I don't mind her being late when the result is so charming," said
Mrs. Hilbery, looking with pride at her daughter. "Still, I don't know
that I LIKE your being out so late, Katharine," she continued. "You
took a cab, I hope?"

Here dinner was announced, and Mr. Hilbery formally led his wife
downstairs on his arm. They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed,
the prettiness of the dinner-table merited that compliment. There was
no cloth upon the table, and the china made regular circles of deep
blue upon the shining brown wood. In the middle there was a bowl of
tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh
that the narrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball.
From the surrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers
surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them
testified in the great man's own handwriting that he was yours
sincerely or affectionately or for ever. The father and daughter would
have been quite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence,
or with a few cryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not
be understood by the servants. But silence depressed Mrs. Hilbery, and
far from minding the presence of maids, she would often address
herself to them, and was never altogether unconscious of their
approval or disapproval of her remarks. In the first place she called
them to witness that the room was darker than usual, and had all the
lights turned on.

"That's more cheerful," she exclaimed. "D'you know, Katharine, that
ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried
to make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them,
you know, that I spilt the tea--and he made an epigram about that!"

"Which ridiculous goose?" Katharine asked her father.

"Only one of my geese, happily, makes epigrams--Augustus Pelham, of
course," said Mrs. Hilbery.

"I'm not sorry that I was out," said Katharine.

"Poor Augustus!" Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. "But we're all too hard on
him. Remember how devoted he is to his tiresome old mother."

"That's only because she is his mother. Any one connected with
himself--"

"No, no, Katharine--that's too bad. That's--what's the word I mean,
Trevor, something long and Latin--the sort of word you and Katharine
know--"

Mr. Hilbery suggested "cynical."

"Well, that'll do. I don't believe in sending girls to college, but I
should teach them that sort of thing. It makes one feel so dignified,
bringing out these little allusions, and passing on gracefully to the
next topic. But I don't know what's come over me--I actually had to
ask Augustus the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with, as you were
out, Katharine, and Heaven knows what he mayn't put down about me in
his diary."

"I wish," Katharine started, with great impetuosity, and checked
herself. Her mother always stirred her to feel and think quickly, and
then she remembered that her father was there, listening with
attention.

"What is it you wish?" he asked, as she paused.

He often surprised her, thus, into telling him what she had not meant
to tell him; and then they argued, while Mrs. Hilbery went on with her
own thoughts.

"I wish mother wasn't famous. I was out at tea, and they would talk to
me about poetry."

"Thinking you must be poetical, I see--and aren't you?"

"Who's been talking to you about poetry, Katharine?" Mrs. Hilbery
demanded, and Katharine was committed to giving her parents an account
of her visit to the Suffrage office.

"They have an office at the top of one of the old houses in Russell
Square. I never saw such queer-looking people. And the man discovered
I was related to the poet, and talked to me about poetry. Even Mary
Datchet seems different in that atmosphere."

"Yes, the office atmosphere is very bad for the soul," said Mr.
Hilbery.

"I don't remember any offices in Russell Square in the old days, when
Mamma lived there," Mrs. Hilbery mused, "and I can't fancy turning one
of those noble great rooms into a stuffy little Suffrage office.
Still, if the clerks read poetry there must be something nice about
them."

"No, because they don't read it as we read it," Katharine insisted.

"But it's nice to think of them reading your grandfather, and not
filling up those dreadful little forms all day long," Mrs. Hilbery
persisted, her notion of office life being derived from some chance
view of a scene behind the counter at her bank, as she slipped the
sovereigns into her purse.

"At any rate, they haven't made a convert of Katharine, which was what
I was afraid of," Mr. Hilbery remarked.

"Oh no," said Katharine very decidedly, "I wouldn't work with them for
anything."

"It's curious," Mr. Hilbery continued, agreeing with his daughter,
"how the sight of one's fellow-enthusiasts always chokes one off. They
show up the faults of one's cause so much more plainly than one's
antagonists. One can be enthusiastic in one's study, but directly one
comes into touch with the people who agree with one, all the glamor
goes. So I've always found," and he proceeded to tell them, as he
peeled his apple, how he committed himself once, in his youthful days,
to make a speech at a political meeting, and went there ablaze with
enthusiasm for the ideals of his own side; but while his leaders
spoke, he became gradually converted to the other way of thinking, if
thinking it could be called, and had to feign illness in order to
avoid making a fool of himself--an experience which had sickened him
of public meetings.

Katharine listened and felt as she generally did when her father, and
to some extent her mother, described their feelings, that she quite
understood and agreed with them, but, at the same time, saw something
which they did not see, and always felt some disappointment when they
fell short of her vision, as they always did. The plates succeeded
each other swiftly and noiselessly in front of her, and the table was
decked for dessert, and as the talk murmured on in familiar grooves,
she sat there, rather like a judge, listening to her parents, who did,
indeed, feel it very pleasant when they made her laugh.

Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious
little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually,
though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood
over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance.
Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port,
which were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr.
Hilbery, and simultaneously Mrs. Hilbery and Katharine left the room.
All the years they had lived together they had never seen Mr. Hilbery
smoke his cigar or drink his port, and they would have felt it
unseemly if, by chance, they had surprised him as he sat there. These
short, but clearly marked, periods of separation between the sexes
were always used for an intimate postscript to what had been said at
dinner, the sense of being women together coming out most strongly
when the male sex was, as if by some religious rite, secluded from the
female. Katharine knew by heart the sort of mood that possessed her as
she walked upstairs to the drawing-room, her mother's arm in hers; and
she could anticipate the pleasure with which, when she had turned on
the lights, they both regarded the drawing-room, fresh swept and set
in order for the last section of the day, with the red parrots
swinging on the chintz curtains, and the arm-chairs warming in the
blaze. Mrs. Hilbery stood over the fire, with one foot on the fender,
and her skirts slightly raised.

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