Night and Day, Virginia Woolf [10 ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: Virginia Woolf
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saying anything, he took Katharine’s letters out of her hand, adjusted
his eyeglasses, and read them through.
At length he said “Humph!” and gave the letters back to her.
“Mother knows nothing about it,” Katharine remarked. “Will you tell
her?”
“I shall tell your mother. But I shall tell her that there is nothing
whatever for us to do.”
“But the marriage?” Katharine asked, with some diffidence.
Mr. Hilbery said nothing, and stared into the fire.
“What in the name of conscience did he do it for?” he speculated at
last, rather to himself than to her.
Katharine had begun to read her aunt’s letter over again, and she now
quoted a sentence. “Ibsen and Butler… . He has sent me a letter
full of quotations—nonsense, though clever nonsense.”
“Well, if the younger generation want to carry on its life on those
lines, it’s none of our affair,” he remarked.
“But isn’t it our affair, perhaps, to make them get married?”
Katharine asked rather wearily.
“Why the dickens should they apply to me?” her father demanded with
sudden irritation.
“Only as the head of the family—”
“But I’m not the head of the family. Alfred’s the head of the family.
Let them apply to Alfred,” said Mr. Hilbery, relapsing again into his
armchair. Katharine was aware that she had touched a sensitive spot,
however, in mentioning the family.
“I think, perhaps, the best thing would be for me to go and see them,”
she observed.
“I won’t have you going anywhere near them,” Mr. Hilbery replied with
unwonted decision and authority. “Indeed, I don’t understand why
they’ve dragged you into the business at all—I don’t see that it’s
got anything to do with you.”
“I’ve always been friends with Cyril,” Katharine observed.
“But did he ever tell you anything about this?” Mr. Hilbery asked
rather sharply.
Katharine shook her head. She was, indeed, a good deal hurt that Cyril
had not confided in her—did he think, as Ralph Denham or Mary Datchet
might think, that she was, for some reason, unsympathetic—hostile
even?
“As to your mother,” said Mr. Hilbery, after a pause, in which he
seemed to be considering the color of the flames, “you had better tell
her the facts. She’d better know the facts before every one begins to
talk about it, though why Aunt Celia thinks it necessary to come, I’m
sure I don’t know. And the less talk there is the better.”
Granting the assumption that gentlemen of sixty who are highly
cultivated, and have had much experience of life, probably think of
many things which they do not say, Katharine could not help feeling
rather puzzled by her father’s attitude, as she went back to her room.
What a distance he was from it all! How superficially he smoothed
these events into a semblance of decency which harmonized with his own
view of life! He never wondered what Cyril had felt, nor did the
hidden aspects of the case tempt him to examine into them. He merely
seemed to realize, rather languidly, that Cyril had behaved in a way
which was foolish, because other people did not behave in that way. He
seemed to be looking through a telescope at little figures hundreds of
miles in the distance.
Her selfish anxiety not to have to tell Mrs. Hilbery what had happened
made her follow her father into the hall after breakfast the next
morning in order to question him.
“Have you told mother?” she asked. Her manner to her father was almost
stern, and she seemed to hold endless depths of reflection in the dark
of her eyes.
Mr. Hilbery sighed.
“My dear child, it went out of my head.” He smoothed his silk hat
energetically, and at once affected an air of hurry. “I’ll send a note
round from the office… . I’m late this morning, and I’ve any
amount of proofs to get through.”
“That wouldn’t do at all,” Katharine said decidedly. “She must be told
—you or I must tell her. We ought to have told her at first.”
Mr. Hilbery had now placed his hat on his head, and his hand was on
the door-knob. An expression which Katharine knew well from her
childhood, when he asked her to shield him in some neglect of duty,
came into his eyes; malice, humor, and irresponsibility were blended
in it. He nodded his head to and fro significantly, opened the door
with an adroit movement, and stepped out with a lightness unexpected
at his age. He waved his hand once to his daughter, and was gone. Left
alone, Katharine could not help laughing to find herself cheated as
usual in domestic bargainings with her father, and left to do the
disagreeable work which belonged, by rights, to him.
Katharine disliked telling her mother about Cyril’s misbehavior quite
as much as her father did, and for much the same reasons. They both
shrank, nervously, as people fear the report of a gun on the stage,
from all that would have to be said on this occasion. Katharine,
moreover, was unable to decide what she thought of Cyril’s
misbehavior. As usual, she saw something which her father and mother
did not see, and the effect of that something was to suspend Cyril’s
behavior in her mind without any qualification at all. They would
think whether it was good or bad; to her it was merely a thing that
had happened.
When Katharine reached the study, Mrs. Hilbery had already dipped her
pen in the ink.
“Katharine,” she said, lifting it in the air, “I’ve just made out such
a queer, strange thing about your grandfather. I’m three years and six
months older than he was when he died. I couldn’t very well have been
his mother, but I might have been his elder sister, and that seems to
me such a pleasant fancy. I’m going to start quite fresh this morning,
and get a lot done.”
She began her sentence, at any rate, and Katharine sat down at her own
table, untied the bundle of old letters upon which she was working,
smoothed them out absent-mindedly, and began to decipher the faded
script. In a minute she looked across at her mother, to judge her
mood. Peace and happiness had relaxed every muscle in her face; her
lips were parted very slightly, and her breath came in smooth,
controlled inspirations like those of a child who is surrounding
itself with a building of bricks, and increasing in ecstasy as each
brick is placed in position. So Mrs. Hilbery was raising round her the
skies and trees of the past with every stroke of her pen, and
recalling the voices of the dead. Quiet as the room was, and
undisturbed by the sounds of the present moment, Katharine could fancy
that here was a deep pool of past time, and that she and her mother
were bathed in the light of sixty years ago. What could the present
give, she wondered, to compare with the rich crowd of gifts bestowed
by the past? Here was a Thursday morning in process of manufacture;
each second was minted fresh by the clock upon the mantelpiece. She
strained her ears and could just hear, far off, the hoot of a
motor-car and the rush of wheels coming nearer and dying away again,
and the voices of men crying old iron and vegetables in one of the
poorer streets at the back of the house. Rooms, of course, accumulate
their suggestions, and any room in which one has been used to carry on
any particular occupation gives off memories of moods, of ideas, of
postures that have been seen in it; so that to attempt any different
kind of work there is almost impossible.
Katharine was unconsciously affected, each time she entered her
mother’s room, by all these influences, which had had their birth
years ago, when she was a child, and had something sweet and solemn
about them, and connected themselves with early memories of the
cavernous glooms and sonorous echoes of the Abbey where her
grandfather lay buried. All the books and pictures, even the chairs
and tables, had belonged to him, or had reference to him; even the
china dogs on the mantelpiece and the little shepherdesses with their
sheep had been bought by him for a penny a piece from a man who used
to stand with a tray of toys in Kensington High Street, as Katharine
had often heard her mother tell. Often she had sat in this room, with
her mind fixed so firmly on those vanished figures that she could
almost see the muscles round their eyes and lips, and had given to
each his own voice, with its tricks of accent, and his coat and his
cravat. Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among them, an
invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than
with her own friends, because she knew their secrets and possessed a
divine foreknowledge of their destiny. They had been so unhappy, such
muddlers, so wrong-headed, it seemed to her. She could have told them
what to do, and what not to do. It was a melancholy fact that they
would pay no heed to her, and were bound to come to grief in their own
antiquated way. Their behavior was often grotesquely irrational; their
conventions monstrously absurd; and yet, as she brooded upon them, she
felt so closely attached to them that it was useless to try to pass
judgment upon them. She very nearly lost consciousness that she was a
separate being, with a future of her own. On a morning of slight
depression, such as this, she would try to find some sort of clue to
the muddle which their old letters presented; some reason which seemed
to make it worth while to them; some aim which they kept steadily in
view—but she was interrupted.
Mrs. Hilbery had risen from her table, and was standing looking out of
the window at a string of barges swimming up the river.
Katharine watched her. Suddenly Mrs. Hilbery turned abruptly, and
exclaimed:
“I really believe I’m bewitched! I only want three sentences, you see,
something quite straightforward and commonplace, and I can’t find
‘em.”
She began to pace up and down the room, snatching up her duster; but
she was too much annoyed to find any relief, as yet, in polishing the
backs of books.
“Besides,” she said, giving the sheet she had written to Katharine, “I
don’t believe this’ll do. Did your grandfather ever visit the
Hebrides, Katharine?” She looked in a strangely beseeching way at her
daughter. “My mind got running on the Hebrides, and I couldn’t help
writing a little description of them. Perhaps it would do at the
beginning of a chapter. Chapters often begin quite differently from
the way they go on, you know.” Katharine read what her mother had
written. She might have been a schoolmaster criticizing a child’s
essay. Her face gave Mrs. Hilbery, who watched it anxiously, no ground
for hope.
“It’s very beautiful,” she stated, “but, you see, mother, we ought to
go from point to point—”
“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “And that’s just what I can’t
do. Things keep coming into my head. It isn’t that I don’t know
everything and feel everything (who did know him, if I didn’t?), but I
can’t put it down, you see. There’s a kind of blind spot,” she said,
touching her forehead, “there. And when I can’t sleep o’ nights, I
fancy I shall die without having done it.”
From exultation she had passed to the depths of depression which the
imagination of her
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