Night and Day, Virginia Woolf [10 ebook reader txt] 📗

CHAPTER XVI

Into that same black night, almost, indeed, into the very same layer

of starlit air, Katharine Hilbery was now gazing, although not with a

view to the prospects of a fine day for duck shooting on the morrow.

She was walking up and down a gravel path in the garden of Stogdon

House, her sight of the heavens being partially intercepted by the

light leafless hoops of a pergola. Thus a spray of clematis would

completely obscure Cassiopeia, or blot out with its black pattern

myriads of miles of the Milky Way. At the end of the pergola, however,

there was a stone seat, from which the sky could be seen completely

swept clear of any earthly interruption, save to the right, indeed,

where a line of elm-trees was beautifully sprinkled with stars, and a

low stable building had a full drop of quivering silver just issuing

from the mouth of the chimney. It was a moonless night, but the light

of the stars was sufficient to show the outline of the young woman’s

form, and the shape of her face gazing gravely, indeed almost sternly,

into the sky. She had come out into the winter’s night, which was mild

enough, not so much to look with scientific eyes upon the stars, as to

shake herself free from certain purely terrestrial discontents. Much

as a literary person in like circumstances would begin,

absent-mindedly, pulling out volume after volume, so she stepped into

the garden in order to have the stars at hand, even though she did not

look at them. Not to be happy, when she was supposed to be happier

than she would ever be again—that, as far as she could see, was the

origin of a discontent which had begun almost as soon as she arrived,

two days before, and seemed now so intolerable that she had left the

family party, and come out here to consider it by herself. It was not

she who thought herself unhappy, but her cousins, who thought it for

her. The house was full of cousins, much of her age, or even younger,

and among them they had some terribly bright eyes. They seemed always

on the search for something between her and Rodney, which they

expected to find, and yet did not find; and when they searched,

Katharine became aware of wanting what she had not been conscious of

wanting in London, alone with William and her parents. Or, if she did

not want it, she missed it. And this state of mind depressed her,

because she had been accustomed always to give complete satisfaction,

and her self-love was now a little ruffled. She would have liked to

break through the reserve habitual to her in order to justify her

engagement to some one whose opinion she valued. No one had spoken a

word of criticism, but they left her alone with William; not that that

would have mattered, if they had not left her alone so politely; and,

perhaps, that would not have mattered if they had not seemed so

queerly silent, almost respectful, in her presence, which gave way to

criticism, she felt, out of it.

 

Looking now and then at the sky, she went through the list of her

cousins’ names: Eleanor, Humphrey, Marmaduke, Silvia, Henry,

Cassandra, Gilbert, and Mostyn—Henry, the cousin who taught the young

ladies of Bungay to play upon the violin, was the only one in whom she

could confide, and as she walked up and down beneath the hoops of the

pergola, she did begin a little speech to him, which ran something

like this:

 

“To begin with, I’m very fond of William. You can’t deny that. I know

him better than any one, almost. But why I’m marrying him is, partly,

I admit—I’m being quite honest with you, and you mustn’t tell any

one—partly because I want to get married. I want to have a house of

my own. It isn’t possible at home. It’s all very well for you, Henry;

you can go your own way. I have to be there always. Besides, you know

what our house is. You wouldn’t be happy either, if you didn’t do

something. It isn’t that I haven’t the time at home—it’s the

atmosphere.” Here, presumably, she imagined that her cousin, who had

listened with his usual intelligent sympathy, raised his eyebrows a

little, and interposed:

 

“Well, but what do you want to do?”

 

Even in this purely imaginary dialogue, Katharine found it difficult

to confide her ambition to an imaginary companion.

 

“I should like,” she began, and hesitated quite a long time before she

forced herself to add, with a change of voice, “to study

mathematics—to know about the stars.”

 

Henry was clearly amazed, but too kind to express all his doubts; he

only said something about the difficulties of mathematics, and

remarked that very little was known about the stars.

 

Katharine thereupon went on with the statement of her case.

 

“I don’t care much whether I ever get to know anything—but I want to

work out something in figures—something that hasn’t got to do with

human beings. I don’t want people particularly. In some ways, Henry,

I’m a humbug—I mean, I’m not what you all take me for. I’m not

domestic, or very practical or sensible, really. And if I could

calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures,

and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy,

and I believe I should give William all he wants.”

 

Having reached this point, instinct told her that she had passed

beyond the region in which Henry’s advice could be of any good; and,

having rid her mind of its superficial annoyance, she sat herself upon

the stone seat, raised her eyes unconsciously and thought about the

deeper questions which she had to decide, she knew, for herself. Would

she, indeed, give William all he wanted? In order to decide the

question, she ran her mind rapidly over her little collection of

significant sayings, looks, compliments, gestures, which had marked

their intercourse during the last day or two. He had been annoyed

because a box, containing some clothes specially chosen by him for her

to wear, had been taken to the wrong station, owing to her neglect in

the matter of labels. The box had arrived in the nick of time, and he

had remarked, as she came downstairs on the first night, that he had

never seen her look more beautiful. She outshone all her cousins. He

had discovered that she never made an ugly movement; he also said that

the shape of her head made it possible for her, unlike most women, to

wear her hair low. He had twice reproved her for being silent at

dinner; and once for never attending to what he said. He had been

surprised at the excellence of her French accent, but he thought it

was selfish of her not to go with her mother to call upon the

Middletons, because they were old family friends and very nice people.

On the whole, the balance was nearly even; and, writing down a kind of

conclusion in her mind which finished the sum for the present, at

least, she changed the focus of her eyes, and saw nothing but the

stars.

 

To-night they seemed fixed with unusual firmness in the blue, and

flashed back such a ripple of light into her eyes that she found

herself thinking that to-night the stars were happy. Without knowing

or caring more for Church practices than most people of her age,

Katharine could not look into the sky at Christmas time without

feeling that, at this one season, the Heavens bend over the earth with

sympathy, and signal with immortal radiance that they, too, take part

in her festival. Somehow, it seemed to her that they were even now

beholding the procession of kings and wise men upon some road on a

distant part of the earth. And yet, after gazing for another second,

the stars did their usual work upon the mind, froze to cinders the

whole of our short human history, and reduced the human body to an

ape-like, furry form, crouching amid the brushwood of a barbarous clod

of mud. This stage was soon succeeded by another, in which there was

nothing in the universe save stars and the light of stars; as she

looked up the pupils of her eyes so dilated with starlight that the

whole of her seemed dissolved in silver and spilt over the ledges of

the stars for ever and ever indefinitely through space. Somehow

simultaneously, though incongruously, she was riding with the

magnanimous hero upon the shore or under forest trees, and so might

have continued were it not for the rebuke forcibly administered by the

body, which, content with the normal conditions of life, in no way

furthers any attempt on the part of the mind to alter them. She grew

cold, shook herself, rose, and walked towards the house.

 

By the light of the stars, Stogdon House looked pale and romantic, and

about twice its natural size. Built by a retired admiral in the early

years of the nineteenth century, the curving bow windows of the front,

now filled with reddish-yellow light, suggested a portly three-decker,

sailing seas where those dolphins and narwhals who disport themselves

upon the edges of old maps were scattered with an impartial hand. A

semicircular flight of shallow steps led to a very large door, which

Katharine had left ajar. She hesitated, cast her eyes over the front

of the house, marked that a light burnt in one small window upon an

upper floor, and pushed the door open. For a moment she stood in the

square hall, among many horned skulls, sallow globes, cracked

oil-paintings, and stuffed owls, hesitating, it seemed, whether she

should open the door on her right, through which the stir of life

reached her ears. Listening for a moment, she heard a sound which

decided her, apparently, not to enter;