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

>a Suffrage meeting to which Henry had taken her, and she asserted,

half seriously, that she had learnt the Greek alphabet, and found it

“fascinating.” The word was underlined. Had she laughed when she drew

that line? Was she ever serious? Didn’t the letter show the most

engaging compound of enthusiasm and spirit and whimsicality, all

tapering into a flame of girlish freakishness, which flitted, for the

rest of the morning, as a will-o’-the-wisp, across Rodney’s landscape.

He could not resist beginning an answer to her there and then. He

found it particularly delightful to shape a style which should express

the bowing and curtsying, advancing and retreating, which are

characteristic of one of the many million partnerships of men and

women. Katharine never trod that particular measure, he could not help

reflecting; Katharine—Cassandra; Cassandra—Katharine—they

alternated in his consciousness all day long. It was all very well to

dress oneself carefully, compose one’s face, and start off punctually

at half-past four to a tea-party in Cheyne Walk, but Heaven only knew

what would come of it all, and when Katharine, after sitting silent

with her usual immobility, wantonly drew from her pocket and slapped

down on the table beneath his eyes a letter addressed to Cassandra

herself, his composure deserted him. What did she mean by her

behavior?

 

He looked up sharply from his row of little pictures. Katharine was

disposing of the American lady in far too arbitrary a fashion. Surely

the victim herself must see how foolish her enthusiasms appeared in

the eyes of the poet’s granddaughter. Katharine never made any attempt

to spare people’s feelings, he reflected; and, being himself very

sensitive to all shades of comfort and discomfort, he cut short the

auctioneer’s catalog, which Katharine was reeling off more and more

absent-mindedly, and took Mrs. Vermont Bankes, with a queer sense of

fellowship in suffering, under his own protection.

 

But within a few minutes the American lady had completed her

inspection, and inclining her head in a little nod of reverential

farewell to the poet and his shoes, she was escorted downstairs by

Rodney. Katharine stayed by herself in the little room. The ceremony

of ancestor-worship had been more than usually oppressive to her.

Moreover, the room was becoming crowded beyond the bounds of order.

Only that morning a heavily insured proof-sheet had reached them from

a collector in Australia, which recorded a change of the poet’s mind

about a very famous phrase, and, therefore, had claims to the honor of

glazing and framing. But was there room for it? Must it be hung on the

staircase, or should some other relic give place to do it honor?

Feeling unable to decide the question, Katharine glanced at the

portrait of her grandfather, as if to ask his opinion. The artist who

had painted it was now out of fashion, and by dint of showing it to

visitors, Katharine had almost ceased to see anything but a glow of

faintly pleasing pink and brown tints, enclosed within a circular

scroll of gilt laurel-leaves. The young man who was her grandfather

looked vaguely over her head. The sensual lips were slightly parted,

and gave the face an expression of beholding something lovely or

miraculous vanishing or just rising upon the rim of the distance. The

expression repeated itself curiously upon Katharine’s face as she

gazed up into his. They were the same age, or very nearly so. She

wondered what he was looking for; were there waves beating upon a

shore for him, too, she wondered, and heroes riding through the

leaf-hung forests? For perhaps the first time in her life she thought

of him as a man, young, unhappy, tempestuous, full of desires and

faults; for the first time she realized him for herself, and not from

her mother’s memory. He might have been her brother, she thought. It

seemed to her that they were akin, with the mysterious kinship of

blood which makes it seem possible to interpret the sights which the

eyes of the dead behold so intently, or even to believe that they look

with us upon our present joys and sorrows. He would have understood,

she thought, suddenly; and instead of laying her withered flowers upon

his shrine, she brought him her own perplexities—perhaps a gift of

greater value, should the dead be conscious of gifts, than flowers and

incense and adoration. Doubts, questionings, and despondencies she

felt, as she looked up, would be more welcome to him than homage, and

he would hold them but a very small burden if she gave him, also, some

share in what she suffered and achieved. The depth of her own pride

and love were not more apparent to her than the sense that the dead

asked neither flowers nor regrets, but a share in the life which they

had given her, the life which they had lived.

 

Rodney found her a moment later sitting beneath her grandfather’s

portrait. She laid her hand on the seat next her in a friendly way,

and said:

 

“Come and sit down, William. How glad I was you were here! I felt

myself getting ruder and ruder.”

 

“You are not good at hiding your feelings,” he returned dryly.

 

“Oh, don’t scold me—I’ve had a horrid afternoon.” She told him how

she had taken the flowers to Mrs. McCormick, and how South Kensington

impressed her as the preserve of officers’ widows. She described how

the door had opened, and what gloomy avenues of busts and palm-trees

and umbrellas had been revealed to her. She spoke lightly, and

succeeded in putting him at his ease. Indeed, he rapidly became too

much at his ease to persist in a condition of cheerful neutrality. He

felt his composure slipping from him. Katharine made it seem so

natural to ask her to help him, or advise him, to say straight out

what he had in his mind. The letter from Cassandra was heavy in his

pocket. There was also the letter to Cassandra lying on the table in

the next room. The atmosphere seemed charged with Cassandra. But,

unless Katharine began the subject of her own accord, he could not

even hint—he must ignore the whole affair; it was the part of a

gentleman to preserve a bearing that was, as far as he could make it,

the bearing of an undoubting lover. At intervals he sighed deeply. He

talked rather more quickly than usual about the possibility that some

of the operas of Mozart would be played in the summer. He had received

a notice, he said, and at once produced a pocketbook stuffed with

papers, and began shuffling them in search. He held a thick envelope

between his finger and thumb, as if the notice from the opera company

had become in some way inseparably attached to it.

 

“A letter from Cassandra?” said Katharine, in the easiest voice in the

world, looking over his shoulder. “I’ve just written to ask her to

come here, only I forgot to post it.”

 

He handed her the envelope in silence. She took it, extracted the

sheets, and read the letter through.

 

The reading seemed to Rodney to take an intolerably long time.

 

“Yes,” she observed at length, “a very charming letter.”

 

Rodney’s face was half turned away, as if in bashfulness. Her view of

his profile almost moved her to laughter. She glanced through the

pages once more.

 

“I see no harm,” William blurted out, “in helping her—with Greek, for

example—if she really cares for that sort of thing.”

 

“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t care,” said Katharine, consulting

the pages once more. “In fact—ah, here it is—‘The Greek alphabet is

absolutely FASCINATING.’ Obviously she does care.”

 

“Well, Greek may be rather a large order. I was thinking chiefly of

English. Her criticisms of my play, though they’re too generous,

evidently immature—she can’t be more than twenty-two, I suppose?—

they certainly show the sort of thing one wants: real feeling for

poetry, understanding, not formed, of course, but it’s at the root of

everything after all. There’d be no harm in lending her books?”

 

“No. Certainly not.”

 

“But if it—hum—led to a correspondence? I mean, Katharine, I take

it, without going into matters which seem to me a little morbid, I

mean,” he floundered, “you, from your point of view, feel that there’s

nothing disagreeable to you in the notion? If so, you’ve only to

speak, and I never think of it again.”

 

She was surprised by the violence of her desire that he never should

think of it again. For an instant it seemed to her impossible to

surrender an intimacy, which might not be the intimacy of love, but

was certainly the intimacy of true friendship, to any woman in the

world. Cassandra would never understand him—she was not good enough

for him. The letter seemed to her a letter of flattery—a letter

addressed to his weakness, which it made her angry to think was known

to another. For he was not weak; he had the rare strength of doing

what he promised—she had only to speak, and he would never think of

Cassandra again.

 

She paused. Rodney guessed the reason. He was amazed.

 

“She loves me,” he thought. The woman he admired more than any one in

the world, loved him, as he had given up hope that she would ever love

him. And now that for the first time he was sure of her love, he

resented it. He felt it as a fetter, an encumbrance, something which

made them both, but him in particular, ridiculous. He was in her power

completely, but his eyes were open and he was no longer her slave or

her dupe. He would be her master in future. The instant prolonged

itself as Katharine realized the strength of her desire to speak the

words that should keep William for ever, and the baseness of the

temptation which assailed her to make the movement, or speak the word,

which he had often begged her for, which she was now near enough to

feeling. She held the letter in her hand. She sat silent.

 

At this moment there was a stir in the other room; the voice of Mrs.

Hilbery was heard talking of proof-sheets rescued by miraculous

providence from butcher’s ledgers in Australia; the curtain separating

one room from the other was drawn apart, and Mrs. Hilbery and Augustus

Pelham stood in the doorway. Mrs. Hilbery stopped short. She looked at

her daughter, and at the man her daughter was to marry, with her

peculiar smile that always seemed to tremble on the brink of satire.

 

“The best of all my treasures, Mr. Pelham!” she exclaimed. “Don’t

move, Katharine. Sit still, William. Mr. Pelham will come another

day.”

 

Mr. Pelham looked, smiled, bowed, and, as his hostess had moved on,

followed her without a word. The curtain was drawn again either by him

or by Mrs. Hilbery.

 

But her mother had settled the question somehow. Katharine doubted no

longer.

 

“As I told you last night,” she said, “I think it’s your duty, if

there’s a chance that you care for Cassandra, to discover what your

feeling is for her now. It’s your duty to her, as well as to me. But

we must tell my mother. We can’t go on pretending.”

 

“That is entirely in your hands, of course,” said Rodney, with an

immediate return to the manner of a formal man of honor.

 

“Very well,” said Katharine.

 

Directly he left her she would go to her mother, and explain that the

engagement was at an end—or it might be better that they should go

together?

 

“But, Katharine,” Rodney began, nervously attempting to stuff

Cassandra’s sheets back into their envelope; “if Cassandra—should

Cassandra—you’ve asked Cassandra to stay with you.”

 

“Yes; but I’ve not posted the letter.”