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

person and seldom in half a dozen people. Where

Katharine was simple, Cassandra was complex; where Katharine was solid

and direct, Cassandra was vague and evasive. In short, they

represented very well the manly and the womanly sides of the feminine

nature, and, for foundation, there was the profound unity of common

blood between them. If Cassandra adored Katharine she was incapable of

adoring any one without refreshing her spirit with frequent draughts

of raillery and criticism, and Katharine enjoyed her laughter at least

as much as her respect.

 

Respect was certainly uppermost in Cassandra’s mind at the present

moment. Katharine’s engagement had appealed to her imagination as the

first engagement in a circle of contemporaries is apt to appeal to the

imaginations of the others; it was solemn, beautiful, and mysterious;

it gave both parties the important air of those who have been

initiated into some rite which is still concealed from the rest of the

group. For Katharine’s sake Cassandra thought William a most

distinguished and interesting character, and welcomed first his

conversation and then his manuscript as the marks of a friendship

which it flattered and delighted her to inspire.

 

Katharine was still out when she arrived at Cheyne Walk. After

greeting her uncle and aunt and receiving, as usual, a present of two

sovereigns for “cab fares and dissipation” from Uncle Trevor, whose

favorite niece she was, she changed her dress and wandered into

Katharine’s room to await her. What a great looking-glass Katharine

had, she thought, and how mature all the arrangements upon the

dressing-table were compared to what she was used to at home. Glancing

round, she thought that the bills stuck upon a skewer and stood for

ornament upon the mantelpiece were astonishingly like Katharine, There

wasn’t a photograph of William anywhere to be seen. The room, with its

combination of luxury and bareness, its silk dressing-gowns and

crimson slippers, its shabby carpet and bare walls, had a powerful air

of Katharine herself; she stood in the middle of the room and enjoyed

the sensation; and then, with a desire to finger what her cousin was

in the habit of fingering, Cassandra began to take down the books

which stood in a row upon the shelf above the bed. In most houses this

shelf is the ledge upon which the last relics of religious belief

lodge themselves as if, late at night, in the heart of privacy,

people, skeptical by day, find solace in sipping one draught of the

old charm for such sorrows or perplexities as may steal from their

hiding-places in the dark. But there was no hymn-book here. By their

battered covers and enigmatical contents, Cassandra judged them to be

old school-books belonging to Uncle Trevor, and piously, though

eccentrically, preserved by his daughter. There was no end, she

thought, to the unexpectedness of Katharine. She had once had a

passion for geometry herself, and, curled upon Katharine’s quilt, she

became absorbed in trying to remember how far she had forgotten what

she once knew. Katharine, coming in a little later, found her deep in

this characteristic pursuit.

 

“My dear,” Cassandra exclaimed, shaking the book at her cousin, “my

whole life’s changed from this moment! I must write the man’s name

down at once, or I shall forget—”

 

Whose name, what book, which life was changed Katharine proceeded to

ascertain. She began to lay aside her clothes hurriedly, for she was

very late.

 

“May I sit and watch you?” Cassandra asked, shutting up her book. “I

got ready on purpose.”

 

“Oh, you’re ready, are you?” said Katharine, half turning in the midst

of her operations, and looking at Cassandra, who sat, clasping her

knees, on the edge of the bed.

 

“There are people dining here,” she said, taking in the effect of

Cassandra from a new point of view. After an interval, the

distinction, the irregular charm, of the small face with its long

tapering nose and its bright oval eyes were very notable. The hair

rose up off the forehead rather stiffly, and, given a more careful

treatment by hairdressers and dressmakers, the light angular figure

might possess a likeness to a French lady of distinction in the

eighteenth century.

 

“Who’s coming to dinner?” Cassandra asked, anticipating further

possibilities of rapture.

 

“There’s William, and, I believe, Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Aubrey.”

 

“I’m so glad William is coming. Did he tell you that he sent me his

manuscript? I think it’s wonderful—I think he’s almost good enough

for you, Katharine.”

 

“You shall sit next to him and tell him what you think of him.”

 

“I shan’t dare do that,” Cassandra asserted.

 

“Why? You’re not afraid of him, are you?”

 

“A little—because he’s connected with you.”

 

Katharine smiled.

 

“But then, with your well-known fidelity, considering that you’re

staying here at least a fortnight, you won’t have any illusions left

about me by the time you go. I give you a week, Cassandra. I shall see

my power fading day by day. Now it’s at the climax; but tomorrow

it’ll have begun to fade. What am I to wear, I wonder? Find me a blue

dress, Cassandra, over there in the long wardrobe.”

 

She spoke disconnectedly, handling brush and comb, and pulling out the

little drawers in her dressing-table and leaving them open. Cassandra,

sitting on the bed behind her, saw the reflection of her cousin’s face

in the looking-glass. The face in the looking-glass was serious and

intent, apparently occupied with other things besides the straightness

of the parting which, however, was being driven as straight as a Roman

road through the dark hair. Cassandra was impressed again by

Katharine’s maturity; and, as she enveloped herself in the blue dress

which filled almost the whole of the long looking-glass with blue

light and made it the frame of a picture, holding not only the

slightly moving effigy of the beautiful woman, but shapes and colors

of objects reflected from the background, Cassandra thought that no

sight had ever been quite so romantic. It was all in keeping with the

room and the house, and the city round them; for her ears had not yet

ceased to notice the hum of distant wheels.

 

They went downstairs rather late, in spite of Katharine’s extreme

speed in getting ready. To Cassandra’s ears the buzz of voices inside

the drawing-room was like the tuning up of the instruments of the

orchestra. It seemed to her that there were numbers of people in the

room, and that they were strangers, and that they were beautiful and

dressed with the greatest distinction, although they proved to be

mostly her relations, and the distinction of their clothing was

confined, in the eyes of an impartial observer, to the white waistcoat

which Rodney wore. But they all rose simultaneously, which was by

itself impressive, and they all exclaimed, and shook hands, and she

was introduced to Mr. Peyton, and the door sprang open, and dinner was

announced, and they filed off, William Rodney offering her his

slightly bent black arm, as she had secretly hoped he would. In short,

had the scene been looked at only through her eyes, it must have been

described as one of magical brilliancy. The pattern of the

soup-plates, the stiff folds of the napkins, which rose by the side of

each plate in the shape of arum lilies, the long sticks of bread tied

with pink ribbon, the silver dishes and the sea-colored champagne

glasses, with the flakes of gold congealed in their stems—all these

details, together with a curiously pervasive smell of kid gloves,

contributed to her exhilaration, which must be repressed, however,

because she was grown up, and the world held no more for her to marvel

at.

 

The world held no more for her to marvel at, it is true; but it held

other people; and each other person possessed in Cassandra’s mind some

fragment of what privately she called “reality.” It was a gift that

they would impart if you asked them for it, and thus no dinner-party

could possibly be dull, and little Mr. Peyton on her right and William

Rodney on her left were in equal measure endowed with the quality

which seemed to her so unmistakable and so precious that the way

people neglected to demand it was a constant source of surprise to

her. She scarcely knew, indeed, whether she was talking to Mr. Peyton

or to William Rodney. But to one who, by degrees, assumed the shape of

an elderly man with a mustache, she described how she had arrived in

London that very afternoon, and how she had taken a cab and driven

through the streets. Mr. Peyton, an editor of fifty years, bowed his

bald head repeatedly, with apparent understanding. At least, he

understood that she was very young and pretty, and saw that she was

excited, though he could not gather at once from her words or remember

from his own experience what there was to be excited about. “Were

there any buds on the trees?” he asked. “Which line did she travel

by?”

 

He was cut short in these amiable inquiries by her desire to know

whether he was one of those who read, or one of those who look out of

the window? Mr. Peyton was by no means sure which he did. He rather

thought he did both. He was told that he had made a most dangerous

confession. She could deduce his entire history from that one fact. He

challenged her to proceed; and she proclaimed him a Liberal Member of

Parliament.

 

William, nominally engaged in a desultory conversation with Aunt

Eleanor, heard every word, and taking advantage of the fact that

elderly ladies have little continuity of conversation, at least with

those whom they esteem for their youth and their sex, he asserted his

presence by a very nervous laugh.

 

Cassandra turned to him directly. She was enchanted to find that,

instantly and with such ease, another of these fascinating beings was

offering untold wealth for her extraction.

 

“There’s no doubt what YOU do in a railway carriage, William,” she

said, making use in her pleasure of his first name. “You never ONCE

look out of the window; you read ALL the time.”

 

“And what facts do you deduce from that?” Mr. Peyton asked.

 

“Oh, that he’s a poet, of course,” said Cassandra. “But I must confess

that I knew that before, so it isn’t fair. I’ve got your manuscript

with me,” she went on, disregarding Mr. Peyton in a shameless way.

“I’ve got all sorts of things I want to ask you about it.”

 

William inclined his head and tried to conceal the pleasure that her

remark gave him. But the pleasure was not unalloyed. However

susceptible to flattery William might be, he would never tolerate it

from people who showed a gross or emotional taste in literature, and

if Cassandra erred even slightly from what he considered essential in

this respect he would express his discomfort by flinging out his hands

and wrinkling his forehead; he would find no pleasure in her flattery

after that.

 

“First of all,” she proceeded, “I want to know why you chose to write

a play?”

 

“Ah! You mean it’s not dramatic?”

 

“I mean that I don’t see what it would gain by being acted. But then

does Shakespeare gain? Henry and I are always arguing about

Shakespeare. I’m certain he’s wrong, but I can’t prove it because I’ve

only seen Shakespeare acted once in Lincoln. But I’m quite positive,”

she insisted, “that Shakespeare wrote for the stage.”

 

“You’re perfectly right,” Rodney exclaimed. “I was hoping you were on

that side. Henry’s wrong—entirely wrong. Of course, I’ve failed, as

all the moderns fail. Dear, dear, I wish I’d consulted you before.”

 

From this point they proceeded to go