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

nursery fireplace hung a photograph of her grandfather’s

tomb in Poets’ Corner, and she was told in one of those moments of

grown-up confidence which are so tremendously impressive to the

child’s mind, that he was buried there because he was a “good and

great man.” Later, on an anniversary, she was taken by her mother

through the fog in a hansom cab, and given a large bunch of bright,

sweet-scented flowers to lay upon his tomb. The candles in the church,

the singing and the booming of the organ, were all, she thought, in

his honor. Again and again she was brought down into the drawing-room

to receive the blessing of some awful distinguished old man, who sat,

even to her childish eye, somewhat apart, all gathered together and

clutching a stick, unlike an ordinary visitor in her father’s own armchair, and her father himself was there, unlike himself, too, a little

excited and very polite. These formidable old creatures used to take

her in their arms, look very keenly in her eyes, and then to bless

her, and tell her that she must mind and be a good girl, or detect a

look in her face something like Richard’s as a small boy. That drew

down upon her her mother’s fervent embrace, and she was sent back to

the nursery very proud, and with a mysterious sense of an important

and unexplained state of things, which time, by degrees, unveiled to

her.

 

There were always visitors—uncles and aunts and cousins “from India,”

to be reverenced for their relationship alone, and others of the

solitary and formidable class, whom she was enjoined by her parents to

“remember all your life.” By these means, and from hearing constant

talk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions of the

world included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the names

of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, for

some reason, much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to other

people. They made a kind of boundary to her vision of life, and played

a considerable part in determining her scale of good and bad in her

own small affairs. Her descent from one of these gods was no surprise

to her, but matter for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, the

privileges of her lot were taken for granted, and certain drawbacks

made themselves very manifest. Perhaps it is a little depressing to

inherit not lands but an example of intellectual and spiritual virtue;

perhaps the conclusiveness of a great ancestor is a little

discouraging to those who run the risk of comparison with him. It

seems as if, having flowered so splendidly, nothing now remained

possible but a steady growth of good, green stalk and leaf. For these

reasons, and for others, Katharine had her moments of despondency. The

glorious past, in which men and women grew to unexampled size,

intruded too much upon the present, and dwarfed it too consistently,

to be altogether encouraging to one forced to make her experiment in

living when the great age was dead.

 

She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural, in

the first place owing to her mother’s absorption in them, and in the

second because a great part of her time was spent in imagination with

the dead, since she was helping her mother to produce a life of the

great poet. When Katharine was seventeen or eighteen—that is to say,

some ten years ago—her mother had enthusiastically announced that

now, with a daughter to help her, the biography would soon be

published. Notices to this effect found their way into the literary

papers, and for some time Katharine worked with a sense of great pride

and achievement.

 

Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were making no way at

all, and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghost

of a literary temperament could doubt but that they had materials for

one of the greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelves

and boxes bulged with the precious stuff. The most private lives of

the most interesting people lay furled in yellow bundles of close-written manuscript. In addition to this Mrs. Hilbery had in her own

head as bright a vision of that time as now remained to the living,

and could give those flashes and thrills to the old words which gave

them almost the substance of flesh. She had no difficulty in writing,

and covered a page every morning as instinctively as a thrush sings,

but nevertheless, with all this to urge and inspire, and the most

devout intention to accomplish the work, the book still remained

unwritten. Papers accumulated without much furthering their task, and

in dull moments Katharine had her doubts whether they would ever

produce anything at all fit to lay before the public. Where did the

difficulty lie? Not in their materials, alas! nor in their ambitions,

but in something more profound, in her own inaptitude, and above all,

in her mother’s temperament. Katharine would calculate that she had

never known her write for more than ten minutes at a time. Ideas came

to her chiefly when she was in motion. She liked to perambulate the

room with a duster in her hand, with which she stopped to polish the

backs of already lustrous books, musing and romancing as she did so.

Suddenly the right phrase or the penetrating point of view would

suggest itself, and she would drop her duster and write ecstatically

for a few breathless moments; and then the mood would pass away, and

the duster would be sought for, and the old books polished again.

These spells of inspiration never burnt steadily, but flickered over

the gigantic mass of the subject as capriciously as a will-o’-the-wisp, lighting now on this point, now on that. It was as much as

Katharine could do to keep the pages of her mother’s manuscript in

order, but to sort them so that the sixteenth year of Richard

Alardyce’s life succeeded the fifteenth was beyond her skill. And yet

they were so brilliant, these paragraphs, so nobly phrased, so

lightning-like in their illumination, that the dead seemed to crowd

the very room. Read continuously, they produced a sort of vertigo, and

set her asking herself in despair what on earth she was to do with

them? Her mother refused, also, to face the radical questions of what

to leave in and what to leave out. She could not decide how far the

public was to be told the truth about the poet’s separation from his

wife. She drafted passages to suit either case, and then liked each so

well that she could not decide upon the rejection of either.

 

But the book must be written. It was a duty that they owed the world,

and to Katharine, at least, it meant more than that, for if they could

not between them get this one book accomplished they had no right to

their privileged position. Their increment became yearly more and more

unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that her

grandfather was a very great man.

 

By the time she was twenty-seven, these thoughts had become very

familiar to her. They trod their way through her mind as she sat

opposite her mother of a morning at a table heaped with bundles of old

letters and well supplied with pencils, scissors, bottles of gum,

india-rubber bands, large envelopes, and other appliances for the

manufacture of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham’s visit, Katharine

had resolved to try the effect of strict rules upon her mother’s

habits of literary composition. They were to be seated at their tables

every morning at ten o’clock, with a clean-swept morning of empty,

secluded hours before them. They were to keep their eyes fast upon the

paper, and nothing was to tempt them to speech, save at the stroke of

the hour when ten minutes for relaxation were to be allowed them. If

these rules were observed for a year, she made out on a sheet of paper

that the completion of the book was certain, and she laid her scheme

before her mother with a feeling that much of the task was already

accomplished. Mrs. Hilbery examined the sheet of paper very carefully.

Then she clapped her hands and exclaimed enthusiastically:

 

“Well done, Katharine! What a wonderful head for business you’ve got!

Now I shall keep this before me, and every day I shall make a little

mark in my pocketbook, and on the last day of all—let me think, what

shall we do to celebrate the last day of all? If it weren’t the winter

we could take a jaunt to Italy. They say Switzerland’s very lovely in

the snow, except for the cold. But, as you say, the great thing is to

finish the book. Now let me see—”

 

When they inspected her manuscripts, which Katharine had put in order,

they found a state of things well calculated to dash their spirits, if

they had not just resolved on reform. They found, to begin with, a

great variety of very imposing paragraphs with which the biography was

to open; many of these, it is true, were unfinished, and resembled

triumphal arches standing upon one leg, but, as Mrs. Hilbery observed,

they could be patched up in ten minutes, if she gave her mind to it.

Next, there was an account of the ancient home of the Alardyces, or

rather, of spring in Suffolk, which was very beautifully written,

although not essential to the story. However, Katharine had put

together a string of names and dates, so that the poet was capably

brought into the world, and his ninth year was reached without further

mishap. After that, Mrs. Hilbery wished, for sentimental reasons, to

introduce the recollections of a very fluent old lady, who had been

brought up in the same village, but these Katharine decided must go.

It might be advisable to introduce here a sketch of contemporary

poetry contributed by Mr. Hilbery, and thus terse and learned and

altogether out of keeping with the rest, but Mrs. Hilbery was of

opinion that it was too bare, and made one feel altogether like a good

little girl in a lecture-room, which was not at all in keeping with

her father. It was put on one side. Now came the period of his early

manhood, when various affairs of the heart must either be concealed or

revealed; here again Mrs. Hilbery was of two minds, and a thick packet

of manuscript was shelved for further consideration.

 

Several years were now altogether omitted, because Mrs. Hilbery had

found something distasteful to her in that period, and had preferred

to dwell upon her own recollections as a child. After this, it seemed

to Katharine that the book became a wild dance of will-o’-the-wisps,

without form or continuity, without coherence even, or any attempt to

make a narrative. Here were twenty pages upon her grandfather’s taste

in hats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summer

day’s expedition into the country, when they had missed their train,

together with fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous men and

women, which seemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic. There

were, moreover, thousands of letters, and a mass of faithful

recollections contributed by old friends, which had grown yellow now

in their envelopes, but must be placed somewhere, or their feelings

would be hurt. So many volumes had been written about the poet since

his death that she had also to dispose of a great number of

misstatements, which involved minute researches and much

correspondence. Sometimes Katharine brooded, half crushed, among her

papers; sometimes she felt that it was necessary for her very

existence that she should free herself from the past; at others, that

the past had completely displaced the present, which, when