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

>unsparing and revealing. His family would find nothing to admire in

her, and she, he felt certain, would despise them all, and this, too,

would help him. He felt himself becoming more and more merciless

towards her. By such courageous measures any one, he thought, could

end the absurd passions which were the cause of so much pain and

waste. He could foresee a time when his experiences, his discovery,

and his triumph were made available for younger brothers who found

themselves in the same predicament. He looked at his watch, and

remarked that the gardens would soon be closed.

 

“Anyhow,” he added, “I think we’ve seen enough for one afternoon.

Where have the others got to?” He looked over his shoulder, and,

seeing no trace of them, remarked at once:

 

“We’d better be independent of them. The best plan will be for you to

come back to tea with me.”

 

“Why shouldn’t you come with me?” she asked.

 

“Because we’re next door to Highgate here,” he replied promptly.

 

She assented, having very little notion whether Highgate was next door

to Regent’s Park or not. She was only glad to put off her return to

the family tea-table in Chelsea for an hour or two. They proceeded

with dogged determination through the winding roads of Regent’s Park,

and the Sunday-stricken streets of the neighborhood, in the direction

of the Tube station. Ignorant of the way, she resigned herself

entirely to him, and found his silence a convenient cover beneath

which to continue her anger with Rodney.

 

When they stepped out of the train into the still grayer gloom of

Highgate, she wondered, for the first time, where he was taking her.

Had he a family, or did he live alone in rooms? On the whole she was

inclined to believe that he was the only son of an aged, and possibly

invalid, mother. She sketched lightly, upon the blank vista down which

they walked, the little white house and the tremulous old lady rising

from behind her tea-table to greet her with faltering words about “my

son’s friends,” and was on the point of asking Ralph to tell her what

she might expect, when he jerked open one of the infinite number of

identical wooden doors, and led her up a tiled path to a porch in the

Alpine style of architecture. As they listened to the shaking of the

bell in the basement, she could summon no vision to replace the one so

rudely destroyed.

 

“I must warn you to expect a family party,” said Ralph. “They’re

mostly in on Sundays. We can go to my room afterwards.”

 

“Have you many brothers and sisters?” she asked, without concealing

her dismay.

 

“Six or seven,” he replied grimly, as the door opened.

 

While Ralph took off his coat, she had time to notice the ferns and

photographs and draperies, and to hear a hum, or rather a babble, of

voices talking each other down, from the sound of them. The rigidity

of extreme shyness came over her. She kept as far behind Denham as she

could, and walked stiffly after him into a room blazing with unshaded

lights, which fell upon a number of people, of different ages, sitting

round a large dining-room table untidily strewn with food, and

unflinchingly lit up by incandescent gas. Ralph walked straight to the

far end of the table.

 

“Mother, this is Miss Hilbery,” he said.

 

A large elderly lady, bent over an unsatisfactory spirit-lamp, looked

up with a little frown, and observed:

 

“I beg your pardon. I thought you were one of my own girls. Dorothy,”

she continued on the same breath, to catch the servant before she left

the room, “we shall want some more methylated spirits—unless the lamp

itself is out of order. If one of you could invent a good

spirit-lamp—” she sighed, looking generally down the table, and then

began seeking among the china before her for two clean cups for the

newcomers.

 

The unsparing light revealed more ugliness than Katharine had seen in

one room for a very long time. It was the ugliness of enormous folds

of brown material, looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which

depended balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen

with black school-texts. Her eye was arrested by crossed scabbards of

fretted wood upon the dull green wall, and whereever there was a high

flat eminence, some fern waved from a pot of crinkled china, or a

bronze horse reared so high that the stump of a tree had to sustain

his forequarters. The waters of family life seemed to rise and close

over her head, and she munched in silence.

 

At length Mrs. Denham looked up from her teacups and remarked:

 

“You see, Miss Hilbery, my children all come in at different hours and

want different things. (The tray should go up if you’ve done,

Johnnie.) My boy Charles is in bed with a cold. What else can you

expect?—standing in the wet playing football. We did try drawing-room

tea, but it didn’t do.”

 

A boy of sixteen, who appeared to be Johnnie, grumbled derisively both

at the notion of drawing-room tea and at the necessity of carrying a

tray up to his brother. But he took himself off, being enjoined by his

mother to mind what he was doing, and shut the door after him.

 

“It’s much nicer like this,” said Katharine, applying herself with

determination to the dissection of her cake; they had given her too

large a slice. She knew that Mrs. Denham suspected her of critical

comparisons. She knew that she was making poor progress with her cake.

Mrs. Denham had looked at her sufficiently often to make it clear to

Katharine that she was asking who this young woman was, and why Ralph

had brought her to tea with them. There was an obvious reason, which

Mrs. Denham had probably reached by this time. Outwardly, she was

behaving with rather rusty and laborious civility. She was making

conversation about the amenities of Highgate, its development and

situation.

 

“When I first married,” she said, “Highgate was quite separate from

London, Miss Hilbery, and this house, though you wouldn’t believe it,

had a view of apple orchards. That was before the Middletons built

their house in front of us.”

 

“It must be a great advantage to live at the top of a hill,” said

Katharine. Mrs. Denham agreed effusively, as if her opinion of

Katharine’s sense had risen.

 

“Yes, indeed, we find it very healthy,” she said, and she went on, as

people who live in the suburbs so often do, to prove that it was

healthier, more convenient, and less spoilt than any suburb round

London. She spoke with such emphasis that it was quite obvious that

she expressed unpopular views, and that her children disagreed with

her.

 

“The ceiling’s fallen down in the pantry again,” said Hester, a girl

of eighteen, abruptly.

 

“The whole house will be down one of these days,” James muttered.

 

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Denham. “It’s only a little bit of plaster—I

don’t see how any house could be expected to stand the wear and tear

you give it.” Here some family joke exploded, which Katharine could

not follow. Even Mrs. Denham laughed against her will.

 

“Miss Hilbery’s thinking us all so rude,” she added reprovingly. Miss

Hilbery smiled and shook her head, and was conscious that a great many

eyes rested upon her, for a moment, as if they would find pleasure in

discussing her when she was gone. Owing, perhaps, to this critical

glance, Katharine decided that Ralph Denham’s family was commonplace,

unshapely, lacking in charm, and fitly expressed by the hideous nature

of their furniture and decorations. She glanced along a mantelpiece

ranged with bronze chariots, silver vases, and china ornaments that

were either facetious or eccentric.

 

She did not apply her judgment consciously to Ralph, but when she

looked at him, a moment later, she rated him lower than at any other

time of their acquaintanceship.

 

He had made no effort to tide over the discomforts of her

introduction, and now, engaged in argument with his brother,

apparently forgot her presence. She must have counted upon his support

more than she realized, for this indifference, emphasized, as it was,

by the insignificant commonplace of his surroundings, awoke her, not

only to that ugliness, but to her own folly. She thought of one scene

after another in a few seconds, with that shudder which is almost a

blush. She had believed him when he spoke of friendship. She had

believed in a spiritual light burning steadily and steadfastly behind

the erratic disorder and incoherence of life. The light was now gone

out, suddenly, as if a sponge had blotted it. The litter of the table

and the tedious but exacting conversation of Mrs. Denham remained:

they struck, indeed, upon a mind bereft of all defences, and, keenly

conscious of the degradation which is the result of strife whether

victorious or not, she thought gloomily of her loneliness, of life’s

futility, of the barren prose of reality, of William Rodney, of her

mother, and the unfinished book.

 

Her answers to Mrs. Denham were perfunctory to the verge of rudeness,

and to Ralph, who watched her narrowly, she seemed further away than

was compatible with her physical closeness. He glanced at her, and

ground out further steps in his argument, determined that no folly

should remain when this experience was over. Next moment, a silence,

sudden and complete, descended upon them all. The silence of all these

people round the untidy table was enormous and hideous; something

horrible seemed about to burst from it, but they endured it

obstinately. A second later the door opened and there was a stir of

relief; cries of “Hullo, Joan! There’s nothing left for you to eat,”

broke up the oppressive concentration of so many eyes upon the

table-cloth, and set the waters of family life dashing in brisk little

waves again. It was obvious that Joan had some mysterious and

beneficent power upon her family. She went up to Katharine as if she

had heard of her, and was very glad to see her at last. She explained

that she had been visiting an uncle who was ill, and that had kept

her. No, she hadn’t had any tea, but a slice of bread would do. Some

one handed up a hot cake, which had been keeping warm in the fender;

she sat down by her mother’s side, Mrs. Denham’s anxieties seemed to

relax, and every one began eating and drinking, as if tea had begun

over again. Hester voluntarily explained to Katharine that she was

reading to pass some examination, because she wanted more than

anything in the whole world to go to Newnham.

 

“Now, just let me hear you decline ‘amo’—I love,” Johnnie demanded.

 

“No, Johnnie, no Greek at meal-times,” said Joan, overhearing him

instantly. “She’s up at all hours of the night over her books, Miss

Hilbery, and I’m sure that’s not the way to pass examinations,” she

went on, smiling at Katharine, with the worried humorous smile of the

elder sister whose younger brothers and sisters have become almost

like children of her own.

 

“Joan, you don’t really think that ‘amo’ is Greek?” Ralph

 

asked.

 

“Did I say Greek? Well, never mind. No dead languages at tea-time. My

dear boy, don’t trouble to make me any toast—”

 

“Or if you do, surely there’s the toasting-fork somewhere?” said Mrs.

Denham, still cherishing the belief that the bread-knife could be

spoilt. “Do one of you ring and ask for one,” she said, without any

conviction that she would be obeyed. “But is Ann coming to be with

Uncle Joseph?” she continued. “If so, surely they had better send Amy

to