Night and Day, Virginia Woolf [10 ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: Virginia Woolf
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half the person of Mr. Hilbery, or saw him gaze at the scene round the
tea-table with an expression of the utmost disgust and expostulation.
He withdrew unseen. He paused outside on the landing trying to recover
his self-control and to decide what course he might with most dignity
pursue. It was obvious to him that his wife had entirely confused the
meaning of his instructions. She had plunged them all into the most
odious confusion. He waited a moment, and then, with much preliminary
rattling of the handle, opened the door a second time. They had all
regained their places; some incident of an absurd nature had now set
them laughing and looking under the table, so that his entrance passed
momentarily unperceived. Katharine, with flushed cheeks, raised her
head and said:
“Well, that’s my last attempt at the dramatic.”
“It’s astonishing what a distance they roll,” said Ralph, stooping to
turn up the corner of the hearthrug.
“Don’t trouble—don’t bother. We shall find it—” Mrs. Hilbery began,
and then saw her husband and exclaimed: “Oh, Trevor, we’re looking for
Cassandra’s engagement-ring!”
Mr. Hilbery looked instinctively at the carpet. Remarkably enough, the
ring had rolled to the very point where he stood. He saw the rubies
touching the tip of his boot. Such is the force of habit that he could
not refrain from stooping, with an absurd little thrill of pleasure at
being the one to find what others were looking for, and, picking the
ring up, he presented it, with a bow that was courtly in the extreme,
to Cassandra. Whether the making of a bow released automatically
feelings of complaisance and urbanity, Mr. Hilbery found his
resentment completely washed away during the second in which he bent
and straightened himself. Cassandra dared to offer her cheek and
received his embrace. He nodded with some degree of stiffness to
Rodney and Denham, who had both risen upon seeing him, and now
altogether sat down. Mrs. Hilbery seemed to have been waiting for the
entrance of her husband, and for this precise moment in order to put
to him a question which, from the ardor with which she announced it,
had evidently been pressing for utterance for some time past.
“Oh, Trevor, please tell me, what was the date of the first
performance of ‘Hamlet’?”
In order to answer her Mr. Hilbery had to have recourse to the exact
scholarship of William Rodney, and before he had given his excellent
authorities for believing as he believed, Rodney felt himself admitted
once more to the society of the civilized and sanctioned by the
authority of no less a person than Shakespeare himself. The power of
literature, which had temporarily deserted Mr. Hilbery, now came back
to him, pouring over the raw ugliness of human affairs its soothing
balm, and providing a form into which such passions as he had felt so
painfully the night before could be molded so that they fell roundly
from the tongue in shapely phrases, hurting nobody. He was
sufficiently sure of his command of language at length to look at
Katharine and again at Denham. All this talk about Shakespeare had
acted as a soporific, or rather as an incantation upon Katharine. She
leaned back in her chair at the head of the tea-table, perfectly
silent, looking vaguely past them all, receiving the most generalized
ideas of human heads against pictures, against yellow-tinted walls,
against curtains of deep crimson velvet. Denham, to whom he turned
next, shared her immobility under his gaze. But beneath his restraint
and calm it was possible to detect a resolution, a will, set now with
unalterable tenacity, which made such turns of speech as Mr. Hilbery
had at command appear oddly irrelevant. At any rate, he said nothing.
He respected the young man; he was a very able young man; he was
likely to get his own way. He could, he thought, looking at his still
and very dignified head, understand Katharine’s preference, and, as he
thought this, he was surprised by a pang of acute jealousy. She might
have married Rodney without causing him a twinge. This man she loved.
Or what was the state of affairs between them? An extraordinary
confusion of emotion was beginning to get the better of him, when Mrs.
Hilbery, who had been conscious of a sudden pause in the conversation,
and had looked wistfully at her daughter once or twice, remarked:
“Don’t stay if you want to go, Katharine. There’s the little room over
there. Perhaps you and Ralph—”
“We’re engaged,” said Katharine, waking with a start, and looking
straight at her father. He was taken aback by the directness of the
statement; he exclaimed as if an unexpected blow had struck him. Had
he loved her to see her swept away by this torrent, to have her taken
from him by this uncontrollable force, to stand by helpless, ignored?
Oh, how he loved her! How he loved her! He nodded very curtly to
Denham.
“I gathered something of the kind last night,” he said. “I hope you’ll
deserve her.” But he never looked at his daughter, and strode out of
the room, leaving in the minds of the women a sense, half of awe, half
of amusement, at the extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized male,
outraged somehow and gone bellowing to his lair with a roar which
still sometimes reverberates in the most polished of drawing-rooms.
Then Katharine, looking at the shut door, looked down again, to hide
her tears.
The lamps were lit; their luster reflected itself in the polished
wood; good wine was passed round the dinner-table; before the meal was
far advanced civilization had triumphed, and Mr. Hilbery presided over
a feast which came to wear more and more surely an aspect, cheerful,
dignified, promising well for the future. To judge from the expression
in Katharine’s eyes it promised something—but he checked the approach
sentimentality. He poured out wine; he bade Denham help himself.
They went upstairs and he saw Katharine and Denham abstract themselves
directly Cassandra had asked whether she might not play him something
—some Mozart? some Beethoven? She sat down to the piano; the door
closed softly behind them. His eyes rested on the closed door for some
seconds unwaveringly, but, by degrees, the look of expectation died
out of them, and, with a sigh, he listened to the music.
Katharine and Ralph were agreed with scarcely a word of discussion as
to what they wished to do, and in a moment she joined him in the hall
dressed for walking. The night was still and moonlit, fit for walking,
though any night would have seemed so to them, desiring more than
anything movement, freedom from scrutiny, silence, and the open air.
“At last!” she breathed, as the front door shut. She told him how she
had waited, fidgeted, thought he was never coming, listened for the
sound of doors, half expected to see him again under the lamp-post,
looking at the house. They turned and looked at the serene front with
its gold-rimmed windows, to him the shrine of so much adoration. In
spite of her laugh and the little pressure of mockery on his arm, he
would not resign his belief, but with her hand resting there, her
voice quickened and mysteriously moving in his ears, he had not time—
they had not the same inclination—other objects drew his attention.
How they came to find themselves walking down a street with many
lamps, corners radiant with light, and a steady succession of motor-omnibuses plying both ways along it, they could neither of them tell;
nor account for the impulse which led them suddenly to select one of
these wayfarers and mount to the very front seat. After curving
through streets of comparative darkness, so narrow that shadows on the
blinds were pressed within a few feet of their faces, they came to one
of those great knots of activity where the lights, having drawn close
together, thin out again and take their separate ways. They were borne
on until they saw the spires of the city churches pale and flat
against the sky.
“Are you cold?” he asked, as they stopped by Temple Bar.
“Yes, I am rather,” she replied, becoming conscious that the splendid
race of lights drawn past her eyes by the superb curving and swerving
of the monster on which she sat was at an end. They had followed some
such course in their thoughts too; they had been borne on, victors in
the forefront of some triumphal car, spectators of a pageant enacted
for them, masters of life. But standing on the pavement alone, this
exaltation left them; they were glad to be alone together. Ralph stood
still for a moment to light his pipe beneath a lamp.
She looked at his face isolated in the little circle of light.
“Oh, that cottage,” she said. “We must take it and go there.”
“And leave all this?” he inquired.
“As you like,” she replied. She thought, looking at the sky above
Chancery Lane, how the roof was the same everywhere; how she was now
secure of all that this lofty blue and its steadfast lights meant to
her; reality, was it, figures, love, truth?
“I’ve something on my mind,” said Ralph abruptly. “I mean I’ve been
thinking of Mary Datchet. We’re very near her rooms now. Would you
mind if we went there?”
She had turned before she answered him. She had no wish to see any one
to-night; it seemed to her that the immense riddle was answered; the
problem had been solved; she held in her hands for one brief moment
the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole,
and entire from the confusion of chaos. To see Mary was to risk the
destruction of this globe.
“Did you treat her badly?” she asked rather mechanically, walking on.
“I could defend myself,” he said, almost defiantly. “But what’s the
use, if one feels a thing? I won’t be with her a minute,” he said.
“I’ll just tell her—”
“Of course, you must tell her,” said Katharine, and now felt anxious
for him to do what appeared to be necessary if he, too, were to hold
his globe for a moment round, whole, and entire.
“I wish—I wish—” she sighed, for melancholy came over her and
obscured at least a section of her clear vision. The globe swam before
her as if obscured by tears.
“I regret nothing,” said Ralph firmly. She leant towards him almost as
if she could thus see what he saw. She thought how obscure he still
was to her, save only that more and more constantly he appeared to her
a fire burning through its smoke, a source of life.
“Go on,” she said. “You regret nothing—”
“Nothing—nothing,” he repeated.
“What a fire!” she thought to herself. She thought of him blazing
splendidly in the night, yet so obscure that to hold his arm, as she
held it, was only to touch the opaque substance surrounding the flame
that roared upwards.
“Why nothing?” she asked hurriedly, in order that he might say more
and so make more splendid, more red, more darkly intertwined with
smoke this flame rushing upwards.
“What are you thinking of, Katharine?” he asked suspiciously, noticing
her tone of dreaminess and the inapt words.
“I was thinking of you—yes, I swear it. Always of you, but you take
such strange shapes in my mind. You’ve destroyed my loneliness. Am I
to tell you how I see you? No, tell me—tell me from the beginning.”
Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak more and more
fluently, more and more passionately, feeling her leaning towards him,
listening
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