Night and Day, Virginia Woolf [electronic book reader .txt] 📗

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 wherever 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