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Night and Day
by Virginia Woolf
A Penn State Electronic Classics Series
Publication
Night and Day by Virginia Woolf is a publication of the Pennsylvania State University. This Portable
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Night and Day by Virginia Woolf, the Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series,
Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, Hazleton, PA 18202-1291 is a Portable Document File produced as
part of an ongoing student publication project to bring classical works of literature, in English,
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Cover Design: Jim Manis
Copyright . 2001 The Pennsylvania State University
The Pennsylvania State University is an equal opportunity university.
Virginia Woolf
Night and Day
by Virginia Woolf
CHAPTER I
It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with
many other young ladies of her class, Katharine Hilbery
was pouring out tea. Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was
thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt over the
little barrier of day which interposed between Monday
morning and this rather subdued moment, and played
with the things one does voluntarily and normally in the
daylight. But although she was silent, she was evidently
mistress of a situation which was familiar enough to her,
and inclined to let it take its way for the six hundredth
time, perhaps, without bringing into play any of her un
occupied faculties. A single glance was enough to show
that Mrs. Hilbery was so rich in the gifts which make tea-
parties of elderly distinguished people successful, that
she scarcely needed any help from her daughter, provided
that the tiresome business of teacups and bread and butter
was discharged for her.
Considering that the little party had been seated round
the tea-table for less than twenty minutes, the animation
observable on their faces, and the amount of sound
they were producing collectively, were very creditable to
the hostess. It suddenly came into Katharine’s mind that
if some one opened the door at this moment he would
think that they were enjoying themselves; he would think,
“What an extremely nice house to come into!” and instinctively
she laughed, and said something to increase
the noise, for the credit of the house presumably, since
she herself had not been feeling exhilarated. At the very
same moment, rather to her amusement, the door was
flung open, and a young man entered the room. Katharine,
as she shook hands with him, asked him, in her own
mind, “Now, do you think we’re enjoying ourselves enor
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mously?” … “Mr. Denham, mother,” she said aloud, for
she saw that her mother had forgotten his name.
That fact was perceptible to Mr. Denham also, and increased
the awkwardness which inevitably attends the
entrance of a stranger into a room full of people much at
their ease, and all launched upon sentences. At the same
time, it seemed to Mr. Denham as if a thousand softly
padded doors had closed between him and the street
outside. A fine mist, the etherealized essence of the fog,
hung visibly in the wide and rather empty space of the
drawing-room, all silver where the candles were grouped
on the tea-table, and ruddy again in the firelight. With
the omnibuses and cabs still running in his head, and his
body still tingling with his quick walk along the streets
and in and out of traffic and foot-passengers, this drawing-
room seemed very remote and still; and the faces of
the elderly people were mellowed, at some distance from
each other, and had a bloom on them owing to the fact
that the air in the drawing-room was thickened by blue
grains of mist. Mr. Denham had come in as Mr. Fortescue,
the eminent novelist, reached the middle of a very long
sentence. He kept this suspended while the newcomer
sat down, and Mrs. Hilbery deftly joined the severed parts
by leaning towards him and remarking:
“Now, what would you do if you were married to an
engineer, and had to live in Manchester, Mr. Denham?”
“Surely she could learn Persian,” broke in a thin, elderly
gentleman. “Is there no retired schoolmaster or man
of letters in Manchester with whom she could read Persian?”
“A cousin of ours has married and gone to live in
Manchester,” Katharine explained. Mr. Denham muttered
something, which was indeed all that was required of
him, and the novelist went on where he had left off.
Privately, Mr. Denham cursed himself very sharply for
having exchanged the freedom of the street for this sophisticated
drawing-room, where, among other
disagreeables, he certainly would not appear at his best.
He glanced round him, and saw that, save for Katharine,
they were all over forty, the only consolation being that
Mr. Fortescue was a considerable celebrity, so that tomorrow
one might be glad to have met him.
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Virginia Woolf
“Have you ever been to Manchester?” he asked
Katharine.
“Never,” she replied.
“Why do you object to it, then?”
Katharine stirred her tea, and seemed to speculate, so
Denham thought, upon the duty of filling somebody else’s
cup, but she was really wondering how she was going to
keep this strange young man in harmony with the rest.
She observed that he was compressing his teacup, so
that there was danger lest the thin china might cave
inwards. She could see that he was nervous; one would
expect a bony young man with his face slightly reddened
by the wind, and his hair not altogether smooth, to be
nervous in such a party. Further, he probably disliked this
kind of thing, and had come out of curiosity, or because
her father had invited him—anyhow, he would not be
easily combined with the rest.
“I should think there would be no one to talk to in
Manchester,” she replied at random. Mr. Fortescue had
been observing her for a moment or two, as novelists are
inclined to observe, and at this remark he smiled, and
made it the text for a little further speculation.
“In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Katharine
decidedly hits the mark,” he said, and lying back in his
chair, with his opaque contemplative eyes fixed on the
ceiling, and the tips of his fingers pressed together, he
depicted, first the horrors of the streets of Manchester,
and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the
town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl
would live, and then the professors and the miserable young
students devoted to the more strenuous works of our
younger dramatists, who would visit her, and how her appearance
would change by degrees, and how she would fly
to London, and how Katharine would have to lead her about,
as one leads an eager dog on a chain, past rows of clamorous
butchers’ shops, poor dear creature.
“Oh, Mr. Fortescue,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, as he finished,
“I had just written to say how I envied her! I was
thinking of the big gardens and the dear old ladies in
mittens, who read nothing but the “Spectator,” and snuff
the candles. Have they ALL disappeared? I told her she
would find the nice things of London without the horrid
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Night and Day
streets that depress one so.”
“There is the University,” said the thin gentleman, who
had previously insisted upon the existence of people knowing
Persian.
“I know there are moors there, because I read about
them in a book the other day,” said Katharine.
“I am grieved and amazed at the ignorance of my family,”
Mr. Hilbery remarked. He was an elderly man, with a
pair of oval, hazel eyes which were rather bright for his
time of life, and relieved the heaviness of his face. He
played constantly with a little green stone attached to
his watch-chain, thus displaying long and very sensitive
fingers, and had a habit of moving his head hither and
thither very quickly without altering the position of his
large and rather corpulent body, so that he seemed to be
providing himself incessantly with food for amusement
and reflection with the least possible expenditure of energy.
One might suppose that he had passed the time of
life when his ambitions were personal, or that he had
gratified them as far as he was likely to do, and now
employed his considerable acuteness rather to observe
and reflect than to attain any result.
Katharine, so Denham decided, while Mr. Fortescue built
up another rounded structure of words, had a likeness to
each of her parents, but these elements were rather oddly
blended. She had the quick, impulsive movements of her
mother, the lips parting often to speak, and closing again;
and the dark oval eyes of her father brimming with light
upon a basis of sadness, or, since she was too young to
have acquired a sorrowful point of view, one might say
that the basis was not sadness so much as a spirit given
to contemplation and self-control. Judging by her hair,
her coloring, and the shape of her features, she was striking,
if not actually beautiful. Decision and composure
stamped her, a combination of qualities that produced a
very marked character, and one that was not calculated
to put a young man, who scarcely knew her, at his ease.
For the rest, she was tall; her dress was of some quiet
color, with old yellow-tinted lace for ornament, to which
the spark of an ancient jewel gave its one red gleam.
Denham noticed that, although silent, she kept sufficient
control of the situation to answer immediately her
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Virginia Woolf
mother appealed to her for help, and yet it was obvious to
him that she attended only with the surface skin of her
mind. It struck him that her position at the tea-table, among
all these elderly people, was not without its difficulties,
and he checked his inclination to find her, or her attitude,
generally antipathetic to him. The talk had passed over
Manchester, after dealing with it very generously.
“Would it be the Battle of Trafalgar or the Spanish Armada,
Katharine?” her mother demanded.
“Trafalgar, mother.”
“Trafalgar, of course! How stupid of me! Another cup of
tea, with a thin slice of lemon in it, and then, dear Mr.
Fortescue, please explain my absurd little puzzle. One
can’t help believing gentlemen with Roman noses, even
if one meets them in omnibuses.”
Mr. Hilbery here interposed so far as Denham was concerned,
and talked a great deal of sense about the solicitors’
profession, and the changes which he had seen in
his lifetime. Indeed, Denham properly fell to his lot, owing
to the fact that an article by Denham upon some
legal matter, published by Mr. Hilbery in his Review, had
brought them acquainted. But when a moment later Mrs.
Sutton Bailey was announced, he turned to her, and Mr.
Denham found himself sitting silent, rejecting possible
things to say, beside Katharine, who was silent too. Being
much about the same age and both under thirty, they
were prohibited from the use of a great many convenient
phrases which launch conversation into smooth waters.
They were further silenced by Katharine’s rather malicious
determination not to help this young man, in whose
upright and resolute bearing she detected something
hostile to her surroundings, by any of the usual feminine
amenities. They therefore sat silent, Denham controlling
his desire to say something abrupt and explosive, which
should shock her into life. But Mrs. Hilbery was immediately
sensitive to any silence in the drawing-room, as of
a dumb note in a sonorous scale, and leaning across the
table she observed, in the curiously tentative detached
manner which always gave her phrases the likeness of
butterflies flaunting from one sunny spot to another,
“D’you know, Mr. Denham, you remind me so much of
dear Mr. Ruskin… . Is it his tie, Katharine, or his hair, or
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Night and Day
the way he sits in his chair? Do tell me, Mr. Denham, are
you an admirer of Ruskin? Some one, the other day, said
to me, ‘Oh, no, we don’t read Ruskin, Mrs. Hilbery.’ What
do you read, I wonder?—for you can’t spend all your time
going up in aeroplanes and burrowing into the bowels of
the earth.”
She looked benevolently at Denham, who said nothing
articulate, and then at Katharine, who smiled but said
nothing either, upon which Mrs. Hilbery seemed possessed
by a brilliant idea, and exclaimed:
“I’m sure Mr. Denham would like to see our things,
Katharine. I’m sure he’s not like that dreadful young man,
Mr. Ponting, who told me that he considered it our duty
to live exclusively in the present. After all, what IS the
present? Half of it’s the past, and the better half, too, I
should say,” she added, turning to Mr. Fortescue.
Denham rose, half meaning to go, and thinking that he
had seen all that there was to see, but Katharine rose at
the same moment, and saying, “Perhaps you would like
to see the pictures,” led the way across the drawing-
room to a smaller room opening out of it.
The smaller room was something like a chapel in a cathedral,
or a grotto in a cave, for the booming sound of
the traffic in the distance suggested the soft surge of waters,
and the oval mirrors, with their silver surface, were
like deep pools trembling beneath starlight. But the comparison
to a religious temple of some kind was the more
apt of the two, for the little room was crowded with relics.
