don’t I go home?” Denham thought to himself. But he
went on walking beside Rodney, and for a time they did
not speak, though Rodney hummed snatches of a tune
out of an opera by Mozart. A feeling of contempt and
liking combine very naturally in the mind of one to whom
another has just spoken unpremeditatedly, revealing rather
more of his private feelings than he intended to reveal.
Denham began to wonder what sort of person Rodney
was, and at the same time Rodney began to think about
Denham.
“You’re a slave like me, I suppose?” he asked.
“A solicitor, yes.”
58
Virginia Woolf
“I sometimes wonder why we don’t chuck it. Why don’t
you emigrate, Denham? I should have thought that would
suit you.”
“I’ve a family.”
“I’m often on the point of going myself. And then I
know I couldn’t live without this”—and he waved his
hand towards the City of London, which wore, at this
moment, the appearance of a town cut out of gray-blue
cardboard, and pasted flat against the sky, which was of
a deeper blue.
“There are one or two people I’m fond of, and there’s a
little good music, and a few pictures, now and then—
just enough to keep one dangling about here. Ah, but I
couldn’t live with savages! Are you fond of books? Music?
Pictures? D’you care at all for first editions? I’ve got a
few nice things up here, things I pick up cheap, for I
can’t afford to give what they ask.”
They had reached a small court of high eighteenth-
century houses, in one of which Rodney had his rooms.
They climbed a very steep staircase, through whose
uncurtained windows the moonlight fell, illuminating the
banisters with their twisted pillars, and the piles of plates
set on the window-sills, and jars half-full of milk. Rodney’s
rooms were small, but the sitting-room window looked
out into a courtyard, with its flagged pavement, and its
single tree, and across to the flat red-brick fronts of the
opposite houses, which would not have surprised Dr.
Johnson, if he had come out of his grave for a turn in the
moonlight. Rodney lit his lamp, pulled his curtains, offered
Denham a chair, and, flinging the manuscript of his
paper on the Elizabethan use of Metaphor on to the table,
exclaimed:
“Oh dear me, what a waste of time! But it’s over now,
and so we may think no more about it.”
He then busied himself very dexterously in lighting a
fire, producing glasses, whisky, a cake, and cups and saucers.
He put on a faded crimson dressing-gown, and a
pair of red slippers, and advanced to Denham with a tumbler
in one hand and a well-burnished book in the other.
“The Baskerville Congreve,” said Rodney, offering it to
his guest. “I couldn’t read him in a cheap edition.”
When he was seen thus among his books and his valu
59
Night and Day
ables, amiably anxious to make his visitor comfortable,
and moving about with something of the dexterity and
grace of a Persian cat, Denham relaxed his critical attitude,
and felt more at home with Rodney than he would
have done with many men better known to him. Rodney’s
room was the room of a person who cherishes a great
many personal tastes, guarding them from the rough blasts
of the public with scrupulous attention. His papers and
his books rose in jagged mounds on table and floor, round
which he skirted with nervous care lest his dressing-gown
might disarrange them ever so slightly. On a chair stood
a stack of photographs of statues and pictures, which it
was his habit to exhibit, one by one, for the space of a
day or two. The books on his shelves were as orderly as
regiments of soldiers, and the backs of them shone like
so many bronze beetle-wings; though, if you took one
from its place you saw a shabbier volume behind it, since
space was limited. An oval Venetian mirror stood above
the fireplace, and reflected duskily in its spotted depths
the faint yellow and crimson of a jarful of tulips which
stood among the letters and pipes and cigarettes upon
the mantelpiece. A small piano occupied a corner of the
room, with the score of “Don Giovanni” open upon the
bracket.
“Well, Rodney,” said Denham, as he filled his pipe and
looked about him, “this is all very nice and comfortable.”
Rodney turned his head half round and smiled, with
the pride of a proprietor, and then prevented himself from
smiling.
“Tolerable,” he muttered.
“But I dare say it’s just as well that you have to earn
your own living.”
“If you mean that I shouldn’t do anything good with
leisure if I had it, I dare say you’re right. But I should be
ten times as happy with my whole day to spend as I
liked.”
“I doubt that,” Denham replied.
They sat silent, and the smoke from their pipes joined
amicably in a blue vapor above their heads.
“I could spend three hours every day reading
Shakespeare,” Rodney remarked. “And there’s music and
pictures, let alone the society of the people one likes.”
60
Virginia Woolf
“You’d be bored to death in a year’s time.”
“Oh, I grant you I should be bored if I did nothing. But
I should write plays.”
“H’m!”
“I should write plays,” he repeated. “I’ve written three-
quarters of one already, and I’m only waiting for a holiday
to finish it. And it’s not bad—no, some of it’s really
rather nice.”
The question arose in Denham’s mind whether he should
ask to see this play, as, no doubt, he was expected to do.
He looked rather stealthily at Rodney, who was tapping
the coal nervously with a poker, and quivering almost
physically, so Denham thought, with desire to talk about
this play of his, and vanity unrequited and urgent. He
seemed very much at Denham’s mercy, and Denham could
not help liking him, partly on that account.
“Well, … will you let me see the play?” Denham asked,
and Rodney looked immediately appeased, but, nevertheless,
he sat silent for a moment, holding the poker perfectly
upright in the air, regarding it with his rather prominent
eyes, and opening his lips and shutting them again.
“Do you really care for this kind of thing?” he asked at
length, in a different tone of voice from that in which he
had been speaking. And, without waiting for an answer,
he went on, rather querulously: “Very few people care for
poetry. I dare say it bores you.”
“Perhaps,” Denham remarked.
“Well, I’ll lend it you,” Rodney announced, putting down
the poker.
As he moved to fetch the play, Denham stretched a
hand to the bookcase beside him, and took down the
first volume which his fingers touched. It happened to
be a small and very lovely edition of Sir Thomas Browne,
containing the “Urn Burial,” the “Hydriotaphia,” and the
“Garden of Cyrus,” and, opening it at a passage which he
knew very nearly by heart, Denham began to read and,
for some time, continued to read.
Rodney resumed his seat, with his manuscript on his
knee, and from time to time he glanced at Denham, and
then joined his finger-tips and crossed his thin legs over
the fender, as if he experienced a good deal of pleasure.
At length Denham shut the book, and stood, with his
61
Night and Day
back to the fireplace, occasionally making an inarticulate
humming sound which seemed to refer to Sir Thomas
Browne. He put his hat on his head, and stood over Rodney,
who still lay stretched back in his chair, with his toes
within the fender.
“I shall look in again some time,” Denham remarked,
upon which Rodney held up his hand, containing his manuscript,
without saying anything except—”If you like.”
Denham took the manuscript and went. Two days later
he was much surprised to find a thin parcel on his
breakfastplate, which, on being opened, revealed the very
copy of Sir Thomas Browne which he had studied so intently
in Rodney’s rooms. From sheer laziness he returned
no thanks, but he thought of Rodney from time to time
with interest, disconnecting him from Katharine, and
meant to go round one evening and smoke a pipe with
him. It pleased Rodney thus to give away whatever his
friends genuinely admired. His library was constantly being
diminished.
CHAPTER VI
Of all the hours of an ordinary working week-day, which
are the pleasantest to look forward to and to look back
upon? If a single instance is of use in framing a theory, it
may be said that the minutes between nine-twenty-five
and nine-thirty in the morning had a singular charm for
Mary Datchet. She spent them in a very enviable frame of
mind; her contentment was almost unalloyed. High in
the air as her flat was, some beams from the morning sun
reached her even in November, striking straight at curtain,
chair, and carpet, and painting there three bright,
true spaces of green, blue, and purple, upon which the
eye rested with a pleasure which gave physical warmth
to the body.
There were few mornings when Mary did not look up, as
she bent to lace her boots, and as she followed the yellow
rod from curtain to breakfast-table she usually
breathed some sigh of thankfulness that her life provided
her with such moments of pure enjoyment. She was robbing
no one of anything, and yet, to get so much plea
62
Virginia Woolf
sure from simple things, such as eating one’s breakfast
alone in a room which had nice colors in it, clean from the
skirting of the boards to the corners of the ceiling, seemed
to suit her so thoroughly that she used at first to hunt
about for some one to apologize to, or for some flaw in the
situation. She had now been six months in London, and
she could find no flaw, but that, as she invariably concluded
by the time her boots were laced, was solely and
entirely due to the fact that she had her work. Every day,
as she stood with her dispatch-box in her hand at the door
of her flat, and gave one look back into the room to see
that everything was straight before she left, she said to
herself that she was very glad that she was going to leave
it all, that to have sat there all day long, in the enjoyment
of leisure, would have been intolerable.
Out in the street she liked to think herself one of the
workers who, at this hour, take their way in rapid single
file along all the broad pavements of the city, with their
heads slightly lowered, as if all their effort were to follow
each other as closely as might be; so that Mary used to
figure to herself a straight rabbit-run worn by their un
swerving feet upon the pavement. But she liked to pretend
that she was indistinguishable from the rest, and
that when a wet day drove her to the Underground or
omnibus, she gave and took her share of crowd and wet
with clerks and typists and commercial men, and shared
with them the serious business of winding-up the world
to tick for another four-and-twenty hours.
Thus thinking, on the particular morning in question,
she made her away across Lincoln’s Inn Fields and up
Kingsway, and so through Southampton Row until she
reached her office in Russell Square. Now and then she
would pause and look into the window of some bookseller
or flower shop, where, at this early hour, the goods
were being arranged, and empty gaps behind the plate
glass revealed a state of undress. Mary felt kindly disposed
towards the shopkeepers, and hoped that they would
trick the midday public into purchasing, for at this hour
of the morning she ranged herself entirely on the side of
the shopkeepers and bank clerks, and regarded all who
slept late and had money to spend as her enemy and
natural prey. And directly she had crossed the road at
63
Night and Day
Holborn, her thoughts all came naturally and regularly to
roost upon her work, and she forgot that she was, properly
speaking, an amateur worker, whose services were
unpaid, and could hardly be said to wind the world up for
its daily task, since the world, so far, had shown very
little desire to take the boons which Mary’s society for
woman’s suffrage had offered it.
She was thinking all the way up Southampton Row of
notepaper and foolscap, and how an economy in the use
of paper might be effected (without, of course, hurting
Mrs. Seal’s feelings), for she was certain that the great
organizers always pounce, to begin with, upon trifles like
these, and build up their triumphant reforms upon a basis
of absolute solidity; and, without acknowledging it
for a moment, Mary Datchet was determined to be a great
organizer, and had already doomed her society to reconstruction
of the most radical kind. Once or twice lately, it
is true, she had started, broad awake, before turning into
Russell Square, and denounced herself rather sharply for
being already in a groove, capable, that is, of thinking
the same thoughts every morning at the same hour, so
that the chestnut-colored brick of the Russell Square
houses had some curious connection with her thoughts
about office economy, and served also as a sign that she
should get into trim for meeting Mr. Clacton, or Mrs. Seal,
or whoever might be beforehand with her at the office.
Having no religious belief, she was the more conscientious
about her life, examining her position from time to
time very seriously, and nothing annoyed her more than
to find one of these bad habits nibbling away unheeded
at the precious substance. What was the good, after all,
of being a woman if one didn’t keep fresh, and cram one’s
life with all sorts of views and experiments? Thus she
always gave herself a little shake, as she turned the corner,
and, as often as not, reached her own door whistling
a snatch of a Somersetshire ballad.
The suffrage office was at the top of one of the large
Russell Square houses, which had once been lived in by a
great city merchant and his family, and was now let out
in slices to a number of societies which displayed assorted
