that phantom with fresh food, which, as all who nourish
dreams are aware, is a process that becomes necessary
from time to time, or refine it to such a degree of thinness
that it was scarcely serviceable any longer; and that,
too, is sometimes a welcome change to a dreamer. And
all the time Ralph was well aware that the bulk of Katharine
was not represented in his dreams at all, so that when he
met her he was bewildered by the fact that she had nothing
to do with his dream of her.
When, on reaching the street, Katharine found that Mr.
Denham proceeded to keep pace by her side, she was
surprised and, perhaps, a little annoyed. She, too, had
her margin of imagination, and to-night her activity in
this obscure region of the mind required solitude. If she
had had her way, she would have walked very fast down
the Tottenham Court Road, and then sprung into a cab and
raced swiftly home. The view she had had of the inside of
an office was of the nature of a dream to her. Shut off up
there, she compared Mrs. Seal, and Mary Datchet, and Mr.
Clacton to enchanted people in a bewitched tower, with
the spiders’ webs looping across the corners of the room,
and all the tools of the necromancer’s craft at hand; for so
aloof and unreal and apart from the normal world did they
seem to her, in the house of innumerable typewriters,
murmuring their incantations and concocting their drugs,
and flinging their frail spiders’ webs over the torrent of life
which rushed down the streets outside.
She may have been conscious that there was some exaggeration
in this fancy of hers, for she certainly did not
wish to share it with Ralph. To him, she supposed, Mary
Datchet, composing leaflets for Cabinet Ministers among
her typewriters, represented all that was interesting and
genuine; and, accordingly, she shut them both out from
all share in the crowded street, with its pendant necklace
of lamps, its lighted windows, and its throng of men and
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Night and Day
women, which exhilarated her to such an extent that she
very nearly forgot her companion. She walked very fast,
and the effect of people passing in the opposite direction
was to produce a queer dizziness both in her head
and in Ralph’s, which set their bodies far apart. But she
did her duty by her companion almost unconsciously.
“Mary Datchet does that sort of work very well… . She’s
responsible for it, I suppose?”
“Yes. The others don’t help at all… . Has she made a
convert of you?”
“Oh no. That is, I’m a convert already.”
“But she hasn’t persuaded you to work for them?”
“Oh dear no—that wouldn’t do at all.”
So they walked on down the Tottenham Court Road,
parting and coming together again, and Ralph felt much
as though he were addressing the summit of a poplar in a
high gale of wind.
“Suppose we get on to that omnibus?” he suggested.
Katharine acquiesced, and they climbed up, and found
themselves alone on top of it.
“But which way are you going?” Katharine asked, wak
ing a little from the trance into which movement among
moving things had thrown her.
“I’m going to the Temple,” Ralph replied, inventing a
destination on the spur of the moment. He felt the change
come over her as they sat down and the omnibus began
to move forward. He imagined her contemplating the avenue
in front of them with those honest sad eyes which
seemed to set him at such a distance from them. But the
breeze was blowing in their faces; it lifted her hat for a
second, and she drew out a pin and stuck it in again,—a
little action which seemed, for some reason, to make her
rather more fallible. Ah, if only her hat would blow off,
and leave her altogether disheveled, accepting it from
his hands!
“This is like Venice,” she observed, raising her hand.
“The motor-cars, I mean, shooting about so quickly, with
their lights.”
“I’ve never seen Venice,” he replied. “I keep that and
some other things for my old age.”
“What are the other things?” she asked.
“There’s Venice and India and, I think, Dante, too.”
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Virginia Woolf
She laughed.
“Think of providing for one’s old age! And would you
refuse to see Venice if you had the chance?”
Instead of answering her, he wondered whether he
should tell her something that was quite true about himself;
and as he wondered, he told her.
“I’ve planned out my life in sections ever since I was a
child, to make it last longer. You see, I’m always afraid
that I’m missing something—”
“And so am I!” Katharine exclaimed. “But, after all,”
she added, “why should you miss anything?”
“Why? Because I’m poor, for one thing,” Ralph rejoined.
“You, I suppose, can have Venice and India and Dante
every day of your life.”
She said nothing for a moment, but rested one hand,
which was bare of glove, upon the rail in front of her,
meditating upon a variety of things, of which one was
that this strange young man pronounced Dante as she
was used to hearing it pronounced, and another, that he
had, most unexpectedly, a feeling about life that was
familiar to her. Perhaps, then, he was the sort of person
she might take an interest in, if she came to know him
better, and as she had placed him among those whom
she would never want to know better, this was enough to
make her silent. She hastily recalled her first view of
him, in the little room where the relics were kept, and
ran a bar through half her impressions, as one cancels a
badly written sentence, having found the right one.
“But to know that one might have things doesn’t alter
the fact that one hasn’t got them,” she said, in some confusion.
“How could I go to India, for example? Besides,”
she began impulsively, and stopped herself. Here the conductor
came round, and interrupted them. Ralph waited
for her to resume her sentence, but she said no more.
“I have a message to give your father,” he remarked.
“Perhaps you would give it him, or I could come—”
“Yes, do come,” Katharine replied.
“Still, I don’t see why you shouldn’t go to India,” Ralph
began, in order to keep her from rising, as she threatened
to do.
But she got up in spite of him, and said good-bye with
her usual air of decision, and left him with a quickness
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Night and Day
which Ralph connected now with all her movements. He
looked down and saw her standing on the pavement edge,
an alert, commanding figure, which waited its season to
cross, and then walked boldly and swiftly to the other
side. That gesture and action would be added to the picture
he had of her, but at present the real woman completely
routed the phantom one.
CHAPTER VII
And little Augustus Pelham said to me, ‘It’s the younger
generation knocking at the door,’ and I said to him, ‘Oh,
but the younger generation comes in without knocking,
Mr. Pelham.’ Such a feeble little joke, wasn’t it, but down
it went into his notebook all the same.”
“Let us congratulate ourselves that we shall be in the
grave before that work is published,” said Mr. Hilbery.
The elderly couple were waiting for the dinner-bell to
ring and for their daughter to come into the room. Their
arm-chairs were drawn up on either side of the fire, and
each sat in the same slightly crouched position, looking
into the coals, with the expressions of people who have
had their share of experiences and wait, rather passively,
for something to happen. Mr. Hilbery now gave all his
attention to a piece of coal which had fallen out of the
grate, and to selecting a favorable position for it among
the lumps that were burning already. Mrs. Hilbery watched
him in silence, and the smile changed on her lips as if
her mind still played with the events of the afternoon.
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Virginia Woolf
When Mr. Hilbery had accomplished his task, he resumed
his crouching position again, and began to toy with the
little green stone attached to his watch-chain. His deep,
oval-shaped eyes were fixed upon the flames, but behind
the superficial glaze seemed to brood an observant and
whimsical spirit, which kept the brown of the eye still
unusually vivid. But a look of indolence, the result of
skepticism or of a taste too fastidious to be satisfied by
the prizes and conclusions so easily within his grasp,
lent him an expression almost of melancholy. After sitting
thus for a time, he seemed to reach some point in
his thinking which demonstrated its futility, upon which
he sighed and stretched his hand for a book lying on the
table by his side.
Directly the door opened he closed the book, and the
eyes of father and mother both rested on Katharine as
she came towards them. The sight seemed at once to
give them a motive which they had not had before. To
them she appeared, as she walked towards them in her
light evening dress, extremely young, and the sight of
her refreshed them, were it only because her youth and
ignorance made their knowledge of the world of some
value.
“The only excuse for you, Katharine, is that dinner is
still later than you are,” said Mr. Hilbery, putting down
his spectacles.
“I don’t mind her being late when the result is so charming,”
said Mrs. Hilbery, looking with pride at her daughter.
“Still, I don’t know that I like your being out so late,
Katharine,” she continued. “You took a cab, I hope?”
Here dinner was announced, and Mr. Hilbery formally
led his wife downstairs on his arm. They were all dressed
for dinner, and, indeed, the prettiness of the dinner-table
merited that compliment. There was no cloth upon the
table, and the china made regular circles of deep blue
upon the shining brown wood. In the middle there was a
bowl of tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums, and one
of pure white, so fresh that the narrow petals were curved
backwards into a firm white ball. From the surrounding
walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers surveyed
this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath
them testified in the great man’s own handwriting
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Night and Day
that he was yours sincerely or affectionately or for ever.
The father and daughter would have been quite content,
apparently, to eat their dinner in silence, or with a few
cryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not
be understood by the servants. But silence depressed Mrs.
Hilbery, and far from minding the presence of maids, she
would often address herself to them, and was never altogether
unconscious of their approval or disapproval of
her remarks. In the first place she called them to witness
that the room was darker than usual, and had all the
lights turned on.
“That’s more cheerful,” she exclaimed. “D’you know,
Katharine, that ridiculous goose came to tea with me?
Oh, how I wanted you! He tried to make epigrams all the
time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, you know,
that I spilt the tea—and he made an epigram about that!”
“Which ridiculous goose?” Katharine asked her father.
“Only one of my geese, happily, makes epigrams—
Augustus Pelham, of course,” said Mrs. Hilbery.
“I’m not sorry that I was out,” said Katharine.
“Poor Augustus!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “But we’re all
too hard on him. Remember how devoted he is to his
tiresome old mother.”
“That’s only because she is his mother. Any one connected
with himself—”
“No, no, Katharine—that’s too bad. That’s—what’s the
word I mean, Trevor, something long and Latin—the sort
of word you and Katharine know—”
Mr. Hilbery suggested “cynical.”
“Well, that’ll do. I don’t believe in sending girls to college,
but I should teach them that sort of thing. It makes
one feel so dignified, bringing out these little allusions,
and passing on gracefully to the next topic. But I don’t
know what’s come over me—I actually had to ask Augustus
the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with, as you
were out, Katharine, and Heaven knows what he mayn’t
put down about me in his diary.”
“I wish,” Katharine started, with great impetuosity, and
checked herself. Her mother always stirred her to feel
and think quickly, and then she remembered that her father
was there, listening with attention.
“What is it you wish?” he asked, as she paused.
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Virginia Woolf
He often surprised her, thus, into telling him what she
had not meant to tell him; and then they argued, while
Mrs. Hilbery went on with her own thoughts.
“I wish mother wasn’t famous. I was out at tea, and
they would talk to me about poetry.”
“Thinking you must be poetical, I see—and aren’t you?”
“Who’s been talking to you about poetry, Katharine?”
Mrs. Hilbery demanded, and Katharine was committed to
giving her parents an account of her visit to the Suffrage
office.
“They have an office at the top of one of the old houses
in Russell Square. I never saw such queer-looking people.
And the man discovered I was related to the poet, and
talked to me about poetry. Even Mary Datchet seems different
in that atmosphere.”
“Yes, the office atmosphere is very bad for the soul,”
said Mr. Hilbery.
“I don’t remember any offices in Russell Square in the
old days, when Mamma lived there,” Mrs. Hilbery mused,
“and I can’t fancy turning one of those noble great rooms
into a stuffy little Suffrage office. Still, if the clerks read
poetry there must be something nice about them.”
“No, because they don’t read it as we read it,” Katharine
insisted.
“But it’s nice to think of them reading your grandfather,
and not filling up those dreadful little forms all day
long,” Mrs. Hilbery persisted, her notion of office life
being derived from some chance view of a scene behind
the counter at her bank, as she slipped the sovereigns
into her purse.
“At any rate, they haven’t made a convert of Katharine,
which was what I was afraid of,” Mr. Hilbery remarked.
