that the book became a wild dance of will-o’-the-wisps,
without form or continuity, without coherence even, or
any attempt to make a narrative. Here were twenty pages
upon her grandfather’s taste in hats, an essay upon contemporary
china, a long account of a summer day’s expedition
into the country, when they had missed their train,
together with fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous
men and women, which seemed to be partly imaginary
and partly authentic. There were, moreover, thousands of
letters, and a mass of faithful recollections contributed
by old friends, which had grown yellow now in their envelopes,
but must be placed somewhere, or their feelings
would be hurt. So many volumes had been written about
the poet since his death that she had also to dispose of
a great number of misstatements, which involved minute
researches and much correspondence. Sometimes
Katharine brooded, half crushed, among her papers; sometimes
she felt that it was necessary for her very existence
that she should free herself from the past; at others, that
the past had completely displaced the present, which,
when one resumed life after a morning among the dead,
proved to be of an utterly thin and inferior composition.
The worst of it was that she had no aptitude for literature.
She did not like phrases. She had even some natural
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Night and Day
antipathy to that process of self-examination, that perpetual
effort to understand one’s own feeling, and express
it beautifully, fitly, or energetically in language,
which constituted so great a part of her mother’s existence.
She was, on the contrary, inclined to be silent; she
shrank from expressing herself even in talk, let alone in
writing. As this disposition was highly convenient in a
family much given to the manufacture of phrases, and
seemed to argue a corresponding capacity for action, she
was, from her childhood even, put in charge of household
affairs. She had the reputation, which nothing in
her manner contradicted, of being the most practical of
people. Ordering meals, directing servants, paying bills,
and so contriving that every clock ticked more or less
accurately in time, and a number of vases were always
full of fresh flowers was supposed to be a natural endowment
of hers, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery often observed
that it was poetry the wrong side out. From a very early
age, too, she had to exert herself in another capacity;
she had to counsel and help and generally sustain her
mother. Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able
to sustain herself if the world had been what the world is
not. She was beautifully adapted for life in another planet.
But the natural genius she had for conducting affairs there
was of no real use to her here. Her watch, for example,
was a constant source of surprise to her, and at the age
of sixty-five she was still amazed at the ascendancy which
rules and reasons exerted over the lives of other people.
She had never learnt her lesson, and had constantly to
be punished for her ignorance. But as that ignorance was
combined with a fine natural insight which saw deep
whenever it saw at all, it was not possible to write Mrs.
Hilbery off among the dunces; on the contrary, she had a
way of seeming the wisest person in the room. But, on
the whole, she found it very necessary to seek support in
her daughter.
Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession
which has, as yet, no title and very little recognition, although
the labor of mill and factory is, perhaps, no more
severe and the results of less benefit to the world. She
lived at home. She did it very well, too. Any one coming to
the house in Cheyne Walk felt that here was an orderly
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Virginia Woolf
place, shapely, controlled—a place where life had been
trained to show to the best advantage, and, though composed
of different elements, made to appear harmonious
and with a character of its own. Perhaps it was the chief
triumph of Katharine’s art that Mrs. Hilbery’s character predominated.
She and Mr. Hilbery appeared to be a rich background
for her mother’s more striking qualities.
Silence being, thus, both natural to her and imposed
upon her, the only other remark that her mother’s friends
were in the habit of making about it was that it was
neither a stupid silence nor an indifferent silence. But to
what quality it owed its character, since character of some
sort it had, no one troubled themselves to inquire. It was
understood that she was helping her mother to produce a
great book. She was known to manage the household.
She was certainly beautiful. That accounted for her satisfactorily.
But it would have been a surprise, not only to
other people but to Katharine herself, if some magic watch
could have taken count of the moments spent in an entirely
different occupation from her ostensible one. Sitting
with faded papers before her, she took part in a
series of scenes such as the taming of wild ponies upon
the American prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a
hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or in others
more peaceful, but marked by her complete emancipation
from her present surroundings and, needless to say,
by her surpassing ability in her new vocation. When she
was rid of the pretense of paper and pen, phrase-making
and biography, she turned her attention in a more legitimate
direction, though, strangely enough, she would
rather have confessed her wildest dreams of hurricane
and prairie than the fact that, upstairs, alone in her room,
she rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to …
work at mathematics. No force on earth would have made
her confess that. Her actions when thus engaged were
furtive and secretive, like those of some nocturnal animal.
Steps had only to sound on the staircase, and she
slipped her paper between the leaves of a great Greek
dictionary which she had purloined from her father’s room
for this purpose. It was only at night, indeed, that she
felt secure enough from surprise to concentrate her mind
to the utmost.
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Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her
instinctively wish to conceal her love of it. But the more
profound reason was that in her mind mathematics were
directly opposed to literature. She would not have cared
to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude,
the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion,
agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose. There was
something a little unseemly in thus opposing the tradition
of her family; something that made her feel wrongheaded,
and thus more than ever disposed to shut her
desires away from view and cherish them with extraordinary
fondness. Again and again she was thinking of some
problem when she should have been thinking of her grandfather.
Waking from these trances, she would see that her
mother, too, had lapsed into some dream almost as visionary
as her own, for the people who played their parts
in it had long been numbered among the dead. But, seeing
her own state mirrored in her mother’s face, Katharine
would shake herself awake with a sense of irritation. Her
mother was the last person she wished to resemble, much
though she admired her. Her common sense would assert
itself almost brutally, and Mrs. Hilbery, looking at her
with her odd sidelong glance, that was half malicious
and half tender, would liken her to “your wicked old Uncle
Judge Peter, who used to be heard delivering sentence of
death in the bathroom. Thank Heaven, Katharine, I’ve
not a drop of HIM in me!”
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Virginia Woolf
CHAPTER IV
At about nine o’clock at night, on every alternate Wednesday,
Miss Mary Datchet made the same resolve, that she
would never again lend her rooms for any purposes whatsoever.
Being, as they were, rather large and conveniently
situated in a street mostly dedicated to offices off the
Strand, people who wished to meet, either for purposes
of enjoyment, or to discuss art, or to reform the State,
had a way of suggesting that Mary had better be asked to
lend them her rooms. She always met the request with
the same frown of well-simulated annoyance, which presently
dissolved in a kind of half-humorous, half-surly
shrug, as of a large dog tormented by children who shakes
his ears. She would lend her room, but only on condition
that all the arrangements were made by her. This fortnightly
meeting of a society for the free discussion of
everything entailed a great deal of moving, and pulling,
and ranging of furniture against the wall, and placing of
breakable and precious things in safe places. Miss Datchet
was quite capable of lifting a kitchen table on her back,
if need were, for although well-proportioned and dressed
becomingly, she had the appearance of unusual strength
and determination.
She was some twenty-five years of age, but looked older
because she earned, or intended to earn, her own living,
and had already lost the look of the irresponsible spectator,
and taken on that of the private in the army of workers.
Her gestures seemed to have a certain purpose, the
muscles round eyes and lips were set rather firmly, as
though the senses had undergone some discipline, and
were held ready for a call on them. She had contracted
two faint lines between her eyebrows, not from anxiety
but from thought, and it was quite evident that all the
feminine instincts of pleasing, soothing, and charming
were crossed by others in no way peculiar to her sex. For
the rest she was brown-eyed, a little clumsy in movement,
and suggested country birth and a descent from
respectable hard-working ancestors, who had been men
of faith and integrity rather than doubters or fanatics.
At the end of a fairly hard day’s work it was certainly
something of an effort to clear one’s room, to pull the
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Night and Day
mattress off one’s bed, and lay it on the floor, to fill a
pitcher with cold coffee, and to sweep a long table clear
for plates and cups and saucers, with pyramids of little
pink biscuits between them; but when these alterations
were effected, Mary felt a lightness of spirit come to her,
as if she had put off the stout stuff of her working hours
and slipped over her entire being some vesture of thin,
bright silk. She knelt before the fire and looked out into
the room. The light fell softly, but with clear radiance,
through shades of yellow and blue paper, and the room,
which was set with one or two sofas resembling grassy
mounds in their lack of shape, looked unusually large and
quiet. Mary was led to think of the heights of a Sussex
down, and the swelling green circle of some camp of ancient
warriors. The moonlight would be falling there so
peacefully now, and she could fancy the rough pathway
of silver upon the wrinkled skin of the sea.
“And here we are,” she said, half aloud, half satirically,
yet with evident pride, “talking about art.”
She pulled a basket containing balls of differently colored
wools and a pair of stockings which needed darning
towards her, and began to set her fingers to work; while
her mind, reflecting the lassitude of her body, went on
perversely, conjuring up visions of solitude and quiet,
and she pictured herself laying aside her knitting and
walking out on to the down, and hearing nothing but the
sheep cropping the grass close to the roots, while the
shadows of the little trees moved very slightly this way
and that in the moonlight, as the breeze went through
them. But she was perfectly conscious of her present situation,
and derived some pleasure from the reflection that
she could rejoice equally in solitude, and in the presence
of the many very different people who were now making
their way, by divers paths, across London to the spot
where she was sitting.
As she ran her needle in and out of the wool, she thought
of the various stages in her own life which made her
present position seem the culmination of successive
miracles. She thought of her clerical father in his country
parsonage, and of her mother’s death, and of her own
determination to obtain education, and of her college
life, which had merged, not so very long ago, in the won
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Virginia Woolf
derful maze of London, which still seemed to her, in spite
of her constitutional level-headedness, like a vast electric
light, casting radiance upon the myriads of men and
women who crowded round it. And here she was at the
very center of it all, that center which was constantly in
the minds of people in remote Canadian forests and on
the plains of India, when their thoughts turned to England.
The nine mellow strokes, by which she was now
apprised of the hour, were a message from the great clock
at Westminster itself. As the last of them died away, there
was a firm knocking on her own door, and she rose and
opened it. She returned to the room, with a look of steady
pleasure in her eyes, and she was talking to Ralph Denham,
who followed her.
“Alone?” he said, as if he were pleasantly surprised by
that fact.
“I am sometimes alone,” she replied.
“But you expect a great many people,” he added, looking
round him. “It’s like a room on the stage. Who is it
to-night?”
“William Rodney, upon the Elizabethan use of meta
phor. I expect a good solid paper, with plenty of quotations
from the classics.”
Ralph warmed his hands at the fire, which was flapping
bravely in the grate, while Mary took up her stocking
again.
“I suppose you are the only woman in London who darns
her own stockings,” he observed.
“I’m only one of a great many thousands really,” she
replied, “though I must admit that I was thinking myself
very remarkable when you came in. And now that you’re
