here I don’t think myself remarkable at all. How horrid of
you! But I’m afraid you’re much more remarkable than I
am. You’ve done much more than I’ve done.”
“If that’s your standard, you’ve nothing to be proud
of,” said Ralph grimly.
“Well, I must reflect with Emerson that it’s being and
not doing that matters,” she continued.
“Emerson?” Ralph exclaimed, with derision. “You don’t
mean to say you read Emerson?”
“Perhaps it wasn’t Emerson; but why shouldn’t I read
Emerson?” she asked, with a tinge of anxiety.
39
Night and Day
“There’s no reason that I know of. It’s the combination
that’s odd—books and stockings. The combination is very
odd.” But it seemed to recommend itself to him. Mary gave
a little laugh, expressive of happiness, and the particular
stitches that she was now putting into her work appeared
to her to be done with singular grace and felicity. She held
out the stocking and looked at it approvingly.
“You always say that,” she said. “I assure you it’s a
common ‘combination,’ as you call it, in the houses of
the clergy. The only thing that’s odd about me is that I
enjoy them both—Emerson and the stocking.”
A knock was heard, and Ralph exclaimed:
“Damn those people! I wish they weren’t coming!”
“It’s only Mr. Turner, on the floor below,” said Mary, and
she felt grateful to Mr. Turner for having alarmed Ralph,
and for having given a false alarm.
“Will there be a crowd?” Ralph asked, after a pause.
“There’ll be the Morrises and the Crashaws, and Dick
Osborne, and Septimus, and all that set. Katharine Hilbery
is coming, by the way, so William Rodney told me.”
“Katharine Hilbery!” Ralph exclaimed.
“You know her?” Mary asked, with some surprise.
“I went to a tea-party at her house.”
Mary pressed him to tell her all about it, and Ralph was
not at all unwilling to exhibit proofs of the extent of his
knowledge. He described the scene with certain additions
and exaggerations which interested Mary very much.
“But, in spite of what you say, I do admire her,” she
said. “I’ve only seen her once or twice, but she seems to
me to be what one calls a ‘personality.’”
“I didn’t mean to abuse her. I only felt that she wasn’t
very sympathetic to me.”
“They say she’s going to marry that queer creature
Rodney.”
“Marry Rodney? Then she must be more deluded than I
thought her.”
“Now that’s my door, all right,” Mary exclaimed, carefully
putting her wools away, as a succession of knocks
reverberated unnecessarily, accompanied by a sound of
people stamping their feet and laughing. A moment later
the room was full of young men and women, who came in
with a peculiar look of expectation, exclaimed “Oh!” when
40
Virginia Woolf
they saw Denham, and then stood still, gaping rather
foolishly.
The room very soon contained between twenty and thirty
people, who found seats for the most part upon the floor,
occupying the mattresses, and hunching themselves together
into triangular shapes. They were all young and
some of them seemed to make a protest by their hair and
dress, and something somber and truculent in the expression
of their faces, against the more normal type,
who would have passed unnoticed in an omnibus or an
underground railway. It was notable that the talk was
confined to groups, and was, at first, entirely spasmodic
in character, and muttered in undertones as if the speakers
were suspicious of their fellow-guests.
Katharine Hilbery came in rather late, and took up a
position on the floor, with her back against the wall. She
looked round quickly, recognized about half a dozen
people, to whom she nodded, but failed to see Ralph, or,
if so, had already forgotten to attach any name to him.
But in a second these heterogeneous elements were all
united by the voice of Mr. Rodney, who suddenly strode
up to the table, and began very rapidly in high-strained
tones:
“In undertaking to speak of the Elizabethan use of metaphor
in poetry—”
All the different heads swung slightly or steadied themselves
into a position in which they could gaze straight
at the speaker’s face, and the same rather solemn expression
was visible on all of them. But, at the same time,
even the faces that were most exposed to view, and therefore
most tautly under control, disclosed a sudden impulsive
tremor which, unless directly checked, would have
developed into an outburst of laughter. The first sight of
Mr. Rodney was irresistibly ludicrous. He was very red in
the face, whether from the cool November night or nervousness,
and every movement, from the way he wrung
his hands to the way he jerked his head to right and left,
as though a vision drew him now to the door, now to the
window, bespoke his horrible discomfort under the stare
of so many eyes. He was scrupulously well dressed, and a
pearl in the center of his tie seemed to give him a touch
of aristocratic opulence. But the rather prominent eyes
41
Night and Day
and the impulsive stammering manner, which seemed to
indicate a torrent of ideas intermittently pressing for utterance
and always checked in their course by a clutch of
nervousness, drew no pity, as in the case of a more imposing
personage, but a desire to laugh, which was, however,
entirely lacking in malice. Mr. Rodney was evidently
so painfully conscious of the oddity of his appearance,
and his very redness and the starts to which his body was
liable gave such proof of his own discomfort, that there
was something endearing in this ridiculous susceptibility,
although most people would probably have echoed
Denham’s private exclamation, “Fancy marrying a creature
like that!”
His paper was carefully written out, but in spite of this
precaution Mr. Rodney managed to turn over two sheets
instead of one, to choose the wrong sentence where two
were written together, and to discover his own handwriting
suddenly illegible. When he found himself possessed
of a coherent passage, he shook it at his audience almost
aggressively, and then fumbled for another. After a distressing
search a fresh discovery would be made, and
produced in the same way, until, by means of repeated
attacks, he had stirred his audience to a degree of animation
quite remarkable in these gatherings. Whether
they were stirred by his enthusiasm for poetry or by the
contortions which a human being was going through for
their benefit, it would be hard to say. At length Mr. Rodney
sat down impulsively in the middle of a sentence, and,
after a pause of bewilderment, the audience expressed
its relief at being able to laugh aloud in a decided outburst
of applause.
Mr. Rodney acknowledged this with a wild glance round
him, and, instead of waiting to answer questions, he
jumped up, thrust himself through the seated bodies into
the corner where Katharine was sitting, and exclaimed,
very audibly:
“Well, Katharine, I hope I’ve made a big enough fool of
myself even for you! It was terrible! terrible! terrible!”
“Hush! You must answer their questions,” Katharine
whispered, desiring, at all costs, to keep him quiet. Oddly
enough, when the speaker was no longer in front of them,
there seemed to be much that was suggestive in what he
42
Virginia Woolf
had said. At any rate, a pale-faced young man with sad
eyes was already on his feet, delivering an accurately
worded speech with perfect composure. William Rodney
listened with a curious lifting of his upper lip, although
his face was still quivering slightly with emotion.
“Idiot!” he whispered. “He’s misunderstood every word
I said!”
“Well then, answer him,” Katharine whispered back.
“No, I shan’t! They’d only laugh at me. Why did I let
you persuade me that these sort of people care for literature?”
he continued.
There was much to be said both for and against Mr.
Rodney’s paper. It had been crammed with assertions that
such-and-such passages, taken liberally from English,
French, and Italian, are the supreme pearls of literature.
Further, he was fond of using metaphors which, compounded
in the study, were apt to sound either cramped
or out of place as he delivered them in fragments. Literature
was a fresh garland of spring flowers, he said, in
which yew-berries and the purple nightshade mingled with
the various tints of the anemone; and somehow or other
this garland encircled marble brows. He had read very
badly some very beautiful quotations. But through his
manner and his confusion of language there had emerged
some passion of feeling which, as he spoke, formed in
the majority of the audience a little picture or an idea
which each now was eager to give expression to. Most of
the people there proposed to spend their lives in the
practice either of writing or painting, and merely by looking
at them it could be seen that, as they listened to Mr.
Purvis first, and then to Mr. Greenhalgh, they were seeing
something done by these gentlemen to a possession
which they thought to be their own. One person after
another rose, and, as with an ill-balanced axe, attempted
to hew out his conception of art a little more clearly, and
sat down with the feeling that, for some reason which he
could not grasp, his strokes had gone awry. As they sat
down they turned almost invariably to the person sitting
next them, and rectified and continued what they had
just said in public. Before long, therefore, the groups on
the mattresses and the groups on the chairs were all in
communication with each other, and Mary Datchet, who
43
Night and Day
had begun to darn stockings again, stooped down and
remarked to Ralph:
“That was what I call a first-rate paper.”
Both of them instinctively turned their eyes in the direction
of the reader of the paper. He was lying back
against the wall, with his eyes apparently shut, and his
chin sunk upon his collar. Katharine was turning over the
pages of his manuscript as if she were looking for some
passage that had particularly struck her, and had a difficulty
in finding it.
“Let’s go and tell him how much we liked it,” said Mary,
thus suggesting an action which Ralph was anxious to
take, though without her he would have been too proud
to do it, for he suspected that he had more interest in
Katharine than she had in him.
“That was a very interesting paper,” Mary began, without
any shyness, seating herself on the floor opposite to
Rodney and Katharine. “Will you lend me the manuscript
to read in peace?”
Rodney, who had opened his eyes on their approach,
regarded her for a moment in suspicious silence.
“Do you say that merely to disguise the fact of my ridiculous
failure?” he asked.
Katharine looked up from her reading with a smile.
“He says he doesn’t mind what we think of him,” she
remarked. “He says we don’t care a rap for art of any
kind.”
“I asked her to pity me, and she teases me!” Rodney
exclaimed.
“I don’t intend to pity you, Mr. Rodney,” Mary remarked,
kindly, but firmly. “When a paper’s a failure, nobody says
anything, whereas now, just listen to them!”
The sound, which filled the room, with its hurry of short
syllables, its sudden pauses, and its sudden attacks, might be
compared to some animal hubbub, frantic and inarticulate.
“D’you think that’s all about my paper?” Rodney inquired,
after a moment’s attention, with a distinct brightening
of expression.
“Of course it is,” said Mary. “It was a very suggestive
paper.”
She turned to Denham for confirmation, and he corroborated
her.
44
Virginia Woolf
“It’s the ten minutes after a paper is read that proves
whether it’s been a success or not,” he said. “If I were
you, Rodney, I should be very pleased with myself.”
This commendation seemed to comfort Mr. Rodney completely,
and he began to bethink him of all the passages
in his paper which deserved to be called “suggestive.”
“Did you agree at all, Denham, with what I said about
Shakespeare’s later use of imagery? I’m afraid I didn’t
altogether make my meaning plain.”
Here he gathered himself together, and by means of a
series of frog-like jerks, succeeded in bringing himself
close to Denham.
Denham answered him with the brevity which is the
result of having another sentence in the mind to be addressed
to another person. He wished to say to Katharine:
“Did you remember to get that picture glazed before your
aunt came to dinner?” but, besides having to answer
Rodney, he was not sure that the remark, with its assertion
of intimacy, would not strike Katharine as impertinent.
She was listening to what some one in another
group was saying. Rodney, meanwhile, was talking about
the Elizabethan dramatists.
He was a curious-looking man since, upon first sight,
especially if he chanced to be talking with animation, he
appeared, in some way, ridiculous; but, next moment, in
repose, his face, with its large nose, thin cheeks and lips
expressing the utmost sensibility, somehow recalled a
Roman head bound with laurel, cut upon a circle of semitransparent
reddish stone. It had dignity and character.
By profession a clerk in a Government office, he was one
of those martyred spirits to whom literature is at once a
source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation.
Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt
to practise it themselves, and they are generally endowed
with very little facility in composition. They condemn
whatever they produce. Moreover, the violence of their
feelings is such that they seldom meet with adequate
sympathy, and being rendered very sensitive by their cultivated
perceptions, suffer constant slights both to their
own persons and to the thing they worship. But Rodney
