could never resist making trial of the sympathies of any
one who seemed favorably disposed, and Denham’s praise
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Night and Day
had stimulated his very susceptible vanity.
“You remember the passage just before the death of
the Duchess?” he continued, edging still closer to Denham,
and adjusting his elbow and knee in an incredibly angular
combination. Here, Katharine, who had been cut off
by these maneuvers from all communication with the outer
world, rose, and seated herself upon the window-sill, where
she was joined by Mary Datchet. The two young women
could thus survey the whole party. Denham looked after
them, and made as if he were tearing handfuls of grass
up by the roots from the carpet. But as it fell in accurately
with his conception of life that all one’s desires
were bound to be frustrated, he concentrated his mind
upon literature, and determined, philosophically, to get
what he could out of that.
Katharine was pleasantly excited. A variety of courses
was open to her. She knew several people slightly, and at
any moment one of them might rise from the floor and
come and speak to her; on the other hand, she might
select somebody for herself, or she might strike into
Rodney’s discourse, to which she was intermittently at
tentive. She was conscious of Mary’s body beside her,
but, at the same time, the consciousness of being both
of them women made it unnecessary to speak to her. But
Mary, feeling, as she had said, that Katharine was a “personality,”
wished so much to speak to her that in a few
moments she did.
“They’re exactly like a flock of sheep, aren’t they?” she
said, referring to the noise that rose from the scattered
bodies beneath her.
Katharine turned and smiled.
“I wonder what they’re making such a noise about?”
she said.
“The Elizabethans, I suppose.”
“No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the Elizabethans.
There! Didn’t you hear them say, ‘Insurance Bill’?”
“I wonder why men always talk about politics?” Mary
speculated. “I suppose, if we had votes, we should, too.”
“I dare say we should. And you spend your life in getting
us votes, don’t you?”
“I do,” said Mary, stoutly. “From ten to six every day
I’m at it.”
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Virginia Woolf
Katharine looked at Ralph Denham, who was now pounding
his way through the metaphysics of metaphor with
Rodney, and was reminded of his talk that Sunday afternoon.
She connected him vaguely with Mary.
“I suppose you’re one of the people who think we should
all have professions,” she said, rather distantly, as if feeling
her way among the phantoms of an unknown world.
“Oh dear no,” said Mary at once.
“Well, I think I do,” Katharine continued, with half a
sigh. “You will always be able to say that you’ve done
something, whereas, in a crowd like this, I feel rather
melancholy.”
“In a crowd? Why in a crowd?” Mary asked, deepening
the two lines between her eyes, and hoisting herself nearer
to Katharine upon the window-sill.
“Don’t you see how many different things these people
care about? And I want to beat them down—I only mean,”
she corrected herself, “that I want to assert myself, and
it’s difficult, if one hasn’t a profession.”
Mary smiled, thinking that to beat people down was a
process that should present no difficulty to Miss Katharine
Hilbery. They knew each other so slightly that the beginning
of intimacy, which Katharine seemed to initiate by
talking about herself, had something solemn in it, and
they were silent, as if to decide whether to proceed or
not. They tested the ground.
“Ah, but I want to trample upon their prostrate bodies!”
Katharine announced, a moment later, with a laugh,
as if at the train of thought which had led her to this
conclusion.
“One doesn’t necessarily trample upon people’s bodies
because one runs an office,” Mary remarked.
“No. Perhaps not,” Katharine replied. The conversation
lapsed, and Mary saw Katharine looking out into the room
rather moodily with closed lips, the desire to talk about
herself or to initiate a friendship having, apparently, left
her. Mary was struck by her capacity for being thus easily
silent, and occupied with her own thoughts. It was a
habit that spoke of loneliness and a mind thinking for
itself. When Katharine remained silent Mary was slightly
embarrassed.
“Yes, they’re very like sheep,” she repeated, foolishly.
47
Night and Day
“And yet they are very clever—at least,” Katharine
added, “I suppose they have all read Webster.”
“Surely you don’t think that a proof of cleverness? I’ve
read Webster, I’ve read Ben Jonson, but I don’t think
myself clever—not exactly, at least.”
“I think you must be very clever,” Katharine observed.
“Why? Because I run an office?”
“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking how you live
alone in this room, and have parties.”
Mary reflected for a second.
“It means, chiefly, a power of being disagreeable to
one’s own family, I think. I have that, perhaps. I didn’t
want to live at home, and I told my father. He didn’t like
it… . But then I have a sister, and you haven’t, have
you?”
“No, I haven’t any sisters.”
“You are writing a life of your grandfather?” Mary pursued.
Katharine seemed instantly to be confronted by some
familiar thought from which she wished to escape. She
replied, “Yes, I am helping my mother,” in such a way
that Mary felt herself baffled, and put back again into
the position in which she had been at the beginning of
their talk. It seemed to her that Katharine possessed a
curious power of drawing near and receding, which sent
alternate emotions through her far more quickly than was
usual, and kept her in a condition of curious alertness.
Desiring to classify her, Mary bethought her of the convenient
term “egoist.”
“She’s an egoist,” she said to herself, and stored that
word up to give to Ralph one day when, as it would certainly
fall out, they were discussing Miss Hilbery.
“Heavens, what a mess there’ll be to-morrow morning!”
Katharine exclaimed. “I hope you don’t sleep in this room,
Miss Datchet?”
Mary laughed.
“What are you laughing at?” Katharine demanded.
“I won’t tell you.”
“Let me guess. You were laughing because you thought
I’d changed the conversation?”
“No.”
“Because you think—” She paused.
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Virginia Woolf
“If you want to know, I was laughing at the way you
said Miss Datchet.”
“Mary, then. Mary, Mary, Mary.”
So saying, Katharine drew back the curtain in order,
perhaps, to conceal the momentary flush of pleasure
which is caused by coming perceptibly nearer to another
person.
“Mary Datchet,” said Mary. “It’s not such an imposing
name as Katharine Hilbery, I’m afraid.”
They both looked out of the window, first up at the
hard silver moon, stationary among a hurry of little grey-
blue clouds, and then down upon the roofs of London,
with all their upright chimneys, and then below them at
the empty moonlit pavement of the street, upon which
the joint of each paving-stone was clearly marked out.
Mary then saw Katharine raise her eyes again to the moon,
with a contemplative look in them, as though she were
setting that moon against the moon of other nights, held
in memory. Some one in the room behind them made a
joke about star-gazing, which destroyed their pleasure in
it, and they looked back into the room again.
Ralph had been watching for this moment, and he instantly
produced his sentence.
“I wonder, Miss Hilbery, whether you remembered to
get that picture glazed?” His voice showed that the question
was one that had been prepared.
“Oh, you idiot!” Mary exclaimed, very nearly aloud, with
a sense that Ralph had said something very stupid. So,
after three lessons in Latin grammar, one might correct a
fellow student, whose knowledge did not embrace the
ablative of “mensa.”
“Picture—what picture?” Katharine asked. “Oh, at home,
you mean—that Sunday afternoon. Was it the day Mr.
Fortescue came? Yes, I think I remembered it.”
The three of them stood for a moment awkwardly silent,
and then Mary left them in order to see that the
great pitcher of coffee was properly handled, for beneath
all her education she preserved the anxieties of one who
owns china.
Ralph could think of nothing further to say; but could
one have stripped off his mask of flesh, one would have
seen that his will-power was rigidly set upon a single
49
Night and Day
object—that Miss Hilbery should obey him. He wished
her to stay there until, by some measures not yet apparent
to him, he had conquered her interest. These states
of mind transmit themselves very often without the use
of language, and it was evident to Katharine that this
young man had fixed his mind upon her. She instantly
recalled her first impressions of him, and saw herself again
proffering family relics. She reverted to the state of mind
in which he had left her that Sunday afternoon. She supposed
that he judged her very severely. She argued naturally
that, if this were the case, the burden of the conversation
should rest with him. But she submitted so far as
to stand perfectly still, her eyes upon the opposite wall,
and her lips very nearly closed, though the desire to laugh
stirred them slightly.
“You know the names of the stars, I suppose?” Denham
remarked, and from the tone of his voice one might have
thought that he grudged Katharine the knowledge he attributed
to her.
She kept her voice steady with some difficulty.
“I know how to find the Pole star if I’m lost.”
“I don’t suppose that often happens to you.”
“No. Nothing interesting ever happens to me,” she said.
“I think you make a system of saying disagreeable things,
Miss Hilbery,” he broke out, again going further than he
meant to. “I suppose it’s one of the characteristics of your
class. They never talk seriously to their inferiors.”
Whether it was that they were meeting on neutral ground
to-night, or whether the carelessness of an old grey coat
that Denham wore gave an ease to his bearing that he
lacked in conventional dress, Katharine certainly felt no
impulse to consider him outside the particular set in which
she lived.
“In what sense are you my inferior?” she asked, looking
at him gravely, as though honestly searching for his meaning.
The look gave him great pleasure. For the first time
he felt himself on perfectly equal terms with a woman
whom he wished to think well of him, although he could
not have explained why her opinion of him mattered one
way or another. Perhaps, after all, he only wanted to
have something of her to take home to think about. But
he was not destined to profit by his advantage.
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Virginia Woolf
“I don’t think I understand what you mean,” Katharine
repeated, and then she was obliged to stop and answer
some one who wished to know whether she would buy a
ticket for an opera from them, at a reduction. Indeed,
the temper of the meeting was now unfavorable to separate
conversation; it had become rather debauched and
hilarious, and people who scarcely knew each other were
making use of Christian names with apparent cordiality,
and had reached that kind of gay tolerance and general
friendliness which human beings in England only attain
after sitting together for three hours or so, and the first
cold blast in the air of the street freezes them into isolation
once more. Cloaks were being flung round the shoulders,
hats swiftly pinned to the head; and Denham had
the mortification of seeing Katharine helped to prepare
herself by the ridiculous Rodney. It was not the convention
of the meeting to say good-bye, or necessarily even
to nod to the person with whom one was talking; but,
nevertheless, Denham was disappointed by the completeness
with which Katharine parted from him, without any
attempt to finish her sentence. She left with Rodney.
CHAPTER V
Denham had no conscious intention of following Katharine,
but, seeing her depart, he took his hat and ran rather
more quickly down the stairs than he would have done if
Katharine had not been in front of him. He overtook a
friend of his, by name Harry Sandys, who was going the
same way, and they walked together a few paces behind
Katharine and Rodney.
The night was very still, and on such nights, when the
traffic thins away, the walker becomes conscious of the
moon in the street, as if the curtains of the sky had been
drawn apart, and the heaven lay bare, as it does in the
country. The air was softly cool, so that people who had
been sitting talking in a crowd found it pleasant to walk
a little before deciding to stop an omnibus or encounter
light again in an underground railway. Sandys, who was a
barrister with a philosophic tendency, took out his pipe,
lit it, murmured “hum” and “ha,” and was silent. The
couple in front of them kept their distance accurately,
and appeared, so far as Denham could judge by the way
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Night and Day
they turned towards each other, to be talking very constantly.
He observed that when a pedestrian going the
opposite way forced them to part they came together
again directly afterwards. Without intending to watch
them he never quite lost sight of the yellow scarf twisted
round Katharine’s head, or the light overcoat which made
Rodney look fashionable among the crowd. At the Strand
he supposed that they would separate, but instead they
crossed the road, and took their way down one of the
narrow passages which lead through ancient courts to
the river. Among the crowd of people in the big thoroughfares
Rodney seemed merely to be lending Katharine
his escort, but now, when passengers were rare and the
