Night and Day by Virginia Woolf (good books for 8th graders .txt) 📕
"You must be very proud of your family, Miss Hilbery."
"Yes, I am," Katharine answered, and she added, "Do you think there's anything wrong in that?"
"Wrong? How should it be wrong? It must be a bore, though, showing your things to visitors," he added reflectively.
"Not if the visitors like them."
"Isn't it difficult to live up to your ancestors?" he proceeded.
"I dare say I shouldn't try to write poetry," Katharine replied.
"No. And that's what I should hate. I couldn't bear my grandfather to cut me out. And, after all," Denham went on, glancing round him satirically, as Katharine thought, "it's not your grandfather only. You're cut out all the way round. I suppose you come of one of the most distinguished families in England. There are the Warburtons and the Mannings--and you're related to the Otways, aren't you? I read it all in some magazine," he added.
"The Otways are my cousins," Katharine replied.
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when she should have left him. He had no wish to use the last moments
of their companionship in adding fresh words to what he had already
said. Since they had stopped talking, she had become to him not so
much a real person, as the very woman he dreamt of; but his solitary
dreams had never produced any such keenness of sensation as that which
he felt in her presence. He himself was also strangely transfigured.
He had complete mastery of all his faculties. For the first time he
was in possession of his full powers. The vistas which opened before
him seemed to have no perceptible end. But the mood had none of the
restlessness or feverish desire to add one delight to another which
had hitherto marked, and somewhat spoilt, the most rapturous of his
imaginings. It was a mood that took such clear-eyed account of the
conditions of human life that he was not disturbed in the least by the
gliding presence of a taxicab, and without agitation he perceived that
Katharine was conscious of it also, and turned her head in that
direction. Their halting steps acknowledged the desirability of
engaging the cab; and they stopped simultaneously, and signed to it.
“Then you will let me know your decision as soon as you can?” he
asked, with his hand on the door.
She hesitated for a moment. She could not immediately recall what the
question was that she had to decide.
“I will write,” she said vaguely. “No,” she added, in a second,
bethinking her of the difficulties of writing anything decided upon a
question to which she had paid no attention, “I don’t see how to
manage it.”
She stood looking at Denham, considering and hesitating, with her foot
upon the step. He guessed her difficulties; he knew in a second that
she had heard nothing; he knew everything that she felt.
“There’s only one place to discuss things satisfactorily that I know
of,” he said quickly; “that’s Kew.”
“Kew?”
“Kew,” he repeated, with immense decision. He shut the door and gave
her address to the driver. She instantly was conveyed away from him,
and her cab joined the knotted stream of vehicles, each marked by a
light, and indistinguishable one from the other. He stood watching for
a moment, and then, as if swept by some fierce impulse, from the spot
where they had stood, he turned, crossed the road at a rapid pace, and
disappeared.
He walked on upon the impetus of this last mood of almost supernatural
exaltation until he reached a narrow street, at this hour empty of
traffic and passengers. Here, whether it was the shops with their
shuttered windows, the smooth and silvered curve of the wood pavement,
or a natural ebb of feeling, his exaltation slowly oozed and deserted
him. He was now conscious of the loss that follows any revelation; he
had lost something in speaking to Katharine, for, after all, was the
Katharine whom he loved the same as the real Katharine? She had
transcended her entirely at moments; her skirt had blown, her feather
waved, her voice spoken; yes, but how terrible sometimes the pause
between the voice of one’s dreams and the voice that comes from the
object of one’s dreams! He felt a mixture of disgust and pity at the
figure cut by human beings when they try to carry out, in practice,
what they have the power to conceive. How small both he and Katharine
had appeared when they issued from the cloud of thought that enveloped
them! He recalled the small, inexpressive, commonplace words in which
they had tried to communicate with each other; he repeated them over
to himself. By repeating Katharine’s words, he came in a few moments
to such a sense of her presence that he worshipped her more than ever.
But she was engaged to be married, he remembered with a start. The
strength of his feeling was revealed to him instantly, and he gave
himself up to an irresistible rage and sense of frustration. The image
of Rodney came before him with every circumstance of folly and
indignity. That little pink-cheeked dancing-master to marry Katharine?
that gibbering ass with the face of a monkey on an organ? that posing,
vain, fantastical fop? with his tragedies and his comedies, his
innumerable spites and prides and pettinesses? Lord! marry Rodney! She
must be as great a fool as he was. His bitterness took possession of
him, and as he sat in the corner of the underground carriage, he
looked as stark an image of unapproachable severity as could be
imagined. Directly he reached home he sat down at his table, and began
to write Katharine a long, wild, mad letter, begging her for both
their sakes to break with Rodney, imploring her not to do what would
destroy for ever the one beauty, the one truth, the one hope; not to
be a traitor, not to be a deserter, for if she were—and he wound up
with a quiet and brief assertion that, whatever she did or left
undone, he would believe to be the best, and accept from her with
gratitude. He covered sheet after sheet, and heard the early carts
starting for London before he went to bed.
The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt towards
the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet
flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring
to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly colored and
sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. Lives frozen by
age, so far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which
neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid,
reflecting the shapes and colors of the present, as well as the shapes
and colors of the past. In the case of Mrs. Hilbery, these early
spring days were chiefly upsetting inasmuch as they caused a general
quickening of her emotional powers, which, as far as the past was
concerned, had never suffered much diminution. But in the spring her
desire for expression invariably increased. She was haunted by the
ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the
combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favorite
authors. She made them for herself on scraps of paper, and rolled them
on her tongue when there seemed no occasion for such eloquence. She
was upheld in these excursions by the certainty that no language could
outdo the splendor of her father’s memory, and although her efforts
did not notably further the end of his biography, she was under the
impression of living more in his shade at such times than at others.
No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English
birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport
themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of
the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets
exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly
affected against her better judgment by her mother’s enthusiasm. Not
that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a
study of Shakespeare’s sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter
of her grandfather’s biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous
jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way,
among other things, of writing Shakespeare’s sonnets; the idea, struck
out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of
privately printed manuals within the next few days for her
instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature;
she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at
least as good as other people’s facts, and all her fancy for the time
being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon. She had a plan, she told
Katharine, when, rather later than usual, Katharine came into the room
the morning after her walk by the river, for visiting Shakespeare’s
tomb. Any fact about the poet had become, for the moment, of far
greater interest to her than the immediate present, and the certainty
that there was existing in England a spot of ground where Shakespeare
had undoubtedly stood, where his very bones lay directly beneath one’s
feet, was so absorbing to her on this particular occasion that she
greeted her daughter with the exclamation:
“D’you think he ever passed this house?”
The question, for the moment, seemed to Katharine to have reference to
Ralph Denham.
“On his way to Blackfriars, I mean,” Mrs. Hilbery continued, “for you
know the latest discovery is that he owned a house there.”
Katharine still looked about her in perplexity, and Mrs. Hilbery
added:
“Which is a proof that he wasn’t as poor as they’ve sometimes said. I
should like to think that he had enough, though I don’t in the least
want him to be rich.”
Then, perceiving her daughter’s expression of perplexity, Mrs. Hilbery
burst out laughing.
“My dear, I’m not talking about YOUR William, though that’s another
reason for liking him. I’m talking, I’m thinking, I’m dreaming of MY
William—William Shakespeare, of course. Isn’t it odd,” she mused,
standing at the window and tapping gently upon the pane, “that for all
one can see, that dear old thing in the blue bonnet, crossing the road
with her basket on her arm, has never heard that there was such a
person? Yet it all goes on: lawyers hurrying to their work, cabmen
squabbling for their fares, little boys rolling their hoops, little
girls throwing bread to the gulls, as if there weren’t a Shakespeare
in the world. I should like to stand at that crossing all day long and
say: ‘People, read Shakespeare!’”
Katharine sat down at her table and opened a long dusty envelope. As
Shelley was mentioned in the course of the letter as if he were alive,
it had, of course, considerable value. Her immediate task was to
decide whether the whole letter should be printed, or only the
paragraph which mentioned Shelley’s name, and she reached out for a
pen and held it in readiness to do justice upon the sheet. Her pen,
however, remained in the air. Almost surreptitiously she slipped a
clean sheet in front of her, and her hand, descending, began drawing
square boxes halved and quartered by straight lines, and then circles
which underwent the same process of dissection.
“Katharine! I’ve hit upon a brilliant idea!” Mrs. Hilbery
exclaimed—“to lay out, say, a hundred pounds or so on copies of
Shakespeare, and give them to working men. Some of your clever friends
who get up meetings might help us, Katharine. And that might lead to a
playhouse, where we could all take parts. You’d be Rosalind—but
you’ve a dash of the old nurse in you. Your father’s Hamlet, come to
years of discretion; and I’m—well, I’m a bit of them all; I’m quite a
large bit of the fool, but the fools in Shakespeare say all the clever
things. Now who shall William be? A hero? Hotspur? Henry the Fifth?
No, William’s got a touch of Hamlet in him, too. I can fancy that
William talks to himself when he’s alone. Ah, Katharine, you must say
very beautiful things when you’re together!” she added wistfully, with
a glance at her daughter, who had told her nothing about the dinner
the night before.
“Oh, we talk a lot of nonsense,” said Katharine, hiding her slip of
paper as her mother stood by her, and spreading the old letter about
Shelley in front of her.
“It won’t seem to you nonsense in ten years’ time,” said Mrs. Hilbery.
“Believe me,
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