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Monday or Tuesday
Virginia Woolf
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Monday or Tuesday
Virginia Woolf
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About This Book
A stylistically innovative volume of short stories from the groundbreaking author of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. First presented as one volume in 1921, Monday or Tuesday was the only collection of stories Virginia Woolf published in her lifetime. Written in her experimental, stream-of-consciousness style, these eight unconventional stories eschew traditional plot and character development in favor of interior thoughts, emotions, memories, and associations. From a heron's in-flight perceptions in "Monday or Tuesday" to a ghost couple searching for treasure in "A Haunted House, " from a meditation on color as a catalyst for imagination and emotional connections in "Blue and Green" to the invented stories of a narrator on a train observing a fellow passenger in "An Unwritten Novel, " Woolf's poetic explorations take readers in directions previously unexamined, revealing an intensity of feeling and depth of insight that would continue to characterize her later work. Michael Cunningham, author of the Pulitzer Prizeâwinning novel The Hours, has said of Woolf: "She was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar." Taken together, these lyrical and evocative stories create a rich mosaic of the artist's radically unique sensibility. Monday or Tuesday includes "A Haunted House, " "A Society, " "Monday or Tuesday, "
"An Unwritten Novel, " "The String Quartet, " "Blue and Green, " "Kew Gardens, " and "The Mark on the Wall." This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
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Monday or Tuesday
Virginia Woolf
A HAUNTED HOUSE
Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sureâa ghostly couple.
âHere we left it,â she said. And he added, âOh, but here too!â âItâs upstairs,â she murmured. âAnd in the garden,â he whispered. âQuietly,â they said, âor we shall wake them.â
But it wasnât that you woke us. Oh, no. âTheyâre looking for it; theyâre drawing the curtain,â one might say, and so read on a page or two. âNow theyâve found it,â one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm. âWhat did I come in here for? What did I want to find?â My hands were empty. âPerhaps itâs upstairs then?â The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.
But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceilingâwhat? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. âSafe, safe, safe,â the pulse of the house beat softly. âThe treasure buried; the room âŚâ the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?
A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. âSafe, safe, safe,â the pulse of the house beat gladly. âThe Treasure yours.â
The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls straight from the window. The candle burns stiff and still. Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.
âHere we slept,â she says. And he adds, âKisses without number.â âWaking in the morningââ âSilver between the treesââ âUpstairsââ âIn the gardenââ âWhen summer cameââ âIn winter snowtimeââ The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.
Nearer they come; cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass. Our eyes darken; we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. âLook,â he breathes. âSound asleep. Love upon their lips.â
Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy.
âSafe, safe, safe,â the heart of the house beats proudly. âLong yearsââ he sighs. âAgain you found me.â âHere,â she murmurs, âsleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasureââ Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. âSafe! safe! safe!â the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry âOh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.â
A SOCIETY
This is how it all came about. Six or seven of us were sitting one day after tea. Some were gazing across the street into the windows of a millinerâs shop where the light still shone brightly upon scarlet feathers and golden slippers. Others were idly occupied in building little towers of sugar upon the edge of the tea tray. After a time, so far as I can remember, we drew round the fire and began as usual to praise menâhow strong, how noble, how brilliant, how courageous, how beautiful they wereâhow we envied those who by hook or by crook managed to get attached to one for lifeâwhen Poll, who had said nothing, burst into tears. Poll, I must tell you, has always been queer. For one thing her father was a strange man. He left her a fortune in his will, but on condition that she read all the books in the London Library. We comforted her as best we could; but we knew in our hearts how vain it was. For though we like her, Poll is no beauty; leaves her shoe laces untied; and must have been thinking, while we praised men, that not one of them would ever wish to marry her. At last she dried her tears. For some time we could make nothing of what she said. Strange enough it was in all conscience. She told us that, as we knew, she spent most of her time in the London Library, reading. She had begun, she said, with English literature on the top floor; and was steadily working her way down to the Times on the bottom. And now half, or perhaps only a quarter, way through a terrible thing had happened. She could read no more. Books were not what we thought them. âBooks,â she cried, rising to her feet and speaking with an intensity of desolation which I shall never forget, âare for the most part unutterably bad!â
Of course we cried out that Shakespeare wrote books, and Milton and Shelley.
âOh, yes,â she interrupted us. âYouâve been well taught, I can see. But you are not members of the London Library.â Here her sobs broke forth anew. At length, recovering a little, she opened one of the pile of books which she always carried about with herââFrom a Windowâ or âIn a Garden,â or some such name as that it was called, and it was written by a man called Benton or Henson, or something of that kind. She read the first few pages. We listened in silence. âBut thatâs not a book,â someone said. So she chose another. This time it was a history, but I have forgotten the writerâs name. Our trepidation increased as she went on. Not a word of it seemed to be true, and the style in which it was written was execrable.
âPoetry! Poetry!â we cried, impatiently. âRead us poetry!â I cannot describe the desolation which fell upon us as she opened a little volume and mouthed out the verbose, sentimental foolery which it contained.
âIt must have been written by a woman,â one of us urged. But no. She told us that it was written by a young man, one of the most famous poets of the day. I leave you to imagine what the shock of the discovery was. Though we all cried and begged her to read no more, she persisted and read us extracts from the Lives of the Lord Chancellors. When she had finished, Jane, the eldest and wisest of us, rose to her feet and said that she for one was not convinced.
âWhy,â she asked, âif men write such rubbish as this, should our mothers have wasted their youth in bringing them into the world?â
We were all silent; and, in the silence, poor Poll could be heard sobbing out, âWhy, why did my father teach me to read?â
Clorinda was the first to come to her senses. âItâs all our fault,â she said. âEvery one of us knows how to read. But no one, save Poll, has ever taken the trouble to do it. I, for one, have taken it for granted that it was a womanâs duty to spend her youth in bearing children. I venerated my mother for bearing ten; still more my grandmother for bearing fifteen; it was, I confess, my own ambition to bear twenty. We have gone on all these ages supposing that men were equally industrious, and that their works were of equal merit. While we have borne the children, they, we supposed, have borne the books and the pictures. We have populated the world. They have civilized it. But now that we can read, what prevents us from judging the results? Before we bring another child into the world we must swear that we will find out what the world is like.â
So we made ourselves into a society for asking questions. One of us was to visit a man-of-war; another was to hide herself in a scholarâs study; another was to attend a meeting of business men; while all were to read books, look at pictures, go to concerts, keep our eyes open in the streets, and ask questions perpetually. We were very young. You can judge of our simplicity when I tell you that before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books. Our questions were to be directed to finding out how far these objects were now attained by men. We vowed solemnly that we would not bear a single child until we were satisfied.
Off we went then, some to the British Museum; others to the Kingâs Navy; some to Oxford; others to Cambridge; we visited the Royal Academy and the Tate; heard modern music in concert rooms, went to the Law Courts, and saw new plays. No one dined out without asking her partner certain questions and carefully noting his replies. At intervals we met together and compared our observations. Oh, those were merry meetings! Never have I laughed so much as I did when Rose read her notes upon âHonourâ and described how she had dressed herself as an Ăthiopian Prince and gone aboard one of His Majestyâs ships. Discovering the hoax, the Captain visited her (now disguised as a private gentleman) and demanded that honour should be satisfied. âBut how?â she asked. âHow?â he bellowed. âWith the cane of course!â Seeing that he was beside himself with rage and expecting that her last moment had come, she bent over and received, to her amazement, six light taps upon the behind. âThe honour of the British Navy is avenged!â he cried, and, raising herself, she saw him with the sweat pouring down his face holding out a trembling right hand....