Night and Day

V >> Virginia Woolf >> Night and Day

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The young men in the office had a perfect right to these opinions,
because Denham showed no particular desire for their friendship. He
liked them well enough, but shut them up in that compartment of life
which was devoted to work. Hitherto, indeed, he had found little
difficulty in arranging his life as methodically as he arranged his
expenditure, but about this time he began to encounter experiences
which were not so easy to classify. Mary Datchet had begun this
confusion two years ago by bursting into laughter at some remark of
his, almost the first time they met. She could not explain why it was.
She thought him quite astonishingly odd. When he knew her well enough
to tell her how he spent Monday and Wednesday and Saturday, she was
still more amused; she laughed till he laughed, too, without knowing
why. It seemed to her very odd that he should know as much about
breeding bulldogs as any man in England; that he had a collection of
wild flowers found near London; and his weekly visit to old Miss
Trotter at Ealing, who was an authority upon the science of Heraldry,
never failed to excite her laughter. She wanted to know everything,
even the kind of cake which the old lady supplied on these occasions;
and their summer excursions to churches in the neighborhood of London
for the purpose of taking rubbings of the brasses became most
important festivals, from the interest she took in them. In six months
she knew more about his odd friends and hobbies than his own brothers
and sisters knew, after living with him all his life; and Ralph found
this very pleasant, though disordering, for his own view of himself
had always been profoundly serious.

Certainly it was very pleasant to be with Mary Datchet and to become,
directly the door was shut, quite a different sort of person,
eccentric and lovable, with scarcely any likeness to the self most
people knew. He became less serious, and rather less dictatorial at
home, for he was apt to hear Mary laughing at him, and telling him, as
she was fond of doing, that he knew nothing at all about anything. She
made him, also, take an interest in public questions, for which she
had a natural liking; and was in process of turning him from Tory to
Radical, after a course of public meetings, which began by boring him
acutely, and ended by exciting him even more than they excited her.

But he was reserved; when ideas started up in his mind, he divided
them automatically into those he could discuss with Mary, and those he
must keep for himself. She knew this and it interested her, for she
was accustomed to find young men very ready to talk about themselves,
and had come to listen to them as one listens to children, without any
thought of herself. But with Ralph, she had very little of this
maternal feeling, and, in consequence, a much keener sense of her own
individuality.

Late one afternoon Ralph stepped along the Strand to an interview with
a lawyer upon business. The afternoon light was almost over, and
already streams of greenish and yellowish artificial light were being
poured into an atmosphere which, in country lanes, would now have been
soft with the smoke of wood fires; and on both sides of the road the
shop windows were full of sparkling chains and highly polished leather
cases, which stood upon shelves made of thick plate-glass. None of
these different objects was seen separately by Denham, but from all of
them he drew an impression of stir and cheerfulness. Thus it came
about that he saw Katharine Hilbery coming towards him, and looked
straight at her, as if she were only an illustration of the argument
that was going forward in his mind. In this spirit he noticed the
rather set expression in her eyes, and the slight, half-conscious
movement of her lips, which, together with her height and the
distinction of her dress, made her look as if the scurrying crowd
impeded her, and her direction were different from theirs. He noticed
this calmly; but suddenly, as he passed her, his hands and knees began
to tremble, and his heart beat painfully. She did not see him, and
went on repeating to herself some lines which had stuck to her memory:
"It's life that matters, nothing but life--the process of discovering
--the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at
all." Thus occupied, she did not see Denham, and he had not the
courage to stop her. But immediately the whole scene in the Strand
wore that curious look of order and purpose which is imparted to the
most heterogeneous things when music sounds; and so pleasant was this
impression that he was very glad that he had not stopped her, after
all. It grew slowly fainter, but lasted until he stood outside the
barrister's chambers.

When his interview with the barrister was over, it was too late to go
back to the office. His sight of Katharine had put him queerly out of
tune for a domestic evening. Where should he go? To walk through the
streets of London until he came to Katharine's house, to look up at
the windows and fancy her within, seemed to him possible for a moment;
and then he rejected the plan almost with a blush as, with a curious
division of consciousness, one plucks a flower sentimentally and
throws it away, with a blush, when it is actually picked. No, he would
go and see Mary Datchet. By this time she would be back from her work.

To see Ralph appear unexpectedly in her room threw Mary for a second
off her balance. She had been cleaning knives in her little scullery,
and when she had let him in she went back again, and turned on the
cold-water tap to its fullest volume, and then turned it off again.
"Now," she thought to herself, as she screwed it tight, "I'm not going
to let these silly ideas come into my head. . . . Don't you think Mr.
Asquith deserves to be hanged?" she called back into the sitting-room,
and when she joined him, drying her hands, she began to tell him about
the latest evasion on the part of the Government with respect to the
Women's Suffrage Bill. Ralph did not want to talk about politics, but
he could not help respecting Mary for taking such an interest in
public questions. He looked at her as she leant forward, poking the
fire, and expressing herself very clearly in phrases which bore
distantly the taint of the platform, and he thought, "How absurd Mary
would think me if she knew that I almost made up my mind to walk all
the way to Chelsea in order to look at Katharine's windows. She
wouldn't understand it, but I like her very much as she is."

For some time they discussed what the women had better do; and as
Ralph became genuinely interested in the question, Mary unconsciously
let her attention wander, and a great desire came over her to talk to
Ralph about her own feelings; or, at any rate, about something
personal, so that she might see what he felt for her; but she resisted
this wish. But she could not prevent him from feeling her lack of
interest in what he was saying, and gradually they both became silent.
One thought after another came up in Ralph's mind, but they were all,
in some way, connected with Katharine, or with vague feelings of
romance and adventure such as she inspired. But he could not talk to
Mary about such thoughts; and he pitied her for knowing nothing of
what he was feeling. "Here," he thought, "is where we differ from
women; they have no sense of romance."

"Well, Mary," he said at length, "why don't you say something
amusing?"

His tone was certainly provoking, but, as a general rule, Mary was not
easily provoked. This evening, however, she replied rather sharply:

"Because I've got nothing amusing to say, I suppose."

Ralph thought for a moment, and then remarked:

"You work too hard. I don't mean your health," he added, as she
laughed scornfully, "I mean that you seem to me to be getting wrapped
up in your work."

"And is that a bad thing?" she asked, shading her eyes with her hand.

"I think it is," he returned abruptly.

"But only a week ago you were saying the opposite." Her tone was
defiant, but she became curiously depressed. Ralph did not perceive
it, and took this opportunity of lecturing her, and expressing his
latest views upon the proper conduct of life. She listened, but her
main impression was that he had been meeting some one who had
influenced him. He was telling her that she ought to read more, and to
see that there were other points of view as deserving of attention as
her own. Naturally, having last seen him as he left the office in
company with Katharine, she attributed the change to her; it was
likely that Katharine, on leaving the scene which she had so clearly
despised, had pronounced some such criticism, or suggested it by her
own attitude. But she knew that Ralph would never admit that he had
been influenced by anybody.

"You don't read enough, Mary," he was saying. "You ought to read more
poetry."

It was true that Mary's reading had been rather limited to such works
as she needed to know for the sake of examinations; and her time for
reading in London was very little. For some reason, no one likes to be
told that they do not read enough poetry, but her resentment was only
visible in the way she changed the position of her hands, and in the
fixed look in her eyes. And then she thought to herself, "I'm behaving
exactly as I said I wouldn't behave," whereupon she relaxed all her
muscles and said, in her reasonable way:

"Tell me what I ought to read, then."

Ralph had unconsciously been irritated by Mary, and he now delivered
himself of a few names of great poets which were the text for a
discourse upon the imperfection of Mary's character and way of life.

"You live with your inferiors," he said, warming unreasonably, as he
knew, to his text. "And you get into a groove because, on the whole,
it's rather a pleasant groove. And you tend to forget what you're
there for. You've the feminine habit of making much of details. You
don't see when things matter and when they don't. And that's what's
the ruin of all these organizations. That's why the Suffragists have
never done anything all these years. What's the point of drawing-room
meetings and bazaars? You want to have ideas, Mary; get hold of
something big; never mind making mistakes, but don't niggle. Why don't
you throw it all up for a year, and travel?--see something of the
world. Don't be content to live with half a dozen people in a
backwater all your life. But you won't," he concluded.

"I've rather come to that way of thinking myself--about myself, I
mean," said Mary, surprising him by her acquiescence. "I should like
to go somewhere far away."

For a moment they were both silent. Ralph then said:

"But look here, Mary, you haven't been taking this seriously, have
you?" His irritation was spent, and the depression, which she could
not keep out of her voice, made him feel suddenly with remorse that he
had been hurting her.

"You won't go away, will you?" he asked. And as she said nothing, he
added, "Oh no, don't go away."

"I don't know exactly what I mean to do," she replied. She hovered on
the verge of some discussion of her plans, but she received no
encouragement. He fell into one of his queer silences, which seemed to
Mary, in spite of all her precautions, to have reference to what she
also could not prevent herself from thinking about--their feeling for
each other and their relationship. She felt that the two lines of
thought bored their way in long, parallel tunnels which came very
close indeed, but never ran into each other.

When he had gone, and he left her without breaking his silence more
than was needed to wish her good night, she sat on for a time,
reviewing what he had said. If love is a devastating fire which melts
the whole being into one mountain torrent, Mary was no more in love
with Denham than she was in love with her poker or her tongs. But
probably these extreme passions are very rare, and the state of mind
thus depicted belongs to the very last stages of love, when the power
to resist has been eaten away, week by week or day by day. Like most
intelligent people, Mary was something of an egoist, to the extent,
that is, of attaching great importance to what she felt, and she was
by nature enough of a moralist to like to make certain, from time to
time, that her feelings were creditable to her. When Ralph left her
she thought over her state of mind, and came to the conclusion that it
would be a good thing to learn a language--say Italian or German. She
then went to a drawer, which she had to unlock, and took from it
certain deeply scored manuscript pages. She read them through, looking
up from her reading every now and then and thinking very intently for
a few seconds about Ralph. She did her best to verify all the
qualities in him which gave rise to emotions in her; and persuaded
herself that she accounted reasonably for them all. Then she looked
back again at her manuscript, and decided that to write grammatical
English prose is the hardest thing in the world. But she thought about
herself a great deal more than she thought about grammatical English
prose or about Ralph Denham, and it may therefore be disputed whether
she was in love, or, if so, to which branch of the family her passion
belonged.

CHAPTER XI

It's life that matters, nothing but life--the process of discovering,
the everlasting and perpetual process," said Katharine, as she passed
under the archway, and so into the wide space of King's Bench Walk,
"not the discovery itself at all." She spoke the last words looking up
at Rodney's windows, which were a semilucent red color, in her honor,
as she knew. He had asked her to tea with him. But she was in a mood
when it is almost physically disagreeable to interrupt the stride of
one's thought, and she walked up and down two or three times under the
trees before approaching his staircase. She liked getting hold of some
book which neither her father or mother had read, and keeping it to
herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the
meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide
whether the book was a good one or a bad one. This evening she had
twisted the words of Dostoevsky to suit her mood--a fatalistic mood--
to proclaim that the process of discovery was life, and that,
presumably, the nature of one's goal mattered not at all. She sat down
for a moment upon one of the seats; felt herself carried along in the
swirl of many things; decided, in her sudden way, that it was time to
heave all this thinking overboard, and rose, leaving a fishmonger's
basket on the seat behind her. Two minutes later her rap sounded with
authority upon Rodney's door.

"Well, William," she said, "I'm afraid I'm late."

It was true, but he was so glad to see her that he forgot his
annoyance. He had been occupied for over an hour in making things
ready for her, and he now had his reward in seeing her look right and
left, as she slipped her cloak from her shoulders, with evident
satisfaction, although she said nothing. He had seen that the fire
burnt well; jam-pots were on the table, tin covers shone in the
fender, and the shabby comfort of the room was extreme. He was dressed
in his old crimson dressing-gown, which was faded irregularly, and had
bright new patches on it, like the paler grass which one finds on
lifting a stone. He made the tea, and Katharine drew off her gloves,
and crossed her legs with a gesture that was rather masculine in its
ease. Nor did they talk much until they were smoking cigarettes over
the fire, having placed their teacups upon the floor between them.

They had not met since they had exchanged letters about their
relationship. Katharine's answer to his protestation had been short
and sensible. Half a sheet of notepaper contained the whole of it, for
she merely had to say that she was not in love with him, and so could
not marry him, but their friendship would continue, she hoped,
unchanged. She had added a postscript in which she stated, "I like
your sonnet very much."

So far as William was concerned, this appearance of ease was assumed.
Three times that afternoon he had dressed himself in a tail-coat, and
three times he had discarded it for an old dressing-gown; three times
he had placed his pearl tie-pin in position, and three times he had
removed it again, the little looking-glass in his room being the
witness of these changes of mind. The question was, which would
Katharine prefer on this particular afternoon in December? He read her
note once more, and the postscript about the sonnet settled the
matter. Evidently she admired most the poet in him; and as this, on
the whole, agreed with his own opinion, he decided to err, if
anything, on the side of shabbiness. His demeanor was also regulated
with premeditation; he spoke little, and only on impersonal matters;
he wished her to realize that in visiting him for the first time alone
she was doing nothing remarkable, although, in fact, that was a point
about which he was not at all sure.

Certainly Katharine seemed quite unmoved by any disturbing thoughts;
and if he had been completely master of himself, he might, indeed,
have complained that she was a trifle absent-minded. The ease, the
familiarity of the situation alone with Rodney, among teacups and
candles, had more effect upon her than was apparent. She asked to look
at his books, and then at his pictures. It was while she held
photograph from the Greek in her hands that she exclaimed,
impulsively, if incongruously:

"My oysters! I had a basket," she explained, "and I've left it
somewhere. Uncle Dudley dines with us to-night. What in the world have
I done with them?"

She rose and began to wander about the room. William rose also, and
stood in front of the fire, muttering, "Oysters, oysters--your basket
of oysters!" but though he looked vaguely here and there, as if the
oysters might be on the top of the bookshelf, his eyes returned always
to Katharine. She drew the curtain and looked out among the scanty
leaves of the plane-trees.

"I had them," she calculated, "in the Strand; I sat on a seat. Well,
never mind," she concluded, turning back into the room abruptly, "I
dare say some old creature is enjoying them by this time."

"I should have thought that you never forgot anything," William
remarked, as they settled down again.

"That's part of the myth about me, I know," Katharine replied.

"And I wonder," William proceeded, with some caution, "what the truth
about you is? But I know this sort of thing doesn't interest you," he
added hastily, with a touch of peevishness.

"No; it doesn't interest me very much," she replied candidly.

"What shall we talk about then?" he asked.

She looked rather whimsically round the walls of the room.

"However we start, we end by talking about the same thing--about
poetry, I mean. I wonder if you realize, William, that I've never read
even Shakespeare? It's rather wonderful how I've kept it up all these
years."

"You've kept it up for ten years very beautifully, as far as I'm
concerned," he said.

"Ten years? So long as that?"

"And I don't think it's always bored you," he added.

She looked into the fire silently. She could not deny that the surface
of her feeling was absolutely unruffled by anything in William's
character; on the contrary, she felt certain that she could deal with
whatever turned up. He gave her peace, in which she could think of
things that were far removed from what they talked about. Even now,
when he sat within a yard of her, how easily her mind ranged hither
and thither! Suddenly a picture presented itself before her, without
any effort on her part as pictures will, of herself in these very
rooms; she had come in from a lecture, and she held a pile of books in
her hand, scientific books, and books about mathematics and astronomy
which she had mastered. She put them down on the table over there. It
was a picture plucked from her life two or three years hence, when she
was married to William; but here she checked herself abruptly.

She could not entirely forget William's presence, because, in spite of
his efforts to control himself, his nervousness was apparent. On such
occasions his eyes protruded more than ever, and his face had more
than ever the appearance of being covered with a thin crackling skin,
through which every flush of his volatile blood showed itself
instantly. By this time he had shaped so many sentences and rejected
them, felt so many impulses and subdued them, that he was a uniform
scarlet.

"You may say you don't read books," he remarked, "but, all the same,
you know about them. Besides, who wants you to be learned? Leave that
to the poor devils who've got nothing better to do. You--you--ahem!--"

"Well, then, why don't you read me something before I go?" said
Katharine, looking at her watch.

"Katharine, you've only just come! Let me see now, what have I got to
show you?" He rose, and stirred about the papers on his table, as if
in doubt; he then picked up a manuscript, and after spreading it
smoothly upon his knee, he looked up at Katharine suspiciously. He
caught her smiling.

"I believe you only ask me to read out of kindness," he burst out.
"Let's find something else to talk about. Who have you been seeing?"

"I don't generally ask things out of kindness," Katharine observed;
"however, if you don't want to read, you needn't."

William gave a queer snort of exasperation, and opened his manuscript
once more, though he kept his eyes upon her face as he did so. No face
could have been graver or more judicial.

"One can trust you, certainly, to say unpleasant things," he said,
smoothing out the page, clearing his throat, and reading half a stanza
to himself. "Ahem! The Princess is lost in the wood, and she hears the
sound of a horn. (This would all be very pretty on the stage, but I
can't get the effect here.) Anyhow, Sylvano enters, accompanied by the
rest of the gentlemen of Gratian's court. I begin where he
soliloquizes." He jerked his head and began to read.

Although Katharine had just disclaimed any knowledge of literature,
she listened attentively. At least, she listened to the first twenty-
five lines attentively, and then she frowned. Her attention was only
aroused again when Rodney raised his finger--a sign, she knew, that
the meter was about to change.

His theory was that every mood has its meter. His mastery of meters
was very great; and, if the beauty of a drama depended upon the
variety of measures in which the personages speak, Rodney's plays must
have challenged the works of Shakespeare. Katharine's ignorance of
Shakespeare did not prevent her from feeling fairly certain that plays
should not produce a sense of chill stupor in the audience, such as
overcame her as the lines flowed on, sometimes long and sometimes
short, but always delivered with the same lilt of voice, which seemed
to nail each line firmly on to the same spot in the hearer's brain.
Still, she reflected, these sorts of skill are almost exclusively
masculine; women neither practice them nor know how to value them; and
one's husband's proficiency in this direction might legitimately
increase one's respect for him, since mystification is no bad basis
for respect. No one could doubt that William was a scholar. The
reading ended with the finish of the Act; Katharine had prepared a
little speech.

"That seems to me extremely well written, William; although, of
course, I don't know enough to criticize in detail."

"But it's the skill that strikes you--not the emotion?"

"In a fragment like that, of course, the skill strikes one most."

"But perhaps--have you time to listen to one more short piece? the
scene between the lovers? There's some real feeling in that, I think.
Denham agrees that it's the best thing I've done."

"You've read it to Ralph Denham?" Katharine inquired, with surprise.
"He's a better judge than I am. What did he say?"

"My dear Katharine," Rodney exclaimed, "I don't ask you for criticism,
as I should ask a scholar. I dare say there are only five men in
England whose opinion of my work matters a straw to me. But I trust
you where feeling is concerned. I had you in my mind often when I was
writing those scenes. I kept asking myself, 'Now is this the sort of
thing Katharine would like?' I always think of you when I'm writing,
Katharine, even when it's the sort of thing you wouldn't know about.
And I'd rather--yes, I really believe I'd rather--you thought well of
my writing than any one in the world."

This was so genuine a tribute to his trust in her that Katharine was
touched.

"You think too much of me altogether, William," she said, forgetting
that she had not meant to speak in this way.

"No, Katharine, I don't," he replied, replacing his manuscript in the
drawer. "It does me good to think of you."

So quiet an answer, followed as it was by no expression of love, but
merely by the statement that if she must go he would take her to the
Strand, and would, if she could wait a moment, change his dressing-
gown for a coat, moved her to the warmest feeling of affection for him
that she had yet experienced. While he changed in the next room, she
stood by the bookcase, taking down books and opening them, but reading
nothing on their pages.

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