Night and Day

V >> Virginia Woolf >> Night and Day

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"I like rubies," he heard Katharine say.

"To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world. . . ."

Mrs. Cosham intoned; at the same instant "Rodney" fitted itself to
"William" in Ralph's mind. He felt convinced that Katharine was
engaged to Rodney. His first sensation was one of violent rage with
her for having deceived him throughout the visit, fed him with
pleasant old wives' tales, let him see her as a child playing in a
meadow, shared her youth with him, while all the time she was a
stranger entirely, and engaged to marry Rodney.

But was it possible? Surely it was not possible. For in his eyes she
was still a child. He paused so long over the book that Mrs. Cosham
had time to look over his shoulder and ask her niece:

"And have you settled upon a house yet, Katharine?"

This convinced him of the truth of the monstrous idea. He looked up at
once and said:

"Yes, it's a difficult passage."

His voice had changed so much, he spoke with such curtness and even
with such contempt, that Mrs. Cosham looked at him fairly puzzled.
Happily she belonged to a generation which expected uncouthness in its
men, and she merely felt convinced that this Mr. Denham was very, very
clever. She took back her Shakespeare, as Denham seemed to have no
more to say, and secreted it once more about her person with the
infinitely pathetic resignation of the old.

"Katharine's engaged to William Rodney," she said, by way of filling
in the pause; "a very old friend of ours. He has a wonderful knowledge
of literature, too--wonderful." She nodded her head rather vaguely.
"You should meet each other."

Denham's one wish was to leave the house as soon as he could; but the
elderly ladies had risen, and were proposing to visit Mrs. Hilbery in
her bedroom, so that any move on his part was impossible. At the same
time, he wished to say something, but he knew not what, to Katharine
alone. She took her aunts upstairs, and returned, coming towards him
once more with an air of innocence and friendliness that amazed him.

"My father will be back," she said. "Won't you sit down?" and she
laughed, as if now they might share a perfectly friendly laugh at the
tea-party.

But Ralph made no attempt to seat himself.

"I must congratulate you," he said. "It was news to me." He saw her
face change, but only to become graver than before.

"My engagement?" she asked. "Yes, I am going to marry William Rodney."

Ralph remained standing with his hand on the back of a chair in
absolute silence. Abysses seemed to plunge into darkness between them.
He looked at her, but her face showed that she was not thinking of
him. No regret or consciousness of wrong disturbed her.

"Well, I must go," he said at length.

She seemed about to say something, then changed her mind and said
merely:

"You will come again, I hope. We always seem"--she hesitated--"to be
interrupted."

He bowed and left the room.

Ralph strode with extreme swiftness along the Embankment. Every muscle
was taut and braced as if to resist some sudden attack from outside.
For the moment it seemed as if the attack were about to be directed
against his body, and his brain thus was on the alert, but without
understanding. Finding himself, after a few minutes, no longer under
observation, and no attack delivered, he slackened his pace, the pain
spread all through him, took possession of every governing seat, and
met with scarcely any resistance from powers exhausted by their first
effort at defence. He took his way languidly along the river
embankment, away from home rather than towards it. The world had him
at its mercy. He made no pattern out of the sights he saw. He felt
himself now, as he had often fancied other people, adrift on the
stream, and far removed from control of it, a man with no grasp upon
circumstances any longer. Old battered men loafing at the doors of
public-houses now seemed to be his fellows, and he felt, as he
supposed them to feel, a mingling of envy and hatred towards those who
passed quickly and certainly to a goal of their own. They, too, saw
things very thin and shadowy, and were wafted about by the lightest
breath of wind. For the substantial world, with its prospect of
avenues leading on and on to the invisible distance, had slipped from
him, since Katharine was engaged. Now all his life was visible, and
the straight, meager path had its ending soon enough. Katharine was
engaged, and she had deceived him, too. He felt for corners of his
being untouched by his disaster; but there was no limit to the flood
of damage; not one of his possessions was safe now. Katharine had
deceived him; she had mixed herself with every thought of his, and
reft of her they seemed false thoughts which he would blush to think
again. His life seemed immeasurably impoverished.

He sat himself down, in spite of the chilly fog which obscured the
farther bank and left its lights suspended upon a blank surface, upon
one of the riverside seats, and let the tide of disillusionment sweep
through him. For the time being all bright points in his life were
blotted out; all prominences leveled. At first he made himself believe
that Katharine had treated him badly, and drew comfort from the
thought that, left alone, she would recollect this, and think of him
and tender him, in silence, at any rate, an apology. But this grain of
comfort failed him after a second or two, for, upon reflection, he had
to admit that Katharine owed him nothing. Katharine had promised
nothing, taken nothing; to her his dreams had meant nothing. This,
indeed, was the lowest pitch of his despair. If the best of one's
feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings,
what reality is left us? The old romance which had warmed his days for
him, the thoughts of Katharine which had painted every hour, were now
made to appear foolish and enfeebled. He rose, and looked into the
river, whose swift race of dun-colored waters seemed the very spirit
of futility and oblivion.

"In what can one trust, then?" he thought, as he leant there. So
feeble and insubstantial did he feel himself that he repeated the word
aloud.

"In what can one trust? Not in men and women. Not in one's dreams
about them. There's nothing--nothing, nothing left at all."

Now Denham had reason to know that he could bring to birth and keep
alive a fine anger when he chose. Rodney provided a good target for
that emotion. And yet at the moment, Rodney and Katharine herself
seemed disembodied ghosts. He could scarcely remember the look of
them. His mind plunged lower and lower. Their marriage seemed of no
importance to him. All things had turned to ghosts; the whole mass of
the world was insubstantial vapor, surrounding the solitary spark in
his mind, whose burning point he could remember, for it burnt no more.
He had once cherished a belief, and Katharine had embodied this
belief, and she did so no longer. He did not blame her; he blamed
nothing, nobody; he saw the truth. He saw the dun-colored race of
waters and the blank shore. But life is vigorous; the body lives, and
the body, no doubt, dictated the reflection, which now urged him to
movement, that one may cast away the forms of human beings, and yet
retain the passion which seemed inseparable from their existence in
the flesh. Now this passion burnt on his horizon, as the winter sun
makes a greenish pane in the west through thinning clouds. His eyes
were set on something infinitely far and remote; by that light he felt
he could walk, and would, in future, have to find his way. But that
was all there was left to him of a populous and teeming world.

CHAPTER XIII

The lunch hour in the office was only partly spent by Denham in the
consumption of food. Whether fine or wet, he passed most of it pacing
the gravel paths in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The children got to know his
figure, and the sparrows expected their daily scattering of bread-
crumbs. No doubt, since he often gave a copper and almost always a
handful of bread, he was not as blind to his surroundings as he
thought himself.

He thought that these winter days were spent in long hours before
white papers radiant in electric light; and in short passages through
fog-dimmed streets. When he came back to his work after lunch he
carried in his head a picture of the Strand, scattered with omnibuses,
and of the purple shapes of leaves pressed flat upon the gravel, as if
his eyes had always been bent upon the ground. His brain worked
incessantly, but his thought was attended with so little joy that he
did not willingly recall it; but drove ahead, now in this direction,
now in that; and came home laden with dark books borrowed from a
library.

Mary Datchet, coming from the Strand at lunch-time, saw him one day
taking his turn, closely buttoned in an overcoat, and so lost in
thought that he might have been sitting in his own room.

She was overcome by something very like awe by the sight of him; then
she felt much inclined to laugh, although her pulse beat faster. She
passed him, and he never saw her. She came back and touched him on the
shoulder.

"Gracious, Mary!" he exclaimed. "How you startled me!"

"Yes. You looked as if you were walking in your sleep," she said. "Are
you arranging some terrible love affair? Have you got to reconcile a
desperate couple?"

"I wasn't thinking about my work," Ralph replied, rather hastily.
"And, besides, that sort of thing's not in my line," he added, rather
grimly.

The morning was fine, and they had still some minutes of leisure to
spend. They had not met for two or three weeks, and Mary had much to
say to Ralph; but she was not certain how far he wished for her
company. However, after a turn or two, in which a few facts were
communicated, he suggested sitting down, and she took the seat beside
him. The sparrows came fluttering about them, and Ralph produced from
his pocket the half of a roll saved from his luncheon. He threw a few
crumbs among them.

"I've never seen sparrows so tame," Mary observed, by way of saying
something.

"No," said Ralph. "The sparrows in Hyde Park aren't as tame as this.
If we keep perfectly still, I'll get one to settle on my arm."

Mary felt that she could have forgone this display of animal good
temper, but seeing that Ralph, for some curious reason, took a pride
in the sparrows, she bet him sixpence that he would not succeed.

"Done!" he said; and his eye, which had been gloomy, showed a spark of
light. His conversation was now addressed entirely to a bald cock-
sparrow, who seemed bolder than the rest; and Mary took the
opportunity of looking at him. She was not satisfied; his face was
worn, and his expression stern. A child came bowling its hoop through
the concourse of birds, and Ralph threw his last crumbs of bread into
the bushes with a snort of impatience.

"That's what always happens--just as I've almost got him," he said.
"Here's your sixpence, Mary. But you've only got it thanks to that
brute of a boy. They oughtn't to be allowed to bowl hoops here--"

"Oughtn't to be allowed to bowl hoops! My dear Ralph, what nonsense!"

"You always say that," he complained; "and it isn't nonsense. What's
the point of having a garden if one can't watch birds in it? The
street does all right for hoops. And if children can't be trusted in
the streets, their mothers should keep them at home."

Mary made no answer to this remark, but frowned.

She leant back on the seat and looked about her at the great houses
breaking the soft gray-blue sky with their chimneys.

"Ah, well," she said, "London's a fine place to live in. I believe I
could sit and watch people all day long. I like my fellow-
creatures. . . ."

Ralph sighed impatiently.

"Yes, I think so, when you come to know them," she added, as if his
disagreement had been spoken.

"That's just when I don't like them," he replied. "Still, I don't see
why you shouldn't cherish that illusion, if it pleases you." He spoke
without much vehemence of agreement or disagreement. He seemed
chilled.

"Wake up, Ralph! You're half asleep!" Mary cried, turning and pinching
his sleeve. "What have you been doing with yourself? Moping? Working?
Despising the world, as usual?"

As he merely shook his head, and filled his pipe, she went on:

"It's a bit of a pose, isn't it?"

"Not more than most things," he said.

"Well," Mary remarked, "I've a great deal to say to you, but I must go
on--we have a committee." She rose, but hesitated, looking down upon
him rather gravely. "You don't look happy, Ralph," she said. "Is it
anything, or is it nothing?"

He did not immediately answer her, but rose, too, and walked with her
towards the gate. As usual, he did not speak to her without
considering whether what he was about to say was the sort of thing
that he could say to her.

"I've been bothered," he said at length. "Partly by work, and partly
by family troubles. Charles has been behaving like a fool. He wants to
go out to Canada as a farmer--"

"Well, there's something to be said for that," said Mary; and they
passed the gate, and walked slowly round the Fields again, discussing
difficulties which, as a matter of fact, were more or less chronic in
the Denham family, and only now brought forward to appease Mary's
sympathy, which, however, soothed Ralph more than he was aware of. She
made him at least dwell upon problems which were real in the sense
that they were capable of solution; and the true cause of his
melancholy, which was not susceptible to such treatment, sank rather
more deeply into the shades of his mind.

Mary was attentive; she was helpful. Ralph could not help feeling
grateful to her, the more so, perhaps, because he had not told her the
truth about his state; and when they reached the gate again he wished
to make some affectionate objection to her leaving him. But his
affection took the rather uncouth form of expostulating with her about
her work.

"What d'you want to sit on a committee for?" he asked. "It's waste of
your time, Mary."

"I agree with you that a country walk would benefit the world more,"
she said. "Look here," she added suddenly, "why don't you come to us
at Christmas? It's almost the best time of year."

"Come to you at Disham?" Ralph repeated.

"Yes. We won't interfere with you. But you can tell me later," she
said, rather hastily, and then started off in the direction of Russell
Square. She had invited him on the impulse of the moment, as a vision
of the country came before her; and now she was annoyed with herself
for having done so, and then she was annoyed at being annoyed.

"If I can't face a walk in a field alone with Ralph," she reasoned,
"I'd better buy a cat and live in a lodging at Ealing, like Sally Seal
--and he won't come. Or did he mean that he WOULD come?"

She shook her head. She really did not know what he had meant. She
never felt quite certain; but now she was more than usually baffled.
Was he concealing something from her? His manner had been odd; his
deep absorption had impressed her; there was something in him that she
had not fathomed, and the mystery of his nature laid more of a spell
upon her than she liked. Moreover, she could not prevent herself from
doing now what she had often blamed others of her sex for doing--from
endowing her friend with a kind of heavenly fire, and passing her life
before it for his sanction.

Under this process, the committee rather dwindled in importance; the
Suffrage shrank; she vowed she would work harder at the Italian
language; she thought she would take up the study of birds. But this
program for a perfect life threatened to become so absurd that she
very soon caught herself out in the evil habit, and was rehearsing her
speech to the committee by the time the chestnut-colored bricks of
Russell Square came in sight. Indeed, she never noticed them. She ran
upstairs as usual, and was completely awakened to reality by the sight
of Mrs. Seal, on the landing outside the office, inducing a very large
dog to drink water out of a tumbler.

"Miss Markham has already arrived," Mrs. Seal remarked, with due
solemnity, "and this is her dog."

"A very fine dog, too," said Mary, patting him on the head.

"Yes. A magnificent fellow, Mrs. Seal agreed. "A kind of St. Bernard,
she tells me--so like Kit to have a St. Bernard. And you guard your
mistress well, don't you, Sailor? You see that wicked men don't break
into her larder when she's out at HER work--helping poor souls who
have lost their way. . . . But we're late--we must begin!" and
scattering the rest of the water indiscriminately over the floor, she
hurried Mary into the committee-room.

CHAPTER XIV

Mr. Clacton was in his glory. The machinery which he had perfected and
controlled was now about to turn out its bi-monthly product, a
committee meeting; and his pride in the perfect structure of these
assemblies was great. He loved the jargon of committee-rooms; he loved
the way in which the door kept opening as the clock struck the hour,
in obedience to a few strokes of his pen on a piece of paper; and when
it had opened sufficiently often, he loved to issue from his inner
chamber with documents in his hands, visibly important, with a
preoccupied expression on his face that might have suited a Prime
Minister advancing to meet his Cabinet. By his orders the table had
been decorated beforehand with six sheets of blotting-paper, with six
pens, six ink-pots, a tumbler and a jug of water, a bell, and, in
deference to the taste of the lady members, a vase of hardy
chrysanthemums. He had already surreptitiously straightened the sheets
of blotting-paper in relation to the ink-pots, and now stood in front
of the fire engaged in conversation with Miss Markham. But his eye was
on the door, and when Mary and Mrs. Seal entered, he gave a little
laugh and observed to the assembly which was scattered about the room:

"I fancy, ladies and gentlemen, that we are ready to commence."

So speaking, he took his seat at the head of the table, and arranging
one bundle of papers upon his right and another upon his left, called
upon Miss Datchet to read the minutes of the previous meeting. Mary
obeyed. A keen observer might have wondered why it was necessary for
the secretary to knit her brows so closely over the tolerably
matter-of-fact statement before her. Could there be any doubt in her
mind that it had been resolved to circularize the provinces with
Leaflet No. 3, or to issue a statistical diagram showing the
proportion of married women to spinsters in New Zealand; or that the
net profits of Mrs. Hipsley's Bazaar had reached a total of five
pounds eight shillings and twopence half-penny?

Could any doubt as to the perfect sense and propriety of these
statements be disturbing her? No one could have guessed, from the look
of her, that she was disturbed at all. A pleasanter and saner woman
than Mary Datchet was never seen within a committee-room. She seemed a
compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine; less poetically
speaking, she showed both gentleness and strength, an indefinable
promise of soft maternity blending with her evident fitness for honest
labor. Nevertheless, she had great difficulty in reducing her mind to
obedience; and her reading lacked conviction, as if, as was indeed the
case, she had lost the power of visualizing what she read. And
directly the list was completed, her mind floated to Lincoln's Inn
Fields and the fluttering wings of innumerable sparrows. Was Ralph
still enticing the bald-headed cock-sparrow to sit upon his hand? Had
he succeeded? Would he ever succeed? She had meant to ask him why it
is that the sparrows in Lincoln's Inn Fields are tamer than the
sparrows in Hyde Park--perhaps it is that the passers-by are rarer,
and they come to recognize their benefactors. For the first half-hour
of the committee meeting, Mary had thus to do battle with the
skeptical presence of Ralph Denham, who threatened to have it all his
own way. Mary tried half a dozen methods of ousting him. She raised
her voice, she articulated distinctly, she looked firmly at Mr.
Clacton's bald head, she began to write a note. To her annoyance, her
pencil drew a little round figure on the blotting-paper, which, she
could not deny, was really a bald-headed cock-sparrow. She looked
again at Mr. Clacton; yes, he was bald, and so are cock-sparrows.
Never was a secretary tormented by so many unsuitable suggestions, and
they all came, alas! with something ludicrously grotesque about them,
which might, at any moment, provoke her to such flippancy as would
shock her colleagues for ever. The thought of what she might say made
her bite her lips, as if her lips would protect her.

But all these suggestions were but flotsam and jetsam cast to the
surface by a more profound disturbance, which, as she could not
consider it at present, manifested its existence by these grotesque
nods and beckonings. Consider it, she must, when the committee was
over. Meanwhile, she was behaving scandalously; she was looking out of
the window, and thinking of the color of the sky, and of the
decorations on the Imperial Hotel, when she ought to have been
shepherding her colleagues, and pinning them down to the matter in
hand. She could not bring herself to attach more weight to one project
than to another. Ralph had said--she could not stop to consider what
he had said, but he had somehow divested the proceedings of all
reality. And then, without conscious effort, by some trick of the
brain, she found herself becoming interested in some scheme for
organizing a newspaper campaign. Certain articles were to be written;
certain editors approached. What line was it advisable to take? She
found herself strongly disapproving of what Mr. Clacton was saying.
She committed herself to the opinion that now was the time to strike
hard. Directly she had said this, she felt that she had turned upon
Ralph's ghost; and she became more and more in earnest, and anxious to
bring the others round to her point of view. Once more, she knew
exactly and indisputably what is right and what is wrong. As if
emerging from a mist, the old foes of the public good loomed ahead of
her--capitalists, newspaper proprietors, anti-suffragists, and, in
some ways most pernicious of all, the masses who take no interest one
way or another--among whom, for the time being, she certainly
discerned the features of Ralph Denham. Indeed, when Miss Markham
asked her to suggest the names of a few friends of hers, she expressed
herself with unusual bitterness:

"My friends think all this kind of thing useless." She felt that she
was really saying that to Ralph himself.

"Oh, they're that sort, are they?" said Miss Markham, with a little
laugh; and with renewed vigor their legions charged the foe.

Mary's spirits had been low when she entered the committee-room; but
now they were considerably improved. She knew the ways of this world;
it was a shapely, orderly place; she felt convinced of its right and
its wrong; and the feeling that she was fit to deal a heavy blow
against her enemies warmed her heart and kindled her eye. In one of
those flights of fancy, not characteristic of her but tiresomely
frequent this afternoon, she envisaged herself battered with rotten
eggs upon a platform, from which Ralph vainly begged her to descend.
But--

"What do I matter compared with the cause?" she said, and so on. Much
to her credit, however teased by foolish fancies, she kept the surface
of her brain moderate and vigilant, and subdued Mrs. Seal very
tactfully more than once when she demanded, "Action!--everywhere!--at
once!" as became her father's daughter.

The other members of the committee, who were all rather elderly
people, were a good deal impressed by Mary, and inclined to side with
her and against each other, partly, perhaps, because of her youth. The
feeling that she controlled them all filled Mary with a sense of
power; and she felt that no work can equal in importance, or be so
exciting as, the work of making other people do what you want them to
do. Indeed, when she had won her point she felt a slight degree of
contempt for the people who had yielded to her.

The committee now rose, gathered together their papers, shook them
straight, placed them in their attache-cases, snapped the locks firmly
together, and hurried away, having, for the most part, to catch
trains, in order to keep other appointments with other committees, for
they were all busy people. Mary, Mrs. Seal, and Mr. Clacton were left
alone; the room was hot and untidy, the pieces of pink blotting-paper
were lying at different angles upon the table, and the tumbler was
half full of water, which some one had poured out and forgotten to
drink.

Mrs. Seal began preparing the tea, while Mr. Clacton retired to his
room to file the fresh accumulation of documents. Mary was too much
excited even to help Mrs. Seal with the cups and saucers. She flung up
the window and stood by it, looking out. The street lamps were already
lit; and through the mist in the square one could see little figures
hurrying across the road and along the pavement, on the farther side.
In her absurd mood of lustful arrogance, Mary looked at the little
figures and thought, "If I liked I could make you go in there or stop
short; I could make you walk in single file or in double file; I could
do what I liked with you." Then Mrs. Seal came and stood by her.

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