Night and Day

V >> Virginia Woolf >> Night and Day

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Sitting in the corner of a third-class railway carriage, on the
afternoon of the following day, Ralph made several inquiries of a
commercial traveler in the opposite corner. They centered round a
village called Lampsher, not three miles, he understood, from Lincoln;
was there a big house in Lampsher, he asked, inhabited by a gentleman
of the name of Otway?

The traveler knew nothing, but rolled the name of Otway on his tongue,
reflectively, and the sound of it gratified Ralph amazingly. It gave
him an excuse to take a letter from his pocket in order to verify the
address.

"Stogdon House, Lampsher, Lincoln," he read out.

"You'll find somebody to direct you at Lincoln," said the man; and
Ralph had to confess that he was not bound there this very evening.

"I've got to walk over from Disham," he said, and in the heart of him
could not help marveling at the pleasure which he derived from making
a bagman in a train believe what he himself did not believe. For the
letter, though signed by Katharine's father, contained no invitation
or warrant for thinking that Katharine herself was there; the only
fact it disclosed was that for a fortnight this address would be Mr.
Hilbery's address. But when he looked out of the window, it was of her
he thought; she, too, had seen these gray fields, and, perhaps, she
was there where the trees ran up a slope, and one yellow light shone
now, and then went out again, at the foot of the hill. The light shone
in the windows of an old gray house, he thought. He lay back in his
corner and forgot the commercial traveler altogether. The process of
visualizing Katharine stopped short at the old gray manor-house;
instinct warned him that if he went much further with this process
reality would soon force itself in; he could not altogether neglect
the figure of William Rodney. Since the day when he had heard from
Katharine's lips of her engagement, he had refrained from investing
his dream of her with the details of real life. But the light of the
late afternoon glowed green behind the straight trees, and became a
symbol of her. The light seemed to expand his heart. She brooded over
the gray fields, and was with him now in the railway carriage,
thoughtful, silent, and infinitely tender; but the vision pressed too
close, and must be dismissed, for the train was slackening. Its abrupt
jerks shook him wide awake, and he saw Mary Datchet, a sturdy russet
figure, with a dash of scarlet about it, as the carriage slid down the
platform. A tall youth who accompanied her shook him by the hand, took
his bag, and led the way without uttering one articulate word.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk
almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a
note of intimacy seldom heard by day. Such an edge was there in Mary's
voice when she greeted him. About her seemed to hang the mist of the
winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves. He felt
himself at once stepping on to the firm ground of an entirely
different world, but he did not allow himself to yield to the pleasure
of it directly. They gave him his choice of driving with Edward or of
walking home across the fields with Mary--not a shorter way, they
explained, but Mary thought it a nicer way. He decided to walk with
her, being conscious, indeed, that he got comfort from her presence.
What could be the cause of her cheerfulness, he wondered, half
ironically, and half enviously, as the pony-cart started briskly away,
and the dusk swam between their eyes and the tall form of Edward,
standing up to drive, with the reins in one hand and the whip in the
other. People from the village, who had been to the market town, were
climbing into their gigs, or setting off home down the road together
in little parties. Many salutations were addressed to Mary, who
shouted back, with the addition of the speaker's name. But soon she
led the way over a stile, and along a path worn slightly darker than
the dim green surrounding it. In front of them the sky now showed
itself of a reddish-yellow, like a slice of some semilucent stone
behind which a lamp burnt, while a fringe of black trees with distinct
branches stood against the light, which was obscured in one direction
by a hump of earth, in all other directions the land lying flat to the
very verge of the sky. One of the swift and noiseless birds of the
winter's night seemed to follow them across the field, circling a few
feet in front of them, disappearing and returning again and again.

Mary had gone this walk many hundred times in the course of her life,
generally alone, and at different stages the ghosts of past moods
would flood her mind with a whole scene or train of thought merely at
the sight of three trees from a particular angle, or at the sound of
the pheasant clucking in the ditch. But to-night the circumstances
were strong enough to oust all other scenes; and she looked at the
field and the trees with an involuntary intensity as if they had no
such associations for her.

"Well, Ralph," she said, "this is better than Lincoln's Inn Fields,
isn't it? Look, there's a bird for you! Oh, you've brought glasses,
have you? Edward and Christopher mean to make you shoot. Can you
shoot? I shouldn't think so--"

"Look here, you must explain," said Ralph. "Who are these young men?
Where am I staying?"

"You are staying with us, of course," she said boldly. "Of course,
you're staying with us--you don't mind coming, do you?"

"If I had, I shouldn't have come," he said sturdily. They walked on in
silence; Mary took care not to break it for a time. She wished Ralph
to feel, as she thought he would, all the fresh delights of the earth
and air. She was right. In a moment he expressed his pleasure, much to
her comfort.

"This is the sort of country I thought you'd live in, Mary," he said,
pushing his hat back on his head, and looking about him. "Real
country. No gentlemen's seats."

He snuffed the air, and felt more keenly than he had done for many
weeks the pleasure of owning a body.

"Now we have to find our way through a hedge," said Mary. In the gap
of the hedge Ralph tore up a poacher's wire, set across a hole to trap
a rabbit.

"It's quite right that they should poach," said Mary, watching him
tugging at the wire. "I wonder whether it was Alfred Duggins or Sid
Rankin? How can one expect them not to, when they only make fifteen
shillings a week? Fifteen shillings a week," she repeated, coming out
on the other side of the hedge, and running her fingers through her
hair to rid herself of a bramble which had attached itself to her. "I
could live on fifteen shillings a week--easily."

"Could you?" said Ralph. "I don't believe you could," he added.

"Oh yes. They have a cottage thrown in, and a garden where one can
grow vegetables. It wouldn't be half bad," said Mary, with a soberness
which impressed Ralph very much.

"But you'd get tired of it," he urged.

"I sometimes think it's the only thing one would never get tired of,"
she replied.

The idea of a cottage where one grew one's own vegetables and lived on
fifteen shillings a week, filled Ralph with an extraordinary sense of
rest and satisfaction.

"But wouldn't it be on the main road, or next door to a woman with six
squalling children, who'd always be hanging her washing out to dry
across your garden?"

"The cottage I'm thinking of stands by itself in a little orchard."

"And what about the Suffrage?" he asked, attempting sarcasm.

"Oh, there are other things in the world besides the Suffrage," she
replied, in an off-hand manner which was slightly mysterious.

Ralph fell silent. It annoyed him that she should have plans of which
he knew nothing; but he felt that he had no right to press her
further. His mind settled upon the idea of life in a country cottage.
Conceivably, for he could not examine into it now, here lay a
tremendous possibility; a solution of many problems. He struck his
stick upon the earth, and stared through the dusk at the shape of the
country.

"D'you know the points of the compass?" he asked.

"Well, of course," said Mary. "What d'you take me for?--a Cockney like
you?" She then told him exactly where the north lay, and where the
south.

"It's my native land, this," she said. "I could smell my way about it
blindfold."

As if to prove this boast, she walked a little quicker, so that Ralph
found it difficult to keep pace with her. At the same time, he felt
drawn to her as he had never been before; partly, no doubt, because
she was more independent of him than in London, and seemed to be
attached firmly to a world where he had no place at all. Now the dusk
had fallen to such an extent that he had to follow her implicitly, and
even lean his hand on her shoulder when they jumped a bank into a very
narrow lane. And he felt curiously shy of her when she began to shout
through her hands at a spot of light which swung upon the mist in a
neighboring field. He shouted, too, and the light stood still.

"That's Christopher, come in already, and gone to feed his chickens,"
she said.

She introduced him to Ralph, who could see only a tall figure in
gaiters, rising from a fluttering circle of soft feathery bodies, upon
whom the light fell in wavering discs, calling out now a bright spot
of yellow, now one of greenish-black and scarlet. Mary dipped her hand
in the bucket he carried, and was at once the center of a circle also;
and as she cast her grain she talked alternately to the birds and to
her brother, in the same clucking, half-inarticulate voice, as it
sounded to Ralph, standing on the outskirts of the fluttering feathers
in his black overcoat.

He had removed his overcoat by the time they sat round the dinner-
table, but nevertheless he looked very strange among the others. A
country life and breeding had preserved in them all a look which Mary
hesitated to call either innocent or youthful, as she compared them,
now sitting round in an oval, softly illuminated by candlelight; and
yet it was something of the kind, yes, even in the case of the Rector
himself. Though superficially marked with lines, his face was a clear
pink, and his blue eyes had the long-sighted, peaceful expression of
eyes seeking the turn of the road, or a distant light through rain, or
the darkness of winter. She looked at Ralph. He had never appeared to
her more concentrated and full of purpose; as if behind his forehead
were massed so much experience that he could choose for himself which
part of it he would display and which part he would keep to himself.
Compared with that dark and stern countenance, her brothers' faces,
bending low over their soup-plates, were mere circles of pink,
unmolded flesh.

"You came by the 3.10, Mr. Denham?" said the Reverend Wyndham Datchet,
tucking his napkin into his collar, so that almost the whole of his
body was concealed by a large white diamond. "They treat us very well,
on the whole. Considering the increase of traffic, they treat us very
well indeed. I have the curiosity sometimes to count the trucks on the
goods' trains, and they're well over fifty--well over fifty, at this
season of the year."

The old gentleman had been roused agreeably by the presence of this
attentive and well-informed young man, as was evident by the care with
which he finished the last words in his sentences, and his slight
exaggeration in the number of trucks on the trains. Indeed, the chief
burden of the talk fell upon him, and he sustained it to-night in a
manner which caused his sons to look at him admiringly now and then;
for they felt shy of Denham, and were glad not to have to talk
themselves. The store of information about the present and past of
this particular corner of Lincolnshire which old Mr. Datchet produced
really surprised his children, for though they knew of its existence,
they had forgotten its extent, as they might have forgotten the amount
of family plate stored in the plate-chest, until some rare celebration
brought it forth.

After dinner, parish business took the Rector to his study, and Mary
proposed that they should sit in the kitchen.

"It's not the kitchen really," Elizabeth hastened to explain to her
guest, "but we call it so--"

"It's the nicest room in the house," said Edward.

"It's got the old rests by the side of the fireplace, where the men
hung their guns," said Elizabeth, leading the way, with a tall brass
candlestick in her hand, down a passage. "Show Mr. Denham the steps,
Christopher. . . . When the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were here two
years ago they said this was the most interesting part of the house.
These narrow bricks prove that it is five hundred years old--five
hundred years, I think--they may have said six." She, too, felt an
impulse to exaggerate the age of the bricks, as her father had
exaggerated the number of trucks. A big lamp hung down from the center
of the ceiling and, together with a fine log fire, illuminated a large
and lofty room, with rafters running from wall to wall, a floor of red
tiles, and a substantial fireplace built up of those narrow red bricks
which were said to be five hundred years old. A few rugs and a
sprinkling of arm-chairs had made this ancient kitchen into a
sitting-room. Elizabeth, after pointing out the gun-racks, and the
hooks for smoking hams, and other evidence of incontestable age, and
explaining that Mary had had the idea of turning the room into a
sitting-room--otherwise it was used for hanging out the wash and for
the men to change in after shooting--considered that she had done her
duty as hostess, and sat down in an upright chair directly beneath the
lamp, beside a very long and narrow oak table. She placed a pair of
horn spectacles upon her nose, and drew towards her a basketful of
threads and wools. In a few minutes a smile came to her face, and
remained there for the rest of the evening.

"Will you come out shooting with us to-morrow?" said Christopher, who
had, on the whole, formed a favorable impression of his sister's
friend.

"I won't shoot, but I'll come with you," said Ralph.

"Don't you care about shooting?" asked Edward, whose suspicions were
not yet laid to rest.

"I've never shot in my life," said Ralph, turning and looking him in
the face, because he was not sure how this confession would be
received.

"You wouldn't have much chance in London, I suppose," said
Christopher. "But won't you find it rather dull--just watching us?"

"I shall watch birds," Ralph replied, with a smile.

"I can show you the place for watching birds," said Edward, "if that's
what you like doing. I know a fellow who comes down from London about
this time every year to watch them. It's a great place for the wild
geese and the ducks. I've heard this man say that it's one of the best
places for birds in the country."

"It's about the best place in England," Ralph replied. They were all
gratified by this praise of their native county; and Mary now had the
pleasure of hearing these short questions and answers lose their
undertone of suspicious inspection, so far as her brothers were
concerned, and develop into a genuine conversation about the habits of
birds which afterwards turned to a discussion as to the habits of
solicitors, in which it was scarcely necessary for her to take part.
She was pleased to see that her brothers liked Ralph, to the extent,
that is, of wishing to secure his good opinion. Whether or not he
liked them it was impossible to tell from his kind but experienced
manner. Now and then she fed the fire with a fresh log, and as the
room filled with the fine, dry heat of burning wood, they all, with
the exception of Elizabeth, who was outside the range of the fire,
felt less and less anxious about the effect they were making, and more
and more inclined for sleep. At this moment a vehement scratching was
heard on the door.

"Piper!--oh, damn!--I shall have to get up," murmured Christopher.

"It's not Piper, it's Pitch," Edward grunted.

"All the same, I shall have to get up," Christopher grumbled. He let
in the dog, and stood for a moment by the door, which opened into the
garden, to revive himself with a draught of the black, starlit air.

"Do come in and shut the door!" Mary cried, half turning in her chair.

"We shall have a fine day to-morrow," said Christopher with
complacency, and he sat himself on the floor at her feet, and leant
his back against her knees, and stretched out his long stockinged legs
to the fire--all signs that he felt no longer any restraint at the
presence of the stranger. He was the youngest of the family, and
Mary's favorite, partly because his character resembled hers, as
Edward's character resembled Elizabeth's. She made her knees a
comfortable rest for his head, and ran her fingers through his hair.

"I should like Mary to stroke my head like that," Ralph thought to
himself suddenly, and he looked at Christopher, almost affectionately,
for calling forth his sister's caresses. Instantly he thought of
Katharine, the thought of her being surrounded by the spaces of night
and the open air; and Mary, watching him, saw the lines upon his
forehead suddenly deepen. He stretched out an arm and placed a log
upon the fire, constraining himself to fit it carefully into the frail
red scaffolding, and also to limit his thoughts to this one room.

Mary had ceased to stroke her brother's head; he moved it impatiently
between her knees, and, much as though he were a child, she began once
more to part the thick, reddish-colored locks this way and that. But a
far stronger passion had taken possession of her soul than any her
brother could inspire in her, and, seeing Ralph's change of
expression, her hand almost automatically continued its movements,
while her mind plunged desperately for some hold upon slippery banks.

CHAPTER XVI

Into that same black night, almost, indeed, into the very same layer
of starlit air, Katharine Hilbery was now gazing, although not with a
view to the prospects of a fine day for duck shooting on the morrow.
She was walking up and down a gravel path in the garden of Stogdon
House, her sight of the heavens being partially intercepted by the
light leafless hoops of a pergola. Thus a spray of clematis would
completely obscure Cassiopeia, or blot out with its black pattern
myriads of miles of the Milky Way. At the end of the pergola, however,
there was a stone seat, from which the sky could be seen completely
swept clear of any earthly interruption, save to the right, indeed,
where a line of elm-trees was beautifully sprinkled with stars, and a
low stable building had a full drop of quivering silver just issuing
from the mouth of the chimney. It was a moonless night, but the light
of the stars was sufficient to show the outline of the young woman's
form, and the shape of her face gazing gravely, indeed almost sternly,
into the sky. She had come out into the winter's night, which was mild
enough, not so much to look with scientific eyes upon the stars, as to
shake herself free from certain purely terrestrial discontents. Much
as a literary person in like circumstances would begin,
absent-mindedly, pulling out volume after volume, so she stepped into
the garden in order to have the stars at hand, even though she did not
look at them. Not to be happy, when she was supposed to be happier
than she would ever be again--that, as far as she could see, was the
origin of a discontent which had begun almost as soon as she arrived,
two days before, and seemed now so intolerable that she had left the
family party, and come out here to consider it by herself. It was not
she who thought herself unhappy, but her cousins, who thought it for
her. The house was full of cousins, much of her age, or even younger,
and among them they had some terribly bright eyes. They seemed always
on the search for something between her and Rodney, which they
expected to find, and yet did not find; and when they searched,
Katharine became aware of wanting what she had not been conscious of
wanting in London, alone with William and her parents. Or, if she did
not want it, she missed it. And this state of mind depressed her,
because she had been accustomed always to give complete satisfaction,
and her self-love was now a little ruffled. She would have liked to
break through the reserve habitual to her in order to justify her
engagement to some one whose opinion she valued. No one had spoken a
word of criticism, but they left her alone with William; not that that
would have mattered, if they had not left her alone so politely; and,
perhaps, that would not have mattered if they had not seemed so
queerly silent, almost respectful, in her presence, which gave way to
criticism, she felt, out of it.

Looking now and then at the sky, she went through the list of her
cousins' names: Eleanor, Humphrey, Marmaduke, Silvia, Henry,
Cassandra, Gilbert, and Mostyn--Henry, the cousin who taught the young
ladies of Bungay to play upon the violin, was the only one in whom she
could confide, and as she walked up and down beneath the hoops of the
pergola, she did begin a little speech to him, which ran something
like this:

"To begin with, I'm very fond of William. You can't deny that. I know
him better than any one, almost. But why I'm marrying him is, partly,
I admit--I'm being quite honest with you, and you mustn't tell any
one--partly because I want to get married. I want to have a house of
my own. It isn't possible at home. It's all very well for you, Henry;
you can go your own way. I have to be there always. Besides, you know
what our house is. You wouldn't be happy either, if you didn't do
something. It isn't that I haven't the time at home--it's the
atmosphere." Here, presumably, she imagined that her cousin, who had
listened with his usual intelligent sympathy, raised his eyebrows a
little, and interposed:

"Well, but what do you want to do?"

Even in this purely imaginary dialogue, Katharine found it difficult
to confide her ambition to an imaginary companion.

"I should like," she began, and hesitated quite a long time before she
forced herself to add, with a change of voice, "to study
mathematics--to know about the stars."

Henry was clearly amazed, but too kind to express all his doubts; he
only said something about the difficulties of mathematics, and
remarked that very little was known about the stars.

Katharine thereupon went on with the statement of her case.

"I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything--but I want to
work out something in figures--something that hasn't got to do with
human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry,
I'm a humbug--I mean, I'm not what you all take me for. I'm not
domestic, or very practical or sensible, really. And if I could
calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures,
and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy,
and I believe I should give William all he wants."

Having reached this point, instinct told her that she had passed
beyond the region in which Henry's advice could be of any good; and,
having rid her mind of its superficial annoyance, she sat herself upon
the stone seat, raised her eyes unconsciously and thought about the
deeper questions which she had to decide, she knew, for herself. Would
she, indeed, give William all he wanted? In order to decide the
question, she ran her mind rapidly over her little collection of
significant sayings, looks, compliments, gestures, which had marked
their intercourse during the last day or two. He had been annoyed
because a box, containing some clothes specially chosen by him for her
to wear, had been taken to the wrong station, owing to her neglect in
the matter of labels. The box had arrived in the nick of time, and he
had remarked, as she came downstairs on the first night, that he had
never seen her look more beautiful. She outshone all her cousins. He
had discovered that she never made an ugly movement; he also said that
the shape of her head made it possible for her, unlike most women, to
wear her hair low. He had twice reproved her for being silent at
dinner; and once for never attending to what he said. He had been
surprised at the excellence of her French accent, but he thought it
was selfish of her not to go with her mother to call upon the
Middletons, because they were old family friends and very nice people.
On the whole, the balance was nearly even; and, writing down a kind of
conclusion in her mind which finished the sum for the present, at
least, she changed the focus of her eyes, and saw nothing but the
stars.

To-night they seemed fixed with unusual firmness in the blue, and
flashed back such a ripple of light into her eyes that she found
herself thinking that to-night the stars were happy. Without knowing
or caring more for Church practices than most people of her age,
Katharine could not look into the sky at Christmas time without
feeling that, at this one season, the Heavens bend over the earth with
sympathy, and signal with immortal radiance that they, too, take part
in her festival. Somehow, it seemed to her that they were even now
beholding the procession of kings and wise men upon some road on a
distant part of the earth. And yet, after gazing for another second,
the stars did their usual work upon the mind, froze to cinders the
whole of our short human history, and reduced the human body to an
ape-like, furry form, crouching amid the brushwood of a barbarous clod
of mud. This stage was soon succeeded by another, in which there was
nothing in the universe save stars and the light of stars; as she
looked up the pupils of her eyes so dilated with starlight that the
whole of her seemed dissolved in silver and spilt over the ledges of
the stars for ever and ever indefinitely through space. Somehow
simultaneously, though incongruously, she was riding with the
magnanimous hero upon the shore or under forest trees, and so might
have continued were it not for the rebuke forcibly administered by the
body, which, content with the normal conditions of life, in no way
furthers any attempt on the part of the mind to alter them. She grew
cold, shook herself, rose, and walked towards the house.

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