Night and Day

V >> Virginia Woolf >> Night and Day

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"Katharine, Katharine," he said aloud, and then, looking round, saw
Mary walking slowly away from him, tearing a long spray of ivy from
the trees as she passed them. She seemed so definitely opposed to the
vision he held in his mind that he returned to it with a gesture of
impatience.

"Katharine, Katharine," he repeated, and seemed to himself to be with
her. He lost his sense of all that surrounded him; all substantial
things--the hour of the day, what we have done and are about to do,
the presence of other people and the support we derive from seeing
their belief in a common reality--all this slipped from him. So he
might have felt if the earth had dropped from his feet, and the empty
blue had hung all round him, and the air had been steeped in the
presence of one woman. The chirp of a robin on the bough above his
head awakened him, and his awakenment was accompanied by a sigh. Here
was the world in which he had lived; here the plowed field, the high
road yonder, and Mary, stripping ivy from the trees. When he came up
with her he linked his arm through hers and said:

"Now, Mary, what's all this about America?"

There was a brotherly kindness in his voice which seemed to her
magnanimous, when she reflected that she had cut short his
explanations and shown little interest in his change of plan. She gave
him her reasons for thinking that she might profit by such a journey,
omitting the one reason which had set all the rest in motion. He
listened attentively, and made no attempt to dissuade her. In truth,
he found himself curiously eager to make certain of her good sense,
and accepted each fresh proof of it with satisfaction, as though it
helped him to make up his mind about something. She forgot the pain he
had caused her, and in place of it she became conscious of a steady
tide of well-being which harmonized very aptly with the tramp of their
feet upon the dry road and the support of his arm. The comfort was the
more glowing in that it seemed to be the reward of her determination
to behave to him simply and without attempting to be other than she
was. Instead of making out an interest in the poets, she avoided them
instinctively, and dwelt rather insistently upon the practical nature
of her gifts.

In a practical way she asked for particulars of his cottage, which
hardly existed in his mind, and corrected his vagueness.

"You must see that there's water," she insisted, with an exaggeration
of interest. She avoided asking him what he meant to do in this
cottage, and, at last, when all the practical details had been
thrashed out as much as possible, he rewarded her by a more intimate
statement.

"One of the rooms," he said, "must be my study, for, you see, Mary,
I'm going to write a book." Here he withdrew his arm from hers, lit
his pipe, and they tramped on in a sagacious kind of comradeship, the
most complete they had attained in all their friendship.

"And what's your book to be about?" she said, as boldly as if she had
never come to grief with Ralph in talking about books. He told her
unhesitatingly that he meant to write the history of the English
village from Saxon days to the present time. Some such plan had lain
as a seed in his mind for many years; and now that he had decided, in
a flash, to give up his profession, the seed grew in the space of
twenty minutes both tall and lusty. He was surprised himself at the
positive way in which he spoke. It was the same with the question of
his cottage. That had come into existence, too, in an unromantic shape
--a square white house standing just off the high road, no doubt, with
a neighbor who kept a pig and a dozen squalling children; for these
plans were shorn of all romance in his mind, and the pleasure he
derived from thinking of them was checked directly it passed a very
sober limit. So a sensible man who has lost his chance of some
beautiful inheritance might tread out the narrow bounds of his actual
dwelling-place, and assure himself that life is supportable within its
demesne, only one must grow turnips and cabbages, not melons and
pomegranates. Certainly Ralph took some pride in the resources of his
mind, and was insensibly helped to right himself by Mary's trust in
him. She wound her ivy spray round her ash-plant, and for the first
time for many days, when alone with Ralph, set no spies upon her
motives, sayings, and feelings, but surrendered herself to complete
happiness.

Thus talking, with easy silences and some pauses to look at the view
over the hedge and to decide upon the species of a little gray-brown
bird slipping among the twigs, they walked into Lincoln, and after
strolling up and down the main street, decided upon an inn where the
rounded window suggested substantial fare, nor were they mistaken. For
over a hundred and fifty years hot joints, potatoes, greens, and apple
puddings had been served to generations of country gentlemen, and now,
sitting at a table in the hollow of the bow window, Ralph and Mary
took their share of this perennial feast. Looking across the joint,
half-way through the meal, Mary wondered whether Ralph would ever come
to look quite like the other people in the room. Would he be absorbed
among the round pink faces, pricked with little white bristles, the
calves fitted in shiny brown leather, the black-and-white check suits,
which were sprinkled about in the same room with them? She half hoped
so; she thought that it was only in his mind that he was different.
She did not wish him to be too different from other people. The walk
had given him a ruddy color, too, and his eyes were lit up by a
steady, honest light, which could not make the simplest farmer feel
ill at ease, or suggest to the most devout of clergymen a disposition
to sneer at his faith. She loved the steep cliff of his forehead, and
compared it to the brow of a young Greek horseman, who reins his horse
back so sharply that it half falls on its haunches. He always seemed
to her like a rider on a spirited horse. And there was an exaltation
to her in being with him, because there was a risk that he would not
be able to keep to the right pace among other people. Sitting opposite
him at the little table in the window, she came back to that state of
careless exaltation which had overcome her when they halted by the
gate, but now it was accompanied by a sense of sanity and security,
for she felt that they had a feeling in common which scarcely needed
embodiment in words. How silent he was! leaning his forehead on his
hand, now and then, and again looking steadily and gravely at the
backs of the two men at the next table, with so little self-
consciousness that she could almost watch his mind placing one thought
solidly upon the top of another; she thought that she could feel him
thinking, through the shade of her fingers, and she could anticipate
the exact moment when he would put an end to his thought and turn a
little in his chair and say:

"Well, Mary--?" inviting her to take up the thread of thought where he
had dropped it.

And at that very moment he turned just so, and said:

"Well, Mary?" with the curious touch of diffidence which she loved in
him.

She laughed, and she explained her laugh on the spur of the moment by
the look of the people in the street below. There was a motor-car with
an old lady swathed in blue veils, and a lady's maid on the seat
opposite, holding a King Charles's spaniel; there was a country-woman
wheeling a perambulator full of sticks down the middle of the road;
there was a bailiff in gaiters discussing the state of the cattle
market with a dissenting minister--so she defined them.

She ran over this list without any fear that her companion would think
her trivial. Indeed, whether it was due to the warmth of the room or
to the good roast beef, or whether Ralph had achieved the process
which is called making up one's mind, certainly he had given up
testing the good sense, the independent character, the intelligence
shown in her remarks. He had been building one of those piles of
thought, as ramshackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from
words let fall by gentlemen in gaiters, half from the litter in his
own mind, about duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman
occupation of Lincoln and the relations of country gentlemen with
their wives, when, from all this disconnected rambling, there suddenly
formed itself in his mind the idea that he would ask Mary to marry
him. The idea was so spontaneous that it seemed to shape itself of its
own accord before his eyes. It was then that he turned round and made
use of his old, instinctive phrase:

"Well, Mary--?"

As it presented itself to him at first, the idea was so new and
interesting that he was half inclined to address it, without more ado,
to Mary herself. His natural instinct to divide his thoughts carefully
into two different classes before he expressed them to her prevailed.
But as he watched her looking out of the window and describing the old
lady, the woman with the perambulator, the bailiff and the dissenting
minister, his eyes filled involuntarily with tears. He would have
liked to lay his head on her shoulder and sob, while she parted his
hair with her fingers and soothed him and said:

"There, there. Don't cry! Tell me why you're crying--"; and they would
clasp each other tight, and her arms would hold him like his mother's.
He felt that he was very lonely, and that he was afraid of the other
people in the room.

"How damnable this all is!" he exclaimed abruptly.

"What are you talking about?" she replied, rather vaguely, still
looking out of the window.

He resented this divided attention more than, perhaps, he knew, and he
thought how Mary would soon be on her way to America.

"Mary," he said, "I want to talk to you. Haven't we nearly done? Why
don't they take away these plates?"

Mary felt his agitation without looking at him; she felt convinced
that she knew what it was that he wished to say to her.

"They'll come all in good time," she said; and felt it necessary to
display her extreme calmness by lifting a salt-cellar and sweeping up
a little heap of bread-crumbs.

"I want to apologize," Ralph continued, not quite knowing what he was
about to say, but feeling some curious instinct which urged him to
commit himself irrevocably, and to prevent the moment of intimacy from
passing.

"I think I've treated you very badly. That is, I've told you lies. Did
you guess that I was lying to you? Once in Lincoln's Inn Fields and
again to-day on our walk. I am a liar, Mary. Did you know that? Do you
think you do know me?"

"I think I do," she said.

At this point the waiter changed their plates.

"It's true I don't want you to go to America," he said, looking
fixedly at the table-cloth. "In fact, my feelings towards you seem to
be utterly and damnably bad," he said energetically, although forced
to keep his voice low.

"If I weren't a selfish beast I should tell you to have nothing more
to do with me. And yet, Mary, in spite of the fact that I believe what
I'm saying, I also believe that it's good we should know each other--
the world being what it is, you see--" and by a nod of his head he
indicated the other occupants of the room, "for, of course, in an
ideal state of things, in a decent community even, there's no doubt
you shouldn't have anything to do with me--seriously, that is."

"You forget that I'm not an ideal character, either," said Mary, in
the same low and very earnest tones, which, in spite of being almost
inaudible, surrounded their table with an atmosphere of concentration
which was quite perceptible to the other diners, who glanced at them
now and then with a queer mixture of kindness, amusement, and
curiosity.

"I'm much more selfish than I let on, and I'm worldly a little--more
than you think, anyhow. I like bossing things--perhaps that's my
greatest fault. I've none of your passion for--" here she hesitated,
and glanced at him, as if to ascertain what his passion was for--"for
the truth," she added, as if she had found what she sought
indisputably.

"I've told you I'm a liar," Ralph repeated obstinately.

"Oh, in little things, I dare say," she said impatiently. "But not in
real ones, and that's what matters. I dare say I'm more truthful than
you are in small ways. But I could never care"--she was surprised to
find herself speaking the word, and had to force herself to speak it
out--"for any one who was a liar in that way. I love the truth a
certain amount--a considerable amount--but not in the way you love
it." Her voice sank, became inaudible, and wavered as if she could
scarcely keep herself from tears.

"Good heavens!" Ralph exclaimed to himself. "She loves me! Why did I
never see it before? She's going to cry; no, but she can't speak."

The certainty overwhelmed him so that he scarcely knew what he was
doing; the blood rushed to his cheeks, and although he had quite made
up his mind to ask her to marry him, the certainty that she loved him
seemed to change the situation so completely that he could not do it.
He did not dare to look at her. If she cried, he did not know what he
should do. It seemed to him that something of a terrible and
devastating nature had happened. The waiter changed their plates once
more.

In his agitation Ralph rose, turned his back upon Mary, and looked out
of the window. The people in the street seemed to him only a
dissolving and combining pattern of black particles; which, for the
moment, represented very well the involuntary procession of feelings
and thoughts which formed and dissolved in rapid succession in his own
mind. At one moment he exulted in the thought that Mary loved him; at
the next, it seemed that he was without feeling for her; her love was
repulsive to him. Now he felt urged to marry her at once; now to
disappear and never see her again. In order to control this disorderly
race of thought he forced himself to read the name on the chemist's
shop directly opposite him; then to examine the objects in the shop
windows, and then to focus his eyes exactly upon a little group of
women looking in at the great windows of a large draper's shop. This
discipline having given him at least a superficial control of himself,
he was about to turn and ask the waiter to bring the bill, when his
eye was caught by a tall figure walking quickly along the opposite
pavement--a tall figure, upright, dark, and commanding, much detached
from her surroundings. She held her gloves in her left hand, and the
left hand was bare. All this Ralph noticed and enumerated and
recognized before he put a name to the whole--Katharine Hilbery. She
seemed to be looking for somebody. Her eyes, in fact, scanned both
sides of the street, and for one second were raised directly to the
bow window in which Ralph stood; but she looked away again instantly
without giving any sign that she had seen him. This sudden apparition
had an extraordinary effect upon him. It was as if he had thought of
her so intensely that his mind had formed the shape of her, rather
than that he had seen her in the flesh outside in the street. And yet
he had not been thinking of her at all. The impression was so intense
that he could not dismiss it, nor even think whether he had seen her
or merely imagined her. He sat down at once, and said, briefly and
strangely, rather to himself than to Mary:

"That was Katharine Hilbery."

"Katharine Hilbery? What do you mean?" she asked, hardly understanding
from his manner whether he had seen her or not.

"Katharine Hilbery," he repeated. "But she's gone now."

"Katharine Hilbery!" Mary thought, in an instant of blinding
revelation; "I've always known it was Katharine Hilbery!" She knew it
all now.

After a moment of downcast stupor, she raised her eyes, looked
steadily at Ralph, and caught his fixed and dreamy gaze leveled at a
point far beyond their surroundings, a point that she had never
reached in all the time that she had known him. She noticed the lips
just parted, the fingers loosely clenched, the whole attitude of rapt
contemplation, which fell like a veil between them. She noticed
everything about him; if there had been other signs of his utter
alienation she would have sought them out, too, for she felt that it
was only by heaping one truth upon another that she could keep herself
sitting there, upright. The truth seemed to support her; it struck
her, even as she looked at his face, that the light of truth was
shining far away beyond him; the light of truth, she seemed to frame
the words as she rose to go, shines on a world not to be shaken by our
personal calamities.

Ralph handed her her coat and her stick. She took them, fastened the
coat securely, grasped the stick firmly. The ivy spray was still
twisted about the handle; this one sacrifice, she thought, she might
make to sentimentality and personality, and she picked two leaves from
the ivy and put them in her pocket before she disencumbered her stick
of the rest of it. She grasped the stick in the middle, and settled
her fur cap closely upon her head, as if she must be in trim for a
long and stormy walk. Next, standing in the middle of the road, she
took a slip of paper from her purse, and read out loud a list of
commissions entrusted to her--fruit, butter, string, and so on; and
all the time she never spoke directly to Ralph or looked at him.

Ralph heard her giving orders to attentive, rosy-checked men in white
aprons, and in spite of his own preoccupation, he commented upon the
determination with which she made her wishes known. Once more he
began, automatically, to take stock of her characteristics. Standing
thus, superficially observant and stirring the sawdust on the floor
meditatively with the toe of his boot, he was roused by a musical and
familiar voice behind him, accompanied by a light touch upon his
shoulder.

"I'm not mistaken? Surely Mr. Denham? I caught a glimpse of your coat
through the window, and I felt sure that I knew your coat. Have you
seen Katharine or William? I'm wandering about Lincoln looking for the
ruins."

It was Mrs. Hilbery; her entrance created some stir in the shop; many
people looked at her.

"First of all, tell me where I am," she demanded, but, catching sight
of the attentive shopman, she appealed to him. "The ruins--my party is
waiting for me at the ruins. The Roman ruins--or Greek, Mr. Denham?
Your town has a great many beautiful things in it, but I wish it
hadn't so many ruins. I never saw such delightful little pots of honey
in my life--are they made by your own bees? Please give me one of
those little pots, and tell me how I shall find my way to the ruins."

"And now," she continued, having received the information and the pot
of honey, having been introduced to Mary, and having insisted that
they should accompany her back to the ruins, since in a town with so
many turnings, such prospects, such delightful little half-naked boys
dabbling in pools, such Venetian canals, such old blue china in the
curiosity shops, it was impossible for one person all alone to find
her way to the ruins. "Now," she exclaimed, "please tell me what
you're doing here, Mr. Denham--for you ARE Mr. Denham, aren't you?"
she inquired, gazing at him with a sudden suspicion of her own
accuracy. "The brilliant young man who writes for the Review, I mean?
Only yesterday my husband was telling me he thought you one of the
cleverest young men he knew. Certainly, you've been the messenger of
Providence to me, for unless I'd seen you I'm sure I should never have
found the ruins at all."

They had reached the Roman arch when Mrs. Hilbery caught sight of her
own party, standing like sentinels facing up and down the road so as
to intercept her if, as they expected, she had got lodged in some
shop.

"I've found something much better than ruins!" she exclaimed. "I've
found two friends who told me how to find you, which I could never
have done without them. They must come and have tea with us. What a
pity that we've just had luncheon." Could they not somehow revoke that
meal?

Katharine, who had gone a few steps by herself down the road, and was
investigating the window of an ironmonger, as if her mother might have
got herself concealed among mowing-machines and garden-shears, turned
sharply on hearing her voice, and came towards them. She was a great
deal surprised to see Denham and Mary Datchet. Whether the cordiality
with which she greeted them was merely that which is natural to a
surprise meeting in the country, or whether she was really glad to see
them both, at any rate she exclaimed with unusual pleasure as she
shook hands:

"I never knew you lived here. Why didn't you say so, and we could have
met? And are you staying with Mary?" she continued, turning to Ralph.
"What a pity we didn't meet before."

Thus confronted at a distance of only a few feet by the real body of
the woman about whom he had dreamt so many million dreams, Ralph
stammered; he made a clutch at his self-control; the color either came
to his cheeks or left them, he knew not which; but he was determined
to face her and track down in the cold light of day whatever vestige
of truth there might be in his persistent imaginations. He did not
succeed in saying anything. It was Mary who spoke for both of them. He
was struck dumb by finding that Katharine was quite different, in some
strange way, from his memory, so that he had to dismiss his old view
in order to accept the new one. The wind was blowing her crimson scarf
across her face; the wind had already loosened her hair, which looped
across the corner of one of the large, dark eyes which, so he used to
think, looked sad; now they looked bright with the brightness of the
sea struck by an unclouded ray; everything about her seemed rapid,
fragmentary, and full of a kind of racing speed. He realized suddenly
that he had never seen her in the daylight before.

Meanwhile, it was decided that it was too late to go in search of
ruins as they had intended; and the whole party began to walk towards
the stables where the carriage had been put up.

"Do you know," said Katharine, keeping slightly in advance of the rest
with Ralph, "I thought I saw you this morning, standing at a window.
But I decided that it couldn't be you. And it must have been you all
the same."

"Yes, I thought I saw you--but it wasn't you," he replied.

This remark, and the rough strain in his voice, recalled to her memory
so many difficult speeches and abortive meetings that she was jerked
directly back to the London drawing-room, the family relics, and the
tea-table; and at the same time recalled some half-finished or
interrupted remark which she had wanted to make herself or to hear
from him--she could not remember what it was.

"I expect it was me," she said. "I was looking for my mother. It
happens every time we come to Lincoln. In fact, there never was a
family so unable to take care of itself as ours is. Not that it very
much matters, because some one always turns up in the nick of time to
help us out of our scrapes. Once I was left in a field with a bull
when I was a baby--but where did we leave the carriage? Down that
street or the next? The next, I think." She glanced back and saw that
the others were following obediently, listening to certain memories of
Lincoln upon which Mrs. Hilbery had started. "But what are you doing
here?" she asked.

"I'm buying a cottage. I'm going to live here--as soon as I can find a
cottage, and Mary tells me there'll be no difficulty about that."

"But," she exclaimed, almost standing still in her surprise, "you will
give up the Bar, then?" It flashed across her mind that he must
already be engaged to Mary.

"The solicitor's office? Yes. I'm giving that up."

"But why?" she asked. She answered herself at once, with a curious
change from rapid speech to an almost melancholy tone. "I think you're
very wise to give it up. You will be much happier."

At this very moment, when her words seemed to be striking a path into
the future for him, they stepped into the yard of an inn, and there
beheld the family coach of the Otways, to which one sleek horse was
already attached, while the second was being led out of the stable
door by the hostler.

"I don't know what one means by happiness," he said briefly, having to
step aside in order to avoid a groom with a bucket. "Why do you think
I shall be happy? I don't expect to be anything of the kind. I expect
to be rather less unhappy. I shall write a book and curse my charwoman
--if happiness consists in that. What do you think?"

She could not answer because they were immediately surrounded by other
members of the party--by Mrs. Hilbery, and Mary, Henry Otway, and
William.

Rodney went up to Katharine immediately and said to her:

"Henry is going to drive home with your mother, and I suggest that
they should put us down half-way and let us walk back."

Katharine nodded her head. She glanced at him with an oddly furtive
expression.

"Unfortunately we go in opposite directions, or we might have given
you a lift," he continued to Denham. His manner was unusually
peremptory; he seemed anxious to hasten the departure, and Katharine
looked at him from time to time, as Denham noticed, with an expression
half of inquiry, half of annoyance. She at once helped her mother into
her cloak, and said to Mary:

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