Night and Day

V >> Virginia Woolf >> Night and Day

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"I want to see you. Are you going back to London at once? I will
write." She half smiled at Ralph, but her look was a little overcast
by something she was thinking, and in a very few minutes the Otway
carriage rolled out of the stable yard and turned down the high road
leading to the village of Lampsher.

The return drive was almost as silent as the drive from home had been
in the morning; indeed, Mrs. Hilbery leant back with closed eyes in
her corner, and either slept or feigned sleep, as her habit was in the
intervals between the seasons of active exertion, or continued the
story which she had begun to tell herself that morning.

About two miles from Lampsher the road ran over the rounded summit of
the heath, a lonely spot marked by an obelisk of granite, setting
forth the gratitude of some great lady of the eighteenth century who
had been set upon by highwaymen at this spot and delivered from death
just as hope seemed lost. In summer it was a pleasant place, for the
deep woods on either side murmured, and the heather, which grew thick
round the granite pedestal, made the light breeze taste sweetly; in
winter the sighing of the trees was deepened to a hollow sound, and
the heath was as gray and almost as solitary as the empty sweep of the
clouds above it.

Here Rodney stopped the carriage and helped Katharine to alight.
Henry, too, gave her his hand, and fancied that she pressed it very
slightly in parting as if she sent him a message. But the carriage
rolled on immediately, without wakening Mrs. Hilbery, and left the
couple standing by the obelisk. That Rodney was angry with her and had
made this opportunity for speaking to her, Katharine knew very well;
she was neither glad nor sorry that the time had come, nor, indeed,
knew what to expect, and thus remained silent. The carriage grew
smaller and smaller upon the dusky road, and still Rodney did not
speak. Perhaps, she thought, he waited until the last sign of the
carriage had disappeared beneath the curve of the road and they were
left entirely alone. To cloak their silence she read the writing on
the obelisk, to do which she had to walk completely round it. She was
murmuring a word to two of the pious lady's thanks above her breath
when Rodney joined her. In silence they set out along the cart-track
which skirted the verge of the trees.

To break the silence was exactly what Rodney wished to do, and yet
could not do to his own satisfaction. In company it was far easier to
approach Katharine; alone with her, the aloofness and force of her
character checked all his natural methods of attack. He believed that
she had behaved very badly to him, but each separate instance of
unkindness seemed too petty to be advanced when they were alone
together.

"There's no need for us to race," he complained at last; upon which
she immediately slackened her pace, and walked too slowly to suit him.
In desperation he said the first thing he thought of, very peevishly
and without the dignified prelude which he had intended.

"I've not enjoyed my holiday."

"No?"

"No. I shall be glad to get back to work again."

"Saturday, Sunday, Monday--there are only three days more," she
counted.

"No one enjoys being made a fool of before other people," he blurted
out, for his irritation rose as she spoke, and got the better of his
awe of her, and was inflamed by that awe.

"That refers to me, I suppose," she said calmly.

"Every day since we've been here you've done something to make me
appear ridiculous," he went on. "Of course, so long as it amuses you,
you're welcome; but we have to remember that we are going to spend our
lives together. I asked you, only this morning, for example, to come
out and take a turn with me in the garden. I was waiting for you ten
minutes, and you never came. Every one saw me waiting. The stable-boys
saw me. I was so ashamed that I went in. Then, on the drive you hardly
spoke to me. Henry noticed it. Every one notices it. . . . You find no
difficulty in talking to Henry, though."

She noted these various complaints and determined philosophically to
answer none of them, although the last stung her to considerable
irritation. She wished to find out how deep his grievance lay.

"None of these things seem to me to matter," she said.

"Very well, then. I may as well hold my tongue," he replied.

"In themselves they don't seem to me to matter; if they hurt you, of
course they matter," she corrected herself scrupulously. Her tone of
consideration touched him, and he walked on in silence for a space.

"And we might be so happy, Katharine!" he exclaimed impulsively, and
drew her arm through his. She withdrew it directly.

"As long as you let yourself feel like this we shall never be happy,"
she said.

The harshness, which Henry had noticed, was again unmistakable in her
manner. William flinched and was silent. Such severity, accompanied by
something indescribably cold and impersonal in her manner, had
constantly been meted out to him during the last few days, always in
the company of others. He had recouped himself by some ridiculous
display of vanity which, as he knew, put him still more at her mercy.
Now that he was alone with her there was no stimulus from outside to
draw his attention from his injury. By a considerable effort of
self-control he forced himself to remain silent, and to make himself
distinguish what part of his pain was due to vanity, what part to the
certainty that no woman really loving him could speak thus.

"What do I feel about Katharine?" he thought to himself. It was clear
that she had been a very desirable and distinguished figure, the
mistress of her little section of the world; but more than that, she
was the person of all others who seemed to him the arbitress of life,
the woman whose judgment was naturally right and steady, as his had
never been in spite of all his culture. And then he could not see her
come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the
flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things
that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in
their heart.

"If she were callous all the time and had only led me on to laugh at
me I couldn't have felt that about her," he thought. "I'm not a fool,
after all. I can't have been utterly mistaken all these years. And
yet, when she speaks to me like that! The truth of it is," he thought,
"that I've got such despicable faults that no one could help speaking
to me like that. Katharine is quite right. And yet those are not my
serious feelings, as she knows quite well. How can I change myself?
What would make her care for me?" He was terribly tempted here to
break the silence by asking Katharine in what respects he could change
himself to suit her; but he sought consolation instead by running over
the list of his gifts and acquirements, his knowledge of Greek and
Latin, his knowledge of art and literature, his skill in the
management of meters, and his ancient west-country blood. But the
feeling that underlay all these feelings and puzzled him profoundly
and kept him silent was the certainty that he loved Katharine as
sincerely as he had it in him to love any one. And yet she could speak
to him like that! In a sort of bewilderment he lost all desire to
speak, and would quite readily have taken up some different topic of
conversation if Katharine had started one. This, however, she did not
do.

He glanced at her, in case her expression might help him to understand
her behavior. As usual, she had quickened her pace unconsciously, and
was now walking a little in front of him; but he could gain little
information from her eyes, which looked steadily at the brown heather,
or from the lines drawn seriously upon her forehead. Thus to lose
touch with her, for he had no idea what she was thinking, was so
unpleasant to him that he began to talk about his grievances again,
without, however, much conviction in his voice.

"If you have no feeling for me, wouldn't it be kinder to say so to me
in private?"

"Oh, William," she burst out, as if he had interrupted some absorbing
train of thought, "how you go on about feelings! Isn't it better not
to talk so much, not to be worrying always about small things that
don't really matter?"

"That's the question precisely," he exclaimed. "I only want you to
tell me that they don't matter. There are times when you seem
indifferent to everything. I'm vain, I've a thousand faults; but you
know they're not everything; you know I care for you."

"And if I say that I care for you, don't you believe me?"

"Say it, Katharine! Say it as if you meant it! Make me feel that you
care for me!"

She could not force herself to speak a word. The heather was growing
dim around them, and the horizon was blotted out by white mist. To ask
her for passion or for certainty seemed like asking that damp prospect
for fierce blades of fire, or the faded sky for the intense blue vault
of June.

He went on now to tell her of his love for her, in words which bore,
even to her critical senses, the stamp of truth; but none of this
touched her, until, coming to a gate whose hinge was rusty, he heaved
it open with his shoulder, still talking and taking no account of his
effort. The virility of this deed impressed her; and yet, normally,
she attached no value to the power of opening gates. The strength of
muscles has nothing to do on the face of it with the strength of
affections; nevertheless, she felt a sudden concern for this power
running to waste on her account, which, combined with a desire to keep
possession of that strangely attractive masculine power, made her
rouse herself from her torpor.

Why should she not simply tell him the truth--which was that she had
accepted him in a misty state of mind when nothing had its right shape
or size? that it was deplorable, but that with clearer eyesight
marriage was out of the question? She did not want to marry any one.
She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some bleak northern
moor, and there study mathematics and the science of astronomy. Twenty
words would explain the whole situation to him. He had ceased to
speak; he had told her once more how he loved her and why. She
summoned her courage, fixed her eyes upon a lightning-splintered
ash-tree, and, almost as if she were reading a writing fixed to the
trunk, began:

"I was wrong to get engaged to you. I shall never make you happy. I
have never loved you."

"Katharine!" he protested.

"No, never," she repeated obstinately. "Not rightly. Don't you see, I
didn't know what I was doing?"

"You love some one else?" he cut her short.

"Absolutely no one."

"Henry?" he demanded.

"Henry? I should have thought, William, even you--"

"There is some one," he persisted. "There has been a change in the
last few weeks. You owe it to me to be honest, Katharine."

"If I could, I would," she replied.

"Why did you tell me you would marry me, then?" he demanded.

Why, indeed? A moment of pessimism, a sudden conviction of the
undeniable prose of life, a lapse of the illusion which sustains youth
midway between heaven and earth, a desperate attempt to reconcile
herself with facts--she could only recall a moment, as of waking from
a dream, which now seemed to her a moment of surrender. But who could
give reasons such as these for doing what she had done? She shook her
head very sadly.

"But you're not a child--you're not a woman of moods," Rodney
persisted. "You couldn't have accepted me if you hadn't loved me!" he
cried.

A sense of her own misbehavior, which she had succeeded in keeping
from her by sharpening her consciousness of Rodney's faults, now swept
over her and almost overwhelmed her. What were his faults in
comparison with the fact that he cared for her? What were her virtues
in comparison with the fact that she did not care for him? In a flash
the conviction that not to care is the uttermost sin of all stamped
itself upon her inmost thought; and she felt herself branded for ever.

He had taken her arm, and held her hand firmly in his, nor had she the
force to resist what now seemed to her his enormously superior
strength. Very well; she would submit, as her mother and her aunt and
most women, perhaps, had submitted; and yet she knew that every second
of such submission to his strength was a second of treachery to him.

"I did say I would marry you, but it was wrong," she forced herself to
say, and she stiffened her arm as if to annul even the seeming
submission of that separate part of her; "for I don't love you,
William; you've noticed it, every one's noticed it; why should we go
on pretending? When I told you I loved you, I was wrong. I said what I
knew to be untrue."

As none of her words seemed to her at all adequate to represent what
she felt, she repeated them, and emphasized them without realizing the
effect that they might have upon a man who cared for her. She was
completely taken aback by finding her arm suddenly dropped; then she
saw his face most strangely contorted; was he laughing, it flashed
across her? In another moment she saw that he was in tears. In her
bewilderment at this apparition she stood aghast for a second. With a
desperate sense that this horror must, at all costs, be stopped, she
then put her arms about him, drew his head for a moment upon her
shoulder, and led him on, murmuring words of consolation, until he
heaved a great sigh. They held fast to each other; her tears, too, ran
down her cheeks; and were both quite silent. Noticing the difficulty
with which he walked, and feeling the same extreme lassitude in her
own limbs, she proposed that they should rest for a moment where the
bracken was brown and shriveled beneath an oak-tree. He assented. Once
more he gave a great sigh, and wiped his eyes with a childlike
unconsciousness, and began to speak without a trace of his previous
anger. The idea came to her that they were like the children in the
fairy tale who were lost in a wood, and with this in her mind she
noticed the scattering of dead leaves all round them which had been
blown by the wind into heaps, a foot or two deep, here and there.

"When did you begin to feel this, Katharine?" he said; "for it isn't
true to say that you've always felt it. I admit I was unreasonable the
first night when you found that your clothes had been left behind.
Still, where's the fault in that? I could promise you never to
interfere with your clothes again. I admit I was cross when I found
you upstairs with Henry. Perhaps I showed it too openly. But that's
not unreasonable either when one's engaged. Ask your mother. And now
this terrible thing--" He broke off, unable for the moment to proceed
any further. "This decision you say you've come to--have you discussed
it with any one? Your mother, for example, or Henry?"

"No, no, of course not," she said, stirring the leaves with her hand.
"But you don't understand me, William--"

"Help me to understand you--"

"You don't understand, I mean, my real feelings; how could you? I've
only now faced them myself. But I haven't got the sort of
feeling--love, I mean--I don't know what to call it"--she looked
vaguely towards the horizon sunk under mist--"but, anyhow, without it
our marriage would be a farce--"

"How a farce?" he asked. "But this kind of analysis is disastrous!" he
exclaimed.

"I should have done it before," she said gloomily.

"You make yourself think things you don't think," he continued,
becoming demonstrative with his hands, as his manner was. "Believe me,
Katharine, before we came here we were perfectly happy. You were full
of plans for our house--the chair-covers, don't you remember?--like
any other woman who is about to be married. Now, for no reason
whatever, you begin to fret about your feeling and about my feeling,
with the usual result. I assure you, Katharine, I've been through it
all myself. At one time I was always asking myself absurd questions
which came to nothing either. What you want, if I may say so, is some
occupation to take you out of yourself when this morbid mood comes on.
If it hadn't been for my poetry, I assure you, I should often have
been very much in the same state myself. To let you into a secret," he
continued, with his little chuckle, which now sounded almost assured,
"I've often gone home from seeing you in such a state of nerves that I
had to force myself to write a page or two before I could get you out
of my head. Ask Denham; he'll tell you how he met me one night; he'll
tell you what a state he found me in."

Katharine started with displeasure at the mention of Ralph's name. The
thought of the conversation in which her conduct had been made a
subject for discussion with Denham roused her anger; but, as she
instantly felt, she had scarcely the right to grudge William any use
of her name, seeing what her fault against him had been from first to
last. And yet Denham! She had a view of him as a judge. She figured
him sternly weighing instances of her levity in this masculine court
of inquiry into feminine morality and gruffly dismissing both her and
her family with some half-sarcastic, half-tolerant phrase which sealed
her doom, as far as he was concerned, for ever. Having met him so
lately, the sense of his character was strong in her. The thought was
not a pleasant one for a proud woman, but she had yet to learn the art
of subduing her expression. Her eyes fixed upon the ground, her brows
drawn together, gave William a very fair picture of the resentment
that she was forcing herself to control. A certain degree of
apprehension, occasionally culminating in a kind of fear, had always
entered into his love for her, and had increased, rather to his
surprise, in the greater intimacy of their engagement. Beneath her
steady, exemplary surface ran a vein of passion which seemed to him
now perverse, now completely irrational, for it never took the normal
channel of glorification of him and his doings; and, indeed, he almost
preferred the steady good sense, which had always marked their
relationship, to a more romantic bond. But passion she had, he could
not deny it, and hitherto he had tried to see it employed in his
thoughts upon the lives of the children who were to be born to them.

"She will make a perfect mother--a mother of sons," he thought; but
seeing her sitting there, gloomy and silent, he began to have his
doubts on this point. "A farce, a farce," he thought to himself. "She
said that our marriage would be a farce," and he became suddenly aware
of their situation, sitting upon the ground, among the dead leaves,
not fifty yards from the main road, so that it was quite possible for
some one passing to see and recognize them. He brushed off his face
any trace that might remain of that unseemly exhibition of emotion.
But he was more troubled by Katharine's appearance, as she sat rapt in
thought upon the ground, than by his own; there was something improper
to him in her self-forgetfulness. A man naturally alive to the
conventions of society, he was strictly conventional where women were
concerned, and especially if the women happened to be in any way
connected with him. He noticed with distress the long strand of dark
hair touching her shoulder and two or three dead beech-leaves attached
to her dress; but to recall her mind in their present circumstances to
a sense of these details was impossible. She sat there, seeming
unconscious of everything. He suspected that in her silence she was
reproaching herself; but he wished that she would think of her hair
and of the dead beech-leaves, which were of more immediate importance
to him than anything else. Indeed, these trifles drew his attention
strangely from his own doubtful and uneasy state of mind; for relief,
mixing itself with pain, stirred up a most curious hurry and tumult in
his breast, almost concealing his first sharp sense of bleak and
overwhelming disappointment. In order to relieve this restlessness and
close a distressingly ill-ordered scene, he rose abruptly and helped
Katharine to her feet. She smiled a little at the minute care with
which he tidied her and yet, when he brushed the dead leaves from his
own coat, she flinched, seeing in that action the gesture of a lonely
man.

"William," she said, "I will marry you. I will try to make you happy."

CHAPTER XIX

The afternoon was already growing dark when the two other wayfarers,
Mary and Ralph Denham, came out on the high road beyond the outskirts
of Lincoln. The high road, as they both felt, was better suited to
this return journey than the open country, and for the first mile or
so of the way they spoke little. In his own mind Ralph was following
the passage of the Otway carriage over the heath; he then went back to
the five or ten minutes that he had spent with Katharine, and examined
each word with the care that a scholar displays upon the
irregularities of an ancient text. He was determined that the glow,
the romance, the atmosphere of this meeting should not paint what he
must in future regard as sober facts. On her side Mary was silent, not
because her thoughts took much handling, but because her mind seemed
empty of thought as her heart of feeling. Only Ralph's presence, as
she knew, preserved this numbness, for she could foresee a time of
loneliness when many varieties of pain would beset her. At the present
moment her effort was to preserve what she could of the wreck of her
self-respect, for such she deemed that momentary glimpse of her love
so involuntarily revealed to Ralph. In the light of reason it did not
much matter, perhaps, but it was her instinct to be careful of that
vision of herself which keeps pace so evenly beside every one of us,
and had been damaged by her confession. The gray night coming down
over the country was kind to her; and she thought that one of these
days she would find comfort in sitting upon the earth, alone, beneath
a tree. Looking through the darkness, she marked the swelling ground
and the tree. Ralph made her start by saying abruptly;

"What I was going to say when we were interrupted at lunch was that if
you go to America I shall come, too. It can't be harder to earn a
living there than it is here. However, that's not the point. The point
is, Mary, that I want to marry you. Well, what do you say?" He spoke
firmly, waited for no answer, and took her arm in his. "You know me by
this time, the good and the bad," he went on. "You know my tempers.
I've tried to let you know my faults. Well, what do you say, Mary?"

She said nothing, but this did not seem to strike him.

"In most ways, at least in the important ways, as you said, we know
each other and we think alike. I believe you are the only person in
the world I could live with happily. And if you feel the same about
me--as you do, don't you, Mary?--we should make each other happy."
Here he paused, and seemed to be in no hurry for an answer; he seemed,
indeed, to be continuing his own thoughts.

"Yes, but I'm afraid I couldn't do it," Mary said at last. The casual
and rather hurried way in which she spoke, together with the fact that
she was saying the exact opposite of what he expected her to say,
baffled him so much that he instinctively loosened his clasp upon her
arm and she withdrew it quietly.

"You couldn't do it?" he asked.

"No, I couldn't marry you," she replied.

"You don't care for me?"

She made no answer.

"Well, Mary," he said, with a curious laugh, "I must be an arrant
fool, for I thought you did." They walked for a minute or two in
silence, and suddenly he turned to her, looked at her, and exclaimed:
"I don't believe you, Mary. You're not telling me the truth."

"I'm too tired to argue, Ralph," she replied, turning her head away
from him. "I ask you to believe what I say. I can't marry you; I don't
want to marry you."

The voice in which she stated this was so evidently the voice of one
in some extremity of anguish that Ralph had no course but to obey her.
And as soon as the tone of her voice had died out, and the surprise
faded from his mind, he found himself believing that she had spoken
the truth, for he had but little vanity, and soon her refusal seemed a
natural thing to him. He slipped through all the grades of despondency
until he reached a bottom of absolute gloom. Failure seemed to mark
the whole of his life; he had failed with Katharine, and now he had
failed with Mary. Up at once sprang the thought of Katharine, and with
it a sense of exulting freedom, but this he checked instantly. No good
had ever come to him from Katharine; his whole relationship with her
had been made up of dreams; and as he thought of the little substance
there had been in his dreams he began to lay the blame of the present
catastrophe upon his dreams.

"Haven't I always been thinking of Katharine while I was with Mary? I
might have loved Mary if it hadn't been for that idiocy of mine. She
cared for me once, I'm certain of that, but I tormented her so with my
humors that I let my chances slip, and now she won't risk marrying me.
And this is what I've made of my life--nothing, nothing, nothing."

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