Night and Day

V >> Virginia Woolf >> Night and Day

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"Ah," she said, "Katharine's not here. She must be upstairs in her
room. You have something to say to her, I know, Mr. Denham. You can
find your way?" she vaguely indicated the ceiling with a gesture of
her hand. She had become suddenly serious and composed, mistress in
her own house. The gesture with which she dismissed him had a dignity
that Ralph never forgot. She seemed to make him free with a wave of
her hand to all that she possessed. He left the room.

The Hilberys' house was tall, possessing many stories and passages
with closed doors, all, once he had passed the drawing-room floor,
unknown to Ralph. He mounted as high as he could and knocked at the
first door he came to.

"May I come in?" he asked.

A voice from within answered "Yes."

He was conscious of a large window, full of light, of a bare table,
and of a long looking-glass. Katharine had risen, and was standing
with some white papers in her hand, which slowly fluttered to the
ground as she saw her visitor. The explanation was a short one. The
sounds were inarticulate; no one could have understood the meaning
save themselves. As if the forces of the world were all at work to
tear them asunder they sat, clasping hands, near enough to be taken
even by the malicious eye of Time himself for a united couple, an
indivisible unit.

"Don't move, don't go," she begged of him, when he stooped to gather
the papers she had let fall. But he took them in his hands and, giving
her by a sudden impulse his own unfinished dissertation, with its
mystical conclusion, they read each other's compositions in silence.

Katharine read his sheets to an end; Ralph followed her figures as far
as his mathematics would let him. They came to the end of their tasks
at about the same moment, and sat for a time in silence.

"Those were the papers you left on the seat at Kew," said Ralph at
length. "You folded them so quickly that I couldn't see what they
were."

She blushed very deeply; but as she did not move or attempt to hide
her face she had the appearance of some one disarmed of all defences,
or Ralph likened her to a wild bird just settling with wings trembling
to fold themselves within reach of his hand. The moment of exposure
had been exquisitely painful--the light shed startlingly vivid. She
had now to get used to the fact that some one shared her loneliness.
The bewilderment was half shame and half the prelude to profound
rejoicing. Nor was she unconscious that on the surface the whole thing
must appear of the utmost absurdity. She looked to see whether Ralph
smiled, but found his gaze fixed on her with such gravity that she
turned to the belief that she had committed no sacrilege but enriched
herself, perhaps immeasurably, perhaps eternally. She hardly dared
steep herself in the infinite bliss. But his glance seemed to ask for
some assurance upon another point of vital interest to him. It
beseeched her mutely to tell him whether what she had read upon his
confused sheet had any meaning or truth to her. She bent her head once
more to the papers she held.

"I like your little dot with the flames round it," she said
meditatively.

Ralph nearly tore the page from her hand in shame and despair when he
saw her actually contemplating the idiotic symbol of his most confused
and emotional moments.

He was convinced that it could mean nothing to another, although
somehow to him it conveyed not only Katharine herself but all those
states of mind which had clustered round her since he first saw her
pouring out tea on a Sunday afternoon. It represented by its
circumference of smudges surrounding a central blot all that
encircling glow which for him surrounded, inexplicably, so many of the
objects of life, softening their sharp outline, so that he could see
certain streets, books, and situations wearing a halo almost
perceptible to the physical eye. Did she smile? Did she put the paper
down wearily, condemning it not only for its inadequacy but for its
falsity? Was she going to protest once more that he only loved the
vision of her? But it did not occur to her that this diagram had
anything to do with her. She said simply, and in the same tone of
reflection:

"Yes, the world looks something like that to me too."

He received her assurance with profound joy. Quietly and steadily
there rose up behind the whole aspect of life that soft edge of fire
which gave its red tint to the atmosphere and crowded the scene with
shadows so deep and dark that one could fancy pushing farther into
their density and still farther, exploring indefinitely. Whether there
was any correspondence between the two prospects now opening before
them they shared the same sense of the impending future, vast,
mysterious, infinitely stored with undeveloped shapes which each would
unwrap for the other to behold; but for the present the prospect of
the future was enough to fill them with silent adoration. At any rate,
their further attempts to communicate articulately were interrupted by
a knock on the door, and the entrance of a maid who, with a due sense
of mystery, announced that a lady wished to see Miss Hilbery, but
refused to allow her name to be given.

When Katharine rose, with a profound sigh, to resume her duties, Ralph
went with her, and neither of them formulated any guess, on their way
downstairs, as to who this anonymous lady might prove to be. Perhaps
the fantastic notion that she was a little black hunchback provided
with a steel knife, which she would plunge into Katharine's heart,
appeared to Ralph more probable than another, and he pushed first into
the dining-room to avert the blow. Then he exclaimed "Cassandra!" with
such heartiness at the sight of Cassandra Otway standing by the
dining-room table that she put her finger to her lips and begged him
to be quiet.

"Nobody must know I'm here," she explained in a sepulchral whisper. "I
missed my train. I have been wandering about London all day. I can
bear it no longer. Katharine, what am I to do?"

Katharine pushed forward a chair; Ralph hastily found wine and poured
it out for her. If not actually fainting, she was very near it.

"William's upstairs," said Ralph, as soon as she appeared to be
recovered. "I'll go and ask him to come down to you." His own
happiness had given him a confidence that every one else was bound to
be happy too. But Cassandra had her uncle's commands and anger too
vividly in her mind to dare any such defiance. She became agitated and
said that she must leave the house at once. She was not in a condition
to go, had they known where to send her. Katharine's common sense,
which had been in abeyance for the past week or two, still failed her,
and she could only ask, "But where's your luggage?" in the vague
belief that to take lodgings depended entirely upon a sufficiency of
luggage. Cassandra's reply, "I've lost my luggage," in no way helped
her to a conclusion.

"You've lost your luggage," she repeated. Her eyes rested upon Ralph,
with an expression which seemed better fitted to accompany a profound
thanksgiving for his existence or some vow of eternal devotion than a
question about luggage. Cassandra perceived the look, and saw that it
was returned; her eyes filled with tears. She faltered in what she was
saying. She began bravely again to discuss the question of lodging
when Katharine, who seemed to have communicated silently with Ralph,
and obtained his permission, took her ruby ring from her finger and
giving it to Cassandra, said: "I believe it will fit you without any
alteration."

These words would not have been enough to convince Cassandra of what
she very much wished to believe had not Ralph taken the bare hand in
his and demanded:

"Why don't you tell us you're glad?" Cassandra was so glad that the
tears ran down her cheeks. The certainty of Katharine's engagement not
only relieved her of a thousand vague fears and self-reproaches, but
entirely quenched that spirit of criticism which had lately impaired
her belief in Katharine. Her old faith came back to her. She seemed to
behold her with that curious intensity which she had lost; as a being
who walks just beyond our sphere, so that life in their presence is a
heightened process, illuminating not only ourselves but a considerable
stretch of the surrounding world. Next moment she contrasted her own
lot with theirs and gave back the ring.

"I won't take that unless William gives it me himself," she said.
"Keep it for me, Katharine."

"I assure you everything's perfectly all right," said Ralph. "Let me
tell William--"

He was about, in spite of Cassandra's protest, to reach the door, when
Mrs. Hilbery, either warned by the parlor-maid or conscious with her
usual prescience of the need for her intervention, opened the door and
smilingly surveyed them.

"My dear Cassandra!" she exclaimed. "How delightful to see you back
again! What a coincidence!" she observed, in a general way. "William
is upstairs. The kettle boils over. Where's Katharine, I say? I go to
look, and I find Cassandra!" She seemed to have proved something to
her own satisfaction, although nobody felt certain what thing
precisely it was.

"I find Cassandra," she repeated.

"She missed her train," Katharine interposed, seeing that Cassandra
was unable to speak.

"Life," began Mrs. Hilbery, drawing inspiration from the portraits on
the wall apparently, "consists in missing trains and in finding--" But
she pulled herself up and remarked that the kettle must have boiled
completely over everything.

To Katharine's agitated mind it appeared that this kettle was an
enormous kettle, capable of deluging the house in its incessant
showers of steam, the enraged representative of all those household
duties which she had neglected. She ran hastily up to the
drawing-room, and the rest followed her, for Mrs. Hilbery put her arm
round Cassandra and drew her upstairs. They found Rodney observing the
kettle with uneasiness but with such absence of mind that Katharine's
catastrophe was in a fair way to be fulfilled. In putting the matter
straight no greetings were exchanged, but Rodney and Cassandra chose
seats as far apart as possible, and sat down with an air of people
making a very temporary lodgment. Either Mrs. Hilbery was impervious
to their discomfort, or chose to ignore it, or thought it high time
that the subject was changed, for she did nothing but talk about
Shakespeare's tomb.

"So much earth and so much water and that sublime spirit brooding over
it all," she mused, and went on to sing her strange, half-earthly song
of dawns and sunsets, of great poets, and the unchanged spirit of
noble loving which they had taught, so that nothing changes, and one
age is linked with another, and no one dies, and we all meet in
spirit, until she appeared oblivious of any one in the room. But
suddenly her remarks seemed to contract the enormously wide circle in
which they were soaring and to alight, airily and temporarily, upon
matters of more immediate moment.

"Katharine and Ralph," she said, as if to try the sound. "William and
Cassandra."

"I feel myself in an entirely false position," said William
desperately, thrusting himself into this breach in her reflections.
"I've no right to be sitting here. Mr. Hilbery told me yesterday to
leave the house. I'd no intention of coming back again. I shall now--"

"I feel the same too," Cassandra interrupted. "After what Uncle Trevor
said to me last night--"

"I have put you into a most odious position," Rodney went on, rising
from his seat, in which movement he was imitated simultaneously by
Cassandra. "Until I have your father's consent I have no right to
speak to you--let alone in this house, where my conduct"--he looked at
Katharine, stammered, and fell silent--"where my conduct has been
reprehensible and inexcusable in the extreme," he forced himself to
continue. "I have explained everything to your mother. She is so
generous as to try and make me believe that I have done no harm--you
have convinced her that my behavior, selfish and weak as it
was--selfish and weak--" he repeated, like a speaker who has lost his
notes.

Two emotions seemed to be struggling in Katharine; one the desire to
laugh at the ridiculous spectacle of William making her a formal
speech across the tea-table, the other a desire to weep at the sight
of something childlike and honest in him which touched her
inexpressibly. To every one's surprise she rose, stretched out her
hand, and said:

"You've nothing to reproach yourself with--you've been always--" but
here her voice died away, and the tears forced themselves into her
eyes, and ran down her cheeks, while William, equally moved, seized
her hand and pressed it to his lips. No one perceived that the
drawing-room door had opened itself sufficiently to admit at least
half the person of Mr. Hilbery, or saw him gaze at the scene round the
tea-table with an expression of the utmost disgust and expostulation.
He withdrew unseen. He paused outside on the landing trying to recover
his self-control and to decide what course he might with most dignity
pursue. It was obvious to him that his wife had entirely confused the
meaning of his instructions. She had plunged them all into the most
odious confusion. He waited a moment, and then, with much preliminary
rattling of the handle, opened the door a second time. They had all
regained their places; some incident of an absurd nature had now set
them laughing and looking under the table, so that his entrance passed
momentarily unperceived. Katharine, with flushed cheeks, raised her
head and said:

"Well, that's my last attempt at the dramatic."

"It's astonishing what a distance they roll," said Ralph, stooping to
turn up the corner of the hearthrug.

"Don't trouble--don't bother. We shall find it--" Mrs. Hilbery began,
and then saw her husband and exclaimed: "Oh, Trevor, we're looking for
Cassandra's engagement-ring!"

Mr. Hilbery looked instinctively at the carpet. Remarkably enough, the
ring had rolled to the very point where he stood. He saw the rubies
touching the tip of his boot. Such is the force of habit that he could
not refrain from stooping, with an absurd little thrill of pleasure at
being the one to find what others were looking for, and, picking the
ring up, he presented it, with a bow that was courtly in the extreme,
to Cassandra. Whether the making of a bow released automatically
feelings of complaisance and urbanity, Mr. Hilbery found his
resentment completely washed away during the second in which he bent
and straightened himself. Cassandra dared to offer her cheek and
received his embrace. He nodded with some degree of stiffness to
Rodney and Denham, who had both risen upon seeing him, and now
altogether sat down. Mrs. Hilbery seemed to have been waiting for the
entrance of her husband, and for this precise moment in order to put
to him a question which, from the ardor with which she announced it,
had evidently been pressing for utterance for some time past.

"Oh, Trevor, please tell me, what was the date of the first
performance of 'Hamlet'?"

In order to answer her Mr. Hilbery had to have recourse to the exact
scholarship of William Rodney, and before he had given his excellent
authorities for believing as he believed, Rodney felt himself admitted
once more to the society of the civilized and sanctioned by the
authority of no less a person than Shakespeare himself. The power of
literature, which had temporarily deserted Mr. Hilbery, now came back
to him, pouring over the raw ugliness of human affairs its soothing
balm, and providing a form into which such passions as he had felt so
painfully the night before could be molded so that they fell roundly
from the tongue in shapely phrases, hurting nobody. He was
sufficiently sure of his command of language at length to look at
Katharine and again at Denham. All this talk about Shakespeare had
acted as a soporific, or rather as an incantation upon Katharine. She
leaned back in her chair at the head of the tea-table, perfectly
silent, looking vaguely past them all, receiving the most generalized
ideas of human heads against pictures, against yellow-tinted walls,
against curtains of deep crimson velvet. Denham, to whom he turned
next, shared her immobility under his gaze. But beneath his restraint
and calm it was possible to detect a resolution, a will, set now with
unalterable tenacity, which made such turns of speech as Mr. Hilbery
had at command appear oddly irrelevant. At any rate, he said nothing.
He respected the young man; he was a very able young man; he was
likely to get his own way. He could, he thought, looking at his still
and very dignified head, understand Katharine's preference, and, as he
thought this, he was surprised by a pang of acute jealousy. She might
have married Rodney without causing him a twinge. This man she loved.
Or what was the state of affairs between them? An extraordinary
confusion of emotion was beginning to get the better of him, when Mrs.
Hilbery, who had been conscious of a sudden pause in the conversation,
and had looked wistfully at her daughter once or twice, remarked:

"Don't stay if you want to go, Katharine. There's the little room over
there. Perhaps you and Ralph--"

"We're engaged," said Katharine, waking with a start, and looking
straight at her father. He was taken aback by the directness of the
statement; he exclaimed as if an unexpected blow had struck him. Had
he loved her to see her swept away by this torrent, to have her taken
from him by this uncontrollable force, to stand by helpless, ignored?
Oh, how he loved her! How he loved her! He nodded very curtly to
Denham.

"I gathered something of the kind last night," he said. "I hope you'll
deserve her." But he never looked at his daughter, and strode out of
the room, leaving in the minds of the women a sense, half of awe, half
of amusement, at the extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized male,
outraged somehow and gone bellowing to his lair with a roar which
still sometimes reverberates in the most polished of drawing-rooms.
Then Katharine, looking at the shut door, looked down again, to hide
her tears.

CHAPTER XXXIV

The lamps were lit; their luster reflected itself in the polished
wood; good wine was passed round the dinner-table; before the meal was
far advanced civilization had triumphed, and Mr. Hilbery presided over
a feast which came to wear more and more surely an aspect, cheerful,
dignified, promising well for the future. To judge from the expression
in Katharine's eyes it promised something--but he checked the approach
sentimentality. He poured out wine; he bade Denham help himself.

They went upstairs and he saw Katharine and Denham abstract themselves
directly Cassandra had asked whether she might not play him something
--some Mozart? some Beethoven? She sat down to the piano; the door
closed softly behind them. His eyes rested on the closed door for some
seconds unwaveringly, but, by degrees, the look of expectation died
out of them, and, with a sigh, he listened to the music.

Katharine and Ralph were agreed with scarcely a word of discussion as
to what they wished to do, and in a moment she joined him in the hall
dressed for walking. The night was still and moonlit, fit for walking,
though any night would have seemed so to them, desiring more than
anything movement, freedom from scrutiny, silence, and the open air.

"At last!" she breathed, as the front door shut. She told him how she
had waited, fidgeted, thought he was never coming, listened for the
sound of doors, half expected to see him again under the lamp-post,
looking at the house. They turned and looked at the serene front with
its gold-rimmed windows, to him the shrine of so much adoration. In
spite of her laugh and the little pressure of mockery on his arm, he
would not resign his belief, but with her hand resting there, her
voice quickened and mysteriously moving in his ears, he had not time--
they had not the same inclination--other objects drew his attention.

How they came to find themselves walking down a street with many
lamps, corners radiant with light, and a steady succession of motor-
omnibuses plying both ways along it, they could neither of them tell;
nor account for the impulse which led them suddenly to select one of
these wayfarers and mount to the very front seat. After curving
through streets of comparative darkness, so narrow that shadows on the
blinds were pressed within a few feet of their faces, they came to one
of those great knots of activity where the lights, having drawn close
together, thin out again and take their separate ways. They were borne
on until they saw the spires of the city churches pale and flat
against the sky.

"Are you cold?" he asked, as they stopped by Temple Bar.

"Yes, I am rather," she replied, becoming conscious that the splendid
race of lights drawn past her eyes by the superb curving and swerving
of the monster on which she sat was at an end. They had followed some
such course in their thoughts too; they had been borne on, victors in
the forefront of some triumphal car, spectators of a pageant enacted
for them, masters of life. But standing on the pavement alone, this
exaltation left them; they were glad to be alone together. Ralph stood
still for a moment to light his pipe beneath a lamp.

She looked at his face isolated in the little circle of light.

"Oh, that cottage," she said. "We must take it and go there."

"And leave all this?" he inquired.

"As you like," she replied. She thought, looking at the sky above
Chancery Lane, how the roof was the same everywhere; how she was now
secure of all that this lofty blue and its steadfast lights meant to
her; reality, was it, figures, love, truth?

"I've something on my mind," said Ralph abruptly. "I mean I've been
thinking of Mary Datchet. We're very near her rooms now. Would you
mind if we went there?"

She had turned before she answered him. She had no wish to see any one
to-night; it seemed to her that the immense riddle was answered; the
problem had been solved; she held in her hands for one brief moment
the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole,
and entire from the confusion of chaos. To see Mary was to risk the
destruction of this globe.

"Did you treat her badly?" she asked rather mechanically, walking on.

"I could defend myself," he said, almost defiantly. "But what's the
use, if one feels a thing? I won't be with her a minute," he said.
"I'll just tell her--"

"Of course, you must tell her," said Katharine, and now felt anxious
for him to do what appeared to be necessary if he, too, were to hold
his globe for a moment round, whole, and entire.

"I wish--I wish--" she sighed, for melancholy came over her and
obscured at least a section of her clear vision. The globe swam before
her as if obscured by tears.

"I regret nothing," said Ralph firmly. She leant towards him almost as
if she could thus see what he saw. She thought how obscure he still
was to her, save only that more and more constantly he appeared to her
a fire burning through its smoke, a source of life.

"Go on," she said. "You regret nothing--"

"Nothing--nothing," he repeated.

"What a fire!" she thought to herself. She thought of him blazing
splendidly in the night, yet so obscure that to hold his arm, as she
held it, was only to touch the opaque substance surrounding the flame
that roared upwards.

"Why nothing?" she asked hurriedly, in order that he might say more
and so make more splendid, more red, more darkly intertwined with
smoke this flame rushing upwards.

"What are you thinking of, Katharine?" he asked suspiciously, noticing
her tone of dreaminess and the inapt words.

"I was thinking of you--yes, I swear it. Always of you, but you take
such strange shapes in my mind. You've destroyed my loneliness. Am I
to tell you how I see you? No, tell me--tell me from the beginning."

Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak more and more
fluently, more and more passionately, feeling her leaning towards him,
listening with wonder like a child, with gratitude like a woman. She
interrupted him gravely now and then.

"But it was foolish to stand outside and look at the windows. Suppose
William hadn't seen you. Would you have gone to bed?"

He capped her reproof with wonderment that a woman of her age could
have stood in Kingsway looking at the traffic until she forgot.

"But it was then I first knew I loved you!" she exclaimed.

"Tell me from the beginning," he begged her.

"No, I'm a person who can't tell things," she pleaded. "I shall say
something ridiculous--something about flames--fires. No, I can't tell
you."

But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful to him,
charged with extreme excitement as she spoke of the dark red fire, and
the smoke twined round it, making him feel that he had stepped over
the threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring
with shapes, so large, so dim, unveiling themselves only in flashes,
and moving away again into the darkness, engulfed by it. They had
walked by this time to the street in which Mary lived, and being
engrossed by what they said and partly saw, passed her staircase
without looking up. At this time of night there was no traffic and
scarcely any foot-passengers, so that they could pace slowly without
interruption, arm-in-arm, raising their hands now and then to draw
something upon the vast blue curtain of the sky.

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