Night and Day - Virginia Woolf (best novels for beginners txt) 📗

one tells lies,” Katharine remarked,

looking about the room to see where she had put down her umbrella and

her parcel, for there was an intimacy in the way in which Mary and

Ralph addressed each other which made her wish to leave them. Mary, on

the other hand, was anxious, superficially at least, that Katharine

should stay and so fortify her in her determination not to be in love

with Ralph.

 

Ralph, while lifting his cup from his lips to the table, had made up

his mind that if Miss Hilbery left, he would go with her.

 

“I don’t think that I tell lies, and I don’t think that Ralph tells

lies, do you, Ralph?” Mary continued.

 

Katharine laughed, with more gayety, as it seemed to Mary, than she

could properly account for. What was she laughing at? At them,

presumably. Katharine had risen, and was glancing hither and thither,

at the presses and the cupboards, and all the machinery of the office,

as if she included them all in her rather malicious amusement, which

caused Mary to keep her eyes on her straightly and rather fiercely, as

if she were a gay-plumed, mischievous bird, who might light on the

topmost bough and pick off the ruddiest cherry, without any warning.

Two women less like each other could scarcely be imagined, Ralph

thought, looking from one to the other. Next moment, he too, rose, and

nodding to Mary, as Katharine said good-bye, opened the door for her,

and followed her out.

 

Mary sat still and made no attempt to prevent them from going. For a

second or two after the door had shut on them her eyes rested on the

door with a straightforward fierceness in which, for a moment, a

certain degree of bewilderment seemed to enter; but, after a brief

hesitation, she put down her cup and proceeded to clear away the

tea-things.

 

The impulse which had driven Ralph to take this action was the result

of a very swift little piece of reasoning, and thus, perhaps, was not

quite so much of an impulse as it seemed. It passed through his mind

that if he missed this chance of talking to Katharine, he would have

to face an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room again,

demanding an explanation of his cowardly indecision. It was better, on

the whole, to risk present discomfiture than to waste an evening

bandying excuses and constructing impossible scenes with this

uncompromising section of himself. For ever since he had visited the

Hilberys he had been much at the mercy of a phantom Katharine, who

came to him when he sat alone, and answered him as he would have her

answer, and was always beside him to crown those varying triumphs

which were transacted almost every night, in imaginary scenes, as he

walked through the lamplit streets home from the office. To walk with

Katharine in the flesh would either feed that phantom with fresh food,

which, as all who nourish dreams are aware, is a process that becomes

necessary from time to time, or refine it to such a degree of thinness

that it was scarcely serviceable any longer; and that, too, is

sometimes a welcome change to a dreamer. And all the time Ralph was

well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not represented in his

dreams at all, so that when he met her he was bewildered by the fact

that she had nothing to do with his dream of her.

 

When, on reaching the street, Katharine found that Mr. Denham

proceeded to keep pace by her side, she was surprised and, perhaps, a

little annoyed. She, too, had her margin of imagination, and to-night

her activity in this obscure region of the mind required solitude. If

she had had her way, she would have walked very fast down the

Tottenham Court Road, and then sprung into a cab and raced swiftly

home. The view she had had of the inside of an office was of the

nature of a dream to her. Shut off up there, she compared Mrs. Seal,

and Mary Datchet, and Mr. Clacton to enchanted people in a bewitched

tower, with the spiders’ webs looping across the corners of the room,

and all the tools of the necromancer’s craft at hand; for so aloof and

unreal and apart from the normal world did they seem to her, in the

house of innumerable typewriters, murmuring their incantations and

concocting their drugs, and flinging their frail spiders’ webs over

the torrent of life which rushed down the streets outside.

 

She may have been conscious that there was some exaggeration in this

fancy of hers, for she certainly did not wish to share it with Ralph.

To him, she supposed, Mary Datchet, composing leaflets for Cabinet

Ministers among her typewriters, represented all that was interesting

and genuine; and, accordingly, she shut them both out from all share

in the crowded street, with its pendant necklace of lamps, its lighted

windows, and its throng of men and women, which exhilarated her to

such an extent that she very nearly forgot her companion. She walked

very fast, and the effect of people passing in the opposite direction

was to produce a queer dizziness both in her head and in Ralph’s,

which set their bodies far apart. But she did her duty by her

companion almost unconsciously.

 

“Mary Datchet does that sort of work very well… . She’s

responsible for it, I suppose?”

 

“Yes. The others don’t help at all… . Has she made a convert of

you?”

 

“Oh no. That is, I’m a convert already.”

 

“But she hasn’t persuaded you to work for them?”

 

“Oh dear no—that wouldn’t do at all.”

 

So they walked on down the Tottenham Court Road, parting and coming

together again, and Ralph felt much as though he were addressing the

summit of a poplar in a high gale of wind.

 

“Suppose we get on to that omnibus?” he suggested.

 

Katharine acquiesced, and they climbed up, and found themselves alone

on top of it.

 

“But which way are you going?” Katharine asked, waking a little from

the trance into which movement among moving things had thrown her.

 

“I’m going to the Temple,” Ralph replied, inventing a destination on

the spur of the moment. He felt the change come over her as they sat

down and the omnibus began to move forward. He imagined her

contemplating the avenue in front of them with those honest sad eyes

which seemed to set him at such a distance from them. But the breeze

was blowing in their faces; it lifted her hat for a second, and she

drew out a pin and stuck it in again,—a little action which seemed,

for some reason, to make her rather more fallible. Ah, if only her hat

would blow off, and leave her altogether disheveled, accepting it from

his hands!

 

“This is like Venice,” she observed, raising her hand. “The motor-cars, I mean, shooting about so quickly, with their lights.”

 

“I’ve never seen Venice,” he replied. “I keep that and some other

things for my old age.”

 

“What are the other things?” she asked.

 

“There’s Venice and India and, I think, Dante, too.”

 

She laughed.

 

“Think of providing for one’s old age! And would you refuse to see

Venice if you had the chance?”

 

Instead of answering her, he wondered whether he should tell her

something that was quite true about himself; and as he wondered, he

told her.

 

“I’ve planned out my life in sections ever since I was a child, to

make it last longer. You see, I’m always afraid that I’m missing

something—”

 

“And so am I!” Katharine exclaimed. “But, after all,” she added, “why

should you miss anything?”

 

“Why? Because I’m poor, for one thing,” Ralph rejoined. “You, I

suppose, can have Venice and India and Dante every day of your life.”

 

She said nothing for a moment, but rested one hand, which was bare of

glove, upon the rail in front of her, meditating upon a variety of

things, of which one was that this strange young man pronounced Dante

as she was used to hearing it pronounced, and another, that he had,

most unexpectedly, a feeling about life that was familiar to her.

Perhaps, then, he was the sort of person she might take an interest

in, if she came to know him better, and as she had placed him among

those whom she would never want to know better, this was enough to

make her silent. She hastily recalled her first view of him, in the

little room where the relics were kept, and ran a bar through half her

impressions, as one cancels a badly written sentence, having found the

right one.

 

“But to know that one might have things doesn’t alter the fact that

one hasn’t got them,” she said, in some confusion. “How could I go to

India, for example? Besides,” she began impulsively, and stopped

herself. Here the conductor came round, and interrupted them. Ralph

waited for her to resume her sentence, but she said no more.

 

“I have a message to give your father,” he remarked. “Perhaps you

would give it him, or I could come—”

 

“Yes, do come,” Katharine replied.

 

“Still, I don’t see why you shouldn’t go to India,” Ralph began, in

order to keep her from rising, as she threatened to do.

 

But she got up in spite of him, and said good-bye with her usual air

of decision, and left him with a quickness which Ralph connected now

with all her movements. He looked down and saw her standing on the

pavement edge, an alert, commanding figure, which waited its season to

cross, and then walked boldly and swiftly to the other side. That

gesture and action would be added to the picture he had of her, but at

present the real woman completely routed the phantom one.