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

ambitions were vain.

 

But, like all beliefs not genuinely held, this one depended very much

upon the amount of acceptance it received from other people, and in

private, when the pressure of public opinion was removed, Ralph let

himself swing very rapidly away from his actual circumstances upon

strange voyages which, indeed, he would have been ashamed to describe.

In these dreams, of course, he figured in noble and romantic parts,

but self-glorification was not the only motive of them. They gave

outlet to some spirit which found no work to do in real life, for,

with the pessimism which his lot forced upon him, Ralph had made up

his mind that there was no use for what, contemptuously enough, he

called dreams, in the world which we inhabit. It sometimes seemed to

him that this spirit was the most valuable possession he had; he

thought that by means of it he could set flowering waste tracts of the

earth, cure many ills, or raise up beauty where none now existed; it

was, too, a fierce and potent spirit which would devour the dusty

books and parchments on the office wall with one lick of its tongue,

and leave him in a minute standing in nakedness, if he gave way to it.

His endeavor, for many years, had been to control the spirit, and at

the age of twenty-nine he thought he could pride himself upon a life

rigidly divided into the hours of work and those of dreams; the two

lived side by side without harming each other. As a matter of fact,

this effort at discipline had been helped by the interests of a

difficult profession, but the old conclusion to which Ralph had come

when he left college still held sway in his mind, and tinged his views

with the melancholy belief that life for most people compels the

exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it

forces us to agree that there is little virtue, as well as little

profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of our inheritance.

 

Denham was not altogether popular either in his office or among his

family. He was too positive, at this stage of his career, as to what

was right and what wrong, too proud of his self-control, and, as is

natural in the case of persons not altogether happy or well suited in

their conditions, too apt to prove the folly of contentment, if he

found any one who confessed to that weakness. In the office his rather

ostentatious efficiency annoyed those who took their own work more

lightly, and, if they foretold his advancement, it was not altogether

sympathetically. Indeed, he appeared to be rather a hard and self-sufficient young man, with a queer temper, and manners that were

uncompromisingly abrupt, who was consumed with a desire to get on in

the world, which was natural, these critics thought, in a man of no

means, but not engaging.

 

The young men in the office had a perfect right to these opinions,

because Denham showed no particular desire for their friendship. He

liked them well enough, but shut them up in that compartment of life

which was devoted to work. Hitherto, indeed, he had found little

difficulty in arranging his life as methodically as he arranged his

expenditure, but about this time he began to encounter experiences

which were not so easy to classify. Mary Datchet had begun this

confusion two years ago by bursting into laughter at some remark of

his, almost the first time they met. She could not explain why it was.

She thought him quite astonishingly odd. When he knew her well enough

to tell her how he spent Monday and Wednesday and Saturday, she was

still more amused; she laughed till he laughed, too, without knowing

why. It seemed to her very odd that he should know as much about

breeding bulldogs as any man in England; that he had a collection of

wild flowers found near London; and his weekly visit to old Miss

Trotter at Ealing, who was an authority upon the science of Heraldry,

never failed to excite her laughter. She wanted to know everything,

even the kind of cake which the old lady supplied on these occasions;

and their summer excursions to churches in the neighborhood of London

for the purpose of taking rubbings of the brasses became most

important festivals, from the interest she took in them. In six months

she knew more about his odd friends and hobbies than his own brothers

and sisters knew, after living with him all his life; and Ralph found

this very pleasant, though disordering, for his own view of himself

had always been profoundly serious.

 

Certainly it was very pleasant to be with Mary Datchet and to become,

directly the door was shut, quite a different sort of person,

eccentric and lovable, with scarcely any likeness to the self most

people knew. He became less serious, and rather less dictatorial at

home, for he was apt to hear Mary laughing at him, and telling him, as

she was fond of doing, that he knew nothing at all about anything. She

made him, also, take an interest in public questions, for which she

had a natural liking; and was in process of turning him from Tory to

Radical, after a course of public meetings, which began by boring him

acutely, and ended by exciting him even more than they excited her.

 

But he was reserved; when ideas started up in his mind, he divided

them automatically into those he could discuss with Mary, and those he

must keep for himself. She knew this and it interested her, for she

was accustomed to find young men very ready to talk about themselves,

and had come to listen to them as one listens to children, without any

thought of herself. But with Ralph, she had very little of this

maternal feeling, and, in consequence, a much keener sense of her own

individuality.

 

Late one afternoon Ralph stepped along the Strand to an interview with

a lawyer upon business. The afternoon light was almost over, and

already streams of greenish and yellowish artificial light were being

poured into an atmosphere which, in country lanes, would now have been

soft with the smoke of wood fires; and on both sides of the road the

shop windows were full of sparkling chains and highly polished leather

cases, which stood upon shelves made of thick plate-glass. None of

these different objects was seen separately by Denham, but from all of

them he drew an impression of stir and cheerfulness. Thus it came

about that he saw Katharine Hilbery coming towards him, and looked

straight at her, as if she were only an illustration of the argument

that was going forward in his mind. In this spirit he noticed the

rather set expression in her eyes, and the slight, half-conscious

movement of her lips, which, together with her height and the

distinction of her dress, made her look as if the scurrying crowd

impeded her, and her direction were different from theirs. He noticed

this calmly; but suddenly, as he passed her, his hands and knees began

to tremble, and his heart beat painfully. She did not see him, and

went on repeating to herself some lines which had stuck to her memory:

“It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering

—the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at

all.” Thus occupied, she did not see Denham, and he had not the

courage to stop her. But immediately the whole scene in the Strand

wore that curious look of order and purpose which is imparted to the

most heterogeneous things when music sounds; and so pleasant was this

impression that he was very glad that he had not stopped her, after

all. It grew slowly fainter, but lasted until he stood outside the

barrister’s chambers.

 

When his interview with the barrister was over, it was too late to go

back to the office. His sight of Katharine had put him queerly out of

tune for a domestic evening. Where should he go? To walk through the

streets of London until he came to Katharine’s house, to look up at

the windows and fancy her within, seemed to him possible for a moment;

and then he rejected the plan almost with a blush as, with a curious

division of consciousness, one plucks a flower sentimentally and

throws it away, with a blush, when it is actually picked. No, he would

go and see Mary Datchet. By this time she would be back from her work.

 

To see Ralph appear unexpectedly in her room threw Mary for a second

off her balance. She had been cleaning knives in her little scullery,

and when she had let him in she went back again, and turned on the

cold-water tap to its fullest volume, and then turned it off again.

“Now,” she thought to herself, as she screwed it tight, “I’m not going

to let these silly ideas come into my head… . Don’t you think Mr.

Asquith deserves to be hanged?” she called back into the sitting-room,

and when she joined him, drying her hands, she began to tell him about

the latest evasion on the part of the Government with respect to the

Women’s Suffrage Bill. Ralph did not want to talk about politics, but

he could not help respecting Mary for taking such an interest in

public questions. He looked at her as she leant forward, poking the

fire, and expressing herself very clearly in phrases which bore

distantly the taint of the platform, and he thought, “How absurd Mary

would think me if she knew that I almost made up my mind to walk all

the way to Chelsea in order to look at Katharine’s windows. She

wouldn’t understand it, but I like her very much as she is.”

 

For some time they discussed what the women had better do; and as

Ralph became genuinely interested in the question, Mary unconsciously

let her attention wander, and a great desire came over her to talk to

Ralph about her own feelings; or, at any rate, about something

personal, so that she might see what he felt for her; but she resisted

this wish. But she could not prevent him from feeling her lack of

interest in what he was saying, and gradually they both became silent.

One thought after another came up in Ralph’s mind, but they were all,

in some way, connected with Katharine, or with vague feelings of

romance and adventure such as she inspired. But he could not talk to

Mary about such thoughts; and he pitied her for knowing nothing of

what he was feeling. “Here,” he thought, “is where we differ from

women; they have no sense of romance.”

 

“Well, Mary,” he said at length, “why don’t you say something

amusing?”

 

His tone was certainly provoking, but, as a general rule, Mary was not

easily provoked. This evening, however, she replied rather sharply:

 

“Because I’ve got nothing amusing to say, I suppose.”

 

Ralph thought for a moment, and then remarked:

 

“You work too hard. I don’t mean your health,” he added, as she

laughed scornfully, “I mean that you seem to me to be getting wrapped

up in your work.”

 

“And is that a bad thing?” she asked, shading her eyes with her hand.

 

“I think it is,” he returned abruptly.

 

“But only a week ago you were saying the opposite.” Her tone was

defiant, but she became curiously depressed. Ralph did not perceive

it, and took this opportunity of lecturing her, and expressing his

latest views upon the proper conduct of life. She listened, but her

main impression was that he had been meeting some one who had

influenced him. He was telling her that she