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

class="calibre1">time, he wished to say something, but he knew not what, to Katharine

alone. She took her aunts upstairs, and returned, coming towards him

once more with an air of innocence and friendliness that amazed him.

 

“My father will be back,” she said. “Won’t you sit down?” and she

laughed, as if now they might share a perfectly friendly laugh at the

tea-party.

 

But Ralph made no attempt to seat himself.

 

“I must congratulate you,” he said. “It was news to me.” He saw her

face change, but only to become graver than before.

 

“My engagement?” she asked. “Yes, I am going to marry William Rodney.”

 

Ralph remained standing with his hand on the back of a chair in

absolute silence. Abysses seemed to plunge into darkness between them.

He looked at her, but her face showed that she was not thinking of

him. No regret or consciousness of wrong disturbed her.

 

“Well, I must go,” he said at length.

 

She seemed about to say something, then changed her mind and said

merely:

 

“You will come again, I hope. We always seem”—she hesitated—“to be

interrupted.”

 

He bowed and left the room.

 

Ralph strode with extreme swiftness along the Embankment. Every muscle

was taut and braced as if to resist some sudden attack from outside.

For the moment it seemed as if the attack were about to be directed

against his body, and his brain thus was on the alert, but without

understanding. Finding himself, after a few minutes, no longer under

observation, and no attack delivered, he slackened his pace, the pain

spread all through him, took possession of every governing seat, and

met with scarcely any resistance from powers exhausted by their first

effort at defence. He took his way languidly along the river

embankment, away from home rather than towards it. The world had him

at its mercy. He made no pattern out of the sights he saw. He felt

himself now, as he had often fancied other people, adrift on the

stream, and far removed from control of it, a man with no grasp upon

circumstances any longer. Old battered men loafing at the doors of

public-houses now seemed to be his fellows, and he felt, as he

supposed them to feel, a mingling of envy and hatred towards those who

passed quickly and certainly to a goal of their own. They, too, saw

things very thin and shadowy, and were wafted about by the lightest

breath of wind. For the substantial world, with its prospect of

avenues leading on and on to the invisible distance, had slipped from

him, since Katharine was engaged. Now all his life was visible, and

the straight, meager path had its ending soon enough. Katharine was

engaged, and she had deceived him, too. He felt for corners of his

being untouched by his disaster; but there was no limit to the flood

of damage; not one of his possessions was safe now. Katharine had

deceived him; she had mixed herself with every thought of his, and

reft of her they seemed false thoughts which he would blush to think

again. His life seemed immeasurably impoverished.

 

He sat himself down, in spite of the chilly fog which obscured the

farther bank and left its lights suspended upon a blank surface, upon

one of the riverside seats, and let the tide of disillusionment sweep

through him. For the time being all bright points in his life were

blotted out; all prominences leveled. At first he made himself believe

that Katharine had treated him badly, and drew comfort from the

thought that, left alone, she would recollect this, and think of him

and tender him, in silence, at any rate, an apology. But this grain of

comfort failed him after a second or two, for, upon reflection, he had

to admit that Katharine owed him nothing. Katharine had promised

nothing, taken nothing; to her his dreams had meant nothing. This,

indeed, was the lowest pitch of his despair. If the best of one’s

feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings,

what reality is left us? The old romance which had warmed his days for

him, the thoughts of Katharine which had painted every hour, were now

made to appear foolish and enfeebled. He rose, and looked into the

river, whose swift race of dun-colored waters seemed the very spirit

of futility and oblivion.

 

“In what can one trust, then?” he thought, as he leant there. So

feeble and insubstantial did he feel himself that he repeated the word

aloud.

 

“In what can one trust? Not in men and women. Not in one’s dreams

about them. There’s nothing—nothing, nothing left at all.”

 

Now Denham had reason to know that he could bring to birth and keep

alive a fine anger when he chose. Rodney provided a good target for

that emotion. And yet at the moment, Rodney and Katharine herself

seemed disembodied ghosts. He could scarcely remember the look of

them. His mind plunged lower and lower. Their marriage seemed of no

importance to him. All things had turned to ghosts; the whole mass of

the world was insubstantial vapor, surrounding the solitary spark in

his mind, whose burning point he could remember, for it burnt no more.

He had once cherished a belief, and Katharine had embodied this

belief, and she did so no longer. He did not blame her; he blamed

nothing, nobody; he saw the truth. He saw the dun-colored race of

waters and the blank shore. But life is vigorous; the body lives, and

the body, no doubt, dictated the reflection, which now urged him to

movement, that one may cast away the forms of human beings, and yet

retain the passion which seemed inseparable from their existence in

the flesh. Now this passion burnt on his horizon, as the winter sun

makes a greenish pane in the west through thinning clouds. His eyes

were set on something infinitely far and remote; by that light he felt

he could walk, and would, in future, have to find his way. But that

was all there was left to him of a populous and teeming world.