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

mind,

rather than any gift, gave her weight in the family. When Mary wrote

to say that she had asked Ralph Denham to stay with them, she added,

out of deference to Elizabeth’s character, that he was very nice,

though rather queer, and had been overworking himself in London. No

doubt Elizabeth would conclude that Ralph was in love with her, but

there could be no doubt either that not a word of this would be spoken

by either of them, unless, indeed, some catastrophe made mention of it

unavoidable.

 

Mary went down to Disham without knowing whether Ralph intended to

come; but two or three days before Christmas she received a telegram

from Ralph, asking her to take a room for him in the village. This was

followed by a letter explaining that he hoped he might have his meals

with them; but quiet, essential for his work, made it necessary to

sleep out.

 

Mary was walking in the garden with Elizabeth, and inspecting the

roses, when the letter arrived.

 

“But that’s absurd,” said Elizabeth decidedly, when the plan was

explained to her. “There are five spare rooms, even when the boys are

here. Besides, he wouldn’t get a room in the village. And he oughtn’t

to work if he’s overworked.”

 

“But perhaps he doesn’t want to see so much of us,” Mary thought to

herself, although outwardly she assented, and felt grateful to

Elizabeth for supporting her in what was, of course, her desire. They

were cutting roses at the time, and laying them, head by head, in a

shallow basket.

 

“If Ralph were here, he’d find this very dull,” Mary thought, with a

little shiver of irritation, which led her to place her rose the wrong

way in the basket. Meanwhile, they had come to the end of the path,

and while Elizabeth straightened some flowers, and made them stand

upright within their fence of string, Mary looked at her father, who

was pacing up and down, with his hand behind his back and his head

bowed in meditation. Obeying an impulse which sprang from some desire

to interrupt this methodical marching, Mary stepped on to the grass

walk and put her hand on his arm.

 

“A flower for your buttonhole, father,” she said, presenting a rose.

 

“Eh, dear?” said Mr. Datchet, taking the flower, and holding it at an

angle which suited his bad eyesight, without pausing in his walk.

 

“Where does this fellow come from? One of Elizabeth’s roses—I hope

you asked her leave. Elizabeth doesn’t like having her roses picked

without her leave, and quite right, too.”

 

He had a habit, Mary remarked, and she had never noticed it so clearly

before, of letting his sentences tail away in a continuous murmur,

whereupon he passed into a state of abstraction, presumed by his

children to indicate some train of thought too profound for utterance.

 

“What?” said Mary, interrupting, for the first time in her life,

perhaps, when the murmur ceased. He made no reply. She knew very well

that he wished to be left alone, but she stuck to his side much as she

might have stuck to some sleep-walker, whom she thought it right

gradually to awaken. She could think of nothing to rouse him with

except:

 

“The garden’s looking very nice, father.”

 

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mr. Datchet, running his words together in the

same abstracted manner, and sinking his head yet lower upon his

breast. And suddenly, as they turned their steps to retrace their way,

he jerked out:

 

“The traffic’s very much increased, you know. More rolling-stock

needed already. Forty trucks went down yesterday by the 12.15—counted

them myself. They’ve taken off the 9.3, and given us an 8.30 instead—

suits the business men, you know. You came by the old 3.10 yesterday,

I suppose?”

 

She said “Yes,” as he seemed to wish for a reply, and then he looked

at his watch, and made off down the path towards the house, holding

the rose at the same angle in front of him. Elizabeth had gone round

to the side of the house, where the chickens lived, so that Mary found

herself alone, holding Ralph’s letter in her hand. She was uneasy. She

had put off the season for thinking things out very successfully, and

now that Ralph was actually coming, the next day, she could only

wonder how her family would impress him. She thought it likely that

her father would discuss the train service with him; Elizabeth would

be bright and sensible, and always leaving the room to give messages

to the servants. Her brothers had already said that they would give

him a day’s shooting. She was content to leave the problem of Ralph’s

relations to the young men obscure, trusting that they would find some

common ground of masculine agreement. But what would he think of HER?

Would he see that she was different from the rest of the family? She

devised a plan for taking him to her sitting-room, and artfully

leading the talk towards the English poets, who now occupied prominent

places in her little bookcase. Moreover, she might give him to

understand, privately, that she, too, thought her family a queer one—

queer, yes, but not dull. That was the rock past which she was bent on

steering him. And she thought how she would draw his attention to

Edward’s passion for Jorrocks, and the enthusiasm which led

Christopher to collect moths and butterflies though he was now twenty-two. Perhaps Elizabeth’s sketching, if the fruits were invisible,

might lend color to the general effect which she wished to produce of

a family, eccentric and limited, perhaps, but not dull. Edward, she

perceived, was rolling the lawn, for the sake of exercise; and the

sight of him, with pink cheeks, bright little brown eyes, and a

general resemblance to a clumsy young cart-horse in its winter coat of

dusty brown hair, made Mary violently ashamed of her ambitious

scheming. She loved him precisely as he was; she loved them all; and

as she walked by his side, up and down, and down and up, her strong

moral sense administered a sound drubbing to the vain and romantic

element aroused in her by the mere thought of Ralph. She felt quite

certain that, for good or for bad, she was very like the rest of her

family.

 

Sitting in the corner of a third-class railway carriage, on the

afternoon of the following day, Ralph made several inquiries of a

commercial traveler in the opposite corner. They centered round a

village called Lampsher, not three miles, he understood, from Lincoln;

was there a big house in Lampsher, he asked, inhabited by a gentleman

of the name of Otway?

 

The traveler knew nothing, but rolled the name of Otway on his tongue,

reflectively, and the sound of it gratified Ralph amazingly. It gave

him an excuse to take a letter from his pocket in order to verify the

address.

 

“Stogdon House, Lampsher, Lincoln,” he read out.

 

“You’ll find somebody to direct you at Lincoln,” said the man; and

Ralph had to confess that he was not bound there this very evening.

 

“I’ve got to walk over from Disham,” he said, and in the heart of him

could not help marveling at the pleasure which he derived from making

a bagman in a train believe what he himself did not believe. For the

letter, though signed by Katharine’s father, contained no invitation

or warrant for thinking that Katharine herself was there; the only

fact it disclosed was that for a fortnight this address would be Mr.

Hilbery’s address. But when he looked out of the window, it was of her

he thought; she, too, had seen these gray fields, and, perhaps, she

was there where the trees ran up a slope, and one yellow light shone

now, and then went out again, at the foot of the hill. The light shone

in the windows of an old gray house, he thought. He lay back in his

corner and forgot the commercial traveler altogether. The process of

visualizing Katharine stopped short at the old gray manor-house;

instinct warned him that if he went much further with this process

reality would soon force itself in; he could not altogether neglect

the figure of William Rodney. Since the day when he had heard from

Katharine’s lips of her engagement, he had refrained from investing

his dream of her with the details of real life. But the light of the

late afternoon glowed green behind the straight trees, and became a

symbol of her. The light seemed to expand his heart. She brooded over

the gray fields, and was with him now in the railway carriage,

thoughtful, silent, and infinitely tender; but the vision pressed too

close, and must be dismissed, for the train was slackening. Its abrupt

jerks shook him wide awake, and he saw Mary Datchet, a sturdy russet

figure, with a dash of scarlet about it, as the carriage slid down the

platform. A tall youth who accompanied her shook him by the hand, took

his bag, and led the way without uttering one articulate word.

 

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk

almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a

note of intimacy seldom heard by day. Such an edge was there in Mary’s

voice when she greeted him. About her seemed to hang the mist of the

winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves. He felt

himself at once stepping on to the firm ground of an entirely

different world, but he did not allow himself to yield to the pleasure

of it directly. They gave him his choice of driving with Edward or of

walking home across the fields with Mary—not a shorter way, they

explained, but Mary thought it a nicer way. He decided to walk with

her, being conscious, indeed, that he got comfort from her presence.

What could be the cause of her cheerfulness, he wondered, half

ironically, and half enviously, as the pony-cart started briskly away,

and the dusk swam between their eyes and the tall form of Edward,

standing up to drive, with the reins in one hand and the whip in the

other. People from the village, who had been to the market town, were

climbing into their gigs, or setting off home down the road together

in little parties. Many salutations were addressed to Mary, who

shouted back, with the addition of the speaker’s name. But soon she

led the way over a stile, and along a path worn slightly darker than

the dim green surrounding it. In front of them the sky now showed

itself of a reddish-yellow, like a slice of some semilucent stone

behind which a lamp burnt, while a fringe of black trees with distinct

branches stood against the light, which was obscured in one direction

by a hump of earth, in all other directions the land lying flat to the

very verge of the sky. One of the swift and noiseless birds of the

winter’s night seemed to follow them across the field, circling a few

feet in front of them, disappearing and returning again and again.

 

Mary had gone this walk many hundred times in the course of her life,

generally alone, and at different stages the ghosts of past moods

would flood her mind with a whole scene or train of thought merely at

the sight of three trees from a particular angle, or at the sound of

the pheasant clucking in the ditch. But to-night the circumstances

were strong enough to oust all other scenes; and she looked at the

field and the trees with an involuntary intensity as if they had no

such associations for her.

 

“Well, Ralph,” she said, “this is better than Lincoln’s