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

Inn Fields,

isn’t it? Look, there’s a bird for you! Oh, you’ve brought glasses,

have you? Edward and Christopher mean to make you shoot. Can you

shoot? I shouldn’t think so—”

 

“Look here, you must explain,” said Ralph. “Who are these young men?

Where am I staying?”

 

“You are staying with us, of course,” she said boldly. “Of course,

you’re staying with us—you don’t mind coming, do you?”

 

“If I had, I shouldn’t have come,” he said sturdily. They walked on in

silence; Mary took care not to break it for a time. She wished Ralph

to feel, as she thought he would, all the fresh delights of the earth

and air. She was right. In a moment he expressed his pleasure, much to

her comfort.

 

“This is the sort of country I thought you’d live in, Mary,” he said,

pushing his hat back on his head, and looking about him. “Real

country. No gentlemen’s seats.”

 

He snuffed the air, and felt more keenly than he had done for many

weeks the pleasure of owning a body.

 

“Now we have to find our way through a hedge,” said Mary. In the gap

of the hedge Ralph tore up a poacher’s wire, set across a hole to trap

a rabbit.

 

“It’s quite right that they should poach,” said Mary, watching him

tugging at the wire. “I wonder whether it was Alfred Duggins or Sid

Rankin? How can one expect them not to, when they only make fifteen

shillings a week? Fifteen shillings a week,” she repeated, coming out

on the other side of the hedge, and running her fingers through her

hair to rid herself of a bramble which had attached itself to her. “I

could live on fifteen shillings a week—easily.”

 

“Could you?” said Ralph. “I don’t believe you could,” he added.

 

“Oh yes. They have a cottage thrown in, and a garden where one can

grow vegetables. It wouldn’t be half bad,” said Mary, with a soberness

which impressed Ralph very much.

 

“But you’d get tired of it,” he urged.

 

“I sometimes think it’s the only thing one would never get tired of,”

she replied.

 

The idea of a cottage where one grew one’s own vegetables and lived on

fifteen shillings a week, filled Ralph with an extraordinary sense of

rest and satisfaction.

 

“But wouldn’t it be on the main road, or next door to a woman with six

squalling children, who’d always be hanging her washing out to dry

across your garden?”

 

“The cottage I’m thinking of stands by itself in a little orchard.”

 

“And what about the Suffrage?” he asked, attempting sarcasm.

 

“Oh, there are other things in the world besides the Suffrage,” she

replied, in an off-hand manner which was slightly mysterious.

 

Ralph fell silent. It annoyed him that she should have plans of which

he knew nothing; but he felt that he had no right to press her

further. His mind settled upon the idea of life in a country cottage.

Conceivably, for he could not examine into it now, here lay a

tremendous possibility; a solution of many problems. He struck his

stick upon the earth, and stared through the dusk at the shape of the

country.

 

“D’you know the points of the compass?” he asked.

 

“Well, of course,” said Mary. “What d’you take me for?—a Cockney like

you?” She then told him exactly where the north lay, and where the

south.

 

“It’s my native land, this,” she said. “I could smell my way about it

blindfold.”

 

As if to prove this boast, she walked a little quicker, so that Ralph

found it difficult to keep pace with her. At the same time, he felt

drawn to her as he had never been before; partly, no doubt, because

she was more independent of him than in London, and seemed to be

attached firmly to a world where he had no place at all. Now the dusk

had fallen to such an extent that he had to follow her implicitly, and

even lean his hand on her shoulder when they jumped a bank into a very

narrow lane. And he felt curiously shy of her when she began to shout

through her hands at a spot of light which swung upon the mist in a

neighboring field. He shouted, too, and the light stood still.

 

“That’s Christopher, come in already, and gone to feed his chickens,”

she said.

 

She introduced him to Ralph, who could see only a tall figure in

gaiters, rising from a fluttering circle of soft feathery bodies, upon

whom the light fell in wavering discs, calling out now a bright spot

of yellow, now one of greenish-black and scarlet. Mary dipped her hand

in the bucket he carried, and was at once the center of a circle also;

and as she cast her grain she talked alternately to the birds and to

her brother, in the same clucking, half-inarticulate voice, as it

sounded to Ralph, standing on the outskirts of the fluttering feathers

in his black overcoat.

 

He had removed his overcoat by the time they sat round the dinner-table, but nevertheless he looked very strange among the others. A

country life and breeding had preserved in them all a look which Mary

hesitated to call either innocent or youthful, as she compared them,

now sitting round in an oval, softly illuminated by candlelight; and

yet it was something of the kind, yes, even in the case of the Rector

himself. Though superficially marked with lines, his face was a clear

pink, and his blue eyes had the long-sighted, peaceful expression of

eyes seeking the turn of the road, or a distant light through rain, or

the darkness of winter. She looked at Ralph. He had never appeared to

her more concentrated and full of purpose; as if behind his forehead

were massed so much experience that he could choose for himself which

part of it he would display and which part he would keep to himself.

Compared with that dark and stern countenance, her brothers’ faces,

bending low over their soup-plates, were mere circles of pink,

unmolded flesh.

 

“You came by the 3.10, Mr. Denham?” said the Reverend Wyndham Datchet,

tucking his napkin into his collar, so that almost the whole of his

body was concealed by a large white diamond. “They treat us very well,

on the whole. Considering the increase of traffic, they treat us very

well indeed. I have the curiosity sometimes to count the trucks on the

goods’ trains, and they’re well over fifty—well over fifty, at this

season of the year.”

 

The old gentleman had been roused agreeably by the presence of this

attentive and well-informed young man, as was evident by the care with

which he finished the last words in his sentences, and his slight

exaggeration in the number of trucks on the trains. Indeed, the chief

burden of the talk fell upon him, and he sustained it to-night in a

manner which caused his sons to look at him admiringly now and then;

for they felt shy of Denham, and were glad not to have to talk

themselves. The store of information about the present and past of

this particular corner of Lincolnshire which old Mr. Datchet produced

really surprised his children, for though they knew of its existence,

they had forgotten its extent, as they might have forgotten the amount

of family plate stored in the plate-chest, until some rare celebration

brought it forth.

 

After dinner, parish business took the Rector to his study, and Mary

proposed that they should sit in the kitchen.

 

“It’s not the kitchen really,” Elizabeth hastened to explain to her

guest, “but we call it so—”

 

“It’s the nicest room in the house,” said Edward.

 

“It’s got the old rests by the side of the fireplace, where the men

hung their guns,” said Elizabeth, leading the way, with a tall brass

candlestick in her hand, down a passage. “Show Mr. Denham the steps,

Christopher… . When the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were here two

years ago they said this was the most interesting part of the house.

These narrow bricks prove that it is five hundred years old—five

hundred years, I think—they may have said six.” She, too, felt an

impulse to exaggerate the age of the bricks, as her father had

exaggerated the number of trucks. A big lamp hung down from the center

of the ceiling and, together with a fine log fire, illuminated a large

and lofty room, with rafters running from wall to wall, a floor of red

tiles, and a substantial fireplace built up of those narrow red bricks

which were said to be five hundred years old. A few rugs and a

sprinkling of armchairs had made this ancient kitchen into a

sitting-room. Elizabeth, after pointing out the gun-racks, and the

hooks for smoking hams, and other evidence of incontestable age, and

explaining that Mary had had the idea of turning the room into a

sitting-room—otherwise it was used for hanging out the wash and for

the men to change in after shooting—considered that she had done her

duty as hostess, and sat down in an upright chair directly beneath the

lamp, beside a very long and narrow oak table. She placed a pair of

horn spectacles upon her nose, and drew towards her a basketful of

threads and wools. In a few minutes a smile came to her face, and

remained there for the rest of the evening.

 

“Will you come out shooting with us tomorrow?” said Christopher, who

had, on the whole, formed a favorable impression of his sister’s

friend.

 

“I won’t shoot, but I’ll come with you,” said Ralph.

 

“Don’t you care about shooting?” asked Edward, whose suspicions were

not yet laid to rest.

 

“I’ve never shot in my life,” said Ralph, turning and looking him in

the face, because he was not sure how this confession would be

received.

 

“You wouldn’t have much chance in London, I suppose,” said

Christopher. “But won’t you find it rather dull—just watching us?”

 

“I shall watch birds,” Ralph replied, with a smile.

 

“I can show you the place for watching birds,” said Edward, “if that’s

what you like doing. I know a fellow who comes down from London about

this time every year to watch them. It’s a great place for the wild

geese and the ducks. I’ve heard this man say that it’s one of the best

places for birds in the country.”

 

“It’s about the best place in England,” Ralph replied. They were all

gratified by this praise of their native county; and Mary now had the

pleasure of hearing these short questions and answers lose their

undertone of suspicious inspection, so far as her brothers were

concerned, and develop into a genuine conversation about the habits of

birds which afterwards turned to a discussion as to the habits of

solicitors, in which it was scarcely necessary for her to take part.

She was pleased to see that her brothers liked Ralph, to the extent,

that is, of wishing to secure his good opinion. Whether or not he

liked them it was impossible to tell from his kind but experienced

manner. Now and then she fed the fire with a fresh log, and as the

room filled with the fine, dry heat of burning wood, they all, with

the exception of Elizabeth, who was outside the range of the fire,

felt less and less anxious about the effect they were making, and more

and more inclined for sleep. At this moment a vehement scratching was

heard on the door.

 

“Piper!—oh, damn!—I shall have to get up,” murmured Christopher.

 

“It’s not Piper, it’s Pitch,” Edward grunted.

 

“All the same, I shall have to get up,” Christopher grumbled. He let

in