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

result of any particular cause.”

 

This rather stilted beginning did not please him, and it became more

and more obvious to him that, whatever he might say, his unhappiness

had been directly caused by Katharine.

 

“I began to find my life unsatisfactory,” he started afresh. “It

seemed to me meaningless.” He paused again, but felt that this, at any

rate, was true, and that on these lines he could go on.

 

“All this money-making and working ten hours a day in an office,

what’s it FOR? When one’s a boy, you see, one’s head is so full of

dreams that it doesn’t seem to matter what one does. And if you’re

ambitious, you’re all right; you’ve got a reason for going on. Now my

reasons ceased to satisfy me. Perhaps I never had any. That’s very

likely now I come to think of it. (What reason is there for anything,

though?) Still, it’s impossible, after a certain age, to take oneself

in satisfactorily. And I know what carried me on”—for a good reason

now occurred to him—“I wanted to be the savior of my family and all

that kind of thing. I wanted them to get on in the world. That was a

lie, of course—a kind of self-glorification, too. Like most people, I

suppose, I’ve lived almost entirely among delusions, and now I’m at

the awkward stage of finding it out. I want another delusion to go on

with. That’s what my unhappiness amounts to, Mary.”

 

There were two reasons that kept Mary very silent during this speech,

and drew curiously straight lines upon her face. In the first place,

Ralph made no mention of marriage; in the second, he was not speaking

the truth.

 

“I don’t think it will be difficult to find a cottage,” she said, with

cheerful hardness, ignoring the whole of this statement. “You’ve got a

little money, haven’t you? Yes,” she concluded, “I don’t see why it

shouldn’t be a very good plan.”

 

They crossed the field in complete silence. Ralph was surprised by her

remark and a little hurt, and yet, on the whole, rather pleased. He

had convinced himself that it was impossible to lay his case

truthfully before Mary, and, secretly, he was relieved to find that he

had not parted with his dream to her. She was, as he had always found

her, the sensible, loyal friend, the woman he trusted; whose sympathy

he could count upon, provided he kept within certain limits. He was

not displeased to find that those limits were very clearly marked.

When they had crossed the next hedge she said to him:

 

“Yes, Ralph, it’s time you made a break. I’ve come to the same

conclusion myself. Only it won’t be a country cottage in my case;

it’ll be America. America!” she cried. “That’s the place for me!

They’ll teach me something about organizing a movement there, and I’ll

come back and show you how to do it.”

 

If she meant consciously or unconsciously to belittle the seclusion

and security of a country cottage, she did not succeed; for Ralph’s

determination was genuine. But she made him visualize her in her own

character, so that he looked quickly at her, as she walked a little in

front of him across the plowed field; for the first time that morning

he saw her independently of him or of his preoccupation with

Katharine. He seemed to see her marching ahead, a rather clumsy but

powerful and independent figure, for whose courage he felt the

greatest respect.

 

“Don’t go away, Mary!” he exclaimed, and stopped.

 

“That’s what you said before, Ralph,” she returned, without looking at

him. “You want to go away yourself and you don’t want me to go away.

That’s not very sensible, is it?”

 

“Mary,” he cried, stung by the remembrance of his exacting and

dictatorial ways with her, “what a brute I’ve been to you!”

 

It took all her strength to keep the tears from springing, and to

thrust back her assurance that she would forgive him till Doomsday if

he chose. She was preserved from doing so only by a stubborn kind of

respect for herself which lay at the root of her nature and forbade

surrender, even in moments of almost overwhelming passion. Now, when

all was tempest and high-running waves, she knew of a land where the

sun shone clear upon Italian grammars and files of docketed papers.

Nevertheless, from the skeleton pallor of that land and the rocks that

broke its surface, she knew that her life there would be harsh and

lonely almost beyond endurance. She walked steadily a little in front

of him across the plowed field. Their way took them round the verge of

a wood of thin trees standing at the edge of a steep fold in the land.

Looking between the tree-trunks, Ralph saw laid out on the perfectly

flat and richly green meadow at the bottom of the hill a small gray

manor-house, with ponds, terraces, and clipped hedges in front of it,

a farm building or so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising

behind, all perfectly sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house

the hill rose again, and the trees on the farther summit stood upright

against the sky, which appeared of a more intense blue between their

trunks. His mind at once was filled with a sense of the actual

presence of Katharine; the gray house and the intense blue sky gave

him the feeling of her presence close by. He leant against a tree,

forming her name beneath his breath:

 

“Katharine, Katharine,” he said aloud, and then, looking round, saw

Mary walking slowly away from him, tearing a long spray of ivy from

the trees as she passed them. She seemed so definitely opposed to the

vision he held in his mind that he returned to it with a gesture of

impatience.

 

“Katharine, Katharine,” he repeated, and seemed to himself to be with

her. He lost his sense of all that surrounded him; all substantial

things—the hour of the day, what we have done and are about to do,

the presence of other people and the support we derive from seeing

their belief in a common reality—all this slipped from him. So he

might have felt if the earth had dropped from his feet, and the empty

blue had hung all round him, and the air had been steeped in the

presence of one woman. The chirp of a robin on the bough above his

head awakened him, and his awakenment was accompanied by a sigh. Here

was the world in which he had lived; here the plowed field, the high

road yonder, and Mary, stripping ivy from the trees. When he came up

with her he linked his arm through hers and said:

 

“Now, Mary, what’s all this about America?”

 

There was a brotherly kindness in his voice which seemed to her

magnanimous, when she reflected that she had cut short his

explanations and shown little interest in his change of plan. She gave

him her reasons for thinking that she might profit by such a journey,

omitting the one reason which had set all the rest in motion. He

listened attentively, and made no attempt to dissuade her. In truth,

he found himself curiously eager to make certain of her good sense,

and accepted each fresh proof of it with satisfaction, as though it

helped him to make up his mind about something. She forgot the pain he

had caused her, and in place of it she became conscious of a steady

tide of well-being which harmonized very aptly with the tramp of their

feet upon the dry road and the support of his arm. The comfort was the

more glowing in that it seemed to be the reward of her determination

to behave to him simply and without attempting to be other than she

was. Instead of making out an interest in the poets, she avoided them

instinctively, and dwelt rather insistently upon the practical nature

of her gifts.

 

In a practical way she asked for particulars of his cottage, which

hardly existed in his mind, and corrected his vagueness.

 

“You must see that there’s water,” she insisted, with an exaggeration

of interest. She avoided asking him what he meant to do in this

cottage, and, at last, when all the practical details had been

thrashed out as much as possible, he rewarded her by a more intimate

statement.

 

“One of the rooms,” he said, “must be my study, for, you see, Mary,

I’m going to write a book.” Here he withdrew his arm from hers, lit

his pipe, and they tramped on in a sagacious kind of comradeship, the

most complete they had attained in all their friendship.

 

“And what’s your book to be about?” she said, as boldly as if she had

never come to grief with Ralph in talking about books. He told her

unhesitatingly that he meant to write the history of the English

village from Saxon days to the present time. Some such plan had lain

as a seed in his mind for many years; and now that he had decided, in

a flash, to give up his profession, the seed grew in the space of

twenty minutes both tall and lusty. He was surprised himself at the

positive way in which he spoke. It was the same with the question of

his cottage. That had come into existence, too, in an unromantic shape

—a square white house standing just off the high road, no doubt, with

a neighbor who kept a pig and a dozen squalling children; for these

plans were shorn of all romance in his mind, and the pleasure he

derived from thinking of them was checked directly it passed a very

sober limit. So a sensible man who has lost his chance of some

beautiful inheritance might tread out the narrow bounds of his actual

dwelling-place, and assure himself that life is supportable within its

demesne, only one must grow turnips and cabbages, not melons and

pomegranates. Certainly Ralph took some pride in the resources of his

mind, and was insensibly helped to right himself by Mary’s trust in

him. She wound her ivy spray round her ash-plant, and for the first

time for many days, when alone with Ralph, set no spies upon her

motives, sayings, and feelings, but surrendered herself to complete

happiness.

 

Thus talking, with easy silences and some pauses to look at the view

over the hedge and to decide upon the species of a little gray-brown

bird slipping among the twigs, they walked into Lincoln, and after

strolling up and down the main street, decided upon an inn where the

rounded window suggested substantial fare, nor were they mistaken. For

over a hundred and fifty years hot joints, potatoes, greens, and apple

puddings had been served to generations of country gentlemen, and now,

sitting at a table in the hollow of the bow window, Ralph and Mary

took their share of this perennial feast. Looking across the joint,

half-way through the meal, Mary wondered whether Ralph would ever come

to look quite like the other people in the room. Would he be absorbed

among the round pink faces, pricked with little white bristles, the

calves fitted in shiny brown leather, the black-and-white check suits,

which were sprinkled about in the same room with them? She half hoped

so; she thought that it was only in his mind that he was different.

She did not wish him to be too different from other people. The walk

had given him a ruddy color, too, and his eyes were lit up by a

steady, honest light, which could not make the simplest farmer feel

ill at ease, or suggest to the most devout of clergymen a disposition

to sneer at his faith. She loved