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

the steep cliff of his forehead, and

compared it to the brow of a young Greek horseman, who reins his horse

back so sharply that it half falls on its haunches. He always seemed

to her like a rider on a spirited horse. And there was an exaltation

to her in being with him, because there was a risk that he would not

be able to keep to the right pace among other people. Sitting opposite

him at the little table in the window, she came back to that state of

careless exaltation which had overcome her when they halted by the

gate, but now it was accompanied by a sense of sanity and security,

for she felt that they had a feeling in common which scarcely needed

embodiment in words. How silent he was! leaning his forehead on his

hand, now and then, and again looking steadily and gravely at the

backs of the two men at the next table, with so little self-consciousness that she could almost watch his mind placing one thought

solidly upon the top of another; she thought that she could feel him

thinking, through the shade of her fingers, and she could anticipate

the exact moment when he would put an end to his thought and turn a

little in his chair and say:

 

“Well, Mary—?” inviting her to take up the thread of thought where he

had dropped it.

 

And at that very moment he turned just so, and said:

 

“Well, Mary?” with the curious touch of diffidence which she loved in

him.

 

She laughed, and she explained her laugh on the spur of the moment by

the look of the people in the street below. There was a motor-car with

an old lady swathed in blue veils, and a lady’s maid on the seat

opposite, holding a King Charles’s spaniel; there was a country-woman

wheeling a perambulator full of sticks down the middle of the road;

there was a bailiff in gaiters discussing the state of the cattle

market with a dissenting minister—so she defined them.

 

She ran over this list without any fear that her companion would think

her trivial. Indeed, whether it was due to the warmth of the room or

to the good roast beef, or whether Ralph had achieved the process

which is called making up one’s mind, certainly he had given up

testing the good sense, the independent character, the intelligence

shown in her remarks. He had been building one of those piles of

thought, as ramshackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from

words let fall by gentlemen in gaiters, half from the litter in his

own mind, about duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman

occupation of Lincoln and the relations of country gentlemen with

their wives, when, from all this disconnected rambling, there suddenly

formed itself in his mind the idea that he would ask Mary to marry

him. The idea was so spontaneous that it seemed to shape itself of its

own accord before his eyes. It was then that he turned round and made

use of his old, instinctive phrase:

 

“Well, Mary—?”

 

As it presented itself to him at first, the idea was so new and

interesting that he was half inclined to address it, without more ado,

to Mary herself. His natural instinct to divide his thoughts carefully

into two different classes before he expressed them to her prevailed.

But as he watched her looking out of the window and describing the old

lady, the woman with the perambulator, the bailiff and the dissenting

minister, his eyes filled involuntarily with tears. He would have

liked to lay his head on her shoulder and sob, while she parted his

hair with her fingers and soothed him and said:

 

“There, there. Don’t cry! Tell me why you’re crying—”; and they would

clasp each other tight, and her arms would hold him like his mother’s.

He felt that he was very lonely, and that he was afraid of the other

people in the room.

 

“How damnable this all is!” he exclaimed abruptly.

 

“What are you talking about?” she replied, rather vaguely, still

looking out of the window.

 

He resented this divided attention more than, perhaps, he knew, and he

thought how Mary would soon be on her way to America.

 

“Mary,” he said, “I want to talk to you. Haven’t we nearly done? Why

don’t they take away these plates?”

 

Mary felt his agitation without looking at him; she felt convinced

that she knew what it was that he wished to say to her.

 

“They’ll come all in good time,” she said; and felt it necessary to

display her extreme calmness by lifting a salt-cellar and sweeping up

a little heap of bread-crumbs.

 

“I want to apologize,” Ralph continued, not quite knowing what he was

about to say, but feeling some curious instinct which urged him to

commit himself irrevocably, and to prevent the moment of intimacy from

passing.

 

“I think I’ve treated you very badly. That is, I’ve told you lies. Did

you guess that I was lying to you? Once in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and

again to-day on our walk. I am a liar, Mary. Did you know that? Do you

think you do know me?”

 

“I think I do,” she said.

 

At this point the waiter changed their plates.

 

“It’s true I don’t want you to go to America,” he said, looking

fixedly at the table-cloth. “In fact, my feelings towards you seem to

be utterly and damnably bad,” he said energetically, although forced

to keep his voice low.

 

“If I weren’t a selfish beast I should tell you to have nothing more

to do with me. And yet, Mary, in spite of the fact that I believe what

I’m saying, I also believe that it’s good we should know each other—

the world being what it is, you see—” and by a nod of his head he

indicated the other occupants of the room, “for, of course, in an

ideal state of things, in a decent community even, there’s no doubt

you shouldn’t have anything to do with me—seriously, that is.”

 

“You forget that I’m not an ideal character, either,” said Mary, in

the same low and very earnest tones, which, in spite of being almost

inaudible, surrounded their table with an atmosphere of concentration

which was quite perceptible to the other diners, who glanced at them

now and then with a queer mixture of kindness, amusement, and

curiosity.

 

“I’m much more selfish than I let on, and I’m worldly a little—more

than you think, anyhow. I like bossing things—perhaps that’s my

greatest fault. I’ve none of your passion for—” here she hesitated,

and glanced at him, as if to ascertain what his passion was for—“for

the truth,” she added, as if she had found what she sought

indisputably.

 

“I’ve told you I’m a liar,” Ralph repeated obstinately.

 

“Oh, in little things, I dare say,” she said impatiently. “But not in

real ones, and that’s what matters. I dare say I’m more truthful than

you are in small ways. But I could never care”—she was surprised to

find herself speaking the word, and had to force herself to speak it

out—“for any one who was a liar in that way. I love the truth a

certain amount—a considerable amount—but not in the way you love

it.” Her voice sank, became inaudible, and wavered as if she could

scarcely keep herself from tears.

 

“Good heavens!” Ralph exclaimed to himself. “She loves me! Why did I

never see it before? She’s going to cry; no, but she can’t speak.”

 

The certainty overwhelmed him so that he scarcely knew what he was

doing; the blood rushed to his cheeks, and although he had quite made

up his mind to ask her to marry him, the certainty that she loved him

seemed to change the situation so completely that he could not do it.

He did not dare to look at her. If she cried, he did not know what he

should do. It seemed to him that something of a terrible and

devastating nature had happened. The waiter changed their plates once

more.

 

In his agitation Ralph rose, turned his back upon Mary, and looked out

of the window. The people in the street seemed to him only a

dissolving and combining pattern of black particles; which, for the

moment, represented very well the involuntary procession of feelings

and thoughts which formed and dissolved in rapid succession in his own

mind. At one moment he exulted in the thought that Mary loved him; at

the next, it seemed that he was without feeling for her; her love was

repulsive to him. Now he felt urged to marry her at once; now to

disappear and never see her again. In order to control this disorderly

race of thought he forced himself to read the name on the chemist’s

shop directly opposite him; then to examine the objects in the shop

windows, and then to focus his eyes exactly upon a little group of

women looking in at the great windows of a large draper’s shop. This

discipline having given him at least a superficial control of himself,

he was about to turn and ask the waiter to bring the bill, when his

eye was caught by a tall figure walking quickly along the opposite

pavement—a tall figure, upright, dark, and commanding, much detached

from her surroundings. She held her gloves in her left hand, and the

left hand was bare. All this Ralph noticed and enumerated and

recognized before he put a name to the whole—Katharine Hilbery. She

seemed to be looking for somebody. Her eyes, in fact, scanned both

sides of the street, and for one second were raised directly to the

bow window in which Ralph stood; but she looked away again instantly

without giving any sign that she had seen him. This sudden apparition

had an extraordinary effect upon him. It was as if he had thought of

her so intensely that his mind had formed the shape of her, rather

than that he had seen her in the flesh outside in the street. And yet

he had not been thinking of her at all. The impression was so intense

that he could not dismiss it, nor even think whether he had seen her

or merely imagined her. He sat down at once, and said, briefly and

strangely, rather to himself than to Mary:

 

“That was Katharine Hilbery.”

 

“Katharine Hilbery? What do you mean?” she asked, hardly understanding

from his manner whether he had seen her or not.

 

“Katharine Hilbery,” he repeated. “But she’s gone now.”

 

“Katharine Hilbery!” Mary thought, in an instant of blinding

revelation; “I’ve always known it was Katharine Hilbery!” She knew it

all now.

 

After a moment of downcast stupor, she raised her eyes, looked

steadily at Ralph, and caught his fixed and dreamy gaze leveled at a

point far beyond their surroundings, a point that she had never

reached in all the time that she had known him. She noticed the lips

just parted, the fingers loosely clenched, the whole attitude of rapt

contemplation, which fell like a veil between them. She noticed

everything about him; if there had been other signs of his utter

alienation she would have sought them out, too, for she felt that it

was only by heaping one truth upon another that she could keep herself

sitting there, upright. The truth seemed to support her; it struck

her, even as she looked at his face, that the light of truth was

shining far away beyond him; the light of truth, she seemed to frame

the words as she rose to go, shines on a world not to be shaken by our

personal calamities.

 

Ralph handed her