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

she had to walk completely round it. She was

murmuring a word to two of the pious lady’s thanks above her breath

when Rodney joined her. In silence they set out along the cart-track

which skirted the verge of the trees.

 

To break the silence was exactly what Rodney wished to do, and yet

could not do to his own satisfaction. In company it was far easier to

approach Katharine; alone with her, the aloofness and force of her

character checked all his natural methods of attack. He believed that

she had behaved very badly to him, but each separate instance of

unkindness seemed too petty to be advanced when they were alone

together.

 

“There’s no need for us to race,” he complained at last; upon which

she immediately slackened her pace, and walked too slowly to suit him.

In desperation he said the first thing he thought of, very peevishly

and without the dignified prelude which he had intended.

 

“I’ve not enjoyed my holiday.”

 

“No?”

 

“No. I shall be glad to get back to work again.”

 

“Saturday, Sunday, Monday—there are only three days more,” she

counted.

 

“No one enjoys being made a fool of before other people,” he blurted

out, for his irritation rose as she spoke, and got the better of his

awe of her, and was inflamed by that awe.

 

“That refers to me, I suppose,” she said calmly.

 

“Every day since we’ve been here you’ve done something to make me

appear ridiculous,” he went on. “Of course, so long as it amuses you,

you’re welcome; but we have to remember that we are going to spend our

lives together. I asked you, only this morning, for example, to come

out and take a turn with me in the garden. I was waiting for you ten

minutes, and you never came. Every one saw me waiting. The stable-boys

saw me. I was so ashamed that I went in. Then, on the drive you hardly

spoke to me. Henry noticed it. Every one notices it… . You find no

difficulty in talking to Henry, though.”

 

She noted these various complaints and determined philosophically to

answer none of them, although the last stung her to considerable

irritation. She wished to find out how deep his grievance lay.

 

“None of these things seem to me to matter,” she said.

 

“Very well, then. I may as well hold my tongue,” he replied.

 

“In themselves they don’t seem to me to matter; if they hurt you, of

course they matter,” she corrected herself scrupulously. Her tone of

consideration touched him, and he walked on in silence for a space.

 

“And we might be so happy, Katharine!” he exclaimed impulsively, and

drew her arm through his. She withdrew it directly.

 

“As long as you let yourself feel like this we shall never be happy,”

she said.

 

The harshness, which Henry had noticed, was again unmistakable in her

manner. William flinched and was silent. Such severity, accompanied by

something indescribably cold and impersonal in her manner, had

constantly been meted out to him during the last few days, always in

the company of others. He had recouped himself by some ridiculous

display of vanity which, as he knew, put him still more at her mercy.

Now that he was alone with her there was no stimulus from outside to

draw his attention from his injury. By a considerable effort of

self-control he forced himself to remain silent, and to make himself

distinguish what part of his pain was due to vanity, what part to the

certainty that no woman really loving him could speak thus.

 

“What do I feel about Katharine?” he thought to himself. It was clear

that she had been a very desirable and distinguished figure, the

mistress of her little section of the world; but more than that, she

was the person of all others who seemed to him the arbitress of life,

the woman whose judgment was naturally right and steady, as his had

never been in spite of all his culture. And then he could not see her

come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the

flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things

that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in

their heart.

 

“If she were callous all the time and had only led me on to laugh at

me I couldn’t have felt that about her,” he thought. “I’m not a fool,

after all. I can’t have been utterly mistaken all these years. And

yet, when she speaks to me like that! The truth of it is,” he thought,

“that I’ve got such despicable faults that no one could help speaking

to me like that. Katharine is quite right. And yet those are not my

serious feelings, as she knows quite well. How can I change myself?

What would make her care for me?” He was terribly tempted here to

break the silence by asking Katharine in what respects he could change

himself to suit her; but he sought consolation instead by running over

the list of his gifts and acquirements, his knowledge of Greek and

Latin, his knowledge of art and literature, his skill in the

management of meters, and his ancient west-country blood. But the

feeling that underlay all these feelings and puzzled him profoundly

and kept him silent was the certainty that he loved Katharine as

sincerely as he had it in him to love any one. And yet she could speak

to him like that! In a sort of bewilderment he lost all desire to

speak, and would quite readily have taken up some different topic of

conversation if Katharine had started one. This, however, she did not

do.

 

He glanced at her, in case her expression might help him to understand

her behavior. As usual, she had quickened her pace unconsciously, and

was now walking a little in front of him; but he could gain little

information from her eyes, which looked steadily at the brown heather,

or from the lines drawn seriously upon her forehead. Thus to lose

touch with her, for he had no idea what she was thinking, was so

unpleasant to him that he began to talk about his grievances again,

without, however, much conviction in his voice.

 

“If you have no feeling for me, wouldn’t it be kinder to say so to me

in private?”

 

“Oh, William,” she burst out, as if he had interrupted some absorbing

train of thought, “how you go on about feelings! Isn’t it better not

to talk so much, not to be worrying always about small things that

don’t really matter?”

 

“That’s the question precisely,” he exclaimed. “I only want you to

tell me that they don’t matter. There are times when you seem

indifferent to everything. I’m vain, I’ve a thousand faults; but you

know they’re not everything; you know I care for you.”

 

“And if I say that I care for you, don’t you believe me?”

 

“Say it, Katharine! Say it as if you meant it! Make me feel that you

care for me!”

 

She could not force herself to speak a word. The heather was growing

dim around them, and the horizon was blotted out by white mist. To ask

her for passion or for certainty seemed like asking that damp prospect

for fierce blades of fire, or the faded sky for the intense blue vault

of June.

 

He went on now to tell her of his love for her, in words which bore,

even to her critical senses, the stamp of truth; but none of this

touched her, until, coming to a gate whose hinge was rusty, he heaved

it open with his shoulder, still talking and taking no account of his

effort. The virility of this deed impressed her; and yet, normally,

she attached no value to the power of opening gates. The strength of

muscles has nothing to do on the face of it with the strength of

affections; nevertheless, she felt a sudden concern for this power

running to waste on her account, which, combined with a desire to keep

possession of that strangely attractive masculine power, made her

rouse herself from her torpor.

 

Why should she not simply tell him the truth—which was that she had

accepted him in a misty state of mind when nothing had its right shape

or size? that it was deplorable, but that with clearer eyesight

marriage was out of the question? She did not want to marry any one.

She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some bleak northern

moor, and there study mathematics and the science of astronomy. Twenty

words would explain the whole situation to him. He had ceased to

speak; he had told her once more how he loved her and why. She

summoned her courage, fixed her eyes upon a lightning-splintered

ash-tree, and, almost as if she were reading a writing fixed to the

trunk, began:

 

“I was wrong to get engaged to you. I shall never make you happy. I

have never loved you.”

 

“Katharine!” he protested.

 

“No, never,” she repeated obstinately. “Not rightly. Don’t you see, I

didn’t know what I was doing?”

 

“You love some one else?” he cut her short.

 

“Absolutely no one.”

 

“Henry?” he demanded.

 

“Henry? I should have thought, William, even you—”

 

“There is some one,” he persisted. “There has been a change in the

last few weeks. You owe it to me to be honest, Katharine.”

 

“If I could, I would,” she replied.

 

“Why did you tell me you would marry me, then?” he demanded.

 

Why, indeed? A moment of pessimism, a sudden conviction of the

undeniable prose of life, a lapse of the illusion which sustains youth

midway between heaven and earth, a desperate attempt to reconcile

herself with facts—she could only recall a moment, as of waking from

a dream, which now seemed to her a moment of surrender. But who could

give reasons such as these for doing what she had done? She shook her

head very sadly.

 

“But you’re not a child—you’re not a woman of moods,” Rodney

persisted. “You couldn’t have accepted me if you hadn’t loved me!” he

cried.

 

A sense of her own misbehavior, which she had succeeded in keeping

from her by sharpening her consciousness of Rodney’s faults, now swept

over her and almost overwhelmed her. What were his faults in

comparison with the fact that he cared for her? What were her virtues

in comparison with the fact that she did not care for him? In a flash

the conviction that not to care is the uttermost sin of all stamped

itself upon her inmost thought; and she felt herself branded for ever.

 

He had taken her arm, and held her hand firmly in his, nor had she the

force to resist what now seemed to her his enormously superior

strength. Very well; she would submit, as her mother and her aunt and

most women, perhaps, had submitted; and yet she knew that every second

of such submission to his strength was a second of treachery to him.

 

“I did say I would marry you, but it was wrong,” she forced herself to

say, and she stiffened her arm as if to annul even the seeming

submission of that separate part of her; “for I don’t love you,

William; you’ve noticed it, every one’s noticed it; why should we go

on pretending? When I told you I loved you, I was wrong. I said what I

knew to be untrue.”

 

As none of her words seemed to her at all adequate to represent what

she felt, she repeated them, and emphasized them without realizing the

effect that