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

can’t marry you; I don’t

want to marry you.”

 

The voice in which she stated this was so evidently the voice of one

in some extremity of anguish that Ralph had no course but to obey her.

And as soon as the tone of her voice had died out, and the surprise

faded from his mind, he found himself believing that she had spoken

the truth, for he had but little vanity, and soon her refusal seemed a

natural thing to him. He slipped through all the grades of despondency

until he reached a bottom of absolute gloom. Failure seemed to mark

the whole of his life; he had failed with Katharine, and now he had

failed with Mary. Up at once sprang the thought of Katharine, and with

it a sense of exulting freedom, but this he checked instantly. No good

had ever come to him from Katharine; his whole relationship with her

had been made up of dreams; and as he thought of the little substance

there had been in his dreams he began to lay the blame of the present

catastrophe upon his dreams.

 

“Haven’t I always been thinking of Katharine while I was with Mary? I

might have loved Mary if it hadn’t been for that idiocy of mine. She

cared for me once, I’m certain of that, but I tormented her so with my

humors that I let my chances slip, and now she won’t risk marrying me.

And this is what I’ve made of my life—nothing, nothing, nothing.”

 

The tramp of their boots upon the dry road seemed to asseverate

nothing, nothing, nothing. Mary thought that this silence was the

silence of relief; his depression she ascribed to the fact that he had

seen Katharine and parted from her, leaving her in the company of

William Rodney. She could not blame him for loving Katharine, but

that, when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him—that

seemed to her the cruellest treachery. Their old friendship and its

firm base upon indestructible qualities of character crumbled, and her

whole past seemed foolish, herself weak and credulous, and Ralph

merely the shell of an honest man. Oh, the past—so much made up of

Ralph; and now, as she saw, made up of something strange and false and

other than she had thought it. She tried to recapture a saying she had

made to help herself that morning, as Ralph paid the bill for

luncheon; but she could see him paying the bill more vividly than she

could remember the phrase. Something about truth was in it; how to see

the truth is our great chance in this world.

 

“If you don’t want to marry me,” Ralph now began again, without

abruptness, with diffidence rather, “there is no need why we should

cease to see each other, is there? Or would you rather that we should

keep apart for the present?”

 

“Keep apart? I don’t know—I must think about it.”

 

“Tell me one thing, Mary,” he resumed; “have I done anything to make

you change your mind about me?”

 

She was immensely tempted to give way to her natural trust in him,

revived by the deep and now melancholy tones of his voice, and to tell

him of her love, and of what had changed it. But although it seemed

likely that she would soon control her anger with him, the certainty

that he did not love her, confirmed by every word of his proposal,

forbade any freedom of speech. To hear him speak and to feel herself

unable to reply, or constrained in her replies, was so painful that

she longed for the time when she should be alone. A more pliant woman

would have taken this chance of an explanation, whatever risks

attached to it; but to one of Mary’s firm and resolute temperament

there was degradation in the idea of self-abandonment; let the waves

of emotion rise ever so high, she could not shut her eyes to what she

conceived to be the truth. Her silence puzzled Ralph. He searched his

memory for words or deeds that might have made her think badly of him.

In his present mood instances came but too quickly, and on top of them

this culminating proof of his baseness—that he had asked her to marry

him when his reasons for such a proposal were selfish and

half-hearted.

 

“You needn’t answer,” he said grimly. “There are reasons enough, I

know. But must they kill our friendship, Mary? Let me keep that, at

least.”

 

“Oh,” she thought to herself, with a sudden rush of anguish which

threatened disaster to her self-respect, “it has come to this—to

this—when I could have given him everything!”

 

“Yes, we can still be friends,” she said, with what firmness she could

muster.

 

“I shall want your friendship,” he said. He added, “If you find it

possible, let me see you as often as you can. The oftener the better.

I shall want your help.”

 

She promised this, and they went on to talk calmly of things that had

no reference to their feelings—a talk which, in its constraint, was

infinitely sad to both of them.

 

One more reference was made to the state of things between them late

that night, when Elizabeth had gone to her room, and the two young men

had stumbled off to bed in such a state of sleep that they hardly felt

the floor beneath their feet after a day’s shooting.

 

Mary drew her chair a little nearer to the fire, for the logs were

burning low, and at this time of night it was hardly worth while to

replenish them. Ralph was reading, but she had noticed for some time

that his eyes instead of following the print were fixed rather above

the page with an intensity of gloom that came to weigh upon her mind.

She had not weakened in her resolve not to give way, for reflection

had only made her more bitterly certain that, if she gave way, it

would be to her own wish and not to his. But she had determined that

there was no reason why he should suffer if her reticence were the

cause of his suffering. Therefore, although she found it painful, she

spoke:

 

“You asked me if I had changed my mind about you, Ralph,” she said. “I

think there’s only one thing. When you asked me to marry you, I don’t

think you meant it. That made me angry—for the moment. Before, you’d

always spoken the truth.”

 

Ralph’s book slid down upon his knee and fell upon the floor. He

rested his forehead on his hand and looked into the fire. He was

trying to recall the exact words in which he had made his proposal to

Mary.

 

“I never said I loved you,” he said at last.

 

She winced; but she respected him for saying what he did, for this,

after all, was a fragment of the truth which she had vowed to live by.

 

“And to me marriage without love doesn’t seem worth while,” she said.

 

“Well, Mary, I’m not going to press you,” he said. “I see you don’t

want to marry me. But love—don’t we all talk a great deal of nonsense

about it? What does one mean? I believe I care for you more genuinely

than nine men out of ten care for the women they’re in love with. It’s

only a story one makes up in one’s mind about another person, and one

knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows; why, one’s

always taking care not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not to

see them too often, or to be alone with them for too long together.

It’s a pleasant illusion, but if you’re thinking of the risks of

marriage, it seems to me that the risk of marrying a person you’re in

love with is something colossal.”

 

“I don’t believe a word of that, and what’s more you don’t, either,”

she replied with anger. “However, we don’t agree; I only wanted you to

understand.” She shifted her position, as if she were about to go. An

instinctive desire to prevent her from leaving the room made Ralph

rise at this point and begin pacing up and down the nearly empty

kitchen, checking his desire, each time he reached the door, to open

it and step out into the garden. A moralist might have said that at

this point his mind should have been full of self-reproach for the

suffering he had caused. On the contrary, he was extremely angry, with

the confused impotent anger of one who finds himself unreasonably but

efficiently frustrated. He was trapped by the illogicality of human

life. The obstacles in the way of his desire seemed to him purely

artificial, and yet he could see no way of removing them. Mary’s

words, the tone of her voice even, angered him, for she would not help

him. She was part of the insanely jumbled muddle of a world which

impedes the sensible life. He would have liked to slam the door or

break the hind legs of a chair, for the obstacles had taken some such

curiously substantial shape in his mind.

 

“I doubt that one human being ever understands another,” he said,

stopping in his march and confronting Mary at a distance of a few

feet.

 

“Such damned liars as we all are, how can we? But we can try. If you

don’t want to marry me, don’t; but the position you take up about

love, and not seeing each other—isn’t that mere sentimentality? You

think I’ve behaved very badly,” he continued, as she did not speak.

“Of course I behave badly; but you can’t judge people by what they do.

You can’t go through life measuring right and wrong with a foot-rule.

That’s what you’re always doing, Mary; that’s what you’re doing now.”

 

She saw herself in the Suffrage Office, delivering judgment, meting

out right and wrong, and there seemed to her to be some justice in the

charge, although it did not affect her main position.

 

“I’m not angry with you,” she said slowly. “I will go on seeing you,

as I said I would.”

 

It was true that she had promised that much already, and it was

difficult for him to say what more it was that he wanted—some

intimacy, some help against the ghost of Katharine, perhaps, something

that he knew he had no right to ask; and yet, as he sank into his

chair and looked once more at the dying fire it seemed to him that he

had been defeated, not so much by Mary as by life itself. He felt

himself thrown back to the beginning of life again, where everything

has yet to be won; but in extreme youth one has an ignorant hope. He

was no longer certain that he would triumph.