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

class="calibre1">“Well, but you’ve got everything that any one can want.”

 

Katharine remained silent. She gazed into the fire quietly, and

without a trace of self-consciousness. The hostility which she had

divined in Mary’s tone had completely disappeared, and she forgot that

she had been upon the point of going.

 

“Well, I suppose I have,” she said at length. “And yet I sometimes

think—” She paused; she did not know how to express what she meant.

 

“It came over me in the Tube the other day,” she resumed, with a

smile; “what is it that makes these people go one way rather than the

other? It’s not love; it’s not reason; I think it must be some idea.

Perhaps, Mary, our affections are the shadow of an idea. Perhaps there

isn’t any such thing as affection in itself… .” She spoke

half-mockingly, asking her question, which she scarcely troubled to

frame, not of Mary, or of any one in particular.

 

But the words seemed to Mary Datchet shallow, supercilious,

cold-blooded, and cynical all in one. All her natural instincts were

roused in revolt against them.

 

“I’m the opposite way of thinking, you see,” she said.

 

“Yes; I know you are,” Katharine replied, looking at her as if now she

were about, perhaps, to explain something very important.

 

Mary could not help feeling the simplicity and good faith that lay

behind Katharine’s words.

 

“I think affection is the only reality,” she said.

 

“Yes,” said Katharine, almost sadly. She understood that Mary was

thinking of Ralph, and she felt it impossible to press her to reveal

more of this exalted condition; she could only respect the fact that,

in some few cases, life arranged itself thus satisfactorily and pass

on. She rose to her feet accordingly. But Mary exclaimed, with

unmistakable earnestness, that she must not go; that they met so

seldom; that she wanted to talk to her so much… . Katharine was

surprised at the earnestness with which she spoke. It seemed to her

that there could be no indiscretion in mentioning Ralph by name.

 

Seating herself “for ten minutes,” she said: “By the way, Mr. Denham

told me he was going to give up the Bar and live in the country. Has

he gone? He was beginning to tell me about it, when we were

interrupted.”

 

“He thinks of it,” said Mary briefly. The color at once came to her

face.

 

“It would be a very good plan,” said Katharine in her decided way.

 

“You think so?”

 

“Yes, because he would do something worth while; he would write a

book. My father always says that he’s the most remarkable of the young

men who write for him.”

 

Mary bent low over the fire and stirred the coal between the bars with

a poker. Katharine’s mention of Ralph had roused within her an almost

irresistible desire to explain to her the true state of the case

between herself and Ralph. She knew, from the tone of her voice, that

in speaking of Ralph she had no desire to probe Mary’s secrets, or to

insinuate any of her own. Moreover, she liked Katharine; she trusted

her; she felt a respect for her. The first step of confidence was

comparatively simple; but a further confidence had revealed itself, as

Katharine spoke, which was not so simple, and yet it impressed itself

upon her as a necessity; she must tell Katharine what it was clear

that she had no conception of—she must tell Katharine that Ralph was

in love with her.

 

“I don’t know what he means to do,” she said hurriedly, seeking time

against the pressure of her own conviction. “I’ve not seen him since

Christmas.”

 

Katharine reflected that this was odd; perhaps, after all, she had

misunderstood the position. She was in the habit of assuming, however,

that she was rather unobservant of the finer shades of feeling, and

she noted her present failure as another proof that she was a

practical, abstract-minded person, better fitted to deal with figures

than with the feelings of men and women. Anyhow, William Rodney would

say so.

 

“And now—” she said.

 

“Oh, please stay!” Mary exclaimed, putting out her hand to stop her.

Directly Katharine moved she felt, inarticulately and violently, that

she could not bear to let her go. If Katharine went, her only chance

of speaking was lost; her only chance of saying something tremendously

important was lost. Half a dozen words were sufficient to wake

Katharine’s attention, and put flight and further silence beyond her

power. But although the words came to her lips, her throat closed upon

them and drove them back. After all, she considered, why should she

speak? Because it is right, her instinct told her; right to expose

oneself without reservations to other human beings. She flinched from

the thought. It asked too much of one already stripped bare. Something

she must keep of her own. But if she did keep something of her own?

Immediately she figured an immured life, continuing for an immense

period, the same feelings living for ever, neither dwindling nor

changing within the ring of a thick stone wall. The imagination of

this loneliness frightened her, and yet to speak—to lose her

loneliness, for it had already become dear to her, was beyond her

power.

 

Her hand went down to the hem of Katharine’s skirt, and, fingering a

line of fur, she bent her head as if to examine it.

 

“I like this fur,” she said, “I like your clothes. And you mustn’t

think that I’m going to marry Ralph,” she continued, in the same tone,

“because he doesn’t care for me at all. He cares for some one else.”

Her head remained bent, and her hand still rested upon the skirt.

 

“It’s a shabby old dress,” said Katharine, and the only sign that

Mary’s words had reached her was that she spoke with a little jerk.

 

“You don’t mind my telling you that?” said Mary, raising herself.

 

“No, no,” said Katharine; “but you’re mistaken, aren’t you?” She was,

in truth, horribly uncomfortable, dismayed, indeed, disillusioned. She

disliked the turn things had taken quite intensely. The indecency of

it afflicted her. The suffering implied by the tone appalled her. She

looked at Mary furtively, with eyes that were full of apprehension.

But if she had hoped to find that these words had been spoken without

understanding of their meaning, she was at once disappointed. Mary lay

back in her chair, frowning slightly, and looking, Katharine thought,

as if she had lived fifteen years or so in the space of a few minutes.

 

“There are some things, don’t you think, that one can’t be mistaken

about?” Mary said, quietly and almost coldly. “That is what puzzles me

about this question of being in love. I’ve always prided myself upon

being reasonable,” she added. “I didn’t think I could have felt

this—I mean if the other person didn’t. I was foolish. I let myself

pretend.” Here she paused. “For, you see, Katharine,” she proceeded,

rousing herself and speaking with greater energy, “I AM in love.

There’s no doubt about that… . I’m tremendously in love … with

Ralph.” The little forward shake of her head, which shook a lock of

hair, together with her brighter color, gave her an appearance at once

proud and defiant.

 

Katharine thought to herself, “That’s how it feels then.” She

hesitated, with a feeling that it was not for her to speak; and then

said, in a low tone, “You’ve got that.”

 

“Yes,” said Mary; “I’ve got that. One wouldn’t NOT be in love… .

But I didn’t mean to talk about that; I only wanted you to know.

There’s another thing I want to tell you …” She paused. “I haven’t

any authority from Ralph to say it; but I’m sure of this—he’s in love

with you.”

 

Katharine looked at her again, as if her first glance must have been

deluded, for, surely, there must be some outward sign that Mary was

talking in an excited, or bewildered, or fantastic manner. No; she

still frowned, as if she sought her way through the clauses of a

difficult argument, but she still looked more like one who reasons

than one who feels.

 

“That proves that you’re mistaken—utterly mistaken,” said Katharine,

speaking reasonably, too. She had no need to verify the mistake by a

glance at her own recollections, when the fact was so clearly stamped

upon her mind that if Ralph had any feeling towards her it was one of

critical hostility. She did not give the matter another thought, and

Mary, now that she had stated the fact, did not seek to prove it, but

tried to explain to herself, rather than to Katharine, her motives in

making the statement.

 

She had nerved herself to do what some large and imperious instinct

demanded her doing; she had been swept on the breast of a wave beyond

her reckoning.

 

“I’ve told you,” she said, “because I want you to help me. I don’t

want to be jealous of you. And I am—I’m fearfully jealous. The only

way, I thought, was to tell you.”

 

She hesitated, and groped in her endeavor to make her feelings clear

to herself.

 

“If I tell you, then we can talk; and when I’m jealous, I can tell

you. And if I’m tempted to do something frightfully mean, I can tell

you; you could make me tell you. I find talking so difficult; but

loneliness frightens me. I should shut it up in my mind. Yes, that’s

what I’m afraid of. Going about with something in my mind all my life

that never changes. I find it so difficult to change. When I think a

thing’s wrong I never stop thinking it wrong, and Ralph was quite

right, I see, when he said that there’s no such thing as right and

wrong; no such thing, I mean, as judging people—”

 

“Ralph Denham said that?” said Katharine, with considerable

indignation. In order to have produced such suffering in Mary, it

seemed to her that he must have behaved with extreme callousness. It

seemed to her that he had discarded the friendship, when it suited his

convenience to do so, with some falsely philosophical theory which

made his conduct all the worse. She was going on to express herself

thus, had not Mary at once interrupted her.

 

“No, no,” she said; “you don’t understand. If there’s any fault it’s

mine entirely; after all, if one chooses to run risks—”

 

Her voice faltered into silence. It was borne in upon her how

completely in running her risk she had lost her prize, lost it so

entirely that she had no longer the right, in talking of Ralph, to

presume that her knowledge of him supplanted all other knowledge. She

no longer completely possessed her love, since his share in it was

doubtful; and now, to make things yet more bitter, her clear vision of

the way to face life was rendered tremulous and uncertain, because

another was witness of it. Feeling her desire for the old unshared

intimacy too great to be borne without tears, she rose, walked to the

farther end of the room, held the curtains apart, and stood there

mastered for a moment. The grief itself was not ignoble; the sting of

it lay in the fact that she had been led to this act of treachery

against herself. Trapped, cheated, robbed, first by Ralph and then by

Katharine, she seemed all dissolved in humiliation, and bereft of

anything she could call her own. Tears of weakness welled up and

rolled down her cheeks. But tears, at least, she could control, and

would this instant, and then, turning, she would face Katharine, and

retrieve what could be retrieved of the