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

had suspected, or existed no longer. She looked at him

attentively as if this discovery of hers must show traces in his face.

Never had she seen so much to respect in his appearance, so much that

attracted her by its sensitiveness and intelligence, although she saw

these qualities as if they were those one responds to, dumbly, in the

face of a stranger. The head bent over the paper, thoughtful as usual,

had now a composure which seemed somehow to place it at a distance,

like a face seen talking to some one else behind glass.

 

He wrote on, without raising his eyes. She would have spoken, but

could not bring herself to ask him for signs of affection which she

had no right to claim. The conviction that he was thus strange to her

filled her with despondency, and illustrated quite beyond doubt the

infinite loneliness of human beings. She had never felt the truth of

this so strongly before. She looked away into the fire; it seemed to

her that even physically they were now scarcely within speaking

distance; and spiritually there was certainly no human being with whom

she could claim comradeship; no dream that satisfied her as she was

used to be satisfied; nothing remained in whose reality she could

believe, save those abstract ideas—figures, laws, stars, facts, which

she could hardly hold to for lack of knowledge and a kind of shame.

 

When Rodney owned to himself the folly of this prolonged silence, and

the meanness of such devices, and looked up ready to seek some excuse

for a good laugh, or opening for a confession, he was disconcerted by

what he saw. Katharine seemed equally oblivious of what was bad or of

what was good in him. Her expression suggested concentration upon

something entirely remote from her surroundings. The carelessness of

her attitude seemed to him rather masculine than feminine. His impulse

to break up the constraint was chilled, and once more the exasperating

sense of his own impotency returned to him. He could not help

contrasting Katharine with his vision of the engaging, whimsical

Cassandra; Katharine undemonstrative, inconsiderate, silent, and yet

so notable that he could never do without her good opinion.

 

She veered round upon him a moment later, as if, when her train of

thought was ended, she became aware of his presence.

 

“Have you finished your letter?” she asked. He thought he heard faint

amusement in her tone, but not a trace of jealousy.

 

“No, I’m not going to write any more to-night,” he said. “I’m not in

the mood for it for some reason. I can’t say what I want to say.”

 

“Cassandra won’t know if it’s well written or badly written,”

Katharine remarked.

 

“I’m not so sure about that. I should say she has a good deal of

literary feeling.”

 

“Perhaps,” said Katharine indifferently. “You’ve been neglecting my

education lately, by the way. I wish you’d read something. Let me

choose a book.” So speaking, she went across to his bookshelves and

began looking in a desultory way among his books. Anything, she

thought, was better than bickering or the strange silence which drove

home to her the distance between them. As she pulled one book forward

and then another she thought ironically of her own certainty not an

hour ago; how it had vanished in a moment, how she was merely marking

time as best she could, not knowing in the least where they stood,

what they felt, or whether William loved her or not. More and more the

condition of Mary’s mind seemed to her wonderful and enviable—if,

indeed, it could be quite as she figured it—if, indeed, simplicity

existed for any one of the daughters of women.

 

“Swift,” she said, at last, taking out a volume at haphazard to settle

this question at least. “Let us have some Swift.”

 

Rodney took the book, held it in front of him, inserted one finger

between the pages, but said nothing. His face wore a queer expression

of deliberation, as if he were weighing one thing with another, and

would not say anything until his mind were made up.

 

Katharine, taking her chair beside him, noted his silence and looked

at him with sudden apprehension. What she hoped or feared, she could

not have said; a most irrational and indefensible desire for some

assurance of his affection was, perhaps, uppermost in her mind.

Peevishness, complaints, exacting cross-examination she was used to,

but this attitude of composed quiet, which seemed to come from the

consciousness of power within, puzzled her. She did not know what was

going to happen next.

 

At last William spoke.

 

“I think it’s a little odd, don’t you?” he said, in a voice of

detached reflection. “Most people, I mean, would be seriously upset if

their marriage was put off for six months or so. But we aren’t; now

how do you account for that?”

 

She looked at him and observed his judicial attitude as of one holding

far aloof from emotion.

 

“I attribute it,” he went on, without waiting for her to answer, “to

the fact that neither of us is in the least romantic about the other.

That may be partly, no doubt, because we’ve known each other so long;

but I’m inclined to think there’s more in it than that. There’s

something temperamental. I think you’re a trifle cold, and I suspect

I’m a trifle self-absorbed. If that were so it goes a long way to

explaining our odd lack of illusion about each other. I’m not saying

that the most satisfactory marriages aren’t founded upon this sort of

understanding. But certainly it struck me as odd this morning, when

Wilson told me, how little upset I felt. By the way, you’re sure we

haven’t committed ourselves to that house?”

 

“I’ve kept the letters, and I’ll go through them tomorrow; but I’m

certain we’re on the safe side.”

 

“Thanks. As to the psychological problem,” he continued, as if the

question interested him in a detached way, “there’s no doubt, I think,

that either of us is capable of feeling what, for reasons of

simplicity, I call romance for a third person—at least, I’ve little

doubt in my own case.”

 

It was, perhaps, the first time in all her knowledge of him that

Katharine had known William enter thus deliberately and without sign

of emotion upon a statement of his own feelings. He was wont to

discourage such intimate discussions by a little laugh or turn of the

conversation, as much as to say that men, or men of the world, find

such topics a little silly, or in doubtful taste. His obvious wish to

explain something puzzled her, interested her, and neutralized the

wound to her vanity. For some reason, too, she felt more at ease with

him than usual; or her ease was more the ease of equality—she could

not stop to think of that at the moment though. His remarks interested

her too much for the light that they threw upon certain problems of

her own.

 

“What is this romance?” she mused.

 

“Ah, that’s the question. I’ve never come across a definition that

satisfied me, though there are some very good ones”—he glanced in the

direction of his books.

 

“It’s not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it’s

ignorance,” she hazarded.

 

“Some authorities say it’s a question of distance—romance in

literature, that is—”

 

“Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be—”

she hesitated.

 

“Have you no personal experience of it?” he asked, letting his eyes

rest upon her swiftly for a moment.

 

“I believe it’s influenced me enormously,” she said, in the tone of

one absorbed by the possibilities of some view just presented to them;

“but in my life there’s so little scope for it,” she added. She

reviewed her daily task, the perpetual demands upon her for good

sense, self-control, and accuracy in a house containing a romantic

mother. Ah, but her romance wasn’t THAT romance. It was a desire, an

echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in

music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by

desires so incoherent, so incommunicable.

 

“But isn’t it curious,” William resumed, “that you should neither feel

it for me, nor I for you?”

 

Katharine agreed that it was curious—very; but even more curious to

her was the fact that she was discussing the question with William. It

revealed possibilities which opened a prospect of a new relationship

altogether. Somehow it seemed to her that he was helping her to

understand what she had never understood; and in her gratitude she was

conscious of a most sisterly desire to help him, too—sisterly, save

for one pang, not quite to be subdued, that for him she was without

romance.

 

“I think you might be very happy with some one you loved in that way,”

she said.

 

“You assume that romance survives a closer knowledge of the person one

loves?”

 

He asked the question formally, to protect himself from the sort of

personality which he dreaded. The whole situation needed the most

careful management lest it should degenerate into some degrading and

disturbing exhibition such as the scene, which he could never think of

without shame, upon the heath among the dead leaves. And yet each

sentence brought him relief. He was coming to understand something or

other about his own desires hitherto undefined by him, the source of

his difficulty with Katharine. The wish to hurt her, which had urged

him to begin, had completely left him, and he felt that it was only

Katharine now who could help him to be sure. He must take his time.

There were so many things that he could not say without the greatest

difficulty—that name, for example, Cassandra. Nor could he move his

eyes from a certain spot, a fiery glen surrounded by high mountains,

in the heart of the coals. He waited in suspense for Katharine to

continue. She had said that he might be very happy with some one he

loved in that way.

 

“I don’t see why it shouldn’t last with you,” she resumed. “I can

imagine a certain sort of person—” she paused; she was aware that he

was listening with the greatest intentness, and that his formality was

merely the cover for an extreme anxiety of some sort. There was some

person then—some woman—who could it be? Cassandra? Ah, possibly—

 

“A person,” she added, speaking in the most matter-of-fact tone she

could command, “like Cassandra Otway, for instance. Cassandra is the

most interesting of the Otways—with the exception of Henry. Even so,

I like Cassandra better. She has more than mere cleverness. She is a

character—a person by herself.”

 

“Those dreadful insects!” burst from William, with a nervous laugh,

and a little spasm went through him as Katharine noticed. It WAS

Cassandra then. Automatically and dully she replied, “You could insist

that she confined herself to—to—something else… . But she cares

for music; I believe she writes poetry; and there can be no doubt that

she has a peculiar charm—”

 

She ceased, as if defining to herself this peculiar charm. After a

moment’s silence William jerked out:

 

“I thought her affectionate?”

 

“Extremely affectionate. She worships Henry. When you think what a

house that is—Uncle Francis always in one mood or another—”

 

“Dear, dear, dear,” William muttered.

 

“And you have so much in common.”

 

“My dear Katharine!” William exclaimed, flinging himself back in his

chair, and uprooting his eyes from the spot in the fire. “I really

don’t know what we’re talking about… . I assure you… .”

 

He was covered with an extreme confusion.

 

He withdrew the finger that