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

class="calibre1">best suited him. The Strand was too busy. There was too much risk,

also, of finding an empty cab. Without a word of explanation he turned

to the left, down one of the side streets leading to the river. On no

account must they part until something of the very greatest importance

had happened. He knew perfectly well what he wished to say, and had

arranged not only the substance, but the order in which he was to say

it. Now, however, that he was alone with her, not only did he find the

difficulty of speaking almost insurmountable, but he was aware that he

was angry with her for thus disturbing him, and casting, as it was so

easy for a person of her advantages to do, these phantoms and pitfalls

across his path. He was determined that he would question her as

severely as he would question himself; and make them both, once and

for all, either justify her dominance or renounce it. But the longer

they walked thus alone, the more he was disturbed by the sense of her

actual presence. Her skirt blew; the feathers in her hat waved;

sometimes he saw her a step or two ahead of him, or had to wait for

her to catch him up.

 

The silence was prolonged, and at length drew her attention to him.

First she was annoyed that there was no cab to free her from his

company; then she recalled vaguely something that Mary had said to

make her think ill of him; she could not remember what, but the

recollection, combined with his masterful ways—why did he walk so

fast down this side street?—made her more and more conscious of a

person of marked, though disagreeable, force by her side. She stopped

and, looking round her for a cab, sighted one in the distance. He was

thus precipitated into speech.

 

“Should you mind if we walked a little farther?” he asked. “There’s

something I want to say to you.”

 

“Very well,” she replied, guessing that his request had something to

do with Mary Datchet.

 

“It’s quieter by the river,” he said, and instantly he crossed over.

“I want to ask you merely this,” he began. But he paused so long that

she could see his head against the sky; the slope of his thin cheek

and his large, strong nose were clearly marked against it. While he

paused, words that were quite different from those he intended to use

presented themselves.

 

“I’ve made you my standard ever since I saw you. I’ve dreamt about

you; I’ve thought of nothing but you; you represent to me the only

reality in the world.”

 

His words, and the queer strained voice in which he spoke them, made

it appear as if he addressed some person who was not the woman beside

him, but some one far away.

 

“And now things have come to such a pass that, unless I can speak to

you openly, I believe I shall go mad. I think of you as the most

beautiful, the truest thing in the world,” he continued, filled with a

sense of exaltation, and feeling that he had no need now to choose his

words with pedantic accuracy, for what he wanted to say was suddenly

become plain to him.

 

“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river; to me you’re

everything that exists; the reality of everything. Life, I tell you,

would be impossible without you. And now I want—”

 

She had heard him so far with a feeling that she had dropped some

material word which made sense of the rest. She could hear no more of

this unintelligible rambling without checking him. She felt that she

was overhearing what was meant for another.

 

“I don’t understand,” she said. “You’re saying things that you don’t

mean.”

 

“I mean every word I say,” he replied, emphatically. He turned his

head towards her. She recovered the words she was searching for while

he spoke. “Ralph Denham is in love with you.” They came back to her in

Mary Datchet’s voice. Her anger blazed up in her.

 

“I saw Mary Datchet this afternoon,” she exclaimed.

 

He made a movement as if he were surprised or taken aback, but

answered in a moment:

 

“She told you that I had asked her to marry me, I suppose?”

 

“No!” Katharine exclaimed, in surprise.

 

“I did though. It was the day I saw you at Lincoln,” he continued. “I

had meant to ask her to marry me, and then I looked out of the window

and saw you. After that I didn’t want to ask any one to marry me. But

I did it; and she knew I was lying, and refused me. I thought then,

and still think, that she cares for me. I behaved very badly. I don’t

defend myself.”

 

“No,” said Katharine, “I should hope not. There’s no defence that I

can think of. If any conduct is wrong, that is.” She spoke with an

energy that was directed even more against herself than against him.

“It seems to me,” she continued, with the same energy, “that people

are bound to be honest. There’s no excuse for such behavior.” She

could now see plainly before her eyes the expression on Mary Datchet’s

face.

 

After a short pause, he said:

 

“I am not telling you that I am in love with you. I am not in love

with you.”

 

“I didn’t think that,” she replied, conscious of some bewilderment.

 

“I have not spoken a word to you that I do not mean,” he added.

 

“Tell me then what it is that you mean,” she said at length.

 

As if obeying a common instinct, they both stopped and, bending

slightly over the balustrade of the river, looked into the flowing

water.

 

“You say that we’ve got to be honest,” Ralph began. “Very well. I will

try to tell you the facts; but I warn you, you’ll think me mad. It’s a

fact, though, that since I first saw you four or five months ago I

have made you, in an utterly absurd way, I expect, my ideal. I’m

almost ashamed to tell you what lengths I’ve gone to. It’s become the

thing that matters most in my life.” He checked himself. “Without

knowing you, except that you’re beautiful, and all that, I’ve come to

believe that we’re in some sort of agreement; that we’re after

something together; that we see something… . I’ve got into the

habit of imagining you; I’m always thinking what you’d say or do; I

walk along the street talking to you; I dream of you. It’s merely a

bad habit, a schoolboy habit, day-dreaming; it’s a common experience;

half one’s friends do the same; well, those are the facts.”

 

Simultaneously, they both walked on very slowly.

 

“If you were to know me you would feel none of this,” she said. “We

don’t know each other—we’ve always been—interrupted… . Were you

going to tell me this that day my aunts came?” she asked, recollecting

the whole scene.

 

He bowed his head.

 

“The day you told me of your engagement,” he said.

 

She thought, with a start, that she was no longer engaged.

 

“I deny that I should cease to feel this if I knew you,” he went on.

“I should feel it more reasonably—that’s all. I shouldn’t talk the

kind of nonsense I’ve talked to-night… . But it wasn’t nonsense.

It was the truth,” he said doggedly. “It’s the important thing. You

can force me to talk as if this feeling for you were an hallucination,

but all our feelings are that. The best of them are half illusions.

Still,” he added, as if arguing to himself, “if it weren’t as real a

feeling as I’m capable of, I shouldn’t be changing my life on your

account.”

 

“What do you mean?” she inquired.

 

“I told you. I’m taking a cottage. I’m giving up my profession.”

 

“On my account?” she asked, in amazement.

 

“Yes, on your account,” he replied. He explained his meaning no

further.

 

“But I don’t know you or your circumstances,” she said at last, as he

remained silent.

 

“You have no opinion about me one way or the other?”

 

“Yes, I suppose I have an opinion—” she hesitated.

 

He controlled his wish to ask her to explain herself, and much to his

pleasure she went on, appearing to search her mind.

 

“I thought that you criticized me—perhaps disliked me. I thought of

you as a person who judges—”

 

“No; I’m a person who feels,” he said, in a low voice.

 

“Tell me, then, what has made you do this?” she asked, after a break.

 

He told her in an orderly way, betokening careful preparation, all

that he had meant to say at first; how he stood with regard to his

brothers and sisters; what his mother had said, and his sister Joan

had refrained from saying; exactly how many pounds stood in his name

at the bank; what prospect his brother had of earning a livelihood in

America; how much of their income went on rent, and other details

known to him by heart. She listened to all this, so that she could

have passed an examination in it by the time Waterloo Bridge was in

sight; and yet she was no more listening to it than she was counting

the paving-stones at her feet. She was feeling happier than she had

felt in her life. If Denham could have seen how visibly books of

algebraic symbols, pages all speckled with dots and dashes and twisted

bars, came before her eyes as they trod the Embankment, his secret joy

in her attention might have been dispersed. She went on, saying, “Yes,

I see… . But how would that help you? … Your brother has

passed his examination?” so sensibly, that he had constantly to keep

his brain in check; and all the time she was in fancy looking up

through a telescope at white shadow-cleft disks which were other

worlds, until she felt herself possessed of two bodies, one walking by

the river with Denham, the other concentrated to a silver globe aloft

in the fine blue space above the scum of vapors that was covering the

visible world. She looked at the sky once, and saw that no star was

keen enough to pierce the flight of watery clouds now coursing rapidly

before the west wind. She looked down hurriedly again. There was no

reason, she assured herself, for this feeling of happiness; she was

not free; she was not alone; she was still bound to earth by a million

fibres; every step took her nearer home. Nevertheless, she exulted as

she had never exulted before. The air was fresher, the lights more

distinct, the cold stone of the balustrade colder and harder, when by

chance or purpose she struck her hand against it. No feeling of

annoyance with Denham remained; he certainly did not hinder any flight

she might choose to make, whether in the direction of the sky or of

her home; but that her condition was due to him, or to anything that

he had said, she had no consciousness at all.

 

They were now within sight of the stream of cabs and omnibuses

crossing to and from the Surrey side of the river; the sound of the

traffic, the hooting of motor-horns, and the light chime of tram-bells

sounded more and more distinctly, and, with the increase of noise,

they both became silent. With a common instinct they slackened their

pace, as if to lengthen the time of semi-privacy allowed them. To

Ralph, the pleasure of these last yards of the walk with Katharine was

so great