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

what he said had its force, she mused;

partly because he seemed unconscious of his own lapse in the case of

Mary Datchet, and thus baffled her insight; partly because he always

spoke with force, for what reason she did not yet feel certain.

 

“Absolute sincerity is rather difficult, don’t you think?” she

inquired, with a touch of irony.

 

“There are people one credits even with that,” he replied a little

vaguely. He was ashamed of his savage wish to hurt her, and yet it was

not for the sake of hurting her, who was beyond his shafts, but in

order to mortify his own incredibly reckless impulse of abandonment to

the spirit which seemed, at moments, about to rush him to the

uttermost ends of the earth. She affected him beyond the scope of his

wildest dreams. He seemed to see that beneath the quiet surface of her

manner, which was almost pathetically at hand and within reach for all

the trivial demands of daily life, there was a spirit which she

reserved or repressed for some reason either of loneliness or—could

it be possible—of love. Was it given to Rodney to see her unmasked,

unrestrained, unconscious of her duties? a creature of uncalculating

passion and instinctive freedom? No; he refused to believe it. It was

in her loneliness that Katharine was unreserved. “I went back to my

room by myself and I did—what I liked.” She had said that to him, and

in saying it had given him a glimpse of possibilities, even of

confidences, as if he might be the one to share her loneliness, the

mere hint of which made his heart beat faster and his brain spin. He

checked himself as brutally as he could. He saw her redden, and in the

irony of her reply he heard her resentment.

 

He began slipping his smooth, silver watch in his pocket, in the hope

that somehow he might help himself back to that calm and fatalistic

mood which had been his when he looked at its face upon the bank of

the lake, for that mood must, at whatever cost, be the mood of his

intercourse with Katharine. He had spoken of gratitude and

acquiescence in the letter which he had never sent, and now all the

force of his character must make good those vows in her presence.

 

She, thus challenged, tried meanwhile to define her points. She wished

to make Denham understand.

 

“Don’t you see that if you have no relations with people it’s easier

to be honest with them?” she inquired. “That is what I meant. One

needn’t cajole them; one’s under no obligation to them. Surely you

must have found with your own family that it’s impossible to discuss

what matters to you most because you’re all herded together, because

you’re in a conspiracy, because the position is false—” Her reasoning

suspended itself a little inconclusively, for the subject was complex,

and she found herself in ignorance whether Denham had a family or not.

Denham was agreed with her as to the destructiveness of the family

system, but he did not wish to discuss the problem at that moment.

 

He turned to a problem which was of greater interest to him.

 

“I’m convinced,” he said, “that there are cases in which perfect

sincerity is possible—cases where there’s no relationship, though the

people live together, if you like, where each is free, where there’s

no obligation upon either side.”

 

“For a time perhaps,” she agreed, a little despondently. “But

obligations always grow up. There are feelings to be considered.

People aren’t simple, and though they may mean to be reasonable, they

end”—in the condition in which she found herself, she meant, but

added lamely—“in a muddle.”

 

“Because,” Denham instantly intervened, “they don’t make themselves

understood at the beginning. I could undertake, at this instant,” he

continued, with a reasonable intonation which did much credit to his

self-control, “to lay down terms for a friendship which should be

perfectly sincere and perfectly straightforward.”

 

She was curious to hear them, but, besides feeling that the topic

concealed dangers better known to her than to him, she was reminded by

his tone of his curious abstract declaration upon the Embankment.

Anything that hinted at love for the moment alarmed her; it was as

much an infliction to her as the rubbing of a skinless wound.

 

But he went on, without waiting for her invitation.

 

“In the first place, such a friendship must be unemotional,” he laid

it down emphatically. “At least, on both sides it must be understood

that if either chooses to fall in love, he or she does so entirely at

his own risk. Neither is under any obligation to the other. They must

be at liberty to break or to alter at any moment. They must be able to

say whatever they wish to say. All this must be understood.”

 

“And they gain something worth having?” she asked.

 

“It’s a risk—of course it’s a risk,” he replied. The word

 

was one that she had been using frequently in her arguments with

herself of late.

 

“But it’s the only way—if you think friendship worth having,” he

concluded.

 

“Perhaps under those conditions it might be,” she said reflectively.

 

“Well,” he said, “those are the terms of the friendship I wish to

offer you.” She had known that this was coming, but, none the less,

felt a little shock, half of pleasure, half of reluctance, when she

heard the formal statement.

 

“I should like it,” she began, “but—”

 

“Would Rodney mind?”

 

“Oh no,” she replied quickly.

 

“No, no, it isn’t that,” she went on, and again came to an end. She

had been touched by the unreserved and yet ceremonious way in which he

had made what he called his offer of terms, but if he was generous it

was the more necessary for her to be cautious. They would find

themselves in difficulties, she speculated; but, at this point, which

was not very far, after all, upon the road of caution, her foresight

deserted her. She sought for some definite catastrophe into which they

must inevitably plunge. But she could think of none. It seemed to her

that these catastrophes were fictitious; life went on and on—life was

different altogether from what people said. And not only was she at an

end of her stock of caution, but it seemed suddenly altogether

superfluous. Surely if any one could take care of himself, Ralph

Denham could; he had told her that he did not love her. And, further,

she meditated, walking on beneath the beech-trees and swinging her

umbrella, as in her thought she was accustomed to complete freedom,

why should she perpetually apply so different a standard to her

behavior in practice? Why, she reflected, should there be this

perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the

life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice

on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the

other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night? Was it not

possible to step from one to the other, erect, and without essential

change? Was this not the chance he offered her—the rare and wonderful

chance of friendship? At any rate, she told Denham, with a sigh in

which he heard both impatience and relief, that she agreed; she

thought him right; she would accept his terms of friendship.

 

“Now,” she said, “let’s go and have tea.”

 

In fact, these principles having been laid down, a great lightness of

spirit showed itself in both of them. They were both convinced that

something of profound importance had been settled, and could now give

their attention to their tea and the Gardens. They wandered in and out

of glass-houses, saw lilies swimming in tanks, breathed in the scent

of thousands of carnations, and compared their respective tastes in

the matter of trees and lakes. While talking exclusively of what they

saw, so that any one might have overheard them, they felt that the

compact between them was made firmer and deeper by the number of

people who passed them and suspected nothing of the kind. The question

of Ralph’s cottage and future was not mentioned again.