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

He looked oddly round

the room as if he wished to make sure that the scene in which he

played a part had some real existence. “Quite mad,” he repeated. “Even

Katharine—” His gaze rested upon her finally, as if she, too, had

changed from his old view of her. He smiled at her as if to encourage

her. “Katharine shall explain,” he said, and giving a little nod to

Denham, he left the room.

 

Katharine sat down at once, and leant her chin upon her hands. So long

as Rodney was in the room the proceedings of the evening had seemed to

be in his charge, and had been marked by a certain unreality. Now that

she was alone with Ralph she felt at once that a constraint had been

taken from them both. She felt that they were alone at the bottom of

the house, which rose, story upon story, upon the top of them.

 

“Why were you waiting out there?” she asked.

 

“For the chance of seeing you,” he replied.

 

“You would have waited all night if it hadn’t been for William. It’s

windy too. You must have been cold. What could you see? Nothing but

our windows.”

 

“It was worth it. I heard you call me.”

 

“I called you?” She had called unconsciously.

 

“They were engaged this morning,” she told him, after a pause.

 

“You’re glad?” he asked.

 

She bent her head. “Yes, yes,” she sighed. “But you don’t know how

good he is—what he’s done for me—” Ralph made a sound of

understanding. “You waited there last night too?” she asked.

 

“Yes. I can wait,” Denham replied.

 

The words seemed to fill the room with an emotion which Katharine

connected with the sound of distant wheels, the footsteps hurrying

along the pavement, the cries of sirens hooting down the river, the

darkness and the wind. She saw the upright figure standing beneath the

lamp-post.

 

“Waiting in the dark,” she said, glancing at the window, as if he saw

what she was seeing. “Ah, but it’s different—” She broke off. “I’m

not the person you think me. Until you realize that it’s impossible—”

 

Placing her elbows on the table, she slid her ruby ring up and down

her finger abstractedly. She frowned at the rows of leather-bound

books opposite her. Ralph looked keenly at her. Very pale, but sternly

concentrated upon her meaning, beautiful but so little aware of

herself as to seem remote from him also, there was something distant

and abstract about her which exalted him and chilled him at the same

time.

 

“No, you’re right,” he said. “I don’t know you. I’ve never known you.”

 

“Yet perhaps you know me better than any one else,” she mused.

 

Some detached instinct made her aware that she was gazing at a book

which belonged by rights to some other part of the house. She walked

over to the shelf, took it down, and returned to her seat, placing the

book on the table between them. Ralph opened it and looked at the

portrait of a man with a voluminous white shirt-collar, which formed

the frontispiece.

 

“I say I do know you, Katharine,” he affirmed, shutting the book.

“It’s only for moments that I go mad.”

 

“Do you call two whole nights a moment?”

 

“I swear to you that now, at this instant, I see you precisely as you

are. No one has ever known you as I know you… . Could you have

taken down that book just now if I hadn’t known you?”

 

“That’s true,” she replied, “but you can’t think how I’m divided—how

I’m at my ease with you, and how I’m bewildered. The unreality—the

dark—the waiting outside in the wind—yes, when you look at me, not

seeing me, and I don’t see you either… . But I do see,” she went

on quickly, changing her position and frowning again, “heaps of

things, only not you.”

 

“Tell me what you see,” he urged.

 

But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single

shape colored upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an

atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind

scouring the flanks of northern hills and flashing light upon

cornfields and pools.

 

“Impossible,” she sighed, laughing at the ridiculous notion of putting

any part of this into words.

 

“Try, Katharine,” Ralph urged her.

 

“But I can’t—I’m talking a sort of nonsense—the sort of nonsense one

talks to oneself.” She was dismayed by the expression of longing and

despair upon his face. “I was thinking about a mountain in the North

of England,” she attempted. “It’s too silly—I won’t go on.”

 

“We were there together?” he pressed her.

 

“No. I was alone.” She seemed to be disappointing the desire of a

child. His face fell.

 

“You’re always alone there?”

 

“I can’t explain.” She could not explain that she was essentially

alone there. “It’s not a mountain in the North of England. It’s an

imagination—a story one tells oneself. You have yours too?”

 

“You’re with me in mine. You’re the thing I make up, you see.”

 

“Oh, I see,” she sighed. “That’s why it’s so impossible.” She turned

upon him almost fiercely. “You must try to stop it,” she said.

 

“I won’t,” he replied roughly, “because I—” He stopped. He realized

that the moment had come to impart that news of the utmost importance

which he had tried to impart to Mary Datchet, to Rodney upon the

Embankment, to the drunken tramp upon the seat. How should he offer it

to Katharine? He looked quickly at her. He saw that she was only half

attentive to him; only a section of her was exposed to him. The sight

roused in him such desperation that he had much ado to control his

impulse to rise and leave the house. Her hand lay loosely curled upon

the table. He seized it and grasped it firmly as if to make sure of

her existence and of his own. “Because I love you, Katharine,” he

said.

 

Some roundness or warmth essential to that statement was absent from

his voice, and she had merely to shake her head very slightly for him

to drop her hand and turn away in shame at his own impotence. He

thought that she had detected his wish to leave her. She had discerned

the break in his resolution, the blankness in the heart of his vision.

It was true that he had been happier out in the street, thinking of

her, than now that he was in the same room with her. He looked at her

with a guilty expression on his face. But her look expressed neither

disappointment nor reproach. Her pose was easy, and she seemed to give

effect to a mood of quiet speculation by the spinning of her ruby ring

upon the polished table. Denham forgot his despair in wondering what

thoughts now occupied her.

 

“You don’t believe me?” he said. His tone was humble, and made her

smile at him.

 

“As far as I understand you—but what should you advise me to do with

this ring?” she asked, holding it out.

 

“I should advise you to let me keep it for you,” he replied, in the

same tone of half-humorous gravity.

 

“After what you’ve said, I can hardly trust you—unless you’ll unsay

what you’ve said?”

 

“Very well. I’m not in love with you.”

 

“But I think you ARE in love with me… . As I am with you,” she

added casually enough. “At least,” she said slipping her ring back to

its old position, “what other word describes the state we’re in?”

 

She looked at him gravely and inquiringly, as if in search of help.

 

“It’s when I’m with you that I doubt it, not when I’m alone,” he

stated.

 

“So I thought,” she replied.

 

In order to explain to her his state of mind, Ralph recounted his

experience with the photograph, the letter, and the flower picked at

Kew. She listened very seriously.

 

“And then you went raving about the streets,” she mused. “Well, it’s

bad enough. But my state is worse than yours, because it hasn’t

anything to do with facts. It’s an hallucination, pure and simple—an

intoxication… . One can be in love with pure reason?” she

hazarded. “Because if you’re in love with a vision, I believe that

that’s what I’m in love with.”

 

This conclusion seemed fantastic and profoundly unsatisfactory to

Ralph, but after the astonishing variations of his own sentiments

during the past half-hour he could not accuse her of fanciful

exaggeration.

 

“Rodney seems to know his own mind well enough,” he said almost

bitterly. The music, which had ceased, had now begun again, and the

melody of Mozart seemed to express the easy and exquisite love of the

two upstairs.

 

“Cassandra never doubted for a moment. But we—” she glanced at him as

if to ascertain his position, “we see each other only now and then—”

 

“Like lights in a storm—”

 

“In the midst of a hurricane,” she concluded, as the window shook

beneath the pressure of the wind. They listened to the sound in

silence.

 

Here the door opened with considerable hesitation, and Mrs. Hilbery’s

head appeared, at first with an air of caution, but having made sure

that she had admitted herself to the dining-room and not to some more

unusual region, she came completely inside and seemed in no way taken

aback by the sight she saw. She seemed, as usual, bound on some quest

of her own which was interrupted pleasantly but strangely by running

into one of those queer, unnecessary ceremonies that other people

thought fit to indulge in.

 

“Please don’t let me interrupt you, Mr.—” she was at a loss, as

usual, for the name, and Katharine thought that she did not recognize

him. “I hope you’ve found something nice to read,” she added, pointing

to the book upon the table. “Byron—ah, Byron. I’ve known people who

knew Lord Byron,” she said.

 

Katharine, who had risen in some confusion, could not help smiling at

the thought that her mother found it perfectly natural and desirable

that her daughter should be reading Byron in the dining-room late at

night alone with a strange young man. She blessed a disposition that

was so convenient, and felt tenderly towards her mother and her

mother’s eccentricities. But Ralph observed that although Mrs. Hilbery

held the book so close to her eyes she was not reading a word.

 

“My dear mother, why aren’t you in bed?” Katharine exclaimed, changing

astonishingly in the space of a minute to her usual condition of

authoritative good sense. “Why are you wandering about?”

 

“I’m sure I should like your poetry better than I like Lord Byron’s,”

said Mrs. Hilbery, addressing Ralph Denham.

 

“Mr. Denham doesn’t write poetry; he has written articles for father,

for the Review,” Katharine said, as if prompting her memory.

 

“Oh dear! How dull!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed, with a sudden laugh that

rather puzzled her daughter.

 

Ralph found that she had turned upon him a gaze that was at once very

vague and very penetrating.

 

“But I’m sure you read poetry at night. I always judge by the

expression of the eyes,” Mrs. Hilbery continued. (“The windows of the

soul,” she added parenthetically.) “I don’t know much about the law,”

she went on, “though many of my relations were lawyers. Some of them

looked very handsome, too, in their wigs. But I think I do know a

little about poetry,” she added. “And all the things that aren’t

written down, but—but—” She waved her hand, as if to indicate the

wealth of