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

just heard on the telephone.

The tendency of her spirit seemed to be in an altogether different

direction; and of a different nature. She had only to look at

Cassandra to see what the love that results in an engagement and

marriage means. She considered for a moment, and then said: “If you

don’t want to tell people yourselves, I’ll do it for you. I know

William has feelings about these matters that make it very difficult

for him to do anything.”

 

“Because he’s fearfully sensitive about other people’s feelings,” said

Cassandra. “The idea that he could upset Aunt Maggie or Uncle Trevor

would make him ill for weeks.”

 

This interpretation of what she was used to call William’s

conventionality was new to Katharine. And yet she felt it now to be

the true one.

 

“Yes, you’re right,” she said.

 

“And then he worships beauty. He wants life to be beautiful in every

part of it. Have you ever noticed how exquisitely he finishes

everything? Look at the address on that envelope. Every letter is

perfect.”

 

Whether this applied also to the sentiments expressed in the letter,

Katharine was not so sure; but when William’s solicitude was spent

upon Cassandra it not only failed to irritate her, as it had done when

she was the object of it, but appeared, as Cassandra said, the fruit

of his love of beauty.

 

“Yes,” she said, “he loves beauty.”

 

“I hope we shall have a great many children,” said Cassandra. “He

loves children.”

 

This remark made Katharine realize the depths of their intimacy better

than any other words could have done; she was jealous for one moment;

but the next she was humiliated. She had known William for years, and

she had never once guessed that he loved children. She looked at the

queer glow of exaltation in Cassandra’s eyes, through which she was

beholding the true spirit of a human being, and wished that she would

go on talking about William for ever. Cassandra was not unwilling to

gratify her. She talked on. The morning slipped away. Katharine

scarcely changed her position on the edge of her father’s

writing-table, and Cassandra never opened the “History of England.”

 

And yet it must be confessed that there were vast lapses in the

attention which Katharine bestowed upon her cousin. The atmosphere was

wonderfully congenial for thoughts of her own. She lost herself

sometimes in such deep reverie that Cassandra, pausing, could look at

her for moments unperceived. What could Katharine be thinking about,

unless it were Ralph Denham? She was satisfied, by certain random

replies, that Katharine had wandered a little from the subject of

William’s perfections. But Katharine made no sign. She always ended

these pauses by saying something so natural that Cassandra was deluded

into giving fresh examples of her absorbing theme. Then they lunched,

and the only sign that Katharine gave of abstraction was to forget to

help the pudding. She looked so like her mother, as she sat there

oblivious of the tapioca, that Cassandra was startled into exclaiming:

 

“How like Aunt Maggie you look!”

 

“Nonsense,” said Katharine, with more irritation than the remark

seemed to call for.

 

In truth, now that her mother was away, Katharine did feel less

sensible than usual, but as she argued it to herself, there was much

less need for sense. Secretly, she was a little shaken by the evidence

which the morning had supplied of her immense capacity for—what could

one call it?—rambling over an infinite variety of thoughts that were

too foolish to be named. She was, for example, walking down a road in

Northumberland in the August sunset; at the inn she left her

companion, who was Ralph Denham, and was transported, not so much by

her own feet as by some invisible means, to the top of a high hill.

Here the scents, the sounds among the dry heather-roots, the

grass-blades pressed upon the palm of her hand, were all so

perceptible that she could experience each one separately. After this

her mind made excursions into the dark of the air, or settled upon the

surface of the sea, which could be discovered over there, or with

equal unreason it returned to its couch of bracken beneath the stars

of midnight, and visited the snow valleys of the moon. These fancies

would have been in no way strange, since the walls of every mind are

decorated with some such tracery, but she found herself suddenly

pursuing such thoughts with an extreme ardor, which became a desire to

change her actual condition for something matching the conditions of

her dream. Then she started; then she awoke to the fact that Cassandra

was looking at her in amazement.

 

Cassandra would have liked to feel certain that, when Katharine made

no reply at all or one wide of the mark, she was making up her mind to

get married at once, but it was difficult, if this were so, to account

for some remarks that Katharine let fall about the future. She

recurred several times to the summer, as if she meant to spend that

season in solitary wandering. She seemed to have a plan in her mind

which required Bradshaws and the names of inns.

 

Cassandra was driven finally, by her own unrest, to put on her clothes

and wander out along the streets of Chelsea, on the pretence that she

must buy something. But, in her ignorance of the way, she became

panic-stricken at the thought of being late, and no sooner had she

found the shop she wanted, than she fled back again in order to be at

home when William came. He came, indeed, five minutes after she had

sat down by the tea-table, and she had the happiness of receiving him

alone. His greeting put her doubts of his affection at rest, but the

first question he asked was:

 

“Has Katharine spoken to you?”

 

“Yes. But she says she’s not engaged. She doesn’t seem to think she’s

ever going to be engaged.”

 

William frowned, and looked annoyed.

 

“They telephoned this morning, and she behaves very oddly. She forgets

to help the pudding,” Cassandra added by way of cheering him.

 

“My dear child, after what I saw and heard last night, it’s not a

question of guessing or suspecting. Either she’s engaged to him—or—”

 

He left his sentence unfinished, for at this point Katharine herself

appeared. With his recollections of the scene the night before, he was

too self-conscious even to look at her, and it was not until she told

him of her mother’s visit to Stratford-on-Avon that he raised his

eyes. It was clear that he was greatly relieved. He looked round him

now, as if he felt at his ease, and Cassandra exclaimed:

 

“Don’t you think everything looks quite different?”

 

“You’ve moved the sofa?” he asked.

 

“No. Nothing’s been touched,” said Katharine. “Everything’s exactly

the same.” But as she said this, with a decision which seemed to make

it imply that more than the sofa was unchanged, she held out a cup

into which she had forgotten to pour any tea. Being told of her

forgetfulness, she frowned with annoyance, and said that Cassandra was

demoralizing her. The glance she cast upon them, and the resolute way

in which she plunged them into speech, made William and Cassandra feel

like children who had been caught prying. They followed her

obediently, making conversation. Any one coming in might have judged

them acquaintances met, perhaps, for the third time. If that were so,

one must have concluded that the hostess suddenly bethought her of an

engagement pressing for fulfilment. First Katharine looked at her

watch, and then she asked William to tell her the right time. When

told that it was ten minutes to five she rose at once, and said:

 

“Then I’m afraid I must go.”

 

She left the room, holding her unfinished bread and butter in her

hand. William glanced at Cassandra.

 

“Well, she IS queer!” Cassandra exclaimed.

 

William looked perturbed. He knew more of Katharine than Cassandra

did, but even he could not tell—. In a second Katharine was back

again dressed in outdoor things, still holding her bread and butter in

her bare hand.

 

“If I’m late, don’t wait for me,” she said. “I shall have dined,” and

so saying, she left them.

 

“But she can’t—” William exclaimed, as the door shut, “not without

any gloves and bread and butter in her hand!” They ran to the window,

and saw her walking rapidly along the street towards the City. Then

she vanished.

 

“She must have gone to meet Mr. Denham,” Cassandra exclaimed.

 

“Goodness knows!” William interjected.

 

The incident impressed them both as having something queer and ominous

about it out of all proportion to its surface strangeness.

 

“It’s the sort of way Aunt Maggie behaves,” said Cassandra, as if in

explanation.

 

William shook his head, and paced up and down the room looking

extremely perturbed.

 

“This is what I’ve been foretelling,” he burst out. “Once set the

ordinary conventions aside—Thank Heaven Mrs. Hilbery is away. But

there’s Mr. Hilbery. How are we to explain it to him? I shall have to

leave you.”

 

“But Uncle Trevor won’t be back for hours, William!” Cassandra

implored.

 

“You never can tell. He may be on his way already. Or suppose Mrs.

Milvain—your Aunt Celia—or Mrs. Cosham, or any other of your aunts

or uncles should be shown in and find us alone together. You know what

they’re saying about us already.”

 

Cassandra was equally stricken by the sight of William’s agitation,

and appalled by the prospect of his desertion.

 

“We might hide,” she exclaimed wildly, glancing at the curtain which

separated the room with the relics.

 

“I refuse entirely to get under the table,” said William

sarcastically.

 

She saw that he was losing his temper with the difficulties of the

situation. Her instinct told her that an appeal to his affection, at

this moment, would be extremely ill-judged. She controlled herself,

sat down, poured out a fresh cup of tea, and sipped it quietly. This

natural action, arguing complete self-mastery, and showing her in one

of those feminine attitudes which William found adorable, did more

than any argument to compose his agitation. It appealed to his

chivalry. He accepted a cup. Next she asked for a slice of cake. By

the time the cake was eaten and the tea drunk the personal question

had lapsed, and they were discussing poetry. Insensibly they turned

from the question of dramatic poetry in general, to the particular

example which reposed in William’s pocket, and when the maid came in

to clear away the tea-things, William had asked permission to read a

short passage aloud, “unless it bored her?”

 

Cassandra bent her head in silence, but she showed a little of what

she felt in her eyes, and thus fortified, William felt confident that

it would take more than Mrs. Milvain herself to rout him from his

position. He read aloud.

 

Meanwhile Katharine walked rapidly along the street. If called upon to

explain her impulsive action in leaving the tea-table, she could have

traced it to no better cause than that William had glanced at

Cassandra; Cassandra at William. Yet, because they had glanced, her

position was impossible. If one forgot to pour out a cup of tea they

rushed to the conclusion that she was engaged to Ralph Denham. She

knew that in half an hour or so the door would open, and Ralph Denham

would appear. She could not sit there and contemplate seeing him with

William’s and Cassandra’s eyes upon them, judging their exact degree

of intimacy, so that they might fix the wedding-day. She promptly

decided that she would meet Ralph out of doors;