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

she still had time to

reach Lincoln’s Inn Fields before he left his office. She hailed a

cab, and bade it take her to a shop for selling maps which she

remembered in Great Queen Street, since she hardly liked to be set

down at his door. Arrived at the shop, she bought a large scale map of

Norfolk, and thus provided, hurried into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and

assured herself of the position of Messrs. Hoper and Grateley’s

office. The great gas chandeliers were alight in the office windows.

She conceived that he sat at an enormous table laden with papers

beneath one of them in the front room with the three tall windows.

Having settled his position there, she began walking to and fro upon

the pavement. Nobody of his build appeared. She scrutinized each male

figure as it approached and passed her. Each male figure had,

nevertheless, a look of him, due, perhaps, to the professional dress,

the quick step, the keen glance which they cast upon her as they

hastened home after the day’s work. The square itself, with its

immense houses all so fully occupied and stern of aspect, its

atmosphere of industry and power, as if even the sparrows and the

children were earning their daily bread, as if the sky itself, with

its gray and scarlet clouds, reflected the serious intention of the

city beneath it, spoke of him. Here was the fit place for their

meeting, she thought; here was the fit place for her to walk thinking

of him. She could not help comparing it with the domestic streets of

Chelsea. With this comparison in her mind, she extended her range a

little, and turned into the main road. The great torrent of vans and

carts was sweeping down Kingsway; pedestrians were streaming in two

currents along the pavements. She stood fascinated at the corner. The

deep roar filled her ears; the changing tumult had the inexpressible

fascination of varied life pouring ceaselessly with a purpose which,

as she looked, seemed to her, somehow, the normal purpose for which

life was framed; its complete indifference to the individuals, whom it

swallowed up and rolled onwards, filled her with at least a temporary

exaltation. The blend of daylight and of lamplight made her an

invisible spectator, just as it gave the people who passed her a

semi-transparent quality, and left the faces pale ivory ovals in which

the eyes alone were dark. They tended the enormous rush of the

current—the great flow, the deep stream, the unquenchable tide. She

stood unobserved and absorbed, glorying openly in the rapture that had

run subterraneously all day. Suddenly she was clutched, unwilling,

from the outside, by the recollection of her purpose in coming there.

She had come to find Ralph Denham. She hastily turned back into

Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and looked for her landmark—the light in the

three tall windows. She sought in vain. The faces of the houses had

now merged in the general darkness, and she had difficulty in

determining which she sought. Ralph’s three windows gave back on their

ghostly glass panels only a reflection of the gray and greenish sky.

She rang the bell, peremptorily, under the painted name of the firm.

After some delay she was answered by a caretaker, whose pail and brush

of themselves told her that the working day was over and the workers

gone. Nobody, save perhaps Mr. Grateley himself, was left, she assured

Katharine; every one else had been gone these ten minutes.

 

The news woke Katharine completely. Anxiety gained upon her. She

hastened back into Kingsway, looking at people who had miraculously

regained their solidity. She ran as far as the Tube station,

overhauling clerk after clerk, solicitor after solicitor. Not one of

them even faintly resembled Ralph Denham. More and more plainly did

she see him; and more and more did he seem to her unlike any one else.

At the door of the station she paused, and tried to collect her

thoughts. He had gone to her house. By taking a cab she could be there

probably in advance of him. But she pictured herself opening the

drawing-room door, and William and Cassandra looking up, and Ralph’s

entrance a moment later, and the glances—the insinuations. No; she

could not face it. She would write him a letter and take it at once to

his house. She bought paper and pencil at the bookstall, and entered

an A.B.C. shop, where, by ordering a cup of coffee, she secured an

empty table, and began at vice to write:

 

“I came to meet you and I have missed you. I could not face William

and Cassandra. They want us—” here she paused. “They insist that we

are engaged,” she substituted, “and we couldn’t talk at all, or

explain anything. I want—” Her wants were so vast, now that she was

in communication with Ralph, that the pencil was utterly inadequate to

conduct them on to the paper; it seemed as if the whole torrent of

Kingsway had to run down her pencil. She gazed intently at a notice

hanging on the gold-encrusted wall opposite. “… to say all kinds

of things,” she added, writing each word with the painstaking of a

child. But, when she raised her eyes again to meditate the next

sentence, she was aware of a waitress, whose expression intimated that

it was closing time, and, looking round, Katharine saw herself almost

the last person left in the shop. She took up her letter, paid her

bill, and found herself once more in the street. She would now take a

cab to Highgate. But at that moment it flashed upon her that she could

not remember the address. This check seemed to let fall a barrier

across a very powerful current of desire. She ransacked her memory in

desperation, hunting for the name, first by remembering the look of

the house, and then by trying, in memory, to retrace the words she had

written once, at least, upon an envelope. The more she pressed the

farther the words receded. Was the house an Orchard Something, on the

street a Hill? She gave it up. Never, since she was a child, had she

felt anything like this blankness and desolation. There rushed in upon

her, as if she were waking from some dream, all the consequences of

her inexplicable indolence. She figured Ralph’s face as he turned from

her door without a word of explanation, receiving his dismissal as a

blow from herself, a callous intimation that she did not wish to see

him. She followed his departure from her door; but it was far more

easy to see him marching far and fast in any direction for any length

of time than to conceive that he would turn back to Highgate. Perhaps

he would try once more to see her in Cheyne Walk? It was proof of the

clearness with which she saw him, that she started forward as this

possibility occurred to her, and almost raised her hand to beckon to a

cab. No; he was too proud to come again; he rejected the desire and

walked on and on, on and on—If only she could read the names of those

visionary streets down which he passed! But her imagination betrayed

her at this point, or mocked her with a sense of their strangeness,

darkness, and distance. Indeed, instead of helping herself to any

decision, she only filled her mind with the vast extent of London and

the impossibility of finding any single figure that wandered off this

way and that way, turned to the right and to the left, chose that

dingy little back street where the children were playing in the road,

and so—She roused herself impatiently. She walked rapidly along

Holborn. Soon she turned and walked as rapidly in the other direction.

This indecision was not merely odious, but had something that alarmed

her about it, as she had been alarmed slightly once or twice already

that day; she felt unable to cope with the strength of her own

desires. To a person controlled by habit, there was humiliation as

well as alarm in this sudden release of what appeared to be a very

powerful as well as an unreasonable force. An aching in the muscles of

her right hand now showed her that she was crushing her gloves and the

map of Norfolk in a grip sufficient to crack a more solid object. She

relaxed her grasp; she looked anxiously at the faces of the passers-by

to see whether their eyes rested on her for a moment longer than was

natural, or with any curiosity. But having smoothed out her gloves,

and done what she could to look as usual, she forgot spectators, and

was once more given up to her desperate desire to find Ralph Denham.

It was a desire now—wild, irrational, unexplained, resembling

something felt in childhood. Once more she blamed herself bitterly for

her carelessness. But finding herself opposite the Tube station, she

pulled herself up and took counsel swiftly, as of old. It flashed upon

her that she would go at once to Mary Datchet, and ask her to give her

Ralph’s address. The decision was a relief, not only in giving her a

goal, but in providing her with a rational excuse for her own actions.

It gave her a goal certainly, but the fact of having a goal led her to

dwell exclusively upon her obsession; so that when she rang the bell

of Mary’s flat, she did not for a moment consider how this demand

would strike Mary. To her extreme annoyance Mary was not at home; a

charwoman opened the door. All Katharine could do was to accept the

invitation to wait. She waited for, perhaps, fifteen minutes, and

spent them in pacing from one end of the room to the other without

intermission. When she heard Mary’s key in the door she paused in

front of the fireplace, and Mary found her standing upright, looking

at once expectant and determined, like a person who has come on an

errand of such importance that it must be broached without preface.

 

Mary exclaimed in surprise.

 

“Yes, yes,” Katharine said, brushing these remarks aside, as if they

were in the way.

 

“Have you had tea?”

 

“Oh yes,” she said, thinking that she had had tea hundreds of years

ago, somewhere or other.

 

Mary paused, took off her gloves, and, finding matches, proceeded to

light the fire.

 

Katharine checked her with an impatient movement, and said:

 

“Don’t light the fire for me… . I want to know Ralph Denham’s

address.”

 

She was holding a pencil and preparing to write on the envelope. She

waited with an imperious expression.

 

“The Apple Orchard, Mount Ararat Road, Highgate,” Mary said, speaking

slowly and rather strangely.

 

“Oh, I remember now!” Katharine exclaimed, with irritation at her own

stupidity. “I suppose it wouldn’t take twenty minutes to drive there?”

She gathered up her purse and gloves and seemed about to go.

 

“But you won’t find him,” said Mary, pausing with a match in her hand.

Katharine, who had already turned towards the door, stopped and looked

at her.

 

“Why? Where is he?” she asked.

 

“He won’t have left his office.”

 

“But he has left the office,” she replied. “The only question is will

he have reached home yet? He went to see me at Chelsea; I tried to

meet him and missed him. He will have found no message to explain. So

I must find him—as soon as possible.”

 

Mary took in the situation at her leisure.

 

“But why not telephone?” she said.

 

Katharine immediately dropped all that she was holding; her strained

expression relaxed, and exclaiming, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of

that!” she seized the telephone receiver and gave her number. Mary

looked at her steadily,