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

go that

evening she played Mozart, and you thought I was asleep?”

 

Katharine recollected with difficulty.

 

“To Mary Datchet’s,” she remembered.

 

“Ah!” said Mrs. Hilbery, with a slight note of disappointment in her

voice. “I had my little romance—my little speculation.” She looked at

her daughter. Katharine faltered beneath that innocent and penetrating

gaze; she flushed, turned away, and then looked up with very bright

eyes.

 

“I’m not in love with Ralph Denham,” she said.

 

“Don’t marry unless you’re in love!” said Mrs. Hilbery very quickly.

“But,” she added, glancing momentarily at her daughter, “aren’t there

different ways, Katharine—different—?”

 

“We want to meet as often as we like, but to be free,” Katharine

continued.

 

“To meet here, to meet in his house, to meet in the street.” Mrs.

Hilbery ran over these phrases as if she were trying chords that did

not quite satisfy her ear. It was plain that she had her sources of

information, and, indeed, her bag was stuffed with what she called

“kind letters” from the pen of her sister-in-law.

 

“Yes. Or to stay away in the country,” Katharine concluded.

 

Mrs. Hilbery paused, looked unhappy, and sought inspiration from the

window.

 

“What a comfort he was in that shop—how he took me and found the

ruins at once—how SAFE I felt with him—”

 

“Safe? Oh, no, he’s fearfully rash—he’s always taking risks. He wants

to throw up his profession and live in a little cottage and write

books, though he hasn’t a penny of his own, and there are any number

of sisters and brothers dependent on him.”

 

“Ah, he has a mother?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired.

 

“Yes. Rather a fine-looking old lady, with white hair.” Katharine

began to describe her visit, and soon Mrs. Hilbery elicited the facts

that not only was the house of excruciating ugliness, which Ralph bore

without complaint, but that it was evident that every one depended on

him, and he had a room at the top of the house, with a wonderful view

over London, and a rook.

 

“A wretched old bird in a corner, with half its feathers out,” she

said, with a tenderness in her voice that seemed to commiserate the

sufferings of humanity while resting assured in the capacity of Ralph

Denham to alleviate them, so that Mrs. Hilbery could not help

exclaiming:

 

“But, Katharine, you ARE in love!” at which Katharine flushed, looked

startled, as if she had said something that she ought not to have

said, and shook her head.

 

Hastily Mrs. Hilbery asked for further details of this extraordinary

house, and interposed a few speculations about the meeting between

Keats and Coleridge in a lane, which tided over the discomfort of the

moment, and drew Katharine on to further descriptions and

indiscretions. In truth, she found an extraordinary pleasure in being

thus free to talk to some one who was equally wise and equally

benignant, the mother of her earliest childhood, whose silence seemed

to answer questions that were never asked. Mrs. Hilbery listened

without making any remark for a considerable time. She seemed to draw

her conclusions rather by looking at her daughter than by listening to

her, and, if cross-examined, she would probably have given a highly

inaccurate version of Ralph Denham’s life-history except that he was

penniless, fatherless, and lived at Highgate—all of which was much in

his favor. But by means of these furtive glances she had assured

herself that Katharine was in a state which gave her, alternately, the

most exquisite pleasure and the most profound alarm.

 

She could not help ejaculating at last:

 

“It’s all done in five minutes at a Registry Office nowadays, if you

think the Church service a little florid—which it is, though there

are noble things in it.”

 

“But we don’t want to be married,” Katharine replied emphatically, and

added, “Why, after all, isn’t it perfectly possible to live together

without being married?”

 

Again Mrs. Hilbery looked discomposed, and, in her trouble, took up

the sheets which were lying upon the table, and began turning them

over this way and that, and muttering to herself as she glanced:

 

“A plus B minus C equals ‘x y z’. It’s so dreadfully ugly, Katharine.

That’s what I feel—so dreadfully ugly.”

 

Katharine took the sheets from her mother’s hand and began shuffling

them absent-mindedly together, for her fixed gaze seemed to show that

her thoughts were intent upon some other matter.

 

“Well, I don’t know about ugliness,” she said at length.

 

“But he doesn’t ask it of you?” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “Not that

grave young man with the steady brown eyes?”

 

“He doesn’t ask anything—we neither of us ask anything.”

 

“If I could help you, Katharine, by the memory of what I felt—”

 

“Yes, tell me what you felt.”

 

Mrs. Hilbery, her eyes growing blank, peered down the enormously long

corridor of days at the far end of which the little figures of herself

and her husband appeared fantastically attired, clasping hands upon a

moonlit beach, with roses swinging in the dusk.

 

“We were in a little boat going out to a ship at night,” she began.

“The sun had set and the moon was rising over our heads. There were

lovely silver lights upon the waves and three green lights upon the

steamer in the middle of the bay. Your father’s head looked so grand

against the mast. It was life, it was death. The great sea was round

us. It was the voyage for ever and ever.”

 

The ancient fairy-tale fell roundly and harmoniously upon Katharine’s

ears. Yes, there was the enormous space of the sea; there were the

three green lights upon the steamer; the cloaked figures climbed up on

deck. And so, voyaging over the green and purple waters, past the

cliffs and the sandy lagoons and through pools crowded with the masts

of ships and the steeples of churches—here they were. The river

seemed to have brought them and deposited them here at this precise

point. She looked admiringly at her mother, that ancient voyager.

 

“Who knows,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, continuing her reveries, “where

we are bound for, or why, or who has sent us, or what we shall

find—who knows anything, except that love is our faith—love—” she

crooned, and the soft sound beating through the dim words was heard by

her daughter as the breaking of waves solemnly in order upon the vast

shore that she gazed upon. She would have been content for her mother

to repeat that word almost indefinitely—a soothing word when uttered

by another, a riveting together of the shattered fragments of the

world. But Mrs. Hilbery, instead of repeating the word love, said

pleadingly:

 

“And you won’t think those ugly thoughts again, will you, Katharine?”

at which words the ship which Katharine had been considering seemed to

put into harbor and have done with its seafaring. Yet she was in great

need, if not exactly of sympathy, of some form of advice, or, at

least, of the opportunity of setting forth her problems before a third

person so as to renew them in her own eyes.

 

“But then,” she said, ignoring the difficult problem of ugliness, “you

knew you were in love; but we’re different. It seems,” she continued,

frowning a little as she tried to fix the difficult feeling, “as if

something came to an end suddenly—gave out—faded—an illusion—as if

when we think we’re in love we make it up—we imagine what doesn’t

exist. That’s why it’s impossible that we should ever marry. Always to

be finding the other an illusion, and going off and forgetting about

them, never to be certain that you cared, or that he wasn’t caring for

some one not you at all, the horror of changing from one state to the

other, being happy one moment and miserable the next—that’s the

reason why we can’t possibly marry. At the same time,” she continued,

“we can’t live without each other, because—” Mrs. Hilbery waited

patiently for the sentence to be completed, but Katharine fell silent

and fingered her sheet of figures.

 

“We have to have faith in our vision,” Mrs. Hilbery resumed, glancing

at the figures, which distressed her vaguely, and had some connection

in her mind with the household accounts, “otherwise, as you say—” She

cast a lightning glance into the depths of disillusionment which were,

perhaps, not altogether unknown to her.

 

“Believe me, Katharine, it’s the same for every one—for me, too—for

your father,” she said earnestly, and sighed. They looked together

into the abyss and, as the elder of the two, she recovered herself

first and asked:

 

“But where is Ralph? Why isn’t he here to see me?”

 

Katharine’s expression changed instantly.

 

“Because he’s not allowed to come here,” she replied bitterly.

 

Mrs. Hilbery brushed this aside.

 

“Would there be time to send for him before luncheon?” she asked.

 

Katharine looked at her as if, indeed, she were some magician. Once

more she felt that instead of being a grown woman, used to advise and

command, she was only a foot or two raised above the long grass and

the little flowers and entirely dependent upon the figure of

indefinite size whose head went up into the sky, whose hand was in

hers, for guidance.

 

“I’m not happy without him,” she said simply.

 

Mrs. Hilbery nodded her head in a manner which indicated complete

understanding, and the immediate conception of certain plans for the

future. She swept up her flowers, breathed in their sweetness, and,

humming a little song about a miller’s daughter, left the room.

 

The case upon which Ralph Denham was engaged that afternoon was not

apparently receiving his full attention, and yet the affairs of the

late John Leake of Dublin were sufficiently confused to need all the

care that a solicitor could bestow upon them, if the widow Leake and

the five Leake children of tender age were to receive any pittance at

all. But the appeal to Ralph’s humanity had little chance of being

heard to-day; he was no longer a model of concentration. The partition

so carefully erected between the different sections of his life had

been broken down, with the result that though his eyes were fixed upon

the last Will and Testament, he saw through the page a certain

drawing-room in Cheyne Walk.

 

He tried every device that had proved effective in the past for

keeping up the partitions of the mind, until he could decently go

home; but a little to his alarm he found himself assailed so

persistently, as if from outside, by Katharine, that he launched forth

desperately into an imaginary interview with her. She obliterated a

bookcase full of law reports, and the corners and lines of the room

underwent a curious softening of outline like that which sometimes

makes a room unfamiliar at the moment of waking from sleep. By

degrees, a pulse or stress began to beat at regular intervals in his

mind, heaping his thoughts into waves to which words fitted

themselves, and without much consciousness of what he was doing, he

began to write on a sheet of draft paper what had the appearance of a

poem lacking several words in each line. Not many lines had been set

down, however, before he threw away his pen as violently as if that

were responsible for his misdeeds, and tore the paper into many

separate pieces. This was a sign that Katharine had asserted herself

and put to him a remark that could not be met poetically. Her remark

was entirely destructive of poetry, since it was to the effect that

poetry had nothing whatever to do with her; all her friends spent

their lives in making up phrases, she said; all his feeling was an

illusion, and