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

with wonder like a child, with gratitude like a woman. She

interrupted him gravely now and then.

 

“But it was foolish to stand outside and look at the windows. Suppose

William hadn’t seen you. Would you have gone to bed?”

 

He capped her reproof with wonderment that a woman of her age could

have stood in Kingsway looking at the traffic until she forgot.

 

“But it was then I first knew I loved you!” she exclaimed.

 

“Tell me from the beginning,” he begged her.

 

“No, I’m a person who can’t tell things,” she pleaded. “I shall say

something ridiculous—something about flames—fires. No, I can’t tell

you.”

 

But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful to him,

charged with extreme excitement as she spoke of the dark red fire, and

the smoke twined round it, making him feel that he had stepped over

the threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring

with shapes, so large, so dim, unveiling themselves only in flashes,

and moving away again into the darkness, engulfed by it. They had

walked by this time to the street in which Mary lived, and being

engrossed by what they said and partly saw, passed her staircase

without looking up. At this time of night there was no traffic and

scarcely any foot-passengers, so that they could pace slowly without

interruption, arm-in-arm, raising their hands now and then to draw

something upon the vast blue curtain of the sky.

 

They brought themselves by these means, acting on a mood of profound

happiness, to a state of clear-sightedness where the lifting of a

finger had effect, and one word spoke more than a sentence. They

lapsed gently into silence, traveling the dark paths of thought side

by side towards something discerned in the distance which gradually

possessed them both. They were victors, masters of life, but at the

same time absorbed in the flame, giving their life to increase its

brightness, to testify to their faith. Thus they had walked, perhaps,

twice or three times up and down Mary Datchet’s street before the

recurrence of a light burning behind a thin, yellow blind caused them

to stop without exactly knowing why they did so. It burned itself into

their minds.

 

“That is the light in Mary’s room,” said Ralph. “She must be at home.”

He pointed across the street. Katharine’s eyes rested there too.

 

“Is she alone, working at this time of night? What is she working at?”

she wondered. “Why should we interrupt her?” she asked passionately.

“What have we got to give her? She’s happy too,” she added. “She has

her work.” Her voice shook slightly, and the light swam like an ocean

of gold behind her tears.

 

“You don’t want me to go to her?” Ralph asked.

 

“Go, if you like; tell her what you like,” she replied.

 

He crossed the road immediately, and went up the steps into Mary’s

house. Katharine stood where he left her, looking at the window and

expecting soon to see a shadow move across it; but she saw nothing;

the blinds conveyed nothing; the light was not moved. It signaled to

her across the dark street; it was a sign of triumph shining there for

ever, not to be extinguished this side of the grave. She brandished

her happiness as if in salute; she dipped it as if in reverence. “How

they burn!” she thought, and all the darkness of London seemed set

with fires, roaring upwards; but her eyes came back to Mary’s window

and rested there satisfied. She had waited some time before a figure

detached itself from the doorway and came across the road, slowly and

reluctantly, to where she stood.

 

“I didn’t go in—I couldn’t bring myself,” he broke off. He had stood

outside Mary’s door unable to bring himself to knock; if she had come

out she would have found him there, the tears running down his cheeks,

unable to speak.

 

They stood for some moments, looking at the illuminated blinds, an

expression to them both of something impersonal and serene in the

spirit of the woman within, working out her plans far into the night—

her plans for the good of a world that none of them were ever to know.

Then their minds jumped on and other little figures came by in

procession, headed, in Ralph’s view, by the figure of Sally Seal.

 

“Do you remember Sally Seal?” he asked. Katharine bent her head.

 

“Your mother and Mary?” he went on. “Rodney and Cassandra? Old Joan up

at Highgate?” He stopped in his enumeration, not finding it possible

to link them together in any way that should explain the queer

combination which he could perceive in them, as he thought of them.

They appeared to him to be more than individuals; to be made up of

many different things in cohesion; he had a vision of an orderly

world.

 

“It’s all so easy—it’s all so simple,” Katherine quoted, remembering

some words of Sally Seal’s, and wishing Ralph to understand that she

followed the track of his thought. She felt him trying to piece

together in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief,

unsoldered and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the

old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where

the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came

together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the complete

and the satisfactory. The future emerged more splendid than ever from

this construction of the present. Books were to be written, and since

books must be written in rooms, and rooms must have hangings, and

outside the windows there must be land, and an horizon to that land,

and trees perhaps, and a hill, they sketched a habitation for

themselves upon the outline of great offices in the Strand and

continued to make an account of the future upon the omnibus which took

them towards Chelsea; and still, for both of them, it swam

miraculously in the golden light of a large steady lamp.

 

As the night was far advanced they had the whole of the seats on the

top of the omnibus to choose from, and the roads, save for an

occasional couple, wearing even at midnight, an air of sheltering

their words from the public, were deserted. No longer did the shadow

of a man sing to the shadow of a piano. A few lights in bedroom

windows burnt but were extinguished one by one as the omnibus passed

them.

 

They dismounted and walked down to the river. She felt his arm stiffen

beneath her hand, and knew by this token that they had entered the

enchanted region. She might speak to him, but with that strange tremor

in his voice, those eyes blindly adoring, whom did he answer? What

woman did he see? And where was she walking, and who was her

companion? Moments, fragments, a second of vision, and then the flying

waters, the winds dissipating and dissolving; then, too, the

recollection from chaos, the return of security, the earth firm,

superb and brilliant in the sun. From the heart of his darkness he

spoke his thanksgiving; from a region as far, as hidden, she answered

him. On a June night the nightingales sing, they answer each other

across the plain; they are heard under the window among the trees in

the garden. Pausing, they looked down into the river which bore its

dark tide of waters, endlessly moving, beneath them. They turned and

found themselves opposite the house. Quietly they surveyed the

friendly place, burning its lamps either in expectation of them or

because Rodney was still there talking to Cassandra. Katharine pushed

the door half open and stood upon the threshold. The light lay in soft

golden grains upon the deep obscurity of the hushed and sleeping

household. For a moment they waited, and then loosed their hands.

“Good night,” he breathed. “Good night,” she murmured back to him.