Night and Day, Virginia Woolf [10 ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: Virginia Woolf
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see that there were other points of view as deserving of attention as
her own. Naturally, having last seen him as he left the office in
company with Katharine, she attributed the change to her; it was
likely that Katharine, on leaving the scene which she had so clearly
despised, had pronounced some such criticism, or suggested it by her
own attitude. But she knew that Ralph would never admit that he had
been influenced by anybody.
“You don’t read enough, Mary,” he was saying. “You ought to read more
poetry.”
It was true that Mary’s reading had been rather limited to such works
as she needed to know for the sake of examinations; and her time for
reading in London was very little. For some reason, no one likes to be
told that they do not read enough poetry, but her resentment was only
visible in the way she changed the position of her hands, and in the
fixed look in her eyes. And then she thought to herself, “I’m behaving
exactly as I said I wouldn’t behave,” whereupon she relaxed all her
muscles and said, in her reasonable way:
“Tell me what I ought to read, then.”
Ralph had unconsciously been irritated by Mary, and he now delivered
himself of a few names of great poets which were the text for a
discourse upon the imperfection of Mary’s character and way of life.
“You live with your inferiors,” he said, warming unreasonably, as he
knew, to his text. “And you get into a groove because, on the whole,
it’s rather a pleasant groove. And you tend to forget what you’re
there for. You’ve the feminine habit of making much of details. You
don’t see when things matter and when they don’t. And that’s what’s
the ruin of all these organizations. That’s why the Suffragists have
never done anything all these years. What’s the point of drawing-room
meetings and bazaars? You want to have ideas, Mary; get hold of
something big; never mind making mistakes, but don’t niggle. Why don’t
you throw it all up for a year, and travel?—see something of the
world. Don’t be content to live with half a dozen people in a
backwater all your life. But you won’t,” he concluded.
“I’ve rather come to that way of thinking myself—about myself, I
mean,” said Mary, surprising him by her acquiescence. “I should like
to go somewhere far away.”
For a moment they were both silent. Ralph then said:
“But look here, Mary, you haven’t been taking this seriously, have
you?” His irritation was spent, and the depression, which she could
not keep out of her voice, made him feel suddenly with remorse that he
had been hurting her.
“You won’t go away, will you?” he asked. And as she said nothing, he
added, “Oh no, don’t go away.”
“I don’t know exactly what I mean to do,” she replied. She hovered on
the verge of some discussion of her plans, but she received no
encouragement. He fell into one of his queer silences, which seemed to
Mary, in spite of all her precautions, to have reference to what she
also could not prevent herself from thinking about—their feeling for
each other and their relationship. She felt that the two lines of
thought bored their way in long, parallel tunnels which came very
close indeed, but never ran into each other.
When he had gone, and he left her without breaking his silence more
than was needed to wish her good night, she sat on for a time,
reviewing what he had said. If love is a devastating fire which melts
the whole being into one mountain torrent, Mary was no more in love
with Denham than she was in love with her poker or her tongs. But
probably these extreme passions are very rare, and the state of mind
thus depicted belongs to the very last stages of love, when the power
to resist has been eaten away, week by week or day by day. Like most
intelligent people, Mary was something of an egoist, to the extent,
that is, of attaching great importance to what she felt, and she was
by nature enough of a moralist to like to make certain, from time to
time, that her feelings were creditable to her. When Ralph left her
she thought over her state of mind, and came to the conclusion that it
would be a good thing to learn a language—say Italian or German. She
then went to a drawer, which she had to unlock, and took from it
certain deeply scored manuscript pages. She read them through, looking
up from her reading every now and then and thinking very intently for
a few seconds about Ralph. She did her best to verify all the
qualities in him which gave rise to emotions in her; and persuaded
herself that she accounted reasonably for them all. Then she looked
back again at her manuscript, and decided that to write grammatical
English prose is the hardest thing in the world. But she thought about
herself a great deal more than she thought about grammatical English
prose or about Ralph Denham, and it may therefore be disputed whether
she was in love, or, if so, to which branch of the family her passion
belonged.
It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering,
the everlasting and perpetual process,” said Katharine, as she passed
under the archway, and so into the wide space of King’s Bench Walk,
“not the discovery itself at all.” She spoke the last words looking up
at Rodney’s windows, which were a semilucent red color, in her honor,
as she knew. He had asked her to tea with him. But she was in a mood
when it is almost physically disagreeable to interrupt the stride of
one’s thought, and she walked up and down two or three times under the
trees before approaching his staircase. She liked getting hold of some
book which neither her father or mother had read, and keeping it to
herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the
meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide
whether the book was a good one or a bad one. This evening she had
twisted the words of Dostoevsky to suit her mood—a fatalistic mood—
to proclaim that the process of discovery was life, and that,
presumably, the nature of one’s goal mattered not at all. She sat down
for a moment upon one of the seats; felt herself carried along in the
swirl of many things; decided, in her sudden way, that it was time to
heave all this thinking overboard, and rose, leaving a fishmonger’s
basket on the seat behind her. Two minutes later her rap sounded with
authority upon Rodney’s door.
“Well, William,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m late.”
It was true, but he was so glad to see her that he forgot his
annoyance. He had been occupied for over an hour in making things
ready for her, and he now had his reward in seeing her look right and
left, as she slipped her cloak from her shoulders, with evident
satisfaction, although she said nothing. He had seen that the fire
burnt well; jam-pots were on the table, tin covers shone in the
fender, and the shabby comfort of the room was extreme. He was dressed
in his old crimson dressing-gown, which was faded irregularly, and had
bright new patches on it, like the paler grass which one finds on
lifting a stone. He made the tea, and Katharine drew off her gloves,
and crossed her legs with a gesture that was rather masculine in its
ease. Nor did they talk much until they were smoking cigarettes over
the fire, having placed their teacups upon the floor between them.
They had not met since they had exchanged letters about their
relationship. Katharine’s answer to his protestation had been short
and sensible. Half a sheet of notepaper contained the whole of it, for
she merely had to say that she was not in love with him, and so could
not marry him, but their friendship would continue, she hoped,
unchanged. She had added a postscript in which she stated, “I like
your sonnet very much.”
So far as William was concerned, this appearance of ease was assumed.
Three times that afternoon he had dressed himself in a tail-coat, and
three times he had discarded it for an old dressing-gown; three times
he had placed his pearl tie-pin in position, and three times he had
removed it again, the little looking-glass in his room being the
witness of these changes of mind. The question was, which would
Katharine prefer on this particular afternoon in December? He read her
note once more, and the postscript about the sonnet settled the
matter. Evidently she admired most the poet in him; and as this, on
the whole, agreed with his own opinion, he decided to err, if
anything, on the side of shabbiness. His demeanor was also regulated
with premeditation; he spoke little, and only on impersonal matters;
he wished her to realize that in visiting him for the first time alone
she was doing nothing remarkable, although, in fact, that was a point
about which he was not at all sure.
Certainly Katharine seemed quite unmoved by any disturbing thoughts;
and if he had been completely master of himself, he might, indeed,
have complained that she was a trifle absent-minded. The ease, the
familiarity of the situation alone with Rodney, among teacups and
candles, had more effect upon her than was apparent. She asked to look
at his books, and then at his pictures. It was while she held
photograph from the Greek in her hands that she exclaimed,
impulsively, if incongruously:
“My oysters! I had a basket,” she explained, “and I’ve left it
somewhere. Uncle Dudley dines with us to-night. What in the world have
I done with them?”
She rose and began to wander about the room. William rose also, and
stood in front of the fire, muttering, “Oysters, oysters—your basket
of oysters!” but though he looked vaguely here and there, as if the
oysters might be on the top of the bookshelf, his eyes returned always
to Katharine. She drew the curtain and looked out among the scanty
leaves of the plane-trees.
“I had them,” she calculated, “in the Strand; I sat on a seat. Well,
never mind,” she concluded, turning back into the room abruptly, “I
dare say some old creature is enjoying them by this time.”
“I should have thought that you never forgot anything,” William
remarked, as they settled down again.
“That’s part of the myth about me, I know,” Katharine replied.
“And I wonder,” William proceeded, with some caution, “what the truth
about you is? But I know this sort of thing doesn’t interest you,” he
added hastily, with a touch of peevishness.
“No; it doesn’t interest me very much,” she replied candidly.
“What shall we talk about then?” he asked.
She looked rather whimsically round the walls of the room.
“However we start, we end by talking about the same thing—about
poetry, I mean. I wonder if you realize, William, that I’ve never read
even Shakespeare? It’s rather wonderful how I’ve kept it up all these
years.”
“You’ve kept it up for ten years very beautifully, as far as I’m
concerned,” he said.
“Ten years? So long as that?”
“And I don’t think it’s always bored you,” he added.
She looked into the fire silently. She could not deny that the surface
of her feeling was absolutely unruffled by anything in William’s
character; on the contrary, she felt certain that she could deal with
whatever turned up. He
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