Night and Day, Virginia Woolf [10 ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: Virginia Woolf
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alone. She took her aunts upstairs, and returned, coming towards him
once more with an air of innocence and friendliness that amazed him.
“My father will be back,” she said. “Won’t you sit down?” and she
laughed, as if now they might share a perfectly friendly laugh at the
tea-party.
But Ralph made no attempt to seat himself.
“I must congratulate you,” he said. “It was news to me.” He saw her
face change, but only to become graver than before.
“My engagement?” she asked. “Yes, I am going to marry William Rodney.”
Ralph remained standing with his hand on the back of a chair in
absolute silence. Abysses seemed to plunge into darkness between them.
He looked at her, but her face showed that she was not thinking of
him. No regret or consciousness of wrong disturbed her.
“Well, I must go,” he said at length.
She seemed about to say something, then changed her mind and said
merely:
“You will come again, I hope. We always seem”—she hesitated—“to be
interrupted.”
He bowed and left the room.
Ralph strode with extreme swiftness along the Embankment. Every muscle
was taut and braced as if to resist some sudden attack from outside.
For the moment it seemed as if the attack were about to be directed
against his body, and his brain thus was on the alert, but without
understanding. Finding himself, after a few minutes, no longer under
observation, and no attack delivered, he slackened his pace, the pain
spread all through him, took possession of every governing seat, and
met with scarcely any resistance from powers exhausted by their first
effort at defence. He took his way languidly along the river
embankment, away from home rather than towards it. The world had him
at its mercy. He made no pattern out of the sights he saw. He felt
himself now, as he had often fancied other people, adrift on the
stream, and far removed from control of it, a man with no grasp upon
circumstances any longer. Old battered men loafing at the doors of
public-houses now seemed to be his fellows, and he felt, as he
supposed them to feel, a mingling of envy and hatred towards those who
passed quickly and certainly to a goal of their own. They, too, saw
things very thin and shadowy, and were wafted about by the lightest
breath of wind. For the substantial world, with its prospect of
avenues leading on and on to the invisible distance, had slipped from
him, since Katharine was engaged. Now all his life was visible, and
the straight, meager path had its ending soon enough. Katharine was
engaged, and she had deceived him, too. He felt for corners of his
being untouched by his disaster; but there was no limit to the flood
of damage; not one of his possessions was safe now. Katharine had
deceived him; she had mixed herself with every thought of his, and
reft of her they seemed false thoughts which he would blush to think
again. His life seemed immeasurably impoverished.
He sat himself down, in spite of the chilly fog which obscured the
farther bank and left its lights suspended upon a blank surface, upon
one of the riverside seats, and let the tide of disillusionment sweep
through him. For the time being all bright points in his life were
blotted out; all prominences leveled. At first he made himself believe
that Katharine had treated him badly, and drew comfort from the
thought that, left alone, she would recollect this, and think of him
and tender him, in silence, at any rate, an apology. But this grain of
comfort failed him after a second or two, for, upon reflection, he had
to admit that Katharine owed him nothing. Katharine had promised
nothing, taken nothing; to her his dreams had meant nothing. This,
indeed, was the lowest pitch of his despair. If the best of one’s
feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings,
what reality is left us? The old romance which had warmed his days for
him, the thoughts of Katharine which had painted every hour, were now
made to appear foolish and enfeebled. He rose, and looked into the
river, whose swift race of dun-colored waters seemed the very spirit
of futility and oblivion.
“In what can one trust, then?” he thought, as he leant there. So
feeble and insubstantial did he feel himself that he repeated the word
aloud.
“In what can one trust? Not in men and women. Not in one’s dreams
about them. There’s nothing—nothing, nothing left at all.”
Now Denham had reason to know that he could bring to birth and keep
alive a fine anger when he chose. Rodney provided a good target for
that emotion. And yet at the moment, Rodney and Katharine herself
seemed disembodied ghosts. He could scarcely remember the look of
them. His mind plunged lower and lower. Their marriage seemed of no
importance to him. All things had turned to ghosts; the whole mass of
the world was insubstantial vapor, surrounding the solitary spark in
his mind, whose burning point he could remember, for it burnt no more.
He had once cherished a belief, and Katharine had embodied this
belief, and she did so no longer. He did not blame her; he blamed
nothing, nobody; he saw the truth. He saw the dun-colored race of
waters and the blank shore. But life is vigorous; the body lives, and
the body, no doubt, dictated the reflection, which now urged him to
movement, that one may cast away the forms of human beings, and yet
retain the passion which seemed inseparable from their existence in
the flesh. Now this passion burnt on his horizon, as the winter sun
makes a greenish pane in the west through thinning clouds. His eyes
were set on something infinitely far and remote; by that light he felt
he could walk, and would, in future, have to find his way. But that
was all there was left to him of a populous and teeming world.
The lunch hour in the office was only partly spent by Denham in the
consumption of food. Whether fine or wet, he passed most of it pacing
the gravel paths in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The children got to know his
figure, and the sparrows expected their daily scattering of bread-crumbs. No doubt, since he often gave a copper and almost always a
handful of bread, he was not as blind to his surroundings as he
thought himself.
He thought that these winter days were spent in long hours before
white papers radiant in electric light; and in short passages through
fog-dimmed streets. When he came back to his work after lunch he
carried in his head a picture of the Strand, scattered with omnibuses,
and of the purple shapes of leaves pressed flat upon the gravel, as if
his eyes had always been bent upon the ground. His brain worked
incessantly, but his thought was attended with so little joy that he
did not willingly recall it; but drove ahead, now in this direction,
now in that; and came home laden with dark books borrowed from a
library.
Mary Datchet, coming from the Strand at lunch-time, saw him one day
taking his turn, closely buttoned in an overcoat, and so lost in
thought that he might have been sitting in his own room.
She was overcome by something very like awe by the sight of him; then
she felt much inclined to laugh, although her pulse beat faster. She
passed him, and he never saw her. She came back and touched him on the
shoulder.
“Gracious, Mary!” he exclaimed. “How you startled me!”
“Yes. You looked as if you were walking in your sleep,” she said. “Are
you arranging some terrible love affair? Have you got to reconcile a
desperate couple?”
“I wasn’t thinking about my work,” Ralph replied, rather hastily.
“And, besides, that sort of thing’s not in my line,” he added, rather
grimly.
The morning was fine, and they had still some minutes of leisure to
spend. They had not met for two or three weeks, and Mary had much to
say to Ralph; but she was not certain how far he wished for her
company. However, after a turn or two, in which a few facts were
communicated, he suggested sitting down, and she took the seat beside
him. The sparrows came fluttering about them, and Ralph produced from
his pocket the half of a roll saved from his luncheon. He threw a few
crumbs among them.
“I’ve never seen sparrows so tame,” Mary observed, by way of saying
something.
“No,” said Ralph. “The sparrows in Hyde Park aren’t as tame as this.
If we keep perfectly still, I’ll get one to settle on my arm.”
Mary felt that she could have forgone this display of animal good
temper, but seeing that Ralph, for some curious reason, took a pride
in the sparrows, she bet him sixpence that he would not succeed.
“Done!” he said; and his eye, which had been gloomy, showed a spark of
light. His conversation was now addressed entirely to a bald cock-sparrow, who seemed bolder than the rest; and Mary took the
opportunity of looking at him. She was not satisfied; his face was
worn, and his expression stern. A child came bowling its hoop through
the concourse of birds, and Ralph threw his last crumbs of bread into
the bushes with a snort of impatience.
“That’s what always happens—just as I’ve almost got him,” he said.
“Here’s your sixpence, Mary. But you’ve only got it thanks to that
brute of a boy. They oughtn’t to be allowed to bowl hoops here—”
“Oughtn’t to be allowed to bowl hoops! My dear Ralph, what nonsense!”
“You always say that,” he complained; “and it isn’t nonsense. What’s
the point of having a garden if one can’t watch birds in it? The
street does all right for hoops. And if children can’t be trusted in
the streets, their mothers should keep them at home.”
Mary made no answer to this remark, but frowned.
She leant back on the seat and looked about her at the great houses
breaking the soft gray-blue sky with their chimneys.
“Ah, well,” she said, “London’s a fine place to live in. I believe I
could sit and watch people all day long. I like my fellow-creatures… .”
Ralph sighed impatiently.
“Yes, I think so, when you come to know them,” she added, as if his
disagreement had been spoken.
“That’s just when I don’t like them,” he replied. “Still, I don’t see
why you shouldn’t cherish that illusion, if it pleases you.” He spoke
without much vehemence of agreement or disagreement. He seemed
chilled.
“Wake up, Ralph! You’re half asleep!” Mary cried, turning and pinching
his sleeve. “What have you been doing with yourself? Moping? Working?
Despising the world, as usual?”
As he merely shook his head, and filled his pipe, she went on:
“It’s a bit of a pose, isn’t it?”
“Not more than most things,” he said.
“Well,” Mary remarked, “I’ve a great deal to say to you, but I must go
on—we have a committee.” She rose, but hesitated, looking down upon
him rather gravely. “You don’t look happy, Ralph,” she said. “Is it
anything, or is it nothing?”
He did not immediately answer her, but rose, too, and walked with her
towards the gate. As usual, he did not speak to her without
considering whether what he was about to say was the sort of thing
that he could say to her.
“I’ve
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