Night and Day, Virginia Woolf [10 ebook reader txt] 📗

her coat and her stick. She took them, fastened the

coat securely, grasped the stick firmly. The ivy spray was still

twisted about the handle; this one sacrifice, she thought, she might

make to sentimentality and personality, and she picked two leaves from

the ivy and put them in her pocket before she disencumbered her stick

of the rest of it. She grasped the stick in the middle, and settled

her fur cap closely upon her head, as if she must be in trim for a

long and stormy walk. Next, standing in the middle of the road, she

took a slip of paper from her purse, and read out loud a list of

commissions entrusted to her—fruit, butter, string, and so on; and

all the time she never spoke directly to Ralph or looked at him.

 

Ralph heard her giving orders to attentive, rosy-checked men in white

aprons, and in spite of his own preoccupation, he commented upon the

determination with which she made her wishes known. Once more he

began, automatically, to take stock of her characteristics. Standing

thus, superficially observant and stirring the sawdust on the floor

meditatively with the toe of his boot, he was roused by a musical and

familiar voice behind him, accompanied by a light touch upon his

shoulder.

 

“I’m not mistaken? Surely Mr. Denham? I caught a glimpse of your coat

through the window, and I felt sure that I knew your coat. Have you

seen Katharine or William? I’m wandering about Lincoln looking for the

ruins.”

 

It was Mrs. Hilbery; her entrance created some stir in the shop; many

people looked at her.

 

“First of all, tell me where I am,” she demanded, but, catching sight

of the attentive shopman, she appealed to him. “The ruins—my party is

waiting for me at the ruins. The Roman ruins—or Greek, Mr. Denham?

Your town has a great many beautiful things in it, but I wish it

hadn’t so many ruins. I never saw such delightful little pots of honey

in my life—are they made by your own bees? Please give me one of

those little pots, and tell me how I shall find my way to the ruins.”

 

“And now,” she continued, having received the information and the pot

of honey, having been introduced to Mary, and having insisted that

they should accompany her back to the ruins, since in a town with so

many turnings, such prospects, such delightful little half-naked boys

dabbling in pools, such Venetian canals, such old blue china in the

curiosity shops, it was impossible for one person all alone to find

her way to the ruins. “Now,” she exclaimed, “please tell me what

you’re doing here, Mr. Denham—for you ARE Mr. Denham, aren’t you?”

she inquired, gazing at him with a sudden suspicion of her own

accuracy. “The brilliant young man who writes for the Review, I mean?

Only yesterday my husband was telling me he thought you one of the

cleverest young men he knew. Certainly, you’ve been the messenger of

Providence to me, for unless I’d seen you I’m sure I should never have

found the ruins at all.”

 

They had reached the Roman arch when Mrs. Hilbery caught sight of her

own party, standing like sentinels facing up and down the road so as

to intercept her if, as they expected, she had got lodged in some

shop.

 

“I’ve found something much better than ruins!” she exclaimed. “I’ve

found two friends who told me how to find you, which I could never

have done without them. They must come and have tea with us. What a

pity that we’ve just had luncheon.” Could they not somehow revoke that

meal?

 

Katharine, who had gone a few steps by herself down the road, and was

investigating the window of an ironmonger, as if her mother might have

got herself concealed among mowing-machines and garden-shears, turned

sharply on hearing her voice, and came towards them. She was a great

deal surprised to see Denham and Mary Datchet. Whether the cordiality

with which she greeted them was merely that which is natural to a

surprise meeting in the country, or whether she was really glad to see

them both, at any rate she exclaimed with unusual pleasure as she

shook hands:

 

“I never knew you lived here. Why didn’t you say so, and we could have

met? And are you staying with Mary?” she continued, turning to Ralph.

“What a pity we didn’t meet before.”

 

Thus confronted at a distance of only a few feet by the real body of

the woman about whom he had dreamt so many million dreams, Ralph

stammered; he made a clutch at his self-control; the color either came

to his cheeks or left them, he knew not which; but he was determined

to face her and track down in the cold light of day whatever vestige

of truth there might be in his persistent imaginations. He did not

succeed in saying anything. It was Mary who spoke for both of them. He

was struck dumb by finding that Katharine was quite different, in some

strange way, from his memory, so that he had to dismiss his old view

in order to accept the new one. The wind was blowing her crimson scarf

across her face; the wind had already loosened her hair, which looped

across the corner of one of the large, dark eyes which, so he used to

think, looked sad; now they looked bright with the brightness of the

sea struck by an unclouded ray; everything about her seemed rapid,

fragmentary, and full of a kind of racing speed. He realized suddenly

that he had never seen her in the daylight before.

 

Meanwhile, it was decided that it was too late to go in search of

ruins as they had intended; and the whole party began to walk towards

the stables where the carriage had been put up.

 

“Do you know,” said Katharine, keeping slightly in advance of the rest

with Ralph, “I thought I saw you this morning, standing at a window.

But I decided that it couldn’t be you. And it must have been you all

the same.”

 

“Yes, I thought I saw you—but it wasn’t you,” he replied.

 

This remark, and the rough strain in his voice, recalled to her memory

so many difficult speeches and abortive meetings that she was jerked

directly back to the London drawing-room, the family relics, and the

tea-table; and at the same time recalled some half-finished or

interrupted remark which she had wanted to make herself or to hear

from him—she could not remember what it was.

 

“I expect it was me,” she said. “I was looking for my mother. It

happens every time we come to Lincoln. In fact, there never was a

family so unable to take care of itself as ours is. Not that it very

much matters, because some one always turns up in the nick of time to

help us out of our scrapes. Once I was left in a field with a bull

when I was a baby—but where did we leave the carriage? Down that

street or the next? The next, I think.” She glanced back and saw that

the others were following obediently, listening to certain memories of

Lincoln upon which Mrs. Hilbery had started. “But what are you doing

here?” she asked.

 

“I’m buying a cottage. I’m going to live here—as soon as I can find a

cottage, and Mary tells me there’ll be no difficulty about that.”

 

“But,” she exclaimed, almost standing still in her surprise, “you will

give up the Bar, then?” It flashed across her mind that he must

already be engaged to Mary.

 

“The solicitor’s office? Yes. I’m giving that up.”

 

“But why?” she asked. She answered herself at once, with a curious

change from rapid speech to an almost melancholy tone. “I think you’re

very wise to give it up. You will be much happier.”

 

At this very moment, when her words seemed to be striking a path into

the future for him, they stepped into the yard of an inn, and there

beheld the family coach of the Otways, to which one sleek horse was

already attached, while the second was being led out of the stable

door by the hostler.

 

“I don’t know what one means by happiness,” he said briefly, having to

step aside in order to avoid a groom with a bucket. “Why do you think

I shall be happy? I don’t expect to be anything of the kind. I expect

to be rather less unhappy. I shall write a book and curse my charwoman

—if happiness consists in that. What do you think?”

 

She could not answer because they were immediately surrounded by other

members of the party—by Mrs. Hilbery, and Mary, Henry Otway, and

William.

 

Rodney went up to Katharine immediately and said to her:

 

“Henry is going to drive home with your mother, and I suggest that

they should put us down half-way and let us walk back.”

 

Katharine nodded her head. She glanced at him with an oddly furtive

expression.

 

“Unfortunately we go in opposite directions, or we might have given

you a lift,” he continued to Denham. His manner was unusually

peremptory; he seemed anxious to hasten the departure, and Katharine

looked at him from time to time, as Denham noticed, with an expression

half of inquiry, half of annoyance. She at once helped her mother into

her cloak, and said to Mary:

 

“I want to see you. Are you going back to London at once? I will

write.” She half smiled at Ralph, but her look was a little overcast

by something she was thinking, and in a very few minutes the Otway

carriage rolled out of the stable yard and turned down the high road

leading to the village of Lampsher.

 

The return drive was almost as silent as the drive from home had been

in the morning; indeed, Mrs. Hilbery leant back with closed eyes in

her corner, and either slept or feigned sleep, as her habit was in the

intervals between the seasons of active exertion, or continued the

story which she had begun to tell herself that morning.

 

About two miles from Lampsher the road ran over the rounded summit of

the heath, a lonely spot marked by an obelisk of granite, setting

forth the gratitude of some great lady of the eighteenth century who

had been set upon by highwaymen at this spot and delivered from death

just as hope seemed lost. In summer it was a pleasant place, for the

deep woods on either side murmured, and the heather, which grew thick

round the granite pedestal, made the light breeze taste sweetly; in

winter the sighing of the trees was deepened to a hollow sound, and

the heath was as gray and almost as solitary as the empty sweep of the

clouds above it.

 

Here Rodney stopped the carriage and helped Katharine to alight.

Henry, too, gave her his hand, and fancied that she pressed it very

slightly in parting as if she sent him a message. But the carriage

rolled on immediately, without wakening Mrs. Hilbery, and left the

couple standing by the obelisk. That Rodney was angry with her and had

made this opportunity for speaking to her, Katharine knew very well;

she was neither glad nor sorry that the time had come, nor, indeed,

knew what to expect, and thus remained silent. The carriage grew

smaller and smaller upon the dusky road, and still Rodney did not

speak. Perhaps, she thought, he waited until the last sign of the

carriage had disappeared beneath the curve of the road and they were

left entirely alone. To cloak their silence she read the writing on

the obelisk, to do which