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

they might have upon a man who cared for her. She was

completely taken aback by finding her arm suddenly dropped; then she

saw his face most strangely contorted; was he laughing, it flashed

across her? In another moment she saw that he was in tears. In her

bewilderment at this apparition she stood aghast for a second. With a

desperate sense that this horror must, at all costs, be stopped, she

then put her arms about him, drew his head for a moment upon her

shoulder, and led him on, murmuring words of consolation, until he

heaved a great sigh. They held fast to each other; her tears, too, ran

down her cheeks; and were both quite silent. Noticing the difficulty

with which he walked, and feeling the same extreme lassitude in her

own limbs, she proposed that they should rest for a moment where the

bracken was brown and shriveled beneath an oak-tree. He assented. Once

more he gave a great sigh, and wiped his eyes with a childlike

unconsciousness, and began to speak without a trace of his previous

anger. The idea came to her that they were like the children in the

fairy tale who were lost in a wood, and with this in her mind she

noticed the scattering of dead leaves all round them which had been

blown by the wind into heaps, a foot or two deep, here and there.

 

“When did you begin to feel this, Katharine?” he said; “for it isn’t

true to say that you’ve always felt it. I admit I was unreasonable the

first night when you found that your clothes had been left behind.

Still, where’s the fault in that? I could promise you never to

interfere with your clothes again. I admit I was cross when I found

you upstairs with Henry. Perhaps I showed it too openly. But that’s

not unreasonable either when one’s engaged. Ask your mother. And now

this terrible thing—” He broke off, unable for the moment to proceed

any further. “This decision you say you’ve come to—have you discussed

it with any one? Your mother, for example, or Henry?”

 

“No, no, of course not,” she said, stirring the leaves with her hand.

“But you don’t understand me, William—”

 

“Help me to understand you—”

 

“You don’t understand, I mean, my real feelings; how could you? I’ve

only now faced them myself. But I haven’t got the sort of

feeling—love, I mean—I don’t know what to call it”—she looked

vaguely towards the horizon sunk under mist—“but, anyhow, without it

our marriage would be a farce—”

 

“How a farce?” he asked. “But this kind of analysis is disastrous!” he

exclaimed.

 

“I should have done it before,” she said gloomily.

 

“You make yourself think things you don’t think,” he continued,

becoming demonstrative with his hands, as his manner was. “Believe me,

Katharine, before we came here we were perfectly happy. You were full

of plans for our house—the chair-covers, don’t you remember?—like

any other woman who is about to be married. Now, for no reason

whatever, you begin to fret about your feeling and about my feeling,

with the usual result. I assure you, Katharine, I’ve been through it

all myself. At one time I was always asking myself absurd questions

which came to nothing either. What you want, if I may say so, is some

occupation to take you out of yourself when this morbid mood comes on.

If it hadn’t been for my poetry, I assure you, I should often have

been very much in the same state myself. To let you into a secret,” he

continued, with his little chuckle, which now sounded almost assured,

“I’ve often gone home from seeing you in such a state of nerves that I

had to force myself to write a page or two before I could get you out

of my head. Ask Denham; he’ll tell you how he met me one night; he’ll

tell you what a state he found me in.”

 

Katharine started with displeasure at the mention of Ralph’s name. The

thought of the conversation in which her conduct had been made a

subject for discussion with Denham roused her anger; but, as she

instantly felt, she had scarcely the right to grudge William any use

of her name, seeing what her fault against him had been from first to

last. And yet Denham! She had a view of him as a judge. She figured

him sternly weighing instances of her levity in this masculine court

of inquiry into feminine morality and gruffly dismissing both her and

her family with some half-sarcastic, half-tolerant phrase which sealed

her doom, as far as he was concerned, for ever. Having met him so

lately, the sense of his character was strong in her. The thought was

not a pleasant one for a proud woman, but she had yet to learn the art

of subduing her expression. Her eyes fixed upon the ground, her brows

drawn together, gave William a very fair picture of the resentment

that she was forcing herself to control. A certain degree of

apprehension, occasionally culminating in a kind of fear, had always

entered into his love for her, and had increased, rather to his

surprise, in the greater intimacy of their engagement. Beneath her

steady, exemplary surface ran a vein of passion which seemed to him

now perverse, now completely irrational, for it never took the normal

channel of glorification of him and his doings; and, indeed, he almost

preferred the steady good sense, which had always marked their

relationship, to a more romantic bond. But passion she had, he could

not deny it, and hitherto he had tried to see it employed in his

thoughts upon the lives of the children who were to be born to them.

 

“She will make a perfect mother—a mother of sons,” he thought; but

seeing her sitting there, gloomy and silent, he began to have his

doubts on this point. “A farce, a farce,” he thought to himself. “She

said that our marriage would be a farce,” and he became suddenly aware

of their situation, sitting upon the ground, among the dead leaves,

not fifty yards from the main road, so that it was quite possible for

some one passing to see and recognize them. He brushed off his face

any trace that might remain of that unseemly exhibition of emotion.

But he was more troubled by Katharine’s appearance, as she sat rapt in

thought upon the ground, than by his own; there was something improper

to him in her self-forgetfulness. A man naturally alive to the

conventions of society, he was strictly conventional where women were

concerned, and especially if the women happened to be in any way

connected with him. He noticed with distress the long strand of dark

hair touching her shoulder and two or three dead beech-leaves attached

to her dress; but to recall her mind in their present circumstances to

a sense of these details was impossible. She sat there, seeming

unconscious of everything. He suspected that in her silence she was

reproaching herself; but he wished that she would think of her hair

and of the dead beech-leaves, which were of more immediate importance

to him than anything else. Indeed, these trifles drew his attention

strangely from his own doubtful and uneasy state of mind; for relief,

mixing itself with pain, stirred up a most curious hurry and tumult in

his breast, almost concealing his first sharp sense of bleak and

overwhelming disappointment. In order to relieve this restlessness and

close a distressingly ill-ordered scene, he rose abruptly and helped

Katharine to her feet. She smiled a little at the minute care with

which he tidied her and yet, when he brushed the dead leaves from his

own coat, she flinched, seeing in that action the gesture of a lonely

man.

 

“William,” she said, “I will marry you. I will try to make you happy.”