Night and Day, Virginia Woolf [electronic book reader .txt] 📗

man, young, unhappy, tempestuous, full of desires and faults; for the first time she realized him for herself, and not from her mother’s memory. He might have been her brother, she thought. It seemed to her that they were akin, with the mysterious kinship of blood which makes it seem possible to interpret the sights which the eyes of the dead behold so intently, or even to believe that they look with us upon our present joys and sorrows. He would have understood, she thought, suddenly; and instead of laying her withered flowers upon his shrine, she brought him her own perplexities⁠—perhaps a gift of greater value, should the dead be conscious of gifts, than flowers and incense and adoration. Doubts, questionings, and despondencies she felt, as she looked up, would be more welcome to him than homage, and he would hold them but a very small burden if she gave him, also, some share in what she suffered and achieved. The depth of her own pride and love were not more apparent to her than the sense that the dead asked neither flowers nor regrets, but a share in the life which they had given her, the life which they had lived.

Rodney found her a moment later sitting beneath her grandfather’s portrait. She laid her hand on the seat next her in a friendly way, and said:

“Come and sit down, William. How glad I was you were here! I felt myself getting ruder and ruder.”

“You are not good at hiding your feelings,” he returned dryly.

“Oh, don’t scold me⁠—I’ve had a horrid afternoon.” She told him how she had taken the flowers to Mrs. McCormick, and how South Kensington impressed her as the preserve of officers’ widows. She described how the door had opened, and what gloomy avenues of busts and palm-trees and umbrellas had been revealed to her. She spoke lightly, and succeeded in putting him at his ease. Indeed, he rapidly became too much at his ease to persist in a condition of cheerful neutrality. He felt his composure slipping from him. Katharine made it seem so natural to ask her to help him, or advise him, to say straight out what he had in his mind. The letter from Cassandra was heavy in his pocket. There was also the letter to Cassandra lying on the table in the next room. The atmosphere seemed charged with Cassandra. But, unless Katharine began the subject of her own accord, he could not even hint⁠—he must ignore the whole affair; it was the part of a gentleman to preserve a bearing that was, as far as he could make it, the bearing of an undoubting lover. At intervals he sighed deeply. He talked rather more quickly than usual about the possibility that some of the operas of Mozart would be played in the summer. He had received a notice, he said, and at once produced a pocketbook stuffed with papers, and began shuffling them in search. He held a thick envelope between his finger and thumb, as if the notice from the opera company had become in some way inseparably attached to it.

“A letter from Cassandra?” said Katharine, in the easiest voice in the world, looking over his shoulder. “I’ve just written to ask her to come here, only I forgot to post it.”

He handed her the envelope in silence. She took it, extracted the sheets, and read the letter through.

The reading seemed to Rodney to take an intolerably long time.

“Yes,” she observed at length, “a very charming letter.”

Rodney’s face was half turned away, as if in bashfulness. Her view of his profile almost moved her to laughter. She glanced through the pages once more.

“I see no harm,” William blurted out, “in helping her⁠—with Greek, for example⁠—if she really cares for that sort of thing.”

“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t care,” said Katharine, consulting the pages once more. “In fact⁠—ah, here it is⁠—‘The Greek alphabet is absolutely fascinating.’ Obviously she does care.”

“Well, Greek may be rather a large order. I was thinking chiefly of English. Her criticisms of my play, though they’re too generous, evidently immature⁠—she can’t be more than twenty-two, I suppose?⁠—they certainly show the sort of thing one wants: real feeling for poetry, understanding, not formed, of course, but it’s at the root of everything after all. There’d be no harm in lending her books?”

“No. Certainly not.”

“But if it⁠—hum⁠—led to a correspondence? I mean, Katharine, I take it, without going into matters which seem to me a little morbid, I mean,” he floundered, “you, from your point of view, feel that there’s nothing disagreeable to you in the notion? If so, you’ve only to speak, and I never think of it again.”

She was surprised by the violence of her desire that he never should think of it again. For an instant it seemed to her impossible to surrender an intimacy, which might not be the intimacy of love, but was certainly the intimacy of true friendship, to any woman in the world. Cassandra would never understand him⁠—she was not good enough for him. The letter seemed to her a letter of flattery⁠—a letter addressed to his weakness, which it made her angry to think was known to another. For he was not weak; he had the rare strength of doing what he promised⁠—she had only to speak, and he would never think of Cassandra again.

She paused. Rodney guessed the reason. He was amazed.

“She loves me,” he thought. The woman he admired more than anyone in the world, loved him, as he had given up hope that she would ever love him. And now that for the first time he was sure of her love, he resented it. He felt it as a fetter, an encumbrance, something which made them both, but him in particular, ridiculous. He was in her power completely, but his eyes were open and he was no longer her slave or her dupe. He would be her master in future. The instant prolonged itself as Katharine realized