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

a certain unreality. Now that she was alone with Ralph she felt at once that a constraint had been taken from them both. She felt that they were alone at the bottom of the house, which rose, story upon story, upon the top of them.

“Why were you waiting out there?” she asked.

“For the chance of seeing you,” he replied.

“You would have waited all night if it hadn’t been for William. It’s windy too. You must have been cold. What could you see? Nothing but our windows.”

“It was worth it. I heard you call me.”

“I called you?” She had called unconsciously.

“They were engaged this morning,” she told him, after a pause.

“You’re glad?” he asked.

She bent her head. “Yes, yes,” she sighed. “But you don’t know how good he is⁠—what he’s done for me⁠—” Ralph made a sound of understanding. “You waited there last night too?” she asked.

“Yes. I can wait,” Denham replied.

The words seemed to fill the room with an emotion which Katharine connected with the sound of distant wheels, the footsteps hurrying along the pavement, the cries of sirens hooting down the river, the darkness and the wind. She saw the upright figure standing beneath the lamppost.

“Waiting in the dark,” she said, glancing at the window, as if he saw what she was seeing. “Ah, but it’s different⁠—” She broke off. “I’m not the person you think me. Until you realize that it’s impossible⁠—”

Placing her elbows on the table, she slid her ruby ring up and down her finger abstractedly. She frowned at the rows of leather-bound books opposite her. Ralph looked keenly at her. Very pale, but sternly concentrated upon her meaning, beautiful but so little aware of herself as to seem remote from him also, there was something distant and abstract about her which exalted him and chilled him at the same time.

“No, you’re right,” he said. “I don’t know you. I’ve never known you.”

“Yet perhaps you know me better than anyone else,” she mused.

Some detached instinct made her aware that she was gazing at a book which belonged by rights to some other part of the house. She walked over to the shelf, took it down, and returned to her seat, placing the book on the table between them. Ralph opened it and looked at the portrait of a man with a voluminous white shirt-collar, which formed the frontispiece.

“I say I do know you, Katharine,” he affirmed, shutting the book. “It’s only for moments that I go mad.”

“Do you call two whole nights a moment?”

“I swear to you that now, at this instant, I see you precisely as you are. No one has ever known you as I know you.⁠ ⁠… Could you have taken down that book just now if I hadn’t known you?”

“That’s true,” she replied, “but you can’t think how I’m divided⁠—how I’m at my ease with you, and how I’m bewildered. The unreality⁠—the dark⁠—the waiting outside in the wind⁠—yes, when you look at me, not seeing me, and I don’t see you either.⁠ ⁠… But I do see,” she went on quickly, changing her position and frowning again, “heaps of things, only not you.”

“Tell me what you see,” he urged.

But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape colored upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of northern hills and flashing light upon cornfields and pools.

“Impossible,” she sighed, laughing at the ridiculous notion of putting any part of this into words.

“Try, Katharine,” Ralph urged her.

“But I can’t⁠—I’m talking a sort of nonsense⁠—the sort of nonsense one talks to oneself.” She was dismayed by the expression of longing and despair upon his face. “I was thinking about a mountain in the North of England,” she attempted. “It’s too silly⁠—I won’t go on.”

“We were there together?” he pressed her.

“No. I was alone.” She seemed to be disappointing the desire of a child. His face fell.

“You’re always alone there?”

“I can’t explain.” She could not explain that she was essentially alone there. “It’s not a mountain in the North of England. It’s an imagination⁠—a story one tells oneself. You have yours too?”

“You’re with me in mine. You’re the thing I make up, you see.”

“Oh, I see,” she sighed. “That’s why it’s so impossible.” She turned upon him almost fiercely. “You must try to stop it,” she said.

“I won’t,” he replied roughly, “because I⁠—” He stopped. He realized that the moment had come to impart that news of the utmost importance which he had tried to impart to Mary Datchet, to Rodney upon the Embankment, to the drunken tramp upon the seat. How should he offer it to Katharine? He looked quickly at her. He saw that she was only half attentive to him; only a section of her was exposed to him. The sight roused in him such desperation that he had much ado to control his impulse to rise and leave the house. Her hand lay loosely curled upon the table. He seized it and grasped it firmly as if to make sure of her existence and of his own. “Because I love you, Katharine,” he said.

Some roundness or warmth essential to that statement was absent from his voice, and she had merely to shake her head very slightly for him to drop her hand and turn away in shame at his own impotence. He thought that she had detected his wish to leave her. She had discerned the break in his resolution, the blankness in the heart of his vision. It was true that he had been happier out in the street, thinking of her, than now that he was in the same room with her. He looked at her with a guilty expression on his face. But her look expressed neither disappointment nor reproach. Her pose was easy, and she seemed to give effect to a mood of quiet speculation by the spinning of her ruby ring upon the polished table. Denham