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

slipped in between the interstices of the coal.

Katharine reflected. “I’ll wait half an hour,” she said.

Mary rose, went to the table, spread out her papers under the green-shaded lamp and, with an action that was becoming a habit, twisted a lock of hair round and round in her fingers. Once she looked unperceived at her visitor, who never moved, who sat so still, with eyes so intent, that you could almost fancy that she was watching something, some face that never looked up at her. Mary found herself unable to go on writing. She turned her eyes away, but only to be aware of the presence of what Katharine looked at. There were ghosts in the room, and one, strangely and sadly, was the ghost of herself. The minutes went by.

“What would be the time now?” said Katharine at last. The half-hour was not quite spent.

“I’m going to get dinner ready,” said Mary, rising from her table.

“Then I’ll go,” said Katharine.

“Why don’t you stay? Where are you going?”

Katharine looked round the room, conveying her uncertainty in her glance.

“Perhaps I might find him,” she mused.

“But why should it matter? You’ll see him another day.”

Mary spoke, and intended to speak, cruelly enough.

“I was wrong to come here,” Katharine replied.

Their eyes met with antagonism, and neither flinched.

“You had a perfect right to come here,” Mary answered.

A loud knocking at the door interrupted them. Mary went to open it, and returning with some note or parcel, Katharine looked away so that Mary might not read her disappointment.

“Of course you had a right to come,” Mary repeated, laying the note upon the table.

“No,” said Katharine. “Except that when one’s desperate one has a sort of right. I am desperate. How do I know what’s happening to him now? He may do anything. He may wander about the streets all night. Anything may happen to him.”

She spoke with a self-abandonment that Mary had never seen in her.

“You know you exaggerate; you’re talking nonsense,” she said roughly.

“Mary, I must talk⁠—I must tell you⁠—”

“You needn’t tell me anything,” Mary interrupted her. “Can’t I see for myself?”

“No, no,” Katharine exclaimed. “It’s not that⁠—”

Her look, passing beyond Mary, beyond the verge of the room and out beyond any words that came her way, wildly and passionately, convinced Mary that she, at any rate, could not follow such a glance to its end. She was baffled; she tried to think herself back again into the height of her love for Ralph. Pressing her fingers upon her eyelids, she murmured:

“You forget that I loved him too. I thought I knew him. I did know him.”

And yet, what had she known? She could not remember it any more. She pressed her eyeballs until they struck stars and suns into her darkness. She convinced herself that she was stirring among ashes. She desisted. She was astonished at her discovery. She did not love Ralph any more. She looked back dazed into the room, and her eyes rested upon the table with its lamplit papers. The steady radiance seemed for a second to have its counterpart within her; she shut her eyes; she opened them and looked at the lamp again; another love burnt in the place of the old one, or so, in a momentary glance of amazement, she guessed before the revelation was over and the old surroundings asserted themselves. She leant in silence against the mantelpiece.

“There are different ways of loving,” she murmured, half to herself, at length.

Katharine made no reply and seemed unaware of her words. She seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.

“Perhaps he’s waiting in the street again tonight,” she exclaimed. “I’ll go now. I might find him.”

“It’s far more likely that he’ll come here,” said Mary, and Katharine, after considering for a moment, said:

“I’ll wait another half-hour.”

She sank down into her chair again, and took up the same position which Mary had compared to the position of one watching an unseeing face. She watched, indeed, not a face, but a procession, not of people, but of life itself: the good and bad; the meaning; the past, the present, and the future. All this seemed apparent to her, and she was not ashamed of her extravagance so much as exalted to one of the pinnacles of existence, where it behoved the world to do her homage. No one but she herself knew what it meant to miss Ralph Denham on that particular night; into this inadequate event crowded feelings that the great crises of life might have failed to call forth. She had missed him, and knew the bitterness of all failure; she desired him, and knew the torment of all passion. It did not matter what trivial accidents led to this culmination. Nor did she care how extravagant she appeared, nor how openly she showed her feelings.

When the dinner was ready Mary told her to come, and she came submissively, as if she let Mary direct her movements for her. They ate and drank together almost in silence, and when Mary told her to eat more, she ate more; when she was told to drink wine, she drank it. Nevertheless, beneath this superficial obedience, Mary knew that she was following her own thoughts unhindered. She was not inattentive so much as remote; she looked at once so unseeing and so intent upon some vision of her own that Mary gradually felt more than protective⁠—she became actually alarmed at the prospect of some collision between Katharine and the forces of the outside world. Directly they had done, Katharine announced her intention of going.

“But where are you going to?” Mary asked, desiring vaguely to hinder her.

“Oh, I’m going home⁠—no, to Highgate perhaps.”

Mary saw that it would be useless to try to stop her. All she could do was to insist upon coming too, but she met with no opposition; Katharine seemed indifferent to her presence. In a few minutes they were walking along the Strand. They walked so rapidly that Mary was deluded into the belief that Katharine knew where she