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

was going. She herself was not attentive. She was glad of the movement along lamplit streets in the open air. She was fingering, painfully and with fear, yet with strange hope, too, the discovery which she had stumbled upon unexpectedly that night. She was free once more at the cost of a gift, the best, perhaps, that she could offer, but she was, thank Heaven, in love no longer. She was tempted to spend the first instalment of her freedom in some dissipation; in the pit of the Coliseum, for example, since they were now passing the door. Why not go in and celebrate her independence of the tyranny of love? Or, perhaps, the top of an omnibus bound for some remote place such as Camberwell, or Sidcup, or the Welsh Harp would suit her better. She noticed these names painted on little boards for the first time for weeks. Or should she return to her room, and spend the night working out the details of a very enlightened and ingenious scheme? Of all possibilities this appealed to her most, and brought to mind the fire, the lamplight, the steady glow which had seemed lit in the place where a more passionate flame had once burnt.

Now Katharine stopped, and Mary woke to the fact that instead of having a goal she had evidently none. She paused at the edge of the crossing, and looked this way and that, and finally made as if in the direction of Haverstock Hill.

“Look here⁠—where are you going?” Mary cried, catching her by the hand. “We must take that cab and go home.” She hailed a cab and insisted that Katharine should get in, while she directed the driver to take them to Cheyne Walk.

Katharine submitted. “Very well,” she said. “We may as well go there as anywhere else.”

A gloom seemed to have fallen on her. She lay back in her corner, silent and apparently exhausted. Mary, in spite of her own preoccupation, was struck by her pallor and her attitude of dejection.

“I’m sure we shall find him,” she said more gently than she had yet spoken.

“It may be too late,” Katharine replied. Without understanding her, Mary began to pity her for what she was suffering.

“Nonsense,” she said, taking her hand and rubbing it. “If we don’t find him there we shall find him somewhere else.”

“But suppose he’s walking about the streets⁠—for hours and hours?”

She leant forward and looked out of the window.

“He may refuse ever to speak to me again,” she said in a low voice, almost to herself.

The exaggeration was so immense that Mary did not attempt to cope with it, save by keeping hold of Katharine’s wrist. She half expected that Katharine might open the door suddenly and jump out. Perhaps Katharine perceived the purpose with which her hand was held.

“Don’t be frightened,” she said, with a little laugh. “I’m not going to jump out of the cab. It wouldn’t do much good after all.”

Upon this, Mary ostentatiously withdrew her hand.

“I ought to have apologized,” Katharine continued, with an effort, “for bringing you into all this business; I haven’t told you half, either. I’m no longer engaged to William Rodney. He is to marry Cassandra Otway. It’s all arranged⁠—all perfectly right.⁠ ⁠… And after he’d waited in the streets for hours and hours, William made me bring him in. He was standing under the lamppost watching our windows. He was perfectly white when he came into the room. William left us alone, and we sat and talked. It seems ages and ages ago, now. Was it last night? Have I been out long? What’s the time?” She sprang forward to catch sight of a clock, as if the exact time had some important bearing on her case.

“Only half-past eight!” she exclaimed. “Then he may be there still.” She leant out of the window and told the cabman to drive faster.

“But if he’s not there, what shall I do? Where could I find him? The streets are so crowded.”

“We shall find him,” Mary repeated.

Mary had no doubt but that somehow or other they would find him. But suppose they did find him? She began to think of Ralph with a sort of strangeness, in her effort to understand how he could be capable of satisfying this extraordinary desire. Once more she thought herself back to her old view of him and could, with an effort, recall the haze which surrounded his figure, and the sense of confused, heightened exhilaration which lay all about his neighborhood, so that for months at a time she had never exactly heard his voice or seen his face⁠—or so it now seemed to her. The pain of her loss shot through her. Nothing would ever make up⁠—not success, or happiness, or oblivion. But this pang was immediately followed by the assurance that now, at any rate, she knew the truth; and Katharine, she thought, stealing a look at her, did not know the truth; yes, Katharine was immensely to be pitied.

The cab, which had been caught in the traffic, was now liberated and sped on down Sloane Street. Mary was conscious of the tension with which Katharine marked its progress, as if her mind were fixed upon a point in front of them, and marked, second by second, their approach to it. She said nothing, and in silence Mary began to fix her mind, in sympathy at first, and later in forgetfulness of her companion, upon a point in front of them. She imagined a point distant as a low star upon the horizon of the dark. There for her too, for them both, was the goal for which they were striving, and the end for the ardors of their spirits was the same: but where it was, or what it was, or why she felt convinced that they were united in search of it, as they drove swiftly down the streets of London side by side, she could not have said.

“At last,” Katharine breathed, as the cab drew