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

He had taken her arm, and held her hand firmly in his, nor had she the force to resist what now seemed to her his enormously superior strength. Very well; she would submit, as her mother and her aunt and most women, perhaps, had submitted; and yet she knew that every second of such submission to his strength was a second of treachery to him.

“I did say I would marry you, but it was wrong,” she forced herself to say, and she stiffened her arm as if to annul even the seeming submission of that separate part of her; “for I don’t love you, William; you’ve noticed it, everyone’s noticed it; why should we go on pretending? When I told you I loved you, I was wrong. I said what I knew to be untrue.”

As none of her words seemed to her at all adequate to represent what she felt, she repeated them, and emphasized them without realizing the effect that 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 anyone? 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, forever. 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