puzzled. He could feel her groping for his meaning, and
he was annoyed with her, and thought how he had always
found her slow, painstaking, and clumsy. He had
behaved badly to her, too, which made his irritation the
more acute. Without waiting for him to answer, she rose
as if his answer were indifferent to her, and began to put
in order some papers that Mr. Basnett had left on the
table. She hummed a scrap of a tune under her breath,
and moved about the room as if she were occupied in
making things tidy, and had no other concern.
“You’ll stay and dine?” she said casually, returning to
her seat.
“No,” Ralph replied. She did not press him further. They
sat side by side without speaking, and Mary reached her
hand for her work basket, and took out her sewing and
threaded a needle.
“That’s a clever young man,” Ralph observed, referring
to Mr. Basnett.
“I’m glad you thought so. It’s tremendously interesting
work, and considering everything, I think we’ve done very
well. But I’m inclined to agree with you; we ought to try
to be more conciliatory. We’re absurdly strict. It’s difficult
to see that there may be sense in what one’s opponents
say, though they are one’s opponents. Horace
Basnett is certainly too uncompromising. I mustn’t forget
to see that he writes that letter to Judson. You’re too
busy, I suppose, to come on to our committee?” She spoke
in the most impersonal manner.
“I may be out of town,” Ralph replied, with equal distance
of manner.
“Our executive meets every week, of course,” she observed.
“But some of our members don’t come more than
once a month. Members of Parliament are the worst; it
was a mistake, I think, to ask them.”
She went on sewing in silence.
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“You’ve not taken your quinine,” she said, looking up
and seeing the tabloids upon the mantelpiece.
“I don’t want it,” said Ralph shortly.
“Well, you know best,” she replied tranquilly.
“Mary, I’m a brute!” he exclaimed. “Here I come and
waste your time, and do nothing but make myself disagreeable.”
“A cold coming on does make one feel wretched,” she
replied.
“I’ve not got a cold. That was a lie. There’s nothing the
matter with me. I’m mad, I suppose. I ought to have had
the decency to keep away. But I wanted to see you—I
wanted to tell you—I’m in love, Mary.” He spoke the word,
but, as he spoke it, it seemed robbed of substance.
“In love, are you?” she said quietly. “I’m glad, Ralph.”
“I suppose I’m in love. Anyhow, I’m out of my mind. I
can’t think, I can’t work, I don’t care a hang for anything
in the world. Good Heavens, Mary! I’m in torment! One
moment I’m happy; next I’m miserable. I hate her for half
an hour; then I’d give my whole life to be with her for ten
minutes; all the time I don’t know what I feel, or why I
feel it; it’s insanity, and yet it’s perfectly reasonable. Can
you make any sense of it? Can you see what’s happened?
I’m raving, I know; don’t listen, Mary; go on with your
work.”
He rose and began, as usual, to pace up and down the
room. He knew that what he had just said bore very little
resemblance to what he felt, for Mary’s presence acted
upon him like a very strong magnet, drawing from him
certain expressions which were not those he made use of
when he spoke to himself, nor did they represent his
deepest feelings. He felt a little contempt for himself at
having spoken thus; but somehow he had been forced
into speech.
“Do sit down,” said Mary suddenly. “You make me so—
” She spoke with unusual irritability, and Ralph, noticing
it with surprise, sat down at once.
“You haven’t told me her name—you’d rather not, I
suppose?”
“Her name? Katharine Hilbery.”
“But she’s engaged—”
“To Rodney. They’re to be married in September.”
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Night and Day
“I see,” said Mary. But in truth the calm of his manner,
now that he was sitting down once more, wrapt her in
the presence of something which she felt to be so strong,
so mysterious, so incalculable, that she scarcely dared to
attempt to intercept it by any word or question that she
was able to frame. She looked at Ralph blankly, with a
kind of awe in her face, her lips slightly parted, and her
brows raised. He was apparently quite unconscious of her
gaze. Then, as if she could look no longer, she leant back
in her chair, and half closed her eyes. The distance between
them hurt her terribly; one thing after another
came into her mind, tempting her to assail Ralph with
questions, to force him to confide in her, and to enjoy
once more his intimacy. But she rejected every impulse,
for she could not speak without doing violence to some
reserve which had grown between them, putting them a
little far from each other, so that he seemed to her dignified
and remote, like a person she no longer knew well.
“Is there anything that I could do for you?” she asked
gently, and even with courtesy, at length.
“You could see her—no, that’s not what I want; you
mustn’t bother about me, Mary.” He, too, spoke very gently.
“I’m afraid no third person can do anything to help,”
she added.
“No,” he shook his head. “Katharine was saying to-day
how lonely we are.” She saw the effort with which he
spoke Katharine’s name, and believed that he forced himself
to make amends now for his concealment in the past.
At any rate, she was conscious of no anger against him;
but rather of a deep pity for one condemned to suffer as
she had suffered. But in the case of Katharine it was
different; she was indignant with Katharine.
“There’s always work,” she said, a little aggressively.
Ralph moved directly.
“Do you want to be working now?” he asked.
“No, no. It’s Sunday,” she replied. “I was thinking of
Katharine. She doesn’t understand about work. She’s never
had to. She doesn’t know what work is. I’ve only found
out myself quite lately. But it’s the thing that saves one—
I’m sure of that.”
“There are other things, aren’t there?” he hesitated.
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Virginia Woolf
“Nothing that one can count upon,” she returned. “After
all, other people—” she stopped, but forced herself to go
on. “Where should I be now if I hadn’t got to go to my
office every day? Thousands of people would tell you the
same thing—thousands of women. I tell you, work is the
only thing that saved me, Ralph.” He set his mouth, as if
her words rained blows on him; he looked as if he had
made up his mind to bear anything she might say, in silence.
He had deserved it, and there would be relief in
having to bear it. But she broke off, and rose as if to fetch
something from the next room. Before she reached the
door she turned back, and stood facing him, self-possessed,
and yet defiant and formidable in her composure.
“It’s all turned out splendidly for me,” she said. “It will
for you, too. I’m sure of that. Because, after all, Katharine
is worth it.”
“Mary—!” he exclaimed. But her head was turned away,
and he could not say what he wished to say. “Mary, you’re
splendid,” he concluded. She faced him as he spoke, and
gave him her hand. She had suffered and relinquished,
she had seen her future turned from one of infinite promise
to one of barrenness, and yet, somehow, over what she
scarcely knew, and with what results she could hardly
foretell, she had conquered. With Ralph’s eyes upon her,
smiling straight back at him serenely and proudly, she
knew, for the first time, that she had conquered. She let
him kiss her hand.
The streets were empty enough on Sunday night, and if
the Sabbath, and the domestic amusements proper to the
Sabbath, had not kept people indoors, a high strong wind
might very probably have done so. Ralph Denham was
aware of a tumult in the street much in accordance with
his own sensations. The gusts, sweeping along the Strand,
seemed at the same time to blow a clear space across the
sky in which stars appeared, and for a short time the
quicks-peeding silver moon riding through clouds, as if
they were waves of water surging round her and over her.
They swamped her, but she emerged; they broke over her
and covered her again; she issued forth indomitable. In
the country fields all the wreckage of winter was being
dispersed; the dead leaves, the withered bracken, the dry
and discolored grass, but no bud would be broken, nor
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Night and Day
would the new stalks that showed above the earth take
any harm, and perhaps to-morrow a line of blue or yellow
would show through a slit in their green. But the whirl of
the atmosphere alone was in Denham’s mood, and what
of star or blossom appeared was only as a light gleaming
for a second upon heaped waves fast following each other.
He had not been able to speak to Mary, though for a
moment he had come near enough to be tantalized by a
wonderful possibility of understanding. But the desire to
communicate something of the very greatest importance
possessed him completely; he still wished to bestow this
gift upon some other human being; he sought their company.
More by instinct than by conscious choice, he took
the direction which led to Rodney’s rooms. He knocked
loudly upon his door; but no one answered. He rang the
bell. It took him some time to accept the fact that Rodney
was out. When he could no longer pretend that the sound
of the wind in the old building was the sound of some
one rising from his chair, he ran downstairs again, as if
his goal had been altered and only just revealed to him.
He walked in the direction of Chelsea.
But physical fatigue, for he had not dined and had
tramped both far and fast, made him sit for a moment
upon a seat on the Embankment. One of the regular occupants
of those seats, an elderly man who had drunk
himself, probably, out of work and lodging, drifted up,
begged a match, and sat down beside him. It was a windy
night, he said; times were hard; some long story of bad
luck and injustice followed, told so often that the man
seemed to be talking to himself, or, perhaps, the neglect
of his audience had long made any attempt to catch their
attention seem scarcely worth while. When he began to
speak Ralph had a wild desire to talk to him; to question
him; to make him understand. He did, in fact, interrupt
him at one point; but it was useless. The ancient story of
failure, ill-luck, undeserved disaster, went down the wind,
disconnected syllables flying past Ralph’s ears with a queer
alternation of loudness and faintness as if, at certain
moments, the man’s memory of his wrongs revived and
then flagged, dying down at last into a grumble of resignation,
which seemed to represent a final lapse into the
accustomed despair. The unhappy voice afflicted Ralph,
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Virginia Woolf
but it also angered him. And when the elderly man refused
to listen and mumbled on, an odd image came to
his mind of a lighthouse besieged by the flying bodies of
lost birds, who were dashed senseless, by the gale, against
the glass. He had a strange sensation that he was both
lighthouse and bird; he was steadfast and brilliant; and
at the same time he was whirled, with all other things,
senseless against the glass. He got up, left his tribute of
silver, and pressed on, with the wind against him. The
image of the lighthouse and the storm full of birds persisted,
taking the place of more definite thoughts, as he
walked past the Houses of Parliament and down Grosvenor
Road, by the side of the river. In his state of physical
fatigue, details merged themselves in the vaster prospect,
of which the flying gloom and the intermittent lights
of lamp-posts and private houses were the outward token,
but he never lost his sense of walking in the direction
of Katharine’s house. He took it for granted that
something would then happen, and, as he walked on, his
mind became more and more full of pleasure and expectancy.
Within a certain radius of her house the streets
came under the influence of her presence. Each house
had an individuality known to Ralph, because of the tremendous
individuality of the house in which she lived.
For some yards before reaching the Hilberys’ door he
walked in a trance of pleasure, but when he reached it,
and pushed the gate of the little garden open, he hesitated.
He did not know what to do next. There was no
hurry, however, for the outside of the house held pleasure
enough to last him some time longer. He crossed the
road, and leant against the balustrade of the Embankment,
fixing his eyes upon the house.
Lights burnt in the three long windows of the drawing-
room. The space of the room behind became, in Ralph’s
vision, the center of the dark, flying wilderness of the
world; the justification for the welter of confusion surrounding
it; the steady light which cast its beams, like
those of a lighthouse, with searching composure over the
trackless waste. In this little sanctuary were gathered
together several different people, but their identity was
dissolved in a general glory of something that might,
perhaps, be called civilization; at any rate, all dryness,
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Night and Day
all safety, all that stood up above the surge and preserved
a consciousness of its own, was centered in the
drawing-room of the Hilberys. Its purpose was beneficent;
and yet so far above his level as to have something
austere about it, a light that cast itself out and yet kept
itself aloof. Then he began, in his mind, to distinguish
different individuals within, consciously refusing as yet
to attack the figure of Katharine. His thoughts lingered
over Mrs. Hilbery and Cassandra; and then he turned to
Rodney and Mr. Hilbery. Physically, he saw them bathed
in that steady flow of yellow light which filled the long
