some crime. She was pale and uncomfortably agitated, as
much by the strangeness of Rodney’s behavior as by the
sight of Ralph Denham.
“If he chooses to come—” she said defiantly.
“You can’t let him wait out there. I shall tell him to come
in.” Rodney spoke with such decision that when he raised
his arm Katharine expected him to draw the curtain instantly.
She caught his hand with a little exclamation.
“Wait!” she cried. “I don’t allow you.”
“You can’t wait,” he replied. “You’ve gone too far.” His
hand remained upon the curtain. “Why don’t you admit,
Katharine,” he broke out, looking at her with an expression
of contempt as well as of anger, “that you love him?
Are you going to treat him as you treated me?”
She looked at him, wondering, in spite of all her perplexity,
at the spirit that possessed him.
“I forbid you to draw the curtain,” she said.
He reflected, and then took his hand away.
“I’ve no right to interfere,” he concluded. “I’ll leave
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you. Or, if you like, we’ll go back to the drawing-room.”
“No. I can’t go back,” she said, shaking her head. She
bent her head in thought.
“You love him, Katharine,” Rodney said suddenly. His
tone had lost something of its sternness, and might have
been used to urge a child to confess its fault. She raised
her eyes and fixed them upon him.
“I love him?” she repeated. He nodded. She searched
his face, as if for further confirmation of his words, and,
as he remained silent and expectant, turned away once
more and continued her thoughts. He observed her closely,
but without stirring, as if he gave her time to make up
her mind to fulfil her obvious duty. The strains of Mozart
reached them from the room above.
“Now,” she said suddenly, with a sort of desperation,
rising from her chair and seeming to command Rodney to
fulfil his part. He drew the curtain instantly, and she
made no attempt to stop him. Their eyes at once sought
the same spot beneath the lamp-post.
“He’s not there!” she exclaimed.
No one was there. William threw the window up and looked
out. The wind rushed into the room, together with the
sound of distant wheels, footsteps hurrying along the pavement,
and the cries of sirens hooting down the river.
“Denham!” William cried.
“Ralph!” said Katharine, but she spoke scarcely louder
than she might have spoken to some one in the same
room. With their eyes fixed upon the opposite side of the
road, they did not notice a figure close to the railing
which divided the garden from the street. But Denham
had crossed the road and was standing there. They were
startled by his voice close at hand.
“Rodney!”
“There you are! Come in, Denham.” Rodney went to the
front door and opened it. “Here he is,” he said, bringing
Ralph with him into the dining-room where Katharine
stood, with her back to the open window. Their eyes met
for a second. Denham looked half dazed by the strong
light, and, buttoned in his overcoat, with his hair ruffled
across his forehead by the wind, he seemed like somebody
rescued from an open boat out at sea. William
promptly shut the window and drew the curtains. He acted
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with a cheerful decision as if he were master of the situation,
and knew exactly what he meant to do.
“You’re the first to hear the news, Denham,” he said.
“Katharine isn’t going to marry me, after all.”
“Where shall I put—” Ralph began vaguely, holding
out his hat and glancing about him; he balanced it carefully
against a silver bowl that stood upon the sideboard.
He then sat himself down rather heavily at the head of
the oval dinner-table. Rodney stood on one side of him
and Katharine on the other. He appeared to be presiding
over some meeting from which most of the members were
absent. Meanwhile, he waited, and his eyes rested upon
the glow of the beautifully polished mahogany table.
“William is engaged to Cassandra,” said Katharine briefly.
At that Denham looked up quickly at Rodney. Rodney’s
expression changed. He lost his self-possession. He smiled
a little nervously, and then his attention seemed to be
caught by a fragment of melody from the floor above. He
seemed for a moment to forget the presence of the others.
He glanced towards the door.
“I congratulate you,” said Denham.
“Yes, yes. We’re all mad—quite out of our minds,
Denham,” he said. “It’s partly Katharine’s doing—partly
mine.” He looked oddly round the room as if he wished to
make sure that the scene in which he played a part had
some real existence. “Quite mad,” he repeated. “Even
Katharine—” His gaze rested upon her finally, as if she,
too, had changed from his old view of her. He smiled at
her as if to encourage her. “Katharine shall explain,” he
said, and giving a little nod to Denham, he left the room.
Katharine sat down at once, and leant her chin upon
her hands. So long as Rodney was in the room the proceedings
of the evening had seemed to be in his charge,
and had been marked by 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
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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 lamp-post.
“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 any one 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.”
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“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
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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 forgot his despair in wondering what thoughts
now occupied her.
“You don’t believe me?” he said. His tone was humble,
and made her smile at him.
“As far as I understand you—but what should you advise
me to do with this ring?” she asked, holding it out.
“I should advise you to let me keep it for you,” he
replied, in the same tone of half-humorous gravity.
“After what you’ve said, I can hardly trust you—unless
you’ll unsay what you’ve said?”
“Very well. I’m not in love with you.”
“But I think you are in love with me… . As I am with
you,” she added casually enough. “At least,” she said
slipping her ring back to its old position, “what other
word describes the state we’re in?”
She looked at him gravely and inquiringly, as if in search
of help.
“It’s when I’m with you that I doubt it, not when I’m
alone,” he stated.
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Virginia Woolf
“So I thought,” she replied.
In order to explain to her his state of mind, Ralph recounted
his experience with the photograph, the letter,
and the flower picked at Kew. She listened very seriously.
“And then you went raving about the streets,” she
mused. “Well, it’s bad enough. But my state is worse than
yours, because it hasn’t anything to do with facts. It’s an
hallucination, pure and simple—an intoxication… . One
can be in love with pure reason?” she hazarded. “Because
if you’re in love with a vision, I believe that that’s
what I’m in love with.”
This conclusion seemed fantastic and profoundly unsatisfactory
to Ralph, but after the astonishing variations
of his own sentiments during the past half-hour he
could not accuse her of fanciful exaggeration.
“Rodney seems to know his own mind well enough,” he
said almost bitterly. The music, which had ceased, had
now begun again, and the melody of Mozart seemed to
express the easy and exquisite love of the two upstairs.
“Cassandra never doubted for a moment. But we—” she
glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, “we see
each other only now and then—”
“Like lights in a storm—”
“In the midst of a hurricane,” she concluded, as the
window shook beneath the pressure of the wind. They
listened to the sound in silence.
Here the door opened with considerable hesitation, and
Mrs. Hilbery’s head appeared, at first with an air of caution,
but having made sure that she had admitted herself
to the dining-room and not to some more unusual region,
she came completely inside and seemed in no way
taken aback by the sight she saw. She seemed, as usual,
bound on some quest of her own which was interrupted
pleasantly but strangely by running into one of those
queer, unnecessary ceremonies that other people thought
fit to indulge in.
“Please don’t let me interrupt you, Mr.—” she was at a
loss, as usual, for the name, and Katharine thought that
she did not recognize him. “I hope you’ve found something
