“Did you treat her badly?” she asked rather mechanically,
walking on.
“I could defend myself,” he said, almost defiantly. “But
what’s the use, if one feels a thing? I won’t be with her a
minute,” he said. “I’ll just tell her—”
“Of course, you must tell her,” said Katharine, and now
felt anxious for him to do what appeared to be necessary
if he, too, were to hold his globe for a moment round,
whole, and entire.
“I wish—I wish—” she sighed, for melancholy came
over her and obscured at least a section of her clear vision.
The globe swam before her as if obscured by tears.
“I regret nothing,” said Ralph firmly. She leant towards
him almost as if she could thus see what he saw. She
thought how obscure he still was to her, save only that
more and more constantly he appeared to her a fire burning
through its smoke, a source of life.
“Go on,” she said. “You regret nothing—”
“Nothing—nothing,” he repeated.
“What a fire!” she thought to herself. She thought of
him blazing splendidly in the night, yet so obscure that
to hold his arm, as she held it, was only to touch the
opaque substance surrounding the flame that roared upwards.
438
Virginia Woolf
“Why nothing?” she asked hurriedly, in order that he
might say more and so make more splendid, more red,
more darkly intertwined with smoke this flame rushing
upwards.
“What are you thinking of, Katharine?” he asked suspiciously,
noticing her tone of dreaminess and the inapt
words.
“I was thinking of you—yes, I swear it. Always of you,
but you take such strange shapes in my mind. You’ve
destroyed my loneliness. Am I to tell you how I see you?
No, tell me—tell me from the beginning.”
Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak
more and more fluently, more and more passionately, feeling
her leaning towards him, listening with wonder like a
child, with gratitude like a woman. She interrupted him
gravely now and then.
“But it was foolish to stand outside and look at the
windows. Suppose William hadn’t seen you. Would you
have gone to bed?”
He capped her reproof with wonderment that a woman
of her age could have stood in Kingsway looking at the
traffic until she forgot.
“But it was then I first knew I loved you!” she exclaimed.
“Tell me from the beginning,” he begged her.
“No, I’m a person who can’t tell things,” she pleaded.
“I shall say something ridiculous—something about
flames—fires. No, I can’t tell you.”
But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful
to him, charged with extreme excitement as she spoke of
the dark red fire, and the smoke twined round it, making
him feel that he had stepped over the threshold into the
faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring with shapes,
so large, so dim, unveiling themselves only in flashes, and
moving away again into the darkness, engulfed by it. They
had walked by this time to the street in which Mary lived,
and being engrossed by what they said and partly saw,
passed her staircase without looking up. At this time of
night there was no traffic and scarcely any foot-passengers,
so that they could pace slowly without interruption,
arm-in-arm, raising their hands now and then to draw something
upon the vast blue curtain of the sky.
439
Night and Day
They brought themselves by these means, acting on a
mood of profound happiness, to a state of clearsightedness
where the lifting of a finger had effect, and
one word spoke more than a sentence. They lapsed gently
into silence, traveling the dark paths of thought side
by side towards something discerned in the distance which
gradually possessed them both. They were victors, masters
of life, but at the same time absorbed in the flame,
giving their life to increase its brightness, to testify to
their faith. Thus they had walked, perhaps, twice or three
times up and down Mary Datchet’s street before the recurrence
of a light burning behind a thin, yellow blind
caused them to stop without exactly knowing why they
did so. It burned itself into their minds.
“That is the light in Mary’s room,” said Ralph. “She
must be at home.” He pointed across the street. Katharine’s
eyes rested there too.
“Is she alone, working at this time of night? What is
she working at?” she wondered. “Why should we interrupt
her?” she asked passionately. “What have we got to
give her? She’s happy too,” she added. “She has her work.”
Her voice shook slightly, and the light swam like an ocean
of gold behind her tears.
“You don’t want me to go to her?” Ralph asked.
“Go, if you like; tell her what you like,” she replied.
He crossed the road immediately, and went up the steps
into Mary’s house. Katharine stood where he left her, looking
at the window and expecting soon to see a shadow
move across it; but she saw nothing; the blinds conveyed
nothing; the light was not moved. It signaled to her across
the dark street; it was a sign of triumph shining there for
ever, not to be extinguished this side of the grave. She
brandished her happiness as if in salute; she dipped it as
if in reverence. “How they burn!” she thought, and all
the darkness of London seemed set with fires, roaring
upwards; but her eyes came back to Mary’s window and
rested there satisfied. She had waited some time before a
figure detached itself from the doorway and came across
the road, slowly and reluctantly, to where she stood.
“I didn’t go in—I couldn’t bring myself,” he broke off.
He had stood outside Mary’s door unable to bring himself
to knock; if she had come out she would have found him
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Virginia Woolf
there, the tears running down his cheeks, unable to speak.
They stood for some moments, looking at the illuminated
blinds, an expression to them both of something
impersonal and serene in the spirit of the woman within,
working out her plans far into the night—her plans for
the good of a world that none of them were ever to know.
Then their minds jumped on and other little figures came
by in procession, headed, in Ralph’s view, by the figure
of Sally Seal.
“Do you remember Sally Seal?” he asked. Katharine bent
her head.
“Your mother and Mary?” he went on. “Rodney and
Cassandra? Old Joan up at Highgate?” He stopped in his
enumeration, not finding it possible to link them together
in any way that should explain the queer combination
which he could perceive in them, as he thought of them.
They appeared to him to be more than individuals; to be
made up of many different things in cohesion; he had a
vision of an orderly world.
“It’s all so easy—it’s all so simple,” Katherine quoted,
remembering some words of Sally Seal’s, and wishing Ralph
to understand that she followed the track of his thought.
She felt him trying to piece together in a laborious and
elementary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered and
separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the
old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region,
where the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten,
the unreturned, came together in their ghostly way
and wore the semblance of the complete and the satisfactory.
The future emerged more splendid than ever from
this construction of the present. Books were to be written,
and since books must be written in rooms, and rooms
must have hangings, and outside the windows there must
be land, and an horizon to that land, and trees perhaps,
and a hill, they sketched a habitation for themselves upon
the outline of great offices in the Strand and continued
to make an account of the future upon the omnibus which
took them towards Chelsea; and still, for both of them, it
swam miraculously in the golden light of a large steady
lamp.
As the night was far advanced they had the whole of
the seats on the top of the omnibus to choose from, and
441
Night and Day
the roads, save for an occasional couple, wearing even at
midnight, an air of sheltering their words from the public,
were deserted. No longer did the shadow of a man
sing to the shadow of a piano. A few lights in bedroom
windows burnt but were extinguished one by one as the
omnibus passed them.
They dismounted and walked down to the river. She felt
his arm stiffen beneath her hand, and knew by this token
that they had entered the enchanted region. She might
speak to him, but with that strange tremor in his voice,
those eyes blindly adoring, whom did he answer? What
woman did he see? And where was she walking, and who
was her companion? Moments, fragments, a second of
vision, and then the flying waters, the winds dissipating
and dissolving; then, too, the recollection from chaos,
the return of security, the earth firm, superb and brilliant
in the sun. From the heart of his darkness he spoke his
thanksgiving; from a region as far, as hidden, she answered
him. On a June night the nightingales sing, they
answer each other across the plain; they are heard under
the window among the trees in the garden. Pausing, they
looked down into the river which bore its dark tide of
waters, endlessly moving, beneath them. They turned and
found themselves opposite the house. Quietly they surveyed
the friendly place, burning its lamps either in expectation
of them or because Rodney was still there talking
to Cassandra. Katharine pushed the door half open
and stood upon the threshold. The light lay in soft golden
grains upon the deep obscurity of the hushed and sleeping
household. For a moment they waited, and then loosed
their hands. “Good night,” he breathed. “Good night,”
she murmured back to him.
442
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