footsteps of the couple were distinctly heard in the silence,
Denham could not help picturing to himself some
change in their conversation. The effect of the light and
shadow, which seemed to increase their height, was to
make them mysterious and significant, so that Denham
had no feeling of irritation with Katharine, but rather a
half-dreamy acquiescence in the course of the world. Yes,
she did very well to dream about—but Sandys had sud
denly begun to talk. He was a solitary man who had made
his friends at college and always addressed them as if
they were still undergraduates arguing in his room, though
many months or even years had passed in some cases
between the last sentence and the present one. The
method was a little singular, but very restful, for it seemed
to ignore completely all accidents of human life, and to
span very deep abysses with a few simple words.
On this occasion he began, while they waited for a
minute on the edge of the Strand:
“I hear that Bennett has given up his theory of truth.”
Denham returned a suitable answer, and he proceeded
to explain how this decision had been arrived at, and
what changes it involved in the philosophy which they
both accepted. Meanwhile Katharine and Rodney drew
further ahead, and Denham kept, if that is the right expression
for an involuntary action, one filament of his
mind upon them, while with the rest of his intelligence
he sought to understand what Sandys was saying.
As they passed through the courts thus talking, Sandys
laid the tip of his stick upon one of the stones forming a
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Virginia Woolf
time-worn arch, and struck it meditatively two or three
times in order to illustrate something very obscure about
the complex nature of one’s apprehension of facts. During
the pause which this necessitated, Katharine and
Rodney turned the corner and disappeared. For a moment
Denham stopped involuntarily in his sentence, and continued
it with a sense of having lost something.
Unconscious that they were observed, Katharine and
Rodney had come out on the Embankment. When they
had crossed the road, Rodney slapped his hand upon the
stone parapet above the river and exclaimed:
“I promise I won’t say another word about it, Katharine!
But do stop a minute and look at the moon upon the
water.”
Katharine paused, looked up and down the river, and
snuffed the air.
“I’m sure one can smell the sea, with the wind blowing
this way,” she said.
They stood silent for a few moments while the river
shifted in its bed, and the silver and red lights which
were laid upon it were torn by the current and joined
together again. Very far off up the river a steamer hooted
with its hollow voice of unspeakable melancholy, as if
from the heart of lonely mist-shrouded voyagings.
“Ah!” Rodney cried, striking his hand once more upon
the balustrade, “why can’t one say how beautiful it all is?
Why am I condemned for ever, Katharine, to feel what I
can’t express? And the things I can give there’s no use in
my giving. Trust me, Katharine,” he added hastily, “I won’t
speak of it again. But in the presence of beauty—look at
the iridescence round the moon!—one feels—one feels—
Perhaps if you married me—I’m half a poet, you see, and
I can’t pretend not to feel what I do feel. If I could
write—ah, that would be another matter. I shouldn’t
bother you to marry me then, Katharine.”
He spoke these disconnected sentences rather abruptly,
with his eyes alternately upon the moon and upon the
stream.
“But for me I suppose you would recommend marriage?”
said Katharine, with her eyes fixed on the moon.
“Certainly I should. Not for you only, but for all women.
Why, you’re nothing at all without it; you’re only half
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Night and Day
alive; using only half your faculties; you must feel that
for yourself. That is why—” Here he stopped himself, and
they began to walk slowly along the Embankment, the
moon fronting them.
“With how sad steps she climbs the sky,
How silently and with how wan a face,”
Rodney quoted.
“I’ve been told a great many unpleasant things about
myself to-night,” Katharine stated, without attending to
him. “Mr. Denham seems to think it his mission to lecture
me, though I hardly know him. By the way, William,
you know him; tell me, what is he like?”
William drew a deep sigh.
“We may lecture you till we’re blue in the face—”
“Yes—but what’s he like?”
“And we write sonnets to your eyebrows, you cruel practical
creature. Denham?” he added, as Katharine remained
silent. “A good fellow, I should think. He cares, naturally,
for the right sort of things, I expect. But you mustn’t
marry him, though. He scolded you, did he—what did he
say?”
“What happens with Mr. Denham is this: He comes to
tea. I do all I can to put him at his ease. He merely sits
and scowls at me. Then I show him our manuscripts. At
this he becomes really angry, and tells me I’ve no business
to call myself a middle-class woman. So we part in a
huff; and next time we meet, which was to-night, he
walks straight up to me, and says, ‘Go to the Devil!’ That’s
the sort of behavior my mother complains of. I want to
know, what does it mean?”
She paused and, slackening her steps, looked at the
lighted train drawing itself smoothly over Hungerford
Bridge.
“It means, I should say, that he finds you chilly and
unsympathetic.”
Katharine laughed with round, separate notes of genuine
amusement.
“It’s time I jumped into a cab and hid myself in my own
house,” she exclaimed.
“Would your mother object to my being seen with you?
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Virginia Woolf
No one could possibly recognize us, could they?” Rodney
inquired, with some solicitude.
Katharine looked at him, and perceiving that his solicitude
was genuine, she laughed again, but with an ironical
note in her laughter.
“You may laugh, Katharine, but I can tell you that if
any of your friends saw us together at this time of night
they would talk about it, and I should find that very
disagreeable. But why do you laugh?”
“I don’t know. Because you’re such a queer mixture, I
think. You’re half poet and half old maid.”
“I know I always seem to you highly ridiculous. But I
can’t help having inherited certain traditions and trying
to put them into practice.”
“Nonsense, William. You may come of the oldest family
in Devonshire, but that’s no reason why you should mind
being seen alone with me on the Embankment.”
“I’m ten years older than you are, Katharine, and I know
more of the world than you do.”
“Very well. Leave me and go home.”
Rodney looked back over his shoulder and perceived
that they were being followed at a short distance by a
taxicab, which evidently awaited his summons. Katharine
saw it, too, and exclaimed:
“Don’t call that cab for me, William. I shall walk.”
“Nonsense, Katharine; you’ll do nothing of the kind. It’s
nearly twelve o’clock, and we’ve walked too far as it is.”
Katharine laughed and walked on so quickly that both
Rodney and the taxicab had to increase their pace to
keep up with her.
“Now, William,” she said, “if people see me racing along
the Embankment like this they will talk. You had far better
say good-night, if you don’t want people to talk.”
At this William beckoned, with a despotic gesture, to
the cab with one hand, and with the other he brought
Katharine to a standstill.
“Don’t let the man see us struggling, for God’s sake!”
he murmured. Katharine stood for a moment quite still.
“There’s more of the old maid in you than the poet,”
she observed briefly.
William shut the door sharply, gave the address to the
driver, and turned away, lifting his hat punctiliously high
55
Night and Day
in farewell to the invisible lady.
He looked back after the cab twice, suspiciously, half
expecting that she would stop it and dismount; but it
bore her swiftly on, and was soon out of sight. William
felt in the mood for a short soliloquy of indignation, for
Katharine had contrived to exasperate him in more ways
than one.
“Of all the unreasonable, inconsiderate creatures I’ve
ever known, she’s the worst!” he exclaimed to himself,
striding back along the Embankment. “Heaven forbid that
I should ever make a fool of myself with her again. Why,
I’d sooner marry the daughter of my landlady than
Katharine Hilbery! She’d leave me not a moment’s peace—
and she’d never understand me—never, never, never!”
Uttered aloud and with vehemence so that the stars of
Heaven might hear, for there was no human being at hand,
these sentiments sounded satisfactorily irrefutable.
Rodney quieted down, and walked on in silence, until he
perceived some one approaching him, who had something,
either in his walk or his dress, which proclaimed
that he was one of William’s acquaintances before it was
possible to tell which of them he was. It was Denham
who, having parted from Sandys at the bottom of his
staircase, was now walking to the Tube at Charing Cross,
deep in the thoughts which his talk with Sandys had suggested.
He had forgotten the meeting at Mary Datchet’s
rooms, he had forgotten Rodney, and metaphors and Elizabethan
drama, and could have sworn that he had forgotten
Katharine Hilbery, too, although that was more disputable.
His mind was scaling the highest pinnacles of
its alps, where there was only starlight and the untrodden
snow. He cast strange eyes upon Rodney, as they encountered
each other beneath a lamp-post.
“Ha!” Rodney exclaimed.
If he had been in full possession of his mind, Denham
would probably have passed on with a salutation. But
the shock of the interruption made him stand still, and
before he knew what he was doing, he had turned and
was walking with Rodney in obedience to Rodney’s invitation
to come to his rooms and have something to drink.
Denham had no wish to drink with Rodney, but he followed
him passively enough. Rodney was gratified by this
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Virginia Woolf
obedience. He felt inclined to be communicative with
this silent man, who possessed so obviously all the good
masculine qualities in which Katharine now seemed lamentably
deficient.
“You do well, Denham,” he began impulsively, “to have
nothing to do with young women. I offer you my experience—
if one trusts them one invariably has cause to
repent. Not that I have any reason at this moment,” he
added hastily, “to complain of them. It’s a subject that
crops up now and again for no particular reason. Miss
Datchet, I dare say, is one of the exceptions. Do you like
Miss Datchet?”
These remarks indicated clearly enough that Rodney’s
nerves were in a state of irritation, and Denham speedily
woke to the situation of the world as it had been one
hour ago. He had last seen Rodney walking with Katharine.
He could not help regretting the eagerness with which
his mind returned to these interests, and fretted him with
the old trivial anxieties. He sank in his own esteem. Reason
bade him break from Rodney, who clearly tended to
become confidential, before he had utterly lost touch
with the problems of high philosophy. He looked along
the road, and marked a lamp-post at a distance of some
hundred yards, and decided that he would part from
Rodney when they reached this point.
“Yes, I like Mary; I don’t see how one could help liking
her,” he remarked cautiously, with his eye on the lamppost.
“Ah, Denham, you’re so different from me. You never
give yourself away. I watched you this evening with
Katharine Hilbery. My instinct is to trust the person I’m
talking to. That’s why I’m always being taken in, I suppose.”
Denham seemed to be pondering this statement of
Rodney’s, but, as a matter of fact, he was hardly conscious
of Rodney and his revelations, and was only concerned
to make him mention Katharine again before they
reached the lamp-post.
“Who’s taken you in now?” he asked. “Katharine
Hilbery?”
Rodney stopped and once more began beating a kind of
rhythm, as if he were marking a phrase in a symphony,
57
Night and Day
upon the smooth stone balustrade of the Embankment.
“Katharine Hilbery,” he repeated, with a curious little
chuckle. “No, Denham, I have no illusions about that
young woman. I think I made that plain to her to-night.
But don’t run away with a false impression,” he continued
eagerly, turning and linking his arm through Denham’s,
as though to prevent him from escaping; and, thus compelled,
Denham passed the monitory lamp-post, to which,
in passing, he breathed an excuse, for how could he break
away when Rodney’s arm was actually linked in his? “You
must not think that I have any bitterness against her—
far from it. It’s not altogether her fault, poor girl. She
lives, you know, one of those odious, self-centered lives—
at least, I think them odious for a woman—feeding her
wits upon everything, having control of everything, getting
far too much her own way at home—spoilt, in a
sense, feeling that every one is at her feet, and so not
realizing how she hurts—that is, how rudely she behaves
to people who haven’t all her advantages. Still, to do her
justice, she’s no fool,” he added, as if to warn Denham
not to take any liberties. “She has taste. She has sense.
She can understand you when you talk to her. But she’s a
woman, and there’s an end of it,” he added, with another
little chuckle, and dropped Denham’s arm.
“And did you tell her all this to-night?” Denham asked.
“Oh dear me, no. I should never think of telling Katharine
the truth about herself. That wouldn’t do at all. One has
to be in an attitude of adoration in order to get on with
Katharine.
“Now I’ve learnt that she’s refused to marry him why
