Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  What was she doing now, he wondered, as he addressed the envelope to his wife. He could not control the telephone. He could not play the spy. She might be making any arrangements she chose. Yet the thought did not disturb him so much as the strange, unpleasant, illicit atmosphere of the whole scene with the young people the night before. His sense of discomfort was almost physical.

  Had he known it, Katharine was far enough withdrawn, both physically and spiritually, from the telephone. She sat in her room with the dictionaries spreading their wide leaves on the table before her, and all the pages which they had concealed for so many years arranged in a pile. She worked with the steady concentration that is produced by the successful effort to think down some unwelcome thought by means of another thought. Having absorbed the unwelcome thought, her mind went on with additional vigor, derived from the victory; on a sheet of paper lines of figures and symbols frequently and firmly written down marked the different stages of its progress. And yet it was broad daylight; there were sounds of knocking and sweeping, which proved that living people were at work on the other side of the door, and the door, which could be thrown open in a second, was her only protection against the world. But she had somehow risen to be mistress in her own kingdom, assuming her sovereignty unconsciously.

  Steps approached her unheard. It is true that they were steps that lingered, divagated, and mounted with the deliberation natural to one past sixty whose arms, moreover, are full of leaves and blossoms; but they came on steadily, and soon a tap of laurel boughs against the door arrested Katharine’s pencil as it touched the page. She did not move, however, and sat blank-eyed as if waiting for the interruption to cease. Instead, the door opened. At first, she attached no meaning to the moving mass of green which seemed to enter the room independently of any human agency. Then she recognized parts of her mother’s face and person behind the yellow flowers and soft velvet of the palm-buds.

  “From Shakespeare’s tomb!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, dropping the entire mass upon the floor, with a gesture that seemed to indicate an act of dedication. Then she flung her arms wide and embraced her daughter.

  “Thank God, Katharine!” she exclaimed. “Thank God!” she repeated.

  “You’ve come back?” said Katharine, very vaguely, standing up to receive the embrace.

  Although she recognized her mother’s presence, she was very far from taking part in the scene, and yet felt it to be amazingly appropriate that her mother should be there, thanking God emphatically for unknown blessings, and strewing the floor with flowers and leaves from Shakespeare’s tomb.

  “Nothing else matters in the world!” Mrs. Hilbery continued. “Names aren’t everything; it’s what we feel that’s everything. I didn’t want silly, kind, interfering letters. I didn’t want your father to tell me. I knew it from the first. I prayed that it might be so.”

  “You knew it?” Katharine repeated her mother’s words softly and vaguely, looking past her. “How did you know it?” She began, like a child, to finger a tassel hanging from her mother’s cloak.

  “The first evening you told me, Katharine. Oh, and thousands of times — dinner-parties — talking about books — the way he came into the room — your voice when you spoke of him.”

  Katharine seemed to consider each of these proofs separately. Then she said gravely:

  “I’m not going to marry William. And then there’s Cassandra—”

  “Yes, there’s Cassandra,” said Mrs. Hilbery. “I own I was a little grudging at first, but, after all, she plays the piano so beautifully. Do tell me, Katharine,” she asked impulsively, “where did you go that evening she played Mozart, and you thought I was asleep?”

  Katharine recollected with difficulty.

  “To Mary Datchet’s,” she remembered.

  “Ah!” said Mrs. Hilbery, with a slight note of disappointment in her voice. “I had my little romance — my little speculation.” She looked at her daughter. Katharine faltered beneath that innocent and penetrating gaze; she flushed, turned away, and then looked up with very bright eyes.

  “I’m not in love with Ralph Denham,” she said.

  “Don’t marry unless you’re in love!” said Mrs. Hilbery very quickly. “But,” she added, glancing momentarily at her daughter, “aren’t there different ways, Katharine — different — ?”

  “We want to meet as often as we like, but to be free,” Katharine continued.

  “To meet here, to meet in his house, to meet in the street.” Mrs. Hilbery ran over these phrases as if she were trying chords that did not quite satisfy her ear. It was plain that she had her sources of information, and, indeed, her bag was stuffed with what she called “kind letters” from the pen of her sister-in-law.

  “Yes. Or to stay away in the country,” Katharine concluded.

  Mrs. Hilbery paused, looked unhappy, and sought inspiration from the window.

  “What a comfort he was in that shop — how he took me and found the ruins at once — how SAFE I felt with him—”

  “Safe? Oh, no, he’s fearfully rash — he’s always taking risks. He wants to throw up his profession and live in a little cottage and write books, though he hasn’t a penny of his own, and there are any number of sisters and brothers dependent on him.”

  “Ah, he has a mother?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired.

  “Yes. Rather a fine-looking old lady, with white hair.” Katharine began to describe her visit, and soon Mrs. Hilbery elicited the facts that not only was the house of excruciating ugliness, which Ralph bore without complaint, but that it was evident that every one depended on him, and he had a room at the top of the house, with a wonderful view over London, and a rook.

  “A wretched old bird in a corner, with half its feathers out,” she said, with a tenderness in her voice that seemed to commiserate the sufferings of humanity while resting assured in the capacity of Ralph Denham to alleviate them, so that Mrs. Hilbery could not help exclaiming:

  “But, Katharine, you ARE in love!” at which Katharine flushed, looked startled, as if she had said something that she ought not to have said, and shook her head.

  Hastily Mrs. Hilbery asked for further details of this extraordinary house, and interposed a few speculations about the meeting between Keats and Coleridge in a lane, which tided over the discomfort of the moment, and drew Katharine on to further descriptions and indiscretions. In truth, she found an extraordinary pleasure in being thus free to talk to some one who was equally wise and equally benignant, the mother of her earliest childhood, whose silence seemed to answer questions that were never asked. Mrs. Hilbery listened without making any remark for a considerable time. She seemed to draw her conclusions rather by looking at her daughter than by listening to her, and, if cross-examined, she would probably have given a highly inaccurate version of Ralph Denham’s life-history except that he was penniless, fatherless, and lived at Highgate — all of which was much in his favor. But by means of these furtive glances she had assured herself that Katharine was in a state which gave her, alternately, the most exquisite pleasure and the most profound alarm.

  She could not help ejaculating at last:

  “It’s all done in five minutes at a Registry Office nowadays, if you think the Church service a little florid — which it is, though there are noble things in it.”

  “But we don’t want to be married,” Katharine replied emphatically, and added, “Why, after all, isn’t it perfectly possible to live together without being married?”

  Again Mrs. Hilbery looked discomposed, and, in her trouble, took up the sheets which were lying upon the table, and began turning them over this way and that, and muttering to herself as she glanced:

  “A plus B minus C equals ‘x y z’. It’s so dreadfully ugly, Katharine. That’s what I feel — so dreadfully ugly.”

  Katharine took the sheets from her mother’s hand and began shuffling them absent-mindedly together, for her fixed gaze seemed to show that her thoughts were intent upon some other matter.

  “Wel
l, I don’t know about ugliness,” she said at length.

  “But he doesn’t ask it of you?” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “Not that grave young man with the steady brown eyes?”

  “He doesn’t ask anything — we neither of us ask anything.”

  “If I could help you, Katharine, by the memory of what I felt—”

  “Yes, tell me what you felt.”

  Mrs. Hilbery, her eyes growing blank, peered down the enormously long corridor of days at the far end of which the little figures of herself and her husband appeared fantastically attired, clasping hands upon a moonlit beach, with roses swinging in the dusk.

  “We were in a little boat going out to a ship at night,” she began. “The sun had set and the moon was rising over our heads. There were lovely silver lights upon the waves and three green lights upon the steamer in the middle of the bay. Your father’s head looked so grand against the mast. It was life, it was death. The great sea was round us. It was the voyage for ever and ever.”

  The ancient fairy-tale fell roundly and harmoniously upon Katharine’s ears. Yes, there was the enormous space of the sea; there were the three green lights upon the steamer; the cloaked figures climbed up on deck. And so, voyaging over the green and purple waters, past the cliffs and the sandy lagoons and through pools crowded with the masts of ships and the steeples of churches — here they were. The river seemed to have brought them and deposited them here at this precise point. She looked admiringly at her mother, that ancient voyager.

  “Who knows,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, continuing her reveries, “where we are bound for, or why, or who has sent us, or what we shall find — who knows anything, except that love is our faith — love—” she crooned, and the soft sound beating through the dim words was heard by her daughter as the breaking of waves solemnly in order upon the vast shore that she gazed upon. She would have been content for her mother to repeat that word almost indefinitely — a soothing word when uttered by another, a riveting together of the shattered fragments of the world. But Mrs. Hilbery, instead of repeating the word love, said pleadingly:

  “And you won’t think those ugly thoughts again, will you, Katharine?” at which words the ship which Katharine had been considering seemed to put into harbor and have done with its seafaring. Yet she was in great need, if not exactly of sympathy, of some form of advice, or, at least, of the opportunity of setting forth her problems before a third person so as to renew them in her own eyes.

  “But then,” she said, ignoring the difficult problem of ugliness, “you knew you were in love; but we’re different. It seems,” she continued, frowning a little as she tried to fix the difficult feeling, “as if something came to an end suddenly — gave out — faded — an illusion — as if when we think we’re in love we make it up — we imagine what doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s impossible that we should ever marry. Always to be finding the other an illusion, and going off and forgetting about them, never to be certain that you cared, or that he wasn’t caring for some one not you at all, the horror of changing from one state to the other, being happy one moment and miserable the next — that’s the reason why we can’t possibly marry. At the same time,” she continued, “we can’t live without each other, because—” Mrs. Hilbery waited patiently for the sentence to be completed, but Katharine fell silent and fingered her sheet of figures.

  “We have to have faith in our vision,” Mrs. Hilbery resumed, glancing at the figures, which distressed her vaguely, and had some connection in her mind with the household accounts, “otherwise, as you say—” She cast a lightning glance into the depths of disillusionment which were, perhaps, not altogether unknown to her.

  “Believe me, Katharine, it’s the same for every one — for me, too — for your father,” she said earnestly, and sighed. They looked together into the abyss and, as the elder of the two, she recovered herself first and asked:

  “But where is Ralph? Why isn’t he here to see me?”

  Katharine’s expression changed instantly.

  “Because he’s not allowed to come here,” she replied bitterly.

  Mrs. Hilbery brushed this aside.

  “Would there be time to send for him before luncheon?” she asked.

  Katharine looked at her as if, indeed, she were some magician. Once more she felt that instead of being a grown woman, used to advise and command, she was only a foot or two raised above the long grass and the little flowers and entirely dependent upon the figure of indefinite size whose head went up into the sky, whose hand was in hers, for guidance.

  “I’m not happy without him,” she said simply.

  Mrs. Hilbery nodded her head in a manner which indicated complete understanding, and the immediate conception of certain plans for the future. She swept up her flowers, breathed in their sweetness, and, humming a little song about a miller’s daughter, left the room.

  The case upon which Ralph Denham was engaged that afternoon was not apparently receiving his full attention, and yet the affairs of the late John Leake of Dublin were sufficiently confused to need all the care that a solicitor could bestow upon them, if the widow Leake and the five Leake children of tender age were to receive any pittance at all. But the appeal to Ralph’s humanity had little chance of being heard to-day; he was no longer a model of concentration. The partition so carefully erected between the different sections of his life had been broken down, with the result that though his eyes were fixed upon the last Will and Testament, he saw through the page a certain drawing-room in Cheyne Walk.

  He tried every device that had proved effective in the past for keeping up the partitions of the mind, until he could decently go home; but a little to his alarm he found himself assailed so persistently, as if from outside, by Katharine, that he launched forth desperately into an imaginary interview with her. She obliterated a bookcase full of law reports, and the corners and lines of the room underwent a curious softening of outline like that which sometimes makes a room unfamiliar at the moment of waking from sleep. By degrees, a pulse or stress began to beat at regular intervals in his mind, heaping his thoughts into waves to which words fitted themselves, and without much consciousness of what he was doing, he began to write on a sheet of draft paper what had the appearance of a poem lacking several words in each line. Not many lines had been set down, however, before he threw away his pen as violently as if that were responsible for his misdeeds, and tore the paper into many separate pieces. This was a sign that Katharine had asserted herself and put to him a remark that could not be met poetically. Her remark was entirely destructive of poetry, since it was to the effect that poetry had nothing whatever to do with her; all her friends spent their lives in making up phrases, she said; all his feeling was an illusion, and next moment, as if to taunt him with his impotence, she had sunk into one of those dreamy states which took no account whatever of his existence. Ralph was roused by his passionate attempts to attract her attention to the fact that he was standing in the middle of his little private room in Lincoln’s Inn Fields at a considerable distance from Chelsea. The physical distance increased his desperation. He began pacing in circles until the process sickened him, and then took a sheet of paper for the composition of a letter which, he vowed before he began it, should be sent that same evening.

  It was a difficult matter to put into words; poetry would have done it better justice, but he must abstain from poetry. In an infinite number of half-obliterated scratches he tried to convey to her the possibility that although human beings are woefully ill-adapted for communication, still, such communion is the best we know; moreover, they make it possible for each to have access to another world independent of personal affairs, a world of law, of philosophy, or more strangely a world such as he had had a glimpse of the other evening when together they seemed to be sharing something, creating something, an ideal — a vision flung out in advance of our actual circumstances. If this golden rim were quenched, if life were no longer circled by an illusion (but was it an illusion after all?), then it wo
uld be too dismal an affair to carry to an end; so he wrote with a sudden spurt of conviction which made clear way for a space and left at least one sentence standing whole. Making every allowance for other desires, on the whole this conclusion appeared to him to justify their relationship. But the conclusion was mystical; it plunged him into thought. The difficulty with which even this amount was written, the inadequacy of the words, and the need of writing under them and over them others which, after all, did no better, led him to leave off before he was at all satisfied with his production, and unable to resist the conviction that such rambling would never be fit for Katharine’s eye. He felt himself more cut off from her than ever. In idleness, and because he could do nothing further with words, he began to draw little figures in the blank spaces, heads meant to resemble her head, blots fringed with flames meant to represent — perhaps the entire universe. From this occupation he was roused by the message that a lady wished to speak to him. He had scarcely time to run his hands through his hair in order to look as much like a solicitor as possible, and to cram his papers into his pocket, already overcome with shame that another eye should behold them, when he realized that his preparations were needless. The lady was Mrs. Hilbery.