Night and Day by Virginia Woolf (websites to read books for free .TXT) 📖

But other passengers were approaching Lincoln meanwhile by other roads

on foot. A county town draws the inhabitants of all vicarages, farms,

country houses, and wayside cottages, within a radius of ten miles at

least, once or twice a week to its streets; and among them, on this

occasion, were Ralph Denham and Mary Datchet. They despised the roads,

and took their way across the fields; and yet, from their appearance,

it did not seem as if they cared much where they walked so long as the

way did not actually trip them up. When they left the Vicarage, they

had begun an argument which swung their feet along so rhythmically in

time with it that they covered the ground at over four miles an hour,

and saw nothing of the hedgerows, the swelling plowland, or the mild

blue sky. What they saw were the Houses of Parliament and the

Government Offices in Whitehall. They both belonged to the class which

is conscious of having lost its birthright in these great structures

and is seeking to build another kind of lodging for its own notion of

law and government. Purposely, perhaps, Mary did not agree with Ralph;

she loved to feel her mind in conflict with his, and to be certain

that he spared her female judgment no ounce of his male muscularity.

He seemed to argue as fiercely with her as if she were his brother.

They were alike, however, in believing that it behooved them to take

in hand the repair and reconstruction of the fabric of England. They

agreed in thinking that nature has not been generous in the endowment

of our councilors. They agreed, unconsciously, in a mute love for the

muddy field through which they tramped, with eyes narrowed close by

the concentration of their minds. At length they drew breath, let the

argument fly away into the limbo of other good arguments, and, leaning

over a gate, opened their eyes for the first time and looked about

them. Their feet tingled with warm blood and their breath rose in

steam around them. The bodily exercise made them both feel more direct

and less self-conscious than usual, and Mary, indeed, was overcome by

a sort of light-headedness which made it seem to her that it mattered

very little what happened next. It mattered so little, indeed, that

she felt herself on the point of saying to Ralph:

“I love you; I shall never love anybody else. Marry me or leave me;

think what you like of me—I don’t care a straw.” At the moment,

however, speech or silence seemed immaterial, and she merely clapped

her hands together, and looked at the distant woods with the rust-like

bloom on their brown, and the green and blue landscape through the

steam of her own breath. It seemed a mere toss-up whether she said, “I

love you,” or whether she said, “I love the beech-trees,” or only “I

love—I love.”

“Do you know, Mary,” Ralph suddenly interrupted her, “I’ve made up my

mind.”

Her indifference must have been superficial, for it disappeared at

once. Indeed, she lost sight of the trees, and saw her own hand upon

the topmost bar of the gate with extreme distinctness, while he went

on:

“I’ve made up my mind to chuck my work and live down here. I want you

to tell me about that cottage you spoke of. However, I suppose

there’ll be no difficulty about getting a cottage, will there?” He

spoke with an assumption of carelessness as if expecting her to

dissuade him.

She still waited, as if for him to continue; she was convinced that in

some roundabout way he approached the subject of their marriage.

“I can’t stand the office any longer,” he proceeded. “I don’t know

what my family will say; but I’m sure I’m right. Don’t you think so?”

“Live down here by yourself?” she asked.

“Some old woman would do for me, I suppose,” he replied. “I’m sick of

the whole thing,” he went on, and opened the gate with a jerk. They

began to cross the next field walking side by side.

“I tell you, Mary, it’s utter destruction, working away, day after

day, at stuff that doesn’t matter a damn to any one. I’ve stood eight

years of it, and I’m not going to stand it any longer. I suppose this

all seems to you mad, though?”

By this time Mary had recovered her self-control.

“No. I thought you weren’t happy,” she said.

“Why did you think that?” he asked, with some surprise.

“Don’t you remember that morning in Lincoln’s Inn Fields?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Ralph, slackening his pace and remembering Katharine and

her engagement, the purple leaves stamped into the path, the white

paper radiant under the electric light, and the hopelessness which

seemed to surround all these things.

“You’re right, Mary,” he said, with something of an effort, “though I

don’t know how you guessed it.”

She was silent, hoping that he might tell her the reason of his

unhappiness, for his excuses had not deceived her.

“I was unhappy—very unhappy,” he repeated. Some six weeks separated

him from that afternoon when he had sat upon the Embankment watching

his visions dissolve in mist as the waters swam past and the sense of

his desolation still made him shiver. He had not recovered in the

least from that depression. Here was an opportunity for making himself

face it, as he felt that he ought to; for, by this time, no doubt, it

was only a sentimental ghost, better exorcised by ruthless exposure to

such an eye as Mary’s, than allowed to underlie all his actions and

thoughts as had been the case ever since he first saw Katharine

Hilbery pouring out tea. He must begin, however, by mentioning her

name, and this he found it impossible to do. He persuaded himself that

he could make an honest statement without speaking her name; he

persuaded himself that his feeling had very little to do with her.

“Unhappiness is a state of mind,” he said, “by which I mean that it is

not necessarily the