Chapter XIX

by Virginia Woolf

　　The afternoon was already growing dark when the two other wayfarers,Mary and Ralph Denham, came out on the high road beyond the outskirtsof Lincoln. The high road, as they both felt, was better suited tothis return journey than the open country, and for the first mile orso of the way they spoke little. In his own mind Ralph was followingthe passage of the Otway carriage over the heath; he then went back tothe five or ten minutes that he had spent with Katharine, and examinedeach word with the care that a scholar displays upon theirregularities of an ancient text. He was determined that the glow,the romance, the atmosphere of this meeting should not paint what hemust in future regard as sober facts. On her side Mary was silent, notbecause her thoughts took much handling, but because her mind seemedempty of thought as her heart of feeling. Only Ralph's presence, asshe knew, preserved this numbness, for she could foresee a time ofloneliness when many varieties of pain would beset her. At the presentmoment her effort was to preserve what she could of the wreck of herself-respect, for such she deemed that momentary glimpse of her loveso involuntarily revealed to Ralph. In the light of reason it did notmuch matter, perhaps, but it was her instinct to be careful of thatvision of herself which keeps pace so evenly beside every one of us,and had been damaged by her confession. The gray night coming downover the country was kind to her; and she thought that one of thesedays she would find comfort in sitting upon the earth, alone, beneatha tree. Looking through the darkness, she marked the swelling groundand the tree. Ralph made her start by saying abruptly;"What I was going to say when we were interrupted at lunch was that ifyou go to America I shall come, too. It can't be harder to earn aliving there than it is here. However, that's not the point. The pointis, Mary, that I want to marry you. Well, what do you say?" He spokefirmly, waited for no answer, and took her arm in his. "You know me bythis time, the good and the bad," he went on. "You know my tempers.I've tried to let you know my faults. Well, what do you say, Mary?"She said nothing, but this did not seem to strike him."In most ways, at least in the important ways, as you said, we knoweach other and we think alike. I believe you are the only person inthe world I could live with happily. And if you feel the same aboutme--as you do, don't you, Mary?--we should make each other happy."Here he paused, and seemed to be in no hurry for an answer; he seemed,indeed, to be continuing his own thoughts."Yes, but I'm afraid I couldn't do it," Mary said at last. The casualand rather hurried way in which she spoke, together with the fact thatshe was saying the exact opposite of what he expected her to say,baffled him so much that he instinctively loosened his clasp upon herarm and she withdrew it quietly."You couldn't do it?" he asked."No, I couldn't marry you," she replied."You don't care for me?"She made no answer."Well, Mary," he said, with a curious laugh, "I must be an arrantfool, for I thought you did." They walked for a minute or two insilence, and suddenly he turned to her, looked at her, and exclaimed:"I don't believe you, Mary. You're not telling me the truth.""I'm too tired to argue, Ralph," she replied, turning her head awayfrom him. "I ask you to believe what I say. I can't marry you; I don'twant to marry you."The voice in which she stated this was so evidently the voice of onein some extremity of anguish that Ralph had no course but to obey her.And as soon as the tone of her voice had died out, and the surprisefaded from his mind, he found himself believing that she had spokenthe truth, for he had but little vanity, and soon her refusal seemed anatural thing to him. He slipped through all the grades of despondencyuntil he reached a bottom of absolute gloom. Failure seemed to markthe whole of his life; he had failed with Katharine, and now he hadfailed with Mary. Up at once sprang the thought of Katharine, and withit a sense of exulting freedom, but this he checked instantly. No goodhad ever come to him from Katharine; his whole relationship with herhad been made up of dreams; and as he thought of the little substancethere had been in his dreams he began to lay the blame of the presentcatastrophe upon his dreams."Haven't I always been thinking of Katharine while I was with Mary? Imight have loved Mary if it hadn't been for that idiocy of mine. Shecared for me once, I'm certain of that, but I tormented her so with myhumors that I let my chances slip, and now she won't risk marrying me.And this is what I've made of my life--nothing, nothing, nothing."The tramp of their boots upon the dry road seemed to asseveratenothing, nothing, nothing. Mary thought that this silence was thesilence of relief; his depression she ascribed to the fact that he hadseen Katharine and parted from her, leaving her in the company ofWilliam Rodney. She could not blame him for loving Katharine, butthat, when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him--thatseemed to her the cruellest treachery. Their old friendship and itsfirm base upon indestructible qualities of character crumbled, and herwhole past seemed foolish, herself weak and credulous, and Ralphmerely the shell of an honest man. Oh, the past--so much made up ofRalph; and now, as she saw, made up of something strange and false andother than she had thought it. She tried to recapture a saying she hadmade to help herself that morning, as Ralph paid the bill forluncheon; but she could see him paying the bill more vividly than shecould remember the phrase. Something about truth was in it; how to seethe truth is our great chance in this world."If you don't want to marry me," Ralph now began again, withoutabruptness, with diffidence rather, "there is no need why we shouldcease to see each other, is there? Or would you rather that we shouldkeep apart for the present?""Keep apart? I don't know--I must think about it.""Tell me one thing, Mary," he resumed; "have I done anything to makeyou change your mind about me?"She was immensely tempted to give way to her natural trust in him,revived by the deep and now melancholy tones of his voice, and to tellhim of her love, and of what had changed it. But although it seemedlikely that she would soon control her anger with him, the certaintythat he did not love her, confirmed by every word of his proposal,forbade any freedom of speech. To hear him speak and to feel herselfunable to reply, or constrained in her replies, was so painful thatshe longed for the time when she should be alone. A more pliant womanwould have taken this chance of an explanation, whatever risksattached to it; but to one of Mary's firm and resolute temperamentthere was degradation in the idea of self-abandonment; let the wavesof emotion rise ever so high, she could not shut her eyes to what sheconceived to be the truth. Her silence puzzled Ralph. He searched hismemory for words or deeds that might have made her think badly of him.In his present mood instances came but too quickly, and on top of themthis culminating proof of his baseness--that he had asked her to marryhim when his reasons for such a proposal were selfish andhalf-hearted."You needn't answer," he said grimly. "There are reasons enough, Iknow. But must they kill our friendship, Mary? Let me keep that, atleast.""Oh," she thought to herself, with a sudden rush of anguish whichthreatened disaster to her self-respect, "it has come to this--tothis--when I could have given him everything!""Yes, we can still be friends," she said, with what firmness she couldmuster."I shall want your friendship," he said. He added, "If you find itpossible, let me see you as often as you can. The oftener the better.I shall want your help."She promised this, and they went on to talk calmly of things that hadno reference to their feelings--a talk which, in its constraint, wasinfinitely sad to both of them.One more reference was made to the state of things between them latethat night, when Elizabeth had gone to her room, and the two young menhad stumbled off to bed in such a state of sleep that they hardly feltthe floor beneath their feet after a day's shooting.Mary drew her chair a little nearer to the fire, for the logs wereburning low, and at this time of night it was hardly worth while toreplenish them. Ralph was reading, but she had noticed for some timethat his eyes instead of following the print were fixed rather abovethe page with an intensity of gloom that came to weigh upon her mind.She had not weakened in her resolve not to give way, for reflectionhad only made her more bitterly certain that, if she gave way, itwould be to her own wish and not to his. But she had determined thatthere was no reason why he should suffer if her reticence were thecause of his suffering. Therefore, although she found it painful, shespoke:"You asked me if I had changed my mind about you, Ralph," she said. "Ithink there's only one thing. When you asked me to marry you, I don'tthink you meant it. That made me angry--for the moment. Before, you'dalways spoken the truth."Ralph's book slid down upon his knee and fell upon the floor. Herested his forehead on his hand and looked into the fire. He wastrying to recall the exact words in which he had made his proposal toMary."I never said I loved you," he said at last.She winced; but she respected him for saying what he did, for this,after all, was a fragment of the truth which she had vowed to live by."And to me marriage without love doesn't seem worth while," she said."Well, Mary, I'm not going to press you," he said. "I see you don'twant to marry me. But love--don't we all talk a great deal of nonsenseabout it? What does one mean? I believe I care for you more genuinelythan nine men out of ten care for the women they're in love with. It'sonly a story one makes up in one's mind about another person, and oneknows all the time it isn't true. Of course one knows; why, one'salways taking care not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not tosee them too often, or to be alone with them for too long together.It's a pleasant illusion, but if you're thinking of the risks ofmarriage, it seems to me that the risk of marrying a person you're inlove with is something colossal.""I don't believe a word of that, and what's more you don't, either,"she replied with anger. "However, we don't agree; I only wanted you tounderstand." She shifted her position, as if she were about to go. Aninstinctive desire to prevent her from leaving the room made Ralphrise at this point and begin pacing up and down the nearly emptykitchen, checking his desire, each time he reached the door, to openit and step out into the garden. A moralist might have said that atthis point his mind should have been full of self-reproach for thesuffering he had caused. On the contrary, he was extremely angry, withthe confused impotent anger of one who finds himself unreasonably butefficiently frustrated. He was trapped by the illogicality of humanlife. The obstacles in the way of his desire seemed to him purelyartificial, and yet he could see no way of removing them. Mary'swords, the tone of her voice even, angered him, for she would not helphim. She was part of the insanely jumbled muddle of a world whichimpedes the sensible life. He would have liked to slam the door orbreak the hind legs of a chair, for the obstacles had taken some suchcuriously substantial shape in his mind."I doubt that one human being ever understands another," he said,stopping in his march and confronting Mary at a distance of a fewfeet."Such damned liars as we all are, how can we? But we can try. If youdon't want to marry me, don't; but the position you take up aboutlove, and not seeing each other--isn't that mere sentimentality? Youthink I've behaved very badly," he continued, as she did not speak."Of course I behave badly; but you can't judge people by what they do.You can't go through life measuring right and wrong with a foot-rule.That's what you're always doing, Mary; that's what you're doing now."She saw herself in the Suffrage Office, delivering judgment, metingout right and wrong, and there seemed to her to be some justice in thecharge, although it did not affect her main position."I'm not angry with you," she said slowly. "I will go on seeing you,as I said I would."It was true that she had promised that much already, and it wasdifficult for him to say what more it was that he wanted--someintimacy, some help against the ghost of Katharine, perhaps, somethingthat he knew he had no right to ask; and yet, as he sank into hischair and looked once more at the dying fire it seemed to him that hehad been defeated, not so much by Mary as by life itself. He felthimself thrown back to the beginning of life again, where everythinghas yet to be won; but in extreme youth one has an ignorant hope. Hewas no longer certain that he would triumph.