Night and Day
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 lamp-post.
“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, 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 don’t I go home?”
Denham thought to himself. But he went on walking beside Rodney, and
for a time they did not speak, though Rodney hummed snatches of a tune
out of an opera by Mozart. A feeling of contempt and liking combine
very naturally in the mind of one to whom another has just spoken
unpremeditatedly, revealing rather more of his private feelings than he
intended to reveal. Denham began to wonder what sort of person Rodney
was, and at the same time Rodney began to think about Denham.
“You’re a slave like me, I suppose?” he asked.
“A solicitor, yes.”
“I sometimes wonder why we don’t chuck it. Why don’t you emigrate,
Denham? I should have thought that would suit you.”
“I’ve a family.”
“I’m often on the point of going myself. And then I know I couldn’t
live without this”—and he waved his hand towards the City of London,
which wore, at this moment, the appearance of a town cut out of
gray-blue cardboard, and pasted flat against the sky, which was of a
deeper blue.
“There are one or two people I’m fond of, and there’s a little good
music, and a few pictures, now and then—just enough to keep one
dangling about here. Ah, but I couldn’t live with savages! Are you fond
of books? Music? Pictures? D’you care at all for first editions? I’ve
got a few nice things up here, things I pick up cheap, for I can’t
afford to give what they ask.”
They had reached a small court of high eighteenth-century houses, in
one of which Rodney had his rooms. They climbed a very steep staircase,
through whose uncurtained windows the moonlight fell, illuminating the
banisters with their twisted pillars, and the piles of plates set on
the window-sills, and jars half-full of milk. Rodney’s rooms were
small, but the sitting-room window looked out into a courtyard, with
its flagged pavement, and its single tree, and across to the flat
red-brick fronts of the opposite houses, which would not have surprised
Dr. Johnson, if he had come out of his grave for a turn in the
moonlight. Rodney lit his lamp, pulled his curtains, offered Denham a
chair, and, flinging the manuscript of his paper on the Elizabethan use
of Metaphor on to the table, exclaimed:
“Oh dear me, what a waste of time! But it’s over now, and so we may
think no more about it.”
He then busied himself very dexterously in lighting a fire, producing
glasses, whisky, a cake, and cups and saucers. He put on a faded
crimson dressing-gown, and a pair of red slippers, and advanced to
Denham with a tumbler in one hand and a well-burnished book in the
other.
“The Baskerville Congreve,” said Rodney, offering it to his guest. “I
couldn’t read him in a cheap edition.”
When he was seen thus among his books and his valuables, amiably
anxious to make his visitor comfortable, and moving about with
something of the dexterity and grace of a Persian cat, Denham relaxed
his critical attitude, and felt more at home with Rodney than he would
have done with many men better known to him. Rodney’s room was the room
of a person who cherishes a great many personal tastes, guarding them
from the rough blasts of the public with scrupulous attention. His
papers and his books rose in jagged mounds on table and floor, round
which he skirted with nervous care lest his dressing-gown might
disarrange them ever so slightly. On a chair stood a stack of
photographs of statues and pictures, which it was his habit to exhibit,
one by one, for the space of a day or two. The books on his shelves
were as orderly as regiments of soldiers, and the backs of them shone
like so many bronze beetle-wings; though, if you took one from its
place you saw a shabbier volume behind it, since space was limited. An
oval Venetian mirror stood above the fireplace, and reflected duskily
in its spotted depths the faint yellow and crimson of a jarful of
tulips which stood among the letters and pipes and cigarettes upon the
mantelpiece. A small piano occupied a corner of the room, with the
score of “Don Giovanni” open upon the bracket.
“Well, Rodney,” said Denham, as he filled his pipe and looked about
him, “this is all very nice and comfortable.”
Rodney turned his head half round and smiled, with the pride of a
proprietor, and then prevented himself from smiling.
“Tolerable,” he muttered.
“But I dare say it’s just as well that you have to earn your own
living.”
“If you mean that I shouldn’t do anything good with leisure if I had
it, I dare say you’re right. But I should be ten times as happy with my
whole day to spend as I liked.”
“I doubt that,” Denham replied.
They sat silent, and the smoke from their pipes joined amicably in a
blue vapor above their heads.
“I could spend three hours every day reading Shakespeare,” Rodney
remarked. “And there’s music and pictures, let alone the society of the
people one likes.”
“You’d be bored to death in a year’s time.”
“Oh, I grant you I should be bored if I did nothing. But I should write
plays.”
“H’m!”
“I should write plays,” he repeated. “I’ve written three-quarters of
one already, and I’m only waiting for a holiday to finish it. And it’s
not bad—no, some of it’s really rather nice.”
The question arose in Denham’s mind whether he should ask to see this
play, as, no doubt, he was expected to do. He looked rather stealthily
at Rodney, who was tapping the coal nervously with a poker, and
quivering almost physically, so Denham thought, with desire to talk
about this play of his, and vanity unrequited and urgent. He seemed
very much at Denham’s mercy, and Denham could not help liking him,
partly on that account.
“Well,... will you let me see the play?” Denham asked, and Rodney
looked immediately appeased, but, nevertheless, he sat silent for a
moment, holding the poker perfectly upright in the air, regarding it
with his rather prominent eyes, and opening his lips and shutting them
again.
“Do you really care for this kind of thing?” he asked at length, in a
different tone of voice from that in which he had been speaking. And,
without waiting for an answer, he went on, rather querulously: “Very
few people care for poetry. I dare say it bores you.”
“Perhaps,” Denham remarked.
“Well, I’ll lend it you,” Rodney announced, putting down the poker.
As he moved to fetch the play, Denham stretched a hand to the bookcase
beside him, and took down the first volume which his fingers touched.
It happened to be a small and very lovely edition of Sir Thomas Browne,
containing the “Urn Burial,” the “Hydriotaphia,” and the “Garden of
Cyrus,” and, opening it at a passage which he knew very nearly by
heart, Denham began to read and, for some time, continued to read.
Rodney resumed his seat, with his manuscript on his knee, and from time
to time he glanced at Denham, and then joined his finger-tips and
crossed his thin legs over the fender, as if he experienced a good deal
of pleasure. At length Denham shut the book, and stood, with his back
to the fireplace, occasionally making an inarticulate humming sound
which seemed to refer to Sir Thomas Browne. He put his hat on his head,
and stood over Rodney, who still lay stretched back in his chair, with
his toes within the fender.
“I shall look in again some time,” Denham remarked, upon which Rodney
held up his hand, containing his manuscript, without saying anything
except—“If you like.”
Denham took the manuscript and went. Two days later he was much
surprised to find a thin parcel on his breakfast-plate, which, on being
opened, revealed the very copy of Sir Thomas Browne which he had
studied so intently in Rodney’s rooms. From sheer laziness he returned
no thanks, but he thought of Rodney from time to time with interest,
disconnecting him from Katharine, and meant to go round one evening and
smoke a pipe with him. It pleased Rodney thus to give away whatever his
friends genuinely admired. His library was constantly being diminished.
CHAPTER VI
Of all the hours of an ordinary working week-day, which are the
pleasantest to look forward to and to look back upon? If a single
instance is of use in framing a theory, it may be said that the minutes
between nine-twenty-five and nine-thirty in the morning had a singular
charm for Mary Datchet. She spent them in a very enviable frame of
mind; her contentment was almost unalloyed. High in the air as her flat
was, some beams from the morning sun reached her even in November,
striking straight at curtain, chair, and carpet, and painting there
three bright, true spaces of green, blue, and purple, upon which the
eye rested with a pleasure which gave physical warmth to the body.
There were few mornings when Mary did not look up, as she bent to lace
her boots, and as she followed the yellow rod from curtain to
breakfast-table she usually breathed some sigh of thankfulness that her
life provided her with such moments of pure enjoyment. She was robbing
no one of anything, and yet, to get so much pleasure from simple
things, such as eating one’s breakfast alone in a room which had nice
colors in it, clean from the skirting of the boards to the corners of
the ceiling, seemed to suit her so thoroughly that she used at first to