Night and Day
protested.
“Then why aren’t you a member of our society?” Mrs. Seal demanded.
Katharine stirred her spoon round and round, stared into the swirl of
the tea, and remained silent. Mr. Clacton, meanwhile, framed a question
which, after a moment’s hesitation, he put to Katharine.
“Are you in any way related, I wonder, to the poet Alardyce? His
daughter, I believe, married a Mr. Hilbery.”
“Yes; I’m the poet’s granddaughter,” said Katharine, with a little
sigh, after a pause; and for a moment they were all silent.
“The poet’s granddaughter!” Mrs. Seal repeated, half to herself, with a
shake of her head, as if that explained what was otherwise
inexplicable.
The light kindled in Mr. Clacton’s eye.
“Ah, indeed. That interests me very much,” he said. “I owe a great debt
to your grandfather, Miss Hilbery. At one time I could have repeated
the greater part of him by heart. But one gets out of the way of
reading poetry, unfortunately. You don’t remember him, I suppose?”
A sharp rap at the door made Katharine’s answer inaudible. Mrs. Seal
looked up with renewed hope in her eyes, and exclaiming:
“The proofs at last!” ran to open the door. “Oh, it’s only Mr. Denham!”
she cried, without any attempt to conceal her disappointment. Ralph,
Katharine supposed, was a frequent visitor, for the only person he
thought it necessary to greet was herself, and Mary at once explained
the strange fact of her being there by saying:
“Katharine has come to see how one runs an office.”
Ralph felt himself stiffen uncomfortably, as he said:
“I hope Mary hasn’t persuaded you that she knows how to run an office?”
“What, doesn’t she?” said Katharine, looking from one to the other.
At these remarks Mrs. Seal began to exhibit signs of discomposure,
which displayed themselves by a tossing movement of her head, and, as
Ralph took a letter from his pocket, and placed his finger upon a
certain sentence, she forestalled him by exclaiming in confusion:
“Now, I know what you’re going to say, Mr. Denham! But it was the day
Kit Markham was here, and she upsets one so—with her wonderful
vitality, always thinking of something new that we ought to be doing
and aren’t—and I was conscious at the time that my dates were mixed. It
had nothing to do with Mary at all, I assure you.”
“My dear Sally, don’t apologize,” said Mary, laughing. “Men are such
pedants—they don’t know what things matter, and what things don’t.”
“Now, Denham, speak up for our sex,” said Mr. Clacton in a jocular
manner, indeed, but like most insignificant men he was very quick to
resent being found fault with by a woman, in argument with whom he was
fond of calling himself “a mere man.” He wished, however, to enter into
a literary conservation with Miss Hilbery, and thus let the matter
drop.
“Doesn’t it seem strange to you, Miss Hilbery,” he said, “that the
French, with all their wealth of illustrious names, have no poet who
can compare with your grandfather? Let me see. There’s Chenier and Hugo
and Alfred de Musset—wonderful men, but, at the same time, there’s a
richness, a freshness about Alardyce—”
Here the telephone bell rang, and he had to absent himself with a smile
and a bow which signified that, although literature is delightful, it
is not work. Mrs. Seal rose at the same time, but remained hovering
over the table, delivering herself of a tirade against party
government. “For if I were to tell you what I know of back-stairs
intrigue, and what can be done by the power of the purse, you wouldn’t
credit me, Mr. Denham, you wouldn’t, indeed. Which is why I feel that
the only work for my father’s daughter—for he was one of the pioneers,
Mr. Denham, and on his tombstone I had that verse from the Psalms put,
about the sowers and the seed.... And what wouldn’t I give that he
should be alive now, seeing what we’re going to see—” but reflecting
that the glories of the future depended in part upon the activity of
her typewriter, she bobbed her head, and hurried back to the seclusion
of her little room, from which immediately issued sounds of
enthusiastic, but obviously erratic, composition.
Mary made it clear at once, by starting a fresh topic of general
interest, that though she saw the humor of her colleague, she did not
intend to have her laughed at.
“The standard of morality seems to me frightfully low,” she observed
reflectively, pouring out a second cup of tea, “especially among women
who aren’t well educated. They don’t see that small things matter, and
that’s where the leakage begins, and then we find ourselves in
difficulties—I very nearly lost my temper yesterday,” she went on,
looking at Ralph with a little smile, as though he knew what happened
when she lost her temper. “It makes me very angry when people tell me
lies—doesn’t it make you angry?” she asked Katharine.
“But considering that every one tells lies,” Katharine remarked,
looking about the room to see where she had put down her umbrella and
her parcel, for there was an intimacy in the way in which Mary and
Ralph addressed each other which made her wish to leave them. Mary, on
the other hand, was anxious, superficially at least, that Katharine
should stay and so fortify her in her determination not to be in love
with Ralph.
Ralph, while lifting his cup from his lips to the table, had made up
his mind that if Miss Hilbery left, he would go with her.
“I don’t think that I tell lies, and I don’t think that Ralph tells
lies, do you, Ralph?” Mary continued.
Katharine laughed, with more gayety, as it seemed to Mary, than she
could properly account for. What was she laughing at? At them,
presumably. Katharine had risen, and was glancing hither and thither,
at the presses and the cupboards, and all the machinery of the office,
as if she included them all in her rather malicious amusement, which
caused Mary to keep her eyes on her straightly and rather fiercely, as
if she were a gay-plumed, mischievous bird, who might light on the
topmost bough and pick off the ruddiest cherry, without any warning.
Two women less like each other could scarcely be imagined, Ralph
thought, looking from one to the other. Next moment, he too, rose, and
nodding to Mary, as Katharine said good-bye, opened the door for her,
and followed her out.
Mary sat still and made no attempt to prevent them from going. For a
second or two after the door had shut on them her eyes rested on the
door with a straightforward fierceness in which, for a moment, a
certain degree of bewilderment seemed to enter; but, after a brief
hesitation, she put down her cup and proceeded to clear away the
tea-things.
The impulse which had driven Ralph to take this action was the result
of a very swift little piece of reasoning, and thus, perhaps, was not
quite so much of an impulse as it seemed. It passed through his mind
that if he missed this chance of talking to Katharine, he would have to
face an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room again, demanding
an explanation of his cowardly indecision. It was better, on the whole,
to risk present discomfiture than to waste an evening bandying excuses
and constructing impossible scenes with this uncompromising section of
himself. For ever since he had visited the Hilberys he had been much at
the mercy of a phantom Katharine, who came to him when he sat alone,
and answered him as he would have her answer, and was always beside him
to crown those varying triumphs which were transacted almost every
night, in imaginary scenes, as he walked through the lamplit streets
home from the office. To walk with Katharine in the flesh would either
feed that phantom with fresh food, which, as all who nourish dreams are
aware, is a process that becomes necessary from time to time, or refine
it to such a degree of thinness that it was scarcely serviceable any
longer; and that, too, is sometimes a welcome change to a dreamer. And
all the time Ralph was well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not
represented in his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was
bewildered by the fact that she had nothing to do with his dream of
her.
When, on reaching the street, Katharine found that Mr. Denham proceeded
to keep pace by her side, she was surprised and, perhaps, a little
annoyed. She, too, had her margin of imagination, and to-night her
activity in this obscure region of the mind required solitude. If she
had had her way, she would have walked very fast down the Tottenham
Court Road, and then sprung into a cab and raced swiftly home. The view
she had had of the inside of an office was of the nature of a dream to
her. Shut off up there, she compared Mrs. Seal, and Mary Datchet, and
Mr. Clacton to enchanted people in a bewitched tower, with the spiders’
webs looping across the corners of the room, and all the tools of the
necromancer’s craft at hand; for so aloof and unreal and apart from the
normal world did they seem to her, in the house of innumerable
typewriters, murmuring their incantations and concocting their drugs,
and flinging their frail spiders’ webs over the torrent of life which
rushed down the streets outside.
She may have been conscious that there was some exaggeration in this
fancy of hers, for she certainly did not wish to share it with Ralph.
To him, she supposed, Mary Datchet, composing leaflets for Cabinet
Ministers among her typewriters, represented all that was interesting
and genuine; and, accordingly, she shut them both out from all share in
the crowded street, with its pendant necklace of lamps, its lighted
windows, and its throng of men and women, which exhilarated her to such
an extent that she very nearly forgot her companion. She walked very
fast, and the effect of people passing in the opposite direction was to
produce a queer dizziness both in her head and in Ralph’s, which set
their bodies far apart. But she did her duty by her companion almost
unconsciously.
“Mary Datchet does that sort of work very well.... She’s responsible
for it, I suppose?”
“Yes. The others don’t help at all.... Has she made a convert of you?”
“Oh no. That is, I’m a convert already.”
“But she hasn’t persuaded you to work for them?”
“Oh dear no—that wouldn’t do at all.”
So they walked on down the Tottenham Court Road, parting and coming
together again, and Ralph felt much as though he were addressing the
summit of a poplar in a high gale of wind.
“Suppose we get on to that omnibus?” he suggested.
Katharine acquiesced, and they climbed up, and found themselves alone
on top of it.
“But which way are you going?” Katharine asked, waking a little from
the trance into which movement among moving things had thrown her.
“I’m going to the Temple,” Ralph replied, inventing a destination on
the spur of the moment. He felt the change come over her as they sat
down and the omnibus began to move forward. He imagined her
contemplating the avenue in front of them with those honest sad eyes
which seemed to set him at such a distance from them. But the breeze
was blowing in their faces; it lifted her hat for a second, and she
drew out a pin and stuck it in again,—a little action which seemed, for
some reason, to make her rather more fallible. Ah, if only her hat
would blow off, and leave her altogether disheveled, accepting it from
his hands!
“This is like Venice,” she observed, raising her hand. “The motor-cars,
I mean, shooting about so quickly, with their lights.”
“I’ve never seen Venice,” he replied. “I keep that and some other
things for my old age.”
“What are the other things?” she asked.
“There’s Venice and India and, I think, Dante, too.”
She laughed.
“Think of providing for one’s old age! And would you refuse to see
Venice if you had the chance?”
Instead of answering her, he wondered whether he should tell her