Night and Day
“Is Mr. Hilbery at home, or Mrs. Hilbery?” Denham asked, of the
parlor-maid in Chelsea, a week later.
“No, sir. But Miss Hilbery is at home,” the girl answered.
Ralph had anticipated many answers, but not this one, and now it was
unexpectedly made plain to him that it was the chance of seeing
Katharine that had brought him all the way to Chelsea on pretence of
seeing her father.
He made some show of considering the matter, and was taken upstairs to
the drawing-room. As upon that first occasion, some weeks ago, the door
closed as if it were a thousand doors softly excluding the world; and
once more Ralph received an impression of a room full of deep shadows,
firelight, unwavering silver candle flames, and empty spaces to be
crossed before reaching the round table in the middle of the room, with
its frail burden of silver trays and china teacups. But this time
Katharine was there by herself; the volume in her hand showed that she
expected no visitors.
Ralph said something about hoping to find her father.
“My father is out,” she replied. “But if you can wait, I expect him
soon.”
It might have been due merely to politeness, but Ralph felt that she
received him almost with cordiality. Perhaps she was bored by drinking
tea and reading a book all alone; at any rate, she tossed the book on
to a sofa with a gesture of relief.
“Is that one of the moderns whom you despise?” he asked, smiling at the
carelessness of her gesture.
“Yes,” she replied. “I think even you would despise him.”
“Even I?” he repeated. “Why even I?”
“You said you liked modern things; I said I hated them.”
This was not a very accurate report of their conversation among the
relics, perhaps, but Ralph was flattered to think that she remembered
anything about it.
“Or did I confess that I hated all books?” she went on, seeing him look
up with an air of inquiry. “I forget—”
“Do you hate all books?” he asked.
“It would be absurd to say that I hate all books when I’ve only read
ten, perhaps; but—’ Here she pulled herself up short.
“Well?”
“Yes, I do hate books,” she continued. “Why do you want to be for ever
talking about your feelings? That’s what I can’t make out. And poetry’s
all about feelings—novels are all about feelings.”
She cut a cake vigorously into slices, and providing a tray with bread
and butter for Mrs. Hilbery, who was in her room with a cold, she rose
to go upstairs.
Ralph held the door open for her, and then stood with clasped hands in
the middle of the room. His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely
knew whether they beheld dreams or realities. All down the street and
on the doorstep, and while he mounted the stairs, his dream of
Katharine possessed him; on the threshold of the room he had dismissed
it, in order to prevent too painful a collision between what he dreamt
of her and what she was. And in five minutes she had filled the shell
of the old dream with the flesh of life; looked with fire out of
phantom eyes. He glanced about him with bewilderment at finding himself
among her chairs and tables; they were solid, for he grasped the back
of the chair in which Katharine had sat; and yet they were unreal; the
atmosphere was that of a dream. He summoned all the faculties of his
spirit to seize what the minutes had to give him; and from the depths
of his mind there rose unchecked a joyful recognition of the truth that
human nature surpasses, in its beauty, all that our wildest dreams
bring us hints of.
Katharine came into the room a moment later. He stood watching her come
towards him, and thought her more beautiful and strange than his dream
of her; for the real Katharine could speak the words which seemed to
crowd behind the forehead and in the depths of the eyes, and the
commonest sentence would be flashed on by this immortal light. And she
overflowed the edges of the dream; he remarked that her softness was
like that of some vast snowy owl; she wore a ruby on her finger.
“My mother wants me to tell you,” she said, “that she hopes you have
begun your poem. She says every one ought to write poetry.... All my
relations write poetry,” she went on. “I can’t bear to think of it
sometimes—because, of course, it’s none of it any good. But then one
needn’t read it—”
“You don’t encourage me to write a poem,” said Ralph.
“But you’re not a poet, too, are you?” she inquired, turning upon him
with a laugh.
“Should I tell you if I were?”
“Yes. Because I think you speak the truth,” she said, searching him for
proof of this apparently, with eyes now almost impersonally direct. It
would be easy, Ralph thought, to worship one so far removed, and yet of
so straight a nature; easy to submit recklessly to her, without thought
of future pain.
“Are you a poet?” she demanded. He felt that her question had an
unexplained weight of meaning behind it, as if she sought an answer to
a question that she did not ask.
“No. I haven’t written any poetry for years,” he replied. “But all the
same, I don’t agree with you. I think it’s the only thing worth doing.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked, almost with impatience, tapping her
spoon two or three times against the side of her cup.
“Why?” Ralph laid hands on the first words that came to mind. “Because,
I suppose, it keeps an ideal alive which might die otherwise.”
A curious change came over her face, as if the flame of her mind were
subdued; and she looked at him ironically and with the expression which
he had called sad before, for want of a better name for it.
“I don’t know that there’s much sense in having ideals,” she said.
“But you have them,” he replied energetically. “Why do we call them
ideals? It’s a stupid word. Dreams, I mean—”
She followed his words with parted lips, as though to answer eagerly
when he had done; but as he said, “Dreams, I mean,” the door of the
drawing-room swung open, and so remained for a perceptible instant.
They both held themselves silent, her lips still parted.
Far off, they heard the rustle of skirts. Then the owner of the skirts
appeared in the doorway, which she almost filled, nearly concealing the
figure of a very much smaller lady who accompanied her.
“My aunts!” Katharine murmured, under her breath. Her tone had a hint
of tragedy in it, but no less, Ralph thought, than the situation
required. She addressed the larger lady as Aunt Millicent; the smaller
was Aunt Celia, Mrs. Milvain, who had lately undertaken the task of
marrying Cyril to his wife. Both ladies, but Mrs. Cosham (Aunt
Millicent) in particular, had that look of heightened, smoothed,
incarnadined existence which is proper to elderly ladies paying calls
in London about five o’clock in the afternoon. Portraits by Romney,
seen through glass, have something of their pink, mellow look, their
blooming softness, as of apricots hanging upon a red wall in the
afternoon sun. Mrs. Cosham was so appareled with hanging muffs, chains,
and swinging draperies that it was impossible to detect the shape of a
human being in the mass of brown and black which filled the arm-chair.
Mrs. Milvain was a much slighter figure; but the same doubt as to the
precise lines of her contour filled Ralph, as he regarded them, with
dismal foreboding. What remark of his would ever reach these fabulous
and fantastic characters?—for there was something fantastically unreal
in the curious swayings and noddings of Mrs. Cosham, as if her
equipment included a large wire spring. Her voice had a high-pitched,
cooing note, which prolonged words and cut them short until the English
language seemed no longer fit for common purposes. In a moment of
nervousness, so Ralph thought, Katharine had turned on innumerable
electric lights. But Mrs. Cosham had gained impetus (perhaps her
swaying movements had that end in view) for sustained speech; and she
now addressed Ralph deliberately and elaborately.
“I come from Woking, Mr. Popham. You may well ask me, why Woking? and
to that I answer, for perhaps the hundredth time, because of the
sunsets. We went there for the sunsets, but that was five-and-twenty
years ago. Where are the sunsets now? Alas! There is no sunset now
nearer than the South Coast.” Her rich and romantic notes were
accompanied by a wave of a long white hand, which, when waved, gave off
a flash of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Ralph wondered whether she
more resembled an elephant, with a jeweled head-dress, or a superb
cockatoo, balanced insecurely upon its perch, and pecking capriciously
at a lump of sugar.
“Where are the sunsets now?” she repeated. “Do you find sunsets now,
Mr. Popham?”
“I live at Highgate,” he replied.
“At Highgate? Yes, Highgate has its charms; your Uncle John lived at
Highgate,” she jerked in the direction of Katharine. She sank her head
upon her breast, as if for a moment’s meditation, which past, she
looked up and observed: “I dare say there are very pretty lanes in
Highgate. I can recollect walking with your mother, Katharine, through
lanes blossoming with wild hawthorn. But where is the hawthorn now? You
remember that exquisite description in De Quincey, Mr. Popham?—but I
forget, you, in your generation, with all your activity and
enlightenment, at which I can only marvel”—here she displayed both her
beautiful white hands—“do not read De Quincey. You have your Belloc,
your Chesterton, your Bernard Shaw—why should you read De Quincey?”
“But I do read De Quincey,” Ralph protested, “more than Belloc and
Chesterton, anyhow.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Cosham, with a gesture of surprise and relief
mingled. “You are, then, a ‘rara avis’ in your generation. I am
delighted to meet anyone who reads De Quincey.”
Here she hollowed her hand into a screen, and, leaning towards
Katharine, inquired, in a very audible whisper, “Does your friend
_write?_”
“Mr. Denham,” said Katharine, with more than her usual clearness and
firmness, “writes for the Review. He is a lawyer.”
“The clean-shaven lips, showing the expression of the mouth! I
recognize them at once. I always feel at home with lawyers, Mr.
Denham—”
“They used to come about so much in the old days,” Mrs. Milvain
interposed, the frail, silvery notes of her voice falling with the
sweet tone of an old bell.
“You say you live at Highgate,” she continued. “I wonder whether you
happen to know if there is an old house called Tempest Lodge still in
existence—an old white house in a garden?”
Ralph shook his head, and she sighed.
“Ah, no; it must have been pulled down by this time, with all the other
old houses. There were such pretty lanes in those days. That was how
your uncle met your Aunt Emily, you know,” she addressed Katharine.
“They walked home through the lanes.”
“A sprig of May in her bonnet,” Mrs. Cosham ejaculated, reminiscently.
“And next Sunday he had violets in his buttonhole. And that was how we
guessed.”
Katharine laughed. She looked at Ralph. His eyes were meditative, and
she wondered what he found in this old gossip to make him ponder so
contentedly. She felt, she hardly knew why, a curious pity for him.
“Uncle John—yes, ‘poor John,’ you always called him. Why was that?” she
asked, to make them go on talking, which, indeed, they needed little
invitation to do.
“That was what his father, old Sir Richard, always called him. Poor
John, or the fool of the family,” Mrs. Milvain hastened to inform them.
“The other boys were so brilliant, and he could never pass his
examinations, so they sent him to India—a long voyage in those days,
poor fellow. You had your own room, you know, and you did it up. But he
will get his knighthood and a pension, I believe,” she said, turning to
Ralph, “only it is not England.”
“No,” Mrs. Cosham confirmed her, “it is not England. In those days we
thought an Indian Judgeship about equal to a county-court judgeship at