Night and Day
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 result of any particular cause.”
This rather stilted beginning did not please him, and it became more
and more obvious to him that, whatever he might say, his unhappiness
had been directly caused by Katharine.
“I began to find my life unsatisfactory,” he started afresh. “It seemed
to me meaningless.” He paused again, but felt that this, at any rate,
was true, and that on these lines he could go on.
“All this money-making and working ten hours a day in an office, what’s
it FOR? When one’s a boy, you see, one’s head is so full of dreams that
it doesn’t seem to matter what one does. And if you’re ambitious,
you’re all right; you’ve got a reason for going on. Now my reasons
ceased to satisfy me. Perhaps I never had any. That’s very likely now I
come to think of it. (What reason is there for anything, though?)
Still, it’s impossible, after a certain age, to take oneself in
satisfactorily. And I know what carried me on”—for a good reason now
occurred to him—“I wanted to be the savior of my family and all that
kind of thing. I wanted them to get on in the world. That was a lie, of
course—a kind of self-glorification, too. Like most people, I suppose,
I’ve lived almost entirely among delusions, and now I’m at the awkward
stage of finding it out. I want another delusion to go on with. That’s
what my unhappiness amounts to, Mary.”
There were two reasons that kept Mary very silent during this speech,
and drew curiously straight lines upon her face. In the first place,
Ralph made no mention of marriage; in the second, he was not speaking
the truth.
“I don’t think it will be difficult to find a cottage,” she said, with
cheerful hardness, ignoring the whole of this statement. “You’ve got a
little money, haven’t you? Yes,” she concluded, “I don’t see why it
shouldn’t be a very good plan.”
They crossed the field in complete silence. Ralph was surprised by her
remark and a little hurt, and yet, on the whole, rather pleased. He had
convinced himself that it was impossible to lay his case truthfully
before Mary, and, secretly, he was relieved to find that he had not
parted with his dream to her. She was, as he had always found her, the
sensible, loyal friend, the woman he trusted; whose sympathy he could
count upon, provided he kept within certain limits. He was not
displeased to find that those limits were very clearly marked. When
they had crossed the next hedge she said to him:
“Yes, Ralph, it’s time you made a break. I’ve come to the same
conclusion myself. Only it won’t be a country cottage in my case; it’ll
be America. America!” she cried. “That’s the place for me! They’ll
teach me something about organizing a movement there, and I’ll come
back and show you how to do it.”
If she meant consciously or unconsciously to belittle the seclusion and
security of a country cottage, she did not succeed; for Ralph’s
determination was genuine. But she made him visualize her in her own
character, so that he looked quickly at her, as she walked a little in
front of him across the plowed field; for the first time that morning
he saw her independently of him or of his preoccupation with Katharine.
He seemed to see her marching ahead, a rather clumsy but powerful and
independent figure, for whose courage he felt the greatest respect.
“Don’t go away, Mary!” he exclaimed, and stopped.
“That’s what you said before, Ralph,” she returned, without looking at
him. “You want to go away yourself and you don’t want me to go away.
That’s not very sensible, is it?”
“Mary,” he cried, stung by the remembrance of his exacting and
dictatorial ways with her, “what a brute I’ve been to you!”
It took all her strength to keep the tears from springing, and to
thrust back her assurance that she would forgive him till Doomsday if
he chose. She was preserved from doing so only by a stubborn kind of
respect for herself which lay at the root of her nature and forbade
surrender, even in moments of almost overwhelming passion. Now, when
all was tempest and high-running waves, she knew of a land where the
sun shone clear upon Italian grammars and files of docketed papers.
Nevertheless, from the skeleton pallor of that land and the rocks that
broke its surface, she knew that her life there would be harsh and
lonely almost beyond endurance. She walked steadily a little in front
of him across the plowed field. Their way took them round the verge of
a wood of thin trees standing at the edge of a steep fold in the land.
Looking between the tree-trunks, Ralph saw laid out on the perfectly
flat and richly green meadow at the bottom of the hill a small gray
manor-house, with ponds, terraces, and clipped hedges in front of it, a
farm building or so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising
behind, all perfectly sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house
the hill rose again, and the trees on the farther summit stood upright
against the sky, which appeared of a more intense blue between their
trunks. His mind at once was filled with a sense of the actual presence
of Katharine; the gray house and the intense blue sky gave him the
feeling of her presence close by. He leant against a tree, forming her
name beneath his breath:
“Katharine, Katharine,” he said aloud, and then, looking round, saw
Mary walking slowly away from him, tearing a long spray of ivy from the
trees as she passed them. She seemed so definitely opposed to the
vision he held in his mind that he returned to it with a gesture of
impatience.
“Katharine, Katharine,” he repeated, and seemed to himself to be with
her. He lost his sense of all that surrounded him; all substantial
things—the hour of the day, what we have done and are about to do, the
presence of other people and the support we derive from seeing their
belief in a common reality—all this slipped from him. So he might have
felt if the earth had dropped from his feet, and the empty blue had
hung all round him, and the air had been steeped in the presence of one
woman. The chirp of a robin on the bough above his head awakened him,
and his awakenment was accompanied by a sigh. Here was the world in
which he had lived; here the plowed field, the high road yonder, and
Mary, stripping ivy from the trees. When he came up with her he linked
his arm through hers and said:
“Now, Mary, what’s all this about America?”
There was a brotherly kindness in his voice which seemed to her
magnanimous, when she reflected that she had cut short his explanations
and shown little interest in his change of plan. She gave him her
reasons for thinking that she might profit by such a journey, omitting
the one reason which had set all the rest in motion. He listened
attentively, and made no attempt to dissuade her. In truth, he found
himself curiously eager to make certain of her good sense, and accepted
each fresh proof of it with satisfaction, as though it helped him to
make up his mind about something. She forgot the pain he had caused
her, and in place of it she became conscious of a steady tide of
well-being which harmonized very aptly with the tramp of their feet
upon the dry road and the support of his arm. The comfort was the more
glowing in that it seemed to be the reward of her determination to
behave to him simply and without attempting to be other than she was.
Instead of making out an interest in the poets, she avoided them
instinctively, and dwelt rather insistently upon the practical nature
of her gifts.
In a practical way she asked for particulars of his cottage, which
hardly existed in his mind, and corrected his vagueness.
“You must see that there’s water,” she insisted, with an exaggeration
of interest. She avoided asking him what he meant to do in this
cottage, and, at last, when all the practical details had been thrashed
out as much as possible, he rewarded her by a more intimate statement.
“One of the rooms,” he said, “must be my study, for, you see, Mary, I’m
going to write a book.” Here he withdrew his arm from hers, lit his
pipe, and they tramped on in a sagacious kind of comradeship, the most
complete they had attained in all their friendship.
“And what’s your book to be about?” she said, as boldly as if she had
never come to grief with Ralph in talking about books. He told her
unhesitatingly that he meant to write the history of the English
village from Saxon days to the present time. Some such plan had lain as
a seed in his mind for many years; and now that he had decided, in a
flash, to give up his profession, the seed grew in the space of twenty
minutes both tall and lusty. He was surprised himself at the positive
way in which he spoke. It was the same with the question of his
cottage. That had come into existence, too, in an unromantic shape—a
square white house standing just off the high road, no doubt, with a
neighbor who kept a pig and a dozen squalling children; for these plans
were shorn of all romance in his mind, and the pleasure he derived from
thinking of them was checked directly it passed a very sober limit. So
a sensible man who has lost his chance of some beautiful inheritance
might tread out the narrow bounds of his actual dwelling-place, and
assure himself that life is supportable within its demesne, only one
must grow turnips and cabbages, not melons and pomegranates. Certainly