Night and Day
Ralph took some pride in the resources of his mind, and was insensibly
helped to right himself by Mary’s trust in him. She wound her ivy spray
round her ash-plant, and for the first time for many days, when alone
with Ralph, set no spies upon her motives, sayings, and feelings, but
surrendered herself to complete happiness.
Thus talking, with easy silences and some pauses to look at the view
over the hedge and to decide upon the species of a little gray-brown
bird slipping among the twigs, they walked into Lincoln, and after
strolling up and down the main street, decided upon an inn where the
rounded window suggested substantial fare, nor were they mistaken. For
over a hundred and fifty years hot joints, potatoes, greens, and apple
puddings had been served to generations of country gentlemen, and now,
sitting at a table in the hollow of the bow window, Ralph and Mary took
their share of this perennial feast. Looking across the joint, half-way
through the meal, Mary wondered whether Ralph would ever come to look
quite like the other people in the room. Would he be absorbed among the
round pink faces, pricked with little white bristles, the calves fitted
in shiny brown leather, the black-and-white check suits, which were
sprinkled about in the same room with them? She half hoped so; she
thought that it was only in his mind that he was different. She did not
wish him to be too different from other people. The walk had given him
a ruddy color, too, and his eyes were lit up by a steady, honest light,
which could not make the simplest farmer feel ill at ease, or suggest
to the most devout of clergymen a disposition to sneer at his faith.
She loved the steep cliff of his forehead, and compared it to the brow
of a young Greek horseman, who reins his horse back so sharply that it
half falls on its haunches. He always seemed to her like a rider on a
spirited horse. And there was an exaltation to her in being with him,
because there was a risk that he would not be able to keep to the right
pace among other people. Sitting opposite him at the little table in
the window, she came back to that state of careless exaltation which
had overcome her when they halted by the gate, but now it was
accompanied by a sense of sanity and security, for she felt that they
had a feeling in common which scarcely needed embodiment in words. How
silent he was! leaning his forehead on his hand, now and then, and
again looking steadily and gravely at the backs of the two men at the
next table, with so little self-consciousness that she could almost
watch his mind placing one thought solidly upon the top of another; she
thought that she could feel him thinking, through the shade of her
fingers, and she could anticipate the exact moment when he would put an
end to his thought and turn a little in his chair and say:
“Well, Mary—?” inviting her to take up the thread of thought where he
had dropped it.
And at that very moment he turned just so, and said:
“Well, Mary?” with the curious touch of diffidence which she loved in
him.
She laughed, and she explained her laugh on the spur of the moment by
the look of the people in the street below. There was a motor-car with
an old lady swathed in blue veils, and a lady’s maid on the seat
opposite, holding a King Charles’s spaniel; there was a country-woman
wheeling a perambulator full of sticks down the middle of the road;
there was a bailiff in gaiters discussing the state of the cattle
market with a dissenting minister—so she defined them.
She ran over this list without any fear that her companion would think
her trivial. Indeed, whether it was due to the warmth of the room or to
the good roast beef, or whether Ralph had achieved the process which is
called making up one’s mind, certainly he had given up testing the good
sense, the independent character, the intelligence shown in her
remarks. He had been building one of those piles of thought, as
ramshackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from words let fall
by gentlemen in gaiters, half from the litter in his own mind, about
duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln
and the relations of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all
this disconnected rambling, there suddenly formed itself in his mind
the idea that he would ask Mary to marry him. The idea was so
spontaneous that it seemed to shape itself of its own accord before his
eyes. It was then that he turned round and made use of his old,
instinctive phrase:
“Well, Mary—?”
As it presented itself to him at first, the idea was so new and
interesting that he was half inclined to address it, without more ado,
to Mary herself. His natural instinct to divide his thoughts carefully
into two different classes before he expressed them to her prevailed.
But as he watched her looking out of the window and describing the old
lady, the woman with the perambulator, the bailiff and the dissenting
minister, his eyes filled involuntarily with tears. He would have liked
to lay his head on her shoulder and sob, while she parted his hair with
her fingers and soothed him and said:
“There, there. Don’t cry! Tell me why you’re crying—“; and they would
clasp each other tight, and her arms would hold him like his mother’s.
He felt that he was very lonely, and that he was afraid of the other
people in the room.
“How damnable this all is!” he exclaimed abruptly.
“What are you talking about?” she replied, rather vaguely, still
looking out of the window.
He resented this divided attention more than, perhaps, he knew, and he
thought how Mary would soon be on her way to America.
“Mary,” he said, “I want to talk to you. Haven’t we nearly done? Why
don’t they take away these plates?”
Mary felt his agitation without looking at him; she felt convinced that
she knew what it was that he wished to say to her.
“They’ll come all in good time,” she said; and felt it necessary to
display her extreme calmness by lifting a salt-cellar and sweeping up a
little heap of bread-crumbs.
“I want to apologize,” Ralph continued, not quite knowing what he was
about to say, but feeling some curious instinct which urged him to
commit himself irrevocably, and to prevent the moment of intimacy from
passing.
“I think I’ve treated you very badly. That is, I’ve told you lies. Did
you guess that I was lying to you? Once in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and
again to-day on our walk. I am a liar, Mary. Did you know that? Do you
think you do know me?”
“I think I do,” she said.
At this point the waiter changed their plates.
“It’s true I don’t want you to go to America,” he said, looking fixedly
at the table-cloth. “In fact, my feelings towards you seem to be
utterly and damnably bad,” he said energetically, although forced to
keep his voice low.
“If I weren’t a selfish beast I should tell you to have nothing more to
do with me. And yet, Mary, in spite of the fact that I believe what I’m
saying, I also believe that it’s good we should know each other—the
world being what it is, you see—” and by a nod of his head he indicated
the other occupants of the room, “for, of course, in an ideal state of
things, in a decent community even, there’s no doubt you shouldn’t have
anything to do with me—seriously, that is.”
“You forget that I’m not an ideal character, either,” said Mary, in the
same low and very earnest tones, which, in spite of being almost
inaudible, surrounded their table with an atmosphere of concentration
which was quite perceptible to the other diners, who glanced at them
now and then with a queer mixture of kindness, amusement, and
curiosity.
“I’m much more selfish than I let on, and I’m worldly a little—more
than you think, anyhow. I like bossing things—perhaps that’s my
greatest fault. I’ve none of your passion for—” here she hesitated, and
glanced at him, as if to ascertain what his passion was for—“for the
truth,” she added, as if she had found what she sought indisputably.
“I’ve told you I’m a liar,” Ralph repeated obstinately.
“Oh, in little things, I dare say,” she said impatiently. “But not in
real ones, and that’s what matters. I dare say I’m more truthful than
you are in small ways. But I could never care”—she was surprised to
find herself speaking the word, and had to force herself to speak it
out—“for any one who was a liar in that way. I love the truth a certain
amount—a considerable amount—but not in the way you love it.” Her voice
sank, became inaudible, and wavered as if she could scarcely keep
herself from tears.
“Good heavens!” Ralph exclaimed to himself. “She loves me! Why did I
never see it before? She’s going to cry; no, but she can’t speak.”
The certainty overwhelmed him so that he scarcely knew what he was
doing; the blood rushed to his cheeks, and although he had quite made
up his mind to ask her to marry him, the certainty that she loved him
seemed to change the situation so completely that he could not do it.
He did not dare to look at her. If she cried, he did not know what he
should do. It seemed to him that something of a terrible and
devastating nature had happened. The waiter changed their plates once
more.
In his agitation Ralph rose, turned his back upon Mary, and looked out
of the window. The people in the street seemed to him only a dissolving
and combining pattern of black particles; which, for the moment,
represented very well the involuntary procession of feelings and
thoughts which formed and dissolved in rapid succession in his own
mind. At one moment he exulted in the thought that Mary loved him; at
the next, it seemed that he was without feeling for her; her love was
repulsive to him. Now he felt urged to marry her at once; now to
disappear and never see her again. In order to control this disorderly
race of thought he forced himself to read the name on the chemist’s
shop directly opposite him; then to examine the objects in the shop
windows, and then to focus his eyes exactly upon a little group of
women looking in at the great windows of a large draper’s shop. This
discipline having given him at least a superficial control of himself,
he was about to turn and ask the waiter to bring the bill, when his eye
was caught by a tall figure walking quickly along the opposite
pavement—a tall figure, upright, dark, and commanding, much detached
from her surroundings. She held her gloves in her left hand, and the
left hand was bare. All this Ralph noticed and enumerated and
recognized before he put a name to the whole—Katharine Hilbery. She
seemed to be looking for somebody. Her eyes, in fact, scanned both
sides of the street, and for one second were raised directly to the bow
window in which Ralph stood; but she looked away again instantly
without giving any sign that she had seen him. This sudden apparition
had an extraordinary effect upon him. It was as if he had thought of
her so intensely that his mind had formed the shape of her, rather than
that he had seen her in the flesh outside in the street. And yet he had
not been thinking of her at all. The impression was so intense that he
could not dismiss it, nor even think whether he had seen her or merely
imagined her. He sat down at once, and said, briefly and strangely,
rather to himself than to Mary:
“That was Katharine Hilbery.”
“Katharine Hilbery? What do you mean?” she asked, hardly understanding
from his manner whether he had seen her or not.
“Katharine Hilbery,” he repeated. “But she’s gone now.”
“Katharine Hilbery!” Mary thought, in an instant of blinding
revelation; “I’ve always known it was Katharine Hilbery!” She knew it
all now.
After a moment of downcast stupor, she raised her eyes, looked steadily
at Ralph, and caught his fixed and dreamy gaze leveled at a point far
beyond their surroundings, a point that she had never reached in all