Night and Day
was a person of no importance in his own family; he was sent for and
treated as a child. He reflected, with a growing sense of injury, that
almost every one of his actions since opening the door of his room had
been won from the grasp of the family system. By rights, he should have
been sitting downstairs in the drawing-room describing his afternoon’s
adventures, or listening to the afternoon’s adventures of other people;
the room itself, the gas-fire, the arm-chair—all had been fought for;
the wretched bird, with half its feathers out and one leg lamed by a
cat, had been rescued under protest; but what his family most resented,
he reflected, was his wish for privacy. To dine alone, or to sit alone
after dinner, was flat rebellion, to be fought with every weapon of
underhand stealth or of open appeal. Which did he dislike
most—deception or tears? But, at any rate, they could not rob him of
his thoughts; they could not make him say where he had been or whom he
had seen. That was his own affair; that, indeed, was a step entirely in
the right direction, and, lighting his pipe, and cutting up the remains
of his meal for the benefit of the rook, Ralph calmed his rather
excessive irritation and settled down to think over his prospects.
This particular afternoon was a step in the right direction, because it
was part of his plan to get to know people beyond the family circuit,
just as it was part of his plan to learn German this autumn, and to
review legal books for Mr. Hilbery’s “Critical Review.” He had always
made plans since he was a small boy; for poverty, and the fact that he
was the eldest son of a large family, had given him the habit of
thinking of spring and summer, autumn and winter, as so many stages in
a prolonged campaign. Although he was still under thirty, this
forecasting habit had marked two semicircular lines above his eyebrows,
which threatened, at this moment, to crease into their wonted shapes.
But instead of settling down to think, he rose, took a small piece of
cardboard marked in large letters with the word OUT, and hung it upon
the handle of his door. This done, he sharpened a pencil, lit a
reading-lamp and opened his book. But still he hesitated to take his
seat. He scratched the rook, he walked to the window; he parted the
curtains, and looked down upon the city which lay, hazily luminous,
beneath him. He looked across the vapors in the direction of Chelsea;
looked fixedly for a moment, and then returned to his chair. But the
whole thickness of some learned counsel’s treatise upon Torts did not
screen him satisfactorily. Through the pages he saw a drawing-room,
very empty and spacious; he heard low voices, he saw women’s figures,
he could even smell the scent of the cedar log which flamed in the
grate. His mind relaxed its tension, and seemed to be giving out now
what it had taken in unconsciously at the time. He could remember Mr.
Fortescue’s exact words, and the rolling emphasis with which he
delivered them, and he began to repeat what Mr. Fortescue had said, in
Mr. Fortescue’s own manner, about Manchester. His mind then began to
wander about the house, and he wondered whether there were other rooms
like the drawing-room, and he thought, inconsequently, how beautiful
the bathroom must be, and how leisurely it was—the life of these
well-kept people, who were, no doubt, still sitting in the same room,
only they had changed their clothes, and little Mr. Anning was there,
and the aunt who would mind if the glass of her father’s picture was
broken. Miss Hilbery had changed her dress (“although she’s wearing
such a pretty one,” he heard her mother say), and she was talking to
Mr. Anning, who was well over forty, and bald into the bargain, about
books. How peaceful and spacious it was; and the peace possessed him so
completely that his muscles slackened, his book drooped from his hand,
and he forgot that the hour of work was wasting minute by minute.
He was roused by a creak upon the stair. With a guilty start he
composed himself, frowned and looked intently at the fifty-sixth page
of his volume. A step paused outside his door, and he knew that the
person, whoever it might be, was considering the placard, and debating
whether to honor its decree or not. Certainly, policy advised him to
sit still in autocratic silence, for no custom can take root in a
family unless every breach of it is punished severely for the first six
months or so. But Ralph was conscious of a distinct wish to be
interrupted, and his disappointment was perceptible when he heard the
creaking sound rather farther down the stairs, as if his visitor had
decided to withdraw. He rose, opened the door with unnecessary
abruptness, and waited on the landing. The person stopped
simultaneously half a flight downstairs.
“Ralph?” said a voice, inquiringly.
“Joan?”
“I was coming up, but I saw your notice.”
“Well, come along in, then.” He concealed his desire beneath a tone as
grudging as he could make it.
Joan came in, but she was careful to show, by standing upright with one
hand upon the mantelpiece, that she was only there for a definite
purpose, which discharged, she would go.
She was older than Ralph by some three or four years. Her face was
round but worn, and expressed that tolerant but anxious good humor
which is the special attribute of elder sisters in large families. Her
pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph’s, save in expression, for whereas
he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to
be in the habit of considering everything from many different points of
view. This made her appear his elder by more years than existed in fact
between them. Her gaze rested for a moment or two upon the rook. She
then said, without any preface:
“It’s about Charles and Uncle John’s offer.... Mother’s been talking to
me. She says she can’t afford to pay for him after this term. She says
she’ll have to ask for an overdraft as it is.”
“That’s simply not true,” said Ralph.
“No. I thought not. But she won’t believe me when I say it.”
Ralph, as if he could foresee the length of this familiar argument,
drew up a chair for his sister and sat down himself.
“I’m not interrupting?” she inquired.
Ralph shook his head, and for a time they sat silent. The lines curved
themselves in semicircles above their eyes.
“She doesn’t understand that one’s got to take risks,” he observed,
finally.
“I believe mother would take risks if she knew that Charles was the
sort of boy to profit by it.”
“He’s got brains, hasn’t he?” said Ralph. His tone had taken on that
shade of pugnacity which suggested to his sister that some personal
grievance drove him to take the line he did. She wondered what it might
be, but at once recalled her mind, and assented.
“In some ways he’s fearfully backward, though, compared with what you
were at his age. And he’s difficult at home, too. He makes Molly slave
for him.”
Ralph made a sound which belittled this particular argument. It was
plain to Joan that she had struck one of her brother’s perverse moods,
and he was going to oppose whatever his mother said. He called her
“she,” which was a proof of it. She sighed involuntarily, and the sigh
annoyed Ralph, and he exclaimed with irritation:
“It’s pretty hard lines to stick a boy into an office at seventeen!”
“Nobody _wants_ to stick him into an office,” she said.
She, too, was becoming annoyed. She had spent the whole of the
afternoon discussing wearisome details of education and expense with
her mother, and she had come to her brother for help, encouraged,
rather irrationally, to expect help by the fact that he had been out
somewhere, she didn’t know and didn’t mean to ask where, all the
afternoon.
Ralph was fond of his sister, and her irritation made him think how
unfair it was that all these burdens should be laid on her shoulders.
“The truth is,” he observed gloomily, “that I ought to have accepted
Uncle John’s offer. I should have been making six hundred a year by
this time.”
“I don’t think that for a moment,” Joan replied quickly, repenting of
her annoyance. “The question, to my mind, is, whether we couldn’t cut
down our expenses in some way.”
“A smaller house?”
“Fewer servants, perhaps.”
Neither brother nor sister spoke with much conviction, and after
reflecting for a moment what these proposed reforms in a strictly
economical household meant, Ralph announced very decidedly:
“It’s out of the question.”
It was out of the question that she should put any more household work
upon herself. No, the hardship must fall on him, for he was determined
that his family should have as many chances of distinguishing
themselves as other families had—as the Hilberys had, for example. He
believed secretly and rather defiantly, for it was a fact not capable
of proof, that there was something very remarkable about his family.
“If mother won’t run risks—”
“You really can’t expect her to sell out again.”
“She ought to look upon it as an investment; but if she won’t, we must
find some other way, that’s all.”
A threat was contained in this sentence, and Joan knew, without asking,
what the threat was. In the course of his professional life, which now
extended over six or seven years, Ralph had saved, perhaps, three or
four hundred pounds. Considering the sacrifices he had made in order to
put by this sum it always amazed Joan to find that he used it to gamble
with, buying shares and selling them again, increasing it sometimes,
sometimes diminishing it, and always running the risk of losing every
penny of it in a day’s disaster. But although she wondered, she could
not help loving him the better for his odd combination of Spartan
self-control and what appeared to her romantic and childish folly.
Ralph interested her more than any one else in the world, and she often
broke off in the middle of one of these economic discussions, in spite
of their gravity, to consider some fresh aspect of his character.
“I think you’d be foolish to risk your money on poor old Charles,” she
observed. “Fond as I am of him, he doesn’t seem to me exactly
brilliant.... Besides, why should you be sacrificed?”
“My dear Joan,” Ralph exclaimed, stretching himself out with a gesture
of impatience, “don’t you see that we’ve all got to be sacrificed?
What’s the use of denying it? What’s the use of struggling against it?
So it always has been, so it always will be. We’ve got no money and we
never shall have any money. We shall just turn round in the mill every
day of our lives until we drop and die, worn out, as most people do,
when one comes to think of it.”
Joan looked at him, opened her lips as if to speak, and closed them
again. Then she said, very tentatively:
“Aren’t you happy, Ralph?”
“No. Are you? Perhaps I’m as happy as most people, though. God knows
whether I’m happy or not. What is happiness?”
He glanced with half a smile, in spite of his gloomy irritation, at his
sister. She looked, as usual, as if she were weighing one thing with
another, and balancing them together before she made up her mind.
“Happiness,” she remarked at length enigmatically, rather as if she
were sampling the word, and then she paused. She paused for a
considerable space, as if she were considering happiness in all its
bearings. “Hilda was here to-day,” she suddenly resumed, as if they had
never mentioned happiness. “She brought Bobbie—he’s a fine boy now.”
Ralph observed, with an amusement that had a tinge of irony in it, that
she was now going to sidle away quickly from this dangerous approach to
intimacy on to topics of general and family interest. Nevertheless, he
reflected, she was the only one of his family with whom he found it
possible to discuss happiness, although he might very well have