Night and Day
“You have no opinion about me one way or the other?”
“Yes, I suppose I have an opinion—” she hesitated.
He controlled his wish to ask her to explain herself, and much to his
pleasure she went on, appearing to search her mind.
“I thought that you criticized me—perhaps disliked me. I thought of you
as a person who judges—”
“No; I’m a person who feels,” he said, in a low voice.
“Tell me, then, what has made you do this?” she asked, after a break.
He told her in an orderly way, betokening careful preparation, all that
he had meant to say at first; how he stood with regard to his brothers
and sisters; what his mother had said, and his sister Joan had
refrained from saying; exactly how many pounds stood in his name at the
bank; what prospect his brother had of earning a livelihood in America;
how much of their income went on rent, and other details known to him
by heart. She listened to all this, so that she could have passed an
examination in it by the time Waterloo Bridge was in sight; and yet she
was no more listening to it than she was counting the paving-stones at
her feet. She was feeling happier than she had felt in her life. If
Denham could have seen how visibly books of algebraic symbols, pages
all speckled with dots and dashes and twisted bars, came before her
eyes as they trod the Embankment, his secret joy in her attention might
have been dispersed. She went on, saying, “Yes, I see.... But how would
that help you?... Your brother has passed his examination?” so
sensibly, that he had constantly to keep his brain in check; and all
the time she was in fancy looking up through a telescope at white
shadow-cleft disks which were other worlds, until she felt herself
possessed of two bodies, one walking by the river with Denham, the
other concentrated to a silver globe aloft in the fine blue space above
the scum of vapors that was covering the visible world. She looked at
the sky once, and saw that no star was keen enough to pierce the flight
of watery clouds now coursing rapidly before the west wind. She looked
down hurriedly again. There was no reason, she assured herself, for
this feeling of happiness; she was not free; she was not alone; she was
still bound to earth by a million fibres; every step took her nearer
home. Nevertheless, she exulted as she had never exulted before. The
air was fresher, the lights more distinct, the cold stone of the
balustrade colder and harder, when by chance or purpose she struck her
hand against it. No feeling of annoyance with Denham remained; he
certainly did not hinder any flight she might choose to make, whether
in the direction of the sky or of her home; but that her condition was
due to him, or to anything that he had said, she had no consciousness
at all.
They were now within sight of the stream of cabs and omnibuses crossing
to and from the Surrey side of the river; the sound of the traffic, the
hooting of motor-horns, and the light chime of tram-bells sounded more
and more distinctly, and, with the increase of noise, they both became
silent. With a common instinct they slackened their pace, as if to
lengthen the time of semi-privacy allowed them. To Ralph, the pleasure
of these last yards of the walk with Katharine was so great that he
could not look beyond the present moment to the time when she should
have left him. He had no wish to use the last moments of their
companionship in adding fresh words to what he had already said. Since
they had stopped talking, she had become to him not so much a real
person, as the very woman he dreamt of; but his solitary dreams had
never produced any such keenness of sensation as that which he felt in
her presence. He himself was also strangely transfigured. He had
complete mastery of all his faculties. For the first time he was in
possession of his full powers. The vistas which opened before him
seemed to have no perceptible end. But the mood had none of the
restlessness or feverish desire to add one delight to another which had
hitherto marked, and somewhat spoilt, the most rapturous of his
imaginings. It was a mood that took such clear-eyed account of the
conditions of human life that he was not disturbed in the least by the
gliding presence of a taxicab, and without agitation he perceived that
Katharine was conscious of it also, and turned her head in that
direction. Their halting steps acknowledged the desirability of
engaging the cab; and they stopped simultaneously, and signed to it.
“Then you will let me know your decision as soon as you can?” he asked,
with his hand on the door.
She hesitated for a moment. She could not immediately recall what the
question was that she had to decide.
“I will write,” she said vaguely. “No,” she added, in a second,
bethinking her of the difficulties of writing anything decided upon a
question to which she had paid no attention, “I don’t see how to manage
it.”
She stood looking at Denham, considering and hesitating, with her foot
upon the step. He guessed her difficulties; he knew in a second that
she had heard nothing; he knew everything that she felt.
“There’s only one place to discuss things satisfactorily that I know
of,” he said quickly; “that’s Kew.”
“Kew?”
“Kew,” he repeated, with immense decision. He shut the door and gave
her address to the driver. She instantly was conveyed away from him,
and her cab joined the knotted stream of vehicles, each marked by a
light, and indistinguishable one from the other. He stood watching for
a moment, and then, as if swept by some fierce impulse, from the spot
where they had stood, he turned, crossed the road at a rapid pace, and
disappeared.
He walked on upon the impetus of this last mood of almost supernatural
exaltation until he reached a narrow street, at this hour empty of
traffic and passengers. Here, whether it was the shops with their
shuttered windows, the smooth and silvered curve of the wood pavement,
or a natural ebb of feeling, his exaltation slowly oozed and deserted
him. He was now conscious of the loss that follows any revelation; he
had lost something in speaking to Katharine, for, after all, was the
Katharine whom he loved the same as the real Katharine? She had
transcended her entirely at moments; her skirt had blown, her feather
waved, her voice spoken; yes, but how terrible sometimes the pause
between the voice of one’s dreams and the voice that comes from the
object of one’s dreams! He felt a mixture of disgust and pity at the
figure cut by human beings when they try to carry out, in practice,
what they have the power to conceive. How small both he and Katharine
had appeared when they issued from the cloud of thought that enveloped
them! He recalled the small, inexpressive, commonplace words in which
they had tried to communicate with each other; he repeated them over to
himself. By repeating Katharine’s words, he came in a few moments to
such a sense of her presence that he worshipped her more than ever. But
she was engaged to be married, he remembered with a start. The strength
of his feeling was revealed to him instantly, and he gave himself up to
an irresistible rage and sense of frustration. The image of Rodney came
before him with every circumstance of folly and indignity. That little
pink-cheeked dancing-master to marry Katharine? that gibbering ass with
the face of a monkey on an organ? that posing, vain, fantastical fop?
with his tragedies and his comedies, his innumerable spites and prides
and pettinesses? Lord! marry Rodney! She must be as great a fool as he
was. His bitterness took possession of him, and as he sat in the corner
of the underground carriage, he looked as stark an image of
unapproachable severity as could be imagined. Directly he reached home
he sat down at his table, and began to write Katharine a long, wild,
mad letter, begging her for both their sakes to break with Rodney,
imploring her not to do what would destroy for ever the one beauty, the
one truth, the one hope; not to be a traitor, not to be a deserter, for
if she were—and he wound up with a quiet and brief assertion that,
whatever she did or left undone, he would believe to be the best, and
accept from her with gratitude. He covered sheet after sheet, and heard
the early carts starting for London before he went to bed.
CHAPTER XXIV
The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt towards
the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet
flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring
to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly colored and
sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. Lives frozen by
age, so far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which
neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid,
reflecting the shapes and colors of the present, as well as the shapes
and colors of the past. In the case of Mrs. Hilbery, these early spring
days were chiefly upsetting inasmuch as they caused a general
quickening of her emotional powers, which, as far as the past was
concerned, had never suffered much diminution. But in the spring her
desire for expression invariably increased. She was haunted by the
ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the
combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favorite
authors. She made them for herself on scraps of paper, and rolled them
on her tongue when there seemed no occasion for such eloquence. She was
upheld in these excursions by the certainty that no language could
outdo the splendor of her father’s memory, and although her efforts did
not notably further the end of his biography, she was under the
impression of living more in his shade at such times than at others. No
one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth
brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport
themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of the
tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating
in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected
against her better judgment by her mother’s enthusiasm. Not that her
judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of
Shakespeare’s sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter of her
grandfather’s biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest,
Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among
other things, of writing Shakespeare’s sonnets; the idea, struck out to
enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of privately
printed manuals within the next few days for her instruction, had
submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature; she had come half
to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other
people’s facts, and all her fancy for the time being centered upon
Stratford-on-Avon. She had a plan, she told Katharine, when, rather
later than usual, Katharine came into the room the morning after her
walk by the river, for visiting Shakespeare’s tomb. Any fact about the
poet had become, for the moment, of far greater interest to her than
the immediate present, and the certainty that there was existing in
England a spot of ground where Shakespeare had undoubtedly stood, where
his very bones lay directly beneath one’s feet, was so absorbing to her
on this particular occasion that she greeted her daughter with the
exclamation:
“D’you think he ever passed this house?”
The question, for the moment, seemed to Katharine to have reference to
Ralph Denham.
“On his way to Blackfriars, I mean,” Mrs. Hilbery continued, “for you
know the latest discovery is that he owned a house there.”
Katharine still looked about her in perplexity, and Mrs. Hilbery added:
“Which is a proof that he wasn’t as poor as they’ve sometimes said. I