Night and Day
feel it to be standing just here with the poet’s granddaughter. You
must know we think a great deal of your grandfather in America, Miss
Hilbery. We have societies for reading him aloud. What! His very own
slippers!” Laying aside the manuscript, she hastily grasped the old
shoes, and remained for a moment dumb in contemplation of them.
While Katharine went on steadily with her duties as show-woman, Rodney
examined intently a row of little drawings which he knew by heart
already. His disordered state of mind made it necessary for him to take
advantage of these little respites, as if he had been out in a high
wind and must straighten his dress in the first shelter he reached. His
calm was only superficial, as he knew too well; it did not exist much
below the surface of tie, waistcoat, and white slip.
On getting out of bed that morning he had fully made up his mind to
ignore what had been said the night before; he had been convinced, by
the sight of Denham, that his love for Katharine was passionate, and
when he addressed her early that morning on the telephone, he had meant
his cheerful but authoritative tones to convey to her the fact that,
after a night of madness, they were as indissolubly engaged as ever.
But when he reached his office his torments began. He found a letter
from Cassandra waiting for him. She had read his play, and had taken
the very first opportunity to write and tell him what she thought of
it. She knew, she wrote, that her praise meant absolutely nothing; but
still, she had sat up all night; she thought this, that, and the other;
she was full of enthusiasm most elaborately scratched out in places,
but enough was written plain to gratify William’s vanity exceedingly.
She was quite intelligent enough to say the right things, or, even more
charmingly, to hint at them. In other ways, too, it was a very charming
letter. She told him about her music, and about a Suffrage meeting to
which Henry had taken her, and she asserted, half seriously, that she
had learnt the Greek alphabet, and found it “fascinating.” The word was
underlined. Had she laughed when she drew that line? Was she ever
serious? Didn’t the letter show the most engaging compound of
enthusiasm and spirit and whimsicality, all tapering into a flame of
girlish freakishness, which flitted, for the rest of the morning, as a
will-o’-the-wisp, across Rodney’s landscape. He could not resist
beginning an answer to her there and then. He found it particularly
delightful to shape a style which should express the bowing and
curtsying, advancing and retreating, which are characteristic of one of
the many million partnerships of men and women. Katharine never trod
that particular measure, he could not help reflecting;
Katharine—Cassandra; Cassandra—Katharine—they alternated in his
consciousness all day long. It was all very well to dress oneself
carefully, compose one’s face, and start off punctually at half-past
four to a tea-party in Cheyne Walk, but Heaven only knew what would
come of it all, and when Katharine, after sitting silent with her usual
immobility, wantonly drew from her pocket and slapped down on the table
beneath his eyes a letter addressed to Cassandra herself, his composure
deserted him. What did she mean by her behavior?
He looked up sharply from his row of little pictures. Katharine was
disposing of the American lady in far too arbitrary a fashion. Surely
the victim herself must see how foolish her enthusiasms appeared in the
eyes of the poet’s granddaughter. Katharine never made any attempt to
spare people’s feelings, he reflected; and, being himself very
sensitive to all shades of comfort and discomfort, he cut short the
auctioneer’s catalog, which Katharine was reeling off more and more
absent-mindedly, and took Mrs. Vermont Bankes, with a queer sense of
fellowship in suffering, under his own protection.
But within a few minutes the American lady had completed her
inspection, and inclining her head in a little nod of reverential
farewell to the poet and his shoes, she was escorted downstairs by
Rodney. Katharine stayed by herself in the little room. The ceremony of
ancestor-worship had been more than usually oppressive to her.
Moreover, the room was becoming crowded beyond the bounds of order.
Only that morning a heavily insured proof-sheet had reached them from a
collector in Australia, which recorded a change of the poet’s mind
about a very famous phrase, and, therefore, had claims to the honor of
glazing and framing. But was there room for it? Must it be hung on the
staircase, or should some other relic give place to do it honor?
Feeling unable to decide the question, Katharine glanced at the
portrait of her grandfather, as if to ask his opinion. The artist who
had painted it was now out of fashion, and by dint of showing it to
visitors, Katharine had almost ceased to see anything but a glow of
faintly pleasing pink and brown tints, enclosed within a circular
scroll of gilt laurel-leaves. The young man who was her grandfather
looked vaguely over her head. The sensual lips were slightly parted,
and gave the face an expression of beholding something lovely or
miraculous vanishing or just rising upon the rim of the distance. The
expression repeated itself curiously upon Katharine’s face as she gazed
up into his. They were the same age, or very nearly so. She wondered
what he was looking for; were there waves beating upon a shore for him,
too, she wondered, and heroes riding through the leaf-hung forests? For
perhaps the first time in her life she thought of him as a man, young,
unhappy, tempestuous, full of desires and faults; for the first time
she realized him for herself, and not from her mother’s memory. He
might have been her brother, she thought. It seemed to her that they
were akin, with the mysterious kinship of blood which makes it seem
possible to interpret the sights which the eyes of the dead behold so
intently, or even to believe that they look with us upon our present
joys and sorrows. He would have understood, she thought, suddenly; and
instead of laying her withered flowers upon his shrine, she brought him
her own perplexities—perhaps a gift of greater value, should the dead
be conscious of gifts, than flowers and incense and adoration. Doubts,
questionings, and despondencies she felt, as she looked up, would be
more welcome to him than homage, and he would hold them but a very
small burden if she gave him, also, some share in what she suffered and
achieved. The depth of her own pride and love were not more apparent to
her than the sense that the dead asked neither flowers nor regrets, but
a share in the life which they had given her, the life which they had
lived.
Rodney found her a moment later sitting beneath her grandfather’s
portrait. She laid her hand on the seat next her in a friendly way, and
said:
“Come and sit down, William. How glad I was you were here! I felt
myself getting ruder and ruder.”
“You are not good at hiding your feelings,” he returned dryly.
“Oh, don’t scold me—I’ve had a horrid afternoon.” She told him how she
had taken the flowers to Mrs. McCormick, and how South Kensington
impressed her as the preserve of officers’ widows. She described how
the door had opened, and what gloomy avenues of busts and palm-trees
and umbrellas had been revealed to her. She spoke lightly, and
succeeded in putting him at his ease. Indeed, he rapidly became too
much at his ease to persist in a condition of cheerful neutrality. He
felt his composure slipping from him. Katharine made it seem so natural
to ask her to help him, or advise him, to say straight out what he had
in his mind. The letter from Cassandra was heavy in his pocket. There
was also the letter to Cassandra lying on the table in the next room.
The atmosphere seemed charged with Cassandra. But, unless Katharine
began the subject of her own accord, he could not even hint—he must
ignore the whole affair; it was the part of a gentleman to preserve a
bearing that was, as far as he could make it, the bearing of an
undoubting lover. At intervals he sighed deeply. He talked rather more
quickly than usual about the possibility that some of the operas of
Mozart would be played in the summer. He had received a notice, he
said, and at once produced a pocket-book stuffed with papers, and began
shuffling them in search. He held a thick envelope between his finger
and thumb, as if the notice from the opera company had become in some
way inseparably attached to it.
“A letter from Cassandra?” said Katharine, in the easiest voice in the
world, looking over his shoulder. “I’ve just written to ask her to come
here, only I forgot to post it.”
He handed her the envelope in silence. She took it, extracted the
sheets, and read the letter through.
The reading seemed to Rodney to take an intolerably long time.
“Yes,” she observed at length, “a very charming letter.”
Rodney’s face was half turned away, as if in bashfulness. Her view of
his profile almost moved her to laughter. She glanced through the pages
once more.
“I see no harm,” William blurted out, “in helping her—with Greek, for
example—if she really cares for that sort of thing.”
“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t care,” said Katharine, consulting
the pages once more. “In fact—ah, here it is—‘The Greek alphabet is
absolutely _fascinating_.’ Obviously she does care.”
“Well, Greek may be rather a large order. I was thinking chiefly of
English. Her criticisms of my play, though they’re too generous,
evidently immature—she can’t be more than twenty-two, I suppose?—they
certainly show the sort of thing one wants: real feeling for poetry,
understanding, not formed, of course, but it’s at the root of
everything after all. There’d be no harm in lending her books?”
“No. Certainly not.”
“But if it—hum—led to a correspondence? I mean, Katharine, I take it,
without going into matters which seem to me a little morbid, I mean,”
he floundered, “you, from your point of view, feel that there’s nothing
disagreeable to you in the notion? If so, you’ve only to speak, and I
never think of it again.”
She was surprised by the violence of her desire that he never should
think of it again. For an instant it seemed to her impossible to
surrender an intimacy, which might not be the intimacy of love, but was
certainly the intimacy of true friendship, to any woman in the world.
Cassandra would never understand him—she was not good enough for him.
The letter seemed to her a letter of flattery—a letter addressed to his
weakness, which it made her angry to think was known to another. For he
was not weak; he had the rare strength of doing what he promised—she
had only to speak, and he would never think of Cassandra again.
She paused. Rodney guessed the reason. He was amazed.
“She loves me,” he thought. The woman he admired more than any one in
the world, loved him, as he had given up hope that she would ever love
him. And now that for the first time he was sure of her love, he
resented it. He felt it as a fetter, an encumbrance, something which
made them both, but him in particular, ridiculous. He was in her power
completely, but his eyes were open and he was no longer her slave or
her dupe. He would be her master in future. The instant prolonged
itself as Katharine realized the strength of her desire to speak the
words that should keep William for ever, and the baseness of the
temptation which assailed her to make the movement, or speak the word,
which he had often begged her for, which she was now near enough to
feeling. She held the letter in her hand. She sat silent.
At this moment there was a stir in the other room; the voice of Mrs.
Hilbery was heard talking of proof-sheets rescued by miraculous
providence from butcher’s ledgers in Australia; the curtain separating