Night and Day
She flushed. He had penetrated at once to the weak spot—her engagement,
and had reason for what he said. He was not altogether justified now,
at any rate, she was glad to remember; but she could not enlighten him
and must bear his insinuations, though from the lips of a man who had
behaved as he had behaved their force should not have been sharp.
Nevertheless, what he said had its force, she mused; partly because he
seemed unconscious of his own lapse in the case of Mary Datchet, and
thus baffled her insight; partly because he always spoke with force,
for what reason she did not yet feel certain.
“Absolute sincerity is rather difficult, don’t you think?” she
inquired, with a touch of irony.
“There are people one credits even with that,” he replied a little
vaguely. He was ashamed of his savage wish to hurt her, and yet it was
not for the sake of hurting her, who was beyond his shafts, but in
order to mortify his own incredibly reckless impulse of abandonment to
the spirit which seemed, at moments, about to rush him to the uttermost
ends of the earth. She affected him beyond the scope of his wildest
dreams. He seemed to see that beneath the quiet surface of her manner,
which was almost pathetically at hand and within reach for all the
trivial demands of daily life, there was a spirit which she reserved or
repressed for some reason either of loneliness or—could it be
possible—of love. Was it given to Rodney to see her unmasked,
unrestrained, unconscious of her duties? a creature of uncalculating
passion and instinctive freedom? No; he refused to believe it. It was
in her loneliness that Katharine was unreserved. “I went back to my
room by myself and I did—what I liked.” She had said that to him, and
in saying it had given him a glimpse of possibilities, even of
confidences, as if he might be the one to share her loneliness, the
mere hint of which made his heart beat faster and his brain spin. He
checked himself as brutally as he could. He saw her redden, and in the
irony of her reply he heard her resentment.
He began slipping his smooth, silver watch in his pocket, in the hope
that somehow he might help himself back to that calm and fatalistic
mood which had been his when he looked at its face upon the bank of the
lake, for that mood must, at whatever cost, be the mood of his
intercourse with Katharine. He had spoken of gratitude and acquiescence
in the letter which he had never sent, and now all the force of his
character must make good those vows in her presence.
She, thus challenged, tried meanwhile to define her points. She wished
to make Denham understand.
“Don’t you see that if you have no relations with people it’s easier to
be honest with them?” she inquired. “That is what I meant. One needn’t
cajole them; one’s under no obligation to them. Surely you must have
found with your own family that it’s impossible to discuss what matters
to you most because you’re all herded together, because you’re in a
conspiracy, because the position is false—” Her reasoning suspended
itself a little inconclusively, for the subject was complex, and she
found herself in ignorance whether Denham had a family or not. Denham
was agreed with her as to the destructiveness of the family system, but
he did not wish to discuss the problem at that moment.
He turned to a problem which was of greater interest to him.
“I’m convinced,” he said, “that there are cases in which perfect
sincerity is possible—cases where there’s no relationship, though the
people live together, if you like, where each is free, where there’s no
obligation upon either side.”
“For a time perhaps,” she agreed, a little despondently. “But
obligations always grow up. There are feelings to be considered. People
aren’t simple, and though they may mean to be reasonable, they end”—in
the condition in which she found herself, she meant, but added
lamely—“in a muddle.”
“Because,” Denham instantly intervened, “they don’t make themselves
understood at the beginning. I could undertake, at this instant,” he
continued, with a reasonable intonation which did much credit to his
self-control, “to lay down terms for a friendship which should be
perfectly sincere and perfectly straightforward.”
She was curious to hear them, but, besides feeling that the topic
concealed dangers better known to her than to him, she was reminded by
his tone of his curious abstract declaration upon the Embankment.
Anything that hinted at love for the moment alarmed her; it was as much
an infliction to her as the rubbing of a skinless wound.
But he went on, without waiting for her invitation.
“In the first place, such a friendship must be unemotional,” he laid it
down emphatically. “At least, on both sides it must be understood that
if either chooses to fall in love, he or she does so entirely at his
own risk. Neither is under any obligation to the other. They must be at
liberty to break or to alter at any moment. They must be able to say
whatever they wish to say. All this must be understood.”
“And they gain something worth having?” she asked.
“It’s a risk—of course it’s a risk,” he replied. The word
was one that she had been using frequently in her arguments with
herself of late.
“But it’s the only way—if you think friendship worth having,” he
concluded.
“Perhaps under those conditions it might be,” she said reflectively.
“Well,” he said, “those are the terms of the friendship I wish to offer
you.” She had known that this was coming, but, none the less, felt a
little shock, half of pleasure, half of reluctance, when she heard the
formal statement.
“I should like it,” she began, “but—”
“Would Rodney mind?”
“Oh no,” she replied quickly.
“No, no, it isn’t that,” she went on, and again came to an end. She had
been touched by the unreserved and yet ceremonious way in which he had
made what he called his offer of terms, but if he was generous it was
the more necessary for her to be cautious. They would find themselves
in difficulties, she speculated; but, at this point, which was not very
far, after all, upon the road of caution, her foresight deserted her.
She sought for some definite catastrophe into which they must
inevitably plunge. But she could think of none. It seemed to her that
these catastrophes were fictitious; life went on and on—life was
different altogether from what people said. And not only was she at an
end of her stock of caution, but it seemed suddenly altogether
superfluous. Surely if any one could take care of himself, Ralph Denham
could; he had told her that he did not love her. And, further, she
meditated, walking on beneath the beech-trees and swinging her
umbrella, as in her thought she was accustomed to complete freedom, why
should she perpetually apply so different a standard to her behavior in
practice? Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity
between the thought and the action, between the life of solitude and
the life of society, this astonishing precipice on one side of which
the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the other side of which
it was contemplative and dark as night? Was it not possible to step
from one to the other, erect, and without essential change? Was this
not the chance he offered her—the rare and wonderful chance of
friendship? At any rate, she told Denham, with a sigh in which he heard
both impatience and relief, that she agreed; she thought him right; she
would accept his terms of friendship.
“Now,” she said, “let’s go and have tea.”
In fact, these principles having been laid down, a great lightness of
spirit showed itself in both of them. They were both convinced that
something of profound importance had been settled, and could now give
their attention to their tea and the Gardens. They wandered in and out
of glass-houses, saw lilies swimming in tanks, breathed in the scent of
thousands of carnations, and compared their respective tastes in the
matter of trees and lakes. While talking exclusively of what they saw,
so that any one might have overheard them, they felt that the compact
between them was made firmer and deeper by the number of people who
passed them and suspected nothing of the kind. The question of Ralph’s
cottage and future was not mentioned again.
CHAPTER XXVI
Although the old coaches, with their gay panels and the guard’s horn,
and the humors of the box and the vicissitudes of the road, have long
moldered into dust so far as they were matter, and are preserved in the
printed pages of our novelists so far as they partook of the spirit, a
journey to London by express train can still be a very pleasant and
romantic adventure. Cassandra Otway, at the age of twenty-two, could
imagine few things more pleasant. Satiated with months of green fields
as she was, the first row of artisans’ villas on the outskirts of
London seemed to have something serious about it, which positively
increased the importance of every person in the railway carriage, and
even, to her impressionable mind, quickened the speed of the train and
gave a note of stern authority to the shriek of the engine-whistle.
They were bound for London; they must have precedence of all traffic
not similarly destined. A different demeanor was necessary directly one
stepped out upon Liverpool Street platform, and became one of those
preoccupied and hasty citizens for whose needs innumerable taxi-cabs,
motor-omnibuses, and underground railways were in waiting. She did her
best to look dignified and preoccupied too, but as the cab carried her
away, with a determination which alarmed her a little, she became more
and more forgetful of her station as a citizen of London, and turned
her head from one window to another, picking up eagerly a building on
this side or a street scene on that to feed her intense curiosity. And
yet, while the drive lasted no one was real, nothing was ordinary; the
crowds, the Government buildings, the tide of men and women washing the
base of the great glass windows, were all generalized, and affected her
as if she saw them on the stage.
All these feelings were sustained and partly inspired by the fact that
her journey took her straight to the center of her most romantic world.
A thousand times in the midst of her pastoral landscape her thoughts
took this precise road, were admitted to the house in Chelsea, and went
directly upstairs to Katharine’s room, where, invisible themselves,
they had the better chance of feasting upon the privacy of the room’s
adorable and mysterious mistress. Cassandra adored her cousin; the
adoration might have been foolish, but was saved from that excess and
lent an engaging charm by the volatile nature of Cassandra’s
temperament. She had adored a great many things and people in the
course of twenty-two years; she had been alternately the pride and the
desperation of her teachers. She had worshipped architecture and music,
natural history and humanity, literature and art, but always at the
height of her enthusiasm, which was accompanied by a brilliant degree
of accomplishment, she changed her mind and bought, surreptitiously,
another grammar. The terrible results which governesses had predicted
from such mental dissipation were certainly apparent now that Cassandra
was twenty-two, and had never passed an examination, and daily showed
herself less and less capable of passing one. The more serious
prediction that she could never possibly earn her living was also
verified. But from all these short strands of different accomplishments
Cassandra wove for herself an attitude, a cast of mind, which, if
useless, was found by some people to have the not despicable virtues of
vivacity and freshness. Katharine, for example, thought her a most
charming companion. The cousins seemed to assemble between them a great