Night and Day
sympathy with Katharine’s melancholy, which seemed to Cassandra the
last refinement of her distinction.
“Ah, but it’s only ten o’clock,” said Katharine darkly.
“As late as that! Well—?” She did not understand.
“At twelve my horses turn into rats and off I go. The illusion fades.
But I accept my fate. I make hay while the sun shines.” Cassandra
looked at her with a puzzled expression.
“Here’s Katharine talking about rats, and hay, and all sorts of odd
things,” she said, as William returned to them. He had been quick. “Can
you make her out?”
Katharine perceived from his little frown and hesitation that he did
not find that particular problem to his taste at present. She stood
upright at once and said in a different tone:
“I really am off, though. I wish you’d explain if they say anything,
William. I shan’t be late, but I’ve got to see some one.”
“At this time of night?” Cassandra exclaimed.
“Whom have you got to see?” William demanded.
“A friend,” she remarked, half turning her head towards him. She knew
that he wished her to stay, not, indeed, with them, but in their
neighborhood, in case of need.
“Katharine has a great many friends,” said William rather lamely,
sitting down once more, as Katharine left the room.
She was soon driving quickly, as she had wished to drive, through the
lamp-lit streets. She liked both light and speed, and the sense of
being out of doors alone, and the knowledge that she would reach Mary
in her high, lonely room at the end of the drive. She climbed the stone
steps quickly, remarking the queer look of her blue silk skirt and blue
shoes upon the stone, dusty with the boots of the day, under the light
of an occasional jet of flickering gas.
The door was opened in a second by Mary herself, whose face showed not
only surprise at the sight of her visitor, but some degree of
embarrassment. She greeted her cordially, and, as there was no time for
explanations, Katharine walked straight into the sitting-room, and
found herself in the presence of a young man who was lying back in a
chair and holding a sheet of paper in his hand, at which he was looking
as if he expected to go on immediately with what he was in the middle
of saying to Mary Datchet. The apparition of an unknown lady in full
evening dress seemed to disturb him. He took his pipe from his mouth,
rose stiffly, and sat down again with a jerk.
“Have you been dining out?” Mary asked.
“Are you working?” Katharine inquired simultaneously.
The young man shook his head, as if he disowned his share in the
question with some irritation.
“Well, not exactly,” Mary replied. “Mr. Basnett had brought some papers
to show me. We were going through them, but we’d almost done.... Tell
us about your party.”
Mary had a ruffled appearance, as if she had been running her fingers
through her hair in the course of her conversation; she was dressed
more or less like a Russian peasant girl. She sat down again in a chair
which looked as if it had been her seat for some hours; the saucer
which stood upon the arm contained the ashes of many cigarettes. Mr.
Basnett, a very young man with a fresh complexion and a high forehead
from which the hair was combed straight back, was one of that group of
“very able young men” suspected by Mr. Clacton, justly as it turned
out, of an influence upon Mary Datchet. He had come down from one of
the Universities not long ago, and was now charged with the reformation
of society. In connection with the rest of the group of very able young
men he had drawn up a scheme for the education of labor, for the
amalgamation of the middle class and the working class, and for a joint
assault of the two bodies, combined in the Society for the Education of
Democracy, upon Capital. The scheme had already reached the stage in
which it was permissible to hire an office and engage a secretary, and
he had been deputed to expound the scheme to Mary, and make her an
offer of the Secretaryship, to which, as a matter of principle, a small
salary was attached. Since seven o’clock that evening he had been
reading out loud the document in which the faith of the new reformers
was expounded, but the reading was so frequently interrupted by
discussion, and it was so often necessary to inform Mary “in strictest
confidence” of the private characters and evil designs of certain
individuals and societies that they were still only half-way through
the manuscript. Neither of them realized that the talk had already
lasted three hours. In their absorption they had forgotten even to feed
the fire, and yet both Mr. Basnett in his exposition, and Mary in her
interrogation, carefully preserved a kind of formality calculated to
check the desire of the human mind for irrelevant discussion. Her
questions frequently began, “Am I to understand—” and his replies
invariably represented the views of some one called “we.”
By this time Mary was almost persuaded that she, too, was included in
the “we,” and agreed with Mr. Basnett in believing that “our” views,
“our” society, “our” policy, stood for something quite definitely
segregated from the main body of society in a circle of superior
illumination.
The appearance of Katharine in this atmosphere was extremely
incongruous, and had the effect of making Mary remember all sorts of
things that she had been glad to forget.
“You’ve been dining out?” she asked again, looking, with a little
smile, at the blue silk and the pearl-sewn shoes.
“No, at home. Are you starting something new?” Katharine hazarded,
rather hesitatingly, looking at the papers.
“We are,” Mr. Basnett replied. He said no more.
“I’m thinking of leaving our friends in Russell Square,” Mary
explained.
“I see. And then you will do something else.”
“Well, I’m afraid I like working,” said Mary.
“Afraid,” said Mr. Basnett, conveying the impression that, in his
opinion, no sensible person could be afraid of liking to work.
“Yes,” said Katharine, as if he had stated this opinion aloud. “I
should like to start something—something off one’s own bat—that’s what
I should like.”
“Yes, that’s the fun,” said Mr. Basnett, looking at her for the first
time rather keenly, and refilling his pipe.
“But you can’t limit work—that’s what I mean,” said Mary. “I mean there
are other sorts of work. No one works harder than a woman with little
children.”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Basnett. “It’s precisely the women with babies we
want to get hold of.” He glanced at his document, rolled it into a
cylinder between his fingers, and gazed into the fire. Katharine felt
that in this company anything that one said would be judged upon its
merits; one had only to say what one thought, rather barely and
tersely, with a curious assumption that the number of things that could
properly be thought about was strictly limited. And Mr. Basnett was
only stiff upon the surface; there was an intelligence in his face
which attracted her intelligence.
“When will the public know?” she asked.
“What d’you mean—about us?” Mr. Basnett asked, with a little smile.
“That depends upon many things,” said Mary. The conspirators looked
pleased, as if Katharine’s question, with the belief in their existence
which it implied, had a warming effect upon them.
“In starting a society such as we wish to start (we can’t say any more
at present),” Mr. Basnett began, with a little jerk of his head, “there
are two things to remember—the Press and the public. Other societies,
which shall be nameless, have gone under because they’ve appealed only
to cranks. If you don’t want a mutual admiration society, which dies as
soon as you’ve all discovered each other’s faults, you must nobble the
Press. You must appeal to the public.”
“That’s the difficulty,” said Mary thoughtfully.
“That’s where she comes in,” said Mr. Basnett, jerking his head in
Mary’s direction. “She’s the only one of us who’s a capitalist. She can
make a whole-time job of it. I’m tied to an office; I can only give my
spare time. Are you, by any chance, on the look-out for a job?” he
asked Katharine, with a queer mixture of distrust and deference.
“Marriage is her job at present,” Mary replied for her.
“Oh, I see,” said Mr. Basnett. He made allowances for that; he and his
friends had faced the question of sex, along with all others, and
assigned it an honorable place in their scheme of life. Katharine felt
this beneath the roughness of his manner; and a world entrusted to the
guardianship of Mary Datchet and Mr. Basnett seemed to her a good
world, although not a romantic or beautiful place or, to put it
figuratively, a place where any line of blue mist softly linked tree to
tree upon the horizon. For a moment she thought she saw in his face,
bent now over the fire, the features of that original man whom we still
recall every now and then, although we know only the clerk, barrister,
Governmental official, or workingman variety of him. Not that Mr.
Basnett, giving his days to commerce and his spare time to social
reform, would long carry about him any trace of his possibilities of
completeness; but, for the moment, in his youth and ardor, still
speculative, still uncramped, one might imagine him the citizen of a
nobler state than ours. Katharine turned over her small stock of
information, and wondered what their society might be going to attempt.
Then she remembered that she was hindering their business, and rose,
still thinking of this society, and thus thinking, she said to Mr.
Basnett:
“Well, you’ll ask me to join when the time comes, I hope.”
He nodded, and took his pipe from his mouth, but, being unable to think
of anything to say, he put it back again, although he would have been
glad if she had stayed.
Against her wish, Mary insisted upon taking her downstairs, and then,
as there was no cab to be seen, they stood in the street together,
looking about them.
“Go back,” Katharine urged her, thinking of Mr. Basnett with his papers
in his hand.
“You can’t wander about the streets alone in those clothes,” said Mary,
but the desire to find a cab was not her true reason for standing
beside Katharine for a minute or two. Unfortunately for her composure,
Mr. Basnett and his papers seemed to her an incidental diversion of
life’s serious purpose compared with some tremendous fact which
manifested itself as she stood alone with Katharine. It may have been
their common womanhood.
“Have you seen Ralph?” she asked suddenly, without preface.
“Yes,” said Katharine directly, but she did not remember when or where
she had seen him. It took her a moment or two to remember why Mary
should ask her if she had seen Ralph.
“I believe I’m jealous,” said Mary.
“Nonsense, Mary,” said Katharine, rather distractedly, taking her arm
and beginning to walk up the street in the direction of the main road.
“Let me see; we went to Kew, and we agreed to be friends. Yes, that’s
what happened.” Mary was silent, in the hope that Katharine would tell
her more. But Katharine said nothing.
“It’s not a question of friendship,” Mary exclaimed, her anger rising,
to her own surprise. “You know it’s not. How can it be? I’ve no right
to interfere—” She stopped. “Only I’d rather Ralph wasn’t hurt,” she
concluded.
“I think he seems able to take care of himself,” Katharine observed.
Without either of them wishing it, a feeling of hostility had risen
between them.
“Do you really think it’s worth it?” said Mary, after a pause.
“How can one tell?” Katharine asked.
“Have you ever cared for any one?” Mary demanded rashly and foolishly.
“I can’t wander about London discussing my feelings—Here’s a cab—no,
there’s some one in it.”
“We don’t want to quarrel,” said Mary.
“Ought I to have told him that I wouldn’t be his friend?” Katharine