Night and Day
the Denham family got up and went out of the door, as if a bell had
summoned them. She was not used to the clockwork regulations of a large
family. She hesitated in what she was saying, and rose. Mrs. Denham and
Joan had drawn together and stood by the fireplace, slightly raising
their skirts above their ankles, and discussing something which had an
air of being very serious and very private. They appeared to have
forgotten her presence among them. Ralph stood holding the door open
for her.
“Won’t you come up to my room?” he said. And Katharine, glancing back
at Joan, who smiled at her in a preoccupied way, followed Ralph
upstairs. She was thinking of their argument, and when, after the long
climb, he opened his door, she began at once.
“The question is, then, at what point is it right for the individual to
assert his will against the will of the State.”
For some time they continued the argument, and then the intervals
between one statement and the next became longer and longer, and they
spoke more speculatively and less pugnaciously, and at last fell
silent. Katharine went over the argument in her mind, remembering how,
now and then, it had been set conspicuously on the right course by some
remark offered either by James or by Johnnie.
“Your brothers are very clever,” she said. “I suppose you’re in the
habit of arguing?”
“James and Johnnie will go on like that for hours,” Ralph replied. “So
will Hester, if you start her upon Elizabethan dramatists.”
“And the little girl with the pigtail?”
“Molly? She’s only ten. But they’re always arguing among themselves.”
He was immensely pleased by Katharine’s praise of his brothers and
sisters. He would have liked to go on telling her about them, but he
checked himself.
“I see that it must be difficult to leave them,” Katharine continued.
His deep pride in his family was more evident to him, at that moment,
than ever before, and the idea of living alone in a cottage was
ridiculous. All that brotherhood and sisterhood, and a common childhood
in a common past mean, all the stability, the unambitious comradeship,
and tacit understanding of family life at its best, came to his mind,
and he thought of them as a company, of which he was the leader, bound
on a difficult, dreary, but glorious voyage. And it was Katharine who
had opened his eyes to this, he thought.
A little dry chirp from the corner of the room now roused her
attention.
“My tame rook,” he explained briefly. “A cat had bitten one of its
legs.” She looked at the rook, and her eyes went from one object to
another.
“You sit here and read?” she said, her eyes resting upon his books. He
said that he was in the habit of working there at night.
“The great advantage of Highgate is the view over London. At night the
view from my window is splendid.” He was extremely anxious that she
should appreciate his view, and she rose to see what was to be seen. It
was already dark enough for the turbulent haze to be yellow with the
light of street lamps, and she tried to determine the quarters of the
city beneath her. The sight of her gazing from his window gave him a
peculiar satisfaction. When she turned, at length, he was still sitting
motionless in his chair.
“It must be late,” she said. “I must be going.” She settled upon the
arm of the chair irresolutely, thinking that she had no wish to go
home. William would be there, and he would find some way of making
things unpleasant for her, and the memory of their quarrel came back to
her. She had noticed Ralph’s coldness, too. She looked at him, and from
his fixed stare she thought that he must be working out some theory,
some argument. He had thought, perhaps, of some fresh point in his
position, as to the bounds of personal liberty. She waited, silently,
thinking about liberty.
“You’ve won again,” he said at last, without moving.
“I’ve won?” she repeated, thinking of the argument.
“I wish to God I hadn’t asked you here,” he burst out.
“What do you mean?”
“When you’re here, it’s different—I’m happy. You’ve only to walk to the
window—you’ve only to talk about liberty. When I saw you down there
among them all—” He stopped short.
“You thought how ordinary I was.”
“I tried to think so. But I thought you more wonderful than ever.”
An immense relief, and a reluctance to enjoy that relief, conflicted in
her heart.
She slid down into the chair.
“I thought you disliked me,” she said.
“God knows I tried,” he replied. “I’ve done my best to see you as you
are, without any of this damned romantic nonsense. That was why I asked
you here, and it’s increased my folly. When you’re gone I shall look
out of that window and think of you. I shall waste the whole evening
thinking of you. I shall waste my whole life, I believe.”
He spoke with such vehemence that her relief disappeared; she frowned;
and her tone changed to one almost of severity.
“This is what I foretold. We shall gain nothing but unhappiness. Look
at me, Ralph.” He looked at her. “I assure you that I’m far more
ordinary than I appear. Beauty means nothing whatever. In fact, the
most beautiful women are generally the most stupid. I’m not that, but
I’m a matter-of-fact, prosaic, rather ordinary character; I order the
dinner, I pay the bills, I do the accounts, I wind up the clock, and I
never look at a book.”
“You forget—” he began, but she would not let him speak.
“You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me
mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very
inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about
me, and now you can’t separate me from the person you’ve imagined me to
be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact it’s
being in delusion. All romantic people are the same,” she added. “My
mother spends her life in making stories about the people she’s fond
of. But I won’t have you do it about me, if I can help it.”
“You can’t help it,” he said.
“I warn you it’s the source of all evil.”
“And of all good,” he added.
“You’ll find out that I’m not what you think me.”
“Perhaps. But I shall gain more than I lose.”
“If such gain’s worth having.”
They were silent for a space.
“That may be what we have to face,” he said. “There may be nothing
else. Nothing but what we imagine.”
“The reason of our loneliness,” she mused, and they were silent for a
time.
“When are you to be married?” he asked abruptly, with a change of tone.
“Not till September, I think. It’s been put off.”
“You won’t be lonely then,” he said. “According to what people say,
marriage is a very queer business. They say it’s different from
anything else. It may be true. I’ve known one or two cases where it
seems to be true.” He hoped that she would go on with the subject. But
she made no reply. He had done his best to master himself, and his
voice was sufficiently indifferent, but her silence tormented him. She
would never speak to him of Rodney of her own accord, and her reserve
left a whole continent of her soul in darkness.
“It may be put off even longer than that,” she said, as if by an
afterthought. “Some one in the office is ill, and William has to take
his place. We may put it off for some time in fact.”
“That’s rather hard on him, isn’t it?” Ralph asked.
“He has his work,” she replied. “He has lots of things that interest
him.... I know I’ve been to that place,” she broke off, pointing to a
photograph. “But I can’t remember where it is—oh, of course it’s
Oxford. Now, what about your cottage?”
“I’m not going to take it.”
“How you change your mind!” she smiled.
“It’s not that,” he said impatiently. “It’s that I want to be where I
can see you.”
“Our compact is going to hold in spite of all I’ve said?” she asked.
“For ever, so far as I’m concerned,” he replied.
“You’re going to go on dreaming and imagining and making up stories
about me as you walk along the street, and pretending that we’re riding
in a forest, or landing on an island—”
“No. I shall think of you ordering dinner, paying bills, doing the
accounts, showing old ladies the relics—”
“That’s better,” she said. “You can think of me to-morrow morning
looking up dates in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography.’”
“And forgetting your purse,” Ralph added.
At this she smiled, but in another moment her smile faded, either
because of his words or of the way in which he spoke them. She was
capable of forgetting things. He saw that. But what more did he see?
Was he not looking at something she had never shown to anybody? Was it
not something so profound that the notion of his seeing it almost
shocked her? Her smile faded, and for a moment she seemed upon the
point of speaking, but looking at him in silence, with a look that
seemed to ask what she could not put into words, she turned and bade
him good night.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Like a strain of music, the effect of Katharine’s presence slowly died
from the room in which Ralph sat alone. The music had ceased in the
rapture of its melody. He strained to catch the faintest lingering
echoes; for a moment the memory lulled him into peace; but soon it
failed, and he paced the room so hungry for the sound to come again
that he was conscious of no other desire left in life. She had gone
without speaking; abruptly a chasm had been cut in his course, down
which the tide of his being plunged in disorder; fell upon rocks; flung
itself to destruction. The distress had an effect of physical ruin and
disaster. He trembled; he was white; he felt exhausted, as if by a
great physical effort. He sank at last into a chair standing opposite
her empty one, and marked, mechanically, with his eye upon the clock,
how she went farther and farther from him, was home now, and now,
doubtless, again with Rodney. But it was long before he could realize
these facts; the immense desire for her presence churned his senses
into foam, into froth, into a haze of emotion that removed all facts
from his grasp, and gave him a strange sense of distance, even from the
material shapes of wall and window by which he was surrounded. The
prospect of the future, now that the strength of his passion was
revealed to him, appalled him.
The marriage would take place in September, she had said; that allowed
him, then, six full months in which to undergo these terrible extremes
of emotion. Six months of torture, and after that the silence of the
grave, the isolation of the insane, the exile of the damned; at best, a
life from which the chief good was knowingly and for ever excluded. An
impartial judge might have assured him that his chief hope of recovery
lay in this mystic temper, which identified a living woman with much
that no human beings long possess in the eyes of each other; she would
pass, and the desire for her vanish, but his belief in what she stood
for, detached from her, would remain. This line of thought offered,
perhaps, some respite, and possessed of a brain that had its station
considerably above the tumult of the senses, he tried to reduce the
vague and wandering incoherency of his emotions to order. The sense of
self-preservation was strong in him, and Katharine herself had
strangely revived it by convincing him that his family deserved and
needed all his strength. She was right, and for their sake, if not for
his own, this passion, which could bear no fruit, must be cut off,
uprooted, shown to be as visionary and baseless as she had maintained.
The best way of achieving this was not to run away from her, but to
face her, and having steeped himself in her qualities, to convince his
reason that they were, as she assured him, not those that he imagined.
She was a practical woman, a domestic wife for an inferior poet,
endowed with romantic beauty by some freak of unintelligent Nature. No