Night and Day
suffered. But in the case of Katharine it was different; she was
indignant with Katharine.
“There’s always work,” she said, a little aggressively.
Ralph moved directly.
“Do you want to be working now?” he asked.
“No, no. It’s Sunday,” she replied. “I was thinking of Katharine. She
doesn’t understand about work. She’s never had to. She doesn’t know
what work is. I’ve only found out myself quite lately. But it’s the
thing that saves one—I’m sure of that.”
“There are other things, aren’t there?” he hesitated.
“Nothing that one can count upon,” she returned. “After all, other
people—” she stopped, but forced herself to go on. “Where should I be
now if I hadn’t got to go to my office every day? Thousands of people
would tell you the same thing—thousands of women. I tell you, work is
the only thing that saved me, Ralph.” He set his mouth, as if her words
rained blows on him; he looked as if he had made up his mind to bear
anything she might say, in silence. He had deserved it, and there would
be relief in having to bear it. But she broke off, and rose as if to
fetch something from the next room. Before she reached the door she
turned back, and stood facing him, self-possessed, and yet defiant and
formidable in her composure.
“It’s all turned out splendidly for me,” she said. “It will for you,
too. I’m sure of that. Because, after all, Katharine is worth it.”
“Mary—!” he exclaimed. But her head was turned away, and he could not
say what he wished to say. “Mary, you’re splendid,” he concluded. She
faced him as he spoke, and gave him her hand. She had suffered and
relinquished, she had seen her future turned from one of infinite
promise to one of barrenness, and yet, somehow, over what she scarcely
knew, and with what results she could hardly foretell, she had
conquered. With Ralph’s eyes upon her, smiling straight back at him
serenely and proudly, she knew, for the first time, that she had
conquered. She let him kiss her hand.
The streets were empty enough on Sunday night, and if the Sabbath, and
the domestic amusements proper to the Sabbath, had not kept people
indoors, a high strong wind might very probably have done so. Ralph
Denham was aware of a tumult in the street much in accordance with his
own sensations. The gusts, sweeping along the Strand, seemed at the
same time to blow a clear space across the sky in which stars appeared,
and for a short time the quick-speeding silver moon riding through
clouds, as if they were waves of water surging round her and over her.
They swamped her, but she emerged; they broke over her and covered her
again; she issued forth indomitable. In the country fields all the
wreckage of winter was being dispersed; the dead leaves, the withered
bracken, the dry and discolored grass, but no bud would be broken, nor
would the new stalks that showed above the earth take any harm, and
perhaps to-morrow a line of blue or yellow would show through a slit in
their green. But the whirl of the atmosphere alone was in Denham’s
mood, and what of star or blossom appeared was only as a light gleaming
for a second upon heaped waves fast following each other. He had not
been able to speak to Mary, though for a moment he had come near enough
to be tantalized by a wonderful possibility of understanding. But the
desire to communicate something of the very greatest importance
possessed him completely; he still wished to bestow this gift upon some
other human being; he sought their company. More by instinct than by
conscious choice, he took the direction which led to Rodney’s rooms. He
knocked loudly upon his door; but no one answered. He rang the bell. It
took him some time to accept the fact that Rodney was out. When he
could no longer pretend that the sound of the wind in the old building
was the sound of some one rising from his chair, he ran downstairs
again, as if his goal had been altered and only just revealed to him.
He walked in the direction of Chelsea.
But physical fatigue, for he had not dined and had tramped both far and
fast, made him sit for a moment upon a seat on the Embankment. One of
the regular occupants of those seats, an elderly man who had drunk
himself, probably, out of work and lodging, drifted up, begged a match,
and sat down beside him. It was a windy night, he said; times were
hard; some long story of bad luck and injustice followed, told so often
that the man seemed to be talking to himself, or, perhaps, the neglect
of his audience had long made any attempt to catch their attention seem
scarcely worth while. When he began to speak Ralph had a wild desire to
talk to him; to question him; to make him understand. He did, in fact,
interrupt him at one point; but it was useless. The ancient story of
failure, ill-luck, undeserved disaster, went down the wind,
disconnected syllables flying past Ralph’s ears with a queer
alternation of loudness and faintness as if, at certain moments, the
man’s memory of his wrongs revived and then flagged, dying down at last
into a grumble of resignation, which seemed to represent a final lapse
into the accustomed despair. The unhappy voice afflicted Ralph, but it
also angered him. And when the elderly man refused to listen and
mumbled on, an odd image came to his mind of a lighthouse besieged by
the flying bodies of lost birds, who were dashed senseless, by the
gale, against the glass. He had a strange sensation that he was both
lighthouse and bird; he was steadfast and brilliant; and at the same
time he was whirled, with all other things, senseless against the
glass. He got up, left his tribute of silver, and pressed on, with the
wind against him. The image of the lighthouse and the storm full of
birds persisted, taking the place of more definite thoughts, as he
walked past the Houses of Parliament and down Grosvenor Road, by the
side of the river. In his state of physical fatigue, details merged
themselves in the vaster prospect, of which the flying gloom and the
intermittent lights of lamp-posts and private houses were the outward
token, but he never lost his sense of walking in the direction of
Katharine’s house. He took it for granted that something would then
happen, and, as he walked on, his mind became more and more full of
pleasure and expectancy. Within a certain radius of her house the
streets came under the influence of her presence. Each house had an
individuality known to Ralph, because of the tremendous individuality
of the house in which she lived. For some yards before reaching the
Hilberys’ door he walked in a trance of pleasure, but when he reached
it, and pushed the gate of the little garden open, he hesitated. He did
not know what to do next. There was no hurry, however, for the outside
of the house held pleasure enough to last him some time longer. He
crossed the road, and leant against the balustrade of the Embankment,
fixing his eyes upon the house.
Lights burnt in the three long windows of the drawing-room. The space
of the room behind became, in Ralph’s vision, the center of the dark,
flying wilderness of the world; the justification for the welter of
confusion surrounding it; the steady light which cast its beams, like
those of a lighthouse, with searching composure over the trackless
waste. In this little sanctuary were gathered together several
different people, but their identity was dissolved in a general glory
of something that might, perhaps, be called civilization; at any rate,
all dryness, all safety, all that stood up above the surge and
preserved a consciousness of its own, was centered in the drawing-room
of the Hilberys. Its purpose was beneficent; and yet so far above his
level as to have something austere about it, a light that cast itself
out and yet kept itself aloof. Then he began, in his mind, to
distinguish different individuals within, consciously refusing as yet
to attack the figure of Katharine. His thoughts lingered over Mrs.
Hilbery and Cassandra; and then he turned to Rodney and Mr. Hilbery.
Physically, he saw them bathed in that steady flow of yellow light
which filled the long oblongs of the windows; in their movements they
were beautiful; and in their speech he figured a reserve of meaning,
unspoken, but understood. At length, after all this half-conscious
selection and arrangement, he allowed himself to approach the figure of
Katharine herself; and instantly the scene was flooded with excitement.
He did not see her in the body; he seemed curiously to see her as a
shape of light, the light itself; he seemed, simplified and exhausted
as he was, to be like one of those lost birds fascinated by the
lighthouse and held to the glass by the splendor of the blaze.
These thoughts drove him to tramp a beat up and down the pavement
before the Hilberys’ gate. He did not trouble himself to make any plans
for the future. Something of an unknown kind would decide both the
coming year and the coming hour. Now and again, in his vigil, he sought
the light in the long windows, or glanced at the ray which gilded a few
leaves and a few blades of grass in the little garden. For a long time
the light burnt without changing. He had just reached the limit of his
beat and was turning, when the front door opened, and the aspect of the
house was entirely changed. A black figure came down the little pathway
and paused at the gate. Denham understood instantly that it was Rodney.
Without hesitation, and conscious only of a great friendliness for any
one coming from that lighted room, he walked straight up to him and
stopped him. In the flurry of the wind Rodney was taken aback, and for
the moment tried to press on, muttering something, as if he suspected a
demand upon his charity.
“Goodness, Denham, what are you doing here?” he exclaimed, recognizing
him.
Ralph mumbled something about being on his way home. They walked on
together, though Rodney walked quick enough to make it plain that he
had no wish for company.
He was very unhappy. That afternoon Cassandra had repulsed him; he had
tried to explain to her the difficulties of the situation, and to
suggest the nature of his feelings for her without saying anything
definite or anything offensive to her. But he had lost his head; under
the goad of Katharine’s ridicule he had said too much, and Cassandra,
superb in her dignity and severity, had refused to hear another word,
and threatened an immediate return to her home. His agitation, after an
evening spent between the two women, was extreme. Moreover, he could
not help suspecting that Ralph was wandering near the Hilberys’ house,
at this hour, for reasons connected with Katharine. There was probably
some understanding between them—not that anything of the kind mattered
to him now. He was convinced that he had never cared for any one save
Cassandra, and Katharine’s future was no concern of his. Aloud, he
said, shortly, that he was very tired and wished to find a cab. But on
Sunday night, on the Embankment, cabs were hard to come by, and Rodney
found himself constrained to walk some distance, at any rate, in
Denham’s company. Denham maintained his silence. Rodney’s irritation
lapsed. He found the silence oddly suggestive of the good masculine
qualities which he much respected, and had at this moment great reason
to need. After the mystery, difficulty, and uncertainty of dealing with
the other sex, intercourse with one’s own is apt to have a composing
and even ennobling influence, since plain speaking is possible and
subterfuges of no avail. Rodney, too, was much in need of a confidant;
Katharine, despite her promises of help, had failed him at the critical
moment; she had gone off with Denham; she was, perhaps, tormenting
Denham as she had tormented him. How grave and stable he seemed,
speaking little, and walking firmly, compared with what Rodney knew of