Night and Day
She left the room, holding her unfinished bread and butter in her hand.
William glanced at Cassandra.
“Well, she IS queer!” Cassandra exclaimed.
William looked perturbed. He knew more of Katharine than Cassandra did,
but even he could not tell—. In a second Katharine was back again
dressed in outdoor things, still holding her bread and butter in her
bare hand.
“If I’m late, don’t wait for me,” she said. “I shall have dined,” and
so saying, she left them.
“But she can’t—” William exclaimed, as the door shut, “not without any
gloves and bread and butter in her hand!” They ran to the window, and
saw her walking rapidly along the street towards the City. Then she
vanished.
“She must have gone to meet Mr. Denham,” Cassandra exclaimed.
“Goodness knows!” William interjected.
The incident impressed them both as having something queer and ominous
about it out of all proportion to its surface strangeness.
“It’s the sort of way Aunt Maggie behaves,” said Cassandra, as if in
explanation.
William shook his head, and paced up and down the room looking
extremely perturbed.
“This is what I’ve been foretelling,” he burst out. “Once set the
ordinary conventions aside—Thank Heaven Mrs. Hilbery is away. But
there’s Mr. Hilbery. How are we to explain it to him? I shall have to
leave you.”
“But Uncle Trevor won’t be back for hours, William!” Cassandra
implored.
“You never can tell. He may be on his way already. Or suppose Mrs.
Milvain—your Aunt Celia—or Mrs. Cosham, or any other of your aunts or
uncles should be shown in and find us alone together. You know what
they’re saying about us already.”
Cassandra was equally stricken by the sight of William’s agitation, and
appalled by the prospect of his desertion.
“We might hide,” she exclaimed wildly, glancing at the curtain which
separated the room with the relics.
“I refuse entirely to get under the table,” said William sarcastically.
She saw that he was losing his temper with the difficulties of the
situation. Her instinct told her that an appeal to his affection, at
this moment, would be extremely ill-judged. She controlled herself, sat
down, poured out a fresh cup of tea, and sipped it quietly. This
natural action, arguing complete self-mastery, and showing her in one
of those feminine attitudes which William found adorable, did more than
any argument to compose his agitation. It appealed to his chivalry. He
accepted a cup. Next she asked for a slice of cake. By the time the
cake was eaten and the tea drunk the personal question had lapsed, and
they were discussing poetry. Insensibly they turned from the question
of dramatic poetry in general, to the particular example which reposed
in William’s pocket, and when the maid came in to clear away the
tea-things, William had asked permission to read a short passage aloud,
“unless it bored her?”
Cassandra bent her head in silence, but she showed a little of what she
felt in her eyes, and thus fortified, William felt confident that it
would take more than Mrs. Milvain herself to rout him from his
position. He read aloud.
Meanwhile Katharine walked rapidly along the street. If called upon to
explain her impulsive action in leaving the tea-table, she could have
traced it to no better cause than that William had glanced at
Cassandra; Cassandra at William. Yet, because they had glanced, her
position was impossible. If one forgot to pour out a cup of tea they
rushed to the conclusion that she was engaged to Ralph Denham. She knew
that in half an hour or so the door would open, and Ralph Denham would
appear. She could not sit there and contemplate seeing him with
William’s and Cassandra’s eyes upon them, judging their exact degree of
intimacy, so that they might fix the wedding-day. She promptly decided
that she would meet Ralph out of doors; she still had time to reach
Lincoln’s Inn Fields before he left his office. She hailed a cab, and
bade it take her to a shop for selling maps which she remembered in
Great Queen Street, since she hardly liked to be set down at his door.
Arrived at the shop, she bought a large scale map of Norfolk, and thus
provided, hurried into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and assured herself of the
position of Messrs. Hoper and Grateley’s office. The great gas
chandeliers were alight in the office windows. She conceived that he
sat at an enormous table laden with papers beneath one of them in the
front room with the three tall windows. Having settled his position
there, she began walking to and fro upon the pavement. Nobody of his
build appeared. She scrutinized each male figure as it approached and
passed her. Each male figure had, nevertheless, a look of him, due,
perhaps, to the professional dress, the quick step, the keen glance
which they cast upon her as they hastened home after the day’s work.
The square itself, with its immense houses all so fully occupied and
stern of aspect, its atmosphere of industry and power, as if even the
sparrows and the children were earning their daily bread, as if the sky
itself, with its gray and scarlet clouds, reflected the serious
intention of the city beneath it, spoke of him. Here was the fit place
for their meeting, she thought; here was the fit place for her to walk
thinking of him. She could not help comparing it with the domestic
streets of Chelsea. With this comparison in her mind, she extended her
range a little, and turned into the main road. The great torrent of
vans and carts was sweeping down Kingsway; pedestrians were streaming
in two currents along the pavements. She stood fascinated at the
corner. The deep roar filled her ears; the changing tumult had the
inexpressible fascination of varied life pouring ceaselessly with a
purpose which, as she looked, seemed to her, somehow, the normal
purpose for which life was framed; its complete indifference to the
individuals, whom it swallowed up and rolled onwards, filled her with
at least a temporary exaltation. The blend of daylight and of lamplight
made her an invisible spectator, just as it gave the people who passed
her a semi-transparent quality, and left the faces pale ivory ovals in
which the eyes alone were dark. They tended the enormous rush of the
current—the great flow, the deep stream, the unquenchable tide. She
stood unobserved and absorbed, glorying openly in the rapture that had
run subterraneously all day. Suddenly she was clutched, unwilling, from
the outside, by the recollection of her purpose in coming there. She
had come to find Ralph Denham. She hastily turned back into Lincoln’s
Inn Fields, and looked for her landmark—the light in the three tall
windows. She sought in vain. The faces of the houses had now merged in
the general darkness, and she had difficulty in determining which she
sought. Ralph’s three windows gave back on their ghostly glass panels
only a reflection of the gray and greenish sky. She rang the bell,
peremptorily, under the painted name of the firm. After some delay she
was answered by a caretaker, whose pail and brush of themselves told
her that the working day was over and the workers gone. Nobody, save
perhaps Mr. Grateley himself, was left, she assured Katharine; every
one else had been gone these ten minutes.
The news woke Katharine completely. Anxiety gained upon her. She
hastened back into Kingsway, looking at people who had miraculously
regained their solidity. She ran as far as the Tube station,
overhauling clerk after clerk, solicitor after solicitor. Not one of
them even faintly resembled Ralph Denham. More and more plainly did she
see him; and more and more did he seem to her unlike any one else. At
the door of the station she paused, and tried to collect her thoughts.
He had gone to her house. By taking a cab she could be there probably
in advance of him. But she pictured herself opening the drawing-room
door, and William and Cassandra looking up, and Ralph’s entrance a
moment later, and the glances—the insinuations. No; she could not face
it. She would write him a letter and take it at once to his house. She
bought paper and pencil at the bookstall, and entered an A.B.C. shop,
where, by ordering a cup of coffee, she secured an empty table, and
began at vice to write:
“I came to meet you and I have missed you. I could not face William and
Cassandra. They want us—” here she paused. “They insist that we are
engaged,” she substituted, “and we couldn’t talk at all, or explain
anything. I want—” Her wants were so vast, now that she was in
communication with Ralph, that the pencil was utterly inadequate to
conduct them on to the paper; it seemed as if the whole torrent of
Kingsway had to run down her pencil. She gazed intently at a notice
hanging on the gold-encrusted wall opposite, “... to say all kinds of
things,” she added, writing each word with the painstaking of a child.
But, when she raised her eyes again to meditate the next sentence, she
was aware of a waitress, whose expression intimated that it was closing
time, and, looking round, Katharine saw herself almost the last person
left in the shop. She took up her letter, paid her bill, and found
herself once more in the street. She would now take a cab to Highgate.
But at that moment it flashed upon her that she could not remember the
address. This check seemed to let fall a barrier across a very powerful
current of desire. She ransacked her memory in desperation, hunting for
the name, first by remembering the look of the house, and then by
trying, in memory, to retrace the words she had written once, at least,
upon an envelope. The more she pressed the farther the words receded.
Was the house an Orchard Something, on the street a Hill? She gave it
up. Never, since she was a child, had she felt anything like this
blankness and desolation. There rushed in upon her, as if she were
waking from some dream, all the consequences of her inexplicable
indolence. She figured Ralph’s face as he turned from her door without
a word of explanation, receiving his dismissal as a blow from herself,
a callous intimation that she did not wish to see him. She followed his
departure from her door; but it was far more easy to see him marching
far and fast in any direction for any length of time than to conceive
that he would turn back to Highgate. Perhaps he would try once more to
see her in Cheyne Walk? It was proof of the clearness with which she
saw him, that she started forward as this possibility occurred to her,
and almost raised her hand to beckon to a cab. No; he was too proud to
come again; he rejected the desire and walked on and on, on and on—If
only she could read the names of those visionary streets down which he
passed! But her imagination betrayed her at this point, or mocked her
with a sense of their strangeness, darkness, and distance. Indeed,
instead of helping herself to any decision, she only filled her mind
with the vast extent of London and the impossibility of finding any
single figure that wandered off this way and that way, turned to the
right and to the left, chose that dingy little back street where the
children were playing in the road, and so—She roused herself
impatiently. She walked rapidly along Holborn. Soon she turned and
walked as rapidly in the other direction. This indecision was not
merely odious, but had something that alarmed her about it, as she had
been alarmed slightly once or twice already that day; she felt unable
to cope with the strength of her own desires. To a person controlled by
habit, there was humiliation as well as alarm in this sudden release of
what appeared to be a very powerful as well as an unreasonable force.
An aching in the muscles of her right hand now showed her that she was
crushing her gloves and the map of Norfolk in a grip sufficient to
crack a more solid object. She relaxed her grasp; she looked anxiously