Night and Day
was to insist upon coming too, but she met with no opposition;
Katharine seemed indifferent to her presence. In a few minutes they
were walking along the Strand. They walked so rapidly that Mary was
deluded into the belief that Katharine knew where she was going. She
herself was not attentive. She was glad of the movement along lamp-lit
streets in the open air. She was fingering, painfully and with fear,
yet with strange hope, too, the discovery which she had stumbled upon
unexpectedly that night. She was free once more at the cost of a gift,
the best, perhaps, that she could offer, but she was, thank Heaven, in
love no longer. She was tempted to spend the first instalment of her
freedom in some dissipation; in the pit of the Coliseum, for example,
since they were now passing the door. Why not go in and celebrate her
independence of the tyranny of love? Or, perhaps, the top of an omnibus
bound for some remote place such as Camberwell, or Sidcup, or the Welsh
Harp would suit her better. She noticed these names painted on little
boards for the first time for weeks. Or should she return to her room,
and spend the night working out the details of a very enlightened and
ingenious scheme? Of all possibilities this appealed to her most, and
brought to mind the fire, the lamplight, the steady glow which had
seemed lit in the place where a more passionate flame had once burnt.
Now Katharine stopped, and Mary woke to the fact that instead of having
a goal she had evidently none. She paused at the edge of the crossing,
and looked this way and that, and finally made as if in the direction
of Haverstock Hill.
“Look here—where are you going?” Mary cried, catching her by the hand.
“We must take that cab and go home.” She hailed a cab and insisted that
Katharine should get in, while she directed the driver to take them to
Cheyne Walk.
Katharine submitted. “Very well,” she said. “We may as well go there as
anywhere else.”
A gloom seemed to have fallen on her. She lay back in her corner,
silent and apparently exhausted. Mary, in spite of her own
preoccupation, was struck by her pallor and her attitude of dejection.
“I’m sure we shall find him,” she said more gently than she had yet
spoken.
“It may be too late,” Katharine replied. Without understanding her,
Mary began to pity her for what she was suffering.
“Nonsense,” she said, taking her hand and rubbing it. “If we don’t find
him there we shall find him somewhere else.”
“But suppose he’s walking about the streets—for hours and hours?”
She leant forward and looked out of the window.
“He may refuse ever to speak to me again,” she said in a low voice,
almost to herself.
The exaggeration was so immense that Mary did not attempt to cope with
it, save by keeping hold of Katharine’s wrist. She half expected that
Katharine might open the door suddenly and jump out. Perhaps Katharine
perceived the purpose with which her hand was held.
“Don’t be frightened,” she said, with a little laugh. “I’m not going to
jump out of the cab. It wouldn’t do much good after all.”
Upon this, Mary ostentatiously withdrew her hand.
“I ought to have apologized,” Katharine continued, with an effort, “for
bringing you into all this business; I haven’t told you half, either.
I’m no longer engaged to William Rodney. He is to marry Cassandra
Otway. It’s all arranged—all perfectly right.... And after he’d waited
in the streets for hours and hours, William made me bring him in. He
was standing under the lamp-post watching our windows. He was perfectly
white when he came into the room. William left us alone, and we sat and
talked. It seems ages and ages ago, now. Was it last night? Have I been
out long? What’s the time?” She sprang forward to catch sight of a
clock, as if the exact time had some important bearing on her case.
“Only half-past eight!” she exclaimed. “Then he may be there still.”
She leant out of the window and told the cabman to drive faster.
“But if he’s not there, what shall I do? Where could I find him? The
streets are so crowded.”
“We shall find him,” Mary repeated.
Mary had no doubt but that somehow or other they would find him. But
suppose they did find him? She began to think of Ralph with a sort of
strangeness, in her effort to understand how he could be capable of
satisfying this extraordinary desire. Once more she thought herself
back to her old view of him and could, with an effort, recall the haze
which surrounded his figure, and the sense of confused, heightened
exhilaration which lay all about his neighborhood, so that for months
at a time she had never exactly heard his voice or seen his face—or so
it now seemed to her. The pain of her loss shot through her. Nothing
would ever make up—not success, or happiness, or oblivion. But this
pang was immediately followed by the assurance that now, at any rate,
she knew the truth; and Katharine, she thought, stealing a look at her,
did not know the truth; yes, Katharine was immensely to be pitied.
The cab, which had been caught in the traffic, was now liberated and
sped on down Sloane Street. Mary was conscious of the tension with
which Katharine marked its progress, as if her mind were fixed upon a
point in front of them, and marked, second by second, their approach to
it. She said nothing, and in silence Mary began to fix her mind, in
sympathy at first, and later in forgetfulness of her companion, upon a
point in front of them. She imagined a point distant as a low star upon
the horizon of the dark. There for her too, for them both, was the goal
for which they were striving, and the end for the ardors of their
spirits was the same: but where it was, or what it was, or why she felt
convinced that they were united in search of it, as they drove swiftly
down the streets of London side by side, she could not have said.
“At last,” Katharine breathed, as the cab drew up at the door. She
jumped out and scanned the pavement on either side. Mary, meanwhile,
rang the bell. The door opened as Katharine assured herself that no one
of the people within view had any likeness to Ralph. On seeing her, the
maid said at once:
“Mr. Denham called again, miss. He has been waiting for you for some
time.”
Katharine vanished from Mary’s sight. The door shut between them, and
Mary walked slowly and thoughtfully up the street alone.
Katharine turned at once to the dining-room. But with her fingers upon
the handle, she held back. Perhaps she realized that this was a moment
which would never come again. Perhaps, for a second, it seemed to her
that no reality could equal the imagination she had formed. Perhaps she
was restrained by some vague fear or anticipation, which made her dread
any exchange or interruption. But if these doubts and fears or this
supreme bliss restrained her, it was only for a moment. In another
second she had turned the handle and, biting her lip to control
herself, she opened the door upon Ralph Denham. An extraordinary
clearness of sight seemed to possess her on beholding him. So little,
so single, so separate from all else he appeared, who had been the
cause of these extreme agitations and aspirations. She could have
laughed in his face. But, gaining upon this clearness of sight against
her will, and to her dislike, was a flood of confusion, of relief, of
certainty, of humility, of desire no longer to strive and to
discriminate, yielding to which, she let herself sink within his arms
and confessed her love.
CHAPTER XXXII
Nobody asked Katharine any questions next day. If cross-examined she
might have said that nobody spoke to her. She worked a little, wrote a
little, ordered the dinner, and sat, for longer than she knew, with her
head on her hand piercing whatever lay before her, whether it was a
letter or a dictionary, as if it were a film upon the deep prospects
that revealed themselves to her kindling and brooding eyes. She rose
once, and going to the bookcase, took out her father’s Greek dictionary
and spread the sacred pages of symbols and figures before her. She
smoothed the sheets with a mixture of affectionate amusement and hope.
Would other eyes look on them with her one day? The thought, long
intolerable, was now just bearable.
She was quite unaware of the anxiety with which her movements were
watched and her expression scanned. Cassandra was careful not to be
caught looking at her, and their conversation was so prosaic that were
it not for certain jolts and jerks between the sentences, as if the
mind were kept with difficulty to the rails, Mrs. Milvain herself could
have detected nothing of a suspicious nature in what she overheard.
William, when he came in late that afternoon and found Cassandra alone,
had a very serious piece of news to impart. He had just passed
Katharine in the street and she had failed to recognize him.
“That doesn’t matter with me, of course, but suppose it happened with
somebody else? What would they think? They would suspect something
merely from her expression. She looked—she looked”—he hesitated—“like
some one walking in her sleep.”
To Cassandra the significant thing was that Katharine had gone out
without telling her, and she interpreted this to mean that she had gone
out to meet Ralph Denham. But to her surprise William drew no comfort
from this probability.
“Once throw conventions aside,” he began, “once do the things that
people don’t do—” and the fact that you are going to meet a young man
is no longer proof of anything, except, indeed, that people will talk.
Cassandra saw, not without a pang of jealousy, that he was extremely
solicitous that people should not talk about Katharine, as if his
interest in her were still proprietary rather than friendly. As they
were both ignorant of Ralph’s visit the night before they had not that
reason to comfort themselves with the thought that matters were
hastening to a crisis. These absences of Katharine’s, moreover, left
them exposed to interruptions which almost destroyed their pleasure in
being alone together. The rainy evening made it impossible to go out;
and, indeed, according to William’s code, it was considerably more
damning to be seen out of doors than surprised within. They were so
much at the mercy of bells and doors that they could hardly talk of
Macaulay with any conviction, and William preferred to defer the second
act of his tragedy until another day.
Under these circumstances Cassandra showed herself at her best. She
sympathized with William’s anxieties and did her utmost to share them;
but still, to be alone together, to be running risks together, to be
partners in the wonderful conspiracy, was to her so enthralling that
she was always forgetting discretion, breaking out into exclamations
and admirations which finally made William believe that, although
deplorable and upsetting, the situation was not without its sweetness.
When the door did open, he started, but braved the forthcoming
revelation. It was not Mrs. Milvain, however, but Katharine herself who
entered, closely followed by Ralph Denham. With a set expression which
showed what an effort she was making, Katharine encountered their eyes,
and saying, “We’re not going to interrupt you,” she led Denham behind
the curtain which hung in front of the room with the relics. This
refuge was none of her willing, but confronted with wet pavements and
only some belated museum or Tube station for shelter, she was forced,
for Ralph’s sake, to face the discomforts of her own house. Under the
street lamps she had thought him looking both tired and strained.
Thus separated, the two couples remained occupied for some time with
their own affairs. Only the lowest murmurs penetrated from one section
of the room to the other. At length the maid came in to bring a message