Night and Day
that Mr. Hilbery would not be home for dinner. It was true that there
was no need that Katharine should be informed, but William began to
inquire Cassandra’s opinion in such a way as to show that, with or
without reason, he wished very much to speak to her.
From motives of her own Cassandra dissuaded him.
“But don’t you think it’s a little unsociable?” he hazarded. “Why not
do something amusing?—go to the play, for instance? Why not ask
Katharine and Ralph, eh?” The coupling of their names in this manner
caused Cassandra’s heart to leap with pleasure.
“Don’t you think they must be—?” she began, but William hastily took
her up.
“Oh, I know nothing about that. I only thought we might amuse
ourselves, as your uncle’s out.”
He proceeded on his embassy with a mixture of excitement and
embarrassment which caused him to turn aside with his hand on the
curtain, and to examine intently for several moments the portrait of a
lady, optimistically said by Mrs. Hilbery to be an early work of Sir
Joshua Reynolds. Then, with some unnecessary fumbling, he drew aside
the curtain, and with his eyes fixed upon the ground, repeated his
message and suggested that they should all spend the evening at the
play. Katharine accepted the suggestion with such cordiality that it
was strange to find her of no clear mind as to the precise spectacle
she wished to see. She left the choice entirely to Ralph and William,
who, taking counsel fraternally over an evening paper, found themselves
in agreement as to the merits of a music-hall. This being arranged,
everything else followed easily and enthusiastically. Cassandra had
never been to a music-hall. Katharine instructed her in the peculiar
delights of an entertainment where Polar bears follow directly upon
ladies in full evening dress, and the stage is alternately a garden of
mystery, a milliner’s band-box, and a fried-fish shop in the Mile End
Road. Whatever the exact nature of the program that night, it fulfilled
the highest purposes of dramatic art, so far, at least, as four of the
audience were concerned.
No doubt the actors and the authors would have been surprised to learn
in what shape their efforts reached those particular eyes and ears; but
they could not have denied that the effect as a whole was tremendous.
The hall resounded with brass and strings, alternately of enormous pomp
and majesty, and then of sweetest lamentation. The reds and creams of
the background, the lyres and harps and urns and skulls, the
protuberances of plaster, the fringes of scarlet plush, the sinking and
blazing of innumerable electric lights, could scarcely have been
surpassed for decorative effect by any craftsman of the ancient or
modern world.
Then there was the audience itself, bare-shouldered, tufted and
garlanded in the stalls, decorous but festal in the balconies, and
frankly fit for daylight and street life in the galleries. But, however
they differed when looked at separately, they shared the same huge,
lovable nature in the bulk, which murmured and swayed and quivered all
the time the dancing and juggling and love-making went on in front of
it, slowly laughed and reluctantly left off laughing, and applauded
with a helter-skelter generosity which sometimes became unanimous and
overwhelming. Once William saw Katharine leaning forward and clapping
her hands with an abandonment that startled him. Her laugh rang out
with the laughter of the audience.
For a second he was puzzled, as if this laughter disclosed something
that he had never suspected in her. But then Cassandra’s face caught
his eye, gazing with astonishment at the buffoon, not laughing, too
deeply intent and surprised to laugh at what she saw, and for some
moments he watched her as if she were a child.
The performance came to an end, the illusion dying out first here and
then there, as some rose to put on their coats, others stood upright to
salute “God Save the King,” the musicians folded their music and
encased their instruments, and the lights sank one by one until the
house was empty, silent, and full of great shadows. Looking back over
her shoulder as she followed Ralph through the swing doors, Cassandra
marveled to see how the stage was already entirely without romance.
But, she wondered, did they really cover all the seats in brown holland
every night?
The success of this entertainment was such that before they separated
another expedition had been planned for the next day. The next day was
Saturday; therefore both William and Ralph were free to devote the
whole afternoon to an expedition to Greenwich, which Cassandra had
never seen, and Katharine confused with Dulwich. On this occasion Ralph
was their guide. He brought them without accident to Greenwich.
What exigencies of state or fantasies of imagination first gave birth
to the cluster of pleasant places by which London is surrounded is
matter of indifference now that they have adapted themselves so
admirably to the needs of people between the ages of twenty and thirty
with Saturday afternoons to spend. Indeed, if ghosts have any interest
in the affections of those who succeed them they must reap their
richest harvests when the fine weather comes again and the lovers, the
sightseers, and the holiday-makers pour themselves out of trains and
omnibuses into their old pleasure-grounds. It is true that they go, for
the most part, unthanked by name, although upon this occasion William
was ready to give such discriminating praise as the dead architects and
painters received seldom in the course of the year. They were walking
by the river bank, and Katharine and Ralph, lagging a little behind,
caught fragments of his lecture. Katharine smiled at the sound of his
voice; she listened as if she found it a little unfamiliar, intimately
though she knew it; she tested it. The note of assurance and happiness
was new. William was very happy. She learnt every hour what sources of
his happiness she had neglected. She had never asked him to teach her
anything; she had never consented to read Macaulay; she had never
expressed her belief that his play was second only to the works of
Shakespeare. She followed dreamily in their wake, smiling and
delighting in the sound which conveyed, she knew, the rapturous and yet
not servile assent of Cassandra.
Then she murmured, “How can Cassandra—” but changed her sentence to the
opposite of what she meant to say and ended, “how could she herself
have been so blind?” But it was unnecessary to follow out such riddles
when the presence of Ralph supplied her with more interesting problems,
which somehow became involved with the little boat crossing the river,
the majestic and careworn City, and the steamers homecoming with their
treasury, or starting in search of it, so that infinite leisure would
be necessary for the proper disentanglement of one from the other. He
stopped, moreover, and began inquiring of an old boatman as to the
tides and the ships. In thus talking he seemed different, and even
looked different, she thought, against the river, with the steeples and
towers for background. His strangeness, his romance, his power to leave
her side and take part in the affairs of men, the possibility that they
should together hire a boat and cross the river, the speed and wildness
of this enterprise filled her mind and inspired her with such rapture,
half of love and half of adventure, that William and Cassandra were
startled from their talk, and Cassandra exclaimed, “She looks as if she
were offering up a sacrifice! Very beautiful,” she added quickly,
though she repressed, in deference to William, her own wonder that the
sight of Ralph Denham talking to a boatman on the banks of the Thames
could move any one to such an attitude of adoration.
That afternoon, what with tea and the curiosities of the Thames tunnel
and the unfamiliarity of the streets, passed so quickly that the only
method of prolonging it was to plan another expedition for the
following day. Hampton Court was decided upon, in preference to
Hampstead, for though Cassandra had dreamt as a child of the brigands
of Hampstead, she had now transferred her affections completely and for
ever to William III. Accordingly, they arrived at Hampton Court about
lunch-time on a fine Sunday morning. Such unity marked their
expressions of admiration for the red-brick building that they might
have come there for no other purpose than to assure each other that
this palace was the stateliest palace in the world. They walked up and
down the Terrace, four abreast, and fancied themselves the owners of
the place, and calculated the amount of good to the world produced
indubitably by such a tenancy.
“The only hope for us,” said Katharine, “is that William shall die, and
Cassandra shall be given rooms as the widow of a distinguished poet.”
“Or—” Cassandra began, but checked herself from the liberty of
envisaging Katharine as the widow of a distinguished lawyer. Upon this,
the third day of junketing, it was tiresome to have to restrain oneself
even from such innocent excursions of fancy. She dared not question
William; he was inscrutable; he never seemed even to follow the other
couple with curiosity when they separated, as they frequently did, to
name a plant, or examine a fresco. Cassandra was constantly studying
their backs. She noticed how sometimes the impulse to move came from
Katharine, and sometimes from Ralph; how, sometimes, they walked slow,
as if in profound intercourse, and sometimes fast, as if in passionate.
When they came together again nothing could be more unconcerned than
their manner.
“We have been wondering whether they ever catch a fish...” or, “We must
leave time to visit the Maze.” Then, to puzzle her further, William and
Ralph filled in all interstices of meal-times or railway journeys with
perfectly good-tempered arguments; or they discussed politics, or they
told stories, or they did sums together upon the backs of old envelopes
to prove something. She suspected that Katharine was absent-minded, but
it was impossible to tell. There were moments when she felt so young
and inexperienced that she almost wished herself back with the
silkworms at Stogdon House, and not embarked upon this bewildering
intrigue.
These moments, however, were only the necessary shadow or chill which
proved the substance of her bliss, and did not damage the radiance
which seemed to rest equally upon the whole party. The fresh air of
spring, the sky washed of clouds and already shedding warmth from its
blue, seemed the reply vouchsafed by nature to the mood of her chosen
spirits. These chosen spirits were to be found also among the deer,
dumbly basking, and among the fish, set still in mid-stream, for they
were mute sharers in a benignant state not needing any exposition by
the tongue. No words that Cassandra could come by expressed the
stillness, the brightness, the air of expectancy which lay upon the
orderly beauty of the grass walks and gravel paths down which they went
walking four abreast that Sunday afternoon. Silently the shadows of the
trees lay across the broad sunshine; silence wrapt her heart in its
folds. The quivering stillness of the butterfly on the half-opened
flower, the silent grazing of the deer in the sun, were the sights her
eye rested upon and received as the images of her own nature laid open
to happiness and trembling in its ecstasy.
But the afternoon wore on, and it became time to leave the gardens. As
they drove from Waterloo to Chelsea, Katharine began to have some
compunction about her father, which, together with the opening of
offices and the need of working in them on Monday, made it difficult to
plan another festival for the following day. Mr. Hilbery had taken
their absence, so far, with paternal benevolence, but they could not