Night and Day
I knew it from the first. I prayed that it might be so.”
“You knew it?” Katharine repeated her mother’s words softly and
vaguely, looking past her. “How did you know it?” She began, like a
child, to finger a tassel hanging from her mother’s cloak.
“The first evening you told me, Katharine. Oh, and thousands of
times—dinner-parties—talking about books—the way he came into the
room—your voice when you spoke of him.”
Katharine seemed to consider each of these proofs separately. Then she
said gravely:
“I’m not going to marry William. And then there’s Cassandra—”
“Yes, there’s Cassandra,” said Mrs. Hilbery. “I own I was a little
grudging at first, but, after all, she plays the piano so beautifully.
Do tell me, Katharine,” she asked impulsively, “where did you go that
evening she played Mozart, and you thought I was asleep?”
Katharine recollected with difficulty.
“To Mary Datchet’s,” she remembered.
“Ah!” said Mrs. Hilbery, with a slight note of disappointment in her
voice. “I had my little romance—my little speculation.” She looked at
her daughter. Katharine faltered beneath that innocent and penetrating
gaze; she flushed, turned away, and then looked up with very bright
eyes.
“I’m not in love with Ralph Denham,” she said.
“Don’t marry unless you’re in love!” said Mrs. Hilbery very quickly.
“But,” she added, glancing momentarily at her daughter, “aren’t there
different ways, Katharine—different—?”
“We want to meet as often as we like, but to be free,” Katharine
continued.
“To meet here, to meet in his house, to meet in the street.” Mrs.
Hilbery ran over these phrases as if she were trying chords that did
not quite satisfy her ear. It was plain that she had her sources of
information, and, indeed, her bag was stuffed with what she called
“kind letters” from the pen of her sister-in-law.
“Yes. Or to stay away in the country,” Katharine concluded.
Mrs. Hilbery paused, looked unhappy, and sought inspiration from the
window.
“What a comfort he was in that shop—how he took me and found the ruins
at once—how _safe_ I felt with him—”
“Safe? Oh, no, he’s fearfully rash—he’s always taking risks. He wants
to throw up his profession and live in a little cottage and write
books, though he hasn’t a penny of his own, and there are any number of
sisters and brothers dependent on him.”
“Ah, he has a mother?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired.
“Yes. Rather a fine-looking old lady, with white hair.” Katharine began
to describe her visit, and soon Mrs. Hilbery elicited the facts that
not only was the house of excruciating ugliness, which Ralph bore
without complaint, but that it was evident that every one depended on
him, and he had a room at the top of the house, with a wonderful view
over London, and a rook.
“A wretched old bird in a corner, with half its feathers out,” she
said, with a tenderness in her voice that seemed to commiserate the
sufferings of humanity while resting assured in the capacity of Ralph
Denham to alleviate them, so that Mrs. Hilbery could not help
exclaiming:
“But, Katharine, you _are_ in love!” at which Katharine flushed, looked
startled, as if she had said something that she ought not to have said,
and shook her head.
Hastily Mrs. Hilbery asked for further details of this extraordinary
house, and interposed a few speculations about the meeting between
Keats and Coleridge in a lane, which tided over the discomfort of the
moment, and drew Katharine on to further descriptions and
indiscretions. In truth, she found an extraordinary pleasure in being
thus free to talk to some one who was equally wise and equally
benignant, the mother of her earliest childhood, whose silence seemed
to answer questions that were never asked. Mrs. Hilbery listened
without making any remark for a considerable time. She seemed to draw
her conclusions rather by looking at her daughter than by listening to
her, and, if cross-examined, she would probably have given a highly
inaccurate version of Ralph Denham’s life-history except that he was
penniless, fatherless, and lived at Highgate—all of which was much in
his favor. But by means of these furtive glances she had assured
herself that Katharine was in a state which gave her, alternately, the
most exquisite pleasure and the most profound alarm.
She could not help ejaculating at last:
“It’s all done in five minutes at a Registry Office nowadays, if you
think the Church service a little florid—which it is, though there are
noble things in it.”
“But we don’t want to be married,” Katharine replied emphatically, and
added, “Why, after all, isn’t it perfectly possible to live together
without being married?”
Again Mrs. Hilbery looked discomposed, and, in her trouble, took up the
sheets which were lying upon the table, and began turning them over
this way and that, and muttering to herself as she glanced:
“A plus B minus C equals _x y z_. It’s so dreadfully ugly, Katharine.
That’s what I feel—so dreadfully ugly.”
Katharine took the sheets from her mother’s hand and began shuffling
them absent-mindedly together, for her fixed gaze seemed to show that
her thoughts were intent upon some other matter.
“Well, I don’t know about ugliness,” she said at length.
“But he doesn’t ask it of you?” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “Not that grave
young man with the steady brown eyes?”
“He doesn’t ask anything—we neither of us ask anything.”
“If I could help you, Katharine, by the memory of what I felt—”
“Yes, tell me what you felt.”
Mrs. Hilbery, her eyes growing blank, peered down the enormously long
corridor of days at the far end of which the little figures of herself
and her husband appeared fantastically attired, clasping hands upon a
moonlit beach, with roses swinging in the dusk.
“We were in a little boat going out to a ship at night,” she began.
“The sun had set and the moon was rising over our heads. There were
lovely silver lights upon the waves and three green lights upon the
steamer in the middle of the bay. Your father’s head looked so grand
against the mast. It was life, it was death. The great sea was round
us. It was the voyage for ever and ever.”
The ancient fairy-tale fell roundly and harmoniously upon Katharine’s
ears. Yes, there was the enormous space of the sea; there were the
three green lights upon the steamer; the cloaked figures climbed up on
deck. And so, voyaging over the green and purple waters, past the
cliffs and the sandy lagoons and through pools crowded with the masts
of ships and the steeples of churches—here they were. The river seemed
to have brought them and deposited them here at this precise point. She
looked admiringly at her mother, that ancient voyager.
“Who knows,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, continuing her reveries, “where we
are bound for, or why, or who has sent us, or what we shall find—who
knows anything, except that love is our faith—love—” she crooned, and
the soft sound beating through the dim words was heard by her daughter
as the breaking of waves solemnly in order upon the vast shore that she
gazed upon. She would have been content for her mother to repeat that
word almost indefinitely—a soothing word when uttered by another, a
riveting together of the shattered fragments of the world. But Mrs.
Hilbery, instead of repeating the word love, said pleadingly:
“And you won’t think those ugly thoughts again, will you, Katharine?”
at which words the ship which Katharine had been considering seemed to
put into harbor and have done with its seafaring. Yet she was in great
need, if not exactly of sympathy, of some form of advice, or, at least,
of the opportunity of setting forth her problems before a third person
so as to renew them in her own eyes.
“But then,” she said, ignoring the difficult problem of ugliness, “you
knew you were in love; but we’re different. It seems,” she continued,
frowning a little as she tried to fix the difficult feeling, “as if
something came to an end suddenly—gave out—faded—an illusion—as if when
we think we’re in love we make it up—we imagine what doesn’t exist.
That’s why it’s impossible that we should ever marry. Always to be
finding the other an illusion, and going off and forgetting about them,
never to be certain that you cared, or that he wasn’t caring for some
one not you at all, the horror of changing from one state to the other,
being happy one moment and miserable the next—that’s the reason why we
can’t possibly marry. At the same time,” she continued, “we can’t live
without each other, because—” Mrs. Hilbery waited patiently for the
sentence to be completed, but Katharine fell silent and fingered her
sheet of figures.
“We have to have faith in our vision,” Mrs. Hilbery resumed, glancing
at the figures, which distressed her vaguely, and had some connection
in her mind with the household accounts, “otherwise, as you say—” She
cast a lightning glance into the depths of disillusionment which were,
perhaps, not altogether unknown to her.
“Believe me, Katharine, it’s the same for every one—for me, too—for
your father,” she said earnestly, and sighed. They looked together into
the abyss and, as the elder of the two, she recovered herself first and
asked:
“But where is Ralph? Why isn’t he here to see me?”
Katharine’s expression changed instantly.
“Because he’s not allowed to come here,” she replied bitterly.
Mrs. Hilbery brushed this aside.
“Would there be time to send for him before luncheon?” she asked.
Katharine looked at her as if, indeed, she were some magician. Once
more she felt that instead of being a grown woman, used to advise and
command, she was only a foot or two raised above the long grass and the
little flowers and entirely dependent upon the figure of indefinite
size whose head went up into the sky, whose hand was in hers, for
guidance.
“I’m not happy without him,” she said simply.
Mrs. Hilbery nodded her head in a manner which indicated complete
understanding, and the immediate conception of certain plans for the
future. She swept up her flowers, breathed in their sweetness, and,
humming a little song about a miller’s daughter, left the room.
The case upon which Ralph Denham was engaged that afternoon was not
apparently receiving his full attention, and yet the affairs of the
late John Leake of Dublin were sufficiently confused to need all the
care that a solicitor could bestow upon them, if the widow Leake and
the five Leake children of tender age were to receive any pittance at
all. But the appeal to Ralph’s humanity had little chance of being
heard to-day; he was no longer a model of concentration. The partition
so carefully erected between the different sections of his life had
been broken down, with the result that though his eyes were fixed upon
the last Will and Testament, he saw through the page a certain
drawing-room in Cheyne Walk.
He tried every device that had proved effective in the past for keeping
up the partitions of the mind, until he could decently go home; but a
little to his alarm he found himself assailed so persistently, as if
from outside, by Katharine, that he launched forth desperately into an
imaginary interview with her. She obliterated a bookcase full of law
reports, and the corners and lines of the room underwent a curious
softening of outline like that which sometimes makes a room unfamiliar
at the moment of waking from sleep. By degrees, a pulse or stress began
to beat at regular intervals in his mind, heaping his thoughts into
waves to which words fitted themselves, and without much consciousness
of what he was doing, he began to write on a sheet of draft paper what
had the appearance of a poem lacking several words in each line. Not
many lines had been set down, however, before he threw away his pen as
violently as if that were responsible for his misdeeds, and tore the