Night and Day
“They say she’s going to marry that queer creature Rodney.”
“Marry Rodney? Then she must be more deluded than I thought her.”
“Now that’s my door, all right,” Mary exclaimed, carefully putting her
wools away, as a succession of knocks reverberated unnecessarily,
accompanied by a sound of people stamping their feet and laughing. A
moment later the room was full of young men and women, who came in with
a peculiar look of expectation, exclaimed “Oh!” when they saw Denham,
and then stood still, gaping rather foolishly.
The room very soon contained between twenty and thirty people, who
found seats for the most part upon the floor, occupying the mattresses,
and hunching themselves together into triangular shapes. They were all
young and some of them seemed to make a protest by their hair and
dress, and something somber and truculent in the expression of their
faces, against the more normal type, who would have passed unnoticed in
an omnibus or an underground railway. It was notable that the talk was
confined to groups, and was, at first, entirely spasmodic in character,
and muttered in undertones as if the speakers were suspicious of their
fellow-guests.
Katharine Hilbery came in rather late, and took up a position on the
floor, with her back against the wall. She looked round quickly,
recognized about half a dozen people, to whom she nodded, but failed to
see Ralph, or, if so, had already forgotten to attach any name to him.
But in a second these heterogeneous elements were all united by the
voice of Mr. Rodney, who suddenly strode up to the table, and began
very rapidly in high-strained tones:
“In undertaking to speak of the Elizabethan use of metaphor in poetry—”
All the different heads swung slightly or steadied themselves into a
position in which they could gaze straight at the speaker’s face, and
the same rather solemn expression was visible on all of them. But, at
the same time, even the faces that were most exposed to view, and
therefore most tautly under control, disclosed a sudden impulsive
tremor which, unless directly checked, would have developed into an
outburst of laughter. The first sight of Mr. Rodney was irresistibly
ludicrous. He was very red in the face, whether from the cool November
night or nervousness, and every movement, from the way he wrung his
hands to the way he jerked his head to right and left, as though a
vision drew him now to the door, now to the window, bespoke his
horrible discomfort under the stare of so many eyes. He was
scrupulously well dressed, and a pearl in the center of his tie seemed
to give him a touch of aristocratic opulence. But the rather prominent
eyes and the impulsive stammering manner, which seemed to indicate a
torrent of ideas intermittently pressing for utterance and always
checked in their course by a clutch of nervousness, drew no pity, as in
the case of a more imposing personage, but a desire to laugh, which
was, however, entirely lacking in malice. Mr. Rodney was evidently so
painfully conscious of the oddity of his appearance, and his very
redness and the starts to which his body was liable gave such proof of
his own discomfort, that there was something endearing in this
ridiculous susceptibility, although most people would probably have
echoed Denham’s private exclamation, “Fancy marrying a creature like
that!”
His paper was carefully written out, but in spite of this precaution
Mr. Rodney managed to turn over two sheets instead of one, to choose
the wrong sentence where two were written together, and to discover his
own handwriting suddenly illegible. When he found himself possessed of
a coherent passage, he shook it at his audience almost aggressively,
and then fumbled for another. After a distressing search a fresh
discovery would be made, and produced in the same way, until, by means
of repeated attacks, he had stirred his audience to a degree of
animation quite remarkable in these gatherings. Whether they were
stirred by his enthusiasm for poetry or by the contortions which a
human being was going through for their benefit, it would be hard to
say. At length Mr. Rodney sat down impulsively in the middle of a
sentence, and, after a pause of bewilderment, the audience expressed
its relief at being able to laugh aloud in a decided outburst of
applause.
Mr. Rodney acknowledged this with a wild glance round him, and, instead
of waiting to answer questions, he jumped up, thrust himself through
the seated bodies into the corner where Katharine was sitting, and
exclaimed, very audibly:
“Well, Katharine, I hope I’ve made a big enough fool of myself even for
you! It was terrible! terrible! terrible!”
“Hush! You must answer their questions,” Katharine whispered, desiring,
at all costs, to keep him quiet. Oddly enough, when the speaker was no
longer in front of them, there seemed to be much that was suggestive in
what he had said. At any rate, a pale-faced young man with sad eyes was
already on his feet, delivering an accurately worded speech with
perfect composure. William Rodney listened with a curious lifting of
his upper lip, although his face was still quivering slightly with
emotion.
“Idiot!” he whispered. “He’s misunderstood every word I said!”
“Well then, answer him,” Katharine whispered back.
“No, I shan’t! They’d only laugh at me. Why did I let you persuade me
that these sort of people care for literature?” he continued.
There was much to be said both for and against Mr. Rodney’s paper. It
had been crammed with assertions that such-and-such passages, taken
liberally from English, French, and Italian, are the supreme pearls of
literature. Further, he was fond of using metaphors which, compounded
in the study, were apt to sound either cramped or out of place as he
delivered them in fragments. Literature was a fresh garland of spring
flowers, he said, in which yew-berries and the purple nightshade
mingled with the various tints of the anemone; and somehow or other
this garland encircled marble brows. He had read very badly some very
beautiful quotations. But through his manner and his confusion of
language there had emerged some passion of feeling which, as he spoke,
formed in the majority of the audience a little picture or an idea
which each now was eager to give expression to. Most of the people
there proposed to spend their lives in the practice either of writing
or painting, and merely by looking at them it could be seen that, as
they listened to Mr. Purvis first, and then to Mr. Greenhalgh, they
were seeing something done by these gentlemen to a possession which
they thought to be their own. One person after another rose, and, as
with an ill-balanced axe, attempted to hew out his conception of art a
little more clearly, and sat down with the feeling that, for some
reason which he could not grasp, his strokes had gone awry. As they sat
down they turned almost invariably to the person sitting next them, and
rectified and continued what they had just said in public. Before long,
therefore, the groups on the mattresses and the groups on the chairs
were all in communication with each other, and Mary Datchet, who had
begun to darn stockings again, stooped down and remarked to Ralph:
“That was what I call a first-rate paper.”
Both of them instinctively turned their eyes in the direction of the
reader of the paper. He was lying back against the wall, with his eyes
apparently shut, and his chin sunk upon his collar. Katharine was
turning over the pages of his manuscript as if she were looking for
some passage that had particularly struck her, and had a difficulty in
finding it.
“Let’s go and tell him how much we liked it,” said Mary, thus
suggesting an action which Ralph was anxious to take, though without
her he would have been too proud to do it, for he suspected that he had
more interest in Katharine than she had in him.
“That was a very interesting paper,” Mary began, without any shyness,
seating herself on the floor opposite to Rodney and Katharine. “Will
you lend me the manuscript to read in peace?”
Rodney, who had opened his eyes on their approach, regarded her for a
moment in suspicious silence.
“Do you say that merely to disguise the fact of my ridiculous failure?”
he asked.
Katharine looked up from her reading with a smile.
“He says he doesn’t mind what we think of him,” she remarked. “He says
we don’t care a rap for art of any kind.”
“I asked her to pity me, and she teases me!” Rodney exclaimed.
“I don’t intend to pity you, Mr. Rodney,” Mary remarked, kindly, but
firmly. “When a paper’s a failure, nobody says anything, whereas now,
just listen to them!”
The sound, which filled the room, with its hurry of short syllables,
its sudden pauses, and its sudden attacks, might be compared to some
animal hubbub, frantic and inarticulate.
“D’you think that’s all about my paper?” Rodney inquired, after a
moment’s attention, with a distinct brightening of expression.
“Of course it is,” said Mary. “It was a very suggestive paper.”
She turned to Denham for confirmation, and he corroborated her.
“It’s the ten minutes after a paper is read that proves whether it’s
been a success or not,” he said. “If I were you, Rodney, I should be
very pleased with myself.”
This commendation seemed to comfort Mr. Rodney completely, and he began
to bethink him of all the passages in his paper which deserved to be
called “suggestive.”
“Did you agree at all, Denham, with what I said about Shakespeare’s
later use of imagery? I’m afraid I didn’t altogether make my meaning
plain.”
Here he gathered himself together, and by means of a series of
frog-like jerks, succeeded in bringing himself close to Denham.
Denham answered him with the brevity which is the result of having
another sentence in the mind to be addressed to another person. He
wished to say to Katharine: “Did you remember to get that picture
glazed before your aunt came to dinner?” but, besides having to answer
Rodney, he was not sure that the remark, with its assertion of
intimacy, would not strike Katharine as impertinent. She was listening
to what some one in another group was saying. Rodney, meanwhile, was
talking about the Elizabethan dramatists.
He was a curious-looking man since, upon first sight, especially if he
chanced to be talking with animation, he appeared, in some way,
ridiculous; but, next moment, in repose, his face, with its large nose,
thin cheeks and lips expressing the utmost sensibility, somehow
recalled a Roman head bound with laurel, cut upon a circle of
semi-transparent reddish stone. It had dignity and character. By
profession a clerk in a Government office, he was one of those martyred
spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of
almost intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it,
they must attempt to practise it themselves, and they are generally
endowed with very little facility in composition. They condemn whatever
they produce. Moreover, the violence of their feelings is such that
they seldom meet with adequate sympathy, and being rendered very
sensitive by their cultivated perceptions, suffer constant slights both
to their own persons and to the thing they worship. But Rodney could
never resist making trial of the sympathies of any one who seemed
favorably disposed, and Denham’s praise had stimulated his very
susceptible vanity.
“You remember the passage just before the death of the Duchess?” he
continued, edging still closer to Denham, and adjusting his elbow and
knee in an incredibly angular combination. Here, Katharine, who had
been cut off by these maneuvers from all communication with the outer
world, rose, and seated herself upon the window-sill, where she was
joined by Mary Datchet. The two young women could thus survey the whole