Night and Day
instructions. She had plunged them all into the most odious confusion.
He waited a moment, and then, with much preliminary rattling of the
handle, opened the door a second time. They had all regained their
places; some incident of an absurd nature had now set them laughing and
looking under the table, so that his entrance passed momentarily
unperceived. Katharine, with flushed cheeks, raised her head and said:
“Well, that’s my last attempt at the dramatic.”
“It’s astonishing what a distance they roll,” said Ralph, stooping to
turn up the corner of the hearthrug.
“Don’t trouble—don’t bother. We shall find it—” Mrs. Hilbery began, and
then saw her husband and exclaimed: “Oh, Trevor, we’re looking for
Cassandra’s engagement-ring!”
Mr. Hilbery looked instinctively at the carpet. Remarkably enough, the
ring had rolled to the very point where he stood. He saw the rubies
touching the tip of his boot. Such is the force of habit that he could
not refrain from stooping, with an absurd little thrill of pleasure at
being the one to find what others were looking for, and, picking the
ring up, he presented it, with a bow that was courtly in the extreme,
to Cassandra. Whether the making of a bow released automatically
feelings of complaisance and urbanity, Mr. Hilbery found his resentment
completely washed away during the second in which he bent and
straightened himself. Cassandra dared to offer her cheek and received
his embrace. He nodded with some degree of stiffness to Rodney and
Denham, who had both risen upon seeing him, and now altogether sat
down. Mrs. Hilbery seemed to have been waiting for the entrance of her
husband, and for this precise moment in order to put to him a question
which, from the ardor with which she announced it, had evidently been
pressing for utterance for some time past.
“Oh, Trevor, please tell me, what was the date of the first performance
of ‘Hamlet’?”
In order to answer her Mr. Hilbery had to have recourse to the exact
scholarship of William Rodney, and before he had given his excellent
authorities for believing as he believed, Rodney felt himself admitted
once more to the society of the civilized and sanctioned by the
authority of no less a person than Shakespeare himself. The power of
literature, which had temporarily deserted Mr. Hilbery, now came back
to him, pouring over the raw ugliness of human affairs its soothing
balm, and providing a form into which such passions as he had felt so
painfully the night before could be molded so that they fell roundly
from the tongue in shapely phrases, hurting nobody. He was sufficiently
sure of his command of language at length to look at Katharine and
again at Denham. All this talk about Shakespeare had acted as a
soporific, or rather as an incantation upon Katharine. She leaned back
in her chair at the head of the tea-table, perfectly silent, looking
vaguely past them all, receiving the most generalized ideas of human
heads against pictures, against yellow-tinted walls, against curtains
of deep crimson velvet. Denham, to whom he turned next, shared her
immobility under his gaze. But beneath his restraint and calm it was
possible to detect a resolution, a will, set now with unalterable
tenacity, which made such turns of speech as Mr. Hilbery had at command
appear oddly irrelevant. At any rate, he said nothing. He respected the
young man; he was a very able young man; he was likely to get his own
way. He could, he thought, looking at his still and very dignified
head, understand Katharine’s preference, and, as he thought this, he
was surprised by a pang of acute jealousy. She might have married
Rodney without causing him a twinge. This man she loved. Or what was
the state of affairs between them? An extraordinary confusion of
emotion was beginning to get the better of him, when Mrs. Hilbery, who
had been conscious of a sudden pause in the conversation, and had
looked wistfully at her daughter once or twice, remarked:
“Don’t stay if you want to go, Katharine. There’s the little room over
there. Perhaps you and Ralph—”
“We’re engaged,” said Katharine, waking with a start, and looking
straight at her father. He was taken aback by the directness of the
statement; he exclaimed as if an unexpected blow had struck him. Had he
loved her to see her swept away by this torrent, to have her taken from
him by this uncontrollable force, to stand by helpless, ignored? Oh,
how he loved her! How he loved her! He nodded very curtly to Denham.
“I gathered something of the kind last night,” he said. “I hope you’ll
deserve her.” But he never looked at his daughter, and strode out of
the room, leaving in the minds of the women a sense, half of awe, half
of amusement, at the extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized male,
outraged somehow and gone bellowing to his lair with a roar which still
sometimes reverberates in the most polished of drawing-rooms. Then
Katharine, looking at the shut door, looked down again, to hide her
tears.
CHAPTER XXXIV
The lamps were lit; their luster reflected itself in the polished wood;
good wine was passed round the dinner-table; before the meal was far
advanced civilization had triumphed, and Mr. Hilbery presided over a
feast which came to wear more and more surely an aspect, cheerful,
dignified, promising well for the future. To judge from the expression
in Katharine’s eyes it promised something—but he checked the approach
to sentimentality. He poured out wine; he bade Denham help himself.
They went upstairs and he saw Katharine and Denham abstract themselves
directly Cassandra had asked whether she might not play him
something—some Mozart? some Beethoven? She sat down to the piano; the
door closed softly behind them. His eyes rested on the closed door for
some seconds unwaveringly, but, by degrees, the look of expectation
died out of them, and, with a sigh, he listened to the music.
Katharine and Ralph were agreed with scarcely a word of discussion as
to what they wished to do, and in a moment she joined him in the hall
dressed for walking. The night was still and moonlit, fit for walking,
though any night would have seemed so to them, desiring more than
anything movement, freedom from scrutiny, silence, and the open air.
“At last!” she breathed, as the front door shut. She told him how she
had waited, fidgeted, thought he was never coming, listened for the
sound of doors, half expected to see him again under the lamp-post,
looking at the house. They turned and looked at the serene front with
its gold-rimmed windows, to him the shrine of so much adoration. In
spite of her laugh and the little pressure of mockery on his arm, he
would not resign his belief, but with her hand resting there, her voice
quickened and mysteriously moving in his ears, he had not time—they had
not the same inclination—other objects drew his attention.
How they came to find themselves walking down a street with many lamps,
corners radiant with light, and a steady succession of motor-omnibuses
plying both ways along it, they could neither of them tell; nor account
for the impulse which led them suddenly to select one of these
wayfarers and mount to the very front seat. After curving through
streets of comparative darkness, so narrow that shadows on the blinds
were pressed within a few feet of their faces, they came to one of
those great knots of activity where the lights, having drawn close
together, thin out again and take their separate ways. They were borne
on until they saw the spires of the city churches pale and flat against
the sky.
“Are you cold?” he asked, as they stopped by Temple Bar.
“Yes, I am rather,” she replied, becoming conscious that the splendid
race of lights drawn past her eyes by the superb curving and swerving
of the monster on which she sat was at an end. They had followed some
such course in their thoughts too; they had been borne on, victors in
the forefront of some triumphal car, spectators of a pageant enacted
for them, masters of life. But standing on the pavement alone, this
exaltation left them; they were glad to be alone together. Ralph stood
still for a moment to light his pipe beneath a lamp.
She looked at his face isolated in the little circle of light.
“Oh, that cottage,” she said. “We must take it and go there.”
“And leave all this?” he inquired.
“As you like,” she replied. She thought, looking at the sky above
Chancery Lane, how the roof was the same everywhere; how she was now
secure of all that this lofty blue and its steadfast lights meant to
her; reality, was it, figures, love, truth?
“I’ve something on my mind,” said Ralph abruptly. “I mean I’ve been
thinking of Mary Datchet. We’re very near her rooms now. Would you mind
if we went there?”
She had turned before she answered him. She had no wish to see any one
to-night; it seemed to her that the immense riddle was answered; the
problem had been solved; she held in her hands for one brief moment the
globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and
entire from the confusion of chaos. To see Mary was to risk the
destruction of this globe.
“Did you treat her badly?” she asked rather mechanically, walking on.
“I could defend myself,” he said, almost defiantly. “But what’s the
use, if one feels a thing? I won’t be with her a minute,” he said.
“I’ll just tell her—”
“Of course, you must tell her,” said Katharine, and now felt anxious
for him to do what appeared to be necessary if he, too, were to hold
his globe for a moment round, whole, and entire.
“I wish—I wish—” she sighed, for melancholy came over her and obscured
at least a section of her clear vision. The globe swam before her as if
obscured by tears.
“I regret nothing,” said Ralph firmly. She leant towards him almost as
if she could thus see what he saw. She thought how obscure he still was
to her, save only that more and more constantly he appeared to her a
fire burning through its smoke, a source of life.
“Go on,” she said. “You regret nothing—”
“Nothing—nothing,” he repeated.
“What a fire!” she thought to herself. She thought of him blazing
splendidly in the night, yet so obscure that to hold his arm, as she
held it, was only to touch the opaque substance surrounding the flame
that roared upwards.
“Why nothing?” she asked hurriedly, in order that he might say more and
so make more splendid, more red, more darkly intertwined with smoke
this flame rushing upwards.
“What are you thinking of, Katharine?” he asked suspiciously, noticing
her tone of dreaminess and the inapt words.
“I was thinking of you—yes, I swear it. Always of you, but you take
such strange shapes in my mind. You’ve destroyed my loneliness. Am I to
tell you how I see you? No, tell me—tell me from the beginning.”
Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak more and more
fluently, more and more passionately, feeling her leaning towards him,
listening with wonder like a child, with gratitude like a woman. She
interrupted him gravely now and then.
“But it was foolish to stand outside and look at the windows. Suppose
William hadn’t seen you. Would you have gone to bed?”
He capped her reproof with wonderment that a woman of her age could
have stood in Kingsway looking at the traffic until she forgot.
“But it was then I first knew I loved you!” she exclaimed.
“Tell me from the beginning,” he begged her.
“No, I’m a person who can’t tell things,” she pleaded. “I shall say
something ridiculous—something about flames—fires. No, I can’t tell
you.”
But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful to him, charged
with extreme excitement as she spoke of the dark red fire, and the
smoke twined round it, making him feel that he had stepped over the
threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring with