Night and Day Part 25

'Well, she is queer!' Ca.s.sandra exclaimed.

William looked perturbed. He knew more of Katharine than Ca.s.sandra did, but even he could not tell-In a second Katharine was back again dressed in outdoor things, still holding her bread and b.u.t.ter in her bare hand.

'If I'm late, don't wait for me,' she said. 'I shall have dined,' and so saying, she left them.

'But she can't-' William exclaimed, as the door shut, 'not without any gloves and bread and b.u.t.ter in her hand!' They ran to the window, and saw her walking rapidly along the street towards the City. Then she vanished.

'She must have gone to meet Mr Denham,' Ca.s.sandra exclaimed.

'Goodness knows!' William interjected.

The incident impressed them both as having something queer and ominous about it out of all proportion to its surface strangeness.

'It's the sort of way Aunt Maggie behaves,' said Ca.s.sandra, as if in explanation.

William shook his head, and paced up and down the room looking extremely perturbed.

'This is what I've been foretelling,' he burst out. 'Once set the ordinary conventions aside-Thank Heaven Mrs Hilbery is away. But there's Mr Hilbery. How are we to explain it to him? I shall have to leave you.'

'But Uncle Trevor won't be back for hours, William!' Ca.s.sandra implored.

'You never can tell. He may be on his way already. Or suppose Mrs Milvain-your Aunt Celia-or Mrs Cosham, or any other of your aunts or uncles should be shown in and find us alone together. You know what they're saying about us already.'

Ca.s.sandra was equally stricken by the sight of William's agitation, and appalled by the prospect of his desertion.

'We might hide,' she exclaimed wildly, glancing at the curtain which separated the room with the relics.

'I refuse entirely to get under the table,' said William sarcastically.

She saw that he was losing his temper with the difficulties of the situation. Her instinct told her that an appeal to his affection, at this moment, would be extremely ill-judged. She controlled herself, sat down, poured out a fresh cup of tea, and sipped it quietly. This natural action, arguing complete self-mastery, and showing her in one of those feminine att.i.tudes which William found adorable, did more than any argument to compose his agitation. It appealed to his chivalry. He accepted a cup. Next she asked for a slice of cake. By the time the cake was eaten and the tea drunk the personal question had lapsed, and they were discussing poetry. Insensibly they turned from the question of dramatic poetry in general to the particular example which reposed in William's pocket, and when the maid came in to clear away the tea-things, William had asked permission to read a short pa.s.sage aloud, 'unless it bored her?'

Ca.s.sandra bent her head in silence, but she showed a little of what she felt in her eyes, and thus fortified, William felt confident that it would take more than Mrs Milvain herself to rout him from his position. He read aloud.

Meanwhile Katharine walked rapidly along the street. If called upon to explain her impulsive action in leaving the tea-table, she could have traced it to no better cause than that William had glanced at Ca.s.sandra; Ca.s.sandra at William. Yet, because they had glanced, her position was impossible. If one forgot to pour out a cup of tea they rushed to the conclusion that she was engaged to Ralph Denham. She knew that in half an hour or so the door would open, and Ralph Denham would appear. She could not sit there and contemplate seeing him with William's and Ca.s.sandra's eyes upon them, judging their exact degree of intimacy, so that they might fix the wedding-day. She promptly decided that she would meet Ralph out of doors; she still had time to reach Lincoln's Inn Fields before he left his office. She hailed a cab, and bade it take her to a shop for selling maps which she remembered in Great Queen Street, since she hardly liked to be set down at his door. Arrived at the shop, she bought a large scale map of Norfolk, and thus provided, hurried into Lincoln's Inn Fields, and a.s.sured herself of the position of Messrs Hooper and Grateley's office. The great gas chandeliers were alight in the office windows. She conceived that he sat at an enormous table laden with papers beneath one of them in the front room with the three tall windows. Having settled his position there, she began walking to and fro upon the pavement. n.o.body of his build appeared. She scrutinized each male figure as it approached and pa.s.sed her. Each male figure had, nevertheless, a look of him, due, perhaps, to the professional dress, the quick step, the keen glance which they cast upon her as they hastened home after the day's work. The square itself, with its immense houses all so fully occupied and stern of aspect, its atmosphere of industry and power, as if even the sparrows and the children were earning their daily bread, as if the sky itself, with its grey and scarlet clouds, reflected the serious intention of the city beneath it, spoke of him. Here was the fit place for their meeting, she thought; here was the fit place for her to walk thinking of him. She could not help comparing it with the domestic streets of Chelsea. With this comparison in her mind, she extended her range a little, and turned into the main road. The great torrent of vans and carts was sweeping down Kingsway; pedestrians were streaming in two currents along the pavements. She stood fascinated at the corner. The deep roar filled her ears; the changing tumult had the inexpressible fascination of varied life pouring ceaselessly with a purpose which, as she looked, seemed to her, somehow, the normal purpose for which life was framed; its complete indifference to the individuals, whom it swallowed up and rolled onwards, filled her with at least a temporary exaltation. The blend of daylight and of lamplight made her an invisible spectator, just as it gave the people who pa.s.sed her a semi-transparent quality, and left the faces pale ivory ovals in which the eyes alone were dark. They tended the enormous rush of the current-the great flow, the deep stream, the unquenchable tide. She stood un.o.bserved and absorbed, glorying openly in the rapture that had run subterraneously all day. Suddenly she was clutched, unwilling, from the outside, by the recollection of her purpose in coming there. She had come to find Ralph Denham. She hastily turned back into Lincoln's Inn Fields, and looked for her landmark-the light in the three tall windows. She sought in vain. The faces of the houses had now merged in the general darkness, and she had difficulty in determining which she sought. Ralph's three windows gave back on their ghostly gla.s.s panels only a reflection of the grey and greenish sky. She rang the bell, peremptorily, under the painted name of the firm. After some delay she was answered by a caretaker, whose pail and brush of themselves told her that the working day was over and the workers gone. n.o.body, save perhaps Mr Grateley himself, was left, she a.s.sured Katharine; every one else had been gone these ten minutes.

The news woke Katharine completely. Anxiety gained upon her. She hastened back into Kingsway, looking at people who had miraculously regained their solidity. She ran as far as the Tube station, overhauling clerk after clerk, solicitor after solicitor. Not one of them even faintly resembled Ralph Denham. More and more plainly did she see him; and more and more did he seem to her unlike any one else. At the door of the station she paused, and tried to collect her thoughts. He had gone to her house. By taking a cab she could be there probably in advance of him. But she pictured herself opening the drawing-room door, and William and Ca.s.sandra looking up, and Ralph's entrance a moment later, and the glances-the insinuations. No; she could not face it. She would write him a letter and take it at once to his house. She bought paper and pencil at the bookstall, and entered an A.B.C. shop,dn where, by ordering a cup of coffee, she secured an empty table, and began at once to write: where, by ordering a cup of coffee, she secured an empty table, and began at once to write: 'I came to meet you and I have missed you. I could not face William and Ca.s.sandra. They want us-' here she paused. 'They insist that we are engaged,' she subst.i.tuted, 'and we couldn't talk at all, or explain anything. I want-' Her wants were so vast, now that she was in communication with Ralph, that the pencil was utterly inadequate to conduct them on to the paper; it seemed as if the whole torrent of Kingsway had to run down her pencil. She gazed intently at a notice hanging on the gold-encrusted wall opposite. '... to say all kinds of things,' she added, writing each word with the painstaking of a child. But, when she raised her eyes again to meditate the next sentence, she was aware of a waitress, whose expression intimated that it was closing time, and, looking round, Katharine saw herself almost the last person left in the shop. She took up her letter, paid her bill, and found herself once more in the street. She would now take a cab to Highgate. But at that moment it flashed upon her that she could not remember the address. This check seemed to let fall a barrier across a very powerful current of desire. She ransacked her memory in desperation, hunting for the name, first by remembering the look of the house, and then by trying, in memory, to retrace the words she had written once, at least, upon an envelope. The more she pressed the farther the words receded. Was the house an Orchard Something, or the street a Hill? She gave it up. Never, since she was a child, had she felt anything like this blankness and desolation. There rushed in upon her, as if she were waking from some dream, all the consequences of her inexplicable indolence. She figured Ralph's face as he turned from her door without a word of explanation, receiving his dismissal as a blow from herself, a callous intimation that she did not wish to see him. She followed his departure from her door; but it was far more easy to see him marching far and fast in any direction for any length of time than to conceive that he would turn back to Highgate. Perhaps he would try once more to see her in Cheyne Walk? It was proof of the clearness with which she saw him, that she started forward as this possibility occurred to her, and almost raised her hand to beckon to a cab. No; he was too proud to come again; he rejected the desire and walked on and on, on and on-If only she could read the names of those visionary streets down which he pa.s.sed! But her imagination betrayed her at this point, or mocked her with a sense of their strangeness, darkness, and distance. Indeed, instead of helping herself to any decision, she only filled her mind with the vast extent of London and the impossibility of finding any single figure that wandered off this way and that way, turned to the right and to the left, chose that dingy little back street where the children were playing in the road, and so-She roused herself impatiently. She walked rapidly along Holborn. Soon she turned and walked as rapidly in the other direction. This indecision was not merely odious, but had something that alarmed her about it, as she had been alarmed slightly once or twice already that day; she felt unable to cope with the strength of her own desires. To a person controlled by habit, there was humiliation as well as alarm in this sudden release of what appeared to be a very powerful as well as an unreasonable force. An aching in the muscles of her right hand now showed her that she was crushing her gloves and the map of Norfolk in a grip sufficient to crack a more solid object. She relaxed her grasp; she looked anxiously at the faces of the pa.s.sers-by to see whether their eyes rested on her for a moment longer than was natural, or with any curiosity. But having smoothed out her gloves, and done what she could to look as usual, she forgot spectators, and was once more given up to her desperate desire to find Ralph Denham. It was a desire now-wild, irrational, unexplained, resembling something felt in childhood. Once more she blamed herself bitterly for her carelessness. But finding herself opposite the Tube station, she pulled herself up and took counsel swiftly, as of old. It flashed upon her that she would go at once to Mary Datchet, and ask her to give her Ralph's address. The decision was a relief, not only in giving her a goal, but in providing her with a rational excuse for her own actions. It gave her a goal certainly, but the fact of having a goal led her to dwell exclusively upon her obsession; so that when she rang the bell of Mary's flat, she did not for a moment consider how this demand would strike Mary. To her extreme annoyance Mary was not at home; a charwoman opened the door. All Katharine could do was to accept the invitation to wait. She waited for, perhaps, fifteen minutes, and spent them in pacing from one end of the room to the other without intermission. When she heard Mary's key in the door she paused in front of the fireplace, and Mary found her standing upright, looking at once expectant and determined, like a person who has come on an errand of such importance that it must be broached without preface.

Mary exclaimed in surprise.

'Yes, yes,' Katharine said, brushing these remarks aside, as if they were in the way.

'Have you had tea?'

'Oh yes,' she said, thinking that she had had tea hundreds of years ago, somewhere or other.

Mary paused, took off her gloves, and, finding matches, proceeded to light the fire.

Katharine checked her with an impatient movement, and said: 'Don't light the fire for me ... I want to know Ralph Denham's address.'

She was holding a pencil and preparing to write on the envelope. She waited with an imperious expression.

'The Apple Orchard, Mount Ararat Road, Highgate,'2 Mary said, speaking slowly and rather strangely. Mary said, speaking slowly and rather strangely.

'Oh, I remember now!' Katharine exclaimed, with irritation at her own stupidity. 'I suppose it wouldn't take twenty minutes to drive there?' She gathered up her purse and gloves and seemed about to go.

'But you won't find him,' said Mary, pausing with a match in her hand. Katharine, who had already turned towards the door, stopped and looked at her.

'Why? Where is he?' she asked.

'He won't have left his office.'

'But he has left the office,' she replied. 'The only question is will he have reached home yet? He went to see me at Chelsea; I tried to meet him and missed him. He will have found no message to explain. So I must find him-as soon as possible.'

Mary took in the situation at her leisure.

'But why not telephone?' she said.

Katharine immediately dropped all that she was holding; her strained expression relaxed, and exclaiming, 'Of course! Why didn't I think of that!' she seized the telephone receiver and gave her number. Mary looked at her steadily, and then left the room. At length Katharine heard, through all the superimposed weight of London, the mysterious sound of feet in her own house mounting to the little room, where she could almost see the pictures and the books; she listened with extreme intentness to the preparatory vibrations, and then established her ident.i.ty.

'Has Mr Denham called?'

'Yes, miss.'

'Did he ask for me?'

'Yes. We said you were out, miss.'

'Did he leave any message?'

'No. He went away. About twenty minutes ago, miss.'

Katharine hung up the receiver. She walked the length of the room in such acute disappointment that she did not at first perceive Mary's absence. Then she called in a harsh and peremptory tone: 'Mary.'

Mary was taking off her outdoor things in the bedroom. She heard Katharine call her. 'Yes,' she said, 'I shan't be a moment.' But the moment prolonged itself, as if for some reason Mary found satisfaction in making herself not only tidy, but seemly and ornamented. A stage in her life had been accomplished in the last months which had left its traces for ever upon her bearing. Youth, and the bloom of youth, had receded, leaving the purpose of her face to show itself in the hollower cheeks, the firmer lips, the eyes no longer spontaneously observing at random, but narrowed upon an end which was not near at hand. This woman was now a serviceable human being, mistress of her own destiny, and thus, by some combination of ideas, fit to be adorned with the dignity of silver chains and glowing brooches. She came in at her leisure and asked: 'Well, did you get an answer?'

'He has left Chelsea already,' Katharine replied.

'Still, he won't be home yet,' said Mary.

Katharine was once more irresistibly drawn to gaze upon an imaginary map of London, to follow the twists and turns of unnamed streets.

'I'll ring up his home and ask whether he's back.' Mary crossed to the telephone and, after a series of brief remarks, announced: 'No. His sister says he hasn't come back yet.'

'Ah!' She applied her ear to the telephone once more. 'They've had a message. He won't be back to dinner.'

'Then what is he going to do?'

Very pale, and with her large eyes fixed not so much upon Mary as upon vistas of unresponding blankness, Katharine addressed herself also not so much to Mary as to the unrelenting spirit which now appeared to mock her from every quarter of her survey.

After waiting a little time Mary remarked indifferently: 'I really don't know' Slackly lying back in her arm-chair, she watched the little flames beginning to creep among the coals indifferently, as if they, too, were very distant and indifferent.

Katharine looked at her indignantly and rose.

'Possibly he may come here,' Mary continued, without altering the abstract tone of her voice. 'It would be worth your while to wait if you want to see him to-night.' She bent forward and touched the wood, so that the flames slipped in between the interstices of the coal.

Katharine reflected. 'I'll wait half an hour,' she said.

Mary rose, went to the table, spread out her papers under the green-shaded lamp and, with an action that was becoming a habit, twisted a lock of hair round and round in her fingers. Once she looked unperceived at her visitor, who never moved, who sat so still, with eyes so intent, that you could almost fancy that she was watching something, some face that never looked up at her. Mary found herself unable to go on writing. She turned her eyes away, but only to be aware of the presence of what Katharine looked at. There were ghosts in the room, and one, strangely and sadly, was the ghost of herself. The minutes went by.

'What would be the time now?' said Katharine at last. The half-hour was not quite spent.

'I'm going to get dinner ready,' said Mary, rising from her table.

'Then I'll go,' said Katharine.

'Why don't you stay? Where are you going?'

Katharine looked round the room, conveying her uncertainty in her glance.

'Perhaps I might find him,' she mused.

'But why should it matter? You'll see him another day.'

Mary spoke, and intended to speak, cruelly enough.

'I was wrong to come here,' Katharine replied.

Their eyes met with antagonism, and neither flinched.

'You had a perfect right to come here,' Mary answered.

A loud knocking at the door interrupted them. Mary went to open it, and returning with some note or parcel, Katharine looked away so that Mary might not read her disappointment.

'Of course you had a right to come,' Mary repeated, laying the note upon the table.

'No,' said Katharine. 'Except that when one's desperate one has a sort of right. I am desperate. How do I know what's happening to him now? He may do anything. He may wander about the streets all night. Anything may happen to him.'

She spoke with a self-abandonment that Mary had never seen in her.

'You know you exaggerate; you're talking nonsense,' she said roughly.

'Mary, I must talk-I must tell you-'

'You needn't tell me anything,' Mary interrupted her. 'Can't I see for myself?'

'No, no,' Katharine exclaimed. 'It's not that-'

Her look, pa.s.sing beyond Mary, beyond the verge of the room and out beyond any words that came her way, wildly and pa.s.sionately, convinced Mary that she, at any rate, could not follow such a glance to its end. She was baffled; she tried to think herself back again into the height of her love for Ralph. Pressing her fingers upon her eyelids, she murmured: 'You forget that I loved him too. I thought I knew him. I did know him.'

And yet, what had she known? She could not remember it any more. She pressed her eyeb.a.l.l.s until they struck stars and suns into her darkness. She convinced herself that she was stirring among ashes. She desisted. She was astonished at her discovery. She did not love Ralph any more. She looked back dazed into the room, and her eyes rested upon the table with its lamp-lit papers. The steady radiance seemed for a second to have its counterpart within her; she shut her eyes; she opened them and looked at the lamp again; another love burnt in the place of the old one, or so, in a momentary glance of amazement, she guessed before the revelation was over and the old surroundings a.s.serted themselves. She leant in silence against the mantelpiece.

'There are different ways of loving,' she murmured, half to herself, at length.

Katharine made no reply and seemed unaware of her words. She seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.

'Perhaps he's waiting in the street again to-night,' she exclaimed. 'I'll go now. I might find him.'

'It's far more likely that he'll come here,' said Mary, and Katharine, after considering for a moment, said: 'I'll wait another half-hour.'

She sank down into her chair again, and took up the same position which Mary had compared to the position of one watching an unseeing face. She watched, indeed, not a face, but a procession, not of people, but of life itself: the good and bad; the meaning; the past, the present, and the future. All this seemed apparent to her, and she was not ashamed of her extravagance so much as exalted to one of the pinnacles of existence, where it behoved the world to do her homage. No one but she herself knew what it meant to miss Ralph Denham on that particular night; into this inadequate event crowded feelings that the great crises of life might have failed to call forth. She had missed him, and knew the bitterness of all failure; she desired him, and knew the torment of all pa.s.sion. It did not matter what trivial accidents led to this culmination. Nor did she care how extravagant she appeared, nor how openly she showed her feelings.

When the dinner was ready Mary told her to come, and she came submissively, as if she let Mary direct her movements for her. They ate and drank together almost in silence, and when Mary told her to eat more, she ate more; when she was told to drink wine, she drank it. Nevertheless, beneath this superficial obedience, Mary knew that she was following her own thoughts unhindered. She was not inattentive so much as remote; she looked at once so unseeing and so intent upon some vision of her own that Mary gradually felt more than protective-she became actually alarmed at the prospect of some collision between Katharine and the forces of the outside world. Directly they had done, Katharine announced her intention of going.

'But where are you going to?' Mary asked, desiring vaguely to hinder her.

'Oh, I'm going home-no, to Highgate perhaps.'

Mary saw that it would be useless to try to stop her. All she could do 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 pa.s.sing 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 Harp3 would suit her better. She noticed these names painted on little boards would suit her better. She noticed these names painted on little boards do do 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 pa.s.sionate flame had once burnt. 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 pa.s.sionate 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.dp '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 att.i.tude 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 Ca.s.sandra 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.'