CHAPTER XXIII
When Ralph Denham entered the room and saw Katharine seated with herback to him, he was conscious of a change in the grade of the atmospheresuch as a traveler meets with sometimes upon the roads, particularlyafter sunset, when, without warning, he runs from clammy chill to ahoard of unspent warmth in which the sweetness of hay and beanfieldis cherished, as if the sun still shone although the moon is up. Hehesitated; he shuddered; he walked elaborately to the window and laidaside his coat. He balanced his stick most carefully against the foldsof the curtain. Thus occupied with his own sensations and preparations,he had little time to observe what either of the other two was feeling.Such symptoms of agitation as he might perceive (and they had left theirtokens in brightness of eye and pallor of cheeks) seemed to him wellbefitting the actors in so great a drama as that of Katharine Hilbery'sdaily life. Beauty and passion were the breath of her being, he thought.
She scarcely noticed his presence, or only as it forced her to adopt amanner of composure, which she was certainly far from feeling. William,however, was even more agitated than she was, and her first instalmentof promised help took the form of some commonplace upon the age of thebuilding or the architect's name, which gave him an excuse to fumble ina drawer for certain designs, which he laid upon the table between thethree of them.
Which of the three followed the designs most carefully it would bedifficult to tell, but it is certain that not one of the three found forthe moment anything to say. Years of training in a drawing-room came atlength to Katharine's help, and she said something suitable, at the samemoment withdrawing her hand from the table because she perceived that ittrembled. William agreed effusively; Denham corroborated him, speakingin rather high-pitched tones; they thrust aside the plans, and drewnearer to the fireplace.
"I'd rather live here than anywhere in the whole of London," saidDenham.
("And I've got nowhere to live") Katharine thought, as she agreed aloud.
"You could get rooms here, no doubt, if you wanted to," Rodney replied.
"But I'm just leaving London for good--I've taken that cottage I wastelling you about." The announcement seemed to convey very little toeither of his hearers.
"Indeed?--that's sad.... You must give me your address. But you won'tcut yourself off altogether, surely--"
"You'll be moving, too, I suppose," Denham remarked.
William showed such visible signs of floundering that Katharinecollected herself and asked:
"Where is the cottage you've taken?"
In answering her, Denham turned and looked at her. As their eyes met,she realized for the first time that she was talking to Ralph Denham,and she remembered, without recalling any details, that she had beenspeaking of him quite lately, and that she had reason to think ill ofhim. What Mary had said she could not remember, but she felt thatthere was a mass of knowledge in her mind which she had not had timeto examine--knowledge now lying on the far side of a gulf. But heragitation flashed the queerest lights upon her past. She must getthrough the matter in hand, and then think it out in quiet. She benther mind to follow what Ralph was saying. He was telling her that he hadtaken a cottage in Norfolk, and she was saying that she knew, or did notknow, that particular neighborhood. But after a moment's attention hermind flew to Rodney, and she had an unusual, indeed unprecedented, sensethat they were in touch and shared each other's thoughts. If onlyRalph were not there, she would at once give way to her desire to takeWilliam's hand, then to bend his head upon her shoulder, for this waswhat she wanted to do more than anything at the moment, unless, indeed,she wished more than anything to be alone--yes, that was what shewanted. She was sick to death of these discussions; she shivered at theeffort to reveal her feelings. She had forgotten to answer. William wasspeaking now.
"But what will you find to do in the country?" she asked at random,striking into a conversation which she had only half heard, in sucha way as to make both Rodney and Denham look at her with a littlesurprise. But directly she took up the conversation, it was William'sturn to fall silent. He at once forgot to listen to what they weresaying, although he interposed nervously at intervals, "Yes, yes, yes."As the minutes passed, Ralph's presence became more and more intolerableto him, since there was so much that he must say to Katharine; themoment he could not talk to her, terrible doubts, unanswerable questionsaccumulated, which he must lay before Katharine, for she alone couldhelp him now. Unless he could see her alone, it would be impossible forhim ever to sleep, or to know what he had said in a moment of madness,which was not altogether mad, or was it mad? He nodded his head, andsaid, nervously, "Yes, yes," and looked at Katharine, and thought howbeautiful she looked; there was no one in the world that he admiredmore. There was an emotion in her face which lent it an expression hehad never seen there. Then, as he was turning over means by which hecould speak to her alone, she rose, and he was taken by surprise, for hehad counted on the fact that she would outstay Denham. His only chance,then, of saying something to her in private, was to take her downstairsand walk with her to the street. While he hesitated, however, overcomewith the difficulty of putting one simple thought into words whenall his thoughts were scattered about, and all were too strong forutterance, he was struck silent by something that was still moreunexpected. Denham got up from his chair, looked at Katharine, and said:
"I'm going, too. Shall we go together?"
And before William could see any way of detaining him--or would itbe better to detain Katharine?--he had taken his hat, stick, and washolding the door open for Katharine to pass out. The most that Williamcould do was to stand at the head of the stairs and say good-night. Hecould not offer to go with them. He could not insist that she shouldstay. He watched her descend, rather slowly, owing to the dusk of thestaircase, and he had a last sight of Denham's head and of Katharine'shead near together, against the panels, when suddenly a pang of acutejealousy overcame him, and had he not remained conscious of the slippersupon his feet, he would have run after them or cried out. As it was hecould not move from the spot. At the turn of the staircase Katharineturned to look back, trusting to this last glance to seal their compactof good friendship. Instead of returning her silent greeting, Williamgrinned back at her a cold stare of sarcasm or of rage.
She stopped dead for a moment, and then descended slowly into the court.She looked to the right and to the left, and once up into the sky. Shewas only conscious of Denham as a block upon her thoughts. She measuredthe distance that must be traversed before she would be alone. But whenthey came to the Strand no cabs were to be seen, and Denham broke thesilence by saying:
"There seem to be no cabs. Shall we walk on a little?"
"Very well," she agreed, paying no attention to him.
Aware of her preoccupation, or absorbed in his own thoughts, Ralph saidnothing further; and in silence they walked some distance along theStrand. Ralph was doing his best to put his thoughts into such orderthat one came before the rest, and the determination that when he spokehe should speak worthily, made him put off the moment of speaking tillhe had found the exact words and even the place that best suited him.The Strand was too busy. There was too much risk, also, of finding anempty cab. Without a word of explanation he turned to the left, down oneof the side streets leading to the river. On no account must they partuntil something of the very greatest importance had happened. He knewperfectly well what he wished to say, and had arranged not only thesubstance, but the order in which he was to say it. Now, however, thathe was alone with her, not only did he find the difficulty of speakingalmost insurmountable, but he was aware that he was angry with her forthus disturbing him, and casting, as it was so easy for a person of heradvantages to do, these phantoms and pitfalls across his path. He wasdetermined that he would question her as severely as he would questionhimself; and make them both, once and for all, either justify herdominance or renounce it. But the longer they walked thus alone, themore he was disturbed by the sense of her actual presence. Her skirtblew; the feathers in her hat waved; sometimes
he saw her a step or twoahead of him, or had to wait for her to catch him up.
The silence was prolonged, and at length drew her attention to him.First she was annoyed that there was no cab to free her from hiscompany; then she recalled vaguely something that Mary had said to makeher think ill of him; she could not remember what, but the recollection,combined with his masterful ways--why did he walk so fast down this sidestreet?--made her more and more conscious of a person of marked, thoughdisagreeable, force by her side. She stopped and, looking round herfor a cab, sighted one in the distance. He was thus precipitated intospeech.
"Should you mind if we walked a little farther?" he asked. "There'ssomething I want to say to you."
"Very well," she replied, guessing that his request had something to dowith Mary Datchet.
"It's quieter by the river," he said, and instantly he crossed over. "Iwant to ask you merely this," he began. But he paused so long that shecould see his head against the sky; the slope of his thin cheek andhis large, strong nose were clearly marked against it. While he paused,words that were quite different from those he intended to use presentedthemselves.
"I've made you my standard ever since I saw you. I've dreamt about you;I've thought of nothing but you; you represent to me the only reality inthe world."
His words, and the queer strained voice in which he spoke them, made itappear as if he addressed some person who was not the woman beside him,but some one far away.
"And now things have come to such a pass that, unless I can speak to youopenly, I believe I shall go mad. I think of you as the most beautiful,the truest thing in the world," he continued, filled with a sense ofexaltation, and feeling that he had no need now to choose his words withpedantic accuracy, for what he wanted to say was suddenly become plainto him.
"I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river; to me you'reeverything that exists; the reality of everything. Life, I tell you,would be impossible without you. And now I want--"
She had heard him so far with a feeling that she had dropped somematerial word which made sense of the rest. She could hear no more ofthis unintelligible rambling without checking him. She felt that she wasoverhearing what was meant for another.
"I don't understand," she said. "You're saying things that you don'tmean."
"I mean every word I say," he replied, emphatically. He turned his headtowards her. She recovered the words she was searching for while hespoke. "Ralph Denham is in love with you." They came back to her in MaryDatchet's voice. Her anger blazed up in her.
"I saw Mary Datchet this afternoon," she exclaimed.
He made a movement as if he were surprised or taken aback, but answeredin a moment:
"She told you that I had asked her to marry me, I suppose?"
"No!" Katharine exclaimed, in surprise.
"I did though. It was the day I saw you at Lincoln," he continued. "Ihad meant to ask her to marry me, and then I looked out of the windowand saw you. After that I didn't want to ask any one to marry me. ButI did it; and she knew I was lying, and refused me. I thought then, andstill think, that she cares for me. I behaved very badly. I don't defendmyself."
"No," said Katharine, "I should hope not. There's no defence that I canthink of. If any conduct is wrong, that is." She spoke with an energythat was directed even more against herself than against him. "It seemsto me," she continued, with the same energy, "that people are boundto be honest. There's no excuse for such behavior." She could now seeplainly before her eyes the expression on Mary Datchet's face.
After a short pause, he said:
"I am not telling you that I am in love with you. I am not in love withyou."
"I didn't think that," she replied, conscious of some bewilderment.
"I have not spoken a word to you that I do not mean," he added.
"Tell me then what it is that you mean," she said at length.
As if obeying a common instinct, they both stopped and, bending slightlyover the balustrade of the river, looked into the flowing water.
"You say that we've got to be honest," Ralph began. "Very well. I willtry to tell you the facts; but I warn you, you'll think me mad. It's afact, though, that since I first saw you four or five months ago Ihave made you, in an utterly absurd way, I expect, my ideal. I'm almostashamed to tell you what lengths I've gone to. It's become the thingthat matters most in my life." He checked himself. "Without knowing you,except that you're beautiful, and all that, I've come to believe thatwe're in some sort of agreement; that we're after something together;that we see something.... I've got into the habit of imagining you; I'malways thinking what you'd say or do; I walk along the street talkingto you; I dream of you. It's merely a bad habit, a schoolboy habit,day-dreaming; it's a common experience; half one's friends do the same;well, those are the facts."
Simultaneously, they both walked on very slowly.
"If you were to know me you would feel none of this," she said. "Wedon't know each other--we've always been--interrupted.... Were you goingto tell me this that day my aunts came?" she asked, recollecting thewhole scene.
He bowed his head.
"The day you told me of your engagement," he said.
She thought, with a start, that she was no longer engaged.
"I deny that I should cease to feel this if I knew you," he went on. "Ishould feel it more reasonably--that's all. I shouldn't talk the kindof nonsense I've talked to-night.... But it wasn't nonsense. It was thetruth," he said doggedly. "It's the important thing. You can force meto talk as if this feeling for you were an hallucination, but all ourfeelings are that. The best of them are half illusions. Still," headded, as if arguing to himself, "if it weren't as real a feeling as I'mcapable of, I shouldn't be changing my life on your account."
"What do you mean?" she inquired.
"I told you. I'm taking a cottage. I'm giving up my profession."
"On my account?" she asked, in amazement.
"Yes, on your account," he replied. He explained his meaning no further.
"But I don't know you or your circumstances," she said at last, as heremained silent.
"You have no opinion about me one way or the other?"
"Yes, I suppose I have an opinion--" she hesitated.
He controlled his wish to ask her to explain herself, and much to hispleasure she went on, appearing to search her mind.
"I thought that you criticized me--perhaps disliked me. I thought of youas a person who judges--"
"No; I'm a person who feels," he said, in a low voice.
"Tell me, then, what has made you do this?" she asked, after a break.
He told her in an orderly way, betokening careful preparation, all thathe had meant to say at first; how he stood with regard to his brothersand sisters; what his mother had said, and his sister Joan had refrainedfrom saying; exactly how many pounds stood in his name at the bank; whatprospect his brother had of earning a livelihood in America; how much oftheir income went on rent, and other details known to him by heart. Shelistened to all this, so that she could have passed an examination init by the time Waterloo Bridge was in sight; and yet she was no morelistening to it than she was counting the paving-stones at her feet. Shewas feeling happier than she had felt in her life. If Denham could haveseen how visibly books of algebraic symbols, pages all speckled withdots and dashes and twisted bars, came before her eyes as they trod theEmbankment, his secret joy in her attention might have been dispersed.She went on, saying, "Yes, I see.... But how would that help you?...Your brother has passed his examination?" so sensibly, that he hadconstantly to keep his brain in check; and all the time she was in fancylooking up through a telescope at white shadow-cleft disks which wereother worlds, until she felt herself possessed of two bodies, onewalking by the river with Denham, the other concentrated to a silverglobe aloft in the fine blue space above the scum of vapors that wascovering the visible world. She looked at the sky once, and saw that nostar was keen enough to pierce the flight of watery clouds now coursingrapidly before the west wind. She loo
ked down hurriedly again. There wasno reason, she assured herself, for this feeling of happiness; she wasnot free; she was not alone; she was still bound to earth by a millionfibres; every step took her nearer home. Nevertheless, she exultedas she had never exulted before. The air was fresher, the lights moredistinct, the cold stone of the balustrade colder and harder, whenby chance or purpose she struck her hand against it. No feeling ofannoyance with Denham remained; he certainly did not hinder any flightshe might choose to make, whether in the direction of the sky or of herhome; but that her condition was due to him, or to anything that he hadsaid, she had no consciousness at all.
They were now within sight of the stream of cabs and omnibuses crossingto and from the Surrey side of the river; the sound of the traffic, thehooting of motor-horns, and the light chime of tram-bells sounded moreand more distinctly, and, with the increase of noise, they both becamesilent. With a common instinct they slackened their pace, as if tolengthen the time of semi-privacy allowed them. To Ralph, the pleasureof these last yards of the walk with Katharine was so great that hecould not look beyond the present moment to the time when she shouldhave left him. He had no wish to use the last moments of theircompanionship in adding fresh words to what he had already said. Sincethey had stopped talking, she had become to him not so much a realperson, as the very woman he dreamt of; but his solitary dreams hadnever produced any such keenness of sensation as that which he feltin her presence. He himself was also strangely transfigured. He hadcomplete mastery of all his faculties. For the first time he was inpossession of his full powers. The vistas which opened before him seemedto have no perceptible end. But the mood had none of the restlessness orfeverish desire to add one delight to another which had hitherto marked,and somewhat spoilt, the most rapturous of his imaginings. It was a moodthat took such clear-eyed account of the conditions of human life thathe was not disturbed in the least by the gliding presence of a taxicab,and without agitation he perceived that Katharine was conscious ofit also, and turned her head in that direction. Their halting stepsacknowledged the desirability of engaging the cab; and they stoppedsimultaneously, and signed to it.
"Then you will let me know your decision as soon as you can?" he asked,with his hand on the door.
She hesitated for a moment. She could not immediately recall what thequestion was that she had to decide.
"I will write," she said vaguely. "No," she added, in a second,bethinking her of the difficulties of writing anything decided upon aquestion to which she had paid no attention, "I don't see how to manageit."
She stood looking at Denham, considering and hesitating, with her footupon the step. He guessed her difficulties; he knew in a second that shehad heard nothing; he knew everything that she felt.
"There's only one place to discuss things satisfactorily that I knowof," he said quickly; "that's Kew."
"Kew?"
"Kew," he repeated, with immense decision. He shut the door and gave heraddress to the driver. She instantly was conveyed away from him, and hercab joined the knotted stream of vehicles, each marked by a light, andindistinguishable one from the other. He stood watching for a moment,and then, as if swept by some fierce impulse, from the spot where theyhad stood, he turned, crossed the road at a rapid pace, and disappeared.
He walked on upon the impetus of this last mood of almost supernaturalexaltation until he reached a narrow street, at this hour empty oftraffic and passengers. Here, whether it was the shops with theirshuttered windows, the smooth and silvered curve of the wood pavement,or a natural ebb of feeling, his exaltation slowly oozed and desertedhim. He was now conscious of the loss that follows any revelation hehad lost something in speaking to Katharine, for, after all, wasthe Katharine whom he loved the same as the real Katharine? She hadtranscended her entirely at moments; her skirt had blown, her featherwaved, her voice spoken; yes, but how terrible sometimes the pausebetween the voice of one's dreams and the voice that comes from theobject of one's dreams! He felt a mixture of disgust and pity at thefigure cut by human beings when they try to carry out, in practice, whatthey have the power to conceive. How small both he and Katharine hadappeared when they issued from the cloud of thought that enveloped them!He recalled the small, inexpressive, commonplace words in which they hadtried to communicate with each other; he repeated them over to himself.By repeating Katharine's words, he came in a few moments to such asense of her presence that he worshipped her more than ever. But she wasengaged to be married, he remembered with a start. The strength of hisfeeling was revealed to him instantly, and he gave himself up to anirresistible rage and sense of frustration. The image of Rodney camebefore him with every circumstance of folly and indignity. That littlepink-cheeked dancing-master to marry Katharine? that gibbering ass withthe face of a monkey on an organ? that posing, vain, fantastical fop?with his tragedies and his comedies, his innumerable spites and pridesand pettinesses? Lord! marry Rodney! She must be as great a fool as hewas. His bitterness took possession of him, and as he sat in thecorner of the underground carriage, he looked as stark an image ofunapproachable severity as could be imagined. Directly he reached homehe sat down at his table, and began to write Katharine a long, wild, madletter, begging her for both their sakes to break with Rodney, imploringher not to do what would destroy for ever the one beauty, the one truth,the one hope; not to be a traitor, not to be a deserter, for if shewere--and he wound up with a quiet and brief assertion that, whatevershe did or left undone, he would believe to be the best, and accept fromher with gratitude. He covered sheet after sheet, and heard the earlycarts starting for London before he went to bed.