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Night and Day
They had reached the Roman arch when Mrs. Hilbery caught sight of her own party, standing like sentinels facing up and down the road so as to intercept her if, as they expected, she had got lodged in some shop.
“I’ve found something much better than ruins!” she exclaimed. “I’ve found two friends who told me how to find you, which I could never have done without them. They must come and have tea with us. What a pity that we’ve just had luncheon.” Could they not somehow revoke that meal?
Katharine, who had gone a few steps by herself down the road, and was investigating the window of an ironmonger, as if her mother might have got herself concealed among mowing-machines and garden-shears, turned sharply on hearing her voice, and came towards them. She was a great deal surprised to see Denham and Mary Datchet. Whether the cordiality with which she greeted them was merely that which is natural to a surprise meeting in the country, or whether she was really glad to see them both, at any rate she exclaimed with unusual pleasure as she shook hands:
“I never knew you lived here. Why didn’t you say so, and we could have met? And are you staying with Mary?” she continued, turning to Ralph. “What a pity we didn’t meet before.”
Thus confronted at a distance of only a few feet by the real body of the woman about whom he had dreamt so many million dreams, Ralph stammered; he made a clutch at his self-control; the color either came to his cheeks or left them, he knew not which; but he was determined to face her and track down in the cold light of day whatever vestige of truth there might be in his persistent imaginations. He did not succeed in saying anything. It was Mary who spoke for both of them. He was struck dumb by finding that Katharine was quite different, in some strange way, from his memory, so that he had to dismiss his old view in order to accept the new one. The wind was blowing her crimson scarf across her face; the wind had already loosened her hair, which looped across the corner of one of the large, dark eyes which, so he used to think, looked sad; now they looked bright with the brightness of the sea struck by an unclouded ray; everything about her seemed rapid, fragmentary, and full of a kind of racing speed. He realized suddenly that he had never seen her in the daylight before.
Meanwhile, it was decided that it was too late to go in search of ruins as they had intended; and the whole party began to walk towards the stables where the carriage had been put up.
“Do you know,” said Katharine, keeping slightly in advance of the rest with Ralph, “I thought I saw you this morning, standing at a window. But I decided that it couldn’t be you. And it must have been you all the same.”
“Yes, I thought I saw you – but it wasn’t you,” he replied.
This remark, and the rough strain in his voice, recalled to her memory so many difficult speeches and abortive meetings that she was jerked directly back to the London drawing-room, the family relics, and the tea-table; and at the same time recalled some half-finished or interrupted remark which she had wanted to make herself or to hear from him – she could not remember what it was.
“I expect it was me,” she said. “I was looking for my mother. It happens every time we come to Lincoln. In fact, there never was a family so unable to take care of itself as ours is. Not that it very much matters, because some one always turns up in the nick of time to help us out of our scrapes. Once I was left in a field with a bull when I was a baby – but where did we leave the carriage? Down that street or the next? The next, I think.” She glanced back and saw that the others were following obediently, listening to certain memories of Lincoln upon which Mrs. Hilbery had started. “But what are you doing here?” she asked.
“I’m buying a cottage. I’m going to live here – as soon as I can find a cottage, and Mary tells me there’ll be no difficulty about that.”
“But,” she exclaimed, almost standing still in her surprise, “you will give up the Bar, then?” It flashed across her mind that he must already be engaged to Mary.
“The solicitor’s office? Yes. I’m giving that up.”
“But why?” she asked. She answered herself at once, with a curious change from rapid speech to an almost melancholy tone. “I think you’re very wise to give it up. You will be much happier.”
At this very moment, when her words seemed to be striking a path into the future for him, they stepped into the yard of an inn, and there beheld the family coach of the Otways, to which one sleek horse was already attached, while the second was being led out of the stable door by the hostler.
“I don’t know what one means by happiness,” he said briefly, having to step aside in order to avoid a groom with a bucket. “Why do you think I shall be happy? I don’t expect to be anything of the kind. I expect to be rather less unhappy. I shall write a book and curse my charwoman – if happiness consists in that. What do you think?”
She could not answer because they were immediately surrounded by other members of the party – by Mrs. Hilbery, and Mary, Henry Otway, and William.
Rodney went up to Katharine immediately and said to her:
“Henry is going to drive home with your mother, and I suggest that they should put us down half-way and let us walk back.”
Katharine nodded her head. She glanced at him with an oddly furtive expression.
“Unfortunately we go in opposite directions, or we might have given you a lift,” he continued to Denham. His manner was unusually peremptory; he seemed anxious to hasten the departure, and Katharine looked at him from time to time, as Denham noticed, with an expression half of inquiry, half of annoyance. She at once helped her mother into her cloak, and said to Mary:
“I want to see you. Are you going back to London at once? I will write.” She half smiled at Ralph, but her look was a little overcast by something she was thinking, and in a very few minutes the Otway carriage rolled out of the stable yard and turned down the high road leading to the village of Lampsher.
The return drive was almost as silent as the drive from home had been in the morning; indeed, Mrs. Hilbery leant back with closed eyes in her corner, and either slept or feigned sleep, as her habit was in the intervals between the seasons of active exertion, or continued the story which she had begun to tell herself that morning.
About two miles from Lampsher the road ran over the rounded summit of the heath, a lonely spot marked by an obelisk of granite, setting forth the gratitude of some great lady of the eighteenth century who had been set upon by highwaymen at this spot and delivered from death just as hope seemed lost. In summer it was a pleasant place, for the deep woods on either side murmured, and the heather, which grew thick round the granite pedestal, made the light breeze taste sweetly; in winter the sighing of the trees was deepened to a hollow sound, and the heath was as gray and almost as solitary as the empty sweep of the clouds above it.
Here Rodney stopped the carriage and helped Katharine to alight. Henry, too, gave her his hand, and fancied that she pressed it very slightly in parting as if she sent him a message. But the carriage rolled on immediately, without wakening Mrs. Hilbery, and left the couple standing by the obelisk. That Rodney was angry with her and had made this opportunity for speaking to her, Katharine knew very well; she was neither glad nor sorry that the time had come, nor, indeed, knew what to expect, and thus remained silent. The carriage grew smaller and smaller upon the dusky road, and still Rodney did not speak. Perhaps, she thought, he waited until the last sign of the carriage had disappeared beneath the curve of the road and they were left entirely alone. To cloak their silence she read the writing on the obelisk, to do which she had to walk completely round it. She was murmuring a word to two of the pious lady’s thanks above her breath when Rodney joined her. In silence they set out along the cart-track which skirted the verge of the trees.
To break the silence was exactly what Rodney wished to do, and yet could not do to his own satisfaction. In company it was far easier to approach Katharine; alone with her, the aloofness and force of her character checked all his natural methods of attack. He believed that she had behaved very badly to him, but each separate instance of unkindness seemed too petty to be advanced when they were alone together.
“There’s no need for us to race,” he complained at last; upon which she immediately slackened her pace, and walked too slowly to suit him. In desperation he said the first thing he thought of, very peevishly and without the dignified prelude which he had intended.
“I’ve not enjoyed my holiday.”
“No?”
“No. I shall be glad to get back to work again.”
“Saturday, Sunday, Monday – there are only three days more,” she counted.
“No one enjoys being made a fool of before other people,” he blurted out, for his irritation rose as she spoke, and got the better of his awe of her, and was inflamed by that awe.
“That refers to me, I suppose,” she said calmly.
“Every day since we’ve been here you’ve done something to make me appear ridiculous,” he went on. “Of course, so long as it amuses you, you’re welcome; but we have to remember that we are going to spend our lives together. I asked you, only this morning, for example, to come out and take a turn with me in the garden. I was waiting for you ten minutes, and you never came. Every one saw me waiting. The stable-boys saw me. I was so ashamed that I went in. Then, on the drive you hardly spoke to me. Henry noticed it. Every one notices it… You find no difficulty in talking to Henry, though.”
She noted these various complaints and determined philosophically to answer none of them, although the last stung her to considerable irritation. She wished to find out how deep his grievance lay.
“None of these things seem to me to matter,” she said.
“Very well, then. I may as well hold my tongue,” he replied.
“In themselves they don’t seem to me to matter; if they hurt you, of course they matter,” she corrected herself scrupulously. Her tone of consideration touched him, and he walked on in silence for a space.
“And we might be so happy, Katharine!” he exclaimed impulsively, and drew her arm through his. She withdrew it directly.
“As long as you let yourself feel like this we shall never be happy,” she said.
The harshness, which Henry had noticed, was again unmistakable in her manner. William flinched and was silent. Such severity, accompanied by something indescribably cold and impersonal in her manner, had constantly been meted out to him during the last few days, always in the company of others. He had recouped himself by some ridiculous display of vanity which, as he knew, put him still more at her mercy. Now that he was alone with her there was no stimulus from outside to draw his attention from his injury. By a considerable effort of self-control he forced himself to remain silent, and to make himself distinguish what part of his pain was due to vanity, what part to the certainty that no woman really loving him could speak thus.
“What do I feel about Katharine?” he thought to himself. It was clear that she had been a very desirable and distinguished figure, the mistress of her little section of the world; but more than that, she was the person of all others who seemed to him the arbitress of life, the woman whose judgment was naturally right and steady, as his had never been in spite of all his culture. And then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.
“If she were callous all the time and had only led me on to laugh at me I couldn’t have felt that about her,” he thought. “I’m not a fool, after all. I can’t have been utterly mistaken all these years. And yet, when she speaks to me like that! The truth of it is,” he thought, “that I’ve got such despicable faults that no one could help speaking to me like that. Katharine is quite right. And yet those are not my serious feelings, as she knows quite well. How can I change myself? What would make her care for me?” He was terribly tempted here to break the silence by asking Katharine in what respects he could change himself to suit her; but he sought consolation instead by running over the list of his gifts and acquirements, his knowledge of Greek and Latin, his knowledge of art and literature, his skill in the management of meters, and his ancient west-country blood. But the feeling that underlay all these feelings and puzzled him profoundly and kept him silent was the certainty that he loved Katharine as sincerely as he had it in him to love any one. And yet she could speak to him like that! In a sort of bewilderment he lost all desire to speak, and would quite readily have taken up some different topic of conversation if Katharine had started one. This, however, she did not do.
He glanced at her, in case her expression might help him to understand her behavior. As usual, she had quickened her pace unconsciously, and was now walking a little in front of him; but he could gain little information from her eyes, which looked steadily at the brown heather, or from the lines drawn seriously upon her forehead. Thus to lose touch with her, for he had no idea what she was thinking, was so unpleasant to him that he began to talk about his grievances again, without, however, much conviction in his voice.
“If you have no feeling for me, wouldn’t it be kinder to say so to me in private?”
“Oh, William,” she burst out, as if he had interrupted some absorbing train of thought, “how you go on about feelings! Isn’t it better not to talk so much, not to be worrying always about small things that don’t really matter?”
“That’s the question precisely,” he exclaimed. “I only want you to tell me that they don’t matter. There are times when you seem indifferent to everything. I’m vain, I’ve a thousand faults; but you know they’re not everything; you know I care for you.”
“And if I say that I care for you, don’t you believe me?”
“Say it, Katharine! Say it as if you meant it! Make me feel that you care for me!”
She could not force herself to speak a word. The heather was growing dim around them, and the horizon was blotted out by white mist. To ask her for passion or for certainty seemed like asking that damp prospect for fierce blades of fire, or the faded sky for the intense blue vault of June.
He went on now to tell her of his love for her, in words which bore, even to her critical senses, the stamp of truth; but none of this touched her, until, coming to a gate whose hinge was rusty, he heaved it open with his shoulder, still talking and taking no account of his effort. The virility of this deed impressed her; and yet, normally, she attached no value to the power of opening gates. The strength of muscles has nothing to do on the face of it with the strength of affections; nevertheless, she felt a sudden concern for this power running to waste on her account, which, combined with a desire to keep possession of that strangely attractive masculine power, made her rouse herself from her torpor.
Why should she not simply tell him the truth – which was that she had accepted him in a misty state of mind when nothing had its right shape or size? that it was deplorable, but that with clearer eyesight marriage was out of the question? She did not want to marry any one. She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some bleak northern moor, and there study mathematics and the science of astronomy. Twenty words would explain the whole situation to him. He had ceased to speak; he had told her once more how he loved her and why. She summoned her courage, fixed her eyes upon a lightning-splintered ash-tree, and, almost as if she were reading a writing fixed to the trunk, began:
“I was wrong to get engaged to you. I shall never make you happy. I have never loved you.”
“Katharine!” he protested.
“No, never,” she repeated obstinately. “Not rightly. Don’t you see, I didn’t know what I was doing?”
“You love some one else?” he cut her short.
“Absolutely no one.”
“Henry?” he demanded.
“Henry? I should have thought, William, even you – ”
“There is some one,” he persisted. “There has been a change in the last few weeks. You owe it to me to be honest, Katharine.”
“If I could, I would,” she replied.
“Why did you tell me you would marry me, then?” he demanded.
Why, indeed? A moment of pessimism, a sudden conviction of the undeniable prose of life, a lapse of the illusion which sustains youth midway between heaven and earth, a desperate attempt to reconcile herself with facts – she could only recall a moment, as of waking from a dream, which now seemed to her a moment of surrender. But who could give reasons such as these for doing what she had done? She shook her head very sadly.
“But you’re not a child – you’re not a woman of moods,” Rodney persisted. “You couldn’t have accepted me if you hadn’t loved me!” he cried.
A sense of her own misbehavior, which she had succeeded in keeping from her by sharpening her consciousness of Rodney’s faults, now swept over her and almost overwhelmed her. What were his faults in comparison with the fact that he cared for her? What were her virtues in comparison with the fact that she did not care for him? In a flash the conviction that not to care is the uttermost sin of all stamped itself upon her inmost thought; and she felt herself branded for ever.
He had taken her arm, and held her hand firmly in his, nor had she the force to resist what now seemed to her his enormously superior strength. Very well; she would submit, as her mother and her aunt and most women, perhaps, had submitted; and yet she knew that every second of such submission to his strength was a second of treachery to him.
“I did say I would marry you, but it was wrong,” she forced herself to say, and she stiffened her arm as if to annul even the seeming submission of that separate part of her; “for I don’t love you, William; you’ve noticed it, every one’s noticed it; why should we go on pretending? When I told you I loved you, I was wrong. I said what I knew to be untrue.”
As none of her words seemed to her at all adequate to represent what she felt, she repeated them, and emphasized them without realizing the effect that they might have upon a man who cared for her. She was completely taken aback by finding her arm suddenly dropped; then she saw his face most strangely contorted; was he laughing, it flashed across her? In another moment she saw that he was in tears. In her bewilderment at this apparition she stood aghast for a second. With a desperate sense that this horror must, at all costs, be stopped, she then put her arms about him, drew his head for a moment upon her shoulder, and led him on, murmuring words of consolation, until he heaved a great sigh. They held fast to each other; her tears, too, ran down her cheeks; and were both quite silent. Noticing the difficulty with which he walked, and feeling the same extreme lassitude in her own limbs, she proposed that they should rest for a moment where the bracken was brown and shriveled beneath an oak-tree. He assented. Once more he gave a great sigh, and wiped his eyes with a childlike unconsciousness, and began to speak without a trace of his previous anger. The idea came to her that they were like the children in the fairy tale who were lost in a wood, and with this in her mind she noticed the scattering of dead leaves all round them which had been blown by the wind into heaps, a foot or two deep, here and there.
“When did you begin to feel this, Katharine?” he said; “for it isn’t true to say that you’ve always felt it. I admit I was unreasonable the first night when you found that your clothes had been left behind. Still, where’s the fault in that? I could promise you never to interfere with your clothes again. I admit I was cross when I found you upstairs with Henry. Perhaps I showed it too openly. But that’s not unreasonable either when one’s engaged. Ask your mother. And now this terrible thing – ” He broke off, unable for the moment to proceed any further. “This decision you say you’ve come to – have you discussed it with any one? Your mother, for example, or Henry?”
“No, no, of course not,” she said, stirring the leaves with her hand. “But you don’t understand me, William – ”
“Help me to understand you – ”
“You don’t understand, I mean, my real feelings; how could you? I’ve only now faced them myself. But I haven’t got the sort of feeling – love, I mean – I don’t know what to call it” – she looked vaguely towards the horizon sunk under mist – “but, anyhow, without it our marriage would be a farce – ”
“How a farce?” he asked. “But this kind of analysis is disastrous!” he exclaimed.
“I should have done it before,” she said gloomily.
“You make yourself think things you don’t think,” he continued, becoming demonstrative with his hands, as his manner was. “Believe me, Katharine, before we came here we were perfectly happy. You were full of plans for our house – the chair-covers, don’t you remember? – like any other woman who is about to be married. Now, for no reason whatever, you begin to fret about your feeling and about my feeling, with the usual result. I assure you, Katharine, I’ve been through it all myself. At one time I was always asking myself absurd questions which came to nothing either. What you want, if I may say so, is some occupation to take you out of yourself when this morbid mood comes on. If it hadn’t been for my poetry, I assure you, I should often have been very much in the same state myself. To let you into a secret,” he continued, with his little chuckle, which now sounded almost assured, “I’ve often gone home from seeing you in such a state of nerves that I had to force myself to write a page or two before I could get you out of my head. Ask Denham; he’ll tell you how he met me one night; he’ll tell you what a state he found me in.”
Katharine started with displeasure at the mention of Ralph’s name. The thought of the conversation in which her conduct had been made a subject for discussion with Denham roused her anger; but, as she instantly felt, she had scarcely the right to grudge William any use of her name, seeing what her fault against him had been from first to last. And yet Denham! She had a view of him as a judge. She figured him sternly weighing instances of her levity in this masculine court of inquiry into feminine morality and gruffly dismissing both her and her family with some half-sarcastic, half-tolerant phrase which sealed her doom, as far as he was concerned, for ever. Having met him so lately, the sense of his character was strong in her. The thought was not a pleasant one for a proud woman, but she had yet to learn the art of subduing her expression. Her eyes fixed upon the ground, her brows drawn together, gave William a very fair picture of the resentment that she was forcing herself to control. A certain degree of apprehension, occasionally culminating in a kind of fear, had always entered into his love for her, and had increased, rather to his surprise, in the greater intimacy of their engagement. Beneath her steady, exemplary surface ran a vein of passion which seemed to him now perverse, now completely irrational, for it never took the normal channel of glorification of him and his doings; and, indeed, he almost preferred the steady good sense, which had always marked their relationship, to a more romantic bond. But passion she had, he could not deny it, and hitherto he had tried to see it employed in his thoughts upon the lives of the children who were to be born to them.
“She will make a perfect mother – a mother of sons,” he thought; but seeing her sitting there, gloomy and silent, he began to have his doubts on this point. “A farce, a farce,” he thought to himself. “She said that our marriage would be a farce,” and he became suddenly aware of their situation, sitting upon the ground, among the dead leaves, not fifty yards from the main road, so that it was quite possible for some one passing to see and recognize them. He brushed off his face any trace that might remain of that unseemly exhibition of emotion. But he was more troubled by Katharine’s appearance, as she sat rapt in thought upon the ground, than by his own; there was something improper to him in her self-forgetfulness. A man naturally alive to the conventions of society, he was strictly conventional where women were concerned, and especially if the women happened to be in any way connected with him. He noticed with distress the long strand of dark hair touching her shoulder and two or three dead beech-leaves attached to her dress; but to recall her mind in their present circumstances to a sense of these details was impossible. She sat there, seeming unconscious of everything. He suspected that in her silence she was reproaching herself; but he wished that she would think of her hair and of the dead beech-leaves, which were of more immediate importance to him than anything else. Indeed, these trifles drew his attention strangely from his own doubtful and uneasy state of mind; for relief, mixing itself with pain, stirred up a most curious hurry and tumult in his breast, almost concealing his first sharp sense of bleak and overwhelming disappointment. In order to relieve this restlessness and close a distressingly ill-ordered scene, he rose abruptly and helped Katharine to her feet. She smiled a little at the minute care with which he tidied her and yet, when he brushed the dead leaves from his own coat, she flinched, seeing in that action the gesture of a lonely man.
“William,” she said, “I will marry you. I will try to make you happy.”