Datchet had begun this confusion two years ago by bursting
into laughter at some remark of his, almost the first
time they met. She could not explain why it was. She
thought him quite astonishingly odd. When he knew her
well enough to tell her how he spent Monday and Wednesday
and Saturday, she was still more amused; she laughed
till he laughed, too, without knowing why. It seemed to
her very odd that he should know as much about breeding
bulldogs as any man in England; that he had a collection
of wild flowers found near London; and his weekly
visit to old Miss Trotter at Ealing, who was an authority
upon the science of Heraldry, never failed to excite her
laughter. She wanted to know everything, even the kind of
cake which the old lady supplied on these occasions; and
their summer excursions to churches in the neighborhood
of London for the purpose of taking rubbings of the brasses
became most important festivals, from the interest she
took in them. In six months she knew more about his odd
friends and hobbies than his own brothers and sisters knew,
after living with him all his life; and Ralph found this very
pleasant, though disordering, for his own view of himself
had always been profoundly serious.
Certainly it was very pleasant to be with Mary Datchet
and to become, directly the door was shut, quite a different
sort of person, eccentric and lovable, with scarcely any
likeness to the self most people knew. He became less
serious, and rather less dictatorial at home, for he was apt
to hear Mary laughing at him, and telling him, as she was
fond of doing, that he knew nothing at all about anything.
She made him, also, take an interest in public questions,
for which she had a natural liking; and was in process of
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turning him from Tory to Radical, after a course of public
meetings, which began by boring him acutely, and ended
by exciting him even more than they excited her.
But he was reserved; when ideas started up in his mind,
he divided them automatically into those he could discuss
with Mary, and those he must keep for himself. She
knew this and it interested her, for she was accustomed
to find young men very ready to talk about themselves,
and had come to listen to them as one listens to children,
without any thought of herself. But with Ralph, she
had very little of this maternal feeling, and, in consequence,
a much keener sense of her own individuality.
Late one afternoon Ralph stepped along the Strand to
an interview with a lawyer upon business. The afternoon
light was almost over, and already streams of greenish
and yellowish artificial light were being poured into an
atmosphere which, in country lanes, would now have been
soft with the smoke of wood fires; and on both sides of
the road the shop windows were full of sparkling chains
and highly polished leather cases, which stood upon
shelves made of thick plate-glass. None of these differ
ent objects was seen separately by Denham, but from all
of them he drew an impression of stir and cheerfulness.
Thus it came about that he saw Katharine Hilbery coming
towards him, and looked straight at her, as if she were
only an illustration of the argument that was going forward
in his mind. In this spirit he noticed the rather set
expression in her eyes, and the slight, half-conscious
movement of her lips, which, together with her height
and the distinction of her dress, made her look as if the
scurrying crowd impeded her, and her direction were different
from theirs. He noticed this calmly; but suddenly,
as he passed her, his hands and knees began to tremble,
and his heart beat painfully. She did not see him, and
went on repeating to herself some lines which had stuck
to her memory: “It’s life that matters, nothing but life—
the process of discovering —the everlasting and perpetual
process, not the discovery itself at all.” Thus occupied,
she did not see Denham, and he had not the courage to
stop her. But immediately the whole scene in the Strand
wore that curious look of order and purpose which is imparted
to the most heterogeneous things when music
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sounds; and so pleasant was this impression that he was
very glad that he had not stopped her, after all. It grew
slowly fainter, but lasted until he stood outside the
barrister’s chambers.
When his interview with the barrister was over, it was
too late to go back to the office. His sight of Katharine
had put him queerly out of tune for a domestic evening.
Where should he go? To walk through the streets of London
until he came to Katharine’s house, to look up at the
windows and fancy her within, seemed to him possible
for a moment; and then he rejected the plan almost with
a blush as, with a curious division of consciousness, one
plucks a flower sentimentally and throws it away, with a
blush, when it is actually picked. No, he would go and
see Mary Datchet. By this time she would be back from
her work.
To see Ralph appear unexpectedly in her room threw
Mary for a second off her balance. She had been cleaning
knives in her little scullery, and when she had let him in
she went back again, and turned on the cold-water tap
to its fullest volume, and then turned it off again. “Now,”
she thought to herself, as she screwed it tight, “I’m not
going to let these silly ideas come into my head… . Don’t
you think Mr. Asquith deserves to be hanged?” she called
back into the sitting-room, and when she joined him,
drying her hands, she began to tell him about the latest
evasion on the part of the Government with respect to
the Women’s Suffrage Bill. Ralph did not want to talk
about politics, but he could not help respecting Mary for
taking such an interest in public questions. He looked at
her as she leant forward, poking the fire, and expressing
herself very clearly in phrases which bore distantly the
taint of the platform, and he thought, “How absurd Mary
would think me if she knew that I almost made up my
mind to walk all the way to Chelsea in order to look at
Katharine’s windows. She wouldn’t understand it, but I
like her very much as she is.”
For some time they discussed what the women had better
do; and as Ralph became genuinely interested in the
question, Mary unconsciously let her attention wander,
and a great desire came over her to talk to Ralph about
her own feelings; or, at any rate, about something per
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sonal, so that she might see what he felt for her; but she
resisted this wish. But she could not prevent him from
feeling her lack of interest in what he was saying, and
gradually they both became silent. One thought after
another came up in Ralph’s mind, but they were all, in
some way, connected with Katharine, or with vague feelings
of romance and adventure such as she inspired. But
he could not talk to Mary about such thoughts; and he
pitied her for knowing nothing of what he was feeling.
“Here,” he thought, “is where we differ from women; they
have no sense of romance.”
“Well, Mary,” he said at length, “why don’t you say something
amusing?”
His tone was certainly provoking, but, as a general rule,
Mary was not easily provoked. This evening, however, she
replied rather sharply:
“Because I’ve got nothing amusing to say, I suppose.”
Ralph thought for a moment, and then remarked:
“You work too hard. I don’t mean your health,” he added,
as she laughed scornfully, “I mean that you seem to me
to be getting wrapped up in your work.”
“And is that a bad thing?” she asked, shading her eyes
with her hand.
“I think it is,” he returned abruptly.
“But only a week ago you were saying the opposite.”
Her tone was defiant, but she became curiously depressed.
Ralph did not perceive it, and took this opportunity of
lecturing her, and expressing his latest views upon the
proper conduct of life. She listened, but her main impression
was that he had been meeting some one who had
influenced him. He was telling her that she ought to read
more, and to see that there were other points of view as
deserving of attention as her own. Naturally, having last
seen him as he left the office in company with Katharine,
she attributed the change to her; it was likely that
Katharine, on leaving the scene which she had so clearly
despised, had pronounced some such criticism, or suggested
it by her own attitude. But she knew that Ralph
would never admit that he had been influenced by anybody.
“You don’t read enough, Mary,” he was saying. “You
ought to read more poetry.”
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It was true that Mary’s reading had been rather limited
to such works as she needed to know for the sake of
examinations; and her time for reading in London was
very little. For some reason, no one likes to be told that
they do not read enough poetry, but her resentment was
only visible in the way she changed the position of her
hands, and in the fixed look in her eyes. And then she
thought to herself, “I’m behaving exactly as I said I
wouldn’t behave,” whereupon she relaxed all her muscles
and said, in her reasonable way:
“Tell me what I ought to read, then.”
Ralph had unconsciously been irritated by Mary, and he
now delivered himself of a few names of great poets which
were the text for a discourse upon the imperfection of
Mary’s character and way of life.
“You live with your inferiors,” he said, warming unreasonably,
as he knew, to his text. “And you get into a
groove because, on the whole, it’s rather a pleasant groove.
And you tend to forget what you’re there for. You’ve the
feminine habit of making much of details. You don’t see
when things matter and when they don’t. And that’s what’s
the ruin of all these organizations. That’s why the Suffragists
have never done anything all these years. What’s
the point of drawing-room meetings and bazaars? You
want to have ideas, Mary; get hold of something big;
never mind making mistakes, but don’t niggle. Why don’t
you throw it all up for a year, and travel?—see something
of the world. Don’t be content to live with half a
dozen people in a backwater all your life. But you won’t,”
he concluded.
“I’ve rather come to that way of thinking myself—about
myself, I mean,” said Mary, surprising him by her acquiescence.
“I should like to go somewhere far away.”
For a moment they were both silent. Ralph then said:
“But look here, Mary, you haven’t been taking this seriously,
have you?” His irritation was spent, and the depression,
which she could not keep out of her voice, made him
feel suddenly with remorse that he had been hurting her.
“You won’t go away, will you?” he asked. And as she
said nothing, he added, “Oh no, don’t go away.”
“I don’t know exactly what I mean to do,” she replied.
She hovered on the verge of some discussion of her plans,
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but she received no encouragement. He fell into one of
his queer silences, which seemed to Mary, in spite of all
her precautions, to have reference to what she also could
not prevent herself from thinking about—their feeling
for each other and their relationship. She felt that the
two lines of thought bored their way in long, parallel
tunnels which came very close indeed, but never ran into
each other.
When he had gone, and he left her without breaking his
silence more than was needed to wish her good night,
she sat on for a time, reviewing what he had said. If love
is a devastating fire which melts the whole being into
one mountain torrent, Mary was no more in love with
Denham than she was in love with her poker or her tongs.
But probably these extreme passions are very rare, and
the state of mind thus depicted belongs to the very last
stages of love, when the power to resist has been eaten
away, week by week or day by day. Like most intelligent
people, Mary was something of an egoist, to the extent,
that is, of attaching great importance to what she felt,
and she was by nature enough of a moralist to like to
make certain, from time to time, that her feelings were
creditable to her. When Ralph left her she thought over
her state of mind, and came to the conclusion that it
would be a good thing to learn a language—say Italian
or German. She then went to a drawer, which she had to
unlock, and took from it certain deeply scored manuscript
pages. She read them through, looking up from her
reading every now and then and thinking very intently
for a few seconds about Ralph. She did her best to verify
all the qualities in him which gave rise to emotions in
her; and persuaded herself that she accounted reasonably
for them all. Then she looked back again at her manuscript,
and decided that to write grammatical English prose
is the hardest thing in the world. But she thought about
herself a great deal more than she thought about grammatical
English prose or about Ralph Denham, and it may
therefore be disputed whether she was in love, or, if so,
to which branch of the family her passion belonged.
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CHAPTER XI
It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of
discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process,” said
Katharine, as she passed under the archway, and so into
the wide space of King’s Bench Walk, “not the discovery
itself at all.” She spoke the last words looking up at
Rodney’s windows, which were a semilucent red color, in
her honor, as she knew. He had asked her to tea with
him. But she was in a mood when it is almost physically
disagreeable to interrupt the stride of one’s thought, and
she walked up and down two or three times under the
trees before approaching his staircase. She liked getting
hold of some book which neither her father or mother
