saying to herself, as she lit her fire, that it is impossible
to think anything out in London; and, no doubt, Ralph
wouldn’t come at Christmas, and she would take long
walks into the heart of the country, and decide this question
and all the others that puzzled her. Meanwhile, she
thought, drawing her feet up on to the fender, life was
full of complexity; life was a thing one must love to the
last fiber of it.
She had sat there for five minutes or so, and her thoughts
had had time to grow dim, when there came a ring at her
bell. Her eye brightened; she felt immediately convinced
that Ralph had come to visit her. Accordingly, she waited
a moment before opening the door; she wanted to feel
her hands secure upon the reins of all the troublesome
emotions which the sight of Ralph would certainly arouse.
She composed herself unnecessarily, however, for she had
to admit, not Ralph, but Katharine and William Rodney.
Her first impression was that they were both extremely
well dressed. She felt herself shabby and slovenly beside
them, and did not know how she should entertain them,
nor could she guess why they had come. She had heard
nothing of their engagement. But after the first disappointment,
she was pleased, for she felt instantly that
Katharine was a personality, and, moreover, she need not
now exercise her self-control.
“We were passing and saw a light in your window, so we
came up,” Katharine explained, standing and looking very
tall and distinguished and rather absent-minded.
“We have been to see some pictures,” said William. “Oh,
dear,” he exclaimed, looking about him, “this room reminds
me of one of the worst hours in my existence—
when I read a paper, and you all sat round and jeered at
me. Katharine was the worst. I could feel her gloating over
every mistake I made. Miss Datchet was kind. Miss Datchet
just made it possible for me to get through, I remember.”
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Sitting down, he drew off his light yellow gloves, and
began slapping his knees with them. His vitality was pleasant,
Mary thought, although he made her laugh. The very
look of him was inclined to make her laugh. His rather
prominent eyes passed from one young woman to the
other, and his lips perpetually formed words which remained
unspoken.
“We have been seeing old masters at the Grafton Gallery,”
said Katharine, apparently paying no attention to
William, and accepting a cigarette which Mary offered
her. She leant back in her chair, and the smoke which
hung about her face seemed to withdraw her still further
from the others.
“Would you believe it, Miss Datchet,” William continued,
“Katharine doesn’t like Titian. She doesn’t like apricots,
she doesn’t like peaches, she doesn’t like green peas.
She likes the Elgin marbles, and gray days without any
sun. She’s a typical example of the cold northern nature.
I come from Devonshire—”
Had they been quarreling, Mary wondered, and had they,
for that reason, sought refuge in her room, or were they
engaged, or had Katharine just refused him? She was
completely baffled.
Katharine now reappeared from her veil of smoke,
knocked the ash from her cigarette into the fireplace,
and looked, with an odd expression of solicitude, at the
irritable man.
“Perhaps, Mary,” she said tentatively, “you wouldn’t mind
giving us some tea? We did try to get some, but the shop
was so crowded, and in the next one there was a band
playing; and most of the pictures, at any rate, were very
dull, whatever you may say, William.” She spoke with a
kind of guarded gentleness.
Mary, accordingly, retired to make preparations in the
pantry.
“What in the world are they after?” she asked of her
own reflection in the little looking-glass which hung there.
She was not left to doubt much longer, for, on coming
back into the sitting-room with the tea-things, Katharine
informed her, apparently having been instructed so to do
by William, of their engagement.
“William,” she said, “thinks that perhaps you don’t know.
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Night and Day
We are going to be married.”
Mary found herself shaking William’s hand, and addressing
her congratulations to him, as if Katharine were inaccessible;
she had, indeed, taken hold of the tea-kettle.
“Let me see,” Katharine said, “one puts hot water into
the cups first, doesn’t one? You have some dodge of your
own, haven’t you, William, about making tea?”
Mary was half inclined to suspect that this was said in
order to conceal nervousness, but if so, the concealment
was unusually perfect. Talk of marriage was dismissed.
Katharine might have been seated in her own drawing-
room, controlling a situation which presented no sort of
difficulty to her trained mind. Rather to her surprise, Mary
found herself making conversation with William about
old Italian pictures, while Katharine poured out tea, cut
cake, kept William’s plate supplied, without joining more
than was necessary in the conversation. She seemed to
have taken possession of Mary’s room, and to handle the
cups as if they belonged to her. But it was done so naturally
that it bred no resentment in Mary; on the contrary,
she found herself putting her hand on Katharine’s knee,
affectionately, for an instant. Was there something maternal
in this assumption of control? And thinking of
Katharine as one who would soon be married, these maternal
airs filled Mary’s mind with a new tenderness, and
even with awe. Katharine seemed very much older and
more experienced than she was.
Meanwhile Rodney talked. If his appearance was superficially
against him, it had the advantage of making his
solid merits something of a surprise. He had kept notebooks;
he knew a great deal about pictures. He could compare
different examples in different galleries, and his authoritative
answers to intelligent questions gained not a
little, Mary felt, from the smart taps which he dealt, as he
delivered them, upon the lumps of coal. She was impressed.
“Your tea, William,” said Katharine gently.
He paused, gulped it down, obediently, and continued.
And then it struck Mary that Katharine, in the shade of
her broad-brimmed hat, and in the midst of the smoke,
and in the obscurity of her character, was, perhaps, smiling
to herself, not altogether in the maternal spirit. What
she said was very simple, but her words, even “Your tea,
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William,” were set down as gently and cautiously and
exactly as the feet of a Persian cat stepping among China
ornaments. For the second time that day Mary felt herself
baffled by something inscrutable in the character of a
person to whom she felt herself much attracted. She
thought that if she were engaged to Katharine, she, too,
would find herself very soon using those fretful questions
with which William evidently teased his bride. And
yet Katharine’s voice was humble.
“I wonder how you find the time to know all about
pictures as well as books?” she asked.
“How do I find the time?” William answered, delighted,
Mary guessed, at this little compliment. “Why, I always
travel with a notebook. And I ask my way to the picture
gallery the very first thing in the morning. And then I
meet men, and talk to them. There’s a man in my office
who knows all about the Flemish school. I was telling
Miss Datchet about the Flemish school. I picked up a lot
of it from him—it’s a way men have—Gibbons, his name
is. You must meet him. We’ll ask him to lunch. And this
not caring about art,” he explained, turning to Mary, “it’s
one of Katharine’s poses, Miss Datchet. Did you know she
posed? She pretends that she’s never read Shakespeare.
And why should she read Shakespeare, since she IS
Shakespeare—Rosalind, you know,” and he gave his queer
little chuckle. Somehow this compliment appeared very
old-fashioned and almost in bad taste. Mary actually felt
herself blush, as if he had said “the sex” or “the ladies.”
Constrained, perhaps, by nervousness, Rodney continued
in the same vein.
“She knows enough—enough for all decent purposes.
What do you women want with learning, when you have
so much else—everything, I should say—everything.
Leave us something, eh, Katharine?”
“Leave you something?” said Katharine, apparently waking
from a brown study. “I was thinking we must be going—”
“Is it to-night that Lady Ferrilby dines with us? No, we
mustn’t be late,” said Rodney, rising. “D’you know the
Ferrilbys, Miss Datchet? They own Trantem Abbey,” he
added, for her information, as she looked doubtful. “And
if Katharine makes herself very charming to-night,
perhaps’ll lend it to us for the honeymoon.”
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Night and Day
“I agree that may be a reason. Otherwise she’s a dull
woman,” said Katharine. “At least,” she added, as if to
qualify her abruptness, “I find it difficult to talk to her.”
“Because you expect every one else to take all the
trouble. I’ve seen her sit silent a whole evening,” he said,
turning to Mary, as he had frequently done already. “Don’t
you find that, too? Sometimes when we’re alone, I’ve
counted the time on my watch”—here he took out a large
gold watch, and tapped the glass—”the time between
one remark and the next. And once I counted ten minutes
and twenty seconds, and then, if you’ll believe me,
she only said ‘Um!’”
“I’m sure I’m sorry,” Katharine apologized. “I know it’s
a bad habit, but then, you see, at home—”
The rest of her excuse was cut short, so far as Mary was
concerned, by the closing of the door. She fancied she
could hear William finding fresh fault on the stairs. A
moment later, the door-bell rang again, and Katharine
reappeared, having left her purse on a chair. She soon
found it, and said, pausing for a moment at the door, and
speaking differently as they were alone:
“I think being engaged is very bad for the character.”
She shook her purse in her hand until the coins jingled,
as if she alluded merely to this example of her forgetfulness.
But the remark puzzled Mary; it seemed to refer to
something else; and her manner had changed so strangely,
now that William was out of hearing, that she could not
help looking at her for an explanation. She looked almost
stern, so that Mary, trying to smile at her, only succeeded
in producing a silent stare of interrogation.
As the door shut for the second time, she sank on to
the floor in front of the fire, trying, now that their bodies
were not there to distract her, to piece together her impressions
of them as a whole. And, though priding herself,
with all other men and women, upon an infallible
eye for character, she could not feel at all certain that
she knew what motives inspired Katharine Hilbery in life.
There was something that carried her on smoothly, out of
reach—something, yes, but what?—something that reminded
Mary of Ralph. Oddly enough, he gave her the
same feeling, too, and with him, too, she felt baffled.
Oddly enough, for no two people, she hastily concluded,
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were more unlike. And yet both had this hidden impulse,
this incalculable force —this thing they cared for and
didn’t talk about—oh, what was it?
CHAPTER XV
The village of Disham lies somewhere on the rolling piece
of cultivated ground in the neighborhood of Lincoln, not
so far inland but that a sound, bringing rumors of the
sea, can be heard on summer nights or when the winter
storms fling the waves upon the long beach. So large is
the church, and in particular the church tower, in comparison
with the little street of cottages which compose
the village, that the traveler is apt to cast his mind back
to the Middle Ages, as the only time when so much piety
could have been kept alive. So great a trust in the Church
can surely not belong to our day, and he goes on to conjecture
that every one of the villagers has reached the
extreme limit of human life. Such are the reflections of
the superficial stranger, and his sight of the population,
as it is represented by two or three men hoeing in a
turnip-field, a small child carrying a jug, and a young
woman shaking a piece of carpet outside her cottage door,
will not lead him to see anything very much out of keeping
with the Middle Ages in the village of Disham as it is
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Night and Day
to-day. These people, though they seem young enough,
look so angular and so crude that they remind him of the
little pictures painted by monks in the capital letters of
their manuscripts. He only half understands what they
say, and speaks very loud and clearly, as though, indeed,
his voice had to carry through a hundred years or more
before it reached them. He would have a far better chance
of understanding some dweller in Paris or Rome, Berlin or
Madrid, than these countrymen of his who have lived for
the last two thousand years not two hundred miles from
the City of London.
The Rectory stands about half a mile beyond the village.
It is a large house, and has been growing steadily
for some centuries round the great kitchen, with its narrow
red tiles, as the Rector would point out to his guests
on the first night of their arrival, taking his brass candlestick,
and bidding them mind the steps up and the steps
down, and notice the immense thickness of the walls, the
old beams across the ceiling, the staircases as steep as
ladders, and the attics, with their deep, tent-like roofs,
in which swallows bred, and once a white owl. But noth
ing very interesting or very beautiful had resulted from
the different additions made by the different rectors.
The house, however, was surrounded by a garden, in
which the Rector took considerable pride. The lawn, which
fronted the drawing-room windows, was a rich and uniform
