she knew I was lying, and refused me. I thought then,
and still think, that she cares for me. I behaved very
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badly. I don’t defend myself.”
“No,” said Katharine, “I should hope not. There’s no
defence that I can think of. If any conduct is wrong, that
is.” She spoke with an energy that was directed even
more against herself than against him. “It seems to me,”
she continued, with the same energy, “that people are
bound to be honest. There’s no excuse for such behavior.”
She could now see plainly 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 with you.”
“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 slightly over the balustrade of the river,
looked into the flowing water.
“You say that we’ve got to be honest,” Ralph began.
“Very well. I will try to tell you the facts; but I warn you,
you’ll think me mad. It’s a fact, though, that since I first
saw you four or five months ago I have made you, in an
utterly absurd way, I expect, my ideal. I’m almost ashamed
to tell you what lengths I’ve gone to. It’s become the
thing that matters most in my life.” He checked himself.
“Without knowing you, except that you’re beautiful, and
all that, I’ve come to believe that we’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’m always thinking what you’d say or do; I walk
along the street talking to 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. “We don’t know each other—we’ve always been—
interrupted… . Were you going to tell me this that day
my aunts came?” she asked, recollecting the whole scene.
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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. “I should feel it more reasonably—that’s all.
I shouldn’t talk the kind of nonsense I’ve talked to-night…
. But it wasn’t nonsense. It was the truth,” he said doggedly.
“It’s the important thing. You can force me to talk
as if this feeling for you were an hallucination, but all
our feelings are that. The best of them are half illusions.
Still,” he added, as if arguing to himself, “if it weren’t as
real a feeling as I’m capable 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 he remained 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 his pleasure she went on, appearing to search
her mind.
“I thought that you criticized me—perhaps disliked me.
I thought of you as 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 that he had meant to say at first; how he stood
with regard to his brothers and sisters; what his mother
had said, and his sister Joan had refrained from saying;
exactly how many pounds stood in his name at the bank;
what prospect his brother had of earning a livelihood in
America; how much of their income went on rent, and
other details known to him by heart. She listened to all
this, so that she could have passed an examination in it
by the time Waterloo Bridge was in sight; and yet she
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was no more listening to it than she was counting the
paving-stones at her feet. She was feeling happier than
she had felt in her life. If Denham could have seen how
visibly books of algebraic symbols, pages all speckled with
dots and dashes and twisted bars, came before her eyes
as they trod the Embankment, 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 had constantly to keep his brain in check; and all the
time she was in fancy looking up through a telescope at
white shadow-cleft disks which were other worlds, until
she felt herself possessed of two bodies, one walking by
the river with Denham, the other concentrated to a silver
globe aloft in the fine blue space above the scum of
vapors that was covering the visible world. She looked at
the sky once, and saw that no star was keen enough to
pierce the flight of watery clouds now coursing rapidly
before the west wind. She looked down hurriedly again.
There was no reason, she assured herself, for this feeling
of happiness; she was not free; she was not alone; she
was still bound to earth by a million fibres; every step took
her nearer home. Nevertheless, she exulted as she had never
exulted before. The air was fresher, the lights more distinct,
the cold stone of the balustrade colder and harder,
when by chance or purpose she struck her hand against it.
No feeling of annoyance with Denham remained; he certainly
did not hinder any flight she might choose to make,
whether in the direction of the sky or of her home; but
that her condition was due to him, or to anything that he
had said, she had no consciousness at all.
They were now within sight of the stream of cabs and
omnibuses crossing to and from the Surrey side of the
river; the sound of the traffic, the hooting of motor-horns,
and the light chime of tram-bells sounded more and more
distinctly, and, with the increase of noise, they both became
silent. With a common instinct they slackened their
pace, as if to lengthen the time of semi-privacy allowed
them. To Ralph, the pleasure of these last yards of the
walk with Katharine was so great that he could not look
beyond the present moment to the time when she should
have left him. He had no wish to use the last moments of
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their companionship in adding fresh words to what he
had already said. Since they had stopped talking, she
had become to him not so much a real person, as the
very woman he dreamt of; but his solitary dreams had
never produced any such keenness of sensation as that
which he felt in her presence. He himself was also strangely
transfigured. He had complete mastery of all his faculties.
For the first time he was in possession of his full
powers. The vistas which opened before him seemed to
have no perceptible end. But the mood had none of the
restlessness or feverish desire to add one delight to another
which had hitherto marked, and somewhat spoilt,
the most rapturous of his imaginings. It was a mood that
took such clear-eyed account of the conditions of human
life that he was not disturbed in the least by the gliding
presence of a taxicab, and without agitation he perceived
that Katharine was conscious of it also, and turned her
head in that direction. Their halting steps acknowledged
the desirability of engaging the cab; and they stopped
simultaneously, 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 the question 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 a question to which she had paid no
attention, “I don’t see how to manage it.”
She stood looking at Denham, considering and hesitating,
with her foot upon the step. He guessed her difficulties;
he knew in a second that she had heard nothing; he
knew everything that she felt.
“There’s only one place to discuss things satisfactorily
that I know of,” he said quickly; “that’s Kew.”
“Kew?”
“Kew,” he repeated, with immense decision. He shut
the door and gave her address to the driver. She instantly
was conveyed away from him, and her cab joined the
knotted stream of vehicles, each marked by a light, and
indistinguishable one from the other. He stood watching
for a moment, and then, as if swept by some fierce impulse,
from the spot where they had stood, he turned,
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crossed the road at a rapid pace, and disappeared.
He walked on upon the impetus of this last mood of
almost supernatural exaltation until he reached a narrow
street, at this hour empty of traffic and passengers. Here,
whether it was the shops with their shuttered windows,
the smooth and silvered curve of the wood pavement, or
a natural ebb of feeling, his exaltation slowly oozed and
deserted him. He was now conscious of the loss that follows
any revelation; he had lost something in speaking
to Katharine, for, after all, was the Katharine whom he
loved the same as the real Katharine? She had transcended
her entirely at moments; her skirt had blown, her feather
waved, her voice spoken; yes, but how terrible sometimes
the pause between the voice of one’s dreams and
the voice that comes from the object of one’s dreams! He
felt a mixture of disgust and pity at the figure cut by
human beings when they try to carry out, in practice,
what they have the power to conceive. How small both
he and Katharine had appeared when they issued from
the cloud of thought that enveloped them! He recalled
the small, inexpressive, commonplace words in which they
had tried to communicate with each other; he repeated
them over to himself. By repeating Katharine’s words, he
came in a few moments to such a sense of her presence
that he worshipped her more than ever. But she was engaged
to be married, he remembered with a start. The
strength of his feeling was revealed to him instantly, and
he gave himself up to an irresistible rage and sense of
frustration. The image of Rodney came before him with
every circumstance of folly and indignity. That little pink-
cheeked dancing-master to marry Katharine? that gibbering
ass with the face of a monkey on an organ? that
posing, vain, fantastical fop? with his tragedies and his
comedies, his innumerable spites and prides and
pettinesses? Lord! marry Rodney! She must be as great a
fool as he was. His bitterness took possession of him,
and as he sat in the corner of the underground carriage,
he looked as stark an image of unapproachable severity
as could be imagined. Directly he reached home he sat
down at his table, and began to write Katharine a long,
wild, mad letter, begging her for both their sakes to break
with Rodney, imploring her not to do what would destroy
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for ever the one beauty, the one truth, the one hope; not
to be a traitor, not to be a deserter, for if she were—and
he wound up with a quiet and brief assertion that, whatever
she did or left undone, he would believe to be the
best, and accept from her with gratitude. He covered sheet
after sheet, and heard the early carts starting for London
before he went to bed.
CHAPTER XXIV
The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves
felt towards the middle of February, not only produce
little white and violet flowers in the more sheltered corners
of woods and gardens, but bring to birth thoughts
and desires comparable to those faintly colored and
sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women.
Lives frozen by age, so far as the present is concerned, to
a hard surface, which neither reflects nor yields, at this
season become soft and fluid, reflecting the shapes and
colors of the present, as well as the shapes and colors of
the past. In the case of Mrs. Hilbery, these early spring
days were chiefly upsetting inasmuch as they caused a
general quickening of her emotional powers, which, as
far as the past was concerned, had never suffered much
diminution. But in the spring her desire for expression
invariably increased. She was haunted by the ghosts of
phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the
combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of
her favorite authors. She made them for herself on scraps
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of paper, and rolled them on her tongue when there
seemed no occasion for such eloquence. She was upheld
in these excursions by the certainty that no language
could outdo the splendor of her father’s memory, and although
her efforts did not notably further the end of his
biography, she was under the impression of living more
in his shade at such times than at others. No one can
escape the power of language, let alone those of English
birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been,
to disport themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in
the Latin splendor of the tongue, and stored with memories,
as she was, of old poets exuberating in an infinity of
vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected against
her better judgment by her mother’s enthusiasm. Not that
her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity
for a study of Shakespeare’s sonnets as a preliminary to
