pass another post-office in a more central position a little
farther on. The longer she held the letter in her hand,
however, the more persistently certain questions pressed
upon her, as if from a collection of voices in the air.
These invisible people wished to be informed whether
she was engaged to William Rodney, or was the engagement
broken off? Was it right, they asked, to invite
Cassandra for a visit, and was William Rodney in love
with her, or likely to fall in love? Then the questioners
paused for a moment, and resumed as if another side of
the problem had just come to their notice. What did Ralph
Denham mean by what he said to you last night? Do you
consider that he is in love with you? Is it right to consent
to a solitary walk with him, and what advice are you
going to give him about his future? Has William Rodney
cause to be jealous of your conduct, and what do you
propose to do about Mary Datchet? What are you going
to do? What does honor require you to do? they repeated.
“Good Heavens!” Katharine exclaimed, after listening
to all these remarks, “I suppose I ought to make up my
mind.”
But the debate was a formal skirmishing, a pastime to
gain breathing-space. Like all people brought up in a
tradition, Katharine was able, within ten minutes or so,
to reduce any moral difficulty to its traditional shape and
solve it by the traditional answers. The book of wisdom
lay open, if not upon her mother’s knee, upon the knees
of many uncles and aunts. She had only to consult them,
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and they would at once turn to the right page and read
out an answer exactly suited to one in her position. The
rules which should govern the behavior of an unmarried
woman are written in red ink, graved upon marble, if, by
some freak of nature, it should fall out that the unmarried
woman has not the same writing scored upon her
heart. She was ready to believe that some people are
fortunate enough to reject, accept, resign, or lay down
their lives at the bidding of traditional authority; she
could envy them; but in her case the questions became
phantoms directly she tried seriously to find an answer,
which proved that the traditional answer would be of no
use to her individually. Yet it had served so many people,
she thought, glancing at the rows of houses on either
side of her, where families, whose incomes must be between
a thousand and fifteen-hundred a year lived, and
kept, perhaps, three servants, and draped their windows
with curtains which were always thick and generally dirty,
and must, she thought, since you could only see a look-
ing-glass gleaming above a sideboard on which a dish of
apples was set, keep the room inside very dark. But she
turned her head away, observing that this was not a
method of thinking the matter out.
The only truth which she could discover was the truth
of what she herself felt—a frail beam when compared
with the broad illumination shed by the eyes of all the
people who are in agreement to see together; but having
rejected the visionary voices, she had no choice but to
make this her guide through the dark masses which confronted
her. She tried to follow her beam, with an expression
upon her face which would have made any passer-by
think her reprehensibly and almost ridiculously detached
from the surrounding scene. One would have felt alarmed
lest this young and striking woman were about to do
something eccentric. But her beauty saved her from the
worst fate that can befall a pedestrian; people looked at
her, but they did not laugh. To seek a true feeling among
the chaos of the unfeelings or half-feelings of life, to
recognize it when found, and to accept the consequences
of the discovery, draws lines upon the smoothest brow,
while it quickens the light of the eyes; it is a pursuit
which is alternately bewildering, debasing, and exalting,
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Night and Day
and, as Katharine speedily found, her discoveries gave her
equal cause for surprise, shame, and intense anxiety. Much
depended, as usual, upon the interpretation of the word
love; which word came up again and again, whether she
considered Rodney, Denham, Mary Datchet, or herself; and
in each case it seemed to stand for something different,
and yet for something unmistakable and something not to
be passed by. For the more she looked into the confusion
of lives which, instead of running parallel, had suddenly
intersected each other, the more distinctly she seemed to
convince herself that there was no other light on them
than was shed by this strange illumination, and no other
path save the one upon which it threw its beams. Her
blindness in the case of Rodney, her attempt to match his
true feeling with her false feeling, was a failure never to
be sufficiently condemned; indeed, she could only pay it
the tribute of leaving it a black and naked landmark unburied
by attempt at oblivion or excuse.
With this to humiliate there was much to exalt. She
thought of three different scenes; she thought of Mary
sitting upright and saying, “I’m in love—I’m in love”;
she thought of Rodney losing his self-consciousness among
the dead leaves, and speaking with the abandonment of
a child; she thought of Denham leaning upon the stone
parapet and talking to the distant sky, so that she thought
him mad. Her mind, passing from Mary to Denham, from
William to Cassandra, and from Denham to herself—if, as
she rather doubted, Denham’s state of mind was connected
with herself—seemed to be tracing out the lines
of some symmetrical pattern, some arrangement of life,
which invested, if not herself, at least the others, not
only with interest, but with a kind of tragic beauty. She
had a fantastic picture of them upholding splendid palaces
upon their bent backs. They were the lantern-bearers,
whose lights, scattered among the crowd, wove a
pattern, dissolving, joining, meeting again in combination.
Half forming such conceptions as these in her rapid
walk along the dreary streets of South Kensington, she
determined that, whatever else might be obscure, she
must further the objects of Mary, Denham, William, and
Cassandra. The way was not apparent. No course of action
seemed to her indubitably right. All she achieved by
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her thinking was the conviction that, in such a cause, no
risk was too great; and that, far from making any rules for
herself or others, she would let difficulties accumulate
unsolved, situations widen their jaws unsatiated, while she
maintained a position of absolute and fearless independence.
So she could best serve the people who loved.
Read in the light of this exaltation, there was a new
meaning in the words which her mother had penciled
upon the card attached to the bunch of anemones. The
door of the house in the Cromwell Road opened; gloomy
vistas of passage and staircase were revealed; such light
as there was seemed to be concentrated upon a silver
salver of visiting-cards, whose black borders suggested
that the widow’s friends had all suffered the same bereavement.
The parlor-maid could hardly be expected to
fathom the meaning of the grave tone in which the young
lady proffered the flowers, with Mrs. Hilbery’s love; and
the door shut upon the offering.
The sight of a face, the slam of a door, are both rather
destructive of exaltation in the abstract; and, as she
walked back to Chelsea, Katharine had her doubts whether
anything would come of her resolves. If you cannot make
sure of people, however, you can hold fairly fast to figures,
and in some way or other her thought about such
problems as she was wont to consider worked in happily
with her mood as to her friends’ lives. She reached home
rather late for tea.
On the ancient Dutch chest in the hall she perceived
one or two hats, coats, and walking-sticks, and the sound
of voices reached her as she stood outside the drawing-
room door. Her mother gave a little cry as she came in; a
cry which conveyed to Katharine the fact that she was
late, that the teacups and milk-jugs were in a conspiracy
of disobedience, and that she must immediately take her
place at the head of the table and pour out tea for the
guests. Augustus Pelham, the diarist, liked a calm atmosphere
in which to tell his stories; he liked attention; he
liked to elicit little facts, little stories, about the past
and the great dead, from such distinguished characters
as Mrs. Hilbery for the nourishment of his diary, for whose
sake he frequented tea-tables and ate yearly an enormous
quantity of buttered toast. He, therefore, welcomed
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Night and Day
Katharine with relief, and she had merely to shake hands
with Rodney and to greet the American lady who had
come to be shown the relics, before the talk started again
on the broad lines of reminiscence and discussion which
were familiar to her.
Yet, even with this thick veil between them, she could
not help looking at Rodney, as if she could detect what
had happened to him since they met. It was in vain. His
clothes, even the white slip, the pearl in his tie, seemed
to intercept her quick glance, and to proclaim the futility
of such inquiries of a discreet, urbane gentleman, who
balanced his cup of tea and poised a slice of bread and
butter on the edge of the saucer. He would not meet her
eye, but that could be accounted for by his activity in
serving and helping, and the polite alacrity with which
he was answering the questions of the American visitor.
It was certainly a sight to daunt any one coming in
with a head full of theories about love. The voices of the
invisible questioners were reinforced by the scene round
the table, and sounded with a tremendous self-confidence,
as if they had behind them the common sense of twenty
generations, together with the immediate approval of Mr.
Augustus Pelham, Mrs. Vermont Bankes, William Rodney,
and, possibly, Mrs. Hilbery herself. Katharine set her teeth,
not entirely in the metaphorical sense, for her hand, obeying
the impulse towards definite action, laid firmly upon
the table beside her an envelope which she had been
grasping all this time in complete forgetfulness. The address
was uppermost, and a moment later she saw William’s
eye rest upon it as he rose to fulfil some duty with a
plate. His expression instantly changed. He did what he
was on the point of doing, and then looked at Katharine
with a look which revealed enough of his confusion to
show her that he was not entirely represented by his appearance.
In a minute or two he proved himself at a loss
with Mrs. Vermont Bankes, and Mrs. Hilbery, aware of the
silence with her usual quickness, suggested that, perhaps,
it was now time that Mrs. Bankes should be shown
“our things.”
Katharine accordingly rose, and led the way to the little
inner room with the pictures and the books. Mrs. Bankes
and Rodney followed her.
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She turned on the lights, and began directly in her low,
pleasant voice: “This table is my grandfather’s writing-
table. Most of the later poems were written at it. And
this is his pen—the last pen he ever used.” She took it in
her hand and paused for the right number of seconds.
“Here,” she continued, “is the original manuscript of the
‘Ode to Winter.’ The early manuscripts are far less corrected
than the later ones, as you will see directly… .
Oh, do take it yourself,” she added, as Mrs. Bankes asked,
in an awestruck tone of voice, for that privilege, and
began a preliminary unbuttoning of her white kid gloves.
“You are wonderfully like your grandfather, Miss Hilbery,”
the American lady observed, gazing from Katharine to
the portrait, “especially about the eyes. Come, now, I
expect she writes poetry herself, doesn’t she?” she asked
in a jocular tone, turning to William. “Quite one’s ideal of
a poet, is it not, Mr. Rodney? I cannot tell you what a
privilege I feel it to be standing just here with the poet’s
granddaughter. You must know we think a great deal of
your grandfather in America, Miss Hilbery. We have societies
for reading him aloud. What! His very own slip
pers!” Laying aside the manuscript, she hastily grasped
the old shoes, and remained for a moment dumb in contemplation
of them.
While Katharine went on steadily with her duties as
show-woman, Rodney examined intently a row of little
drawings which he knew by heart already. His disordered
state of mind made it necessary for him to take advantage
of these little respites, as if he had been out in a
high wind and must straighten his dress in the first shelter
he reached. His calm was only superficial, as he knew
too well; it did not exist much below the surface of tie,
waistcoat, and white slip.
On getting out of bed that morning he had fully made
up his mind to ignore what had been said the night before;
he had been convinced, by the sight of Denham,
that his love for Katharine was passionate, and when he
addressed her early that morning on the telephone, he
had meant his cheerful but authoritative tones to convey
to her the fact that, after a night of madness, they were
as indissolubly engaged as ever. But when he reached his
office his torments began. He found a letter from Cassandra
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Night and Day
waiting for him. She had read his play, and had taken the
very first opportunity to write and tell him what she
thought of it. She knew, she wrote, that her praise meant
absolutely nothing; but still, she had sat up all night;
she thought this, that, and the other; she was full of
enthusiasm most elaborately scratched out in places, but
enough was written plain to gratify William’s vanity exceedingly.
She was quite intelligent enough to say the
