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she could find herself driving rapidly through the streets;
she was even anxious to be with some one who, after a
moment’s groping, took a definite shape and solidified
into the person of Mary Datchet. She drew the curtains so
that the draperies met in deep folds in the middle of the
window.
“Ah, there she is,” said Mr. Hilbery, who was standing
swaying affably from side to side, with his back to the
fire. “Come here, Katharine. I couldn’t see where you’d
got to—our children,” he observed parenthetically, “have
their uses—I want you to go to my study, Katharine; go
to the third shelf on the right-hand side of the door; take
down ‘Trelawny’s Recollections of Shelley’; bring it to me.
Then, Peyton, you will have to admit to the assembled
company that you have been mistaken.”
“‘Trelawny’s Recollections of Shelley.’ The third shelf on
the right of the door,” Katharine repeated. After all, one
does not check children in their play, or rouse sleepers
from their dreams. She passed William and Cassandra on
her way to the door.
“Stop, Katharine,” said William, speaking almost as if he
were conscious of her against his will. “Let me go.” He rose,
after a second’s hesitation, and she understood that it cost
him an effort. She knelt one knee upon the sofa where
Cassandra sat, looking down at her cousin’s face, which still
moved with the speed of what she had been saying.
“Are you—happy?” she asked.
“Oh, my dear!” Cassandra exclaimed, as if no further
words were needed. “Of course, we disagree about every
subject under the sun,” she exclaimed, “but I think he’s
the cleverest man I’ve ever met—and you’re the most
beautiful woman,” she added, looking at Katharine, and
as she looked her face lost its animation and became
almost melancholy in sympathy with Katharine’s melancholy,
which seemed to Cassandra the last refinement of
her distinction.
“Ah, but it’s only ten o’clock,” said Katharine darkly.
“As late as that! Well—?” She did not understand.
“At twelve my horses turn into rats and off I go. The
illusion fades. But I accept my fate. I make hay while the
sun shines.” Cassandra looked at her with a puzzled expression.
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“Here’s Katharine talking about rats, and hay, and all
sorts of odd things,” she said, as William returned to
them. He had been quick. “Can you make her out?”
Katharine perceived from his little frown and hesitation
that he did not find that particular problem to his
taste at present. She stood upright at once and said in a
different tone:
“I really am off, though. I wish you’d explain if they
say anything, William. I shan’t be late, but I’ve got to see
some one.”
“At this time of night?” Cassandra exclaimed.
“Whom have you got to see?” William demanded.
“A friend,” she remarked, half turning her head towards
him. She knew that he wished her to stay, not, indeed,
with them, but in their neighborhood, in case of need.
“Katharine has a great many friends,” said William rather
lamely, sitting down once more, as Katharine left the room.
She was soon driving quickly, as she had wished to
drive, through the lamp-lit streets. She liked both light
and speed, and the sense of being out of doors alone,
and the knowledge that she would reach Mary in her high,
lonely room at the end of the drive. She climbed the
stone steps quickly, remarking the queer look of her blue
silk skirt and blue shoes upon the stone, dusty with the
boots of the day, under the light of an occasional jet of
flickering gas.
The door was opened in a second by Mary herself, whose
face showed not only surprise at the sight of her visitor,
but some degree of embarrassment. She greeted her cordially,
and, as there was no time for explanations,
Katharine walked straight into the sitting-room, and found
herself in the presence of a young man who was lying
back in a chair and holding a sheet of paper in his hand,
at which he was looking as if he expected to go on immediately
with what he was in the middle of saying to Mary
Datchet. The apparition of an unknown lady in full evening
dress seemed to disturb him. He took his pipe from his
mouth, rose stiffly, and sat down again with a jerk.
“Have you been dining out?” Mary asked.
“Are you working?” Katharine inquired simultaneously.
The young man shook his head, as if he disowned his
share in the question with some irritation.
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“Well, not exactly,” Mary replied. “Mr. Basnett had
brought some papers to show me. We were going through
them, but we’d almost done… . Tell us about your party.”
Mary had a ruffled appearance, as if she had been running
her fingers through her hair in the course of her
conversation; she was dressed more or less like a Russian
peasant girl. She sat down again in a chair which looked
as if it had been her seat for some hours; the saucer
which stood upon the arm contained the ashes of many
cigarettes. Mr. Basnett, a very young man with a fresh
complexion and a high forehead from which the hair was
combed straight back, was one of that group of “very
able young men” suspected by Mr. Clacton, justly as it
turned out, of an influence upon Mary Datchet. He had
come down from one of the Universities not long ago,
and was now charged with the reformation of society. In
connection with the rest of the group of very able young
men he had drawn up a scheme for the education of labor,
for the amalgamation of the middle class and the
working class, and for a joint assault of the two bodies,
combined in the Society for the Education of Democracy,
upon Capital. The scheme had already reached the stage
in which it was permissible to hire an office and engage
a secretary, and he had been deputed to expound the
scheme to Mary, and make her an offer of the Secretaryship,
to which, as a matter of principle, a small salary
was attached. Since seven o’clock that evening he had
been reading out loud the document in which the faith of
the new reformers was expounded, but the reading was
so frequently interrupted by discussion, and it was so
often necessary to inform Mary “in strictest confidence”
of the private characters and evil designs of certain individuals
and societies that they were still only half-way
through the manuscript. Neither of them realized that
the talk had already lasted three hours. In their absorption
they had forgotten even to feed the fire, and yet
both Mr. Basnett in his exposition, and Mary in her interrogation,
carefully preserved a kind of formality calculated
to check the desire of the human mind for irrelevant
discussion. Her questions frequently began, “Am I
to understand—” and his replies invariably represented
the views of some one called “we.”
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Night and Day
By this time Mary was almost persuaded that she, too,
was included in the “we,” and agreed with Mr. Basnett in
believing that “our” views, “our” society, “our” policy,
stood for something quite definitely segregated from the
main body of society in a circle of superior illumination.
The appearance of Katharine in this atmosphere was
extremely incongruous, and had the effect of making Mary
remember all sorts of things that she had been glad to
forget.
“You’ve been dining out?” she asked again, looking,
with a little smile, at the blue silk and the pearl-sewn
shoes.
“No, at home. Are you starting something new?”
Katharine hazarded, rather hesitatingly, looking at the
papers.
“We are,” Mr. Basnett replied. He said no more.
“I’m thinking of leaving our friends in Russell Square,”
Mary explained.
“I see. And then you will do something else.”
“Well, I’m afraid I like working,” said Mary.
“Afraid,” said Mr. Basnett, conveying the impression
that, in his opinion, no sensible person could be afraid
of liking to work.
“Yes,” said Katharine, as if he had stated this opinion
aloud. “I should like to start something—something off
one’s own bat—that’s what I should like.”
“Yes, that’s the fun,” said Mr. Basnett, looking at her
for the first time rather keenly, and refilling his pipe.
“But you can’t limit work—that’s what I mean,” said
Mary. “I mean there are other sorts of work. No one works
harder than a woman with little children.”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Basnett. “It’s precisely the women
with babies we want to get hold of.” He glanced at his
document, rolled it into a cylinder between his fingers,
and gazed into the fire. Katharine felt that in this company
anything that one said would be judged upon its
merits; one had only to say what one thought, rather
barely and tersely, with a curious assumption that the
number of things that could properly be thought about
was strictly limited. And Mr. Basnett was only stiff upon
the surface; there was an intelligence in his face which
attracted her intelligence.
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“When will the public know?” she asked.
“What d’you mean—about us?” Mr. Basnett asked, with
a little smile.
“That depends upon many things,” said Mary. The conspirators
looked pleased, as if Katharine’s question, with
the belief in their existence which it implied, had a warming
effect upon them.
“In starting a society such as we wish to start (we can’t
say any more at present),” Mr. Basnett began, with a
little jerk of his head, “there are two things to remember—
the Press and the public. Other societies, which shall
be nameless, have gone under because they’ve appealed
only to cranks. If you don’t want a mutual admiration
society, which dies as soon as you’ve all discovered each
other’s faults, you must nobble the Press. You must appeal
to the public.”
“That’s the difficulty,” said Mary thoughtfully.
“That’s where she comes in,” said Mr. Basnett, jerking
his head in Mary’s direction. “She’s the only one of us
who’s a capitalist. She can make a whole-time job of it. I’m
tied to an office; I can only give my spare time. Are you,
by any chance, on the look-out for a job?” he asked
Katharine, with a queer mixture of distrust and deference.
“Marriage is her job at present,” Mary replied for her.
“Oh, I see,” said Mr. Basnett. He made allowances for
that; he and his friends had faced the question of sex,
along with all others, and assigned it an honorable place
in their scheme of life. Katharine felt this beneath the
roughness of his manner; and a world entrusted to the
guardianship of Mary Datchet and Mr. Basnett seemed to
her a good world, although not a romantic or beautiful
place or, to put it figuratively, a place where any line of
blue mist softly linked tree to tree upon the horizon. For
a moment she thought she saw in his face, bent now over
the fire, the features of that original man whom we still
recall every now and then, although we know only the
clerk, barrister, Governmental official, or workingman
variety of him. Not that Mr. Basnett, giving his days to
commerce and his spare time to social reform, would long
carry about him any trace of his possibilities of completeness;
but, for the moment, in his youth and ardor,
still speculative, still uncramped, one might imagine him
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Night and Day
the citizen of a nobler state than ours. Katharine turned
over her small stock of information, and wondered what
their society might be going to attempt. Then she remembered
that she was hindering their business, and rose,
still thinking of this society, and thus thinking, she said
to Mr. Basnett:
“Well, you’ll ask me to join when the time comes, I
hope.”
He nodded, and took his pipe from his mouth, but,
being unable to think of anything to say, he put it back
again, although he would have been glad if she had
stayed.
Against her wish, Mary insisted upon taking her downstairs,
and then, as there was no cab to be seen, they
stood in the street together, looking about them.
“Go back,” Katharine urged her, thinking of Mr. Basnett
with his papers in his hand.
“You can’t wander about the streets alone in those
clothes,” said Mary, but the desire to find a cab was not
her true reason for standing beside Katharine for a minute
or two. Unfortunately for her composure, Mr. Basnett and
his papers seemed to her an incidental diversion of life’s
serious purpose compared with some tremendous fact
which manifested itself as she stood alone with Katharine.
It may have been their common womanhood.
“Have you seen Ralph?” she asked suddenly, without
preface.
“Yes,” said Katharine directly, but she did not remember
when or where she had seen him. It took her a moment
or two to remember why Mary should ask her if she
had seen Ralph.
“I believe I’m jealous,” said Mary.
“Nonsense, Mary,” said Katharine, rather distractedly,
taking her arm and beginning to walk up the street in the
direction of the main road. “Let me see; we went to Kew,
and we agreed to be friends. Yes, that’s what happened.”
Mary was silent, in the hope that Katharine would tell
her more. But Katharine said nothing.
“It’s not a question of friendship,” Mary exclaimed, her
anger rising, to her own surprise. “You know it’s not. How
can it be? I’ve no right to interfere—” She stopped. “Only
I’d rather Ralph wasn’t hurt,” she concluded.
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“I think he seems able to take care of himself,” Katharine
observed. Without either of them wishing it, a feeling of
hostility had risen between them.
“Do you really think it’s worth it?” said Mary, after a
pause.
“How can one tell?” Katharine asked.
“Have you ever cared for any one?” Mary demanded
rashly and foolishly.
“I can’t wander about London discussing my feelings—
Here’s a cab—no, there’s some one in it.”
