further. But he was not going to press her for explanations.
Each moment was to be, as far as he could make it,
complete in itself, owing nothing of its happiness to explanations,
borrowing neither bright nor dark tints from
the future.
“The bears seem happy,” he remarked. “But we must
buy them a bag of something. There’s the place to buy
buns. Let’s go and get them.” They walked to the counter
piled with little paper bags, and each simultaneously produced
a shilling and pressed it upon the young lady, who
did not know whether to oblige the lady or the gentleman,
but decided, from conventional reasons, that it was
the part of the gentleman to pay.
“I wish to pay,” said Ralph peremptorily, refusing the
coin which Katharine tendered. “I have a reason for what
I do,” he added, seeing her smile at his tone of decision.
“I believe you have a reason for everything,” she agreed,
breaking the bun into parts and tossing them down the
bears’ throats, “but I can’t believe it’s a good one this
time. What is your reason?”
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Night and Day
He refused to tell her. He could not explain to her that
he was offering up consciously all his happiness to her,
and wished, absurdly enough, to pour every possession
he had upon the blazing pyre, even his silver and gold.
He wished to keep this distance between them—the distance
which separates the devotee from the image in the
shrine.
Circumstances conspired to make this easier than it
would have been, had they been seated in a drawing-
room, for example, with a tea-tray between them. He saw
her against a background of pale grottos and sleek hides;
camels slanted their heavy-ridded eyes at her, giraffes
fastidiously observed her from their melancholy eminence,
and the pink-lined trunks of elephants cautiously abstracted
buns from her outstretched hands. Then there
were the hothouses. He saw her bending over pythons
coiled upon the sand, or considering the brown rock breaking
the stagnant water of the alligators’ pool, or searching
some minute section of tropical forest for the golden
eye of a lizard or the indrawn movement of the green
frogs’ flanks. In particular, he saw her outlined against
the deep green waters, in which squadrons of silvery fish
wheeled incessantly, or ogled her for a moment, pressing
their distorted mouths against the glass, quivering their
tails straight out behind them. Again, there was the insect
house, where she lifted the blinds of the little cages,
and marveled at the purple circles marked upon the rich
tussore wings of some lately emerged and semi-conscious
butterfly, or at caterpillars immobile like the knobbed
twigs of a pale-skinned tree, or at slim green snakes stabbing
the glass wall again and again with their flickering
cleft tongues. The heat of the air, and the bloom of heavy
flowers, which swam in water or rose stiffly from great
red jars, together with the display of curious patterns
and fantastic shapes, produced an atmosphere in which
human beings tended to look pale and to fall silent.
Opening the door of a house which rang with the mocking
and profoundly unhappy laughter of monkeys, they
discovered William and Cassandra. William appeared to
be tempting some small reluctant animal to descend from
an upper perch to partake of half an apple. Cassandra
was reading out, in her high-pitched tones, an account
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of this creature’s secluded disposition and nocturnal habits.
She saw Katharine and exclaimed:
“Here you are! Do prevent William from torturing this
unfortunate aye-aye.”
“We thought we’d lost you,” said William. He looked
from one to the other, and seemed to take stock of
Denham’s unfashionable appearance. He seemed to wish
to find some outlet for malevolence, but, failing one, he
remained silent. The glance, the slight quiver of the upper
lip, were not lost upon Katharine.
“William isn’t kind to animals,” she remarked. “He doesn’t
know what they like and what they don’t like.”
“I take it you’re well versed in these matters, Denham,”
said Rodney, withdrawing his hand with the apple.
“It’s mainly a question of knowing how to stroke them,”
Denham replied.
“Which is the way to the Reptile House?” Cassandra
asked him, not from a genuine desire to visit the reptiles,
but in obedience to her new-born feminine susceptibility,
which urged her to charm and conciliate the other
sex. Denham began to give her directions, and Katharine
and William moved on together.
“I hope you’ve had a pleasant afternoon,” William remarked.
“I like Ralph Denham,” she replied.
“Ca se voit,” William returned, with superficial urbanity.
Many retorts were obvious, but wishing, on the whole,
for peace, Katharine merely inquired:
“Are you coming back to tea?”
“Cassandra and I thought of having tea at a little shop
in Portland Place,” he replied. “I don’t know whether you
and Denham would care to join us.”
“I’ll ask him,” she replied, turning her head to look for
him. But he and Cassandra were absorbed in the aye-aye
once more.
William and Katharine watched them for a moment, and
each looked curiously at the object of the other’s preference.
But resting his eye upon Cassandra, to whose elegance
the dressmakers had now done justice, William
said sharply:
“If you come, I hope you won’t do your best to make
me ridiculous.”
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Night and Day
“If that’s what you’re afraid of I certainly shan’t come,”
Katharine replied.
They were professedly looking into the enormous central
cage of monkeys, and being thoroughly annoyed by
William, she compared him to a wretched misanthropical
ape, huddled in a scrap of old shawl at the end of a pole,
darting peevish glances of suspicion and distrust at his
companions. Her tolerance was deserting her. The events
of the past week had worn it thin. She was in one of
those moods, perhaps not uncommon with either sex,
when the other becomes very clearly distinguished, and
of contemptible baseness, so that the necessity of association
is degrading, and the tie, which at such moments
is always extremely close, drags like a halter round the
neck. William’s exacting demands and his jealousy had
pulled her down into some horrible swamp of her nature
where the primeval struggle between man and woman
still rages.
“You seem to delight in hurting me,” William persisted.
“Why did you say that just now about my behavior to
animals?” As he spoke he rattled his stick against the
bars of the cage, which gave his words an accompaniment
peculiarly exasperating to Katharine’s nerves.
“Because it’s true. You never see what any one feels,”
she said. “You think of no one but yourself.”
“That is not true,” said William. By his determined rattling
he had now collected the animated attention of
some half-dozen apes. Either to propitiate them, or to
show his consideration for their feelings, he proceeded
to offer them the apple which he held.
The sight, unfortunately, was so comically apt in its
illustration of the picture in her mind, the ruse was so
transparent, that Katharine was seized with laughter. She
laughed uncontrollably. William flushed red. No display
of anger could have hurt his feelings more profoundly. It
was not only that she was laughing at him; the detachment
of the sound was horrible.
“I don’t know what you’re laughing at,” he muttered,
and, turning, found that the other couple had rejoined
them. As if the matter had been privately agreed upon,
the couples separated once more, Katharine and Denham
passing out of the house without more than a perfunc
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tory glance round them. Denham obeyed what seemed to
be Katharine’s wish in thus making haste. Some change
had come over her. He connected it with her laughter,
and her few words in private with Rodney; he felt that
she had become unfriendly to him. She talked, but her
remarks were indifferent, and when he spoke her attention
seemed to wander. This change of mood was at first
extremely disagreeable to him; but soon he found it salutary.
The pale drizzling atmosphere of the day affected
him, also. The charm, the insidious magic in which he
had luxuriated, were suddenly gone; his feeling had become
one of friendly respect, and to his great pleasure
he found himself thinking spontaneously of the relief of
finding himself alone in his room that night. In his surprise
at the suddenness of the change, and at the extent
of his freedom, he bethought him of a daring plan, by
which the ghost of Katharine could be more effectually
exorcised than by mere abstinence. He would ask her to
come home with him to tea. He would force her through
the mill of family life; he would place her in a light unsparing
and revealing. His family would find nothing to
admire in her, and she, he felt certain, would despise
them all, and this, too, would help him. He felt himself
becoming more and more merciless towards her. By such
courageous measures any one, he thought, could end the
absurd passions which were the cause of so much pain
and waste. He could foresee a time when his experiences,
his discovery, and his triumph were made available for
younger brothers who found themselves in the same predicament.
He looked at his watch, and remarked that the
gardens would soon be closed.
“Anyhow,” he added, “I think we’ve seen enough for
one afternoon. Where have the others got to?” He looked
over his shoulder, and, seeing no trace of them, remarked
at once:
“We’d better be independent of them. The best plan
will be for you to come back to tea with me.”
“Why shouldn’t you come with me?” she asked.
“Because we’re next door to Highgate here,” he replied
promptly.
She assented, having very little notion whether Highgate
was next door to Regent’s Park or not. She was only glad
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Night and Day
to put off her return to the family tea-table in Chelsea for
an hour or two. They proceeded with dogged determination
through the winding roads of Regent’s Park, and the
Sunday-stricken streets of the neighborhood, in the direction
of the Tube station. Ignorant of the way, she resigned
herself entirely to him, and found his silence a
convenient cover beneath which to continue her anger
with Rodney.
When they stepped out of the train into the still grayer
gloom of Highgate, she wondered, for the first time, where
he was taking her. Had he a family, or did he live alone in
rooms? On the whole she was inclined to believe that he
was the only son of an aged, and possibly invalid, mother.
She sketched lightly, upon the blank vista down which
they walked, the little white house and the tremulous old
lady rising from behind her tea-table to greet her with
faltering words about “my son’s friends,” and was on the
point of asking Ralph to tell her what she might expect,
when he jerked open one of the infinite number of identical
wooden doors, and led her up a tiled path to a porch
in the Alpine style of architecture. As they listened to
the shaking of the bell in the basement, she could summon
no vision to replace the one so rudely destroyed.
“I must warn you to expect a family party,” said Ralph.
“They’re mostly in on Sundays. We can go to my room
afterwards.”
“Have you many brothers and sisters?” she asked, without
concealing her dismay.
“Six or seven,” he replied grimly, as the door opened.
While Ralph took off his coat, she had time to notice
the ferns and photographs and draperies, and to hear a
hum, or rather a babble, of voices talking each other
down, from the sound of them. The rigidity of extreme
shyness came over her. She kept as far behind Denham as
she could, and walked stiffly after him into a room blazing
with unshaded lights, which fell upon a number of
people, of different ages, sitting round a large dining-
room table untidily strewn with food, and unflinchingly
lit up by incandescent gas. Ralph walked straight to the
far end of the table.
“Mother, this is Miss Hilbery,” he said.
A large elderly lady, bent over an unsatisfactory spirit
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lamp, looked up with a little frown, and observed:
“I beg your pardon. I thought you were one of my own
girls. Dorothy,” she continued on the same breath, to
catch the servant before she left the room, “we shall
want some more methylated spirits—unless the lamp itself
is out of order. If one of you could invent a good
spirit-lamp—” she sighed, looking generally down the
table, and then began seeking among the china before
her for two clean cups for the new-comers.
The unsparing light revealed more ugliness than
Katharine had seen in one room for a very long time. It
was the ugliness of enormous folds of brown material,
looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which depended
balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves
swollen with black school-texts. Her eye was arrested by
crossed scabbards of fretted wood upon the dull green
wall, and whereever there was a high flat eminence, some
fern waved from a pot of crinkled china, or a bronze horse
reared so high that the stump of a tree had to sustain his
forequarters. The waters of family life seemed to rise and
close over her head, and she munched in silence.
At length Mrs. Denham looked up from her teacups and
remarked:
“You see, Miss Hilbery, my children all come in at different
hours and want different things. (The tray should
go up if you’ve done, Johnnie.) My boy Charles is in bed
with a cold. What else can you expect?—standing in the
wet playing football. We did try drawing-room tea, but it
didn’t do.”
A boy of sixteen, who appeared to be Johnnie, grumbled
