she frowned; and her tone changed to one almost
of severity.
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“This is what I foretold. We shall gain nothing but unhappiness.
Look at me, Ralph.” He looked at her. “I assure
you that I’m far more ordinary than I appear. Beauty
means nothing whatever. In fact, the most beautiful
women are generally the most stupid. I’m not that, but
I’m a matter-of-fact, prosaic, rather ordinary character; I
order the dinner, I pay the bills, I do the accounts, I wind
up the clock, and I never look at a book.”
“You forget—” he began, but she would not let him
speak.
“You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and
think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being
yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you
go home and invent a story about me, and now you can’t
separate me from the person you’ve imagined me to be.
You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact
it’s being in delusion. All romantic people are the same,”
she added. “My mother spends her life in making stories
about the people she’s fond of. But I won’t have you do it
about me, if I can help it.”
“You can’t help it,” he said.
“I warn you it’s the source of all evil.”
“And of all good,” he added.
“You’ll find out that I’m not what you think me.”
“Perhaps. But I shall gain more than I lose.”
“If such gain’s worth having.”
They were silent for a space.
“That may be what we have to face,” he said. “There
may be nothing else. Nothing but what we imagine.”
“The reason of our loneliness,” she mused, and they
were silent for a time.
“When are you to be married?” he asked abruptly, with
a change of tone.
“Not till September, I think. It’s been put off.”
“You won’t be lonely then,” he said. “According to what
people say, marriage is a very queer business. They say
it’s different from anything else. It may be true. I’ve known
one or two cases where it seems to be true.” He hoped
that she would go on with the subject. But she made no
reply. He had done his best to master himself, and his
voice was sufficiently indifferent, but her silence tormented
him. She would never speak to him of Rodney of
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her own accord, and her reserve left a whole continent of
her soul in darkness.
“It may be put off even longer than that,” she said, as
if by an afterthought. “Some one in the office is ill, and
William has to take his place. We may put it off for some
time in fact.”
“That’s rather hard on him, isn’t it?” Ralph asked.
“He has his work,” she replied. “He has lots of things
that interest him… . I know I’ve been to that place,” she
broke off, pointing to a photograph. “But I can’t remember
where it is—oh, of course it’s Oxford. Now, what about
your cottage?”
“I’m not going to take it.”
“How you change your mind!” she smiled.
“It’s not that,” he said impatiently. “It’s that I want to
be where I can see you.”
“Our compact is going to hold in spite of all I’ve said?”
she asked.
“For ever, so far as I’m concerned,” he replied.
“You’re going to go on dreaming and imagining and
making up stories about me as you walk along the street,
and pretending that we’re riding in a forest, or landing
on an island—”
“No. I shall think of you ordering dinner, paying bills,
doing the accounts, showing old ladies the relics—”
“That’s better,” she said. “You can think of me to-morrow
morning looking up dates in the ‘Dictionary of National
Biography.’”
“And forgetting your purse,” Ralph added.
At this she smiled, but in another moment her smile
faded, either because of his words or of the way in which
he spoke them. She was capable of forgetting things. He
saw that. But what more did he see? Was he not looking
at something she had never shown to anybody? Was it
not something so profound that the notion of his seeing
it almost shocked her? Her smile faded, and for a moment
she seemed upon the point of speaking, but looking at
him in silence, with a look that seemed to ask what she
could not put into words, she turned and bade him good
night.
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CHAPTER XXVIII
Like a strain of music, the effect of Katharine’s presence
slowly died from the room in which Ralph sat alone. The
music had ceased in the rapture of its melody. He strained
to catch the faintest lingering echoes; for a moment the
memory lulled him into peace; but soon it failed, and he
paced the room so hungry for the sound to come again
that he was conscious of no other desire left in life. She
had gone without speaking; abruptly a chasm had been
cut in his course, down which the tide of his being plunged
in disorder; fell upon rocks; flung itself to destruction.
The distress had an effect of physical ruin and disaster.
He trembled; he was white; he felt exhausted, as if by a
great physical effort. He sank at last into a chair standing
opposite her empty one, and marked, mechanically,
with his eye upon the clock, how she went farther and
farther from him, was home now, and now, doubtless,
again with Rodney. But it was long before he could realize
these facts; the immense desire for her presence
churned his senses into foam, into froth, into a haze of
emotion that removed all facts from his grasp, and gave
him a strange sense of distance, even from the material
shapes of wall and window by which he was surrounded.
The prospect of the future, now that the strength of his
passion was revealed to him, appalled him.
The marriage would take place in September, she had
said; that allowed him, then, six full months in which to
undergo these terrible extremes of emotion. Six months
of torture, and after that the silence of the grave, the
isolation of the insane, the exile of the damned; at best,
a life from which the chief good was knowingly and for
ever excluded. An impartial judge might have assured him
that his chief hope of recovery lay in this mystic temper,
which identified a living woman with much that no human
beings long possess in the eyes of each other; she
would pass, and the desire for her vanish, but his belief
in what she stood for, detached from her, would remain.
This line of thought offered, perhaps, some respite, and
possessed of a brain that had its station considerably
above the tumult of the senses, he tried to reduce the
vague and wandering incoherency of his emotions to or
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der. The sense of self-preservation was strong in him,
and Katharine herself had strangely revived it by convincing
him that his family deserved and needed all his
strength. She was right, and for their sake, if not for his
own, this passion, which could bear no fruit, must be cut
off, uprooted, shown to be as visionary and baseless as
she had maintained. The best way of achieving this was
not to run away from her, but to face her, and having
steeped himself in her qualities, to convince his reason
that they were, as she assured him, not those that he
imagined. She was a practical woman, a domestic wife
for an inferior poet, endowed with romantic beauty by
some freak of unintelligent Nature. No doubt her beauty
itself would not stand examination. He had the means of
settling this point at least. He possessed a book of photographs
from the Greek statues; the head of a goddess,
if the lower part were concealed, had often given him
the ecstasy of being in Katharine’s presence. He took it
down from the shelf and found the picture. To this he
added a note from her, bidding him meet her at the Zoo.
He had a flower which he had picked at Kew to teach her
botany. Such were his relics. He placed them before him,
and set himself to visualize her so clearly that no deception
or delusion was possible. In a second he could see
her, with the sun slanting across her dress, coming towards
him down the green walk at Kew. He made her sit
upon the seat beside him. He heard her voice, so low and
yet so decided in its tone; she spoke reasonably of indifferent
matters. He could see her faults, and analyze her
virtues. His pulse became quieter, and his brain increased
in clarity. This time she could not escape him. The illusion
of her presence became more and more complete.
They seemed to pass in and out of each other’s minds,
questioning and answering. The utmost fullness of communion
seemed to be theirs. Thus united, he felt himself
raised to an eminence, exalted, and filled with a power of
achievement such as he had never known in singleness.
Once more he told over conscientiously her faults, both
of face and character; they were clearly known to him;
but they merged themselves in the flawless union that
was born of their association. They surveyed life to its
uttermost limits. How deep it was when looked at from
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this height! How sublime! How the commonest things
moved him almost to tears! Thus, he forgot the inevitable
limitations; he forgot her absence, he thought it of
no account whether she married him or another; nothing
mattered, save that she should exist, and that he should
love her. Some words of these reflections were uttered
aloud, and it happened that among them were the words,
“I love her.” It was the first time that he had used the
word “love” to describe his feeling; madness, romance,
hallucination—he had called it by these names before;
but having, apparently by accident, stumbled upon the
word “love,” he repeated it again and again with a sense
of revelation.
“But I’m in love with you!” he exclaimed, with something
like dismay. He leant against the window-sill, looking
over the city as she had looked. Everything had become
miraculously different and completely distinct. His
feelings were justified and needed no further explanation.
But he must impart them to some one, because his
discovery was so important that it concerned other people
too. Shutting the book of Greek photographs, and hiding
his relics, he ran downstairs, snatched his coat, and passed
out of doors.
The lamps were being lit, but the streets were dark
enough and empty enough to let him walk his fastest,
and to talk aloud as he walked. He had no doubt where
he was going. He was going to find Mary Datchet. The
desire to share what he felt, with some one who understood
it, was so imperious that he did not question it. He
was soon in her street. He ran up the stairs leading to her
flat two steps at a time, and it never crossed his mind
that she might not be at home. As he rang her bell, he
seemed to himself to be announcing the presence of something
wonderful that was separate from himself, and gave
him power and authority over all other people. Mary came
to the door after a moment’s pause. He was perfectly
silent, and in the dusk his face looked completely white.
He followed her into her room.
“Do you know each other?” she said, to his extreme
surprise, for he had counted on finding her alone. A young
man rose, and said that he knew Ralph by sight.
“We were just going through some papers,” said Mary.
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“Mr. Basnett has to help me, because I don’t know much
about my work yet. It’s the new society,” she explained.
“I’m the secretary. I’m no longer at Russell Square.”
The voice in which she gave this information was so
constrained as to sound almost harsh.
“What are your aims?” said Ralph. He looked neither at
Mary nor at Mr. Basnett. Mr. Basnett thought he had seldom
seen a more disagreeable or formidable man than
this friend of Mary’s, this sarcastic-looking, white-faced
Mr. Denham, who seemed to demand, as if by right, an
account of their proposals, and to criticize them before
he had heard them. Nevertheless, he explained his projects
as clearly as he could, and knew that he wished Mr. Denham
to think well of them.
“I see,” said Ralph, when he had done. “D’you know,
Mary,” he suddenly remarked, “I believe I’m in for a cold.
Have you any quinine?” The look which he cast at her
frightened her; it expressed mutely, perhaps without his
own consciousness, something deep, wild, and passionate.
She left the room at once. Her heart beat fast at the
knowledge of Ralph’s presence; but it beat with pain,
and with an extraordinary fear. She stood listening for a
moment to the voices in the next room.
“Of course, I agree with you,” she heard Ralph say, in
this strange voice, to Mr. Basnett. “But there’s more that
might be done. Have you seen Judson, for instance? You
should make a point of getting him.”
Mary returned with the quinine.
“Judson’s address?” Mr. Basnett inquired, pulling out
his notebook and preparing to write. For twenty minutes,
perhaps, he wrote down names, addresses, and other suggestions
that Ralph dictated to him. Then, when Ralph
fell silent, Mr. Basnett felt that his presence was not
desired, and thanking Ralph for his help, with a sense
that he was very young and ignorant compared with him,
he said good-bye.
“Mary,” said Ralph, directly Mr. Basnett had shut the
door and they were alone together. “Mary,” he repeated.
But the old difficulty of speaking to Mary without reserve
prevented him from continuing. His desire to proclaim
his love for Katharine was still strong in him, but he had
felt, directly he saw Mary, that he could not share it with
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her. The feeling increased as he sat talking to Mr. Basnett.
And yet all the time he was thinking of Katharine, and
marveling at his love. The tone in which he spoke Mary’s
name was harsh.
“What is it, Ralph?” she asked, startled by his tone. She
looked at him anxiously, and her little frown showed that
she was trying painfully to understand him, and was
