that Katharine was in a state which gave her, alternately,
the most exquisite pleasure and the most profound alarm.
She could not help ejaculating at last:
“It’s all done in five minutes at a Registry Office nowadays,
if you think the Church service a little florid—which
it is, though there are noble things in it.”
“But we don’t want to be married,” Katharine replied
emphatically, and added, “Why, after all, isn’t it perfectly
possible to live together without being married?”
Again Mrs. Hilbery looked discomposed, and, in her
trouble, took up the sheets which were lying upon the
table, and began turning them over this way and that,
and muttering to herself as she glanced:
“A plus B minus C equals ‘x y z’. It’s so dreadfully ugly,
Katharine. That’s what I feel—so dreadfully ugly.”
Katharine took the sheets from her mother’s hand and
began shuffling them absent-mindedly together, for her
fixed gaze seemed to show that her thoughts were intent
upon some other matter.
“Well, I don’t know about ugliness,” she said at length.
“But he doesn’t ask it of you?” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed.
“Not that grave young man with the steady brown eyes?”
“He doesn’t ask anything—we neither of us ask anything.”
“If I could help you, Katharine, by the memory of what
I felt—”
“Yes, tell me what you felt.”
Mrs. Hilbery, her eyes growing blank, peered down the
enormously long corridor of days at the far end of which
the little figures of herself and her husband appeared
fantastically attired, clasping hands upon a moonlit beach,
with roses swinging in the dusk.
“We were in a little boat going out to a ship at night,”
she began. “The sun had set and the moon was rising
over our heads. There were lovely silver lights upon the
waves and three green lights upon the steamer in the
middle of the bay. Your father’s head looked so grand
against the mast. It was life, it was death. The great sea
was round us. It was the voyage for ever and ever.”
The ancient fairy-tale fell roundly and harmoniously upon
Katharine’s ears. Yes, there was the enormous space of
the sea; there were the three green lights upon the
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steamer; the cloaked figures climbed up on deck. And so,
voyaging over the green and purple waters, past the cliffs
and the sandy lagoons and through pools crowded with
the masts of ships and the steeples of churches—here
they were. The river seemed to have brought them and
deposited them here at this precise point. She looked
admiringly at her mother, that ancient voyager.
“Who knows,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, continuing her
reveries, “where we are bound for, or why, or who has
sent us, or what we shall find—who knows anything,
except that love is our faith—love—” she crooned, and
the soft sound beating through the dim words was heard
by her daughter as the breaking of waves solemnly in
order upon the vast shore that she gazed upon. She would
have been content for her mother to repeat that word
almost indefinitely—a soothing word when uttered by
another, a riveting together of the shattered fragments
of the world. But Mrs. Hilbery, instead of repeating the
word love, said pleadingly:
“And you won’t think those ugly thoughts again, will
you, Katharine?” at which words the ship which Katharine
had been considering seemed to put into harbor and have
done with its seafaring. Yet she was in great need, if not
exactly of sympathy, of some form of advice, or, at least,
of the opportunity of setting forth her problems before a
third person so as to renew them in her own eyes.
“But then,” she said, ignoring the difficult problem of
ugliness, “you knew you were in love; but we’re different.
It seems,” she continued, frowning a little as she tried to
fix the difficult feeling, “as if something came to an end
suddenly—gave out—faded—an illusion—as if when we
think we’re in love we make it up—we imagine what
doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s impossible that we should
ever marry. Always to be finding the other an illusion,
and going off and forgetting about them, never to be
certain that you cared, or that he wasn’t caring for some
one not you at all, the horror of changing from one state
to the other, being happy one moment and miserable the
next—that’s the reason why we can’t possibly marry. At
the same time,” she continued, “we can’t live without
each other, because—” Mrs. Hilbery waited patiently for
the sentence to be completed, but Katharine fell silent
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and fingered her sheet of figures.
“We have to have faith in our vision,” Mrs. Hilbery resumed,
glancing at the figures, which distressed her
vaguely, and had some connection in her mind with the
household accounts, “otherwise, as you say—” She cast
a lightning glance into the depths of disillusionment which
were, perhaps, not altogether unknown to her.
“Believe me, Katharine, it’s the same for every one—
for me, too—for your father,” she said earnestly, and
sighed. They looked together into the abyss and, as the
elder of the two, she recovered herself first and asked:
“But where is Ralph? Why isn’t he here to see me?”
Katharine’s expression changed instantly.
“Because he’s not allowed to come here,” she replied
bitterly.
Mrs. Hilbery brushed this aside.
“Would there be time to send for him before luncheon?”
she asked.
Katharine looked at her as if, indeed, she were some
magician. Once more she felt that instead of being a
grown woman, used to advise and command, she was
only a foot or two raised above the long grass and the
little flowers and entirely dependent upon the figure of
indefinite size whose head went up into the sky, whose
hand was in hers, for guidance.
“I’m not happy without him,” she said simply.
Mrs. Hilbery nodded her head in a manner which indicated
complete understanding, and the immediate conception
of certain plans for the future. She swept up her
flowers, breathed in their sweetness, and, humming a
little song about a miller’s daughter, left the room.
The case upon which Ralph Denham was engaged that
afternoon was not apparently receiving his full attention,
and yet the affairs of the late John Leake of Dublin
were sufficiently confused to need all the care that a
solicitor could bestow upon them, if the widow Leake
and the five Leake children of tender age were to receive
any pittance at all. But the appeal to Ralph’s humanity
had little chance of being heard to-day; he was no longer
a model of concentration. The partition so carefully erected
between the different sections of his life had been broken
down, with the result that though his eyes were fixed
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upon the last Will and Testament, he saw through the
page a certain drawing-room in Cheyne Walk.
He tried every device that had proved effective in the
past for keeping up the partitions of the mind, until he
could decently go home; but a little to his alarm he found
himself assailed so persistently, as if from outside, by
Katharine, that he launched forth desperately into an
imaginary interview with her. She obliterated a bookcase
full of law reports, and the corners and lines of the room
underwent a curious softening of outline like that which
sometimes makes a room unfamiliar at the moment of
waking from sleep. By degrees, a pulse or stress began to
beat at regular intervals in his mind, heaping his thoughts
into waves to which words fitted themselves, and without
much consciousness of what he was doing, he began
to write on a sheet of draft paper what had the appearance
of a poem lacking several words in each line. Not
many lines had been set down, however, before he threw
away his pen as violently as if that were responsible for
his misdeeds, and tore the paper into many separate
pieces. This was a sign that Katharine had asserted her
self and put to him a remark that could not be met poetically.
Her remark was entirely destructive of poetry, since
it was to the effect that poetry had nothing whatever to
do with her; all her friends spent their lives in making up
phrases, she said; all his feeling was an illusion, and next
moment, as if to taunt him with his impotence, she had
sunk into one of those dreamy states which took no account
whatever of his existence. Ralph was roused by his
passionate attempts to attract her attention to the fact
that he was standing in the middle of his little private
room in Lincoln’s Inn Fields at a considerable distance
from Chelsea. The physical distance increased his desperation.
He began pacing in circles until the process
sickened him, and then took a sheet of paper for the
composition of a letter which, he vowed before he began
it, should be sent that same evening.
It was a difficult matter to put into words; poetry would
have done it better justice, but he must abstain from
poetry. In an infinite number of half-obliterated scratches
he tried to convey to her the possibility that although
human beings are woefully ill-adapted for communica
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tion, still, such communion is the best we know; moreover,
they make it possible for each to have access to
another world independent of personal affairs, a world of
law, of philosophy, or more strangely a world such as he
had had a glimpse of the other evening when together
they seemed to be sharing something, creating something,
an ideal—a vision flung out in advance of our
actual circumstances. If this golden rim were quenched,
if life were no longer circled by an illusion (but was it an
illusion after all?), then it would be too dismal an affair
to carry to an end; so he wrote with a sudden spurt of
conviction which made clear way for a space and left at
least one sentence standing whole. Making every allowance
for other desires, on the whole this conclusion appeared
to him to justify their relationship. But the conclusion
was mystical; it plunged him into thought. The
difficulty with which even this amount was written, the
inadequacy of the words, and the need of writing under
them and over them others which, after all, did no better,
led him to leave off before he was at ail satisfied
with his production, and unable to resist the conviction
that such rambling would never be fit for Katharine’s eye.
He felt himself more cut off from her than ever. In idleness,
and because he could do nothing further with words,
he began to draw little figures in the blank spaces, heads
meant to resemble her head, blots fringed with flames
meant to represent—perhaps the entire universe. From
this occupation he was roused by the message that a
lady wished to speak to him. He had scarcely time to run
his hands through his hair in order to look as much like a
solicitor as possible, and to cram his papers into his
pocket, already overcome with shame that another eye
should behold them, when he realized that his preparations
were needless. The lady was Mrs. Hilbery.
“I hope you’re not disposing of somebody’s fortune in a
hurry,” she remarked, gazing at the documents on his
table, “or cutting off an entail at one blow, because I
want to ask you to do me a favor. And Anderson won’t
keep his horse waiting. (Anderson is a perfect tyrant, but
he drove my dear father to the Abbey the day they buried
him.) I made bold to come to you, Mr. Denham, not exactly
in search of legal assistance (though I don’t know
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who I’d rather come to, if I were in trouble), but in order
to ask your help in settling some tiresome little domestic
affairs that have arisen in my absence. I’ve been to
Stratford-on-Avon (I must tell you all about that one of
these days), and there I got a letter from my sister-inlaw,
a dear kind goose who likes interfering with other
people’s children because she’s got none of her own. (We’re
dreadfully afraid that she’s going to lose the sight of one
of her eyes, and I always feel that our physical ailments
are so apt to turn into mental ailments. I think Matthew
Arnold says something of the same kind about Lord Byron.)
But that’s neither here nor there.”
The effect of these parentheses, whether they were introduced
for that purpose or represented a natural instinct
on Mrs. Hilbery’s part to embellish the bareness of
her discourse, gave Ralph time to perceive that she possessed
all the facts of their situation and was come, somehow,
in the capacity of ambassador.
“I didn’t come here to talk about Lord Byron,” Mrs.
Hilbery continued, with a little laugh, “though I know
that both you and Katharine, unlike other young people
of your generation, still find him worth reading.” She
paused. “I’m so glad you’ve made Katharine read poetry,
Mr. Denham!” she exclaimed, “and feel poetry, and look
poetry! She can’t talk it yet, but she will—oh, she will!”
Ralph, whose hand was grasped and whose tongue almost
refused to articulate, somehow contrived to say that there
were moments when he felt hopeless, utterly hopeless, though
he gave no reason for this statement on his part.
“But you care for her?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired.
“Good God!” he exclaimed, with a vehemence which
admitted of no question.
“It’s the Church of England service you both object to?”
Mrs. Hilbery inquired innocently.
“I don’t care a damn what service it is,” Ralph replied.
“You would marry her in Westminster Abbey if the worst
came to the worst?” Mrs. Hilbery inquired.
“I would marry her in St. Paul’s Cathedral,” Ralph replied.
His doubts upon this point, which were always
roused by Katharine’s presence, had vanished completely,
and his strongest wish in the world was to be with her
immediately, since every second he was away from her he
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