Messrs. Grateley and Hooper, the solicitors in whose firm Ralph Denham
was clerk, had their office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and there Ralph
Denham appeared every morning very punctually at ten o’clock. His
punctuality, together with other qualities, marked him out among the
clerks for success, and indeed it would have been safe to wager that in
ten years’ time or so one would find him at the head of his profession,
had it not been for a peculiarity which sometimes seemed to make
everything about him uncertain and perilous. His sister Joan had
already been disturbed by his love of gambling with his savings.
Scrutinizing him constantly with the eye of affection, she had become
aware of a curious perversity in his temperament which caused her much
anxiety, and would have caused her still more if she had not recognized
the germs of it in her own nature. She could fancy Ralph suddenly
sacrificing his entire career for some fantastic imagination; some
cause or idea or even (so her fancy ran) for some woman seen from a
railway train, hanging up clothes in a back yard. When he had found
this beauty or this cause, no force, she knew, would avail to restrain
him from pursuit of it. She suspected the East also, and always
fidgeted herself when she saw him with a book of Indian travels in his
hand, as though he were sucking contagion from the page. On the other
hand, no common love affair, had there been such a thing, would have
caused her a moment’s uneasiness where Ralph was concerned. He was
destined in her fancy for something splendid in the way of success or
failure, she knew not which.
And yet nobody could have worked harder or done better in all the
recognized stages of a young man’s life than Ralph had done, and Joan
had to gather materials for her fears from trifles in her brother’s
behavior which would have escaped any other eye. It was natural that
she should be anxious. Life had been so arduous for all of them from
the start that she could not help dreading any sudden relaxation of his
grasp upon what he held, though, as she knew from inspection of her own
life, such sudden impulse to let go and make away from the discipline
and the drudgery was sometimes almost irresistible. But with Ralph, if
he broke away, she knew that it would be only to put himself under
harsher constraint; she figured him toiling through sandy deserts under
a tropical sun to find the source of some river or the haunt of some
fly; she figured him living by the labor of his hands in some city
slum, the victim of one of those terrible theories of right and wrong
which were current at the time; she figured him prisoner for life in
the house of a woman who had seduced him by her misfortunes. Half
proudly, and wholly anxiously, she framed such thoughts, as they sat,
late at night, talking together over the gas-stove in Ralph’s bedroom.
It is likely that Ralph would not have recognized his own dream of a
future in the forecasts which disturbed his sister’s peace of mind.
Certainly, if any one of them had been put before him he would have
rejected it with a laugh, as the sort of life that held no attractions
for him. He could not have said how it was that he had put these absurd
notions into his sister’s head. Indeed, he prided himself upon being
well broken into a life of hard work, about which he had no sort of
illusions. His vision of his own future, unlike many such forecasts,
could have been made public at any moment without a blush; he
attributed to himself a strong brain, and conferred on himself a seat
in the House of Commons at the age of fifty, a moderate fortune, and,
with luck, an unimportant office in a Liberal Government. There was
nothing extravagant in a forecast of that kind, and certainly nothing
dishonorable. Nevertheless, as his sister guessed, it needed all
Ralph’s strength of will, together with the pressure of circumstances,
to keep his feet moving in the path which led that way. It needed, in
particular, a constant repetition of a phrase to the effect that he
shared the common fate, found it best of all, and wished for no other;
and by repeating such phrases he acquired punctuality and habits of
work, and could very plausibly demonstrate that to be a clerk in a
solicitor’s office was the best of all possible lives, and that other
ambitions were vain.
But, like all beliefs not genuinely held, this one depended very much
upon the amount of acceptance it received from other people, and in
private, when the pressure of public opinion was removed, Ralph let
himself swing very rapidly away from his actual circumstances upon
strange voyages which, indeed, he would have been ashamed to describe.
In these dreams, of course, he figured in noble and romantic parts, but
self-glorification was not the only motive of them. They gave outlet to
some spirit which found no work to do in real life, for, with the
pessimism which his lot forced upon him, Ralph had made up his mind
that there was no use for what, contemptuously enough, he called
dreams, in the world which we inhabit. It sometimes seemed to him that
this spirit was the most valuable possession he had; he thought that by
means of it he could set flowering waste tracts of the earth, cure many
ills, or raise up beauty where none now existed; it was, too, a fierce
and potent spirit which would devour the dusty books and parchments on
the office wall with one lick of its tongue, and leave him in a minute
standing in nakedness, if he gave way to it. His endeavor, for many
years, had been to control the spirit, and at the age of twenty-nine he
thought he could pride himself upon a life rigidly divided into the
hours of work and those of dreams; the two lived side by side without
harming each other. As a matter of fact, this effort at discipline had
been helped by the interests of a difficult profession, but the old
conclusion to which Ralph had come when he left college still held sway
in his mind, and tinged his views with the melancholy belief that life
for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the
precious ones, until it forces us to agree that there is little virtue,
as well as little profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of
our inheritance.
Denham was not altogether popular either in his office or among his
family. He was too positive, at this stage of his career, as to what
was right and what wrong, too proud of his self-control, and, as is
natural in the case of persons not altogether happy or well suited in
their conditions, too apt to prove the folly of contentment, if he
found any one who confessed to that weakness. In the office his rather
ostentatious efficiency annoyed those who took their own work more
lightly, and, if they foretold his advancement, it was not altogether
sympathetically. Indeed, he appeared to be rather a hard and
self-sufficient young man, with a queer temper, and manners that were
uncompromisingly abrupt, who was consumed with a desire to get on in
the world, which was natural, these critics thought, in a man of no
means, but not engaging.
The young men in the office had a perfect right to these opinions,
because Denham showed no particular desire for their friendship. He
liked them well enough, but shut them up in that compartment of life
which was devoted to work. Hitherto, indeed, he had found little
difficulty in arranging his life as methodically as he arranged his
expenditure, but about this time he began to encounter experiences
which were not so easy to classify. Mary Datchet had begun this
confusion two years ago by bursting into laughter at some remark of
his, almost the first time they met. She could not explain why it was.
She thought him quite astonishingly odd. When he knew her well enough
to tell her how he spent Monday and Wednesday and Saturday, she was
still more amused; she laughed till he laughed, too, without knowing
why. It seemed to her very odd that he should know as much about
breeding bulldogs as any man in England; that he had a collection of
wild flowers found near London; and his weekly visit to old Miss
Trotter at Ealing, who was an authority upon the science of Heraldry,
never failed to excite her laughter. She wanted to know everything,
even the kind of cake which the old lady supplied on these occasions;
and their summer excursions to churches in the neighborhood of London
for the purpose of taking rubbings of the brasses became most important
festivals, from the interest she took in them. In six months she knew
more about his odd friends and hobbies than his own brothers and
sisters knew, after living with him all his life; and Ralph found this
very pleasant, though disordering, for his own view of himself had
always been profoundly serious.
Certainly it was very pleasant to be with Mary Datchet and to become,
directly the door was shut, quite a different sort of person, eccentric
and lovable, with scarcely any likeness to the self most people knew.
He became less serious, and rather less dictatorial at home, for he was
apt to hear Mary laughing at him, and telling him, as she was fond of
doing, that he knew nothing at all about anything. She made him, also,
take an interest in public questions, for which she had a natural
liking; and was in process of turning him from Tory to Radical, after a
course of public meetings, which began by boring him acutely, and ended
by exciting him even more than they excited her.
But he was reserved; when ideas started up in his mind, he divided them
automatically into those he could discuss with Mary, and those he must
keep for himself. She knew this and it interested her, for she was
accustomed to find young men very ready to talk about themselves, and
had come to listen to them as one listens to children, without any
thought of herself. But with Ralph, she had very little of this
maternal feeling, and, in consequence, a much keener sense of her own
individuality.
Late one afternoon Ralph stepped along the Strand to an interview with
a lawyer upon business. The afternoon light was almost over, and
already streams of greenish and yellowish artificial light were being
poured into an atmosphere which, in country lanes, would now have been
soft with the smoke of wood fires; and on both sides of the road the
shop windows were full of sparkling chains and highly polished leather
cases, which stood upon shelves made of thick plate-glass. None of
these different objects was seen separately by Denham, but from all of
them he drew an impression of stir and cheerfulness. Thus it came about
that he saw Katharine Hilbery coming towards him, and looked straight
at her, as if she were only an illustration of the argument that was
going forward in his mind. In this spirit he noticed the rather set
expression in her eyes, and the slight, half-conscious movement of her
lips, which, together with her height and the distinction of her dress,
made her look as if the scurrying crowd impeded her, and her direction
were different from theirs. He noticed this calmly; but suddenly, as he
passed her, his hands and knees began to tremble, and his heart beat
painfully. She did not see him, and went on repeating to herself some
lines which had stuck to her memory: “It’s life that matters, nothing
but life—the process of discovering—the everlasting and perpetual
process, not the discovery itself at all.” Thus occupied, she did not
see Denham, and he had not the courage to stop her. But immediately the
whole scene in the Strand wore that curious look of order and purpose
which is imparted to the most heterogeneous things when music sounds;
and so pleasant was this impression that he was very glad that he had
not stopped her, after all. It grew slowly fainter, but lasted until he
stood outside the barrister’s chambers.
When his interview with the barrister was over, it was too late to go
back to the office. His sight of Katharine had put him queerly out of
tune for a domestic evening. Where should he go? To walk through the
streets of London until he came to Katharine’s house, to look up at the
windows and fancy her within, seemed to him possible for a moment; and
then he rejected the plan almost with a blush as, with a curious
division of consciousness, one plucks a flower sentimentally and throws
it away, with a blush, when it is actually picked. No, he would go and
see Mary Datchet. By this time she would be back from her work.
To see Ralph appear unexpectedly in her room threw Mary for a second
off her balance. She had been cleaning knives in her little scullery,
and when she had let him in she went back again, and turned on the
cold-water tap to its fullest volume, and then turned it off again.
“Now,” she thought to herself, as she screwed it tight, “I’m not going
to let these silly ideas come into my head.... Don’t you think Mr.
Asquith deserves to be hanged?” she called back into the sitting-room,
and when she joined him, drying her hands, she began to tell him about
the latest evasion on the part of the Government with respect to the
Women’s Suffrage Bill. Ralph did not want to talk about politics, but
he could not help respecting Mary for taking such an interest in public
questions. He looked at her as she leant forward, poking the fire, and
expressing herself very clearly in phrases which bore distantly the
taint of the platform, and he thought, “How absurd Mary would think me
if she knew that I almost made up my mind to walk all the way to
Chelsea in order to look at Katharine’s windows. She wouldn’t
understand it, but I like her very much as she is.”
For some time they discussed what the women had better do; and as Ralph
became genuinely interested in the question, Mary unconsciously let her
attention wander, and a great desire came over her to talk to Ralph
about her own feelings; or, at any rate, about something personal, so
that she might see what he felt for her; but she resisted this wish.
But she could not prevent him from feeling her lack of interest in what
he was saying, and gradually they both became silent. One thought after
another came up in Ralph’s mind, but they were all, in some way,
connected with Katharine, or with vague feelings of romance and
adventure such as she inspired. But he could not talk to Mary about
such thoughts; and he pitied her for knowing nothing of what he was
feeling. “Here,” he thought, “is where we differ from women; they have
no sense of romance.”
“Well, Mary,” he said at length, “why don’t you say something amusing?”
His tone was certainly provoking, but, as a general rule, Mary was not
easily provoked. This evening, however, she replied rather sharply:
“Because I’ve got nothing amusing to say, I suppose.”
Ralph thought for a moment, and then remarked:
“You work too hard. I don’t mean your health,” he added, as she laughed
scornfully, “I mean that you seem to me to be getting wrapped up in
your work.”
“And is that a bad thing?” she asked, shading her eyes with her hand.
“I think it is,” he returned abruptly.
“But only a week ago you were saying the opposite.” Her tone was
defiant, but she became curiously depressed. Ralph did not perceive it,
and took this opportunity of lecturing her, and expressing his latest
views upon the proper conduct of life. She listened, but her main
impression was that he had been meeting some one who had influenced
him. He was telling her that she ought to read more, and to see that
there were other points of view as deserving of attention as her own.
Naturally, having last seen him as he left the office in company with
Katharine, she attributed the change to her; it was likely that
Katharine, on leaving the scene which she had so clearly despised, had
pronounced some such criticism, or suggested it by her own attitude.
But she knew that Ralph would never admit that he had been influenced
by anybody.
“You don’t read enough, Mary,” he was saying. “You ought to read more
poetry.”
It was true that Mary’s reading had been rather limited to such works
as she needed to know for the sake of examinations; and her time for
reading in London was very little. For some reason, no one likes to be
told that they do not read enough poetry, but her resentment was only
visible in the way she changed the position of her hands, and in the
fixed look in her eyes. And then she thought to herself, “I’m behaving
exactly as I said I wouldn’t behave,” whereupon she relaxed all her
muscles and said, in her reasonable way:
“Tell me what I ought to read, then.”
Ralph had unconsciously been irritated by Mary, and he now delivered
himself of a few names of great poets which were the text for a
discourse upon the imperfection of Mary’s character and way of life.
“You live with your inferiors,” he said, warming unreasonably, as he
knew, to his text. “And you get into a groove because, on the whole,
it’s rather a pleasant groove. And you tend to forget what you’re there
for. You’ve the feminine habit of making much of details. You don’t see
when things matter and when they don’t. And that’s what’s the ruin of
all these organizations. That’s why the Suffragists have never done
anything all these years. What’s the point of drawing-room meetings and
bazaars? You want to have ideas, Mary; get hold of something big; never
mind making mistakes, but don’t niggle. Why don’t you throw it all up
for a year, and travel?—see something of the world. Don’t be content to
live with half a dozen people in a backwater all your life. But you
won’t,” he concluded.
“I’ve rather come to that way of thinking myself—about myself, I mean,”
said Mary, surprising him by her acquiescence. “I should like to go
somewhere far away.”
For a moment they were both silent. Ralph then said:
“But look here, Mary, you haven’t been taking this seriously, have
you?” His irritation was spent, and the depression, which she could not
keep out of her voice, made him feel suddenly with remorse that he had
been hurting her.
“You won’t go away, will you?” he asked. And as she said nothing, he
added, “Oh no, don’t go away.”
“I don’t know exactly what I mean to do,” she replied. She hovered on
the verge of some discussion of her plans, but she received no
encouragement. He fell into one of his queer silences, which seemed to
Mary, in spite of all her precautions, to have reference to what she
also could not prevent herself from thinking about—their feeling for
each other and their relationship. She felt that the two lines of
thought bored their way in long, parallel tunnels which came very close
indeed, but never ran into each other.
When he had gone, and he left her without breaking his silence more
than was needed to wish her good night, she sat on for a time,
reviewing what he had said. If love is a devastating fire which melts
the whole being into one mountain torrent, Mary was no more in love
with Denham than she was in love with her poker or her tongs. But
probably these extreme passions are very rare, and the state of mind
thus depicted belongs to the very last stages of love, when the power
to resist has been eaten away, week by week or day by day. Like most
intelligent people, Mary was something of an egoist, to the extent,
that is, of attaching great importance to what she felt, and she was by
nature enough of a moralist to like to make certain, from time to time,
that her feelings were creditable to her. When Ralph left her she
thought over her state of mind, and came to the conclusion that it
would be a good thing to learn a language—say Italian or German. She
then went to a drawer, which she had to unlock, and took from it
certain deeply scored manuscript pages. She read them through, looking
up from her reading every now and then and thinking very intently for a
few seconds about Ralph. She did her best to verify all the qualities
in him which gave rise to emotions in her; and persuaded herself that
she accounted reasonably for them all. Then she looked back again at
her manuscript, and decided that to write grammatical English prose is
the hardest thing in the world. But she thought about herself a great
deal more than she thought about grammatical English prose or about
Ralph Denham, and it may therefore be disputed whether she was in love,
or, if so, to which branch of the family her passion belonged.