But other passengers were approaching Lincoln meanwhile by other roads
on foot. A county town draws the inhabitants of all vicarages, farms,
country houses, and wayside cottages, within a radius of ten miles at
least, once or twice a week to its streets; and among them, on this
occasion, were Ralph Denham and Mary Datchet. They despised the roads,
and took their way across the fields; and yet, from their appearance,
it did not seem as if they cared much where they walked so long as the
way did not actually trip them up. When they left the Vicarage, they
had begun an argument which swung their feet along so rhythmically in
time with it that they covered the ground at over four miles an hour,
and saw nothing of the hedgerows, the swelling plowland, or the mild
blue sky. What they saw were the Houses of Parliament and the
Government Offices in Whitehall. They both belonged to the class which
is conscious of having lost its birthright in these great structures
and is seeking to build another kind of lodging for its own notion of
law and government. Purposely, perhaps, Mary did not agree with Ralph;
she loved to feel her mind in conflict with his, and to be certain that
he spared her female judgment no ounce of his male muscularity. He
seemed to argue as fiercely with her as if she were his brother. They
were alike, however, in believing that it behooved them to take in hand
the repair and reconstruction of the fabric of England. They agreed in
thinking that nature has not been generous in the endowment of our
councilors. They agreed, unconsciously, in a mute love for the muddy
field through which they tramped, with eyes narrowed close by the
concentration of their minds. At length they drew breath, let the
argument fly away into the limbo of other good arguments, and, leaning
over a gate, opened their eyes for the first time and looked about
them. Their feet tingled with warm blood and their breath rose in steam
around them. The bodily exercise made them both feel more direct and
less self-conscious than usual, and Mary, indeed, was overcome by a
sort of light-headedness which made it seem to her that it mattered
very little what happened next. It mattered so little, indeed, that she
felt herself on the point of saying to Ralph:
“I love you; I shall never love anybody else. Marry me or leave me;
think what you like of me—I don’t care a straw.” At the moment,
however, speech or silence seemed immaterial, and she merely clapped
her hands together, and looked at the distant woods with the rust-like
bloom on their brown, and the green and blue landscape through the
steam of her own breath. It seemed a mere toss-up whether she said, “I
love you,” or whether she said, “I love the beech-trees,” or only “I
love—I love.”
“Do you know, Mary,” Ralph suddenly interrupted her, “I’ve made up my
mind.”
Her indifference must have been superficial, for it disappeared at
once. Indeed, she lost sight of the trees, and saw her own hand upon
the topmost bar of the gate with extreme distinctness, while he went
on:
“I’ve made up my mind to chuck my work and live down here. I want you
to tell me about that cottage you spoke of. However, I suppose there’ll
be no difficulty about getting a cottage, will there?” He spoke with an
assumption of carelessness as if expecting her to dissuade him.
She still waited, as if for him to continue; she was convinced that in
some roundabout way he approached the subject of their marriage.
“I can’t stand the office any longer,” he proceeded. “I don’t know what
my family will say; but I’m sure I’m right. Don’t you think so?”
“Live down here by yourself?” she asked.
“Some old woman would do for me, I suppose,” he replied. “I’m sick of
the whole thing,” he went on, and opened the gate with a jerk. They
began to cross the next field walking side by side.
“I tell you, Mary, it’s utter destruction, working away, day after day,
at stuff that doesn’t matter a damn to any one. I’ve stood eight years
of it, and I’m not going to stand it any longer. I suppose this all
seems to you mad, though?”
By this time Mary had recovered her self-control.
“No. I thought you weren’t happy,” she said.
“Why did you think that?” he asked, with some surprise.
“Don’t you remember that morning in Lincoln’s Inn Fields?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Ralph, slackening his pace and remembering Katharine and
her engagement, the purple leaves stamped into the path, the white
paper radiant under the electric light, and the hopelessness which
seemed to surround all these things.
“You’re right, Mary,” he said, with something of an effort, “though I
don’t know how you guessed it.”
She was silent, hoping that he might tell her the reason of his
unhappiness, for his excuses had not deceived her.
“I was unhappy—very unhappy,” he repeated. Some six weeks separated him
from that afternoon when he had sat upon the Embankment watching his
visions dissolve in mist as the waters swam past and the sense of his
desolation still made him shiver. He had not recovered in the least
from that depression. Here was an opportunity for making himself face
it, as he felt that he ought to; for, by this time, no doubt, it was
only a sentimental ghost, better exorcised by ruthless exposure to such
an eye as Mary’s, than allowed to underlie all his actions and thoughts
as had been the case ever since he first saw Katharine Hilbery pouring
out tea. He must begin, however, by mentioning her name, and this he
found it impossible to do. He persuaded himself that he could make an
honest statement without speaking her name; he persuaded himself that
his feeling had very little to do with her.
“Unhappiness is a state of mind,” he said, “by which I mean that it is
not necessarily the result of any particular cause.”
This rather stilted beginning did not please him, and it became more
and more obvious to him that, whatever he might say, his unhappiness
had been directly caused by Katharine.
“I began to find my life unsatisfactory,” he started afresh. “It seemed
to me meaningless.” He paused again, but felt that this, at any rate,
was true, and that on these lines he could go on.
“All this money-making and working ten hours a day in an office, what’s
it FOR? When one’s a boy, you see, one’s head is so full of dreams that
it doesn’t seem to matter what one does. And if you’re ambitious,
you’re all right; you’ve got a reason for going on. Now my reasons
ceased to satisfy me. Perhaps I never had any. That’s very likely now I
come to think of it. (What reason is there for anything, though?)
Still, it’s impossible, after a certain age, to take oneself in
satisfactorily. And I know what carried me on”—for a good reason now
occurred to him—“I wanted to be the savior of my family and all that
kind of thing. I wanted them to get on in the world. That was a lie, of
course—a kind of self-glorification, too. Like most people, I suppose,
I’ve lived almost entirely among delusions, and now I’m at the awkward
stage of finding it out. I want another delusion to go on with. That’s
what my unhappiness amounts to, Mary.”
There were two reasons that kept Mary very silent during this speech,
and drew curiously straight lines upon her face. In the first place,
Ralph made no mention of marriage; in the second, he was not speaking
the truth.
“I don’t think it will be difficult to find a cottage,” she said, with
cheerful hardness, ignoring the whole of this statement. “You’ve got a
little money, haven’t you? Yes,” she concluded, “I don’t see why it
shouldn’t be a very good plan.”
They crossed the field in complete silence. Ralph was surprised by her
remark and a little hurt, and yet, on the whole, rather pleased. He had
convinced himself that it was impossible to lay his case truthfully
before Mary, and, secretly, he was relieved to find that he had not
parted with his dream to her. She was, as he had always found her, the
sensible, loyal friend, the woman he trusted; whose sympathy he could
count upon, provided he kept within certain limits. He was not
displeased to find that those limits were very clearly marked. When
they had crossed the next hedge she said to him:
“Yes, Ralph, it’s time you made a break. I’ve come to the same
conclusion myself. Only it won’t be a country cottage in my case; it’ll
be America. America!” she cried. “That’s the place for me! They’ll
teach me something about organizing a movement there, and I’ll come
back and show you how to do it.”
If she meant consciously or unconsciously to belittle the seclusion and
security of a country cottage, she did not succeed; for Ralph’s
determination was genuine. But she made him visualize her in her own
character, so that he looked quickly at her, as she walked a little in
front of him across the plowed field; for the first time that morning
he saw her independently of him or of his preoccupation with Katharine.
He seemed to see her marching ahead, a rather clumsy but powerful and
independent figure, for whose courage he felt the greatest respect.
“Don’t go away, Mary!” he exclaimed, and stopped.
“That’s what you said before, Ralph,” she returned, without looking at
him. “You want to go away yourself and you don’t want me to go away.
That’s not very sensible, is it?”
“Mary,” he cried, stung by the remembrance of his exacting and
dictatorial ways with her, “what a brute I’ve been to you!”
It took all her strength to keep the tears from springing, and to
thrust back her assurance that she would forgive him till Doomsday if
he chose. She was preserved from doing so only by a stubborn kind of
respect for herself which lay at the root of her nature and forbade
surrender, even in moments of almost overwhelming passion. Now, when
all was tempest and high-running waves, she knew of a land where the
sun shone clear upon Italian grammars and files of docketed papers.
Nevertheless, from the skeleton pallor of that land and the rocks that
broke its surface, she knew that her life there would be harsh and
lonely almost beyond endurance. She walked steadily a little in front
of him across the plowed field. Their way took them round the verge of
a wood of thin trees standing at the edge of a steep fold in the land.
Looking between the tree-trunks, Ralph saw laid out on the perfectly
flat and richly green meadow at the bottom of the hill a small gray
manor-house, with ponds, terraces, and clipped hedges in front of it, a
farm building or so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising
behind, all perfectly sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house
the hill rose again, and the trees on the farther summit stood upright
against the sky, which appeared of a more intense blue between their
trunks. His mind at once was filled with a sense of the actual presence
of Katharine; the gray house and the intense blue sky gave him the
feeling of her presence close by. He leant against a tree, forming her
name beneath his breath:
“Katharine, Katharine,” he said aloud, and then, looking round, saw
Mary walking slowly away from him, tearing a long spray of ivy from the
trees as she passed them. She seemed so definitely opposed to the
vision he held in his mind that he returned to it with a gesture of
impatience.
“Katharine, Katharine,” he repeated, and seemed to himself to be with
her. He lost his sense of all that surrounded him; all substantial
things—the hour of the day, what we have done and are about to do, the
presence of other people and the support we derive from seeing their
belief in a common reality—all this slipped from him. So he might have
felt if the earth had dropped from his feet, and the empty blue had
hung all round him, and the air had been steeped in the presence of one
woman. The chirp of a robin on the bough above his head awakened him,
and his awakenment was accompanied by a sigh. Here was the world in
which he had lived; here the plowed field, the high road yonder, and
Mary, stripping ivy from the trees. When he came up with her he linked
his arm through hers and said:
“Now, Mary, what’s all this about America?”
There was a brotherly kindness in his voice which seemed to her
magnanimous, when she reflected that she had cut short his explanations
and shown little interest in his change of plan. She gave him her
reasons for thinking that she might profit by such a journey, omitting
the one reason which had set all the rest in motion. He listened
attentively, and made no attempt to dissuade her. In truth, he found
himself curiously eager to make certain of her good sense, and accepted
each fresh proof of it with satisfaction, as though it helped him to
make up his mind about something. She forgot the pain he had caused
her, and in place of it she became conscious of a steady tide of
well-being which harmonized very aptly with the tramp of their feet
upon the dry road and the support of his arm. The comfort was the more
glowing in that it seemed to be the reward of her determination to
behave to him simply and without attempting to be other than she was.
Instead of making out an interest in the poets, she avoided them
instinctively, and dwelt rather insistently upon the practical nature
of her gifts.
In a practical way she asked for particulars of his cottage, which
hardly existed in his mind, and corrected his vagueness.
“You must see that there’s water,” she insisted, with an exaggeration
of interest. She avoided asking him what he meant to do in this
cottage, and, at last, when all the practical details had been thrashed
out as much as possible, he rewarded her by a more intimate statement.
“One of the rooms,” he said, “must be my study, for, you see, Mary, I’m
going to write a book.” Here he withdrew his arm from hers, lit his
pipe, and they tramped on in a sagacious kind of comradeship, the most
complete they had attained in all their friendship.
“And what’s your book to be about?” she said, as boldly as if she had
never come to grief with Ralph in talking about books. He told her
unhesitatingly that he meant to write the history of the English
village from Saxon days to the present time. Some such plan had lain as
a seed in his mind for many years; and now that he had decided, in a
flash, to give up his profession, the seed grew in the space of twenty
minutes both tall and lusty. He was surprised himself at the positive
way in which he spoke. It was the same with the question of his
cottage. That had come into existence, too, in an unromantic shape—a
square white house standing just off the high road, no doubt, with a
neighbor who kept a pig and a dozen squalling children; for these plans
were shorn of all romance in his mind, and the pleasure he derived from
thinking of them was checked directly it passed a very sober limit. So
a sensible man who has lost his chance of some beautiful inheritance
might tread out the narrow bounds of his actual dwelling-place, and
assure himself that life is supportable within its demesne, only one
must grow turnips and cabbages, not melons and pomegranates. Certainly
Ralph took some pride in the resources of his mind, and was insensibly
helped to right himself by Mary’s trust in him. She wound her ivy spray
round her ash-plant, and for the first time for many days, when alone
with Ralph, set no spies upon her motives, sayings, and feelings, but
surrendered herself to complete happiness.
Thus talking, with easy silences and some pauses to look at the view
over the hedge and to decide upon the species of a little gray-brown
bird slipping among the twigs, they walked into Lincoln, and after
strolling up and down the main street, decided upon an inn where the
rounded window suggested substantial fare, nor were they mistaken. For
over a hundred and fifty years hot joints, potatoes, greens, and apple
puddings had been served to generations of country gentlemen, and now,
sitting at a table in the hollow of the bow window, Ralph and Mary took
their share of this perennial feast. Looking across the joint, half-way
through the meal, Mary wondered whether Ralph would ever come to look
quite like the other people in the room. Would he be absorbed among the
round pink faces, pricked with little white bristles, the calves fitted
in shiny brown leather, the black-and-white check suits, which were
sprinkled about in the same room with them? She half hoped so; she
thought that it was only in his mind that he was different. She did not
wish him to be too different from other people. The walk had given him
a ruddy color, too, and his eyes were lit up by a steady, honest light,
which could not make the simplest farmer feel ill at ease, or suggest
to the most devout of clergymen a disposition to sneer at his faith.
She loved the steep cliff of his forehead, and compared it to the brow
of a young Greek horseman, who reins his horse back so sharply that it
half falls on its haunches. He always seemed to her like a rider on a
spirited horse. And there was an exaltation to her in being with him,
because there was a risk that he would not be able to keep to the right
pace among other people. Sitting opposite him at the little table in
the window, she came back to that state of careless exaltation which
had overcome her when they halted by the gate, but now it was
accompanied by a sense of sanity and security, for she felt that they
had a feeling in common which scarcely needed embodiment in words. How
silent he was! leaning his forehead on his hand, now and then, and
again looking steadily and gravely at the backs of the two men at the
next table, with so little self-consciousness that she could almost
watch his mind placing one thought solidly upon the top of another; she
thought that she could feel him thinking, through the shade of her
fingers, and she could anticipate the exact moment when he would put an
end to his thought and turn a little in his chair and say:
“Well, Mary—?” inviting her to take up the thread of thought where he
had dropped it.
And at that very moment he turned just so, and said:
“Well, Mary?” with the curious touch of diffidence which she loved in
him.
She laughed, and she explained her laugh on the spur of the moment by
the look of the people in the street below. There was a motor-car with
an old lady swathed in blue veils, and a lady’s maid on the seat
opposite, holding a King Charles’s spaniel; there was a country-woman
wheeling a perambulator full of sticks down the middle of the road;
there was a bailiff in gaiters discussing the state of the cattle
market with a dissenting minister—so she defined them.
She ran over this list without any fear that her companion would think
her trivial. Indeed, whether it was due to the warmth of the room or to
the good roast beef, or whether Ralph had achieved the process which is
called making up one’s mind, certainly he had given up testing the good
sense, the independent character, the intelligence shown in her
remarks. He had been building one of those piles of thought, as
ramshackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from words let fall
by gentlemen in gaiters, half from the litter in his own mind, about
duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln
and the relations of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all
this disconnected rambling, there suddenly formed itself in his mind
the idea that he would ask Mary to marry him. The idea was so
spontaneous that it seemed to shape itself of its own accord before his
eyes. It was then that he turned round and made use of his old,
instinctive phrase:
“Well, Mary—?”
As it presented itself to him at first, the idea was so new and
interesting that he was half inclined to address it, without more ado,
to Mary herself. His natural instinct to divide his thoughts carefully
into two different classes before he expressed them to her prevailed.
But as he watched her looking out of the window and describing the old
lady, the woman with the perambulator, the bailiff and the dissenting
minister, his eyes filled involuntarily with tears. He would have liked
to lay his head on her shoulder and sob, while she parted his hair with
her fingers and soothed him and said:
“There, there. Don’t cry! Tell me why you’re crying—“; and they would
clasp each other tight, and her arms would hold him like his mother’s.
He felt that he was very lonely, and that he was afraid of the other
people in the room.
“How damnable this all is!” he exclaimed abruptly.
“What are you talking about?” she replied, rather vaguely, still
looking out of the window.
He resented this divided attention more than, perhaps, he knew, and he
thought how Mary would soon be on her way to America.
“Mary,” he said, “I want to talk to you. Haven’t we nearly done? Why
don’t they take away these plates?”
Mary felt his agitation without looking at him; she felt convinced that
she knew what it was that he wished to say to her.
“They’ll come all in good time,” she said; and felt it necessary to
display her extreme calmness by lifting a salt-cellar and sweeping up a
little heap of bread-crumbs.
“I want to apologize,” Ralph continued, not quite knowing what he was
about to say, but feeling some curious instinct which urged him to
commit himself irrevocably, and to prevent the moment of intimacy from
passing.
“I think I’ve treated you very badly. That is, I’ve told you lies. Did
you guess that I was lying to you? Once in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and
again to-day on our walk. I am a liar, Mary. Did you know that? Do you
think you do know me?”
“I think I do,” she said.
At this point the waiter changed their plates.
“It’s true I don’t want you to go to America,” he said, looking fixedly
at the table-cloth. “In fact, my feelings towards you seem to be
utterly and damnably bad,” he said energetically, although forced to
keep his voice low.
“If I weren’t a selfish beast I should tell you to have nothing more to
do with me. And yet, Mary, in spite of the fact that I believe what I’m
saying, I also believe that it’s good we should know each other—the
world being what it is, you see—” and by a nod of his head he indicated
the other occupants of the room, “for, of course, in an ideal state of
things, in a decent community even, there’s no doubt you shouldn’t have
anything to do with me—seriously, that is.”
“You forget that I’m not an ideal character, either,” said Mary, in the
same low and very earnest tones, which, in spite of being almost
inaudible, surrounded their table with an atmosphere of concentration
which was quite perceptible to the other diners, who glanced at them
now and then with a queer mixture of kindness, amusement, and
curiosity.
“I’m much more selfish than I let on, and I’m worldly a little—more
than you think, anyhow. I like bossing things—perhaps that’s my
greatest fault. I’ve none of your passion for—” here she hesitated, and
glanced at him, as if to ascertain what his passion was for—“for the
truth,” she added, as if she had found what she sought indisputably.
“I’ve told you I’m a liar,” Ralph repeated obstinately.
“Oh, in little things, I dare say,” she said impatiently. “But not in
real ones, and that’s what matters. I dare say I’m more truthful than
you are in small ways. But I could never care”—she was surprised to
find herself speaking the word, and had to force herself to speak it
out—“for any one who was a liar in that way. I love the truth a certain
amount—a considerable amount—but not in the way you love it.” Her voice
sank, became inaudible, and wavered as if she could scarcely keep
herself from tears.
“Good heavens!” Ralph exclaimed to himself. “She loves me! Why did I
never see it before? She’s going to cry; no, but she can’t speak.”
The certainty overwhelmed him so that he scarcely knew what he was
doing; the blood rushed to his cheeks, and although he had quite made
up his mind to ask her to marry him, the certainty that she loved him
seemed to change the situation so completely that he could not do it.
He did not dare to look at her. If she cried, he did not know what he
should do. It seemed to him that something of a terrible and
devastating nature had happened. The waiter changed their plates once
more.
In his agitation Ralph rose, turned his back upon Mary, and looked out
of the window. The people in the street seemed to him only a dissolving
and combining pattern of black particles; which, for the moment,
represented very well the involuntary procession of feelings and
thoughts which formed and dissolved in rapid succession in his own
mind. At one moment he exulted in the thought that Mary loved him; at
the next, it seemed that he was without feeling for her; her love was
repulsive to him. Now he felt urged to marry her at once; now to
disappear and never see her again. In order to control this disorderly
race of thought he forced himself to read the name on the chemist’s
shop directly opposite him; then to examine the objects in the shop
windows, and then to focus his eyes exactly upon a little group of
women looking in at the great windows of a large draper’s shop. This
discipline having given him at least a superficial control of himself,
he was about to turn and ask the waiter to bring the bill, when his eye
was caught by a tall figure walking quickly along the opposite
pavement—a tall figure, upright, dark, and commanding, much detached
from her surroundings. She held her gloves in her left hand, and the
left hand was bare. All this Ralph noticed and enumerated and
recognized before he put a name to the whole—Katharine Hilbery. She
seemed to be looking for somebody. Her eyes, in fact, scanned both
sides of the street, and for one second were raised directly to the bow
window in which Ralph stood; but she looked away again instantly
without giving any sign that she had seen him. This sudden apparition
had an extraordinary effect upon him. It was as if he had thought of
her so intensely that his mind had formed the shape of her, rather than
that he had seen her in the flesh outside in the street. And yet he had
not been thinking of her at all. The impression was so intense that he
could not dismiss it, nor even think whether he had seen her or merely
imagined her. He sat down at once, and said, briefly and strangely,
rather to himself than to Mary:
“That was Katharine Hilbery.”
“Katharine Hilbery? What do you mean?” she asked, hardly understanding
from his manner whether he had seen her or not.
“Katharine Hilbery,” he repeated. “But she’s gone now.”
“Katharine Hilbery!” Mary thought, in an instant of blinding
revelation; “I’ve always known it was Katharine Hilbery!” She knew it
all now.
After a moment of downcast stupor, she raised her eyes, looked steadily
at Ralph, and caught his fixed and dreamy gaze leveled at a point far
beyond their surroundings, a point that she had never reached in all
the time that she had known him. She noticed the lips just parted, the
fingers loosely clenched, the whole attitude of rapt contemplation,
which fell like a veil between them. She noticed everything about him;
if there had been other signs of his utter alienation she would have
sought them out, too, for she felt that it was only by heaping one
truth upon another that she could keep herself sitting there, upright.
The truth seemed to support her; it struck her, even as she looked at
his face, that the light of truth was shining far away beyond him; the
light of truth, she seemed to frame the words as she rose to go, shines
on a world not to be shaken by our personal calamities.
Ralph handed her her coat and her stick. She took them, fastened the
coat securely, grasped the stick firmly. The ivy spray was still
twisted about the handle; this one sacrifice, she thought, she might
make to sentimentality and personality, and she picked two leaves from
the ivy and put them in her pocket before she disencumbered her stick
of the rest of it. She grasped the stick in the middle, and settled her
fur cap closely upon her head, as if she must be in trim for a long and
stormy walk. Next, standing in the middle of the road, she took a slip
of paper from her purse, and read out loud a list of commissions
entrusted to her—fruit, butter, string, and so on; and all the time she
never spoke directly to Ralph or looked at him.
Ralph heard her giving orders to attentive, rosy-cheeked men in white
aprons, and in spite of his own preoccupation, he commented upon the
determination with which she made her wishes known. Once more he began,
automatically, to take stock of her characteristics. Standing thus,
superficially observant and stirring the sawdust on the floor
meditatively with the toe of his boot, he was roused by a musical and
familiar voice behind him, accompanied by a light touch upon his
shoulder.
“I’m not mistaken? Surely Mr. Denham? I caught a glimpse of your coat
through the window, and I felt sure that I knew your coat. Have you
seen Katharine or William? I’m wandering about Lincoln looking for the
ruins.”
It was Mrs. Hilbery; her entrance created some stir in the shop; many
people looked at her.
“First of all, tell me where I am,” she demanded, but, catching sight
of the attentive shopman, she appealed to him. “The ruins—my party is
waiting for me at the ruins. The Roman ruins—or Greek, Mr. Denham? Your
town has a great many beautiful things in it, but I wish it hadn’t so
many ruins. I never saw such delightful little pots of honey in my
life—are they made by your own bees? Please give me one of those little
pots, and tell me how I shall find my way to the ruins.”
“And now,” she continued, having received the information and the pot
of honey, having been introduced to Mary, and having insisted that they
should accompany her back to the ruins, since in a town with so many
turnings, such prospects, such delightful little half-naked boys
dabbling in pools, such Venetian canals, such old blue china in the
curiosity shops, it was impossible for one person all alone to find her
way to the ruins. “Now,” she exclaimed, “please tell me what you’re
doing here, Mr. Denham—for you _are_ Mr. Denham, aren’t you?” she
inquired, gazing at him with a sudden suspicion of her own accuracy.
“The brilliant young man who writes for the Review, I mean? Only
yesterday my husband was telling me he thought you one of the cleverest
young men he knew. Certainly, you’ve been the messenger of Providence
to me, for unless I’d seen you I’m sure I should never have found the
ruins at all.”
They had reached the Roman arch when Mrs. Hilbery caught sight of her
own party, standing like sentinels facing up and down the road so as to
intercept her if, as they expected, she had got lodged in some shop.
“I’ve found something much better than ruins!” she exclaimed. “I’ve
found two friends who told me how to find you, which I could never have
done without them. They must come and have tea with us. What a pity
that we’ve just had luncheon.” Could they not somehow revoke that meal?
Katharine, who had gone a few steps by herself down the road, and was
investigating the window of an ironmonger, as if her mother might have
got herself concealed among mowing-machines and garden-shears, turned
sharply on hearing her voice, and came towards them. She was a great
deal surprised to see Denham and Mary Datchet. Whether the cordiality
with which she greeted them was merely that which is natural to a
surprise meeting in the country, or whether she was really glad to see
them both, at any rate she exclaimed with unusual pleasure as she shook
hands:
“I never knew you lived here. Why didn’t you say so, and we could have
met? And are you staying with Mary?” she continued, turning to Ralph.
“What a pity we didn’t meet before.”
Thus confronted at a distance of only a few feet by the real body of
the woman about whom he had dreamt so many million dreams, Ralph
stammered; he made a clutch at his self-control; the color either came
to his cheeks or left them, he knew not which; but he was determined to
face her and track down in the cold light of day whatever vestige of
truth there might be in his persistent imaginations. He did not succeed
in saying anything. It was Mary who spoke for both of them. He was
struck dumb by finding that Katharine was quite different, in some
strange way, from his memory, so that he had to dismiss his old view in
order to accept the new one. The wind was blowing her crimson scarf
across her face; the wind had already loosened her hair, which looped
across the corner of one of the large, dark eyes which, so he used to
think, looked sad; now they looked bright with the brightness of the
sea struck by an unclouded ray; everything about her seemed rapid,
fragmentary, and full of a kind of racing speed. He realized suddenly
that he had never seen her in the daylight before.
Meanwhile, it was decided that it was too late to go in search of ruins
as they had intended; and the whole party began to walk towards the
stables where the carriage had been put up.
“Do you know,” said Katharine, keeping slightly in advance of the rest
with Ralph, “I thought I saw you this morning, standing at a window.
But I decided that it couldn’t be you. And it must have been you all
the same.”
“Yes, I thought I saw you—but it wasn’t you,” he replied.
This remark, and the rough strain in his voice, recalled to her memory
so many difficult speeches and abortive meetings that she was jerked
directly back to the London drawing-room, the family relics, and the
tea-table; and at the same time recalled some half-finished or
interrupted remark which she had wanted to make herself or to hear from
him—she could not remember what it was.
“I expect it was me,” she said. “I was looking for my mother. It
happens every time we come to Lincoln. In fact, there never was a
family so unable to take care of itself as ours is. Not that it very
much matters, because some one always turns up in the nick of time to
help us out of our scrapes. Once I was left in a field with a bull when
I was a baby—but where did we leave the carriage? Down that street or
the next? The next, I think.” She glanced back and saw that the others
were following obediently, listening to certain memories of Lincoln
upon which Mrs. Hilbery had started. “But what are you doing here?” she
asked.
“I’m buying a cottage. I’m going to live here—as soon as I can find a
cottage, and Mary tells me there’ll be no difficulty about that.”
“But,” she exclaimed, almost standing still in her surprise, “you will
give up the Bar, then?” It flashed across her mind that he must already
be engaged to Mary.
“The solicitor’s office? Yes. I’m giving that up.”
“But why?” she asked. She answered herself at once, with a curious
change from rapid speech to an almost melancholy tone. “I think you’re
very wise to give it up. You will be much happier.”
At this very moment, when her words seemed to be striking a path into
the future for him, they stepped into the yard of an inn, and there
beheld the family coach of the Otways, to which one sleek horse was
already attached, while the second was being led out of the stable door
by the hostler.
“I don’t know what one means by happiness,” he said briefly, having to
step aside in order to avoid a groom with a bucket. “Why do you think I
shall be happy? I don’t expect to be anything of the kind. I expect to
be rather less unhappy. I shall write a book and curse my charwoman—if
happiness consists in that. What do you think?”
She could not answer because they were immediately surrounded by other
members of the party—by Mrs. Hilbery, and Mary, Henry Otway, and
William.
Rodney went up to Katharine immediately and said to her:
“Henry is going to drive home with your mother, and I suggest that they
should put us down half-way and let us walk back.”
Katharine nodded her head. She glanced at him with an oddly furtive
expression.
“Unfortunately we go in opposite directions, or we might have given you
a lift,” he continued to Denham. His manner was unusually peremptory;
he seemed anxious to hasten the departure, and Katharine looked at him
from time to time, as Denham noticed, with an expression half of
inquiry, half of annoyance. She at once helped her mother into her
cloak, and said to Mary:
“I want to see you. Are you going back to London at once? I will
write.” She half smiled at Ralph, but her look was a little overcast by
something she was thinking, and in a very few minutes the Otway
carriage rolled out of the stable yard and turned down the high road
leading to the village of Lampsher.
The return drive was almost as silent as the drive from home had been
in the morning; indeed, Mrs. Hilbery leant back with closed eyes in her
corner, and either slept or feigned sleep, as her habit was in the
intervals between the seasons of active exertion, or continued the
story which she had begun to tell herself that morning.
About two miles from Lampsher the road ran over the rounded summit of
the heath, a lonely spot marked by an obelisk of granite, setting forth
the gratitude of some great lady of the eighteenth century who had been
set upon by highwaymen at this spot and delivered from death just as
hope seemed lost. In summer it was a pleasant place, for the deep woods
on either side murmured, and the heather, which grew thick round the
granite pedestal, made the light breeze taste sweetly; in winter the
sighing of the trees was deepened to a hollow sound, and the heath was
as gray and almost as solitary as the empty sweep of the clouds above
it.
Here Rodney stopped the carriage and helped Katharine to alight. Henry,
too, gave her his hand, and fancied that she pressed it very slightly
in parting as if she sent him a message. But the carriage rolled on
immediately, without wakening Mrs. Hilbery, and left the couple
standing by the obelisk. That Rodney was angry with her and had made
this opportunity for speaking to her, Katharine knew very well; she was
neither glad nor sorry that the time had come, nor, indeed, knew what
to expect, and thus remained silent. The carriage grew smaller and
smaller upon the dusky road, and still Rodney did not speak. Perhaps,
she thought, he waited until the last sign of the carriage had
disappeared beneath the curve of the road and they were left entirely
alone. To cloak their silence she read the writing on the obelisk, to
do which she had to walk completely round it. She was murmuring a word
to two of the pious lady’s thanks above her breath when Rodney joined
her. In silence they set out along the cart-track which skirted the
verge of the trees.
To break the silence was exactly what Rodney wished to do, and yet
could not do to his own satisfaction. In company it was far easier to
approach Katharine; alone with her, the aloofness and force of her
character checked all his natural methods of attack. He believed that
she had behaved very badly to him, but each separate instance of
unkindness seemed too petty to be advanced when they were alone
together.
“There’s no need for us to race,” he complained at last; upon which she
immediately slackened her pace, and walked too slowly to suit him. In
desperation he said the first thing he thought of, very peevishly and
without the dignified prelude which he had intended.
“I’ve not enjoyed my holiday.”
“No?”
“No. I shall be glad to get back to work again.”
“Saturday, Sunday, Monday—there are only three days more,” she counted.
“No one enjoys being made a fool of before other people,” he blurted
out, for his irritation rose as she spoke, and got the better of his
awe of her, and was inflamed by that awe.
“That refers to me, I suppose,” she said calmly.
“Every day since we’ve been here you’ve done something to make me
appear ridiculous,” he went on. “Of course, so long as it amuses you,
you’re welcome; but we have to remember that we are going to spend our
lives together. I asked you, only this morning, for example, to come
out and take a turn with me in the garden. I was waiting for you ten
minutes, and you never came. Every one saw me waiting. The stable-boys
saw me. I was so ashamed that I went in. Then, on the drive you hardly
spoke to me. Henry noticed it. Every one notices it.... You find no
difficulty in talking to Henry, though.”
She noted these various complaints and determined philosophically to
answer none of them, although the last stung her to considerable
irritation. She wished to find out how deep his grievance lay.
“None of these things seem to me to matter,” she said.
“Very well, then. I may as well hold my tongue,” he replied.
“In themselves they don’t seem to me to matter; if they hurt you, of
course they matter,” she corrected herself scrupulously. Her tone of
consideration touched him, and he walked on in silence for a space.
“And we might be so happy, Katharine!” he exclaimed impulsively, and
drew her arm through his. She withdrew it directly.
“As long as you let yourself feel like this we shall never be happy,”
she said.
The harshness, which Henry had noticed, was again unmistakable in her
manner. William flinched and was silent. Such severity, accompanied by
something indescribably cold and impersonal in her manner, had
constantly been meted out to him during the last few days, always in
the company of others. He had recouped himself by some ridiculous
display of vanity which, as he knew, put him still more at her mercy.
Now that he was alone with her there was no stimulus from outside to
draw his attention from his injury. By a considerable effort of
self-control he forced himself to remain silent, and to make himself
distinguish what part of his pain was due to vanity, what part to the
certainty that no woman really loving him could speak thus.
“What do I feel about Katharine?” he thought to himself. It was clear
that she had been a very desirable and distinguished figure, the
mistress of her little section of the world; but more than that, she
was the person of all others who seemed to him the arbitress of life,
the woman whose judgment was naturally right and steady, as his had
never been in spite of all his culture. And then he could not see her
come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the
flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things
that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in
their heart.
“If she were callous all the time and had only led me on to laugh at me
I couldn’t have felt that about her,” he thought. “I’m not a fool,
after all. I can’t have been utterly mistaken all these years. And yet,
when she speaks to me like that! The truth of it is,” he thought, “that
I’ve got such despicable faults that no one could help speaking to me
like that. Katharine is quite right. And yet those are not my serious
feelings, as she knows quite well. How can I change myself? What would
make her care for me?” He was terribly tempted here to break the
silence by asking Katharine in what respects he could change himself to
suit her; but he sought consolation instead by running over the list of
his gifts and acquirements, his knowledge of Greek and Latin, his
knowledge of art and literature, his skill in the management of meters,
and his ancient west-country blood. But the feeling that underlay all
these feelings and puzzled him profoundly and kept him silent was the
certainty that he loved Katharine as sincerely as he had it in him to
love any one. And yet she could speak to him like that! In a sort of
bewilderment he lost all desire to speak, and would quite readily have
taken up some different topic of conversation if Katharine had started
one. This, however, she did not do.
He glanced at her, in case her expression might help him to understand
her behavior. As usual, she had quickened her pace unconsciously, and
was now walking a little in front of him; but he could gain little
information from her eyes, which looked steadily at the brown heather,
or from the lines drawn seriously upon her forehead. Thus to lose touch
with her, for he had no idea what she was thinking, was so unpleasant
to him that he began to talk about his grievances again, without,
however, much conviction in his voice.
“If you have no feeling for me, wouldn’t it be kinder to say so to me
in private?”
“Oh, William,” she burst out, as if he had interrupted some absorbing
train of thought, “how you go on about feelings! Isn’t it better not to
talk so much, not to be worrying always about small things that don’t
really matter?”
“That’s the question precisely,” he exclaimed. “I only want you to tell
me that they don’t matter. There are times when you seem indifferent to
everything. I’m vain, I’ve a thousand faults; but you know they’re not
everything; you know I care for you.”
“And if I say that I care for you, don’t you believe me?”
“Say it, Katharine! Say it as if you meant it! Make me feel that you
care for me!”
She could not force herself to speak a word. The heather was growing
dim around them, and the horizon was blotted out by white mist. To ask
her for passion or for certainty seemed like asking that damp prospect
for fierce blades of fire, or the faded sky for the intense blue vault
of June.
He went on now to tell her of his love for her, in words which bore,
even to her critical senses, the stamp of truth; but none of this
touched her, until, coming to a gate whose hinge was rusty, he heaved
it open with his shoulder, still talking and taking no account of his
effort. The virility of this deed impressed her; and yet, normally, she
attached no value to the power of opening gates. The strength of
muscles has nothing to do on the face of it with the strength of
affections; nevertheless, she felt a sudden concern for this power
running to waste on her account, which, combined with a desire to keep
possession of that strangely attractive masculine power, made her rouse
herself from her torpor.
Why should she not simply tell him the truth—which was that she had
accepted him in a misty state of mind when nothing had its right shape
or size? that it was deplorable, but that with clearer eyesight
marriage was out of the question? She did not want to marry any one.
She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some bleak northern
moor, and there study mathematics and the science of astronomy. Twenty
words would explain the whole situation to him. He had ceased to speak;
he had told her once more how he loved her and why. She summoned her
courage, fixed her eyes upon a lightning-splintered ash-tree, and,
almost as if she were reading a writing fixed to the trunk, began:
“I was wrong to get engaged to you. I shall never make you happy. I
have never loved you.”
“Katharine!” he protested.
“No, never,” she repeated obstinately. “Not rightly. Don’t you see, I
didn’t know what I was doing?”
“You love some one else?” he cut her short.
“Absolutely no one.”
“Henry?” he demanded.
“Henry? I should have thought, William, even you—”
“There is some one,” he persisted. “There has been a change in the last
few weeks. You owe it to me to be honest, Katharine.”
“If I could, I would,” she replied.
“Why did you tell me you would marry me, then?” he demanded.
Why, indeed? A moment of pessimism, a sudden conviction of the
undeniable prose of life, a lapse of the illusion which sustains youth
midway between heaven and earth, a desperate attempt to reconcile
herself with facts—she could only recall a moment, as of waking from a
dream, which now seemed to her a moment of surrender. But who could
give reasons such as these for doing what she had done? She shook her
head very sadly.
“But you’re not a child—you’re not a woman of moods,” Rodney persisted.
“You couldn’t have accepted me if you hadn’t loved me!” he cried.
A sense of her own misbehavior, which she had succeeded in keeping from
her by sharpening her consciousness of Rodney’s faults, now swept over
her and almost overwhelmed her. What were his faults in comparison with
the fact that he cared for her? What were her virtues in comparison
with the fact that she did not care for him? In a flash the conviction
that not to care is the uttermost sin of all stamped itself upon her
inmost thought; and she felt herself branded for ever.
He had taken her arm, and held her hand firmly in his, nor had she the
force to resist what now seemed to her his enormously superior
strength. Very well; she would submit, as her mother and her aunt and
most women, perhaps, had submitted; and yet she knew that every second
of such submission to his strength was a second of treachery to him.
“I did say I would marry you, but it was wrong,” she forced herself to
say, and she stiffened her arm as if to annul even the seeming
submission of that separate part of her; “for I don’t love you,
William; you’ve noticed it, every one’s noticed it; why should we go on
pretending? When I told you I loved you, I was wrong. I said what I
knew to be untrue.”
As none of her words seemed to her at all adequate to represent what
she felt, she repeated them, and emphasized them without realizing the
effect that they might have upon a man who cared for her. She was
completely taken aback by finding her arm suddenly dropped; then she
saw his face most strangely contorted; was he laughing, it flashed
across her? In another moment she saw that he was in tears. In her
bewilderment at this apparition she stood aghast for a second. With a
desperate sense that this horror must, at all costs, be stopped, she
then put her arms about him, drew his head for a moment upon her
shoulder, and led him on, murmuring words of consolation, until he
heaved a great sigh. They held fast to each other; her tears, too, ran
down her cheeks; and were both quite silent. Noticing the difficulty
with which he walked, and feeling the same extreme lassitude in her own
limbs, she proposed that they should rest for a moment where the
bracken was brown and shriveled beneath an oak-tree. He assented. Once
more he gave a great sigh, and wiped his eyes with a childlike
unconsciousness, and began to speak without a trace of his previous
anger. The idea came to her that they were like the children in the
fairy tale who were lost in a wood, and with this in her mind she
noticed the scattering of dead leaves all round them which had been
blown by the wind into heaps, a foot or two deep, here and there.
“When did you begin to feel this, Katharine?” he said; “for it isn’t
true to say that you’ve always felt it. I admit I was unreasonable the
first night when you found that your clothes had been left behind.
Still, where’s the fault in that? I could promise you never to
interfere with your clothes again. I admit I was cross when I found you
upstairs with Henry. Perhaps I showed it too openly. But that’s not
unreasonable either when one’s engaged. Ask your mother. And now this
terrible thing—” He broke off, unable for the moment to proceed any
further. “This decision you say you’ve come to—have you discussed it
with any one? Your mother, for example, or Henry?”
“No, no, of course not,” she said, stirring the leaves with her hand.
“But you don’t understand me, William—”
“Help me to understand you—”
“You don’t understand, I mean, my real feelings; how could you? I’ve
only now faced them myself. But I haven’t got the sort of feeling—love,
I mean—I don’t know what to call it”—she looked vaguely towards the
horizon sunk under mist—“but, anyhow, without it our marriage would be
a farce—”
“How a farce?” he asked. “But this kind of analysis is disastrous!” he
exclaimed.
“I should have done it before,” she said gloomily.
“You make yourself think things you don’t think,” he continued,
becoming demonstrative with his hands, as his manner was. “Believe me,
Katharine, before we came here we were perfectly happy. You were full
of plans for our house—the chair-covers, don’t you remember?—like any
other woman who is about to be married. Now, for no reason whatever,
you begin to fret about your feeling and about my feeling, with the
usual result. I assure you, Katharine, I’ve been through it all myself.
At one time I was always asking myself absurd questions which came to
nothing either. What you want, if I may say so, is some occupation to
take you out of yourself when this morbid mood comes on. If it hadn’t
been for my poetry, I assure you, I should often have been very much in
the same state myself. To let you into a secret,” he continued, with
his little chuckle, which now sounded almost assured, “I’ve often gone
home from seeing you in such a state of nerves that I had to force
myself to write a page or two before I could get you out of my head.
Ask Denham; he’ll tell you how he met me one night; he’ll tell you what
a state he found me in.”
Katharine started with displeasure at the mention of Ralph’s name. The
thought of the conversation in which her conduct had been made a
subject for discussion with Denham roused her anger; but, as she
instantly felt, she had scarcely the right to grudge William any use of
her name, seeing what her fault against him had been from first to
last. And yet Denham! She had a view of him as a judge. She figured him
sternly weighing instances of her levity in this masculine court of
inquiry into feminine morality and gruffly dismissing both her and her
family with some half-sarcastic, half-tolerant phrase which sealed her
doom, as far as he was concerned, for ever. Having met him so lately,
the sense of his character was strong in her. The thought was not a
pleasant one for a proud woman, but she had yet to learn the art of
subduing her expression. Her eyes fixed upon the ground, her brows
drawn together, gave William a very fair picture of the resentment that
she was forcing herself to control. A certain degree of apprehension,
occasionally culminating in a kind of fear, had always entered into his
love for her, and had increased, rather to his surprise, in the greater
intimacy of their engagement. Beneath her steady, exemplary surface ran
a vein of passion which seemed to him now perverse, now completely
irrational, for it never took the normal channel of glorification of
him and his doings; and, indeed, he almost preferred the steady good
sense, which had always marked their relationship, to a more romantic
bond. But passion she had, he could not deny it, and hitherto he had
tried to see it employed in his thoughts upon the lives of the children
who were to be born to them.
“She will make a perfect mother—a mother of sons,” he thought; but
seeing her sitting there, gloomy and silent, he began to have his
doubts on this point. “A farce, a farce,” he thought to himself. “She
said that our marriage would be a farce,” and he became suddenly aware
of their situation, sitting upon the ground, among the dead leaves, not
fifty yards from the main road, so that it was quite possible for some
one passing to see and recognize them. He brushed off his face any
trace that might remain of that unseemly exhibition of emotion. But he
was more troubled by Katharine’s appearance, as she sat rapt in thought
upon the ground, than by his own; there was something improper to him
in her self-forgetfulness. A man naturally alive to the conventions of
society, he was strictly conventional where women were concerned, and
especially if the women happened to be in any way connected with him.
He noticed with distress the long strand of dark hair touching her
shoulder and two or three dead beech-leaves attached to her dress; but
to recall her mind in their present circumstances to a sense of these
details was impossible. She sat there, seeming unconscious of
everything. He suspected that in her silence she was reproaching
herself; but he wished that she would think of her hair and of the dead
beech-leaves, which were of more immediate importance to him than
anything else. Indeed, these trifles drew his attention strangely from
his own doubtful and uneasy state of mind; for relief, mixing itself
with pain, stirred up a most curious hurry and tumult in his breast,
almost concealing his first sharp sense of bleak and overwhelming
disappointment. In order to relieve this restlessness and close a
distressingly ill-ordered scene, he rose abruptly and helped Katharine
to her feet. She smiled a little at the minute care with which he
tidied her and yet, when he brushed the dead leaves from his own coat,
she flinched, seeing in that action the gesture of a lonely man.
“William,” she said, “I will marry you. I will try to make you happy.”