At a quarter-past three in the afternoon of the following Saturday
Ralph Denham sat on the bank of the lake in Kew Gardens, dividing the
dial-plate of his watch into sections with his forefinger. The just and
inexorable nature of time itself was reflected in his face. He might
have been composing a hymn to the unhasting and unresting march of that
divinity. He seemed to greet the lapse of minute after minute with
stern acquiescence in the inevitable order. His expression was so
severe, so serene, so immobile, that it seemed obvious that for him at
least there was a grandeur in the departing hour which no petty
irritation on his part was to mar, although the wasting time wasted
also high private hopes of his own.
His face was no bad index to what went on within him. He was in a
condition of mind rather too exalted for the trivialities of daily
life. He could not accept the fact that a lady was fifteen minutes late
in keeping her appointment without seeing in that accident the
frustration of his entire life. Looking at his watch, he seemed to look
deep into the springs of human existence, and by the light of what he
saw there altered his course towards the north and the midnight....
Yes, one’s voyage must be made absolutely without companions through
ice and black water—towards what goal? Here he laid his finger upon the
half-hour, and decided that when the minute-hand reached that point he
would go, at the same time answering the question put by another of the
many voices of consciousness with the reply that there was undoubtedly
a goal, but that it would need the most relentless energy to keep
anywhere in its direction. Still, still, one goes on, the ticking
seconds seemed to assure him, with dignity, with open eyes, with
determination not to accept the second-rate, not to be tempted by the
unworthy, not to yield, not to compromise. Twenty-five minutes past
three were now marked upon the face of the watch. The world, he assured
himself, since Katharine Hilbery was now half an hour behind her time,
offers no happiness, no rest from struggle, no certainty. In a scheme
of things utterly bad from the start the only unpardonable folly is
that of hope. Raising his eyes for a moment from the face of his watch,
he rested them upon the opposite bank, reflectively and not without a
certain wistfulness, as if the sternness of their gaze were still
capable of mitigation. Soon a look of the deepest satisfaction filled
them, though, for a moment, he did not move. He watched a lady who came
rapidly, and yet with a trace of hesitation, down the broad grass-walk
towards him. She did not see him. Distance lent her figure an
indescribable height, and romance seemed to surround her from the
floating of a purple veil which the light air filled and curved from
her shoulders.
“Here she comes, like a ship in full sail,” he said to himself, half
remembering some line from a play or poem where the heroine bore down
thus with feathers flying and airs saluting her. The greenery and the
high presences of the trees surrounded her as if they stood forth at
her coming. He rose, and she saw him; her little exclamation proved
that she was glad to find him, and then that she blamed herself for
being late.
“Why did you never tell me? I didn’t know there was this,” she
remarked, alluding to the lake, the broad green space, the vista of
trees, with the ruffled gold of the Thames in the distance and the
Ducal castle standing in its meadows. She paid the rigid tail of the
Ducal lion the tribute of incredulous laughter.
“You’ve never been to Kew?” Denham remarked.
But it appeared that she had come once as a small child, when the
geography of the place was entirely different, and the fauna included
certainly flamingoes and, possibly, camels. They strolled on,
refashioning these legendary gardens. She was, as he felt, glad merely
to stroll and loiter and let her fancy touch upon anything her eyes
encountered—a bush, a park-keeper, a decorated goose—as if the
relaxation soothed her. The warmth of the afternoon, the first of
spring, tempted them to sit upon a seat in a glade of beech-trees, with
forest drives striking green paths this way and that around them. She
sighed deeply.
“It’s so peaceful,” she said, as if in explanation of her sigh. Not a
single person was in sight, and the stir of the wind in the branches,
that sound so seldom heard by Londoners, seemed to her as if wafted
from fathomless oceans of sweet air in the distance.
While she breathed and looked, Denham was engaged in uncovering with
the point of his stick a group of green spikes half smothered by the
dead leaves. He did this with the peculiar touch of the botanist. In
naming the little green plant to her he used the Latin name, thus
disguising some flower familiar even to Chelsea, and making her
exclaim, half in amusement, at his knowledge. Her own ignorance was
vast, she confessed. What did one call that tree opposite, for
instance, supposing one condescended to call it by its English name?
Beech or elm or sycamore? It chanced, by the testimony of a dead leaf,
to be oak; and a little attention to a diagram which Denham proceeded
to draw upon an envelope soon put Katharine in possession of some of
the fundamental distinctions between our British trees. She then asked
him to inform her about flowers. To her they were variously shaped and
colored petals, poised, at different seasons of the year, upon very
similar green stalks; but to him they were, in the first instance,
bulbs or seeds, and later, living things endowed with sex, and pores,
and susceptibilities which adapted themselves by all manner of
ingenious devices to live and beget life, and could be fashioned squat
or tapering, flame-colored or pale, pure or spotted, by processes which
might reveal the secrets of human existence. Denham spoke with
increasing ardor of a hobby which had long been his in secret. No
discourse could have worn a more welcome sound in Katharine’s ears. For
weeks she had heard nothing that made such pleasant music in her mind.
It wakened echoes in all those remote fastnesses of her being where
loneliness had brooded so long undisturbed.
She wished he would go on for ever talking of plants, and showing her
how science felt not quite blindly for the law that ruled their endless
variations. A law that might be inscrutable but was certainly
omnipotent appealed to her at the moment, because she could find
nothing like it in possession of human lives. Circumstances had long
forced her, as they force most women in the flower of youth, to
consider, painfully and minutely, all that part of life which is
conspicuously without order; she had had to consider moods and wishes,
degrees of liking or disliking, and their effect upon the destiny of
people dear to her; she had been forced to deny herself any
contemplation of that other part of life where thought constructs a
destiny which is independent of human beings. As Denham spoke, she
followed his words and considered their bearing with an easy vigor
which spoke of a capacity long hoarded and unspent. The very trees and
the green merging into the blue distance became symbols of the vast
external world which recks so little of the happiness, of the marriages
or deaths of individuals. In order to give her examples of what he was
saying, Denham led the way, first to the Rock Garden, and then to the
Orchid House.
For him there was safety in the direction which the talk had taken. His
emphasis might come from feelings more personal than those science
roused in him, but it was disguised, and naturally he found it easy to
expound and explain. Nevertheless, when he saw Katharine among the
orchids, her beauty strangely emphasized by the fantastic plants, which
seemed to peer and gape at her from striped hoods and fleshy throats,
his ardor for botany waned, and a more complex feeling replaced it. She
fell silent. The orchids seemed to suggest absorbing reflections. In
defiance of the rules she stretched her ungloved hand and touched one.
The sight of the rubies upon her finger affected him so disagreeably
that he started and turned away. But next moment he controlled himself;
he looked at her taking in one strange shape after another with the
contemplative, considering gaze of a person who sees not exactly what
is before him, but gropes in regions that lie beyond it. The far-away
look entirely lacked self-consciousness. Denham doubted whether she
remembered his presence. He could recall himself, of course, by a word
or a movement—but why? She was happier thus. She needed nothing that he
could give her. And for him, too, perhaps, it was best to keep aloof,
only to know that she existed, to preserve what he already had—perfect,
remote, and unbroken. Further, her still look, standing among the
orchids in that hot atmosphere, strangely illustrated some scene that
he had imagined in his room at home. The sight, mingling with his
recollection, kept him silent when the door was shut and they were
walking on again.
But though she did not speak, Katharine had an uneasy sense that
silence on her part was selfishness. It was selfish of her to continue,
as she wished to do, a discussion of subjects not remotely connected
with any human beings. She roused herself to consider their exact
position upon the turbulent map of the emotions. Oh yes—it was a
question whether Ralph Denham should live in the country and write a
book; it was getting late; they must waste no more time; Cassandra
arrived to-night for dinner; she flinched and roused herself, and
discovered that she ought to be holding something in her hands. But
they were empty. She held them out with an exclamation.
“I’ve left my bag somewhere—where?” The gardens had no points of the
compass, so far as she was concerned. She had been walking for the most
part on grass—that was all she knew. Even the road to the Orchid House
had now split itself into three. But there was no bag in the Orchid
House. It must, therefore, have been left upon the seat. They retraced
their steps in the preoccupied manner of people who have to think about
something that is lost. What did this bag look like? What did it
contain?
“A purse—a ticket—some letters, papers,” Katharine counted, becoming
more agitated as she recalled the list. Denham went on quickly in
advance of her, and she heard him shout that he had found it before she
reached the seat. In order to make sure that all was safe she spread
the contents on her knee. It was a queer collection, Denham thought,
gazing with the deepest interest. Loose gold coins were tangled in a
narrow strip of lace; there were letters which somehow suggested the
extreme of intimacy; there were two or three keys, and lists of
commissions against which crosses were set at intervals. But she did
not seem satisfied until she had made sure of a certain paper so folded
that Denham could not judge what it contained. In her relief and
gratitude she began at once to say that she had been thinking over what
Denham had told her of his plans.
He cut her short. “Don’t let’s discuss that dreary business.”
“But I thought—”
“It’s a dreary business. I ought never to have bothered you—”
“Have you decided, then?”
He made an impatient sound. “It’s not a thing that matters.”
She could only say rather flatly, “Oh!”
“I mean it matters to me, but it matters to no one else. Anyhow,” he
continued, more amiably, “I see no reason why you should be bothered
with other people’s nuisances.”
She supposed that she had let him see too clearly her weariness of this
side of life.
“I’m afraid I’ve been absent-minded,” she began, remembering how often
William had brought this charge against her.
“You have a good deal to make you absent-minded,” he replied.
“Yes,” she replied, flushing. “No,” she contradicted herself. “Nothing
particular, I mean. But I was thinking about plants. I was enjoying
myself. In fact, I’ve seldom enjoyed an afternoon more. But I want to
hear what you’ve settled, if you don’t mind telling me.”
“Oh, it’s all settled,” he replied. “I’m going to this infernal cottage
to write a worthless book.”
“How I envy you,” she replied, with the utmost sincerity.
“Well, cottages are to be had for fifteen shillings a week.”
“Cottages are to be had—yes,” she replied. “The question is—” She
checked herself. “Two rooms are all I should want,” she continued, with
a curious sigh; “one for eating, one for sleeping. Oh, but I should
like another, a large one at the top, and a little garden where one
could grow flowers. A path—so—down to a river, or up to a wood, and the
sea not very far off, so that one could hear the waves at night. Ships
just vanishing on the horizon—” She broke off. “Shall you be near the
sea?”
“My notion of perfect happiness,” he began, not replying to her
question, “is to live as you’ve said.”
“Well, now you can. You will work, I suppose,” she continued; “you’ll
work all the morning and again after tea and perhaps at night. You
won’t have people always coming about you to interrupt.”
“How far can one live alone?” he asked. “Have you tried ever?”
“Once for three weeks,” she replied. “My father and mother were in
Italy, and something happened so that I couldn’t join them. For three
weeks I lived entirely by myself, and the only person I spoke to was a
stranger in a shop where I lunched—a man with a beard. Then I went back
to my room by myself and—well, I did what I liked. It doesn’t make me
out an amiable character, I’m afraid,” she added, “but I can’t endure
living with other people. An occasional man with a beard is
interesting; he’s detached; he lets me go my way, and we know we shall
never meet again. Therefore, we are perfectly sincere—a thing not
possible with one’s friends.”
“Nonsense,” Denham replied abruptly.
“Why ‘nonsense’?” she inquired.
“Because you don’t mean what you say,” he expostulated.
“You’re very positive,” she said, laughing and looking at him. How
arbitrary, hot-tempered, and imperious he was! He had asked her to come
to Kew to advise him; he then told her that he had settled the question
already; he then proceeded to find fault with her. He was the very
opposite of William Rodney, she thought; he was shabby, his clothes
were badly made, he was ill versed in the amenities of life; he was
tongue-tied and awkward to the verge of obliterating his real
character. He was awkwardly silent; he was awkwardly emphatic. And yet
she liked him.
“I don’t mean what I say,” she repeated good-humoredly. “Well—?”
“I doubt whether you make absolute sincerity your standard in life,” he
answered significantly.
She flushed. He had penetrated at once to the weak spot—her engagement,
and had reason for what he said. He was not altogether justified now,
at any rate, she was glad to remember; but she could not enlighten him
and must bear his insinuations, though from the lips of a man who had
behaved as he had behaved their force should not have been sharp.
Nevertheless, what he said had its force, she mused; partly because he
seemed unconscious of his own lapse in the case of Mary Datchet, and
thus baffled her insight; partly because he always spoke with force,
for what reason she did not yet feel certain.
“Absolute sincerity is rather difficult, don’t you think?” she
inquired, with a touch of irony.
“There are people one credits even with that,” he replied a little
vaguely. He was ashamed of his savage wish to hurt her, and yet it was
not for the sake of hurting her, who was beyond his shafts, but in
order to mortify his own incredibly reckless impulse of abandonment to
the spirit which seemed, at moments, about to rush him to the uttermost
ends of the earth. She affected him beyond the scope of his wildest
dreams. He seemed to see that beneath the quiet surface of her manner,
which was almost pathetically at hand and within reach for all the
trivial demands of daily life, there was a spirit which she reserved or
repressed for some reason either of loneliness or—could it be
possible—of love. Was it given to Rodney to see her unmasked,
unrestrained, unconscious of her duties? a creature of uncalculating
passion and instinctive freedom? No; he refused to believe it. It was
in her loneliness that Katharine was unreserved. “I went back to my
room by myself and I did—what I liked.” She had said that to him, and
in saying it had given him a glimpse of possibilities, even of
confidences, as if he might be the one to share her loneliness, the
mere hint of which made his heart beat faster and his brain spin. He
checked himself as brutally as he could. He saw her redden, and in the
irony of her reply he heard her resentment.
He began slipping his smooth, silver watch in his pocket, in the hope
that somehow he might help himself back to that calm and fatalistic
mood which had been his when he looked at its face upon the bank of the
lake, for that mood must, at whatever cost, be the mood of his
intercourse with Katharine. He had spoken of gratitude and acquiescence
in the letter which he had never sent, and now all the force of his
character must make good those vows in her presence.
She, thus challenged, tried meanwhile to define her points. She wished
to make Denham understand.
“Don’t you see that if you have no relations with people it’s easier to
be honest with them?” she inquired. “That is what I meant. One needn’t
cajole them; one’s under no obligation to them. Surely you must have
found with your own family that it’s impossible to discuss what matters
to you most because you’re all herded together, because you’re in a
conspiracy, because the position is false—” Her reasoning suspended
itself a little inconclusively, for the subject was complex, and she
found herself in ignorance whether Denham had a family or not. Denham
was agreed with her as to the destructiveness of the family system, but
he did not wish to discuss the problem at that moment.
He turned to a problem which was of greater interest to him.
“I’m convinced,” he said, “that there are cases in which perfect
sincerity is possible—cases where there’s no relationship, though the
people live together, if you like, where each is free, where there’s no
obligation upon either side.”
“For a time perhaps,” she agreed, a little despondently. “But
obligations always grow up. There are feelings to be considered. People
aren’t simple, and though they may mean to be reasonable, they end”—in
the condition in which she found herself, she meant, but added
lamely—“in a muddle.”
“Because,” Denham instantly intervened, “they don’t make themselves
understood at the beginning. I could undertake, at this instant,” he
continued, with a reasonable intonation which did much credit to his
self-control, “to lay down terms for a friendship which should be
perfectly sincere and perfectly straightforward.”
She was curious to hear them, but, besides feeling that the topic
concealed dangers better known to her than to him, she was reminded by
his tone of his curious abstract declaration upon the Embankment.
Anything that hinted at love for the moment alarmed her; it was as much
an infliction to her as the rubbing of a skinless wound.
But he went on, without waiting for her invitation.
“In the first place, such a friendship must be unemotional,” he laid it
down emphatically. “At least, on both sides it must be understood that
if either chooses to fall in love, he or she does so entirely at his
own risk. Neither is under any obligation to the other. They must be at
liberty to break or to alter at any moment. They must be able to say
whatever they wish to say. All this must be understood.”
“And they gain something worth having?” she asked.
“It’s a risk—of course it’s a risk,” he replied. The word
was one that she had been using frequently in her arguments with
herself of late.
“But it’s the only way—if you think friendship worth having,” he
concluded.
“Perhaps under those conditions it might be,” she said reflectively.
“Well,” he said, “those are the terms of the friendship I wish to offer
you.” She had known that this was coming, but, none the less, felt a
little shock, half of pleasure, half of reluctance, when she heard the
formal statement.
“I should like it,” she began, “but—”
“Would Rodney mind?”
“Oh no,” she replied quickly.
“No, no, it isn’t that,” she went on, and again came to an end. She had
been touched by the unreserved and yet ceremonious way in which he had
made what he called his offer of terms, but if he was generous it was
the more necessary for her to be cautious. They would find themselves
in difficulties, she speculated; but, at this point, which was not very
far, after all, upon the road of caution, her foresight deserted her.
She sought for some definite catastrophe into which they must
inevitably plunge. But she could think of none. It seemed to her that
these catastrophes were fictitious; life went on and on—life was
different altogether from what people said. And not only was she at an
end of her stock of caution, but it seemed suddenly altogether
superfluous. Surely if any one could take care of himself, Ralph Denham
could; he had told her that he did not love her. And, further, she
meditated, walking on beneath the beech-trees and swinging her
umbrella, as in her thought she was accustomed to complete freedom, why
should she perpetually apply so different a standard to her behavior in
practice? Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity
between the thought and the action, between the life of solitude and
the life of society, this astonishing precipice on one side of which
the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the other side of which
it was contemplative and dark as night? Was it not possible to step
from one to the other, erect, and without essential change? Was this
not the chance he offered her—the rare and wonderful chance of
friendship? At any rate, she told Denham, with a sigh in which he heard
both impatience and relief, that she agreed; she thought him right; she
would accept his terms of friendship.
“Now,” she said, “let’s go and have tea.”
In fact, these principles having been laid down, a great lightness of
spirit showed itself in both of them. They were both convinced that
something of profound importance had been settled, and could now give
their attention to their tea and the Gardens. They wandered in and out
of glass-houses, saw lilies swimming in tanks, breathed in the scent of
thousands of carnations, and compared their respective tastes in the
matter of trees and lakes. While talking exclusively of what they saw,
so that any one might have overheard them, they felt that the compact
between them was made firmer and deeper by the number of people who
passed them and suspected nothing of the kind. The question of Ralph’s
cottage and future was not mentioned again.