Night and Day

“If anybody says anything, I shall say that I’m looking at the river,” she thought, for in her slavery to her family traditions, she was ready to pay for her transgression with some plausible falsehood. She pushed aside the blind and looked at the river. But it was a dark night and the water was barely visible. Cabs were passing, and couples were loitering slowly along the road, keeping as close to the railings as possible, though the trees had as yet no leaves to cast shadow upon their embraces. Katharine, thus withdrawn, felt her loneliness. The evening had been one of pain, offering her, minute after minute, plainer proof that things would fall out as she had foreseen. She had faced tones, gestures, glances; she knew, with her back to them, that William, even now, was plunging deeper and deeper into the delight of unexpected understanding with Cassandra. He had almost told her that he was finding it infinitely better than he could have believed. She looked out of the window, sternly determined to forget private misfortunes, to forget herself, to forget individual lives. With her eyes upon the dark sky, voices reached her from the room in which she was standing. She heard them as if they came from people in another world, a world antecedent to her world, a world that was the prelude, the antechamber to reality; it was as if, lately dead, she heard the living talking. The dream nature of our life had never been more apparent to her, never had life been more certainly an affair of four walls, whose objects existed only within the range of lights and fires, beyond which lay nothing, or nothing more than darkness. She seemed physically to have stepped beyond the region where the light of illusion still makes it desirable to possess, to love, to struggle. And yet her melancholy brought her no serenity. She still heard the voices within the room. She was still tormented by desires. She wished to be beyond their range. She wished inconsistently enough that she could find herself driving rapidly through the streets; she was even anxious to be with some one who, after a moment’s groping, took a definite shape and solidified into the person of Mary Datchet. She drew the curtains so that the draperies met in deep folds in the middle of the window.

“Ah, there she is,” said Mr. Hilbery, who was standing swaying affably from side to side, with his back to the fire. “Come here, Katharine. I couldn’t see where you’d got to – our children,” he observed parenthetically, “have their uses – I want you to go to my study, Katharine; go to the third shelf on the right-hand side of the door; take down ‘Trelawny’s Recollections of Shelley’; bring it to me. Then, Peyton, you will have to admit to the assembled company that you have been mistaken.”

“‘Trelawny’s Recollections of Shelley.’ The third shelf on the right of the door,” Katharine repeated. After all, one does not check children in their play, or rouse sleepers from their dreams. She passed William and Cassandra on her way to the door.

“Stop, Katharine,” said William, speaking almost as if he were conscious of her against his will. “Let me go.” He rose, after a second’s hesitation, and she understood that it cost him an effort. She knelt one knee upon the sofa where Cassandra sat, looking down at her cousin’s face, which still moved with the speed of what she had been saying.

“Are you – happy?” she asked.

“Oh, my dear!” Cassandra exclaimed, as if no further words were needed. “Of course, we disagree about every subject under the sun,” she exclaimed, “but I think he’s the cleverest man I’ve ever met – and you’re the most beautiful woman,” she added, looking at Katharine, and as she looked her face lost its animation and became almost melancholy in sympathy with Katharine’s melancholy, which seemed to Cassandra the last refinement of her distinction.

“Ah, but it’s only ten o’clock,” said Katharine darkly.

“As late as that! Well – ?” She did not understand.

“At twelve my horses turn into rats and off I go. The illusion fades. But I accept my fate. I make hay while the sun shines.” Cassandra looked at her with a puzzled expression.

“Here’s Katharine talking about rats, and hay, and all sorts of odd things,” she said, as William returned to them. He had been quick. “Can you make her out?”

Katharine perceived from his little frown and hesitation that he did not find that particular problem to his taste at present. She stood upright at once and said in a different tone:

“I really am off, though. I wish you’d explain if they say anything, William. I shan’t be late, but I’ve got to see some one.”

“At this time of night?” Cassandra exclaimed.

“Whom have you got to see?” William demanded.

“A friend,” she remarked, half turning her head towards him. She knew that he wished her to stay, not, indeed, with them, but in their neighborhood, in case of need.

“Katharine has a great many friends,” said William rather lamely, sitting down once more, as Katharine left the room.

She was soon driving quickly, as she had wished to drive, through the lamp-lit streets. She liked both light and speed, and the sense of being out of doors alone, and the knowledge that she would reach Mary in her high, lonely room at the end of the drive. She climbed the stone steps quickly, remarking the queer look of her blue silk skirt and blue shoes upon the stone, dusty with the boots of the day, under the light of an occasional jet of flickering gas.

The door was opened in a second by Mary herself, whose face showed not only surprise at the sight of her visitor, but some degree of embarrassment. She greeted her cordially, and, as there was no time for explanations, Katharine walked straight into the sitting-room, and found herself in the presence of a young man who was lying back in a chair and holding a sheet of paper in his hand, at which he was looking as if he expected to go on immediately with what he was in the middle of saying to Mary Datchet. The apparition of an unknown lady in full evening dress seemed to disturb him. He took his pipe from his mouth, rose stiffly, and sat down again with a jerk.

“Have you been dining out?” Mary asked.

“Are you working?” Katharine inquired simultaneously.

The young man shook his head, as if he disowned his share in the question with some irritation.

“Well, not exactly,” Mary replied. “Mr. Basnett had brought some papers to show me. We were going through them, but we’d almost done… Tell us about your party.”

Mary had a ruffled appearance, as if she had been running her fingers through her hair in the course of her conversation; she was dressed more or less like a Russian peasant girl. She sat down again in a chair which looked as if it had been her seat for some hours; the saucer which stood upon the arm contained the ashes of many cigarettes. Mr. Basnett, a very young man with a fresh complexion and a high forehead from which the hair was combed straight back, was one of that group of “very able young men” suspected by Mr. Clacton, justly as it turned out, of an influence upon Mary Datchet. He had come down from one of the Universities not long ago, and was now charged with the reformation of society. In connection with the rest of the group of very able young men he had drawn up a scheme for the education of labor, for the amalgamation of the middle class and the working class, and for a joint assault of the two bodies, combined in the Society for the Education of Democracy, upon Capital. The scheme had already reached the stage in which it was permissible to hire an office and engage a secretary, and he had been deputed to expound the scheme to Mary, and make her an offer of the Secretaryship, to which, as a matter of principle, a small salary was attached. Since seven o’clock that evening he had been reading out loud the document in which the faith of the new reformers was expounded, but the reading was so frequently interrupted by discussion, and it was so often necessary to inform Mary “in strictest confidence” of the private characters and evil designs of certain individuals and societies that they were still only half-way through the manuscript. Neither of them realized that the talk had already lasted three hours. In their absorption they had forgotten even to feed the fire, and yet both Mr. Basnett in his exposition, and Mary in her interrogation, carefully preserved a kind of formality calculated to check the desire of the human mind for irrelevant discussion. Her questions frequently began, “Am I to understand – ” and his replies invariably represented the views of some one called “we.”

By this time Mary was almost persuaded that she, too, was included in the “we,” and agreed with Mr. Basnett in believing that “our” views, “our” society, “our” policy, stood for something quite definitely segregated from the main body of society in a circle of superior illumination.

The appearance of Katharine in this atmosphere was extremely incongruous, and had the effect of making Mary remember all sorts of things that she had been glad to forget.

“You’ve been dining out?” she asked again, looking, with a little smile, at the blue silk and the pearl-sewn shoes.

“No, at home. Are you starting something new?” Katharine hazarded, rather hesitatingly, looking at the papers.

“We are,” Mr. Basnett replied. He said no more.

“I’m thinking of leaving our friends in Russell Square,” Mary explained.

“I see. And then you will do something else.”

“Well, I’m afraid I like working,” said Mary.

“Afraid,” said Mr. Basnett, conveying the impression that, in his opinion, no sensible person could be afraid of liking to work.

“Yes,” said Katharine, as if he had stated this opinion aloud. “I should like to start something – something off one’s own bat – that’s what I should like.”

“Yes, that’s the fun,” said Mr. Basnett, looking at her for the first time rather keenly, and refilling his pipe.

“But you can’t limit work – that’s what I mean,” said Mary. “I mean there are other sorts of work. No one works harder than a woman with little children.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Basnett. “It’s precisely the women with babies we want to get hold of.” He glanced at his document, rolled it into a cylinder between his fingers, and gazed into the fire. Katharine felt that in this company anything that one said would be judged upon its merits; one had only to say what one thought, rather barely and tersely, with a curious assumption that the number of things that could properly be thought about was strictly limited. And Mr. Basnett was only stiff upon the surface; there was an intelligence in his face which attracted her intelligence.

“When will the public know?” she asked.

“What d’you mean – about us?” Mr. Basnett asked, with a little smile.

“That depends upon many things,” said Mary. The conspirators looked pleased, as if Katharine’s question, with the belief in their existence which it implied, had a warming effect upon them.

“In starting a society such as we wish to start (we can’t say any more at present),” Mr. Basnett began, with a little jerk of his head, “there are two things to remember – the Press and the public. Other societies, which shall be nameless, have gone under because they’ve appealed only to cranks. If you don’t want a mutual admiration society, which dies as soon as you’ve all discovered each other’s faults, you must nobble the Press. You must appeal to the public.”

“That’s the difficulty,” said Mary thoughtfully.

“That’s where she comes in,” said Mr. Basnett, jerking his head in Mary’s direction. “She’s the only one of us who’s a capitalist. She can make a whole-time job of it. I’m tied to an office; I can only give my spare time. Are you, by any chance, on the look-out for a job?” he asked Katharine, with a queer mixture of distrust and deference.

“Marriage is her job at present,” Mary replied for her.

“Oh, I see,” said Mr. Basnett. He made allowances for that; he and his friends had faced the question of sex, along with all others, and assigned it an honorable place in their scheme of life. Katharine felt this beneath the roughness of his manner; and a world entrusted to the guardianship of Mary Datchet and Mr. Basnett seemed to her a good world, although not a romantic or beautiful place or, to put it figuratively, a place where any line of blue mist softly linked tree to tree upon the horizon. For a moment she thought she saw in his face, bent now over the fire, the features of that original man whom we still recall every now and then, although we know only the clerk, barrister, Governmental official, or workingman variety of him. Not that Mr. Basnett, giving his days to commerce and his spare time to social reform, would long carry about him any trace of his possibilities of completeness; but, for the moment, in his youth and ardor, still speculative, still uncramped, one might imagine him the citizen of a nobler state than ours. Katharine turned over her small stock of information, and wondered what their society might be going to attempt. Then she remembered that she was hindering their business, and rose, still thinking of this society, and thus thinking, she said to Mr. Basnett:

“Well, you’ll ask me to join when the time comes, I hope.”

He nodded, and took his pipe from his mouth, but, being unable to think of anything to say, he put it back again, although he would have been glad if she had stayed.

Against her wish, Mary insisted upon taking her downstairs, and then, as there was no cab to be seen, they stood in the street together, looking about them.

“Go back,” Katharine urged her, thinking of Mr. Basnett with his papers in his hand.

“You can’t wander about the streets alone in those clothes,” said Mary, but the desire to find a cab was not her true reason for standing beside Katharine for a minute or two. Unfortunately for her composure, Mr. Basnett and his papers seemed to her an incidental diversion of life’s serious purpose compared with some tremendous fact which manifested itself as she stood alone with Katharine. It may have been their common womanhood.

“Have you seen Ralph?” she asked suddenly, without preface.