Night and Day

“Why were you waiting out there?” she asked.

“For the chance of seeing you,” he replied.

“You would have waited all night if it hadn’t been for William. It’s windy too. You must have been cold. What could you see? Nothing but our windows.”

“It was worth it. I heard you call me.”

“I called you?” She had called unconsciously.

“They were engaged this morning,” she told him, after a pause.

“You’re glad?” he asked.

She bent her head. “Yes, yes,” she sighed. “But you don’t know how good he is – what he’s done for me – ” Ralph made a sound of understanding. “You waited there last night too?” she asked.

“Yes. I can wait,” Denham replied.

The words seemed to fill the room with an emotion which Katharine connected with the sound of distant wheels, the footsteps hurrying along the pavement, the cries of sirens hooting down the river, the darkness and the wind. She saw the upright figure standing beneath the lamp-post.

“Waiting in the dark,” she said, glancing at the window, as if he saw what she was seeing. “Ah, but it’s different – ” She broke off. “I’m not the person you think me. Until you realize that it’s impossible – ”

Placing her elbows on the table, she slid her ruby ring up and down her finger abstractedly. She frowned at the rows of leather-bound books opposite her. Ralph looked keenly at her. Very pale, but sternly concentrated upon her meaning, beautiful but so little aware of herself as to seem remote from him also, there was something distant and abstract about her which exalted him and chilled him at the same time.

“No, you’re right,” he said. “I don’t know you. I’ve never known you.”

“Yet perhaps you know me better than any one else,” she mused.

Some detached instinct made her aware that she was gazing at a book which belonged by rights to some other part of the house. She walked over to the shelf, took it down, and returned to her seat, placing the book on the table between them. Ralph opened it and looked at the portrait of a man with a voluminous white shirt-collar, which formed the frontispiece.

“I say I do know you, Katharine,” he affirmed, shutting the book. “It’s only for moments that I go mad.”

“Do you call two whole nights a moment?”

“I swear to you that now, at this instant, I see you precisely as you are. No one has ever known you as I know you… Could you have taken down that book just now if I hadn’t known you?”

“That’s true,” she replied, “but you can’t think how I’m divided – how I’m at my ease with you, and how I’m bewildered. The unreality – the dark – the waiting outside in the wind – yes, when you look at me, not seeing me, and I don’t see you either… But I do see,” she went on quickly, changing her position and frowning again, “heaps of things, only not you.”

“Tell me what you see,” he urged.

But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape colored upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of northern hills and flashing light upon cornfields and pools.

“Impossible,” she sighed, laughing at the ridiculous notion of putting any part of this into words.

“Try, Katharine,” Ralph urged her.

“But I can’t – I’m talking a sort of nonsense – the sort of nonsense one talks to oneself.” She was dismayed by the expression of longing and despair upon his face. “I was thinking about a mountain in the North of England,” she attempted. “It’s too silly – I won’t go on.”

“We were there together?” he pressed her.

“No. I was alone.” She seemed to be disappointing the desire of a child. His face fell.

“You’re always alone there?”

“I can’t explain.” She could not explain that she was essentially alone there. “It’s not a mountain in the North of England. It’s an imagination – a story one tells oneself. You have yours too?”

“You’re with me in mine. You’re the thing I make up, you see.”

“Oh, I see,” she sighed. “That’s why it’s so impossible.” She turned upon him almost fiercely. “You must try to stop it,” she said.

“I won’t,” he replied roughly, “because I – ” He stopped. He realized that the moment had come to impart that news of the utmost importance which he had tried to impart to Mary Datchet, to Rodney upon the Embankment, to the drunken tramp upon the seat. How should he offer it to Katharine? He looked quickly at her. He saw that she was only half attentive to him; only a section of her was exposed to him. The sight roused in him such desperation that he had much ado to control his impulse to rise and leave the house. Her hand lay loosely curled upon the table. He seized it and grasped it firmly as if to make sure of her existence and of his own. “Because I love you, Katharine,” he said.

Some roundness or warmth essential to that statement was absent from his voice, and she had merely to shake her head very slightly for him to drop her hand and turn away in shame at his own impotence. He thought that she had detected his wish to leave her. She had discerned the break in his resolution, the blankness in the heart of his vision. It was true that he had been happier out in the street, thinking of her, than now that he was in the same room with her. He looked at her with a guilty expression on his face. But her look expressed neither disappointment nor reproach. Her pose was easy, and she seemed to give effect to a mood of quiet speculation by the spinning of her ruby ring upon the polished table. Denham forgot his despair in wondering what thoughts now occupied her.

“You don’t believe me?” he said. His tone was humble, and made her smile at him.

“As far as I understand you – but what should you advise me to do with this ring?” she asked, holding it out.

“I should advise you to let me keep it for you,” he replied, in the same tone of half-humorous gravity.

“After what you’ve said, I can hardly trust you – unless you’ll unsay what you’ve said?”

“Very well. I’m not in love with you.”

“But I think you ARE in love with me… As I am with you,” she added casually enough. “At least,” she said slipping her ring back to its old position, “what other word describes the state we’re in?”

She looked at him gravely and inquiringly, as if in search of help.

“It’s when I’m with you that I doubt it, not when I’m alone,” he stated.

“So I thought,” she replied.

In order to explain to her his state of mind, Ralph recounted his experience with the photograph, the letter, and the flower picked at Kew. She listened very seriously.

“And then you went raving about the streets,” she mused. “Well, it’s bad enough. But my state is worse than yours, because it hasn’t anything to do with facts. It’s an hallucination, pure and simple – an intoxication… One can be in love with pure reason?” she hazarded. “Because if you’re in love with a vision, I believe that that’s what I’m in love with.”

This conclusion seemed fantastic and profoundly unsatisfactory to Ralph, but after the astonishing variations of his own sentiments during the past half-hour he could not accuse her of fanciful exaggeration.

“Rodney seems to know his own mind well enough,” he said almost bitterly. The music, which had ceased, had now begun again, and the melody of Mozart seemed to express the easy and exquisite love of the two upstairs.

“Cassandra never doubted for a moment. But we – ” she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, “we see each other only now and then – ”

“Like lights in a storm – ”

“In the midst of a hurricane,” she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind. They listened to the sound in silence.

Here the door opened with considerable hesitation, and Mrs. Hilbery’s head appeared, at first with an air of caution, but having made sure that she had admitted herself to the dining-room and not to some more unusual region, she came completely inside and seemed in no way taken aback by the sight she saw. She seemed, as usual, bound on some quest of her own which was interrupted pleasantly but strangely by running into one of those queer, unnecessary ceremonies that other people thought fit to indulge in.

“Please don’t let me interrupt you, Mr. – ” she was at a loss, as usual, for the name, and Katharine thought that she did not recognize him. “I hope you’ve found something nice to read,” she added, pointing to the book upon the table. “Byron – ah, Byron. I’ve known people who knew Lord Byron,” she said.