over our heads. There were lovely silver lights upon the waves and three green lights upon the steamer in the middle of the bay. Your father’s head looked so grand against the mast. It was life, it was death. The great sea was round us. It was the voyage for ever and ever.’
The ancient fairy-tale fell roundly and harmoniously upon Katharine’s ears. Yes, there was the enormous space of the sea; there were the three green lights upon the steamer; the cloaked figures climbed up on deck. And so, voyaging over the green and purple waters, past the cliffs and the sandy lagoons and through pools crowded with the masts of ships and the steeples of churches—here they were. The river seemed to have brought them and deposited them here at this precise point. She looked admiringly at her mother, that ancient voyager.
‘Who knows,’ exclaimed Mrs Hilbery, continuing her reveries, ‘where we are bound for, or why, or who has sent us, or what we shall find—who knows anything, except that love is our faith—love—’ she crooned, and the soft sound beating through the dim words was heard by her daughter as the breaking of waves solemnly in order upon the vast shore that she gazed upon. She would have been content for her mother to repeat that word almost indefinitely—a soothing word when uttered by another, a riveting together of the shattered fragments of the world. But Mrs Hilbery, instead of repeating the word love, said pleadingly:
‘And you won’t think those ugly thoughts again, will you, Katharine?’ at which words the ship which Katharine had been considering seemed to put into harbour and have done with its sea-faring. Yet she was in great need, if not exactly of sympathy, of some form of advice, or, at least, of the opportunity of setting forth her problems before a third person so as to renew them in her own eyes.
‘But then,’ she said, ignoring the difficult problem of ugliness, ‘you knew you were in love; but we’re different. It seems,’ she continued, frowning a little as she tried to fix the difficult feeling, ‘as if something came to an end suddenly—gave out—faded—an illusion—as if when we think we’re in love we make it up—we imagine what doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s impossible that we should ever marry. Always to be finding the other an illusion, and going off and forgetting about them, never to be certain that you cared, or that he wasn’t caring for some one not you at all, the horror of changing from one state to the other, being happy one moment and miserable the next—that’s the reason why we can’t possibly marry. At the same time,’ she continued, ‘we can’t live without each other, because —’ Mrs Hilbery waited patiently for the sentence to be completed, but Katharine fell silent and fingered her sheet of figures.
‘We have to have faith in our vision,’ Mrs Hilbery resumed, glancing at the figures, which distressed her vaguely, and had some connexion in her mind with the household accounts, ‘otherwise, as you say—’ She cast a lightning glance into the depths of disillusionment which were, perhaps, not altogether unknown to her.
‘Believe me, Katharine, it’s the same for every one—for me, too—for your father,’ she said earnestly, and sighed. They looked together into the abyss and, as the elder of the two, she recovered herself first and asked:
‘But where is Ralph? Why isn’t he here to see me?’
Katharine’s expression changed instantly.
‘Because he’s not allowed to come here,’ she replied bitterly.
Mrs Hilbery brushed this aside.
‘Would there be time to send for him before luncheon?’ she asked.
Katharine looked at her as if, indeed, she were some magician. Once more she felt that instead of being a grown woman, used to advise and command, she was only a foot or two raised above the long grass and the little flowers and entirely dependent upon the figure of indefinite size whose head went up into the sky, whose hand was in hers, for guidance.
‘I’m not happy without him,’ she said simply.
Mrs Hilbery nodded her head in a manner which indicated complete understanding, and the immediate conception of certain plans for the future. She swept up her flowers, breathed in their sweetness, and, humming a little song about a miller’s daughter,3 left the room.
The case upon which Ralph Denham was engaged that afternoon was not apparently receiving his full attention, and yet the affairs of the late John Leake of Dublin were sufficiently confused to need all the care that a solicitor could bestow upon them, if the widow Leake and the five Leake children of tender age were to receive any pittance at all. But the appeal to Ralph’s humanity had little chance of being heard to-day; he was no longer a model of concentration. The partition so carefully erected between the different sections of his life had been broken down, with the result that though his eyes were fixed upon the last Will and Testament, he saw through the page a certain drawing-room in Cheyne Walk.
He tried every device that had proved effective in the past for keeping up the partitions of the mind, until he could decently go home; but a little to his alarm he found himself assailed so persistently, as if from outside, by Katharine, that he launched forth desperately into an imaginary interview with her. She obliterated a bookcase full of law reports, and the corners and lines of the room underwent a curious softening of outline like that which sometimes makes a room unfamiliar at the moment of waking from sleep. By degrees, a pulse or stress began to beat at regular intervals in his mind, heaping his thoughts into waves to which words fitted themselves, and without much consciousness of what he was doing, he began to write on a sheet of draft paper what had the appearance of a poem lacking several words in each line. Not many lines had been set down, however, before he threw away his pen as violently as if that were responsible for his misdeeds, and tore the paper into many separate pieces. This was a sign that Katharine had asserted herself and put to him a remark that could not be met poetically. Her remark was entirely destructive of poetry, since it was to the effect that poetry had nothing whatever to do with her; all her friends spent their lives in making up phrases, she said; all his feeling was an illusion, and next moment, as if to taunt him with his impotence, she had sunk into one of those dreamy states which took no account whatever of his existence. Ralph was roused by his passionate attempts to attract her attention to the fact that he was standing in the middle of his little private room in Lincoln’s Inn Fields at a considerable distance from Chelsea. The physical distance increased his desperation. He began pacing in circles until the process sickened him, and then took a sheet of paper for the composition of a letter which, he vowed before he began it, should be sent that same evening.
It was a difficult matter to put into words; poetry would have done it better justice, but he must abstain from poetry. In an infinite number of half-obliterated scratches he tried to convey to her the possibility that although human beings are woefully ill-adapted for communication, still, such communion is the best we know; moreover, they make it possible for each to have access to another world independent of personal affairs, a world of law, of philosophy, or more strangely a world such as he had had a glimpse of the other evening when together they seemed to be sharing something, creating something, an ideal—a vision flung out in advance of our actual circumstances. If this golden rim were quenched, if life were no longer circled by an illusion (but was it an illusion after all?), then it would be too dismal an affair to carry to an end; so he wrote with a sudden spurt of conviction which made clear way for a space and left at least one sentence standing whole. Making every allowance for other desires, on the whole this conclusion appeared to him to justify their relationship. But the conclusion was mystical; it plunged him into thought. The difficulty with which even this amount was written, the inadequacy of the words, and the need of writing under them and over them others which, after all, did no better, led him to leave off before
