necessary if he, too, were to hold his globe for a moment round, whole, and entire.
‘I wish—I wish—’ she sighed, for melancholy came over her and obscured at least a section of her clear vision. The globe swam before her as if obscured by tears.
‘I regret nothing,’ said Ralph firmly. She leant towards him almost as if she could thus see what he saw. She thought how obscure he still was to her, save only that more and more constantly he appeared to her a fire burning through its smoke, a source of life.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You regret nothing—’
‘Nothing—nothing,’ he repeated.
‘What a fire!’ she thought to herself She thought of him blazing splendidly in the night, yet so obscure that to hold his arm, as she held it, was only to touch the opaque substance surrounding the flame that roared upwards.
‘Why nothing?’ she asked hurriedly, in order that he might say more and so make more splendid, more red, more darkly intertwined with smoke this flame rushing upwards.
‘What are you thinking of, Katharine?’ he asked suspiciously, noticing her tone of dreaminess and the inapt words.
‘I was thinking of you—yes, I swear it. Always of you, but you take such strange shapes in my mind. You’ve destroyed my loneliness. Am I to tell you how I see you? No, tell me—tell me from the beginning.’
Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak more and more fluently, more and more passionately, feeling her leaning towards him, listening with wonder like a child, with gratitude, like a woman. She interrupted him gravely now and then.
‘But it was foolish to stand outside and look at the windows. Suppose William hadn’t seen you. Would you have gone to bed?’
He capped her reproof with wonderment that a woman of her age could have stood in Kingsway looking at the traffic until she forgot.
‘But it was then I first knew I loved you!’ she exclaimed.
‘Tell me from the beginning,’ he begged her.
‘No, I’m a person who can’t tell things,’ she pleaded. ‘I shall say something ridiculous—something about flames—fires. No, I can’t tell you.’
But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful to him, charged with extreme excitement as she spoke of the dark red fire, and the smoke twined round it, making him feel that he had stepped over the threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring with shapes, so large, so dim, unveiling themselves only in flashes, and moving away again into the darkness, engulfed by it. They had walked by this time to the street in which Mary lived, and being engrossed by what they said and partly saw, passed her staircase without looking up. At this time of night there was no traffic and scarcely any foot-passengers, so that they could pace slowly without interruption, arm-in-arm, raising their hands now and then to draw something upon the vast blue curtain of the sky.
They brought themselves by these means, acting on a mood of profound happiness, to a state of clear- sightedness where the lifting of a finger had effect, and one word spoke more than a sentence. They lapsed gently into silence, travelling the dark paths of thought side by side towards something discerned in the distance which gradually possessed them both. They were victors, masters of life, but at the same time absorbed in the flame, giving their life to increase its brightness, to testify to their faith. Thus they had walked, perhaps, twice or three times up and down Mary Datchet’s street before the recurrence of a light burning behind a thin, yellow blind caused them to stop without exactly knowing why they did so. It burnt itself into their minds.
‘That is the light in Mary’s room,’ said Ralph. ‘She must be at home.’ He pointed across the street. Katharine’s eyes rested there too.
‘Is she alone, working at this time of night? What is she working at?’ she wondered. ‘Why should we interrupt her?’ she asked passionately. ‘What have we got to give her? She’s happy too,’ she added. ‘She has her work.’ Her voice shook slightly, and the light swam like an ocean of gold behind her tears.
‘You don’t want me to go to her?’ Ralph asked.
‘Go, if you like; tell her what you like,’ she replied.
He crossed the road immediately, and went up the steps into Mary’s house. Katharine stood where he left her, looking at the window and expecting soon to see a shadow move across it; but she saw nothing; the blinds conveyed nothing; the light was not moved. It signalled to her across the dark street; it was a sign of triumph shining there for ever, not to be extinguished this side of the grave. She brandished her happiness as if in salute; she dipped it as if in reverence. ‘How they burn!’ she thought, and all the darkness of London seemed set with fires, roaring upwards; but her eyes came back to Mary’s window and rested there satisfied. She had waited some time before a figure detached itself from the doorway and came across the road, slowly and reluctantly, to where she stood.
‘I didn’t go in—I couldn’t bring myself,’ he broke off. He had stood outside Mary’s door unable to bring himself to knock; if she had come out she would have found him there, the tears running down his cheeks, unable to speak.
They stood for some moments, looking at the illuminated blinds, an expression to them both of something impersonal and serene in the spirit of the woman within, working out her plans far into the night—her plans for the good of a world that none of them were ever to know. Then their minds jumped on and other little figures came by in procession, headed, in Ralph’s view, by the figure of Sally Seal.
‘Do you remember Sally Seal?’ he asked. Katharine bent her head.
‘Your mother and Mary?’ he went on. ‘Rodney and Cassandra? Old Joan up at Highgate?’ He stopped in his enumeration, not finding it possible to link them together in any way that should explain the queer combination which he could perceive in them, as he thought of them. They appeared to him to be more than individuals; to be made up of many different things in cohesion; he had a vision of an orderly world.
‘It’s all so easy—it’s all so simple,’ Katharine quoted, remembering some words of Sally Seal’s, and wishing Ralph to understand that she followed the track of his thought. She felt him trying to piece together in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the
