Night and Day

‘My mother wants me to tell you,’ she said, ‘that she hopes you have begun your poem. She says every one ought to write poetry . . . All my relations write poetry,’ she went on. ‘I can’t bear to think of it sometimes— because, of course, it’s none of it any good. But then one needn’t read it—’

‘You don’t encourage me to write a poem,’ said Ralph.

‘But you’re not a poet, too, are you?’ she inquired, turning upon him with a laugh.

‘Should I tell you if I were?’

‘Yes. Because I think you speak the truth,’ she said, searching him for proof of this apparently, with eyes now almost impersonally direct. It would be easy, Ralph thought, to worship one so far removed, and yet of so straight a nature; easy to submit recklessly to her, without thought of future pain.

‘Are you a poet?’ she demanded. He felt that her question had an unexplained weight of meaning behind it, as if she sought an answer to a question that she did not ask.

‘No. I haven’t written any poetry for years,’ he replied. ‘But all the same, I don’t agree with you. I think it’s the only thing worth doing.’

‘Why do you say that?’ she asked, almost with impatience, tapping her spoon two or three times against the side of her cup.

‘Why?’ Ralph laid hands on the first words that came to mind. ‘Because, I suppose, it keeps an ideal alive which might die otherwise.’

A curious change came over her face, as if the flame of her mind were subdued; and she looked at him ironically and with the expression which he had called sad before, for want of a better name for it.

‘I don’t know that there’s much sense in having ideals,’ she said.

‘But you have them,’ he replied energetically. ‘Why do we call them ideals? It’s a stupid word. Dreams, I mean—’

She followed his words with parted lips, as though to answer eagerly when he had done; but as he said, ‘Dreams, I mean,’ the door of the drawing-room swung open, and so remained for a perceptible instant. They both held themselves silent, her lips still parted.

Far off, they heard the rustle of skirts. Then the owner of the skirts appeared in the doorway, which she almost filled, nearly concealing the figure of a very much smaller lady who accompanied her.

‘My aunts!’ Katharine murmured, under her breath. Her tone had a hint of tragedy in it, but no less, Ralph thought, than the situation required. She addressed the larger lady as Aunt Millicent; the smaller was Aunt Celia, Mrs Milvain, who had lately undertaken the task of marrying Cyril to his wife. Both ladies, but Mrs Cosham (Aunt Millicent) in particular, had that look of heightened, smoothed, incarnadined^ba existence which is proper to elderly ladies paying calls in London about five o’clock in the afternoon. Portraits by Romney,^bb seen through glass, have something of their pink, mellow look, their blooming softness, as of apricots hanging upon a red wall in the afternoon sun. Mrs Cosham was so apparelled with hanging muffs, chains, and swinging draperies that it was impossible to detect the shape of a human being in the mass of brown and black which filled the arm-chair. Mrs Milvain was a much slighter figure; but the same doubt as to the precise lines of her contour filled Ralph, as he regarded them, with dismal foreboding. What remark of his would ever reach these fabulous and fantastic characters?—for there was something fantastically unreal in the curious swayings and noddings of Mrs Cosham, as if her equipment included a large wire spring. Her voice had a high-pitched, cooing note, which prolonged words and cut them short until the English language seemed no longer fit for common purposes. In a moment of nervousness, so Ralph thought, Katharine had turned on innumerable electric lights. But Mrs Cosham had gained impetus (perhaps her swaying movements had that end in view) for sustained speech; and she now addressed Ralph deliberately and elaborately.

‘I come from Woking, Mr Popham. You may well ask me, why Woking? and to that I answer, for perhaps the hundredth time, because of the sunsets. We went there for the sunsets, but that was five-and-twenty years ago. Where are the sunsets now? Alas! There is no sunset now nearer than the South Coast.’¹ Her rich and romantic notes were accompanied by a wave of a long white hand, which, when waved, gave off a flash of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Ralph wondered whether she more resembled an elephant, with a jewelled head- dress, or a superb cockatoo, balanced insecurely upon its perch, and pecking capriciously at a lump of sugar.

‘Where are the sunsets now?’ she repeated. ‘Do you find sunsets now, Mr Popham?’

‘I live at Highgate,’ he replied.

‘At Highgate? Yes, Highgate has its charms; your Uncle John lived at Highgate,’ she jerked in the direction of Katharine. She sank her head upon her breast, as if for a moment’s meditation, which past, she looked up and observed: ‘I dare say there are very pretty lanes in Highgate. I can recollect walking with your mother, Katharine, through lanes blossoming with wild hawthorn. But where is the hawthorn now? You remember that exquisite description in De Quincey,^bc Mr Popham?—but I forget, you, in your generation, with all your activity and enlightenment, at which I can only marvel’—here she displayed both her beautiful white hands—‘do not read De Quincey. You have your Belloc, your Chesterton, your Bernard Shaw^bd—why should you read De Quincey?’

‘But I do read De Quincey,’ Ralph protested, ‘more than Belloc and Chesterton, anyhow.’

‘Indeed!’ exclaimed Mrs Cosham, with a gesture of surprise and relief mingled. ‘You are, then, a rara avis‡ in your generation. I am delighted to meet any one who reads De Quincey.’

Here she hollowed her hand into a screen, and, leaning towards Katharine, inquired, in a very audible whisper, ‘Does your friend write?’

‘Mr Denham,’ said Katharine, with more than her usual clearness and firmness, ‘writes for the Review. He is a lawyer.’

‘The clean-shaven lips, showing the expression of the mouth! I recognized them at once. I always feel at home with lawyers, Mr Denham—’

‘They used to come about us so much in the old days,’ Mrs Milvain interposed, the frail, silvery notes of her voice falling with the sweet tone of an old bell.

‘You say you live at Highgate,’ she continued. ‘I wonder whether you happen to know if there is an old house called Tempest Lodge still in existence—an old white house in a garden?’