Katharine paused, looked up and down the river, and snuffed the air.
“I’m sure one can smell the sea, with the wind blowing this way,” she said.
They stood silent for a few moments while the river shifted in its bed, and the silver and red lights which were laid upon it were torn by the current and joined together again. Very far off up the river a steamer hooted with its hollow voice of unspeakable melancholy, as if from the heart of lonely mist-shrouded voyagings.
“Ah!” Rodney cried, striking his hand once more upon the balustrade, “why can’t one say how beautiful it all is? Why am I condemned for ever, Katharine, to feel what I can’t express? And the things I can give there’s no use in my giving. Trust me, Katharine,” he added hastily, “I won’t speak of it again. But in the presence of beauty—look at the iridescence round the moon!—one feels—one feels—Perhaps if you married me—I’m half a poet, you see, and I can’t pretend not to feel what I do feel. If I could write—ah, that would be another matter. I shouldn’t bother you to marry me then, Katharine.”
He spoke these disconnected sentences rather abruptly, with his eyes alternately upon the moon and upon the stream.
“But for me I suppose you would recommend marriage?” said Katharine, with her eyes fixed on the moon.
“Certainly I should. Not for you only, but for all women. Why, you’re nothing at all without it; you’re only half alive; using only half your faculties; you must feel that for yourself. That is why—” Here he stopped himself, and they began to walk slowly along the Embankment, the moon fronting them.
“With how sad steps she climbs the sky,
How silently and with how wan a face,”
Rodney quoted.
“I’ve been told a great many unpleasant things about myself to-night,” Katharine stated, without attending to him. “Mr. Denham seems to think it his mission to lecture me, though I hardly know him. By the way, William, you know him; tell me, what is he like?”
William drew a deep sigh.
“We may lecture you till we’re blue in the face—”
“Yes—but what’s he like?”
“And we write sonnets to your eyebrows, you cruel practical creature. Denham?” he added, as Katharine remained silent. “A good fellow, I should think. He cares, naturally, for the right sort of things, I expect. But you mustn’t marry him, though. He scolded you, did he—what did he say?”
“What happens with Mr. Denham is this: He comes to tea. I do all I can to put him at his ease. He merely sits and scowls at me. Then I show him our manuscripts. At this he becomes really angry, and tells me I’ve no business to call myself a middle-class woman. So we part in a huff; and next time we meet, which was to-night, he walks straight up to me, and says, ‘Go to the Devil!’ That’s the sort of behavior my mother complains of. I want to know, what does it mean?”
She paused and, slackening her steps, looked at the lighted train drawing itself smoothly over Hungerford Bridge.
“It means, I should say, that he finds you chilly and unsympathetic.”
Katharine laughed with round, separate notes of genuine amusement.
“It’s time I jumped into a cab and hid myself in my own house,” she exclaimed.
“Would your mother object to my being seen with you? No one could possibly recognize us, could they?” Rodney inquired, with some solicitude.
Katharine looked at him, and perceiving that his solicitude was genuine, she laughed again, but with an ironical note in her laughter.
“You may laugh, Katharine, but I can tell you that if any of your friends saw us together at this time of night they would talk about it, and I should find that very disagreeable. But why do you laugh?”
“I don’t know. Because you’re such a queer mixture, I think. You’re half poet and half old maid.”
“I know I always seem to you highly ridiculous. But I can’t help having inherited certain traditions and trying to put them into practice.”
“Nonsense, William. You may come of the oldest family in Devonshire, but that’s no reason why you should mind being seen alone with me on the Embankment.”
“I’m ten years older than you are, Katharine, and I know more of the world than you do.”
“Very well. Leave me and go home.”
Rodney looked back over his shoulder and perceived that they were being followed at a short distance by a taxicab, which evidently awaited his summons. Katharine saw it, too, and exclaimed:
“Don’t call that cab for me, William. I shall walk.”
“Nonsense, Katharine; you’ll do nothing of the kind. It’s nearly twelve o’clock, and we’ve walked too far as it is.”
Katharine laughed and walked on so quickly that both Rodney and the taxicab had to increase their pace to keep up with her.
“Now, William,” she said, “if people see me racing along the Embankment like this they will talk. You had far better say good-night, if you don’t want people to talk.”
At this William beckoned, with a despotic gesture, to the cab with one hand, and with the other he brought Katharine to a standstill.
“Don’t let the man see us struggling, for God’s sake!” he murmured. Katharine stood for a moment quite still.
“There’s more of the old maid in you than the poet,” she observed briefly.
William shut the door sharply, gave the address to the driver, and turned away, lifting his hat punctiliously high in farewell to the invisible lady.
He looked back after the cab twice, suspiciously, half expecting that she would stop it and dismount; but it bore her swiftly on, and was soon out of sight. William felt in the mood for a short soliloquy of indignation, for Katharine had contrived to exasperate him in more ways than one.
“Of all the unreasonable, inconsiderate creatures I’ve ever known, she’s the worst!” he exclaimed to himself, striding back along the Embankment. “Heaven forbid that I should ever make a fool of myself with her again. Why, I’d sooner marry the daughter of my landlady than Katharine Hilbery! She’d leave me not a moment’s peace—and she’d never understand me—never, never, never!”
Uttered aloud and with vehemence so that the stars of Heaven might hear, for there was no human being at hand, these sentiments sounded satisfactorily irrefutable. Rodney quieted down, and walked on in silence, until he perceived some one approaching him, who had something, either in his walk or his dress, which proclaimed that he was one of William’s acquaintances before it was possible to tell which of them he was. It was Denham who, having parted from Sandys at the bottom of his staircase, was now walking to the Tube at Charing Cross, deep in the thoughts which his talk with Sandys had suggested. He had forgotten the meeting at Mary Datchet’s rooms, he had forgotten Rodney, and metaphors and Elizabethan drama, and could have sworn that he had forgotten Katharine Hilbery, too, although that was more disputable. His mind was scaling the highest pinnacles of its alps, where there was only starlight and the untrodden snow. He cast strange eyes upon Rodney, as they encountered each other beneath a lamp-post.
“Ha!” Rodney exclaimed.
If he had been in full possession of his mind, Denham would probably have passed on with a salutation. But the shock of the interruption made him stand still, and before he knew what he was doing, he had turned and was walking with Rodney in obedience to Rodney’s invitation to come to his rooms and have something to drink. Denham had no wish to drink with Rodney, but he followed him passively enough. Rodney was gratified by this