These remarks indicated clearly enough that Rodney’s nerves were in a state of irritation, and Denham speedily woke to the situation of the world as it had been one hour ago. He had last seen Rodney walking with Katharine. He could not help regretting the eagerness with which his mind returned to these interests, and fretted him with the old trivial anxieties. He sank in his own esteem. Reason bade him break from Rodney, who clearly tended to become confidential, before he had utterly lost touch with the problems of high philosophy. He looked along the road, and marked a lamp-post at a distance of some hundred yards, and decided that he would part from Rodney when they reached this point.
“Yes, I like Mary; I don’t see how one could help liking her,” he remarked cautiously, with his eye on the lamp-post.
“Ah, Denham, you’re so different from me. You never give yourself away. I watched you this evening with Katharine Hilbery. My instinct is to trust the person I’m talking to. That’s why I’m always being taken in, I suppose.”
Denham seemed to be pondering this statement of Rodney’s, but, as a matter of fact, he was hardly conscious of Rodney and his revelations, and was only concerned to make him mention Katharine again before they reached the lamp-post.
“Who’s taken you in now?” he asked. “Katharine Hilbery?”
Rodney stopped and once more began beating a kind of rhythm, as if he were marking a phrase in a symphony, upon the smooth stone balustrade of the Embankment.
“Katharine Hilbery,” he repeated, with a curious little chuckle. “No, Denham, I have no illusions about that young woman. I think I made that plain to her to-night. But don’t run away with a false impression,” he continued eagerly, turning and linking his arm through Denham’s, as though to prevent him from escaping; and, thus compelled, Denham passed the monitory lamp-post, to which, in passing, he breathed an excuse, for how could he break away when Rodney’s arm was actually linked in his? “You must not think that I have any bitterness against her—far from it. It’s not altogether her fault, poor girl. She lives, you know, one of those odious, self-centered lives—at least, I think them odious for a woman—feeding her wits upon everything, having control of everything, getting far too much her own way at home—spoilt, in a sense, feeling that every one is at her feet, and so not realizing how she hurts—that is, how rudely she behaves to people who haven’t all her advantages. Still, to do her justice, she’s no fool,” he added, as if to warn Denham not to take any liberties. “She has taste. She has sense. She can understand you when you talk to her. But she’s a woman, and there’s an end of it,” he added, with another little chuckle, and dropped Denham’s arm.
“And did you tell her all this to-night?” Denham asked.
“Oh dear me, no. I should never think of telling Katharine the truth about herself. That wouldn’t do at all. One has to be in an attitude of adoration in order to get on with Katharine.
“Now I’ve learnt that she’s refused to marry him why don’t I go home?” Denham thought to himself. But he went on walking beside Rodney, and for a time they did not speak, though Rodney hummed snatches of a tune out of an opera by Mozart. A feeling of contempt and liking combine very naturally in the mind of one to whom another has just spoken unpremeditatedly, revealing rather more of his private feelings than he intended to reveal. Denham began to wonder what sort of person Rodney was, and at the same time Rodney began to think about Denham.
“You’re a slave like me, I suppose?” he asked.
“A solicitor, yes.”
“I sometimes wonder why we don’t chuck it. Why don’t you emigrate, Denham? I should have thought that would suit you.”
“I’ve a family.”
“I’m often on the point of going myself. And then I know I couldn’t live without this”—and he waved his hand towards the City of London, which wore, at this moment, the appearance of a town cut out of gray-blue cardboard, and pasted flat against the sky, which was of a deeper blue.
“There are one or two people I’m fond of, and there’s a little good music, and a few pictures, now and then—just enough to keep one dangling about here. Ah, but I couldn’t live with savages! Are you fond of books? Music? Pictures? D’you care at all for first editions? I’ve got a few nice things up here, things I pick up cheap, for I can’t afford to give what they ask.”
They had reached a small court of high eighteenth-century houses, in one of which Rodney had his rooms. They climbed a very steep staircase, through whose uncurtained windows the moonlight fell, illuminating the banisters with their twisted pillars, and the piles of plates set on the window-sills, and jars half-full of milk. Rodney’s rooms were small, but the sitting-room window looked out into a courtyard, with its flagged pavement, and its single tree, and across to the flat red-brick fronts of the opposite houses, which would not have surprised Dr. Johnson, if he had come out of his grave for a turn in the moonlight. Rodney lit his lamp, pulled his curtains, offered Denham a chair, and, flinging the manuscript of his paper on the Elizabethan use of Metaphor on to the table, exclaimed:
“Oh dear me, what a waste of time! But it’s over now, and so we may think no more about it.”
He then busied himself very dexterously in lighting a fire, producing glasses, whisky, a cake, and cups and saucers. He put on a faded crimson dressing-gown, and a pair of red slippers, and advanced to Denham with a tumbler in one hand and a well-burnished book in the other.
“The Baskerville Congreve,” said Rodney, offering it to his guest. “I couldn’t read him in a cheap edition.”
When he was seen thus among his books and his valuables, amiably anxious to make his visitor comfortable, and moving about with something of the dexterity and grace of a Persian cat, Denham relaxed his critical attitude, and felt more at home with Rodney than he would have done with many men better known to him. Rodney’s room was the room of a person who cherishes a great many personal tastes, guarding them from the rough blasts of the public with scrupulous attention. His papers and his books rose in jagged mounds on table and floor, round which he skirted with nervous care lest his dressing-gown might disarrange them ever so slightly. On a chair stood a stack of photographs of statues and pictures, which it was his habit to exhibit, one by one, for the space of a day or two. The books on his shelves were as orderly as regiments of soldiers, and the backs of them shone like so many bronze beetle-wings; though, if you took one from its place you saw a shabbier volume behind it, since space was limited. An oval Venetian mirror stood above the fireplace, and reflected duskily in its spotted depths the faint yellow and crimson of a jarful of tulips which stood among the letters and pipes and cigarettes upon the mantelpiece. A small piano occupied a corner of the room, with the score of “Don Giovanni” open upon the bracket.
“Well, Rodney,” said Denham, as he filled his pipe and looked about him, “this is all very nice and comfortable.”
Rodney turned his head half round and smiled, with the pride of a proprietor, and then prevented himself from smiling.
“Tolerable,” he muttered.
“But I dare say it’s just as well that you have to earn your own living.”
“If you mean that I shouldn’t do anything good with leisure if I had it, I dare say you’re right. But I should be ten times as happy with my whole day to spend as I liked.”
“I doubt that,” Denham replied.
They sat silent, and the smoke from their pipes joined amicably in a blue vapor above their heads.
“I could spend three hours every day reading Shakespeare,” Rodney remarked. “And there’s music and pictures, let alone