‘My oysters! I had a basket,’ she explained, ‘and I’ve left it somewhere. Uncle Dudley dines with us to-night. What in the world have I done with them?’
She rose and began to wander about the room. William rose also, and stood in front of the fire, muttering, ‘Oysters, oysters—your basket of oysters!’ but though he looked vaguely here and there, as if the oysters might be on top of the bookshelf, his eyes returned always to Katharine. She drew the curtain and looked out among the scanty leaves of the plane-trees.
‘I had them,’ she calculated, ‘in the Strand; I sat on a seat. Well, never mind,’ she concluded, turning back into the room abruptly, ‘I dare say some old creature is enjoying them by this time.’
‘I should have thought that you never forgot anything,’ William remarked, as they settled down again.
‘That’s part of the myth about me, I know,’ Katharine replied. Δnd I wonder,’ William proceeded, with some caution, ’what the truth about you is? But I know this sort of thing doesn’t interest you, ’he added hastily, with a touch of peevishness.
‘No; it doesn’t interest me very much,’ she replied candidly.
‘What shall we talk about then?’ he asked.
She looked rather whimsically round the walls of the room.
‘However we start, we end by talking about the same thing—about poetry, I mean. I wonder if you realize, William, that I’ve never read even Shakespeare? It’s rather wonderful how I’ve kept it up all these years.’
‘You’ve kept it up for ten years very beautifully, as far as I’m concerned,’ he said.
‘Ten years? So long as that?’
And I don’t think it’s always bored you,’ he added.
She looked into the fire silently. She could not deny that the surface of her feeling was absolutely unruffled by anything in William’s character; on the contrary, she felt certain that she could deal with whatever turned up. He gave her peace, in which she could think of things that were far removed from what they talked about. Even now, when he sat within a yard of her, how easily her mind ranged hither and thither! Suddenly a picture presented itself before her, without any effort on her part as pictures will, of herself in these very rooms; she had come in from a lecture, and she held a pile of books in her hand, scientific books, and books about mathematics and astronomy which she had mastered. She put them down on the table over there. It was a picture plucked from her life two or three years hence, when she was married to William; but here she checked herself abruptly.
She could not entirely forget William’s presence, because, in spite of his efforts to control himself, his nervousness was apparent. On such occasions his eyes protruded more than ever, and his face had more than ever the appearance of being covered with a thin crackling skin, through which every flush of his volatile blood showed itself instantly. By this time he had shaped so many sentences and rejected them, felt so many impulses and subdued them, that he was a uniform scarlet.
‘You may say you don’t read books,’ he remarked, ‘but, all the same, you know about them. Besides, who wants you to be learned? Leave that to the poor devils who’ve got nothing better to do. You—you—ahem!—’
‘Well, then, why don’t you read me something before I go?’ said Katharine, looking at her watch.
‘Katharine, you’ve only just come! Let me see now, what have I got to show you?’ He rose, and stirred about the papers on his table, as if in doubt; he then picked up a manuscript, and after spreading it smoothly upon his knee, he looked up at Katharine suspiciously. He caught her smiling.
‘I believe you only ask me to read out of kindness,’ he burst out. ‘Let’s find something else to talk about. Who have you been seeing?’
‘I don’t generally ask things out of kindness,’ Katharine observed; ‘however, if you don’t want to read, you needn’t.’
William gave a queer snort of exasperation, and opened his manuscript once more, though he kept his eyes upon her face as he did so. No face could have been graver or more judicial.
‘One can trust you, certainly, to say unpleasant things,’ he said, smoothing out the page, clearing his throat, and reading half a stanza to himself ‘Ahem! The Princess is lost in the wood, and she hears the sound of a horn. (This would all be very pretty on the stage, but I can’t get the effect here.) Anyhow, Sylvano enters, accompanied by the rest of the gentlemen of Gratian’s court.1 I begin where he soliloquizes.’ He jerked his head and began to read.
Although Katharine had just disclaimed any knowledge of literature, she listened attentively. At least, she listened to the first twenty-five lines attentively, and then she frowned. Her attention was only aroused again when Rodney raised his finger—a sign, she knew, that the metre was about to change.
His theory was that every mood has its metre. His mastery of metres was very great; and, if the beauty of a drama depended upon the variety of measures in which the personages speak, Rodney’s plays must have challenged the works of Shakespeare. Katharine’s ignorance of Shakespeare did not prevent her from feeling fairly certain that plays should not produce a sense of chill stupor in the audience, such as overcame her as the lines flowed on, sometimes long and sometimes short, but always delivered with the same lilt of voice, which seemed to nail each line firmly on to the same spot in the hearer’s brain. Still, she reflected, these sorts of skill are almost exclusively masculine; women neither practise them nor know how to value them; and one’s husband’s proficiency in this direction might legitimately increase one’s respect for him, since mystification is no bad basis for respect. No one could doubt that William was a scholar. The reading ended with the finish of the Act; Katharine had prepared a little speech.
‘That seems to me extremely well written, William; although, of course, I don’t know enough to criticize in detail.’
‘But it’s the skill that strikes you—not the emotion?’
‘In a fragment like that, of course, the skill strikes one most.’
‘But perhaps—have you time to listen to one more short piece? the scene between the lovers? There’s some real feeling in that, I think. Denham agrees that it’s the best thing I’ve done.’
‘You’ve read it to Ralph Denham?’ Katharine inquired, with surprise. ‘He’s a better judge than I am. What did he say?’
‘My dear Katharine,’ Rodney exclaimed, ‘I don’t ask you for criticism, as I should ask a scholar. I dare say there are only five men in England whose opinion of my work matters a straw to me. But I trust you where feeling is concerned. I had you in my mind often when I was writing those scenes. I kept asking myself, “Now is this the sort of thing Katharine would like?” I always think of you when I’m writing, Katharine, even when it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t know about. And I’d rather—yes, I really believe I’d rather—you thought well of my writing than any one in the world.’
This was so genuine a tribute to his trust in her that Katharine was touched.
‘You think too much of me altogether, William,’ she said, forgetting that she had not meant to speak in this way.
‘No, Katharine, I don’t,’ he replied, replacing his manuscript in the drawer. ’It does me good to think of you.’
So quiet an answer, followed as it was by no expression of love, but merely by the statement that if she must go he would take her to the Strand, and would, if she could wait a moment, change his dressing-gown for a coat, moved her to the warmest feeling of affection for him that she had yet experienced. While he changed in the next room, she stood by the bookcase, taking down books and opening them, but reading nothing on their pages.
She felt certain that she would marry Rodney. How could one avoid it? How could one find fault with it? Here she sighed, and, putting the thought of marriage away, fell into a dream state, in which she became another person, and the whole world seemed changed. Being a frequent visitor to that world, she could find her way there unhesitatingly. If she had tried to analyse her impressions, she would have said that there dwelt the realities of the appearances which figure in our world; so direct, powerful, and unimpeded were her sensations there, compared with those called forth in actual life. There dwelt the things one might have felt, had there been cause; the perfect happiness of which here we taste the fragment; the beauty seen here in flying glimpses only.2 No doubt much of the furniture of this world was drawn directly from the past, and even from the England of the Elizabethan age. However the embellishment of this imaginary world might change, two qualities were constant in it. It was a place where feelings were liberated from the constraint which the real world puts upon them; and the process of awakenment was always marked by resignation and a kind of stoical acceptance of facts. She met no acquaintance there, as Denham did, miraculously transfigured; she played no heroic part. But there certainly she loved some magnanimous hero, and as they swept together among the leaf-hung trees of an unknown world, they shared the feelings which came fresh and fast as the waves on the shore. But the sands of her liberation were running fast; even through the forest branches came sounds of Rodney moving things on his dressing-table; and Katharine woke herself from this excursion by shutting the cover of the book she was holding, and replacing it in the bookshelf.