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reach Lincoln’s Inn Fields before he left his office. She hailed a
cab, and bade it take her to a shop for selling maps which she
remembered in Great Queen Street, since she hardly liked to be set
down at his door. Arrived at the shop, she bought a large scale map of
Norfolk, and thus provided, hurried into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and
assured herself of the position of Messrs. Hoper and Grateley’s
office. The great gas chandeliers were alight in the office windows.
She conceived that he sat at an enormous table laden with papers
beneath one of them in the front room with the three tall windows.
Having settled his position there, she began walking to and fro upon
the pavement. Nobody of his build appeared. She scrutinized each male
figure as it approached and passed her. Each male figure had,
nevertheless, a look of him, due, perhaps, to the professional dress,
the quick step, the keen glance which they cast upon her as they
hastened home after the day’s work. The square itself, with its
immense houses all so fully occupied and stern of aspect, its
atmosphere of industry and power, as if even the sparrows and the
children were earning their daily bread, as if the sky itself, with
its gray and scarlet clouds, reflected the serious intention of the
city beneath it, spoke of him. Here was the fit place for their
meeting, she thought; here was the fit place for her to walk thinking
of him. She could not help comparing it with the domestic streets of
Chelsea. With this comparison in her mind, she extended her range a
little, and turned into the main road. The great torrent of vans and
carts was sweeping down Kingsway; pedestrians were streaming in two
currents along the pavements. She stood fascinated at the corner. The
deep roar filled her ears; the changing tumult had the inexpressible
fascination of varied life pouring ceaselessly with a purpose which,
as she looked, seemed to her, somehow, the normal purpose for which
life was framed; its complete indifference to the individuals, whom it
swallowed up and rolled onwards, filled her with at least a temporary
exaltation. The blend of daylight and of lamplight made her an
invisible spectator, just as it gave the people who passed her a
semi-transparent quality, and left the faces pale ivory ovals in which
the eyes alone were dark. They tended the enormous rush of the
current—the great flow, the deep stream, the unquenchable tide. She
stood unobserved and absorbed, glorying openly in the rapture that had
run subterraneously all day. Suddenly she was clutched, unwilling,
from the outside, by the recollection of her purpose in coming there.
She had come to find Ralph Denham. She hastily turned back into
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and looked for her landmark—the light in the
three tall windows. She sought in vain. The faces of the houses had
now merged in the general darkness, and she had difficulty in
determining which she sought. Ralph’s three windows gave back on their
ghostly glass panels only a reflection of the gray and greenish sky.
She rang the bell, peremptorily, under the painted name of the firm.
After some delay she was answered by a caretaker, whose pail and brush
of themselves told her that the working day was over and the workers
gone. Nobody, save perhaps Mr. Grateley himself, was left, she assured
Katharine; every one else had been gone these ten minutes.
The news woke Katharine completely. Anxiety gained upon her. She
hastened back into Kingsway, looking at people who had miraculously
regained their solidity. She ran as far as the Tube station,
overhauling clerk after clerk, solicitor after solicitor. Not one of
them even faintly resembled Ralph Denham. More and more plainly did
she see him; and more and more did he seem to her unlike any one else.
At the door of the station she paused, and tried to collect her
thoughts. He had gone to her house. By taking a cab she could be there
probably in advance of him. But she pictured herself opening the
drawing-room door, and William and Cassandra looking up, and Ralph’s
entrance a moment later, and the glances—the insinuations. No; she
could not face it. She would write him a letter and take it at once to
his house. She bought paper and pencil at the bookstall, and entered
an A.B.C. shop, where, by ordering a cup of coffee, she secured an
empty table, and began at vice to write:
“I came to meet you and I have missed you. I could not face William
and Cassandra. They want us—” here she paused. “They insist that we
are engaged,” she substituted, “and we couldn’t talk at all, or
explain anything. I want—” Her wants were so vast, now that she was
in communication with Ralph, that the pencil was utterly inadequate to
conduct them on to the paper; it seemed as if the whole torrent of
Kingsway had to run down her pencil. She gazed intently at a notice
hanging on the gold-encrusted wall opposite. “… to say all kinds
of things,” she added, writing each word with the painstaking of a
child. But, when she raised her eyes again to meditate the next
sentence, she was aware of a waitress, whose expression intimated that
it was closing time, and, looking round, Katharine saw herself almost
the last person left in the shop. She took up her letter, paid her
bill, and found herself once more in the street. She would now take a
cab to Highgate. But at that moment it flashed upon her that she could
not remember the address. This check seemed to let fall a barrier
across a very powerful current of desire. She ransacked her memory in
desperation, hunting for the name, first by remembering the look of
the house, and then by trying, in memory, to retrace the words she had
written once, at least, upon an envelope. The more she pressed the
farther the words receded. Was the house an Orchard Something, on the
street a Hill? She gave it up. Never, since she was a child, had she
felt anything like this blankness and desolation. There rushed in upon
her, as if she were waking from some dream, all the consequences of
her inexplicable indolence. She figured Ralph’s face as he turned from
her door without a word of explanation, receiving his dismissal as a
blow from herself, a callous intimation that she did not wish to see
him. She followed his departure from her door; but it was far more
easy to see him marching far and fast in any direction for any length
of time than to conceive that he would turn back to Highgate. Perhaps
he would try once more to see her in Cheyne Walk? It was proof of the
clearness with which she saw him, that she started forward as this
possibility occurred to her, and almost raised her hand to beckon to a
cab. No; he was too proud to come again; he rejected the desire and
walked on and on, on and on—If only she could read the names of those
visionary streets down which he passed! But her imagination betrayed
her at this point, or mocked her with a sense of their strangeness,
darkness, and distance. Indeed, instead of helping herself to any
decision, she only filled her mind with the vast extent of London and
the impossibility of finding any single figure that wandered off this
way and that way, turned to the right and to the left, chose that
dingy little back street where the children were playing in the road,
and so—She roused herself impatiently. She walked rapidly along
Holborn. Soon she turned and walked as rapidly in the other direction.
This indecision was not merely odious, but had something that alarmed
her about it, as she had been alarmed slightly once or twice already
that day; she felt unable to cope with the strength of her own
desires. To a person controlled by habit, there was humiliation as
well as alarm in this sudden release of what appeared to be a very
powerful as well as an unreasonable force. An aching in the muscles of
her right hand now showed her that she was crushing her gloves and the
map of Norfolk in a grip sufficient to crack a more solid object. She
relaxed her grasp; she looked anxiously at the faces of the passers-by
to see whether their eyes rested on her for a moment longer than was
natural, or with any curiosity. But having smoothed out her gloves,
and done what she could to look as usual, she forgot spectators, and
was once more given up to her desperate desire to find Ralph Denham.
It was a desire now—wild, irrational, unexplained, resembling
something felt in childhood. Once more she blamed herself bitterly for
her carelessness. But finding herself opposite the Tube station, she
pulled herself up and took counsel swiftly, as of old. It flashed upon
her that she would go at once to Mary Datchet, and ask her to give her
Ralph’s address. The decision was a relief, not only in giving her a
goal, but in providing her with a rational excuse for her own actions.
It gave her a goal certainly, but the fact of having a goal led her to
dwell exclusively upon her obsession; so that when she rang the bell
of Mary’s flat, she did not for a moment consider how this demand
would strike Mary. To her extreme annoyance Mary was not at home; a
charwoman opened the door. All Katharine could do was to accept the
invitation to wait. She waited for, perhaps, fifteen minutes, and
spent them in pacing from one end of the room to the other without
intermission. When she heard Mary’s key in the door she paused in
front of the fireplace, and Mary found her standing upright, looking
at once expectant and determined, like a person who has come on an
errand of such importance that it must be broached without preface.
Mary exclaimed in surprise.
“Yes, yes,” Katharine said, brushing these remarks aside, as if they
were in the way.
“Have you had tea?”
“Oh yes,” she said, thinking that she had had tea hundreds of years
ago, somewhere or other.
Mary paused, took off her gloves, and, finding matches, proceeded to
light the fire.
Katharine checked her with an impatient movement, and said:
“Don’t light the fire for me… . I want to know Ralph Denham’s
address.”
She was holding a pencil and preparing to write on the envelope. She
waited with an imperious expression.
“The Apple Orchard, Mount Ararat Road, Highgate,” Mary said, speaking
slowly and rather strangely.
“Oh, I remember now!” Katharine exclaimed, with irritation at her own
stupidity. “I suppose it wouldn’t take twenty minutes to drive there?”
She gathered up her purse and gloves and seemed about to go.
“But you won’t find him,” said Mary, pausing with a match in her hand.
Katharine, who had already turned towards the door, stopped and looked
at her.
“Why? Where is he?” she asked.
“He won’t have left his office.”
“But he has left the office,” she replied. “The only question is will
he have reached home yet? He went to see me at Chelsea; I tried to
meet him and missed him. He will have found no message to explain. So
I must find him—as soon as possible.”
Mary took in the situation at her leisure.
“But why not telephone?” she said.
Katharine immediately dropped all that she was holding; her strained
expression relaxed, and exclaiming, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of
that!” she seized the telephone receiver and gave her number. Mary
looked at her steadily,
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