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Night and Day

by Virginia Woolf · English · Gutenberg #1245 · 965,371 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Night and Day

Author: Virginia Woolf


        
Release date: March 1, 1998 [eBook #1245]
                Most recently updated: March 18, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1245

Credits: Judy Boss and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHT AND DAY ***

Night and Day

by Virginia Woolf


               TO
               VANESSA BELL
               BUT, LOOKING FOR A PHRASE,
               I FOUND NONE TO STAND
               BESIDE YOUR NAME


Contents

 CHAPTER I. 
 CHAPTER II. 
 CHAPTER III. 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 CHAPTER V. 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 CHAPTER X. 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 




NIGHT AND DAY




CHAPTER I


It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other young
ladies of her class, Katharine Hilbery was pouring out tea. Perhaps a
fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt
over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning
and this rather subdued moment, and played with the things one does
voluntarily and normally in the daylight. But although she was silent,
she was evidently mistress of a situation which was familiar enough to
her, and inclined to let it take its way for the six hundredth time,
perhaps, without bringing into play any of her unoccupied faculties. A
single glance was enough to show that Mrs. Hilbery was so rich in the
gifts which make tea-parties of elderly distinguished people
successful, that she scarcely needed any help from her daughter,
provided that the tiresome business of teacups and bread and butter was
discharged for her.

Considering that the little party had been seated round the tea-table
for less than twenty minutes, the animation observable on their faces,
and the amount of sound they were producing collectively, were very
creditable to the hostess. It suddenly came into Katharine’s mind that
if some one opened the door at this moment he would think that they
were enjoying themselves; he would think, “What an extremely nice house
to come into!” and instinctively she laughed, and said something to
increase the noise, for the credit of the house presumably, since she
herself had not been feeling exhilarated. At the very same moment,
rather to her amusement, the door was flung open, and a young man
entered the room. Katharine, as she shook hands with him, asked him, in
her own mind, “Now, do you think we’re enjoying ourselves
enormously?”... “Mr. Denham, mother,” she said aloud, for she saw that
her mother had forgotten his name.

That fact was perceptible to Mr. Denham also, and increased the
awkwardness which inevitably attends the entrance of a stranger into a
room full of people much at their ease, and all launched upon
sentences. At the same time, it seemed to Mr. Denham as if a thousand
softly padded doors had closed between him and the street outside. A
fine mist, the etherealized essence of the fog, hung visibly in the
wide and rather empty space of the drawing-room, all silver where the
candles were grouped on the tea-table, and ruddy again in the
firelight. With the omnibuses and cabs still running in his head, and
his body still tingling with his quick walk along the streets and in
and out of traffic and foot-passengers, this drawing-room seemed very
remote and still; and the faces of the elderly people were mellowed, at
some distance from each other, and had a bloom on them owing to the
fact that the air in the drawing-room was thickened by blue grains of
mist. Mr. Denham had come in as Mr. Fortescue, the eminent novelist,
reached the middle of a very long sentence. He kept this suspended
while the newcomer sat down, and Mrs. Hilbery deftly joined the severed
parts by leaning towards him and remarking:

“Now, what would you do if you were married to an engineer, and had to
live in Manchester, Mr. Denham?”

“Surely she could learn Persian,” broke in a thin, elderly gentleman.
“Is there no retired schoolmaster or man of letters in Manchester with
whom she could read Persian?”

“A cousin of ours has married and gone to live in Manchester,”
Katharine explained. Mr. Denham muttered something, which was indeed
all that was required of him, and the novelist went on where he had
left off. Privately, Mr. Denham cursed himself very sharply for having
exchanged the freedom of the street for this sophisticated
drawing-room, where, among other disagreeables, he certainly would not
appear at his best. He glanced round him, and saw that, save for
Katharine, they were all over forty, the only consolation being that
Mr. Fortescue was a considerable celebrity, so that to-morrow one might
be glad to have met him.

“Have you ever been to Manchester?” he asked Katharine.

“Never,” she replied.

“Why do you object to it, then?”

Katharine stirred her tea, and seemed to speculate, so Denham thought,
upon the duty of filling somebody else’s cup, but she was really
wondering how she was going to keep this strange young man in harmony
with the rest. She observed that he was compressing his teacup, so that
there was danger lest the thin china might cave inwards. She could see
that he was nervous; one would expect a bony young man with his face
slightly reddened by the wind, and his hair not altogether smooth, to
be nervous in such a party. Further, he probably disliked this kind of
thing, and had come out of curiosity, or because her father had invited
him—anyhow, he would not be easily combined with the rest.

“I should think there would be no one to talk to in Manchester,” she
replied at random. Mr. Fortescue had been observing her for a moment or
two, as novelists are inclined to observe, and at this remark he
smiled, and made it the text for a little further speculation.

“In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Katharine decidedly
hits the mark,” he said, and lying back in his chair, with his opaque
contemplative eyes fixed on the ceiling, and the tips of his fingers
pressed together, he depicted, first the horrors of the streets of
Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the
town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live,
and then the professors and the miserable young students devoted to the
more strenuous works of our younger dramatists, who would visit her,
and how her appearance would change by degrees, and how she would fly
to London, and how Katharine would have to lead her about, as one leads
an eager dog on a chain, past rows of clamorous butchers’ shops, poor
dear creature.

“Oh, Mr. Fortescue,” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery, as he finished, “I had
just written to say how I envied her! I was thinking of the big gardens
and the dear old ladies in mittens, who read nothing but the
“Spectator,” and snuff the candles. Have they _all_ disappeared? I told
her she would find the nice things of London without the horrid streets
that depress one so.”

“There is the University,” said the thin gentleman, who had previously
insisted upon the existence of people knowing Persian.

“I know there are moors there, because I read about them in a book the
other day,” said Katharine.

“I am grieved and amazed at the ignorance of my family,” Mr. Hilbery
remarked. He was an elderly man, with a pair of oval, hazel eyes which
were rather bright for his time of life, and relieved the heaviness of
his face. He played constantly with a little green stone attached to
his watch-chain, thus displaying long and very sensitive fingers, and
had a habit of moving his head hither and thither very quickly without
altering the position of his large and rather corpulent body, so that
he seemed to be providing himself incessantly with food for amusement
and reflection with the least possible expenditure of energy. One might
suppose that he had passed the time of life when his ambitions were
personal, or that he had gratified them as far as he was likely to do,
and now employed his considerable acuteness rather to observe and
reflect than to attain any result.

Katharine, so Denham decided, while Mr. Fortescue built up another
rounded structure of words, had a likeness to each of her parents, but
these elements were rather oddly blended. She had the quick, impulsive
movements of her mother, the lips parting often to speak, and closing
again; and the dark oval eyes of her father brimming with light upon a
basis of sadness, or, since she was too young to have acquired a
sorrowful point of view, one might say that the basis was not sadness
so much as a spirit given to contemplation and self-control. Judging by
her hair, her coloring, and the shape of her features, she was
striking, if not actually beautiful. Decision and composure stamped
her, a combination of qualities that produced a very marked character,
and one that was not calculated to put a young man, who scarcely knew
her, at his ease. For the rest, she was tall; her dress was of some
quiet color, with old yellow-tinted lace for ornament, to which the
spark of an ancient jewel gave its one red gleam. Denham noticed that,
although silent, she kept sufficient control of the situation to answer
immediately her mother appealed to her for help, and yet it was obvious
to him that she attended only with the surface skin of her mind. It
struck him that her position at the tea-table, among all these elderly
people, was not without its difficulties, and he checked his
inclination to find her, or her attitude, generally antipathetic to
him. The talk had passed over Manchester, after dealing with it very
generously.

“Would it be the Battle of Trafalgar or the Spanish Armada, Katharine?”
her mother demanded.

“Trafalgar, mother.”

“Trafalgar, of course! How stupid of me! Another cup of tea, with a
thin slice of lemon in it, and then, dear Mr. Fortescue, please explain
my absurd little puzzle. One can’t help believing gentlemen with Roman
noses, even if one meets them in omnibuses.”

Mr. Hilbery here interposed so far as Denham was concerned, and talked
a great deal of sense about the solicitors’ profession, and the changes
which he had seen in his lifetime. Indeed, Denham properly fell to his
lot, owing to the fact that an article by Denham upon some legal
matter, published by Mr. Hilbery in his Review, had brought them
acquainted. But when a moment later Mrs. Sutton Bailey was announced,
he turned to her, and Mr. Denham found himself sitting silent,
rejecting possible things to say, beside Katharine, who was silent too.
Being much about the same age and both under thirty, they were
prohibited from the use of a great many convenient phrases which launch
conversation into smooth waters. They were further silenced by
Katharine’s rather malicious determination not to help this young man,
in whose upright and resolute bearing she detected something hostile to
her surroundings, by any of the usual feminine amenities. They
therefore sat silent, Denham controlling his desire to say something
abrupt and explosive, which should shock her into life. But Mrs.
Hilbery was immediately sensitive to any silence in the drawing-room,
as of a dumb note in a sonorous scale, and leaning across the table she
observed, in the curiously tentative detached manner which always gave
her phrases the likeness of butterflies flaunting from one sunny spot
to another, “D’you know, Mr. Denham, you remind me so much of dear Mr.
Ruskin.... Is it his tie, Katharine, or his hair, or the way he sits in
his chair? Do tell me, Mr. Denham, are you an admirer of Ruskin? Some
one, the other day, said to me, ‘Oh, no, we don’t read Ruskin, Mrs.
Hilbery.’ What _do_ you read, I wonder?—for you can’t spend all your
time going up in aeroplanes and burrowing into the bowels of the
earth.”

She looked benevolently at Denham, who said nothing articulate, and
then at Katharine, who smiled but said nothing either, upon which Mrs.
Hilbery seemed possessed by a brilliant idea, and exclaimed:

“I’m sure Mr. Denham would like to see our things, Katharine. I’m sure
he’s not like that dreadful young man, Mr. Ponting, who told me that he
considered it our duty to live exclusively in the present. After all,
what IS the present? Half of it’s the past, and the better half, too, I
should say,” she added, turning to Mr. Fortescue.

Denham rose, half meaning to go, and thinking that he had seen all that
there was to see, but Katharine rose at the same moment, and saying,
“Perhaps you would like to see the pictures,” led the way across the
drawing-room to a smaller room opening out of it.

The smaller room was something like a chapel in a cathedral, or a
grotto in a cave, for the booming sound of the traffic in the distance
suggested the soft surge of waters, and the oval mirrors, with their
silver surface, were like deep pools trembling beneath starlight. But
the comparison to a religious temple of some kind was the more apt of
the two, for the little room was crowded with relics.

As Katharine touched different spots, lights sprang here and there, and
revealed a square mass of red-and-gold books, and then a long skirt in
blue-and-white paint lustrous behind glass, and then a mahogany
writing-table, with its orderly equipment, and, finally, a picture
above the table, to which special illumination was accorded. When
Katharine had touched these last lights, she stood back, as much as to
say, “There!” Denham found himself looked down upon by the eyes of the
great poet, Richard Alardyce, and suffered a little shock which would
have led him, had he been wearing a hat, to remove it. The eyes looked
at him out of the mellow pinks and yellows of the paint with divine
friendliness, which embraced him, and passed on to contemplate the
entire world. The paint had so faded that very little but the beautiful
large eyes were left, dark in the surrounding dimness.

Katharine waited as though for him to receive a full impression, and
then she said:

“This is his writing-table. He used this pen,” and she lifted a quill
pen and laid it down again. The writing-table was splashed with old
ink, and the pen disheveled in service. There lay the gigantic
gold-rimmed spectacles, ready to his hand, and beneath the table was a
pair of large, worn slippers, one of which Katharine picked up,
remarking:

“I think my grandfather must have been at least twice as large as any
one is nowadays. This,” she went on, as if she knew what she had to say
by heart, “is the original manuscript of the ‘Ode to Winter.’ The early
poems are far less corrected than the later. Would you like to look at
it?”

While Mr. Denham examined the manuscript, she glanced up at her
grandfather, and, for the thousandth time, fell into a pleasant dreamy
state in which she seemed to be the companion of those giant men, of
their own lineage, at any rate, and the insignificant present moment
was put to shame. That magnificent ghostly head on the canvas, surely,
never beheld all the trivialities of a Sunday afternoon, and it did not
seem to matter what she and this young man said to each other, for they
were only small people.

“This is a copy of the first edition of the poems,” she continued,
without considering the fact that Mr. Denham was still occupied with
the manuscript, “which contains several poems that have not been
reprinted, as well as corrections.” She paused for a minute, and then
went on, as if these spaces had all been calculated.

“That lady in blue is my great-grandmother, by Millington. Here is my
uncle’s walking-stick—he was Sir Richard Warburton, you know, and rode
with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow. And then, let me see—oh, that’s
the original Alardyce, 1697, the founder of the family fortunes, with
his wife. Some one gave us this bowl the other day because it has their
crest and initials. We think it must have been given them to celebrate
their silver wedding-day.”

Here she stopped for a moment, wondering why it was that Mr. Denham
said nothing. Her feeling that he was antagonistic to her, which had
lapsed while she thought of her family possessions, returned so keenly
that she stopped in the middle of her catalog and looked at him. Her
mother, wishing to connect him reputably with the great dead, had
compared him with Mr. Ruskin; and the comparison was in Katharine’s
mind, and led her to be more critical of the young man than was fair,
for a young man paying a call in a tail-coat is in a different element
altogether from a head seized at its climax of expressiveness, gazing
immutably from behind a sheet of glass, which was all that remained to
her of Mr. Ruskin. He had a singular face—a face built for swiftness
and decision rather than for massive contemplation; the forehead broad,
the nose long and formidable, the lips clean-shaven and at once dogged
and sensitive, the cheeks lean, with a deeply running tide of red blood
in them. His eyes, expressive now of the usual masculine impersonality
and authority, might reveal more subtle emotions under favorable
circumstances, for they were large, and of a clear, brown color; they
seemed unexpectedly to hesitate and speculate; but Katharine only
looked at him to wonder whether his face would not have come nearer the
standard of her dead heroes if it had been adorned with side-whiskers.
In his spare build and thin, though healthy, cheeks, she saw tokens of
an angular and acrid soul. His voice, she noticed, had a slight
vibrating or creaking sound in it, as he laid down the manuscript and
said:

“You must be very proud of your family, Miss Hilbery.”

“Yes, I am,” Katharine answered, and she added, “Do you think there’s
anything wrong in that?”

“Wrong? How should it be wrong? It must be a bore, though, showing your
things to visitors,” he added reflectively.

“Not if the visitors like them.”

“Isn’t it difficult to live up to your ancestors?” he proceeded.

“I dare say I shouldn’t try to write poetry,” Katharine replied.

“No. And that’s what I should hate. I couldn’t bear my grandfather to
cut me out. And, after all,” Denham went on, glancing round him
satirically, as Katharine thought, “it’s not your grandfather only.
You’re cut out all the way round. I suppose you come of one of the most
distinguished families in England. There are the Warburtons and the
Mannings—and you’re related to the Otways, aren’t you? I read it all in
some magazine,” he added.

“The Otways are my cousins,” Katharine replied.

“Well,” said Denham, in a final tone of voice, as if his argument were
proved.

“Well,” said Katharine, “I don’t see that you’ve proved anything.”

Denham smiled, in a peculiarly provoking way. He was amused and
gratified to find that he had the power to annoy his oblivious,
supercilious hostess, if he could not impress her; though he would have
preferred to impress her.

He sat silent, holding the precious little book of poems unopened in
his hands, and Katharine watched him, the melancholy or contemplative
expression deepening in her eyes as her annoyance faded. She appeared
to be considering many things. She had forgotten her duties.

“Well,” said Denham again, suddenly opening the little book of poems,
as though he had said all that he meant to say or could, with
propriety, say. He turned over the pages with great decision, as if he
were judging the book in its entirety, the printing and paper and
binding, as well as the poetry, and then, having satisfied himself of
its good or bad quality, he placed it on the writing-table, and
examined the malacca cane with the gold knob which had belonged to the
soldier.

“But aren’t you proud of your family?” Katharine demanded.

“No,” said Denham. “We’ve never done anything to be proud of—unless you
count paying one’s bills a matter for pride.”

“That sounds rather dull,” Katharine remarked.

“You would think us horribly dull,” Denham agreed.

“Yes, I might find you dull, but I don’t think I should find you
ridiculous,” Katharine added, as if Denham had actually brought that
charge against her family.

“No—because we’re not in the least ridiculous. We’re a respectable
middle-class family, living at Highgate.”

“We don’t live at Highgate, but we’re middle class too, I suppose.”

Denham merely smiled, and replacing the malacca cane on the rack, he
drew a sword from its ornamental sheath.

“That belonged to Clive, so we say,” said Katharine, taking up her
duties as hostess again automatically.

“Is it a lie?” Denham inquired.

“It’s a family tradition. I don’t know that we can prove it.”

“You see, we don’t have traditions in our family,” said Denham.

“You sound very dull,” Katharine remarked, for the second time.

“Merely middle class,” Denham replied.

“You pay your bills, and you speak the truth. I don’t see why you
should despise us.”

Mr. Denham carefully sheathed the sword which the Hilberys said
belonged to Clive.

“I shouldn’t like to be you; that’s all I said,” he replied, as if he
were saying what he thought as accurately as he could.

“No, but one never would like to be any one else.”

“I should. I should like to be lots of other people.”

“Then why not us?” Katharine asked.

Denham looked at her as she sat in her grandfather’s arm-chair, drawing
her great-uncle’s malacca cane smoothly through her fingers, while her
background was made up equally of lustrous blue-and-white paint, and
crimson books with gilt lines on them. The vitality and composure of
her attitude, as of a bright-plumed bird poised easily before further
flights, roused him to show her the limitations of her lot. So soon, so
easily, would he be forgotten.

“You’ll never know anything at first hand,” he began, almost savagely.
“It’s all been done for you. You’ll never know the pleasure of buying
things after saving up for them, or reading books for the first time,
or making discoveries.”

“Go on,” Katharine observed, as he paused, suddenly doubtful, when he
heard his voice proclaiming aloud these facts, whether there was any
truth in them.

“Of course, I don’t know how you spend your time,” he continued, a
little stiffly, “but I suppose you have to show people round. You are
writing a life of your grandfather, aren’t you? And this kind of
thing”—he nodded towards the other room, where they could hear bursts
of cultivated laughter—“must take up a lot of time.”

She looked at him expectantly, as if between them they were decorating
a small figure of herself, and she saw him hesitating in the
disposition of some bow or sash.

“You’ve got it very nearly right,” she said, “but I only help my
mother. I don’t write myself.”

“Do you do anything yourself?” he demanded.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “I don’t leave the house at ten and come
back at six.”

“I don’t mean that.”

Mr. Denham had recovered his self-control; he spoke with a quietness
which made Katharine rather anxious that he should explain himself, but
at the same time she wished to annoy him, to waft him away from her on
some light current of ridicule or satire, as she was wont to do with
these intermittent young men of her father’s.

“Nobody ever does do anything worth doing nowadays,” she remarked. “You
see”—she tapped the volume of her grandfather’s poems—“we don’t even
print as well as they did, and as for poets or painters or
novelists—there are none; so, at any rate, I’m not singular.”

“No, we haven’t any great men,” Denham replied. “I’m very glad that we
haven’t. I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth
century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation.”

Katharine opened her lips and drew in her breath, as if to reply with
equal vigor, when the shutting of a door in the next room withdrew her
attention, and they both became conscious that the voices, which had
been rising and falling round the tea-table, had fallen silent; the
light, even, seemed to have sunk lower. A moment later Mrs. Hilbery
appeared in the doorway of the ante-room. She stood looking at them
with a smile of expectancy on her face, as if a scene from the drama of
the younger generation were being played for her benefit. She was a
remarkable-looking woman, well advanced in the sixties, but owing to
the lightness of her frame and the brightness of her eyes she seemed to
have been wafted over the surface of the years without taking much harm
in the passage. Her face was shrunken and aquiline, but any hint of
sharpness was dispelled by the large blue eyes, at once sagacious and
innocent, which seemed to regard the world with an enormous desire that
it should behave itself nobly, and an entire confidence that it could
do so, if it would only take the pains.

Certain lines on the broad forehead and about the lips might be taken
to suggest that she had known moments of some difficulty and perplexity
in the course of her career, but these had not destroyed her
trustfulness, and she was clearly still prepared to give every one any
number of fresh chances and the whole system the benefit of the doubt.
She wore a great resemblance to her father, and suggested, as he did,
the fresh airs and open spaces of a younger world.

“Well,” she said, “how do you like our things, Mr. Denham?”

Mr. Denham rose, put his book down, opened his mouth, but said nothing,
as Katharine observed, with some amusement.

Mrs. Hilbery handled the book he had laid down.

“There are some books that _live_,” she mused. “They are young with us,
and they grow old with us. Are you fond of poetry, Mr. Denham? But what
an absurd question to ask! The truth is, dear Mr. Fortescue has almost
tired me out. He is so eloquent and so witty, so searching and so
profound that, after half an hour or so, I feel inclined to turn out
all the lights. But perhaps he’d be more wonderful than ever in the
dark. What d’you think, Katharine? Shall we give a little party in
complete darkness? There’d have to be bright rooms for the bores....”

Here Mr. Denham held out his hand.

“But we’ve any number of things to show you!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed,
taking no notice of it. “Books, pictures, china, manuscripts, and the
very chair that Mary Queen of Scots sat in when she heard of Darnley’s
murder. I must lie down for a little, and Katharine must change her
dress (though she’s wearing a very pretty one), but if you don’t mind
being left alone, supper will be at eight. I dare say you’ll write a
poem of your own while you’re waiting. Ah, how I love the firelight!
Doesn’t our room look charming?”

She stepped back and bade them contemplate the empty drawing-room, with
its rich, irregular lights, as the flames leapt and wavered.

“Dear things!” she exclaimed. “Dear chairs and tables! How like old
friends they are—faithful, silent friends. Which reminds me, Katharine,
little Mr. Anning is coming to-night, and Tite Street, and Cadogan
Square.... Do remember to get that drawing of your great-uncle glazed.
Aunt Millicent remarked it last time she was here, and I know how it
would hurt me to see _my_ father in a broken glass.”

It was like tearing through a maze of diamond-glittering spiders’ webs
to say good-bye and escape, for at each movement Mrs. Hilbery
remembered something further about the villainies of picture-framers or
the delights of poetry, and at one time it seemed to the young man that
he would be hypnotized into doing what she pretended to want him to do,
for he could not suppose that she attached any value whatever to his
presence. Katharine, however, made an opportunity for him to leave, and
for that he was grateful to her, as one young person is grateful for
the understanding of another.




CHAPTER II


The young man shut the door with a sharper slam than any visitor had
used that afternoon, and walked up the street at a great pace, cutting
the air with his walking-stick. He was glad to find himself outside
that drawing-room, breathing raw fog, and in contact with unpolished
people who only wanted their share of the pavement allowed them. He
thought that if he had had Mr. or Mrs. or Miss Hilbery out here he
would have made them, somehow, feel his superiority, for he was chafed
by the memory of halting awkward sentences which had failed to give
even the young woman with the sad, but inwardly ironical eyes a hint of
his force. He tried to recall the actual words of his little outburst,
and unconsciously supplemented them by so many words of greater
expressiveness that the irritation of his failure was somewhat
assuaged. Sudden stabs of the unmitigated truth assailed him now and
then, for he was not inclined by nature to take a rosy view of his
conduct, but what with the beat of his foot upon the pavement, and the
glimpse which half-drawn curtains offered him of kitchens,
dining-rooms, and drawing-rooms, illustrating with mute power different
scenes from different lives, his own experience lost its sharpness.

His own experience underwent a curious change. His speed slackened, his
head sank a little towards his breast, and the lamplight shone now and
again upon a face grown strangely tranquil. His thought was so
absorbing that when it became necessary to verify the name of a street,
he looked at it for a time before he read it; when he came to a
crossing, he seemed to have to reassure himself by two or three taps,
such as a blind man gives, upon the curb; and, reaching the Underground
station, he blinked in the bright circle of light, glanced at his
watch, decided that he might still indulge himself in darkness, and
walked straight on.

And yet the thought was the thought with which he had started. He was
still thinking about the people in the house which he had left; but
instead of remembering, with whatever accuracy he could, their looks
and sayings, he had consciously taken leave of the literal truth. A
turn of the street, a firelit room, something monumental in the
procession of the lamp-posts, who shall say what accident of light or
shape had suddenly changed the prospect within his mind, and led him to
murmur aloud:

“She’ll do.... Yes, Katharine Hilbery’ll do.... I’ll take Katharine
Hilbery.”

As soon as he had said this, his pace slackened, his head fell, his
eyes became fixed. The desire to justify himself, which had been so
urgent, ceased to torment him, and, as if released from constraint, so
that they worked without friction or bidding, his faculties leapt
forward and fixed, as a matter of course, upon the form of Katharine
Hilbery. It was marvellous how much they found to feed upon,
considering the destructive nature of Denham’s criticism in her
presence. The charm, which he had tried to disown, when under the
effect of it, the beauty, the character, the aloofness, which he had
been determined not to feel, now possessed him wholly; and when, as
happened by the nature of things, he had exhausted his memory, he went
on with his imagination. He was conscious of what he was about, for in
thus dwelling upon Miss Hilbery’s qualities, he showed a kind of
method, as if he required this vision of her for a particular purpose.
He increased her height, he darkened her hair; but physically there was
not much to change in her. His most daring liberty was taken with her
mind, which, for reasons of his own, he desired to be exalted and
infallible, and of such independence that it was only in the case of
Ralph Denham that it swerved from its high, swift flight, but where he
was concerned, though fastidious at first, she finally swooped from her
eminence to crown him with her approval. These delicious details,
however, were to be worked out in all their ramifications at his
leisure; the main point was that Katharine Hilbery would do; she would
do for weeks, perhaps for months. In taking her he had provided himself
with something the lack of which had left a bare place in his mind for
a considerable time. He gave a sigh of satisfaction; his consciousness
of his actual position somewhere in the neighborhood of Knightsbridge
returned to him, and he was soon speeding in the train towards
Highgate.

Although thus supported by the knowledge of his new possession of
considerable value, he was not proof against the familiar thoughts
which the suburban streets and the damp shrubs growing in front gardens
and the absurd names painted in white upon the gates of those gardens
suggested to him. His walk was uphill, and his mind dwelt gloomily upon
the house which he approached, where he would find six or seven
brothers and sisters, a widowed mother, and, probably, some aunt or
uncle sitting down to an unpleasant meal under a very bright light.
Should he put in force the threat which, two weeks ago, some such
gathering had wrung from him—the terrible threat that if visitors came
on Sunday he should dine alone in his room? A glance in the direction
of Miss Hilbery determined him to make his stand this very night, and
accordingly, having let himself in, having verified the presence of
Uncle Joseph by means of a bowler hat and a very large umbrella, he
gave his orders to the maid, and went upstairs to his room.

He went up a great many flights of stairs, and he noticed, as he had
very seldom noticed, how the carpet became steadily shabbier, until it
ceased altogether, how the walls were discolored, sometimes by cascades
of damp, and sometimes by the outlines of picture-frames since removed,
how the paper flapped loose at the corners, and a great flake of
plaster had fallen from the ceiling. The room itself was a cheerless
one to return to at this inauspicious hour. A flattened sofa would,
later in the evening, become a bed; one of the tables concealed a
washing apparatus; his clothes and boots were disagreeably mixed with
books which bore the gilt of college arms; and, for decoration, there
hung upon the wall photographs of bridges and cathedrals and large,
unprepossessing groups of insufficiently clothed young men, sitting in
rows one above another upon stone steps. There was a look of meanness
and shabbiness in the furniture and curtains, and nowhere any sign of
luxury or even of a cultivated taste, unless the cheap classics in the
book-case were a sign of an effort in that direction. The only object
that threw any light upon the character of the room’s owner was a large
perch, placed in the window to catch the air and sun, upon which a tame
and, apparently, decrepit rook hopped dryly from side to side. The
bird, encouraged by a scratch behind the ear, settled upon Denham’s
shoulder. He lit his gas-fire and settled down in gloomy patience to
await his dinner. After sitting thus for some minutes a small girl
popped her head in to say,

“Mother says, aren’t you coming down, Ralph? Uncle Joseph—”

“They’re to bring my dinner up here,” said Ralph, peremptorily;
whereupon she vanished, leaving the door ajar in her haste to be gone.
After Denham had waited some minutes, in the course of which neither he
nor the rook took their eyes off the fire, he muttered a curse, ran
downstairs, intercepted the parlor-maid, and cut himself a slice of
bread and cold meat. As he did so, the dining-room door sprang open, a
voice exclaimed “Ralph!” but Ralph paid no attention to the voice, and
made off upstairs with his plate. He set it down in a chair opposite
him, and ate with a ferocity that was due partly to anger and partly to
hunger. His mother, then, was determined not to respect his wishes; he
was a person of no importance in his own family; he was sent for and
treated as a child. He reflected, with a growing sense of injury, that
almost every one of his actions since opening the door of his room had
been won from the grasp of the family system. By rights, he should have
been sitting downstairs in the drawing-room describing his afternoon’s
adventures, or listening to the afternoon’s adventures of other people;
the room itself, the gas-fire, the arm-chair—all had been fought for;
the wretched bird, with half its feathers out and one leg lamed by a
cat, had been rescued under protest; but what his family most resented,
he reflected, was his wish for privacy. To dine alone, or to sit alone
after dinner, was flat rebellion, to be fought with every weapon of
underhand stealth or of open appeal. Which did he dislike
most—deception or tears? But, at any rate, they could not rob him of
his thoughts; they could not make him say where he had been or whom he
had seen. That was his own affair; that, indeed, was a step entirely in
the right direction, and, lighting his pipe, and cutting up the remains
of his meal for the benefit of the rook, Ralph calmed his rather
excessive irritation and settled down to think over his prospects.

This particular afternoon was a step in the right direction, because it
was part of his plan to get to know people beyond the family circuit,
just as it was part of his plan to learn German this autumn, and to
review legal books for Mr. Hilbery’s “Critical Review.” He had always
made plans since he was a small boy; for poverty, and the fact that he
was the eldest son of a large family, had given him the habit of
thinking of spring and summer, autumn and winter, as so many stages in
a prolonged campaign. Although he was still under thirty, this
forecasting habit had marked two semicircular lines above his eyebrows,
which threatened, at this moment, to crease into their wonted shapes.
But instead of settling down to think, he rose, took a small piece of
cardboard marked in large letters with the word OUT, and hung it upon
the handle of his door. This done, he sharpened a pencil, lit a
reading-lamp and opened his book. But still he hesitated to take his
seat. He scratched the rook, he walked to the window; he parted the
curtains, and looked down upon the city which lay, hazily luminous,
beneath him. He looked across the vapors in the direction of Chelsea;
looked fixedly for a moment, and then returned to his chair. But the
whole thickness of some learned counsel’s treatise upon Torts did not
screen him satisfactorily. Through the pages he saw a drawing-room,
very empty and spacious; he heard low voices, he saw women’s figures,
he could even smell the scent of the cedar log which flamed in the
grate. His mind relaxed its tension, and seemed to be giving out now
what it had taken in unconsciously at the time. He could remember Mr.
Fortescue’s exact words, and the rolling emphasis with which he
delivered them, and he began to repeat what Mr. Fortescue had said, in
Mr. Fortescue’s own manner, about Manchester. His mind then began to
wander about the house, and he wondered whether there were other rooms
like the drawing-room, and he thought, inconsequently, how beautiful
the bathroom must be, and how leisurely it was—the life of these
well-kept people, who were, no doubt, still sitting in the same room,
only they had changed their clothes, and little Mr. Anning was there,
and the aunt who would mind if the glass of her father’s picture was
broken. Miss Hilbery had changed her dress (“although she’s wearing
such a pretty one,” he heard her mother say), and she was talking to
Mr. Anning, who was well over forty, and bald into the bargain, about
books. How peaceful and spacious it was; and the peace possessed him so
completely that his muscles slackened, his book drooped from his hand,
and he forgot that the hour of work was wasting minute by minute.

He was roused by a creak upon the stair. With a guilty start he
composed himself, frowned and looked intently at the fifty-sixth page
of his volume. A step paused outside his door, and he knew that the
person, whoever it might be, was considering the placard, and debating
whether to honor its decree or not. Certainly, policy advised him to
sit still in autocratic silence, for no custom can take root in a
family unless every breach of it is punished severely for the first six
months or so. But Ralph was conscious of a distinct wish to be
interrupted, and his disappointment was perceptible when he heard the
creaking sound rather farther down the stairs, as if his visitor had
decided to withdraw. He rose, opened the door with unnecessary
abruptness, and waited on the landing. The person stopped
simultaneously half a flight downstairs.

“Ralph?” said a voice, inquiringly.

“Joan?”

“I was coming up, but I saw your notice.”

“Well, come along in, then.” He concealed his desire beneath a tone as
grudging as he could make it.

Joan came in, but she was careful to show, by standing upright with one
hand upon the mantelpiece, that she was only there for a definite
purpose, which discharged, she would go.

She was older than Ralph by some three or four years. Her face was
round but worn, and expressed that tolerant but anxious good humor
which is the special attribute of elder sisters in large families. Her
pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph’s, save in expression, for whereas
he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to
be in the habit of considering everything from many different points of
view. This made her appear his elder by more years than existed in fact
between them. Her gaze rested for a moment or two upon the rook. She
then said, without any preface:

“It’s about Charles and Uncle John’s offer.... Mother’s been talking to
me. She says she can’t afford to pay for him after this term. She says
she’ll have to ask for an overdraft as it is.”

“That’s simply not true,” said Ralph.

“No. I thought not. But she won’t believe me when I say it.”

Ralph, as if he could foresee the length of this familiar argument,
drew up a chair for his sister and sat down himself.

“I’m not interrupting?” she inquired.

Ralph shook his head, and for a time they sat silent. The lines curved
themselves in semicircles above their eyes.

“She doesn’t understand that one’s got to take risks,” he observed,
finally.

“I believe mother would take risks if she knew that Charles was the
sort of boy to profit by it.”

“He’s got brains, hasn’t he?” said Ralph. His tone had taken on that
shade of pugnacity which suggested to his sister that some personal
grievance drove him to take the line he did. She wondered what it might
be, but at once recalled her mind, and assented.

“In some ways he’s fearfully backward, though, compared with what you
were at his age. And he’s difficult at home, too. He makes Molly slave
for him.”

Ralph made a sound which belittled this particular argument. It was
plain to Joan that she had struck one of her brother’s perverse moods,
and he was going to oppose whatever his mother said. He called her
“she,” which was a proof of it. She sighed involuntarily, and the sigh
annoyed Ralph, and he exclaimed with irritation:

“It’s pretty hard lines to stick a boy into an office at seventeen!”

“Nobody _wants_ to stick him into an office,” she said.

She, too, was becoming annoyed. She had spent the whole of the
afternoon discussing wearisome details of education and expense with
her mother, and she had come to her brother for help, encouraged,
rather irrationally, to expect help by the fact that he had been out
somewhere, she didn’t know and didn’t mean to ask where, all the
afternoon.

Ralph was fond of his sister, and her irritation made him think how
unfair it was that all these burdens should be laid on her shoulders.

“The truth is,” he observed gloomily, “that I ought to have accepted
Uncle John’s offer. I should have been making six hundred a year by
this time.”

“I don’t think that for a moment,” Joan replied quickly, repenting of
her annoyance. “The question, to my mind, is, whether we couldn’t cut
down our expenses in some way.”

“A smaller house?”

“Fewer servants, perhaps.”

Neither brother nor sister spoke with much conviction, and after
reflecting for a moment what these proposed reforms in a strictly
economical household meant, Ralph announced very decidedly:

“It’s out of the question.”

It was out of the question that she should put any more household work
upon herself. No, the hardship must fall on him, for he was determined
that his family should have as many chances of distinguishing
themselves as other families had—as the Hilberys had, for example. He
believed secretly and rather defiantly, for it was a fact not capable
of proof, that there was something very remarkable about his family.

“If mother won’t run risks—”

“You really can’t expect her to sell out again.”

“She ought to look upon it as an investment; but if she won’t, we must
find some other way, that’s all.”

A threat was contained in this sentence, and Joan knew, without asking,
what the threat was. In the course of his professional life, which now
extended over six or seven years, Ralph had saved, perhaps, three or
four hundred pounds. Considering the sacrifices he had made in order to
put by this sum it always amazed Joan to find that he used it to gamble
with, buying shares and selling them again, increasing it sometimes,
sometimes diminishing it, and always running the risk of losing every
penny of it in a day’s disaster. But although she wondered, she could
not help loving him the better for his odd combination of Spartan
self-control and what appeared to her romantic and childish folly.
Ralph interested her more than any one else in the world, and she often
broke off in the middle of one of these economic discussions, in spite
of their gravity, to consider some fresh aspect of his character.

“I think you’d be foolish to risk your money on poor old Charles,” she
observed. “Fond as I am of him, he doesn’t seem to me exactly
brilliant.... Besides, why should you be sacrificed?”

“My dear Joan,” Ralph exclaimed, stretching himself out with a gesture
of impatience, “don’t you see that we’ve all got to be sacrificed?
What’s the use of denying it? What’s the use of struggling against it?
So it always has been, so it always will be. We’ve got no money and we
never shall have any money. We shall just turn round in the mill every
day of our lives until we drop and die, worn out, as most people do,
when one comes to think of it.”

Joan looked at him, opened her lips as if to speak, and closed them
again. Then she said, very tentatively:

“Aren’t you happy, Ralph?”

“No. Are you? Perhaps I’m as happy as most people, though. God knows
whether I’m happy or not. What is happiness?”

He glanced with half a smile, in spite of his gloomy irritation, at his
sister. She looked, as usual, as if she were weighing one thing with
another, and balancing them together before she made up her mind.

“Happiness,” she remarked at length enigmatically, rather as if she
were sampling the word, and then she paused. She paused for a
considerable space, as if she were considering happiness in all its
bearings. “Hilda was here to-day,” she suddenly resumed, as if they had
never mentioned happiness. “She brought Bobbie—he’s a fine boy now.”
Ralph observed, with an amusement that had a tinge of irony in it, that
she was now going to sidle away quickly from this dangerous approach to
intimacy on to topics of general and family interest. Nevertheless, he
reflected, she was the only one of his family with whom he found it
possible to discuss happiness, although he might very well have
discussed happiness with Miss Hilbery at their first meeting. He looked
critically at Joan, and wished that she did not look so provincial or
suburban in her high green dress with the faded trimming, so patient,
and almost resigned. He began to wish to tell her about the Hilberys in
order to abuse them, for in the miniature battle which so often rages
between two quickly following impressions of life, the life of the
Hilberys was getting the better of the life of the Denhams in his mind,
and he wanted to assure himself that there was some quality in which
Joan infinitely surpassed Miss Hilbery. He should have felt that his
own sister was more original, and had greater vitality than Miss
Hilbery had; but his main impression of Katharine now was of a person
of great vitality and composure; and at the moment he could not
perceive what poor dear Joan had gained from the fact that she was the
granddaughter of a man who kept a shop, and herself earned her own
living. The infinite dreariness and sordidness of their life oppressed
him in spite of his fundamental belief that, as a family, they were
somehow remarkable.

“Shall you talk to mother?” Joan inquired. “Because, you see, the
thing’s got to be settled, one way or another. Charles must write to
Uncle John if he’s going there.”

Ralph sighed impatiently.

“I suppose it doesn’t much matter either way,” he exclaimed. “He’s
doomed to misery in the long run.”

A slight flush came into Joan’s cheek.

“You know you’re talking nonsense,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt any one
to have to earn their own living. I’m very glad I have to earn mine.”

Ralph was pleased that she should feel this, and wished her to
continue, but he went on, perversely enough.

“Isn’t that only because you’ve forgotten how to enjoy yourself? You
never have time for anything decent—”

“As for instance?”

“Well, going for walks, or music, or books, or seeing interesting
people. You never do anything that’s really worth doing any more than I
do.”

“I always think you could make this room much nicer, if you liked,” she
observed.

“What does it matter what sort of room I have when I’m forced to spend
all the best years of my life drawing up deeds in an office?”

“You said two days ago that you found the law so interesting.”

“So it is if one could afford to know anything about it.”

(“That’s Herbert only just going to bed now,” Joan interposed, as a
door on the landing slammed vigorously. “And then he won’t get up in
the morning.”)

Ralph looked at the ceiling, and shut his lips closely together. Why,
he wondered, could Joan never for one moment detach her mind from the
details of domestic life? It seemed to him that she was getting more
and more enmeshed in them, and capable of shorter and less frequent
flights into the outer world, and yet she was only thirty-three.

“D’you ever pay calls now?” he asked abruptly.

“I don’t often have the time. Why do you ask?”

“It might be a good thing, to get to know new people, that’s all.”

“Poor Ralph!” said Joan suddenly, with a smile. “You think your
sister’s getting very old and very dull—that’s it, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind,” he said stoutly, but he flushed.
“But you lead a dog’s life, Joan. When you’re not working in an office,
you’re worrying over the rest of us. And I’m not much good to you, I’m
afraid.”

Joan rose, and stood for a moment warming her hands, and, apparently,
meditating as to whether she should say anything more or not. A feeling
of great intimacy united the brother and sister, and the semicircular
lines above their eyebrows disappeared. No, there was nothing more to
be said on either side. Joan brushed her brother’s head with her hand
as she passed him, murmured good night, and left the room. For some
minutes after she had gone Ralph lay quiescent, resting his head on his
hand, but gradually his eyes filled with thought, and the line
reappeared on his brow, as the pleasant impression of companionship and
ancient sympathy waned, and he was left to think on alone.

After a time he opened his book, and read on steadily, glancing once or
twice at his watch, as if he had set himself a task to be accomplished
in a certain measure of time. Now and then he heard voices in the
house, and the closing of bedroom doors, which showed that the
building, at the top of which he sat, was inhabited in every one of its
cells. When midnight struck, Ralph shut his book, and with a candle in
his hand, descended to the ground floor, to ascertain that all lights
were extinct and all doors locked. It was a threadbare, well-worn house
that he thus examined, as if the inmates had grazed down all luxuriance
and plenty to the verge of decency; and in the night, bereft of life,
bare places and ancient blemishes were unpleasantly visible. Katharine
Hilbery, he thought, would condemn it off-hand.




CHAPTER III


Denham had accused Katharine Hilbery of belonging to one of the most
distinguished families in England, and if any one will take the trouble
to consult Mr. Galton’s “Hereditary Genius,” he will find that this
assertion is not far from the truth. The Alardyces, the Hilberys, the
Millingtons, and the Otways seem to prove that intellect is a
possession which can be tossed from one member of a certain group to
another almost indefinitely, and with apparent certainty that the
brilliant gift will be safely caught and held by nine out of ten of the
privileged race. They had been conspicuous judges and admirals, lawyers
and servants of the State for some years before the richness of the
soil culminated in the rarest flower that any family can boast, a great
writer, a poet eminent among the poets of England, a Richard Alardyce;
and having produced him, they proved once more the amazing virtues of
their race by proceeding unconcernedly again with their usual task of
breeding distinguished men. They had sailed with Sir John Franklin to
the North Pole, and ridden with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow, and
when they were not lighthouses firmly based on rock for the guidance of
their generation, they were steady, serviceable candles, illuminating
the ordinary chambers of daily life. Whatever profession you looked at,
there was a Warburton or an Alardyce, a Millington or a Hilbery
somewhere in authority and prominence.

It may be said, indeed, that English society being what it is, no very
great merit is required, once you bear a well-known name, to put you
into a position where it is easier on the whole to be eminent than
obscure. And if this is true of the sons, even the daughters, even in
the nineteenth century, are apt to become people of
importance—philanthropists and educationalists if they are spinsters,
and the wives of distinguished men if they marry. It is true that there
were several lamentable exceptions to this rule in the Alardyce group,
which seems to indicate that the cadets of such houses go more rapidly
to the bad than the children of ordinary fathers and mothers, as if it
were somehow a relief to them. But, on the whole, in these first years
of the twentieth century, the Alardyces and their relations were
keeping their heads well above water. One finds them at the tops of
professions, with letters after their names; they sit in luxurious
public offices, with private secretaries attached to them; they write
solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great
universities, and when one of them dies the chances are that another of
them writes his biography.

Now the source of this nobility was, of course, the poet, and his
immediate descendants, therefore, were invested with greater luster
than the collateral branches. Mrs. Hilbery, in virtue of her position
as the only child of the poet, was spiritually the head of the family,
and Katharine, her daughter, had some superior rank among all the
cousins and connections, the more so because she was an only child. The
Alardyces had married and intermarried, and their offspring were
generally profuse, and had a way of meeting regularly in each other’s
houses for meals and family celebrations which had acquired a
semi-sacred character, and were as regularly observed as days of
feasting and fasting in the Church.

In times gone by, Mrs. Hilbery had known all the poets, all the
novelists, all the beautiful women and distinguished men of her time.
These being now either dead or secluded in their infirm glory, she made
her house a meeting-place for her own relations, to whom she would
lament the passing of the great days of the nineteenth century, when
every department of letters and art was represented in England by two
or three illustrious names. Where are their successors? she would ask,
and the absence of any poet or painter or novelist of the true caliber
at the present day was a text upon which she liked to ruminate, in a
sunset mood of benignant reminiscence, which it would have been hard to
disturb had there been need. But she was far from visiting their
inferiority upon the younger generation. She welcomed them very
heartily to her house, told them her stories, gave them sovereigns and
ices and good advice, and weaved round them romances which had
generally no likeness to the truth.

The quality of her birth oozed into Katharine’s consciousness from a
dozen different sources as soon as she was able to perceive anything.
Above her nursery fireplace hung a photograph of her grandfather’s tomb
in Poets’ Corner, and she was told in one of those moments of grown-up
confidence which are so tremendously impressive to the child’s mind,
that he was buried there because he was a “good and great man.” Later,
on an anniversary, she was taken by her mother through the fog in a
hansom cab, and given a large bunch of bright, sweet-scented flowers to
lay upon his tomb. The candles in the church, the singing and the
booming of the organ, were all, she thought, in his honor. Again and
again she was brought down into the drawing-room to receive the
blessing of some awful distinguished old man, who sat, even to her
childish eye, somewhat apart, all gathered together and clutching a
stick, unlike an ordinary visitor in her father’s own arm-chair, and
her father himself was there, unlike himself, too, a little excited and
very polite. These formidable old creatures used to take her in their
arms, look very keenly in her eyes, and then to bless her, and tell her
that she must mind and be a good girl, or detect a look in her face
something like Richard’s as a small boy. That drew down upon her her
mother’s fervent embrace, and she was sent back to the nursery very
proud, and with a mysterious sense of an important and unexplained
state of things, which time, by degrees, unveiled to her.

There were always visitors—uncles and aunts and cousins “from India,”
to be reverenced for their relationship alone, and others of the
solitary and formidable class, whom she was enjoined by her parents to
“remember all your life.” By these means, and from hearing constant
talk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions of the
world included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the names of
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, for some
reason, much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to other people.
They made a kind of boundary to her vision of life, and played a
considerable part in determining her scale of good and bad in her own
small affairs. Her descent from one of these gods was no surprise to
her, but matter for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, the
privileges of her lot were taken for granted, and certain drawbacks
made themselves very manifest. Perhaps it is a little depressing to
inherit not lands but an example of intellectual and spiritual virtue;
perhaps the conclusiveness of a great ancestor is a little discouraging
to those who run the risk of comparison with him. It seems as if,
having flowered so splendidly, nothing now remained possible but a
steady growth of good, green stalk and leaf. For these reasons, and for
others, Katharine had her moments of despondency. The glorious past, in
which men and women grew to unexampled size, intruded too much upon the
present, and dwarfed it too consistently, to be altogether encouraging
to one forced to make her experiment in living when the great age was
dead.

She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural, in the
first place owing to her mother’s absorption in them, and in the second
because a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the
dead, since she was helping her mother to produce a life of the great
poet. When Katharine was seventeen or eighteen—that is to say, some ten
years ago—her mother had enthusiastically announced that now, with a
daughter to help her, the biography would soon be published. Notices to
this effect found their way into the literary papers, and for some time
Katharine worked with a sense of great pride and achievement.

Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were making no way at
all, and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghost of
a literary temperament could doubt but that they had materials for one
of the greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelves and
boxes bulged with the precious stuff. The most private lives of the
most interesting people lay furled in yellow bundles of close-written
manuscript. In addition to this Mrs. Hilbery had in her own head as
bright a vision of that time as now remained to the living, and could
give those flashes and thrills to the old words which gave them almost
the substance of flesh. She had no difficulty in writing, and covered a
page every morning as instinctively as a thrush sings, but
nevertheless, with all this to urge and inspire, and the most devout
intention to accomplish the work, the book still remained unwritten.
Papers accumulated without much furthering their task, and in dull
moments Katharine had her doubts whether they would ever produce
anything at all fit to lay before the public. Where did the difficulty
lie? Not in their materials, alas! nor in their ambitions, but in
something more profound, in her own inaptitude, and above all, in her
mother’s temperament. Katharine would calculate that she had never
known her write for more than ten minutes at a time. Ideas came to her
chiefly when she was in motion. She liked to perambulate the room with
a duster in her hand, with which she stopped to polish the backs of
already lustrous books, musing and romancing as she did so. Suddenly
the right phrase or the penetrating point of view would suggest itself,
and she would drop her duster and write ecstatically for a few
breathless moments; and then the mood would pass away, and the duster
would be sought for, and the old books polished again. These spells of
inspiration never burnt steadily, but flickered over the gigantic mass
of the subject as capriciously as a will-o’-the-wisp, lighting now on
this point, now on that. It was as much as Katharine could do to keep
the pages of her mother’s manuscript in order, but to sort them so that
the sixteenth year of Richard Alardyce’s life succeeded the fifteenth
was beyond her skill. And yet they were so brilliant, these paragraphs,
so nobly phrased, so lightning-like in their illumination, that the
dead seemed to crowd the very room. Read continuously, they produced a
sort of vertigo, and set her asking herself in despair what on earth
she was to do with them? Her mother refused, also, to face the radical
questions of what to leave in and what to leave out. She could not
decide how far the public was to be told the truth about the poet’s
separation from his wife. She drafted passages to suit either case, and
then liked each so well that she could not decide upon the rejection of
either.

But the book must be written. It was a duty that they owed the world,
and to Katharine, at least, it meant more than that, for if they could
not between them get this one book accomplished they had no right to
their privileged position. Their increment became yearly more and more
unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that her
grandfather was a very great man.

By the time she was twenty-seven, these thoughts had become very
familiar to her. They trod their way through her mind as she sat
opposite her mother of a morning at a table heaped with bundles of old
letters and well supplied with pencils, scissors, bottles of gum,
india-rubber bands, large envelopes, and other appliances for the
manufacture of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham’s visit, Katharine
had resolved to try the effect of strict rules upon her mother’s habits
of literary composition. They were to be seated at their tables every
morning at ten o’clock, with a clean-swept morning of empty, secluded
hours before them. They were to keep their eyes fast upon the paper,
and nothing was to tempt them to speech, save at the stroke of the hour
when ten minutes for relaxation were to be allowed them. If these rules
were observed for a year, she made out on a sheet of paper that the
completion of the book was certain, and she laid her scheme before her
mother with a feeling that much of the task was already accomplished.
Mrs. Hilbery examined the sheet of paper very carefully. Then she
clapped her hands and exclaimed enthusiastically:

“Well done, Katharine! What a wonderful head for business you’ve got!
Now I shall keep this before me, and every day I shall make a little
mark in my pocketbook, and on the last day of all—let me think, what
shall we do to celebrate the last day of all? If it weren’t the winter
we could take a jaunt to Italy. They say Switzerland’s very lovely in
the snow, except for the cold. But, as you say, the great thing is to
finish the book. Now let me see—”

When they inspected her manuscripts, which Katharine had put in order,
they found a state of things well calculated to dash their spirits, if
they had not just resolved on reform. They found, to begin with, a
great variety of very imposing paragraphs with which the biography was
to open; many of these, it is true, were unfinished, and resembled
triumphal arches standing upon one leg, but, as Mrs. Hilbery observed,
they could be patched up in ten minutes, if she gave her mind to it.
Next, there was an account of the ancient home of the Alardyces, or
rather, of spring in Suffolk, which was very beautifully written,
although not essential to the story. However, Katharine had put
together a string of names and dates, so that the poet was capably
brought into the world, and his ninth year was reached without further
mishap. After that, Mrs. Hilbery wished, for sentimental reasons, to
introduce the recollections of a very fluent old lady, who had been
brought up in the same village, but these Katharine decided must go. It
might be advisable to introduce here a sketch of contemporary poetry
contributed by Mr. Hilbery, and thus terse and learned and altogether
out of keeping with the rest, but Mrs. Hilbery was of opinion that it
was too bare, and made one feel altogether like a good little girl in a
lecture-room, which was not at all in keeping with her father. It was
put on one side. Now came the period of his early manhood, when various
affairs of the heart must either be concealed or revealed; here again
Mrs. Hilbery was of two minds, and a thick packet of manuscript was
shelved for further consideration.

Several years were now altogether omitted, because Mrs. Hilbery had
found something distasteful to her in that period, and had preferred to
dwell upon her own recollections as a child. After this, it seemed to
Katharine that the book became a wild dance of will-o’-the-wisps,
without form or continuity, without coherence even, or any attempt to
make a narrative. Here were twenty pages upon her grandfather’s taste
in hats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summer
day’s expedition into the country, when they had missed their train,
together with fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous men and women,
which seemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic. There were,
moreover, thousands of letters, and a mass of faithful recollections
contributed by old friends, which had grown yellow now in their
envelopes, but must be placed somewhere, or their feelings would be
hurt. So many volumes had been written about the poet since his death
that she had also to dispose of a great number of misstatements, which
involved minute researches and much correspondence. Sometimes Katharine
brooded, half crushed, among her papers; sometimes she felt that it was
necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the
past; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present,
which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to
be of an utterly thin and inferior composition.

The worst of it was that she had no aptitude for literature. She did
not like phrases. She had even some natural antipathy to that process
of self-examination, that perpetual effort to understand one’s own
feeling, and express it beautifully, fitly, or energetically in
language, which constituted so great a part of her mother’s existence.
She was, on the contrary, inclined to be silent; she shrank from
expressing herself even in talk, let alone in writing. As this
disposition was highly convenient in a family much given to the
manufacture of phrases, and seemed to argue a corresponding capacity
for action, she was, from her childhood even, put in charge of
household affairs. She had the reputation, which nothing in her manner
contradicted, of being the most practical of people. Ordering meals,
directing servants, paying bills, and so contriving that every clock
ticked more or less accurately in time, and a number of vases were
always full of fresh flowers was supposed to be a natural endowment of
hers, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery often observed that it was poetry the
wrong side out. From a very early age, too, she had to exert herself in
another capacity; she had to counsel and help and generally sustain her
mother. Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to sustain
herself if the world had been what the world is not. She was
beautifully adapted for life in another planet. But the natural genius
she had for conducting affairs there was of no real use to her here.
Her watch, for example, was a constant source of surprise to her, and
at the age of sixty-five she was still amazed at the ascendancy which
rules and reasons exerted over the lives of other people. She had never
learnt her lesson, and had constantly to be punished for her ignorance.
But as that ignorance was combined with a fine natural insight which
saw deep whenever it saw at all, it was not possible to write Mrs.
Hilbery off among the dunces; on the contrary, she had a way of seeming
the wisest person in the room. But, on the whole, she found it very
necessary to seek support in her daughter.

Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as
yet, no title and very little recognition, although the labor of mill
and factory is, perhaps, no more severe and the results of less benefit
to the world. She lived at home. She did it very well, too. Any one
coming to the house in Cheyne Walk felt that here was an orderly place,
shapely, controlled—a place where life had been trained to show to the
best advantage, and, though composed of different elements, made to
appear harmonious and with a character of its own. Perhaps it was the
chief triumph of Katharine’s art that Mrs. Hilbery’s character
predominated. She and Mr. Hilbery appeared to be a rich background for
her mother’s more striking qualities.

Silence being, thus, both natural to her and imposed upon her, the only
other remark that her mother’s friends were in the habit of making
about it was that it was neither a stupid silence nor an indifferent
silence. But to what quality it owed its character, since character of
some sort it had, no one troubled themselves to inquire. It was
understood that she was helping her mother to produce a great book. She
was known to manage the household. She was certainly beautiful. That
accounted for her satisfactorily. But it would have been a surprise,
not only to other people but to Katharine herself, if some magic watch
could have taken count of the moments spent in an entirely different
occupation from her ostensible one. Sitting with faded papers before
her, she took part in a series of scenes such as the taming of wild
ponies upon the American prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a
hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or in others more peaceful,
but marked by her complete emancipation from her present surroundings
and, needless to say, by her surpassing ability in her new vocation.
When she was rid of the pretense of paper and pen, phrase-making and
biography, she turned her attention in a more legitimate direction,
though, strangely enough, she would rather have confessed her wildest
dreams of hurricane and prairie than the fact that, upstairs, alone in
her room, she rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to...
work at mathematics. No force on earth would have made her confess
that. Her actions when thus engaged were furtive and secretive, like
those of some nocturnal animal. Steps had only to sound on the
staircase, and she slipped her paper between the leaves of a great
Greek dictionary which she had purloined from her father’s room for
this purpose. It was only at night, indeed, that she felt secure enough
from surprise to concentrate her mind to the utmost.

Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively wish
to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in her
mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would not
have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the
star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and
vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly in
thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feel
wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away
from view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness. Again and again
she was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinking of
her grandfather. Waking from these trances, she would see that her
mother, too, had lapsed into some dream almost as visionary as her own,
for the people who played their parts in it had long been numbered
among the dead. But, seeing her own state mirrored in her mother’s
face, Katharine would shake herself awake with a sense of irritation.
Her mother was the last person she wished to resemble, much though she
admired her. Her common sense would assert itself almost brutally, and
Mrs. Hilbery, looking at her with her odd sidelong glance, that was
half malicious and half tender, would liken her to “your wicked old
Uncle Judge Peter, who used to be heard delivering sentence of death in
the bathroom. Thank Heaven, Katharine, I’ve not a drop of _him_ in me!”




CHAPTER IV


At about nine o’clock at night, on every alternate Wednesday, Miss Mary
Datchet made the same resolve, that she would never again lend her
rooms for any purposes whatsoever. Being, as they were, rather large
and conveniently situated in a street mostly dedicated to offices off
the Strand, people who wished to meet, either for purposes of
enjoyment, or to discuss art, or to reform the State, had a way of
suggesting that Mary had better be asked to lend them her rooms. She
always met the request with the same frown of well-simulated annoyance,
which presently dissolved in a kind of half-humorous, half-surly shrug,
as of a large dog tormented by children who shakes his ears. She would
lend her room, but only on condition that all the arrangements were
made by her. This fortnightly meeting of a society for the free
discussion of everything entailed a great deal of moving, and pulling,
and ranging of furniture against the wall, and placing of breakable and
precious things in safe places. Miss Datchet was quite capable of
lifting a kitchen table on her back, if need were, for although
well-proportioned and dressed becomingly, she had the appearance of
unusual strength and determination.

She was some twenty-five years of age, but looked older because she
earned, or intended to earn, her own living, and had already lost the
look of the irresponsible spectator, and taken on that of the private
in the army of workers. Her gestures seemed to have a certain purpose,
the muscles round eyes and lips were set rather firmly, as though the
senses had undergone some discipline, and were held ready for a call on
them. She had contracted two faint lines between her eyebrows, not from
anxiety but from thought, and it was quite evident that all the
feminine instincts of pleasing, soothing, and charming were crossed by
others in no way peculiar to her sex. For the rest she was brown-eyed,
a little clumsy in movement, and suggested country birth and a descent
from respectable hard-working ancestors, who had been men of faith and
integrity rather than doubters or fanatics.

At the end of a fairly hard day’s work it was certainly something of an
effort to clear one’s room, to pull the mattress off one’s bed, and lay
it on the floor, to fill a pitcher with cold coffee, and to sweep a
long table clear for plates and cups and saucers, with pyramids of
little pink biscuits between them; but when these alterations were
effected, Mary felt a lightness of spirit come to her, as if she had
put off the stout stuff of her working hours and slipped over her
entire being some vesture of thin, bright silk. She knelt before the
fire and looked out into the room. The light fell softly, but with
clear radiance, through shades of yellow and blue paper, and the room,
which was set with one or two sofas resembling grassy mounds in their
lack of shape, looked unusually large and quiet. Mary was led to think
of the heights of a Sussex down, and the swelling green circle of some
camp of ancient warriors. The moonlight would be falling there so
peacefully now, and she could fancy the rough pathway of silver upon
the wrinkled skin of the sea.

“And here we are,” she said, half aloud, half satirically, yet with
evident pride, “talking about art.”

She pulled a basket containing balls of differently colored wools and a
pair of stockings which needed darning towards her, and began to set
her fingers to work; while her mind, reflecting the lassitude of her
body, went on perversely, conjuring up visions of solitude and quiet,
and she pictured herself laying aside her knitting and walking out on
to the down, and hearing nothing but the sheep cropping the grass close
to the roots, while the shadows of the little trees moved very slightly
this way and that in the moonlight, as the breeze went through them.
But she was perfectly conscious of her present situation, and derived
some pleasure from the reflection that she could rejoice equally in
solitude, and in the presence of the many very different people who
were now making their way, by divers paths, across London to the spot
where she was sitting.

As she ran her needle in and out of the wool, she thought of the
various stages in her own life which made her present position seem the
culmination of successive miracles. She thought of her clerical father
in his country parsonage, and of her mother’s death, and of her own
determination to obtain education, and of her college life, which had
merged, not so very long ago, in the wonderful maze of London, which
still seemed to her, in spite of her constitutional level-headedness,
like a vast electric light, casting radiance upon the myriads of men
and women who crowded round it. And here she was at the very center of
it all, that center which was constantly in the minds of people in
remote Canadian forests and on the plains of India, when their thoughts
turned to England. The nine mellow strokes, by which she was now
apprised of the hour, were a message from the great clock at
Westminster itself. As the last of them died away, there was a firm
knocking on her own door, and she rose and opened it. She returned to
the room, with a look of steady pleasure in her eyes, and she was
talking to Ralph Denham, who followed her.

“Alone?” he said, as if he were pleasantly surprised by that fact.

“I am sometimes alone,” she replied.

“But you expect a great many people,” he added, looking round him.
“It’s like a room on the stage. Who is it to-night?”

“William Rodney, upon the Elizabethan use of metaphor. I expect a good
solid paper, with plenty of quotations from the classics.”

Ralph warmed his hands at the fire, which was flapping bravely in the
grate, while Mary took up her stocking again.

“I suppose you are the only woman in London who darns her own
stockings,” he observed.

“I’m only one of a great many thousands really,” she replied, “though I
must admit that I was thinking myself very remarkable when you came in.
And now that you’re here I don’t think myself remarkable at all. How
horrid of you! But I’m afraid you’re much more remarkable than I am.
You’ve done much more than I’ve done.”

“If that’s your standard, you’ve nothing to be proud of,” said Ralph
grimly.

“Well, I must reflect with Emerson that it’s being and not doing that
matters,” she continued.

“Emerson?” Ralph exclaimed, with derision. “You don’t mean to say you
read Emerson?”

“Perhaps it wasn’t Emerson; but why shouldn’t I read Emerson?” she
asked, with a tinge of anxiety.

“There’s no reason that I know of. It’s the combination that’s
odd—books and stockings. The combination is very odd.” But it seemed to
recommend itself to him. Mary gave a little laugh, expressive of
happiness, and the particular stitches that she was now putting into
her work appeared to her to be done with singular grace and felicity.
She held out the stocking and looked at it approvingly.

“You always say that,” she said. “I assure you it’s a common
‘combination,’ as you call it, in the houses of the clergy. The only
thing that’s odd about me is that I enjoy them both—Emerson and the
stocking.”

A knock was heard, and Ralph exclaimed:

“Damn those people! I wish they weren’t coming!”

“It’s only Mr. Turner, on the floor below,” said Mary, and she felt
grateful to Mr. Turner for having alarmed Ralph, and for having given a
false alarm.

“Will there be a crowd?” Ralph asked, after a pause.

“There’ll be the Morrises and the Crashaws, and Dick Osborne, and
Septimus, and all that set. Katharine Hilbery is coming, by the way, so
William Rodney told me.”

“Katharine Hilbery!” Ralph exclaimed.

“You know her?” Mary asked, with some surprise.

“I went to a tea-party at her house.”

Mary pressed him to tell her all about it, and Ralph was not at all
unwilling to exhibit proofs of the extent of his knowledge. He
described the scene with certain additions and exaggerations which
interested Mary very much.

“But, in spite of what you say, I do admire her,” she said. “I’ve only
seen her once or twice, but she seems to me to be what one calls a
‘personality.’”

“I didn’t mean to abuse her. I only felt that she wasn’t very
sympathetic to me.”

“They say she’s going to marry that queer creature Rodney.”

“Marry Rodney? Then she must be more deluded than I thought her.”

“Now that’s my door, all right,” Mary exclaimed, carefully putting her
wools away, as a succession of knocks reverberated unnecessarily,
accompanied by a sound of people stamping their feet and laughing. A
moment later the room was full of young men and women, who came in with
a peculiar look of expectation, exclaimed “Oh!” when they saw Denham,
and then stood still, gaping rather foolishly.

The room very soon contained between twenty and thirty people, who
found seats for the most part upon the floor, occupying the mattresses,
and hunching themselves together into triangular shapes. They were all
young and some of them seemed to make a protest by their hair and
dress, and something somber and truculent in the expression of their
faces, against the more normal type, who would have passed unnoticed in
an omnibus or an underground railway. It was notable that the talk was
confined to groups, and was, at first, entirely spasmodic in character,
and muttered in undertones as if the speakers were suspicious of their
fellow-guests.

Katharine Hilbery came in rather late, and took up a position on the
floor, with her back against the wall. She looked round quickly,
recognized about half a dozen people, to whom she nodded, but failed to
see Ralph, or, if so, had already forgotten to attach any name to him.
But in a second these heterogeneous elements were all united by the
voice of Mr. Rodney, who suddenly strode up to the table, and began
very rapidly in high-strained tones:

“In undertaking to speak of the Elizabethan use of metaphor in poetry—”

All the different heads swung slightly or steadied themselves into a
position in which they could gaze straight at the speaker’s face, and
the same rather solemn expression was visible on all of them. But, at
the same time, even the faces that were most exposed to view, and
therefore most tautly under control, disclosed a sudden impulsive
tremor which, unless directly checked, would have developed into an
outburst of laughter. The first sight of Mr. Rodney was irresistibly
ludicrous. He was very red in the face, whether from the cool November
night or nervousness, and every movement, from the way he wrung his
hands to the way he jerked his head to right and left, as though a
vision drew him now to the door, now to the window, bespoke his
horrible discomfort under the stare of so many eyes. He was
scrupulously well dressed, and a pearl in the center of his tie seemed
to give him a touch of aristocratic opulence. But the rather prominent
eyes and the impulsive stammering manner, which seemed to indicate a
torrent of ideas intermittently pressing for utterance and always
checked in their course by a clutch of nervousness, drew no pity, as in
the case of a more imposing personage, but a desire to laugh, which
was, however, entirely lacking in malice. Mr. Rodney was evidently so
painfully conscious of the oddity of his appearance, and his very
redness and the starts to which his body was liable gave such proof of
his own discomfort, that there was something endearing in this
ridiculous susceptibility, although most people would probably have
echoed Denham’s private exclamation, “Fancy marrying a creature like
that!”

His paper was carefully written out, but in spite of this precaution
Mr. Rodney managed to turn over two sheets instead of one, to choose
the wrong sentence where two were written together, and to discover his
own handwriting suddenly illegible. When he found himself possessed of
a coherent passage, he shook it at his audience almost aggressively,
and then fumbled for another. After a distressing search a fresh
discovery would be made, and produced in the same way, until, by means
of repeated attacks, he had stirred his audience to a degree of
animation quite remarkable in these gatherings. Whether they were
stirred by his enthusiasm for poetry or by the contortions which a
human being was going through for their benefit, it would be hard to
say. At length Mr. Rodney sat down impulsively in the middle of a
sentence, and, after a pause of bewilderment, the audience expressed
its relief at being able to laugh aloud in a decided outburst of
applause.

Mr. Rodney acknowledged this with a wild glance round him, and, instead
of waiting to answer questions, he jumped up, thrust himself through
the seated bodies into the corner where Katharine was sitting, and
exclaimed, very audibly:

“Well, Katharine, I hope I’ve made a big enough fool of myself even for
you! It was terrible! terrible! terrible!”

“Hush! You must answer their questions,” Katharine whispered, desiring,
at all costs, to keep him quiet. Oddly enough, when the speaker was no
longer in front of them, there seemed to be much that was suggestive in
what he had said. At any rate, a pale-faced young man with sad eyes was
already on his feet, delivering an accurately worded speech with
perfect composure. William Rodney listened with a curious lifting of
his upper lip, although his face was still quivering slightly with
emotion.

“Idiot!” he whispered. “He’s misunderstood every word I said!”

“Well then, answer him,” Katharine whispered back.

“No, I shan’t! They’d only laugh at me. Why did I let you persuade me
that these sort of people care for literature?” he continued.

There was much to be said both for and against Mr. Rodney’s paper. It
had been crammed with assertions that such-and-such passages, taken
liberally from English, French, and Italian, are the supreme pearls of
literature. Further, he was fond of using metaphors which, compounded
in the study, were apt to sound either cramped or out of place as he
delivered them in fragments. Literature was a fresh garland of spring
flowers, he said, in which yew-berries and the purple nightshade
mingled with the various tints of the anemone; and somehow or other
this garland encircled marble brows. He had read very badly some very
beautiful quotations. But through his manner and his confusion of
language there had emerged some passion of feeling which, as he spoke,
formed in the majority of the audience a little picture or an idea
which each now was eager to give expression to. Most of the people
there proposed to spend their lives in the practice either of writing
or painting, and merely by looking at them it could be seen that, as
they listened to Mr. Purvis first, and then to Mr. Greenhalgh, they
were seeing something done by these gentlemen to a possession which
they thought to be their own. One person after another rose, and, as
with an ill-balanced axe, attempted to hew out his conception of art a
little more clearly, and sat down with the feeling that, for some
reason which he could not grasp, his strokes had gone awry. As they sat
down they turned almost invariably to the person sitting next them, and
rectified and continued what they had just said in public. Before long,
therefore, the groups on the mattresses and the groups on the chairs
were all in communication with each other, and Mary Datchet, who had
begun to darn stockings again, stooped down and remarked to Ralph:

“That was what I call a first-rate paper.”

Both of them instinctively turned their eyes in the direction of the
reader of the paper. He was lying back against the wall, with his eyes
apparently shut, and his chin sunk upon his collar. Katharine was
turning over the pages of his manuscript as if she were looking for
some passage that had particularly struck her, and had a difficulty in
finding it.

“Let’s go and tell him how much we liked it,” said Mary, thus
suggesting an action which Ralph was anxious to take, though without
her he would have been too proud to do it, for he suspected that he had
more interest in Katharine than she had in him.

“That was a very interesting paper,” Mary began, without any shyness,
seating herself on the floor opposite to Rodney and Katharine. “Will
you lend me the manuscript to read in peace?”

Rodney, who had opened his eyes on their approach, regarded her for a
moment in suspicious silence.

“Do you say that merely to disguise the fact of my ridiculous failure?”
he asked.

Katharine looked up from her reading with a smile.

“He says he doesn’t mind what we think of him,” she remarked. “He says
we don’t care a rap for art of any kind.”

“I asked her to pity me, and she teases me!” Rodney exclaimed.

“I don’t intend to pity you, Mr. Rodney,” Mary remarked, kindly, but
firmly. “When a paper’s a failure, nobody says anything, whereas now,
just listen to them!”

The sound, which filled the room, with its hurry of short syllables,
its sudden pauses, and its sudden attacks, might be compared to some
animal hubbub, frantic and inarticulate.

“D’you think that’s all about my paper?” Rodney inquired, after a
moment’s attention, with a distinct brightening of expression.

“Of course it is,” said Mary. “It was a very suggestive paper.”

She turned to Denham for confirmation, and he corroborated her.

“It’s the ten minutes after a paper is read that proves whether it’s
been a success or not,” he said. “If I were you, Rodney, I should be
very pleased with myself.”

This commendation seemed to comfort Mr. Rodney completely, and he began
to bethink him of all the passages in his paper which deserved to be
called “suggestive.”

“Did you agree at all, Denham, with what I said about Shakespeare’s
later use of imagery? I’m afraid I didn’t altogether make my meaning
plain.”

Here he gathered himself together, and by means of a series of
frog-like jerks, succeeded in bringing himself close to Denham.

Denham answered him with the brevity which is the result of having
another sentence in the mind to be addressed to another person. He
wished to say to Katharine: “Did you remember to get that picture
glazed before your aunt came to dinner?” but, besides having to answer
Rodney, he was not sure that the remark, with its assertion of
intimacy, would not strike Katharine as impertinent. She was listening
to what some one in another group was saying. Rodney, meanwhile, was
talking about the Elizabethan dramatists.

He was a curious-looking man since, upon first sight, especially if he
chanced to be talking with animation, he appeared, in some way,
ridiculous; but, next moment, in repose, his face, with its large nose,
thin cheeks and lips expressing the utmost sensibility, somehow
recalled a Roman head bound with laurel, cut upon a circle of
semi-transparent reddish stone. It had dignity and character. By
profession a clerk in a Government office, he was one of those martyred
spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of
almost intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it,
they must attempt to practise it themselves, and they are generally
endowed with very little facility in composition. They condemn whatever
they produce. Moreover, the violence of their feelings is such that
they seldom meet with adequate sympathy, and being rendered very
sensitive by their cultivated perceptions, suffer constant slights both
to their own persons and to the thing they worship. But Rodney could
never resist making trial of the sympathies of any one who seemed
favorably disposed, and Denham’s praise had stimulated his very
susceptible vanity.

“You remember the passage just before the death of the Duchess?” he
continued, edging still closer to Denham, and adjusting his elbow and
knee in an incredibly angular combination. Here, Katharine, who had
been cut off by these maneuvers from all communication with the outer
world, rose, and seated herself upon the window-sill, where she was
joined by Mary Datchet. The two young women could thus survey the whole
party. Denham looked after them, and made as if he were tearing
handfuls of grass up by the roots from the carpet. But as it fell in
accurately with his conception of life that all one’s desires were
bound to be frustrated, he concentrated his mind upon literature, and
determined, philosophically, to get what he could out of that.

Katharine was pleasantly excited. A variety of courses was open to her.
She knew several people slightly, and at any moment one of them might
rise from the floor and come and speak to her; on the other hand, she
might select somebody for herself, or she might strike into Rodney’s
discourse, to which she was intermittently attentive. She was conscious
of Mary’s body beside her, but, at the same time, the consciousness of
being both of them women made it unnecessary to speak to her. But Mary,
feeling, as she had said, that Katharine was a “personality,” wished so
much to speak to her that in a few moments she did.

“They’re exactly like a flock of sheep, aren’t they?” she said,
referring to the noise that rose from the scattered bodies beneath her.

Katharine turned and smiled.

“I wonder what they’re making such a noise about?” she said.

“The Elizabethans, I suppose.”

“No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the Elizabethans.
There! Didn’t you hear them say, ‘Insurance Bill’?”

“I wonder why men always talk about politics?” Mary speculated. “I
suppose, if we had votes, we should, too.”

“I dare say we should. And you spend your life in getting us votes,
don’t you?”

“I do,” said Mary, stoutly. “From ten to six every day I’m at it.”

Katharine looked at Ralph Denham, who was now pounding his way through
the metaphysics of metaphor with Rodney, and was reminded of his talk
that Sunday afternoon. She connected him vaguely with Mary.

“I suppose you’re one of the people who think we should all have
professions,” she said, rather distantly, as if feeling her way among
the phantoms of an unknown world.

“Oh dear no,” said Mary at once.

“Well, I think I do,” Katharine continued, with half a sigh. “You will
always be able to say that you’ve done something, whereas, in a crowd
like this, I feel rather melancholy.”

“In a crowd? Why in a crowd?” Mary asked, deepening the two lines
between her eyes, and hoisting herself nearer to Katharine upon the
window-sill.

“Don’t you see how many different things these people care about? And I
want to beat them down—I only mean,” she corrected herself, “that I
want to assert myself, and it’s difficult, if one hasn’t a profession.”

Mary smiled, thinking that to beat people down was a process that
should present no difficulty to Miss Katharine Hilbery. They knew each
other so slightly that the beginning of intimacy, which Katharine
seemed to initiate by talking about herself, had something solemn in
it, and they were silent, as if to decide whether to proceed or not.
They tested the ground.

“Ah, but I want to trample upon their prostrate bodies!” Katharine
announced, a moment later, with a laugh, as if at the train of thought
which had led her to this conclusion.

“One doesn’t necessarily trample upon people’s bodies because one runs
an office,” Mary remarked.

“No. Perhaps not,” Katharine replied. The conversation lapsed, and Mary
saw Katharine looking out into the room rather moodily with closed
lips, the desire to talk about herself or to initiate a friendship
having, apparently, left her. Mary was struck by her capacity for being
thus easily silent, and occupied with her own thoughts. It was a habit
that spoke of loneliness and a mind thinking for itself. When Katharine
remained silent Mary was slightly embarrassed.

“Yes, they’re very like sheep,” she repeated, foolishly.

“And yet they are very clever—at least,” Katharine added, “I suppose
they have all read Webster.”

“Surely you don’t think that a proof of cleverness? I’ve read Webster,
I’ve read Ben Jonson, but I don’t think myself clever—not exactly, at
least.”

“I think you must be very clever,” Katharine observed.

“Why? Because I run an office?”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking how you live alone in this
room, and have parties.”

Mary reflected for a second.

“It means, chiefly, a power of being disagreeable to one’s own family,
I think. I have that, perhaps. I didn’t want to live at home, and I
told my father. He didn’t like it.... But then I have a sister, and you
haven’t, have you?”

“No, I haven’t any sisters.”

“You are writing a life of your grandfather?” Mary pursued.

Katharine seemed instantly to be confronted by some familiar thought
from which she wished to escape. She replied, “Yes, I am helping my
mother,” in such a way that Mary felt herself baffled, and put back
again into the position in which she had been at the beginning of their
talk. It seemed to her that Katharine possessed a curious power of
drawing near and receding, which sent alternate emotions through her
far more quickly than was usual, and kept her in a condition of curious
alertness. Desiring to classify her, Mary bethought her of the
convenient term “egoist.”

“She’s an egoist,” she said to herself, and stored that word up to give
to Ralph one day when, as it would certainly fall out, they were
discussing Miss Hilbery.

“Heavens, what a mess there’ll be to-morrow morning!” Katharine
exclaimed. “I hope you don’t sleep in this room, Miss Datchet?”

Mary laughed.

“What are you laughing at?” Katharine demanded.

“I won’t tell you.”

“Let me guess. You were laughing because you thought I’d changed the
conversation?”

“No.”

“Because you think—” She paused.

“If you want to know, I was laughing at the way you said Miss Datchet.”

“Mary, then. Mary, Mary, Mary.”

So saying, Katharine drew back the curtain in order, perhaps, to
conceal the momentary flush of pleasure which is caused by coming
perceptibly nearer to another person.

“Mary Datchet,” said Mary. “It’s not such an imposing name as Katharine
Hilbery, I’m afraid.”

They both looked out of the window, first up at the hard silver moon,
stationary among a hurry of little grey-blue clouds, and then down upon
the roofs of London, with all their upright chimneys, and then below
them at the empty moonlit pavement of the street, upon which the joint
of each paving-stone was clearly marked out. Mary then saw Katharine
raise her eyes again to the moon, with a contemplative look in them, as
though she were setting that moon against the moon of other nights,
held in memory. Some one in the room behind them made a joke about
star-gazing, which destroyed their pleasure in it, and they looked back
into the room again.

Ralph had been watching for this moment, and he instantly produced his
sentence.

“I wonder, Miss Hilbery, whether you remembered to get that picture
glazed?” His voice showed that the question was one that had been
prepared.

“Oh, you idiot!” Mary exclaimed, very nearly aloud, with a sense that
Ralph had said something very stupid. So, after three lessons in Latin
grammar, one might correct a fellow student, whose knowledge did not
embrace the ablative of “mensa.”

“Picture—what picture?” Katharine asked. “Oh, at home, you mean—that
Sunday afternoon. Was it the day Mr. Fortescue came? Yes, I think I
remembered it.”

The three of them stood for a moment awkwardly silent, and then Mary
left them in order to see that the great pitcher of coffee was properly
handled, for beneath all her education she preserved the anxieties of
one who owns china.

Ralph could think of nothing further to say; but could one have
stripped off his mask of flesh, one would have seen that his will-power
was rigidly set upon a single object—that Miss Hilbery should obey him.
He wished her to stay there until, by some measures not yet apparent to
him, he had conquered her interest. These states of mind transmit
themselves very often without the use of language, and it was evident
to Katharine that this young man had fixed his mind upon her. She
instantly recalled her first impressions of him, and saw herself again
proffering family relics. She reverted to the state of mind in which he
had left her that Sunday afternoon. She supposed that he judged her
very severely. She argued naturally that, if this were the case, the
burden of the conversation should rest with him. But she submitted so
far as to stand perfectly still, her eyes upon the opposite wall, and
her lips very nearly closed, though the desire to laugh stirred them
slightly.

“You know the names of the stars, I suppose?” Denham remarked, and from
the tone of his voice one might have thought that he grudged Katharine
the knowledge he attributed to her.

She kept her voice steady with some difficulty.

“I know how to find the Pole star if I’m lost.”

“I don’t suppose that often happens to you.”

“No. Nothing interesting ever happens to me,” she said.

“I think you make a system of saying disagreeable things, Miss
Hilbery,” he broke out, again going further than he meant to. “I
suppose it’s one of the characteristics of your class. They never talk
seriously to their inferiors.”

Whether it was that they were meeting on neutral ground to-night, or
whether the carelessness of an old grey coat that Denham wore gave an
ease to his bearing that he lacked in conventional dress, Katharine
certainly felt no impulse to consider him outside the particular set in
which she lived.

“In what sense are you my inferior?” she asked, looking at him gravely,
as though honestly searching for his meaning. The look gave him great
pleasure. For the first time he felt himself on perfectly equal terms
with a woman whom he wished to think well of him, although he could not
have explained why her opinion of him mattered one way or another.
Perhaps, after all, he only wanted to have something of her to take
home to think about. But he was not destined to profit by his
advantage.

“I don’t think I understand what you mean,” Katharine repeated, and
then she was obliged to stop and answer some one who wished to know
whether she would buy a ticket for an opera from them, at a reduction.
Indeed, the temper of the meeting was now unfavorable to separate
conversation; it had become rather debauched and hilarious, and people
who scarcely knew each other were making use of Christian names with
apparent cordiality, and had reached that kind of gay tolerance and
general friendliness which human beings in England only attain after
sitting together for three hours or so, and the first cold blast in the
air of the street freezes them into isolation once more. Cloaks were
being flung round the shoulders, hats swiftly pinned to the head; and
Denham had the mortification of seeing Katharine helped to prepare
herself by the ridiculous Rodney. It was not the convention of the
meeting to say good-bye, or necessarily even to nod to the person with
whom one was talking; but, nevertheless, Denham was disappointed by the
completeness with which Katharine parted from him, without any attempt
to finish her sentence. She left with Rodney.




CHAPTER V


Denham had no conscious intention of following Katharine, but, seeing
her depart, he took his hat and ran rather more quickly down the stairs
than he would have done if Katharine had not been in front of him. He
overtook a friend of his, by name Harry Sandys, who was going the same
way, and they walked together a few paces behind Katharine and Rodney.

The night was very still, and on such nights, when the traffic thins
away, the walker becomes conscious of the moon in the street, as if the
curtains of the sky had been drawn apart, and the heaven lay bare, as
it does in the country. The air was softly cool, so that people who had
been sitting talking in a crowd found it pleasant to walk a little
before deciding to stop an omnibus or encounter light again in an
underground railway. Sandys, who was a barrister with a philosophic
tendency, took out his pipe, lit it, murmured “hum” and “ha,” and was
silent. The couple in front of them kept their distance accurately, and
appeared, so far as Denham could judge by the way they turned towards
each other, to be talking very constantly. He observed that when a
pedestrian going the opposite way forced them to part they came
together again directly afterwards. Without intending to watch them he
never quite lost sight of the yellow scarf twisted round Katharine’s
head, or the light overcoat which made Rodney look fashionable among
the crowd. At the Strand he supposed that they would separate, but
instead they crossed the road, and took their way down one of the
narrow passages which lead through ancient courts to the river. Among
the crowd of people in the big thoroughfares Rodney seemed merely to be
lending Katharine his escort, but now, when passengers were rare and
the footsteps of the couple were distinctly heard in the silence,
Denham could not help picturing to himself some change in their
conversation. The effect of the light and shadow, which seemed to
increase their height, was to make them mysterious and significant, so
that Denham had no feeling of irritation with Katharine, but rather a
half-dreamy acquiescence in the course of the world. Yes, she did very
well to dream about—but Sandys had suddenly begun to talk. He was a
solitary man who had made his friends at college and always addressed
them as if they were still undergraduates arguing in his room, though
many months or even years had passed in some cases between the last
sentence and the present one. The method was a little singular, but
very restful, for it seemed to ignore completely all accidents of human
life, and to span very deep abysses with a few simple words.

On this occasion he began, while they waited for a minute on the edge
of the Strand:

“I hear that Bennett has given up his theory of truth.”

Denham returned a suitable answer, and he proceeded to explain how this
decision had been arrived at, and what changes it involved in the
philosophy which they both accepted. Meanwhile Katharine and Rodney
drew further ahead, and Denham kept, if that is the right expression
for an involuntary action, one filament of his mind upon them, while
with the rest of his intelligence he sought to understand what Sandys
was saying.

As they passed through the courts thus talking, Sandys laid the tip of
his stick upon one of the stones forming a time-worn arch, and struck
it meditatively two or three times in order to illustrate something
very obscure about the complex nature of one’s apprehension of facts.
During the pause which this necessitated, Katharine and Rodney turned
the corner and disappeared. For a moment Denham stopped involuntarily
in his sentence, and continued it with a sense of having lost
something.

Unconscious that they were observed, Katharine and Rodney had come out
on the Embankment. When they had crossed the road, Rodney slapped his
hand upon the stone parapet above the river and exclaimed:

“I promise I won’t say another word about it, Katharine! But do stop a
minute and look at the moon upon the water.”

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 obedience. He felt inclined to be communicative with
this silent man, who possessed so obviously all the good masculine
qualities in which Katharine now seemed lamentably deficient.

“You do well, Denham,” he began impulsively, “to have nothing to do
with young women. I offer you my experience—if one trusts them one
invariably has cause to repent. Not that I have any reason at this
moment,” he added hastily, “to complain of them. It’s a subject that
crops up now and again for no particular reason. Miss Datchet, I dare
say, is one of the exceptions. Do you like Miss Datchet?”

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 the society of the
people one likes.”

“You’d be bored to death in a year’s time.”

“Oh, I grant you I should be bored if I did nothing. But I should write
plays.”

“H’m!”

“I should write plays,” he repeated. “I’ve written three-quarters of
one already, and I’m only waiting for a holiday to finish it. And it’s
not bad—no, some of it’s really rather nice.”

The question arose in Denham’s mind whether he should ask to see this
play, as, no doubt, he was expected to do. He looked rather stealthily
at Rodney, who was tapping the coal nervously with a poker, and
quivering almost physically, so Denham thought, with desire to talk
about this play of his, and vanity unrequited and urgent. He seemed
very much at Denham’s mercy, and Denham could not help liking him,
partly on that account.

“Well,... will you let me see the play?” Denham asked, and Rodney
looked immediately appeased, but, nevertheless, he sat silent for a
moment, holding the poker perfectly upright in the air, regarding it
with his rather prominent eyes, and opening his lips and shutting them
again.

“Do you really care for this kind of thing?” he asked at length, in a
different tone of voice from that in which he had been speaking. And,
without waiting for an answer, he went on, rather querulously: “Very
few people care for poetry. I dare say it bores you.”

“Perhaps,” Denham remarked.

“Well, I’ll lend it you,” Rodney announced, putting down the poker.

As he moved to fetch the play, Denham stretched a hand to the bookcase
beside him, and took down the first volume which his fingers touched.
It happened to be a small and very lovely edition of Sir Thomas Browne,
containing the “Urn Burial,” the “Hydriotaphia,” and the “Garden of
Cyrus,” and, opening it at a passage which he knew very nearly by
heart, Denham began to read and, for some time, continued to read.

Rodney resumed his seat, with his manuscript on his knee, and from time
to time he glanced at Denham, and then joined his finger-tips and
crossed his thin legs over the fender, as if he experienced a good deal
of pleasure. At length Denham shut the book, and stood, with his back
to the fireplace, occasionally making an inarticulate humming sound
which seemed to refer to Sir Thomas Browne. He put his hat on his head,
and stood over Rodney, who still lay stretched back in his chair, with
his toes within the fender.

“I shall look in again some time,” Denham remarked, upon which Rodney
held up his hand, containing his manuscript, without saying anything
except—“If you like.”

Denham took the manuscript and went. Two days later he was much
surprised to find a thin parcel on his breakfast-plate, which, on being
opened, revealed the very copy of Sir Thomas Browne which he had
studied so intently in Rodney’s rooms. From sheer laziness he returned
no thanks, but he thought of Rodney from time to time with interest,
disconnecting him from Katharine, and meant to go round one evening and
smoke a pipe with him. It pleased Rodney thus to give away whatever his
friends genuinely admired. His library was constantly being diminished.




CHAPTER VI


Of all the hours of an ordinary working week-day, which are the
pleasantest to look forward to and to look back upon? If a single
instance is of use in framing a theory, it may be said that the minutes
between nine-twenty-five and nine-thirty in the morning had a singular
charm for Mary Datchet. She spent them in a very enviable frame of
mind; her contentment was almost unalloyed. High in the air as her flat
was, some beams from the morning sun reached her even in November,
striking straight at curtain, chair, and carpet, and painting there
three bright, true spaces of green, blue, and purple, upon which the
eye rested with a pleasure which gave physical warmth to the body.

There were few mornings when Mary did not look up, as she bent to lace
her boots, and as she followed the yellow rod from curtain to
breakfast-table she usually breathed some sigh of thankfulness that her
life provided her with such moments of pure enjoyment. She was robbing
no one of anything, and yet, to get so much pleasure from simple
things, such as eating one’s breakfast alone in a room which had nice
colors in it, clean from the skirting of the boards to the corners of
the ceiling, seemed to suit her so thoroughly that she used at first to
hunt about for some one to apologize to, or for some flaw in the
situation. She had now been six months in London, and she could find no
flaw, but that, as she invariably concluded by the time her boots were
laced, was solely and entirely due to the fact that she had her work.
Every day, as she stood with her dispatch-box in her hand at the door
of her flat, and gave one look back into the room to see that
everything was straight before she left, she said to herself that she
was very glad that she was going to leave it all, that to have sat
there all day long, in the enjoyment of leisure, would have been
intolerable.

Out in the street she liked to think herself one of the workers who, at
this hour, take their way in rapid single file along all the broad
pavements of the city, with their heads slightly lowered, as if all
their effort were to follow each other as closely as might be; so that
Mary used to figure to herself a straight rabbit-run worn by their
unswerving feet upon the pavement. But she liked to pretend that she
was indistinguishable from the rest, and that when a wet day drove her
to the Underground or omnibus, she gave and took her share of crowd and
wet with clerks and typists and commercial men, and shared with them
the serious business of winding-up the world to tick for another
four-and-twenty hours.

Thus thinking, on the particular morning in question, she made her away
across Lincoln’s Inn Fields and up Kingsway, and so through Southampton
Row until she reached her office in Russell Square. Now and then she
would pause and look into the window of some bookseller or flower shop,
where, at this early hour, the goods were being arranged, and empty
gaps behind the plate glass revealed a state of undress. Mary felt
kindly disposed towards the shopkeepers, and hoped that they would
trick the midday public into purchasing, for at this hour of the
morning she ranged herself entirely on the side of the shopkeepers and
bank clerks, and regarded all who slept late and had money to spend as
her enemy and natural prey. And directly she had crossed the road at
Holborn, her thoughts all came naturally and regularly to roost upon
her work, and she forgot that she was, properly speaking, an amateur
worker, whose services were unpaid, and could hardly be said to wind
the world up for its daily task, since the world, so far, had shown
very little desire to take the boons which Mary’s society for woman’s
suffrage had offered it.

She was thinking all the way up Southampton Row of notepaper and
foolscap, and how an economy in the use of paper might be effected
(without, of course, hurting Mrs. Seal’s feelings), for she was certain
that the great organizers always pounce, to begin with, upon trifles
like these, and build up their triumphant reforms upon a basis of
absolute solidity; and, without acknowledging it for a moment, Mary
Datchet was determined to be a great organizer, and had already doomed
her society to reconstruction of the most radical kind. Once or twice
lately, it is true, she had started, broad awake, before turning into
Russell Square, and denounced herself rather sharply for being already
in a groove, capable, that is, of thinking the same thoughts every
morning at the same hour, so that the chestnut-colored brick of the
Russell Square houses had some curious connection with her thoughts
about office economy, and served also as a sign that she should get
into trim for meeting Mr. Clacton, or Mrs. Seal, or whoever might be
beforehand with her at the office. Having no religious belief, she was
the more conscientious about her life, examining her position from time
to time very seriously, and nothing annoyed her more than to find one
of these bad habits nibbling away unheeded at the precious substance.
What was the good, after all, of being a woman if one didn’t keep
fresh, and cram one’s life with all sorts of views and experiments?
Thus she always gave herself a little shake, as she turned the corner,
and, as often as not, reached her own door whistling a snatch of a
Somersetshire ballad.

The suffrage office was at the top of one of the large Russell Square
houses, which had once been lived in by a great city merchant and his
family, and was now let out in slices to a number of societies which
displayed assorted initials upon doors of ground glass, and kept, each
of them, a typewriter which clicked busily all day long. The old house,
with its great stone staircase, echoed hollowly to the sound of
typewriters and of errand-boys from ten to six. The noise of different
typewriters already at work, disseminating their views upon the
protection of native races, or the value of cereals as foodstuffs,
quickened Mary’s steps, and she always ran up the last flight of steps
which led to her own landing, at whatever hour she came, so as to get
her typewriter to take its place in competition with the rest.

She sat herself down to her letters, and very soon all these
speculations were forgotten, and the two lines drew themselves between
her eyebrows, as the contents of the letters, the office furniture, and
the sounds of activity in the next room gradually asserted their sway
upon her. By eleven o’clock the atmosphere of concentration was running
so strongly in one direction that any thought of a different order
could hardly have survived its birth more than a moment or so. The task
which lay before her was to organize a series of entertainments, the
profits of which were to benefit the society, which drooped for want of
funds. It was her first attempt at organization on a large scale, and
she meant to achieve something remarkable. She meant to use the
cumbrous machine to pick out this, that, and the other interesting
person from the muddle of the world, and to set them for a week in a
pattern which must catch the eyes of Cabinet Ministers, and the eyes
once caught, the old arguments were to be delivered with unexampled
originality. Such was the scheme as a whole; and in contemplation of it
she would become quite flushed and excited, and have to remind herself
of all the details that intervened between her and success.

The door would open, and Mr. Clacton would come in to search for a
certain leaflet buried beneath a pyramid of leaflets. He was a thin,
sandy-haired man of about thirty-five, spoke with a Cockney accent, and
had about him a frugal look, as if nature had not dealt generously with
him in any way, which, naturally, prevented him from dealing generously
with other people. When he had found his leaflet, and offered a few
jocular hints upon keeping papers in order, the typewriting would stop
abruptly, and Mrs. Seal would burst into the room with a letter which
needed explanation in her hand. This was a more serious interruption
than the other, because she never knew exactly what she wanted, and
half a dozen requests would bolt from her, no one of which was clearly
stated. Dressed in plum-colored velveteen, with short, gray hair, and a
face that seemed permanently flushed with philanthropic enthusiasm, she
was always in a hurry, and always in some disorder. She wore two
crucifixes, which got themselves entangled in a heavy gold chain upon
her breast, and seemed to Mary expressive of her mental ambiguity. Only
her vast enthusiasm and her worship of Miss Markham, one of the
pioneers of the society, kept her in her place, for which she had no
sound qualification.

So the morning wore on, and the pile of letters grew, and Mary felt, at
last, that she was the center ganglion of a very fine network of nerves
which fell over England, and one of these days, when she touched the
heart of the system, would begin feeling and rushing together and
emitting their splendid blaze of revolutionary fireworks—for some such
metaphor represents what she felt about her work, when her brain had
been heated by three hours of application.

Shortly before one o’clock Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal desisted from
their labors, and the old joke about luncheon, which came out regularly
at this hour, was repeated with scarcely any variation of words. Mr.
Clacton patronized a vegetarian restaurant; Mrs. Seal brought
sandwiches, which she ate beneath the plane-trees in Russell Square;
while Mary generally went to a gaudy establishment, upholstered in red
plush, near by, where, much to the vegetarian’s disapproval, you could
buy steak, two inches thick, or a roast section of fowl, swimming in a
pewter dish.

“The bare branches against the sky do one so much _good_,” Mrs. Seal
asserted, looking out into the Square.

“But one can’t lunch off trees, Sally,” said Mary.

“I confess I don’t know how you manage it, Miss Datchet,” Mr. Clacton
remarked. “I should sleep all the afternoon, I know, if I took a heavy
meal in the middle of the day.”

“What’s the very latest thing in literature?” Mary asked,
good-humoredly pointing to the yellow-covered volume beneath Mr.
Clacton’s arm, for he invariably read some new French author at
lunch-time, or squeezed in a visit to a picture gallery, balancing his
social work with an ardent culture of which he was secretly proud, as
Mary had very soon divined.

So they parted and Mary walked away, wondering if they guessed that she
really wanted to get away from them, and supposing that they had not
quite reached that degree of subtlety. She bought herself an evening
paper, which she read as she ate, looking over the top of it again and
again at the queer people who were buying cakes or imparting their
secrets, until some young woman whom she knew came in, and she called
out, “Eleanor, come and sit by me,” and they finished their lunch
together, parting on the strip of pavement among the different lines of
traffic with a pleasant feeling that they were stepping once more into
their separate places in the great and eternally moving pattern of
human life.

But, instead of going straight back to the office to-day, Mary turned
into the British Museum, and strolled down the gallery with the shapes
of stone until she found an empty seat directly beneath the gaze of the
Elgin marbles. She looked at them, and seemed, as usual, borne up on
some wave of exaltation and emotion, by which her life at once became
solemn and beautiful—an impression which was due as much, perhaps, to
the solitude and chill and silence of the gallery as to the actual
beauty of the statues. One must suppose, at least, that her emotions
were not purely esthetic, because, after she had gazed at the Ulysses
for a minute or two, she began to think about Ralph Denham. So secure
did she feel with these silent shapes that she almost yielded to an
impulse to say “I am in love with you” aloud. The presence of this
immense and enduring beauty made her almost alarmingly conscious of her
desire, and at the same time proud of a feeling which did not display
anything like the same proportions when she was going about her daily
work.

She repressed her impulse to speak aloud, and rose and wandered about
rather aimlessly among the statues until she found herself in another
gallery devoted to engraved obelisks and winged Assyrian bulls, and her
emotion took another turn. She began to picture herself traveling with
Ralph in a land where these monsters were couchant in the sand. “For,”
she thought to herself, as she gazed fixedly at some information
printed behind a piece of glass, “the wonderful thing about you is that
you’re ready for anything; you’re not in the least conventional, like
most clever men.”

And she conjured up a scene of herself on a camel’s back, in the
desert, while Ralph commanded a whole tribe of natives.

“That is what you can do,” she went on, moving on to the next statue.
“You always make people do what you want.”

A glow spread over her spirit, and filled her eyes with brightness.
Nevertheless, before she left the Museum she was very far from saying,
even in the privacy of her own mind, “I am in love with you,” and that
sentence might very well never have framed itself. She was, indeed,
rather annoyed with herself for having allowed such an ill-considered
breach of her reserve, weakening her powers of resistance, she felt,
should this impulse return again. For, as she walked along the street
to her office, the force of all her customary objections to being in
love with any one overcame her. She did not want to marry at all. It
seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing love into
touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship, such as hers was
with Ralph, which, for two years now, had based itself upon common
interests in impersonal topics, such as the housing of the poor, or the
taxation of land values.

But the afternoon spirit differed intrinsically from the morning
spirit. Mary found herself watching the flight of a bird, or making
drawings of the branches of the plane-trees upon her blotting-paper.
People came in to see Mr. Clacton on business, and a seductive smell of
cigarette smoke issued from his room. Mrs. Seal wandered about with
newspaper cuttings, which seemed to her either “quite splendid” or
“really too bad for words.” She used to paste these into books, or send
them to her friends, having first drawn a broad bar in blue pencil down
the margin, a proceeding which signified equally and indistinguishably
the depths of her reprobation or the heights of her approval.

About four o’clock on that same afternoon Katharine Hilbery was walking
up Kingsway. The question of tea presented itself. The street lamps
were being lit already, and as she stood still for a moment beneath one
of them, she tried to think of some neighboring drawing-room where
there would be firelight and talk congenial to her mood. That mood,
owing to the spinning traffic and the evening veil of unreality, was
ill-adapted to her home surroundings. Perhaps, on the whole, a shop was
the best place in which to preserve this queer sense of heightened
existence. At the same time she wished to talk. Remembering Mary
Datchet and her repeated invitations, she crossed the road, turned into
Russell Square, and peered about, seeking for numbers with a sense of
adventure that was out of all proportion to the deed itself. She found
herself in a dimly lighted hall, unguarded by a porter, and pushed open
the first swing door. But the office-boy had never heard of Miss
Datchet. Did she belong to the S.R.F.R.? Katharine shook her head with
a smile of dismay. A voice from within shouted, “No. The S.G.S.—top
floor.”

Katharine mounted past innumerable glass doors, with initials on them,
and became steadily more and more doubtful of the wisdom of her
venture. At the top she paused for a moment to breathe and collect
herself. She heard the typewriter and formal professional voices
inside, not belonging, she thought, to any one she had ever spoken to.
She touched the bell, and the door was opened almost immediately by
Mary herself. Her face had to change its expression entirely when she
saw Katharine.

“You!” she exclaimed. “We thought you were the printer.” Still holding
the door open, she called back, “No, Mr. Clacton, it’s not Penningtons.
I should ring them up again—double three double eight, Central. Well,
this is a surprise. Come in,” she added. “You’re just in time for tea.”

The light of relief shone in Mary’s eyes. The boredom of the afternoon
was dissipated at once, and she was glad that Katharine had found them
in a momentary press of activity, owing to the failure of the printer
to send back certain proofs.

The unshaded electric light shining upon the table covered with papers
dazed Katharine for a moment. After the confusion of her twilight walk,
and her random thoughts, life in this small room appeared extremely
concentrated and bright. She turned instinctively to look out of the
window, which was uncurtained, but Mary immediately recalled her.

“It was very clever of you to find your way,” she said, and Katharine
wondered, as she stood there, feeling, for the moment, entirely
detached and unabsorbed, why she had come. She looked, indeed, to
Mary’s eyes strangely out of place in the office. Her figure in the
long cloak, which took deep folds, and her face, which was composed
into a mask of sensitive apprehension, disturbed Mary for a moment with
a sense of the presence of some one who was of another world, and,
therefore, subversive of her world. She became immediately anxious that
Katharine should be impressed by the importance of her world, and hoped
that neither Mrs. Seal nor Mr. Clacton would appear until the
impression of importance had been received. But in this she was
disappointed. Mrs. Seal burst into the room holding a kettle in her
hand, which she set upon the stove, and then, with inefficient haste,
she set light to the gas, which flared up, exploded, and went out.

“Always the way, always the way,” she muttered. “Kit Markham is the
only person who knows how to deal with the thing.”

Mary had to go to her help, and together they spread the table, and
apologized for the disparity between the cups and the plainness of the
food.

“If we had known Miss Hilbery was coming, we should have bought a
cake,” said Mary, upon which Mrs. Seal looked at Katharine for the
first time, suspiciously, because she was a person who needed cake.

Here Mr. Clacton opened the door, and came in, holding a typewritten
letter in his hand, which he was reading aloud.

“Salford’s affiliated,” he said.

“Well done, Salford!” Mrs. Seal exclaimed enthusiastically, thumping
the teapot which she held upon the table, in token of applause.

“Yes, these provincial centers seem to be coming into line at last,”
said Mr. Clacton, and then Mary introduced him to Miss Hilbery, and he
asked her, in a very formal manner, if she were interested “in our
work.”

“And the proofs still not come?” said Mrs. Seal, putting both her
elbows on the table, and propping her chin on her hands, as Mary began
to pour out tea. “It’s too bad—too bad. At this rate we shall miss the
country post. Which reminds me, Mr. Clacton, don’t you think we should
circularize the provinces with Partridge’s last speech? What? You’ve
not read it? Oh, it’s the best thing they’ve had in the House this
Session. Even the Prime Minister—”

But Mary cut her short.

“We don’t allow shop at tea, Sally,” she said firmly. “We fine her a
penny each time she forgets, and the fines go to buying a plum cake,”
she explained, seeking to draw Katharine into the community. She had
given up all hope of impressing her.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Seal apologized. “It’s my misfortune to be
an enthusiast,” she said, turning to Katharine. “My father’s daughter
could hardly be anything else. I think I’ve been on as many committees
as most people. Waifs and Strays, Rescue Work, Church Work, C. O.
S.—local branch—besides the usual civic duties which fall to one as a
householder. But I’ve given them all up for our work here, and I don’t
regret it for a second,” she added. “This is the root question, I feel;
until women have votes—”

“It’ll be sixpence, at least, Sally,” said Mary, bringing her fist down
on the table. “And we’re all sick to death of women and their votes.”

Mrs. Seal looked for a moment as though she could hardly believe her
ears, and made a deprecating “tut-tut-tut” in her throat, looking
alternately at Katharine and Mary, and shaking her head as she did so.
Then she remarked, rather confidentially to Katharine, with a little
nod in Mary’s direction:

“She’s doing more for the cause than any of us. She’s giving her
youth—for, alas! when I was young there were domestic circumstances—”
she sighed, and stopped short.

Mr. Clacton hastily reverted to the joke about luncheon, and explained
how Mrs. Seal fed on a bag of biscuits under the trees, whatever the
weather might be, rather, Katharine thought, as though Mrs. Seal were a
pet dog who had convenient tricks.

“Yes, I took my little bag into the square,” said Mrs. Seal, with the
self-conscious guilt of a child owning some fault to its elders. “It
was really very sustaining, and the bare boughs against the sky do one
so much _good_. But I shall have to give up going into the square,” she
proceeded, wrinkling her forehead. “The injustice of it! Why should I
have a beautiful square all to myself, when poor women who need rest
have nowhere at all to sit?” She looked fiercely at Katharine, giving
her short locks a little shake. “It’s dreadful what a tyrant one still
is, in spite of all one’s efforts. One tries to lead a decent life, but
one can’t. Of course, directly one thinks of it, one sees that _all_
squares should be open to _every one_. Is there any society with that
object, Mr. Clacton? If not, there should be, surely.”

“A most excellent object,” said Mr. Clacton in his professional manner.
“At the same time, one must deplore the ramification of organizations,
Mrs. Seal. So much excellent effort thrown away, not to speak of
pounds, shillings, and pence. Now how many organizations of a
philanthropic nature do you suppose there are in the City of London
itself, Miss Hilbery?” he added, screwing his mouth into a queer little
smile, as if to show that the question had its frivolous side.

Katharine smiled, too. Her unlikeness to the rest of them had, by this
time, penetrated to Mr. Clacton, who was not naturally observant, and
he was wondering who she was; this same unlikeness had subtly
stimulated Mrs. Seal to try and make a convert of her. Mary, too,
looked at her almost as if she begged her to make things easy. For
Katharine had shown no disposition to make things easy. She had
scarcely spoken, and her silence, though grave and even thoughtful,
seemed to Mary the silence of one who criticizes.

“Well, there are more in this house than I’d any notion of,” she said.
“On the ground floor you protect natives, on the next you emigrate
women and tell people to eat nuts—”

“Why do you say that ‘we’ do these things?” Mary interposed, rather
sharply. “We’re not responsible for all the cranks who choose to lodge
in the same house with us.”

Mr. Clacton cleared his throat and looked at each of the young ladies
in turn. He was a good deal struck by the appearance and manner of Miss
Hilbery, which seemed to him to place her among those cultivated and
luxurious people of whom he used to dream. Mary, on the other hand, was
more of his own sort, and a little too much inclined to order him
about. He picked up crumbs of dry biscuit and put them into his mouth
with incredible rapidity.

“You don’t belong to our society, then?” said Mrs. Seal.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said Katharine, with such ready candor that
Mrs. Seal was nonplussed, and stared at her with a puzzled expression,
as if she could not classify her among the varieties of human beings
known to her.

“But surely,” she began.

“Mrs. Seal is an enthusiast in these matters,” said Mr. Clacton, almost
apologetically. “We have to remind her sometimes that others have a
right to their views even if they differ from our own.... “Punch” has a
very funny picture this week, about a Suffragist and an agricultural
laborer. Have you seen this week’s “Punch,” Miss Datchet?”

Mary laughed, and said “No.”

Mr. Clacton then told them the substance of the joke, which, however,
depended a good deal for its success upon the expression which the
artist had put into the people’s faces. Mrs. Seal sat all the time
perfectly grave. Directly he had done speaking she burst out:

“But surely, if you care about the welfare of your sex at all, you must
wish them to have the vote?”

“I never said I didn’t wish them to have the vote,” Katharine
protested.

“Then why aren’t you a member of our society?” Mrs. Seal demanded.

Katharine stirred her spoon round and round, stared into the swirl of
the tea, and remained silent. Mr. Clacton, meanwhile, framed a question
which, after a moment’s hesitation, he put to Katharine.

“Are you in any way related, I wonder, to the poet Alardyce? His
daughter, I believe, married a Mr. Hilbery.”

“Yes; I’m the poet’s granddaughter,” said Katharine, with a little
sigh, after a pause; and for a moment they were all silent.

“The poet’s granddaughter!” Mrs. Seal repeated, half to herself, with a
shake of her head, as if that explained what was otherwise
inexplicable.

The light kindled in Mr. Clacton’s eye.

“Ah, indeed. That interests me very much,” he said. “I owe a great debt
to your grandfather, Miss Hilbery. At one time I could have repeated
the greater part of him by heart. But one gets out of the way of
reading poetry, unfortunately. You don’t remember him, I suppose?”

A sharp rap at the door made Katharine’s answer inaudible. Mrs. Seal
looked up with renewed hope in her eyes, and exclaiming:

“The proofs at last!” ran to open the door. “Oh, it’s only Mr. Denham!”
she cried, without any attempt to conceal her disappointment. Ralph,
Katharine supposed, was a frequent visitor, for the only person he
thought it necessary to greet was herself, and Mary at once explained
the strange fact of her being there by saying:

“Katharine has come to see how one runs an office.”

Ralph felt himself stiffen uncomfortably, as he said:

“I hope Mary hasn’t persuaded you that she knows how to run an office?”

“What, doesn’t she?” said Katharine, looking from one to the other.

At these remarks Mrs. Seal began to exhibit signs of discomposure,
which displayed themselves by a tossing movement of her head, and, as
Ralph took a letter from his pocket, and placed his finger upon a
certain sentence, she forestalled him by exclaiming in confusion:

“Now, I know what you’re going to say, Mr. Denham! But it was the day
Kit Markham was here, and she upsets one so—with her wonderful
vitality, always thinking of something new that we ought to be doing
and aren’t—and I was conscious at the time that my dates were mixed. It
had nothing to do with Mary at all, I assure you.”

“My dear Sally, don’t apologize,” said Mary, laughing. “Men are such
pedants—they don’t know what things matter, and what things don’t.”

“Now, Denham, speak up for our sex,” said Mr. Clacton in a jocular
manner, indeed, but like most insignificant men he was very quick to
resent being found fault with by a woman, in argument with whom he was
fond of calling himself “a mere man.” He wished, however, to enter into
a literary conservation with Miss Hilbery, and thus let the matter
drop.

“Doesn’t it seem strange to you, Miss Hilbery,” he said, “that the
French, with all their wealth of illustrious names, have no poet who
can compare with your grandfather? Let me see. There’s Chenier and Hugo
and Alfred de Musset—wonderful men, but, at the same time, there’s a
richness, a freshness about Alardyce—”

Here the telephone bell rang, and he had to absent himself with a smile
and a bow which signified that, although literature is delightful, it
is not work. Mrs. Seal rose at the same time, but remained hovering
over the table, delivering herself of a tirade against party
government. “For if I were to tell you what I know of back-stairs
intrigue, and what can be done by the power of the purse, you wouldn’t
credit me, Mr. Denham, you wouldn’t, indeed. Which is why I feel that
the only work for my father’s daughter—for he was one of the pioneers,
Mr. Denham, and on his tombstone I had that verse from the Psalms put,
about the sowers and the seed.... And what wouldn’t I give that he
should be alive now, seeing what we’re going to see—” but reflecting
that the glories of the future depended in part upon the activity of
her typewriter, she bobbed her head, and hurried back to the seclusion
of her little room, from which immediately issued sounds of
enthusiastic, but obviously erratic, composition.

Mary made it clear at once, by starting a fresh topic of general
interest, that though she saw the humor of her colleague, she did not
intend to have her laughed at.

“The standard of morality seems to me frightfully low,” she observed
reflectively, pouring out a second cup of tea, “especially among women
who aren’t well educated. They don’t see that small things matter, and
that’s where the leakage begins, and then we find ourselves in
difficulties—I very nearly lost my temper yesterday,” she went on,
looking at Ralph with a little smile, as though he knew what happened
when she lost her temper. “It makes me very angry when people tell me
lies—doesn’t it make you angry?” she asked Katharine.

“But considering that every one tells lies,” Katharine remarked,
looking about the room to see where she had put down her umbrella and
her parcel, for there was an intimacy in the way in which Mary and
Ralph addressed each other which made her wish to leave them. Mary, on
the other hand, was anxious, superficially at least, that Katharine
should stay and so fortify her in her determination not to be in love
with Ralph.

Ralph, while lifting his cup from his lips to the table, had made up
his mind that if Miss Hilbery left, he would go with her.

“I don’t think that I tell lies, and I don’t think that Ralph tells
lies, do you, Ralph?” Mary continued.

Katharine laughed, with more gayety, as it seemed to Mary, than she
could properly account for. What was she laughing at? At them,
presumably. Katharine had risen, and was glancing hither and thither,
at the presses and the cupboards, and all the machinery of the office,
as if she included them all in her rather malicious amusement, which
caused Mary to keep her eyes on her straightly and rather fiercely, as
if she were a gay-plumed, mischievous bird, who might light on the
topmost bough and pick off the ruddiest cherry, without any warning.
Two women less like each other could scarcely be imagined, Ralph
thought, looking from one to the other. Next moment, he too, rose, and
nodding to Mary, as Katharine said good-bye, opened the door for her,
and followed her out.

Mary sat still and made no attempt to prevent them from going. For a
second or two after the door had shut on them her eyes rested on the
door with a straightforward fierceness in which, for a moment, a
certain degree of bewilderment seemed to enter; but, after a brief
hesitation, she put down her cup and proceeded to clear away the
tea-things.

The impulse which had driven Ralph to take this action was the result
of a very swift little piece of reasoning, and thus, perhaps, was not
quite so much of an impulse as it seemed. It passed through his mind
that if he missed this chance of talking to Katharine, he would have to
face an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room again, demanding
an explanation of his cowardly indecision. It was better, on the whole,
to risk present discomfiture than to waste an evening bandying excuses
and constructing impossible scenes with this uncompromising section of
himself. For ever since he had visited the Hilberys he had been much at
the mercy of a phantom Katharine, who came to him when he sat alone,
and answered him as he would have her answer, and was always beside him
to crown those varying triumphs which were transacted almost every
night, in imaginary scenes, as he walked through the lamplit streets
home from the office. To walk with Katharine in the flesh would either
feed that phantom with fresh food, which, as all who nourish dreams are
aware, is a process that becomes necessary from time to time, or refine
it to such a degree of thinness that it was scarcely serviceable any
longer; and that, too, is sometimes a welcome change to a dreamer. And
all the time Ralph was well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not
represented in his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was
bewildered by the fact that she had nothing to do with his dream of
her.

When, on reaching the street, Katharine found that Mr. Denham proceeded
to keep pace by her side, she was surprised and, perhaps, a little
annoyed. She, too, had her margin of imagination, and to-night her
activity in this obscure region of the mind required solitude. If she
had had her way, she would have walked very fast down the Tottenham
Court Road, and then sprung into a cab and raced swiftly home. The view
she had had of the inside of an office was of the nature of a dream to
her. Shut off up there, she compared Mrs. Seal, and Mary Datchet, and
Mr. Clacton to enchanted people in a bewitched tower, with the spiders’
webs looping across the corners of the room, and all the tools of the
necromancer’s craft at hand; for so aloof and unreal and apart from the
normal world did they seem to her, in the house of innumerable
typewriters, murmuring their incantations and concocting their drugs,
and flinging their frail spiders’ webs over the torrent of life which
rushed down the streets outside.

She may have been conscious that there was some exaggeration in this
fancy of hers, for she certainly did not wish to share it with Ralph.
To him, she supposed, Mary Datchet, composing leaflets for Cabinet
Ministers among her typewriters, represented all that was interesting
and genuine; and, accordingly, she shut them both out from all share in
the crowded street, with its pendant necklace of lamps, its lighted
windows, and its throng of men and women, which exhilarated her to such
an extent that she very nearly forgot her companion. She walked very
fast, and the effect of people passing in the opposite direction was to
produce a queer dizziness both in her head and in Ralph’s, which set
their bodies far apart. But she did her duty by her companion almost
unconsciously.

“Mary Datchet does that sort of work very well.... She’s responsible
for it, I suppose?”

“Yes. The others don’t help at all.... Has she made a convert of you?”

“Oh no. That is, I’m a convert already.”

“But she hasn’t persuaded you to work for them?”

“Oh dear no—that wouldn’t do at all.”

So they walked on down the Tottenham Court Road, parting and coming
together again, and Ralph felt much as though he were addressing the
summit of a poplar in a high gale of wind.

“Suppose we get on to that omnibus?” he suggested.

Katharine acquiesced, and they climbed up, and found themselves alone
on top of it.

“But which way are you going?” Katharine asked, waking a little from
the trance into which movement among moving things had thrown her.

“I’m going to the Temple,” Ralph replied, inventing a destination on
the spur of the moment. He felt the change come over her as they sat
down and the omnibus began to move forward. He imagined her
contemplating the avenue in front of them with those honest sad eyes
which seemed to set him at such a distance from them. But the breeze
was blowing in their faces; it lifted her hat for a second, and she
drew out a pin and stuck it in again,—a little action which seemed, for
some reason, to make her rather more fallible. Ah, if only her hat
would blow off, and leave her altogether disheveled, accepting it from
his hands!

“This is like Venice,” she observed, raising her hand. “The motor-cars,
I mean, shooting about so quickly, with their lights.”

“I’ve never seen Venice,” he replied. “I keep that and some other
things for my old age.”

“What are the other things?” she asked.

“There’s Venice and India and, I think, Dante, too.”

She laughed.

“Think of providing for one’s old age! And would you refuse to see
Venice if you had the chance?”

Instead of answering her, he wondered whether he should tell her
something that was quite true about himself; and as he wondered, he
told her.

“I’ve planned out my life in sections ever since I was a child, to make
it last longer. You see, I’m always afraid that I’m missing something—”

“And so am I!” Katharine exclaimed. “But, after all,” she added, “why
should you miss anything?”

“Why? Because I’m poor, for one thing,” Ralph rejoined. “You, I
suppose, can have Venice and India and Dante every day of your life.”

She said nothing for a moment, but rested one hand, which was bare of
glove, upon the rail in front of her, meditating upon a variety of
things, of which one was that this strange young man pronounced Dante
as she was used to hearing it pronounced, and another, that he had,
most unexpectedly, a feeling about life that was familiar to her.
Perhaps, then, he was the sort of person she might take an interest in,
if she came to know him better, and as she had placed him among those
whom she would never want to know better, this was enough to make her
silent. She hastily recalled her first view of him, in the little room
where the relics were kept, and ran a bar through half her impressions,
as one cancels a badly written sentence, having found the right one.

“But to know that one might have things doesn’t alter the fact that one
hasn’t got them,” she said, in some confusion. “How could I go to
India, for example? Besides,” she began impulsively, and stopped
herself. Here the conductor came round, and interrupted them. Ralph
waited for her to resume her sentence, but she said no more.

“I have a message to give your father,” he remarked. “Perhaps you would
give it him, or I could come—”

“Yes, do come,” Katharine replied.

“Still, I don’t see why you shouldn’t go to India,” Ralph began, in
order to keep her from rising, as she threatened to do.

But she got up in spite of him, and said good-bye with her usual air of
decision, and left him with a quickness which Ralph connected now with
all her movements. He looked down and saw her standing on the pavement
edge, an alert, commanding figure, which waited its season to cross,
and then walked boldly and swiftly to the other side. That gesture and
action would be added to the picture he had of her, but at present the
real woman completely routed the phantom one.




CHAPTER VII


“And little Augustus Pelham said to me, ‘It’s the younger generation
knocking at the door,’ and I said to him, ‘Oh, but the younger
generation comes in without knocking, Mr. Pelham.’ Such a feeble little
joke, wasn’t it, but down it went into his notebook all the same.”

“Let us congratulate ourselves that we shall be in the grave before
that work is published,” said Mr. Hilbery.

The elderly couple were waiting for the dinner-bell to ring and for
their daughter to come into the room. Their arm-chairs were drawn up on
either side of the fire, and each sat in the same slightly crouched
position, looking into the coals, with the expressions of people who
have had their share of experiences and wait, rather passively, for
something to happen. Mr. Hilbery now gave all his attention to a piece
of coal which had fallen out of the grate, and to selecting a favorable
position for it among the lumps that were burning already. Mrs. Hilbery
watched him in silence, and the smile changed on her lips as if her
mind still played with the events of the afternoon.

When Mr. Hilbery had accomplished his task, he resumed his crouching
position again, and began to toy with the little green stone attached
to his watch-chain. His deep, oval-shaped eyes were fixed upon the
flames, but behind the superficial glaze seemed to brood an observant
and whimsical spirit, which kept the brown of the eye still unusually
vivid. But a look of indolence, the result of skepticism or of a taste
too fastidious to be satisfied by the prizes and conclusions so easily
within his grasp, lent him an expression almost of melancholy. After
sitting thus for a time, he seemed to reach some point in his thinking
which demonstrated its futility, upon which he sighed and stretched his
hand for a book lying on the table by his side.

Directly the door opened he closed the book, and the eyes of father and
mother both rested on Katharine as she came towards them. The sight
seemed at once to give them a motive which they had not had before. To
them she appeared, as she walked towards them in her light evening
dress, extremely young, and the sight of her refreshed them, were it
only because her youth and ignorance made their knowledge of the world
of some value.

“The only excuse for you, Katharine, is that dinner is still later than
you are,” said Mr. Hilbery, putting down his spectacles.

“I don’t mind her being late when the result is so charming,” said Mrs.
Hilbery, looking with pride at her daughter. “Still, I don’t know that
I _like_ your being out so late, Katharine,” she continued. “You took a
cab, I hope?”

Here dinner was announced, and Mr. Hilbery formally led his wife
downstairs on his arm. They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed,
the prettiness of the dinner-table merited that compliment. There was
no cloth upon the table, and the china made regular circles of deep
blue upon the shining brown wood. In the middle there was a bowl of
tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh
that the narrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball.
From the surrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers
surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them
testified in the great man’s own handwriting that he was yours
sincerely or affectionately or for ever. The father and daughter would
have been quite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence, or
with a few cryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not be
understood by the servants. But silence depressed Mrs. Hilbery, and far
from minding the presence of maids, she would often address herself to
them, and was never altogether unconscious of their approval or
disapproval of her remarks. In the first place she called them to
witness that the room was darker than usual, and had all the lights
turned on.

“That’s more cheerful,” she exclaimed. “D’you know, Katharine, that
ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried to
make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, you
know, that I spilt the tea—and he made an epigram about that!”

“Which ridiculous goose?” Katharine asked her father.

“Only one of my geese, happily, makes epigrams—Augustus Pelham, of
course,” said Mrs. Hilbery.

“I’m not sorry that I was out,” said Katharine.

“Poor Augustus!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “But we’re all too hard on
him. Remember how devoted he is to his tiresome old mother.”

“That’s only because she is his mother. Any one connected with
himself—”

“No, no, Katharine—that’s too bad. That’s—what’s the word I mean,
Trevor, something long and Latin—the sort of word you and Katharine
know—”

Mr. Hilbery suggested “cynical.”

“Well, that’ll do. I don’t believe in sending girls to college, but I
should teach them that sort of thing. It makes one feel so dignified,
bringing out these little allusions, and passing on gracefully to the
next topic. But I don’t know what’s come over me—I actually had to ask
Augustus the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with, as you were out,
Katharine, and Heaven knows what he mayn’t put down about me in his
diary.”

“I wish,” Katharine started, with great impetuosity, and checked
herself. Her mother always stirred her to feel and think quickly, and
then she remembered that her father was there, listening with
attention.

“What is it you wish?” he asked, as she paused.

He often surprised her, thus, into telling him what she had not meant
to tell him; and then they argued, while Mrs. Hilbery went on with her
own thoughts.

“I wish mother wasn’t famous. I was out at tea, and they would talk to
me about poetry.”

“Thinking you must be poetical, I see—and aren’t you?”

“Who’s been talking to you about poetry, Katharine?” Mrs. Hilbery
demanded, and Katharine was committed to giving her parents an account
of her visit to the Suffrage office.

“They have an office at the top of one of the old houses in Russell
Square. I never saw such queer-looking people. And the man discovered I
was related to the poet, and talked to me about poetry. Even Mary
Datchet seems different in that atmosphere.”

“Yes, the office atmosphere is very bad for the soul,” said Mr.
Hilbery.

“I don’t remember any offices in Russell Square in the old days, when
Mamma lived there,” Mrs. Hilbery mused, “and I can’t fancy turning one
of those noble great rooms into a stuffy little Suffrage office. Still,
if the clerks read poetry there must be something nice about them.”

“No, because they don’t read it as we read it,” Katharine insisted.

“But it’s nice to think of them reading your grandfather, and not
filling up those dreadful little forms all day long,” Mrs. Hilbery
persisted, her notion of office life being derived from some chance
view of a scene behind the counter at her bank, as she slipped the
sovereigns into her purse.

“At any rate, they haven’t made a convert of Katharine, which was what
I was afraid of,” Mr. Hilbery remarked.

“Oh no,” said Katharine very decidedly, “I wouldn’t work with them for
anything.”

“It’s curious,” Mr. Hilbery continued, agreeing with his daughter, “how
the sight of one’s fellow-enthusiasts always chokes one off. They show
up the faults of one’s cause so much more plainly than one’s
antagonists. One can be enthusiastic in one’s study, but directly one
comes into touch with the people who agree with one, all the glamor
goes. So I’ve always found,” and he proceeded to tell them, as he
peeled his apple, how he committed himself once, in his youthful days,
to make a speech at a political meeting, and went there ablaze with
enthusiasm for the ideals of his own side; but while his leaders spoke,
he became gradually converted to the other way of thinking, if thinking
it could be called, and had to feign illness in order to avoid making a
fool of himself—an experience which had sickened him of public
meetings.

Katharine listened and felt as she generally did when her father, and
to some extent her mother, described their feelings, that she quite
understood and agreed with them, but, at the same time, saw something
which they did not see, and always felt some disappointment when they
fell short of her vision, as they always did. The plates succeeded each
other swiftly and noiselessly in front of her, and the table was decked
for dessert, and as the talk murmured on in familiar grooves, she sat
there, rather like a judge, listening to her parents, who did, indeed,
feel it very pleasant when they made her laugh.

Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious
little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually,
though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood
over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance.
Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port, which
were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr. Hilbery, and
simultaneously Mrs. Hilbery and Katharine left the room. All the years
they had lived together they had never seen Mr. Hilbery smoke his cigar
or drink his port, and they would have felt it unseemly if, by chance,
they had surprised him as he sat there. These short, but clearly
marked, periods of separation between the sexes were always used for an
intimate postscript to what had been said at dinner, the sense of being
women together coming out most strongly when the male sex was, as if by
some religious rite, secluded from the female. Katharine knew by heart
the sort of mood that possessed her as she walked upstairs to the
drawing-room, her mother’s arm in hers; and she could anticipate the
pleasure with which, when she had turned on the lights, they both
regarded the drawing-room, fresh swept and set in order for the last
section of the day, with the red parrots swinging on the chintz
curtains, and the arm-chairs warming in the blaze. Mrs. Hilbery stood
over the fire, with one foot on the fender, and her skirts slightly
raised.

“Oh, Katharine,” she exclaimed, “how you’ve made me think of Mamma and
the old days in Russell Square! I can see the chandeliers, and the
green silk of the piano, and Mamma sitting in her cashmere shawl by the
window, singing till the little ragamuffin boys outside stopped to
listen. Papa sent me in with a bunch of violets while he waited round
the corner. It must have been a summer evening. That was before things
were hopeless....”

As she spoke an expression of regret, which must have come frequently
to cause the lines which now grew deep round the lips and eyes, settled
on her face. The poet’s marriage had not been a happy one. He had left
his wife, and after some years of a rather reckless existence, she had
died, before her time. This disaster had led to great irregularities of
education, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery might be said to have escaped
education altogether. But she had been her father’s companion at the
season when he wrote the finest of his poems. She had sat on his knee
in taverns and other haunts of drunken poets, and it was for her sake,
so people said, that he had cured himself of his dissipation, and
become the irreproachable literary character that the world knows,
whose inspiration had deserted him. As Mrs. Hilbery grew old she
thought more and more of the past, and this ancient disaster seemed at
times almost to prey upon her mind, as if she could not pass out of
life herself without laying the ghost of her parent’s sorrow to rest.

Katharine wished to comfort her mother, but it was difficult to do this
satisfactorily when the facts themselves were so much of a legend. The
house in Russell Square, for example, with its noble rooms, and the
magnolia-tree in the garden, and the sweet-voiced piano, and the sound
of feet coming down the corridors, and other properties of size and
romance—had they any existence? Yet why should Mrs. Alardyce live all
alone in this gigantic mansion, and, if she did not live alone, with
whom did she live? For its own sake, Katharine rather liked this tragic
story, and would have been glad to hear the details of it, and to have
been able to discuss them frankly. But this it became less and less
possible to do, for though Mrs. Hilbery was constantly reverting to the
story, it was always in this tentative and restless fashion, as though
by a touch here and there she could set things straight which had been
crooked these sixty years. Perhaps, indeed, she no longer knew what the
truth was.

“If they’d lived now,” she concluded, “I feel it wouldn’t have
happened. People aren’t so set upon tragedy as they were then. If my
father had been able to go round the world, or if she’d had a rest
cure, everything would have come right. But what could I do? And then
they had bad friends, both of them, who made mischief. Ah, Katharine,
when you marry, be quite, quite sure that you love your husband!”

The tears stood in Mrs. Hilbery’s eyes.

While comforting her, Katharine thought to herself, “Now this is what
Mary Datchet and Mr. Denham don’t understand. This is the sort of
position I’m always getting into. How simple it must be to live as they
do!” for all the evening she had been comparing her home and her father
and mother with the Suffrage office and the people there.

“But, Katharine,” Mrs. Hilbery continued, with one of her sudden
changes of mood, “though, Heaven knows, I don’t want to see you
married, surely if ever a man loved a woman, William loves you. And
it’s a nice, rich-sounding name too—Katharine Rodney, which,
unfortunately, doesn’t mean that he’s got any money, because he
hasn’t.”

The alteration of her name annoyed Katharine, and she observed, rather
sharply, that she didn’t want to marry any one.

“It’s very dull that you can only marry one husband, certainly,” Mrs.
Hilbery reflected. “I always wish that you could marry everybody who
wants to marry you. Perhaps they’ll come to that in time, but meanwhile
I confess that dear William—” But here Mr. Hilbery came in, and the
more solid part of the evening began. This consisted in the reading
aloud by Katharine from some prose work or other, while her mother
knitted scarves intermittently on a little circular frame, and her
father read the newspaper, not so attentively but that he could comment
humorously now and again upon the fortunes of the hero and the heroine.
The Hilberys subscribed to a library, which delivered books on Tuesdays
and Fridays, and Katharine did her best to interest her parents in the
works of living and highly respectable authors; but Mrs. Hilbery was
perturbed by the very look of the light, gold-wreathed volumes, and
would make little faces as if she tasted something bitter as the
reading went on; while Mr. Hilbery would treat the moderns with a
curious elaborate banter such as one might apply to the antics of a
promising child. So this evening, after five pages or so of one of
these masters, Mrs. Hilbery protested that it was all too clever and
cheap and nasty for words.

“Please, Katharine, read us something _real_.”

Katharine had to go to the bookcase and choose a portly volume in
sleek, yellow calf, which had directly a sedative effect upon both her
parents. But the delivery of the evening post broke in upon the periods
of Henry Fielding, and Katharine found that her letters needed all her
attention.




CHAPTER VIII


She took her letters up to her room with her, having persuaded her
mother to go to bed directly Mr. Hilbery left them, for so long as she
sat in the same room as her mother, Mrs. Hilbery might, at any moment,
ask for a sight of the post. A very hasty glance through many sheets
had shown Katharine that, by some coincidence, her attention had to be
directed to many different anxieties simultaneously. In the first
place, Rodney had written a very full account of his state of mind,
which was illustrated by a sonnet, and he demanded a reconsideration of
their position, which agitated Katharine more than she liked. Then
there were two letters which had to be laid side by side and compared
before she could make out the truth of their story, and even when she
knew the facts she could not decide what to make of them; and finally
she had to reflect upon a great many pages from a cousin who found
himself in financial difficulties, which forced him to the uncongenial
occupation of teaching the young ladies of Bungay to play upon the
violin.

But the two letters which each told the same story differently were the
chief source of her perplexity. She was really rather shocked to find
it definitely established that her own second cousin, Cyril Alardyce,
had lived for the last four years with a woman who was not his wife,
who had borne him two children, and was now about to bear him another.
This state of things had been discovered by Mrs. Milvain, her aunt
Celia, a zealous inquirer into such matters, whose letter was also
under consideration. Cyril, she said, must be made to marry the woman
at once; and Cyril, rightly or wrongly, was indignant with such
interference with his affairs, and would not own that he had any cause
to be ashamed of himself. Had he any cause to be ashamed of himself,
Katharine wondered; and she turned to her aunt again.

“Remember,” she wrote, in her profuse, emphatic statement, “that he
bears your grandfather’s name, and so will the child that is to be
born. The poor boy is not so much to blame as the woman who deluded
him, thinking him a gentleman, which he IS, and having money, which he
has _not_.”

“What would Ralph Denham say to this?” thought Katharine, beginning to
pace up and down her bedroom. She twitched aside the curtains, so that,
on turning, she was faced by darkness, and looking out, could just
distinguish the branches of a plane-tree and the yellow lights of some
one else’s windows.

“What would Mary Datchet and Ralph Denham say?” she reflected, pausing
by the window, which, as the night was warm, she raised, in order to
feel the air upon her face, and to lose herself in the nothingness of
night. But with the air the distant humming sound of far-off crowded
thoroughfares was admitted to the room. The incessant and tumultuous
hum of the distant traffic seemed, as she stood there, to represent the
thick texture of her life, for her life was so hemmed in with the
progress of other lives that the sound of its own advance was
inaudible. People like Ralph and Mary, she thought, had it all their
own way, and an empty space before them, and, as she envied them, she
cast her mind out to imagine an empty land where all this petty
intercourse of men and women, this life made up of the dense crossings
and entanglements of men and women, had no existence whatever. Even
now, alone, at night, looking out into the shapeless mass of London,
she was forced to remember that there was one point and here another
with which she had some connection. William Rodney, at this very
moment, was seated in a minute speck of light somewhere to the east of
her, and his mind was occupied, not with his book, but with her. She
wished that no one in the whole world would think of her. However,
there was no way of escaping from one’s fellow-beings, she concluded,
and shut the window with a sigh, and returned once more to her letters.

She could not doubt but that William’s letter was the most genuine she
had yet received from him. He had come to the conclusion that he could
not live without her, he wrote. He believed that he knew her, and could
give her happiness, and that their marriage would be unlike other
marriages. Nor was the sonnet, in spite of its accomplishment, lacking
in passion, and Katharine, as she read the pages through again, could
see in what direction her feelings ought to flow, supposing they
revealed themselves. She would come to feel a humorous sort of
tenderness for him, a zealous care for his susceptibilities, and, after
all, she considered, thinking of her father and mother, what is love?

Naturally, with her face, position, and background, she had experience
of young men who wished to marry her, and made protestations of love,
but, perhaps because she did not return the feeling, it remained
something of a pageant to her. Not having experience of it herself, her
mind had unconsciously occupied itself for some years in dressing up an
image of love, and the marriage that was the outcome of love, and the
man who inspired love, which naturally dwarfed any examples that came
her way. Easily, and without correction by reason, her imagination made
pictures, superb backgrounds casting a rich though phantom light upon
the facts in the foreground. Splendid as the waters that drop with
resounding thunder from high ledges of rock, and plunge downwards into
the blue depths of night, was the presence of love she dreamt, drawing
into it every drop of the force of life, and dashing them all asunder
in the superb catastrophe in which everything was surrendered, and
nothing might be reclaimed. The man, too, was some magnanimous hero,
riding a great horse by the shore of the sea. They rode through forests
together, they galloped by the rim of the sea. But waking, she was able
to contemplate a perfectly loveless marriage, as the thing one did
actually in real life, for possibly the people who dream thus are those
who do the most prosaic things.

At this moment she was much inclined to sit on into the night, spinning
her light fabric of thoughts until she tired of their futility, and
went to her mathematics; but, as she knew very well, it was necessary
that she should see her father before he went to bed. The case of Cyril
Alardyce must be discussed, her mother’s illusions and the rights of
the family attended to. Being vague herself as to what all this
amounted to, she had to take counsel with her father. She took her
letters in her hand and went downstairs. It was past eleven, and the
clocks had come into their reign, the grandfather’s clock in the hall
ticking in competition with the small clock on the landing. Mr.
Hilbery’s study ran out behind the rest of the house, on the ground
floor, and was a very silent, subterranean place, the sun in daytime
casting a mere abstract of light through a skylight upon his books and
the large table, with its spread of white papers, now illumined by a
green reading-lamp. Here Mr. Hilbery sat editing his review, or placing
together documents by means of which it could be proved that Shelley
had written “of” instead of “and,” or that the inn in which Byron had
slept was called the “Nag’s Head” and not the “Turkish Knight,” or that
the Christian name of Keats’s uncle had been John rather than Richard,
for he knew more minute details about these poets than any man in
England, probably, and was preparing an edition of Shelley which
scrupulously observed the poet’s system of punctuation. He saw the
humor of these researches, but that did not prevent him from carrying
them out with the utmost scrupulosity.

He was lying back comfortably in a deep arm-chair smoking a cigar, and
ruminating the fruitful question as to whether Coleridge had wished to
marry Dorothy Wordsworth, and what, if he had done so, would have been
the consequences to him in particular, and to literature in general.
When Katharine came in he reflected that he knew what she had come for,
and he made a pencil note before he spoke to her. Having done this, he
saw that she was reading, and he watched her for a moment without
saying anything. She was reading “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” and
her mind was full of the Italian hills and the blue daylight, and the
hedges set with little rosettes of red and white roses. Feeling that
her father waited for her, she sighed and said, shutting her book:

“I’ve had a letter from Aunt Celia about Cyril, father.... It seems to
be true—about his marriage. What are we to do?”

“Cyril seems to have been behaving in a very foolish manner,” said Mr.
Hilbery, in his pleasant and deliberate tones.

Katharine found some difficulty in carrying on the conversation, while
her father balanced his finger-tips so judiciously, and seemed to
reserve so many of his thoughts for himself.

“He’s about done for himself, I should say,” he continued. Without
saying anything, he took Katharine’s letters out of her hand, adjusted
his eyeglasses, and read them through.

At length he said “Humph!” and gave the letters back to her.

“Mother knows nothing about it,” Katharine remarked. “Will you tell
her?”

“I shall tell your mother. But I shall tell her that there is nothing
whatever for us to do.”

“But the marriage?” Katharine asked, with some diffidence.

Mr. Hilbery said nothing, and stared into the fire.

“What in the name of conscience did he do it for?” he speculated at
last, rather to himself than to her.

Katharine had begun to read her aunt’s letter over again, and she now
quoted a sentence. “Ibsen and Butler.... He has sent me a letter full
of quotations—nonsense, though clever nonsense.”

“Well, if the younger generation want to carry on its life on those
lines, it’s none of our affair,” he remarked.

“But isn’t it our affair, perhaps, to make them get married?” Katharine
asked rather wearily.

“Why the dickens should they apply to me?” her father demanded with
sudden irritation.

“Only as the head of the family—”

“But I’m not the head of the family. Alfred’s the head of the family.
Let them apply to Alfred,” said Mr. Hilbery, relapsing again into his
arm-chair. Katharine was aware that she had touched a sensitive spot,
however, in mentioning the family.

“I think, perhaps, the best thing would be for me to go and see them,”
she observed.

“I won’t have you going anywhere near them,” Mr. Hilbery replied with
unwonted decision and authority. “Indeed, I don’t understand why
they’ve dragged you into the business at all—I don’t see that it’s got
anything to do with you.”

“I’ve always been friends with Cyril,” Katharine observed.

“But did he ever tell you anything about this?” Mr. Hilbery asked
rather sharply.

Katharine shook her head. She was, indeed, a good deal hurt that Cyril
had not confided in her—did he think, as Ralph Denham or Mary Datchet
might think, that she was, for some reason, unsympathetic—hostile even?

“As to your mother,” said Mr. Hilbery, after a pause, in which he
seemed to be considering the color of the flames, “you had better tell
her the facts. She’d better know the facts before every one begins to
talk about it, though why Aunt Celia thinks it necessary to come, I’m
sure I don’t know. And the less talk there is the better.”

Granting the assumption that gentlemen of sixty who are highly
cultivated, and have had much experience of life, probably think of
many things which they do not say, Katharine could not help feeling
rather puzzled by her father’s attitude, as she went back to her room.
What a distance he was from it all! How superficially he smoothed these
events into a semblance of decency which harmonized with his own view
of life! He never wondered what Cyril had felt, nor did the hidden
aspects of the case tempt him to examine into them. He merely seemed to
realize, rather languidly, that Cyril had behaved in a way which was
foolish, because other people did not behave in that way. He seemed to
be looking through a telescope at little figures hundreds of miles in
the distance.

Her selfish anxiety not to have to tell Mrs. Hilbery what had happened
made her follow her father into the hall after breakfast the next
morning in order to question him.

“Have you told mother?” she asked. Her manner to her father was almost
stern, and she seemed to hold endless depths of reflection in the dark
of her eyes.

Mr. Hilbery sighed.

“My dear child, it went out of my head.” He smoothed his silk hat
energetically, and at once affected an air of hurry. “I’ll send a note
round from the office.... I’m late this morning, and I’ve any amount of
proofs to get through.”

“That wouldn’t do at all,” Katharine said decidedly. “She must be
told—you or I must tell her. We ought to have told her at first.”

Mr. Hilbery had now placed his hat on his head, and his hand was on the
door-knob. An expression which Katharine knew well from her childhood,
when he asked her to shield him in some neglect of duty, came into his
eyes; malice, humor, and irresponsibility were blended in it. He nodded
his head to and fro significantly, opened the door with an adroit
movement, and stepped out with a lightness unexpected at his age. He
waved his hand once to his daughter, and was gone. Left alone,
Katharine could not help laughing to find herself cheated as usual in
domestic bargainings with her father, and left to do the disagreeable
work which belonged, by rights, to him.




CHAPTER IX


Katharine disliked telling her mother about Cyril’s misbehavior quite
as much as her father did, and for much the same reasons. They both
shrank, nervously, as people fear the report of a gun on the stage,
from all that would have to be said on this occasion. Katharine,
moreover, was unable to decide what she thought of Cyril’s misbehavior.
As usual, she saw something which her father and mother did not see,
and the effect of that something was to suspend Cyril’s behavior in her
mind without any qualification at all. They would think whether it was
good or bad; to her it was merely a thing that had happened.

When Katharine reached the study, Mrs. Hilbery had already dipped her
pen in the ink.

“Katharine,” she said, lifting it in the air, “I’ve just made out such
a queer, strange thing about your grandfather. I’m three years and six
months older than he was when he died. I couldn’t very well have been
his mother, but I might have been his elder sister, and that seems to
me such a pleasant fancy. I’m going to start quite fresh this morning,
and get a lot done.”

She began her sentence, at any rate, and Katharine sat down at her own
table, untied the bundle of old letters upon which she was working,
smoothed them out absent-mindedly, and began to decipher the faded
script. In a minute she looked across at her mother, to judge her mood.
Peace and happiness had relaxed every muscle in her face; her lips were
parted very slightly, and her breath came in smooth, controlled
inspirations like those of a child who is surrounding itself with a
building of bricks, and increasing in ecstasy as each brick is placed
in position. So Mrs. Hilbery was raising round her the skies and trees
of the past with every stroke of her pen, and recalling the voices of
the dead. Quiet as the room was, and undisturbed by the sounds of the
present moment, Katharine could fancy that here was a deep pool of past
time, and that she and her mother were bathed in the light of sixty
years ago. What could the present give, she wondered, to compare with
the rich crowd of gifts bestowed by the past? Here was a Thursday
morning in process of manufacture; each second was minted fresh by the
clock upon the mantelpiece. She strained her ears and could just hear,
far off, the hoot of a motor-car and the rush of wheels coming nearer
and dying away again, and the voices of men crying old iron and
vegetables in one of the poorer streets at the back of the house.
Rooms, of course, accumulate their suggestions, and any room in which
one has been used to carry on any particular occupation gives off
memories of moods, of ideas, of postures that have been seen in it; so
that to attempt any different kind of work there is almost impossible.

Katharine was unconsciously affected, each time she entered her
mother’s room, by all these influences, which had had their birth years
ago, when she was a child, and had something sweet and solemn about
them, and connected themselves with early memories of the cavernous
glooms and sonorous echoes of the Abbey where her grandfather lay
buried. All the books and pictures, even the chairs and tables, had
belonged to him, or had reference to him; even the china dogs on the
mantelpiece and the little shepherdesses with their sheep had been
bought by him for a penny a piece from a man who used to stand with a
tray of toys in Kensington High Street, as Katharine had often heard
her mother tell. Often she had sat in this room, with her mind fixed so
firmly on those vanished figures that she could almost see the muscles
round their eyes and lips, and had given to each his own voice, with
its tricks of accent, and his coat and his cravat. Often she had seemed
to herself to be moving among them, an invisible ghost among the
living, better acquainted with them

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