“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 him
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self 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
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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
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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
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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.
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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 entangle
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ments 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.
