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 re
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claimed. 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
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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.
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“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
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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 light
ness 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.
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CHAPTER IX this morning, and get a lot done.”
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
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
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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 than with her own friends, because she knew their
secrets and possessed a divine foreknowledge of their
destiny. They had been so unhappy, such muddlers, so
wrong-headed, it seemed to her. She could have told them
what to do, and what not to do. It was a melancholy fact
that they would pay no heed to her, and were bound to
come to grief in their own antiquated way. Their behavior
was often grotesquely irrational; their conventions
monstrously absurd; and yet, as she brooded upon them,
she felt so closely attached to them that it was useless
to try to pass judgment upon them. She very nearly lost
consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future
of her own. On a morning of slight depression, such
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as this, she would try to find some sort of clue to the
muddle which their old letters presented; some reason
which seemed to make it worth while to them; some aim
which they kept steadily in view—but she was interrupted.
Mrs. Hilbery had risen from her table, and was standing
looking out of the window at a string of barges swimming
up the river.
Katharine watched her. Suddenly Mrs. Hilbery turned
abruptly, and exclaimed:
“I really believe I’m bewitched! I only want three sentences,
you see, something quite straightforward and
commonplace, and I can’t find ‘em.”
