the fifth chapter of her grandfather’s biography. Beginning
with a perfectly frivolous jest, Mrs. Hilbery had
evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among
other things, of writing Shakespeare’s sonnets; the idea,
struck out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded
a number of privately printed manuals within the next
few days for her instruction, had submerged her in a flood
of Elizabethan literature; she had come half to believe in
her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other
people’s facts, and all her fancy for the time being centered
upon Stratford-on-Avon. She had a plan, she told
Katharine, when, rather later than usual, Katharine came
into the room the morning after her walk by the river, for
visiting Shakespeare’s tomb. Any fact about the poet had
become, for the moment, of far greater interest to her
than the immediate present, and the certainty that there
was existing in England a spot of ground where
Shakespeare had undoubtedly stood, where his very bones
lay directly beneath one’s feet, was so absorbing to her
on this particular occasion that she greeted her daughter
with the exclamation:
“D’you think he ever passed this house?”
The question, for the moment, seemed to Katharine to
have reference to Ralph Denham.
“On his way to Blackfriars, I mean,” Mrs. Hilbery continued,
“for you know the latest discovery is that he owned
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a house there.”
Katharine still looked about her in perplexity, and Mrs.
Hilbery added:
“Which is a proof that he wasn’t as poor as they’ve
sometimes said. I should like to think that he had enough,
though I don’t in the least want him to be rich.”
Then, perceiving her daughter’s expression of perplexity,
Mrs. Hilbery burst out laughing.
“My dear, I’m not talking about YOUR William, though
that’s another reason for liking him. I’m talking, I’m thinking,
I’m dreaming of MY William—William Shakespeare,
of course. Isn’t it odd,” she mused, standing at the window
and tapping gently upon the pane, “that for all one
can see, that dear old thing in the blue bonnet, crossing
the road with her basket on her arm, has never heard
that there was such a person? Yet it all goes on: lawyers
hurrying to their work, cabmen squabbling for their fares,
little boys rolling their hoops, little girls throwing bread
to the gulls, as if there weren’t a Shakespeare in the
world. I should like to stand at that crossing all day long
and say: ‘People, read Shakespeare!’”
Katharine sat down at her table and opened a long
dusty envelope. As Shelley was mentioned in the course
of the letter as if he were alive, it had, of course, considerable
value. Her immediate task was to decide whether
the whole letter should be printed, or only the paragraph
which mentioned Shelley’s name, and she reached out for
a pen and held it in readiness to do justice upon the
sheet. Her pen, however, remained in the air. Almost surreptitiously
she slipped a clean sheet in front of her, and
her hand, descending, began drawing square boxes halved
and quartered by straight lines, and then circles which
underwent the same process of dissection.
“Katharine! I’ve hit upon a brilliant idea!” Mrs. Hilbery
exclaimed—”to lay out, say, a hundred pounds or so on
copies of Shakespeare, and give them to working men.
Some of your clever friends who get up meetings might
help us, Katharine. And that might lead to a playhouse,
where we could all take parts. You’d be Rosalind—but
you’ve a dash of the old nurse in you. Your father’s Hamlet,
come to years of discretion; and I’m—well, I’m a bit
of them all; I’m quite a large bit of the fool, but the fools
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in Shakespeare say all the clever things. Now who shall
William be? A hero? Hotspur? Henry the Fifth? No, William’s
got a touch of Hamlet in him, too. I can fancy that William
talks to himself when he’s alone. Ah, Katharine, you
must say very beautiful things when you’re together!”
she added wistfully, with a glance at her daughter, who
had told her nothing about the dinner the night before.
“Oh, we talk a lot of nonsense,” said Katharine, hiding
her slip of paper as her mother stood by her, and spreading
the old letter about Shelley in front of her.
“It won’t seem to you nonsense in ten years’ time,”
said Mrs. Hilbery. “Believe me, Katharine, you’ll look back
on these days afterwards; you’ll remember all the silly
things you’ve said; and you’ll find that your life has been
built on them. The best of life is built on what we say
when we’re in love. It isn’t nonsense, Katharine,” she
urged, “it’s the truth, it’s the only truth.”
Katharine was on the point of interrupting her mother,
and then she was on the point of confiding in her. They
came strangely close together sometimes. But, while she
hesitated and sought for words not too direct, her mother
had recourse to Shakespeare, and turned page after page,
set upon finding some quotation which said all this about
love far, far better than she could. Accordingly, Katharine
did nothing but scrub one of her circles an intense black
with her pencil, in the midst of which process the telephone-
bell rang, and she left the room to answer it.
When she returned, Mrs. Hilbery had found not the passage
she wanted, but another of exquisite beauty as she
justly observed, looking up for a second to ask Katharine
who that was?
“Mary Datchet,” Katharine replied briefly.
“Ah—I half wish I’d called you Mary, but it wouldn’t
have gone with Hilbery, and it wouldn’t have gone with
Rodney. Now this isn’t the passage I wanted. (I never can
find what I want.) But it’s spring; it’s the daffodils; it’s
the green fields; it’s the birds.”
She was cut short in her quotation by another imperative
telephone-bell. Once more Katharine left the room.
“My dear child, how odious the triumphs of science are!”
Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed on her return. “They’ll be linking
us with the moon next—but who was that?”
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“William,” Katharine replied yet more briefly.
“I’ll forgive William anything, for I’m certain that there
aren’t any Williams in the moon. I hope he’s coming to
luncheon?”
“He’s coming to tea.”
“Well, that’s better than nothing, and I promise to leave
you alone.”
“There’s no need for you to do that,” said Katharine.
She swept her hand over the faded sheet, and drew
herself up squarely to the table as if she refused to waste
time any longer. The gesture was not lost upon her mother.
It hinted at the existence of something stern and unapproachable
in her daughter’s character, which struck chill
upon her, as the sight of poverty, or drunkenness, or the
logic with which Mr. Hilbery sometimes thought good to
demolish her certainty of an approaching millennium
struck chill upon her. She went back to her own table,
and putting on her spectacles with a curious expression
of quiet humility, addressed herself for the first time that
morning to the task before her. The shock with an unsympathetic
world had a sobering effect on her. For once,
her industry surpassed her daughter’s. Katharine could
not reduce the world to that particular perspective in
which Harriet Martineau, for instance, was a figure of
solid importance, and possessed of a genuine relationship
to this figure or to that date. Singularly enough, the
sharp call of the telephone-bell still echoed in her ear,
and her body and mind were in a state of tension, as if,
at any moment, she might hear another summons of
greater interest to her than the whole of the nineteenth
century. She did not clearly realize what this call was to
be; but when the ears have got into the habit of listening,
they go on listening involuntarily, and thus Katharine
spent the greater part of the morning in listening to a
variety of sounds in the back streets of Chelsea. For the
first time in her life, probably, she wished that Mrs. Hilbery
would not keep so closely to her work. A quotation from
Shakespeare would not have come amiss. Now and again
she heard a sigh from her mother’s table, but that was
the only proof she gave of her existence, and Katharine
did not think of connecting it with the square aspect of
her own position at the table, or, perhaps, she would
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Night and Day
have thrown her pen down and told her mother the reason
of her restlessness. The only writing she managed to accomplish
in the course of the morning was one letter, addressed
to her cousin, Cassandra Otway—a rambling letter,
long, affectionate, playful and commanding all at once.
She bade Cassandra put her creatures in the charge of a
groom, and come to them for a week or so. They would go
and hear some music together. Cassandra’s dislike of rational
society, she said, was an affectation fast hardening
into a prejudice, which would, in the long run, isolate her
from all interesting people and pursuits. She was finishing
the sheet when the sound she was anticipating all the
time actually struck upon her ears. She jumped up hastily,
and slammed the door with a sharpness which made Mrs.
Hilbery start. Where was Katharine off to? In her preoccupied
state she had not heard the bell.
The alcove on the stairs, in which the telephone was
placed, was screened for privacy by a curtain of purple
velvet. It was a pocket for superfluous possessions, such
as exist in most houses which harbor the wreckage of
three generations. Prints of great-uncles, famed for their
prowess in the East, hung above Chinese teapots, whose
sides were riveted by little gold stitches, and the precious
teapots, again, stood upon bookcases containing
the complete works of William Cowper and Sir Walter Scott.
The thread of sound, issuing from the telephone, was
always colored by the surroundings which received it, so
it seemed to Katharine. Whose voice was now going to
combine with them, or to strike a discord?
“Whose voice?” she asked herself, hearing a man inquire,
with great determination, for her number. The unfamiliar
voice now asked for Miss Hilbery. Out of all the welter of
voices which crowd round the far end of the telephone,
out of the enormous range of possibilities, whose voice,
what possibility, was this? A pause gave her time to ask
herself this question. It was solved next moment.
“I’ve looked out the train… . Early on Saturday afternoon
would suit me best… . I’m Ralph Denham… . But
I’ll write it down… .”
With more than the usual sense of being impinged upon
the point of a bayonet, Katharine replied:
“I think I could come. I’ll look at my engagements… .
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Virginia Woolf
Hold on.”
She dropped the machine, and looked fixedly at the
print of the great-uncle who had not ceased to gaze,
with an air of amiable authority, into a world which, as
yet, beheld no symptoms of the Indian Mutiny. And yet,
gently swinging against the wall, within the black tube,
was a voice which recked nothing of Uncle James, of China
teapots, or of red velvet curtains. She watched the oscillation
of the tube, and at the same moment became conscious
of the individuality of the house in which she stood;
she heard the soft domestic sounds of regular existence
upon staircases and floors above her head, and movements
through the wall in the house next door. She had
no very clear vision of Denham himself, when she lifted
the telephone to her lips and replied that she thought
Saturday would suit her. She hoped that he would not say
good-bye at once, although she felt no particular anxiety
to attend to what he was saying, and began, even while
he spoke, to think of her own upper room, with its books,
its papers pressed between the leaves of dictionaries,
and the table that could be cleared for work. She re
placed the instrument, thoughtfully; her restlessness was
assuaged; she finished her letter to Cassandra without
difficulty, addressed the envelope, and fixed the stamp
with her usual quick decision.
A bunch of anemones caught Mrs. Hilbery’s eye when
they had finished luncheon. The blue and purple and white
of the bowl, standing in a pool of variegated light on a
polished Chippendale table in the drawing-room window,
made her stop dead with an exclamation of pleasure.
“Who is lying ill in bed, Katharine?” she demanded.
“Which of our friends wants cheering up? Who feels that
they’ve been forgotten and passed over, and that nobody
wants them? Whose water rates are overdue, and the cook
leaving in a temper without waiting for her wages? There
was somebody I know—” she concluded, but for the moment
the name of this desirable acquaintance escaped
her. The best representative of the forlorn company whose
day would be brightened by a bunch of anemones was, in
Katharine’s opinion, the widow of a general living in the
Cromwell Road. In default of the actually destitute and
starving, whom she would much have preferred, Mrs.
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Hilbery was forced to acknowledge her claims, for though
in comfortable circumstances, she was extremely dull,
unattractive, connected in some oblique fashion with literature,
and had been touched to the verge of tears, on
one occasion, by an afternoon call.
It happened that Mrs. Hilbery had an engagement elsewhere,
so that the task of taking the flowers to the
Cromwell Road fell upon Katharine. She took her letter to
Cassandra with her, meaning to post it in the first pillar-
box she came to. When, however, she was fairly out of
doors, and constantly invited by pillar-boxes and post-
offices to slip her envelope down their scarlet throats,
she forbore. She made absurd excuses, as that she did
not wish to cross the road, or that she was certain to
