assumed the shape of an elderly man with a mustache,
she described how she had arrived in London that very
afternoon, and how she had taken a cab and driven
through the streets. Mr. Peyton, an editor of fifty years,
bowed his bald head repeatedly, with apparent understanding.
At least, he understood that she was very young
and pretty, and saw that she was excited, though he could
not gather at once from her words or remember from his
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own experience what there was to be excited about. “Were
there any buds on the trees?” he asked. “Which line did
she travel by?”
He was cut short in these amiable inquiries by her desire
to know whether he was one of those who read, or
one of those who look out of the window? Mr. Peyton was
by no means sure which he did. He rather thought he did
both. He was told that he had made a most dangerous
confession. She could deduce his entire history from that
one fact. He challenged her to proceed; and she proclaimed
him a Liberal Member of Parliament.
William, nominally engaged in a desultory conversation
with Aunt Eleanor, heard every word, and taking advantage
of the fact that elderly ladies have little continuity
of conversation, at least with those whom they
esteem for their youth and their sex, he asserted his presence
by a very nervous laugh.
Cassandra turned to him directly. She was enchanted to
find that, instantly and with such ease, another of these
fascinating beings was offering untold wealth for her extraction.
“There’s no doubt what you do in a railway carriage,
William,” she said, making use in her pleasure of his first
name. “You never once look out of the window; you read
all the time.”
“And what facts do you deduce from that?” Mr. Peyton
asked.
“Oh, that he’s a poet, of course,” said Cassandra. “But I
must confess that I knew that before, so it isn’t fair. I’ve
got your manuscript with me,” she went on, disregarding
Mr. Peyton in a shameless way. “I’ve got all sorts of things
I want to ask you about it.”
William inclined his head and tried to conceal the pleasure
that her remark gave him. But the pleasure was not
unalloyed. However susceptible to flattery William might
be, he would never tolerate it from people who showed a
gross or emotional taste in literature, and if Cassandra
erred even slightly from what he considered essential in
this respect he would express his discomfort by flinging
out his hands and wrinkling his forehead; he would find
no pleasure in her flattery after that.
“First of all,” she proceeded, “I want to know why you
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chose to write a play?”
“Ah! You mean it’s not dramatic?”
“I mean that I don’t see what it would gain by being
acted. But then does Shakespeare gain? Henry and I are
always arguing about Shakespeare. I’m certain he’s wrong,
but I can’t prove it because I’ve only seen Shakespeare
acted once in Lincoln. But I’m quite positive,” she insisted,
“that Shakespeare wrote for the stage.”
“You’re perfectly right,” Rodney exclaimed. “I was hoping
you were on that side. Henry’s wrong—entirely wrong.
Of course, I’ve failed, as all the moderns fail. Dear, dear,
I wish I’d consulted you before.”
From this point they proceeded to go over, as far as
memory served them, the different aspects of Rodney’s
drama. She said nothing that jarred upon him, and untrained
daring had the power to stimulate experience to
such an extent that Rodney was frequently seen to hold
his fork suspended before him, while he debated the first
principles of the art. Mrs. Hilbery thought to herself that
she had never seen him to such advantage; yes, he was
somehow different; he reminded her of some one who
was dead, some one who was distinguished—she had
forgotten his name.
Cassandra’s voice rose high in its excitement.
“You’ve not read ‘The Idiot’!” she exclaimed.
“I’ve read ‘War and Peace’,” William replied, a little testily.
“‘War and Peace’!” she echoed, in a tone of derision.
“I confess I don’t understand the Russians.”
“Shake hands! Shake hands!” boomed Uncle Aubrey from
across the table. “Neither do I. And I hazard the opinion
that they don’t themselves.”
The old gentleman had ruled a large part of the Indian
Empire, but he was in the habit of saying that he had
rather have written the works of Dickens. The table now
took possession of a subject much to its liking. Aunt
Eleanor showed premonitory signs of pronouncing an
opinion. Although she had blunted her taste upon some
form of philanthropy for twenty-five years, she had a fine
natural instinct for an upstart or a pretender, and knew
to a hairbreadth what literature should be and what it
should not be. She was born to the knowledge, and scarcely
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thought it a matter to be proud of.
“Insanity is not a fit subject for fiction,” she announced
positively.
“There’s the well-known case of Hamlet,” Mr. Hilbery
interposed, in his leisurely, half-humorous tones.
“Ah, but poetry’s different, Trevor,” said Aunt Eleanor,
as if she had special authority from Shakespeare to say
so. “Different altogether. And I’ve never thought, for my
part, that Hamlet was as mad as they make out. What is
your opinion, Mr. Peyton?” For, as there was a minister of
literature present in the person of the editor of an esteemed
review, she deferred to him.
Mr. Peyton leant a little back in his chair, and, putting
his head rather on one side, observed that that was a question
that he had never been able to answer entirely to his
satisfaction. There was much to be said on both sides, but
as he considered upon which side he should say it, Mrs.
Hilbery broke in upon his judicious meditations.
“Lovely, lovely Ophelia!” she exclaimed. “What a wonderful
power it is—poetry! I wake up in the morning all
bedraggled; there’s a yellow fog outside; little Emily turns
on the electric light when she brings me my tea, and
says, ‘Oh, ma’am, the water’s frozen in the cistern, and
cook’s cut her finger to the bone.’ And then I open a little
green book, and the birds are singing, the stars shining,
the flowers twinkling—” She looked about her as if these
presences had suddenly manifested themselves round her
dining-room table.
“Has the cook cut her finger badly?” Aunt Eleanor demanded,
addressing herself naturally to Katharine.
“Oh, the cook’s finger is only my way of putting it,”
said Mrs. Hilbery. “But if she had cut her arm off, Katharine
would have sewn it on again,” she remarked, with an
affectionate glance at her daughter, who looked, she
thought, a little sad. “But what horrid, horrid thoughts,”
she wound up, laying down her napkin and pushing her
chair back. “Come, let us find something more cheerful
to talk about upstairs.”
Upstairs in the drawing-room Cassandra found fresh
sources of pleasure, first in the distinguished and expectant
look of the room, and then in the chance of exercising
her divining-rod upon a new assortment of human
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beings. But the low tones of the women, their meditative
silences, the beauty which, to her at least, shone even
from black satin and the knobs of amber which encircled
elderly necks, changed her wish to chatter to a more subdued
desire merely to watch and to whisper. She entered
with delight into an atmosphere in which private matters
were being interchanged freely, almost in monosyllables,
by the older women who now accepted her as one of
themselves. Her expression became very gentle and sympathetic,
as if she, too, were full of solicitude for the
world which was somehow being cared for, managed and
deprecated by Aunt Maggie and Aunt Eleanor. After a time
she perceived that Katharine was outside the community
in some way, and, suddenly, she threw aside her wisdom
and gentleness and concern and began to laugh.
“What are you laughing at?” Katharine asked.
A joke so foolish and unfilial wasn’t worth explaining.
“It was nothing—ridiculous—in the worst of taste, but
still, if you half shut your eyes and looked—” Katharine
half shut her eyes and looked, but she looked in the wrong
direction, and Cassandra laughed more than ever, and
was still laughing and doing her best to explain in a
whisper that Aunt Eleanor, through half-shut eyes, was
like the parrot in the cage at Stogdon House, when the
gentlemen came in and Rodney walked straight up to
them and wanted to know what they were laughing at.
“I utterly refuse to tell you!” Cassandra replied, standing
up straight, clasping her hands in front of her, and
facing him. Her mockery was delicious to him. He had
not even for a second the fear that she had been laughing
at him. She was laughing because life was so adorable,
so enchanting.
“Ah, but you’re cruel to make me feel the barbarity of
my sex,” he replied, drawing his feet together and pressing
his finger-tips upon an imaginary opera-hat or malacca
cane. “We’ve been discussing all sorts of dull things,
and now I shall never know what I want to know more
than anything in the world.”
“You don’t deceive us for a minute!” she cried. “Not for
a second. We both know that you’ve been enjoying yourself
immensely. Hasn’t he, Katharine?”
“No,” she replied, “I think he’s speaking the truth. He
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doesn’t care much for politics.”
Her words, though spoken simply, produced a curious
change in the light, sparkling atmosphere. William at once
lost his look of animation and said seriously:
“I detest politics.”
“I don’t think any man has the right to say that,” said
Cassandra, almost severely.
“I agree. I mean that I detest politicians,” he corrected
himself quickly.
“You see, I believe Cassandra is what they call a Feminist,”
Katharine went on. “Or rather, she was a Feminist
six months ago, but it’s no good supposing that she is
now what she was then. That is one of her greatest charms
in my eyes. One never can tell.” She smiled at her as an
elder sister might smile.
“Katharine, you make one feel so horribly small!”
Cassandra exclaimed.
“No, no, that’s not what she means,” Rodney interposed.
“I quite agree that women have an immense advantage
over us there. One misses a lot by attempting to know
things thoroughly.”
“He knows Greek thoroughly,” said Katharine. “But then
he also knows a good deal about painting, and a certain
amount about music. He’s very cultivated—perhaps the
most cultivated person I know.”
“And poetry,” Cassandra added.
“Yes, I was forgetting his play,” Katharine remarked,
and turning her head as though she saw something that
needed her attention in a far corner of the room, she left
them.
For a moment they stood silent, after what seemed a
deliberate introduction to each other, and Cassandra
watched her crossing the room.
“Henry,” she said next moment, “would say that a stage
ought to be no bigger than this drawing-room. He wants
there to be singing and dancing as well as acting—only
all the opposite of Wagner—you understand?”
They sat down, and Katharine, turning when she reached
the window, saw William with his hand raised in gesticulation
and his mouth open, as if ready to speak the moment
Cassandra ceased.
Katharine’s duty, whether it was to pull a curtain or
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move a chair, was either forgotten or discharged, but she
continued to stand by the window without doing anything.
The elderly people were all grouped together round
the fire. They seemed an independent, middle-aged community
busy with its own concerns. They were telling
stories very well and listening to them very graciously.
But for her there was no obvious employment.
“If anybody says anything, I shall say that I’m looking
at the river,” she thought, for in her slavery to her family
traditions, she was ready to pay for her transgression
with some plausible falsehood. She pushed aside the blind
and looked at the river. But it was a dark night and the
water was barely visible. Cabs were passing, and couples
were loitering slowly along the road, keeping as close to
the railings as possible, though the trees had as yet no
leaves to cast shadow upon their embraces. Katharine,
thus withdrawn, felt her loneliness. The evening had been
one of pain, offering her, minute after minute, plainer
proof that things would fall out as she had foreseen. She
had faced tones, gestures, glances; she knew, with her
back to them, that William, even now, was plunging deeper
and deeper into the delight of unexpected understanding
with Cassandra. He had almost told her that he was finding
it infinitely better than he could have believed. She
looked out of the window, sternly determined to forget
private misfortunes, to forget herself, to forget individual
lives. With her eyes upon the dark sky, voices reached her
from the room in which she was standing. She heard them
as if they came from people in another world, a world
antecedent to her world, a world that was the prelude,
the antechamber to reality; it was as if, lately dead, she
heard the living talking. The dream nature of our life had
never been more apparent to her, never had life been
more certainly an affair of four walls, whose objects existed
only within the range of lights and fires, beyond
which lay nothing, or nothing more than darkness. She
seemed physically to have stepped beyond the region
where the light of illusion still makes it desirable to possess,
to love, to struggle. And yet her melancholy brought
her no serenity. She still heard the voices within the room.
She was still tormented by desires. She wished to be beyond
their range. She wished inconsistently enough that
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