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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.
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 armchair 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
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