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tomb in Poets’ Corner, and she was told in one of those moments of
grown-up confidence which are so tremendously impressive to the
child’s mind, that he was buried there because he was a “good and
great man.” Later, on an anniversary, she was taken by her mother
through the fog in a hansom cab, and given a large bunch of bright,
sweet-scented flowers to lay upon his tomb. The candles in the church,
the singing and the booming of the organ, were all, she thought, in
his honor. Again and again she was brought down into the drawing-room
to receive the blessing of some awful distinguished old man, who sat,
even to her childish eye, somewhat apart, all gathered together and
clutching a stick, unlike an ordinary visitor in her father’s own armchair, and her father himself was there, unlike himself, too, a little
excited and very polite. These formidable old creatures used to take
her in their arms, look very keenly in her eyes, and then to bless
her, and tell her that she must mind and be a good girl, or detect a
look in her face something like Richard’s as a small boy. That drew
down upon her her mother’s fervent embrace, and she was sent back to
the nursery very proud, and with a mysterious sense of an important
and unexplained state of things, which time, by degrees, unveiled to
her.
There were always visitors—uncles and aunts and cousins “from India,”
to be reverenced for their relationship alone, and others of the
solitary and formidable class, whom she was enjoined by her parents to
“remember all your life.” By these means, and from hearing constant
talk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions of the
world included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the names
of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, for
some reason, much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to other
people. They made a kind of boundary to her vision of life, and played
a considerable part in determining her scale of good and bad in her
own small affairs. Her descent from one of these gods was no surprise
to her, but matter for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, the
privileges of her lot were taken for granted, and certain drawbacks
made themselves very manifest. Perhaps it is a little depressing to
inherit not lands but an example of intellectual and spiritual virtue;
perhaps the conclusiveness of a great ancestor is a little
discouraging to those who run the risk of comparison with him. It
seems as if, having flowered so splendidly, nothing now remained
possible but a steady growth of good, green stalk and leaf. For these
reasons, and for others, Katharine had her moments of despondency. The
glorious past, in which men and women grew to unexampled size,
intruded too much upon the present, and dwarfed it too consistently,
to be altogether encouraging to one forced to make her experiment in
living when the great age was dead.
She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural, in
the first place owing to her mother’s absorption in them, and in the
second because a great part of her time was spent in imagination with
the dead, since she was helping her mother to produce a life of the
great poet. When Katharine was seventeen or eighteen—that is to say,
some ten years ago—her mother had enthusiastically announced that
now, with a daughter to help her, the biography would soon be
published. Notices to this effect found their way into the literary
papers, and for some time Katharine worked with a sense of great pride
and achievement.
Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were making no way at
all, and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghost
of a literary temperament could doubt but that they had materials for
one of the greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelves
and boxes bulged with the precious stuff. The most private lives of
the most interesting people lay furled in yellow bundles of close-written manuscript. In addition to this Mrs. Hilbery had in her own
head as bright a vision of that time as now remained to the living,
and could give those flashes and thrills to the old words which gave
them almost the substance of flesh. She had no difficulty in writing,
and covered a page every morning as instinctively as a thrush sings,
but nevertheless, with all this to urge and inspire, and the most
devout intention to accomplish the work, the book still remained
unwritten. Papers accumulated without much furthering their task, and
in dull moments Katharine had her doubts whether they would ever
produce anything at all fit to lay before the public. Where did the
difficulty lie? Not in their materials, alas! nor in their ambitions,
but in something more profound, in her own inaptitude, and above all,
in her mother’s temperament. Katharine would calculate that she had
never known her write for more than ten minutes at a time. Ideas came
to her chiefly when she was in motion. She liked to perambulate the
room with a duster in her hand, with which she stopped to polish the
backs of already lustrous books, musing and romancing as she did so.
Suddenly the right phrase or the penetrating point of view would
suggest itself, and she would drop her duster and write ecstatically
for a few breathless moments; and then the mood would pass away, and
the duster would be sought for, and the old books polished again.
These spells of inspiration never burnt steadily, but flickered over
the gigantic mass of the subject as capriciously as a will-o’-the-wisp, lighting now on this point, now on that. It was as much as
Katharine could do to keep the pages of her mother’s manuscript in
order, but to sort them so that the sixteenth year of Richard
Alardyce’s life succeeded the fifteenth was beyond her skill. And yet
they were so brilliant, these paragraphs, so nobly phrased, so
lightning-like in their illumination, that the dead seemed to crowd
the very room. Read continuously, they produced a sort of vertigo, and
set her asking herself in despair what on earth she was to do with
them? Her mother refused, also, to face the radical questions of what
to leave in and what to leave out. She could not decide how far the
public was to be told the truth about the poet’s separation from his
wife. She drafted passages to suit either case, and then liked each so
well that she could not decide upon the rejection of either.
But the book must be written. It was a duty that they owed the world,
and to Katharine, at least, it meant more than that, for if they could
not between them get this one book accomplished they had no right to
their privileged position. Their increment became yearly more and more
unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that her
grandfather was a very great man.
By the time she was twenty-seven, these thoughts had become very
familiar to her. They trod their way through her mind as she sat
opposite her mother of a morning at a table heaped with bundles of old
letters and well supplied with pencils, scissors, bottles of gum,
india-rubber bands, large envelopes, and other appliances for the
manufacture of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham’s visit, Katharine
had resolved to try the effect of strict rules upon her mother’s
habits of literary composition. They were to be seated at their tables
every morning at ten o’clock, with a clean-swept morning of empty,
secluded hours before them. They were to keep their eyes fast upon the
paper, and nothing was to tempt them to speech, save at the stroke of
the hour when ten minutes for relaxation were to be allowed them. If
these rules were observed for a year, she made out on a sheet of paper
that the completion of the book was certain, and she laid her scheme
before her mother with a feeling that much of the task was already
accomplished. Mrs. Hilbery examined the sheet of paper very carefully.
Then she clapped her hands and exclaimed enthusiastically:
“Well done, Katharine! What a wonderful head for business you’ve got!
Now I shall keep this before me, and every day I shall make a little
mark in my pocketbook, and on the last day of all—let me think, what
shall we do to celebrate the last day of all? If it weren’t the winter
we could take a jaunt to Italy. They say Switzerland’s very lovely in
the snow, except for the cold. But, as you say, the great thing is to
finish the book. Now let me see—”
When they inspected her manuscripts, which Katharine had put in order,
they found a state of things well calculated to dash their spirits, if
they had not just resolved on reform. They found, to begin with, a
great variety of very imposing paragraphs with which the biography was
to open; many of these, it is true, were unfinished, and resembled
triumphal arches standing upon one leg, but, as Mrs. Hilbery observed,
they could be patched up in ten minutes, if she gave her mind to it.
Next, there was an account of the ancient home of the Alardyces, or
rather, of spring in Suffolk, which was very beautifully written,
although not essential to the story. However, Katharine had put
together a string of names and dates, so that the poet was capably
brought into the world, and his ninth year was reached without further
mishap. After that, Mrs. Hilbery wished, for sentimental reasons, to
introduce the recollections of a very fluent old lady, who had been
brought up in the same village, but these Katharine decided must go.
It might be advisable to introduce here a sketch of contemporary
poetry contributed by Mr. Hilbery, and thus terse and learned and
altogether out of keeping with the rest, but Mrs. Hilbery was of
opinion that it was too bare, and made one feel altogether like a good
little girl in a lecture-room, which was not at all in keeping with
her father. It was put on one side. Now came the period of his early
manhood, when various affairs of the heart must either be concealed or
revealed; here again Mrs. Hilbery was of two minds, and a thick packet
of manuscript was shelved for further consideration.
Several years were now altogether omitted, because Mrs. Hilbery had
found something distasteful to her in that period, and had preferred
to dwell upon her own recollections as a child. After this, it seemed
to Katharine that the book became a wild dance of will-o’-the-wisps,
without form or continuity, without coherence even, or any attempt to
make a narrative. Here were twenty pages upon her grandfather’s taste
in hats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summer
day’s expedition into the country, when they had missed their train,
together with fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous men and
women, which seemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic. There
were, moreover, thousands of letters, and a mass of faithful
recollections contributed by old friends, which had grown yellow now
in their envelopes, but must be placed somewhere, or their feelings
would be hurt. So many volumes had been written about the poet since
his death that she had also to dispose of a great number of
misstatements, which involved minute researches and much
correspondence. Sometimes Katharine brooded, half crushed, among her
papers; sometimes she felt that it was necessary for her very
existence that she should free herself from the past; at others, that
the past had completely displaced the present, which, when
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