The young man shut the door with a sharper slam than any visitor had
used that afternoon, and walked up the street at a great pace, cutting
the air with his walking-stick. He was glad to find himself outside
that drawing-room, breathing raw fog, and in contact with unpolished
people who only wanted their share of the pavement allowed them. He
thought that if he had had Mr. or Mrs. or Miss Hilbery out here he
would have made them, somehow, feel his superiority, for he was chafed
by the memory of halting awkward sentences which had failed to give
even the young woman with the sad, but inwardly ironical eyes a hint of
his force. He tried to recall the actual words of his little outburst,
and unconsciously supplemented them by so many words of greater
expressiveness that the irritation of his failure was somewhat
assuaged. Sudden stabs of the unmitigated truth assailed him now and
then, for he was not inclined by nature to take a rosy view of his
conduct, but what with the beat of his foot upon the pavement, and the
glimpse which half-drawn curtains offered him of kitchens,
dining-rooms, and drawing-rooms, illustrating with mute power different
scenes from different lives, his own experience lost its sharpness.
His own experience underwent a curious change. His speed slackened, his
head sank a little towards his breast, and the lamplight shone now and
again upon a face grown strangely tranquil. His thought was so
absorbing that when it became necessary to verify the name of a street,
he looked at it for a time before he read it; when he came to a
crossing, he seemed to have to reassure himself by two or three taps,
such as a blind man gives, upon the curb; and, reaching the Underground
station, he blinked in the bright circle of light, glanced at his
watch, decided that he might still indulge himself in darkness, and
walked straight on.
And yet the thought was the thought with which he had started. He was
still thinking about the people in the house which he had left; but
instead of remembering, with whatever accuracy he could, their looks
and sayings, he had consciously taken leave of the literal truth. A
turn of the street, a firelit room, something monumental in the
procession of the lamp-posts, who shall say what accident of light or
shape had suddenly changed the prospect within his mind, and led him to
murmur aloud:
“She’ll do.... Yes, Katharine Hilbery’ll do.... I’ll take Katharine
Hilbery.”
As soon as he had said this, his pace slackened, his head fell, his
eyes became fixed. The desire to justify himself, which had been so
urgent, ceased to torment him, and, as if released from constraint, so
that they worked without friction or bidding, his faculties leapt
forward and fixed, as a matter of course, upon the form of Katharine
Hilbery. It was marvellous how much they found to feed upon,
considering the destructive nature of Denham’s criticism in her
presence. The charm, which he had tried to disown, when under the
effect of it, the beauty, the character, the aloofness, which he had
been determined not to feel, now possessed him wholly; and when, as
happened by the nature of things, he had exhausted his memory, he went
on with his imagination. He was conscious of what he was about, for in
thus dwelling upon Miss Hilbery’s qualities, he showed a kind of
method, as if he required this vision of her for a particular purpose.
He increased her height, he darkened her hair; but physically there was
not much to change in her. His most daring liberty was taken with her
mind, which, for reasons of his own, he desired to be exalted and
infallible, and of such independence that it was only in the case of
Ralph Denham that it swerved from its high, swift flight, but where he
was concerned, though fastidious at first, she finally swooped from her
eminence to crown him with her approval. These delicious details,
however, were to be worked out in all their ramifications at his
leisure; the main point was that Katharine Hilbery would do; she would
do for weeks, perhaps for months. In taking her he had provided himself
with something the lack of which had left a bare place in his mind for
a considerable time. He gave a sigh of satisfaction; his consciousness
of his actual position somewhere in the neighborhood of Knightsbridge
returned to him, and he was soon speeding in the train towards
Highgate.
Although thus supported by the knowledge of his new possession of
considerable value, he was not proof against the familiar thoughts
which the suburban streets and the damp shrubs growing in front gardens
and the absurd names painted in white upon the gates of those gardens
suggested to him. His walk was uphill, and his mind dwelt gloomily upon
the house which he approached, where he would find six or seven
brothers and sisters, a widowed mother, and, probably, some aunt or
uncle sitting down to an unpleasant meal under a very bright light.
Should he put in force the threat which, two weeks ago, some such
gathering had wrung from him—the terrible threat that if visitors came
on Sunday he should dine alone in his room? A glance in the direction
of Miss Hilbery determined him to make his stand this very night, and
accordingly, having let himself in, having verified the presence of
Uncle Joseph by means of a bowler hat and a very large umbrella, he
gave his orders to the maid, and went upstairs to his room.
He went up a great many flights of stairs, and he noticed, as he had
very seldom noticed, how the carpet became steadily shabbier, until it
ceased altogether, how the walls were discolored, sometimes by cascades
of damp, and sometimes by the outlines of picture-frames since removed,
how the paper flapped loose at the corners, and a great flake of
plaster had fallen from the ceiling. The room itself was a cheerless
one to return to at this inauspicious hour. A flattened sofa would,
later in the evening, become a bed; one of the tables concealed a
washing apparatus; his clothes and boots were disagreeably mixed with
books which bore the gilt of college arms; and, for decoration, there
hung upon the wall photographs of bridges and cathedrals and large,
unprepossessing groups of insufficiently clothed young men, sitting in
rows one above another upon stone steps. There was a look of meanness
and shabbiness in the furniture and curtains, and nowhere any sign of
luxury or even of a cultivated taste, unless the cheap classics in the
book-case were a sign of an effort in that direction. The only object
that threw any light upon the character of the room’s owner was a large
perch, placed in the window to catch the air and sun, upon which a tame
and, apparently, decrepit rook hopped dryly from side to side. The
bird, encouraged by a scratch behind the ear, settled upon Denham’s
shoulder. He lit his gas-fire and settled down in gloomy patience to
await his dinner. After sitting thus for some minutes a small girl
popped her head in to say,
“Mother says, aren’t you coming down, Ralph? Uncle Joseph—”
“They’re to bring my dinner up here,” said Ralph, peremptorily;
whereupon she vanished, leaving the door ajar in her haste to be gone.
After Denham had waited some minutes, in the course of which neither he
nor the rook took their eyes off the fire, he muttered a curse, ran
downstairs, intercepted the parlor-maid, and cut himself a slice of
bread and cold meat. As he did so, the dining-room door sprang open, a
voice exclaimed “Ralph!” but Ralph paid no attention to the voice, and
made off upstairs with his plate. He set it down in a chair opposite
him, and ate with a ferocity that was due partly to anger and partly to
hunger. His mother, then, was determined not to respect his wishes; he
was a person of no importance in his own family; he was sent for and
treated as a child. He reflected, with a growing sense of injury, that
almost every one of his actions since opening the door of his room had
been won from the grasp of the family system. By rights, he should have
been sitting downstairs in the drawing-room describing his afternoon’s
adventures, or listening to the afternoon’s adventures of other people;
the room itself, the gas-fire, the arm-chair—all had been fought for;
the wretched bird, with half its feathers out and one leg lamed by a
cat, had been rescued under protest; but what his family most resented,
he reflected, was his wish for privacy. To dine alone, or to sit alone
after dinner, was flat rebellion, to be fought with every weapon of
underhand stealth or of open appeal. Which did he dislike
most—deception or tears? But, at any rate, they could not rob him of
his thoughts; they could not make him say where he had been or whom he
had seen. That was his own affair; that, indeed, was a step entirely in
the right direction, and, lighting his pipe, and cutting up the remains
of his meal for the benefit of the rook, Ralph calmed his rather
excessive irritation and settled down to think over his prospects.
This particular afternoon was a step in the right direction, because it
was part of his plan to get to know people beyond the family circuit,
just as it was part of his plan to learn German this autumn, and to
review legal books for Mr. Hilbery’s “Critical Review.” He had always
made plans since he was a small boy; for poverty, and the fact that he
was the eldest son of a large family, had given him the habit of
thinking of spring and summer, autumn and winter, as so many stages in
a prolonged campaign. Although he was still under thirty, this
forecasting habit had marked two semicircular lines above his eyebrows,
which threatened, at this moment, to crease into their wonted shapes.
But instead of settling down to think, he rose, took a small piece of
cardboard marked in large letters with the word OUT, and hung it upon
the handle of his door. This done, he sharpened a pencil, lit a
reading-lamp and opened his book. But still he hesitated to take his
seat. He scratched the rook, he walked to the window; he parted the
curtains, and looked down upon the city which lay, hazily luminous,
beneath him. He looked across the vapors in the direction of Chelsea;
looked fixedly for a moment, and then returned to his chair. But the
whole thickness of some learned counsel’s treatise upon Torts did not
screen him satisfactorily. Through the pages he saw a drawing-room,
very empty and spacious; he heard low voices, he saw women’s figures,
he could even smell the scent of the cedar log which flamed in the
grate. His mind relaxed its tension, and seemed to be giving out now
what it had taken in unconsciously at the time. He could remember Mr.
Fortescue’s exact words, and the rolling emphasis with which he
delivered them, and he began to repeat what Mr. Fortescue had said, in
Mr. Fortescue’s own manner, about Manchester. His mind then began to
wander about the house, and he wondered whether there were other rooms
like the drawing-room, and he thought, inconsequently, how beautiful
the bathroom must be, and how leisurely it was—the life of these
well-kept people, who were, no doubt, still sitting in the same room,
only they had changed their clothes, and little Mr. Anning was there,
and the aunt who would mind if the glass of her father’s picture was
broken. Miss Hilbery had changed her dress (“although she’s wearing
such a pretty one,” he heard her mother say), and she was talking to
Mr. Anning, who was well over forty, and bald into the bargain, about
books. How peaceful and spacious it was; and the peace possessed him so
completely that his muscles slackened, his book drooped from his hand,
and he forgot that the hour of work was wasting minute by minute.
He was roused by a creak upon the stair. With a guilty start he
composed himself, frowned and looked intently at the fifty-sixth page
of his volume. A step paused outside his door, and he knew that the
person, whoever it might be, was considering the placard, and debating
whether to honor its decree or not. Certainly, policy advised him to
sit still in autocratic silence, for no custom can take root in a
family unless every breach of it is punished severely for the first six
months or so. But Ralph was conscious of a distinct wish to be
interrupted, and his disappointment was perceptible when he heard the
creaking sound rather farther down the stairs, as if his visitor had
decided to withdraw. He rose, opened the door with unnecessary
abruptness, and waited on the landing. The person stopped
simultaneously half a flight downstairs.
“Ralph?” said a voice, inquiringly.
“Joan?”
“I was coming up, but I saw your notice.”
“Well, come along in, then.” He concealed his desire beneath a tone as
grudging as he could make it.
Joan came in, but she was careful to show, by standing upright with one
hand upon the mantelpiece, that she was only there for a definite
purpose, which discharged, she would go.
She was older than Ralph by some three or four years. Her face was
round but worn, and expressed that tolerant but anxious good humor
which is the special attribute of elder sisters in large families. Her
pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph’s, save in expression, for whereas
he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to
be in the habit of considering everything from many different points of
view. This made her appear his elder by more years than existed in fact
between them. Her gaze rested for a moment or two upon the rook. She
then said, without any preface:
“It’s about Charles and Uncle John’s offer.... Mother’s been talking to
me. She says she can’t afford to pay for him after this term. She says
she’ll have to ask for an overdraft as it is.”
“That’s simply not true,” said Ralph.
“No. I thought not. But she won’t believe me when I say it.”
Ralph, as if he could foresee the length of this familiar argument,
drew up a chair for his sister and sat down himself.
“I’m not interrupting?” she inquired.
Ralph shook his head, and for a time they sat silent. The lines curved
themselves in semicircles above their eyes.
“She doesn’t understand that one’s got to take risks,” he observed,
finally.
“I believe mother would take risks if she knew that Charles was the
sort of boy to profit by it.”
“He’s got brains, hasn’t he?” said Ralph. His tone had taken on that
shade of pugnacity which suggested to his sister that some personal
grievance drove him to take the line he did. She wondered what it might
be, but at once recalled her mind, and assented.
“In some ways he’s fearfully backward, though, compared with what you
were at his age. And he’s difficult at home, too. He makes Molly slave
for him.”
Ralph made a sound which belittled this particular argument. It was
plain to Joan that she had struck one of her brother’s perverse moods,
and he was going to oppose whatever his mother said. He called her
“she,” which was a proof of it. She sighed involuntarily, and the sigh
annoyed Ralph, and he exclaimed with irritation:
“It’s pretty hard lines to stick a boy into an office at seventeen!”
“Nobody _wants_ to stick him into an office,” she said.
She, too, was becoming annoyed. She had spent the whole of the
afternoon discussing wearisome details of education and expense with
her mother, and she had come to her brother for help, encouraged,
rather irrationally, to expect help by the fact that he had been out
somewhere, she didn’t know and didn’t mean to ask where, all the
afternoon.
Ralph was fond of his sister, and her irritation made him think how
unfair it was that all these burdens should be laid on her shoulders.
“The truth is,” he observed gloomily, “that I ought to have accepted
Uncle John’s offer. I should have been making six hundred a year by
this time.”
“I don’t think that for a moment,” Joan replied quickly, repenting of
her annoyance. “The question, to my mind, is, whether we couldn’t cut
down our expenses in some way.”
“A smaller house?”
“Fewer servants, perhaps.”
Neither brother nor sister spoke with much conviction, and after
reflecting for a moment what these proposed reforms in a strictly
economical household meant, Ralph announced very decidedly:
“It’s out of the question.”
It was out of the question that she should put any more household work
upon herself. No, the hardship must fall on him, for he was determined
that his family should have as many chances of distinguishing
themselves as other families had—as the Hilberys had, for example. He
believed secretly and rather defiantly, for it was a fact not capable
of proof, that there was something very remarkable about his family.
“If mother won’t run risks—”
“You really can’t expect her to sell out again.”
“She ought to look upon it as an investment; but if she won’t, we must
find some other way, that’s all.”
A threat was contained in this sentence, and Joan knew, without asking,
what the threat was. In the course of his professional life, which now
extended over six or seven years, Ralph had saved, perhaps, three or
four hundred pounds. Considering the sacrifices he had made in order to
put by this sum it always amazed Joan to find that he used it to gamble
with, buying shares and selling them again, increasing it sometimes,
sometimes diminishing it, and always running the risk of losing every
penny of it in a day’s disaster. But although she wondered, she could
not help loving him the better for his odd combination of Spartan
self-control and what appeared to her romantic and childish folly.
Ralph interested her more than any one else in the world, and she often
broke off in the middle of one of these economic discussions, in spite
of their gravity, to consider some fresh aspect of his character.
“I think you’d be foolish to risk your money on poor old Charles,” she
observed. “Fond as I am of him, he doesn’t seem to me exactly
brilliant.... Besides, why should you be sacrificed?”
“My dear Joan,” Ralph exclaimed, stretching himself out with a gesture
of impatience, “don’t you see that we’ve all got to be sacrificed?
What’s the use of denying it? What’s the use of struggling against it?
So it always has been, so it always will be. We’ve got no money and we
never shall have any money. We shall just turn round in the mill every
day of our lives until we drop and die, worn out, as most people do,
when one comes to think of it.”
Joan looked at him, opened her lips as if to speak, and closed them
again. Then she said, very tentatively:
“Aren’t you happy, Ralph?”
“No. Are you? Perhaps I’m as happy as most people, though. God knows
whether I’m happy or not. What is happiness?”
He glanced with half a smile, in spite of his gloomy irritation, at his
sister. She looked, as usual, as if she were weighing one thing with
another, and balancing them together before she made up her mind.
“Happiness,” she remarked at length enigmatically, rather as if she
were sampling the word, and then she paused. She paused for a
considerable space, as if she were considering happiness in all its
bearings. “Hilda was here to-day,” she suddenly resumed, as if they had
never mentioned happiness. “She brought Bobbie—he’s a fine boy now.”
Ralph observed, with an amusement that had a tinge of irony in it, that
she was now going to sidle away quickly from this dangerous approach to
intimacy on to topics of general and family interest. Nevertheless, he
reflected, she was the only one of his family with whom he found it
possible to discuss happiness, although he might very well have
discussed happiness with Miss Hilbery at their first meeting. He looked
critically at Joan, and wished that she did not look so provincial or
suburban in her high green dress with the faded trimming, so patient,
and almost resigned. He began to wish to tell her about the Hilberys in
order to abuse them, for in the miniature battle which so often rages
between two quickly following impressions of life, the life of the
Hilberys was getting the better of the life of the Denhams in his mind,
and he wanted to assure himself that there was some quality in which
Joan infinitely surpassed Miss Hilbery. He should have felt that his
own sister was more original, and had greater vitality than Miss
Hilbery had; but his main impression of Katharine now was of a person
of great vitality and composure; and at the moment he could not
perceive what poor dear Joan had gained from the fact that she was the
granddaughter of a man who kept a shop, and herself earned her own
living. The infinite dreariness and sordidness of their life oppressed
him in spite of his fundamental belief that, as a family, they were
somehow remarkable.
“Shall you talk to mother?” Joan inquired. “Because, you see, the
thing’s got to be settled, one way or another. Charles must write to
Uncle John if he’s going there.”
Ralph sighed impatiently.
“I suppose it doesn’t much matter either way,” he exclaimed. “He’s
doomed to misery in the long run.”
A slight flush came into Joan’s cheek.
“You know you’re talking nonsense,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt any one
to have to earn their own living. I’m very glad I have to earn mine.”
Ralph was pleased that she should feel this, and wished her to
continue, but he went on, perversely enough.
“Isn’t that only because you’ve forgotten how to enjoy yourself? You
never have time for anything decent—”
“As for instance?”
“Well, going for walks, or music, or books, or seeing interesting
people. You never do anything that’s really worth doing any more than I
do.”
“I always think you could make this room much nicer, if you liked,” she
observed.
“What does it matter what sort of room I have when I’m forced to spend
all the best years of my life drawing up deeds in an office?”
“You said two days ago that you found the law so interesting.”
“So it is if one could afford to know anything about it.”
(“That’s Herbert only just going to bed now,” Joan interposed, as a
door on the landing slammed vigorously. “And then he won’t get up in
the morning.”)
Ralph looked at the ceiling, and shut his lips closely together. Why,
he wondered, could Joan never for one moment detach her mind from the
details of domestic life? It seemed to him that she was getting more
and more enmeshed in them, and capable of shorter and less frequent
flights into the outer world, and yet she was only thirty-three.
“D’you ever pay calls now?” he asked abruptly.
“I don’t often have the time. Why do you ask?”
“It might be a good thing, to get to know new people, that’s all.”
“Poor Ralph!” said Joan suddenly, with a smile. “You think your
sister’s getting very old and very dull—that’s it, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think anything of the kind,” he said stoutly, but he flushed.
“But you lead a dog’s life, Joan. When you’re not working in an office,
you’re worrying over the rest of us. And I’m not much good to you, I’m
afraid.”
Joan rose, and stood for a moment warming her hands, and, apparently,
meditating as to whether she should say anything more or not. A feeling
of great intimacy united the brother and sister, and the semicircular
lines above their eyebrows disappeared. No, there was nothing more to
be said on either side. Joan brushed her brother’s head with her hand
as she passed him, murmured good night, and left the room. For some
minutes after she had gone Ralph lay quiescent, resting his head on his
hand, but gradually his eyes filled with thought, and the line
reappeared on his brow, as the pleasant impression of companionship and
ancient sympathy waned, and he was left to think on alone.
After a time he opened his book, and read on steadily, glancing once or
twice at his watch, as if he had set himself a task to be accomplished
in a certain measure of time. Now and then he heard voices in the
house, and the closing of bedroom doors, which showed that the
building, at the top of which he sat, was inhabited in every one of its
cells. When midnight struck, Ralph shut his book, and with a candle in
his hand, descended to the ground floor, to ascertain that all lights
were extinct and all doors locked. It was a threadbare, well-worn house
that he thus examined, as if the inmates had grazed down all luxuriance
and plenty to the verge of decency; and in the night, bereft of life,
bare places and ancient blemishes were unpleasantly visible. Katharine
Hilbery, he thought, would condemn it off-hand.