Denham had accused Katharine Hilbery of belonging to one of the most
distinguished families in England, and if any one will take the trouble
to consult Mr. Galton’s “Hereditary Genius,” he will find that this
assertion is not far from the truth. The Alardyces, the Hilberys, the
Millingtons, and the Otways seem to prove that intellect is a
possession which can be tossed from one member of a certain group to
another almost indefinitely, and with apparent certainty that the
brilliant gift will be safely caught and held by nine out of ten of the
privileged race. They had been conspicuous judges and admirals, lawyers
and servants of the State for some years before the richness of the
soil culminated in the rarest flower that any family can boast, a great
writer, a poet eminent among the poets of England, a Richard Alardyce;
and having produced him, they proved once more the amazing virtues of
their race by proceeding unconcernedly again with their usual task of
breeding distinguished men. They had sailed with Sir John Franklin to
the North Pole, and ridden with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow, and
when they were not lighthouses firmly based on rock for the guidance of
their generation, they were steady, serviceable candles, illuminating
the ordinary chambers of daily life. Whatever profession you looked at,
there was a Warburton or an Alardyce, a Millington or a Hilbery
somewhere in authority and prominence.
It may be said, indeed, that English society being what it is, no very
great merit is required, once you bear a well-known name, to put you
into a position where it is easier on the whole to be eminent than
obscure. And if this is true of the sons, even the daughters, even in
the nineteenth century, are apt to become people of
importance—philanthropists and educationalists if they are spinsters,
and the wives of distinguished men if they marry. It is true that there
were several lamentable exceptions to this rule in the Alardyce group,
which seems to indicate that the cadets of such houses go more rapidly
to the bad than the children of ordinary fathers and mothers, as if it
were somehow a relief to them. But, on the whole, in these first years
of the twentieth century, the Alardyces and their relations were
keeping their heads well above water. One finds them at the tops of
professions, with letters after their names; they sit in luxurious
public offices, with private secretaries attached to them; they write
solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great
universities, and when one of them dies the chances are that another of
them writes his biography.
Now the source of this nobility was, of course, the poet, and his
immediate descendants, therefore, were invested with greater luster
than the collateral branches. Mrs. Hilbery, in virtue of her position
as the only child of the poet, was spiritually the head of the family,
and Katharine, her daughter, had some superior rank among all the
cousins and connections, the more so because she was an only child. The
Alardyces had married and intermarried, and their offspring were
generally profuse, and had a way of meeting regularly in each other’s
houses for meals and family celebrations which had acquired a
semi-sacred character, and were as regularly observed as days of
feasting and fasting in the Church.
In times gone by, Mrs. Hilbery had known all the poets, all the
novelists, all the beautiful women and distinguished men of her time.
These being now either dead or secluded in their infirm glory, she made
her house a meeting-place for her own relations, to whom she would
lament the passing of the great days of the nineteenth century, when
every department of letters and art was represented in England by two
or three illustrious names. Where are their successors? she would ask,
and the absence of any poet or painter or novelist of the true caliber
at the present day was a text upon which she liked to ruminate, in a
sunset mood of benignant reminiscence, which it would have been hard to
disturb had there been need. But she was far from visiting their
inferiority upon the younger generation. She welcomed them very
heartily to her house, told them her stories, gave them sovereigns and
ices and good advice, and weaved round them romances which had
generally no likeness to the truth.
The quality of her birth oozed into Katharine’s consciousness from a
dozen different sources as soon as she was able to perceive anything.
Above her nursery fireplace hung a photograph of her grandfather’s 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 arm-chair, 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 one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to
be of an utterly thin and inferior composition.
The worst of it was that she had no aptitude for literature. She did
not like phrases. She had even some natural antipathy to that process
of self-examination, that perpetual effort to understand one’s own
feeling, and express it beautifully, fitly, or energetically in
language, which constituted so great a part of her mother’s existence.
She was, on the contrary, inclined to be silent; she shrank from
expressing herself even in talk, let alone in writing. As this
disposition was highly convenient in a family much given to the
manufacture of phrases, and seemed to argue a corresponding capacity
for action, she was, from her childhood even, put in charge of
household affairs. She had the reputation, which nothing in her manner
contradicted, of being the most practical of people. Ordering meals,
directing servants, paying bills, and so contriving that every clock
ticked more or less accurately in time, and a number of vases were
always full of fresh flowers was supposed to be a natural endowment of
hers, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery often observed that it was poetry the
wrong side out. From a very early age, too, she had to exert herself in
another capacity; she had to counsel and help and generally sustain her
mother. Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to sustain
herself if the world had been what the world is not. She was
beautifully adapted for life in another planet. But the natural genius
she had for conducting affairs there was of no real use to her here.
Her watch, for example, was a constant source of surprise to her, and
at the age of sixty-five she was still amazed at the ascendancy which
rules and reasons exerted over the lives of other people. She had never
learnt her lesson, and had constantly to be punished for her ignorance.
But as that ignorance was combined with a fine natural insight which
saw deep whenever it saw at all, it was not possible to write Mrs.
Hilbery off among the dunces; on the contrary, she had a way of seeming
the wisest person in the room. But, on the whole, she found it very
necessary to seek support in her daughter.
Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as
yet, no title and very little recognition, although the labor of mill
and factory is, perhaps, no more severe and the results of less benefit
to the world. She lived at home. She did it very well, too. Any one
coming to the house in Cheyne Walk felt that here was an orderly place,
shapely, controlled—a place where life had been trained to show to the
best advantage, and, though composed of different elements, made to
appear harmonious and with a character of its own. Perhaps it was the
chief triumph of Katharine’s art that Mrs. Hilbery’s character
predominated. She and Mr. Hilbery appeared to be a rich background for
her mother’s more striking qualities.
Silence being, thus, both natural to her and imposed upon her, the only
other remark that her mother’s friends were in the habit of making
about it was that it was neither a stupid silence nor an indifferent
silence. But to what quality it owed its character, since character of
some sort it had, no one troubled themselves to inquire. It was
understood that she was helping her mother to produce a great book. She
was known to manage the household. She was certainly beautiful. That
accounted for her satisfactorily. But it would have been a surprise,
not only to other people but to Katharine herself, if some magic watch
could have taken count of the moments spent in an entirely different
occupation from her ostensible one. Sitting with faded papers before
her, she took part in a series of scenes such as the taming of wild
ponies upon the American prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a
hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or in others more peaceful,
but marked by her complete emancipation from her present surroundings
and, needless to say, by her surpassing ability in her new vocation.
When she was rid of the pretense of paper and pen, phrase-making and
biography, she turned her attention in a more legitimate direction,
though, strangely enough, she would rather have confessed her wildest
dreams of hurricane and prairie than the fact that, upstairs, alone in
her room, she rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to...
work at mathematics. No force on earth would have made her confess
that. Her actions when thus engaged were furtive and secretive, like
those of some nocturnal animal. Steps had only to sound on the
staircase, and she slipped her paper between the leaves of a great
Greek dictionary which she had purloined from her father’s room for
this purpose. It was only at night, indeed, that she felt secure enough
from surprise to concentrate her mind to the utmost.
Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively wish
to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in her
mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would not
have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the
star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and
vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly in
thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feel
wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away
from view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness. Again and again
she was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinking of
her grandfather. Waking from these trances, she would see that her
mother, too, had lapsed into some dream almost as visionary as her own,
for the people who played their parts in it had long been numbered
among the dead. But, seeing her own state mirrored in her mother’s
face, Katharine would shake herself awake with a sense of irritation.
Her mother was the last person she wished to resemble, much though she
admired her. Her common sense would assert itself almost brutally, and
Mrs. Hilbery, looking at her with her odd sidelong glance, that was
half malicious and half tender, would liken her to “your wicked old
Uncle Judge Peter, who used to be heard delivering sentence of death in
the bathroom. Thank Heaven, Katharine, I’ve not a drop of _him_ in me!”