“And little Augustus Pelham said to me, ‘It’s the younger generation
knocking at the door,’ and I said to him, ‘Oh, but the younger
generation comes in without knocking, Mr. Pelham.’ Such a feeble little
joke, wasn’t it, but down it went into his notebook all the same.”
“Let us congratulate ourselves that we shall be in the grave before
that work is published,” said Mr. Hilbery.
The elderly couple were waiting for the dinner-bell to ring and for
their daughter to come into the room. Their arm-chairs were drawn up on
either side of the fire, and each sat in the same slightly crouched
position, looking into the coals, with the expressions of people who
have had their share of experiences and wait, rather passively, for
something to happen. Mr. Hilbery now gave all his attention to a piece
of coal which had fallen out of the grate, and to selecting a favorable
position for it among the lumps that were burning already. Mrs. Hilbery
watched him in silence, and the smile changed on her lips as if her
mind still played with the events of the afternoon.
When Mr. Hilbery had accomplished his task, he resumed his crouching
position again, and began to toy with the little green stone attached
to his watch-chain. His deep, oval-shaped eyes were fixed upon the
flames, but behind the superficial glaze seemed to brood an observant
and whimsical spirit, which kept the brown of the eye still unusually
vivid. But a look of indolence, the result of skepticism or of a taste
too fastidious to be satisfied by the prizes and conclusions so easily
within his grasp, lent him an expression almost of melancholy. After
sitting thus for a time, he seemed to reach some point in his thinking
which demonstrated its futility, upon which he sighed and stretched his
hand for a book lying on the table by his side.
Directly the door opened he closed the book, and the eyes of father and
mother both rested on Katharine as she came towards them. The sight
seemed at once to give them a motive which they had not had before. To
them she appeared, as she walked towards them in her light evening
dress, extremely young, and the sight of her refreshed them, were it
only because her youth and ignorance made their knowledge of the world
of some value.
“The only excuse for you, Katharine, is that dinner is still later than
you are,” said Mr. Hilbery, putting down his spectacles.
“I don’t mind her being late when the result is so charming,” said Mrs.
Hilbery, looking with pride at her daughter. “Still, I don’t know that
I _like_ your being out so late, Katharine,” she continued. “You took a
cab, I hope?”
Here dinner was announced, and Mr. Hilbery formally led his wife
downstairs on his arm. They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed,
the prettiness of the dinner-table merited that compliment. There was
no cloth upon the table, and the china made regular circles of deep
blue upon the shining brown wood. In the middle there was a bowl of
tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh
that the narrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball.
From the surrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers
surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them
testified in the great man’s own handwriting that he was yours
sincerely or affectionately or for ever. The father and daughter would
have been quite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence, or
with a few cryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not be
understood by the servants. But silence depressed Mrs. Hilbery, and far
from minding the presence of maids, she would often address herself to
them, and was never altogether unconscious of their approval or
disapproval of her remarks. In the first place she called them to
witness that the room was darker than usual, and had all the lights
turned on.
“That’s more cheerful,” she exclaimed. “D’you know, Katharine, that
ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried to
make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, you
know, that I spilt the tea—and he made an epigram about that!”
“Which ridiculous goose?” Katharine asked her father.
“Only one of my geese, happily, makes epigrams—Augustus Pelham, of
course,” said Mrs. Hilbery.
“I’m not sorry that I was out,” said Katharine.
“Poor Augustus!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed. “But we’re all too hard on
him. Remember how devoted he is to his tiresome old mother.”
“That’s only because she is his mother. Any one connected with
himself—”
“No, no, Katharine—that’s too bad. That’s—what’s the word I mean,
Trevor, something long and Latin—the sort of word you and Katharine
know—”
Mr. Hilbery suggested “cynical.”
“Well, that’ll do. I don’t believe in sending girls to college, but I
should teach them that sort of thing. It makes one feel so dignified,
bringing out these little allusions, and passing on gracefully to the
next topic. But I don’t know what’s come over me—I actually had to ask
Augustus the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with, as you were out,
Katharine, and Heaven knows what he mayn’t put down about me in his
diary.”
“I wish,” Katharine started, with great impetuosity, and checked
herself. Her mother always stirred her to feel and think quickly, and
then she remembered that her father was there, listening with
attention.
“What is it you wish?” he asked, as she paused.
He often surprised her, thus, into telling him what she had not meant
to tell him; and then they argued, while Mrs. Hilbery went on with her
own thoughts.
“I wish mother wasn’t famous. I was out at tea, and they would talk to
me about poetry.”
“Thinking you must be poetical, I see—and aren’t you?”
“Who’s been talking to you about poetry, Katharine?” Mrs. Hilbery
demanded, and Katharine was committed to giving her parents an account
of her visit to the Suffrage office.
“They have an office at the top of one of the old houses in Russell
Square. I never saw such queer-looking people. And the man discovered I
was related to the poet, and talked to me about poetry. Even Mary
Datchet seems different in that atmosphere.”
“Yes, the office atmosphere is very bad for the soul,” said Mr.
Hilbery.
“I don’t remember any offices in Russell Square in the old days, when
Mamma lived there,” Mrs. Hilbery mused, “and I can’t fancy turning one
of those noble great rooms into a stuffy little Suffrage office. Still,
if the clerks read poetry there must be something nice about them.”
“No, because they don’t read it as we read it,” Katharine insisted.
“But it’s nice to think of them reading your grandfather, and not
filling up those dreadful little forms all day long,” Mrs. Hilbery
persisted, her notion of office life being derived from some chance
view of a scene behind the counter at her bank, as she slipped the
sovereigns into her purse.
“At any rate, they haven’t made a convert of Katharine, which was what
I was afraid of,” Mr. Hilbery remarked.
“Oh no,” said Katharine very decidedly, “I wouldn’t work with them for
anything.”
“It’s curious,” Mr. Hilbery continued, agreeing with his daughter, “how
the sight of one’s fellow-enthusiasts always chokes one off. They show
up the faults of one’s cause so much more plainly than one’s
antagonists. One can be enthusiastic in one’s study, but directly one
comes into touch with the people who agree with one, all the glamor
goes. So I’ve always found,” and he proceeded to tell them, as he
peeled his apple, how he committed himself once, in his youthful days,
to make a speech at a political meeting, and went there ablaze with
enthusiasm for the ideals of his own side; but while his leaders spoke,
he became gradually converted to the other way of thinking, if thinking
it could be called, and had to feign illness in order to avoid making a
fool of himself—an experience which had sickened him of public
meetings.
Katharine listened and felt as she generally did when her father, and
to some extent her mother, described their feelings, that she quite
understood and agreed with them, but, at the same time, saw something
which they did not see, and always felt some disappointment when they
fell short of her vision, as they always did. The plates succeeded each
other swiftly and noiselessly in front of her, and the table was decked
for dessert, and as the talk murmured on in familiar grooves, she sat
there, rather like a judge, listening to her parents, who did, indeed,
feel it very pleasant when they made her laugh.
Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious
little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually,
though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood
over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance.
Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port, which
were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr. Hilbery, and
simultaneously Mrs. Hilbery and Katharine left the room. All the years
they had lived together they had never seen Mr. Hilbery smoke his cigar
or drink his port, and they would have felt it unseemly if, by chance,
they had surprised him as he sat there. These short, but clearly
marked, periods of separation between the sexes were always used for an
intimate postscript to what had been said at dinner, the sense of being
women together coming out most strongly when the male sex was, as if by
some religious rite, secluded from the female. Katharine knew by heart
the sort of mood that possessed her as she walked upstairs to the
drawing-room, her mother’s arm in hers; and she could anticipate the
pleasure with which, when she had turned on the lights, they both
regarded the drawing-room, fresh swept and set in order for the last
section of the day, with the red parrots swinging on the chintz
curtains, and the arm-chairs warming in the blaze. Mrs. Hilbery stood
over the fire, with one foot on the fender, and her skirts slightly
raised.
“Oh, Katharine,” she exclaimed, “how you’ve made me think of Mamma and
the old days in Russell Square! I can see the chandeliers, and the
green silk of the piano, and Mamma sitting in her cashmere shawl by the
window, singing till the little ragamuffin boys outside stopped to
listen. Papa sent me in with a bunch of violets while he waited round
the corner. It must have been a summer evening. That was before things
were hopeless....”
As she spoke an expression of regret, which must have come frequently
to cause the lines which now grew deep round the lips and eyes, settled
on her face. The poet’s marriage had not been a happy one. He had left
his wife, and after some years of a rather reckless existence, she had
died, before her time. This disaster had led to great irregularities of
education, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery might be said to have escaped
education altogether. But she had been her father’s companion at the
season when he wrote the finest of his poems. She had sat on his knee
in taverns and other haunts of drunken poets, and it was for her sake,
so people said, that he had cured himself of his dissipation, and
become the irreproachable literary character that the world knows,
whose inspiration had deserted him. As Mrs. Hilbery grew old she
thought more and more of the past, and this ancient disaster seemed at
times almost to prey upon her mind, as if she could not pass out of
life herself without laying the ghost of her parent’s sorrow to rest.
Katharine wished to comfort her mother, but it was difficult to do this
satisfactorily when the facts themselves were so much of a legend. The
house in Russell Square, for example, with its noble rooms, and the
magnolia-tree in the garden, and the sweet-voiced piano, and the sound
of feet coming down the corridors, and other properties of size and
romance—had they any existence? Yet why should Mrs. Alardyce live all
alone in this gigantic mansion, and, if she did not live alone, with
whom did she live? For its own sake, Katharine rather liked this tragic
story, and would have been glad to hear the details of it, and to have
been able to discuss them frankly. But this it became less and less
possible to do, for though Mrs. Hilbery was constantly reverting to the
story, it was always in this tentative and restless fashion, as though
by a touch here and there she could set things straight which had been
crooked these sixty years. Perhaps, indeed, she no longer knew what the
truth was.
“If they’d lived now,” she concluded, “I feel it wouldn’t have
happened. People aren’t so set upon tragedy as they were then. If my
father had been able to go round the world, or if she’d had a rest
cure, everything would have come right. But what could I do? And then
they had bad friends, both of them, who made mischief. Ah, Katharine,
when you marry, be quite, quite sure that you love your husband!”
The tears stood in Mrs. Hilbery’s eyes.
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.