The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt towards
the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet
flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring
to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly colored and
sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. Lives frozen by
age, so far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which
neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid,
reflecting the shapes and colors of the present, as well as the shapes
and colors of the past. In the case of Mrs. Hilbery, these early spring
days were chiefly upsetting inasmuch as they caused a general
quickening of her emotional powers, which, as far as the past was
concerned, had never suffered much diminution. But in the spring her
desire for expression invariably increased. She was haunted by the
ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the
combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favorite
authors. She made them for herself on scraps of paper, and rolled them
on her tongue when there seemed no occasion for such eloquence. She was
upheld in these excursions by the certainty that no language could
outdo the splendor of her father’s memory, and although her efforts did
not notably further the end of his biography, she was under the
impression of living more in his shade at such times than at others. No
one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth
brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport
themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of the
tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating
in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected
against her better judgment by her mother’s enthusiasm. Not that her
judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of
Shakespeare’s sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter of her
grandfather’s biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest,
Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among
other things, of writing Shakespeare’s sonnets; the idea, struck out to
enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of privately
printed manuals within the next few days for her instruction, had
submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature; she had come half
to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other
people’s facts, and all her fancy for the time being centered upon
Stratford-on-Avon. She had a plan, she told Katharine, when, rather
later than usual, Katharine came into the room the morning after her
walk by the river, for visiting Shakespeare’s tomb. Any fact about the
poet had become, for the moment, of far greater interest to her than
the immediate present, and the certainty that there was existing in
England a spot of ground where Shakespeare had undoubtedly stood, where
his very bones lay directly beneath one’s feet, was so absorbing to her
on this particular occasion that she greeted her daughter with the
exclamation:
“D’you think he ever passed this house?”
The question, for the moment, seemed to Katharine to have reference to
Ralph Denham.
“On his way to Blackfriars, I mean,” Mrs. Hilbery continued, “for you
know the latest discovery is that he owned a house there.”
Katharine still looked about her in perplexity, and Mrs. Hilbery added:
“Which is a proof that he wasn’t as poor as they’ve sometimes said. I
should like to think that he had enough, though I don’t in the least
want him to be rich.”
Then, perceiving her daughter’s expression of perplexity, Mrs. Hilbery
burst out laughing.
“My dear, I’m not talking about _your_ William, though that’s another
reason for liking him. I’m talking, I’m thinking, I’m dreaming of _my_
William—William Shakespeare, of course. Isn’t it odd,” she mused,
standing at the window and tapping gently upon the pane, “that for all
one can see, that dear old thing in the blue bonnet, crossing the road
with her basket on her arm, has never heard that there was such a
person? Yet it all goes on: lawyers hurrying to their work, cabmen
squabbling for their fares, little boys rolling their hoops, little
girls throwing bread to the gulls, as if there weren’t a Shakespeare in
the world. I should like to stand at that crossing all day long and
say: ‘People, read Shakespeare!’”
Katharine sat down at her table and opened a long dusty envelope. As
Shelley was mentioned in the course of the letter as if he were alive,
it had, of course, considerable value. Her immediate task was to decide
whether the whole letter should be printed, or only the paragraph which
mentioned Shelley’s name, and she reached out for a pen and held it in
readiness to do justice upon the sheet. Her pen, however, remained in
the air. Almost surreptitiously she slipped a clean sheet in front of
her, and her hand, descending, began drawing square boxes halved and
quartered by straight lines, and then circles which underwent the same
process of dissection.
“Katharine! I’ve hit upon a brilliant idea!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed—“to
lay out, say, a hundred pounds or so on copies of Shakespeare, and give
them to working men. Some of your clever friends who get up meetings
might help us, Katharine. And that might lead to a playhouse, where we
could all take parts. You’d be Rosalind—but you’ve a dash of the old
nurse in you. Your father’s Hamlet, come to years of discretion; and
I’m—well, I’m a bit of them all; I’m quite a large bit of the fool, but
the fools in Shakespeare say all the clever things. Now who shall
William be? A hero? Hotspur? Henry the Fifth? No, William’s got a touch
of Hamlet in him, too. I can fancy that William talks to himself when
he’s alone. Ah, Katharine, you must say very beautiful things when
you’re together!” she added wistfully, with a glance at her daughter,
who had told her nothing about the dinner the night before.
“Oh, we talk a lot of nonsense,” said Katharine, hiding her slip of
paper as her mother stood by her, and spreading the old letter about
Shelley in front of her.
“It won’t seem to you nonsense in ten years’ time,” said Mrs. Hilbery.
“Believe me, Katharine, you’ll look back on these days afterwards;
you’ll remember all the silly things you’ve said; and you’ll find that
your life has been built on them. The best of life is built on what we
say when we’re in love. It isn’t nonsense, Katharine,” she urged, “it’s
the truth, it’s the only truth.”
Katharine was on the point of interrupting her mother, and then she was
on the point of confiding in her. They came strangely close together
sometimes. But, while she hesitated and sought for words not too
direct, her mother had recourse to Shakespeare, and turned page after
page, set upon finding some quotation which said all this about love
far, far better than she could. Accordingly, Katharine did nothing but
scrub one of her circles an intense black with her pencil, in the midst
of which process the telephone-bell rang, and she left the room to
answer it.
When she returned, Mrs. Hilbery had found not the passage she wanted,
but another of exquisite beauty as she justly observed, looking up for
a second to ask Katharine who that was?
“Mary Datchet,” Katharine replied briefly.
“Ah—I half wish I’d called you Mary, but it wouldn’t have gone with
Hilbery, and it wouldn’t have gone with Rodney. Now this isn’t the
passage I wanted. (I never can find what I want.) But it’s spring; it’s
the daffodils; it’s the green fields; it’s the birds.”
She was cut short in her quotation by another imperative
telephone-bell. Once more Katharine left the room.
“My dear child, how odious the triumphs of science are!” Mrs. Hilbery
exclaimed on her return. “They’ll be linking us with the moon next—but
who was that?”
“William,” Katharine replied yet more briefly.
“I’ll forgive William anything, for I’m certain that there aren’t any
Williams in the moon. I hope he’s coming to luncheon?”
“He’s coming to tea.”
“Well, that’s better than nothing, and I promise to leave you alone.”
“There’s no need for you to do that,” said Katharine.
She swept her hand over the faded sheet, and drew herself up squarely
to the table as if she refused to waste time any longer. The gesture
was not lost upon her mother. It hinted at the existence of something
stern and unapproachable in her daughter’s character, which struck
chill upon her, as the sight of poverty, or drunkenness, or the logic
with which Mr. Hilbery sometimes thought good to demolish her certainty
of an approaching millennium struck chill upon her. She went back to
her own table, and putting on her spectacles with a curious expression
of quiet humility, addressed herself for the first time that morning to
the task before her. The shock with an unsympathetic world had a
sobering effect on her. For once, her industry surpassed her
daughter’s. Katharine could not reduce the world to that particular
perspective in which Harriet Martineau, for instance, was a figure of
solid importance, and possessed of a genuine relationship to this
figure or to that date. Singularly enough, the sharp call of the
telephone-bell still echoed in her ear, and her body and mind were in a
state of tension, as if, at any moment, she might hear another summons
of greater interest to her than the whole of the nineteenth century.
She did not clearly realize what this call was to be; but when the ears
have got into the habit of listening, they go on listening
involuntarily, and thus Katharine spent the greater part of the morning
in listening to a variety of sounds in the back streets of Chelsea. For
the first time in her life, probably, she wished that Mrs. Hilbery
would not keep so closely to her work. A quotation from Shakespeare
would not have come amiss. Now and again she heard a sigh from her
mother’s table, but that was the only proof she gave of her existence,
and Katharine did not think of connecting it with the square aspect of
her own position at the table, or, perhaps, she would have thrown her
pen down and told her mother the reason of her restlessness. The only
writing she managed to accomplish in the course of the morning was one
letter, addressed to her cousin, Cassandra Otway—a rambling letter,
long, affectionate, playful and commanding all at once. She bade
Cassandra put her creatures in the charge of a groom, and come to them
for a week or so. They would go and hear some music together.
Cassandra’s dislike of rational society, she said, was an affectation
fast hardening into a prejudice, which would, in the long run, isolate
her from all interesting people and pursuits. She was finishing the
sheet when the sound she was anticipating all the time actually struck
upon her ears. She jumped up hastily, and slammed the door with a
sharpness which made Mrs. Hilbery start. Where was Katharine off to? In
her preoccupied state she had not heard the bell.
The alcove on the stairs, in which the telephone was placed, was
screened for privacy by a curtain of purple velvet. It was a pocket for
superfluous possessions, such as exist in most houses which harbor the
wreckage of three generations. Prints of great-uncles, famed for their
prowess in the East, hung above Chinese teapots, whose sides were
riveted by little gold stitches, and the precious teapots, again, stood
upon bookcases containing the complete works of William Cowper and Sir
Walter Scott. The thread of sound, issuing from the telephone, was
always colored by the surroundings which received it, so it seemed to
Katharine. Whose voice was now going to combine with them, or to strike
a discord?
“Whose voice?” she asked herself, hearing a man inquire, with great
determination, for her number. The unfamiliar voice now asked for Miss
Hilbery. Out of all the welter of voices which crowd round the far end
of the telephone, out of the enormous range of possibilities, whose
voice, what possibility, was this? A pause gave her time to ask herself
this question. It was solved next moment.
“I’ve looked out the train.... Early on Saturday afternoon would suit
me best.... I’m Ralph Denham.... But I’ll write it down....”
With more than the usual sense of being impinged upon the point of a
bayonet, Katharine replied:
“I think I could come. I’ll look at my engagements.... Hold on.”
She dropped the machine, and looked fixedly at the print of the
great-uncle who had not ceased to gaze, with an air of amiable
authority, into a world which, as yet, beheld no symptoms of the Indian
Mutiny. And yet, gently swinging against the wall, within the black
tube, was a voice which recked nothing of Uncle James, of China
teapots, or of red velvet curtains. She watched the oscillation of the
tube, and at the same moment became conscious of the individuality of
the house in which she stood; she heard the soft domestic sounds of
regular existence upon staircases and floors above her head, and
movements through the wall in the house next door. She had no very
clear vision of Denham himself, when she lifted the telephone to her
lips and replied that she thought Saturday would suit her. She hoped
that he would not say good-bye at once, although she felt no particular
anxiety to attend to what he was saying, and began, even while he
spoke, to think of her own upper room, with its books, its papers
pressed between the leaves of dictionaries, and the table that could be
cleared for work. She replaced the instrument, thoughtfully; her
restlessness was assuaged; she finished her letter to Cassandra without
difficulty, addressed the envelope, and fixed the stamp with her usual
quick decision.
A bunch of anemones caught Mrs. Hilbery’s eye when they had finished
luncheon. The blue and purple and white of the bowl, standing in a pool
of variegated light on a polished Chippendale table in the drawing-room
window, made her stop dead with an exclamation of pleasure.
“Who is lying ill in bed, Katharine?” she demanded. “Which of our
friends wants cheering up? Who feels that they’ve been forgotten and
passed over, and that nobody wants them? Whose water rates are overdue,
and the cook leaving in a temper without waiting for her wages? There
was somebody I know—” she concluded, but for the moment the name of
this desirable acquaintance escaped her. The best representative of the
forlorn company whose day would be brightened by a bunch of anemones
was, in Katharine’s opinion, the widow of a general living in the
Cromwell Road. In default of the actually destitute and starving, whom
she would much have preferred, Mrs. Hilbery was forced to acknowledge
her claims, for though in comfortable circumstances, she was extremely
dull, unattractive, connected in some oblique fashion with literature,
and had been touched to the verge of tears, on one occasion, by an
afternoon call.
It happened that Mrs. Hilbery had an engagement elsewhere, so that the
task of taking the flowers to the Cromwell Road fell upon Katharine.
She took her letter to Cassandra with her, meaning to post it in the
first pillar-box she came to. When, however, she was fairly out of
doors, and constantly invited by pillar-boxes and post-offices to slip
her envelope down their scarlet throats, she forbore. She made absurd
excuses, as that she did not wish to cross the road, or that she was
certain to pass another post-office in a more central position a little
farther on. The longer she held the letter in her hand, however, the
more persistently certain questions pressed upon her, as if from a
collection of voices in the air. These invisible people wished to be
informed whether she was engaged to William Rodney, or was the
engagement broken off? Was it right, they asked, to invite Cassandra
for a visit, and was William Rodney in love with her, or likely to fall
in love? Then the questioners paused for a moment, and resumed as if
another side of the problem had just come to their notice. What did
Ralph Denham mean by what he said to you last night? Do you consider
that he is in love with you? Is it right to consent to a solitary walk
with him, and what advice are you going to give him about his future?
Has William Rodney cause to be jealous of your conduct, and what do you
propose to do about Mary Datchet? What are you going to do? What does
honor require you to do? they repeated.
“Good Heavens!” Katharine exclaimed, after listening to all these
remarks, “I suppose I ought to make up my mind.”
But the debate was a formal skirmishing, a pastime to gain
breathing-space. Like all people brought up in a tradition, Katharine
was able, within ten minutes or so, to reduce any moral difficulty to
its traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers. The book
of wisdom lay open, if not upon her mother’s knee, upon the knees of
many uncles and aunts. She had only to consult them, and they would at
once turn to the right page and read out an answer exactly suited to
one in her position. The rules which should govern the behavior of an
unmarried woman are written in red ink, graved upon marble, if, by some
freak of nature, it should fall out that the unmarried woman has not
the same writing scored upon her heart. She was ready to believe that
some people are fortunate enough to reject, accept, resign, or lay down
their lives at the bidding of traditional authority; she could envy
them; but in her case the questions became phantoms directly she tried
seriously to find an answer, which proved that the traditional answer
would be of no use to her individually. Yet it had served so many
people, she thought, glancing at the rows of houses on either side of
her, where families, whose incomes must be between a thousand and
fifteen-hundred a year lived, and kept, perhaps, three servants, and
draped their windows with curtains which were always thick and
generally dirty, and must, she thought, since you could only see a
looking-glass gleaming above a sideboard on which a dish of apples was
set, keep the room inside very dark. But she turned her head away,
observing that this was not a method of thinking the matter out.
The only truth which she could discover was the truth of what she
herself felt—a frail beam when compared with the broad illumination
shed by the eyes of all the people who are in agreement to see
together; but having rejected the visionary voices, she had no choice
but to make this her guide through the dark masses which confronted
her. She tried to follow her beam, with an expression upon her face
which would have made any passer-by think her reprehensibly and almost
ridiculously detached from the surrounding scene. One would have felt
alarmed lest this young and striking woman were about to do something
eccentric. But her beauty saved her from the worst fate that can befall
a pedestrian; people looked at her, but they did not laugh. To seek a
true feeling among the chaos of the unfeelings or half-feelings of
life, to recognize it when found, and to accept the consequences of the
discovery, draws lines upon the smoothest brow, while it quickens the
light of the eyes; it is a pursuit which is alternately bewildering,
debasing, and exalting, and, as Katharine speedily found, her
discoveries gave her equal cause for surprise, shame, and intense
anxiety. Much depended, as usual, upon the interpretation of the word
love; which word came up again and again, whether she considered
Rodney, Denham, Mary Datchet, or herself; and in each case it seemed to
stand for something different, and yet for something unmistakable and
something not to be passed by. For the more she looked into the
confusion of lives which, instead of running parallel, had suddenly
intersected each other, the more distinctly she seemed to convince
herself that there was no other light on them than was shed by this
strange illumination, and no other path save the one upon which it
threw its beams. Her blindness in the case of Rodney, her attempt to
match his true feeling with her false feeling, was a failure never to
be sufficiently condemned; indeed, she could only pay it the tribute of
leaving it a black and naked landmark unburied by attempt at oblivion
or excuse.
With this to humiliate there was much to exalt. She thought of three
different scenes; she thought of Mary sitting upright and saying, “I’m
in love—I’m in love”; she thought of Rodney losing his
self-consciousness among the dead leaves, and speaking with the
abandonment of a child; she thought of Denham leaning upon the stone
parapet and talking to the distant sky, so that she thought him mad.
Her mind, passing from Mary to Denham, from William to Cassandra, and
from Denham to herself—if, as she rather doubted, Denham’s state of
mind was connected with herself—seemed to be tracing out the lines of
some symmetrical pattern, some arrangement of life, which invested, if
not herself, at least the others, not only with interest, but with a
kind of tragic beauty. She had a fantastic picture of them upholding
splendid palaces upon their bent backs. They were the lantern-bearers,
whose lights, scattered among the crowd, wove a pattern, dissolving,
joining, meeting again in combination. Half forming such conceptions as
these in her rapid walk along the dreary streets of South Kensington,
she determined that, whatever else might be obscure, she must further
the objects of Mary, Denham, William, and Cassandra. The way was not
apparent. No course of action seemed to her indubitably right. All she
achieved by her thinking was the conviction that, in such a cause, no
risk was too great; and that, far from making any rules for herself or
others, she would let difficulties accumulate unsolved, situations
widen their jaws unsatiated, while she maintained a position of
absolute and fearless independence. So she could best serve the people
who loved.
Read in the light of this exaltation, there was a new meaning in the
words which her mother had penciled upon the card attached to the bunch
of anemones. The door of the house in the Cromwell Road opened; gloomy
vistas of passage and staircase were revealed; such light as there was
seemed to be concentrated upon a silver salver of visiting-cards, whose
black borders suggested that the widow’s friends had all suffered the
same bereavement. The parlor-maid could hardly be expected to fathom
the meaning of the grave tone in which the young lady proffered the
flowers, with Mrs. Hilbery’s love; and the door shut upon the offering.
The sight of a face, the slam of a door, are both rather destructive of
exaltation in the abstract; and, as she walked back to Chelsea,
Katharine had her doubts whether anything would come of her resolves.
If you cannot make sure of people, however, you can hold fairly fast to
figures, and in some way or other her thought about such problems as
she was wont to consider worked in happily with her mood as to her
friends’ lives. She reached home rather late for tea.
On the ancient Dutch chest in the hall she perceived one or two hats,
coats, and walking-sticks, and the sound of voices reached her as she
stood outside the drawing-room door. Her mother gave a little cry as
she came in; a cry which conveyed to Katharine the fact that she was
late, that the teacups and milk-jugs were in a conspiracy of
disobedience, and that she must immediately take her place at the head
of the table and pour out tea for the guests. Augustus Pelham, the
diarist, liked a calm atmosphere in which to tell his stories; he liked
attention; he liked to elicit little facts, little stories, about the
past and the great dead, from such distinguished characters as Mrs.
Hilbery for the nourishment of his diary, for whose sake he frequented
tea-tables and ate yearly an enormous quantity of buttered toast. He,
therefore, welcomed Katharine with relief, and she had merely to shake
hands with Rodney and to greet the American lady who had come to be
shown the relics, before the talk started again on the broad lines of
reminiscence and discussion which were familiar to her.
Yet, even with this thick veil between them, she could not help looking
at Rodney, as if she could detect what had happened to him since they
met. It was in vain. His clothes, even the white slip, the pearl in his
tie, seemed to intercept her quick glance, and to proclaim the futility
of such inquiries of a discreet, urbane gentleman, who balanced his cup
of tea and poised a slice of bread and butter on the edge of the
saucer. He would not meet her eye, but that could be accounted for by
his activity in serving and helping, and the polite alacrity with which
he was answering the questions of the American visitor.
It was certainly a sight to daunt any one coming in with a head full of
theories about love. The voices of the invisible questioners were
reinforced by the scene round the table, and sounded with a tremendous
self-confidence, as if they had behind them the common sense of twenty
generations, together with the immediate approval of Mr. Augustus
Pelham, Mrs. Vermont Bankes, William Rodney, and, possibly, Mrs.
Hilbery herself. Katharine set her teeth, not entirely in the
metaphorical sense, for her hand, obeying the impulse towards definite
action, laid firmly upon the table beside her an envelope which she had
been grasping all this time in complete forgetfulness. The address was
uppermost, and a moment later she saw William’s eye rest upon it as he
rose to fulfil some duty with a plate. His expression instantly
changed. He did what he was on the point of doing, and then looked at
Katharine with a look which revealed enough of his confusion to show
her that he was not entirely represented by his appearance. In a minute
or two he proved himself at a loss with Mrs. Vermont Bankes, and Mrs.
Hilbery, aware of the silence with her usual quickness, suggested that,
perhaps, it was now time that Mrs. Bankes should be shown “our things.”
Katharine accordingly rose, and led the way to the little inner room
with the pictures and the books. Mrs. Bankes and Rodney followed her.
She turned on the lights, and began directly in her low, pleasant
voice: “This table is my grandfather’s writing-table. Most of the later
poems were written at it. And this is his pen—the last pen he ever
used.” She took it in her hand and paused for the right number of
seconds. “Here,” she continued, “is the original manuscript of the ‘Ode
to Winter.’ The early manuscripts are far less corrected than the later
ones, as you will see directly.... Oh, do take it yourself,” she added,
as Mrs. Bankes asked, in an awestruck tone of voice, for that
privilege, and began a preliminary unbuttoning of her white kid gloves.
“You are wonderfully like your grandfather, Miss Hilbery,” the American
lady observed, gazing from Katharine to the portrait, “especially about
the eyes. Come, now, I expect she writes poetry herself, doesn’t she?”
she asked in a jocular tone, turning to William. “Quite one’s ideal of
a poet, is it not, Mr. Rodney? I cannot tell you what a privilege I
feel it to be standing just here with the poet’s granddaughter. You
must know we think a great deal of your grandfather in America, Miss
Hilbery. We have societies for reading him aloud. What! His very own
slippers!” Laying aside the manuscript, she hastily grasped the old
shoes, and remained for a moment dumb in contemplation of them.
While Katharine went on steadily with her duties as show-woman, Rodney
examined intently a row of little drawings which he knew by heart
already. His disordered state of mind made it necessary for him to take
advantage of these little respites, as if he had been out in a high
wind and must straighten his dress in the first shelter he reached. His
calm was only superficial, as he knew too well; it did not exist much
below the surface of tie, waistcoat, and white slip.
On getting out of bed that morning he had fully made up his mind to
ignore what had been said the night before; he had been convinced, by
the sight of Denham, that his love for Katharine was passionate, and
when he addressed her early that morning on the telephone, he had meant
his cheerful but authoritative tones to convey to her the fact that,
after a night of madness, they were as indissolubly engaged as ever.
But when he reached his office his torments began. He found a letter
from Cassandra waiting for him. She had read his play, and had taken
the very first opportunity to write and tell him what she thought of
it. She knew, she wrote, that her praise meant absolutely nothing; but
still, she had sat up all night; she thought this, that, and the other;
she was full of enthusiasm most elaborately scratched out in places,
but enough was written plain to gratify William’s vanity exceedingly.
She was quite intelligent enough to say the right things, or, even more
charmingly, to hint at them. In other ways, too, it was a very charming
letter. She told him about her music, and about a Suffrage meeting to
which Henry had taken her, and she asserted, half seriously, that she
had learnt the Greek alphabet, and found it “fascinating.” The word was
underlined. Had she laughed when she drew that line? Was she ever
serious? Didn’t the letter show the most engaging compound of
enthusiasm and spirit and whimsicality, all tapering into a flame of
girlish freakishness, which flitted, for the rest of the morning, as a
will-o’-the-wisp, across Rodney’s landscape. He could not resist
beginning an answer to her there and then. He found it particularly
delightful to shape a style which should express the bowing and
curtsying, advancing and retreating, which are characteristic of one of
the many million partnerships of men and women. Katharine never trod
that particular measure, he could not help reflecting;
Katharine—Cassandra; Cassandra—Katharine—they alternated in his
consciousness all day long. It was all very well to dress oneself
carefully, compose one’s face, and start off punctually at half-past
four to a tea-party in Cheyne Walk, but Heaven only knew what would
come of it all, and when Katharine, after sitting silent with her usual
immobility, wantonly drew from her pocket and slapped down on the table
beneath his eyes a letter addressed to Cassandra herself, his composure
deserted him. What did she mean by her behavior?
He looked up sharply from his row of little pictures. Katharine was
disposing of the American lady in far too arbitrary a fashion. Surely
the victim herself must see how foolish her enthusiasms appeared in the
eyes of the poet’s granddaughter. Katharine never made any attempt to
spare people’s feelings, he reflected; and, being himself very
sensitive to all shades of comfort and discomfort, he cut short the
auctioneer’s catalog, which Katharine was reeling off more and more
absent-mindedly, and took Mrs. Vermont Bankes, with a queer sense of
fellowship in suffering, under his own protection.
But within a few minutes the American lady had completed her
inspection, and inclining her head in a little nod of reverential
farewell to the poet and his shoes, she was escorted downstairs by
Rodney. Katharine stayed by herself in the little room. The ceremony of
ancestor-worship had been more than usually oppressive to her.
Moreover, the room was becoming crowded beyond the bounds of order.
Only that morning a heavily insured proof-sheet had reached them from a
collector in Australia, which recorded a change of the poet’s mind
about a very famous phrase, and, therefore, had claims to the honor of
glazing and framing. But was there room for it? Must it be hung on the
staircase, or should some other relic give place to do it honor?
Feeling unable to decide the question, Katharine glanced at the
portrait of her grandfather, as if to ask his opinion. The artist who
had painted it was now out of fashion, and by dint of showing it to
visitors, Katharine had almost ceased to see anything but a glow of
faintly pleasing pink and brown tints, enclosed within a circular
scroll of gilt laurel-leaves. The young man who was her grandfather
looked vaguely over her head. The sensual lips were slightly parted,
and gave the face an expression of beholding something lovely or
miraculous vanishing or just rising upon the rim of the distance. The
expression repeated itself curiously upon Katharine’s face as she gazed
up into his. They were the same age, or very nearly so. She wondered
what he was looking for; were there waves beating upon a shore for him,
too, she wondered, and heroes riding through the leaf-hung forests? For
perhaps the first time in her life she thought of him as a man, young,
unhappy, tempestuous, full of desires and faults; for the first time
she realized him for herself, and not from her mother’s memory. He
might have been her brother, she thought. It seemed to her that they
were akin, with the mysterious kinship of blood which makes it seem
possible to interpret the sights which the eyes of the dead behold so
intently, or even to believe that they look with us upon our present
joys and sorrows. He would have understood, she thought, suddenly; and
instead of laying her withered flowers upon his shrine, she brought him
her own perplexities—perhaps a gift of greater value, should the dead
be conscious of gifts, than flowers and incense and adoration. Doubts,
questionings, and despondencies she felt, as she looked up, would be
more welcome to him than homage, and he would hold them but a very
small burden if she gave him, also, some share in what she suffered and
achieved. The depth of her own pride and love were not more apparent to
her than the sense that the dead asked neither flowers nor regrets, but
a share in the life which they had given her, the life which they had
lived.
Rodney found her a moment later sitting beneath her grandfather’s
portrait. She laid her hand on the seat next her in a friendly way, and
said:
“Come and sit down, William. How glad I was you were here! I felt
myself getting ruder and ruder.”
“You are not good at hiding your feelings,” he returned dryly.
“Oh, don’t scold me—I’ve had a horrid afternoon.” She told him how she
had taken the flowers to Mrs. McCormick, and how South Kensington
impressed her as the preserve of officers’ widows. She described how
the door had opened, and what gloomy avenues of busts and palm-trees
and umbrellas had been revealed to her. She spoke lightly, and
succeeded in putting him at his ease. Indeed, he rapidly became too
much at his ease to persist in a condition of cheerful neutrality. He
felt his composure slipping from him. Katharine made it seem so natural
to ask her to help him, or advise him, to say straight out what he had
in his mind. The letter from Cassandra was heavy in his pocket. There
was also the letter to Cassandra lying on the table in the next room.
The atmosphere seemed charged with Cassandra. But, unless Katharine
began the subject of her own accord, he could not even hint—he must
ignore the whole affair; it was the part of a gentleman to preserve a
bearing that was, as far as he could make it, the bearing of an
undoubting lover. At intervals he sighed deeply. He talked rather more
quickly than usual about the possibility that some of the operas of
Mozart would be played in the summer. He had received a notice, he
said, and at once produced a pocket-book stuffed with papers, and began
shuffling them in search. He held a thick envelope between his finger
and thumb, as if the notice from the opera company had become in some
way inseparably attached to it.
“A letter from Cassandra?” said Katharine, in the easiest voice in the
world, looking over his shoulder. “I’ve just written to ask her to come
here, only I forgot to post it.”
He handed her the envelope in silence. She took it, extracted the
sheets, and read the letter through.
The reading seemed to Rodney to take an intolerably long time.
“Yes,” she observed at length, “a very charming letter.”
Rodney’s face was half turned away, as if in bashfulness. Her view of
his profile almost moved her to laughter. She glanced through the pages
once more.
“I see no harm,” William blurted out, “in helping her—with Greek, for
example—if she really cares for that sort of thing.”
“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t care,” said Katharine, consulting
the pages once more. “In fact—ah, here it is—‘The Greek alphabet is
absolutely _fascinating_.’ Obviously she does care.”
“Well, Greek may be rather a large order. I was thinking chiefly of
English. Her criticisms of my play, though they’re too generous,
evidently immature—she can’t be more than twenty-two, I suppose?—they
certainly show the sort of thing one wants: real feeling for poetry,
understanding, not formed, of course, but it’s at the root of
everything after all. There’d be no harm in lending her books?”
“No. Certainly not.”
“But if it—hum—led to a correspondence? I mean, Katharine, I take it,
without going into matters which seem to me a little morbid, I mean,”
he floundered, “you, from your point of view, feel that there’s nothing
disagreeable to you in the notion? If so, you’ve only to speak, and I
never think of it again.”
She was surprised by the violence of her desire that he never should
think of it again. For an instant it seemed to her impossible to
surrender an intimacy, which might not be the intimacy of love, but was
certainly the intimacy of true friendship, to any woman in the world.
Cassandra would never understand him—she was not good enough for him.
The letter seemed to her a letter of flattery—a letter addressed to his
weakness, which it made her angry to think was known to another. For he
was not weak; he had the rare strength of doing what he promised—she
had only to speak, and he would never think of Cassandra again.
She paused. Rodney guessed the reason. He was amazed.
“She loves me,” he thought. The woman he admired more than any one in
the world, loved him, as he had given up hope that she would ever love
him. And now that for the first time he was sure of her love, he
resented it. He felt it as a fetter, an encumbrance, something which
made them both, but him in particular, ridiculous. He was in her power
completely, but his eyes were open and he was no longer her slave or
her dupe. He would be her master in future. The instant prolonged
itself as Katharine realized the strength of her desire to speak the
words that should keep William for ever, and the baseness of the
temptation which assailed her to make the movement, or speak the word,
which he had often begged her for, which she was now near enough to
feeling. She held the letter in her hand. She sat silent.
At this moment there was a stir in the other room; the voice of Mrs.
Hilbery was heard talking of proof-sheets rescued by miraculous
providence from butcher’s ledgers in Australia; the curtain separating
one room from the other was drawn apart, and Mrs. Hilbery and Augustus
Pelham stood in the doorway. Mrs. Hilbery stopped short. She looked at
her daughter, and at the man her daughter was to marry, with her
peculiar smile that always seemed to tremble on the brink of satire.
“The best of all my treasures, Mr. Pelham!” she exclaimed. “Don’t move,
Katharine. Sit still, William. Mr. Pelham will come another day.”
Mr. Pelham looked, smiled, bowed, and, as his hostess had moved on,
followed her without a word. The curtain was drawn again either by him
or by Mrs. Hilbery.
But her mother had settled the question somehow. Katharine doubted no
longer.
“As I told you last night,” she said, “I think it’s your duty, if
there’s a chance that you care for Cassandra, to discover what your
feeling is for her now. It’s your duty to her, as well as to me. But we
must tell my mother. We can’t go on pretending.”
“That is entirely in your hands, of course,” said Rodney, with an
immediate return to the manner of a formal man of honor.
“Very well,” said Katharine.
Directly he left her she would go to her mother, and explain that the
engagement was at an end—or it might be better that they should go
together?
“But, Katharine,” Rodney began, nervously attempting to stuff
Cassandra’s sheets back into their envelope; “if Cassandra—should
Cassandra—you’ve asked Cassandra to stay with you.”
“Yes; but I’ve not posted the letter.”
He crossed his knees in a discomfited silence. By all his codes it was
impossible to ask a woman with whom he had just broken off his
engagement to help him to become acquainted with another woman with a
view to his falling in love with her. If it was announced that their
engagement was over, a long and complete separation would inevitably
follow; in those circumstances, letters and gifts were returned; after
years of distance the severed couple met, perhaps at an evening party,
and touched hands uncomfortably with an indifferent word or two. He
would be cast off completely; he would have to trust to his own
resources. He could never mention Cassandra to Katharine again; for
months, and doubtless years, he would never see Katharine again;
anything might happen to her in his absence.
Katharine was almost as well aware of his perplexities as he was. She
knew in what direction complete generosity pointed the way; but
pride—for to remain engaged to Rodney and to cover his experiments hurt
what was nobler in her than mere vanity—fought for its life.
“I’m to give up my freedom for an indefinite time,” she thought, “in
order that William may see Cassandra here at his ease. He’s not the
courage to manage it without my help—he’s too much of a coward to tell
me openly what he wants. He hates the notion of a public breach. He
wants to keep us both.”
When she reached this point, Rodney pocketed the letter and elaborately
looked at his watch. Although the action meant that he resigned
Cassandra, for he knew his own incompetence and distrusted himself
entirely, and lost Katharine, for whom his feeling was profound though
unsatisfactory, still it appeared to him that there was nothing else
left for him to do. He was forced to go, leaving Katharine free, as he
had said, to tell her mother that the engagement was at an end. But to
do what plain duty required of an honorable man, cost an effort which
only a day or two ago would have been inconceivable to him. That a
relationship such as he had glanced at with desire could be possible
between him and Katharine, he would have been the first, two days ago,
to deny with indignation. But now his life had changed; his attitude
had changed; his feelings were different; new aims and possibilities
had been shown him, and they had an almost irresistible fascination and
force. The training of a life of thirty-five years had not left him
defenceless; he was still master of his dignity; he rose, with a mind
made up to an irrevocable farewell.
“I leave you, then,” he said, standing up and holding out his hand with
an effort that left him pale, but lent him dignity, “to tell your
mother that our engagement is ended by your desire.”
She took his hand and held it.
“You don’t trust me?” she said.
“I do, absolutely,” he replied.
“No. You don’t trust me to help you.... I could help you?”
“I’m hopeless without your help!” he exclaimed passionately, but
withdrew his hand and turned his back. When he faced her, she thought
that she saw him for the first time without disguise.
“It’s useless to pretend that I don’t understand what you’re offering,
Katharine. I admit what you say. Speaking to you perfectly frankly, I
believe at this moment that I do love your cousin; there is a chance
that, with your help, I might—but no,” he broke off, “it’s impossible,
it’s wrong—I’m infinitely to blame for having allowed this situation to
arise.”
“Sit beside me. Let’s consider sensibly—”
“Your sense has been our undoing—” he groaned.
“I accept the responsibility.”
“Ah, but can I allow that?” he exclaimed. “It would mean—for we must
face it, Katharine—that we let our engagement stand for the time
nominally; in fact, of course, your freedom would be absolute.”
“And yours too.”
“Yes, we should both be free. Let us say that I saw Cassandra once,
twice, perhaps, under these conditions; and then if, as I think
certain, the whole thing proves a dream, we tell your mother instantly.
Why not tell her now, indeed, under pledge of secrecy?”
“Why not? It would be over London in ten minutes, besides, she would
never even remotely understand.”
“Your father, then? This secrecy is detestable—it’s dishonorable.”
“My father would understand even less than my mother.”
“Ah, who could be expected to understand?” Rodney groaned; “but it’s
from your point of view that we must look at it. It’s not only asking
too much, it’s putting you into a position—a position in which I could
not endure to see my own sister.”
“We’re not brothers and sisters,” she said impatiently, “and if we
can’t decide, who can? I’m not talking nonsense,” she proceeded. “I’ve
done my best to think this out from every point of view, and I’ve come
to the conclusion that there are risks which have to be taken,—though I
don’t deny that they hurt horribly.”
“Katharine, you mind? You’ll mind too much.”
“No I shan’t,” she said stoutly. “I shall mind a good deal, but I’m
prepared for that; I shall get through it, because you will help me.
You’ll both help me. In fact, we’ll help each other. That’s a Christian
doctrine, isn’t it?”
“It sounds more like Paganism to me,” Rodney groaned, as he reviewed
the situation into which her Christian doctrine was plunging them.
And yet he could not deny that a divine relief possessed him, and that
the future, instead of wearing a lead-colored mask, now blossomed with
a thousand varied gaieties and excitements. He was actually to see
Cassandra within a week or perhaps less, and he was more anxious to
know the date of her arrival than he could own even to himself. It
seemed base to be so anxious to pluck this fruit of Katharine’s
unexampled generosity and of his own contemptible baseness. And yet,
though he used these words automatically, they had now no meaning. He
was not debased in his own eyes by what he had done, and as for
praising Katharine, were they not partners, conspirators, people bent
upon the same quest together, so that to praise the pursuit of a common
end as an act of generosity was meaningless. He took her hand and
pressed it, not in thanks so much as in an ecstasy of comradeship.
“We will help each other,” he said, repeating her words, seeking her
eyes in an enthusiasm of friendship.
Her eyes were grave but dark with sadness as they rested on him. “He’s
already gone,” she thought, “far away—he thinks of me no more.” And the
fancy came to her that, as they sat side by side, hand in hand, she
could hear the earth pouring from above to make a barrier between them,
so that, as they sat, they were separated second by second by an
impenetrable wall. The process, which affected her as that of being
sealed away and for ever from all companionship with the person she
cared for most, came to an end at last, and by common consent they
unclasped their fingers, Rodney touching hers with his lips, as the
curtain parted, and Mrs. Hilbery peered through the opening with her
benevolent and sarcastic expression to ask whether Katharine could
remember was it Tuesday or Wednesday, and did she dine in Westminster?
“Dearest William,” she said, pausing, as if she could not resist the
pleasure of encroaching for a second upon this wonderful world of love
and confidence and romance. “Dearest children,” she added, disappearing
with an impulsive gesture, as if she forced herself to draw the curtain
upon a scene which she refused all temptation to interrupt.