CHAPTER VII
"And little Augustus Pelham said to me, 'It's the younger generationknocking at the door,' and I said to him, 'Oh, but the youngergeneration comes in without knocking, Mr. Pelham.' Such a feeble littlejoke, 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 thatwork is published," said Mr. Hilbery.
The elderly couple were waiting for the dinner-bell to ring and fortheir daughter to come into the room. Their arm-chairs were drawn upon either side of the fire, and each sat in the same slightly crouchedposition, looking into the coals, with the expressions of people whohave had their share of experiences and wait, rather passively, forsomething to happen. Mr. Hilbery now gave all his attention to a pieceof coal which had fallen out of the grate, and to selecting a favorableposition for it among the lumps that were burning already. Mrs. Hilberywatched him in silence, and the smile changed on her lips as if her mindstill played with the events of the afternoon.
When Mr. Hilbery had accomplished his task, he resumed his crouchingposition again, and began to toy with the little green stone attached tohis watch-chain. His deep, oval-shaped eyes were fixed upon the flames,but behind the superficial glaze seemed to brood an observant andwhimsical spirit, which kept the brown of the eye still unusually vivid.But a look of indolence, the result of skepticism or of a taste toofastidious to be satisfied by the prizes and conclusions so easilywithin his grasp, lent him an expression almost of melancholy. Aftersitting thus for a time, he seemed to reach some point in his thinkingwhich demonstrated its futility, upon which he sighed and stretched hishand for a book lying on the table by his side.
Directly the door opened he closed the book, and the eyes of fatherand mother both rested on Katharine as she came towards them. The sightseemed 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 eveningdress, extremely young, and the sight of her refreshed them, were itonly because her youth and ignorance made their knowledge of the worldof some value.
"The only excuse for you, Katharine, is that dinner is still later thanyou 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 ILIKE your being out so late, Katharine," she continued. "You took a cab,I hope?"
Here dinner was announced, and Mr. Hilbery formally led his wifedownstairs on his arm. They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed,the prettiness of the dinner-table merited that compliment. There wasno cloth upon the table, and the china made regular circles of deep blueupon the shining brown wood. In the middle there was a bowl of tawnyred and yellow chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh that thenarrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball. From thesurrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers surveyedthis entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them testifiedin the great man's own handwriting that he was yours sincerely oraffectionately or for ever. The father and daughter would have beenquite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence, or with a fewcryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not be understoodby the servants. But silence depressed Mrs. Hilbery, and far fromminding the presence of maids, she would often address herself to them,and was never altogether unconscious of their approval or disapproval ofher remarks. In the first place she called them to witness that the roomwas darker than usual, and had all the lights turned on.
"That's more cheerful," she exclaimed. "D'you know, Katharine, thatridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried tomake epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, youknow, 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, ofcourse," 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 withhimself--"
"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 Katharineknow--"
Mr. Hilbery suggested "cynical."
"Well, that'll do. I don't believe in sending girls to college, but Ishould teach them that sort of thing. It makes one feel so dignified,bringing out these little allusions, and passing on gracefully to thenext topic. But I don't know what's come over me--I actually had to askAugustus 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 hisdiary."
"I wish," Katharine started, with great impetuosity, and checkedherself. Her mother always stirred her to feel and think quickly, andthen 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 totell him; and then they argued, while Mrs. Hilbery went on with her ownthoughts.
"I wish mother wasn't famous. I was out at tea, and they would talk tome about poetry."
"Thinking you must be poetical, I see--and aren't you?"
"Who's been talking to you about poetry, Katharine?" Mrs. Hilberydemanded, and Katharine was committed to giving her parents an accountof her visit to the Suffrage office.
"They have an office at the top of one of the old houses in RussellSquare. I never saw such queer-looking people. And the man discoveredI was related to the poet, and talked to me about poetry. Even MaryDatchet 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, whenMamma lived there," Mrs. Hilbery mused, "and I can't fancy turning oneof 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 notfilling up those dreadful little forms all day long," Mrs. Hilberypersisted, her notion of office life being derived from some chance viewof a scene behind the counter at her bank, as she slipped the sovereignsinto her purse.
"At any rate, they haven't made a convert of Katharine, which was what Iwas afraid of," Mr. Hilbery remarked.
"Oh no," said Katharine very decidedly, "I wouldn't work with them foranything."
"It's curious," Mr. Hilbery continued, agreeing with his daughter, "howthe sight of one's fellow-enthusiasts always chokes one off. Theyshow up the faults of one's cause so much more plainly than one'santagonists. One can be enthusiastic in one's study, but directly onecomes into touch with the people who agree with one, all the glamorgoes. So I've always found," and he proceeded to tell them, as he peeledhis apple, how he committed himself once, in his youthful days, to makea speech at a political meeting, and went there ablaze with enthusiasmfor the ideals of his own side; but while his leaders spoke, he becamegradually converted to the other way of thinking, if thinking it couldbe called, and had to feign illness in order to avoid making a fool ofhimself--an experience which had sickened him of public meetings.
Katharine listened and felt as she generally did when her father, andto some extent her mother, described their feelings, that she quiteunderstood and agreed with them, but, at the same time, saw somethingwhich they did not see, and always felt some disappointment when theyfell short of her vision, as they always did. The plates succeeded eachother swiftly and noiselessly in front of her, and the table was deckedfor dessert, and as the talk murmured on in familiar grooves, she satthere, rather like a judge, listening to her parents, who did, indeed,feel it very pleasant when they made her l
augh.
Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curiouslittle ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually,though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to broodover them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance.Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port, whichwere placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr. Hilbery, andsimultaneously Mrs. Hilbery and Katharine left the room. All the yearsthey had lived together they had never seen Mr. Hilbery smoke his cigaror 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 intimatepostscript to what had been said at dinner, the sense of being womentogether coming out most strongly when the male sex was, as if by somereligious rite, secluded from the female. Katharine knew by heartthe sort of mood that possessed her as she walked upstairs to thedrawing-room, her mother's arm in hers; and she could anticipate thepleasure with which, when she had turned on the lights, they bothregarded the drawing-room, fresh swept and set in order for thelast section of the day, with the red parrots swinging on the chintzcurtains, and the arm-chairs warming in the blaze. Mrs. Hilbery stoodover the fire, with one foot on the fender, and her skirts slightlyraised.
"Oh, Katharine," she exclaimed, "how you've made me think of Mamma andthe old days in Russell Square! I can see the chandeliers, and thegreen silk of the piano, and Mamma sitting in her cashmere shawl bythe window, singing till the little ragamuffin boys outside stopped tolisten. Papa sent me in with a bunch of violets while he waited roundthe corner. It must have been a summer evening. That was before thingswere hopeless...."
As she spoke an expression of regret, which must have come frequently tocause the lines which now grew deep round the lips and eyes, settled onher face. The poet's marriage had not been a happy one. He had left hiswife, and after some years of a rather reckless existence, she haddied, before her time. This disaster had led to great irregularitiesof education, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery might be said to have escapededucation altogether. But she had been her father's companion at theseason when he wrote the finest of his poems. She had sat on his knee intaverns and other haunts of drunken poets, and it was for her sake, sopeople said, that he had cured himself of his dissipation, and becomethe irreproachable literary character that the world knows, whoseinspiration had deserted him. As Mrs. Hilbery grew old she thought moreand more of the past, and this ancient disaster seemed at times almostto prey upon her mind, as if she could not pass out of life herselfwithout laying the ghost of her parent's sorrow to rest.
Katharine wished to comfort her mother, but it was difficult to do thissatisfactorily when the facts themselves were so much of a legend. Thehouse in Russell Square, for example, with its noble rooms, and themagnolia-tree in the garden, and the sweet-voiced piano, and the soundof feet coming down the corridors, and other properties of size andromance--had they any existence? Yet why should Mrs. Alardyce live allalone in this gigantic mansion, and, if she did not live alone, withwhom did she live? For its own sake, Katharine rather liked this tragicstory, and would have been glad to hear the details of it, and to havebeen able to discuss them frankly. But this it became less and lesspossible to do, for though Mrs. Hilbery was constantly reverting to thestory, it was always in this tentative and restless fashion, as thoughby a touch here and there she could set things straight which had beencrooked these sixty years. Perhaps, indeed, she no longer knew what thetruth 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 hadbeen able to go round the world, or if she'd had a rest cure, everythingwould have come right. But what could I do? And then they had badfriends, 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 whatMary Datchet and Mr. Denham don't understand. This is the sort ofposition I'm always getting into. How simple it must be to live as theydo!" for all the evening she had been comparing her home and her fatherand mother with the Suffrage office and the people there.
"But, Katharine," Mrs. Hilbery continued, with one of her sudden changesof 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'tmean that he's got any money, because he hasn't."
The alteration of her name annoyed Katharine, and she observed, rathersharply, 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 whowants to marry you. Perhaps they'll come to that in time, but meanwhileI confess that dear William--" But here Mr. Hilbery came in, and themore solid part of the evening began. This consisted in the readingaloud by Katharine from some prose work or other, while her motherknitted scarves intermittently on a little circular frame, and herfather read the newspaper, not so attentively but that he could commenthumorously now and again upon the fortunes of the hero and the heroine.The Hilberys subscribed to a library, which delivered books on Tuesdaysand Fridays, and Katharine did her best to interest her parents in theworks of living and highly respectable authors; but Mrs. Hilbery wasperturbed by the very look of the light, gold-wreathed volumes, andwould make little faces as if she tasted something bitter as the readingwent on while Mr. Hilbery would treat the moderns with a curiouselaborate banter such as one might apply to the antics of a promisingchild. 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 nastyfor 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 HenryFielding, and Katharine found that her letters needed all her attention.