Night and Day
actually in real life, for possibly the people who dream thus are those
who do the most prosaic things.
At this moment she was much inclined to sit on into the night, spinning
her light fabric of thoughts until she tired of their futility, and
went to her mathematics; but, as she knew very well, it was necessary
that she should see her father before he went to bed. The case of Cyril
Alardyce must be discussed, her mother’s illusions and the rights of
the family attended to. Being vague herself as to what all this
amounted to, she had to take counsel with her father. She took her
letters in her hand and went downstairs. It was past eleven, and the
clocks had come into their reign, the grandfather’s clock in the hall
ticking in competition with the small clock on the landing. Mr.
Hilbery’s study ran out behind the rest of the house, on the ground
floor, and was a very silent, subterranean place, the sun in daytime
casting a mere abstract of light through a skylight upon his books and
the large table, with its spread of white papers, now illumined by a
green reading-lamp. Here Mr. Hilbery sat editing his review, or placing
together documents by means of which it could be proved that Shelley
had written “of” instead of “and,” or that the inn in which Byron had
slept was called the “Nag’s Head” and not the “Turkish Knight,” or that
the Christian name of Keats’s uncle had been John rather than Richard,
for he knew more minute details about these poets than any man in
England, probably, and was preparing an edition of Shelley which
scrupulously observed the poet’s system of punctuation. He saw the
humor of these researches, but that did not prevent him from carrying
them out with the utmost scrupulosity.
He was lying back comfortably in a deep arm-chair smoking a cigar, and
ruminating the fruitful question as to whether Coleridge had wished to
marry Dorothy Wordsworth, and what, if he had done so, would have been
the consequences to him in particular, and to literature in general.
When Katharine came in he reflected that he knew what she had come for,
and he made a pencil note before he spoke to her. Having done this, he
saw that she was reading, and he watched her for a moment without
saying anything. She was reading “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” and
her mind was full of the Italian hills and the blue daylight, and the
hedges set with little rosettes of red and white roses. Feeling that
her father waited for her, she sighed and said, shutting her book:
“I’ve had a letter from Aunt Celia about Cyril, father.... It seems to
be true—about his marriage. What are we to do?”
“Cyril seems to have been behaving in a very foolish manner,” said Mr.
Hilbery, in his pleasant and deliberate tones.
Katharine found some difficulty in carrying on the conversation, while
her father balanced his finger-tips so judiciously, and seemed to
reserve so many of his thoughts for himself.
“He’s about done for himself, I should say,” he continued. Without
saying anything, he took Katharine’s letters out of her hand, adjusted
his eyeglasses, and read them through.
At length he said “Humph!” and gave the letters back to her.
“Mother knows nothing about it,” Katharine remarked. “Will you tell
her?”
“I shall tell your mother. But I shall tell her that there is nothing
whatever for us to do.”
“But the marriage?” Katharine asked, with some diffidence.
Mr. Hilbery said nothing, and stared into the fire.
“What in the name of conscience did he do it for?” he speculated at
last, rather to himself than to her.
Katharine had begun to read her aunt’s letter over again, and she now
quoted a sentence. “Ibsen and Butler.... He has sent me a letter full
of quotations—nonsense, though clever nonsense.”
“Well, if the younger generation want to carry on its life on those
lines, it’s none of our affair,” he remarked.
“But isn’t it our affair, perhaps, to make them get married?” Katharine
asked rather wearily.
“Why the dickens should they apply to me?” her father demanded with
sudden irritation.
“Only as the head of the family—”
“But I’m not the head of the family. Alfred’s the head of the family.
Let them apply to Alfred,” said Mr. Hilbery, relapsing again into his
arm-chair. Katharine was aware that she had touched a sensitive spot,
however, in mentioning the family.
“I think, perhaps, the best thing would be for me to go and see them,”
she observed.
“I won’t have you going anywhere near them,” Mr. Hilbery replied with
unwonted decision and authority. “Indeed, I don’t understand why
they’ve dragged you into the business at all—I don’t see that it’s got
anything to do with you.”
“I’ve always been friends with Cyril,” Katharine observed.
“But did he ever tell you anything about this?” Mr. Hilbery asked
rather sharply.
Katharine shook her head. She was, indeed, a good deal hurt that Cyril
had not confided in her—did he think, as Ralph Denham or Mary Datchet
might think, that she was, for some reason, unsympathetic—hostile even?
“As to your mother,” said Mr. Hilbery, after a pause, in which he
seemed to be considering the color of the flames, “you had better tell
her the facts. She’d better know the facts before every one begins to
talk about it, though why Aunt Celia thinks it necessary to come, I’m
sure I don’t know. And the less talk there is the better.”
Granting the assumption that gentlemen of sixty who are highly
cultivated, and have had much experience of life, probably think of
many things which they do not say, Katharine could not help feeling
rather puzzled by her father’s attitude, as she went back to her room.
What a distance he was from it all! How superficially he smoothed these
events into a semblance of decency which harmonized with his own view
of life! He never wondered what Cyril had felt, nor did the hidden
aspects of the case tempt him to examine into them. He merely seemed to
realize, rather languidly, that Cyril had behaved in a way which was
foolish, because other people did not behave in that way. He seemed to
be looking through a telescope at little figures hundreds of miles in
the distance.
Her selfish anxiety not to have to tell Mrs. Hilbery what had happened
made her follow her father into the hall after breakfast the next
morning in order to question him.
“Have you told mother?” she asked. Her manner to her father was almost
stern, and she seemed to hold endless depths of reflection in the dark
of her eyes.
Mr. Hilbery sighed.
“My dear child, it went out of my head.” He smoothed his silk hat
energetically, and at once affected an air of hurry. “I’ll send a note
round from the office.... I’m late this morning, and I’ve any amount of
proofs to get through.”
“That wouldn’t do at all,” Katharine said decidedly. “She must be
told—you or I must tell her. We ought to have told her at first.”
Mr. Hilbery had now placed his hat on his head, and his hand was on the
door-knob. An expression which Katharine knew well from her childhood,
when he asked her to shield him in some neglect of duty, came into his
eyes; malice, humor, and irresponsibility were blended in it. He nodded
his head to and fro significantly, opened the door with an adroit
movement, and stepped out with a lightness unexpected at his age. He
waved his hand once to his daughter, and was gone. Left alone,
Katharine could not help laughing to find herself cheated as usual in
domestic bargainings with her father, and left to do the disagreeable
work which belonged, by rights, to him.
CHAPTER IX
Katharine disliked telling her mother about Cyril’s misbehavior quite
as much as her father did, and for much the same reasons. They both
shrank, nervously, as people fear the report of a gun on the stage,
from all that would have to be said on this occasion. Katharine,
moreover, was unable to decide what she thought of Cyril’s misbehavior.
As usual, she saw something which her father and mother did not see,
and the effect of that something was to suspend Cyril’s behavior in her
mind without any qualification at all. They would think whether it was
good or bad; to her it was merely a thing that had happened.
When Katharine reached the study, Mrs. Hilbery had already dipped her
pen in the ink.
“Katharine,” she said, lifting it in the air, “I’ve just made out such
a queer, strange thing about your grandfather. I’m three years and six
months older than he was when he died. I couldn’t very well have been
his mother, but I might have been his elder sister, and that seems to
me such a pleasant fancy. I’m going to start quite fresh this morning,
and get a lot done.”
She began her sentence, at any rate, and Katharine sat down at her own
table, untied the bundle of old letters upon which she was working,
smoothed them out absent-mindedly, and began to decipher the faded
script. In a minute she looked across at her mother, to judge her mood.
Peace and happiness had relaxed every muscle in her face; her lips were
parted very slightly, and her breath came in smooth, controlled
inspirations like those of a child who is surrounding itself with a
building of bricks, and increasing in ecstasy as each brick is placed
in position. So Mrs. Hilbery was raising round her the skies and trees
of the past with every stroke of her pen, and recalling the voices of
the dead. Quiet as the room was, and undisturbed by the sounds of the
present moment, Katharine could fancy that here was a deep pool of past
time, and that she and her mother were bathed in the light of sixty
years ago. What could the present give, she wondered, to compare with
the rich crowd of gifts bestowed by the past? Here was a Thursday
morning in process of manufacture; each second was minted fresh by the
clock upon the mantelpiece. She strained her ears and could just hear,
far off, the hoot of a motor-car and the rush of wheels coming nearer
and dying away again, and the voices of men crying old iron and
vegetables in one of the poorer streets at the back of the house.
Rooms, of course, accumulate their suggestions, and any room in which
one has been used to carry on any particular occupation gives off
memories of moods, of ideas, of postures that have been seen in it; so
that to attempt any different kind of work there is almost impossible.
Katharine was unconsciously affected, each time she entered her
mother’s room, by all these influences, which had had their birth years
ago, when she was a child, and had something sweet and solemn about
them, and connected themselves with early memories of the cavernous
glooms and sonorous echoes of the Abbey where her grandfather lay
buried. All the books and pictures, even the chairs and tables, had
belonged to him, or had reference to him; even the china dogs on the
mantelpiece and the little shepherdesses with their sheep had been
bought by him for a penny a piece from a man who used to stand with a
tray of toys in Kensington High Street, as Katharine had often heard
her mother tell. Often she had sat in this room, with her mind fixed so
firmly on those vanished figures that she could almost see the muscles
round their eyes and lips, and had given to each his own voice, with
its tricks of accent, and his coat and his cravat. Often she had seemed
to herself to be moving among them, an invisible ghost among the
living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends, because
she knew their secrets and possessed a divine foreknowledge of their
destiny. They had been so unhappy, such muddlers, so wrong-headed, it
seemed to her. She could have told them what to do, and what not to do.
It was a melancholy fact that they would pay no heed to her, and were
bound to come to grief in their own antiquated way. Their behavior was
often grotesquely irrational; their conventions monstrously absurd; and