Night and Day
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