Night and Day
discussed happiness with Miss Hilbery at their first meeting. He looked
critically at Joan, and wished that she did not look so provincial or
suburban in her high green dress with the faded trimming, so patient,
and almost resigned. He began to wish to tell her about the Hilberys in
order to abuse them, for in the miniature battle which so often rages
between two quickly following impressions of life, the life of the
Hilberys was getting the better of the life of the Denhams in his mind,
and he wanted to assure himself that there was some quality in which
Joan infinitely surpassed Miss Hilbery. He should have felt that his
own sister was more original, and had greater vitality than Miss
Hilbery had; but his main impression of Katharine now was of a person
of great vitality and composure; and at the moment he could not
perceive what poor dear Joan had gained from the fact that she was the
granddaughter of a man who kept a shop, and herself earned her own
living. The infinite dreariness and sordidness of their life oppressed
him in spite of his fundamental belief that, as a family, they were
somehow remarkable.
“Shall you talk to mother?” Joan inquired. “Because, you see, the
thing’s got to be settled, one way or another. Charles must write to
Uncle John if he’s going there.”
Ralph sighed impatiently.
“I suppose it doesn’t much matter either way,” he exclaimed. “He’s
doomed to misery in the long run.”
A slight flush came into Joan’s cheek.
“You know you’re talking nonsense,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt any one
to have to earn their own living. I’m very glad I have to earn mine.”
Ralph was pleased that she should feel this, and wished her to
continue, but he went on, perversely enough.
“Isn’t that only because you’ve forgotten how to enjoy yourself? You
never have time for anything decent—”
“As for instance?”
“Well, going for walks, or music, or books, or seeing interesting
people. You never do anything that’s really worth doing any more than I
do.”
“I always think you could make this room much nicer, if you liked,” she
observed.
“What does it matter what sort of room I have when I’m forced to spend
all the best years of my life drawing up deeds in an office?”
“You said two days ago that you found the law so interesting.”
“So it is if one could afford to know anything about it.”
(“That’s Herbert only just going to bed now,” Joan interposed, as a
door on the landing slammed vigorously. “And then he won’t get up in
the morning.”)
Ralph looked at the ceiling, and shut his lips closely together. Why,
he wondered, could Joan never for one moment detach her mind from the
details of domestic life? It seemed to him that she was getting more
and more enmeshed in them, and capable of shorter and less frequent
flights into the outer world, and yet she was only thirty-three.
“D’you ever pay calls now?” he asked abruptly.
“I don’t often have the time. Why do you ask?”
“It might be a good thing, to get to know new people, that’s all.”
“Poor Ralph!” said Joan suddenly, with a smile. “You think your
sister’s getting very old and very dull—that’s it, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think anything of the kind,” he said stoutly, but he flushed.
“But you lead a dog’s life, Joan. When you’re not working in an office,
you’re worrying over the rest of us. And I’m not much good to you, I’m
afraid.”
Joan rose, and stood for a moment warming her hands, and, apparently,
meditating as to whether she should say anything more or not. A feeling
of great intimacy united the brother and sister, and the semicircular
lines above their eyebrows disappeared. No, there was nothing more to
be said on either side. Joan brushed her brother’s head with her hand
as she passed him, murmured good night, and left the room. For some
minutes after she had gone Ralph lay quiescent, resting his head on his
hand, but gradually his eyes filled with thought, and the line
reappeared on his brow, as the pleasant impression of companionship and
ancient sympathy waned, and he was left to think on alone.
After a time he opened his book, and read on steadily, glancing once or
twice at his watch, as if he had set himself a task to be accomplished
in a certain measure of time. Now and then he heard voices in the
house, and the closing of bedroom doors, which showed that the
building, at the top of which he sat, was inhabited in every one of its
cells. When midnight struck, Ralph shut his book, and with a candle in
his hand, descended to the ground floor, to ascertain that all lights
were extinct and all doors locked. It was a threadbare, well-worn house
that he thus examined, as if the inmates had grazed down all luxuriance
and plenty to the verge of decency; and in the night, bereft of life,
bare places and ancient blemishes were unpleasantly visible. Katharine
Hilbery, he thought, would condemn it off-hand.
CHAPTER III
Denham had accused Katharine Hilbery of belonging to one of the most
distinguished families in England, and if any one will take the trouble
to consult Mr. Galton’s “Hereditary Genius,” he will find that this
assertion is not far from the truth. The Alardyces, the Hilberys, the
Millingtons, and the Otways seem to prove that intellect is a
possession which can be tossed from one member of a certain group to
another almost indefinitely, and with apparent certainty that the
brilliant gift will be safely caught and held by nine out of ten of the
privileged race. They had been conspicuous judges and admirals, lawyers
and servants of the State for some years before the richness of the
soil culminated in the rarest flower that any family can boast, a great
writer, a poet eminent among the poets of England, a Richard Alardyce;
and having produced him, they proved once more the amazing virtues of
their race by proceeding unconcernedly again with their usual task of
breeding distinguished men. They had sailed with Sir John Franklin to
the North Pole, and ridden with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow, and
when they were not lighthouses firmly based on rock for the guidance of
their generation, they were steady, serviceable candles, illuminating
the ordinary chambers of daily life. Whatever profession you looked at,
there was a Warburton or an Alardyce, a Millington or a Hilbery
somewhere in authority and prominence.
It may be said, indeed, that English society being what it is, no very
great merit is required, once you bear a well-known name, to put you
into a position where it is easier on the whole to be eminent than
obscure. And if this is true of the sons, even the daughters, even in
the nineteenth century, are apt to become people of
importance—philanthropists and educationalists if they are spinsters,
and the wives of distinguished men if they marry. It is true that there
were several lamentable exceptions to this rule in the Alardyce group,
which seems to indicate that the cadets of such houses go more rapidly
to the bad than the children of ordinary fathers and mothers, as if it
were somehow a relief to them. But, on the whole, in these first years
of the twentieth century, the Alardyces and their relations were
keeping their heads well above water. One finds them at the tops of
professions, with letters after their names; they sit in luxurious
public offices, with private secretaries attached to them; they write
solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great
universities, and when one of them dies the chances are that another of
them writes his biography.
Now the source of this nobility was, of course, the poet, and his
immediate descendants, therefore, were invested with greater luster
than the collateral branches. Mrs. Hilbery, in virtue of her position
as the only child of the poet, was spiritually the head of the family,
and Katharine, her daughter, had some superior rank among all the
cousins and connections, the more so because she was an only child. The
Alardyces had married and intermarried, and their offspring were
generally profuse, and had a way of meeting regularly in each other’s
houses for meals and family celebrations which had acquired a
semi-sacred character, and were as regularly observed as days of
feasting and fasting in the Church.
In times gone by, Mrs. Hilbery had known all the poets, all the
novelists, all the beautiful women and distinguished men of her time.
These being now either dead or secluded in their infirm glory, she made
her house a meeting-place for her own relations, to whom she would
lament the passing of the great days of the nineteenth century, when
every department of letters and art was represented in England by two
or three illustrious names. Where are their successors? she would ask,
and the absence of any poet or painter or novelist of the true caliber
at the present day was a text upon which she liked to ruminate, in a
sunset mood of benignant reminiscence, which it would have been hard to
disturb had there been need. But she was far from visiting their
inferiority upon the younger generation. She welcomed them very
heartily to her house, told them her stories, gave them sovereigns and
ices and good advice, and weaved round them romances which had
generally no likeness to the truth.
The quality of her birth oozed into Katharine’s consciousness from a
dozen different sources as soon as she was able to perceive anything.
Above her nursery fireplace hung a photograph of her grandfather’s tomb
in Poets’ Corner, and she was told in one of those moments of grown-up
confidence which are so tremendously impressive to the child’s mind,
that he was buried there because he was a “good and great man.” Later,
on an anniversary, she was taken by her mother through the fog in a
hansom cab, and given a large bunch of bright, sweet-scented flowers to
lay upon his tomb. The candles in the church, the singing and the
booming of the organ, were all, she thought, in his honor. Again and
again she was brought down into the drawing-room to receive the
blessing of some awful distinguished old man, who sat, even to her
childish eye, somewhat apart, all gathered together and clutching a
stick, unlike an ordinary visitor in her father’s own arm-chair, and
her father himself was there, unlike himself, too, a little excited and
very polite. These formidable old creatures used to take her in their
arms, look very keenly in her eyes, and then to bless her, and tell her
that she must mind and be a good girl, or detect a look in her face
something like Richard’s as a small boy. That drew down upon her her
mother’s fervent embrace, and she was sent back to the nursery very
proud, and with a mysterious sense of an important and unexplained
state of things, which time, by degrees, unveiled to her.
There were always visitors—uncles and aunts and cousins “from India,”
to be reverenced for their relationship alone, and others of the
solitary and formidable class, whom she was enjoined by her parents to
“remember all your life.” By these means, and from hearing constant
talk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions of the
world included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the names of
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, for some
reason, much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to other people.
They made a kind of boundary to her vision of life, and played a
considerable part in determining her scale of good and bad in her own
small affairs. Her descent from one of these gods was no surprise to
her, but matter for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, the
privileges of her lot were taken for granted, and certain drawbacks
made themselves very manifest. Perhaps it is a little depressing to
inherit not lands but an example of intellectual and spiritual virtue;