Night and Day
perhaps the conclusiveness of a great ancestor is a little discouraging
to those who run the risk of comparison with him. It seems as if,
having flowered so splendidly, nothing now remained possible but a
steady growth of good, green stalk and leaf. For these reasons, and for
others, Katharine had her moments of despondency. The glorious past, in
which men and women grew to unexampled size, intruded too much upon the
present, and dwarfed it too consistently, to be altogether encouraging
to one forced to make her experiment in living when the great age was
dead.
She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural, in the
first place owing to her mother’s absorption in them, and in the second
because a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the
dead, since she was helping her mother to produce a life of the great
poet. When Katharine was seventeen or eighteen—that is to say, some ten
years ago—her mother had enthusiastically announced that now, with a
daughter to help her, the biography would soon be published. Notices to
this effect found their way into the literary papers, and for some time
Katharine worked with a sense of great pride and achievement.
Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were making no way at
all, and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghost of
a literary temperament could doubt but that they had materials for one
of the greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelves and
boxes bulged with the precious stuff. The most private lives of the
most interesting people lay furled in yellow bundles of close-written
manuscript. In addition to this Mrs. Hilbery had in her own head as
bright a vision of that time as now remained to the living, and could
give those flashes and thrills to the old words which gave them almost
the substance of flesh. She had no difficulty in writing, and covered a
page every morning as instinctively as a thrush sings, but
nevertheless, with all this to urge and inspire, and the most devout
intention to accomplish the work, the book still remained unwritten.
Papers accumulated without much furthering their task, and in dull
moments Katharine had her doubts whether they would ever produce
anything at all fit to lay before the public. Where did the difficulty
lie? Not in their materials, alas! nor in their ambitions, but in
something more profound, in her own inaptitude, and above all, in her
mother’s temperament. Katharine would calculate that she had never
known her write for more than ten minutes at a time. Ideas came to her
chiefly when she was in motion. She liked to perambulate the room with
a duster in her hand, with which she stopped to polish the backs of
already lustrous books, musing and romancing as she did so. Suddenly
the right phrase or the penetrating point of view would suggest itself,
and she would drop her duster and write ecstatically for a few
breathless moments; and then the mood would pass away, and the duster
would be sought for, and the old books polished again. These spells of
inspiration never burnt steadily, but flickered over the gigantic mass
of the subject as capriciously as a will-o’-the-wisp, lighting now on
this point, now on that. It was as much as Katharine could do to keep
the pages of her mother’s manuscript in order, but to sort them so that
the sixteenth year of Richard Alardyce’s life succeeded the fifteenth
was beyond her skill. And yet they were so brilliant, these paragraphs,
so nobly phrased, so lightning-like in their illumination, that the
dead seemed to crowd the very room. Read continuously, they produced a
sort of vertigo, and set her asking herself in despair what on earth
she was to do with them? Her mother refused, also, to face the radical
questions of what to leave in and what to leave out. She could not
decide how far the public was to be told the truth about the poet’s
separation from his wife. She drafted passages to suit either case, and
then liked each so well that she could not decide upon the rejection of
either.
But the book must be written. It was a duty that they owed the world,
and to Katharine, at least, it meant more than that, for if they could
not between them get this one book accomplished they had no right to
their privileged position. Their increment became yearly more and more
unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that her
grandfather was a very great man.
By the time she was twenty-seven, these thoughts had become very
familiar to her. They trod their way through her mind as she sat
opposite her mother of a morning at a table heaped with bundles of old
letters and well supplied with pencils, scissors, bottles of gum,
india-rubber bands, large envelopes, and other appliances for the
manufacture of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham’s visit, Katharine
had resolved to try the effect of strict rules upon her mother’s habits
of literary composition. They were to be seated at their tables every
morning at ten o’clock, with a clean-swept morning of empty, secluded
hours before them. They were to keep their eyes fast upon the paper,
and nothing was to tempt them to speech, save at the stroke of the hour
when ten minutes for relaxation were to be allowed them. If these rules
were observed for a year, she made out on a sheet of paper that the
completion of the book was certain, and she laid her scheme before her
mother with a feeling that much of the task was already accomplished.
Mrs. Hilbery examined the sheet of paper very carefully. Then she
clapped her hands and exclaimed enthusiastically:
“Well done, Katharine! What a wonderful head for business you’ve got!
Now I shall keep this before me, and every day I shall make a little
mark in my pocketbook, and on the last day of all—let me think, what
shall we do to celebrate the last day of all? If it weren’t the winter
we could take a jaunt to Italy. They say Switzerland’s very lovely in
the snow, except for the cold. But, as you say, the great thing is to
finish the book. Now let me see—”
When they inspected her manuscripts, which Katharine had put in order,
they found a state of things well calculated to dash their spirits, if
they had not just resolved on reform. They found, to begin with, a
great variety of very imposing paragraphs with which the biography was
to open; many of these, it is true, were unfinished, and resembled
triumphal arches standing upon one leg, but, as Mrs. Hilbery observed,
they could be patched up in ten minutes, if she gave her mind to it.
Next, there was an account of the ancient home of the Alardyces, or
rather, of spring in Suffolk, which was very beautifully written,
although not essential to the story. However, Katharine had put
together a string of names and dates, so that the poet was capably
brought into the world, and his ninth year was reached without further
mishap. After that, Mrs. Hilbery wished, for sentimental reasons, to
introduce the recollections of a very fluent old lady, who had been
brought up in the same village, but these Katharine decided must go. It
might be advisable to introduce here a sketch of contemporary poetry
contributed by Mr. Hilbery, and thus terse and learned and altogether
out of keeping with the rest, but Mrs. Hilbery was of opinion that it
was too bare, and made one feel altogether like a good little girl in a
lecture-room, which was not at all in keeping with her father. It was
put on one side. Now came the period of his early manhood, when various
affairs of the heart must either be concealed or revealed; here again
Mrs. Hilbery was of two minds, and a thick packet of manuscript was
shelved for further consideration.
Several years were now altogether omitted, because Mrs. Hilbery had
found something distasteful to her in that period, and had preferred to
dwell upon her own recollections as a child. After this, it seemed to
Katharine that the book became a wild dance of will-o’-the-wisps,
without form or continuity, without coherence even, or any attempt to
make a narrative. Here were twenty pages upon her grandfather’s taste
in hats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summer
day’s expedition into the country, when they had missed their train,
together with fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous men and women,
which seemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic. There were,
moreover, thousands of letters, and a mass of faithful recollections
contributed by old friends, which had grown yellow now in their
envelopes, but must be placed somewhere, or their feelings would be
hurt. So many volumes had been written about the poet since his death
that she had also to dispose of a great number of misstatements, which
involved minute researches and much correspondence. Sometimes Katharine
brooded, half crushed, among her papers; sometimes she felt that it was
necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the
past; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present,
which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to
be of an utterly thin and inferior composition.
The worst of it was that she had no aptitude for literature. She did
not like phrases. She had even some natural antipathy to that process
of self-examination, that perpetual effort to understand one’s own
feeling, and express it beautifully, fitly, or energetically in
language, which constituted so great a part of her mother’s existence.
She was, on the contrary, inclined to be silent; she shrank from
expressing herself even in talk, let alone in writing. As this
disposition was highly convenient in a family much given to the
manufacture of phrases, and seemed to argue a corresponding capacity
for action, she was, from her childhood even, put in charge of
household affairs. She had the reputation, which nothing in her manner
contradicted, of being the most practical of people. Ordering meals,
directing servants, paying bills, and so contriving that every clock
ticked more or less accurately in time, and a number of vases were
always full of fresh flowers was supposed to be a natural endowment of
hers, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery often observed that it was poetry the
wrong side out. From a very early age, too, she had to exert herself in
another capacity; she had to counsel and help and generally sustain her
mother. Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to sustain
herself if the world had been what the world is not. She was
beautifully adapted for life in another planet. But the natural genius
she had for conducting affairs there was of no real use to her here.
Her watch, for example, was a constant source of surprise to her, and
at the age of sixty-five she was still amazed at the ascendancy which
rules and reasons exerted over the lives of other people. She had never
learnt her lesson, and had constantly to be punished for her ignorance.
But as that ignorance was combined with a fine natural insight which
saw deep whenever it saw at all, it was not possible to write Mrs.
Hilbery off among the dunces; on the contrary, she had a way of seeming
the wisest person in the room. But, on the whole, she found it very
necessary to seek support in her daughter.
Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as
yet, no title and very little recognition, although the labor of mill
and factory is, perhaps, no more severe and the results of less benefit
to the world. She lived at home. She did it very well, too. Any one
coming to the house in Cheyne Walk felt that here was an orderly place,
shapely, controlled—a place where life had been trained to show to the
best advantage, and, though composed of different elements, made to
appear harmonious and with a character of its own. Perhaps it was the