Night and Day
chief triumph of Katharine’s art that Mrs. Hilbery’s character
predominated. She and Mr. Hilbery appeared to be a rich background for
her mother’s more striking qualities.
Silence being, thus, both natural to her and imposed upon her, the only
other remark that her mother’s friends were in the habit of making
about it was that it was neither a stupid silence nor an indifferent
silence. But to what quality it owed its character, since character of
some sort it had, no one troubled themselves to inquire. It was
understood that she was helping her mother to produce a great book. She
was known to manage the household. She was certainly beautiful. That
accounted for her satisfactorily. But it would have been a surprise,
not only to other people but to Katharine herself, if some magic watch
could have taken count of the moments spent in an entirely different
occupation from her ostensible one. Sitting with faded papers before
her, she took part in a series of scenes such as the taming of wild
ponies upon the American prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a
hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or in others more peaceful,
but marked by her complete emancipation from her present surroundings
and, needless to say, by her surpassing ability in her new vocation.
When she was rid of the pretense of paper and pen, phrase-making and
biography, she turned her attention in a more legitimate direction,
though, strangely enough, she would rather have confessed her wildest
dreams of hurricane and prairie than the fact that, upstairs, alone in
her room, she rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to...
work at mathematics. No force on earth would have made her confess
that. Her actions when thus engaged were furtive and secretive, like
those of some nocturnal animal. Steps had only to sound on the
staircase, and she slipped her paper between the leaves of a great
Greek dictionary which she had purloined from her father’s room for
this purpose. It was only at night, indeed, that she felt secure enough
from surprise to concentrate her mind to the utmost.
Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively wish
to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in her
mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would not
have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the
star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and
vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly in
thus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feel
wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires away
from view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness. Again and again
she was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinking of
her grandfather. Waking from these trances, she would see that her
mother, too, had lapsed into some dream almost as visionary as her own,
for the people who played their parts in it had long been numbered
among the dead. But, seeing her own state mirrored in her mother’s
face, Katharine would shake herself awake with a sense of irritation.
Her mother was the last person she wished to resemble, much though she
admired her. Her common sense would assert itself almost brutally, and
Mrs. Hilbery, looking at her with her odd sidelong glance, that was
half malicious and half tender, would liken her to “your wicked old
Uncle Judge Peter, who used to be heard delivering sentence of death in
the bathroom. Thank Heaven, Katharine, I’ve not a drop of _him_ in me!”
CHAPTER IV
At about nine o’clock at night, on every alternate Wednesday, Miss Mary
Datchet made the same resolve, that she would never again lend her
rooms for any purposes whatsoever. Being, as they were, rather large
and conveniently situated in a street mostly dedicated to offices off
the Strand, people who wished to meet, either for purposes of
enjoyment, or to discuss art, or to reform the State, had a way of
suggesting that Mary had better be asked to lend them her rooms. She
always met the request with the same frown of well-simulated annoyance,
which presently dissolved in a kind of half-humorous, half-surly shrug,
as of a large dog tormented by children who shakes his ears. She would
lend her room, but only on condition that all the arrangements were
made by her. This fortnightly meeting of a society for the free
discussion of everything entailed a great deal of moving, and pulling,
and ranging of furniture against the wall, and placing of breakable and
precious things in safe places. Miss Datchet was quite capable of
lifting a kitchen table on her back, if need were, for although
well-proportioned and dressed becomingly, she had the appearance of
unusual strength and determination.
She was some twenty-five years of age, but looked older because she
earned, or intended to earn, her own living, and had already lost the
look of the irresponsible spectator, and taken on that of the private
in the army of workers. Her gestures seemed to have a certain purpose,
the muscles round eyes and lips were set rather firmly, as though the
senses had undergone some discipline, and were held ready for a call on
them. She had contracted two faint lines between her eyebrows, not from
anxiety but from thought, and it was quite evident that all the
feminine instincts of pleasing, soothing, and charming were crossed by
others in no way peculiar to her sex. For the rest she was brown-eyed,
a little clumsy in movement, and suggested country birth and a descent
from respectable hard-working ancestors, who had been men of faith and
integrity rather than doubters or fanatics.
At the end of a fairly hard day’s work it was certainly something of an
effort to clear one’s room, to pull the mattress off one’s bed, and lay
it on the floor, to fill a pitcher with cold coffee, and to sweep a
long table clear for plates and cups and saucers, with pyramids of
little pink biscuits between them; but when these alterations were
effected, Mary felt a lightness of spirit come to her, as if she had
put off the stout stuff of her working hours and slipped over her
entire being some vesture of thin, bright silk. She knelt before the
fire and looked out into the room. The light fell softly, but with
clear radiance, through shades of yellow and blue paper, and the room,
which was set with one or two sofas resembling grassy mounds in their
lack of shape, looked unusually large and quiet. Mary was led to think
of the heights of a Sussex down, and the swelling green circle of some
camp of ancient warriors. The moonlight would be falling there so
peacefully now, and she could fancy the rough pathway of silver upon
the wrinkled skin of the sea.
“And here we are,” she said, half aloud, half satirically, yet with
evident pride, “talking about art.”
She pulled a basket containing balls of differently colored wools and a
pair of stockings which needed darning towards her, and began to set
her fingers to work; while her mind, reflecting the lassitude of her
body, went on perversely, conjuring up visions of solitude and quiet,
and she pictured herself laying aside her knitting and walking out on
to the down, and hearing nothing but the sheep cropping the grass close
to the roots, while the shadows of the little trees moved very slightly
this way and that in the moonlight, as the breeze went through them.
But she was perfectly conscious of her present situation, and derived
some pleasure from the reflection that she could rejoice equally in
solitude, and in the presence of the many very different people who
were now making their way, by divers paths, across London to the spot
where she was sitting.
As she ran her needle in and out of the wool, she thought of the
various stages in her own life which made her present position seem the
culmination of successive miracles. She thought of her clerical father
in his country parsonage, and of her mother’s death, and of her own
determination to obtain education, and of her college life, which had
merged, not so very long ago, in the wonderful maze of London, which
still seemed to her, in spite of her constitutional level-headedness,
like a vast electric light, casting radiance upon the myriads of men
and women who crowded round it. And here she was at the very center of
it all, that center which was constantly in the minds of people in
remote Canadian forests and on the plains of India, when their thoughts
turned to England. The nine mellow strokes, by which she was now
apprised of the hour, were a message from the great clock at
Westminster itself. As the last of them died away, there was a firm
knocking on her own door, and she rose and opened it. She returned to
the room, with a look of steady pleasure in her eyes, and she was
talking to Ralph Denham, who followed her.
“Alone?” he said, as if he were pleasantly surprised by that fact.
“I am sometimes alone,” she replied.
“But you expect a great many people,” he added, looking round him.
“It’s like a room on the stage. Who is it to-night?”
“William Rodney, upon the Elizabethan use of metaphor. I expect a good
solid paper, with plenty of quotations from the classics.”
Ralph warmed his hands at the fire, which was flapping bravely in the
grate, while Mary took up her stocking again.
“I suppose you are the only woman in London who darns her own
stockings,” he observed.
“I’m only one of a great many thousands really,” she replied, “though I
must admit that I was thinking myself very remarkable when you came in.
And now that you’re here I don’t think myself remarkable at all. How
horrid of you! But I’m afraid you’re much more remarkable than I am.
You’ve done much more than I’ve done.”
“If that’s your standard, you’ve nothing to be proud of,” said Ralph
grimly.
“Well, I must reflect with Emerson that it’s being and not doing that
matters,” she continued.
“Emerson?” Ralph exclaimed, with derision. “You don’t mean to say you
read Emerson?”
“Perhaps it wasn’t Emerson; but why shouldn’t I read Emerson?” she
asked, with a tinge of anxiety.
“There’s no reason that I know of. It’s the combination that’s
odd—books and stockings. The combination is very odd.” But it seemed to
recommend itself to him. Mary gave a little laugh, expressive of
happiness, and the particular stitches that she was now putting into
her work appeared to her to be done with singular grace and felicity.
She held out the stocking and looked at it approvingly.
“You always say that,” she said. “I assure you it’s a common
‘combination,’ as you call it, in the houses of the clergy. The only
thing that’s odd about me is that I enjoy them both—Emerson and the
stocking.”
A knock was heard, and Ralph exclaimed:
“Damn those people! I wish they weren’t coming!”
“It’s only Mr. Turner, on the floor below,” said Mary, and she felt
grateful to Mr. Turner for having alarmed Ralph, and for having given a
false alarm.
“Will there be a crowd?” Ralph asked, after a pause.
“There’ll be the Morrises and the Crashaws, and Dick Osborne, and
Septimus, and all that set. Katharine Hilbery is coming, by the way, so
William Rodney told me.”
“Katharine Hilbery!” Ralph exclaimed.
“You know her?” Mary asked, with some surprise.
“I went to a tea-party at her house.”
Mary pressed him to tell her all about it, and Ralph was not at all
unwilling to exhibit proofs of the extent of his knowledge. He
described the scene with certain additions and exaggerations which
interested Mary very much.
“But, in spite of what you say, I do admire her,” she said. “I’ve only
seen her once or twice, but she seems to me to be what one calls a
‘personality.’”
“I didn’t mean to abuse her. I only felt that she wasn’t very
sympathetic to me.”