CHAPTER III
Denham had accused Katharine Hilbery of belonging to one of the mostdistinguished families in England, and if any one will take the troubleto consult Mr. Galton's "Hereditary Genius," he will find that thisassertion is not far from the truth. The Alardyces, the Hilberys, theMillingtons, and the Otways seem to prove that intellect is a possessionwhich can be tossed from one member of a certain group to another almostindefinitely, and with apparent certainty that the brilliant gift willbe safely caught and held by nine out of ten of the privileged race.They had been conspicuous judges and admirals, lawyers and servants ofthe State for some years before the richness of the soil culminatedin the rarest flower that any family can boast, a great writer, a poeteminent among the poets of England, a Richard Alardyce; and havingproduced him, they proved once more the amazing virtues of their raceby proceeding unconcernedly again with their usual task of breedingdistinguished men. They had sailed with Sir John Franklin to the NorthPole, and ridden with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow, and when theywere not lighthouses firmly based on rock for the guidance of theirgeneration, they were steady, serviceable candles, illuminating theordinary chambers of daily life. Whatever profession you lookedat, there was a Warburton or an Alardyce, a Millington or a Hilberysomewhere in authority and prominence.
It may be said, indeed, that English society being what it is, no verygreat merit is required, once you bear a well-known name, to put youinto a position where it is easier on the whole to be eminent thanobscure. And if this is true of the sons, even the daughters,even in the nineteenth century, are apt to become people ofimportance--philanthropists and educationalists if they are spinsters,and the wives of distinguished men if they marry. It is true that therewere several lamentable exceptions to this rule in the Alardyce group,which seems to indicate that the cadets of such houses go more rapidlyto the bad than the children of ordinary fathers and mothers, as if itwere somehow a relief to them. But, on the whole, in these first yearsof the twentieth century, the Alardyces and their relations were keepingtheir 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 indark covers, issued by the presses of the two great universities, andwhen one of them dies the chances are that another of them writes hisbiography.
Now the source of this nobility was, of course, the poet, and hisimmediate descendants, therefore, were invested with greater luster thanthe collateral branches. Mrs. Hilbery, in virtue of her position asthe only child of the poet, was spiritually the head of the family, andKatharine, her daughter, had some superior rank among all the cousinsand connections, the more so because she was an only child. TheAlardyces had married and intermarried, and their offspring weregenerally profuse, and had a way of meeting regularly in eachother's houses for meals and family celebrations which had acquireda semi-sacred character, and were as regularly observed as days offeasting and fasting in the Church.
In times gone by, Mrs. Hilbery had known all the poets, all thenovelists, all the beautiful women and distinguished men of her time.These being now either dead or secluded in their infirm glory, shemade her house a meeting-place for her own relations, to whom she wouldlament the passing of the great days of the nineteenth century, whenevery department of letters and art was represented in England by two orthree illustrious names. Where are their successors? she would ask, andthe absence of any poet or painter or novelist of the true caliber atthe present day was a text upon which she liked to ruminate, in a sunsetmood of benignant reminiscence, which it would have been hard to disturbhad there been need. But she was far from visiting their inferiorityupon the younger generation. She welcomed them very heartily to herhouse, told them her stories, gave them sovereigns and ices and goodadvice, and weaved round them romances which had generally no likenessto the truth.
The quality of her birth oozed into Katharine's consciousness from adozen different sources as soon as she was able to perceive anything.Above her nursery fireplace hung a photograph of her grandfather's tombin Poets' Corner, and she was told in one of those moments of grown-upconfidence 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 ahansom cab, and given a large bunch of bright, sweet-scented flowersto lay upon his tomb. The candles in the church, the singing and thebooming of the organ, were all, she thought, in his honor. Again andagain she was brought down into the drawing-room to receive the blessingof some awful distinguished old man, who sat, even to her childish eye,somewhat apart, all gathered together and clutching a stick, unlike anordinary visitor in her father's own arm-chair, and her father himselfwas there, unlike himself, too, a little excited and very polite. Theseformidable old creatures used to take her in their arms, look verykeenly in her eyes, and then to bless her, and tell her that she mustmind and be a good girl, or detect a look in her face something likeRichard's as a small boy. That drew down upon her her mother's ferventembrace, and she was sent back to the nursery very proud, and with amysterious sense of an important and unexplained state of things, whichtime, 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 thesolitary and formidable class, whom she was enjoined by her parents to"remember all your life." By these means, and from hearing constanttalk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions of theworld included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the names ofShakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, for somereason, much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to other people. Theymade a kind of boundary to her vision of life, and played a considerablepart 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 matterfor satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, the privileges of herlot were taken for granted, and certain drawbacks made themselves verymanifest. Perhaps it is a little depressing to inherit not lands but anexample of intellectual and spiritual virtue; perhaps the conclusivenessof a great ancestor is a little discouraging to those who run the riskof comparison with him. It seems as if, having flowered so splendidly,nothing now remained possible but a steady growth of good, green stalkand leaf. For these reasons, and for others, Katharine had her momentsof despondency. The glorious past, in which men and women grew tounexampled size, intruded too much upon the present, and dwarfed it tooconsistently, to be altogether encouraging to one forced to make herexperiment in living when the great age was dead.
She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural, in thefirst place owing to her mother's absorption in them, and in the secondbecause 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 yearsago--her mother had enthusiastically announced that now, with a daughterto help her, the biography would soon be published. Notices to thiseffect found their way into the literary papers, and for some timeKatharine worked with a sense of great pride and achievement.
Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were making no way atall, and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghost ofa literary temperament could doubt but that they had materials for oneof the greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelves andboxes bulged with the precious stuff. The most private lives of themost interesting people lay furled in yellow bundles of close-writtenmanuscript. In addition to this Mrs. Hilbery had in her own head asbright a vision of that time as now remained to the living, and couldgive those flashes and thrills to the old words which gave them almostthe substance of flesh. She had no difficulty in writing, and covered apage every morning as instinctively as a thrush sings, but nevertheless,with all this to urge and inspire, and the most devout intentionto accomplish the work, the book stil
l remained unwritten. Papersaccumulated without much furthering their task, and in dull momentsKatharine had her doubts whether they would ever produce anything at allfit to lay before the public. Where did the difficulty lie? Not in theirmaterials, 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 morethan ten minutes at a time. Ideas came to her chiefly when she was inmotion. 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 thepenetrating point of view would suggest itself, and she would drop herduster and write ecstatically for a few breathless moments; and then themood would pass away, and the duster would be sought for, and the oldbooks polished again. These spells of inspiration never burnt steadily,but flickered over the gigantic mass of the subject as capriciously asa will-o'-the-wisp, lighting now on this point, now on that. It was asmuch as Katharine could do to keep the pages of her mother's manuscriptin order, but to sort them so that the sixteenth year of RichardAlardyce's life succeeded the fifteenth was beyond her skill. Andyet they were so brilliant, these paragraphs, so nobly phrased, solightning-like in their illumination, that the dead seemed to crowd thevery room. Read continuously, they produced a sort of vertigo, and sether asking herself in despair what on earth she was to do with them? Hermother refused, also, to face the radical questions of what to leave inand what to leave out. She could not decide how far the public was tobe told the truth about the poet's separation from his wife. She draftedpassages to suit either case, and then liked each so well that she couldnot 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 couldnot between them get this one book accomplished they had no right totheir privileged position. Their increment became yearly more andmore unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that hergrandfather was a very great man.
By the time she was twenty-seven, these thoughts had become veryfamiliar to her. They trod their way through her mind as she satopposite her mother of a morning at a table heaped with bundles ofold letters and well supplied with pencils, scissors, bottles of gum,india-rubber bands, large envelopes, and other appliances for themanufacture of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham's visit, Katharine hadresolved to try the effect of strict rules upon her mother's habitsof literary composition. They were to be seated at their tables everymorning at ten o'clock, with a clean-swept morning of empty, secludedhours before them. They were to keep their eyes fast upon the paper, andnothing was to tempt them to speech, save at the stroke of the hour whenten minutes for relaxation were to be allowed them. If these ruleswere observed for a year, she made out on a sheet of paper that thecompletion of the book was certain, and she laid her scheme before hermother with a feeling that much of the task was already accomplished.Mrs. Hilbery examined the sheet of paper very carefully. Then sheclapped 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 littlemark in my pocketbook, and on the last day of all--let me think, whatshall we do to celebrate the last day of all? If it weren't the winterwe could take a jaunt to Italy. They say Switzerland's very lovely inthe snow, except for the cold. But, as you say, the great thing is tofinish 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, ifthey had not just resolved on reform. They found, to begin with, a greatvariety of very imposing paragraphs with which the biography wasto open; many of these, it is true, were unfinished, and resembledtriumphal 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, orrather, of spring in Suffolk, which was very beautifully written,although not essential to the story. However, Katharine had put togethera string of names and dates, so that the poet was capably brought intothe world, and his ninth year was reached without further mishap. Afterthat, Mrs. Hilbery wished, for sentimental reasons, to introduce therecollections of a very fluent old lady, who had been brought up in thesame village, but these Katharine decided must go. It might be advisableto introduce here a sketch of contemporary poetry contributed by Mr.Hilbery, and thus terse and learned and altogether out of keeping withthe rest, but Mrs. Hilbery was of opinion that it was too bare, and madeone feel altogether like a good little girl in a lecture-room, which wasnot at all in keeping with her father. It was put on one side. Now camethe period of his early manhood, when various affairs of the heart musteither be concealed or revealed; here again Mrs. Hilbery was oftwo minds, and a thick packet of manuscript was shelved for furtherconsideration.
Several years were now altogether omitted, because Mrs. Hilbery hadfound something distasteful to her in that period, and had preferred todwell upon her own recollections as a child. After this, it seemedto Katharine that the book became a wild dance of will-o'-the-wisps,without form or continuity, without coherence even, or any attempt tomake a narrative. Here were twenty pages upon her grandfather's taste inhats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summer day'sexpedition into the country, when they had missed their train, togetherwith fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous men and women, whichseemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic. There were,moreover, thousands of letters, and a mass of faithful recollectionscontributed by old friends, which had grown yellow now in theirenvelopes, but must be placed somewhere, or their feelings would behurt. So many volumes had been written about the poet since his deaththat she had also to dispose of a great number of misstatements, whichinvolved minute researches and much correspondence. Sometimes Katharinebrooded, half crushed, among her papers; sometimes she felt that it wasnecessary for her very existence that she should free herself from thepast; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present,which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved tobe of an utterly thin and inferior composition.
The worst of it was that she had no aptitude for literature. She didnot like phrases. She had even some natural antipathy to that process ofself-examination, that perpetual effort to understand one's own feeling,and express it beautifully, fitly, or energetically in language, whichconstituted so great a part of her mother's existence. She was, on thecontrary, inclined to be silent; she shrank from expressing herself evenin talk, let alone in writing. As this disposition was highly convenientin a family much given to the manufacture of phrases, and seemed toargue a corresponding capacity for action, she was, from her childhoodeven, put in charge of household affairs. She had the reputation, whichnothing in her manner contradicted, of being the most practical ofpeople. Ordering meals, directing servants, paying bills, and socontriving that every clock ticked more or less accurately in time, anda number of vases were always full of fresh flowers was supposed to be anatural endowment of hers, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery often observed thatit was poetry the wrong side out. From a very early age, too, she hadto exert herself in another capacity; she had to counsel and help andgenerally sustain her mother. Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectlywell able to sustain herself if the world had been what the world isnot. She was beautifully adapted for life in another planet. But thenatural genius she had for conducting affairs there was of no real useto her here. Her watch, for example, was a constant source of surpriseto her, and at the age of sixty-five she was still amazed at theascendancy which rules and reasons exerted over the lives of otherpeople. She had never learnt her lesson, and had constantly to bepunished for her ignorance. But as that ignorance was combined with afine natural insight which saw deep whenever it saw at all, it was notpossible to write Mrs. Hilbery off among the dunces; on the contrary,she had a way of see
ming the wisest person in the room. But, on thewhole, she found it very necessary to seek support in her daughter.
Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, asyet, no title and very little recognition, although the labor of milland factory is, perhaps, no more severe and the results of less benefitto the world. She lived at home. She did it very well, too. Any onecoming to the house in Cheyne Walk felt that here was an orderly place,shapely, controlled--a place where life had been trained to show tothe best advantage, and, though composed of different elements, made toappear harmonious and with a character of its own. Perhaps it wasthe chief triumph of Katharine's art that Mrs. Hilbery's characterpredominated. She and Mr. Hilbery appeared to be a rich background forher mother's more striking qualities.
Silence being, thus, both natural to her and imposed upon her, the onlyother remark that her mother's friends were in the habit of making aboutit was that it was neither a stupid silence nor an indifferent silence.But to what quality it owed its character, since character of some sortit had, no one troubled themselves to inquire. It was understood thatshe was helping her mother to produce a great book. She was known tomanage the household. She was certainly beautiful. That accounted forher satisfactorily. But it would have been a surprise, not only to otherpeople but to Katharine herself, if some magic watch could have takencount of the moments spent in an entirely different occupation from herostensible one. Sitting with faded papers before her, she took part ina series of scenes such as the taming of wild ponies upon the Americanprairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a hurricane round a blackpromontory of rock, or in others more peaceful, but marked by hercomplete emancipation from her present surroundings and, needless tosay, by her surpassing ability in her new vocation. When she was rid ofthe pretense of paper and pen, phrase-making and biography, she turnedher attention in a more legitimate direction, though, strangely enough,she would rather have confessed her wildest dreams of hurricane andprairie than the fact that, upstairs, alone in her room, she rose earlyin the morning or sat up late at night to... work at mathematics. Noforce on earth would have made her confess that. Her actions when thusengaged were furtive and secretive, like those of some nocturnal animal.Steps had only to sound on the staircase, and she slipped her paperbetween the leaves of a great Greek dictionary which she had purloinedfrom 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 theutmost.
Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctively wishto conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was that in hermind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She would nothave cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, thestar-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, andvagueness of the finest prose. There was something a little unseemly inthus opposing the tradition of her family; something that made her feelwrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shut her desires awayfrom view and cherish them with extraordinary fondness. Again and againshe was thinking of some problem when she should have been thinkingof her grandfather. Waking from these trances, she would see that hermother, too, had lapsed into some dream almost as visionary as her own,for the people who played their parts in it had long been numberedamong the dead. But, seeing her own state mirrored in her mother's face,Katharine would shake herself awake with a sense of irritation. Hermother was the last person she wished to resemble, much though sheadmired her. Her common sense would assert itself almost brutally, andMrs. Hilbery, looking at her with her odd sidelong glance, that was halfmalicious and half tender, would liken her to "your wicked old UncleJudge Peter, who used to be heard delivering sentence of death in thebathroom. Thank Heaven, Katharine, I've not a drop of HIM in me!"