Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  There was a faint scent in the room of eau-de-cologne and burning candles. The little clock on the table gave an irritating, self-important whirr and clatter now and then, and it had been doing that for a great many years.

  Mrs. Trenchard was lying upon her sofa making a little crimson jacket for the half-clothed doll. She did not move when Katherine came in, but went on with her work, her fat, rather clumsy-looking fingers moving very comfortably up and down the little piece of red cloth.

  “Who is that?” she said.

  “It’s I, Mother,” said Katherine, remaining by the door.

  “Ah, it’s you, dear,” her mother answered. “Just give me that doll on the table. It’s for Miss Sawyer’s Bazaar in the Hampstead Rooms. I said I’d dress three dolls, and I only remembered this morning that they’ve got to go off to-morrow. I thought I’d snatch this quiet time before tea. Yes, it’s for Miss Sawyer, poor thing. I’m sure I shall run out of red silk, and I don’t suppose there’s any in the house. Did you want anything, Katherine?”

  Katherine came forward, picked up the doll from the table and gave it to her mother. Then she went to one of the broad high windows and stood looking out. She could see the river, over whose face the evening, studded with golden lamps, was dropping its veil. She could see, very dimly, Westminster Bridge, with dots and little splashes of black passing and repassing with the mechanical indifference of some moving toy. The sight of her mother’s room had suddenly told her that her task would be a supremely difficult one; she did not know why she had not realised that before. Her personal happiness was overwhelmed by her consciousness of her mother; nothing at this moment seemed to be of importance save their relations, the one to the other. “I’m going to hurt her,” she thought, as she turned round from the window. All her life it had been her urgent passion to save her mother from pain.

  “Mother dear,” she said, “I’ve got something very important to tell you. Mr. Mark has asked me to marry him, and I’ve accepted him. Father says we’re to wait for a year.”

  She moved forward and then stopped. Mrs. Trenchard looked at her, suddenly, as a house of cards crumples up at a single touch, her face puckered as though she were going to cry. For an instant it was like the face of a baby. It was so swift that in a flash it was gone, and only in the eyes there was still the effect of it. Her hands trembled so that she forced them down upon her lap. Then her face, except for her eyes, which were terrified, wore again exactly her look of placid, rather stupid composure. The force that she had driven into her hands had done its work, for now she could raise them again; in one hand she held the doll and in another the little red jacket.

  “My dear Katherine!” she said. Then— “Just give me that reel of silk, dear, on the table.” Then— “But it’s absurd — you don’t—” she seemed to struggle with her words as though she were beating back some other personality that threatened to rise and overwhelm her. “You don’t—” She found her words. “You don’t know him.”

  Katherine broke in eagerly. “I loved him at the very beginning I think. I felt I knew him at once. I don’t know; it’s so hard to see how it began, but I can’t help it, Mother. I’ve known it myself for weeks now; Mother—” She knelt down beside the sofa and looked up, and then, at something in her mother’s eyes, looked down again. “Please — please — I know it seems strange to you now, but soon you’ll get to know him — then you’ll be glad—” She broke off, and there followed a long silence.

  Mrs. Trenchard put down the doll very carefully, and then, with her hands folded on her lap, lay back on her sofa. She watched the dark evening as it gathered in beyond the windows; she heard her maid’s knock on the door, watched her draw the curtains and switch on the light.

  It was only four o’clock, but it was very cold.

  “I think I’ll have my shawl, dear,” said Mrs. Trenchard. “The Indian one that your Uncle Timothy gave me — it’s in the third drawer — there — to the right.... Thank you. I must go down. Grandfather’s coming down to tea this afternoon.”

  Katherine drew closer to the sofa, after she had brought the shawl; she laid her hand upon her mother’s, which were very cold.

  “But, Mother, you’ve said nothing! I know that now it must seem as though I’d done it without asking you, without telling you, but I didn’t know myself until yesterday afternoon. It came so suddenly.”

  “Yesterday afternoon?” Mrs. Trenchard drew her shawl closely about her. “But how could he — Mr. Mark — yesterday afternoon? You weren’t alone with him — Aggie was there. Surely she—”

  “No. He wrote on a piece of paper and slipped it across to me, and I said ‘yes.’ We both felt we couldn’t wait.”

  “I don’t like him,” Mrs. Trenchard said slowly. “You knew that I didn’t like him.”

  The colour rose in Katherine’s cheeks.

  “No,” she said, “I knew that you thought some of his ideas odd. But you didn’t know him.”

  “I don’t like him,” said Mrs. Trenchard again. “I could never like him. He isn’t a religious man. He has a bad effect upon Henry. You, Katherine, to accept him when you know that he doesn’t go to church and was so rude to poor Mr. Seymour and thinks Russia such a fine country! I can’t think,” said Mrs. Trenchard, her hands trembling again, “what’s come over you.”

  Katherine got up from her knees. “You won’t think that when you know him better. It’s only that he’s seen more of the world than we have. He’ll change and we’ll change, and perhaps it will be better for all of us. Down in Glebeshire we always have done so much the same things and seen the same people, and even here in London—”

  Her mother gave a little cry, not sharp for anyone else in the world, but very sharp indeed for Mrs. Trenchard.

  “You! Katherine — you! If it had been Millie!”

  They looked at one another then in silence. They were both of them conscious of an intensity of love that they had borne towards one another through the space of a great many years — a love that nothing else had ever approached. But it was an emotion that had always been expressed in the quietest terms. Both to Katherine and her mother demonstrations were unknown. Katherine felt now, at what promised to be, perhaps, the sharpest crisis that her life had yet experienced, an urgent desire to break through, to fling her arms round her mother, to beat down all barriers, to assure her that whatever emotion might come to her, nothing could touch their own perfect relationship. But the habits of years muffled everything in thick, thick wrappings — it was impossible to break through.

  “Your father is pleased?” said Mrs. Trenchard.

  “Yes,” answered Katherine. “He likes Philip. But we must wait a year.”

  “Your father has never told me anything. Never.” She got up slowly from the sofa.

  “He couldn’t have told you,” Katherine said eagerly. “He has only just known. I came straight to you from him.”

  Mrs. Trenchard now stood, looking rather lost, in the middle of her room; the shawl had slipped half from her shoulders, and she seemed, suddenly, an old woman.

  The vision of something helpless in her, as she stood there, stirred Katherine passionately.

  She took her mother into her arms, stroking her hair, kissing her cheeks and whispering to her: “Darling — darling — it doesn’t make any difference to us — it can’t — it can’t. Nothing can. Nothing.... Nothing!”

  Mrs. Trenchard kissed her daughter very quietly, remained in her embrace for a little, then drew herself away and went to her mirror. She tidied her hair, patted her dress, put some eau-de-Cologne on her handkerchief, laid the shawl carefully away in the drawer.

  “I must go down now. Father will want his tea. I’ll take the doll — I shan’t have another chance of finishing it.” She walked to the door, then, turning, said with an intensity that was amazing in its sudden vehemence and fire: “No one shall take you from me, Katherine. No one. Let him do what he likes. No one shall take you.”

  She did not appear an old
woman, then, as she faced her daughter.

  Meanwhile, in the drawing-room, the family had already gathered together as though it were aware that something had occurred. Mr. Trenchard, Senior, surrounded by his rugs, his especial table, his silver snuff-box (he never took snuff in the drawing-room, but liked his box to be there), a case of spectacles, and the last number of ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’. Great Aunt Sarah, Aunt Aggie, Aunt Betty, and Millie. Millie, watching them, was, to her own immense surprise, sorry for them.

  Millie, watching them, wondered at herself. What had happened to her? She had returned from Paris, eager to find herself as securely inside the family as she had always been — longing after the wide, vague horizons of the outside world to feel that security. She had laughed at them a little, perhaps, but she had always understood and approved of their motives.

  Now she found herself at every turn criticising, wondering, defending against her own intelligence, as though she had been the merest stranger. She loved them — all of them — but — how strange they were! And how terrible of her that she should find them strange! They were utterly unaware of any alteration in her; she seemed to herself to be a spy in their midst....

  Happily, however, they were all, this afternoon, most comfortably unaware of any criticism from anyone in the world. They sat about the room, waiting for their tea and saying very little. They knew one another so well that conversation was a mere emphasis of platitudes. Aunt Aggie talked, but nobody listened, unless one of the above-mentioned assurances were demanded.

  Her dry, sharp little voice, like the fire and the ticking of the clock, made an agreeable background.

  Upon this innocent gathering, so happy and tranquil, Henry burst with his news. He came with all the excited vehemence sprung from his own vision of the lovers. He could see only that; he did not realise that the others had not shared his experience. It was almost as though he had tumbled into the middle of them, so abrupt, so agitated, so incoherent was he!

  “They’re engaged!” he burst out.

  “My dear Henry!” said Millie. “What’s the matter?”

  “I tell you! Katherine and Mark. They’ve been into father, and he says they’re to wait a year, but it’s all right. He says that he didn’t know till they told him. Katherine’s with Mother now, — Mark’s coming in to-night; Katherine!”

  He broke off, words failed him, and he was suddenly conscious of his Uncle’s eye.

  “What?” said Aunt Aggie.

  “They’re engaged,” repeated Henry.

  “Whom?” cried Aunt Aggie, ungrammatically, with a shrill horror that showed that she had already heard.

  “Katie and Philip,” Henry almost screamed in reply.

  What Aunt Aggie, whose eyes were staring as though she saw ghosts or a man under her bed, would have said to this no one could say, but Aunt Sarah drove, like a four-wheeled coach, right across her protruding body.

  Aunt Sarah said: “What are you all talking about? What’s the matter with Henry? Is he ill? I can’t hear.”

  Millie went up to her. “Katherine’s engaged, Aunt Sarah, to Mr. Mark.”

  “What do you say about Katherine?”

  “She’s engaged.”

  “She’s what?”

  “Engaged!”

  “Who to?”

  “Mr. Mark.”

  “Eh? What?”

  “Mark!”

  At the shouting of that name it did indeed seem that the very walls and ceiling of that old room would collapse. To Aunt Aggie, to Millie, to Henry, to Aunt Betty, this raid upon Katherine struck more deeply than any cynical student of human nature could have credited. For the moment Philip Mark was forgotten — only was it apparent to them all from Grandfather Trenchard and Great Aunt Sarah to Henry that Katherine, their own absolute property, the assurance given to them that life would be always secure, solid, unalterable, had declared publicly, before the world, that she preferred a stranger, a complete, blown-from-anywhere stranger, to the family. What would happen to them all, to their comforts, their secret preferences and habits (known as they all, individually, believed, only to Katherine), to their pride, to their self-esteem? They loved one another, yes, they loved the Trenchard family, the Trenchard position, but through all these things, as a skewer through beef, ran their reliance upon Katherine. It was as though someone had cried to them: “The whole of Glebeshire is blown away — fields and houses, roads and rivers. You must go and live in Yorkshire. Glebeshire cares for you no longer!”

  “They’re to wait a year, Father says!” shouted Millie.

  Aunt Sarah shook her white-plumed head and snorted:

  “Katherine! Engaged! To a Stranger! Impossible!”

  Aunt Aggie was conscious, at the moment, of nothing except that she herself had been defeated. They had tricked her, those two. They had eluded her vigilance.... They were now, in all probability, laughing at her.

  “The last thing I want to do,” she said, “is to blame anybody, but if I’d been listened to at the beginning, Mr. Mark would never have been asked to stay.... It was thoughtless of George. Now we can all see—”

  But Millie, standing before them all, her face flushed, said:

  “The chief thing is to consider Katherine’s happiness. Mr. Mark is probably delightful. She was sure to marry somebody. How can people help falling in love with Katherine? We all love her. She loves us. I don’t see what Mr. Mark can do to prevent that — and he won’t want to. He must be nice if Katherine loves him!”

  But the final word was spoken by Grandfather Trenchard, who had been hitherto utterly silent. In his clear, silvery voice he said:

  “A great deal can happen in a year!”

  At that moment Katherine and her mother came in.

  BOOK II. THE FEATHER BED

  CHAPTER I. KATHERINE IN LOVE

  Katherine Trenchard, although she had, for a number of years now, gone about the world with open eyes and an understanding heart, was, in very many ways, absurdly old-fashioned. I say “absurd” because many people, from amongst her own Trenchard relations, thought her prejudices, simplicities, and confidences absurd, and hoped that she would grow out of them. The two people who really knew her, her Uncle Timothy and Rachel Seddon, hoped that she never would. Her “old-fashioned” habits of mind led her to believe in “people” in “things” and in “causes”, and it was her misfortune that up to this year of which I am speaking she had never been disappointed. That may be because she had grown up amongst the rocks, the fields, the lanes of Glebeshire, true ground where sincerity and truth flourish yet in abundance — moreover it is assured that man lives up to the qualities with which he is by his friends credited, and all the Trenchard family lived up to Katherine’s belief in their word of honour.

  She was not so simple a character that she found the world perfect, but she was in no way subtle, and, because she herself acted in her faults and virtues, her impetuosities and repentances, her dislikes and affections with clear-hearted simplicity, she believed that other persons did the same. Her love for her mother was of this quite unquestioning sort; her religion too was perfectly direct and unquestioning: so, then, her love for Philip....

  She had never before been in love, nor had she ever considered men very closely as anything but visitors or relations. The force and power of the passion that now held her was utterly removed from anything that had ever encountered her before, but she was a strong character, and her simplicity of outlook helped her. Philip seemed to her to be possessed of all the qualities of the perfect hero. His cleverness, his knowledge of the world, his humour were only balanced by his kindness to everyone and everything, his unselfishness, his honesty of speech and eye. She had thought him, once, a little weak in his anxiety to be liked by all the world, but now that was forgotten. He was, during these days, a perfect character.

  She had not, however, lost her clear-sighted sense of humour; that humour was almost cynical sometimes in its sharp perception of people and things, and did not seem to b
elong to the rest of Katherine at all. It was driven more often upon herself than upon anyone else, but it was, for a character of Katherine’s simplicity, strangely sharp. A fair field for the employment of it was offered to her just now in the various attitudes and dispositions of her own immediate family, but, as yet, she was unable to see the family at all, so blinding was Philip’s radiance.

  That year England enjoyed one of the old romantic Christmases. There were sparkling dazzling frosts. The snow lay hard and shining under skies of unchanging blue, and on Christmas Eve, when the traffic and smoke of the town had stolen the purity away, more snow fell and restored it again.

  It had always been the rule that the Trenchards should spend Christmas in Glebeshire, but, this year, typhoid fever had visited Garth only a month or two before, and London was held to be safer. Katherine had not had, in her life, so many entertainments that she could afford to be blasé about them, and she still thought a Pantomime splendid, “The Only Way” certainly the most magnificent play in the world, and a dance a thing of perfect rapture, if only she could be more secure about the right shapes and colours of her clothes. She had no vanity whatever — indeed a little more would have helped her judgment: she never knew whether a dress would suit her, nor why it was that one thing “looked right” and another thing “looked wrong”. Millie could have helped her, because Millie knew all about clothes, but it was always a case with Katherine of something else coming first, of having to dress at the last minute, of “putting on any old thing because there was no time.”

  Now, however, there was Philip to dress for, and she did really try. She went to Millie’s dressmaker with Millie as her guide, but unfortunately Mrs. Trenchard, who had as little idea about dress as Katherine, insisted on coming too, and confused everyone by her introduction of personal motives and religious dogmas into something that should have been simply a matter of ribbons and bows. Katherine, indeed, was too happy to care. Philip loved her in any old thing, the truth being that when he went about with her, he saw very little except his own happiness....