by Hugh Walpole
“October!” he answered, still very quietly, “that’s a long time to wait — and I haven’t had very much of you lately. It won’t help things very much my staying here — and I want to please your mother,” he ended. “I’ve a kind of idea,” he went on, “that she’ll get to like me later, when she really gets to know me. I’ve been thinking all this time in London that I behaved very badly when I was down there before. Wanted everything my own way.”
Katherine could say nothing. In between them once more was that shadow. To speak right out would mean the old business all over again, the business that they had both resolutely dismissed. To speak out would mean Anna and the family, and that same demand once more — that Katherine should choose. One word and she knew that he would be pleading with all his force: “Marry me now! Come off with me! Slip out of the house and have it over.”
But she could not — she was not ready. Give them all up, cut her life in half, fling them all away? No, still she clung desperately to the belief that she would keep them both, the family and Philip, the old life and the new. She heard Millie urging her, she saw Philip quietly determined to say nothing now until she led the way — but she could not do it, she could not, could not do it!
So they sat there, holding hands, his shoulder against hers, until at last it was time for him to go. After he had left her, whilst she was dressing for dinner, she had a moment of panic and almost ran out of the house, just as she was, to find him. But the Trenchard blood reasserted itself; she went down to dinner calm and apparently at ease.
That night, when they had all gone up to their rooms, she stood for a moment waiting outside her bedroom door, then, as though some sudden resolve had come to her, turned and walked to her mother’s door. She knocked, entered and found her mother standing in front of her looking-glass. She had slipped off her evening dress, there with her short white sleeves, from which her stout, firm, bare arms stood out strong and reliant, with her thick neck, her sturdy legs, she seemed, in spite of her grey hair, in the very plenitude of her strength. Her mild eyes, large and calm, her high white forehead, the whole poise of her broad, resolute back seemed to Katherine to have something defiant and challenging in it. Her mouth was full of hair-pins, but she nodded and smiled to her daughter.
“May I come in, Mother,” said Katherine, “I want to speak to you.”
Katherine thought of that earlier occasion in that same room when she had first spoken of her engagement. How far apart since then they had grown! It seemed to her to-night, as she looked at that broad white back, that she was looking at a stranger.... Yes, but an extraordinary stranger, a really marvellous woman. How curious that Katherine should have been living during all those years of intimate affection with her mother and have thought of her never — no, never at all. She had taken her, her love, her little habits, her slow voice, her relentless determination, her ‘managing’ — all these things and many more — as though they had been inevitably outside argument, statement or gratitude. But now, simply because of the division that there was between them, she saw her as a marvellous woman, the strangest mingling of sweetness and bitterness, of tenderness and hardness, of unselfishness and relentless egotism. She saw this, suddenly, standing there in the doorway, and the imminent flash of it struck her for an instant with great fear. Then she saw Philip and gained her courage.
“I want to speak to you, Mother,” she repeated, moving into the middle of the room.
“Well, dear ...” said Mrs. Trenchard, through the hair-pins. She did not let down her hair, but after another glance into the mirror, moved away, found a pink woolly dressing-gown, which she put on. Then sat down on the old sofa, taking up, as she always did, a little piece of work — this time it was some long red worsted that she was knitting. It curled away from her, like a scarlet snake, under the flickering light of the candles on her dressing-table, disappearing into darkness.
Katherine stood in front of her mother, with her hands behind her, as she had done when she was a very little girl.
“Well, dear, what is it?” said Mrs. Trenchard again.
“Mother — I don’t want you to have Philip down at Garth.”
“Why not, dear? I thought you would like it.”
“He isn’t happy there.”
“Well, he’s only got to say so.... He needn’t come.”
“If he doesn’t — he’s afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of losing me.” Katherine, as she said this, made a little forward movement with her hand as though she were asking for help, but Mrs. Trenchard’s eyes were wide and cold.
“Afraid of losing you?... My dear, he can’t trust you very much!”
“No, no, it isn’t that!... He knows that you, the others don’t like him. He hates Garth — at least he hates it if he’s always got to live there. If he’s alone here in London he thinks that you’ll persuade me never to leave you, that you’ll get the tighter hold of me, that — Oh! I can’t explain it all!” she broke off quite desperately. “But it isn’t good for him to be there, he’s unhappy, he’s depressed. Mother, why do you hate him?” she cried, suddenly challenging the whole room, with its old familiar pictures, its books and furniture to answer her.
“I think,” said Mrs. Trenchard, very quietly, counting her stitches and nodding her head at her stocking, “that you’re taking all this in a very exaggerated fashion — and you never used to be exaggerated, Katie, my dear — no, you never used to be. I often used to say what a comfort and help I always found you, because you saw things as they were — not like Millie and Henry, who would get excited sometimes over very little. But your engagement’s changed you, Katie dear — it really has — more than I should have expected.”
Katherine, during this speech, had summoned her control. She spoke now with a voice low and quiet — ridiculously like her mother’s an observer might have thought.
“Mother, I don’t want to be exaggerated — I don’t indeed. But, all these last six months, we’ve never said to one another what we’ve thought, have never spoken openly about anything — and now we must. It can’t go on like this.”
“Like what, Katie dear?”
“Never knowing what we’re really thinking. We’ve become a dreadful family — even father’s noticed it.”
“Certainly,” said Mrs. Trenchard slowly. “We were all happier before Philip came.”
Katherine’s cheeks flushed. “That’s unkind, Mother!” she cried. Her voice grew harder. “Please don’t say anything about Philip unless you must. It makes everything very difficult. I know that you don’t like him. You see him strangely, you put him in the wrong whatever he does. But, Mother,” her voice softened again. “It isn’t that. We can’t alter that. Phil will never be at his best at Garth — not as things are now. But if we were married. Oh! you would see how fine things would be!” Her voice was eager, excited now. “He would be happy and quite, quite different with everyone. I know him. He depends so much — too much — on what people think of him. He knows that you don’t like him, and that makes him embarrassed and cross — at his worst. But he’s splendid, really, he is, indeed, and you’d see it if we were married and this horrid engagement were over. He’s fine in every way, but he’s different from us — he’s seen so much more, knows life that we can’t know, has other standards and judgments. Everyone can’t be like us, Mother. There must be people who want different things and think different things. Why should he be made into something like us, forced to think as we do?... Mother, let us be married soon, at once, perhaps, and then everything will be right—” She stopped, breathless then, in her eagerness, bent down and kissed her mother’s cheek.
But Mrs. Trenchard’s cheek was very cold.
“Your father said a year,” she answered, counting her stitches, “four, five, six — Yes, a year. And you agreed to that, you know.”
Katherine turned, with a sharp movement, away, clenching her hands. At that moment she hated her mother, hated with a hot,
fiery impulse that urged her to leave the room, the house, the family at that very instant, flinging out, banging the door, and so settle the whole affair for ever.
Mrs. Trenchard made no sound. Her needles clicked. Then she said, as though she had been looking things over:
“Do you think it’s good of you, Katherine, considering how much all these years we’ve all been to one another, to persist in marrying a man whom, after really doing our best, we all of us — yes, all of us — dislike? You’re of age, my dear — you can do as you please. It was your father who consented to this engagement, I was not asked. And now, after all these months, it is hardly a success, is it? You are losing us all — and I believe we still mean something to you. And Philip. How can you know about him, my dear? You are in love now, but that — that first illusion goes very quickly after marriage. And then — when it has gone — do you think that he will be a good companion for you, so different from us all, with such strange ideas picked up in foreign countries? You don’t know what he may have done before he met you.... I don’t appeal to your love for us, as once I might have done, but to your common-sense — your common-sense. Is it worth while to lose us, whom you know, in exchange for a man of whom you can know nothing at all?... Just give me those scissors off the dressing-table. The little ones, dear.”
Katherine turned at the dressing-table. “But,” she cried, her voice full of passionate entreaty, “why must I give you up because I marry him? Why can’t I have you — all of you — and him as well? Why must I choose?” Then she added defiantly: “Millie doesn’t dislike him — nor Aunt Betty.”
“Millie’s very young,” answered her mother. “Thank you, my dear, and as you are there, just that thimble. Thank you ... and your Aunt Betty likes everyone.”
“And then,” Katherine went on, “why do you see it from everyone’s point of view except mine? It’s my life, my future. You’re settled — all of you, you, father, Aunt Aggie, Aunt Betty — but with Millie and Henry and I everything’s to come. And yet you expect us to do all the things, think all the things that you’ve done and thought. We’re different, we’re another generation. If we weren’t behind everyone else there wouldn’t be anything to talk about at all. All parents now,” Katherine ended, with an air of profound knowledge, “think of their children. Life isn’t what it was fifty years ago.”
Mrs. Trenchard smiled a grim little smile. “These are the things, my dear, I suppose, that Philip’s been telling you. You must remember that he’s been living for years in a country where one can apparently do anything one pleases without being thought wicked, and where you’re put in prison a great deal, but only for rather innocent crimes. I don’t pretend to understand all that. We may be — perhaps we are — an old-fashioned family, but the fact remains that we were all happy enough a year ago.”
She picked up the long trailing serpent, then concluded: “But you’re free, Katie dear. Perfectly free.”
“If I were to go,” said Katie, staring at her mother’s face, so like that of an uneloquent baby, “if I were to go off now. If we were to be married at once — would you — would you — turn us out — have no more to do with us?”
She waited as though her whole life hung on her mother’s answer.
“I really don’t know what’s happened to you, Katie,” Mrs. Trenchard answered very quietly. “You’re like a young woman in a play — and you used to be so sensible. Just give me those scissors again, dear. Certainly if you were to marry Philip to-morrow, without waiting until the end of the year, as you promised, I should feel — we should all feel — that you had given us up. It would be difficult not to feel that.”
“And if we wait until the end of the year and then marry and don’t live in Glebeshire but somewhere else — will you give us up then?”
“My dear, isn’t it quite simple? We’ve given Philip every opportunity of knowing us — we’re now just going to give him another. If he loves you he will not want to take you away from all of us who love you also. He’ll do his best to like us — to settle—”
“To settle!” Katherine cried. “Don’t you see that that’s what he’s tried to do — and he can’t — he can’t! It’s killing him — and you want him to be killed!... You’d like him to leave me, and if he won’t do that you’ll break his will, keep him under you, ruin his spirit.... Mother, let him alone — If we marry, after six months, let us lead our own lives. You’ll see I shall be as much yours as ever, more than ever. It will be all right. It must be!”
Mrs. Trenchard said then her final word.
“If you leave us for Philip that is your affair. I do my best to keep you both. You’ve talked much, Katie dear, about our dislike of Philip — what of his dislike of us? Is that nothing? Doesn’t he show it every moment of the day? Unless he hates us less you’ll have to choose. You’ll have to choose — let him come down to Garth then — we’ll do everything for him.”
Katherine would have answered, but a sudden catch in her mother’s voice, a sudden, involuntary closing of the eyes, made her dart forward.
“Mother, you’re tired.”
“Yes, my dear, very.”
They sat down on the old sofa together. Mrs. Trenchard, her arms folded, leant back against her daughter’s shoulder.
“Just a moment, Katie dear,” she murmured, “before I undress.”
Suddenly she was asleep.
Katherine sat stiffly, staring before her into the room. Her arm was round her mother, and with the pressure of her hand she felt the soft firmness of the shoulder beneath the dressing-gown. Often in the old days her mother had thus leant against her. The brushing of her hair against Katherine’s cheek brought back to the girl thronging memories of happy, tranquil hours. Those memories flung before her, like reproaching, haunting ghosts, her present unhappiness. Her love for her mother filled her heart; her body thrilled with the sense of it. And so, there in the clumsy, familiar room, the loneliest hour of all life came to her.
She was separated from them all. She seemed to know that she was holding her mother thus for the last time.... Then as her hands tightened, in very protest, about the slumbering body, she was conscious of the presence, behind her, just then where she could not see, of the taunting, laughing figure. She could catch the eyes, the scornful lips, the thin, defiant attitude.
“I’ll take him back! I’ll take him back!” the laughing figure cried.
But Katherine had her bravery. She summoned it all.
“I’ll beat you!” she answered, her arms tight around her mother. “I’ve made my choice. He’s mine now whatever you try!”
CHAPTER II. THE MIRROR
Philip had never had any conceit of himself — that is, he could not remember the time when he had been satisfied with what he had done, or pleased with the figure that he presented. The selfish actions in his life had always arisen from unselfish motives, because he had been afraid of hurting or vexing other people, because he thought other people finer than himself. Even when, as in the case of Seymour, he burst out in indignation at something that he felt to be pretentious and false, he, afterwards, on thinking it over, wondered whether the man hadn’t after all been right ‘from his point of view.’ It was this ability to see the other person’s point of view that had been, and would always be, the curse of his life.
Such men as Philip are not among the fine creatures of the world. Very rightly they are despised for their weakness, their lack of resistance, their inability to stand up for themselves. It is possible, nevertheless, that in heaven they will find that they, too, have their fine side. And this possibility of an ultimate divine comprehension irritates, very naturally, their fellow human beings who resent any defence of weakness. Philip himself would have been the first to resent it. He never consoled himself with thought of heaven, but took, now and then, a half-humorous, half-despairing glance at himself, swore, as he had in those long-ago days sworn about his mother, ‘how this shall never happen again’, and then once more was defeated by his imagin
ation.
In this matter of the Trenchards he saw only too plainly, everyone’s point of view; even with Aunt Aggie he saw that she was an old disappointed woman who disliked change and loved power so long as she need not struggle for it. Mrs. Trenchard he did not understand, because he was afraid of her. His fear of her had grown and grown and grown, and in that fear was fascination, hatred, and admiration. He felt now quite definitely that he was beaten by her. He had felt that, after she had taken no notice whatever of his public scene with Aunt Aggie. She would now, he believed, take no notice of anything. He knew also, now, of her hold over Katherine. He must stay with Katherine because he loved her. Therefore he must submit to Mrs. Trenchard ... it was all quite simple. — Meanwhile to submit to Mrs. Trenchard meant, he knew, to such a character as his, extinction. He knew. Oh!... better than anyone else in the world — the kind of creature that, under her influence, he would become. He saw the others under her influence, the men and women of the village, the very chickens and pigs in the neighbouring farms. He knew what he had been under his mother, he knew what he had been under Anna, he knew what now he would be under Mrs. Trenchard. Well, extinction was a simple thing enough if you made up your mind to it — why struggle any further?
But day and night, increasingly, as the weeks passed, he was being urged to escape. All this summer, Anna, no longer a suggestion, no longer a memory, but now a vital, bodily presence, was urging him. Her power over him was not in the least because he was still in love with her — he loved only Katherine in all the world — but because of the damnable common-sense of what she said. What she said was this:
“Here you are amongst all these funny people. You are too much in the middle of them to see it plainly for yourself, but I’m a ghost and can see everything quite clearly; I know you — better than you know yourself. This Mrs. Trenchard is determined never to let her daughter go. You say that you love this young woman, although what you can see in her stupid English solidity I can’t imagine. However, you were always a fool.... All the same, if you love her it’s for her sake that you must escape. You know the kind of creature you’re going to be if you stay. What does she want with such a man? When she wakes up, about a week after marriage, and finds you under the thumb of her mother, what will happen to her love? She may continue to love you — English women are so stupid — but she’ll certainly despise you. Come back to Russia. It isn’t that I want you, or will take you back into my life, but she’ll find out what you’re worth then. If she really loves you she’ll have to come after you. Then you’ll have broken with the family and will be free. Run away, I tell you. It’s the only thing to do.”