“William,” she said, speaking rather faintly at first, like one sending a voice from sleep to reach the living. “William,” she repeated firmly, “if you still want me to marry you, I will.”
Perhaps it was that no man could expect to have the most momentous question of his life settled in a voice so level, so toneless, so devoid of joy or energy. At any rate William made no answer. She waited stoically. A moment later he stepped briskly from his dressing-room, and observed that if she wanted to buy more oysters he thought he knew where they could find a fishmonger’s shop still open. She breathed deeply a sigh of relief.
Extract from a letter sent a few days later by Mrs. Hilbery to her sister-in-law, Mrs. Milvain:
“... How stupid of me to forget the name in my telegram. Such a nice, rich, English name, too, and, in addition, he has all the graces of intellect; he has read literally EVERYTHING. I tell Katharine, I shall always put him on my right side at dinner, so as to have him by me when people begin talking about characters in Shakespeare. They won’t be rich, but they’ll be very, very happy. I was sitting in my room late one night, feeling that nothing nice would ever happen to me again, when I heard Katharine outside in the passage, and I thought to myself, ‘Shall I call her in?’ and then I thought (in that hopeless, dreary way one does think, with the fire going out and one’s birthday just over), ‘Why should I lay my troubles on HER?’ But my little self-control had its reward, for next moment she tapped at the door and came in, and sat on the rug, and though we neither of us said anything, I felt so happy all of a second that I couldn’t help crying, ‘Oh, Katharine, when you come to my age, how I hope you’ll have a daughter, too!’ You know how silent Katharine is. She was so silent, for such a long time, that in my foolish, nervous state I dreaded something, I don’t quite know what. And then she told me how, after all, she had made up her mind. She had written. She expected him to-morrow. At first I wasn’t glad at all. I didn’t want her to marry any one; but when she said, ‘It will make no difference. I shall always care for you and father most,’ then I saw how selfish I was, and I told her she must give him everything, everything, everything! I told her I should be thankful to come second. But why, when everything’s turned out just as one always hoped it would turn out, why then can one do nothing but cry, nothing but feel a desolate old woman whose life’s been a failure, and now is nearly over, and age is so cruel? But Katharine said to me, ‘I am happy. I’m very happy.’ And then I thought, though it all seemed so desperately dismal at the time, Katharine had said she was happy, and I should have a son, and it would all turn out so much more wonderfully than I could possibly imagine, for though the sermons don’t say so, I do believe the world is meant for us to be happy in. She told me that they would live quite near us, and see us every day; and she would go on with the Life, and we should finish it as we had meant to. And, after all, it would be far more horrid if she didn’t marry — or suppose she married some one we couldn’t endure? Suppose she had fallen in love with some one who was married already?
“And though one never thinks any one good enough for the people one’s fond of, he has the kindest, truest instincts, I’m sure, and though he seems nervous and his manner is not commanding, I only think these things because it’s Katharine. And now I’ve written this, it comes over me that, of course, all the time, Katharine has what he hasn’t. She does command, she isn’t nervous; it comes naturally to her to rule and control. It’s time that she should give all this to some one who will need her when we aren’t there, save in our spirits, for whatever people say, I’m sure I shall come back to this wonderful world where one’s been so happy and so miserable, where, even now, I seem to see myself stretching out my hands for another present from the great Fairy Tree whose boughs are still hung with enchanting toys, though they are rarer now, perhaps, and between the branches one sees no longer the blue sky, but the stars and the tops of the mountains.
“One doesn’t know any more, does one? One hasn’t any advice to give one’s children. One can only hope that they will have the same vision and the same power to believe, without which life would be so meaningless. That is what I ask for Katharine and her husband.”
CHAPTER XII
“Is Mr. Hilbery at home, or Mrs. Hilbery?” Denham asked, of the parlor-maid in Chelsea, a week later.
“No, sir. But Miss Hilbery is at home,” the girl answered.
Ralph had anticipated many answers, but not this one, and now it was unexpectedly made plain to him that it was the chance of seeing Katharine that had brought him all the way to Chelsea on pretence of seeing her father.
He made some show of considering the matter, and was taken upstairs to the drawing-room. As upon that first occasion, some weeks ago, the door closed as if it were a thousand doors softly excluding the world; and once more Ralph received an impression of a room full of deep shadows, firelight, unwavering silver candle flames, and empty spaces to be crossed before reaching the round table in the middle of the room, with its frail burden of silver trays and china teacups. But this time Katharine was there by herself; the volume in her hand showed that she expected no visitors.
Ralph said something about hoping to find her father.
“My father is out,” she replied. “But if you can wait, I expect him soon.”
It might have been due merely to politeness, but Ralph felt that she received him almost with cordiality. Perhaps she was bored by drinking tea and reading a book all alone; at any rate, she tossed the book on to a sofa with a gesture of relief.
“Is that one of the moderns whom you despise?” he asked, smiling at the carelessness of her gesture.
“Yes,” she replied. “I think even you would despise him.”
“Even I?” he repeated. “Why even I?”
“You said you liked modern things; I said I hated them.”
This was not a very accurate report of their conversation among the relics, perhaps, but Ralph was flattered to think that she remembered anything about it.
“Or did I confess that I hated all books?” she went on, seeing him look up with an air of inquiry. “I forget—”
“Do you hate all books?” he asked.
“It would be absurd to say that I hate all books when I’ve only read ten, perhaps; but—’ Here she pulled herself up short.
“Well?”
“Yes, I do hate books,” she continued. “Why do you want to be for ever talking about your feelings? That’s what I can’t make out. And poetry’s all about feelings — novels are all about feelings.”
She cut a cake vigorously into slices, and providing a tray with bread and butter for Mrs. Hilbery, who was in her room with a cold, she rose to go upstairs.
Ralph held the door open for her, and then stood with clasped hands in the middle of the room. His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they beheld dreams or realities. All down the street and on the doorstep, and while he mounted the stairs, his dream of Katharine possessed him; on the threshold of the room he had dismissed it, in order to prevent too painful a collision between what he dreamt of her and what she was. And in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life; looked with fire out of phantom eyes. He glanced about him with bewilderment at finding himself among her chairs and tables; they were solid, for he grasped the back of the chair in which Katharine had sat; and yet they were unreal; the atmosphere was that of a dream. He summoned all the faculties of his spirit to seize what the minutes had to give him; and from the depths of his mind there rose unchecked a joyful recognition of the truth that human nature surpasses, in its beauty, all that our wildest dreams bring us hints of.
Katharine came into the room a moment later. He stood watching her come towards him, and thought her more beautiful and strange than his dream of her; for the real Katharine could speak the words which seemed to crowd behind the forehead and in the depths of the eyes, and the commonest sentence would be flashed on by this immortal light. And she overflowed the
edges of the dream; he remarked that her softness was like that of some vast snowy owl; she wore a ruby on her finger.
“My mother wants me to tell you,” she said, “that she hopes you have begun your poem. She says every one ought to write poetry.... All my relations write poetry,” she went on. “I can’t bear to think of it sometimes — because, of course, it’s none of it any good. But then one needn’t read it—”
“You don’t encourage me to write a poem,” said Ralph.
“But you’re not a poet, too, are you?” she inquired, turning upon him with a laugh.
“Should I tell you if I were?”
“Yes. Because I think you speak the truth,” she said, searching him for proof of this apparently, with eyes now almost impersonally direct. It would be easy, Ralph thought, to worship one so far removed, and yet of so straight a nature; easy to submit recklessly to her, without thought of future pain.
“Are you a poet?” she demanded. He felt that her question had an unexplained weight of meaning behind it, as if she sought an answer to a question that she did not ask.
“No. I haven’t written any poetry for years,” he replied. “But all the same, I don’t agree with you. I think it’s the only thing worth doing.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked, almost with impatience, tapping her spoon two or three times against the side of her cup.
“Why?” Ralph laid hands on the first words that came to mind. “Because, I suppose, it keeps an ideal alive which might die otherwise.”
A curious change came over her face, as if the flame of her mind were subdued; and she looked at him ironically and with the expression which he had called sad before, for want of a better name for it.
“I don’t know that there’s much sense in having ideals,” she said.
“But you have them,” he replied energetically. “Why do we call them ideals? It’s a stupid word. Dreams, I mean—”
She followed his words with parted lips, as though to answer eagerly when he had done; but as he said, “Dreams, I mean,” the door of the drawing-room swung open, and so remained for a perceptible instant. They both held themselves silent, her lips still parted.
Far off, they heard the rustle of skirts. Then the owner of the skirts appeared in the doorway, which she almost filled, nearly concealing the figure of a very much smaller lady who accompanied her.
“My aunts!” Katharine murmured, under her breath. Her tone had a hint of tragedy in it, but no less, Ralph thought, than the situation required. She addressed the larger lady as Aunt Millicent; the smaller was Aunt Celia, Mrs. Milvain, who had lately undertaken the task of marrying Cyril to his wife. Both ladies, but Mrs. Cosham (Aunt Millicent) in particular, had that look of heightened, smoothed, incarnadined existence which is proper to elderly ladies paying calls in London about five o’clock in the afternoon. Portraits by Romney, seen through glass, have something of their pink, mellow look, their blooming softness, as of apricots hanging upon a red wall in the afternoon sun. Mrs. Cosham was so appareled with hanging muffs, chains, and swinging draperies that it was impossible to detect the shape of a human being in the mass of brown and black which filled the arm-chair. Mrs. Milvain was a much slighter figure; but the same doubt as to the precise lines of her contour filled Ralph, as he regarded them, with dismal foreboding. What remark of his would ever reach these fabulous and fantastic characters? — for there was something fantastically unreal in the curious swayings and noddings of Mrs. Cosham, as if her equipment included a large wire spring. Her voice had a high-pitched, cooing note, which prolonged words and cut them short until the English language seemed no longer fit for common purposes. In a moment of nervousness, so Ralph thought, Katharine had turned on innumerable electric lights. But Mrs. Cosham had gained impetus (perhaps her swaying movements had that end in view) for sustained speech; and she now addressed Ralph deliberately and elaborately.
“I come from Woking, Mr. Popham. You may well ask me, why Woking? and to that I answer, for perhaps the hundredth time, because of the sunsets. We went there for the sunsets, but that was five-and-twenty years ago. Where are the sunsets now? Alas! There is no sunset now nearer than the South Coast.” Her rich and romantic notes were accompanied by a wave of a long white hand, which, when waved, gave off a flash of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Ralph wondered whether she more resembled an elephant, with a jeweled head-dress, or a superb cockatoo, balanced insecurely upon its perch, and pecking capriciously at a lump of sugar.
“Where are the sunsets now?” she repeated. “Do you find sunsets now, Mr. Popham?”
“I live at Highgate,” he replied.
“At Highgate? Yes, Highgate has its charms; your Uncle John lived at Highgate,” she jerked in the direction of Katharine. She sank her head upon her breast, as if for a moment’s meditation, which past, she looked up and observed: “I dare say there are very pretty lanes in Highgate. I can recollect walking with your mother, Katharine, through lanes blossoming with wild hawthorn. But where is the hawthorn now? You remember that exquisite description in De Quincey, Mr. Popham? — but I forget, you, in your generation, with all your activity and enlightenment, at which I can only marvel” — here she displayed both her beautiful white hands— “do not read De Quincey. You have your Belloc, your Chesterton, your Bernard Shaw — why should you read De Quincey?”
“But I do read De Quincey,” Ralph protested, “more than Belloc and Chesterton, anyhow.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Cosham, with a gesture of surprise and relief mingled. “You are, then, a ‘rara avis’ in your generation. I am delighted to meet anyone who reads De Quincey.”
Here she hollowed her hand into a screen, and, leaning towards Katharine, inquired, in a very audible whisper, “Does your friend WRITE?”
“Mr. Denham,” said Katharine, with more than her usual clearness and firmness, “writes for the Review. He is a lawyer.”
“The clean-shaven lips, showing the expression of the mouth! I recognize them at once. I always feel at home with lawyers, Mr. Denham—”
“They used to come about so much in the old days,” Mrs. Milvain interposed, the frail, silvery notes of her voice falling with the sweet tone of an old bell.
“You say you live at Highgate,” she continued. “I wonder whether you happen to know if there is an old house called Tempest Lodge still in existence — an old white house in a garden?”
Ralph shook his head, and she sighed.
“Ah, no; it must have been pulled down by this time, with all the other old houses. There were such pretty lanes in those days. That was how your uncle met your Aunt Emily, you know,” she addressed Katharine. “They walked home through the lanes.”
“A sprig of May in her bonnet,” Mrs. Cosham ejaculated, reminiscently.
“And next Sunday he had violets in his buttonhole. And that was how we guessed.”
Katharine laughed. She looked at Ralph. His eyes were meditative, and she wondered what he found in this old gossip to make him ponder so contentedly. She felt, she hardly knew why, a curious pity for him.
“Uncle John — yes, ‘poor John,’ you always called him. Why was that?” she asked, to make them go on talking, which, indeed, they needed little invitation to do.
“That was what his father, old Sir Richard, always called him. Poor John, or the fool of the family,” Mrs. Milvain hastened to inform them. “The other boys were so brilliant, and he could never pass his examinations, so they sent him to India — a long voyage in those days, poor fellow. You had your own room, you know, and you did it up. But he will get his knighthood and a pension, I believe,” she said, turning to Ralph, “only it is not England.”
“No,” Mrs. Cosham confirmed her, “it is not England. In those days we thought an Indian Judgeship about equal to a county-court judgeship at home. His Honor — a pretty title, but still, not at the top of the tree. However,” she sighed, “if you have a wife and seven children, and people nowadays very quickly forget your father’s name — well
, you have to take what you can get,” she concluded.
“And I fancy,” Mrs. Milvain resumed, lowering her voice rather confidentially, “that John would have done more if it hadn’t been for his wife, your Aunt Emily. She was a very good woman, devoted to him, of course, but she was not ambitious for him, and if a wife isn’t ambitious for her husband, especially in a profession like the law, clients soon get to know of it. In our young days, Mr. Denham, we used to say that we knew which of our friends would become judges, by looking at the girls they married. And so it was, and so, I fancy, it always will be. I don’t think,” she added, summing up these scattered remarks, “that any man is really happy unless he succeeds in his profession.”
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 56