‘Which ridiculous goose?’ Katharine asked her father.
‘Only one of my geese, happily, makes epigrams—Augustus Pelham, of course,’ said Mrs Hilbery.
‘I’m not sorry that I was out,’ said Katharine.
‘Poor Augustus!’ Mrs Hilbery exclaimed. ‘But we’re all too hard on him. Remember how devoted he is to his tiresome old mother.’
‘That’s only because she is his mother. Any one connected with himself—’
‘No, no, Katharine—that’s too bad. That’s—what’s the word I mean, Trevor, something long and Latin—the sort of word you and Katharine know—’
Mr Hilbery suggested ‘cynical’.
‘Well, that’ll do. I don’t believe in sending girls to college, but I should teach them that sort of thing. It makes one feel so dignified, bringing out these little allusions, and passing on gracefully to the next topic. But I don’t know what’s come over me—I actually had to ask Augustus the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with,2 as you were out, Katharine, and Heaven knows what he mayn’t put down about me in his diary.’
‘I wish,’ Katharine started, with great impetuosity, and checked herself. Her mother always stirred her to feel and think quickly, and then she remembered that her father was there, listening with attention.
‘What is it you wish?’ he asked, as she paused.
He often surprised her, thus, into telling him what she had not meant to tell him; and then they argued, while Mrs Hilbery went on with her own thoughts.
‘I wish mother wasn’t famous. I was out at tea, and they would talk to me about poetry.’
‘Thinking you must be poetical, I see—and aren’t you?’
‘Who’s been talking to you about poetry, Katharine?’ Mrs Hilbery demanded, and Katharine was committed to giving her parents an account of her visit to the Suffrage office.
‘They have an office at the top of one of the old houses in Russell Square. I never saw such queer-looking people. And the man discovered I was related to the poet, and talked to me about poetry. Even Mary Datchet seems different in that atmosphere.’
‘Yes, the office atmosphere is very bad for the soul,’ said Mr Hilbery.
‘I don’t remember any offices in Russell Square in the old days, when Mamma lived there,’ Mrs Hilbery mused, ‘and I can’t fancy turning one of those noble great rooms into a stuffy little Suffrage office. Still, if the clerks read poetry there must be something nice about them.’
‘No, because they don’t read it as we read it,’ Katharine insisted.
‘But it’s nice to think of them reading your grandfather, and not filling up those dreadful little forms all day long,’ Mrs Hilbery persisted, her notion of office life derived from some chance view of a scene behind the counter at her bank, as she slipped her sovereigns into her purse.
‘At any rate, they haven’t made a convert of Katharine, which was what I was afraid of,’ Mr Hilbery remarked.
‘Oh no,’ said Katharine very decidedly, ‘I wouldn’t work with them for anything.’
‘It’s curious,’ Mr Hilbery continued, agreeing with his daughter, ‘how the sight of one’s fellow-enthusiasts always chokes one off. They show up the faults of one’s cause so much more plainly than one’s antagonists. One can be enthusiastic in one’s study, but directly one comes into touch with the people who agree with one, all the glamour goes. So I’ve always found,’ and he proceeded to tell them, as he peeled his apple, how he committed himself once, in his youthful days, to make a speech at a political meeting, and went there ablaze with enthusiasm for the ideals of his own side; but while his leaders spoke, he became gradually converted to the other way of thinking, if thinking it could be called, and had to feign illness in order to avoid making a fool of himself—an experience which had sickened him of public meetings.
Katharine listened and felt as she generally did when her father, and to some extent her mother, described their feelings, that she quite understood and agreed with them, but, at the same time, saw something which they did not see, and always felt some disappointment when they fell short of her vision, as they always did. The plates succeeded each other swiftly and noiselessly in front of her, and the table was decked for dessert, and as the talk murmured on in familiar grooves, she sat there, rather like a judge, listening to her parents, who did, indeed, feel it very pleasant when they made her laugh.
Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance. Such was the nightly ceremony of the cigar and the glass of port, which were placed on the right hand and on the left hand of Mr Hilbery, and simultaneously Mrs Hilbery and Katharine left the room. All the years they had lived together they had never seen Mr Hilbery smoke his cigar or drink his port, and they would have felt it unseemly if, by chance, they had surprised him as he sat there. These short, but clearly marked, periods of separation between the sexes were always used for an intimate postscript to what had been said at dinner, the sense of being women together coming out most strongly when the male sex was, as if by some religious rite, secluded from the female. Katharine knew by heart the sort of mood that possessed her as she walked upstairs to the drawing-room, her mother’s arm in hers; and she could anticipate the pleasure with which, when she had turned on the lights, they both regarded the drawing-room, fresh swept and set in order for the last section of the day, with the red parrots swinging on the chintz curtains, and the arm-chairs warming in the blaze. Mrs Hilbery stood over the fire, with one foot on the fender, and her skirts slightly raised.
‘Oh, Katharine,’ she exclaimed, ‘how you’ve made me think of Mamma and the old days in Russell Square! I can see the chandeliers, and the green silk of the piano, and Mamma sitting in her cashmere shawl by the window, singing till the little ragamuffin boys outside stopped to listen. Papa sent me in with a bunch of violets while he waited round the corner. It must have been a summer evening. That was before things were hopeless...’
As she spoke an expression of regret, which must have come frequently to cause the lines which now grew deep round the lips and eyes, settled on her face. The poet’s marriage had not been a happy one. He had left his wife, and after some years of a rather reckless existence, she had died, before her time. This disaster had led to great irregularities of education, and, indeed, Mrs Hilbery might be said to have escaped education altogether. But she had been her father’s companion at the season when he wrote the finest of his poems. She had sat on his knee in taverns and other haunts of drunken poets, and it was for her sake, so people said, that he had cured himself of
