Night and Day

She began to pace up and down the room, snatching up her duster; but she was too much annoyed to find any relief, as yet, in polishing the backs of books.

‘Besides,’ she said, giving the sheet she had written to Katharine, ‘I don’t believe this’ll do. Did your grandfather ever visit the Hebrides,^aq Katharine?’ She looked in a strangely beseeching way at her daughter. ‘My mind got running on the Hebrides, and I couldn’t help writing a little description of them. Perhaps it would do at the beginning of a chapter. Chapters often begin quite differently from the way they go on, you know.’ Katharine read what her mother had written. She might have been a schoolmaster criticizing a child’s essay. Her face gave Mrs Hilbery, who watched it anxiously, no ground for hope.

‘It’s very beautiful,’ she stated, ‘but, you see, mother, we ought to go from point to point—’

‘Oh, I know,’ Mrs Hilbery exclaimed. ‘And that’s just what I can’t do. Things keep coming into my head. It isn’t that I don’t know everything and feel everything (who did know him, if I didn’t?), but I can’t put it down, you see. There’s a kind of blind spot,‘ she said, touching her forehead, ‘there. And when I can’t sleep o’ nights, I fancy I shall die without having done it.’

From exultation she had passed to the depths of depression which the imagination of her death aroused. The depression communicated itself to Katharine. How impotent they were, fiddling about all day long with papers! And the clock was striking eleven and nothing done! She watched her mother, now rummaging in a great brass-bound box which stood by her table, but she did not go to her help. Of course, Katharine reflected, her mother had now lost some paper, and they would waste the rest of the morning looking for it. She cast her eyes down in irritation, and read again her mother’s musical sentences about the silver gulls, and the roots of little pink flowers washed by pellucid streams, and the blue mists of hyacinths, until she was struck by her mother’s silence. She raised her eyes. Mrs Hilbery had emptied a portfolio containing old photographs over her table, and was looking from one to another.

‘Surely, Katharine,’ she said, ‘the men were far handsomer in those days than they are now, in spite of their odious whiskers? Look at old John Graham, in his white waistcoat—look at Uncle Harley. That’s Peter the manservant, I suppose. Uncle John brought him back from India.’

Katharine looked at her mother, but did not stir or answer. She had suddenly become very angry, with a rage which their relationship made silent, and therefore doubly powerful and critical. She felt all the unfairness of the claim which her mother tacitly made to her time and sympathy, and what Mrs Hilbery took, Katharine thought bitterly, she wasted. Then, in a flash, she remembered that she had still to tell her about Cyril’s misbehaviour. Her anger immediately dissipated itself; it broke like some wave that has gathered itself high above the rest; the waters were resumed into the sea again, and Katharine felt once more full of peace and solicitude, and anxious only that her mother should be protected from pain. She crossed the room instinctively, and sat on the arm of her mother’s chair. Mrs Hilbery leant her head against her daughter’s body.

‘What is nobler,’ she mused, turning over the photographs, ‘than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty? How have the young women of your generation improved upon that, Katharine? I can see them now, sweeping over the lawns at Melbury House,¹ in their flounces and furbelows,^ar so calm and stately and imperial (and the monkey and the little black dwarf following behind), as if nothing mattered in the world but to be beautiful and kind. But they did more than we do, I sometimes think. They were, and that’s better than doing. They seem to me like ships, like majestic ships, holding on their way, not shoving or pushing, not fretted by little things, as we are, but taking their way, like ships with white sails.’

Katharine tried to interrupt this discourse, but the opportunity did not come, and she could not forbear to turn over the pages of the album in which the old photographs were stored. The faces of these men and women shone forth wonderfully after the hubbub of living faces, and seemed, as her mother had said, to wear a marvellous dignity and calm, as if they had ruled their kingdoms justly and deserved great love. Some were of almost incredible beauty, others were ugly enough in a forcible way, but none were dull or bored or insignificant. The superb stiff folds of the crinolines suited the women; the cloaks and hats of the gentlemen seemed full of character. Once more Katharine felt the serene air all round her, and seemed far off to hear the solemn beating of the sea upon the shore. But she knew that she must join the present on to this past.

Mrs Hilbery was rambling on, from story to story.

‘That’s Janie Mannering,’ she said, pointing to a superb, white-haired dame, whose satin robes seemed strung with pearls. ‘I must have told you how she found her cook drunk under the kitchen table when the Empress^as was coming to dinner, and tucked up her velvet sleeves (she always dressed like an Empress herself), cooked the whole meal, and appeared in the drawing-room as if she’d been sleeping on a bank of roses all day. She could do anything with her hands—they all could—make a cottage or embroider a petticoat.

‘And that’s Queenie Colquhoun,’ she went on, turning the pages, ‘who took her coffin out with her to Jamaica, packed with lovely shawls and bonnets, because you couldn’t get coffins in Jamaica, and she had a horror of dying there (as she did), and being devoured by the white ants. And there’s Sabine, the loveliest of them all; ah! it was like a star rising when she came into the room. And that’s Miriam, in her coachman’s cloak, with all the little capes on, and she wore great top-boots underneath. You young people may say you’re unconventional, but you’re nothing compared with her.’

Turning the page, she came upon the picture of a very masculine, handsome lady, whose head the photographer had adorned with an imperial crown.

Ah, you wretch!’ Mrs Hilbery exclaimed, ‘what a wicked old despot you were, in your day! How we all bowed down before you! “Maggie,” she used to say, “if it hadn’t been for me, where would you be now?” And it was true; she brought them together, you know. She said to my father, “Marry her,” and he did; and she said to poor little Clara, “Fall down and worship him,” and she did; but she got up again, of course. What else could one expect? She was a mere child—eighteen—and half dead with fright, too. But that old tyrant never repented. She used to say that she had given them three perfect months, and no one had a right to more; and I sometimes think, Katharine, that’s true, you know. It’s more than most of us have, only we have to pretend, which was a thing neither of them could ever do. I fancy,’ Mrs Hilbery mused, ‘that there was a kind of sincerity in those days between men and women which, with all your outspokenness, you haven’t got.’

Katharine again tried to interrupt. But Mrs Hilbery had been gathering impetus from her recollections, and was now in high spirits.

‘They must have been good friends at heart,’ she resumed, ‘because she used to sing his songs. Ah, how did it go?’ and Mrs Hilbery, who had a very sweet voice, trolled out a famous lyric of her father’s which had been set to an absurdly and charmingly sentimental air by some early Victorian composer.

‘It’s the vitality of them!’ she concluded, striking her fist against the table. ‘That’s what we haven’t got! We’re virtuous, we’re earnest, we go to meetings, we pay the poor their wages, but we don’t live as they lived. As often as not, my father wasn’t in bed three nights out of the seven, but always fresh as paint in the morning. I hear him now, come singing up the stairs to the nursery, and tossing the loaf for breakfast on his sword-stick, and then off we went for a day’s pleasuring—Richmond, Hampton Court, the Surrey Hills.² Why shouldn’t we go, Katharine? It’s going to be a fine day.’