‘I’m not in love with Ralph Denham,’ she said.
‘Don’t marry unless you’re in love!’ said Mrs Hilbery very quickly. ‘But,’ she added, glancing momentarily at her daughter, ‘aren’t there different ways, Katharine—different—?’
‘We want to meet as often as we like, but to be free,’ Katharine continued.
‘To meet here, to meet in his house, to meet in the street.’ Mrs Hilbery ran over these phrases as if she were trying chords that did not quite satisfy her ear. It was plain that she had her sources of information, and, indeed, her bag was stuffed with what she called ‘kind letters’ from the pen of her sister-in-law
‘Yes. Or to stay away in the country,’ Katharine concluded.
Mrs Hilbery paused, looked unhappy, and sought inspiration from the window.
‘What a comfort he was in that shop—how he took me and found the ruins at once—how safe I felt with him—’
‘Safe? Oh no, he’s fearfully rash—he’s always taking risks. He wants to throw up his profession and live in a little cottage and write books, though he hasn’t a penny of his own, and there are any number of sisters and brothers dependent on him.’
‘Ah, he has a mother?’ Mrs Hilbery inquired.
‘Yes. Rather a fine-looking old lady, with white hair.’ Katharine began to describe her visit, and soon Mrs Hilbery elicited the facts that not only was the house of excruciating ugliness, which Ralph bore without complaint, but that it was evident that every one depended on him, and he had a room at the top of the house, with a wonderful view over London, and a rook.
‘A wretched old bird in a corner, with half its feathers out,’ she said, with a tenderness in her voice that seemed to commiserate the sufferings of humanity while resting assured in the capacity of Ralph Denham to alleviate them, so that Mrs Hilbery could not help exclaiming:
‘But, Katharine, you are in love!’ at which Katharine flushed, looked startled, as if she had said something that she ought not to have said, and shook her head.
Hastily Mrs Hilbery asked for further details of this extraordinary house, and interposed a few speculations about the meeting between Keats and Coleridge2 in a lane, which tided over the discomfort of the moment, and drew Katharine on to further descriptions and indiscretions. In truth, she found an extraordinary pleasure in being thus free to talk to some one who was equally wise and equally benignant, the mother of her earliest childhood, whose silence seemed to answer questions that were never asked. Mrs Hilbery listened without making any remark for a considerable time. She seemed to draw her conclusions rather by looking at her daughter than by listening to her, and, if cross-examined she would probably have given a highly inaccurate version of Ralph Denham’s life-history except that he was penniless, fatherless, and lived at Highgate—all of which was much in his favour. But by means of these furtive glances she had assured herself that Katharine was in a state which gave her, alternately, the most exquisite pleasure and the most profound alarm.
She could not help ejaculating at last:
‘It’s all done in five minutes at a Registry Officeea nowadays, if you think the Church service a little florid—which it is, though there are noble things in it.’
‘But we don’t want to be married,’ Katharine replied emphatically, and added, ‘Why, after all, isn’t it perfectly possible to live together without being married?’
Again Mrs Hilbery looked discomposed, and, in her trouble, took up the sheets which were lying upon the table, and began turning them over this way and that, and muttering to herself as she glanced:
‘A plus B minus C equals x y z. It’s so dreadfully ugly, Katharine. That’s what I feel—so dreadfully ugly.’
Katharine took the sheets from her mother’s hand and began shuffling them absent-mindedly together, for her fixed gaze seemed to show that her thoughts were intent upon some other matter.
‘Well, I don’t know about ugliness,’ she said at length.
‘But he doesn’t ask it of you?’ Mrs Hilbery exclaimed. ‘Not that grave young man with the steady brown eyes?’
‘He doesn’t ask anything—we neither of us ask anything.’
‘If I could help you, Katharine, by the memory of what I felt—’
‘Yes, tell me what you felt.’
Mrs Hilbery, her eyes growing blank, peered down the enormously long corridor of days at the far end of which the little figures of herself and her husband appeared fantastically attired, clasping hands upon a moonlit beach, with roses swinging in the dusk.
‘We were in a little boat going out to a ship at night,’ she began. ‘The sun had set and the moon was rising over our heads. There were lovely silver lights upon the waves and three green lights upon the steamer in the middle of the bay. Your father’s head looked so grand against the mast. It was life, it was death. The great sea was round us. It was the voyage for ever and ever.’
The ancient fairy-tale fell roundly and harmoniously upon Katharine’s ears. Yes, there was the enormous space of the sea; there were the three green lights upon the steamer; the cloaked figures climbed up on deck. And so, voyaging over the green and purple waters, past the cliffs and the sandy lagoons and through pools crowded with the masts of ships and the steeples of churches—here they were. The river seemed to have brought them and deposited them here at this precise point. She looked admiringly at her mother, that ancient voyager.
‘Who knows,’ exclaimed Mrs Hilbery, continuing her reveries, ‘where we are bound for, or why, or who has sent us, or what we shall find—who knows anything, except that love is our faith—love—’ she crooned, and the soft sound beating through the dim words was heard by her daughter as the breaking of waves solemnly in order upon the vast shore that she gazed upon. She would have been content for her mother to repeat that word almost indefinitely—a soothing word when uttered by another, a riveting together of the shattered fragments of the world. But Mrs Hilbery, instead of repeating the word love, said pleadingly:
‘And you won’t think those ugly thoughts again, will you, Katharine?’ at which words the ship which Katharine had been considering seemed to put into harbour and have done with its sea-faring. Yet she was in great need, if not exactly of sympathy, of some form of advice, or, at least, of the opportunity of setting forth her problems before a third person so as to renew them in her own eyes.
‘But then,’ she said, ignoring the difficult problem of ugliness, ‘you knew you were in love; but we’re different. It seems,’ she continued, frowning a little as she tried to fix the difficult feeling, ‘as if something came to an end suddenly—gave out—faded—an illusion—as if when we think we’re in love we make it up—we imagine what doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s impossible that we should ever marry. Always to be finding the other an illusion, and going off and forgetting about them, never to be certain that you cared, or that he wasn’t caring for some one not you at all, the horror of changing from one state to the other, being happy one moment and miserable the next—that’s the reason why we can’t possibly marry. At the same time,’ she continued, ‘we can’t live without each other, because—’ Mrs Hilbery waited patiently for the sentence to be completed, but Katharine fell silent and fingered her sheet of figures.
‘We have to have faith in our vision,’ Mrs Hilbery resumed, glancing at the figures, which distressed her vaguely, and had some connexion in her mind with the household accounts, ‘otherwise, as you say—’ She cast a lightning glance into the depths of disillusionment which were, perhaps, not altogether unknown to her.
‘Believe me, Katharine, it’s the same for every one—for me, too—for your father,’ she said earnestly, and sighed. They looked together into the abyss and, as the elder of the two, she recovered herself first and asked: