‘I confess I don’t understand the Russians.’
‘Shake hands! Shake hands!’ boomed Uncle Aubrey from across the table. ‘Neither do I. And I hazard the opinion that they don’t themselves.’
The old gentleman had ruled a large part of the Indian Empire, but he was in the habit of saying that he had rather have written the works of Dickens. The table now took possession of a subject much to its liking. Aunt Eleanor showed premonitory signs of pronouncing an opinion. Although she had blunted her taste upon some form of philanthropy for twenty-five years, she had a fine natural instinct for an upstart or a pretender, and knew to a hairbreadth what literature should be and what it should not be. She was born to the knowledge, and scarcely thought it a matter to be proud of.
‘Insanity is not a fit subject for fiction,’ she announced positively.
‘There’s the well-known case of Hamlet,’ Mr Hilbery interposed, in his leisurely, half-humorous tones.
Ah, but poetry’s different, Trevor,’ said Aunt Eleanor, as if she had special authority from Shakespeare to say so. ‘Different altogether. And I’ve never thought, for my part, that Hamlet was as mad as they make out. What is your opinion, Mr Peyton?’ For, as there was a minister of literature present in the person of the editor of an esteemed review, she deferred to him.
Mr Peyton leant a little back in his chair, and, putting his head rather on one side, observed that that was a question that he had never been able to answer entirely to his satisfaction. There was much to be said on both sides, but as he considered upon which side he should say it, Mrs Hilbery broke in upon his judicious meditations.
‘Lovely, lovely Ophelia!’ she exclaimed. ‘What a wonderful power it is—poetry! I wake up in the morning all bedraggled; there’s a yellow fog outside; little Emily turns on the electric light when she brings me my tea, and says, “Oh, ma’am, the water’s frozen in the cistern, and cook’s cut her finger to the bone.” And then I open a little green book, and the birds are singing, the stars shining, the flowers twinkling—’ She looked about her as if these presences had suddenly manifested themselves round her dining-room table.
‘Has the cook cut her finger badly?’ Aunt Eleanor demanded, addressing herself naturally to Katharine.
‘Oh, the cook’s finger is only my way of putting it,’ said Mrs Hilbery.‘But if she had cut her arm off, Katharine would have sewn it on again,’ she remarked, with an affectionate glance at her daughter, who looked, she thought, a little sad. ‘But what horrid, horrid thoughts,’ she wound up, laying down her napkin and pushing her chair back. ‘Come, let us find something more cheerful to talk about upstairs.’
Upstairs in the drawing room Cassandra found fresh sources of pleasure, first in the distinguished and expectant look of the room, and then in the chance of exercising her divining-rod upon a new assortment of human beings. But the low tones of the women, their meditative silences, the beauty which, to her at least, shone even from black satin and the knobs of amber which encircled elderly necks, changed her wish to chatter to a more subdued desire merely to watch and to whisper. She entered with delight into an atmosphere in which private matters were being interchanged freely, almost in monosyllables, by the older women who now accepted her as one of themselves. Her expression became very gentle and sympathetic, as if she, too, were full of solicitude for the world which was somehow being cared for, managed and deprecated by Aunt Maggie and Aunt Eleanor. After a time she perceived that Katharine was outside the community in some way, and, suddenly, she threw aside her wisdom and gentleness and concern and began to laugh.
‘What are you laughing at?’ Katharine asked.
A joke so foolish and unfilial wasn’t worth explaining.
‘It was nothing—ridiculous—in the worst of taste, but still, if you half shut your eyes and looked—’ Katharine half shut her eyes and looked, but she looked in the wrong direction, and Cassandra laughed more than ever, and was still laughing and doing her best to explain in a whisper that Aunt Eleanor, through half-shut eyes, was like the parrot in the cage at Stogdon House, when the gentlemen came in and Rodney walked straight up to them and wanted to know what they were laughing at.
‘I utterly refuse to tell you!’ Cassandra replied, standing up straight, clasping her hands in front of her, and facing him. Her mockery was delicious to him. He had not even for a second the fear that she had been laughing at him. She was laughing because life was so adorable, so enchanting.
Ah, but you’re cruel to make me feel the barbarity of my sex,’ he replied, drawing his feet together and pressing his finger-tips upon an imaginary opera-hat or malacca cane. ‘We’ve been discussing all sorts of dull things, and now I shall never know what I want to know more than anything in the world.’
‘You don’t deceive us for a minute!’ she cried. ‘Not for a second! We both know that you’ve been enjoying yourself immensely. Hasn’t he, Katharine?’
‘No,’ she replied, ‘I think he’s speaking the truth. He doesn’t care much for politics.’
Her words, though spoken simply, produced a curious change in the light, sparkling atmosphere. William at once lost his look of animation and said seriously:
‘I detest politics.’
‘I don’t think any man has the right to say that,’ said Cassandra, almost severely.
‘I agree. I mean that I detest politicians,’ he corrected himself quickly.
‘You see, I believe Cassandra is what they call a Feminist,’ Katharine went on. ‘Or rather, she was a Feminist six months ago, but it’s no good supposing that she is now what she was then. That is one of her greatest charms in my eyes. One never can tell.’ She smiled at her as an elder sister might smile.
‘Katharine, you make one feel so horribly small!’ Cassandra exclaimed.
‘No, no, that’s not what she means,’ Rodney interposed. ‘I quite agree that women have an immense advantage over us there. One misses a lot by attempting to know things thoroughly.’
‘He knows Greek thoroughly,’ said Katharine. ‘But then he also knows a good deal about painting, and a certain amount about music. He’s very cultivated—perhaps the most cultivated person I know.’
And poetry,’ Cassandra added.
‘Yes, I was forgetting his play,’ Katharine remarked, and turning her head as though she saw something that needed her attention in a far corner of the room, she left them.
For a moment they stood silent, after what seemed a deliberate introduction to each other, and Cassandra watched her crossing the room.
‘Henry,’ she said, next moment, ‘would say that a stage ought to be no bigger than this drawing-room. He wants there to be singing and dancing as well as acting—only all the opposite of Wagnercx you understand?’
They sat down, and Katharine, turning when she reached the window, saw William with his hand raised in gesticulation and his mouth open, as if ready to speak the moment Cassandra ceased.
Katharine’s duty, whether it was to pull a curtain or move a chair, was either forgotten or discharged, but she continued to stand by the window without doing anything. The elderly people were all grouped together round the fire. They seemed an independent, middle-aged community busy with its own concerns. They were telling stories very well and listening to them very graciously. But for her there was no obvious employment.
‘If anybody says anything, I shall say that I’m looking at the river,’ she thought, for in her slavery to her family traditions, she was ready to pay for her transgression with some plausible falsehood. She pushed aside the blind and looked at the river. But it was a dark night and the water was barely visible. Cabs were passing, and couples were loitering slowly along the road, keeping as close to the railings as possible, though the trees had as yet no leaves to cast shadow upon their embraces. Katharine, thus withdrawn, felt her loneliness. The evening had been one of pain, offering her, minute after minute, plainer proof that things would fall out as she had foreseen. She had faced tones, gestures, glances; she knew, with her back to them, that William, even now, was plunging deeper and deeper into the delight of unexpected understanding with Cassandra. He had almost told her that he was finding it infinitely better than he could have believed. She looked out of the window, sternly determined to forget private misfortunes, to forget herself, to forget individual lives. With her eyes upon the dark sky, voices reached her from the room in which she was standing. She heard them as if they came from people in another world, a world antecedent to her world, a world that was the prelude, the antechamber to reality; it was as if, lately dead, she heard the living talking. The dream nature of our life had never been more apparent to her, never had life been more certainly an affair of four walls, whose objects existed only within the range of lights and fires, beyond which lay nothing, or nothing more than darkness. She seemed physically to have stepped beyond the region where the light of illusion still makes it desirable to possess, to love, to struggle. And yet her melancholy brought her no serenity. She still heard the voices within the room. She was still tormented by desires. She wished to be beyond their range. She wished inconsistently enough that she could find herself driving rapidly through the streets; she was even anxious to be with some one who, after a moment’s groping, took a definite shape and solidified into the person of Mary Datchet. She drew the curtains so that the draperies met in deep folds in the middle of the window.