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that he could not look beyond the present moment to the time

when she should have left him. He had no wish to use the last moments

of their companionship in adding fresh words to what he had already

said. Since they had stopped talking, she had become to him not so

much a real person, as the very woman he dreamt of; but his solitary

dreams had never produced any such keenness of sensation as that which

he felt in her presence. He himself was also strangely transfigured.

He had complete mastery of all his faculties. For the first time he

was in possession of his full powers. The vistas which opened before

him seemed to have no perceptible end. But the mood had none of the

restlessness or feverish desire to add one delight to another which

had hitherto marked, and somewhat spoilt, the most rapturous of his

imaginings. It was a mood that took such clear-eyed account of the

conditions of human life that he was not disturbed in the least by the

gliding presence of a taxicab, and without agitation he perceived that

Katharine was conscious of it also, and turned her head in that

direction. Their halting steps acknowledged the desirability of

engaging the cab; and they stopped simultaneously, and signed to it.

 

“Then you will let me know your decision as soon as you can?” he

asked, with his hand on the door.

 

She hesitated for a moment. She could not immediately recall what the

question was that she had to decide.

 

“I will write,” she said vaguely. “No,” she added, in a second,

bethinking her of the difficulties of writing anything decided upon a

question to which she had paid no attention, “I don’t see how to

manage it.”

 

She stood looking at Denham, considering and hesitating, with her foot

upon the step. He guessed her difficulties; he knew in a second that

she had heard nothing; he knew everything that she felt.

 

“There’s only one place to discuss things satisfactorily that I know

of,” he said quickly; “that’s Kew.”

 

“Kew?”

 

“Kew,” he repeated, with immense decision. He shut the door and gave

her address to the driver. She instantly was conveyed away from him,

and her cab joined the knotted stream of vehicles, each marked by a

light, and indistinguishable one from the other. He stood watching for

a moment, and then, as if swept by some fierce impulse, from the spot

where they had stood, he turned, crossed the road at a rapid pace, and

disappeared.

 

He walked on upon the impetus of this last mood of almost supernatural

exaltation until he reached a narrow street, at this hour empty of

traffic and passengers. Here, whether it was the shops with their

shuttered windows, the smooth and silvered curve of the wood pavement,

or a natural ebb of feeling, his exaltation slowly oozed and deserted

him. He was now conscious of the loss that follows any revelation; he

had lost something in speaking to Katharine, for, after all, was the

Katharine whom he loved the same as the real Katharine? She had

transcended her entirely at moments; her skirt had blown, her feather

waved, her voice spoken; yes, but how terrible sometimes the pause

between the voice of one’s dreams and the voice that comes from the

object of one’s dreams! He felt a mixture of disgust and pity at the

figure cut by human beings when they try to carry out, in practice,

what they have the power to conceive. How small both he and Katharine

had appeared when they issued from the cloud of thought that enveloped

them! He recalled the small, inexpressive, commonplace words in which

they had tried to communicate with each other; he repeated them over

to himself. By repeating Katharine’s words, he came in a few moments

to such a sense of her presence that he worshipped her more than ever.

But she was engaged to be married, he remembered with a start. The

strength of his feeling was revealed to him instantly, and he gave

himself up to an irresistible rage and sense of frustration. The image

of Rodney came before him with every circumstance of folly and

indignity. That little pink-cheeked dancing-master to marry Katharine?

that gibbering ass with the face of a monkey on an organ? that posing,

vain, fantastical fop? with his tragedies and his comedies, his

innumerable spites and prides and pettinesses? Lord! marry Rodney! She

must be as great a fool as he was. His bitterness took possession of

him, and as he sat in the corner of the underground carriage, he

looked as stark an image of unapproachable severity as could be

imagined. Directly he reached home he sat down at his table, and began

to write Katharine a long, wild, mad letter, begging her for both

their sakes to break with Rodney, imploring her not to do what would

destroy for ever the one beauty, the one truth, the one hope; not to

be a traitor, not to be a deserter, for if she were—and he wound up

with a quiet and brief assertion that, whatever she did or left

undone, he would believe to be the best, and accept from her with

gratitude. He covered sheet after sheet, and heard the early carts

starting for London before he went to bed.

CHAPTER XXIV

The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt towards

the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet

flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring

to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly colored and

sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. Lives frozen by

age, so far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which

neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid,

reflecting the shapes and colors of the present, as well as the shapes

and colors of the past. In the case of Mrs. Hilbery, these early

spring days were chiefly upsetting inasmuch as they caused a general

quickening of her emotional powers, which, as far as the past was

concerned, had never suffered much diminution. But in the spring her

desire for expression invariably increased. She was haunted by the

ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the

combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favorite

authors. She made them for herself on scraps of paper, and rolled them

on her tongue when there seemed no occasion for such eloquence. She

was upheld in these excursions by the certainty that no language could

outdo the splendor of her father’s memory, and although her efforts

did not notably further the end of his biography, she was under the

impression of living more in his shade at such times than at others.

No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English

birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport

themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of

the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets

exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly

affected against her better judgment by her mother’s enthusiasm. Not

that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a

study of Shakespeare’s sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter

of her grandfather’s biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous

jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way,

among other things, of writing Shakespeare’s sonnets; the idea, struck

out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of

privately printed manuals within the next few days for her

instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature;

she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at

least as good as other people’s facts, and all her fancy for the time

being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon. She had a plan, she told

Katharine, when, rather later than usual, Katharine came into the room

the morning after her walk by the river, for visiting Shakespeare’s

tomb. Any fact about the poet had become, for the moment, of far

greater interest to her than the immediate present, and the certainty

that there was existing in England a spot of ground where Shakespeare

had undoubtedly stood, where his very bones lay directly beneath one’s

feet, was so absorbing to her on this particular occasion that she

greeted her daughter with the exclamation:

 

“D’you think he ever passed this house?”

 

The question, for the moment, seemed to Katharine to have reference to

Ralph Denham.

 

“On his way to Blackfriars, I mean,” Mrs. Hilbery continued, “for you

know the latest discovery is that he owned a house there.”

 

Katharine still looked about her in perplexity, and Mrs. Hilbery

added:

 

“Which is a proof that he wasn’t as poor as they’ve sometimes said. I

should like to think that he had enough, though I don’t in the least

want him to be rich.”

 

Then, perceiving her daughter’s expression of perplexity, Mrs. Hilbery

burst out laughing.

 

“My dear, I’m not talking about YOUR William, though that’s another

reason for liking him. I’m talking, I’m thinking, I’m dreaming of MY

William—William Shakespeare, of course. Isn’t it odd,” she mused,

standing at the window and tapping gently upon the pane, “that for all

one can see, that dear old thing in the blue bonnet, crossing the road

with her basket on her arm, has never heard that there was such a

person? Yet it all goes on: lawyers hurrying to their work, cabmen

squabbling for their fares, little boys rolling their hoops, little

girls throwing bread to the gulls, as if there weren’t a Shakespeare

in the world. I should like to stand at that crossing all day long and

say: ‘People, read Shakespeare!’”

 

Katharine sat down at her table and opened a long dusty envelope. As

Shelley was mentioned in the course of the letter as if he were alive,

it had, of course, considerable value. Her immediate task was to

decide whether the whole letter should be printed, or only the

paragraph which mentioned Shelley’s name, and she reached out for a

pen and held it in readiness to do justice upon the sheet. Her pen,

however, remained in the air. Almost surreptitiously she slipped a

clean sheet in front of her, and her hand, descending, began drawing

square boxes halved and quartered by straight lines, and then circles

which underwent the same process of dissection.

 

“Katharine! I’ve hit upon a brilliant idea!” Mrs. Hilbery

exclaimed—“to lay out, say, a hundred pounds or so on copies of

Shakespeare, and give them to working men. Some of your clever friends

who get up meetings might help us, Katharine. And that might lead to a

playhouse, where we could all take parts. You’d be Rosalind—but

you’ve a dash of the old nurse in you. Your father’s Hamlet, come to

years of discretion; and I’m—well, I’m a bit of them all; I’m quite a

large bit of the fool, but the fools in Shakespeare say all the clever

things. Now who shall William be? A hero? Hotspur? Henry the Fifth?

No, William’s got a touch of Hamlet in him, too. I can fancy that

William talks to himself when he’s alone. Ah, Katharine, you must say

very beautiful things when you’re together!” she added wistfully, with

a glance at her daughter, who had told her nothing about the dinner

the night before.

 

“Oh, we talk a lot of nonsense,” said Katharine, hiding her slip of

paper as her mother stood by her, and spreading the old letter about

Shelley in front of her.

 

“It won’t seem to you nonsense in ten years’ time,” said Mrs. Hilbery.

“Believe me,

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