Chapter III

by Virginia Woolf

　　Denham had accused Katharine Hilbery of belonging to one of the mostdistinguished families in England, and if any one will take thetrouble to consult Mr. Galton's "Hereditary Genius," he will find thatthis assertion is not far from the truth. The Alardyces, the Hilberys,the Millingtons, and the Otways seem to prove that intellect is apossession which can be tossed from one member of a certain group toanother almost indefinitely, and with apparent certainty that thebrilliant gift will be safely caught and held by nine out of ten ofthe privileged race. They had been conspicuous judges and admirals,lawyers and servants of the State for some years before the richnessof the soil culminated in the rarest flower that any family can boast,a great writer, a poet eminent among the poets of England, a RichardAlardyce; and having produced him, they proved once more the amazingvirtues of their race by proceeding unconcernedly again with theirusual task of breeding distinguished men. They had sailed with SirJohn Franklin to the North Pole, and ridden with Havelock to theRelief of Lucknow, and when they were not lighthouses firmly based onrock for the guidance of their generation, they were steady,serviceable candles, illuminating the ordinary chambers of daily life.Whatever profession you looked at, there was a Warburton or anAlardyce, a Millington or a Hilbery somewhere in authority andprominence.It may be said, indeed, that English society being what it is, no verygreat merit is required, once you bear a well-known name, to put youinto a position where it is easier on the whole to be eminent thanobscure. And if this is true of the sons, even the daughters, even inthe nineteenth century, are apt to become people of importance--philanthropists and educationalists if they are spinsters, and thewives of distinguished men if they marry. It is true that there wereseveral lamentable exceptions to this rule in the Alardyce group,which seems to indicate that the cadets of such houses go more rapidlyto the bad than the children of ordinary fathers and mothers, as if itwere somehow a relief to them. But, on the whole, in these first yearsof the twentieth century, the Alardyces and their relations werekeeping their heads well above water. One finds them at the tops ofprofessions, with letters after their names; they sit in luxuriouspublic offices, with private secretaries attached to them; they writesolid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two greatuniversities, and when one of them dies the chances are that anotherof them writes his biography.Now the source of this nobility was, of course, the poet, and hisimmediate descendants, therefore, were invested with greater lusterthan the collateral branches. Mrs. Hilbery, in virtue of her positionas the only child of the poet, was spiritually the head of the family,and Katharine, her daughter, had some superior rank among all thecousins and connections, the more so because she was an only child.The Alardyces had married and intermarried, and their offspring weregenerally profuse, and had a way of meeting regularly in each other'shouses for meals and family celebrations which had acquired a semi-sacred character, and were as regularly observed as days of feastingand fasting in the Church.In times gone by, Mrs. Hilbery had known all the poets, all thenovelists, all the beautiful women and distinguished men of her time.These being now either dead or secluded in their infirm glory, shemade her house a meeting-place for her own relations, to whom shewould lament the passing of the great days of the nineteenth century,when every department of letters and art was represented in England bytwo or three illustrious names. Where are their successors? she wouldask, and the absence of any poet or painter or novelist of the truecaliber at the present day was a text upon which she liked toruminate, in a sunset mood of benignant reminiscence, which it wouldhave been hard to disturb had there been need. But she was far fromvisiting their inferiority upon the younger generation. She welcomedthem very heartily to her house, told them her stories, gave themsovereigns and ices and good advice, and weaved round them romanceswhich had generally no likeness to the truth.The quality of her birth oozed into Katharine's consciousness from adozen different sources as soon as she was able to perceive anything.Above her nursery fireplace hung a photograph of her grandfather'stomb in Poets' Corner, and she was told in one of those moments ofgrown-up confidence which are so tremendously impressive to thechild's mind, that he was buried there because he was a "good andgreat man." Later, on an anniversary, she was taken by her motherthrough the fog in a hansom cab, and given a large bunch of bright,sweet-scented flowers to lay upon his tomb. The candles in the church,the singing and the booming of the organ, were all, she thought, inhis honor. Again and again she was brought down into the drawing-roomto receive the blessing of some awful distinguished old man, who sat,even to her childish eye, somewhat apart, all gathered together andclutching a stick, unlike an ordinary visitor in her father's own arm-chair, and her father himself was there, unlike himself, too, a littleexcited and very polite. These formidable old creatures used to takeher in their arms, look very keenly in her eyes, and then to blessher, and tell her that she must mind and be a good girl, or detect alook in her face something like Richard's as a small boy. That drewdown upon her her mother's fervent embrace, and she was sent back tothe nursery very proud, and with a mysterious sense of an importantand unexplained state of things, which time, by degrees, unveiled toher.There were always visitors--uncles and aunts and cousins "from India,"to be reverenced for their relationship alone, and others of thesolitary and formidable class, whom she was enjoined by her parents to"remember all your life." By these means, and from hearing constanttalk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions of theworld included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the namesof Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, forsome reason, much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to otherpeople. They made a kind of boundary to her vision of life, and playeda considerable part in determining her scale of good and bad in herown small affairs. Her descent from one of these gods was no surpriseto her, but matter for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, theprivileges of her lot were taken for granted, and certain drawbacksmade themselves very manifest. Perhaps it is a little depressing toinherit not lands but an example of intellectual and spiritual virtue;perhaps the conclusiveness of a great ancestor is a littlediscouraging to those who run the risk of comparison with him. Itseems as if, having flowered so splendidly, nothing now remainedpossible but a steady growth of good, green stalk and leaf. For thesereasons, and for others, Katharine had her moments of despondency. Theglorious past, in which men and women grew to unexampled size,intruded too much upon the present, and dwarfed it too consistently,to be altogether encouraging to one forced to make her experiment inliving when the great age was dead.She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural, inthe first place owing to her mother's absorption in them, and in thesecond because a great part of her time was spent in imagination withthe dead, since she was helping her mother to produce a life of thegreat poet. When Katharine was seventeen or eighteen--that is to say,some ten years ago--her mother had enthusiastically announced thatnow, with a daughter to help her, the biography would soon bepublished. Notices to this effect found their way into the literarypapers, and for some time Katharine worked with a sense of great prideand achievement.Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were making no way atall, and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghostof a literary temperament could doubt but that they had materials forone of the greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelvesand boxes bulged with the precious stuff. The most private lives ofthe most interesting people lay furled in yellow bundles of close-written manuscript. In addition to this Mrs. Hilbery had in her ownhead as bright a vision of that time as now remained to the living,and could give those flashes and thrills to the old words which gavethem almost the substance of flesh. She had no difficulty in writing,and covered a page every morning as instinctively as a thrush sings,but nevertheless, with all this to urge and inspire, and the mostdevout intention to accomplish the work, the book still remainedunwritten. Papers accumulated without much furthering their task, andin dull moments Katharine had her doubts whether they would everproduce anything at all fit to lay before the public. Where did thedifficulty lie? Not in their materials, alas! nor in their ambitions,but in something more profound, in her own inaptitude, and above all,in her mother's temperament. Katharine would calculate that she hadnever known her write for more than ten minutes at a time. Ideas cameto her chiefly when she was in motion. She liked to perambulate theroom with a duster in her hand, with which she stopped to polish thebacks of already lustrous books, musing and romancing as she did so.Suddenly the right phrase or the penetrating point of view wouldsuggest itself, and she would drop her duster and write ecstaticallyfor a few breathless moments; and then the mood would pass away, andthe duster would be sought for, and the old books polished again.These spells of inspiration never burnt steadily, but flickered overthe gigantic mass of the subject as capriciously as a will-o'-the-wisp, lighting now on this point, now on that. It was as much asKatharine could do to keep the pages of her mother's manuscript inorder, but to sort them so that the sixteenth year of RichardAlardyce's life succeeded the fifteenth was beyond her skill. And yetthey were so brilliant, these paragraphs, so nobly phrased, solightning-like in their illumination, that the dead seemed to crowdthe very room. Read continuously, they produced a sort of vertigo, andset her asking herself in despair what on earth she was to do withthem? Her mother refused, also, to face the radical questions of whatto leave in and what to leave out. She could not decide how far thepublic was to be told the truth about the poet's separation from hiswife. She drafted passages to suit either case, and then liked each sowell that she could not decide upon the rejection of either.But the book must be written. It was a duty that they owed the world,and to Katharine, at least, it meant more than that, for if they couldnot between them get this one book accomplished they had no right totheir privileged position. Their increment became yearly more and moreunearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that hergrandfather was a very great man.By the time she was twenty-seven, these thoughts had become veryfamiliar to her. They trod their way through her mind as she satopposite her mother of a morning at a table heaped with bundles of oldletters and well supplied with pencils, scissors, bottles of gum,india-rubber bands, large envelopes, and other appliances for themanufacture of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham's visit, Katharinehad resolved to try the effect of strict rules upon her mother'shabits of literary composition. They were to be seated at their tablesevery morning at ten o'clock, with a clean-swept morning of empty,secluded hours before them. They were to keep their eyes fast upon thepaper, and nothing was to tempt them to speech, save at the stroke ofthe hour when ten minutes for relaxation were to be allowed them. Ifthese rules were observed for a year, she made out on a sheet of paperthat the completion of the book was certain, and she laid her schemebefore her mother with a feeling that much of the task was alreadyaccomplished. Mrs. Hilbery examined the sheet of paper very carefully.Then she clapped her hands and exclaimed enthusiastically:"Well done, Katharine! What a wonderful head for business you've got!Now I shall keep this before me, and every day I shall make a littlemark in my pocketbook, and on the last day of all--let me think, whatshall we do to celebrate the last day of all? If it weren't the winterwe could take a jaunt to Italy. They say Switzerland's very lovely inthe snow, except for the cold. But, as you say, the great thing is tofinish the book. Now let me see--"When they inspected her manuscripts, which Katharine had put in order,they found a state of things well calculated to dash their spirits, ifthey had not just resolved on reform. They found, to begin with, agreat variety of very imposing paragraphs with which the biography wasto open; many of these, it is true, were unfinished, and resembledtriumphal arches standing upon one leg, but, as Mrs. Hilbery observed,they could be patched up in ten minutes, if she gave her mind to it.Next, there was an account of the ancient home of the Alardyces, orrather, of spring in Suffolk, which was very beautifully written,although not essential to the story. However, Katharine had puttogether a string of names and dates, so that the poet was capablybrought into the world, and his ninth year was reached without furthermishap. After that, Mrs. Hilbery wished, for sentimental reasons, tointroduce the recollections of a very fluent old lady, who had beenbrought up in the same village, but these Katharine decided must go.It might be advisable to introduce here a sketch of contemporarypoetry contributed by Mr. Hilbery, and thus terse and learned andaltogether out of keeping with the rest, but Mrs. Hilbery was ofopinion that it was too bare, and made one feel altogether like a goodlittle girl in a lecture-room, which was not at all in keeping withher father. It was put on one side. Now came the period of his earlymanhood, when various affairs of the heart must either be concealed orrevealed; here again Mrs. Hilbery was of two minds, and a thick packetof manuscript was shelved for further consideration.Several years were now altogether omitted, because Mrs. Hilbery hadfound something distasteful to her in that period, and had preferredto dwell upon her own recollections as a child. After this, it seemedto Katharine that the book became a wild dance of will-o'-the-wisps,without form or continuity, without coherence even, or any attempt tomake a narrative. Here were twenty pages upon her grandfather's tastein hats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summerday's expedition into the country, when they had missed their train,together with fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous men andwomen, which seemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic. Therewere, moreover, thousands of letters, and a mass of faithfulrecollections contributed by old friends, which had grown yellow nowin their envelopes, but must be placed somewhere, or their feelingswould be hurt. So many volumes had been written about the poet sincehis death that she had also to dispose of a great number ofmisstatements, which involved minute researches and muchcorrespondence. Sometimes Katharine brooded, half crushed, among herpapers; sometimes she felt that it was necessary for her veryexistence that she should free herself from the past; at others, thatthe past had completely displaced the present, which, when one resumedlife after a morning among the dead, proved to be of an utterly thinand inferior composition.The worst of it was that she had no aptitude for literature. She didnot like phrases. She had even some natural antipathy to that processof self-examination, that perpetual effort to understand one's ownfeeling, and express it beautifully, fitly, or energetically inlanguage, which constituted so great a part of her mother's existence.She was, on the contrary, inclined to be silent; she shrank fromexpressing herself even in talk, let alone in writing. As thisdisposition was highly convenient in a family much given to themanufacture of phrases, and seemed to argue a corresponding capacityfor action, she was, from her childhood even, put in charge ofhousehold affairs. She had the reputation, which nothing in her mannercontradicted, of being the most practical of people. Ordering meals,directing servants, paying bills, and so contriving that every clockticked more or less accurately in time, and a number of vases werealways full of fresh flowers was supposed to be a natural endowment ofhers, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery often observed that it was poetry thewrong side out. From a very early age, too, she had to exert herselfin another capacity; she had to counsel and help and generally sustainher mother. Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able tosustain herself if the world had been what the world is not. She wasbeautifully adapted for life in another planet. But the natural geniusshe had for conducting affairs there was of no real use to her here.Her watch, for example, was a constant source of surprise to her, andat the age of sixty-five she was still amazed at the ascendancy whichrules and reasons exerted over the lives of other people. She hadnever learnt her lesson, and had constantly to be punished for herignorance. But as that ignorance was combined with a fine naturalinsight which saw deep whenever it saw at all, it was not possible towrite Mrs. Hilbery off among the dunces; on the contrary, she had away of seeming the wisest person in the room. But, on the whole, shefound it very necessary to seek support in her daughter.Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, asyet, no title and very little recognition, although the labor of milland factory is, perhaps, no more severe and the results of lessbenefit to the world. She lived at home. She did it very well, too.Any one coming to the house in Cheyne Walk felt that here was anorderly place, shapely, controlled--a place where life had beentrained to show to the best advantage, and, though composed ofdifferent elements, made to appear harmonious and with a character ofits own. Perhaps it was the chief triumph of Katharine's art that Mrs.Hilbery's character predominated. She and Mr. Hilbery appeared to be arich background for her mother's more striking qualities.Silence being, thus, both natural to her and imposed upon her, theonly other remark that her mother's friends were in the habit ofmaking about it was that it was neither a stupid silence nor anindifferent silence. But to what quality it owed its character, sincecharacter of some sort it had, no one troubled themselves to inquire.It was understood that she was helping her mother to produce a greatbook. She was known to manage the household. She was certainlybeautiful. That accounted for her satisfactorily. But it would havebeen a surprise, not only to other people but to Katharine herself, ifsome magic watch could have taken count of the moments spent in anentirely different occupation from her ostensible one. Sitting withfaded papers before her, she took part in a series of scenes such asthe taming of wild ponies upon the American prairies, or the conductof a vast ship in a hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or inothers more peaceful, but marked by her complete emancipation from herpresent surroundings and, needless to say, by her surpassing abilityin her new vocation. When she was rid of the pretense of paper andpen, phrase-making and biography, she turned her attention in a morelegitimate direction, though, strangely enough, she would rather haveconfessed her wildest dreams of hurricane and prairie than the factthat, upstairs, alone in her room, she rose early in the morning orsat up late at night to . . . work at mathematics. No force on earthwould have made her confess that. Her actions when thus engaged werefurtive and secretive, like those of some nocturnal animal. Steps hadonly to sound on the staircase, and she slipped her paper between theleaves of a great Greek dictionary which she had purloined from herfather's room for this purpose. It was only at night, indeed, that shefelt secure enough from surprise to concentrate her mind to theutmost.Perhaps the unwomanly nature of the science made her instinctivelywish to conceal her love of it. But the more profound reason was thatin her mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature. She wouldnot have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude,the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation,and vagueness of the finest prose. There was something a littleunseemly in thus opposing the tradition of her family; something thatmade her feel wrong-headed, and thus more than ever disposed to shuther desires away from view and cherish them with extraordinaryfondness. Again and again she was thinking of some problem when sheshould have been thinking of her grandfather. Waking from thesetrances, she would see that her mother, too, had lapsed into somedream almost as visionary as her own, for the people who played theirparts in it had long been numbered among the dead. But, seeing her ownstate mirrored in her mother's face, Katharine would shake herselfawake with a sense of irritation. Her mother was the last person shewished to resemble, much though she admired her. Her common sensewould assert itself almost brutally, and Mrs. Hilbery, looking at herwith her odd sidelong glance, that was half malicious and half tender,would liken her to "your wicked old Uncle Judge Peter, who used to beheard delivering sentence of death in the bathroom. Thank Heaven,Katharine, I've not a drop of him in me!"