← catalogue

Howards End

by E. M. Forster · English · Gutenberg #2891 · 630,921 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Howards End
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Howards End

Author: E. M. Forster


        
Release date: November 1, 2001 [eBook #2891]
                Most recently updated: January 21, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2891

Credits: Richard Fane


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOWARDS END ***




Howards End

by E. M. Forster




Chapter 1


One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.

Howards End,
Tuesday.


Dearest Meg,

It isn’t going to be what we expected. It is old and little, and
altogether delightful—red brick. We can scarcely pack in as it is, and
the dear knows what will happen when Paul (younger son) arrives
tomorrow. From hall you go right or left into dining-room or
drawing-room. Hall itself is practically a room. You open another door
in it, and there are the stairs going up in a sort of tunnel to the
first-floor. Three bedrooms in a row there, and three attics in a row
above. That isn’t all the house really, but it’s all that one
notices—nine windows as you look up from the front garden.

Then there’s a very big wych-elm—to the left as you look up—leaning a
little over the house, and standing on the boundary between the garden
and meadow. I quite love that tree already. Also ordinary elms, oaks—no
nastier than ordinary oaks—pear-trees, apple-trees, and a vine. No
silver birches, though. However, I must get on to my host and hostess.
I only wanted to show that it isn’t the least what we expected. Why did
we settle that their house would be all gables and wiggles, and their
garden all gamboge-coloured paths? I believe simply because we
associate them with expensive hotels—Mrs. Wilcox trailing in beautiful
dresses down long corridors, Mr. Wilcox bullying porters, etc. We
females are that unjust.

I shall be back Saturday; will let you know train later. They are as
angry as I am that you did not come too; really Tibby is too tiresome,
he starts a new mortal disease every month. How could he have got hay
fever in London? and even if he could, it seems hard that you should
give up a visit to hear a schoolboy sneeze. Tell him that Charles
Wilcox (the son who is here) has hay fever too, but he’s brave, and
gets quite cross when we inquire after it. Men like the Wilcoxes would
do Tibby a power of good. But you won’t agree, and I’d better change
the subject.

This long letter is because I’m writing before breakfast. Oh, the
beautiful vine leaves! The house is covered with a vine. I looked out
earlier, and Mrs. Wilcox was already in the garden. She evidently loves
it. No wonder she sometimes looks tired. She was watching the large red
poppies come out. Then she walked off the lawn to the meadow, whose
corner to the right I can just see. Trail, trail, went her long dress
over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of the
hay that was cut yesterday—I suppose for rabbits or something, as she
kept on smelling it. The air here is delicious. Later on I heard the
noise of croquet balls, and looked out again, and it was Charles Wilcox
practising; they are keen on all games. Presently he started sneezing
and had to stop. Then I hear more clicketing, and it is Mr. Wilcox
practising, and then, ‘a-tissue, a-tissue’: he has to stop too. Then
Evie comes out, and does some calisthenic exercises on a machine that
is tacked on to a greengage-tree—they put everything to use—and then
she says ‘a-tissue,’ and in she goes. And finally Mrs. Wilcox
reappears, trail, trail, still smelling hay and looking at the flowers.
I inflict all this on you because once you said that life is sometimes
life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish
t’other from which, and up to now I have always put that down as ‘Meg’s
clever nonsense.’ But this morning, it really does seem not life but a
play, and it did amuse me enormously to watch the W’s. Now Mrs. Wilcox
has come in.

I am going to wear [omission]. Last night Mrs. Wilcox wore an
[omission], and Evie [omission]. So it isn’t exactly a go-as-you-please
place, and if you shut your eyes it still seems the wiggly hotel that
we expected. Not if you open them. The dog-roses are too sweet. There
is a great hedge of them over the lawn—magnificently tall, so that they
fall down in garlands, and nice and thin at the bottom, so that you can
see ducks through it and a cow. These belong to the farm, which is the
only house near us. There goes the breakfast gong. Much love. Modified
love to Tibby. Love to Aunt Juley; how good of her to come and keep you
company, but what a bore. Burn this. Will write again Thursday.


_Helen_


Howards End,
Friday.


Dearest Meg,

I am having a glorious time. I like them all. Mrs. Wilcox, if quieter
than in Germany, is sweeter than ever, and I never saw anything like
her steady unselfishness, and the best of it is that the others do not
take advantage of her. They are the very happiest, jolliest family that
you can imagine. I do really feel that we are making friends. The fun
of it is that they think me a noodle, and say so—at least Mr. Wilcox
does—and when that happens, and one doesn’t mind, it’s a pretty sure
test, isn’t it? He says the most horrid things about women’s suffrage
so nicely, and when I said I believed in equality he just folded his
arms and gave me such a setting down as I’ve never had. Meg, shall we
ever learn to talk less? I never felt so ashamed of myself in my life.
I couldn’t point to a time when men had been equal, nor even to a time
when the wish to be equal had made them happier in other ways. I
couldn’t say a word. I had just picked up the notion that equality is
good from some book—probably from poetry, or you. Anyhow, it’s been
knocked into pieces, and, like all people who are really strong, Mr.
Wilcox did it without hurting me. On the other hand, I laugh at them
for catching hay fever. We live like fighting-cocks, and Charles takes
us out every day in the motor—a tomb with trees in it, a hermit’s
house, a wonderful road that was made by the Kings of Mercia—tennis—a
cricket match—bridge—and at night we squeeze up in this lovely house.
The whole clan’s here now—it’s like a rabbit warren. Evie is a dear.
They want me to stop over Sunday—I suppose it won’t matter if I do.
Marvellous weather and the view’s marvellous—views westward to the high
ground. Thank you for your letter. Burn this.


Your affectionate
Helen


Howards End,
Sunday.


Dearest, dearest Meg,—I do not know what you will say: Paul and I are
in love—the younger son who only came here Wednesday.




Chapter 2


Margaret glanced at her sister’s note and pushed it over the
breakfast-table to her aunt. There was a moment’s hush, and then the
flood-gates opened.

“I can tell you nothing, Aunt Juley. I know no more than you do. We
met—we only met the father and mother abroad last spring. I know so
little that I didn’t even know their son’s name. It’s all so—” She
waved her hand and laughed a little.

“In that case it is far too sudden.”

“Who knows, Aunt Juley, who knows?”

“But, Margaret dear, I mean we mustn’t be unpractical now that we’ve
come to facts. It is too sudden, surely.”

“Who knows!”

“But Margaret dear—”

“I’ll go for her other letters,” said Margaret. “No, I won’t, I’ll
finish my breakfast. In fact, I haven’t them. We met the Wilcoxes on an
awful expedition that we made from Heidelberg to Speyer. Helen and I
had got it into our heads that there was a grand old cathedral at
Speyer—the Archbishop of Speyer was one of the seven electors—you
know—‘Speyer, Maintz, and Köln.’ Those three sees once commanded the
Rhine Valley and got it the name of Priest Street.”

“I still feel quite uneasy about this business, Margaret.”

“The train crossed by a bridge of boats, and at first sight it looked
quite fine. But oh, in five minutes we had seen the whole thing. The
cathedral had been ruined, absolutely ruined, by restoration; not an
inch left of the original structure. We wasted a whole day, and came
across the Wilcoxes as we were eating our sandwiches in the public
gardens. They too, poor things, had been taken in—they were actually
stopping at Speyer—and they rather liked Helen insisting that they must
fly with us to Heidelberg. As a matter of fact, they did come on next
day. We all took some drives together. They knew us well enough to ask
Helen to come and see them—at least, I was asked too, but Tibby’s
illness prevented me, so last Monday she went alone. That’s all. You
know as much as I do now. It’s a young man out the unknown. She was to
have come back Saturday, but put off till Monday, perhaps on account
of—I don’t know.

She broke off, and listened to the sounds of a London morning. Their
house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of
buildings separated it from the main thoroughfare. One had the sense of
a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the
invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves
without were still beating. Though the promontory consisted of
flats—expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, full of concierges and
palms—it fulfilled its purpose, and gained for the older houses
opposite a certain measure of peace. These, too, would be swept away in
time, and another promontory would rise upon their site, as humanity
piled itself higher and higher on the precious soil of London.

Mrs. Munt had her own method of interpreting her nieces. She decided
that Margaret was a little hysterical, and was trying to gain time by a
torrent of talk. Feeling very diplomatic, she lamented the fate of
Speyer, and declared that never, never should she be so misguided as to
visit it, and added of her own accord that the principles of
restoration were ill understood in Germany. “The Germans,” she said,
“are too thorough, and this is all very well sometimes, but at other
times it does not do.”

“Exactly,” said Margaret; “Germans are too thorough.” And her eyes
began to shine.

“Of course I regard you Schlegels as English,” said Mrs. Munt
hastily—“English to the backbone.”

Margaret leaned forward and stroked her hand.

“And that reminds me—Helen’s letter—”

“Oh, yes, Aunt Juley, I am thinking all right about Helen’s letter. I
know—I must go down and see her. I am thinking about her all right. I
am meaning to go down.”

“But go with some plan,” said Mrs. Munt, admitting into her kindly
voice a note of exasperation. “Margaret, if I may interfere, don’t be
taken by surprise. What do you think of the Wilcoxes? Are they our
sort? Are they likely people? Could they appreciate Helen, who is to my
mind a very special sort of person? Do they care about Literature and
Art? That is most important when you come to think of it. Literature
and Art. Most important. How old would the son be? She says ‘younger
son.’ Would he be in a position to marry? Is he likely to make Helen
happy? Did you gather—”

“I gathered nothing.”

They began to talk at once.

“Then in that case—”

“In that case I can make no plans, don’t you see.”

“On the contrary—”

“I hate plans. I hate lines of action. Helen isn’t a baby.”

“Then in that case, my dear, why go down?”

Margaret was silent. If her aunt could not see why she must go down,
she was not going to tell her. She was not going to say “I love my dear
sister; I must be near her at this crisis of her life.” The affections
are more reticent than the passions, and their expression more subtle.
If she herself should ever fall in love with a man, she, like Helen,
would proclaim it from the house-tops, but as she only loved a sister
she used the voiceless language of sympathy.

“I consider you odd girls,” continued Mrs. Munt, “and very wonderful
girls, and in many ways far older than your years. But—you won’t be
offended?—frankly I feel you are not up to this business. It requires
an older person. Dear, I have nothing to call me back to Swanage.” She
spread out her plump arms. “I am all at your disposal. Let me go down
to this house whose name I forget instead of you.”

“Aunt Juley”—she jumped up and kissed her—“I must, must go to Howards
End myself. You don’t exactly understand, though I can never thank you
properly for offering.”

“I do understand,” retorted Mrs. Munt, with immense confidence. “I go
down in no spirit of interference, but to make inquiries. Inquiries are
necessary. Now, I am going to be rude. You would say the wrong thing;
to a certainty you would. In your anxiety for Helen’s happiness you
would offend the whole of these Wilcoxes by asking one of your
impetuous questions—not that one minds offending them.”

“I shall ask no questions. I have it in Helen’s writing that she and a
man are in love. There is no question to ask as long as she keeps to
that. All the rest isn’t worth a straw. A long engagement if you like,
but inquiries, questions, plans, lines of action—no, Aunt Juley, no.”

Away she hurried, not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled
with something that took the place of both qualities—something best
described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to
all that she encountered in her path through life.

“If Helen had written the same to me about a shop-assistant or a
penniless clerk—”

“Dear Margaret, do come into the library and shut the door. Your good
maids are dusting the banisters.”

“—or if she had wanted to marry the man who calls for Carter Paterson,
I should have said the same.” Then, with one of those turns that
convinced her aunt that she was not mad really and convinced observers
of another type that she was not a barren theorist, she added: “Though
in the case of Carter Paterson I should want it to be a very long
engagement indeed, I must say.”

“I should think so,” said Mrs. Munt; “and, indeed, I can scarcely
follow you. Now, just imagine if you said anything of that sort to the
Wilcoxes. I understand it, but most good people would think you mad.
Imagine how disconcerting for Helen! What is wanted is a person who
will go slowly, slowly in this business, and see how things are and
where they are likely to lead to.”

Margaret was down on this.

“But you implied just now that the engagement must be broken off.”

“I think probably it must; but slowly.”

“Can you break an engagement off slowly?” Her eyes lit up. “What’s an
engagement made of, do you suppose? I think it’s made of some hard
stuff, that may snap, but can’t break. It is different to the other
ties of life. They stretch or bend. They admit of degree. They’re
different.”

“Exactly so. But won’t you let me just run down to Howards House, and
save you all the discomfort? I will really not interfere, but I do so
thoroughly understand the kind of thing you Schlegels want that one
quiet look round will be enough for me.”

Margaret again thanked her, again kissed her, and then ran upstairs to
see her brother.

He was not so well.

The hay fever had worried him a good deal all night. His head ached,
his eyes were wet, his mucous membrane, he informed her, was in a most
unsatisfactory condition. The only thing that made life worth living
was the thought of Walter Savage Landor, from whose _Imaginary
Conversations_ she had promised to read at frequent intervals during
the day.

It was rather difficult. Something must be done about Helen. She must
be assured that it is not a criminal offence to love at first sight. A
telegram to this effect would be cold and cryptic, a personal visit
seemed each moment more impossible. Now the doctor arrived, and said
that Tibby was quite bad. Might it really be best to accept Aunt
Juley’s kind offer, and to send her down to Howards End with a note?

Certainly Margaret was impulsive. She did swing rapidly from one
decision to another. Running downstairs into the library, she
cried—“Yes, I have changed my mind; I do wish that you would go.”

There was a train from King’s Cross at eleven. At half-past ten Tibby,
with rare self-effacement, fell asleep, and Margaret was able to drive
her aunt to the station.

“You will remember, Aunt Juley, not to be drawn into discussing the
engagement. Give my letter to Helen, and say whatever you feel
yourself, but do keep clear of the relatives. We have scarcely got
their names straight yet, and besides, that sort of thing is so
uncivilized and wrong.

“So uncivilized?” queried Mrs. Munt, fearing that she was losing the
point of some brilliant remark.

“Oh, I used an affected word. I only meant would you please only talk
the thing over with Helen.”

“Only with Helen.”

“Because—” But it was no moment to expound the personal nature of love.
Even Margaret shrank from it, and contented herself with stroking her
good aunt’s hand, and with meditating, half sensibly and half
poetically, on the journey that was about to begin from King’s Cross.

Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong
feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the
glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and
sunshine, to them alas! we return. In Paddington all Cornwall is latent
and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie
fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of
Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo. Italians realize
this, as is natural; those of them who are so unfortunate as to serve
as waiters in Berlin call the Anhalt Bahnhof the Stazione d’Italia,
because by it they must return to their homes. And he is a chilly
Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and
extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love.

To Margaret—I hope that it will not set the reader against her—the
station of King’s Cross had always suggested Infinity. Its very
situation—withdrawn a little behind the facile splendours of St.
Pancras—implied a comment on the materialism of life. Those two great
arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering between them an unlovely
clock, were fit portals for some eternal adventure, whose issue might
be prosperous, but would certainly not be expressed in the ordinary
language of prosperity. If you think this ridiculous, remember that it
is not Margaret who is telling you about it; and let me hasten to add
that they were in plenty of time for the train; that Mrs. Munt, though
she took a second-class ticket, was put by the guard into a first (only
two seconds on the train, one smoking and the other babies—one cannot
be expected to travel with babies); and that Margaret, on her return to
Wickham Place, was confronted with the following telegram:

All over. Wish I had never written. Tell no one.


—Helen


But Aunt Juley was gone—gone irrevocably, and no power on earth could
stop her.




Chapter 3


Most complacently did Mrs. Munt rehearse her mission. Her nieces were
independent young women, and it was not often that she was able to help
them. Emily’s daughters had never been quite like other girls. They had
been left motherless when Tibby was born, when Helen was five and
Margaret herself but thirteen. It was before the passing of the
Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill, so Mrs. Munt could without impropriety
offer to go and keep house at Wickham Place. But her brother-in-law,
who was peculiar and a German, had referred the question to Margaret,
who with the crudity of youth had answered, “No, they could manage much
better alone.” Five years later Mr. Schlegel had died too, and Mrs.
Munt had repeated her offer. Margaret, crude no longer, had been
grateful and extremely nice, but the substance of her answer had been
the same. “I must not interfere a third time,” thought Mrs. Munt.
However, of course she did. She learnt, to her horror, that Margaret,
now of age, was taking her money out of the old safe investments and
putting it into Foreign Things, which always smash. Silence would have
been criminal. Her own fortune was invested in Home Rails, and most
ardently did she beg her niece to imitate her. “Then we should be
together, dear.” Margaret, out of politeness, invested a few hundreds
in the Nottingham and Derby Railway, and though the Foreign Things did
admirably and the Nottingham and Derby declined with the steady dignity
of which only Home Rails are capable, Mrs. Munt never ceased to
rejoice, and to say, “I did manage that, at all events. When the smash
comes poor Margaret will have a nest-egg to fall back upon.” This year
Helen came of age, and exactly the same thing happened in Helen’s case;
she also would shift her money out of Consols, but she, too, almost
without being pressed, consecrated a fraction of it to the Nottingham
and Derby Railway. So far so good, but in social matters their aunt had
accomplished nothing. Sooner or later the girls would enter on the
process known as throwing themselves away, and if they had delayed
hitherto, it was only that they might throw themselves more vehemently
in the future. They saw too many people at Wickham Place—unshaven
musicians, an actress even, German cousins (one knows what foreigners
are), acquaintances picked up at Continental hotels (one knows what
they are too). It was interesting, and down at Swanage no one
appreciated culture more than Mrs. Munt; but it was dangerous, and
disaster was bound to come. How right she was, and how lucky to be on
the spot when the disaster came!

The train sped northward, under innumerable tunnels. It was only an
hour’s journey, but Mrs. Munt had to raise and lower the window again
and again. She passed through the South Welwyn Tunnel, saw light for a
moment, and entered the North Welwyn Tunnel, of tragic fame. She
traversed the immense viaduct, whose arches span untroubled meadows and
the dreamy flow of Tewin Water. She skirted the parks of politicians.
At times the Great North Road accompanied her, more suggestive of
infinity than any railway, awakening, after a nap of a hundred years,
to such life as is conferred by the stench of motor-cars, and to such
culture as is implied by the advertisements of antibilious pills. To
history, to tragedy, to the past, to the future, Mrs. Munt remained
equally indifferent; hers but to concentrate on the end of her journey,
and to rescue poor Helen from this dreadful mess.

The station for Howards End was at Hilton, one of the large villages
that are strung so frequently along the North Road, and that owe their
size to the traffic of coaching and pre-coaching days. Being near
London, it had not shared in the rural decay, and its long High Street
had budded out right and left into residential estates. For about a
mile a series of tiled and slated houses passed before Mrs. Munt’s
inattentive eyes, a series broken at one point by six Danish tumuli
that stood shoulder to shoulder along the highroad, tombs of soldiers.
Beyond these tumuli habitations thickened, and the train came to a
standstill in a tangle that was almost a town.

The station, like the scenery, like Helen’s letters, struck an
indeterminate note. Into which country will it lead, England or
Suburbia? It was new, it had island platforms and a subway, and the
superficial comfort exacted by business men. But it held hints of local
life, personal intercourse, as even Mrs. Munt was to discover.

“I want a house,” she confided to the ticket boy. “Its name is Howards
Lodge. Do you know where it is?”

“Mr. Wilcox!” the boy called.

A young man in front of them turned round.

“She’s wanting Howards End.”

There was nothing for it but to go forward, though Mrs. Munt was too
much agitated even to stare at the stranger. But remembering that there
were two brothers, she had the sense to say to him, “Excuse me asking,
but are you the younger Mr. Wilcox or the elder?”

“The younger. Can I do anything for you?”

“Oh, well”—she controlled herself with difficulty. “Really. Are you?
I—” She moved away from the ticket boy and lowered her voice. “I am
Miss Schlegel’s aunt. I ought to introduce myself, oughtn’t I? My name
is Mrs. Munt.”

She was conscious that he raised his cap and said quite coolly, “Oh,
rather; Miss Schlegel is stopping with us. Did you want to see her?”

“Possibly—”

“I’ll call you a cab. No; wait a mo—” He thought. “Our motor’s here.
I’ll run you up in it.”

“That is very kind—”

“Not at all, if you’ll just wait till they bring out a parcel from the
office. This way.”

“My niece is not with you by any chance?”

“No; I came over with my father. He has gone on north in your train.
You’ll see Miss Schlegel at lunch. You’re coming up to lunch, I hope?”

“I should like to come _up_,” said Mrs. Munt, not committing herself to
nourishment until she had studied Helen’s lover a little more. He
seemed a gentleman, but had so rattled her round that her powers of
observation were numbed. She glanced at him stealthily. To a feminine
eye there was nothing amiss in the sharp depressions at the corners of
his mouth, nor in the rather box-like construction of his forehead. He
was dark, clean-shaven and seemed accustomed to command.

“In front or behind? Which do you prefer? It may be windy in front.”

“In front if I may; then we can talk.”

“But excuse me one moment—I can’t think what they’re doing with that
parcel.” He strode into the booking-office and called with a new voice:
“Hi! hi, you there! Are you going to keep me waiting all day? Parcel
for Wilcox, Howards End. Just look sharp!” Emerging, he said in quieter
tones: “This station’s abominably organized; if I had my way, the whole
lot of ’em should get the sack. May I help you in?”

“This is very good of you,” said Mrs. Munt, as she settled herself into
a luxurious cavern of red leather, and suffered her person to be padded
with rugs and shawls. She was more civil than she had intended, but
really this young man was very kind. Moreover, she was a little afraid
of him: his self-possession was extraordinary. “Very good indeed,” she
repeated, adding: “It is just what I should have wished.”

“Very good of you to say so,” he replied, with a slight look of
surprise, which, like most slight looks, escaped Mrs. Munt’s attention.
“I was just tooling my father over to catch the down train.”

“You see, we heard from Helen this morning.”

Young Wilcox was pouring in petrol, starting his engine, and performing
other actions with which this story has no concern. The great car began
to rock, and the form of Mrs. Munt, trying to explain things, sprang
agreeably up and down among the red cushions. “The mater will be very
glad to see you,” he mumbled. “Hi! I say. Parcel for Howards End. Bring
it out. Hi!”

A bearded porter emerged with the parcel in one hand and an entry book
in the other. With the gathering whir of the motor these ejaculations
mingled: “Sign, must I? Why the—should I sign after all this bother?
Not even got a pencil on you? Remember next time I report you to the
station-master. My time’s of value, though yours mayn’t be. Here”—here
being a tip.

“Extremely sorry, Mrs. Munt.”

“Not at all, Mr. Wilcox.”

“And do you object to going through the village? It is rather a longer
spin, but I have one or two commissions.”

“I should love going through the village. Naturally I am very anxious
to talk things over with you.”

As she said this she felt ashamed, for she was disobeying Margaret’s
instructions. Only disobeying them in the letter, surely. Margaret had
only warned her against discussing the incident with outsiders. Surely
it was not “uncivilized or wrong” to discuss it with the young man
himself, since chance had thrown them together.

A reticent fellow, he made no reply. Mounting by her side, he put on
gloves and spectacles, and off they drove, the bearded porter—life is a
mysterious business—looking after them with admiration.

The wind was in their faces down the station road, blowing the dust
into Mrs. Munt’s eyes. But as soon as they turned into the Great North
Road she opened fire. “You can well imagine,” she said, “that the news
was a great shock to us.”

“What news?”

“Mr. Wilcox,” she said frankly. “Margaret has told me
everything—everything. I have seen Helen’s letter.”

He could not look her in the face, as his eyes were fixed on his work;
he was travelling as quickly as he dared down the High Street. But he
inclined his head in her direction, and said, “I beg your pardon; I
didn’t catch.”

“About Helen. Helen, of course. Helen is a very exceptional person—I am
sure you will let me say this, feeling towards her as you do—indeed,
all the Schlegels are exceptional. I come in no spirit of interference,
but it was a great shock.”

They drew up opposite a draper’s. Without replying, he turned round in
his seat, and contemplated the cloud of dust that they had raised in
their passage through the village. It was settling again, but not all
into the road from which he had taken it. Some of it had percolated
through the open windows, some had whitened the roses and gooseberries
of the wayside gardens, while a certain proportion had entered the
lungs of the villagers. “I wonder when they’ll learn wisdom and tar the
roads,” was his comment. Then a man ran out of the draper’s with a roll
of oilcloth, and off they went again.

“Margaret could not come herself, on account of poor Tibby, so I am
here to represent her and to have a good talk.”

“I’m sorry to be so dense,” said the young man, again drawing up
outside a shop. “But I still haven’t quite understood.”

“Helen, Mr. Wilcox—my niece and you.”

He pushed up his goggles and gazed at her, absolutely bewildered.
Horror smote her to the heart, for even she began to suspect that they
were at cross-purposes, and that she had commenced her mission by some
hideous blunder.

“Miss Schlegel and myself.” he asked, compressing his lips.

“I trust there has been no misunderstanding,” quavered Mrs. Munt. “Her
letter certainly read that way.”

“What way?”

“That you and she—” She paused, then drooped her eyelids.

“I think I catch your meaning,” he said stickily. “What an
extraordinary mistake!”

“Then you didn’t the least—” she stammered, getting blood-red in the
face, and wishing she had never been born.

“Scarcely, as I am already engaged to another lady.” There was a
moment’s silence, and then he caught his breath and exploded with, “Oh,
good God! Don’t tell me it’s some silliness of Paul’s.”

“But you are Paul.”

“I’m not.”

“Then why did you say so at the station?”

“I said nothing of the sort.”

“I beg your pardon, you did.”

“I beg your pardon, I did not. My name is Charles.”

“Younger” may mean son as opposed to father, or second brother as
opposed to first. There is much to be said for either view, and later
on they said it. But they had other questions before them now.

“Do you mean to tell me that Paul—”

But she did not like his voice. He sounded as if he was talking to a
porter, and, certain that he had deceived her at the station, she too
grew angry.

“Do you mean to tell me that Paul and your niece—”

Mrs. Munt—such is human nature—determined that she would champion the
lovers. She was not going to be bullied by a severe young man. “Yes,
they care for one another very much indeed,” she said. “I dare say they
will tell you about it by-and-by. We heard this morning.”

And Charles clenched his fist and cried, “The idiot, the idiot, the
little fool!”

Mrs. Munt tried to divest herself of her rugs. “If that is your
attitude, Mr. Wilcox, I prefer to walk.”

“I beg you will do no such thing. I’ll take you up this moment to the
house. Let me tell you the thing’s impossible, and must be stopped.”

Mrs. Munt did not often lose her temper, and when she did it was only
to protect those whom she loved. On this occasion she blazed out. “I
quite agree, sir. The thing is impossible, and I will come up and stop
it. My niece is a very exceptional person, and I am not inclined to sit
still while she throws herself away on those who will not appreciate
her.”

Charles worked his jaws.

“Considering she has only known your brother since Wednesday, and only
met your father and mother at a stray hotel—”

“Could you possibly lower your voice? The shopman will overhear.”

“Esprit de classe”—if one may coin the phrase—was strong in Mrs. Munt.
She sat quivering while a member of the lower orders deposited a metal
funnel, a saucepan, and a garden squirt beside the roll of oilcloth.

“Right behind?”

“Yes, sir.” And the lower orders vanished in a cloud of dust.

“I warn you: Paul hasn’t a penny; it’s useless.”

“No need to warn us, Mr. Wilcox, I assure you. The warning is all the
other way. My niece has been very foolish, and I shall give her a good
scolding and take her back to London with me.”

“He has to make his way out in Nigeria. He couldn’t think of marrying
for years and when he does it must be a woman who can stand the
climate, and is in other ways—Why hasn’t he told us? Of course he’s
ashamed. He knows he’s been a fool. And so he has—a damned fool.”

She grew furious.

“Whereas Miss Schlegel has lost no time in publishing the news.”

“If I were a man, Mr. Wilcox, for that last remark I’d box your ears.
You’re not fit to clean my niece’s boots, to sit in the same room with
her, and you dare—you actually dare—I decline to argue with such a
person.”

“All I know is, she’s spread the thing and he hasn’t, and my father’s
away and I—”

“And all that I know is—”

“Might I finish my sentence, please?”

“No.”

Charles clenched his teeth and sent the motor swerving all over the
lane.

She screamed.

So they played the game of Capping Families, a round of which is always
played when love would unite two members of our race. But they played
it with unusual vigour, stating in so many words that Schlegels were
better than Wilcoxes, Wilcoxes better than Schlegels. They flung
decency aside. The man was young, the woman deeply stirred; in both a
vein of coarseness was latent. Their quarrel was no more surprising
than are most quarrels—inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.
But it was more than usually futile. A few minutes, and they were
enlightened. The motor drew up at Howards End, and Helen, looking very
pale, ran out to meet her aunt.

“Aunt Juley, I have just had a telegram from Margaret; I—I meant to
stop your coming. It isn’t—it’s over.”

The climax was too much for Mrs. Munt. She burst into tears.

“Aunt Juley dear, don’t. Don’t let them know I’ve been so silly. It
wasn’t anything. Do bear up for my sake.”

“Paul,” cried Charles Wilcox, pulling his gloves off.

“Don’t let them know. They are never to know.”

“Oh, my darling Helen—”

“Paul! Paul!”

A very young man came out of the house.

“Paul, is there any truth in this?”

“I didn’t—I don’t—”

“Yes or no, man; plain question, plain answer. Did or didn’t Miss
Schlegel—”

“Charles dear,” said a voice from the garden. “Charles, dear Charles,
one doesn’t ask plain questions. There aren’t such things.”

They were all silent. It was Mrs. Wilcox.

She approached just as Helen’s letter had described her, trailing
noiselessly over the lawn, and there was actually a wisp of hay in her
hands. She seemed to belong not to the young people and their motor,
but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it. One knew that
she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can
alone bestow had descended upon her—that wisdom to which we give the
clumsy name of aristocracy. High born she might not be. But assuredly
she cared about her ancestors, and let them help her. When she saw
Charles angry, Paul frightened, and Mrs. Munt in tears, she heard her
ancestors say, “Separate those human beings who will hurt each other
most. The rest can wait.” So she did not ask questions. Still less did
she pretend that nothing had happened, as a competent society hostess
would have done. She said, “Miss Schlegel, would you take your aunt up
to your room or to my room, whichever you think best. Paul, do find
Evie, and tell her lunch for six, but I’m not sure whether we shall all
be downstairs for it.” And when they had obeyed her, she turned to her
elder son, who still stood in the throbbing stinking car, and smiled at
him with tenderness, and without a word, turned away from him towards
her flowers.

“Mother,” he called, “are you aware that Paul has been playing the fool
again?”

“It’s all right, dear. They have broken off the engagement.”

“Engagement—!”

“They do not love any longer, if you prefer it put that way,” said Mrs.
Wilcox, stooping down to smell a rose.




Chapter 4


Helen and her aunt returned to Wickham Place in a state of collapse,
and for a little time Margaret had three invalids on her hands. Mrs.
Munt soon recovered. She possessed to a remarkable degree the power of
distorting the past, and before many days were over she had forgotten
the part played by her own imprudence in the catastrophe. Even at the
crisis she had cried, “Thank goodness, poor Margaret is saved this!”
which during the journey to London evolved into, “It had to be gone
through by someone,” which in its turn ripened into the permanent form
of “The one time I really did help Emily’s girls was over the Wilcox
business.” But Helen was a more serious patient. New ideas had burst
upon her like a thunder clap, and by them and by her reverberations she
had been stunned.

The truth was that she had fallen in love, not with an individual, but
with a family.

Before Paul arrived she had, as it were, been tuned up into his key.
The energy of the Wilcoxes had fascinated her, had created new images
of beauty in her responsive mind. To be all day with them in the open
air, to sleep at night under their roof, had seemed the supreme joy of
life, and had led to that abandonment of personality that is a possible
prelude to love. She had liked giving in to Mr. Wilcox, or Evie, or
Charles; she had liked being told that her notions of life were
sheltered or academic; that Equality was nonsense, Votes for Women
nonsense, Socialism nonsense, Art and Literature, except when conducive
to strengthening the character, nonsense. One by one the Schlegel
fetiches had been overthrown, and, though professing to defend them,
she had rejoiced. When Mr. Wilcox said that one sound man of business
did more good to the world than a dozen of your social reformers, she
had swallowed the curious assertion without a gasp, and had leant back
luxuriously among the cushions of his motor-car. When Charles said,
“Why be so polite to servants? they don’t understand it,” she had not
given the Schlegel retort of, “If they don’t understand it, I do.” No;
she had vowed to be less polite to servants in the future. “I am
swathed in cant,” she thought, “and it is good for me to be stripped of
it.” And all that she thought or did or breathed was a quiet
preparation for Paul. Paul was inevitable. Charles was taken up with
another girl, Mr. Wilcox was so old, Evie so young, Mrs. Wilcox so
different. Round the absent brother she began to throw the halo of
Romance, to irradiate him with all the splendour of those happy days,
to feel that in him she should draw nearest to the robust ideal. He and
she were about the same age, Evie said. Most people thought Paul
handsomer than his brother. He was certainly a better shot, though not
so good at golf. And when Paul appeared, flushed with the triumph of
getting through an examination, and ready to flirt with any pretty
girl, Helen met him halfway, or more than halfway, and turned towards
him on the Sunday evening.

He had been talking of his approaching exile in Nigeria, and he should
have continued to talk of it, and allowed their guest to recover. But
the heave of her bosom flattered him. Passion was possible, and he
became passionate. Deep down in him something whispered, “This girl
would let you kiss her; you might not have such a chance again.”

That was “how it happened,” or, rather, how Helen described it to her
sister, using words even more unsympathetic than my own. But the poetry
of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for
hours after it—who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman
to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular
cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is
so easy to talk of “passing emotion,” and how to forget how vivid the
emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root
a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and
women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere
opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too
highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the
doors of heaven may be shaken open. To Helen, at all events, her life
was to bring nothing more intense than the embrace of this boy who
played no part in it. He had drawn her out of the house, where there
was danger of surprise and light; he had led her by a path he knew,
until they stood under the column of the vast wych-elm. A man in the
darkness, he had whispered “I love you” when she was desiring love. In
time his slender personality faded, the scene that he had evoked
endured. In all the variable years that followed she never saw the like
of it again.

“I understand,” said Margaret—“at least, I understand as much as ever
is understood of these things. Tell me now what happened on the Monday
morning.”

“It was over at once.”

“How, Helen?”

“I was still happy while I dressed, but as I came downstairs I got
nervous, and when I went into the dining-room I knew it was no good.
There was Evie—I can’t explain—managing the tea-urn, and Mr. Wilcox
reading the _Times_.”

“Was Paul there?”

“Yes; and Charles was talking to him about Stocks and Shares, and he
looked frightened.”

By slight indications the sisters could convey much to each other.
Margaret saw horror latent in the scene, and Helen’s next remark did
not surprise her.

“Somehow, when that kind of man looks frightened it is too awful. It is
all right for us to be frightened, or for men of another sort—father,
for instance; but for men like that! When I saw all the others so
placid, and Paul mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing, I felt
for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of
newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should
find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.”

“I don’t think that. The Wilcoxes struck me as being genuine people,
particularly the wife.”

“No, I don’t really think that. But Paul was so broad-shouldered; all
kinds of extraordinary things made it worse, and I knew that it would
never do—never. I said to him after breakfast, when the others were
practising strokes, ‘We rather lost our heads,’ and he looked better at
once, though frightfully ashamed. He began a speech about having no
money to marry on, but it hurt him to make it, and I—stopped him. Then
he said, ‘I must beg your pardon over this, Miss Schlegel; I can’t
think what came over me last night.’ And I said, ‘Nor what over me;
never mind.’ And then we parted—at least, until I remembered that I had
written straight off to tell you the night before, and that frightened
him again. I asked him to send a telegram for me, for he knew you would
be coming or something; and he tried to get hold of the motor, but
Charles and Mr. Wilcox wanted it to go to the station; and Charles
offered to send the telegram for me, and then I had to say that the
telegram was of no consequence, for Paul said Charles might read it,
and though I wrote it out several times, he always said people would
suspect something. He took it himself at last, pretending that he must
walk down to get cartridges, and, what with one thing and the other, it
was not handed in at the Post Office until too late. It was the most
terrible morning. Paul disliked me more and more, and Evie talked
cricket averages till I nearly screamed. I cannot think how I stood her
all the other days. At last Charles and his father started for the
station, and then came your telegram warning me that Aunt Juley was
coming by that train, and Paul—oh, rather horrible—said that I had
muddled it. But Mrs. Wilcox knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Everything; though we neither of us told her a word, and had known all
along, I think.”

“Oh, she must have overheard you.”

“I suppose so, but it seemed wonderful. When Charles and Aunt Juley
drove up, calling each other names, Mrs. Wilcox stepped in from the
garden and made everything less terrible. Ugh! but it has been a
disgusting business. To think that—” She sighed.

“To think that because you and a young man meet for a moment, there
must be all these telegrams and anger,” supplied Margaret.

Helen nodded.

“I’ve often thought about it, Helen. It’s one of the most interesting
things in the world. The truth is that there is a great outer life that
you and I have never touched—a life in which telegrams and anger count.
Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. There
love means marriage settlements, death, death duties. So far I’m clear.
But here my difficulty. This outer life, though obviously horrid, often
seems the real one—there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do
personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?”

“Oh, Meg, that’s what I felt, only not so clearly, when the Wilcoxes
were so competent, and seemed to have their hands on all the ropes.”

“Don’t you feel it now?”

“I remember Paul at breakfast,” said Helen quietly. “I shall never
forget him. He had nothing to fall back upon. I know that personal
relations are the real life, for ever and ever.

“Amen!”

So the Wilcox episode fell into the background, leaving behind it
memories of sweetness and horror that mingled, and the sisters pursued
the life that Helen had commended. They talked to each other and to
other people, they filled the tall thin house at Wickham Place with
those whom they liked or could befriend. They even attended public
meetings. In their own fashion they cared deeply about politics, though
not as politicians would have us care; they desired that public life
should mirror whatever is good in the life within. Temperance,
tolerance, and sexual equality were intelligible cries to them; whereas
they did not follow our Forward Policy in Thibet with the keen
attention that it merits, and would at times dismiss the whole British
Empire with a puzzled, if reverent, sigh. Not out of them are the shows
of history erected: the world would be a grey, bloodless place were it
entirely composed of Miss Schlegels. But the world being what it is,
perhaps they shine out in it like stars.

A word on their origin. They were not “English to the backbone,” as
their aunt had piously asserted. But, on the other band, they were not
“Germans of the dreadful sort.” Their father had belonged to a type
that was more prominent in Germany fifty years ago than now. He was not
the aggressive German, so dear to the English journalist, nor the
domestic German, so dear to the English wit. If one classed him at all
it would be as the countryman of Hegel and Kant, as the idealist,
inclined to be dreamy, whose Imperialism was the Imperialism of the
air. Not that his life had been inactive. He had fought like blazes
against Denmark, Austria, France. But he had fought without visualizing
the results of victory. A hint of the truth broke on him after Sedan,
when he saw the dyed moustaches of Napoleon going grey; another when he
entered Paris, and saw the smashed windows of the Tuileries. Peace
came—it was all very immense, one had turned into an Empire—but he knew
that some quality had vanished for which not all Alsace-Lorraine could
compensate him. Germany a commercial Power, Germany a naval Power,
Germany with colonies here and a Forward Policy there, and legitimate
aspirations in the other place, might appeal to others, and be fitly
served by them; for his own part, he abstained from the fruits of
victory, and naturalized himself in England. The more earnest members
of his family never forgave him, and knew that his children, though
scarcely English of the dreadful sort, would never be German to the
backbone. He had obtained work in one of our provincial Universities,
and there married Poor Emily (or Die Engländerin as the case may be),
and as she had money, they proceeded to London, and came to know a good
many people. But his gaze was always fixed beyond the sea. It was his
hope that the clouds of materialism obscuring the Fatherland would part
in time, and the mild intellectual light re-emerge. “Do you imply that
we Germans are stupid, Uncle Ernst?” exclaimed a haughty and
magnificent nephew. Uncle Ernst replied, “To my mind. You use the
intellect, but you no longer care about it. That I call stupidity.” As
the haughty nephew did not follow, he continued, “You only care about
the’ things that you can use, and therefore arrange them in the
following order: Money, supremely useful; intellect, rather useful;
imagination, of no use at all. No”—for the other had protested—“your
Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than is our Imperialism over here.
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think
that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than
one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as
heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it. When their poets over
here try to celebrate bigness they are dead at once, and naturally.
Your poets too are dying, your philosophers, your musicians, to whom
Europe has listened for two hundred years. Gone. Gone with the little
courts that nurtured them—gone with Esterhaz and Weimar. What? What’s
that? Your Universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men, who collect
more facts than do the learned men of England. They collect facts, and
facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light
within?”

To all this Margaret listened, sitting on the haughty nephew’s knee.

It was a unique education for the little girls. The haughty nephew
would be at Wickham Place one day, bringing with him an even haughtier
wife, both convinced that Germany was appointed by God to govern the
world. Aunt Juley would come the next day, convinced that Great Britain
had been appointed to the same post by the same authority. Were both
these loud-voiced parties right? On one occasion they had met, and
Margaret with clasped hands had implored them to argue the subject out
in her presence. Whereat they blushed, and began to talk about the
weather. “Papa” she cried—she was a most offensive child—“why will they
not discuss this most clear question?” Her father, surveying the
parties grimly, replied that he did not know. Putting her head on one
side, Margaret then remarked, “To me one of two things is very clear;
either God does not know his own mind about England and Germany, or
else these do not know the mind of God.” A hateful little girl, but at
thirteen she had grasped a dilemma that most people travel through life
without perceiving. Her brain darted up and down; it grew pliant and
strong. Her conclusion was, that any human being lies nearer to the
unseen than any organization, and from this she never varied.

Helen advanced along the same lines, though with a more irresponsible
tread. In character she resembled her sister, but she was pretty, and
so apt to have a more amusing time. People gathered round her more
readily, especially when they were new acquaintances, and she did enjoy
a little homage very much. When their father died and they ruled alone
at Wickham Place, she often absorbed the whole of the company, while
Margaret—both were tremendous talkers—fell flat. Neither sister
bothered about this. Helen never apologized afterwards, Margaret did
not feel the slightest rancour. But looks have their influence upon
character. The sisters were alike as little girls, but at the time of
the Wilcox episode their methods were beginning to diverge; the younger
was rather apt to entice people, and, in enticing them, to be herself
enticed; the elder went straight ahead, and accepted an occasional
failure as part of the game.

Little need be premised about Tibby. He was now an intelligent man of
sixteen, but dyspeptic and difficile.




Chapter 5


It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the
most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All
sorts and conditions are satisfied by it. Whether you are like Mrs.
Munt, and tap surreptitiously when the tunes come—of course, not so as
to disturb the others—; or like Helen, who can see heroes and
shipwrecks in the music’s flood; or like Margaret, who can only see the
music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and
holds the full score open on his knee; or like their cousin, Fräulein
Mosebach, who remembers all the time that Beethoven is “echt Deutsch”;
or like Fräulein Mosebach’s young man, who can remember nothing but
Fräulein Mosebach: in any case, the passion of your life becomes more
vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two
shillings. It is cheap, even if you hear it in the Queen’s Hall,
dreariest music-room in London, though not as dreary as the Free Trade
Hall, Manchester; and even if you sit on the extreme left of that hall,
so that the brass bumps at you before the rest of the orchestra
arrives, it is still cheap.

“Who is Margaret talking to?” said Mrs. Munt, at the conclusion of the
first movement. She was again in London on a visit to Wickham Place.

Helen looked down the long line of their party, and said that she did
not know.

“Would it be some young man or other whom she takes an interest in?”

“I expect so,” Helen replied. Music enwrapped her, and she could not
enter into the distinction that divides young men whom one takes an
interest in from young men whom one knows.

“You girls are so wonderful in always having—Oh dear! one mustn’t
talk.”

For the Andante had begun—very beautiful, but bearing a family likeness
to all the other beautiful Andantes that Beethoven had written, and, to
Helen’s mind, rather disconnecting the heroes and shipwrecks of the
first movement from the heroes and goblins of the third. She heard the
tune through once, and then her attention wandered, and she gazed at
the audience, or the organ, or the architecture. Much did she censure
the attenuated Cupids who encircle the ceiling of the Queen’s Hall,
inclining each to each with vapid gesture, and clad in sallow
pantaloons, on which the October sunlight struck. “How awful to marry a
man like those Cupids!” thought Helen. Here Beethoven started
decorating his tune, so she heard him through once more, and then she
smiled at her cousin Frieda. But Frieda, listening to Classical Music,
could not respond. Herr Liesecke, too, looked as if wild horses could
not make him inattentive; there were lines across his forehead, his
lips were parted, his pince-nez at right angles to his nose, and he had
laid a thick, white hand on either knee. And next to her was Aunt
Juley, so British, and wanting to tap. How interesting that row of
people was! What diverse influences had gone to the making! Here
Beethoven, after humming and hawing with great sweetness, said
“Heigho,” and the Andante came to an end. Applause, and a round of
“wunderschöning” and “prachtvolleying” from the German contingent.
Margaret started talking to her new young man; Helen said to her aunt:
“Now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a
trio of elephants dancing;” and Tibby implored the company generally to
look out for the transitional passage on the drum.

“On the what, dear?”

“On the _drum_, Aunt Juley.”

“No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the
goblins and they come back,” breathed Helen, as the music started with
a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end. Others
followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made
them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there
was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. After the
interlude of elephants dancing, they returned and made the observation
for the second time. Helen could not contradict them, for, once at all
events, she had felt the same, and had seen the reliable walls of youth
collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were
right.

Her brother raised his finger: it was the transitional passage on the
drum.

For, as if things were going too far, Beethoven took hold of the
goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave
them a little push, and they began to walk in major key instead of in a
minor, and then—he blew with his mouth and they were scattered! Gusts
of splendour, gods and demigods contending with vast swords, colour and
fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory,
magnificent death! Oh, it all burst before the girl, and she even
stretched out her gloved hands as if it was tangible. Any fate was
titanic; any contest desirable; conqueror and conquered would alike be
applauded by the angels of the utmost stars.

And the goblins—they had not really been there at all? They were only
the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief? One healthy human impulse would
dispel them? Men like the Wilcoxes, or President Roosevelt, would say
yes. Beethoven knew better. The goblins really had been there. They
might return—and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might
boil over—and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard
the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity,
walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness!
Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall.

Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up.
He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were
scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the
youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings
of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But
the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and
that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.

Helen pushed her way out during the applause. She desired to be alone.
The music summed up to her all that had happened or could happen in her
career. She read it as a tangible statement, which could never be
superseded. The notes meant this and that to her, and they could have
no other meaning, and life could have no other meaning. She pushed
right out of the building, and walked slowly down the outside
staircase, breathing the autumnal air, and then she strolled home.

“Margaret,” called Mrs. Munt, “is Helen all right?”

“Oh yes.”

“She is always going away in the middle of a programme,” said Tibby.

“The music has evidently moved her deeply,” said Fräulein Mosebach.

“Excuse me,” said Margaret’s young man, who had for some time been
preparing a sentence, “but that lady has, quite inadvertently, taken my
umbrella.”

“Oh, good gracious me!—I am so sorry. Tibby, run after Helen.”

“I shall miss the Four Serious Songs if I do.”

“Tibby love, you must go.”

“It isn’t of any consequence,” said the young man, in truth a little
uneasy about his umbrella.

“But of course it is. Tibby! Tibby!”

Tibby rose to his feet, and wilfully caught his person on the backs of
the chairs. By the time he had tipped up the seat and had found his
hat, and had deposited his full score in safety, it was “too late” to
go after Helen. The Four Serious Songs had begun, and one could not
move during their performance.

“My sister is so careless,” whispered Margaret.

“Not at all,” replied the young man; but his voice was dead and cold.

“If you would give me your address—”

“Oh, not at all, not at all;” and he wrapped his greatcoat over his
knees.

Then the Four Serious Songs rang shallow in Margaret’s ears. Brahms,
for all his grumbling and grizzling, had never guessed what it felt
like to be suspected of stealing an umbrella. For this fool of a young
man thought that she and Helen and Tibby had been playing the
confidence trick on him, and that if he gave his address they would
break into his rooms some midnight or other and steal his walkingstick
too. Most ladies would have laughed, but Margaret really minded, for it
gave her a glimpse into squalor. To trust people is a luxury in which
only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it. As soon as
Brahms had grunted himself out, she gave him her card and said, “That
is where we live; if you preferred, you could call for the umbrella
after the concert, but I didn’t like to trouble you when it has all
been our fault.”

His face brightened a little when he saw that Wickham Place was W. It
was sad to see him corroded with suspicion, and yet not daring to be
impolite, in case these well-dressed people were honest after all. She
took it as a good sign that he said to her, “It’s a fine programme this
afternoon, is it not?” for this was the remark with which he had
originally opened, before the umbrella intervened.

“The Beethoven’s fine,” said Margaret, who was not a female of the
encouraging type. “I don’t like the Brahms, though, nor the Mendelssohn
that came first—and ugh! I don’t like this Elgar that’s coming.”

“What, what?” called Herr Liesecke, overhearing. “The _Pomp and
Circumstance_ will not be fine?”

“Oh, Margaret, you tiresome girl!” cried her aunt. “Here have I been
persuading Herr Liesecke to stop for _Pomp and Circumstance_, and you
are undoing all my work. I am so anxious for him to hear what we are
doing in music. Oh, you mustn’t run down our English composers,
Margaret.”

“For my part, I have heard the composition at Stettin,” said Fräulein
Mosebach. “On two occasions. It is dramatic, a little.”

“Frieda, you despise English music. You know you do. And English art.
And English Literature, except Shakespeare and he’s a German. Very
well, Frieda, you may go.”

The lovers laughed and glanced at each other. Moved by a common
impulse, they rose to their feet and fled from _Pomp and Circumstance_.

“We have this call to play in Finsbury Circus, it is true,” said Herr
Liesecke, as he edged past her and reached the gangway just as the
music started.

“Margaret—” loudly whispered by Aunt Juley. “Margaret, Margaret!
Fräulein Mosebach has left her beautiful little bag behind her on the
seat.”

Sure enough, there was Frieda’s reticule, containing her address book,
her pocket dictionary, her map of London, and her money.

“Oh, what a bother—what a family we are! Fr-Frieda!”

“Hush!” said all those who thought the music fine.

“But it’s the number they want in Finsbury Circus—”

“Might I—couldn’t I—” said the suspicious young man, and got very red.

“Oh, I would be so grateful.”

He took the bag—money clinking inside it—and slipped up the gangway
with it. He was just in time to catch them at the swing-door, and he
received a pretty smile from the German girl and a fine bow from her
cavalier. He returned to his seat up-sides with the world. The trust
that they had reposed in him was trivial, but he felt that it cancelled
his mistrust for them, and that probably he would not be “had” over his
umbrella. This young man had been “had” in the past—badly, perhaps
overwhelmingly—and now most of his energies went in defending himself
against the unknown. But this afternoon—perhaps on account of music—he
perceived that one must slack off occasionally, or what is the good of
being alive? Wickham Place, W., though a risk, was as safe as most
things, and he would risk it.

So when the concert was over and Margaret said, “We live quite near; I
am going there now. Could you walk around with me, and we’ll find your
umbrella?” he said, “Thank you,” peaceably, and followed her out of the
Queen’s Hall. She wished that he was not so anxious to hand a lady
downstairs, or to carry a lady’s programme for her—his class was near
enough her own for its manners to vex her. But she found him
interesting on the whole—every one interested the Schlegels on the
whole at that time—and while her lips talked culture, her heart was
planning to invite him to tea.

“How tired one gets after music!” she began.

“Do you find the atmosphere of Queen’s Hall oppressive?”

“Yes, horribly.”

“But surely the atmosphere of Covent Garden is even more oppressive.”

“Do you go there much?”

“When my work permits, I attend the gallery for, the Royal Opera.”

Helen would have exclaimed, “So do I. I love the gallery,” and thus
have endeared herself to the young man. Helen could do these things.
But Margaret had an almost morbid horror of “drawing people out,” of
“making things go.” She had been to the gallery at Covent Garden, but
she did not “attend” it, preferring the more expensive seats; still
less did she love it. So she made no reply.

“This year I have been three times—to _Faust_, _Tosca_, and—” Was it
“Tannhouser” or “Tannhoyser”? Better not risk the word.

Margaret disliked _Tosca_ and _Faust_. And so, for one reason and
another, they walked on in silence, chaperoned by the voice of Mrs.
Munt, who was getting into difficulties with her nephew.

“I do in a _way_ remember the passage, Tibby, but when every instrument
is so beautiful, it is difficult to pick out one thing rather than
another. I am sure that you and Helen take me to the very nicest
concerts. Not a dull note from beginning to end. I only wish that our
German friends would have stayed till it finished.”

“But surely you haven’t forgotten the drum steadily beating on the low
C, Aunt Juley?” came Tibby’s voice. “No one could. It’s unmistakable.”

“A specially loud part?” hazarded Mrs. Munt. “Of course I do not go in
for being musical,” she added, the shot failing. “I only care for
music—a very different thing. But still I will say this for myself—I do
know when I like a thing and when I don’t. Some people are the same
about pictures. They can go into a picture gallery—Miss Conder can—and
say straight off what they feel, all round the wall. I never could do
that. But music is so different to pictures, to my mind. When it comes
to music I am as safe as houses, and I assure you, Tibby, I am by no
means pleased by everything. There was a thing—something about a faun
in French—which Helen went into ecstasies over, but I thought it most
tinkling and superficial, and said so, and I held to my opinion too.”

“Do you agree?” asked Margaret. “Do you think music is so different to
pictures?”

“I—I should have thought so, kind of,” he said.

“So should I. Now, my sister declares they’re just the same. We have
great arguments over it. She says I’m dense; I say she’s sloppy.”
Getting under way, she cried: “Now, doesn’t it seem absurd to you? What
is the good of the Arts if they are interchangeable? What is the good
of the ear if it tells you the same as the eye? Helen’s one aim is to
translate tunes into the language of painting, and pictures into the
language of music. It’s very ingenious, and she says several pretty
things in the process, but what’s gained, I’d like to know? Oh, it’s
all rubbish, radically false. If Monet’s really Debussy, and Debussy’s
really Monet, neither gentleman is worth his salt—that’s my opinion.

Evidently these sisters quarrelled.

“Now, this very symphony that we’ve just been having—she won’t let it
alone. She labels it with meanings from start to finish; turns it into
literature. I wonder if the day will ever return when music will be
treated as music. Yet I don’t know. There’s my brother—behind us. He
treats music as music, and oh, my goodness! He makes me angrier than
anyone, simply furious. With him I daren’t even argue.”

An unhappy family, if talented.

“But, of course, the real villain is Wagner. He has done more than any
man in the nineteenth century towards the muddling of arts. I do feel
that music is in a very serious state just now, though extraordinarily
interesting. Every now and then in history there do come these terrible
geniuses, like Wagner, who stir up all the wells of thought at once.
For a moment it’s splendid. Such a splash as never was. But
afterwards—such a lot of mud; and the wells—as it were, they
communicate with each other too easily now, and not one of them will
run quite clear. That’s what Wagner’s done.”

Her speeches fluttered away from the young man like birds. If only he
could talk like this, he would have caught the world. Oh to acquire
culture! Oh, to pronounce foreign names correctly! Oh, to be well
informed, discoursing at ease on every subject that a lady started! But
it would take one years. With an hour at lunch and a few shattered
hours in the evening, how was it possible to catch up with leisured
women, who had been reading steadily from childhood? His brain might be
full of names, he might have even heard of Monet and Debussy; the
trouble was that he could not string them together into a sentence, he
could not make them “tell,” he could not quite forget about his stolen
umbrella. Yes, the umbrella was the real trouble. Behind Monet and
Debussy the umbrella persisted, with the steady beat of a drum. “I
suppose my umbrella will be all right,” he was thinking. “I don’t
really mind about it. I will think about music instead. I suppose my
umbrella will be all right.” Earlier in the afternoon he had worried
about seats. Ought he to have paid as much as two shillings? Earlier
still he had wondered, “Shall I try to do without a programme?” There
had always been something to worry him ever since he could remember,
always something that distracted him in the pursuit of beauty. For he
did pursue beauty, and therefore, Margaret’s speeches did flutter away
from him like birds.

Margaret talked ahead, occasionally saying, “Don’t you think so? don’t
you feel the same?” And once she stopped, and said “Oh, do interrupt
me!” which terrified him. She did not attract him, though she filled
him with awe. Her figure was meagre, her face seemed all teeth and
eyes, her references to her sister and brother were uncharitable. For
all her cleverness and culture, she was probably one of those soulless,
atheistical women who have been so shown up by Miss Corelli. It was
surprising (and alarming) that she should suddenly say, “I do hope that
you’ll come in and have some tea.”

“I do hope that you’ll come in and have some tea. We should be so glad.
I have dragged you so far out of your way.”

They had arrived at Wickham Place. The sun had set, and the backwater,
in deep shadow, was filling with a gentle haze. To the right of the
fantastic skyline of the flats towered black against the hues of
evening; to the left the older houses raised a square-cut, irregular
parapet against the grey. Margaret fumbled for her latchkey. Of course
she had forgotten it. So, grasping her umbrella by its ferrule, she
leant over the area and tapped at the dining-room window.

“Helen! Let us in!”

“All right,” said a voice.

“You’ve been taking this gentleman’s umbrella.”

“Taken a what?” said Helen, opening the door. “Oh, what’s that? Do come
in! How do you do?”

“Helen, you must not be so ramshackly. You took this gentleman’s
umbrella away from Queen’s Hall, and he has had the trouble of coming
for it.”

“Oh, I am so sorry!” cried Helen, all her hair flying. She had pulled
off her hat as soon as she returned, and had flung herself into the big
dining-room chair. “I do nothing but steal umbrellas. I am so very
sorry! Do come in and choose one. Is yours a hooky or a nobbly? Mine’s
a nobbly—at least, I _think_ it is.”

The light was turned on, and they began to search the hall, Helen, who
had abruptly parted with the Fifth Symphony, commenting with shrill
little cries.

“Don’t you talk, Meg! You stole an old gentleman’s silk top-hat. Yes,
she did, Aunt Juley. It is a positive fact. She thought it was a muff.
Oh, heavens! I’ve knocked the In and Out card down. Where’s Frieda?
Tibby, why don’t you ever—No, I can’t remember what I was going to say.
That wasn’t it, but do tell the maids to hurry tea up. What about this
umbrella?” She opened it. “No, it’s all gone along the seams. It’s an
appalling umbrella. It must be mine.”

But it was not.

He took it from her, murmured a few words of thanks, and then fled,
with the lilting step of the clerk.

“But if you will stop—” cried Margaret. “Now, Helen, how stupid you’ve
been!”

“Whatever have I done?”

“Don’t you see that you’ve frightened him away? I meant him to stop to
tea. You oughtn’t to talk about stealing or holes in an umbrella. I saw
his nice eyes getting so miserable. No, it’s not a bit of good now.”
For Helen had darted out into the street, shouting, “Oh, do stop!”

“I dare say it is all for the best,” opined Mrs. Munt. “We know nothing
about the young man, Margaret, and your drawing-room is full of very
tempting little things.”

But Helen cried: “Aunt Juley, how can you! You make me more and more
ashamed. I’d rather he _had_ been a thief and taken all the apostle
spoons than that I—Well, I must shut the front-door, I suppose. One
more failure for Helen.”

“Yes, I think the apostle spoons could have gone as rent,” said
Margaret. Seeing that her aunt did not understand, she added: “You
remember ‘rent.’ It was one of father’s words—Rent to the ideal, to his
own faith in human nature. You remember how he would trust strangers,
and if they fooled him he would say, ‘It’s better to be fooled than to
be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the
want-of-confidence-trick is the work of the devil.”

“I remember something of the sort now,” said Mrs. Munt, rather tartly,
for she longed to add, “It was lucky that your father married a wife
with money.” But this was unkind, and she contented herself with, “Why,
he might have stolen the little Ricketts picture as well.”

“Better that he had,” said Helen stoutly.

“No, I agree with Aunt Juley,” said Margaret. “I’d rather mistrust
people than lose my little Ricketts. There are limits.”

Their brother, finding the incident commonplace, had stolen upstairs to
see whether there were scones for tea. He warmed the teapot—almost too
deftly—rejected the Orange Pekoe that the parlour-maid had provided,
poured in five spoonfuls of a superior blend, filled up with really
boiling water, and now called to the ladies to be quick or they would
lose the aroma.

“All right, Auntie Tibby,” called Helen, while Margaret, thoughtful
again, said: “In a way, I wish we had a real boy in the house—the kind
of boy who cares for men. It would make entertaining so much easier.”

“So do I,” said her sister. “Tibby only cares for cultured females
singing Brahms.” And when they joined him she said rather sharply: “Why
didn’t you make that young man welcome, Tibby? You must do the host a
little, you know. You ought to have taken his hat and coaxed him into
stopping, instead of letting him be swamped by screaming women.”

Tibby sighed, and drew a long strand of hair over his forehead.

“Oh, it’s no good looking superior. I mean what I say.”

“Leave Tibby alone!” said Margaret, who could not bear her brother to
be scolded.

“Here’s the house a regular hen-coop!” grumbled Helen.

“Oh, my dear!” protested Mrs. Munt. “How can you say such dreadful
things! The number of men you get here has always astonished me. If
there is any danger it’s the other way round.”

“Yes, but it’s the wrong sort of men, Helen means.”

“No, I don’t,” corrected Helen. “We get the right sort of man, but the
wrong side of him, and I say that’s Tibby’s fault. There ought to be a
something about the house—an—I don’t know what.”

“A touch of the W.’s, perhaps?”

Helen put out her tongue.

“Who are the W.’s?” asked Tibby.

“The W.’s are things I and Meg and Aunt Juley know about and you don’t,
so there!”

“I suppose that ours is a female house,” said Margaret, “and one must
just accept it. No, Aunt Juley, I don’t mean that this house is full of
women. I am trying to say something much more clever. I mean that it
was irrevocably feminine, even in father’s time. Now I’m sure you
understand! Well, I’ll give you another example. It’ll shock you, but I
don’t care. Suppose Queen Victoria gave a dinner-party, and that the
guests had been Leighton, Millais, Swinburne, Rossetti, Meredith,
Fitzgerald, etc. Do you suppose that the atmosphere of that dinner
would have been artistic? Heavens no! The very chairs on which they sat
would have seen to that. So with our house—it must be feminine, and all
we can do is to see that it isn’t effeminate. Just as another house
that I can mention, but I won’t, sounded irrevocably masculine, and all
its inmates can do is to see that it isn’t brutal.”

“That house being the W.’s house, I presume,” said Tibby.

“You’re not going to be told about the W.’s, my child,” Helen cried,
“so don’t you think it. And on the other hand, I don’t the least mind
if you find out, so don’t you think you’ve done anything clever, in
either case. Give me a cigarette.”

“You do what you can for the house,” said Margaret. “The drawing-room
reeks of smoke.”

“If you smoked too, the house might suddenly turn masculine. Atmosphere
is probably a question of touch and go. Even at Queen Victoria’s
dinner-party—if something had been just a little different—perhaps if
she’d worn a clinging Liberty tea-gown instead of a magenta satin—”

“With an Indian shawl over her shoulders—”

“Fastened at the bosom with a Cairngorm-pin—”

Bursts of disloyal laughter—you must remember that they are half
German—greeted these suggestions, and Margaret said pensively, “How
inconceivable it would be if the Royal Family cared about Art.” And the
conversation drifted away and away, and Helen’s cigarette turned to a
spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with
lighted windows, which vanished and were relit again, and vanished
incessantly. Beyond them the thoroughfare roared gently—a tide that
could never be quiet, while in the east, invisible behind the smokes of
Wapping, the moon was rising.

“That reminds me, Margaret. We might have taken that young man into the
dining-room, at all events. Only the majolica plate—and that is so
firmly set in the wall. I am really distressed that he had no tea.”

For that little incident had impressed the three women more than might
be supposed. It remained as a goblin football, as a hint that all is
not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath
these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy,
who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address
behind him, and no name.




Chapter 6


We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only
to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with
gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are
gentlefolk.

The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was
not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew
had dropped in, and counted no more. He knew that he was poor, and
would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority
to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most
rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as
courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy,
nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because
he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better
food. Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured
civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his
rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel
of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings,
and proclaiming, “All men are equal—all men, that is to say, who
possess umbrellas,” and so he was obliged to assert gentility, lest he
slipped into the abyss where nothing counts, and the statements of
Democracy are inaudible.

As he walked away from Wickham Place, his first care was to prove that
he was as good as the Miss Schlegels. Obscurely wounded in his pride,
he tried to wound them in return. They were probably not ladies. Would
real ladies have asked him to tea? They were certainly ill-natured and
cold. At each step his feeling of superiority increased. Would a real
lady have talked about stealing an umbrella? Perhaps they were thieves
after all, and if he had gone into the house they could have clapped a
chloroformed handkerchief over his face. He walked on complacently as
far as the Houses of Parliament. There an empty stomach asserted
itself, and told him he was a fool.

“Evening, Mr. Bast.”

“Evening, Mr. Dealtry.”

“Nice evening.”

“Evening.”

Mr. Dealtry, a fellow clerk, passed on, and Leonard stood wondering
whether he would take the tram as far as a penny would take him, or
whether he would walk. He decided to walk—it is no good giving in, and
he had spent money enough at Queen’s Hall—and he walked over
Westminster Bridge, in front of St. Thomas’s Hospital, and through the
immense tunnel that passes under the South-Western main line at
Vauxhall. In the tunnel he paused and listened to the roar of the
trains. A sharp pain darted through his head, and he was conscious of
the exact form of his eye sockets. He pushed on for another mile, and
did not slacken speed until he stood at the entrance of a road called
Camelia Road, which was at present his home.

Here he stopped again, and glanced suspiciously to right and left, like
a rabbit that is going to bolt into its hole. A block of flats,
constructed with extreme cheapness, towered on either hand. Farther
down the road two more blocks were being built, and beyond these an old
house was being demolished to accommodate another pair. It was the kind
of scene that may be observed all over London, whatever the
locality—bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of
the water in a fountain, as the city receives more and more men upon
her soil. Camelia Road would soon stand out like a fortress, and
command, for a little, an extensive view. Only for a little. Plans were
out for the erection of flats in Magnolia Road also. And again a few
years, and all the flats in either road might be pulled down, and new
buildings, of a vastness at present unimaginable, might arise where
they had fallen.

“Evening, Mr. Bast.”

“Evening, Mr. Cunningham.”

“Very serious thing this decline of the birth-rate in Manchester.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Very serious thing this decline of the birth-rate in Manchester,”
repeated Mr. Cunningham, tapping the Sunday paper, in which the
calamity in question had just been announced to him.

“Ah, yes,” said Leonard, who was not going to let on that he had not
bought a Sunday paper.

“If this kind of thing goes on the population of England will be
stationary in 1960.”

“You don’t say so.”

“I call it a very serious thing, eh?”

“Good-evening, Mr. Cunningham.”

“Good-evening, Mr. Bast.”

Then Leonard entered Block B of the flats, and turned, not upstairs,
but down, into what is known to house agents as a semi-basement, and to
other men as a cellar. He opened the door, and cried “Hullo!” with the
pseudo-geniality of the Cockney. There was no reply. “Hullo!” he
repeated. The sitting-room was empty, though the electric light had
been left burning. A look of relief came over his face, and he flung
himself into the armchair.

The sitting-room contained, besides the armchair, two other chairs, a
piano, a three-legged table, and a cosy corner. Of the walls, one was
occupied by the window, the other by a draped mantelshelf bristling
with Cupids. Opposite the window was the door, and beside the door a
bookcase, while over the piano there extended one of the masterpieces
of Maud Goodman. It was an amorous and not unpleasant little hole when
the curtains were drawn, and the lights turned on, and the gas-stove
unlit. But it struck that shallow makeshift note that is so often heard
in the modem dwelling-place. It had been too easily gained, and could
be relinquished too easily.

As Leonard was kicking off his boots he jarred the three-legged table,
and a photograph frame, honourably poised upon it, slid sideways, fell
off into the fireplace, and smashed. He swore in a colourless sort of
way, and picked the photograph up. It represented a young lady called
Jacky, and had been taken at the time when young ladies called Jacky
were often photographed with their mouths open. Teeth of dazzling
whiteness extended along either of Jacky’s jaws, and positively
weighted her head sideways, so large were they and so numerous. Take my
word for it, that smile was simply stunning, and it is only you and I
who will be fastidious, and complain that true joy begins in the eyes,
and that the eyes of Jacky did not accord with her smile, but were
anxious and hungry.

Leonard tried to pull out the fragments of glass, and cut his fingers
and swore again. A drop of blood fell on the frame, another followed,
spilling over on to the exposed photograph. He swore more vigorously,
and dashed to the kitchen, where he bathed his hands. The kitchen was
the same size as the sitting room; through it was a bedroom. This
completed his home. He was renting the flat furnished: of all the
objects that encumbered it none were his own except the photograph
frame, the Cupids, and the books.

“Damn, damn, damnation!” he murmured, together with such other words as
he had learnt from older men. Then he raised his hand to his forehead
and said, “Oh, damn it all—” which meant something different. He pulled
himself together. He drank a little tea, black and silent, that still
survived upon an upper shelf. He swallowed some dusty crumbs of cake.
Then he went back to the sitting-room, settled himself anew, and began
to read a volume of Ruskin.

“Seven miles to the north of Venice—”

How perfectly the famous chapter opens! How supreme its command of
admonition and of poetry! The rich man is speaking to us from his
gondola.

“Seven miles to the north of Venice the banks of sand which nearer the
city rise little above low-water mark attain by degrees a higher level,
and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and
there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea.”

Leonard was trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be
the greatest master of English Prose. He read forward steadily,
occasionally making a few notes.

“Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and
first (for of the shafts enough has been said already), what is very
peculiar to this church—its luminousness.”

Was there anything to be learnt from this fine sentence? Could he adapt
it to the needs of daily life? Could he introduce it, with
modifications, when he next wrote a letter to his brother, the
lay-reader? For example—

“Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and
first (for of the absence of ventilation enough has been said already),
what is very peculiar to this flat—its obscurity.”

Something told him that the modifications would not do; and that
something, had he known it, was the spirit of English Prose. “My flat
is dark as well as stuffy.” Those were the words for him.

And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort
and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of
sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual
and insistent in Leonard’s life. For it was the voice of one who had
never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt
and hunger are.

Leonard listened to it with reverence. He felt that he was being done
good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queen’s Hall
Concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head
out of the grey waters and see the universe. He believed in sudden
conversion, a belief which may be right, but which is peculiarly
attractive to a half-baked mind. It is the bias of much popular
religion: in the domain of business it dominates the Stock Exchange,
and becomes that “bit of luck” by which all successes and failures are
explained. “If only I had a bit of luck, the whole thing would come
straight. . . . He’s got a most magnificent place down at Streatham and
a 20 h.-p. Fiat, but then, mind you, he’s had luck. . . . I’m sorry the
wife’s so late, but she never has any luck over catching trains.”
Leonard was superior to these people; he did believe in effort and in a
steady preparation for the change that he desired. But of a heritage
that may expand gradually, he had no conception: he hoped to come to
Culture suddenly, much as the Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus. Those
Miss Schlegels had come to it; they had done the trick; their hands
were upon the ropes, once and for all. And meanwhile, his flat was
dark, as well as stuffy.

Presently there was a noise on the staircase. He shut up Margaret’s
card in the pages of Ruskin, and opened the door. A woman entered, of
whom it is simplest to say that she was not respectable. Her appearance
was awesome. She seemed all strings and bell-pulls—ribbons, chains,
bead necklaces that clinked and caught—and a boa of azure feathers hung
round her neck, with the ends uneven. Her throat was bare, wound with a
double row of pearls, her arms were bare to the elbows, and might again
be detected at the shoulder, through cheap lace. Her hat, which was
flowery, resembled those punnets, covered with flannel, which we sowed
with mustard and cress in our childhood, and which germinated here yes,
and there no. She wore it on the back of her head. As for her hair, or
rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went
down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a
lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead. The face—the face does
not signify. It was the face of the photograph, but older, and the
teeth were not so numerous as the photographer had suggested, and
certainly not so white. Yes, Jacky was past her prime, whatever that
prime may have been. She was descending quicker than most women into
the colourless years, and the look in her eyes confessed it.

“What ho!” said Leonard, greeting that apparition with much spirit, and
helping it off with its boa.

Jacky, in husky tones, replied, “What ho!”

“Been out?” he asked. The question sounds superfluous, but it cannot
have been really, for the lady answered, “No,” adding, “Oh, I am so
tired.”

“You tired?”

“Eh?”

“I’m tired,” said he, hanging the boa up.

“Oh, Len, I am so tired.”

“I’ve been to that classical concert I told you about,” said Leonard.

“What’s that?”

“I came back as soon as it was over.”

“Any one been round to our place?” asked Jacky.

“Not that I’ve seen. I met Mr. Cunningham outside, and we passed a few
remarks.”

“What, not Mr. Cunningham?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, you mean Mr. Cunningham.”

“Yes. Mr. Cunningham.”

“I’ve been out to tea at a lady friend’s.”

Her secret being at last given to the world, and the name of the
lady-friend being even adumbrated, Jacky made no further experiments in
the difficult and tiring art of conversation. She never had been a
great talker. Even in her photographic days she had relied upon her
smile and her figure to attract, and now that she was—

“On the shelf,
On the shelf,
Boys, boys, I’m on the shelf,”


she was not likely to find her tongue. Occasional bursts of song (of
which the above is an example) still issued from her lips, but the
spoken word was rare.

She sat down on Leonard’s knee, and began to fondle him. She was now a
massive woman of thirty-three, and her weight hurt him, but he could
not very well say anything. Then she said, “Is that a book you’re
reading?” and he said, “That’s a book,” and drew it from her
unreluctant grasp. Margaret’s card fell out of it. It fell face
downwards, and he murmured, “Bookmarker.”

“Len—”

“What is it?” he asked, a little wearily, for she only had one topic of
conversation when she sat upon his knee.

“You do love me?”

“Jacky, you know that I do. How can you ask such questions!”

“But you do love me, Len, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

A pause. The other remark was still due.

“Len—”

“Well? What is it?”

“Len, you will make it all right?”

“I can’t have you ask me that again,” said the boy, flaring up into a
sudden passion. “I’ve promised to marry you when I’m of age, and that’s
enough. My word’s my word. I’ve promised to marry you as soon as ever
I’m twenty-one, and I can’t keep on being worried. I’ve worries enough.
It isn’t likely I’d throw you over, let alone my word, when I’ve spent
all this money. Besides, I’m an Englishman, and I never go back on my
word. Jacky, do be reasonable. Of course I’ll marry you. Only do stop
badgering me.”

“When’s your birthday, Len?”

“I’ve told you again and again, the eleventh of November next. Now get
off my knee a bit; someone must get supper, I suppose.”

Jacky went through to the bedroom, and began to see to her hat. This
meant blowing at it with short sharp puffs. Leonard tidied up the
sitting-room, and began to prepare their evening meal. He put a penny
into the slot of the gas-meter, and soon the flat was reeking with
metallic fumes. Somehow he could not recover his temper, and all the
time he was cooking he continued to complain bitterly.

“It really is too bad when a fellow isn’t trusted. It makes one feel so
wild, when I’ve pretended to the people here that you’re my wife—all
right, you shall be my wife—and I’ve bought you the ring to wear, and
I’ve taken this flat furnished, and it’s far more than I can afford,
and yet you aren’t content, and I’ve also not told the truth when I’ve
written home.” He lowered his voice. “He’d stop it.” In a tone of
horror, that was a little luxurious, he repeated: “My brother’d stop
it. I’m going against the whole world, Jacky.

“That’s what I am, Jacky. I don’t take any heed of what anyone says. I
just go straight forward, I do. That’s always been my way. I’m not one
of your weak knock-kneed chaps. If a woman’s in trouble, I don’t leave
her in the lurch. That’s not my street. No, thank you.

“I’ll tell you another thing too. I care a good deal about improving
myself by means of Literature and Art, and so getting a wider outlook.
For instance, when you came in I was reading Ruskin’s _Stones of
Venice_. I don’t say this to boast, but just to show you the kind of
man I am. I can tell you, I enjoyed that classical concert this
afternoon.”

To all his moods Jacky remained equally indifferent. When supper was
ready—and not before—she emerged from the bedroom, saying: “But you do
love me, don’t you?”

They began with a soup square, which Leonard had just dissolved in some
hot water. It was followed by the tongue—a freckled cylinder of meat,
with a little jelly at the top, and a great deal of yellow fat at the
bottom—ending with another square dissolved in water (jelly:
pineapple), which Leonard had prepared earlier in the day. Jacky ate
contentedly enough, occasionally looking at her man with those anxious
eyes, to which nothing else in her appearance corresponded, and which
yet seemed to mirror her soul. And Leonard managed to convince his
stomach that it was having a nourishing meal.

After supper they smoked cigarettes and exchanged a few statements. She
observed that her “likeness” had been broken. He found occasion to
remark, for the second time, that he had come straight back home after
the concert at Queen’s Hall. Presently she sat upon his knee. The
inhabitants of Camelia Road tramped to and fro outside the window, just
on a level with their heads, and the family in the flat on the
ground-floor began to sing, “Hark, my soul, it is the Lord.”

“That tune fairly gives me the hump,” said Leonard.

Jacky followed this, and said that, for her part, she thought it a
lovely tune.

“No; I’ll play you something lovely. Get up, dear, for a minute.”

He went to the piano and jingled out a little Grieg. He played badly
and vulgarly, but the performance was not without its effect, for Jacky
said she thought she’d be going to bed. As she receded, a new set of
interests possessed the boy, and he began to think of what had been
said about music by that odd Miss Schlegel—the one that twisted her
face about so when she spoke. Then the thoughts grew sad and envious.
There was the girl named Helen, who had pinched his umbrella, and the
German girl who had smiled at him pleasantly, and Herr someone, and
Aunt someone, and the brother—all, all with their hands on the ropes.
They had all passed up that narrow, rich staircase at Wickham Place, to
some ample room, whither he could never follow them, not if he read for
ten hours a day. Oh, it was not good, this continual aspiration. Some
are born cultured; the rest had better go in for whatever comes easy.
To see life steadily and to see it whole was not for the likes of him.

From the darkness beyond the kitchen a voice called, “Len?”

“You in bed?” he asked, his forehead twitching.

“M’m.”

“All right.”

Presently she called him again.

“I must clean my boots ready for the morning,” he answered.

Presently she called him again.

“I rather want to get this chapter done.”

“What?”

He closed his ears against her.

“What’s that?”

“All right, Jacky, nothing; I’m reading a book.”

“What?”

“What?” he answered, catching her degraded deafness.

Presently she called him again.

Ruskin had visited Torcello by this time, and was ordering his
gondoliers to take him to Murano. It occurred to him, as he glided over
the whispering lagoons, that the power of Nature could not be shortened
by the folly, nor her beauty altogether saddened by the misery, of such
as Leonard.




Chapter 7


“Oh, Margaret,” cried her aunt next morning, “such a most unfortunate
thing has happened. I could not get you alone.”

The most unfortunate thing was not very serious. One of the flats in
the ornate block opposite had been taken furnished by the Wilcox
family, “coming up, no doubt, in the hope of getting into London
society.” That Mrs. Munt should be the first to discover the misfortune
was not remarkable, for she was so interested in the flats, that she
watched their every mutation with unwearying care. In theory she
despised them—they took away that old-world look—they cut off the
sun—flats house a flashy type of person. But if the truth had been
known, she found her visits to Wickham Place twice as amusing since
Wickham Mansions had arisen, and would in a couple of days learn more
about them than her nieces in a couple of months, or her nephew in a
couple of years. She would stroll across and make friends with the
porters, and inquire what the rents were, exclaiming for example:
“What! a hundred and twenty for a basement? You’ll never get it!” And
they would answer: “One can but try, madam.” The passenger lifts, the
provision lifts, the arrangement for coals (a great temptation for a
dishonest porter), were all familiar matters to her, and perhaps a
relief from the politico-economical-æsthetic atmosphere that reigned at
the Schlegels’.

Margaret received the information calmly, and did not agree that it
would throw a cloud over poor Helen’s life.

“Oh, but Helen isn’t a girl with no interests,” she explained. “She has
plenty of other things and other people to think about. She made a
false start with the Wilcoxes, and she’ll be as willing as we are to
have nothing more to do with them.”

“For a clever girl, dear, how very oddly you do talk. Helen’ll _have_
to have something more to do with them, now that they’re all opposite.
She may meet that Paul in the street. She cannot very well not bow.”

“Of course she must bow. But look here; let’s do the flowers. I was
going to say, the will to be interested in him has died, and what else
matters? I look on that disastrous episode (over which you were so
kind) as the killing of a nerve in Helen. It’s dead, and she’ll never
be troubled with it again. The only things that matter are the things
that interest one. Bowing, even calling and leaving cards, even a
dinner-party—we can do all those things to the Wilcoxes, if they find
it agreeable; but the other thing, the one important thing—never again.
Don’t you see?”

Mrs. Munt did not see, and indeed Margaret was making a most
questionable statement—that any emotion, any interest once vividly
aroused, can wholly die.

“I also have the honour to inform you that the Wilcoxes are bored with
us. I didn’t tell you at the time—it might have made you angry, and you
had enough to worry you—but I wrote a letter to Mrs. W., and apologized
for the trouble that Helen had given them. She didn’t answer it.”

“How very rude!”

“I wonder. Or was it sensible?”

“No, Margaret, most rude.”

“In either case one can class it as reassuring.”

Mrs. Munt sighed. She was going back to Swanage on the morrow, just as
her nieces were wanting her most. Other regrets crowded upon her: for
instance, how magnificently she would have cut Charles if she had met
him face to face. She had already seen him, giving an order to the
porter—and very common he looked in a tall hat. But unfortunately his
back was turned to her, and though she had cut his back, she could not
regard this as a telling snub.

“But you will be careful, won’t you?” she exhorted.

“Oh, certainly. Fiendishly careful.”

“And Helen must be careful, too,”

“Careful over what?” cried Helen, at that moment coming into the room
with her cousin.

“Nothing,” said Margaret, seized with a momentary awkwardness.

“Careful over what, Aunt Juley?”

Mrs. Munt assumed a cryptic air. “It is only that a certain family,
whom we know by name but do not mention, as you said yourself last
night after the concert, have taken the flat opposite from the
Mathesons—where the plants are in the balcony.”

Helen began some laughing reply, and then disconcerted them all by
blushing. Mrs. Munt was so disconcerted that she exclaimed, “What,
Helen, you don’t mind them coming, do you?” and deepened the blush to
crimson.

“Of course I don’t mind,” said Helen a little crossly. “It is that you
and Meg are both so absurdly grave about it, when there’s nothing to be
grave about at all.”

“I’m not grave,” protested Margaret, a little cross in her turn.

“Well, you look grave; doesn’t she, Frieda?”

“I don’t feel grave, that’s all I can say; you’re going quite on the
wrong tack.”

“No, she does not feel grave,” echoed Mrs. Munt. “I can bear witness to
that. She disagrees—”

“Hark!” interrupted Fräulein Mosebach. “I hear Bruno entering the
hall.”

For Herr Liesecke was due at Wickham Place to call for the two younger
girls. He was not entering the hall—in fact, he did not enter it for
quite five minutes. But Frieda detected a delicate situation, and said
that she and Helen had much better wait for Bruno down below, and leave
Margaret and Mrs. Munt to finish arranging the flowers. Helen
acquiesced. But, as if to prove that the situation was not delicate
really, she stopped in the doorway and said:

“Did you say the Mathesons’ flat, Aunt Juley? How wonderful you are! I
never knew that the woman who laced too tightly’s name was Matheson.”

“Come, Helen,” said her cousin.

“Go, Helen,” said her aunt; and continued to Margaret almost in the
same breath: “Helen cannot deceive me. She does mind.”

“Oh, hush!” breathed Margaret. “Frieda’ll hear you, and she can be so
tiresome.”

“She minds,” persisted Mrs. Munt, moving thoughtfully about the room,
and pulling the dead chrysanthemums out of the vases. “I knew she’d
mind—and I’m sure a girl ought to! Such an experience! Such awful
coarse-grained people! I know more about them than you do, which you
forget, and if Charles had taken you that motor drive—well, you’d have
reached the house a perfect wreck. Oh, Margaret, you don’t know what
you are in for. They’re all bottled up against the drawing-room window.
There’s Mrs. Wilcox—I’ve seen her. There’s Paul. There’s Evie, who is a
minx. There’s Charles—I saw him to start with. And who would an elderly
man with a moustache and a copper-coloured face be?”

“Mr. Wilcox, possibly.”

“I knew it. And there’s Mr. Wilcox.”

“It’s a shame to call his face copper colour,” complained Margaret. “He
has a remarkably good complexion for a man of his age.”

Mrs. Munt, triumphant elsewhere, could afford to concede Mr. Wilcox his
complexion. She passed on from it to the plan of campaign that her
nieces should pursue in the future. Margaret tried to stop her.

“Helen did not take the news quite as I expected, but the Wilcox nerve
is dead in her really, so there’s no need for plans.”

“It’s as well to be prepared.”

“No—it’s as well not to be prepared.”

“Because—”

Her thought drew being from the obscure borderland. She could not
explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all
the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense
of joy. It is necessary to prepare for an examination, or a
dinner-party, or a possible fall in the price of stock: those who
attempt human relations must adopt another method, or fail. “Because
I’d sooner risk it,” was her lame conclusion.

“But imagine the evenings,” exclaimed her aunt, pointing to the
Mansions with the spout of the watering-can. “Turn the electric light
on here or there, and it’s almost the same room. One evening they may
forget to draw their blinds down, and you’ll see them; and the next,
you yours, and they’ll see you. Impossible to sit out on the balconies.
Impossible to water the plants, or even speak. Imagine going out of the
front-door, and they come out opposite at the same moment. And yet you
tell me that plans are unnecessary, and you’d rather risk it.”

“I hope to risk things all my life.”

“Oh, Margaret, most dangerous.”

“But after all,” she continued with a smile, “there’s never any great
risk as long as you have money.”

“Oh, shame! What a shocking speech!”

“Money pads the edges of things,” said Miss Schlegel. “God help those
who have none.”

“But this is something quite new!” said Mrs. Munt, who collected new
ideas as a squirrel collects nuts, and was especially attracted by
those that are portable.

“New for me; sensible people have acknowledged it for years. You and I
and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm
beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It’s only when we
see someone near us tottering that we realize all that an independent
income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire,
I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that
the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin.”

“I call that rather cynical.”

“So do I. But Helen and I, we ought to remember, when we are tempted to
criticize others, that we are standing on these islands, and that most
of the others, are down below the surface of the sea. The poor cannot
always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever
escape from those whom they love no longer. We rich can. Imagine the
tragedy last June, if Helen and Paul Wilcox had been poor people, and
couldn’t invoke railways and motor-cars to part them.”

“That’s more like Socialism,” said Mrs. Munt suspiciously.

“Call it what you like. I call it going through life with one’s hand
spread open on the table. I’m tired of these rich people who pretend to
be poor, and think it shows a nice mind to ignore the piles of money
that keep their feet above the waves. I stand each year upon six
hundred pounds, and Helen upon the same, and Tibby will stand upon
eight, and as fast as our pounds crumble away into the sea they are
renewed—from the sea, yes, from the sea. And all our thoughts are the
thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches; and because we
don’t want to steal umbrellas ourselves, we forget that below the sea
people do want to steal them, and do steal them sometimes, and that
what’s a joke up here is down there reality—”

“There they go—there goes Fräulein Mosebach. Really, for a German she
does dress charmingly. Oh—!”

“What is it?”

“Helen was looking up at the Wilcoxes’ flat.”

“Why shouldn’t she?”

“I beg your pardon, I interrupted you. What was it you were saying
about reality?”

“I had worked round to myself, as usual,” answered Margaret in tones
that were suddenly preoccupied.

“Do tell me this, at all events. Are you for the rich or for the poor?”

“Too difficult. Ask me another. Am I for poverty or for riches? For
riches. Hurrah for riches!”

“For riches!” echoed Mrs. Munt, having, as it were, at last secured her
nut.

“Yes. For riches. Money for ever!”

“So am I, and so, I am afraid, are most of my acquaintances at Swanage,
but I am surprised that you agree with us.”

“Thank you so much, Aunt Juley. While I have talked theories, you have
done the flowers.”

“Not at all, dear. I wish you would let me help you in more important
things.”

“Well, would you be very kind? Would you come round with me to the
registry office? There’s a housemaid who won’t say yes but doesn’t say
no.”

On their way thither they too looked up at the Wilcoxes’ flat. Evie was
in the balcony, “staring most rudely,” according to Mrs. Munt. Oh yes,
it was a nuisance, there was no doubt of it. Helen was proof against a
passing encounter but—Margaret began to lose confidence. Might it
reawake the dying nerve if the family were living close against her
eyes? And Frieda Mosebach was stopping with them for another fortnight,
and Frieda was sharp, abominably sharp, and quite capable of remarking,
“You love one of the young gentlemen opposite, yes?” The remark would
be untrue, but of the kind which, if stated often enough, may become
true; just as the remark, “England and Germany are bound to fight,”
renders war a little more likely each time that it is made, and is
therefore made the more readily by the gutter press of either nation.
Have the private emotions also their gutter press? Margaret thought so,
and feared that good Aunt Juley and Frieda were typical specimens of
it. They might, by continual chatter, lead Helen into a repetition of
the desires of June. Into a repetition—they could not do more; they
could not lead her into lasting love. They were—she saw it
clearly—Journalism; her father, with all his defects and
wrong-headedness, had been Literature, and had he lived, he would have
persuaded his daughter rightly.

The registry office was holding its morning reception. A string of
carriages filled the street. Miss Schlegel waited her turn, and finally
had to be content with an insidious “temporary,” being rejected by
genuine housemaids on the ground of her numerous stairs. Her failure
depressed her, and though she forgot the failure, the depression
remained. On her way home she again glanced up at the Wilcoxes’ flat,
and took the rather matronly step of speaking about the matter to
Helen.

“Helen, you must tell me whether this thing worries you.”

“If what?” said Helen, who was washing her hands for lunch.

“The W.’s coming.”

“No, of course not.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Then she admitted that she was a little worried on Mrs.
Wilcox’s account; she implied that Mrs. Wilcox might reach backward
into deep feelings, and be pained by things that never touched the
other members of that clan. “I shan’t mind if Paul points at our house
and says, ‘There lives the girl who tried to catch me.’ But she might.”

“If even that worries you, we could arrange something. There’s no
reason we should be near people who displease us or whom we displease,
thanks to our money. We might even go away for a little.”

“Well, I am going away. Frieda’s just asked me to Stettin, and I shan’t
be back till after the New Year. Will that do? Or must I fly the
country altogether? Really, Meg, what has come over you to make such a
fuss?”

“Oh, I’m getting an old maid, I suppose. I thought I minded nothing,
but really I—I should be bored if you fell in love with the same man
twice and”—she cleared her throat—“you did go red, you know, when Aunt
Juley attacked you this morning. I shouldn’t have referred to it
otherwise.”

But Helen’s laugh rang true, as she raised a soapy hand to heaven and
swore that never, nowhere and nohow, would she again fall in love with
any of the Wilcox family, down to its remotest collaterals.




Chapter 8


The friendship between Margaret and Mrs. Wilcox, which was to develop
so quickly and with such strange results, may perhaps have had its
beginnings at Speyer, in the spring. Perhaps the elder lady, as she
gazed at the vulgar, ruddy cathedral, and listened to the talk of Helen
and her husband, may have detected in the other and less charming of
the sisters a deeper sympathy, a sounder judgment. She was capable of
detecting such things. Perhaps it was she who had desired the Miss
Schlegels to be invited to Howards End, and Margaret whose presence she
had particularly desired. All this is speculation: Mrs. Wilcox has left
few clear indications behind her. It is certain that she came to call
at Wickham Place a fortnight later, the very day that Helen was going
with her cousin to Stettin.

“Helen!” cried Fräulein Mosebach in awestruck tones (she was now in her
cousin’s confidence)—“his mother has forgiven you!” And then,
remembering that in England the new-comer ought not to call before she
is called upon, she changed her tone from awe to disapproval, and
opined that Mrs. Wilcox was “keine Dame.”

“Bother the whole family!” snapped Margaret. “Helen, stop giggling and
pirouetting, and go and finish your packing. Why can’t the woman leave
us alone?”

“I don’t know what I shall do with Meg,” Helen retorted, collapsing
upon the stairs. “She’s got Wilcox and Box upon the brain. Meg, Meg, I
don’t love the young gentleman; I don’t love the young gentleman, Meg,
Meg. Can a body speak plainer?”

“Most certainly her love has died,” asserted Fräulein Mosebach.

“Most certainly it has, Frieda, but that will not prevent me from being
bored with the Wilcoxes if I return the call.”

Then Helen simulated tears, and Fräulein Mosebach, who thought her
extremely amusing, did the same. “Oh, boo hoo! boo hoo hoo! Meg’s going
to return the call, and I can’t. ’Cos why? ’Cos I’m going to
German-eye.”

“If you are going to Germany, go and pack; if you aren’t, go and call
on the Wilcoxes instead of me.”

“But, Meg, Meg, I don’t love the young gentleman; I don’t love the
young—0 lud, who’s that coming down the stairs? I vow ’tis my brother.
O crimini!”

A male—even such a male as Tibby—was enough to stop the foolery. The
barrier of sex, though decreasing among the civilized, is still high,
and higher on the side of women. Helen could tell her sister all, and
her cousin much about Paul; she told her brother nothing. It was not
prudishness, for she now spoke of “the Wilcox ideal” with laughter, and
even with a growing brutality. Nor was it precaution, for Tibby seldom
repeated any news that did not concern himself. It was rather the
feeling that she betrayed a secret into the camp of men, and that,
however trivial it was on this side of the barrier, it would become
important on that. So she stopped, or rather began to fool on other
subjects, until her long-suffering relatives drove her upstairs.
Fräulein Mosebach followed her, but lingered to say heavily over the
banisters to Margaret, “It is all right—she does not love the young
man—he has not been worthy of her.”

“Yes, I know; thanks very much.”

“I thought I did right to tell you.”

“Ever so many thanks.”

“What’s that?” asked Tibby. No one told him, and he proceeded into the
dining-room, to eat Elvas plums.

That evening Margaret took decisive action. The house was very quiet,
and the fog—we are in November now—pressed against the windows like an
excluded ghost. Frieda and Helen and all their luggage had gone. Tibby,
who was not feeling well, lay stretched on a sofa by the fire. Margaret
sat by him, thinking. Her mind darted from impulse to impulse, and
finally marshalled them all in review. The practical person, who knows
what he wants at once, and generally knows nothing else, will excuse
her of indecision. But this was the way her mind worked. And when she
did act, no one could accuse her of indecision then. She hit out as
lustily as if she had not considered the matter at all. The letter that
she wrote Mrs. Wilcox glowed with the native hue of resolution. The
pale cast of thought was with her a breath rather than a tarnish, a
breath that leaves the colours all the more vivid when it has been
wiped away.


Dear Mrs. Wilcox,

I have to write something discourteous. It would be better if we did
not meet. Both my sister and my aunt have given displeasure to your
family, and, in my sister’s case, the grounds for displeasure might
recur. As far as I know, she no longer occupies her thoughts with your
son. But it would not be fair, either to her or to you, if they met,
and it is therefore right that our acquaintance which began so
pleasantly, should end.

I fear that you will not agree with this; indeed, I know that you will
not, since you have been good enough to call on us. It is only an
instinct on my part, and no doubt the instinct is wrong. My sister
would, undoubtedly, say that it is wrong. I write without her
knowledge, and I hope that you will not associate her with my
discourtesy.


Believe me,
Yours truly,
M. J. Schlegel


Margaret sent this letter round by post. Next morning she received the
following reply by hand:


Dear Miss Schlegel,

You should not have written me such a letter. I called to tell you that
Paul has gone abroad.

Ruth Wilcox


Margaret’s cheeks burnt. She could not finish her breakfast. She was on
fire with shame. Helen had told her that the youth was leaving England,
but other things had seemed more important, and she had forgotten. All
her absurd anxieties fell to the ground, and in their place arose the
certainty that she had been rude to Mrs. Wilcox. Rudeness affected
Margaret like a bitter taste in the mouth. It poisoned life. At times
it is necessary, but woe to those who employ it without due need. She
flung on a hat and shawl, just like a poor woman, and plunged into the
fog, which still continued. Her lips were compressed, the letter
remained in her hand, and in this state she crossed the street, entered
the marble vestibule of the flats, eluded the concierges, and ran up
the stairs till she reached the second-floor.

She sent in her name, and to her surprise was shown straight into Mrs.
Wilcox’s bedroom.

“Oh, Mrs. Wilcox, I have made the baddest blunder. I am more, more
ashamed and sorry than I can say.”

Mrs. Wilcox bowed gravely. She was offended, and did not pretend to the
contrary. She was sitting up in bed, writing letters on an invalid
table that spanned her knees. A breakfast tray was on another table
beside her. The light of the fire, the light from the window, and the
light of a candle-lamp, which threw a quivering halo round her hands,
combined to create a strange atmosphere of dissolution.

“I knew he was going to India in November, but I forgot.”

“He sailed on the 17th for Nigeria, in Africa.”

“I knew—I know. I have been too absurd all through. I am very much
ashamed.”

Mrs. Wilcox did not answer.

“I am more sorry than I can say, and I hope that you will forgive me.”

“It doesn’t matter, Miss Schlegel. It is good of you to have come round
so promptly.”

“It does matter,” cried Margaret. “I have been rude to you; and my
sister is not even at home, so there was not even that excuse.

“Indeed?”

“She has just gone to Germany.”

“She gone as well,” murmured the other. “Yes, certainly, it is quite
safe—safe, absolutely, now.”

“You’ve been worrying too!” exclaimed Margaret, getting more and more
excited, and taking a chair without invitation. “How perfectly
extraordinary! I can see that you have. You felt as I do; Helen mustn’t
meet him again.”

“I did think it best.”

“Now why?”

“That’s a most difficult question,” said Mrs. Wilcox, smiling, and a
little losing her expression of annoyance. “I think you put it best in
your letter—it was an instinct, which may be wrong.”

“It wasn’t that your son still—”

“Oh no; he often—my Paul is very young, you see.”

“Then what was it?”

She repeated: “An instinct which may be wrong.”

“In other words, they belong to types that can fall in love, but
couldn’t live together. That’s dreadfully probable. I’m afraid that in
nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another.”

“These are indeed ‘other words,’” said Mrs. Wilcox.” I had nothing so
coherent in my head. I was merely alarmed when I knew that my boy cared
for your sister.”

“Ah, I have always been wanting to ask you. How did you know? Helen was
so surprised when our aunt drove up, and you stepped forward and
arranged things. Did Paul tell you?”

“There is nothing to be gained by discussing that,” said Mrs. Wilcox
after a moment’s pause.

“Mrs. Wilcox, were you very angry with us last June? I wrote you a
letter and you didn’t answer it.”

“I was certainly against taking Mrs. Matheson’s flat. I knew it was
opposite your house.”

“But it’s all right now?”

“I think so.”

“You only think? You aren’t sure? I do love these little muddles tidied
up?”

“Oh yes, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Wilcox, moving with uneasiness beneath
the clothes. “I always sound uncertain over things. It is my way of
speaking.”

“That’s all right, and I’m sure too.”

Here the maid came in to remove the breakfast-tray. They were
interrupted, and when they resumed conversation it was on more normal
lines.

“I must say good-bye now—you will be getting up.”

“No—please stop a little longer—I am taking a day in bed. Now and then
I do.”

“I thought of you as one of the early risers.”

“At Howards End—yes; there is nothing to get up for in London.”

“Nothing to get up for?” cried the scandalized Margaret. “When there
are all the autumn exhibitions, and Ysaye playing in the afternoon! Not
to mention people.”

“The truth is, I am a little tired. First came the wedding, and then
Paul went off, and, instead of resting yesterday, I paid a round of
calls.”

“A wedding?”

“Yes; Charles, my elder son, is married.”

“Indeed!”

“We took the flat chiefly on that account, and also that Paul could get
his African outfit. The flat belongs to a cousin of my husband’s, and
she most kindly offered it to us. So before the day came we were able
to make the acquaintance of Dolly’s people, which we had not yet done.”

Margaret asked who Dolly’s people were.

“Fussell. The father is in the Indian army—retired; the brother is in
the army. The mother is dead.”

So perhaps these were the “chinless sunburnt men” whom Helen had espied
one afternoon through the window. Margaret felt mildly interested in
the fortunes of the Wilcox family. She had acquired the habit on
Helen’s account, and it still clung to her. She asked for more
information about Miss Dolly Fussell that was, and was given it in
even, unemotional tones. Mrs. Wilcox’s voice, though sweet and
compelling, had little range of expression. It suggested that pictures,
concerts, and people are all of small and equal value. Only once had it
quickened—when speaking of Howards End.

“Charles and Albert Fussell have known one another some time. They
belong to the same club, and are both devoted to golf. Dolly plays golf
too, though I believe not so well, and they first met in a mixed
foursome. We all like her, and are very much pleased. They were married
on the 11th, a few days before Paul sailed. Charles was very anxious to
have his brother as best man, so he made a great point of having it on
the 11th. The Fussells would have preferred it after Christmas, but
they were very nice about it. There is Dolly’s photograph—in that
double frame.”

“Are you quite certain that I’m not interrupting, Mrs. Wilcox?”

“Yes, quite.”

“Then I will stay. I’m enjoying this.”

Dolly’s photograph was now examined. It was signed “For dear Mims,”
which Mrs. Wilcox interpreted as “the name she and Charles had settled
that she should call me.” Dolly looked silly, and had one of those
triangular faces that so often prove attractive to a robust man. She
was very pretty. From her Margaret passed to Charles, whose features
prevailed opposite. She speculated on the forces that had drawn the two
together till God parted them. She found time to hope that they would
be happy.

“They have gone to Naples for their honeymoon.”

“Lucky people!”

“I can hardly imagine Charles in Italy.”

“Doesn’t he care for travelling?”

“He likes travel, but he does see through foreigners so. What he enjoys
most is a motor tour in England, and I think that would have carried
the day if the weather had not been so abominable. His father gave him
a car of his own for a wedding present, which for the present is being
stored at Howards End.”

“I suppose you have a garage there?”

“Yes. My husband built a little one only last month, to the west of the
house, not far from the wych-elm, in what used to be the paddock for
the pony.”

The last words had an indescribable ring about them.

“Where’s the pony gone?” asked Margaret after a pause.

“The pony? Oh, dead, ever so long ago.” “The wych-elm I remember. Helen
spoke of it as a very splendid tree.”

“It is the finest wych-elm in Hertfordshire. Did your sister tell you
about the teeth?”

“No.”

“Oh, it might interest you. There are pigs’ teeth stuck into the trunk,
about four feet from the ground. The country people put them in long
ago, and they think that if they chew a piece of the bark, it will cure
the toothache. The teeth are almost grown over now, and no one comes to
the tree.”

“I should. I love folklore and all festering superstitions.”

“Do you think that the tree really did cure toothache, if one believed
in it?”

“Of course it did. It would cure anything—once.”

“Certainly I remember cases—you see I lived at Howards End long, long
before Mr. Wilcox knew it. I was born there.”

The conversation again shifted. At the time it seemed little more than
aimless chatter. She was interested when her hostess explained that
Howards End was her own property. She was bored when too minute an
account was given of the Fussell family, of the anxieties of Charles
concerning Naples, of the movements of Mr. Wilcox and Evie, who were
motoring in Yorkshire. Margaret could not bear being bored. She grew
inattentive, played with the photograph frame, dropped it, smashed
Dolly’s glass, apologized, was pardoned, cut her finger thereon, was
pitied, and finally said she must be going—there was all the
housekeeping to do, and she had to interview Tibby’s riding-master.

Then the curious note was struck again.

“Good-bye, Miss Schlegel, good-bye. Thank you for coming. You have
cheered me up.”

“I’m so glad!”

“I—I wonder whether you ever think about yourself.”

“I think of nothing else,” said Margaret, blushing, but letting her
hand remain in that of the invalid.

“I wonder. I wondered at Heidelberg.”

“_I’m_ sure!”

“I almost think—”

“Yes?” asked Margaret, for there was a long pause—a pause that was
somehow akin to the flicker of the fire, the quiver of the reading-lamp
upon their hands, the white blur from the window; a pause of shifting
and eternal shadows.

“I almost think you forget you’re a girl.”

Margaret was startled and a little annoyed. “I’m twenty-nine,” she
remarked. “That not so wildly girlish.”

Mrs. Wilcox smiled.

“What makes you say that? Do you mean that I have been gauche and
rude?”

A shake of the head. “I only meant that I am fifty-one, and that to me
both of you—Read it all in some book or other; I cannot put things
clearly.”

“Oh, I’ve got it—inexperience. I’m no better than Helen, you mean, and
yet I presume to advise her.”

“Yes. You have got it. Inexperience is the word.”

“Inexperience,” repeated Margaret, in serious yet buoyant tones. “Of
course, I have everything to learn—absolutely everything—just as much
as Helen. Life’s very difficult and full of surprises. At all events,
I’ve got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead,
to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged—well,
one can’t do all these things at once, worse luck, because they’re so
contradictory. It’s then that proportion comes in—to live by
proportion. Don’t _begin_ with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let
proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have
failed, and a deadlock—Gracious me, I’ve started preaching!”

“Indeed, you put the difficulties of life splendidly,” said Mrs.
Wilcox, withdrawing her hand into the deeper shadows. “It is just what
I should have liked to say about them myself.”




Chapter 9


Mrs. Wilcox cannot be accused of giving Margaret much information about
life. And Margaret, on the other hand, has made a fair show of modesty,
and has pretended to an inexperience that she certainly did not feel.
She had kept house for over ten years; she had entertained, almost with
distinction; she had brought up a charming sister, and was bringing up
a brother. Surely, if experience is attainable, she had attained it.

Yet the little luncheon-party that she gave in Mrs. Wilcox’s honour was
not a success. The new friend did not blend with the “one or two
delightful people” who had been asked to meet her, and the atmosphere
was one of polite bewilderment. Her tastes were simple, her knowledge
of culture slight, and she was not interested in the New English Art
Club, nor in the dividing-line between Journalism and Literature, which
was started as a conversational hare. The delightful people darted
after it with cries of joy, Margaret leading them, and not till the
meal was half over did they realize that the principal guest had taken
no part in the chase. There was no common topic. Mrs. Wilcox, whose
life had been spent in the service of husband and sons, had little to
say to strangers who had never shared it, and whose age was half her
own. Clever talk alarmed her, and withered her delicate imaginings; it
was the social counterpart of a motorcar, all jerks, and she was a
wisp of hay, a flower. Twice she deplored the weather, twice criticized
the train service on the Great Northern Railway. They vigorously
assented, and rushed on, and when she inquired whether there was any
news of Helen, her hostess was too much occupied in placing Rothenstein
to answer. The question was repeated: “I hope that your sister is safe
in Germany by now.” Margaret checked herself and said, “Yes, thank you;
I heard on Tuesday.” But the demon of vociferation was in her, and the
next moment she was off again.

“Only on Tuesday, for they live right away at Stettin. Did you ever
know any one living at Stettin?”

“Never,” said Mrs. Wilcox gravely, while her neighbour, a young man low
down in the Education Office, began to discuss what people who lived at
Stettin ought to look like. Was there such a thing as Stettininity?
Margaret swept on.

“People at Stettin drop things into boats out of overhanging
warehouses. At least, our cousins do, but aren’t particularly rich. The
town isn’t interesting, except for a clock that rolls its eyes, and the
view of the Oder, which truly is something special. Oh, Mrs. Wilcox,
you would love the Oder! The river, or rather rivers—there seem to be
dozens of them—are intense blue, and the plain they run through an
intensest green.”

“Indeed! That sounds like a most beautiful view, Miss Schlegel.”

“So I say, but Helen, who will muddle things, says no, it’s like music.
The course of the Oder is to be like music. It’s obliged to remind her
of a symphonic poem. The part by the landing-stage is in B minor, if I
remember rightly, but lower down things get extremely mixed. There is a
slodgy theme in several keys at once, meaning mud-banks, and another
for the navigable canal, and the exit into the Baltic is in C sharp
major, pianissimo.”

“What do the overhanging warehouses make of that?” asked the man,
laughing.

“They make a great deal of it,” replied Margaret, unexpectedly rushing
off on a new track. “I think it’s affectation to compare the Oder to
music, and so do you, but the overhanging warehouses of Stettin take
beauty seriously, which we don’t, and the average Englishman doesn’t,
and despises all who do. Now don’t say ‘Germans have no taste,’ or I
shall scream. They haven’t. But—but—such a tremendous but!—they take
poetry seriously. They do take poetry seriously.

“Is anything gained by that?”

“Yes, yes. The German is always on the lookout for beauty. He may miss
it through stupidity, or misinterpret it, but he is always asking
beauty to enter his life, and I believe that in the end it will come.
At Heidelberg I met a fat veterinary surgeon whose voice broke with
sobs as he repeated some mawkish poetry. So easy for me to laugh—I, who
never repeat poetry, good or bad, and cannot remember one fragment of
verse to thrill myself with. My blood boils—well, I’m half German, so
put it down to patriotism—when I listen to the tasteful contempt of the
average islander for things Teutonic, whether they’re Böcklin or my
veterinary surgeon. ‘Oh, Böcklin,’ they say; ‘he strains after beauty,
he peoples Nature with gods too consciously.’ Of course Böcklin
strains, because he wants something—beauty and all the other intangible
gifts that are floating about the world. So his landscapes don’t come
off, and Leader’s do.”

“I am not sure that I agree. Do you?” said he, turning to Mrs. Wilcox.

She replied: “I think Miss Schlegel puts everything splendidly”; and a
chill fell on the conversation.

“Oh, Mrs. Wilcox, say something nicer than that. It’s such a snub to be
told you put things splendidly.”

“I do not mean it as a snub. Your last speech interested me so much.
Generally people do not seem quite to like Germany. I have long wanted
to hear what is said on the other side.”

“The other side? Then you do disagree. Oh, good! Give us your side.”

“I have no side. But my husband”—her voice softened, the chill
increased—“has very little faith in the Continent, and our children
have all taken after him.”

“On what grounds? Do they feel that the Continent is in bad form?”

Mrs. Wilcox had no idea; she paid little attention to grounds. She was
not intellectual, nor even alert, and it was odd that, all the same,
she should give the idea of greatness. Margaret, zigzagging with her
friends over Thought and Art, was conscious of a personality that
transcended their own and dwarfed their activities. There was no
bitterness in Mrs. Wilcox; there was not even criticism; she was
lovable, and no ungracious or uncharitable word had passed her lips.
Yet she and daily life were out of focus: one or the other must show
blurred. And at lunch she seemed more out of focus than usual, and
nearer the line that divides life from a life that may be of greater
importance.

“You will admit, though, that the Continent—it seems silly to speak of
‘the Continent,’ but really it is all more like itself than any part of
it is like England. England is unique. Do have another jelly first. I
was going to say that the Continent, for good or for evil, is
interested in ideas. Its Literature and Art have what one might call
the kink of the unseen about them, and this persists even through
decadence and affectation. There is more liberty of action in England,
but for liberty of thought go to bureaucratic Prussia. People will
there discuss with humility vital questions that we here think
ourselves too good to touch with tongs.”

“I do not want to go to Prussia” said Mrs. Wilcox—“not even to see
that interesting view that you were describing. And for discussing with
humility I am too old. We never discuss anything at Howards End.”

“Then you ought to!” said Margaret. “Discussion keeps a house alive. It
cannot stand by bricks and mortar alone.”

“It cannot stand without them,” said Mrs. Wilcox, unexpectedly catching
on to the thought, and rousing, for the first and last time, a faint
hope in the breasts of the delightful people. “It cannot stand without
them, and I sometimes think—But I cannot expect your generation to
agree, for even my daughter disagrees with me here.”

“Never mind us or her. Do say!”

“I sometimes think that it is wiser to leave action and discussion to
men.”

There was a little silence.

“One admits that the arguments against the suffrage are extraordinarily
strong,” said a girl opposite, leaning forward and crumbling her bread.

“Are they? I never follow any arguments. I am only too thankful not to
have a vote myself.”

“We didn’t mean the vote, though, did we?” supplied Margaret. “Aren’t
we differing on something much wider, Mrs. Wilcox? Whether women are to
remain what they have been since the dawn of history; or whether, since
men have moved forward so far, they too may move forward a little now.
I say they may. I would even admit a biological change.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“I must be getting back to my overhanging warehouse,” said the man.
“They’ve turned disgracefully strict.”

Mrs. Wilcox also rose.

“Oh, but come upstairs for a little. Miss Quested plays. Do you like
MacDowell? Do you mind him only having two noises? If you must really
go, I’ll see you out. Won’t you even have coffee?”

They left the dining-room, closing the door behind them, and as Mrs.
Wilcox buttoned up her jacket, she said: “What an interesting life you
all lead in London!”

“No, we don’t,” said Margaret, with a sudden revulsion. “We lead the
lives of gibbering monkeys. Mrs. Wilcox—really—We have something quiet
and stable at the bottom. We really have. All my friends have. Don’t
pretend you enjoyed lunch, for you loathed it, but forgive me by coming
again, alone, or by asking me to you.”

“I am used to young people,” said Mrs. Wilcox, and with each word she
spoke the outlines of known things grew dim. “I hear a great deal of
chatter at home, for we, like you, entertain a great deal. With us it
is more sport and politics, but—I enjoyed my lunch very much, Miss
Schlegel, dear, and am not pretending, and only wish I could have
joined in more. For one thing, I’m not particularly well just today.
For another, you younger people move so quickly that it dazes me.
Charles is the same, Dolly the same. But we are all in the same boat,
old and young. I never forget that.”

They were silent for a moment. Then, with a newborn emotion, they shook
hands. The conversation ceased suddenly when Margaret re-entered the
dining-room: her friends had been talking over her new friend, and had
dismissed her as uninteresting.




Chapter 10


Several days passed.

Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people—there are many of
them—who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests
and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling round them.
Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a
definite name for such behaviour—flirting—and if carried far enough it
is punishable by law. But no law—not public opinion even—punishes those
who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict,
the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable.
Was she one of these?

Margaret feared so at first, for, with a Londoner’s impatience, she
wanted everything to be settled up immediately. She mistrusted the
periods of quiet that are essential to true growth. Desiring to book
Mrs. Wilcox as a friend, she pressed on the ceremony, pencil, as it
were, in hand, pressing the more because the rest of the family were
away, and the opportunity seemed favourable. But the elder woman would
not be hurried. She refused to fit in with the Wickham Place set, or to
reopen discussion of Helen and Paul, whom Margaret would have utilized
as a short-cut. She took her time, or perhaps let time take her, and
when the crisis did come all was ready.

The crisis opened with a message: would Miss Schlegel come shopping?
Christmas was nearing, and Mrs. Wilcox felt behind-hand with the
presents. She had taken some more days in bed, and must make up for
lost time. Margaret accepted, and at eleven o’clock one cheerless
morning they started out in a brougham.

“First of all,” began Margaret, “we must make a list and tick off the
people’s names. My aunt always does, and this fog may thicken up any
moment. Have you any ideas?”

“I thought we would go to Harrod’s or the Haymarket Stores,” said Mrs.
Wilcox rather hopelessly. “Everything is sure to be there. I am not a
good shopper. The din is so confusing, and your aunt is quite right—one
ought to make a list. Take my notebook, then, and write your own name
at the top of the page.”

“Oh, hooray!” said Margaret, writing it. “How very kind of you to start
with me!” But she did not want to receive anything expensive. Their
acquaintance was singular rather than intimate, and she divined that
the Wilcox clan would resent any expenditure on outsiders; the more
compact families do. She did not want to be thought a second Helen, who
would snatch presents since she could not snatch young men, nor to be
exposed, like a second Aunt Juley, to the insults of Charles. A certain
austerity of demeanour was best, and she added: “I don’t really want a
Yuletide gift, though. In fact, I’d rather not.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve odd ideas about Christmas. Because I have all that money
can buy. I want more people, but no more things.”

“I should like to give you something worth your acquaintance, Miss
Schlegel, in memory of your kindness to me during my lonely fortnight.
It has so happened that I have been left alone, and you have stopped me
from brooding. I am too apt to brood.”

“If that is so,” said Margaret, “if I have happened to be of use to
you, which I didn’t know, you cannot pay me back with anything
tangible.”

“ I suppose not, but one would like to. Perhaps I shall think of
something as we go about.”

Her name remained at the head of the list, but nothing was written
opposite it. They drove from shop to shop. The air was white, and when
they alighted it tasted like cold pennies. At times they passed through
a clot of grey. Mrs. Wilcox’s vitality was low that morning, and it was
Margaret who decided on a horse for this little girl, a golliwog for
that, for the rector’s wife a copper warming-tray. “We always give the
servants money.” “Yes, do you, yes, much easier,” replied Margaret, but
felt the grotesque impact of the unseen upon the seen, and saw issuing
from a forgotten manger at Bethlehem this torrent of coins and toys.
Vulgarity reigned. Public-houses, besides their usual exhortation
against temperance reform, invited men to “Join our Christmas goose
club”—one bottle of gin, etc., or two, according to subscription. A
poster of a woman in tights heralded the Christmas pantomime, and
little red devils, who had come in again that year, were prevalent upon
the Christmas-cards. Margaret was no morbid idealist. She did not wish
this spate of business and self-advertisement checked. It was only the
occasion of it that struck her with amazement annually. How many of
these vacillating shoppers and tired shop-assistants realized that it
was a divine event that drew them together? She realized it, though
standing outside in the matter. She was not a Christian in the accepted
sense; she did not believe that God had ever worked among us as a young
artisan. These people, or most of them, believed it, and if pressed,
would affirm it in words. But the visible signs of their belief were
Regent Street or Drury Lane, a little mud displaced, a little money
spent, a little food cooked, eaten, and forgotten. Inadequate. But in
public who shall express the unseen adequately? It is private life that
holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone,
that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision.

“No, I do like Christmas on the whole,” she announced. “In its clumsy
way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But oh, it is clumsier every
year.”

“Is it? I am only used to country Christmases.”

“We are usually in London, and play the game with vigour—carols at the
Abbey, clumsy midday meal, clumsy dinner for the maids, followed by
Christmas-tree and dancing of poor children, with songs from Helen. The
drawing-room does very well for that. We put the tree in the
powder-closet, and draw a curtain when the candles are lighted, and
with the looking-glass behind it looks quite pretty. I wish we might
have a powder-closet in our next house. Of course, the tree has to be
very small, and the presents don’t hang on it. No; the presents reside
in a sort of rocky landscape made of crumpled brown paper.”

“You spoke of your ‘next house,’ Miss Schlegel. Then are you leaving
Wickham Place?”

“Yes, in two or three years, when the lease expires. We must.”

“Have you been there long?”

“All our lives.”

“You will be very sorry to leave it.”

“I suppose so. We scarcely realize it yet. My father—” She broke off,
for they had reached the stationery department of the Haymarket Stores,
and Mrs. Wilcox wanted to order some private greeting cards.

“If possible, something distinctive,” she sighed. At the counter she
found a friend, bent on the same errand, and conversed with her
insipidly, wasting much time. “My husband and our daughter are
motoring.”

“Bertha too? Oh, fancy, what a coincidence!” Margaret, though not
practical, could shine in such company as this. While they talked, she
went through a volume of specimen cards, and submitted one for Mrs.
Wilcox’s inspection. Mrs. Wilcox was delighted—so original, words so
sweet; she would order a hundred like that, and could never be
sufficiently grateful. Then, just as the assistant was booking the
order, she said: “Do you know, I’ll wait. On second thoughts, I’ll
wait. There’s plenty of time still, isn’t there, and I shall be able to
get Evie’s opinion.”

They returned to the carriage by devious paths; when they were in, she
said, “But couldn’t you get it renewed?”

“I beg your pardon?” asked Margaret.

“The lease, I mean.”

“Oh, the lease! Have you been thinking of that all the time? How very
kind of you!”

“Surely something could be done.”

“No; values have risen too enormously. They mean to pull down Wickham
Place, and build flats like yours.”

“But how horrible!”

“Landlords are horrible.”

Then she said vehemently: “It is monstrous, Miss Schlegel; it isn’t
right. I had no idea that this was hanging over you. I do pity you from
the bottom of my heart. To be parted from your house, your father’s
house—it oughtn’t to be allowed. It is worse than dying. I would rather
die than—Oh, poor girls! Can what they call civilization be right, if
people mayn’t die in the room where they were born? My dear, I am so
sorry—”

Margaret did not know what to say. Mrs. Wilcox had been overtired by
the shopping, and was inclined to hysteria.

“Howards End was nearly pulled down once. It would have killed me.”

“Howards End must be a very different house to ours. We are fond of
ours, but there is nothing distinctive about it. As you saw, it is an
ordinary London house. We shall easily find another.”

“So you think.”

“Again my lack of experience, I suppose!” said Margaret, easing away
from the subject. “I can’t say anything when you take up that line,
Mrs. Wilcox. I wish I could see myself as you see me—foreshortened into
a backfisch. Quite the ingénue. Very charming—wonderfully well read for
my age, but incapable—”

Mrs. Wilcox would not be deterred. “Come down with me to Howards End
now,” she said, more vehemently than ever. “I want you to see it. You
have never seen it. I want to hear what you say about it, for you do
put things so wonderfully.”

Margaret glanced at the pitiless air and then at the tired face of her
companion. “Later on I should love it,” she continued, “but it’s hardly
the weather for such an expedition, and we ought to start when we’re
fresh. Isn’t the house shut up, too?”

She received no answer. Mrs. Wilcox appeared to be annoyed.

“Might I come some other day?”

Mrs. Wilcox bent forward and tapped the glass. “Back to Wickham Place,
please!” was her order to the coachman. Margaret had been snubbed.

“A thousand thanks, Miss Schlegel, for all your help.”

“Not at all.”

“It is such a comfort to get the presents off my mind—the
Christmas-cards especially. I do admire your choice.”

It was her turn to receive no answer. In her turn Margaret became
annoyed.

“My husband and Evie will be back the day after tomorrow. That is why I
dragged you out shopping today. I stayed in town chiefly to shop, but
got through nothing, and now he writes that they must cut their tour
short, the weather is so bad, and the police-traps have been so
bad—nearly as bad as in Surrey. Ours is such a careful chauffeur, and
my husband feels it particularly hard that they should be treated like
road-hogs.”

“Why?”

“Well, naturally he—he isn’t a road-hog.”

“He was exceeding the speed-limit, I conclude. He must expect to suffer
with the lower animals.”

Mrs. Wilcox was silenced. In growing discomfort they drove homewards.
The city seemed Satanic, the narrower streets oppressing like the
galleries of a mine. No harm was done by the fog to trade, for it lay
high, and the lighted windows of the shops were thronged with
customers. It was rather a darkening of the spirit which fell back upon
itself, to find a more grievous darkness within. Margaret nearly spoke
a dozen times, but something throttled her. She felt petty and awkward,
and her meditations on Christmas grew more cynical. Peace? It may bring
other gifts, but is there a single Londoner to whom Christmas is
peaceful? The craving for excitement and for elaboration has ruined
that blessing. Goodwill? Had she seen any example of it in the hordes
of purchasers? Or in herself. She had failed to respond to this
invitation merely because it was a little queer and imaginative—she,
whose birthright it was to nourish imagination! Better to have
accepted, to have tired themselves a little by the journey, than coldly
to reply, “Might I come some other day?” Her cynicism left her. There
would be no other day. This shadowy woman would never ask her again.

They parted at the Mansions. Mrs. Wilcox went in after due civilities,
and Margaret watched the tall, lonely figure sweep up the hall to the
lift. As the glass doors closed on it she had the sense of an
imprisonment. The beautiful head disappeared first, still buried in the
muff, the long trailing skirt followed. A woman of undefinable rarity
was going up heaven-ward, like a specimen in a bottle. And into what a
heaven—a vault as of hell, sooty black, from which soots descended!

At lunch her brother, seeing her inclined for silence, insisted on
talking. Tibby was not ill-natured, but from babyhood something drove
him to do the unwelcome and the unexpected. Now he gave her a long
account of the day-school that he sometimes patronized. The account was
interesting, and she had often pressed him for it before, but she could
not attend now, for her mind was focussed on the invisible. She
discerned that Mrs. Wilcox, though a loving wife and mother, had only
one passion in life—her house—and that the moment was solemn when she
invited a friend to share this passion with her. To answer “another
day” was to answer as a fool. “Another day” will do for brick and
mortar, but not for the Holy of Holies into which Howards End had been
transfigured. Her own curiosity was slight. She had heard more than
enough about it in the summer. The nine windows, the vine, and the
wych-elm had no pleasant connections for her, and she would have
preferred to spend the afternoon at a concert. But imagination
triumphed. While her brother held forth she determined to go, at
whatever cost, and to compel Mrs. Wilcox to go, too. When lunch was
over she stepped over to the flats.

Mrs. Wilcox had just gone away for the night.

Margaret said that it was of no consequence, hurried downstairs, and
took a hansom to King’s Cross. She was convinced that the escapade was
important, though it would have puzzled her to say why. There was a
question of imprisonment and escape, and though she did not know the
time of the train, she strained her eyes for the St. Pancras’ clock.

Then the clock of King’s Cross swung into sight, a second moon in that
infernal sky, and her cab drew up at the station. There was a train for
Hilton in five minutes. She took a ticket, asking in her agitation for
a single. As she did so, a grave and happy voice saluted her and
thanked her.

“I will come if I still may,” said Margaret, laughing nervously.

“You are coming to sleep, dear, too. It is in the morning that my house
is most beautiful. You are coming to stop. I cannot show you my meadow
properly except at sunrise. These fogs”—she pointed at the station
roof—“never spread far. I dare say they are sitting in the sun in
Hertfordshire, and you will never repent joining them.

“I shall never repent joining you.”

“It is the same.”

They began the walk up the long platform. Far at its end stood the
train, breasting the darkness without. They never reached it. Before
imagination could triumph, there were cries of “Mother! Mother!” and a
heavy-browed girl darted out of the cloak-room and seized Mrs. Wilcox
by the arm.

“Evie!” she gasped. “Evie, my pet—”

The girl called, “Father! I say! look who’s here.”

“Evie, dearest girl, why aren’t you in Yorkshire?”

“No—motor smash—changed plans—Father’s coming.”

“Why, Ruth!” cried Mr. Wilcox, joining them. “What in the name of all
that’s wonderful are you doing here, Ruth?”

Mrs. Wilcox had recovered herself.

“Oh, Henry dear!—here’s a lovely surprise—but let me introduce—but I
think you know Miss Schlegel.”

“Oh, yes,” he replied, not greatly interested. “But how’s yourself,
Ruth?”

“Fit as a fiddle,” she answered gaily.

“So are we and so was our car, which ran A-1 as far as Ripon, but there
a wretched horse and cart which a fool of a driver—”

“Miss Schlegel, our little outing must be for another day.”

“I was saying that this fool of a driver, as the policeman himself
admits—”

“Another day, Mrs. Wilcox. Of course.”

“—But as we’ve insured against third party risks, it won’t so much
matter—”

“—Cart and car being practically at right angles—”

The voices of the happy family rose high. Margaret was left alone. No
one wanted her. Mrs. Wilcox walked out of King’s Cross between her
husband and her daughter, listening to both of them.




Chapter 11


The funeral was over. The carriages rolled away through the soft mud,
and only the poor remained. They approached to the newly-dug shaft and
looked their last at the coffin, now almost hidden beneath the
spadefuls of clay. It was their moment. Most of them were women from
the dead woman’s district, to whom black garments had been served out
by Mr. Wilcox’s orders. Pure curiosity had brought others. They
thrilled with the excitement of a death, and of a rapid death, and
stood in groups or moved between the graves, like drops of ink. The son
of one of them, a wood-cutter, was perched high above their heads,
pollarding one of the churchyard elms. From where he sat he could see
the village of Hilton, strung upon the North Road, with its accreting
suburbs; the sunset beyond, scarlet and orange, winking at him beneath
brows of grey; the church; the plantations; and behind him an unspoilt
country of fields and farms. But he, too, was rolling the event
luxuriously in his mouth. He tried to tell his mother down below all
that he had felt when he saw the coffin approaching: how he could not
leave his work, and yet did not like to go on with it; how he had
almost slipped out of the tree, he was so upset; the rooks had cawed,
and no wonder—it was as if rooks knew too. His mother claimed the
prophetic power herself—she had seen a strange look about Mrs. Wilcox
for some time. London had done the mischief, said others. She had been
a kind lady; her grandmother had been kind, too—a plainer person, but
very kind. Ah, the old sort was dying out! Mr. Wilcox, he was a kind
gentleman. They advanced to the topic again and again, dully, but with
exaltation. The funeral of a rich person was to them what the funeral
of Alcestis or Ophelia is to the educated. It was Art; though remote
from life, it enhanced life’s values, and they witnessed it avidly.

The grave-diggers, who had kept up an undercurrent of disapproval—they
disliked Charles; it was not a moment to speak of such things, but they
did not like Charles Wilcox—the grave-diggers finished their work and
piled up the wreaths and crosses above it. The sun set over Hilton: the
grey brows of the evening flushed a little, and were cleft with one
scarlet frown. Chattering sadly to each other, the mourners passed
through the lych-gate and traversed the chestnut avenues that led down
to the village. The young wood-cutter stayed a little longer, poised
above the silence and swaying rhythmically. At last the bough fell
beneath his saw. With a grunt, he descended, his thoughts dwelling no
longer on death, but on love, for he was mating. He stopped as he
passed the new grave; a sheaf of tawny chrysanthemums had caught his
eye. “They didn’t ought to have coloured flowers at buryings,” he
reflected. Trudging on a few steps, he stopped again, looked furtively
at the dusk, turned back, wrenched a chrysanthemum from the sheaf, and
hid it in his pocket.

After him came silence absolute. The cottage that abutted on the
churchyard was empty, and no other house stood near. Hour after hour
the scene of the interment remained without an eye to witness it.
Clouds drifted over it from the west; or the church may have been a
ship, high-prowed, steering with all its company towards infinity.
Towards morning the air grew colder, the sky clearer, the surface of
the earth hard and sparkling above the prostrate dead. The wood-cutter,
returning after a night of joy, reflected: “They lilies, they
chrysants; it’s a pity I didn’t take them all.”

Up at Howards End they were attempting breakfast. Charles and Evie sat
in the dining-room, with Mrs. Charles. Their father, who could not bear
to see a face, breakfasted upstairs. He suffered acutely. Pain came
over him in spasms, as if it was physical, and even while he was about
to eat, his eyes would fill with tears, and he would lay down the
morsel untasted.

He remembered his wife’s even goodness during thirty years. Not
anything in detail—not courtship or early raptures—but just the
unvarying virtue, that seemed to him a woman’s noblest quality. So many
women are capricious, breaking into odd flaws of passion or frivolity.
Not so his wife. Year after year, summer and winter, as bride and
mother, she had been the same, he had always trusted her. Her
tenderness! Her innocence! The wonderful innocence that was hers by the
gift of God. Ruth knew no more of worldly wickedness and wisdom than
did the flowers in her garden, or the grass in her field. Her idea of
business—“Henry, why do people who have enough money try to get more
money?” Her idea of politics—“I am sure that if the mothers of various
nations could meet, there would be no more wars.” Her idea of
religion—ah, this had been a cloud, but a cloud that passed. She came
of Quaker stock, and he and his family, formerly Dissenters, were now
members of the Church of England. The rector’s sermons had at first
repelled her, and she had expressed a desire for “a more inward light,”
adding, “not so much for myself as for baby” (Charles). Inward light
must have been granted, for he heard no complaints in later years. They
brought up their three children without dispute. They had never
disputed.

She lay under the earth now. She had gone, and as if to make her going
the more bitter, had gone with a touch of mystery that was all unlike
her. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew of it?” he had moaned, and her
faint voice had answered: “I didn’t want to, Henry—I might have been
wrong—and every one hates illnesses.” He had been told of the horror by
a strange doctor, whom she had consulted during his absence from town.
Was this altogether just? Without fully explaining, she had died. It
was a fault on her part, and—tears rushed into his eyes—what a little
fault! It was the only time she had deceived him in those thirty years.

He rose to his feet and looked out of the window, for Evie had come in
with the letters, and he could meet no one’s eye. Ah yes—she had been a
good woman—she had been steady. He chose the word deliberately. To him
steadiness included all praise.

He himself, gazing at the wintry garden, is in appearance a steady man.
His face was not as square as his son’s, and, indeed, the chin, though
firm enough in outline, retreated a little, and the lips, ambiguous,
were curtained by a moustache. But there was no external hint of
weakness. The eyes, if capable of kindness and goodfellowship, if ruddy
for the moment with tears, were the eyes of one who could not be
driven. The forehead, too, was like Charles’s. High and straight, brown
and polished, merging abruptly into temples and skull, it has the
effect of a bastion that protected his head from the world. At times it
had the effect of a blank wall. He had dwelt behind it, intact and
happy, for fifty years.

“The post’s come, Father,” said Evie awkwardly.

“Thanks. Put it down.”

“Has the breakfast been all right?”

“Yes, thanks.”

The girl glanced at him and at it with constraint. She did not know
what to do.

“Charles says do you want the _Times_?”

“No, I’ll read it later.”

“Ring if you want anything, Father, won’t you?”

“I’ve all I want.”

Having sorted the letters from the circulars, she went back to the
dining-room.

“Father’s eaten nothing,” she announced, sitting down with wrinkled
brows behind the tea-urn—

Charles did not answer, but after a moment he ran quickly upstairs,
opened the door, and said: “Look here, Father, you must eat, you know”;
and having paused for a reply that did not come, stole down again.
“He’s going to read his letters first, I think,” he said evasively; “I
dare say he will go on with his breakfast afterwards.” Then he took up
the _Times_, and for some time there was no sound except the clink of
cup against saucer and of knife on plate.

Poor Mrs. Charles sat between her silent companions, terrified at the
course of events, and a little bored. She was a rubbishy little
creature, and she knew it. A telegram had dragged her from Naples to
the death-bed of a woman whom she had scarcely known. A word from her
husband had plunged her into mourning. She desired to mourn inwardly as
well, but she wished that Mrs. Wilcox, since fated to die, could have
died before the marriage, for then less would have been expected of
her. Crumbling her toast, and too nervous to ask for the butter, she
remained almost motionless, thankful only for this, that her
father-in-law was having his breakfast upstairs.

At last Charles spoke. “They had no business to be pollarding those
elms yesterday,” he said to his sister.

“No indeed.”

“I must make a note of that,” he continued. “I am surprised that the
rector allowed it.”

“Perhaps it may not be the rector’s affair.”

“Whose else could it be?”

“The lord of the manor.”

“Impossible.”

“Butter, Dolly?”

“Thank you, Evie dear. Charles—”

“Yes, dear?”

“I didn’t know one could pollard elms. I thought one only pollarded
willows.”

“Oh no, one can pollard elms.”

“Then why oughtn’t the elms in the churchyard to be pollarded?”

Charles frowned a little, and turned again to his sister. “Another
point. I must speak to Chalkeley.”

“Yes, rather; you must complain to Chalkeley.”

“It’s no good him saying he is not responsible for those men. He is
responsible.”

“Yes, rather.”

Brother and sister were not callous. They spoke thus, partly because
they desired to keep Chalkeley up to the mark—a healthy desire in its
way—partly because they avoided the personal note in life. All Wilcoxes
did. It did not seem to them of supreme importance. Or it may be as
Helen supposed: they realized its importance, but were afraid of it.
Panic and emptiness, could one glance behind. They were not callous,
and they left the breakfast-table with aching hearts. Their mother
never had come in to breakfast. It was in the other rooms, and
especially in the garden, that they felt her loss most. As Charles went
out to the garage, he was reminded at every step of the woman who had
loved him and whom he could never replace. What battles he had fought
against her gentle conservatism! How she had disliked improvements, yet
how loyally she had accepted them when made! He and his father—what
trouble they had had to get this very garage! With what difficulty had
they persuaded her to yield them to the paddock for it—the paddock that
she loved more dearly than the garden itself! The vine—she had got her
way about the vine. It still encumbered the south wall with its
unproductive branches. And so with Evie, as she stood talking to the
cook. Though she could take up her mother’s work inside the house, just
as the man could take it up without, she felt that something unique had
fallen out of her life. Their grief, though less poignant than their
father’s, grew from deeper roots, for a wife may be replaced; a mother
never.

Charles would go back to the office. There was little to do at Howards
End. The contents of his mother’s will had been long known to them.
There were no legacies, no annuities, none of the posthumous bustle
with which some of the dead prolong their activities. Trusting her
husband, she had left him everything without reserve. She was quite a
poor woman—the house had been all her dowry, and the house would come
to Charles in time. Her water-colours Mr. Wilcox intended to reserve
for Paul, while Evie would take the jewellery and lace. How easily she
slipped out of life! Charles thought the habit laudable, though he did
not intend to adopt it himself, whereas Margaret would have seen in it
an almost culpable indifference to earthly fame. Cynicism—not the
superficial cynicism that snarls and sneers, but the cynicism that can
go with courtesy and tenderness—that was the note of Mrs. Wilcox’s
will. She wanted not to vex people. That accomplished, the earth might
freeze over her for ever.

No, there was nothing for Charles to wait for. He could not go on with
his honeymoon, so he would go up to London and work—he felt too
miserable hanging about. He and Dolly would have the furnished flat
while his father rested quietly in the country with Evie. He could also
keep an eye on his own little house, which was being painted and
decorated for him in one of the Surrey suburbs, and in which he hoped
to install himself soon after Christmas. Yes, he would go up after
lunch in his new motor, and the town servants, who had come down for
the funeral, would go up by train.

He found his father’s chauffeur in the garage, said, “Morning” without
looking at the man’s face, and, bending over the car, continued:
“Hullo! my new car’s been driven!”

“Has it, sir?”

“Yes,” said Charles, getting rather red; “and whoever’s driven it
hasn’t cleaned it properly, for there’s mud on the axle. Take it off.”

The man went for the cloths without a word. He was a chauffeur as ugly
as sin—not that this did him disservice with Charles, who thought charm
in a man rather rot, and had soon got rid of the little Italian beast
with whom they had started.

“Charles—” His bride was tripping after him over the hoar-frost, a
dainty black column, her little face and elaborate mourning hat forming
the capital thereof.

“One minute, I’m busy. Well, Crane, who’s been driving it, do you
suppose?”

“Don’t know, I’m sure, sir. No one’s driven it since I’ve been back,
but, of course, there’s the fortnight I’ve been away with the other car
in Yorkshire.”

The mud came off easily.

“Charles, your father’s down. Something’s happened. He wants you in the
house at once. Oh, Charles!”

“Wait, dear, wait a minute. Who had the key to the garage while you
were away, Crane?”

“The gardener, sir.”

“Do you mean to tell me that old Penny can drive a motor?”

“No, sir; no one’s had the motor out, sir.”

“Then how do you account for the mud on the axle?”

“I can’t, of course, say for the time I’ve been in Yorkshire. No more
mud now, sir.”

Charles was vexed. The man was treating him as a fool, and if his heart
had not been so heavy he would have reported him to his father. But it
was not a morning for complaints. Ordering the motor to be round after
lunch, he joined his wife, who had all the while been pouring out some
incoherent story about a letter and a Miss Schlegel.

“Now, Dolly, I can attend to you. Miss Schlegel? What does she want?”

When people wrote a letter Charles always asked what they wanted. Want
was to him the only cause of action. And the question in this case was
correct, for his wife replied, “She wants Howards End.”

“Howards End? Now, Crane, just don’t forget to put on the Stepney
wheel.”

“No, sir.”

“Now, mind you don’t forget, for I—Come, little woman.” When they were
out of the chauffeur’s sight he put his arm around her waist and
pressed her against him. All his affection and half his attention—it
was what he granted her throughout their happy married life.

“But you haven’t listened, Charles—”

“What’s wrong?”

“I keep on telling you—Howards End. Miss Schlegels got it.”

“Got what?” asked Charles, unclasping her. “What the dickens are you
talking about?”

“Now, Charles, you promised not to say those naughty—”

“Look here, I’m in no mood for foolery. It’s no morning for it either.”

“I tell you—I keep on telling you—Miss Schlegel—she’s got it—your
mother’s left it to her—and you’ve all got to move out!”

“_Howards End?_”

“_Howards End!_” she screamed, mimicking him, and as she did so Evie
came dashing out of the shrubbery.

“Dolly, go back at once! My father’s much annoyed with you.
Charles”—she hit herself wildly—“come in at once to Father. He’s had a
letter that’s too awful.”

Charles began to run, but checked himself, and stepped heavily across
the gravel path. There the house was—the nine windows, the unprolific
vine. He exclaimed, “Schlegels again!” and as if to complete chaos,
Dolly said, “Oh no, the matron of the nursing home has written instead
of her.”

“Come in, all three of you!” cried his father, no longer inert. “Dolly,
why have you disobeyed me?”

“Oh, Mr. Wilcox—”

“I told you not to go out to the garage. I’ve heard you all shouting in
the garden. I won’t have it. Come in.”

He stood in the porch, transformed, letters in his hand.

“Into the dining-room, every one of you. We can’t discuss private
matters in the middle of all the servants. Here, Charles, here; read
these. See what you make.”

Charles took two letters, and read them as he followed the procession.
The first was a covering note from the matron. Mrs. Wilcox had desired
her, when the funeral should be over, to forward the enclosed. The
enclosed—it was from his mother herself. She had written: “To my
husband: I should like Miss Schlegel (Margaret) to have Howards End.”

“I suppose we’re going to have a talk about this?” he remarked,
ominously calm.

“Certainly. I was coming out to you when Dolly—”

“Well, let’s sit down.”

“Come, Evie, don’t waste time, sit down.”

In silence they drew up to the breakfast-table. The events of
yesterday—indeed, of this morning—suddenly receded into a past so
remote that they seemed scarcely to have lived in it. Heavy breathings
were heard. They were calming themselves. Charles, to steady them
further, read the enclosure out loud: “A note in my mother’s
handwriting, in an envelope addressed to my father, sealed. Inside: ‘I
should like Miss Schlegel (Margaret) to have Howards End.’ No date, no
signature. Forwarded through the matron of that nursing home. Now, the
question is—”

Dolly interrupted him. “But I say that note isn’t legal. Houses ought
to be done by a lawyer, Charles, surely.”

Her husband worked his jaw severely. Little lumps appeared in front of
either ear—a symptom that she had not yet learnt to respect, and she
asked whether she might see the note. Charles looked at his father for
permission, who said abstractedly, “Give it her.” She seized it, and at
once exclaimed: “Why, it’s only in pencil! I said so. Pencil never
counts.”

“We know that it is not legally binding, Dolly,” said Mr. Wilcox,
speaking from out of his fortress. “We are aware of that. Legally, I
should be justified in tearing it up and throwing it into the fire. Of
course, my dear, we consider you as one of the family, but it will be
better if you do not interfere with what you do not understand.”

Charles, vexed both with his father and his wife, then repeated: “The
question is—” He had cleared a space of the breakfast-table from plates
and knives, so that he could draw patterns on the tablecloth. “The
question is whether Miss Schlegel, during the fortnight we were all
away, whether she unduly—” He stopped.

“I don’t think that,” said his father, whose nature was nobler than his
son’s.

“Don’t think what?”

“That she would have—that it is a case of undue influence. No, to my
mind the question is the—the invalid’s condition at the time she
wrote.”

“My dear father, consult an expert if you like, but I don’t admit it is
my mother’s writing.”

“Why, you just said it was!” cried Dolly.

“Never mind if I did,” he blazed out; “and hold your tongue.”

The poor little wife coloured at this, and, drawing her handkerchief
from her pocket, shed a few tears. No one noticed her. Evie was
scowling like an angry boy. The two men were gradually assuming the
manner of the committee-room. They were both at their best when serving
on committees. They did not make the mistake of handling human affairs
in the bulk, but disposed of them item by item, sharply. Calligraphy
was the item before them now, and on it they turned their well-trained
brains. Charles, after a little demur, accepted the writing as genuine,
and they passed on to the next point. It is the best—perhaps the
only—way of dodging emotion. They were the average human article, and
had they considered the note as a whole it would have driven them
miserable or mad. Considered item by item, the emotional content was
minimized, and all went forward smoothly. The clock ticked, the coals
blazed higher, and contended with the white radiance that poured in
through the windows. Unnoticed, the sun occupied his sky, and the
shadows of the tree stems, extraordinarily solid, fell like trenches of
purple across the frosted lawn. It was a glorious winter morning.
Evie’s fox terrier, who had passed for white, was only a dirty grey dog
now, so intense was the purity that surrounded him. He was discredited,
but the blackbirds that he was chasing glowed with Arabian darkness,
for all the conventional colouring of life had been altered. Inside,
the clock struck ten with a rich and confident note. Other clocks
confirmed it, and the discussion moved towards its close.

To follow it is unnecessary. It is rather a moment when the commentator
should step forward. Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to
Margaret? I think not. The appeal was too flimsy. It was not legal; it
had been written in illness, and under the spell of a sudden
friendship; it was contrary to the dead woman’s intentions in the past,
contrary to her very nature, so far as that nature was understood by
them. To them Howards End was a house: they could not know that to her
it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir.
And—pushing one step farther in these mists—may they not have decided
even better than they supposed? Is it credible that the possessions of
the spirit can be bequeathed at all? Has the soul offspring? A wych-elm
tree, a vine, a wisp of hay with dew on it—can passion for such things
be transmitted where there is no bond of blood? No; the Wilcoxes are
not to be blamed. The problem is too terrific, and they could not even
perceive a problem. No; it is natural and fitting that after due debate
they should tear the note up and throw it on to their dining-room fire.
The practical moralist may acquit them absolutely. He who strives to
look deeper may acquit them—almost. For one hard fact remains. They did
neglect a personal appeal. The woman who had died did say to them, “Do
this,” and they answered, “We will not.”

The incident made a most painful impression on them. Grief mounted into
the brain and worked there disquietingly. Yesterday they had lamented:
“She was a dear mother, a true wife: in our absence she neglected her
health and died.” Today they thought: “She was not as true, as dear, as
we supposed.” The desire for a more inward light had found expression
at last, the unseen had impacted on the seen, and all that they could
say was “Treachery.” Mrs. Wilcox had been treacherous to the family, to
the laws of property, to her own written word. How did she expect
Howards End to be conveyed to Miss Schlegel? Was her husband, to whom
it legally belonged, to make it over to her as a free gift? Was the
said Miss Schlegel to have a life interest in it, or to own it
absolutely? Was there to be no compensation for the garage and other
improvements that they had made under the assumption that all would be
theirs some day? Treacherous! treacherous and absurd! When we think the
dead both treacherous and absurd, we have gone far towards reconciling
ourselves to their departure. That note, scribbled in pencil, sent
through the matron, was unbusinesslike as well as cruel, and decreased
at once the value of the woman who had written it.

“Ah, well!” said Mr. Wilcox, rising from the table. “I shouldn’t have
thought it possible.”

“Mother couldn’t have meant it,” said Evie, still frowning.

“No, my girl, of course not.”

“Mother believed so in ancestors too—it isn’t like her to leave
anything to an outsider, who’d never appreciate.”

“The whole thing is unlike her,” he announced. “If Miss Schlegel had
been poor, if she had wanted a house, I could understand it a little.
But she has a house of her own. Why should she want another? She
wouldn’t have any use of Howards End.”

“That time may prove,” murmured Charles.

“How?” asked his sister.

“Presumably she knows—mother will have told her. She got twice or three
times into the nursing home. Presumably she is awaiting developments.”

“What a horrid woman!” And Dolly, who had recovered, cried, “Why, she
may be coming down to turn us out now!”

Charles put her right. “I wish she would,” he said ominously. “I could
then deal with her.”

“So could I,” echoed his father, who was feeling rather in the cold.
Charles had been kind in undertaking the funeral arrangements and in
telling him to eat his breakfast, but the boy as he grew up was a
little dictatorial, and assumed the post of chairman too readily. “I
could deal with her, if she comes, but she won’t come. You’re all a bit
hard on Miss Schlegel.”

“That Paul business was pretty scandalous, though.”

“I want no more of the Paul business, Charles, as I said at the time,
and besides, it is quite apart from this business. Margaret Schlegel
has been officious and tiresome during this terrible week, and we have
all suffered under her, but upon my soul she’s honest. She’s not in
collusion with the matron. I’m absolutely certain of it. Nor was she
with the doctor. I’m equally certain of that. She did not hide anything
from us, for up to that very afternoon she was as ignorant as we are.
She, like ourselves, was a dupe—” He stopped for a moment. “You see,
Charles, in her terrible pain your poor mother put us all in false
positions. Paul would not have left England, you would not have gone to
Italy, nor Evie and I into Yorkshire, if only we had known. Well, Miss
Schlegel’s position has been equally false. Take all in all, she has
not come out of it badly.”

Evie said: “But those chrysanthemums—”

“Or coming down to the funeral at all—” echoed Dolly.

“Why shouldn’t she come down? She had the right to, and she stood far
back among the Hilton women. The flowers—certainly we should not have
sent such flowers, but they may have seemed the right thing to her,
Evie, and for all you know they may be the custom in Germany.”

“Oh, I forget she isn’t really English,” cried Evie. “That would
explain a lot.”

“She’s a cosmopolitan,” said Charles, looking at his watch. “I admit
I’m rather down on cosmopolitans. My fault, doubtless. I cannot stand
them, and a German cosmopolitan is the limit. I think that’s about all,
isn’t it? I want to run down and see Chalkeley. A bicycle will do. And,
by the way, I wish you’d speak to Crane some time. I’m certain he’s had
my new car out.”

“Has he done it any harm?”

“No.”

“In that case I shall let it pass. It’s not worth while having a row.”

Charles and his father sometimes disagreed. But they always parted with
an increased regard for one another, and each desired no doughtier
comrade when it was necessary to voyage for a little past the emotions.
So the sailors of Ulysses voyaged past the Sirens, having first stopped
one another’s ears with wool.




Chapter 12


Charles need not have been anxious. Miss Schlegel had never heard of
his mother’s strange request. She was to hear of it in after years,
when she had built up her life differently, and it was to fit into
position as the headstone of the corner. Her mind was bent on other
questions now, and by her also it would have been rejected as the
fantasy of an invalid.

She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his
mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out
of it for ever. The ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had
strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker,
she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but
tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide.
Her friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in
degradation. Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease
and pain. Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane
frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer
natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of
her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her
heart—almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that
we ought to die—neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer
who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the
shore that he must leave.

The last word—whatever it would be—had certainly not been said in
Hilton churchyard. She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any
more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy
devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would
register the quick motions of man. In Margaret’s eyes Mrs. Wilcox had
escaped registration. She had gone out of life vividly, her own way,
and no dust was so truly dust as the contents of that heavy coffin,
lowered with ceremonial until it rested on the dust of the earth, no
flowers so utterly wasted as the chrysanthemums that the frost must
have withered before morning. Margaret had once said she “loved
superstition.” It was not true. Few women had tried more earnestly to
pierce the accretions in which body and soul are enwrapped. The death
of Mrs. Wilcox had helped her in her work. She saw a little more
clearly than hitherto what a human being is, and to what he may aspire.
Truer relationships gleamed. Perhaps the last word would be hope—hope
even on this side of the grave.

Meanwhile, she could take an interest in the survivors. In spite of her
Christmas duties, in spite of her brother, the Wilcoxes continued to
play a considerable part in her thoughts. She had seen so much of them
in the final week. They were not “her sort,” they were often suspicious
and stupid, and deficient where she excelled; but collision with them
stimulated her, and she felt an interest that verged into liking, even
for Charles. She desired to protect them, and often felt that they
could protect her, excelling where she was deficient. Once past the
rocks of emotion, they knew so well what to do, whom to send for; their
hands were on all the ropes, they had grit as well as grittiness, and
she valued grit enormously. They led a life that she could not attain
to—the outer life of “telegrams and anger,” which had detonated when
Helen and Paul had touched in June, and had detonated again the other
week. To Margaret this life was to remain a real force. She could not
despise it, as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtues
as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no
doubt, but they have formed our civilization. They form character, too;
Margaret could not doubt it: they keep the soul from becoming sloppy.
How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a
world?

“Don’t brood too much,” she wrote to Helen, “on the superiority of the
unseen to the seen. It’s true, but to brood on it is mediaeval. Our
business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.”

Helen replied that she had no intention of brooding on such a dull
subject. What did her sister take her for? The weather was magnificent.
She and the Mosebachs had gone tobogganing on the only hill that
Pomerania boasted. It was fun, but overcrowded, for the rest of
Pomerania had gone there too. Helen loved the country, and her letter
glowed with physical exercise and poetry. She spoke of the scenery,
quiet, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, with their scampering herds
of deer; of the river and its quaint entrance into the Baltic Sea; of
the Oderberge, only three hundred feet high, from which one slid all
too quickly back into the Pomeranian plains, and yet these Oderberge
were real mountains, with pine-forests, streams, and views complete.
“It isn’t size that counts so much as the way things are arranged.” In
another paragraph she referred to Mrs. Wilcox sympathetically, but the
news had not bitten into her. She had not realized the accessories of
death, which are in a sense more memorable than death itself. The
atmosphere of precautions and recriminations, and in the midst a human
body growing more vivid because it was in pain; the end of that body in
Hilton churchyard; the survival of something that suggested hope, vivid
in its turn against life’s workaday cheerfulness;—all these were lost
to Helen, who only felt that a pleasant lady could now be pleasant no
longer. She returned to Wickham Place full of her own affairs—she had
had another proposal—and Margaret, after a moment’s hesitation, was
content that this should be so.

The proposal had not been a serious matter. It was the work of Fräulein
Mosebach, who had conceived the large and patriotic notion of winning
back her cousins to the Fatherland by matrimony. England had played
Paul Wilcox, and lost; Germany played Herr Förstmeister someone—Helen
could not remember his name.

Herr Förstmeister lived in a wood, and standing on the summit of the
Oderberge, he had pointed out his house to Helen, or rather, had
pointed out the wedge of pines in which it lay. She had exclaimed, “Oh,
how lovely! That’s the place for me!” and in the evening Frieda
appeared in her bedroom. “I have a message, dear Helen,” etc., and so
she had, but had been very nice when Helen laughed; quite understood—a
forest too solitary and damp—quite agreed, but Herr Förstmeister
believed he had assurance to the contrary. Germany had lost, but with
good-humour; holding the manhood of the world, she felt bound to win.
“And there will even be someone for Tibby,” concluded Helen. “There
now, Tibby, think of that; Frieda is saving up a little girl for you,
in pig-tails and white worsted stockings, but the feet of the stockings
are pink, as if the little girl had trodden in strawberries. I’ve
talked too much. My head aches. Now you talk.”

Tibby consented to talk. He too was full of his own affairs, for he had
just been up to try for a scholarship at Oxford. The men were down, and
the candidates had been housed in various colleges, and had dined in
hall. Tibby was sensitive to beauty, the experience was new, and he
gave a description of his visit that was almost glowing. The august and
mellow University, soaked with the richness of the western counties
that it has served for a thousand years, appealed at once to the boy’s
taste: it was the kind of thing he could understand, and he understood
it all the better because it was empty. Oxford is—Oxford: not a mere
receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to
love it rather than to love one another: such at all events was to be
its effect on Tibby. His sisters sent him there that he might make
friends, for they knew that his education had been cranky, and had
severed him from other boys and men. He made no friends. His Oxford
remained Oxford empty, and he took into life with him, not the memory
of a radiance, but the memory of a colour scheme.

It pleased Margaret to hear her brother and sister talking. They did
not get on overwell as a rule. For a few moments she listened to them,
feeling elderly and benign. Then something occurred to her, and she
interrupted:

“Helen, I told you about poor Mrs. Wilcox; that sad business?”

“Yes.”

“I have had a correspondence with her son. He was winding up the
estate, and wrote to ask me whether his mother had wanted me to have
anything. I thought it good of him, considering I knew her so little. I
said that she had once spoken of giving me a Christmas present, but we
both forgot about it afterwards.”

“I hope Charles took the hint.”

“Yes—that is to say, her husband wrote later on, and thanked me for
being a little kind to her, and actually gave me her silver
vinaigrette. Don’t you think that is extraordinarily generous? It has
made me like him very much. He hopes that this will not be the end of
our acquaintance, but that you and I will go and stop with Evie some
time in the future. I like Mr. Wilcox. He is taking up his
work—rubber—it is a big business. I gather he is launching out rather.
Charles is in it, too. Charles is married—a pretty little creature, but
she doesn’t seem wise. They took on the flat, but now they have gone
off to a house of their own.”

Helen, after a decent pause, continued her account of Stettin. How
quickly a situation changes! In June she had been in a crisis; even in
November she could blush and be unnatural; now it was January, and the
whole affair lay forgotten. Looking back on the past six months,
Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its
difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by
historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead
nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that
never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength
that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not
that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared
and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is
duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a
good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through
life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been
handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the
way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the
essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a
romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

Margaret hoped that for the future she would be less cautious, not more
cautious, than she had been in the past.




Chapter 13


Over two years passed, and the Schlegel household continued to lead its
life of cultured but not ignoble ease, still swimming gracefully on the
grey tides of London. Concerts and plays swept past them, money had
been spent and renewed, reputations won and lost, and the city herself,
emblematic of their lives, rose and fell in a continual flux, while her
shallows washed more widely against the hills of Surrey and over the
fields of Hertfordshire. This famous building had arisen, that was
doomed. Today Whitehall had been transformed: it would be the turn of
Regent Street tomorrow. And month by month the roads smelt more
strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings
heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the
air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew: the leaves were falling
by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity.

To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The Earth as an
artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future
will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town.
One can understand the reaction. Of Pan and the elemental forces, the
public has heard a little too much—they seem Victorian, while London is
Georgian—and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long
ere the pendulum swings back to her again. Certainly London fascinates.
One visualizes it as a tract of quivering grey, intelligent without
purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered
before it can be chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with
no pulsation of humanity. It lies beyond everything: Nature, with all
her cruelty, comes nearer to us than do these crowds of men. A friend
explains himself: the earth is explicable—from her we came, and we must
return to her. But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool
Street in the morning—the city inhaling—or the same thoroughfares in
the evening—the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in
desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the
universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human
face. London is religion’s opportunity—not the decorous religion of
theologians, but anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would
be tolerable if a man of our own sort—not anyone pompous or
tearful—were caring for us up in the sky.

The Londoner seldom understands his city until it sweeps him, too, away
from his moorings, and Margaret’s eyes were not opened until the lease
of Wickham Place expired. She had always known that it must expire, but
the knowledge only became vivid about nine months before the event.
Then the house was suddenly ringed with pathos. It had seen so much
happiness. Why had it to be swept away? In the streets of the city she
noted for the first time the architecture of hurry, and heard the
language of hurry on the mouths of its inhabitants—clipped words,
formless sentences, potted expressions of approval or disgust. Month by
month things were stepping livelier, but to what goal? The population
still rose, but what was the quality of the men born? The particular
millionaire who owned the freehold of Wickham Place, and desired to
erect Babylonian flats upon it—what right had he to stir so large a
portion of the quivering jelly? He was not a fool—she had heard him
expose Socialism—but true insight began just where his intelligence
ended, and one gathered that this was the case with most millionaires.
What right had such men—But Margaret checked herself. That way lies
madness. Thank goodness she, too, had some money, and could purchase a
new home.

Tibby, now in his second year at Oxford, was down for the Easter
vacation, and Margaret took the opportunity of having a serious talk
with him. Did he at all know where he wanted to live? Tibby didn’t know
that he did know. Did he at all know what he wanted to do? He was
equally uncertain, but when pressed remarked that he should prefer to
be quite free of any profession. Margaret was not shocked, but went on
sewing for a few minutes before she replied:

“I was thinking of Mr. Vyse. He never strikes me as particularly
happy.”

“Ye-es,” said Tibby, and then held his mouth open in a curious quiver,
as if he, too, had thoughts of Mr. Vyse, had seen round, through, over,
and beyond Mr. Vyse, had weighed Mr. Vyse, grouped him, and finally
dismissed him as having no possible bearing on the subject under
discussion. That bleat of Tibby’s infuriated Helen. But Helen was now
down in the dining-room preparing a speech about political economy. At
times her voice could be heard declaiming through the floor.

“But Mr. Vyse is rather a wretched, weedy man, don’t you think? Then
there’s Guy. That was a pitiful business. Besides”—shifting to the
general—” every one is the better for some regular work.”

Groans.

“I shall stick to it,” she continued, smiling. “I am not saying it to
educate you; it is what I really think. I believe that in the last
century men have developed the desire for work, and they must not
starve it. It’s a new desire. It goes with a great deal that’s bad, but
in itself it’s good, and I hope that for women, too, ‘not to work’ will
soon become as shocking as ‘not to be married’ was a hundred years
ago.”

“I have no experience of this profound desire to which you allude,”
enunciated Tibby.

“Then we’ll leave the subject till you do. I’m not going to rattle you
round. Take your time. Only do think over the lives of the men you like
most, and see how they’ve arranged them.”

“I like Guy and Mr. Vyse most,” said Tibby faintly, and leant so far
back in his chair that he extended in a horizontal line from knees to
throat.

“And don’t think I’m not serious because I don’t use the traditional
arguments—making money, a sphere awaiting you, and so on—all of which
are, for various reasons, cant.” She sewed on. “I’m only your sister. I
haven’t any authority over you, and I don’t want to have any. Just to
put before you what I think the truth. You see”—she shook off the
pince-nez to which she had recently taken—“in a few years we shall be
the same age practically, and I shall want you to help me. Men are so
much nicer than women.”

“Labouring under such a delusion, why do you not marry?”

“I sometimes jolly well think I would if I got the chance.”

“Has nobody arst you?”

“Only ninnies.”

“Do people ask Helen?”

“Plentifully.”

“Tell me about them.”

“No.”

“Tell me about your ninnies, then.”

“They were men who had nothing better to do,” said his sister, feeling
that she was entitled to score this point. “So take warning: you must
work, or else you must pretend to work, which is what I do. Work, work,
work if you’d save your soul and your body. It is honestly a necessity,
dear boy. Look at the Wilcoxes, look at Mr. Pembroke. With all their
defects of temper and understanding, such men give me more pleasure
than many who are better equipped and I think it is because they have
worked regularly and honestly.

“Spare me the Wilcoxes,” he moaned.

“I shall not. They are the right sort.”

“Oh, goodness me, Meg!” he protested, suddenly sitting up, alert and
angry. Tibby, for all his defects, had a genuine personality.

“Well, they’re as near the right sort as you can imagine.”

“No, no—oh, no!”

“I was thinking of the younger son, whom I once classed as a ninny, but
who came back so ill from Nigeria. He’s gone out there again, Evie
Wilcox tells me—out to his duty.”

“Duty” always elicited a groan.

“He doesn’t want the money, it is work he wants, though it is beastly
work—dull country, dishonest natives, an eternal fidget over fresh
water and food. A nation who can produce men of that sort may well be
proud. No wonder England has become an Empire.”

“_Empire!_”

“I can’t bother over results,” said Margaret, a little sadly. “They are
too difficult for me. I can only look at the men. An Empire bores me,
so far, but I can appreciate the heroism that builds it up. London
bores me, but what thousands of splendid people are labouring to make
London—”

“What it is,” he sneered.

“What it is, worse luck. I want activity without civilization. How
paradoxical! Yet I expect that is what we shall find in heaven.”

“And I,” said Tibby, “want civilization without

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2891