CHAPTER XV
The sisters went out to dinner full of their adventure, and when they were both full of the same subject, there were few dinner-parties that could stand up against them. This particular one, which was all ladies, had more kick in it than most, but succumbed after a struggle. Helen at one part of the table, Margaret at the other, would talk of Mr. Bast and of no one else, and somewhere about the entree their monologues collided, fell ruining, and became common property. Nor was this all. The dinner-party was really an informal discussion club; there was a paper after it, read amid coffee-cups and laughter in the drawing-room, but dealing more or less thoughtfully with some topic of general interest. After the paper came a debate, and in this debate Mr. Bast also figured, appearing now as a bright spot in civilisation, now as a dark spot, according to the temperament of the speaker. The subject of the paper had been, “How ought I to dispose of my money?” the reader professing to be a millionaire on the point of death, inclined to bequeath her fortune for the foundation of local art galleries, but open to conviction from other sources. The various parts had been assigned beforehand, and some of the speeches were amusing. The hostess assumed the ungrateful role of “the millionaire’s eldest son,” and implored her expiring parent not to dislocate Society by allowing such vast sums to pass out of the family. Money was the fruit of self-denial, and the second generation had a right to profit by the self-denial of the first. What right had “Mr. Bast” to profit? The National Gallery was good enough for the likes of him. After property had had its say—a saying that is necessarily ungracious—the various philanthropists stepped forward. Something must be done for “Mr. Bast”; his conditions must be improved without impairing his independence; he must have a free library, or free tennis-courts; his rent must be paid in such a way that he did not know it was being paid; it must be made worth his while to join the Territorials; he must be forcibly parted from his uninspiring wife, the money going to her as compensation; he must be assigned a Twin Star, some member of the leisured classes who would watch over him ceaselessly (groans from Helen); he must be given food but no clothes, clothes but no food, a third-return ticket to Venice, without either food or clothes when he arrived there. In short, he might be given anything and everything so long as it was not the money itself.
And here Margaret interrupted.
“Order, order, Miss Schlegel!” said the reader of the paper. “You are here, I understand, to advise me in the interests of the Society for the Preservation of Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. I cannot have you speaking out of your role. It makes my poor head go round, and I think you forget that I am very ill.”
“Your head won’t go round if only you’ll listen to my argument,” said Margaret. “Why not give him the money itself? You’re supposed to have about thirty thousand a year.”
“Have I? I thought I had a million.”
“Wasn’t a million your capital? Dear me! we ought to have settled that. Still, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you’ve got, I order you to give as many poor men as you can three hundred a year each.”
“But that would be pauperising them,” said an earnest girl, who liked the Schlegels, but thought them a little unspiritual at times.
“Not if you gave them so much. A big windfall would not pauperise a man. It is these little driblets, distributed among too many, that do the harm. Money’s educational. It’s far more educational than the things it buys.” There was a protest. “In a sense,” added Margaret, but the protest continued. “Well, isn’t the most civilized thing going, the man who has learnt to wear his income properly?”
“Exactly what your Mr. Basts won’t do.”
“Give them a chance. Give them money. Don’t dole them out poetry-books and railway-tickets like babies. Give them the wherewithal to buy these things. When your Socialism comes it may be different, and we may think in terms of commodities instead of cash. Till it comes give people cash, for it is the warp of civilisation, whatever the woof may be. The imagination ought to play upon money and realise it vividly, for it’s the—the second most important thing in the world. It is so slurred over and hushed up, there is so little clear thinking—oh, political economy, of course, but so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means. Money: give Mr. Bast money, and don’t bother about his ideals. He’ll pick up those for himself.”
She leant back while the more earnest members of the club began to misconstrue her. The female mind, though cruelly practical in daily life, cannot bear to hear ideals belittled in conversation, and Miss Schlegel was asked however she could say such dreadful things, and what it would profit Mr. Bast if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul. She answered, “Nothing, but he would not gain his soul until he had gained a little of the world.” Then they said, “No, we do not believe it,” and she admitted that an overworked clerk may save his soul in the superterrestrial sense, where the effort will be taken for the deed, but she denied that he will ever explore the spiritual resources of this world, will ever know the rarer joys of the body, or attain to clear and passionate intercourse with his fellows. Others had attacked the fabric of Society—Property, Interest, etc.; she only fixed her eyes on a few human beings, to see how, under present conditions, they could be made happier. Doing good to humanity was useless: the many-coloured efforts thereto spreading over the vast area like films and resulting in an universal grey. To do good to one, or, as in this case, to a few, was the utmost she dare hope for.
Between the idealists, and the political economists, Margaret had a bad time. Disagreeing elsewhere, they agreed in disowning her, and in keeping the administration of the millionaire’s money in their own hands. The earnest girl brought forward a scheme of “personal supervision and mutual help,” the effect of which was to alter poor people until they became exactly like people who were not so poor. The hostess pertinently remarked that she, as eldest son, might surely rank among the millionaire’s legatees. Margaret weakly admitted the claim, and another claim was at once set up by Helen, who declared that she had been the millionaire’s housemaid for over forty years, overfed and underpaid; was nothing to be done for her, so corpulent and poor? The millionaire then read out her last will and testament, in which she left the whole of her fortune to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Then she died. The serious parts of the discussion had been of higher merit than the playful—in a men’s debate is the reverse more general?—but the meeting broke up hilariously enough, and a dozen happy ladies dispersed to their homes.
Helen and Margaret walked with the earnest girl as far as Battersea Bridge Station, arguing copiously all the way. When she had gone they were conscious of an alleviation, and of the great beauty of the evening. They turned back towards Oakley Street. The lamps and the plane-trees, following the line of the embankment, struck a note of dignity that is rare in English cities. The seats, almost deserted, were here and there occupied by gentlefolk in evening dress, who had strolled out from the houses behind to enjoy fresh air and the whisper of the rising tide. There is something continental about Chelsea Embankment. It is an open space used rightly, a blessing more frequent in Germany than here. As Margaret and Helen sat down, the city behind them seemed to be a vast theatre, an opera-house in which some endless trilogy was performing, and they themselves a pair of satisfied subscribers, who did not mind losing a little of the second act.
“Cold?”
“No.”
“Tired?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
The earnest girl’s train rumbled away over the bridge.
“I say, Helen—”
“Well?”
“Are we really going to follow up Mr. Bast?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think we won’t.”
“As you like.”
“It’s no good, I think, unless you really mean to know people. The discussion brought that home to me. We got on well enough with him in a spirit of excitement, but think of rational intercourse. We mustn’t play at friendship. No, it’s no good.”
“There’s Mrs. Lanoline, too,” Helen yawned. “So dull.”
“Just so, and possibly worse than dull.”
“I should like to know how he got hold of your card.”
“But he said—something about a concert and an umbrella.”
“Then did the card see the wife—”
“Helen, come to bed.”
“No, just a little longer, it is so beautiful. Tell me; oh yes; did you say money is the warp of the world?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s the woof?”
“Very much what one chooses,” said Margaret. “It’s something that isn’t money—one can’t say more.”
“Walking at night?”
“Probably.”
“For Tibby, Oxford?”
“It seems so.”
“For you?”
“Now that we have to leave Wickham Place, I begin to think it’s that. For Mrs. Wilcox it was certainly Howards End.”
One’s own name will carry immense distances. Mr. Wilcox, who was sitting with friends many seats away, heard this, rose to his feet, and strolled along towards the speakers.
“It is sad to suppose that places may ever be more important than people,” continued Margaret.
“Why, Meg? They’re so much nicer generally. I’d rather think of that forester’s house in Pomerania than of the fat Herr Forstmeister who lived in it.”
“I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.”
Here Mr. Wilcox reached them. It was several weeks since they had met.
“How do you do?” he cried. “I thought I recognised your voices. Whatever are you both doing down here?”
His tones were protective. He implied that one ought not to sit out on Chelsea Embankment without a male escort. Helen resented this, but Margaret accepted it as part of the good man’s equipment.
“What an age it is since I’ve seen you, Mr. Wilcox. I met Evie in the Tube, though, lately. I hope you have good news of your son.”
“Paul?” said Mr. Wilcox, extinguishing his cigarette, and sitting down between them. “Oh, Paul’s all right. We had a line from Madeira. He’ll be at work again by now.”
“Ugh—” said Helen, shuddering from complex causes.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Isn’t the climate of Nigeria too horrible?”
“Some one’s got to go,” he said simply. “England will never keep her trade overseas unless she is prepared to make sacrifices. Unless we get firm in West Africa, Ger—untold complications may follow. Now tell me all your news.”
“Oh, we’ve had a splendid evening,” cried Helen, who always woke up at the advent of a visitor. “We belong to a kind of club that reads papers, Margaret and I—all women, but there is a discussion after. This evening it was on how one ought to leave one’s money—whether to one’s family, or to the poor, and if so how—oh, most interesting.”
The man of business smiled. Since his wife’s death he had almost doubled his income. He was an important figure at last, a reassuring name on company prospectuses, and life had treated him very well. The world seemed in his grasp as he listened to the River Thames, which still flowed inland from the sea. So wonderful to the girls, it held no mysteries for him. He had helped to shorten its long tidal trough by taking shares in the lock at Teddington, and if he and other capitalists thought good, some day it could be shortened again. With a good dinner inside him and an amiable but academic woman on either flank, he felt that his hands were on all the ropes of life, and that what he did not know could not be worth knowing.
“Sounds a most original entertainment!” he exclaimed, and laughed in his pleasant way. “I wish Evie would go to that sort of thing. But she hasn’t the time. She’s taken to breeding Aberdeen terriers—jolly little dogs.”
“I expect we’d better be doing the same, really.”
“We pretend we’re improving ourselves, you see,” said Helen a little sharply, for the Wilcox glamour is not of the kind that returns, and she had bitter memories of the days when a speech such as he had just made would have impressed her favourably. “We suppose it a good thing to waste an evening once a fortnight over a debate, but, as my sister says, it may be better to breed dogs.”
“Not at all. I don’t agree with your sister. There’s nothing like a debate to teach one quickness. I often wish I had gone in for them when I was a youngster. It would have helped me no end.”
“Quickness—?”
“Yes. Quickness in argument. Time after time I’ve missed scoring a point because the other man has had the gift of the gab and I haven’t. Oh, I believe in these discussions.”
The patronising tone, thought Margaret, came well enough from a man who was old enough to be their father. She had always maintained that Mr. Wilcox had a charm. In times of sorrow or emotion his inadequacy had pained her, but it was pleasant to listen to him now, and to watch his thick brown moustache and high forehead confronting the stars. But Helen was nettled. The aim of their debates she implied was Truth.
“Oh yes, it doesn’t much matter what subject you take,” said he.
Margaret laughed and said, “But this is going to be far better than the debate itself.” Helen recovered herself and laughed too. “No, I won’t go on,” she declared. “I’ll just put our special case to Mr. Wilcox.”
“About Mr. Bast? Yes, do. He’ll be more lenient to a special case.”
“But, Mr. Wilcox, do first light another cigarette. It’s this. We’ve just come across a young fellow, who’s evidently very poor, and who seems interest—”
“What’s his profession?”
“Clerk.”
“What in?”
“Do you remember, Margaret?”
“Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company.”
“Oh yes; the nice people who gave Aunt Juley a new hearth rug. He seems interesting, in some ways very, and one wishes one could help him. He is married to a wife whom he doesn’t seem to care for much. He likes books, and what one may roughly call adventure, and if he had a chance—But he is so poor. He lives a life where all the money is apt to go on nonsense and clothes. One is so afraid that circumstances will be too strong for him and that he will sink. Well, he got mixed up in our debate. He wasn’t the subject of it, but it seemed to bear on his point. Suppose a millionaire died, and desired to leave money to help such a man. How should he be helped? Should he be given three hundred pounds a year direct, which was Margaret’s plan? Most of them thought this would pauperise him. Should he and those like him be given free libraries? I said ‘No!’ He doesn’t want more books to read, but to read books rightly. My suggestion was he should be given something every year towards a summer holiday, but then there is his wife, and they said she would have to go too. Nothing seemed quite right! Now what do you think? Imagine that you were a millionaire, and wanted to help the poor. What would you do?”
Mr. Wilcox, whose fortune was not so very far below the standard indicated, laughed exuberantly. “My dear Miss Schlegel, I will not rush in where your sex has been unable to tread. I will not add another plan to the numerous excellent ones that have been already suggested. My only contribution is this: let your young friend clear out of the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company with all possible speed.”
“Why?” said Margaret.
He lowered his voice. “This is between friends. It’ll be in the Receiver’s hands before Christmas. It’ll smash,” he added, thinking that she had not understood.
“Dear me, Helen, listen to that. And he’ll have to get another place!”
“WILL have? Let him leave the ship before it sinks. Let him get one now.”
“Rather than wait, to make sure?”
“Decidedly.”
“Why’s that?”
Again the Olympian laugh, and the lowered voice. “Naturally the man who’s in a situation when he applies stands a better chance, is in a stronger position, that the man who isn’t. It looks as if he’s worth something. I know by myself—(this is letting you into the State secrets)—it affects an employer greatly. Human nature, I’m afraid.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” murmured Margaret, while Helen said, “Our human nature appears to be the other way round. We employ people because they’re unemployed. The boot man, for instance.”
“And how does he clean the boots?”
“Not well,” confessed Margaret.
“There you are!”
“Then do you really advise us to tell this youth—?”
“I advise nothing,” he interrupted, glancing up and down the Embankment, in case his indiscretion had been overheard. “I oughtn’t to have spoken—but I happen to know, being more or less behind the scenes. The Porphyrion’s a bad, bad concern—Now, don’t say I said so. It’s outside the Tariff Ring.”
“Certainly I won’t say. In fact, I don’t know what that means.”
“I thought an insurance company never smashed,” was Helen’s contribution. “Don’t the others always run in and save them?”
“You’re thinking of reinsurance,” said Mr. Wilcox mildly. “It is exactly there that the Porphyrion is weak. It has tried to undercut, has been badly hit by a long series of small fires, and it hasn’t been able to reinsure. I’m afraid that public companies don’t save one another for love.”
“‘Human nature,’ I suppose,” quoted Helen, and he laughed and agreed that it was. When Margaret said that she supposed that clerks, like every one else, found it extremely difficult to get situations in these days, he replied, “Yes, extremely,” and rose to rejoin his friends. He knew by his own office—seldom a vacant post, and hundreds of applicants for it; at present no vacant post.
“And how’s Howards End looking?” said Margaret, wishing to change the subject before they parted. Mr. Wilcox was a little apt to think one wanted to get something out of him.
“It’s let.”
“Really. And you wandering homeless in longhaired Chelsea? How strange are the ways of Fate!”
“No; it’s let unfurnished. We’ve moved.”
“Why, I thought of you both as anchored there for ever. Evie never told me.”
“I dare say when you met Evie the thing wasn’t settled. We only moved a week ago. Paul has rather a feeling for the old place, and we held on for him to have his holiday there; but, really, it is impossibly small. Endless drawbacks. I forget whether you’ve been up to it?”
“As far as the house, never.”
“Well, Howards End is one of those converted farms. They don’t really do, spend what you will on them. We messed away with a garage all among the wych-elm roots, and last year we enclosed a bit of the meadow and attempted a rockery. Evie got rather keen on Alpine plants. But it didn’t do—no, it didn’t do. You remember, your sister will remember, the farm with those abominable guinea-fowls, and the hedge that the old woman never would cut properly, so that it all went thin at the bottom. And, inside the house, the beams—and the staircase through a door—picturesque enough, but not a place to live in.” He glanced over the parapet cheerfully. “Full tide. And the position wasn’t right either. The neighbourhood’s getting suburban. Either be in London or out of it, I say; so we’ve taken a house in Ducie Street, close to Sloane Street, and a place right down in Shropshire—Oniton Grange. Ever heard of Oniton? Do come and see us—right away from everywhere, up towards Wales.”
“What a change!” said Margaret. But the change was in her own voice, which had become most sad. “I can’t imagine Howards End or Hilton without you.”
“Hilton isn’t without us,” he replied. “Charles is there still.”
“Still?” said Margaret, who had not kept up with the Charles’s. “But I thought he was still at Epsom. They were furnishing that Christmas—one Christmas. How everything alters! I used to admire Mrs. Charles from our windows very often. Wasn’t it Epsom?”
“Yes, but they moved eighteen months ago. Charles, the good chap”—his voice dropped—“thought I should be lonely. I didn’t want him to move, but he would, and took a house at the other end of Hilton, down by the Six Hills. He had a motor, too. There they all are, a very jolly party—he and she and the two grandchildren.”
“I manage other people’s affairs so much better than they manage them themselves,” said Margaret as they shook hands. “When you moved out of Howards End, I should have moved Mr. Charles Wilcox into it. I should have kept so remarkable a place in the family.”
“So it is,” he replied. “I haven’t sold it, and don’t mean to.”
“No; but none of you are there.”
“Oh, we’ve got a splendid tenant—Hamar Bryce, an invalid. If Charles ever wanted it—but he won’t. Dolly is so dependent on modern conveniences. No, we have all decided against Howards End. We like it in a way, but now we feel that it is neither one thing nor the other. One must have one thing or the other.”
“And some people are lucky enough to have both. You’re doing yourself proud, Mr. Wilcox. My congratulations.”
“And mine,” said Helen.
“Do remind Evie to come and see us—2 Wickham Place. We shan’t be there very long, either.”
“You, too, on the move?”
“Next September,” Margaret sighed.
“Every one moving! Good-bye.”
The tide had begun to ebb. Margaret leant over the parapet and watched it sadly. Mr. Wilcox had forgotten his wife, Helen her lover; she herself was probably forgetting. Every one moving. Is it worth while attempting the past when there is this continual flux even in the hearts of men?
Helen roused her by saying: “What a prosperous vulgarian Mr. Wilcox has grown! I have very little use for him in these days. However, he did tell us about the Porphyrion. Let us write to Mr. Bast as soon as ever we get home, and tell him to clear out of it at once.”
“Do; yes, that’s worth doing. Let us.”
CHAPTER XVI
Leonard accepted the invitation to tea next Saturday. But he was right; the visit proved a conspicuous failure.
“Sugar?” said Margaret.
“Cake?” said Helen. “The big cake or the little deadlies? I’m afraid you thought my letter rather odd, but we’ll explain—we aren’t odd, really—nor affected, really. We’re over-expressive—that’s all.”
As a lady’s lap-dog Leonard did not excel. He was not an Italian, still less a Frenchman, in whose blood there runs the very spirit of persiflage and of gracious repartee. His wit was the Cockney’s; it opened no doors into imagination, and Helen was drawn up short by “The more a lady has to say, the better,” administered waggishly.
“Oh yes,” she said.
“Ladies brighten—”
“Yes, I know. The darlings are regular sunbeams. Let me give you a plate.”
“How do you like your work?” interposed Margaret.
He, too, was drawn up short. He would not have these women prying into his work. They were Romance, and so was the room to which he had at last penetrated, with the queer sketches of people bathing upon its walls, and so were the very tea-cups, with their delicate borders of wild strawberries. But he would not let romance interfere with his life. There is the devil to pay then.
“Oh, well enough,” he answered.
“Your company is the Porphyrion, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s so.”—becoming rather offended. “It’s funny how things get round.”
“Why funny?” asked Helen, who did not follow the workings of his mind. “It was written as large as life on your card, and considering we wrote to you there, and that you replied on the stamped paper—”
“Would you call the Porphyrion one of the big Insurance Companies?” pursued Margaret.
“It depends on what you call big.”
“I mean by big, a solid, well-established concern, that offers a reasonably good career to its employes.”
“I couldn’t say—some would tell you one thing and others another,” said the employee uneasily. “For my own part”—he shook his head—“I only believe half I hear. Not that even; it’s safer. Those clever ones come to the worse grief, I’ve often noticed. Ah, you can’t be too careful.”
He drank, and wiped his moustache, which was going to be one of those moustaches that always droop into tea-cups—more bother than they’re worth, surely, and not fashionable either.
“I quite agree, and that’s why I was curious to know; is it a solid, well-established concern?”
Leonard had no idea. He understood his own corner of the machine, but nothing beyond it. He desired to confess neither knowledge nor ignorance, and under these circumstances, another motion of the head seemed safest. To him, as to the British public, the Porphyrion was the Porphyrion of the advertisement—a giant, in the classical style, but draped sufficiently, who held in one hand a burning torch, and pointed with the other to St. Paul’s and Windsor Castle. A large sum of money was inscribed below, and you drew your own conclusions. This giant caused Leonard to do arithmetic and write letters, to explain the regulations to new clients, and re-explain them to old ones. A giant was of an impulsive morality—one knew that much. He would pay for Mrs. Munt’s hearthrug with ostentatious haste, a large claim he would repudiate quietly, and fight court by court. But his true fighting weight, his antecedents, his amours with other members of the commercial Pantheon—all these were as uncertain to ordinary mortals as were the escapades of Zeus. While the gods are powerful, we learn little about them. It is only in the days of their decadence that a strong light beats into heaven.
“We were told the Porphyrion’s no go,” blurted Helen. “We wanted to tell you; that’s why we wrote.”
“A friend of ours did think that it is insufficiently reinsured,” said Margaret.
Now Leonard had his clue.
He must praise the Porphyrion. “You can tell your friend,” he said, “that he’s quite wrong.”
“Oh, good!”
The young man coloured a little. In his circle to be wrong was fatal. The Miss Schlegels did not mind being wrong. They were genuinely glad that they had been misinformed. To them nothing was fatal but evil.
“Wrong, so to speak,” he added.
“How ‘so to speak’?”
“I mean I wouldn’t say he’s right altogether.”
But this was a blunder. “Then he is right partly,” said the elder woman, quick as lightning.
Leonard replied that every one was right partly, if it came to that.
“Mr. Bast, I don’t understand business, and I dare say my questions are stupid, but can you tell me what makes a concern ‘right’ or ‘wrong’?”
Leonard sat back with a sigh.
“Our friend, who is also a business man, was so positive. He said before Christmas—”
“And advised you to clear out of it,” concluded Helen. “But I don’t see why he should know better than you do.”
Leonard rubbed his hands. He was tempted to say that he knew nothing about the thing at all. But a commercial training was too strong for him. Nor could he say it was a bad thing, for this would be giving it away; nor yet that it was good, for this would be giving it away equally. He attempted to suggest that it was something between the two, with vast possibilities in either direction, but broke down under the gaze of four sincere eyes. And yet he scarcely distinguished between the two sisters. One was more beautiful and more lively, but “the Miss Schlegels” still remained a composite Indian god, whose waving arms and contradictory speeches were the product of a single mind.
“One can but see,” he remarked, adding, “as Ibsen says, ‘things happen.’” He was itching to talk about books and make the most of his romantic hour. Minute after minute slipped away, while the ladies, with imperfect skill, discussed the subject of reinsurance or praised their anonymous friend. Leonard grew annoyed—perhaps rightly. He made vague remarks about not being one of those who minded their affairs being talked over by others, but they did not take the hint. Men might have shown more tact. Women, however tactful elsewhere, are heavy-handed here. They cannot see why we should shroud our incomes and our prospects in a veil. “How much exactly have you, and how much do you expect to have next June?” And these were women with a theory, who held that reticence about money matters is absurd, and that life would be truer if each would state the exact size of the golden island upon which he stands, the exact stretch of warp over which he throws the woof that is not money. How can we do justice to the pattern otherwise?
And the precious minutes slipped away, and Jacky and squalor came nearer. At last he could bear it no longer, and broke in, reciting the names of books feverishly. There was a moment of piercing joy when Margaret said, “So YOU like Carlyle” and then the door opened, and “Mr. Wilcox, Miss Wilcox” entered, preceded by two prancing puppies.
“Oh, the dears! Oh, Evie, how too impossibly sweet!” screamed Helen, falling on her hands and knees.
“We brought the little fellows round,” said Mr. Wilcox.
“I bred ’em myself.”
“Oh, really! Mr. Bast, come and play with puppies.”
“I’ve got to be going now,” said Leonard sourly.
“But play with puppies a little first.”
“This is Ahab, that’s Jezebel,” said Evie, who was one of those who name animals after the less successful characters of Old Testament history.
“I’ve got to be going.”
Helen was too much occupied with puppies to notice him.
“Mr. Wilcox, Mr. Ba—Must you be really? Good-bye!”
“Come again,” said Helen from the floor.
Then Leonard’s gorge arose. Why should he come again? What was the good of it? He said roundly: “No, I shan’t; I knew it would be a failure.”
Most people would have let him go. “A little mistake. We tried knowing another class—impossible.”
But the Schlegels had never played with life. They had attempted friendship, and they would take the consequences. Helen retorted, “I call that a very rude remark. What do you want to turn on me like that for?” and suddenly the drawing-room re-echoed to a vulgar row.
“You ask me why I turn on you?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want to have me here for?’
“To help you, you silly boy!” cried Helen. “And don’t shout.”
“I don’t want your patronage. I don’t want your tea. I was quite happy. What do you want to unsettle me for?” He turned to Mr. Wilcox. “I put it to this gentleman. I ask you, sir, am I to have my brain picked?”
Mr. Wilcox turned to Margaret with the air of humorous strength that he could so well command. “Are we intruding, Miss Schlegel? Can we be of any use, or shall we go?”
But Margaret ignored him.
“I’m connected with a leading insurance company, sir. I receive what I take to be an invitation from these—ladies” (he drawled the word). “I come, and it’s to have my brain picked. I ask you, is it fair?”
“Highly unfair,” said Mr. Wilcox, drawing a gasp from Evie, who knew that her father was becoming dangerous.
“There, you hear that? Most unfair, the gentleman says. There! Not content with”—pointing at Margaret—“you can’t deny it.” His voice rose; he was falling into the rhythm of a scene with Jacky. “But as soon as I’m useful it’s a very different thing. ‘Oh yes, send for him. Cross-question him. Pick his brains.’ Oh yes. Now, take me on the whole, I’m a quiet fellow: I’m law-abiding, I don’t wish any unpleasantness; but I—I—”
“You,” said Margaret—“you—you—”
Laughter from Evie as at a repartee.
“You are the man who tried to walk by the Pole Star.”
More laughter.
“You saw the sunrise.”
Laughter.
“You tried to get away from the fogs that are stifling us all—away past books and houses to the truth. You were looking for a real home.”
“I fail to see the connection,” said Leonard, hot with stupid anger.
“So do I.” There was a pause. “You were that last Sunday—you are this to-day. Mr. Bast! I and my sister have talked you over. We wanted to help you; we also supposed you might help us. We did not have you here out of charity—which bores us—but because we hoped there would be a connection between last Sunday and other days. What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought—Haven’t we all to struggle against life’s daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place—some beloved place or tree—we thought you one of these.”
“Of course, if there’s been any misunderstanding,” mumbled Leonard, “all I can do is to go. But I beg to state—” He paused. Ahab and Jezebel danced at his boots and made him look ridiculous. “You were picking my brain for official information—I can prove it—I—” He blew his nose and left them.
“Can I help you now?” said Mr. Wilcox, turning to Margaret. “May I have one quiet word with him in the hall?”
“Helen, go after him—do anything—anything—to make the noodle understand.”
Helen hesitated.
“But really—” said their visitor. “Ought she to?”
At once she went.
He resumed. “I would have chimed in, but I felt that you could polish him off for yourselves—I didn’t interfere. You were splendid, Miss Schlegel—absolutely splendid. You can take my word for it, but there are very few women who could have managed him.”
“Oh yes,” said Margaret distractedly.
“Bowling him over with those long sentences was what fetched me,” cried Evie.
“Yes, indeed,” chuckled her father; “all that part about ‘mechanical cheerfulness’—oh, fine!”
“I’m very sorry,” said Margaret, collecting herself. “He’s a nice creature really. I cannot think what set him off. It has been most unpleasant for you.”
“Oh, I didn’t mind.” Then he changed his mood. He asked if he might speak as an old friend, and, permission given, said: “Oughtn’t you really to be more careful?”
Margaret laughed, though her thoughts still strayed after Helen. “Do you realise that it’s all your fault?” she said. “You’re responsible.”
“I?”
“This is the young man whom we were to warn against the Porphyrion. We warn him, and—look!”
Mr. Wilcox was annoyed. “I hardly consider that a fair deduction,” he said.
“Obviously unfair,” said Margaret. “I was only thinking how tangled things are. It’s our fault mostly—neither yours nor his.”
“Not his?”
“No.”
“Miss Schlegel, you are too kind.”
“Yes, indeed,” nodded Evie, a little contemptuously.
“You behave much too well to people, and then they impose on you. I know the world and that type of man, and as soon as I entered the room I saw you had not been treating him properly. You must keep that type at a distance. Otherwise they forget themselves. Sad, but true. They aren’t our sort, and one must face the fact.”
“Ye—es.”
“Do admit that we should never have had the outburst if he was a gentleman.”
“I admit it willingly,” said Margaret, who was pacing up and down the room. “A gentleman would have kept his suspicions to himself.”
Mr. Wilcox watched her with a vague uneasiness.
“What did he suspect you of?”
“Of wanting to make money out of him.”
“Intolerable brute! But how were you to benefit?”
“Exactly. How indeed! Just horrible, corroding suspicion. One touch of thought or of goodwill would have brushed it away. Just the senseless fear that does make men intolerable brutes.”
“I come back to my original point. You ought to be more careful, Miss Schlegel. Your servants ought to have orders not to let such people in.”
She turned to him frankly. “Let me explain exactly why we like this man, and want to see him again.”
“That’s your clever way of talking. I shall never believe you like him.”
“I do. Firstly, because he cares for physical adventure, just as you do. Yes, you go motoring and shooting; he would like to go camping out. Secondly, he cares for something special IN adventure. It is quickest to call that special something poetry—”
“Oh, he’s one of that writer sort.”
“No—oh no! I mean he may be, but it would be loathsome stuff. His brain is filled with the husks of books, culture—horrible; we want him to wash out his brain and go to the real thing. We want to show him how he may get upsides with life. As I said, either friends or the country, some”—she hesitated—“either some very dear person or some very dear place seems necessary to relieve life’s daily grey, and to show that it is grey. If possible, one should have both.”
Some of her words ran past Mr. Wilcox. He let them run past. Others he caught and criticised with admirable lucidity.
“Your mistake is this, and it is a very common mistake. This young bounder has a life of his own. What right have you to conclude it is an unsuccessful life, or, as you call it, ‘grey’?”
“Because—”
“One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests—wife, children, snug little home. That’s where we practical fellows” he smiled—“are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs. I quite grant—I look at the faces of the clerks in my own office, and observe them to be dull, but I don’t know what’s going on beneath. So, by the way, with London. I have heard you rail against London, Miss Schlegel, and it seems a funny thing to say but I was very angry with you. What do you know about London? You only see civilisation from the outside. I don’t say in your case, but in too many cases that attitude leads to morbidity, discontent, and Socialism.”
She admitted the strength of his position, though it undermined imagination. As he spoke, some outposts of poetry and perhaps of sympathy fell ruining, and she retreated to what she called her “second line”—to the special facts of the case.
“His wife is an old bore,” she said simply. “He never came home last Saturday night because he wanted to be alone, and she thought he was with us.”
“With YOU?”
“Yes.” Evie tittered. “He hasn’t got the cosy home that you assumed. He needs outside interests.”
“Naughty young man!” cried the girl.
“Naughty?” said Margaret, who hated naughtiness more than sin. “When you’re married Miss Wilcox, won’t you want outside interests?”
“He has apparently got them,” put in Mr. Wilcox slyly.
“Yes, indeed, father.”
“He was tramping in Surrey, if you mean that,” said Margaret, pacing away rather crossly.
“Oh, I dare say!”
“Miss Wilcox, he was!”
“M—m—m—m!” from Mr. Wilcox, who thought the episode amusing, if risque. With most ladies he would not have discussed it, but he was trading on Margaret’s reputation as an emancipated woman.
“He said so, and about such a thing he wouldn’t lie.”
They both began to laugh.
“That’s where I differ from you. Men lie about their positions and prospects, but not about a thing of that sort.”
He shook his head. “Miss Schlegel, excuse me, but I know the type.”
“I said before—he isn’t a type. He cares about adventures rightly. He’s certain that our smug existence isn’t all. He’s vulgar and hysterical and bookish, but don’t think that sums him up. There’s manhood in him as well. Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say. He’s a real man.”
As she spoke their eyes met, and it was as if Mr. Wilcox’s defences fell. She saw back to the real man in him. Unwittingly she had touched his emotions.
A woman and two men—they had formed the magic triangle of sex, and the male was thrilled to jealousy, in case the female was attracted by another male. Love, say the ascetics, reveals our shameful kinship with the beasts. Be it so: one can bear that; jealousy is the real shame. It is jealousy, not love, that connects us with the farmyard intolerably, and calls up visions of two angry cocks and a complacent hen. Margaret crushed complacency down because she was civilised. Mr. Wilcox, uncivilised, continued to feel anger long after he had rebuilt his defences, and was again presenting a bastion to the world.
“Miss Schlegel, you’re a pair of dear creatures, but you really MUST be careful in this uncharitable world. What does your brother say?”
“I forget.”
“Surely he has some opinion?”
“He laughs, if I remember correctly.”
“He’s very clever, isn’t he?” said Evie, who had met and detested Tibby at Oxford.
“Yes, pretty well—but I wonder what Helen’s doing.”
“She is very young to undertake this sort of thing,” said Mr. Wilcox.
Margaret went out to the landing. She heard no sound, and Mr. Bast’s topper was missing from the hall.
“Helen!” she called.
“Yes!” replied a voice from the library.
“You in there?”
“Yes—he’s gone some time.”
Margaret went to her. “Why, you’re all alone,” she said.
“Yes—it’s all right, Meg. Poor, poor creature—”
“Come back to the Wilcoxes and tell me later—Mr. W much concerned, and slightly titillated.”
“Oh, I’ve no patience with him. I hate him. Poor dear Mr. Bast! he wanted to talk literature, and we would talk business. Such a muddle of a man, and yet so worth pulling through. I like him extraordinarily.”
“Well done,” said Margaret, kissing her, “but come into the drawing-room now, and don’t talk about him to the Wilcoxes. Make light of the whole thing.”
Helen came and behaved with a cheerfulness that reassured their visitor—this hen at all events was fancy-free.
“He’s gone with my blessing,” she cried, “and now for puppies.”
As they drove away, Mr. Wilcox said to his daughter:
“I am really concerned at the way those girls go on. They are as clever as you make ’em, but unpractical—God bless me! One of these days they’ll go too far. Girls like that oughtn’t to live alone in London. Until they marry, they ought to have some one to look after them. We must look in more often—we’re better than no one. You like them, don’t you, Evie?”
Evie replied: “Helen’s right enough, but I can’t stand the toothy one. And I shouldn’t have called either of them girls.”
Evie had grown up handsome. Dark-eyed, with the glow of youth under sunburn, built firmly and firm-lipped, she was the best the Wilcoxes could do in the way of feminine beauty. For the present, puppies and her father were the only things she loved, but the net of matrimony was being prepared for her, and a few days later she was attracted to a Mr. Percy Cahill, an uncle of Mrs. Charles’s, and he was attracted to her.