CHAPTER XX
Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world’s waters, when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in. Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores. No doubt the disturbance is really the spirit of the generations, welcoming the new generation, and chafing against the ultimate Fate, who holds all the seas in the palm of her hand. But Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another’s infinity; he is conscious only of his own—flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and time. He knows that he will survive at the end of things, and be gathered by Fate as a jewel from the slime, and be handed with admiration round the assembly of the gods. “Men did produce this” they will say, and, saying, they will give men immortality. But meanwhile—what agitations meanwhile! The foundations of Property and Propriety are laid bare, twin rocks; Family Pride flounders to the surface, puffing and blowing and refusing to be comforted; Theology, vaguely ascetic, gets up a nasty ground swell. Then the lawyers are aroused—cold brood—and creep out of their holes. They do what they can; they tidy up Property and Propriety, reassure Theology and Family Pride. Half-guineas are poured on the troubled waters, the lawyers creep back, and, if all has gone well, Love joins one man and woman together in Matrimony.
Margaret had expected the disturbance, and was not irritated by it. For a sensitive woman she had steady nerves, and could bear with the incongruous and the grotesque; and, besides, there was nothing excessive about her love-affair. Good-humour was the dominant note of her relations with Mr. Wilcox, or, as I must now call him, Henry. Henry did not encourage romance, and she was no girl to fidget for it. An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.
In this spirit she promised to marry him.
He was in Swanage on the morrow bearing the engagement ring.
They greeted one another with a hearty cordiality that impressed Aunt Juley. Henry dined at The Bays, but had engaged a bedroom in the principal hotel; he was one of those men who know the principal hotel by instinct. After dinner he asked Margaret if she wouldn’t care for a turn on the Parade. She accepted, and could not repress a little tremor; it would be her first real love scene. But as she put on her hat she burst out laughing. Love was so unlike the article served up in books; the joy, though genuine was different; the mystery an unexpected mystery. For one thing, Mr. Wilcox still seemed a stranger.
For a time they talked about the ring; then she said: “Do you remember the Embankment at Chelsea? It can’t be ten days ago.”
“Yes,” he said, laughing. “And you and your sister were head and ears deep in some Quixotic scheme. Ah well!”
“I little thought then, certainly. Did you?”
“I don’t know about that; I shouldn’t like to say.”
“Why, was it earlier?” she cried. “Did you think of me this way earlier! How extraordinarily interesting, Henry! Tell me.”
But Henry had no intention of telling. Perhaps he could not have told, for his mental states became obscure as soon as he had passed through them. He misliked the very word “interesting,” connoting it with wasted energy and even with morbidity. Hard facts were enough for him.
“I didn’t think of it,” she pursued. “No; when you spoke to me in the drawing-room, that was practically the first. It was all so different from what it’s supposed to be. On the stage, or in books, a proposal is—how shall I put it?—a full-blown affair, a kind of bouquet; it loses its literal meaning. But in life a proposal really is a proposal—”
“By the way—”
“—a suggestion, a seed,” she concluded; and the thought flew away into darkness.
“I was thinking, if you didn’t mind, that we ought to spend this evening in a business talk; there will be so much to settle.”
“I think so too. Tell me, in the first place, how did you get on with Tibby?”
“With your brother?”
“Yes, during cigarettes.”
“Oh, very well.”
“I am so glad,” she answered, a little surprised. “What did you talk about? Me, presumably.”
“About Greece too.”
“Greece was a very good card, Henry. Tibby’s only a boy still, and one has to pick and choose subjects a little. Well done.”
“I was telling him I have shares in a currant-farm near Calamata.”
“What a delightful thing to have shares in! Can’t we go there for our honeymoon?”
“What to do?”
“To eat the currants. And isn’t there marvellous scenery?”
“Moderately, but it’s not the kind of place one could possibly go to with a lady.”
“Why not?”
“No hotels.”
“Some ladies do without hotels. Are you aware that Helen and I have walked alone over the Apennines, with our luggage on our backs?”
“I wasn’t aware, and, if I can manage it, you will never do such a thing again.”
She said more gravely: “You haven’t found time for a talk with Helen yet, I suppose?”
“No.”
“Do, before you go. I am so anxious you two should be friends.”
“Your sister and I have always hit it off,” he said negligently. “But we’re drifting away from our business. Let me begin at the beginning. You know that Evie is going to marry Percy Cahill.”
“Dolly’s uncle.”
“Exactly. The girl’s madly in love with him. A very good sort of fellow, but he demands—and rightly—a suitable provision with her. And in the second place you will naturally understand, there is Charles. Before leaving town, I wrote Charles a very careful letter. You see, he has an increasing family and increasing expenses, and the I. and W. A. is nothing particular just now, though capable of development.”
“Poor fellow!” murmured Margaret, looking out to sea, and not understanding.
“Charles being the elder son, some day Charles will have Howards End; but I am anxious, in my own happiness, not to be unjust to others.”
“Of course not,” she began, and then gave a little cry. “you mean money. How stupid I am! Of course not!”
Oddly enough, he winced a little at the word. “Yes, Money, since you put it so frankly. I am determined to be just to all—just to you, just to them. I am determined that my children shall have me.”
“Be generous to them,” she said sharply. “Bother justice!”
“I am determined—and have already written to Charles to that effect—”
“But how much have you got?”
“What?”
“How much have you a year? I’ve six hundred.”
“My income?”
“Yes. We must begin with how much you have, before we can settle how much you can give Charles. Justice, and even generosity, depend on that.”
“I must say you’re a downright young woman,” he observed, patting her arm and laughing a little. “What a question to spring on a fellow!”
“Don’t you know your income? Or don’t you want to tell it me?”
“I—”
“That’s all right”—now she patted him—“don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I can do the sum just as well by proportion. Divide your income into ten parts. How many parts would you give to Evie, how many to Charles, how many to Paul?”
“The fact is, my dear, I hadn’t any intention of bothering you with details. I only wanted to let you know that—well, that something must be done for the others, and you’ve understood me perfectly, so let’s pass on to the next point.”
“Yes, we’ve settled that,” said Margaret, undisturbed by his strategic blunderings. “Go ahead; give away all you can, bearing in mind that I’ve a clear six hundred. What a mercy it is to have all this money about one.”
“We’ve none too much, I assure you; you’re marrying a poor man.”
“Helen wouldn’t agree with me here,” she continued. “Helen daren’t slang the rich, being rich herself, but she would like to. There’s an odd notion, that I haven’t yet got hold of, running about at the back of her brain, that poverty is somehow ‘real.’ She dislikes all organisation, and probably confuses wealth with the technique of wealth. Sovereigns in a stocking wouldn’t bother her; cheques do. Helen is too relentless. One can’t deal in her high-handed manner with the world.”
“There’s this other point, and then I must go back to my hotel and write some letters. What’s to be done now about the house in Ducie Street?”
“Keep it on—at least, it depends. When do you want to marry me?”
She raised her voice, as too often, and some youths, who were also taking the evening air, overheard her. “Getting a bit hot, eh?” said one. Mr. Wilcox turned on them, and said sharply, “I say!” There was silence. “Take care I don’t report you to the police.” They moved away quietly enough, but were only biding their time, and the rest of the conversation was punctuated by peals of ungovernable laughter.
Lowering his voice and infusing a hint of reproof into it, he said: “Evie will probably be married in September. We could scarcely think of anything before then.”
“The earlier the nicer, Henry. Females are not supposed to say such things, but the earlier the nicer.”
“How about September for us too?” he asked, rather dryly.
“Right. Shall we go into Ducie Street ourselves in September? Or shall we try to bounce Helen and Tibby into it? That’s rather an idea. They are so unbusinesslike, we could make them do anything by judicious management. Look here—yes. We’ll do that. And we ourselves could live at Howards End or Shropshire.”
He blew out his cheeks. “Heavens! how you women do fly round! My head’s in a whirl. Point by point, Margaret. Howards End’s impossible. I let it to Hamar Bryce on a three years’ agreement last March. Don’t you remember? Oniton. Well, that is much, much too far away to rely on entirely. You will be able to be down there entertaining a certain amount, but we must have a house within easy reach of Town. Only Ducie Street has huge drawbacks. There’s a mews behind.”
Margaret could not help laughing. It was the first she had heard of the mews behind Ducie Street. When she was a possible tenant it had suppressed itself, not consciously, but automatically. The breezy Wilcox manner, though genuine, lacked the clearness of vision that is imperative for truth. When Henry lived in Ducie Street he remembered the mews; when he tried to let he forgot it; and if any one had remarked that the mews must be either there or not, he would have felt annoyed, and afterwards have found some opportunity of stigmatising the speaker as academic. So does my grocer stigmatise me when I complain of the quality of his sultanas, and he answers in one breath that they are the best sultanas, and how can I expect the best sultanas at that price? It is a flaw inherent in the business mind, and Margaret may do well to be tender to it, considering all that the business mind has done for England.
“Yes, in summer especially, the mews is a serious nuisance. The smoking-room, too, is an abominable little den. The house opposite has been taken by operatic people. Ducie Street’s going down, it’s my private opinion.”
“How sad! It’s only a few years since they built those pretty houses.”
“Shows things are moving. Good for trade.”
“I hate this continual flux of London. It is an epitome of us at our worst—eternal formlessness; all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, streaming away—streaming, streaming for ever. That’s why I dread it so. I mistrust rivers, even in scenery. Now, the sea—”
“High tide, yes.”
“Hoy toid”—from the promenading youths.
“And these are the men to whom we give the vote,” observed Mr. Wilcox, omitting to add that they were also the men to whom he gave work as clerks—work that scarcely encouraged them to grow into other men. “However, they have their own lives and interests. Let’s get on.”
He turned as he spoke, and prepared to see her back to The Bays. The business was over. His hotel was in the opposite direction, and if he accompanied her his letters would be late for the post. She implored him not to come, but he was obdurate.
“A nice beginning, if your aunt saw you slip in alone!”
“But I always do go about alone. Considering I’ve walked over the Apennines, it’s common sense. You will make me so angry. I don’t the least take it as a compliment.”
He laughed, and lit a cigar. “It isn’t meant as a compliment, my dear. I just won’t have you going about in the dark. Such people about too! It’s dangerous.”
“Can’t I look after myself? I do wish—”
“Come along, Margaret; no wheedling.”
A younger woman might have resented his masterly ways, but Margaret had too firm a grip of life to make a fuss. She was, in her own way, as masterly. If he was a fortress she was a mountain peak, whom all might tread, but whom the snows made nightly virginal. Disdaining the heroic outfit, excitable in her methods, garrulous, episodical, shrill, she misled her lover much as she had misled her aunt. He mistook her fertility for Weakness. He supposed her “as clever as they make them,” but no more, not realising that she was penetrating to the depths of his soul, and approving of what she found there.
And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness had been assured.
They walked ahead briskly. The parade and the road after it were well lighted, but it was darker in Aunt Juley’s garden. As they were going up by the side-paths, through some rhododendrons, Mr. Wilcox, who was in front, said “Margaret” rather huskily, turned, dropped his cigar, and took her in his arms.
She was startled, and nearly screamed, but recovered herself at once, and kissed with genuine love the lips that were pressed against her own. It was their first kiss, and when it was over he saw her safely to the door and rang the bell for her but disappeared into the night before the maid answered it. On looking back, the incident displeased her. It was so isolated. Nothing in their previous conversation had heralded it, and, worse still, no tenderness had ensued. If a man cannot lead up to passion he can at all events lead down from it, and she had hoped, after her complaisance, for some interchange of gentle words. But he had hurried away as if ashamed, and for an instant she was reminded of Helen and Paul.
CHAPTER XXI
Charles had just been scolding his Dolly. She deserved the scolding, and had bent before it, but her head, though bloody was unsubdued and her chirrupings began to mingle with his retreating thunder.
“You’ve waked the baby. I knew you would. (Rum-ti-foo, Rackety-tackety-Tompkin!) I’m not responsible for what Uncle Percy does, nor for anybody else or anything, so there!”
“Who asked him while I was away? Who asked my sister down to meet him? Who sent them out in the motor day after day?”
“Charles, that reminds me of some poem.”
“Does it indeed? We shall all be dancing to a very different music presently. Miss Schlegel has fairly got us on toast.”
“I could simply scratch that woman’s eyes out, and to say it’s my fault is most unfair.”
“It’s your fault, and five months ago you admitted it.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“Tootle, tootle, playing on the pootle!” exclaimed Dolly, suddenly devoting herself to the child.
“It’s all very well to turn the conversation, but father would never have dreamt of marrying as long as Evie was there to make him comfortable. But you must needs start match-making. Besides, Cahill’s too old.”
“Of course, if you’re going to be rude to Uncle Percy.”
“Miss Schlegel always meant to get hold of Howards End, and, thanks to you, she’s got it.”
“I call the way you twist things round and make them hang together most unfair. You couldn’t have been nastier if you’d caught me flirting. Could he, diddums?”
“We’re in a bad hole, and must make the best of it. I shall answer the pater’s letter civilly. He’s evidently anxious to do the decent thing. But I do not intend to forget these Schlegels in a hurry. As long as they’re on their best behaviour—Dolly, are you listening?—we’ll behave, too. But if I find them giving themselves airs or monopolising my father, or at all ill-treating him, or worrying him with their artistic beastliness, I intend to put my foot down, yes, firmly. Taking my mother’s place! Heaven knows what poor old Paul will say when the news reaches him.”
The interlude closes. It has taken place in Charles’s garden at Hilton. He and Dolly are sitting in deckchairs, and their motor is regarding them placidly from its garage across the lawn. A short-frocked edition of Charles also regards them placidly; a perambulator edition is squeaking; a third edition is expected shortly. Nature is turning out Wilcoxes in this peaceful abode, so that they may inherit the earth.
CHAPTER XXII
Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy-going.
It was hard-going in the roads of Mr. Wilcox’s soul. From boyhood he had neglected them. “I am not a fellow who bothers about my own inside.” Outwardly he was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos, ruled, so far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism. Whether as boy, husband, or widower, he had always the sneaking belief that bodily passion is bad, a belief that is desirable only when held passionately. Religion had confirmed him. The words that were read aloud on Sunday to him and to other respectable men were the words that had once kindled the souls of St. Catherine and St. Francis into a white-hot hatred of the carnal. He could not be as the saints and love the Infinite with a seraphic ardour, but he could be a little ashamed of loving a wife. Amabat, amare timebat. And it was here that Margaret hoped to help him.
It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
Nor was the message difficult to give. It need not take the form of a good “talking.” By quiet indications the bridge would be built and span their lives with beauty.
But she failed. For there was one quality in Henry for which she was never prepared, however much she reminded herself of it: his obtuseness. He simply did not notice things, and there was no more to be said. He never noticed that Helen and Frieda were hostile, or that Tibby was not interested in currant plantations; he never noticed the lights and shades that exist in the greyest conversation, the finger-posts, the milestones, the collisions, the illimitable views. Once—on another occasion—she scolded him about it. He was puzzled, but replied with a laugh: “My motto is Concentrate. I’ve no intention of frittering away my strength on that sort of thing.” “It isn’t frittering away the strength,” she protested. “It’s enlarging the space in which you may be strong.” He answered: “You’re a clever little woman, but my motto’s Concentrate.” And this morning he concentrated with a vengeance.
They met in the rhododendrons of yesterday. In the daylight the bushes were inconsiderable and the path was bright in the morning sun. She was with Helen, who had been ominously quiet since the affair was settled. “Here we all are!” she cried, and took him by one hand, retaining her sister’s in the other.
“Here we are. Good-morning, Helen.”
Helen replied, “Good-morning, Mr. Wilcox.”
“Henry, she has had such a nice letter from the queer, cross boy. Do you remember him? He had a sad moustache, but the back of his head was young.”
“I have had a letter too. Not a nice one—I want to talk it over with you”; for Leonard Bast was nothing to him now that she had given him her word; the triangle of sex was broken for ever.
“Thanks to your hint, he’s clearing out of the Porphyrion.”
“Not a bad business that Porphyrion,” he said absently, as he took his own letter out of his pocket.
“Not a BAD—” she exclaimed, dropping his hand. “Surely, on Chelsea Embankment—”
“Here’s our hostess. Good-morning, Mrs. Munt. Fine rhododendrons. Good-morning, Frau Liesecke; we manage to grow flowers in England, don’t we?”
“Not a BAD business?”
“No. My letter’s about Howards End. Bryce has been ordered abroad, and wants to sublet it—I am far from sure that I shall give him permission. There was no clause in the agreement. In my opinion, subletting is a mistake. If he can find me another tenant, whom I consider suitable, I may cancel the agreement. Morning, Schlegel. Don’t you think that’s better than subletting?”
Helen had dropped her hand now, and he had steered her past the whole party to the seaward side of the house. Beneath them was the bourgeois little bay, which must have yearned all through the centuries for just such a watering-place as Swanage to be built on its margin.
The waves were colourless, and the Bournemouth steamer gave a further touch of insipidity, drawn up against the pier and hooting wildly for excursionists.
“When there is a sublet I find that damage—”
“Do excuse me, but about the Porphyrion. I don’t feel easy—might I just bother you, Henry?”
Her manner was so serious that he stopped, and asked her a little sharply what she wanted.
“You said on Chelsea Embankment, surely, that it was a bad concern, so we advised this clerk to clear out. He writes this morning that he’s taken our advice, and now you say it’s not a bad concern.”
“A clerk who clears out of any concern, good or bad, without securing a berth somewhere else first, is a fool, and I’ve no pity for him.”
“He has not done that. He’s going into a bank in Camden Town, he says. The salary’s much lower, but he hopes to manage—a branch of Dempster’s Bank. Is that all right?”
“Dempster! Why goodness me, yes.”
“More right than the Porphyrion?”
“Yes, yes, yes; safe as houses—safer.”
“Very many thanks. I’m sorry—if you sublet—?”
“If he sublets, I shan’t have the same control. In theory there should be no more damage done at Howards End; in practice there will be. Things may be done for which no money can compensate. For instance, I shouldn’t want that fine wych-elm spoilt. It hangs—Margaret, we must go and see the old place some time. It’s pretty in its way. We’ll motor down and have lunch with Charles.”
“I should enjoy that,” said Margaret bravely.
“What about next Wednesday?”
“Wednesday? No, I couldn’t well do that. Aunt Juley expects us to stop here another week at least.”
“But you can give that up now.”
“Er—no,” said Margaret, after a moment’s thought.
“Oh, that’ll be all right. I’ll speak to her.”
“This visit is a high solemnity. My aunt counts on it year after year. She turns the house upside down for us; she invites our special friends—she scarcely knows Frieda, and we can’t leave her on her hands. I missed one day, and she would be so hurt if I didn’t stay the full ten.”
“But I’ll say a word to her. Don’t you bother.”
“Henry, I won’t go. Don’t bully me.”
“You want to see the house, though?”
“Very much—I’ve heard so much about it, one way or the other. Aren’t there pigs’ teeth in the wych-elm?”
“PIGS TEETH?”
“And you chew the bark for toothache.”
“What a rum notion! Of course not!”
“Perhaps I have confused it with some other tree. There are still a great number of sacred trees in England, it seems.”
But he left her to intercept Mrs. Munt, whose voice could be heard in the distance; to be intercepted himself by Helen.
“Oh. Mr. Wilcox, about the Porphyrion—” she began and went scarlet all over her face.
“It’s all right,” called Margaret, catching them up. “Dempster’s Bank’s better.”
“But I think you told us the Porphyrion was bad, and would smash before Christmas.”
“Did I? It was still outside the Tariff Ring, and had to take rotten policies. Lately it came in—safe as houses now.”
“In other words, Mr. Bast need never have left it.”
“No, the fellow needn’t.”
“—and needn’t have started life elsewhere at a greatly reduced salary.”
“He only says ‘reduced,’” corrected Margaret, seeing trouble ahead.
“With a man so poor, every reduction must be great. I consider it a deplorable misfortune.”
Mr. Wilcox, intent on his business with Mrs. Munt, was going steadily on, but the last remark made him say: “What? What’s that? Do you mean that I’m responsible?”
“You’re ridiculous, Helen.”
“You seem to think—” He looked at his watch. “Let me explain the point to you. It is like this. You seem to assume, when a business concern is conducting a delicate negotiation, it ought to keep the public informed stage by stage. The Porphyrion, according to you, was bound to say, ‘I am trying all I can to get into the Tariff Ring. I am not sure that I shall succeed, but it is the only thing that will save me from insolvency, and I am trying.’ My dear Helen—”
“Is that your point? A man who had little money has less—that’s mine.”
“I am grieved for your clerk. But it is all in the day’s work. It’s part of the battle of life.”
“A man who had little money—” she repeated, “has less, owing to us. Under these circumstances I consider ‘the battle of life’ a happy expression.”
“Oh come, come!” he protested pleasantly, “you’re not to blame. No one’s to blame.”
“Is no one to blame for anything?”
“I wouldn’t say that, but you’re taking it far too seriously. Who is this fellow?”
“We have told you about the fellow twice already,” said Helen. “You have even met the fellow. He is very poor and his wife is an extravagant imbecile. He is capable of better things. We—we, the upper classes—thought we would help him from the height of our superior knowledge—and here’s the result!”
He raised his finger. “Now, a word of advice.”
“I require no more advice.”
“A word of advice. Don’t take up that sentimental attitude over the poor. See that she doesn’t, Margaret. The poor are poor, and one’s sorry for them, but there it is. As civilisation moves forward, the shoe is bound to pinch in places, and it’s absurd to pretend that any one is responsible personally. Neither you, nor I, nor my informant, nor the man who informed him, nor the directors of the Porphyrion, are to blame for this clerk’s loss of salary. It’s just the shoe pinching—no one can help it; and it might easily have been worse.”
Helen quivered with indignation.
“By all means subscribe to charities—subscribe to them largely—but don’t get carried away by absurd schemes of Social Reform. I see a good deal behind the scenes, and you can take it from me that there is no Social Question—except for a few journalists who try to get a living out of the phrase. There are just rich and poor, as there always have been and always will be. Point me out a time when men have been equal—”
“I didn’t say—”
“Point me out a time when desire for equality has made them happier. No, no. You can’t. There always have been rich and poor. I’m no fatalist. Heaven forbid! But our civilisation is moulded by great impersonal forces” (his voice grew complacent; it always did when he eliminated the personal), “and there always will be rich and poor. You can’t deny it” (and now it was a respectful voice)—“and you can’t deny that, in spite of all, the tendency of civilisation has on the whole been upward.”
“Owing to God, I suppose,” flashed Helen.
He stared at her.
“You grab the dollars. God does the rest.”
It was no good instructing the girl if she was going to talk about God in that neurotic modern way. Fraternal to the last, he left her for the quieter company of Mrs. Munt. He thought, “She rather reminds me of Dolly.”
Helen looked out at the sea.
“Don’t ever discuss political economy with Henry,” advised her sister. “It’ll only end in a cry.”
“But he must be one of those men who have reconciled science with religion,” said Helen slowly. “I don’t like those men. They are scientific themselves, and talk of the survival of the fittest, and cut down the salaries of their clerks, and stunt the independence of all who may menace their comfort, but yet they believe that somehow good—it is always that sloppy ‘somehow’ will be the outcome, and that in some mystical way the Mr. Basts of the future will benefit because the Mr. Brits of today are in pain.”
“He is such a man in theory. But oh, Helen, in theory!”
“But oh, Meg, what a theory!”
“Why should you put things so bitterly, dearie?”
“Because I’m an old maid,” said Helen, biting her lip. “I can’t think why I go on like this myself.” She shook off her sister’s hand and went into the house. Margaret, distressed at the day’s beginning, followed the Bournemouth steamer with her eyes. She saw that Helen’s nerves were exasperated by the unlucky Bast business beyond the bounds of politeness. There might at any minute be a real explosion, which even Henry would notice. Henry must be removed.
“Margaret!” her aunt called. “Magsy! It isn’t true, surely, what Mr. Wilcox says, that you want to go away early next week?”
“Not ‘want,’” was Margaret’s prompt reply; “but there is so much to be settled, and I do want to see the Charles’s.”
“But going away without taking the Weymouth trip, or even the Lulworth?” said Mrs. Munt, coming nearer. “Without going once more up Nine Barrows Down?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Mr. Wilcox rejoined her with, “Good! I did the breaking of the ice.”
A wave of tenderness came over her. She put a hand on either shoulder, and looked deeply into the black, bright eyes. What was behind their competent stare? She knew, but was not disquieted.
CHAPTER XXIII
Margaret had no intention of letting things slide, and the evening before she left Swanage she gave her sister a thorough scolding. She censured her, not for disapproving of the engagement, but for throwing over her disapproval a veil of mystery. Helen was equally frank. “Yes,” she said, with the air of one looking inwards, “there is a mystery. I can’t help it. It’s not my fault. It’s the way life has been made.” Helen in those days was over-interested in the subconscious self. She exaggerated the Punch and Judy aspect of life, and spoke of mankind as puppets, whom an invisible showman twitches into love and war. Margaret pointed out that if she dwelt on this she, too, would eliminate the personal. Helen was silent for a minute, and then burst into a queer speech, which cleared the air. “Go on and marry him. I think you’re splendid; and if any one can pull it off, you will.” Margaret denied that there was anything to “pull off,” but she continued: “Yes, there is, and I wasn’t up to it with Paul. I can do only what’s easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can’t, and won’t, attempt difficult relations. If I marry, it will either be a man who’s strong enough to boss me or whom I’m strong enough to boss. So I shan’t ever marry, for there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.’ There! Because I’m uneducated. But you, you’re different; you’re a heroine.”
“Oh, Helen! Am I? Will it be as dreadful for poor Henry as all that?”
“You mean to keep proportion, and that’s heroic, it’s Greek, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t succeed with you. Go on and fight with him and help him. Don’t ask me for help, or even for sympathy. Henceforward I’m going my own way. I mean to be thorough, because thoroughness is easy. I mean to dislike your husband, and to tell him so. I mean to make no concessions to Tibby. If Tibby wants to live with me, he must lump me. I mean to love you more than ever. Yes, I do. You and I have built up something real, because it is purely spiritual. There’s no veil of mystery over us. Unreality and mystery begin as soon as one touches the body. The popular view is, as usual, exactly the wrong one. Our bothers are over tangible things—money, husbands, house-hunting. But Heaven will work of itself.”
Margaret was grateful for this expression of affection, and answered, “Perhaps.” All vistas close in the unseen—no one doubts it—but Helen closed them rather too quickly for her taste. At every turn of speech one was confronted with reality and the absolute. Perhaps Margaret grew too old for metaphysics, perhaps Henry was weaning her from them, but she felt that there was something a little unbalanced in the mind that so readily shreds the visible. The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. “Yes, I see, dear; it’s about half-way between,” Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not half-way between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility.
Helen, agreeing here, disagreeing there, would have talked till midnight, but Margaret, with her packing to do, focussed the conversation on Henry. She might abuse Henry behind his back, but please would she always be civil to him in company? “I definitely dislike him, but I’ll do what I can,” promised Helen. “Do what you can with my friends in return.”
This conversation made Margaret easier. Their inner life was so safe that they could bargain over externals in a way that would have been incredible to Aunt Juley, and impossible for Tibby or Charles. There are moments when the inner life actually “pays,” when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use. Such moments are still rare in the West; that they come at all promises a fairer future. Margaret, though unable to understand her sister, was assured against estrangement, and returned to London with a more peaceful mind.
The following morning, at eleven o’clock, she presented herself at the offices of the Imperial and West African Rubber Company. She was glad to go there, for Henry had implied his business rather than described it, and the formlessness and vagueness that one associates with Africa itself had hitherto brooded over the main sources of his wealth. Not that a visit to the office cleared things up. There was just the ordinary surface scum of ledgers and polished counters and brass bars that began and stopped for no possible reason, of electric-light globes blossoming in triplets, of little rabbit-hutches faced with glass or wire, of little rabbits. And even when she penetrated to the inner depths, she found only the ordinary table and Turkey carpet, and though the map over the fireplace did depict a helping of West Africa, it was a very ordinary map. Another map hung opposite, on which the whole continent appeared, looking like a whale marked out for a blubber, and by its side was a door, shut, but Henry’s voice came through it, dictating a “strong” letter. She might have been at the Porphyrion, or Dempster’s Bank, or her own wine-merchant’s. Everything seems just alike in these days. But perhaps she was seeing the Imperial side of the company rather than its West African, and Imperialism always had been one of her difficulties.
“One minute!” called Mr. Wilcox on receiving her name. He touched a bell, the effect of which was to produce Charles.
Charles had written his father an adequate letter—more adequate than Evie’s, through which a girlish indignation throbbed. And he greeted his future stepmother with propriety.
“I hope that my wife—how do you do?—will give you a decent lunch,” was his opening. “I left instructions, but we live in a rough-and-ready way. She expects you back to tea, too, after you have had a look at Howards End. I wonder what you’ll think of the place. I wouldn’t touch it with tongs myself. Do sit down! It’s a measly little place.”
“I shall enjoy seeing it,” said Margaret, feeling, for the first time, shy.
“You’ll see it at its worst, for Bryce decamped abroad last Monday without even arranging for a charwoman to clear up after him. I never saw such a disgraceful mess. It’s unbelievable. He wasn’t in the house a month.”
“I’ve more than a little bone to pick with Bryce,” called Henry from the inner chamber.
“Why did he go so suddenly?”
“Invalid type; couldn’t sleep.”
“Poor fellow!”
“Poor fiddlesticks!” said Mr. Wilcox, joining them. “He had the impudence to put up notice-boards without as much as saying with your leave or by your leave. Charles flung them down.”
“Yes, I flung them down,” said Charles modestly.
“I’ve sent a telegram after him, and a pretty sharp one, too. He, and he in person, is responsible for the upkeep of that house for the next three years.”
“The keys are at the farm; we wouldn’t have the keys.”
“Quite right.”
“Dolly would have taken them, but I was in, fortunately.”
“What’s Mr. Bryce like?” asked Margaret.
But nobody cared. Mr. Bryce was the tenant, who had no right to sublet; to have defined him further was a waste of time. On his misdeeds they descanted profusely, until the girl who had been typing the strong letter came out with it. Mr. Wilcox added his signature. “Now we’ll be off,” said he.
A motor-drive, a form of felicity detested by Margaret, awaited her. Charles saw them in, civil to the last, and in a moment the offices of the Imperial and West African Rubber Company faded away. But it was not an impressive drive. Perhaps the weather was to blame, being grey and banked high with weary clouds. Perhaps Hertfordshire is scarcely intended for motorists. Did not a gentleman once motor so quickly through Westmoreland that he missed it? and if Westmoreland can be missed, it will fare ill with a county whose delicate structure particularly needs the attentive eye. Hertfordshire is England at its quietest, with little emphasis of river and hill; it is England meditative. If Drayton were with us again to write a new edition of his incomparable poem, he would sing the nymphs of Hertfordshire as indeterminate of feature, with hair obfuscated by the London smoke. Their eyes would be sad, and averted from their fate towards the Northern flats, their leader not Isis or Sabrina, but the slowly flowing Lea. No glory of raiment would be theirs, no urgency of dance; but they would be real nymphs.
The chauffeur could not travel as quickly as he had hoped, for the Great North Road was full of Easter traffic. But he went quite quick enough for Margaret, a poor-spirited creature, who had chickens and children on the brain.
“They’re all right,” said Mr. Wilcox. “They’ll learn—like the swallows and the telegraph-wires.”
“Yes, but, while they’re learning—”
“The motor’s come to stay,” he answered. “One must get about. There’s a pretty church—oh, you aren’t sharp enough. Well, look out, if the road worries you—right outward at the scenery.”
She looked at the scenery. It heaved and merged like porridge. Presently it congealed. They had arrived.
Charles’s house on the left; on the right the swelling forms of the Six Hills. Their appearance in such a neighbourhood surprised her. They interrupted the stream of residences that was thickening up towards Hilton. Beyond them she saw meadows and a wood, and beneath them she settled that soldiers of the best kind lay buried. She hated war and liked soldiers—it was one of her amiable inconsistencies.
But here was Dolly, dressed up to the nines, standing at the door to greet them, and here were the first drops of the rain. They ran in gaily, and after a long wait in the drawing-room, sat down to the rough-and-ready lunch, every dish of which concealed or exuded cream. Mr. Bryce was the chief topic of conversation. Dolly described his visit with the key, while her father-in-law gave satisfaction by chaffing her and contradicting all she said. It was evidently the custom to laugh at Dolly. He chaffed Margaret too, and Margaret roused from a grave meditation was pleased and chaffed him back. Dolly seemed surprised and eyed her curiously. After lunch the two children came down. Margaret disliked babies, but hit it off better with the two-year-old, and sent Dolly into fits of laughter by talking sense to him. “Kiss them now, and come away,” said Mr. Wilcox. She came, but refused to kiss them; it was such hard luck on the little things, she said, and though Dolly proffered Chorly-worly and Porgly-woggles in turn, she was obdurate.
By this time it was raining steadily. The car came round with the hood up, and again she lost all sense of space. In a few minutes they stopped, and Crane opened the door of the car.
“What’s happened?” asked Margaret.
“What do you suppose?” said Henry.
A little porch was close up against her face.
“Are we there already?”
“We are.”
“Well, I never! In years ago it seemed so far away.”
Smiling, but somehow disillusioned, she jumped out, and her impetus carried her to the front-door. She was about to open it, when Henry said: “That’s no good; it’s locked. Who’s got the key?”
As he had himself forgotten to call for the key at the farm, no one replied. He also wanted to know who had left the front gate open, since a cow had strayed in from the road, and was spoiling the croquet lawn. Then he said rather crossly: “Margaret, you wait in the dry. I’ll go down for the key. It isn’t a hundred yards.”
“Mayn’t I come too?”
“No; I shall be back before I’m gone.”
Then the car turned away, and it was as if a curtain had risen. For the second time that day she saw the appearance of the earth.
There were the greengage-trees that Helen had once described, there the tennis lawn, there the hedge that would be glorious with dog-roses in June, but the vision now was of black and palest green. Down by the dell-hole more vivid colours were awakening, and Lent lilies stood sentinel on its margin, or advanced in battalions over the grass. Tulips were a tray of jewels. She could not see the wych-elm tree, but a branch of the celebrated vine, studded with velvet knobs had covered the perch. She was struck by the fertility of the soil; she had seldom been in a garden where the flowers looked so well, and even the weeds she was idly plucking out of the porch were intensely green. Why had poor Mr. Bryce fled from all this beauty? For she had already decided that the place was beautiful.
“Naughty cow! Go away!” cried Margaret to the cow, but without indignation.
Harder came the rain, pouring out of a windless sky, and spattering up from the notice-boards of the house-agents, which lay in a row on the lawn where Charles had hurled them. She must have interviewed Charles in another world—where one did have interviews. How Helen would revel in such a notion! Charles dead, all people dead, nothing alive but houses and gardens. The obvious dead, the intangible alive, and no connection at all between them! Margaret smiled. Would that her own fancies were as clear-cut! Would that she could deal as high-handedly with the world! Smiling and sighing, she laid her hand upon the door. It opened. The house was not locked up at all.
She hesitated. Ought she to wait for Henry? He felt strongly about property, and might prefer to show her over himself. On the other hand, he had told her to keep in the dry, and the porch was beginning to drip. So she went in, and the draught from inside slammed the door behind.
Desolation greeted her. Dirty finger-prints were on the hall-windows, flue and rubbish on its unwashed boards. The civilisation of luggage had been here for a month, and then decamped. Dining-room and drawing-room—right and left—were guessed only by their wallpapers. They were just rooms where one could shelter from the rain. Across the ceiling of each ran a great beam. The dining-room and hall revealed theirs openly, but the drawing-room’s was match-boarded—because the facts of life must be concealed from ladies? Drawing-room, dining-room, and hall—how petty the names sounded! Here were simply three rooms where children could play and friends shelter from the rain. Yes, and they were beautiful.
Then she opened one of the doors opposite—there were two—and exchanged wall-papers for whitewash. It was the servants’ part, though she scarcely realised that: just rooms again, where friends might shelter. The garden at the back was full of flowering cherries and plums. Farther on were hints of the meadow and a black cliff of pines. Yes, the meadow was beautiful.
Penned in by the desolate weather, she recaptured the sense of space which the motor had tried to rob from her. She remembered again that ten square miles are not ten times as wonderful as one square mile, that a thousand square miles are not practically the same as heaven. The phantom of bigness, which London encourages, was laid for ever when she paced from the hall at Howards End to its kitchen and heard the rain run this way and that where the watershed of the roof divided it.
Now Helen came to her mind, scrutinising half Wessex from the ridge of the Purbeck Downs, and saying: “You will have to lose something.” She was not so sure. For instance she would double her kingdom by opening the door that concealed the stairs.
Now she thought of the map of Africa; of empires; of her father; of the two supreme nations, streams of whose life warmed her blood, but, mingling, had cooled her brain. She paced back into the hall, and as she did so the house reverberated.
“Is that you, Henry?” she called.
There was no answer, but the house reverberated again.
“Henry, have you got in?”
But it was the heart of the house beating, faintly at first, then loudly, martially. It dominated the rain.
It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid. Margaret flung open the door to the stairs. A noise as of drums seemed to deafen her. A woman, an old woman, was descending, with figure erect, with face impassive, with lips that parted and said dryly:
“Oh! Well, I took you for Ruth Wilcox.”
Margaret stammered: “I—Mrs. Wilcox—I?”
“In fancy, of course—in fancy. You had her way of walking. Good-day.” And the old woman passed out into the rain.