A Room with a View
forgot; of course, you knew her before. No, she wasn’t wonderful in
Florence either, but I kept on expecting that she would be.”
“In what way?”
Conversation had become agreeable to them, and they were pacing up and
down the terrace.
“I could as easily tell you what tune she’ll play next. There was
simply the sense that she had found wings, and meant to use them. I can
show you a beautiful picture in my Italian diary: Miss Honeychurch as a
kite, Miss Bartlett holding the string. Picture number two: the string
breaks.”
The sketch was in his diary, but it had been made afterwards, when he
viewed things artistically. At the time he had given surreptitious tugs
to the string himself.
“But the string never broke?”
“No. I mightn’t have seen Miss Honeychurch rise, but I should certainly
have heard Miss Bartlett fall.”
“It has broken now,” said the young man in low, vibrating tones.
Immediately he realized that of all the conceited, ludicrous,
contemptible ways of announcing an engagement this was the worst. He
cursed his love of metaphor; had he suggested that he was a star and
that Lucy was soaring up to reach him?
“Broken? What do you mean?”
“I meant,” said Cecil stiffly, “that she is going to marry me.”
The clergyman was conscious of some bitter disappointment which he
could not keep out of his voice.
“I am sorry; I must apologize. I had no idea you were intimate with
her, or I should never have talked in this flippant, superficial way.
Mr. Vyse, you ought to have stopped me.” And down the garden he saw
Lucy herself; yes, he was disappointed.
Cecil, who naturally preferred congratulations to apologies, drew down
his mouth at the corners. Was this the reception his action would get
from the world? Of course, he despised the world as a whole; every
thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement. But he was
sensitive to the successive particles of it which he encountered.
Occasionally he could be quite crude.
“I am sorry I have given you a shock,” he said dryly. “I fear that
Lucy’s choice does not meet with your approval.”
“Not that. But you ought to have stopped me. I know Miss Honeychurch
only a little as time goes. Perhaps I oughtn’t to have discussed her so
freely with any one; certainly not with you.”
“You are conscious of having said something indiscreet?”
Mr. Beebe pulled himself together. Really, Mr. Vyse had the art of
placing one in the most tiresome positions. He was driven to use the
prerogatives of his profession.
“No, I have said nothing indiscreet. I foresaw at Florence that her
quiet, uneventful childhood must end, and it has ended. I realized
dimly enough that she might take some momentous step. She has taken it.
She has learnt—you will let me talk freely, as I have begun freely—she
has learnt what it is to love: the greatest lesson, some people will
tell you, that our earthly life provides.” It was now time for him to
wave his hat at the approaching trio. He did not omit to do so. “She
has learnt through you,” and if his voice was still clerical, it was
now also sincere; “let it be your care that her knowledge is profitable
to her.”
“Grazie tante!” said Cecil, who did not like parsons.
“Have you heard?” shouted Mrs. Honeychurch as she toiled up the sloping
garden. “Oh, Mr. Beebe, have you heard the news?”
Freddy, now full of geniality, whistled the wedding march. Youth seldom
criticizes the accomplished fact.
“Indeed I have!” he cried. He looked at Lucy. In her presence he could
not act the parson any longer—at all events not without apology. “Mrs.
Honeychurch, I’m going to do what I am always supposed to do, but
generally I’m too shy. I want to invoke every kind of blessing on them,
grave and gay, great and small. I want them all their lives to be
supremely good and supremely happy as husband and wife, as father and
mother. And now I want my tea.”
“You only asked for it just in time,” the lady retorted. “How dare you
be serious at Windy Corner?”
He took his tone from her. There was no more heavy beneficence, no more
attempts to dignify the situation with poetry or the Scriptures. None
of them dared or was able to be serious any more.
An engagement is so potent a thing that sooner or later it reduces all
who speak of it to this state of cheerful awe. Away from it, in the
solitude of their rooms, Mr. Beebe, and even Freddy, might again be
critical. But in its presence and in the presence of each other they
were sincerely hilarious. It has a strange power, for it compels not
only the lips, but the very heart. The chief parallel to compare one
great thing with another—is the power over us of a temple of some alien
creed. Standing outside, we deride or oppose it, or at the most feel
sentimental. Inside, though the saints and gods are not ours, we become
true believers, in case any true believer should be present.
So it was that after the gropings and the misgivings of the afternoon
they pulled themselves together and settled down to a very pleasant
tea-party. If they were hypocrites they did not know it, and their
hypocrisy had every chance of setting and of becoming true. Anne,
putting down each plate as if it were a wedding present, stimulated
them greatly. They could not lag behind that smile of hers which she
gave them ere she kicked the drawing-room door. Mr. Beebe chirruped.
Freddy was at his wittiest, referring to Cecil as the “Fiasco”—family
honoured pun on fiance. Mrs. Honeychurch, amusing and portly, promised
well as a mother-in-law. As for Lucy and Cecil, for whom the temple had
been built, they also joined in the merry ritual, but waited, as
earnest worshippers should, for the disclosure of some holier shrine of
joy.
Chapter IX
Lucy As a Work of Art
A few days after the engagement was announced Mrs. Honeychurch made
Lucy and her Fiasco come to a little garden-party in the neighbourhood,
for naturally she wanted to show people that her daughter was marrying
a presentable man.
Cecil was more than presentable; he looked distinguished, and it was
very pleasant to see his slim figure keeping step with Lucy, and his
long, fair face responding when Lucy spoke to him. People congratulated
Mrs. Honeychurch, which is, I believe, a social blunder, but it pleased
her, and she introduced Cecil rather indiscriminately to some stuffy
dowagers.
At tea a misfortune took place: a cup of coffee was upset over Lucy’s
figured silk, and though Lucy feigned indifference, her mother feigned
nothing of the sort but dragged her indoors to have the frock treated
by a sympathetic maid. They were gone some time, and Cecil was left
with the dowagers. When they returned he was not as pleasant as he had
been.
“Do you go to much of this sort of thing?” he asked when they were
driving home.
“Oh, now and then,” said Lucy, who had rather enjoyed herself.
“Is it typical of country society?”
“I suppose so. Mother, would it be?”
“Plenty of society,” said Mrs. Honeychurch, who was trying to remember
the hang of one of the dresses.
Seeing that her thoughts were elsewhere, Cecil bent towards Lucy and
said:
“To me it seemed perfectly appalling, disastrous, portentous.”
“I am so sorry that you were stranded.”
“Not that, but the congratulations. It is so disgusting, the way an
engagement is regarded as public property—a kind of waste place where
every outsider may shoot his vulgar sentiment. All those old women
smirking!”
“One has to go through it, I suppose. They won’t notice us so much next
time.”
“But my point is that their whole attitude is wrong. An
engagement—horrid word in the first place—is a private matter, and
should be treated as such.”
Yet the smirking old women, however wrong individually, were racially
correct. The spirit of the generations had smiled through them,
rejoicing in the engagement of Cecil and Lucy because it promised the
continuance of life on earth. To Cecil and Lucy it promised something
quite different—personal love. Hence Cecil’s irritation and Lucy’s
belief that his irritation was just.
“How tiresome!” she said. “Couldn’t you have escaped to tennis?”
“I don’t play tennis—at least, not in public. The neighbourhood is
deprived of the romance of me being athletic. Such romance as I have is
that of the Inglese Italianato.”
“Inglese Italianato?”
“E un diavolo incarnato! You know the proverb?”
She did not. Nor did it seem applicable to a young man who had spent a
quiet winter in Rome with his mother. But Cecil, since his engagement,
had taken to affect a cosmopolitan naughtiness which he was far from
possessing.
“Well,” said he, “I cannot help it if they do disapprove of me. There
are certain irremovable barriers between myself and them, and I must
accept them.”
“We all have our limitations, I suppose,” said wise Lucy.
“Sometimes they are forced on us, though,” said Cecil, who saw from her
remark that she did not quite understand his position.
“How?”
“It makes a difference doesn’t it, whether we fully fence ourselves in,
or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?”
She thought a moment, and agreed that it did make a difference.
“Difference?” cried Mrs. Honeychurch, suddenly alert. “I don’t see any
difference. Fences are fences, especially when they are in the same
place.”
“We were speaking of motives,” said Cecil, on whom the interruption
jarred.
“My dear Cecil, look here.” She spread out her knees and perched her
card-case on her lap. “This is me. That’s Windy Corner. The rest of the
pattern is the other people. Motives are all very well, but the fence
comes here.”
“We weren’t talking of real fences,” said Lucy, laughing.
“Oh, I see, dear—poetry.”
She leant placidly back. Cecil wondered why Lucy had been amused.
“I tell you who has no ‘fences,’ as you call them,” she said, “and
that’s Mr. Beebe.”
“A parson fenceless would mean a parson defenceless.”
Lucy was slow to follow what people said, but quick enough to detect
what they meant. She missed Cecil’s epigram, but grasped the feeling
that prompted it.
“Don’t you like Mr. Beebe?” she asked thoughtfully.
“I never said so!” he cried. “I consider him far above the average. I
only denied—” And he swept off on the subject of fences again, and was
brilliant.
“Now, a clergyman that I do hate,” said she wanting to say something
sympathetic, “a clergyman that does have fences, and the most dreadful
ones, is Mr. Eager, the English chaplain at Florence. He was truly
insincere—not merely the manner unfortunate. He was a snob, and so
conceited, and he did say such unkind things.”
“What sort of things?”
“There was an old man at the Bertolini whom he said had murdered his
wife.”
“Perhaps he had.”
“No!”
“Why ‘no’?”
“He was such a nice old man, I’m sure.”
Cecil laughed at her feminine inconsequence.
“Well, I did try to sift the thing. Mr. Eager would never come to the
point. He prefers it vague—said the old man had ‘practically’ murdered
his wife—had murdered her in the sight of God.”
“Hush, dear!” said Mrs. Honeychurch absently.
“But isn’t it intolerable that a person whom we’re told to imitate
should go round spreading slander? It was, I believe, chiefly owing to
him that the old man was dropped. People pretended he was vulgar, but
he certainly wasn’t that.”
“Poor old man! What was his name?”
“Harris,” said Lucy glibly.
“Let’s hope that Mrs. Harris there warn’t no sich person,” said her
mother.
Cecil nodded intelligently.
“Isn’t Mr. Eager a parson of the cultured type?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I hate him. I’ve heard him lecture on Giotto. I hate
him. Nothing can hide a petty nature. I _hate_ him.”
“My goodness gracious me, child!” said Mrs. Honeychurch. “You’ll blow