A Room with a View
Mr. Beebe, what guarantee was there that the people who really mattered
to her would escape? For instance, Freddy. Freddy was neither clever,
nor subtle, nor beautiful, and what prevented Cecil from saying, any
minute, “It would be wrong not to loathe Freddy”? And what would she
reply? Further than Freddy she did not go, but he gave her anxiety
enough. She could only assure herself that Cecil had known Freddy some
time, and that they had always got on pleasantly, except, perhaps,
during the last few days, which was an accident, perhaps.
“Which way shall we go?” she asked him.
Nature—simplest of topics, she thought—was around them. Summer Street
lay deep in the woods, and she had stopped where a footpath diverged
from the highroad.
“Are there two ways?”
“Perhaps the road is more sensible, as we’re got up smart.”
“I’d rather go through the wood,” said Cecil, with that subdued
irritation that she had noticed in him all the afternoon. “Why is it,
Lucy, that you always say the road? Do you know that you have never
once been with me in the fields or the wood since we were engaged?”
“Haven’t I? The wood, then,” said Lucy, startled at his queerness, but
pretty sure that he would explain later; it was not his habit to leave
her in doubt as to his meaning.
She led the way into the whispering pines, and sure enough he did
explain before they had gone a dozen yards.
“I had got an idea—I dare say wrongly—that you feel more at home with
me in a room.”
“A room?” she echoed, hopelessly bewildered.
“Yes. Or, at the most, in a garden, or on a road. Never in the real
country like this.”
“Oh, Cecil, whatever do you mean? I have never felt anything of the
sort. You talk as if I was a kind of poetess sort of person.”
“I don’t know that you aren’t. I connect you with a view—a certain type
of view. Why shouldn’t you connect me with a room?”
She reflected a moment, and then said, laughing:
“Do you know that you’re right? I do. I must be a poetess after all.
When I think of you it’s always as in a room. How funny!”
To her surprise, he seemed annoyed.
“A drawing-room, pray? With no view?”
“Yes, with no view, I fancy. Why not?”
“I’d rather,” he said reproachfully, “that you connected me with the
open air.”
She said again, “Oh, Cecil, whatever do you mean?”
As no explanation was forthcoming, she shook off the subject as too
difficult for a girl, and led him further into the wood, pausing every
now and then at some particularly beautiful or familiar combination of
the trees. She had known the wood between Summer Street and Windy
Corner ever since she could walk alone; she had played at losing Freddy
in it, when Freddy was a purple-faced baby; and though she had been to
Italy, it had lost none of its charm.
Presently they came to a little clearing among the pines—another tiny
green alp, solitary this time, and holding in its bosom a shallow pool.
She exclaimed, “The Sacred Lake!”
“Why do you call it that?”
“I can’t remember why. I suppose it comes out of some book. It’s only a
puddle now, but you see that stream going through it? Well, a good deal
of water comes down after heavy rains, and can’t get away at once, and
the pool becomes quite large and beautiful. Then Freddy used to bathe
there. He is very fond of it.”
“And you?”
He meant, “Are you fond of it?” But she answered dreamily, “I bathed
here, too, till I was found out. Then there was a row.”
At another time he might have been shocked, for he had depths of
prudishness within him. But now? with his momentary cult of the fresh
air, he was delighted at her admirable simplicity. He looked at her as
she stood by the pool’s edge. She was got up smart, as she phrased it,
and she reminded him of some brilliant flower that has no leaves of its
own, but blooms abruptly out of a world of green.
“Who found you out?”
“Charlotte,” she murmured. “She was stopping with us.
Charlotte—Charlotte.”
“Poor girl!”
She smiled gravely. A certain scheme, from which hitherto he had
shrunk, now appeared practical.
“Lucy!”
“Yes, I suppose we ought to be going,” was her reply.
“Lucy, I want to ask something of you that I have never asked before.”
At the serious note in his voice she stepped frankly and kindly towards
him.
“What, Cecil?”
“Hitherto never—not even that day on the lawn when you agreed to marry
me—”
He became self-conscious and kept glancing round to see if they were
observed. His courage had gone.
“Yes?”
“Up to now I have never kissed you.”
She was as scarlet as if he had put the thing most indelicately.
“No—more you have,” she stammered.
“Then I ask you—may I now?”
“Of course, you may, Cecil. You might before. I can’t run at you, you
know.”
At that supreme moment he was conscious of nothing but absurdities. Her
reply was inadequate. She gave such a business-like lift to her veil.
As he approached her he found time to wish that he could recoil. As he
touched her, his gold pince-nez became dislodged and was flattened
between them.
Such was the embrace. He considered, with truth, that it had been a
failure. Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget
civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined
nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right
of way. Why could he not do as any labourer or navvy—nay, as any young
man behind the counter would have done? He recast the scene. Lucy was
standing flowerlike by the water, he rushed up and took her in his
arms; she rebuked him, permitted him and revered him ever after for his
manliness. For he believed that women revere men for their manliness.
They left the pool in silence, after this one salutation. He waited for
her to make some remark which should show him her inmost thoughts. At
last she spoke, and with fitting gravity.
“Emerson was the name, not Harris.”
“What name?”
“The old man’s.”
“What old man?”
“That old man I told you about. The one Mr. Eager was so unkind to.”
He could not know that this was the most intimate conversation they had
ever had.
Chapter X
Cecil as a Humourist
The society out of which Cecil proposed to rescue Lucy was perhaps no
very splendid affair, yet it was more splendid than her antecedents
entitled her to. Her father, a prosperous local solicitor, had built
Windy Corner, as a speculation at the time the district was opening up,
and, falling in love with his own creation, had ended by living there
himself. Soon after his marriage the social atmosphere began to alter.
Other houses were built on the brow of that steep southern slope and
others, again, among the pine-trees behind, and northward on the chalk
barrier of the downs. Most of these houses were larger than Windy
Corner, and were filled by people who came, not from the district, but
from London, and who mistook the Honeychurches for the remnants of an
indigenous aristocracy. He was inclined to be frightened, but his wife
accepted the situation without either pride or humility. “I cannot
think what people are doing,” she would say, “but it is extremely
fortunate for the children.” She called everywhere; her calls were
returned with enthusiasm, and by the time people found out that she was
not exactly of their _milieu_, they liked her, and it did not seem to
matter. When Mr. Honeychurch died, he had the satisfaction—which few
honest solicitors despise—of leaving his family rooted in the best
society obtainable.
The best obtainable. Certainly many of the immigrants were rather dull,
and Lucy realized this more vividly since her return from Italy.
Hitherto she had accepted their ideals without questioning—their kindly
affluence, their inexplosive religion, their dislike of paper-bags,
orange-peel, and broken bottles. A Radical out and out, she learnt to
speak with horror of Suburbia. Life, so far as she troubled to conceive
it, was a circle of rich, pleasant people, with identical interests and
identical foes. In this circle, one thought, married, and died. Outside
it were poverty and vulgarity for ever trying to enter, just as the
London fog tries to enter the pine-woods pouring through the gaps in
the northern hills. But, in Italy, where any one who chooses may warm
himself in equality, as in the sun, this conception of life vanished.
Her senses expanded; she felt that there was no one whom she might not
get to like, that social barriers were irremovable, doubtless, but not
particularly high. You jump over them just as you jump into a peasant’s
olive-yard in the Apennines, and he is glad to see you. She returned
with new eyes.
So did Cecil; but Italy had quickened Cecil, not to tolerance, but to
irritation. He saw that the local society was narrow, but, instead of
saying, “Does that very much matter?” he rebelled, and tried to
substitute for it the society he called broad. He did not realize that
Lucy had consecrated her environment by the thousand little civilities
that create a tenderness in time, and that though her eyes saw its
defects, her heart refused to despise it entirely. Nor did he realize a
more important point—that if she was too great for this society, she
was too great for all society, and had reached the stage where personal
intercourse would alone satisfy her. A rebel she was, but not of the
kind he understood—a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but
equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most
priceless of all possessions—her own soul.
Playing bumble-puppy with Minnie Beebe, niece to the rector, and aged
thirteen—an ancient and most honourable game, which consists in
striking tennis-balls high into the air, so that they fall over the net
and immoderately bounce; some hit Mrs. Honeychurch; others are lost.
The sentence is confused, but the better illustrates Lucy’s state of
mind, for she was trying to talk to Mr. Beebe at the same time.
“Oh, it has been such a nuisance—first he, then they—no one knowing
what they wanted, and everyone so tiresome.”
“But they really are coming now,” said Mr. Beebe. “I wrote to Miss
Teresa a few days ago—she was wondering how often the butcher called,
and my reply of once a month must have impressed her favourably. They
are coming. I heard from them this morning.
“I shall hate those Miss Alans!” Mrs. Honeychurch cried. “Just because
they’re old and silly one’s expected to say ‘How sweet!’ I hate their
‘if’-ing and ‘but’-ing and ‘and’-ing. And poor Lucy—serve her
right—worn to a shadow.”
Mr. Beebe watched the shadow springing and shouting over the
tennis-court. Cecil was absent—one did not play bumble-puppy when he
was there.
“Well, if they are coming—No, Minnie, not Saturn.” Saturn was a
tennis-ball whose skin was partially unsewn. When in motion his orb was
encircled by a ring. “If they are coming, Sir Harry will let them move
in before the twenty-ninth, and he will cross out the clause about
whitewashing the ceilings, because it made them nervous, and put in the
fair wear and tear one.—That doesn’t count. I told you not Saturn.”
“Saturn’s all right for bumble-puppy,” cried Freddy, joining them.
“Minnie, don’t you listen to her.”
“Saturn doesn’t bounce.”
“Saturn bounces enough.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Well; he bounces better than the Beautiful White Devil.”
“Hush, dear,” said Mrs. Honeychurch.
“But look at Lucy—complaining of Saturn, and all the time’s got the
Beautiful White Devil in her hand, ready to plug it in. That’s right,
Minnie, go for her—get her over the shins with the racquet—get her over
the shins!”
Lucy fell, the Beautiful White Devil rolled from her hand.
Mr. Beebe picked it up, and said: “The name of this ball is Vittoria
Corombona, please.” But his correction passed unheeded.