A Room with a View
which superstition has wrapped it round. But we have souls. I cannot
say how they came nor whither they go, but we have them, and I see you
ruining yours. I cannot bear it. It is again the darkness creeping in;
it is hell.” Then he checked himself. “What nonsense I have talked—how
abstract and remote! And I have made you cry! Dear girl, forgive my
prosiness; marry my boy. When I think what life is, and how seldom love
is answered by love—Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the
world was made.”
She could not understand him; the words were indeed remote. Yet as he
spoke the darkness was withdrawn, veil after veil, and she saw to the
bottom of her soul.
“Then, Lucy—”
“You’ve frightened me,” she moaned. “Cecil—Mr. Beebe—the ticket’s
bought—everything.” She fell sobbing into the chair. “I’m caught in the
tangle. I must suffer and grow old away from him. I cannot break the
whole of life for his sake. They trusted me.”
A carriage drew up at the front-door.
“Give George my love—once only. Tell him ‘muddle.’” Then she arranged
her veil, while the tears poured over her cheeks inside.
“Lucy—”
“No—they are in the hall—oh, please not, Mr. Emerson—they trust me—”
“But why should they, when you have deceived them?”
Mr. Beebe opened the door, saying: “Here’s my mother.”
“You’re not worthy of their trust.”
“What’s that?” said Mr. Beebe sharply.
“I was saying, why should you trust her when she deceived you?”
“One minute, mother.” He came in and shut the door.
“I don’t follow you, Mr. Emerson. To whom do you refer? Trust whom?”
“I mean she has pretended to you that she did not love George. They
have loved one another all along.”
Mr. Beebe looked at the sobbing girl. He was very quiet, and his white
face, with its ruddy whiskers, seemed suddenly inhuman. A long black
column, he stood and awaited her reply.
“I shall never marry him,” quavered Lucy.
A look of contempt came over him, and he said, “Why not?”
“Mr. Beebe—I have misled you—I have misled myself—”
“Oh, rubbish, Miss Honeychurch!”
“It is not rubbish!” said the old man hotly. “It’s the part of people
that you don’t understand.”
Mr. Beebe laid his hand on the old man’s shoulder pleasantly.
“Lucy! Lucy!” called voices from the carriage.
“Mr. Beebe, could you help me?”
He looked amazed at the request, and said in a low, stern voice: “I am
more grieved than I can possibly express. It is lamentable,
lamentable—incredible.”
“What’s wrong with the boy?” fired up the other again.
“Nothing, Mr. Emerson, except that he no longer interests me. Marry
George, Miss Honeychurch. He will do admirably.”
He walked out and left them. They heard him guiding his mother
up-stairs.
“Lucy!” the voices called.
She turned to Mr. Emerson in despair. But his face revived her. It was
the face of a saint who understood.
“Now it is all dark. Now Beauty and Passion seem never to have existed.
I know. But remember the mountains over Florence and the view. Ah,
dear, if I were George, and gave you one kiss, it would make you brave.
You have to go cold into a battle that needs warmth, out into the
muddle that you have made yourself; and your mother and all your
friends will despise you, oh, my darling, and rightly, if it is ever
right to despise. George still dark, all the tussle and the misery
without a word from him. Am I justified?” Into his own eyes tears came.
“Yes, for we fight for more than Love or Pleasure; there is Truth.
Truth counts, Truth does count.”
“You kiss me,” said the girl. “You kiss me. I will try.”
He gave her a sense of deities reconciled, a feeling that, in gaining
the man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world.
Throughout the squalor of her homeward drive—she spoke at once—his
salutation remained. He had robbed the body of its taint, the world’s
taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire.
She “never exactly understood,” she would say in after years, “how he
managed to strengthen her. It was as if he had made her see the whole
of everything at once.”
Chapter XX
The End of the Middle Ages
The Miss Alans did go to Greece, but they went by themselves. They
alone of this little company will double Malea and plough the waters of
the Saronic gulf. They alone will visit Athens and Delphi, and either
shrine of intellectual song—that upon the Acropolis, encircled by blue
seas; that under Parnassus, where the eagles build and the bronze
charioteer drives undismayed towards infinity. Trembling, anxious,
cumbered with much digestive bread, they did proceed to Constantinople,
they did go round the world. The rest of us must be contented with a
fair, but a less arduous, goal. Italiam petimus: we return to the
Pension Bertolini.
George said it was his old room.
“No, it isn’t,” said Lucy; “because it is the room I had, and I had
your father’s room. I forget why; Charlotte made me, for some reason.”
He knelt on the tiled floor, and laid his face in her lap.
“George, you baby, get up.”
“Why shouldn’t I be a baby?” murmured George.
Unable to answer this question, she put down his sock, which she was
trying to mend, and gazed out through the window. It was evening and
again the spring.
“Oh, bother Charlotte,” she said thoughtfully. “What can such people be
made of?”
“Same stuff as parsons are made of.”
“Nonsense!”
“Quite right. It is nonsense.”
“Now you get up off the cold floor, or you’ll be starting rheumatism
next, and you stop laughing and being so silly.”
“Why shouldn’t I laugh?” he asked, pinning her with his elbows, and
advancing his face to hers. “What’s there to cry at? Kiss me here.” He
indicated the spot where a kiss would be welcome.
He was a boy after all. When it came to the point, it was she who
remembered the past, she into whose soul the iron had entered, she who
knew whose room this had been last year. It endeared him to her
strangely that he should be sometimes wrong.
“Any letters?” he asked.
“Just a line from Freddy.”
“Now kiss me here; then here.”
Then, threatened again with rheumatism, he strolled to the window,
opened it (as the English will), and leant out. There was the parapet,
there the river, there to the left the beginnings of the hills. The
cab-driver, who at once saluted him with the hiss of a serpent, might
be that very Phaethon who had set this happiness in motion twelve
months ago. A passion of gratitude—all feelings grow to passions in the
South—came over the husband, and he blessed the people and the things
who had taken so much trouble about a young fool. He had helped
himself, it is true, but how stupidly!
All the fighting that mattered had been done by others—by Italy, by his
father, by his wife.
“Lucy, you come and look at the cypresses; and the church, whatever its
name is, still shows.”
“San Miniato. I’ll just finish your sock.”
“Signorino, domani faremo uno giro,” called the cabman, with engaging
certainty.
George told him that he was mistaken; they had no money to throw away
on driving.
And the people who had not meant to help—the Miss Lavishes, the Cecils,
the Miss Bartletts! Ever prone to magnify Fate, George counted up the
forces that had swept him into this contentment.
“Anything good in Freddy’s letter?”
“Not yet.”
His own content was absolute, but hers held bitterness: the
Honeychurches had not forgiven them; they were disgusted at her past
hypocrisy; she had alienated Windy Corner, perhaps for ever.
“What does he say?”
“Silly boy! He thinks he’s being dignified. He knew we should go off in
the spring—he has known it for six months—that if mother wouldn’t give
her consent we should take the thing into our own hands. They had fair
warning, and now he calls it an elopement. Ridiculous boy—”
“Signorino, domani faremo uno giro—”
“But it will all come right in the end. He has to build us both up from
the beginning again. I wish, though, that Cecil had not turned so
cynical about women. He has, for the second time, quite altered. Why
will men have theories about women? I haven’t any about men. I wish,
too, that Mr. Beebe—”
“You may well wish that.”
“He will never forgive us—I mean, he will never be interested in us
again. I wish that he did not influence them so much at Windy Corner. I
wish he hadn’t—But if we act the truth, the people who really love us
are sure to come back to us in the long run.”
“Perhaps.” Then he said more gently: “Well, I acted the truth—the only
thing I did do—and you came back to me. So possibly you know.” He
turned back into the room. “Nonsense with that sock.” He carried her to
the window, so that she, too, saw all the view. They sank upon their
knees, invisible from the road, they hoped, and began to whisper one
another’s names. Ah! it was worth while; it was the great joy that they
had expected, and countless little joys of which they had never dreamt.
They were silent.
“Signorino, domani faremo—”
“Oh, bother that man!”
But Lucy remembered the vendor of photographs and said, “No, don’t be
rude to him.” Then with a catching of her breath, she murmured: “Mr.
Eager and Charlotte, dreadful frozen Charlotte. How cruel she would be
to a man like that!”
“Look at the lights going over the bridge.”
“But this room reminds me of Charlotte. How horrible to grow old in
Charlotte’s way! To think that evening at the rectory that she
shouldn’t have heard your father was in the house. For she would have
stopped me going in, and he was the only person alive who could have
made me see sense. You couldn’t have made me. When I am very happy”—she
kissed him—“I remember on how little it all hangs. If Charlotte had
only known, she would have stopped me going in, and I should have gone
to silly Greece, and become different for ever.”
“But she did know,” said George; “she did see my father, surely. He
said so.”
“Oh, no, she didn’t see him. She was upstairs with old Mrs. Beebe,
don’t you remember, and then went straight to the church. She said so.”
George was obstinate again. “My father,” said he, “saw her, and I
prefer his word. He was dozing by the study fire, and he opened his
eyes, and there was Miss Bartlett. A few minutes before you came in.
She was turning to go as he woke up. He didn’t speak to her.”
Then they spoke of other things—the desultory talk of those who have
been fighting to reach one another, and whose reward is to rest quietly
in each other’s arms. It was long ere they returned to Miss Bartlett,
but when they did her behaviour seemed more interesting. George, who
disliked any darkness, said: “It’s clear that she knew. Then, why did
she risk the meeting? She knew he was there, and yet she went to
church.”
They tried to piece the thing together.
As they talked, an incredible solution came into Lucy’s mind. She
rejected it, and said: “How like Charlotte to undo her work by a feeble
muddle at the last moment.” But something in the dying evening, in the
roar of the river, in their very embrace warned them that her words
fell short of life, and George whispered: “Or did she mean it?”
“Mean what?”
“Signorino, domani faremo uno giro—”
Lucy bent forward and said with gentleness: “Lascia, prego, lascia.
Siamo sposati.”
“Scusi tanto, signora,” he replied in tones as gentle and whipped up
his horse.
“Buona sera—e grazie.”
“Niente.”
The cabman drove away singing.
“Mean what, George?”
He whispered: “Is it this? Is this possible? I’ll put a marvel to you.
That your cousin has always hoped. That from the very first moment we
met, she hoped, far down in her mind, that we should be like this—of
course, very far down. That she fought us on the surface, and yet she
hoped. I can’t explain her any other way. Can you? Look how she kept me