Howards End
may acquit them--almost. For one hard fact remains. They did neglect a
personal appeal. The woman who had died did say to them, “Do this,” and
they answered, “We will not.”
The incident made a most painful impression on them. Grief mounted into
the brain and worked there disquietingly. Yesterday they had lamented:
“She was a dear mother, a true wife; in our absence she neglected her
health and died.” To-day they thought: “She was not as true, as dear, as
we supposed.” The desire for a more inward light had found expression at
last, the unseen had impacted on the seen, and all that they could say
was “Treachery.” Mrs. Wilcox had been treacherous to the family, to the
laws of property, to her own written word. How did she expect Howards
End to be conveyed to Miss Schlegel? Was her husband, to whom it legally
belonged, to make it over to her as a free gift? Was the said Miss
Schlegel to have a life interest in it, or to own it absolutely? Was
there to be no compensation for the garage and other improvements that
they had made under the assumption that all would be theirs some
day? Treacherous! treacherous and absurd! When we think the dead both
treacherous and absurd, we have gone far towards reconciling ourselves
to their departure. That note, scribbled in pencil, sent through the
matron, was unbusinesslike as well as cruel, and decreased at once the
value of the woman who had written it.
“Ah, well!” said Mr. Wilcox, rising from the table. “I shouldn’t have
thought it possible.”
“Mother couldn’t have meant it,” said Evie, still frowning.
“No, my girl, of course not.”
“Mother believed so in ancestors too--it isn’t like her to leave
anything to an outsider, who’d never appreciate.”
“The whole thing is unlike her,” he announced. “If Miss Schlegel had
been poor, if she had wanted a house, I could understand it a little.
But she has a house of her own. Why should she want another? She
wouldn’t have any use for Howards End.”
“That time may prove,” murmured Charles.
“How?” asked his sister.
“Presumably she knows--mother will have told her. She got twice or three
times into the nursing home. Presumably she is awaiting developments.”
“What a horrid woman!” And Dolly, who had recovered, cried, “Why, she
may be coming down to turn us out now!”
Charles put her right. “I wish she would,” he said ominously. “I could
then deal with her.”
“So could I,” echoed his father, who was feeling rather in the cold.
Charles had been kind in undertaking the funeral arrangements and in
telling him to eat his breakfast, but the boy as he grew up was a little
dictatorial, and assumed the post of chairman too readily. “I could deal
with her, if she comes, but she won’t come. You’re all a bit hard on
Miss Schlegel.”
“That Paul business was pretty scandalous, though.”
“I want no more of the Paul business, Charles, as I said at the time,
and besides, it is quite apart from this business. Margaret Schlegel has
been officious and tiresome during this terrible week, and we have
all suffered under her, but upon my soul she’s honest. She’s NOT in
collusion with the matron. I’m absolutely certain of it. Nor was she
with the doctor, I’m equally certain of that. She did not hide anything
from us, for up to that very afternoon she was as ignorant as we are.
She, like ourselves, was a dupe--” He stopped for a moment. “You see,
Charles, in her terrible pain your mother put us all in false positions.
Paul would not have left England, you would not have gone to Italy, nor
Evie and I into Yorkshire, if only we had known. Well, Miss Schlegel’s
position has been equally false. Take all in all, she has not come out
of it badly.”
Evie said: “But those chrysanthemums--”
“Or coming down to the funeral at all--” echoed Dolly.
“Why shouldn’t she come down? She had the right to, and she stood far
back among the Hilton women. The flowers--certainly we should not have
sent such flowers, but they may have seemed the right thing to her,
Evie, and for all you know they may be the custom in Germany.”
“Oh, I forget she isn’t really English,” cried Evie. “That would explain
a lot.”
“She’s a cosmopolitan,” said Charles, looking at his watch. “I admit I’m
rather down on cosmopolitans. My fault, doubtless. I cannot stand them,
and a German cosmopolitan is the limit. I think that’s about all, isn’t
it? I want to run down and see Chalkeley. A bicycle will do. And, by the
way, I wish you’d speak to Crane some time. I’m certain he’s had my new
car out.”
“Has he done it any harm?”
“No.”
“In that case I shall let it pass. It’s not worth while having a row.”
Charles and his father sometimes disagreed. But they always parted
with an increased regard for one another, and each desired no doughtier
comrade when it was necessary to voyage for a little past the emotions.
So the sailors of Ulysses voyaged past the Sirens, having first stopped
one another’s ears with wool.
CHAPTER XII
Charles need not have been anxious. Miss Schlegel had never heard of his
mother’s strange request. She was to hear of it in after years, when she
had built up her life differently, and it was to fit into position as
the headstone of the corner. Her mind was bent on other questions
now, and by her also it would have been rejected as the fantasy of an
invalid.
She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his
mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of
it for ever. The ripple had left no traces behind; the wave had strewn
at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood
for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells
a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. Her
friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in degradation.
Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease and pain. Some
leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox
had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She
had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her
friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but
not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to
die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet
with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he
must leave.
The last word--whatever it would be--had certainly not been said in
Hilton churchyard. She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any
more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy
devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would
register the quick motions of man. In Margaret’s eyes Mrs. Wilcox had
escaped registration. She had gone out of life vividly, her own way, and
no dust was so truly dust as the contents of that heavy coffin, lowered
with ceremonial until it rested on the dust of the earth, no flowers so
utterly wasted as the chrysanthemums that the frost must have withered
before morning. Margaret had once said she “loved superstition.” It was
not true. Few women had tried more earnestly to pierce the accretions in
which body and soul are enwrapped. The death of Mrs. Wilcox had helped
her in her work. She saw a little more clearly than hitherto what a
human being is, and to what he may aspire. Truer relationships gleamed.
Perhaps the last word would be hope--hope even on this side of the
grave.
Meanwhile, she could take an interest in the survivors. In spite of her
Christmas duties, in spite of her brother, the Wilcoxes continued to
play a considerable part in her thoughts. She had seen so much of them
in the final week. They were not “her sort,” they were often suspicious
and stupid, and deficient where she excelled; but collision with them
stimulated her, and she felt an interest that verged into liking, even
for Charles. She desired to protect them, and often felt that they could
protect her, excelling where she was deficient. Once past the rocks of
emotion, they knew so well what to do, whom to send for; their hands
were on all the ropes, they had grit as well as grittiness and she
valued grit enormously. They led a life that she could not attain
to--the outer life of “telegrams and anger,” which had detonated when
Helen and Paul had touched in June, and had detonated again the other
week. To Margaret this life was to remain a real force. She could not
despise it, as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtues
as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no
doubt, but they have formed our civilisation. They form character, too;
Margaret could not doubt it; they keep the soul from becoming sloppy.
How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a
world?
“Don’t brood too much,” she wrote to Helen, “on the superiority of
the unseen to the seen. It’s true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our
business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.”
Helen replied that she had no intention of brooding on such a dull
subject. What did her sister take her for? The weather was magnificent.
She and the Mosebachs had gone tobogganing on the only hill that
Pomerania boasted. It was fun, but over-crowded, for the rest of
Pomerania had gone there too. Helen loved the country, and her letter
glowed with physical exercise and poetry. She spoke of the scenery,
quiet, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, with their scampering herds
of deer; of the river and its quaint entrance into the Baltic Sea; of
the Oderberge, only three hundred feet high, from which one slid all too
quickly back into the Pomeranian plains, and yet these Oderberge were
real mountains, with pine-forests, streams, and views complete. “It
isn’t size that counts so much as the way things are arranged.” In
another paragraph she referred to Mrs. Wilcox sympathetically, but the
news had not bitten into her. She had not realised the accessories
of death, which are in a sense more memorable than death itself. The
atmosphere of precautions and recriminations, and in the midst a human
body growing more vivid because it was in pain; the end of that body in
Hilton churchyard; the survival of something that suggested hope, vivid
in its turn against life’s workaday cheerfulness;--all these were lost
to Helen, who only felt that a pleasant lady could now be pleasant no
longer. She returned to Wickham Place full of her own affairs--she had
had another proposal--and Margaret, after a moment’s hesitation, was
content that this should be so.
The proposal had not been a serious matter. It was the work of Fraulein
Mosebach, who had conceived the large and patriotic notion of winning
back her cousins to the Fatherland by matrimony. England had played Paul
Wilcox, and lost; Germany played Herr Forstmeister some one--Helen could
not remember his name. Herr Forstmeister lived in a wood, and, standing
on the summit of the Oderberge, he had pointed out his house to Helen,
or rather, had pointed out the wedge of pines in which it lay. She had
exclaimed, “Oh, how lovely! That’s the place for me!” and in the evening
Frieda appeared in her bedroom. “I have a message, dear Helen,” etc.,
and so she had, but had been very nice when Helen laughed; quite
understood--a forest too solitary and damp--quite agreed, but Herr
Forstmeister believed he had assurance to the contrary. Germany had
lost, but with good-humour; holding the manhood of the world, she felt
bound to win. “And there will even be some one for Tibby,” concluded
Helen. “There now, Tibby, think of that; Frieda is saving up a little
girl for you, in pig-tails and white worsted stockings but the feet
of the stockings are pink as if the little girl had trodden in
strawberries. I’ve talked too much. My head aches. Now you talk.”