Howards End
Tibby consented to talk. He too was full of his own affairs, for he had
just been up to try for a scholarship at Oxford. The men were down, and
the candidates had been housed in various colleges, and had dined in
hall. Tibby was sensitive to beauty, the experience was new, and he
gave a description of his visit that was almost glowing. The august and
mellow University, soaked with the richness of the western counties that
it has served for a thousand years, appealed at once to the boy’s taste;
it was the kind of thing he could understand, and he understood it
all the better because it was empty. Oxford is--Oxford; not a mere
receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to
love it rather than to love one another; such at all events was to
be its effect on Tibby. His sisters sent him there that he might make
friends, for they knew that his education had been cranky, and had
severed him from other boys and men. He made no friends. His Oxford
remained Oxford empty, and he took into life with him, not the memory of
a radiance, but the memory of a colour scheme.
It pleased Margaret to hear her brother and sister talking. They did
not get on overwell as a rule. For a few moments she listened to them,
feeling elderly and benign.
Then something occurred to her, and she interrupted.
“Helen, I told you about poor Mrs. Wilcox; that sad business?”
“Yes.”
“I have had a correspondence with her son. He was winding up the estate,
and wrote to ask me whether his mother had wanted me to have anything.
I thought it good of him, considering I knew her so little. I said that
she had once spoken of giving me a Christmas present, but we both forgot
about it afterwards.”
“I hope Charles took the hint.”
“Yes--that is to say, her husband wrote later on, and thanked me for
being a little kind to her, and actually gave me her silver vinaigrette.
Don’t you think that is extraordinarily generous? It has made me
like him very much. He hopes that this will not be the end of our
acquaintance, but that you and I will go and stop with Evie some time in
the future. I like Mr. Wilcox. He is taking up his work--rubber--it is
a big business. I gather he is launching out rather. Charles is in it,
too. Charles is married--a pretty little creature, but she doesn’t seem
wise. They took on the flat, but now they have gone off to a house of
their own.”
Helen, after a decent pause, continued her account of Stettin. How
quickly a situation changes! In June she had been in a crisis; even in
November she could blush and be unnatural; now it was January and
the whole affair lay forgotten. Looking back on the past six months,
Margaret realised the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its
difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by
historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead
nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never
comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that
might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that
of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is
never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly
silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good,
and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life
fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save
by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality
would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of
it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its
essence is romantic beauty. Margaret hoped that for the future she would
be less cautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the past.
CHAPTER XIII
Over two years passed, and the Schlegel household continued to lead its
life of cultured, but not ignoble, ease, still swimming gracefully on
the grey tides of London. Concerts and plays swept past them, money had
been spent and renewed, reputations won and lost, and the city herself,
emblematic of their lives, rose and fell in a continual flux, while her
shallows washed more widely against the hills of Surrey and over the
fields of Hertfordshire. This famous building had arisen, that was
doomed. To-day Whitehall had been transformed; it would be the turn
of Regent Street to-morrow. And month by month the roads smelt more
strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings
heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the
air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew; the leaves were falling
by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity.
To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The Earth as an
artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future
will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. One
can understand the reaction. Of Pan and the elemental forces, the public
has heard a little too much--they seem Victorian, while London is
Georgian--and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long
ere the pendulum swings back to her again. Certainly London fascinates.
One visualises it as a tract of quivering grey, intelligent without
purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered before
it can be chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with no
pulsation of humanity. It lies beyond everything; Nature, with all
her cruelty, comes nearer to us than do these crowds of men. A friend
explains himself; the earth is explicable--from her we came, and we must
return to her. But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool
Street in the morning--the city inhaling--or the same thoroughfares
in the evening--the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in
desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the
universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human
face. London is religion’s opportunity--not the decorous religion of
theologians, but anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow
would be tolerable if a man of our own sort--not any one pompous or
tearful--were caring for us up in the sky.
The Londoner seldom understands his city until it sweeps him, too, away
from his moorings, and Margaret’s eyes were not opened until the lease
of Wickham Place expired. She had always known that it must expire, but
the knowledge only became vivid about nine months before the event.
Then the house was suddenly ringed with pathos. It had seen so much
happiness. Why had it to be swept away? In the streets of the city
she noted for the first time the architecture of hurry and heard the
language of hurry on the mouths of its inhabitants--clipped words,
formless sentences, potted expressions of approval or disgust. Month by
month things were stepping livelier, but to what goal? The population
still rose, but what was the quality of the men born? The particular
millionaire who owned the freehold of Wickham Place, and desired to
erect Babylonian flats upon it--what right had he to stir so large a
portion of the quivering jelly? He was not a fool--she had heard him
expose Socialism--but true insight began just where his intelligence
ended, and one gathered that this was the case with most millionaires.
What right had such men--But Margaret checked herself. That way lies
madness. Thank goodness, she, too, had some money, and could purchase a
new home.
Tibby, now in his second year at Oxford, was down for the Easter
vacation, and Margaret took the opportunity of having a serious talk
with him. Did he at all know where he wanted to live? Tibby didn’t
know that he did know. Did he at all know what he wanted to do? He was
equally uncertain, but when pressed remarked that he should prefer to
be quite free of any profession. Margaret was not shocked, but went on
sewing for a few minutes before she replied:
“I was thinking of Mr. Vyse. He never strikes me as particularly happy.”
“Ye--es.” said Tibby, and then held his mouth open in a curious quiver,
as if he, too, had thought of Mr. Vyse, had seen round, through, over,
and beyond Mr. Vyse, had weighed Mr. Vyse, grouped him, and finally
dismissed him as having no possible bearing on the Subject under
discussion. That bleat of Tibby’s infuriated Helen. But Helen was now
down in the dining room preparing a speech about political economy. At
times her voice could be heard declaiming through the floor.
“But Mr. Vyse is rather a wretched, weedy man, don’t you think? Then
there’s Guy. That was a pitiful business. Besides”--shifting to the
general--“every one is the better for some regular work.”
Groans.
“I shall stick to it,” she continued, smiling. “I am not saying it
to educate you; it is what I really think. I believe that in the last
century men have developed the desire for work, and they must not starve
it. It’s a new desire. It goes with a great deal that’s bad, but in
itself it’s good, and I hope that for women, too, ‘not to work’ will
soon become as shocking as ‘not to be married’ was a hundred years ago.”
“I have no experience of this profound desire to which you allude,”
enunciated Tibby.
“Then we’ll leave the subject till you do. I’m not going to rattle you
round. Take your time. Only do think over the lives of the men you like
most, and see how they’ve arranged them.”
“I like Guy and Mr. Vyse most,” said Tibby faintly, and leant so far
back in his chair that he extended in a horizontal line from knees to
throat.
“And don’t think I’m not serious because I don’t use the traditional
arguments--making money, a sphere awaiting you, and so on--all of which
are, for various reasons, cant.” She sewed on. “I’m only your sister.
I haven’t any authority over you, and I don’t want to have any. Just
to put before you what I think the Truth. You see”--she shook off the
pince-nez to which she had recently taken--“in a few years we shall be
the same age practically, and I shall want you to help me. Men are so
much nicer than women.”
“Labouring under such a delusion, why do you not marry?”
“I sometimes jolly well think I would if I got the chance.”
“Has nobody arst you?”
“Only ninnies.”
“Do people ask Helen?”
“Plentifully.”
“Tell me about them.”
“No.”
“Tell me about your ninnies, then.”
“They were men who had nothing better to do,” said his sister, feeling
that she was entitled to score this point. “So take warning; you must
work, or else you must pretend to work, which is what I do. Work, work,
work if you’d save your soul and your body. It is honestly a necessity,
dear boy. Look at the Wilcoxes, look at Mr. Pembroke. With all their
defects of temper and understanding, such men give me more pleasure than
many who are better equipped, and I think it is because they have worked
regularly and honestly.”
“Spare me the Wilcoxes,” he moaned.
“I shall not. They are the right sort.”
“Oh, goodness me, Meg--!” he protested, suddenly sitting up, alert and
angry. Tibby, for all his defects, had a genuine personality.
“Well, they’re as near the right sort as you can imagine.”
“No, no--oh, no!”
“I was thinking of the younger son, whom I once classed as a ninny,
but who came back so ill from Nigeria. He’s gone out there again, Evie
Wilcox tells me--out to his duty.”
“Duty” always elicited a groan.
“He doesn’t want the money, it is work he wants, though it is beastly
work--dull country, dishonest natives, an eternal fidget over fresh
water and food... A nation that can produce men of that sort may well be
proud. No wonder England has become an Empire.”
“EMPIRE!”
“I can’t bother over results,” said Margaret, a little sadly. “They are
too difficult for me. I can only look at the men. An Empire bores me,