Howards End
enjoying myself. I shall be no fun to myself or to others until this
business is off my mind.”
“But you won’t do anything rash, Margaret?”
“There’s nothing rash to do.”
“Who ARE the Wilcoxes?” said Tibby, a question that sounds silly, but
was really extremely subtle as his aunt found to her cost when she tried
to answer it. “I don’t MANAGE the Wilcoxes; I don’t see where they come
IN.”
“No more do I,” agreed Helen. “It’s funny that we just don’t lose sight
of them. Out of all our hotel acquaintances, Mr. Wilcox is the only one
who has stuck. It is now over three years, and we have drifted away from
far more interesting people in that time.”
“Interesting people don’t get one houses.”
“Meg, if you start in your honest-English vein, I shall throw the
treacle at you.”
“It’s a better vein than the cosmopolitan,” said Margaret, getting up.
“Now, children, which is it to be? You know the Ducie Street house.
Shall I say yes or shall I say no? Tibby love--which? I’m specially
anxious to pin you both.”
“It all depends on what meaning you attach to the word ‘possible’”
“It depends on nothing of the sort. Say ‘yes.’”
“Say ‘no.’”
Then Margaret spoke rather seriously. “I think,” she said, “that our
race is degenerating. We cannot settle even this little thing; what will
it be like when we have to settle a big one?”
“It will be as easy as eating,” returned Helen.
“I was thinking of father. How could he settle to leave Germany as he
did, when he had fought for it as a young man, and all his feelings
and friends were Prussian? How could he break loose with Patriotism and
begin aiming at something else? It would have killed me. When he was
nearly forty he could change countries and ideals--and we, at our age,
can’t change houses. It’s humiliating.”
“Your father may have been able to change countries,” said Mrs. Munt
with asperity, “and that may or may not be a good thing. But he could
change houses no better than you can, in fact, much worse. Never shall I
forget what poor Emily suffered in the move from Manchester.”
“I knew it,” cried Helen. “I told you so. It is the little things one
bungles at. The big, real ones are nothing when they come.”
“Bungle, my dear! You are too little to recollect--in fact, you weren’t
there. But the furniture was actually in the vans and on the move
before the lease for Wickham Place was signed, and Emily took train with
baby--who was Margaret then--and the smaller luggage for London, without
so much as knowing where her new home would be. Getting away from that
house may be hard, but it is nothing to the misery that we all went
through getting you into it.”
Helen, with her mouth full, cried:
“And that’s the man who beat the Austrians, and the Danes, and the
French, and who beat the Germans that were inside himself. And we’re
like him.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Tibby. “Remember that I am cosmopolitan,
please.”
“Helen may be right.”
“Of course she’s right,” said Helen.
Helen might be right, but she did not go up to London. Margaret did
that. An interrupted holiday is the worst of the minor worries, and one
may be pardoned for feeling morbid when a business letter snatches one
away from the sea and friends. She could not believe that her father had
ever felt the same. Her eyes had been troubling her lately, so that she
could not read in the train and it bored her to look at the landscape,
which she had seen but yesterday. At Southampton she “waved” to Frieda;
Frieda was on her way down to join them at Swanage, and Mrs. Munt had
calculated that their trains would cross. But Frieda was looking the
other way, and Margaret travelled on to town feeling solitary and
old-maidish. How like an old maid to fancy that Mr. Wilcox was
courting her! She had once visited a spinster--poor, silly, and
unattractive--whose mania it was that every man who approached her fell
in love. How Margaret’s heart had bled for the deluded thing! How she
had lectured, reasoned, and in despair acquiesced! “I may have been
deceived by the curate, my dear, but the young fellow who brings the
midday post really is fond of me, and has, as a matter of fact--” It had
always seemed to her the most hideous corner of old age, yet she might
be driven into it herself by the mere pressure of virginity.
Mr. Wilcox met her at Waterloo himself. She felt certain that he was
not the same as usual; for one thing, he took offence at everything she
said.
“This is awfully kind of you,” she began, “but I’m afraid it’s not going
to do. The house has not been built that suits the Schlegel family.”
“What! Have you come up determined not to deal?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly? In that case let’s be starting.”
She lingered to admire the motor, which was new, and a fairer creature
than the vermilion giant that had borne Aunt Juley to her doom three
years before.
“Presumably it’s very beautiful,” she said. “How do you like it, Crane?”
“Come, let’s be starting,” repeated her host. “How on earth did you know
that my chauffeur was called Crane?”
“Why, I know Crane; I’ve been for a drive with Evie once. I know that
you’ve got a parlourmaid called Milton. I know all sorts of things.”
“Evie!” he echoed in injured tones. “You won’t see her. She’s gone out
with Cahill. It’s no fun, I can tell you, being left so much alone. I’ve
got my work all day--indeed, a great deal too much of it--but when I
come home in the evening, I tell you, I can’t stand the house.”
“In my absurd way, I’m lonely too,” Margaret replied. “It’s
heart-breaking to leave one’s old home. I scarcely remember anything
before Wickham Place, and Helen and Tibby were born there. Helen says--”
“You, too, feel lonely?”
“Horribly. Hullo, Parliament’s back!”
Mr. Wilcox glanced at Parliament contemptuously. The more important
ropes of life lay elsewhere. “Yes, they are talking again,” said he.
“But you were going to say--”
“Only some rubbish about furniture. Helen says it alone endures while
men and houses perish, and that in the end the world will be a desert of
chairs and sofas--just imagine it!--rolling through infinity with no one
to sit upon them.”
“Your sister always likes her little joke.”
“She says ‘Yes,’ my brother says `No,’ to Ducie Street. It’s no fun
helping us, Mr. Wilcox, I assure you.”
“You are not as unpractical as you pretend. I shall never believe it.”
Margaret laughed. But she was--quite as unpractical. She could not
concentrate on details. Parliament, the Thames, the irresponsive
chauffeur, would flash into the field of house-hunting, and all demand
some comment or response. It is impossible to see modern life steadily
and see it whole, and she had chosen to see it whole. Mr. Wilcox saw
steadily. He never bothered over the mysterious or the private. The
Thames might run inland from the sea, the chauffeur might conceal all
passion and philosophy beneath his unhealthy skin. They knew their own
business, and he knew his.
Yet she liked being with him. He was not a rebuke, but a stimulus, and
banished morbidity. Some twenty years her senior, he preserved a gift
that she supposed herself to have already lost--not youth’s creative
power, but its self-confidence and optimism. He was so sure that it was
a very pleasant world. His complexion was robust, his hair had receded
but not thinned, the thick moustache and the eyes that Helen had
compared to brandy-balls had an agreeable menace in them, whether they
were turned towards the slums or towards the stars. Some day--in the
millennium--there may be no need for his type. At present, homage is due
to it from those who think themselves superior, and who possibly are.
“At all events you responded to my telegram promptly,” he remarked.
“Oh, even I know a good thing when I see it.”
“I’m glad you don’t despise the goods of this world.”
“Heavens, no! Only idiots and prigs do that.”
“I am glad, very glad,” he repeated, suddenly softening and turning to
her, as if the remark had pleased him. “There is so much cant talked in
would-be intellectual circles. I am glad you don’t share it. Self-denial
is all very well as a means of strengthening the character. But I can’t
stand those people who run down comforts. They have usually some axe to
grind. Can you?”
“Comforts are of two kinds,” said Margaret, who was keeping herself in
hand--“those we can share with others, like fire, weather, or music; and
those we can’t--food, food, for instance. It depends.”
“I mean reasonable comforts, of course. I shouldn’t like to think that
you--” He bent nearer; the sentence died unfinished. Margaret’s head
turned very stupid, and the inside of it seemed to revolve like the
beacon in a lighthouse. He did not kiss her, for the hour was half-past
twelve, and the car was passing by the stables of Buckingham Palace. But
the atmosphere was so charged with emotion that people only seemed to
exist on her account, and she was surprised that Crane did not realise
this, and turn round. Idiot though she might be, surely Mr. Wilcox was
more--how should one put it?--more psychological than usual. Always a
good judge of character for business purposes, he seemed this afternoon
to enlarge his field, and to note qualities outside neatness, obedience,
and decision.
“I want to go over the whole house,” she announced when they arrived.
“As soon as I get back to Swanage, which will be to-morrow afternoon,
I’ll talk it over once more with Helen and Tibby, and wire you ‘yes’ or
‘no.’”
“Right. The dining-room.” And they began their survey.
The dining-room was big, but over-furnished. Chelsea would have moaned
aloud. Mr. Wilcox had eschewed those decorative schemes that wince,
and relent, and refrain, and achieve beauty by sacrificing comfort and
pluck. After so much self-colour and self-denial, Margaret viewed with
relief the sumptuous dado, the frieze, the gilded wall-paper, amid whose
foliage parrots sang. It would never do with her own furniture, but
those heavy chairs, that immense sideboard loaded with presentation
plate, stood up against its pressure like men. The room suggested men,
and Margaret, keen to derive the modern capitalist from the warriors and
hunters of the past, saw it as an ancient guest-hall, where the lord sat
at meat among his thanes. Even the Bible--the Dutch Bible that Charles
had brought back from the Boer War--fell into position. Such a room
admitted loot.
“Now the entrance-hall.”
The entrance-hall was paved.
“Here we fellows smoke.”
We fellows smoked in chairs of maroon leather. It was as if a motor-car
had spawned. “Oh, jolly!” said Margaret, sinking into one of them.
“You do like it?” he said, fixing his eyes on her upturned face, and
surely betraying an almost intimate note. “It’s all rubbish not making
oneself comfortable. Isn’t it?”
“Ye--es. Semi-rubbish. Are those Cruikshanks?”
“Gillrays. Shall we go on upstairs?”
“Does all this furniture come from Howards End?”
“The Howards End furniture has all gone to Oniton.”
“Does--However, I’m concerned with the house, not the furniture. How big
is this smoking-room?”
“Thirty by fifteen. No, wait a minute. Fifteen and a half.”
“Ah, well. Mr. Wilcox, aren’t you ever amused at the solemnity with
which we middle classes approach the subject of houses?”
They proceeded to the drawing-room. Chelsea managed better here. It was
sallow and ineffective. One could visualise the ladies withdrawing
to it, while their lords discussed life’s realities below, to the
accompaniment of cigars. Had Mrs. Wilcox’s drawing-room at Howards End
looked thus? Just as this thought entered Margaret’s brain, Mr. Wilcox
did ask her to be his wife, and the knowledge that she had been right so
overcame her that she nearly fainted.