Howards End
Leader’s, strident and ill-considered, but quivering into supernatural
life. It sharpened idealism, stirred the soul. It may have been a bad
preparation for what followed.
“Look!” cried Aunt Juley, hurrying away from generalities over the
narrow summit of the down. “Stand where I stand, and you will see the
pony-cart coming. I see the pony-cart coming.”
They stood and saw the pony-cart coming. Margaret and Tibby were
presently seen coming in it. Leaving the outskirts of Swanage, it drove
for a little through the budding lanes, and then began the ascent.
“Have you got the house?” they shouted, long before she could possibly
hear.
Helen ran down to meet her. The highroad passed over a saddle, and a
track went thence at right angles alone the ridge of the down.
“Have you got the house?”
Margaret shook her head.
“Oh, what a nuisance! So we’re as we were?”
“Not exactly.”
She got out, looking tired.
“Some mystery,” said Tibby. “We are to be enlightened presently.”
Margaret came close up to her and whispered that she had had a proposal
of marriage from Mr. Wilcox.
Helen was amused. She opened the gate on to the downs so that her
brother might lead the pony through. “It’s just like a widower,” she
remarked. “They’ve cheek enough for anything, and invariably select one
of their first wife’s friends.”
Margaret’s face flashed despair.
“That type--” She broke off with a cry. “Meg, not anything wrong with
you?”
“Wait one minute,” said Margaret, whispering always.
“But you’ve never conceivably--you’ve never--” She pulled herself
together. “Tibby, hurry up through; I can’t hold this gate indefinitely.
Aunt Juley! I say, Aunt Juley, make the tea, will you, and Frieda; we’ve
got to talk houses, and will come on afterwards.” And then, turning her
face to her sister’s, she burst into tears.
Margaret was stupefied. She heard herself saying, “Oh, really--” She
felt herself touched with a hand that trembled.
“Don’t,” sobbed Helen, “don’t, don’t, Meg, don’t!” She seemed incapable
of saying any other word. Margaret, trembling herself, led her forward
up the road, till they strayed through another gate on to the down.
“Don’t, don’t do such a thing! I tell you not to--don’t! I know--don’t!”
“What do you know?”
“Panic and emptiness,” sobbed Helen. “Don’t!”
Then Margaret thought, “Helen is a little selfish. I have never behaved
like this when there has seemed a chance of her marrying.” She said:
“But we would still see each other very--often, and you--”
“It’s not a thing like that,” sobbed Helen. And she broke right away and
wandered distractedly upwards, stretching her hands towards the view and
crying.
“What’s happened to you?” called Margaret, following through the wind
that gathers at sundown on the northern slopes of hills. “But it’s
stupid!” And suddenly stupidity seized her, and the immense landscape
was blurred. But Helen turned back.
“I don’t know what’s happened to either of us,” said Margaret, wiping
her eyes. “We must both have gone mad.” Then Helen wiped hers, and they
even laughed a little.
“Look here, sit down.”
“All right; I’ll sit down if you’ll sit down.”
“There. (One kiss.) Now, whatever, whatever is the matter?”
“I do mean what I said. Don’t; it wouldn’t do.”
“Oh, Helen, stop saying ‘don’t’! It’s ignorant. It’s as if your head
wasn’t out of the slime. ‘Don’t’ is probably what Mrs. Bast says all the
day to Mr. Bast.”
Helen was silent.
“Well?”
“Tell me about it first, and meanwhile perhaps I’ll have got my head out
of the slime.”
“That’s better. Well, where shall I begin? When I arrived at
Waterloo--no, I’ll go back before that, because I’m anxious you should
know everything from the first. The ‘first’ was about ten days ago. It
was the day Mr. Bast came to tea and lost his temper. I was defending
him, and Mr. Wilcox became jealous about me, however slightly. I thought
it was the involuntary thing, which men can’t help any more than we can.
You know--at least, I know in my own case--when a man has said to me,
‘So-and-so’s a pretty girl,’ I am seized with a momentary sourness
against So-and-so, and long to tweak her ear. It’s a tiresome feeling,
but not an important one, and one easily manages it. But it wasn’t only
this in Mr. Wilcox’s case, I gather now.”
“Then you love him?”
Margaret considered. “It is wonderful knowing that a real man cares for
you,” she said. “The mere fact of that grows more tremendous. Remember,
I’ve known and liked him steadily for nearly three years.”
“But loved him?”
Margaret peered into her past. It is pleasant to analyse feelings while
they are still only feelings, and unembodied in the social fabric. With
her arm round Helen, and her eyes shifting over the view, as if this
country or that could reveal the secret of her own heart, she meditated
honestly, and said, “No.”
“But you will?”
“Yes,” said Margaret, “of that I’m pretty sure. Indeed, I began the
moment he spoke to me.”
“And have settled to marry him?”
“I had, but am wanting a long talk about it now. What is it against him,
Helen? You must try and say.”
Helen, in her turn, looked outwards. “It is ever since Paul,” she said
finally.
“But what has Mr. Wilcox to do with Paul?”
“But he was there, they were all there that morning when I came down
to breakfast, and saw that Paul was frightened--the man who loved me
frightened and all his paraphernalia fallen, so that I knew it was
impossible, because personal relations are the important thing for ever
and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.”
She poured the sentence forth in one breath, but her sister understood
it, because it touched on thoughts that were familiar between them.
“That’s foolish. In the first place, I disagree about the outer life.
Well, we’ve often argued that. The real point is that there is the
widest gulf between my love-making and yours. Yours was romance; mine
will be prose. I’m not running it down--a very good kind of prose, but
well considered, well thought out. For instance, I know all Mr. Wilcox’s
faults. He’s afraid of emotion. He cares too much about success, too
little about the past. His sympathy lacks poetry, and so isn’t sympathy
really. I’d even say”--she looked at the shining lagoons--“that,
spiritually, he’s not as honest as I am. Doesn’t that satisfy you?”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Helen. “It makes me feel worse and worse. You
must be mad.”
Margaret made a movement of irritation.
“I don’t intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life--good
heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn’t, and shall
never, understand.”
Thus she spoke before the wedding ceremony and the physical union,
before the astonishing glass shade had fallen that interposes between
married couples and the world. She was to keep her independence more
than do most women as yet. Marriage was to alter her fortunes rather
than her character, and she was not far wrong in boasting that she
understood her future husband. Yet he did alter her character--a little.
There was an unforeseen surprise, a cessation of the winds and odours of
life, a social pressure that would have her think conjugally.
“So with him,” she continued. “There are heaps of things in him--more
especially things that he does that will always be hidden from me. He
has all those public qualities which you so despise and which enable all
this--” She waved her hand at the landscape, which confirmed anything.
“If Wilcoxes hadn’t worked and died in England for thousands of years,
you and I couldn’t sit here without having our throats cut. There would
be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields
even. Just savagery. No--perhaps not even that. Without their spirit
life might never have moved out of protoplasm. More and more do I refuse
to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it. There are times
when it seems to me--”
“And to me, and to all women. So one kissed Paul.”
“That’s brutal,” said Margaret. “Mine is an absolutely different case.
I’ve thought things out.”
“It makes no difference thinking things out. They come to the same.”
“Rubbish!”
There was a long silence, during which the tide returned into Poole
Harbour. “One would lose something,” murmured Helen, apparently to
herself. The water crept over the mud-flats towards the gorse and the
blackened heather. Branksea Island lost its immense foreshores, and
became a sombre episode of trees. Frome was forced inward towards
Dorchester, Stour against Wimborne, Avon towards Salisbury, and over the
immense displacement the sun presided, leading it to triumph ere he sank
to rest. England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying
for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with
contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it
mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her
sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made
her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her
power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying
as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the
brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity?
CHAPTER XX
Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the
world’s waters, when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in. Whom
does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact
deluges a hundred shores. No doubt the disturbance is really the spirit
of the generations, welcoming the new generation, and chafing against
the ultimate Fate, who holds all the seas in the palm of her hand. But
Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another’s infinity; he
is conscious only of his own--flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that
asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and
time. He knows that he will survive at the end of things, and be
gathered by Fate as a jewel from the slime, and be handed with
admiration round the assembly of the gods. “Men did produce this”
they will say, and, saying, they will give men immortality. But
meanwhile--what agitations meanwhile! The foundations of Property and
Propriety are laid bare, twin rocks; Family Pride flounders to the
surface, puffing and blowing and refusing to be comforted; Theology,
vaguely ascetic, gets up a nasty ground swell. Then the lawyers are
aroused--cold brood--and creep out of their holes. They do what they
can; they tidy up Property and Propriety, reassure Theology and Family
Pride. Half-guineas are poured on the troubled waters, the lawyers creep
back, and, if all has gone well, Love joins one man and woman together
in Matrimony.
Margaret had expected the disturbance, and was not irritated by it.
For a sensitive woman she had steady nerves, and could bear with the
incongruous and the grotesque; and, besides, there was nothing excessive
about her love-affair. Good-humour was the dominant note of her
relations with Mr. Wilcox, or, as I must now call him, Henry. Henry
did not encourage romance, and she was no girl to fidget for it. An
acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would
retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm
an old relation rather than reveal a new one.
In this spirit she promised to marry him.
He was in Swanage on the morrow bearing the engagement ring.
They greeted one another with a hearty cordiality that impressed
Aunt Juley. Henry dined at The Bays, but had engaged a bedroom in the
principal hotel; he was one of those men who know the principal hotel by
instinct. After dinner he asked Margaret if she wouldn’t care for a turn
on the Parade. She accepted, and could not repress a little tremor; it