Howards End
“I wouldn’t say that, but you’re taking it far too seriously. Who is
this fellow?”
“We have told you about the fellow twice already,” said Helen. “You
have even met the fellow. He is very poor and his wife is an
extravagant imbecile. He is capable of better things. We--we, the upper
classes--thought we would help him from the height of our superior
knowledge--and here’s the result!”
He raised his finger. “Now, a word of advice.”
“I require no more advice.”
“A word of advice. Don’t take up that sentimental attitude over the
poor. See that she doesn’t, Margaret. The poor are poor, and one’s sorry
for them, but there it is. As civilisation moves forward, the shoe is
bound to pinch in places, and it’s absurd to pretend that any one is
responsible personally. Neither you, nor I, nor my informant, nor the
man who informed him, nor the directors of the Porphyrion, are to blame
for this clerk’s loss of salary. It’s just the shoe pinching--no one can
help it; and it might easily have been worse.”
Helen quivered with indignation.
“By all means subscribe to charities--subscribe to them largely--but
don’t get carried away by absurd schemes of Social Reform. I see a good
deal behind the scenes, and you can take it from me that there is no
Social Question--except for a few journalists who try to get a living
out of the phrase. There are just rich and poor, as there always have
been and always will be. Point me out a time when men have been equal--”
“I didn’t say--”
“Point me out a time when desire for equality has made them happier. No,
no. You can’t. There always have been rich and poor. I’m no fatalist.
Heaven forbid! But our civilisation is moulded by great impersonal
forces” (his voice grew complacent; it always did when he eliminated the
personal), “and there always will be rich and poor. You can’t deny it”
(and now it was a respectful voice)--“and you can’t deny that, in spite
of all, the tendency of civilisation has on the whole been upward.”
“Owing to God, I suppose,” flashed Helen.
He stared at her.
“You grab the dollars. God does the rest.”
It was no good instructing the girl if she was going to talk about God
in that neurotic modern way. Fraternal to the last, he left her for
the quieter company of Mrs. Munt. He thought, “She rather reminds me of
Dolly.”
Helen looked out at the sea.
“Don’t ever discuss political economy with Henry,” advised her sister.
“It’ll only end in a cry.”
“But he must be one of those men who have reconciled science with
religion,” said Helen slowly. “I don’t like those men. They are
scientific themselves, and talk of the survival of the fittest, and cut
down the salaries of their clerks, and stunt the independence of all who
may menace their comfort, but yet they believe that somehow good--it
is always that sloppy ‘somehow’ will be the outcome, and that in some
mystical way the Mr. Basts of the future will benefit because the Mr.
Brits of today are in pain.”
“He is such a man in theory. But oh, Helen, in theory!”
“But oh, Meg, what a theory!”
“Why should you put things so bitterly, dearie?”
“Because I’m an old maid,” said Helen, biting her lip. “I can’t think
why I go on like this myself.” She shook off her sister’s hand and went
into the house. Margaret, distressed at the day’s beginning, followed
the Bournemouth steamer with her eyes. She saw that Helen’s nerves
were exasperated by the unlucky Bast business beyond the bounds of
politeness. There might at any minute be a real explosion, which even
Henry would notice. Henry must be removed.
“Margaret!” her aunt called. “Magsy! It isn’t true, surely, what Mr.
Wilcox says, that you want to go away early next week?”
“Not ‘want,’” was Margaret’s prompt reply; “but there is so much to be
settled, and I do want to see the Charles’s.”
“But going away without taking the Weymouth trip, or even the Lulworth?”
said Mrs. Munt, coming nearer. “Without going once more up Nine Barrows
Down?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Mr. Wilcox rejoined her with, “Good! I did the breaking of the ice.”
A wave of tenderness came over her. She put a hand on either shoulder,
and looked deeply into the black, bright eyes. What was behind their
competent stare? She knew, but was not disquieted.
CHAPTER XXIII
Margaret had no intention of letting things slide, and the evening
before she left Swanage she gave her sister a thorough scolding. She
censured her, not for disapproving of the engagement, but for throwing
over her disapproval a veil of mystery. Helen was equally frank. “Yes,”
she said, with the air of one looking inwards, “there is a mystery.
I can’t help it. It’s not my fault. It’s the way life has been made.”
Helen in those days was over-interested in the subconscious self. She
exaggerated the Punch and Judy aspect of life, and spoke of mankind as
puppets, whom an invisible showman twitches into love and war. Margaret
pointed out that if she dwelt on this she, too, would eliminate the
personal. Helen was silent for a minute, and then burst into a queer
speech, which cleared the air. “Go on and marry him. I think you’re
splendid; and if any one can pull it off, you will.” Margaret denied
that there was anything to “pull off,” but she continued: “Yes, there
is, and I wasn’t up to it with Paul. I can do only what’s easy. I
can only entice and be enticed. I can’t, and won’t, attempt difficult
relations. If I marry, it will either be a man who’s strong enough to
boss me or whom I’m strong enough to boss. So I shan’t ever marry, for
there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I
shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.’
There! Because I’m uneducated. But you, you’re different; you’re a
heroine.”
“Oh, Helen! Am I? Will it be as dreadful for poor Henry as all that?”
“You mean to keep proportion, and that’s heroic, it’s Greek, and I don’t
see why it shouldn’t succeed with you. Go on and fight with him and help
him. Don’t ask me for help, or even for sympathy. Henceforward I’m going
my own way. I mean to be thorough, because thoroughness is easy. I
mean to dislike your husband, and to tell him so. I mean to make no
concessions to Tibby. If Tibby wants to live with me, he must lump me.
I mean to love you more than ever. Yes, I do. You and I have built
up something real, because it is purely spiritual. There’s no veil of
mystery over us. Unreality and mystery begin as soon as one touches the
body. The popular view is, as usual, exactly the wrong one. Our bothers
are over tangible things--money, husbands, house-hunting. But Heaven
will work of itself.”
Margaret was grateful for this expression of affection, and answered,
“Perhaps.” All vistas close in the unseen--no one doubts it--but Helen
closed them rather too quickly for her taste. At every turn of speech
one was confronted with reality and the absolute. Perhaps Margaret grew
too old for metaphysics, perhaps Henry was weaning her from them, but
she felt that there was something a little unbalanced in the mind that
so readily shreds the visible. The business man who assumes that this
life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail,
on this side and on that, to hit the truth. “Yes, I see, dear; it’s
about half-way between,” Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No;
truth, being alive, was not half-way between anything. It was only to be
found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion
is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility.
Helen, agreeing here, disagreeing there, would have talked till
midnight, but Margaret, with her packing to do, focussed the
conversation on Henry. She might abuse Henry behind his back, but please
would she always be civil to him in company? “I definitely dislike
him, but I’ll do what I can,” promised Helen. “Do what you can with my
friends in return.”
This conversation made Margaret easier. Their inner life was so safe
that they could bargain over externals in a way that would have been
incredible to Aunt Juley, and impossible for Tibby or Charles. There
are moments when the inner life actually “pays,” when years of
self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of
practical use. Such moments are still rare in the West; that they come
at all promises a fairer future. Margaret, though unable to understand
her sister, was assured against estrangement, and returned to London
with a more peaceful mind.
The following morning, at eleven o’clock, she presented herself at the
offices of the Imperial and West African Rubber Company. She was glad to
go there, for Henry had implied his business rather than described
it, and the formlessness and vagueness that one associates with Africa
itself had hitherto brooded over the main sources of his wealth.
Not that a visit to the office cleared things up. There was just the
ordinary surface scum of ledgers and polished counters and brass bars
that began and stopped for no possible reason, of electric-light globes
blossoming in triplets, of little rabbit-hutches faced with glass or
wire, of little rabbits. And even when she penetrated to the inner
depths, she found only the ordinary table and Turkey carpet, and though
the map over the fireplace did depict a helping of West Africa, it was
a very ordinary map. Another map hung opposite, on which the whole
continent appeared, looking like a whale marked out for a blubber,
and by its side was a door, shut, but Henry’s voice came through it,
dictating a “strong” letter. She might have been at the Porphyrion, or
Dempster’s Bank, or her own wine-merchant’s. Everything seems just
alike in these days. But perhaps she was seeing the Imperial side of the
company rather than its West African, and Imperialism always had been
one of her difficulties.
“One minute!” called Mr. Wilcox on receiving her name. He touched a
bell, the effect of which was to produce Charles.
Charles had written his father an adequate letter--more adequate than
Evie’s, through which a girlish indignation throbbed. And he greeted his
future stepmother with propriety.
“I hope that my wife--how do you do?--will give you a decent lunch,” was
his opening. “I left instructions, but we live in a rough-and-ready way.
She expects you back to tea, too, after you have had a look at Howards
End. I wonder what you’ll think of the place. I wouldn’t touch it with
tongs myself. Do sit down! It’s a measly little place.”
“I shall enjoy seeing it,” said Margaret, feeling, for the first time,
shy.
“You’ll see it at its worst, for Bryce decamped abroad last Monday
without even arranging for a charwoman to clear up after him. I never
saw such a disgraceful mess. It’s unbelievable. He wasn’t in the house a
month.”
“I’ve more than a little bone to pick with Bryce,” called Henry from the
inner chamber.
“Why did he go so suddenly?”
“Invalid type; couldn’t sleep.”
“Poor fellow!”
“Poor fiddlesticks!” said Mr. Wilcox, joining them. “He had the
impudence to put up notice-boards without as much as saying with your
leave or by your leave. Charles flung them down.”
“Yes, I flung them down,” said Charles modestly.
“I’ve sent a telegram after him, and a pretty sharp one, too. He, and
he in person, is responsible for the upkeep of that house for the next
three years.”
“The keys are at the farm; we wouldn’t have the keys.”
“Quite right.”
“Dolly would have taken them, but I was in, fortunately.”
“What’s Mr. Bryce like?” asked Margaret.
But nobody cared. Mr. Bryce was the tenant, who had no right to sublet;
to have defined him further was a waste of time. On his misdeeds they
descanted profusely, until the girl who had been typing the strong
letter came out with it. Mr. Wilcox added his signature. “Now we’ll be
off,” said he.