Howards End
A motor-drive, a form of felicity detested by Margaret, awaited her.
Charles saw them in, civil to the last, and in a moment the offices of
the Imperial and West African Rubber Company faded away. But it was not
an impressive drive. Perhaps the weather was to blame, being grey
and banked high with weary clouds. Perhaps Hertfordshire is scarcely
intended for motorists. Did not a gentleman once motor so quickly
through Westmoreland that he missed it? and if Westmoreland can
be missed, it will fare ill with a county whose delicate structure
particularly needs the attentive eye. Hertfordshire is England at
its quietest, with little emphasis of river and hill; it is England
meditative. If Drayton were with us again to write a new edition of
his incomparable poem, he would sing the nymphs of Hertfordshire as
indeterminate of feature, with hair obfuscated by the London smoke.
Their eyes would be sad, and averted from their fate towards the
Northern flats, their leader not Isis or Sabrina, but the slowly flowing
Lea. No glory of raiment would be theirs, no urgency of dance; but they
would be real nymphs.
The chauffeur could not travel as quickly as he had hoped, for the Great
North Road was full of Easter traffic. But he went quite quick enough
for Margaret, a poor-spirited creature, who had chickens and children on
the brain.
“They’re all right,” said Mr. Wilcox. “They’ll learn--like the swallows
and the telegraph-wires.”
“Yes, but, while they’re learning--”
“The motor’s come to stay,” he answered. “One must get about. There’s a
pretty church--oh, you aren’t sharp enough. Well, look out, if the road
worries you--right outward at the scenery.”
She looked at the scenery. It heaved and merged like porridge. Presently
it congealed. They had arrived.
Charles’s house on the left; on the right the swelling forms of the
Six Hills. Their appearance in such a neighbourhood surprised her. They
interrupted the stream of residences that was thickening up towards
Hilton. Beyond them she saw meadows and a wood, and beneath them she
settled that soldiers of the best kind lay buried. She hated war and
liked soldiers--it was one of her amiable inconsistencies.
But here was Dolly, dressed up to the nines, standing at the door to
greet them, and here were the first drops of the rain. They ran in
gaily, and after a long wait in the drawing-room, sat down to the
rough-and-ready lunch, every dish of which concealed or exuded cream.
Mr. Bryce was the chief topic of conversation. Dolly described his visit
with the key, while her father-in-law gave satisfaction by chaffing her
and contradicting all she said. It was evidently the custom to laugh
at Dolly. He chaffed Margaret too, and Margaret roused from a grave
meditation was pleased and chaffed him back. Dolly seemed surprised and
eyed her curiously. After lunch the two children came down. Margaret
disliked babies, but hit it off better with the two-year-old, and sent
Dolly into fits of laughter by talking sense to him. “Kiss them now, and
come away,” said Mr. Wilcox. She came, but refused to kiss them; it
was such hard luck on the little things, she said, and though Dolly
proffered Chorly-worly and Porgly-woggles in turn, she was obdurate.
By this time it was raining steadily. The car came round with the
hood up, and again she lost all sense of space. In a few minutes they
stopped, and Crane opened the door of the car.
“What’s happened?” asked Margaret.
“What do you suppose?” said Henry.
A little porch was close up against her face.
“Are we there already?”
“We are.”
“Well, I never! In years ago it seemed so far away.”
Smiling, but somehow disillusioned, she jumped out, and her impetus
carried her to the front-door. She was about to open it, when Henry
said: “That’s no good; it’s locked. Who’s got the key?”
As he had himself forgotten to call for the key at the farm, no one
replied. He also wanted to know who had left the front gate open, since
a cow had strayed in from the road, and was spoiling the croquet lawn.
Then he said rather crossly: “Margaret, you wait in the dry. I’ll go
down for the key. It isn’t a hundred yards.”
“Mayn’t I come too?”
“No; I shall be back before I’m gone.”
Then the car turned away, and it was as if a curtain had risen. For the
second time that day she saw the appearance of the earth.
There were the greengage-trees that Helen had once described, there the
tennis lawn, there the hedge that would be glorious with dog-roses in
June, but the vision now was of black and palest green. Down by the
dell-hole more vivid colours were awakening, and Lent lilies stood
sentinel on its margin, or advanced in battalions over the grass. Tulips
were a tray of jewels. She could not see the wych-elm tree, but a branch
of the celebrated vine, studded with velvet knobs had covered the perch.
She was struck by the fertility of the soil; she had seldom been in a
garden where the flowers looked so well, and even the weeds she was idly
plucking out of the porch were intensely green. Why had poor Mr. Bryce
fled from all this beauty? For she had already decided that the place
was beautiful.
“Naughty cow! Go away!” cried Margaret to the cow, but without
indignation.
Harder came the rain, pouring out of a windless sky, and spattering up
from the notice-boards of the house-agents, which lay in a row on the
lawn where Charles had hurled them. She must have interviewed Charles in
another world--where one did have interviews. How Helen would revel in
such a notion! Charles dead, all people dead, nothing alive but houses
and gardens. The obvious dead, the intangible alive, and no connection
at all between them! Margaret smiled. Would that her own fancies were
as clear-cut! Would that she could deal as high-handedly with the world!
Smiling and sighing, she laid her hand upon the door. It opened. The
house was not locked up at all.
She hesitated. Ought she to wait for Henry? He felt strongly about
property, and might prefer to show her over himself. On the other hand,
he had told her to keep in the dry, and the porch was beginning to drip.
So she went in, and the draught from inside slammed the door behind.
Desolation greeted her. Dirty finger-prints were on the hall-windows,
flue and rubbish on its unwashed boards. The civilisation of luggage
had been here for a month, and then decamped. Dining-room and
drawing-room--right and left--were guessed only by their wallpapers.
They were just rooms where one could shelter from the rain. Across the
ceiling of each ran a great beam. The dining-room and hall revealed
theirs openly, but the drawing-room’s was match-boarded--because the
facts of life must be concealed from ladies? Drawing-room, dining-room,
and hall--how petty the names sounded! Here were simply three rooms
where children could play and friends shelter from the rain. Yes, and
they were beautiful.
Then she opened one of the doors opposite--there were two--and exchanged
wall-papers for whitewash. It was the servants’ part, though she
scarcely realised that: just rooms again, where friends might shelter.
The garden at the back was full of flowering cherries and plums. Farther
on were hints of the meadow and a black cliff of pines. Yes, the meadow
was beautiful.
Penned in by the desolate weather, she recaptured the sense of space
which the motor had tried to rob from her. She remembered again that ten
square miles are not ten times as wonderful as one square mile, that
a thousand square miles are not practically the same as heaven. The
phantom of bigness, which London encourages, was laid for ever when she
paced from the hall at Howards End to its kitchen and heard the rain run
this way and that where the watershed of the roof divided it.
Now Helen came to her mind, scrutinising half Wessex from the ridge of
the Purbeck Downs, and saying: “You will have to lose something.” She
was not so sure. For instance she would double her kingdom by opening
the door that concealed the stairs.
Now she thought of the map of Africa; of empires; of her father; of
the two supreme nations, streams of whose life warmed her blood, but,
mingling, had cooled her brain. She paced back into the hall, and as she
did so the house reverberated.
“Is that you, Henry?” she called.
There was no answer, but the house reverberated again.
“Henry, have you got in?”
But it was the heart of the house beating, faintly at first, then
loudly, martially. It dominated the rain.
It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.
Margaret flung open the door to the stairs. A noise as of drums seemed
to deafen her. A woman, an old woman, was descending, with figure erect,
with face impassive, with lips that parted and said dryly:
“Oh! Well, I took you for Ruth Wilcox.”
Margaret stammered: “I--Mrs. Wilcox--I?”
“In fancy, of course--in fancy. You had her way of walking. Good-day.”
And the old woman passed out into the rain.
CHAPTER XXIV
“It gave her quite a turn,” said Mr. Wilcox, when retailing the incident
to Dolly at tea-time. “None of you girls have any nerves, really. Of
course, a word from me put it all right, but silly old Miss Avery--she
frightened you, didn’t she, Margaret? There you stood clutching a bunch
of weeds. She might have said something, instead of coming down the
stairs with that alarming bonnet on. I passed her as I came in. Enough
to make the car shy. I believe Miss Avery goes in for being a character;
some old maids do.” He lit a cigarette. “It is their last resource.
Heaven knows what she was doing in the place; but that’s Bryce’s
business, not mine.”
“I wasn’t as foolish as you suggest,” said Margaret “She only startled
me, for the house had been silent so long.”
“Did you take her for a spook?” asked Dolly, for whom “spooks”’ and
“going to church” summarised the unseen.
“Not exactly.”
“She really did frighten you,” said Henry, who was far from discouraging
timidity in females. “Poor Margaret! And very naturally. Uneducated
classes are so stupid.”
“Is Miss Avery uneducated classes?” Margaret asked, and found herself
looking at the decoration scheme of Dolly’s drawing-room.
“She’s just one of the crew at the farm. People like that always assume
things. She assumed you’d know who she was. She left all the Howards End
keys in the front lobby, and assumed that you’d seen them as you came
in, that you’d lock up the house when you’d done, and would bring them
on down to her. And there was her niece hunting for them down at the
farm. Lack of education makes people very casual. Hilton was full of
women like Miss Avery once.”
“I shouldn’t have disliked it, perhaps.”
“Or Miss Avery giving me a wedding present,” said Dolly.
Which was illogical but interesting. Through Dolly, Margaret was
destined to learn a good deal.
“But Charles said I must try not to mind, because she had known his
grandmother.”
“As usual, you’ve got the story wrong, my good Dorothea.”
“I meant great-grandmother--the one who left Mrs. Wilcox the house.
Weren’t both of them and Miss Avery friends when Howards End, too, was a
farm?”
Her father-in-law blew out a shaft of smoke. His attitude to his dead
wife was curious. He would allude to her, and hear her discussed, but
never mentioned her by name. Nor was he interested in the dim, bucolic
past. Dolly was--for the following reason.
“Then hadn’t Mrs. Wilcox a brother--or was it an uncle? Anyhow, he
popped the question, and Miss Avery, she said ‘No.’ Just imagine, if
she’d said ‘Yes,’ she would have been Charles’s aunt. (Oh, I say,
that’s rather good! ‘Charlie’s Aunt’! I must chaff him about that this
evening.) And the man went out and was killed. Yes, I’m certain I’ve
got it right now. Tom Howard--he was the last of them.”