Howards End
She rejoined Henry. Fortunately he had been sitting down: these physical
matters were important. “Was it townees?” he asked, greeting her with a
pleasant smile.
“You’ll never believe me,” said Margaret, sitting down beside him. “It’s
all right now, but it was my sister.”
“Helen here?” he cried, preparing to rise. “But she refused the
invitation. I thought hated weddings.”
“Don’t get up. She has not come to the wedding. I’ve bundled her off to
the George.”
Inherently hospitable, he protested.
“No; she has two of her proteges with her and must keep with them.”
“Let ’em all come.”
“My dear Henry, did you see them?”
“I did catch sight of a brown bunch of a woman, certainly.”
“The brown bunch was Helen, but did you catch sight of a sea-green and
salmon bunch?”
“What! are they out bean-feasting?”
“No; business. They wanted to see me, and later on I want to talk to you
about them.”
She was ashamed of her own diplomacy. In dealing with a Wilcox, how
tempting it was to lapse from comradeship, and to give him the kind of
woman that he desired! Henry took the hint at once, and said: “Why later
on? Tell me now. No time like the present.”
“Shall I?”
“If it isn’t a long story.”
“Oh, not five minutes; but there’s a sting at the end of it, for I want
you to find the man some work in your office.”
“What are his qualifications?”
“I don’t know. He’s a clerk.”
“How old?”
“Twenty-five, perhaps.”
“What’s his name?”
“Bast,” said Margaret, and was about to remind him that they had met
at Wickham Place, but stopped herself. It had not been a successful
meeting.
“Where was he before?”
“Dempster’s Bank.”
“Why did he leave?” he asked, still remembering nothing.
“They reduced their staff.”
“All right; I’ll see him.”
It was the reward of her tact and devotion through the day. Now she
understood why some women prefer influence to rights. Mrs. Plynlimmon,
when condemning suffragettes, had said: “The woman who can’t influence
her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.”
Margaret had winced, but she was influencing Henry now, and though
pleased at her little victory, she knew that she had won it by the
methods of the harem.
“I should be glad if you took him,” she said, “but I don’t know whether
he’s qualified.”
“I’ll do what I can. But, Margaret, this mustn’t be taken as a
precedent.”
“No, of course--of course--”
“I can’t fit in your proteges every day. Business would suffer.”
“I can promise you he’s the last. He--he’s rather a special case.”
“Proteges always are.”
She let it stand at that. He rose with a little extra touch of
complacency, and held out his hand to help her up. How wide the gulf
between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be! And
she herself--hovering as usual between the two, now accepting men as
they are, now yearning with her sister for Truth. Love and Truth--their
warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it,
and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was
reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air.
“Your protege has made us late,” said he. “The Fussells--will just be
starting.”
On the whole she sided with men as they are. Henry would save the Basts
as he had saved Howards End, while Helen and her friends were discussing
the ethics of salvation. His was a slap-dash method, but the world has
been built slap-dash, and the beauty of mountain and river and sunset
may be but the varnish with which the unskilled artificer hides his
joins. Oniton, like herself, was imperfect. Its apple-trees were
stunted, its castle ruinous. It, too, had suffered in the border warfare
between the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt, between things as they are and
as they ought to be. Once more the west was retreating, once again the
orderly stars were dotting the eastern sky. There is certainly no rest
for us on the earth. But there is happiness, and as Margaret descended
the mound on her lover’s arm, she felt that she was having her share.
To her annoyance, Mrs. Bast was still in the garden; the husband and
Helen had left her there to finish her meal while they went to engage
rooms. Margaret found this woman repellent. She had felt, when shaking
her hand, an overpowering shame. She remembered the motive of her call
at Wickham Place, and smelt again odours from the abyss--odours the more
disturbing because they were involuntary. For there was no malice in
Jacky. There she sat, a piece of cake in one hand, an empty champagne
glass in the other, doing no harm to anybody.
“She’s overtired,” Margaret whispered.
“She’s something else,” said Henry. “This won’t do. I can’t have her in
my garden in this state.”
“Is she--” Margaret hesitated to add “drunk.” Now that she was going
to marry him, he had grown particular. He discountenanced risque
conversations now.
Henry went up to the woman. She raised her face, which gleamed in the
twilight like a puff-ball.
“Madam, you will be more comfortable at the hotel,” he said sharply.
Jacky replied: “If it isn’t Hen!”
“Ne crois pas que le mari lui ressemble,” apologised Margaret. “Il est
tout à fait différent.”
“Henry!” she repeated, quite distinctly.
Mr. Wilcox was much annoyed. “I congratulate you on your proteges,” he
remarked.
“Hen, don’t go. You do love me, dear, don’t you?”
“Bless us, what a person!” sighed Margaret, gathering up her skirts.
Jacky pointed with her cake. “You’re a nice boy, you are.” She yawned.
“There now, I love you.”
“Henry, I am awfully sorry.”
“And pray why?” he asked, and looked at her so sternly that she feared
he was ill. He seemed more scandalised than the facts demanded.
“To have brought this down on you.”
“Pray don’t apologise.”
The voice continued.
“Why does she call you ‘Hen’?” said Margaret innocently. “Has she ever
seen you before?”
“Seen Hen before!” said Jacky. “Who hasn’t seen Hen? He’s serving you
like me, my boys! You wait--Still we love ’em.”
“Are you now satisfied?” Henry asked.
Margaret began to grow frightened. “I don’t know what it is all about,”
she said. “Let’s come in.”
But he thought she was acting. He thought he was trapped. He saw his
whole life crumbling. “Don’t you indeed?” he said bitingly. “I do. Allow
me to congratulate you on the success of your plan.”
“This is Helen’s plan, not mine.”
“I now understand your interest in the Basts. Very well thought out.
I am amused at your caution, Margaret. You are quite right--it was
necessary. I am a man, and have lived a man’s past. I have the honour to
release you from your engagement.”
Still she could not understand. She knew of life’s seamy side as a
theory; she could not grasp it as a fact. More words from Jacky were
necessary--words unequivocal, undenied.
“So that--” burst from her, and she went indoors. She stopped herself
from saying more.
“So what?” asked Colonel Fussell, who was getting ready to start in the
hall.
“We were saying--Henry and I were just having the fiercest argument, my
point being--” Seizing his fur coat from a footman, she offered to help
him on. He protested, and there was a playful little scene.
“No, let me do that,” said Henry, following.
“Thanks so much! You see--he has forgiven me!”
The Colonel said gallantly: “I don’t expect there’s much to forgive.”
He got into the car. The ladies followed him after an interval.
Maids, courier, and heavier luggage had been sent on earlier by the
branch-line. Still chattering, still thanking their host and patronising
their future hostess, the guests were borne away.
Then Margaret continued: “So that woman has been your mistress?”
“You put it with your usual delicacy,” he replied.
“When, please?”
“Why?”
“When, please?”
“Ten years ago.”
She left him without a word. For it was not her tragedy; it was Mrs.
Wilcox’s.
CHAPTER XXVII
Helen began to wonder why she had spent a matter of eight pounds in
making some people ill and others angry. Now that the wave of excitement
was ebbing, and had left her, Mr. Bast, and Mrs. Bast stranded for the
night in a Shropshire hotel, she asked herself what forces had made the
wave flow. At all events, no harm was done. Margaret would play the game
properly now, and though Helen disapproved of her sister’s methods, she
knew that the Basts would benefit by them in the long-run.
“Mr. Wilcox is so illogical,” she explained to Leonard, who had put his
wife to bed, and was sitting with her in the empty coffee-room. “If we
told him it was his duty to take you on, he might refuse to do it. The
fact is, he isn’t properly educated. I don’t want to set you against
him, but you’ll find him a trial.”
“I can never thank you sufficiently, Miss Schlegel,” was all that
Leonard felt equal to.
“I believe in personal responsibility. Don’t you? And in personal
everything. I hate--I suppose I oughtn’t to say that--but the Wilcoxes
are on the wrong tack surely. Or perhaps it isn’t their fault. Perhaps
the little thing that says ‘I’ is missing out of the middle of their
heads, and then it’s a waste of time to blame them. There’s a nightmare
of a theory that says a special race is being born which will rule the
rest of us in the future just because it lacks the little thing that
says ‘I.’ Had you heard that?”
“I get no time for reading.”
“Had you thought it, then? That there are two kinds of people--our kind,
who live straight from the middle of their heads, and the other kind
who can’t, because their heads have no middle? They can’t say ‘I.’ They
AREN’T in fact, and so they’re supermen. Pierpont Morgan has never said
‘I’ in his life.”
Leonard roused himself. If his benefactress wanted intellectual
conversation, she must have it. She was more important than his ruined
past. “I never got on to Nietzsche,” he said. “But I always understood
that those supermen were rather what you may call egoists.”
“Oh no, that’s wrong,” replied Helen. “No superman ever said ‘I want,’
because ‘I want’ must lead to the question, ‘Who am I?’ and so to Pity
and to Justice. He only says ‘want.’ ‘Want Europe,’ if he’s Napoleon;
‘want wives,’ if he’s Bluebeard; ‘want Botticelli,’ if he’s Pierpont
Morgan. Never the ‘I’; and if you could pierce through the superman,
you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle.”
Leonard was silent for a moment. Then he said: “May I take it, Miss
Schlegel, that you and I are both the sort that say ‘I’?”
“Of course.”
“And your sister, too?”
“Of course,” repeated Helen, a little sharply. She was annoyed with
Margaret, but did not want her discussed. “All presentable people say
‘I.’”
“But Mr. Wilcox--he is not perhaps--”
“I don’t know that it’s any good discussing Mr. Wilcox either.”
“Quite so, quite so,” he agreed. Helen asked herself why she had snubbed
him. Once or twice during the day she had encouraged him to criticise,
and then had pulled him up short. Was she afraid of him presuming? If
so, it was disgusting of her.
But he was thinking the snub quite natural. Everything she did was
natural, and incapable of causing offence. While the Miss Schlegels
were together he had felt them scarcely human--a sort of admonitory
whirligig. But a Miss Schlegel alone was different. She was in Helen’s
case unmarried, in Margaret’s about to be married, in neither case an
echo of her sister. A light had fallen at last into this rich upper
world, and he saw that it was full of men and women, some of whom were
more friendly to him than others. Helen had become “his” Miss Schlegel,
who scolded him and corresponded with him, and had swept down yesterday
with grateful vehemence. Margaret, though not unkind, was severe and
remote. He would not presume to help her, for instance. He had never