Howards End
“I’ll tell you another thing too. I care a good deal about improving
myself by means of Literature and Art, and so getting a wider outlook.
For instance, when you came in I was reading Ruskin’s Stones of Venice.
I don’t say this to boast, but just to show you the kind of man I am. I
can tell you, I enjoyed that classical concert this afternoon.”
To all his moods Jacky remained equally indifferent. When supper was
ready--and not before--she emerged from the bedroom, saying: “But you do
love me, don’t you?”
They began with a soup square, which Leonard had just dissolved in some
hot water. It was followed by the tongue--a freckled cylinder of meat,
with a little jelly at the top, and a great deal of yellow fat at
the bottom--ending with another square dissolved in water (jelly:
pineapple), which Leonard had prepared earlier in the day. Jacky ate
contentedly enough, occasionally looking at her man with those anxious
eyes, to which nothing else in her appearance corresponded, and which
yet seemed to mirror her soul. And Leonard managed to convince his
stomach that it was having a nourishing meal.
After supper they smoked cigarettes and exchanged a few statements.
She observed that her “likeness” had been broken. He found occasion to
remark, for the second time, that he had come straight back home after
the concert at Queen’s Hall. Presently she sat upon his knee. The
inhabitants of Camelia Road tramped to and fro outside the window,
just on a level with their heads, and the family in the flat on the
ground-floor began to sing, “Hark, my soul, it is the Lord.”
“That tune fairly gives me the hump,” said Leonard.
Jacky followed this, and said that, for her part, she thought it a
lovely tune.
“No; I’ll play you something lovely. Get up, dear, for a minute.”
He went to the piano and jingled out a little Grieg. He played badly and
vulgarly, but the performance was not without its effect, for Jacky
said she thought she’d be going to bed. As she receded, a new set of
interests possessed the boy, and he began to think of what had been said
about music by that odd Miss Schlegel--the one that twisted her face
about so when she spoke. Then the thoughts grew sad and envious. There
was the girl named Helen, who had pinched his umbrella, and the German
girl who had smiled at him pleasantly, and Herr some one, and Aunt some
one, and the brother--all, all with their hands on the ropes. They had
all passed up that narrow, rich staircase at Wickham Place to some ample
room, whither he could never follow them, not if he read for ten hours
a day. Oh, it was no good, this continual aspiration. Some are born
cultured; the rest had better go in for whatever comes easy. To see life
steadily and to see it whole was not for the likes of him.
From the darkness beyond the kitchen a voice called, “Len?”
“You in bed?” he asked, his forehead twitching.
“All right.”
Presently she called him again.
“I must clean my boots ready for the morning,” he answered.
Presently she called him again.
“I rather want to get this chapter done.”
“What?”
He closed his ears against her.
“What’s that?”
“All right, Jacky, nothing; I’m reading a book.”
“What?”
“What?” he answered, catching her degraded deafness.
Presently she called him again.
Ruskin had visited Torcello by this time, and was ordering his
gondoliers to take him to Murano. It occurred to him, as he glided over
the whispering lagoons, that the power of Nature could not be shortened
by the folly, nor her beauty altogether saddened by the misery of such
as Leonard.
CHAPTER VII
“Oh, Margaret,” cried her aunt next morning, “such a most unfortunate
thing has happened. I could not get you alone.”
The most unfortunate thing was not very serious. One of the flats in
the ornate block opposite had been taken furnished by the Wilcox family,
“coming up, no doubt, in the hope of getting into London society.”
That Mrs. Munt should be the first to discover the misfortune was not
remarkable, for she was so interested in the flats, that she watched
their every mutation with unwearying care. In theory she despised
them--they took away that old-world look--they cut off the sun--flats
house a flashy type of person. But if the truth had been known, she
found her visits to Wickham Place twice as amusing since Wickham
Mansions had arisen, and would in a couple of days learn more about
them than her nieces in a couple of months, or her nephew in a couple
of years. She would stroll across and make friends with the porters, and
inquire what the rents were, exclaiming for example: “What! a hundred
and twenty for a basement? You’ll never get it!” And they would answer:
“One can but try, madam.” The passenger lifts, the arrangement for coals
(a great temptation for a dishonest porter), were all familiar matters
to her, and perhaps a relief from the politico-economical-esthetic
atmosphere that reigned at the Schlegels.
Margaret received the information calmly, and did not agree that it
would throw a cloud over poor Helen’s life.
“Oh, but Helen isn’t a girl with no interests,” she explained. “She has
plenty of other things and other people to think about. She made a false
start with the Wilcoxes, and she’ll be as willing as we are to have
nothing more to do with them.”
“For a clever girl, dear, how very oddly you do talk. Helen’ll HAVE to
have something more to do with them, now that they’re all opposite. She
may meet that Paul in the street. She cannot very well not bow.”
“Of course she must bow. But look here; let’s do the flowers. I was
going to say, the will to be interested in him has died, and what else
matters? I look on that disastrous episode (over which you were so
kind) as the killing of a nerve in Helen. It’s dead, and she’ll never be
troubled with it again. The only things that matter are the things
that interest one. Bowing, even calling and leaving cards, even a
dinner-party--we can do all those things to the Wilcoxes, if they find
it agreeable; but the other thing, the one important thing--never again.
Don’t you see?”
Mrs. Munt did not see, and indeed Margaret was making a most
questionable statement--that any emotion, any interest once vividly
aroused, can wholly die.
“I also have the honour to inform you that the Wilcoxes are bored with
us. I didn’t tell you at the time--it might have made you angry, and you
had enough to worry you--but I wrote a letter to Mrs. W, and apologised
for the trouble that Helen had given them. She didn’t answer it.”
“How very rude!”
“I wonder. Or was it sensible?”
“No, Margaret, most rude.”
“In either case one can class it as reassuring.”
Mrs. Munt sighed. She was going back to Swanage on the morrow, just as
her nieces were wanting her most. Other regrets crowded upon her: for
instance, how magnificently she would have cut Charles if she had met
him face to face. She had already seen him, giving an order to the
porter--and very common he looked in a tall hat. But unfortunately his
back was turned to her, and though she had cut his back, she could not
regard this as a telling snub.
“But you will be careful, won’t you?” she exhorted.
“Oh, certainly. Fiendishly careful.”
“And Helen must be careful, too.”
“Careful over what?” cried Helen, at that moment coming into the room
with her cousin.
“Nothing” said Margaret, seized with a momentary awkwardness.
“Careful over what, Aunt Juley?”
Mrs. Munt assumed a cryptic air. “It is only that a certain family,
whom we know by name but do not mention, as you said yourself last
night after the concert, have taken the flat opposite from the
Mathesons--where the plants are in the balcony.”
Helen began some laughing reply, and then disconcerted them all by
blushing. Mrs. Munt was so disconcerted that she exclaimed, “What,
Helen, you don’t mind them coming, do you?” and deepened the blush to
crimson.
“Of course I don’t mind,” said Helen a little crossly. “It is that you
and Meg are both so absurdly grave about it, when there’s nothing to be
grave about at all.”
“I’m not grave,” protested Margaret, a little cross in her turn.
“Well, you look grave; doesn’t she, Frieda?”
“I don’t feel grave, that’s all I can say; you’re going quite on the
wrong tack.”
“No, she does not feel grave,” echoed Mrs. Munt. “I can bear witness to
that. She disagrees--”
“Hark!” interrupted Fraulein Mosebach. “I hear Bruno entering the hall.”
For Herr Liesecke was due at Wickham Place to call for the two younger
girls. He was not entering the hall--in fact, he did not enter it for
quite five minutes. But Frieda detected a delicate situation, and said
that she and Helen had much better wait for Bruno down below, and
leave Margaret and Mrs. Munt to finish arranging the flowers. Helen
acquiesced. But, as if to prove that the situation was not delicate
really, she stopped in the doorway and said:
“Did you say the Mathesons’ flat, Aunt Juley? How wonderful you are!
I never knew that the name of the woman who laced too tightly was
Matheson.”
“Come, Helen,” said her cousin.
“Go, Helen,” said her aunt; and continued to Margaret almost in the same
breath: “Helen cannot deceive me. She does mind.”
“Oh, hush!” breathed Margaret. “Frieda’ll hear you, and she can be so
tiresome.”
“She minds,” persisted Mrs. Munt, moving thoughtfully about the room,
and pulling the dead chrysanthemums out of the vases. “I knew she’d
mind--and I’m sure a girl ought to! Such an experience! Such awful
coarse-grained people! I know more about them than you do, which you
forget, and if Charles had taken you that motor drive--well, you’d have
reached the house a perfect wreck. Oh, Margaret, you don’t know what
you are in for! They’re all bottled up against the drawing-room window.
There’s Mrs. Wilcox--I’ve seen her. There’s Paul. There’s Evie, who is a
minx. There’s Charles--I saw him to start with. And who would an elderly
man with a moustache and a copper-coloured face be?”
“Mr. Wilcox, possibly.”
“I knew it. And there’s Mr. Wilcox.”
“It’s a shame to call his face copper colour,” complained Margaret. “He
has a remarkably good complexion for a man of his age.”
Mrs. Munt, triumphant elsewhere, could afford to concede Mr. Wilcox
his complexion. She passed on from it to the plan of campaign that her
nieces should pursue in the future. Margaret tried to stop her.
“Helen did not take the news quite as I expected, but the Wilcox nerve
is dead in her really, so there’s no need for plans.”
“It’s as well to be prepared.”
“No--it’s as well not to be prepared.”
“Why?”
“Because--”
Her thought drew being from the obscure borderland. She could not
explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all
the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the
expense of joy. It is necessary to prepare for an examination, or
a dinner-party, or a possible fall in the price of stock: those who
attempt human relations must adopt another method, or fail. “Because I’d
sooner risk it,” was her lame conclusion.
“But imagine the evenings,” exclaimed her aunt, pointing to the Mansions
with the spout of the watering can. “Turn the electric light on here
or there, and it’s almost the same room. One evening they may forget to
draw their blinds down, and you’ll see them; and the next, you yours,
and they’ll see you. Impossible to sit out on the balconies. Impossible
to water the plants, or even speak. Imagine going out of the front-door,
and they come out opposite at the same moment. And yet you tell me that
plans are unnecessary, and you’d rather risk it.”
“I hope to risk things all my life.”
“Oh, Margaret, most dangerous.”
“But after all,” she continued with a smile, “there’s never any great
risk as long as you have money.”