Howards End (5 page)

“Margaret could not come herself, on account of poor Tibby, so I am here to represent her and to have a good talk.”

“I'm sorry to be so dense,” said the young man, again drawing up outside a shop. “But I still haven't quite understood.”

“Helen, Mr. Wilcox—my niece and you.”

He pushed up his goggles and gazed at her, absolutely bewildered. Horror smote her to the heart, for even she began to suspect that they were at cross-purposes, and that she had commenced her mission by some hideous blunder.

“Miss Schlegel and myself?” he asked, compressing his lips.

“I trust there has been no misunderstanding,” quavered Mrs. Munt. “Her letter certainly read that way.”

“What way?”

“That you and she—” She paused, then drooped her eyelids.

“I think I catch your meaning,” he said stickily. “What an extraordinary mistake!”

“Then you didn't the least—” she stammered, getting blood-red in the face, and wishing she had never been born.

“Scarcely, as I am already engaged to another lady.” There was a moment's silence, and then he caught his breath and exploded with: “Oh, good God! Don't tell me it's some silliness of Paul's.”

“But you are Paul.”

“I'm not.”

“Then why did you say so at the station?”

“I said nothing of the sort.”

“I beg your pardon, you did.”

“I beg your pardon, I did not. My name is Charles.”

“Younger” may mean son as opposed to father, or second brother as opposed to first. There is much to be said for either view, and later on they said it. But they had other questions before them now.

“Do you mean to tell me that Paul—”

But she did not like his voice. He sounded as if he was talking to a porter, and, certain that he had deceived her at the station, she too grew angry.

“Do you mean to tell me that Paul and your niece—”

Mrs. Munt—such is human nature—determined that she would champion the lovers. She was not going to be bullied by a severe young man. “Yes, they care for one another very much indeed,” she said. “I dare say they will tell you about it by and by. We heard this morning.”

And Charles clenched his fist and cried: “The idiot, the idiot, the little fool!”

Mrs. Munt tried to divest herself of her rugs. “If that is your attitude, Mr. Wilcox, I prefer to walk.”

“I beg you will do no such thing. I'll take you up this moment to the house. Let me tell you the thing's impossible, and must be stopped. ”

Mrs. Munt did not often lose her temper, and when she did, it was only to protect those whom she loved. On this occasion she blazed out. “I quite agree, sir. The thing is impossible, and I will come up and stop it. My niece is a very exceptional person, and I am not inclined to sit still while she throws herself away on those who will not appreciate her.”

Charles worked his jaws.

“Considering she has only known your brother since Wednesday, and only met your father and mother at a stray hotel—”

“Could you possibly lower your voice? The shopman will overhear.”

“Esprit de classe”—if one may coin the phrase—was strong in Mrs. Munt. She sat quivering while a member of the lower orders deposited a metal funnel, a saucepan, and a garden squirt beside the roll of oilcloth.

“Right behind?‘

“Yes, sir.” And the lower orders vanished in a cloud of dust.

“I warn you: Paul hasn't a penny; it's useless.”

“No need to warn us, Mr. Wilcox, I assure you. The warning is all the other way. My niece has been very foolish, and I shall give her a good scolding and take her back to London with me. ”

“He has to make his way out in Nigeria. He couldn't think of marrying for years, and when he does it must be a woman who can stand the climate, and is in other ways—Why hasn't he told us? Of course he's ashamed. He knows he's been a fool. And so he has—a damned fool.”

She grew furious.

“Whereas Miss Schlegel has lost no time in publishing the news.”

“If I were a man, Mr. Wilcox, for that last remark I'd box your ears. You're not fit to clean my niece's boots, to sit in the same room with her, and you are—you actually dare—I decline to argue with such a person.”

“All I know is, she's spread the thing and he hasn‘t, and my father's away and I—”

“And all that I know is—”

“Might I finish my sentence, please?”

“No.”

Charles clenched his teeth and sent the motor swerving all over the lane.

She screamed.

So they played the game of Capping Families, a round of which is always played when love would unite two members of our race. But they played it with unusual vigour, stating in so many words that Schlegels were better than Wilcoxes, Wilcoxes better than Schlegels. They flung decency aside. The man was young, the woman deeply stirred; in both a vein of coarseness was latent. Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels—inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards. But it was more than usually futile. A few minutes, and they were enlightened. The motor drew up at Howards End, and Helen, looking very pale, ran out to meet her aunt.

“Aunt Juley, I have just had a telegram from Margaret; I—I meant to stop your coming. It isn‘t—it's over.”

The climax was too much for Mrs. Munt. She burst into tears.

“Aunt Juley dear, don't. Don't let them know I've been so silly. It wasn't anything. Do bear up for my sake.”

“Paul,” cried Charles Wilcox, pulling his gloves off.

“Don't let them know. They are never to know.”

“Oh, my darling Helen—”

“Paul! Paul!”

A very young man came out of the house.

“Paul, is there any truth in this?”

“I didn‘t—I don't—”

“Yes or no, man; plain question, plain answer. Did or didn't Miss Schlegel—”

“Charles dear,” said a voice from the garden. “Charles, dear Charles, one doesn't ask plain questions. There aren't such things.”

They were all silent. It was Mrs. Wilcox.

She approached just as Helen's letter had described her, trailing noiselessly over the lawn, and there was actually a wisp of hay in her hands. She seemed to belong not to the young people and their motor, but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it. One knew that she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her—that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy. High-born she might not be. But assuredly she cared about her ancestors, and let them help her. When she saw Charles angry, Paul frightened, and Mrs. Munt in tears, she heard her ancestors say: “Separate those human beings who will hurt each other most. The rest can wait.” So she did not ask questions. Still less did she pretend that nothing had happened, as a competent society hostess would have done. She said: “Miss Schlegel, would you take your aunt up to your room or to my room, whichever you think best. Paul, do find Evie, and tell her lunch for six, but I'm not sure whether we shall all be downstairs for it.” And when they had obeyed her, she turned to her elder son, who still stood in the throbbing stinking car, and smiled at him with tenderness, and without saying a word, turned away from him towards her flowers.

“Mother,” he called, “are you aware that Paul has been playing the fool again?”

“It's all right, dear. They have broken off the engagement.”

“Engagement—!”

“They do not love any longer, if you prefer it put that way,” said Mrs. Wilcox, stooping down to smell a rose.

Helen and her aunt returned to Wickham Place in a state of collapse, and for a little time Margaret had three invalids on her hands. Mrs. Munt soon recovered. She possessed to a remarkable degree the power of distorting the past, and before many days were over she had forgotten the part played by her own imprudence in the catastrophe. Even at the crisis she had cried: “Thank goodness, poor Margaret is saved this!” which during the journey to London evolved into: “It had to be gone through by someone,” which in its turn ripened into the permanent form of: “The one time I really did help Emily's girls was over the Wilcox business.” But Helen was a more serious patient. New ideas had burst upon her like a thunder clap, and by them and by their reverberations she had been stunned.

The truth was that she had fallen in love, not with an individual, but with a family.

Before Paul arrived she had, as it were, been tuned up into his key. The energy of the Wilcoxes had fascinated her, had created new images of beauty in her responsive mind. To be all day with them in the open air, to sleep at night under their roof, had seemed the supreme joy of life, and had led to that abandonment of personality that is a possible prelude to love. She had liked giving in to Mr. Wilcox, or Evie, or Charles; she had liked being told that her notions of life were sheltered or academic; that Equality was nonsense, Votes for Women nonsense, Socialism nonsense, Art and Literature, except when conducive to strengthening the character, nonsense. One by one the Schlegel fetiches had been overthrown, and, though professing to defend them, she had rejoiced. When Mr. Wilcox said that one sound man of business did more good to the world than a dozen of your social reformers, she had swallowed the curious assertion without a gasp, and had leant back luxuriously among the cushions of his motor-car. When Charles said: “Why be so polite to servants? They don't understand it,” she had not given the Schlegel retort of: “If they don't understand it, I do.” No; she had vowed to be less polite to servants in the future. “I am swathed in cant,” she thought, “and it is good for me to be stripped of it.” And all that she thought or did or breathed was a quiet preparation for Paul. Paul was inevitable. Charles was taken up with another girl, Mr. Wilcox was so old, Evie so young, Mrs. Wilcox so different. Round the absent brother she began to throw the halo of Romance, to irradiate him with all the splendour of those happy days, to feel that in him she should draw nearest to the robust ideal. He and she were about the same age, Evie said. Most people thought Paul handsomer than his brother. He was certainly a better shot, though not so good at golf. And when Paul appeared, flushed with the triumph of getting through an examination, and ready to flirt with any pretty girl, Helen met him halfway, or more than halfway, and turned towards him on the Sunday evening.

He had been talking of his approaching exile in Nigeria, and he should have continued to talk of it, and allowed their guest to recover. But the heave of her bosom flattered him. Passion was possible, and he became passionate. Deep down in him something whispered: “This girl would let you kiss her; you might not have such a chance again.”

That was “how it happened,” or, rather, how Helen described it to her sister, using words even more unsympathetic than my own. But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it—who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of “passing emotion,” and to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open. To Helen, at all events, her life was to bring nothing more intense than the embrace of this boy who played no part in it. He had drawn her out of the house, where there was danger of surprise and light; he had led her by a path he knew, until they stood under the column of the vast wych-elm. A man in the darkness, he had whispered: “I love you” when she was desiring love. In time his slender personality faded, the scene that he had evoked endured. In all the variable years that followed she never saw the like of it again.

“I understand,” said Margaret—“at least, I understand as much as ever is understood of these things. Tell me now what happened on the Monday morning.”

“It was over at once.”

“How, Helen?”

“I was still happy while I dressed, but as I came downstairs I got nervous, and when I went into the dining-room I knew it was no good. There was Evie—I can't explain—managing the tea-urn, and Mr. Wilcox reading the
Times.”

“Was Paul there?”

“Yes; and Charles was talking to him about Stocks and Shares, and he looked frightened.”

By slight indications the sisters could convey much to each other. Margaret saw horror latent in the scene, and Helen's next remark did not surprise her.

“Somehow, when that kind of man looks frightened it is too awful. It is all right for us to be frightened, or for men of another sort—Father, for instance; but for men like that! When I saw all the others so placid, and Paul mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing, I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.”

“I don't think that. The Wilcoxes struck me as being genuine people, particularly the wife.”

“No, I don't really think that. But Paul was so broad-shouldered; all kinds of extraordinary things made it worse, and I knew that it would never do—never. I said to him after breakfast, when the others were practising strokes: ‘We rather lost our heads,' and he looked better at once, though frightfully ashamed. He began a speech about having no money to marry on, but it hurt him to make it, and I stopped him. Then he said: ‘I must beg your pardon over this, Miss Schlegel; I can't think what came over me last night.' And I said: ‘Nor what over me; never mind.' And then we parted—at least, until I remembered that I had written straight off to tell you the night before, and that frightened him again. I asked him to send a telegram for me, for he knew you would be coming or something; and he tried to get hold of the motor, but Charles and Mr. Wilcox wanted it to go to the station; and Charles offered to send the telegram for me, and then I had to say that the telegram was of no consequence, for Paul said Charles might read it, and though I wrote it out several times, he always said people would suspect something. He took it himself at last, pretending that he must walk down to get cartridges, and, what with one thing and the other, it was not handed in at the Post Office until too late. It was the most terrible morning. Paul disliked me more and more, and Evie talked cricket averages till I nearly screamed. I cannot think how I stood her all the other days. At last Charles and his father started for the station, and then came your telegram warning me that Aunt Juley was coming by that train, and Paul—oh, rather horrible—said that I had muddled it. But Mrs. Wilcox knew.”