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Howards End by E. M. Forster CHAPTER 1
One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.
HOWARDS END, TUESDAY. Dearest Meg,
It isn't going to be what we expected. It is old and little, and altogether
delightful--red brick.
We can scarcely pack in as it is, and the dear knows what will happen when Paul
(younger son) arrives tomorrow. From hall you go right or left into dining-
room or drawing-room.
Hall itself is practically a room. You open another door in it, and there are
the stairs going up in a sort of tunnel to the first-floor.
Three bedrooms in a row there, and three attics in a row above.
That isn't all the house really, but it's all that one notices--nine windows as you
look up from the front garden.
Then there's a very big wych-elm--to the left as you look up--leaning a little over
the house, and standing on the boundary between the garden and meadow.
I quite love that tree already.
Also ordinary elms, oaks--no nastier than ordinary oaks--pear-trees, apple-trees, and
a vine. No silver birches, though.
However, I must get on to my host and hostess.
I only wanted to show that it isn't the least what we expected.
Why did we settle that their house would be all gables and wiggles, and their garden
all gamboge-coloured paths?
I believe simply because we associate them with expensive hotels--Mrs. Wilcox trailing
in beautiful dresses down long corridors, Mr. Wilcox bullying porters, etc.
We females are that unjust.
I shall be back Saturday; will let you know train later.
They are as angry as I am that you did not come too; really Tibby is too tiresome, he
starts a new mortal disease every month.
How could he have got hay fever in London? and even if he could, it seems hard that
you should give up a visit to hear a schoolboy sneeze.
Tell him that Charles Wilcox (the son who is here) has hay fever too, but he's brave,
and gets quite cross when we inquire after it.
Men like the Wilcoxes would do Tibby a power of good.
But you won't agree, and I'd better change the subject.
This long letter is because I'm writing before breakfast.
Oh, the beautiful vine leaves! The house is covered with a vine.
I looked out earlier, and Mrs. Wilcox was already in the garden.
She evidently loves it. No wonder she sometimes looks tired.
She was watching the large red poppies come out.
Then she walked off the lawn to the meadow, whose corner to the right I can just see.
Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her
hands full of the hay that was cut yesterday--I suppose for rabbits or
something, as she kept on smelling it.
The air here is delicious. Later on I heard the noise of croquet
balls, and looked out again, and it was Charles Wilcox practising; they are keen on
all games.
Presently he started sneezing and had to stop.
Then I hear more clicketing, and it is Mr. Wilcox practising, and then, 'a-tissue, a-
tissue': he has to stop too.
Then Evie comes out, and does some calisthenic exercises on a machine that is
tacked on to a greengage-tree--they put everything to use--and then she says 'a-
tissue,' and in she goes.
And finally Mrs. Wilcox reappears, trail, trail, still smelling hay and looking at
the flowers.
I inflict all this on you because once you said that life is sometimes life and
sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which, and up
to now I have always put that down as 'Meg's clever nonsense.'
But this morning, it really does seem not life but a play, and it did amuse me
enormously to watch the W's.
Now Mrs. Wilcox has come in. I am going to wear [omission].
Last night Mrs. Wilcox wore an [omission], and Evie [omission].
So it isn't exactly a go-as-you-please place, and if you shut your eyes it still
seems the wiggly hotel that we expected. Not if you open them.
The dog-roses are too sweet.
There is a great hedge of them over the lawn--magnificently tall, so that they fall
down in garlands, and nice and thin at the bottom, so that you can see ducks through
it and a cow.
These belong to the farm, which is the only house near us.
There goes the breakfast gong. Much love.
Modified love to Tibby.
Love to Aunt Juley; how good of her to come and keep you company, but what a bore.
Burn this. Will write again Thursday.
Helen
HOWARDS END, FRIDAY. Dearest Meg,
I am having a glorious time. I like them all.
Mrs. Wilcox, if quieter than in Germany, is sweeter than ever, and I never saw anything
like her steady unselfishness, and the best of it is that the others do not take
advantage of her.
They are the very happiest, jolliest family that you can imagine.
I do really feel that we are making friends.
The fun of it is that they think me a noodle, and say so--at least Mr. Wilcox
does--and when that happens, and one doesn't mind, it's a pretty sure test,
isn't it?
He says the most horrid things about women's suffrage so nicely, and when I said
I believed in equality he just folded his arms and gave me such a setting down as
I've never had.
Meg, shall we ever learn to talk less? I never felt so ashamed of myself in my
life.
I couldn't point to a time when men had been equal, nor even to a time when the
wish to be equal had made them happier in other ways.
I couldn't say a word.
I had just picked up the notion that equality is good from some book--probably
from poetry, or you.
Anyhow, it's been knocked into pieces, and, like all people who are really strong, Mr.
Wilcox did it without hurting me. On the other hand, I laugh at them for
catching hay fever.
We live like fighting-***, and Charles takes us out every day in the motor--a tomb
with trees in it, a hermit's house, a wonderful road that was made by the Kings
of Mercia--tennis--a cricket match--bridge-
-and at night we squeeze up in this lovely house.
The whole clan's here now--it's like a rabbit warren.
Evie is a dear.
They want me to stop over Sunday--I suppose it won't matter if I do.
Marvellous weather and the view's marvellous--views westward to the high
ground.
Thank you for your letter. Burn this.
Your affectionate Helen
HOWARDS END, SUNDAY. Dearest, dearest Meg,--I do not know what
you will say: Paul and I are in love--the younger son who only came here Wednesday.
>
Howards End by E. M. Forster CHAPTER 2
Margaret glanced at her sister's note and pushed it over the breakfast-table to her
aunt. There was a moment's hush, and then the
flood-gates opened.
"I can tell you nothing, Aunt Juley. I know no more than you do.
We met--we only met the father and mother abroad last spring.
I know so little that I didn't even know their son's name.
It's all so--" She waved her hand and laughed a little.
"In that case it is far too sudden."
"Who knows, Aunt Juley, who knows?" "But, Margaret dear, I mean we mustn't be
unpractical now that we've come to facts. It is too sudden, surely."
"Who knows!"
"But Margaret dear--" "I'll go for her other letters," said
Margaret. "No, I won't, I'll finish my breakfast.
In fact, I haven't them.
We met the Wilcoxes on an awful expedition that we made from Heidelberg to Speyer.
Helen and I had got it into our heads that there was a grand old cathedral at Speyer--
the Archbishop of Speyer was one of the seven electors--you know--'Speyer, Maintz,
and Koln.'
Those three sees once commanded the Rhine Valley and got it the name of Priest
Street." "I still feel quite uneasy about this
business, Margaret."
"The train crossed by a bridge of boats, and at first sight it looked quite fine.
But oh, in five minutes we had seen the whole thing.
The cathedral had been ruined, absolutely ruined, by restoration; not an inch left of
the original structure.
We wasted a whole day, and came across the Wilcoxes as we were eating our sandwiches
in the public gardens.
They too, poor things, had been taken in-- they were actually stopping at Speyer--and
they rather liked Helen insisting that they must fly with us to Heidelberg.
As a matter of fact, they did come on next day.
We all took some drives together.
They knew us well enough to ask Helen to come and see them--at least, I was asked
too, but Tibby's illness prevented me, so last Monday she went alone.
That's all.
You know as much as I do now. It's a young man out the unknown.
She was to have come back Saturday, but put off till Monday, perhaps on account of--I
don't know.
She broke off, and listened to the sounds of a London morning.
Their house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of
buildings separated it from the main thoroughfare.
One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from
the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without
were still beating.
Though the promontory consisted of flats-- expensive, with cavernous entrance halls,
full of concierges and palms--it fulfilled its purpose, and gained for the older
houses opposite a certain measure of peace.
These, too, would be swept away in time, and another promontory would rise upon
their site, as humanity piled itself higher and higher on the precious soil of London.
Mrs. Munt had her own method of interpreting her nieces.
She decided that Margaret was a little hysterical, and was trying to gain time by
a torrent of talk.
Feeling very diplomatic, she lamented the fate of Speyer, and declared that never,
never should she be so misguided as to visit it, and added of her own accord that
the principles of restoration were ill understood in Germany.
"The Germans," she said, "are too thorough, and this is all very well sometimes, but at
other times it does not do."
"Exactly," said Margaret; "Germans are too thorough."
And her eyes began to shine.
"Of course I regard you Schlegels as English," said Mrs. Munt hastily--"English
to the backbone." Margaret leaned forward and stroked her
hand.
"And that reminds me--Helen's letter--" "Oh, yes, Aunt Juley, I am thinking all
right about Helen's letter. I know--I must go down and see her.
I am thinking about her all right.
I am meaning to go down" "But go with some plan," said Mrs. Munt,
admitting into her kindly voice a note of exasperation.
"Margaret, if I may interfere, don't be taken by surprise.
What do you think of the Wilcoxes? Are they our sort?
Are they likely people?
Could they appreciate Helen, who is to my mind a very special sort of person?
Do they care about Literature and Art? That is most important when you come to
think of it.
Literature and Art. Most important.
How old would the son be? She says 'younger son.'
Would he be in a position to marry?
Is he likely to make Helen happy? Did you gather--"
"I gathered nothing." They began to talk at once.
"Then in that case--"
"In that case I can make no plans, don't you see."
"On the contrary--" "I hate plans.
I hate lines of action.
Helen isn't a baby." "Then in that case, my dear, why go down?"
Margaret was silent. If her aunt could not see why she must go
down, she was not going to tell her.
She was not going to say "I love my dear sister; I must be near her at this crisis
of her life." The affections are more reticent than the
passions, and their expression more subtle.
If she herself should ever fall in love with a man, she, like Helen, would proclaim
it from the house-tops, but as she only loved a sister she used the voiceless
language of sympathy.
"I consider you odd girls," continued Mrs. Munt, "and very wonderful girls, and in
many ways far older than your years. But--you won't be offended?
--frankly I feel you are not up to this business.
It requires an older person. Dear, I have nothing to call me back to
Swanage."
She spread out her plump arms. "I am all at your disposal.
Let me go down to this house whose name I forget instead of you."
"Aunt Juley"--she jumped up and kissed her- -"I must, must go to Howards End myself.
You don't exactly understand, though I can never thank you properly for offering."
"I do understand," retorted Mrs. Munt, with immense confidence.
"I go down in no spirit of interference, but to make inquiries.
Inquiries are necessary.
Now, I am going to be rude. You would say the wrong thing; to a
certainty you would.
In your anxiety for Helen's happiness you would offend the whole of these Wilcoxes by
asking one of your impetuous questions--not that one minds offending them."
"I shall ask no questions.
I have it in Helen's writing that she and a man are in love.
There is no question to ask as long as she keeps to that.
All the rest isn't worth a straw.
A long engagement if you like, but inquiries, questions, plans, lines of
action--no, Aunt Juley, no."
Away she hurried, not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with
something that took the place of both qualities--something best described as a
profound vivacity, a continual and sincere
response to all that she encountered in her path through life.
"If Helen had written the same to me about a shop-assistant or a penniless clerk--"
"Dear Margaret, do come into the library and shut the door.
Your good maids are dusting the banisters."
"--or if she had wanted to marry the man who calls for Carter Paterson, I should
have said the same."
Then, with one of those turns that convinced her aunt that she was not mad
really and convinced observers of another type that she was not a barren theorist,
she added: "Though in the case of Carter
Paterson I should want it to be a very long engagement indeed, I must say."
"I should think so," said Mrs. Munt; "and, indeed, I can scarcely follow you.
Now, just imagine if you said anything of that sort to the Wilcoxes.
I understand it, but most good people would think you mad.
Imagine how disconcerting for Helen!
What is wanted is a person who will go slowly, slowly in this business, and see
how things are and where they are likely to lead to."
Margaret was down on this.
"But you implied just now that the engagement must be broken off."
"I think probably it must; but slowly." "Can you break an engagement off slowly?"
Her eyes lit up.
"What's an engagement made of, do you suppose?
I think it's made of some hard stuff, that may snap, but can't break.
It is different to the other ties of life.
They stretch or bend. They admit of degree.
They're different." "Exactly so.
But won't you let me just run down to Howards House, and save you all the
discomfort?
I will really not interfere, but I do so thoroughly understand the kind of thing you
Schlegels want that one quiet look round will be enough for me."
Margaret again thanked her, again kissed her, and then ran upstairs to see her
brother. He was not so well.
The hay fever had worried him a good deal all night.
His head ached, his eyes were wet, his mucous membrane, he informed her, was in a
most unsatisfactory condition.
The only thing that made life worth living was the thought of Walter Savage Landor,
from whose IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS she had promised to read at frequent intervals
during the day.
It was rather difficult. Something must be done about Helen.
She must be assured that it is not a criminal offence to love at first sight.
A telegram to this effect would be cold and cryptic, a personal visit seemed each
moment more impossible. Now the doctor arrived, and said that Tibby
was quite bad.
Might it really be best to accept Aunt Juley's kind offer, and to send her down to
Howards End with a note? Certainly Margaret was impulsive.
She did swing rapidly from one decision to another.
Running downstairs into the library, she cried--"Yes, I have changed my mind; I do
wish that you would go."
There was a train from King's Cross at eleven.
At half-past ten Tibby, with rare self- effacement, fell asleep, and Margaret was
able to drive her aunt to the station.
"You will remember, Aunt Juley, not to be drawn into discussing the engagement.
Give my letter to Helen, and say whatever you feel yourself, but do keep clear of the
relatives.
We have scarcely got their names straight yet, and besides, that sort of thing is so
uncivilized and wrong.
"So uncivilized?" queried Mrs. Munt, fearing that she was losing the point of
some brilliant remark. "Oh, I used an affected word.
I only meant would you please only talk the thing over with Helen."
"Only with Helen." "Because--" But it was no moment to expound
the personal nature of love.
Even Margaret shrank from it, and contented herself with stroking her good aunt's hand,
and with meditating, half sensibly and half poetically, on the journey that was about
to begin from King's Cross.
Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings
about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and the
unknown.
Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them alas! we return.
In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of
Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the
pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo.
Italians realize this, as is natural; those of them who are so unfortunate as to serve
as waiters in Berlin call the Anhalt Bahnhof the Stazione d'Italia, because by
it they must return to their homes.
And he is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality,
and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love.
To Margaret--I hope that it will not set the reader against her--the station of
King's Cross had always suggested Infinity.
Its very situation--withdrawn a little behind the facile splendours of St.
Pancras--implied a comment on the materialism of life.
Those two great arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering between them an
unlovely clock, were fit portals for some eternal adventure, whose issue might be
prosperous, but would certainly not be
expressed in the ordinary language of prosperity.
If you think this ridiculous, remember that it is not Margaret who is telling you about
it; and let me hasten to add that they were in plenty of time for the train; that Mrs.
Munt, though she took a second-class
ticket, was put by the guard into a first (only two seconds on the train, one smoking
and the other babies--one cannot be expected to travel with babies); and that
Margaret, on her return to Wickham Place, was confronted with the following telegram:
ALL OVER. WISH I HAD NEVER WRITTEN.
TELL NO ONE. --HELEN
But Aunt Juley was gone--gone irrevocably, and no power on earth could stop her.
>
Howards End by E. M. Forster CHAPTER 3
Most complacently did Mrs. Munt rehearse her mission.
Her nieces were independent young women, and it was not often that she was able to
help them.
Emily's daughters had never been quite like other girls.
They had been left motherless when Tibby was born, when Helen was five and Margaret
herself but thirteen.
It was before the passing of the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, so Mrs. Munt could
without impropriety offer to go and keep house at Wickham Place.
But her brother-in-law, who was peculiar and a German, had referred the question to
Margaret, who with the crudity of youth had answered, "No, they could manage much
better alone."
Five years later Mr. Schlegel had died too, and Mrs. Munt had repeated her offer.
Margaret, crude no longer, had been grateful and extremely nice, but the
substance of her answer had been the same.
"I must not interfere a third time," thought Mrs. Munt.
However, of course she did.
She learnt, to her horror, that Margaret, now of age, was taking her money out of the
old safe investments and putting it into Foreign Things, which always smash.
Silence would have been criminal.
Her own fortune was invested in Home Rails, and most ardently did she beg her niece to
imitate her. "Then we should be together, dear."
Margaret, out of politeness, invested a few hundreds in the Nottingham and Derby
Railway, and though the Foreign Things did admirably and the Nottingham and Derby
declined with the steady dignity of which
only Home Rails are capable, Mrs. Munt never ceased to rejoice, and to say, "I did
manage that, at all events. When the smash comes poor Margaret will
have a nest-egg to fall back upon."
This year Helen came of age, and exactly the same thing happened in Helen's case;
she also would shift her money out of Consols, but she, too, almost without being
pressed, consecrated a fraction of it to the Nottingham and Derby Railway.
So far so good, but in social matters their aunt had accomplished nothing.
Sooner or later the girls would enter on the process known as throwing themselves
away, and if they had delayed hitherto, it was only that they might throw themselves
more vehemently in the future.
They saw too many people at Wickham Place-- unshaven musicians, an actress even, German
cousins (one knows what foreigners are), acquaintances picked up at Continental
hotels (one knows what they are too).
It was interesting, and down at Swanage no one appreciated culture more than Mrs.
Munt; but it was dangerous, and disaster was bound to come.
How right she was, and how lucky to be on the spot when the disaster came!
The train sped northward, under innumerable tunnels.
It was only an hour's journey, but Mrs. Munt had to raise and lower the window
again and again.
She passed through the South Welwyn Tunnel, saw light for a moment, and entered the
North Welwyn Tunnel, of tragic fame.
She traversed the immense viaduct, whose arches span untroubled meadows and the
dreamy flow of Tewin Water. She skirted the parks of politicians.
At times the Great North Road accompanied her, more suggestive of infinity than any
railway, awakening, after a nap of a hundred years, to such life as is conferred
by the stench of motor-cars, and to such
culture as is implied by the advertisements of antibilious pills.
To history, to tragedy, to the past, to the future, Mrs. Munt remained equally
indifferent; hers but to concentrate on the end of her journey, and to rescue poor
Helen from this dreadful mess.
The station for Howards End was at Hilton, one of the large villages that are strung
so frequently along the North Road, and that owe their size to the traffic of
coaching and pre-coaching days.
Being near London, it had not shared in the rural decay, and its long High Street had
budded out right and left into residential estates.
For about a mile a series of tiled and slated houses passed before Mrs. Munt's
inattentive eyes, a series broken at one point by six Danish tumuli that stood
shoulder to shoulder along the highroad, tombs of soldiers.
Beyond these tumuli habitations thickened, and the train came to a standstill in a
tangle that was almost a town.
The station, like the scenery, like Helen's letters, struck an indeterminate note.
Into which country will it lead, England or Suburbia?
It was new, it had island platforms and a subway, and the superficial comfort exacted
by business men.
But it held hints of local life, personal intercourse, as even Mrs. Munt was to
discover. "I want a house," she confided to the
ticket boy.
"Its name is Howards Lodge. Do you know where it is?"
"Mr. Wilcox!" the boy called. A young man in front of them turned round.
"She's wanting Howards End."
There was nothing for it but to go forward, though Mrs. Munt was too much agitated even
to stare at the stranger.
But remembering that there were two brothers, she had the sense to say to him,
"Excuse me asking, but are you the younger Mr. Wilcox or the elder?"
"The younger.
Can I do anything for you?" "Oh, well"--she controlled herself with
difficulty. "Really.
Are you?
I--" She moved away from the ticket boy and lowered her voice.
"I am Miss Schlegels aunt. I ought to introduce myself, oughtn't I?
My name is Mrs. Munt."
She was conscious that he raised his cap and said quite coolly, "Oh, rather; Miss
Schlegel is stopping with us. Did you want to see her?"
"Possibly--"
"I'll call you a cab. No; wait a mo--" He thought.
"Our motor's here. I'll run you up in it."
"That is very kind--"
"Not at all, if you'll just wait till they bring out a parcel from the office.
This way." "My niece is not with you by any chance?"
"No; I came over with my father.
He has gone on north in your train. You'll see Miss Schlegel at lunch.
You're coming up to lunch, I hope?"
"I should like to come UP," said Mrs. Munt, not committing herself to nourishment until
she had studied Helen's lover a little more.
He seemed a gentleman, but had so rattled her round that her powers of observation
were numbed. She glanced at him stealthily.
To a feminine eye there was nothing amiss in the sharp depressions at the corners of
his mouth, nor in the rather box-like construction of his forehead.
He was dark, clean-shaven and seemed accustomed to command.
"In front or behind? Which do you prefer?
It may be windy in front."
"In front if I may; then we can talk." "But excuse me one moment--I can't think
what they're doing with that parcel."
He strode into the booking-office and called with a new voice: "Hi! hi, you
there! Are you going to keep me waiting all day?
Parcel for Wilcox, Howards End.
Just look sharp!" Emerging, he said in quieter tones: "This
station's abominably organized; if I had my way, the whole lot of 'em should get the
sack.
May I help you in?" "This is very good of you," said Mrs. Munt,
as she settled herself into a luxurious cavern of red leather, and suffered her
person to be padded with rugs and shawls.
She was more civil than she had intended, but really this young man was very kind.
Moreover, she was a little afraid of him: his self-possession was extraordinary.
"Very good indeed," she repeated, adding: "It is just what I should have wished."
"Very good of you to say so," he replied, with a slight look of surprise, which, like
most slight looks, escaped Mrs. Munt's attention.
"I was just tooling my father over to catch the down train."
"You see, we heard from Helen this morning."
Young Wilcox was pouring in petrol, starting his engine, and performing other
actions with which this story has no concern.
The great car began to rock, and the form of Mrs. Munt, trying to explain things,
sprang agreeably up and down among the red cushions.
"The mater will be very glad to see you," he mumbled.
"Hi! I say. Parcel for Howards End.
Bring it out.
Hi!" A bearded porter emerged with the parcel in
one hand and an entry book in the other. With the gathering whir of the motor these
ejaculations mingled: "Sign, must I?
Why the--should I sign after all this bother?
Not even got a pencil on you? Remember next time I report you to the
station-master.
My time's of value, though yours mayn't be. Here"--here being a tip.
"Extremely sorry, Mrs. Munt." "Not at all, Mr. Wilcox."
"And do you object to going through the village?
It is rather a longer spin, but I have one or two commissions."
"I should love going through the village.
Naturally I am very anxious to talk things over with you."
As she said this she felt ashamed, for she was disobeying Margaret's instructions.
Only disobeying them in the letter, surely.
Margaret had only warned her against discussing the incident with outsiders.
Surely it was not "uncivilized or wrong" to discuss it with the young man himself,
since chance had thrown them together.
A reticent fellow, he made no reply. Mounting by her side, he put on gloves and
spectacles, and off they drove, the bearded porter--life is a mysterious business--
looking after them with admiration.
The wind was in their faces down the station road, blowing the dust into Mrs.
Munt's eyes. But as soon as they turned into the Great
North Road she opened fire.
"You can well imagine," she said, "that the news was a great shock to us."
"What news?" "Mr. Wilcox," she said frankly.
"Margaret has told me everything-- everything.
I have seen Helen's letter."
He could not look her in the face, as his eyes were fixed on his work; he was
travelling as quickly as he dared down the High Street.
But he inclined his head in her direction, and said, "I beg your pardon; I didn't
catch." "About Helen.
Helen, of course.
Helen is a very exceptional person--I am sure you will let me say this, feeling
towards her as you do--indeed, all the Schlegels are exceptional.
I come in no spirit of interference, but it was a great shock."
They drew up opposite a draper's.
Without replying, he turned round in his seat, and contemplated the cloud of dust
that they had raised in their passage through the village.
It was settling again, but not all into the road from which he had taken it.
Some of it had percolated through the open windows, some had whitened the roses and
gooseberries of the wayside gardens, while a certain proportion had entered the lungs
of the villagers.
"I wonder when they'll learn wisdom and tar the roads," was his comment.
Then a man ran out of the draper's with a roll of oilcloth, and off they went again.
"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
dare--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 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.
>
Howards End by E. M. Forster CHAPTER 4
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 her 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 *** 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 how 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." "Knew what?"
"Everything; though we neither of us told her a word, and had known all along, I
think."
"Oh, she must have overheard you." "I suppose so, but it seemed wonderful.
When Charles and Aunt Juley drove up, calling each other names, Mrs. Wilcox
stepped in from the garden and made everything less terrible.
Ugh! but it has been a disgusting business.
To think that--" She sighed. "To think that because you and a young man
meet for a moment, there must be all these telegrams and anger," supplied Margaret.
Helen nodded.
"I've often thought about it, Helen. It's one of the most interesting things in
the world.
The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched--a
life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme,
are not supreme there.
There love means marriage settlements, death, death duties.
So far I'm clear. But here my difficulty.
This outer life, though obviously horrid, often seems the real one--there's grit in
it. It does breed character.
Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?"
"Oh, Meg, that's what I felt, only not so clearly, when the Wilcoxes were so
competent, and seemed to have their hands on all the ropes."
"Don't you feel it now?"
"I remember Paul at breakfast," said Helen quietly.
"I shall never forget him. He had nothing to fall back upon.
I know that personal relations are the real life, for ever and ever.
"Amen!"
So the Wilcox episode fell into the background, leaving behind it memories of
sweetness and horror that mingled, and the sisters pursued the life that Helen had
commended.
They talked to each other and to other people, they filled the tall thin house at
Wickham Place with those whom they liked or could befriend.
They even attended public meetings.
In their own fashion they cared deeply about politics, though not as politicians
would have us care; they desired that public life should mirror whatever is good
in the life within.
Temperance, tolerance, and *** equality were intelligible cries to them; whereas
they did not follow our Forward Policy in Thibet with the keen attention that it
merits, and would at times dismiss the
whole British Empire with a puzzled, if reverent, sigh.
Not out of them are the shows of history erected: the world would be a grey,
bloodless place were it entirely composed of Miss Schlegels.
But the world being what it is, perhaps they shine out in it like stars.
A word on their origin. They were not "English to the backbone," as
their aunt had piously asserted.
But, on the other band, they were not "Germans of the dreadful sort."
Their father had belonged to a type that was more prominent in Germany fifty years
ago than now.
He was not the aggressive German, so dear to the English journalist, nor the domestic
German, so dear to the English wit.
If one classed him at all it would be as the countryman of Hegel and Kant, as the
idealist, inclined to be dreamy, whose Imperialism was the Imperialism of the air.
Not that his life had been inactive.
He had fought like blazes against Denmark, Austria, France.
But he had fought without visualizing the results of victory.
A hint of the truth broke on him after Sedan, when he saw the dyed moustaches of
Napoleon going grey; another when he entered Paris, and saw the smashed windows
of the Tuileries.
Peace came--it was all very immense, one had turned into an Empire--but he knew that
some quality had vanished for which not all Alsace-Lorraine could compensate him.
Germany a commercial Power, Germany a naval Power, Germany with colonies here and a
Forward Policy there, and legitimate aspirations in the other place, might
appeal to others, and be fitly served by
them; for his own part, he abstained from the fruits of victory, and naturalized
himself in England.
The more earnest members of his family never forgave him, and knew that his
children, though scarcely English of the dreadful sort, would never be German to the
backbone.
He had obtained work in one of our provincial Universities, and there married
Poor Emily (or Die Englanderin as the case may be), and as she had money, they
proceeded to London, and came to know a good many people.
But his gaze was always fixed beyond the sea.
It was his hope that the clouds of materialism obscuring the Fatherland would
part in time, and the mild intellectual light re-emerge.
"Do you imply that we Germans are stupid, Uncle Ernst?" exclaimed a haughty and
magnificent nephew. Uncle Ernst replied, "To my mind.
You use the intellect, but you no longer care about it.
That I call stupidity."
As the haughty nephew did not follow, he continued, "You only care about the' things
that you can use, and therefore arrange them in the following order: Money,
supremely useful; intellect, rather useful; imagination, of no use at all.
No"--for the other had protested--"your Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than
is our Imperialism over here.
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a
thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and
that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.
That is not imagination. No, it kills it.
When their poets over here try to celebrate bigness they are dead at once, and
naturally.
Your poets too are dying, your philosophers, your musicians, to whom
Europe has listened for two hundred years. Gone.
Gone with the little courts that nurtured them--gone with Esterhaz and Weimar.
What? What's that?
Your Universities?
Oh, yes, you have learned men, who collect more facts than do the learned men of
England. They collect facts, and facts, and empires
of facts.
But which of them will rekindle the light within?"
To all this Margaret listened, sitting on the haughty nephew's knee.
It was a unique education for the little girls.
The haughty nephew would be at Wickham Place one day, bringing with him an even
haughtier wife, both convinced that Germany was appointed by God to govern the world.
Aunt Juley would come the next day, convinced that Great Britain had been
appointed to the same post by the same authority.
Were both these loud-voiced parties right?
On one occasion they had met, and Margaret with clasped hands had implored them to
argue the subject out in her presence. Whereat they blushed, and began to talk
about the weather.
"Papa" she cried--she was a most offensive child--"why will they not discuss this most
clear question?" Her father, surveying the parties grimly,
replied that he did not know.
Putting her head on one side, Margaret then remarked, "To me one of two things is very
clear; either God does not know his own mind about England and Germany, or else
these do not know the mind of God."
A hateful little girl, but at thirteen she had grasped a dilemma that most people
travel through life without perceiving. Her brain darted up and down; it grew
pliant and strong.
Her conclusion was, that any human being lies nearer to the unseen than any
organization, and from this she never varied.
Helen advanced along the same lines, though with a more irresponsible tread.
In character she resembled her sister, but she was pretty, and so apt to have a more
amusing time.
People gathered round her more readily, especially when they were new
acquaintances, and she did enjoy a little homage very much.
When their father died and they ruled alone at Wickham Place, she often absorbed the
whole of the company, while Margaret--both were tremendous talkers--fell flat.
Neither sister bothered about this.
Helen never apologized afterwards, Margaret did not feel the slightest rancour.
But looks have their influence upon character.
The sisters were alike as little girls, but at the time of the Wilcox episode their
methods were beginning to diverge; the younger was rather apt to entice people,
and, in enticing them, to be herself
enticed; the elder went straight ahead, and accepted an occasional failure as part of
the game. Little need be premised about Tibby.
He was now an intelligent man of sixteen, but dyspeptic and difficile.
>
Howards End by E. M. Forster CHAPTER 5
It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most
sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it.
Whether you are like Mrs. Munt, and tap surreptitiously when the tunes come--of
course, not so as to disturb the others--; or like Helen, who can see heroes and
shipwrecks in the music's flood; or like
Margaret, who can only see the music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in
counterpoint, and holds the full score open on his knee; or like their cousin, Fraulein
Mosebach, who remembers all the time that
Beethoven is "echt Deutsch"; or like Fraulein Mosebach's young man, who can
remember nothing but Fraulein Mosebach: in any case, the passion of your life becomes
more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings.
It is cheap, even if you hear it in the Queen's Hall, dreariest music-room in
London, though not as dreary as the Free Trade Hall, Manchester; and even if you sit
on the extreme left of that hall, so that
the brass bumps at you before the rest of the orchestra arrives, it is still cheap.
"Who is Margaret talking to?" said Mrs. Munt, at the conclusion of the first
movement.
She was again in London on a visit to Wickham Place.
Helen looked down the long line of their party, and said that she did not know.
"Would it be some young man or other whom she takes an interest in?"
"I expect so," Helen replied.
Music enwrapped her, and she could not enter into the distinction that divides
young men whom one takes an interest in from young men whom one knows.
"You girls are so wonderful in always having--Oh dear! one mustn't talk."
For the Andante had begun--very beautiful, but bearing a family likeness to all the
other beautiful Andantes that Beethoven had written, and, to Helen's mind, rather
disconnecting the heroes and shipwrecks of
the first movement from the heroes and goblins of the third.
She heard the tune through once, and then her attention wandered, and she gazed at
the audience, or the organ, or the architecture.
Much did she censure the attenuated Cupids who encircle the ceiling of the Queen's
Hall, inclining each to each with vapid gesture, and clad in sallow pantaloons, on
which the October sunlight struck.
"How awful to marry a man like those Cupids!" thought Helen.
Here Beethoven started decorating his tune, so she heard him through once more, and
then she smiled at her cousin Frieda.
But Frieda, listening to Classical Music, could not respond.
Herr Liesecke, too, looked as if wild horses could not make him inattentive;
there were lines across his forehead, his lips were parted, his pince-nez at right
angles to his nose, and he had laid a thick, white hand on either knee.
And next to her was Aunt Juley, so British, and wanting to tap.
How interesting that row of people was!
What diverse influences had gone to the making!
Here Beethoven, after humming and hawing with great sweetness, said "Heigho," and
the Andante came to an end.
Applause, and a round of "wunderschoning" and "prachtvolleying" from the German
contingent.
Margaret started talking to her new young man; Helen said to her aunt: "Now comes the
wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants
dancing;" and Tibby implored the company
generally to look out for the transitional passage on the drum.
"On the what, dear?" "On the DRUM, Aunt Juley."
"No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they
come back," breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over
the universe, from end to end.
Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was
that that made them so terrible to Helen.
They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism
in the world.
After the interlude of elephants dancing, they returned and made the observation for
the second time.
Helen could not contradict them, for, once at all events, she had felt the same, and
had seen the reliable walls of youth collapse.
Panic and emptiness!
Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right.
Her brother raised his finger: it was the transitional passage on the drum.
For, as if things were going too far, Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made
them do what he wanted. He appeared in person.
He gave them a little push, and they began to walk in major key instead of in a minor,
and then--he blew with his mouth and they were scattered!
Gusts of splendour, gods and demigods contending with vast swords, colour and
fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death!
Oh, it all burst before the girl, and she even stretched out her gloved hands as if
it was tangible.
Any fate was titanic; any contest desirable; conqueror and conquered would
alike be applauded by the angels of the utmost stars.
And the goblins--they had not really been there at all?
They were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief?
One healthy human impulse would dispel them?
Men like the Wilcoxes, or President Roosevelt, would say yes.
Beethoven knew better.
The goblins really had been there. They might return--and they did.
It was as if the splendour of life might boil over--and waste to steam and froth.
In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased
malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end.
Panic and emptiness!
Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world
might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the
end.
He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time,
and again the goblins were scattered.
He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of
life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth
Symphony to its conclusion.
But the goblins were there. They could return.
He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other
things.
Helen pushed her way out during the applause.
She desired to be alone. The music summed up to her all that had
happened or could happen in her career.
She read it as a tangible statement, which could never be superseded.
The notes meant this and that to her, and they could have no other meaning, and life
could have no other meaning.
She pushed right out of the building, and walked slowly down the outside staircase,
breathing the autumnal air, and then she strolled home.
"Margaret," called Mrs. Munt, "is Helen all right?"
"Oh yes." "She is always going away in the middle of
a programme," said Tibby.
"The music has evidently moved her deeply," said Fraulein Mosebach.
"Excuse me," said Margaret's young man, who had for some time been preparing a
sentence, "but that lady has, quite inadvertently, taken my umbrella."
"Oh, good gracious me!
--I am so sorry. Tibby, run after Helen."
"I shall miss the Four Serious Songs if I do."
"Tibby love, you must go."
"It isn't of any consequence," said the young man, in truth a little uneasy about
his umbrella. "But of course it is.
Tibby!
Tibby!" Tibby rose to his feet, and wilfully caught
his person on the backs of the chairs.
By the time he had tipped up the seat and had found his hat, and had deposited his
full score in safety, it was "too late" to go after Helen.
The Four Serious Songs had begun, and one could not move during their performance.
"My sister is so careless," whispered Margaret.
"Not at all," replied the young man; but his voice was dead and cold.
"If you would give me your address--" "Oh, not at all, not at all;" and he
wrapped his greatcoat over his knees.
Then the Four Serious Songs rang shallow in Margaret's ears.
Brahms, for all his grumbling and grizzling, had never guessed what it felt
like to be suspected of stealing an umbrella.
For this fool of a young man thought that she and Helen and Tibby had been playing
the confidence trick on him, and that if he gave his address they would break into his
rooms some midnight or other and steal his walkingstick too.
Most ladies would have laughed, but Margaret really minded, for it gave her a
glimpse into squalor.
To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot
afford it.
As soon as Brahms had grunted himself out, she gave him her card and said, "That is
where we live; if you preferred, you could call for the umbrella after the concert,
but I didn't like to trouble you when it has all been our fault."
His face brightened a little when he saw that Wickham Place was W.
It was sad to see him corroded with suspicion, and yet not daring to be
impolite, in case these well-dressed people were honest after all.
She took it as a good sign that he said to her, "It's a fine programme this afternoon,
is it not?" for this was the remark with which he had originally opened, before the
umbrella intervened.
"The Beethoven's fine," said Margaret, who was not a female of the encouraging type.
"I don't like the Brahms, though, nor the Mendelssohn that came first--and ugh!
I don't like this Elgar that's coming."
"What, what?" called Herr Liesecke, overhearing.
"The POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE will not be fine?"
"Oh, Margaret, you tiresome girl!" cried her aunt.
"Here have I been persuading Herr Liesecke to stop for POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE, and you
are undoing all my work.
I am so anxious for him to hear what we are doing in music.
Oh, you mustn't run down our English composers, Margaret."
"For my part, I have heard the composition at Stettin," said Fraulein Mosebach.
"On two occasions. It is dramatic, a little."
"Frieda, you despise English music.
You know you do. And English art.
And English Literature, except Shakespeare and he's a German.
Very well, Frieda, you may go."
The lovers laughed and glanced at each other.
Moved by a common impulse, they rose to their feet and fled from POMP AND
CIRCUMSTANCE.
"We have this call to play in Finsbury Circus, it is true," said Herr Liesecke, as
he edged past her and reached the gangway just as the music started.
"Margaret--" loudly whispered by Aunt Juley.
"Margaret, Margaret! Fraulein Mosebach has left her beautiful
little bag behind her on the seat."
Sure enough, there was Frieda's reticule, containing her address book, her pocket
dictionary, her map of London, and her money.
"Oh, what a bother--what a family we are!
Fr-Frieda!" "Hush!" said all those who thought the
music fine. "But it's the number they want in Finsbury
Circus--"
"Might I--couldn't I--" said the suspicious young man, and got very red.
"Oh, I would be so grateful." He took the bag--money clinking inside it--
and slipped up the gangway with it.
He was just in time to catch them at the swing-door, and he received a pretty smile
from the German girl and a fine bow from her cavalier.
He returned to his seat up-sides with the world.
The trust that they had reposed in him was trivial, but he felt that it cancelled his
mistrust for them, and that probably he would not be "had" over his umbrella.
This young man had been "had" in the past-- badly, perhaps overwhelmingly--and now most
of his energies went in defending himself against the unknown.
But this afternoon--perhaps on account of music--he perceived that one must slack off
occasionally, or what is the good of being alive?
Wickham Place, W., though a risk, was as safe as most things, and he would risk it.
So when the concert was over and Margaret said, "We live quite near; I am going there
now.
Could you walk around with me, and we'll find your umbrella?" he said, "Thank you,"
peaceably, and followed her out of the Queen's Hall.
She wished that he was not so anxious to hand a lady downstairs, or to carry a
lady's programme for her--his class was near enough her own for its manners to vex
her.
But she found him interesting on the whole- -every one interested the Schlegels on the
whole at that time--and while her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to
invite him to tea.
"How tired one gets after music!" she began.
"Do you find the atmosphere of Queen's Hall oppressive?"
"Yes, horribly."
"But surely the atmosphere of Covent Garden is even more oppressive."
"Do you go there much?" "When my work permits, I attend the gallery
for, the Royal Opera."
Helen would have exclaimed, "So do I. I love the gallery," and thus have endeared
herself to the young man. Helen could do these things.
But Margaret had an almost morbid horror of "drawing people out," of "making things
go."
She had been to the gallery at Covent Garden, but she did not "attend" it,
preferring the more expensive seats; still less did she love it.
So she made no reply.
"This year I have been three times--to FAUST, TOSCA, and--" Was it "Tannhouser" or
"Tannhoyser"? Better not risk the word.
Margaret disliked TOSCA and FAUST.
And so, for one reason and another, they walked on in silence, chaperoned by the
voice of Mrs. Munt, who was getting into difficulties with her nephew.
"I do in a WAY remember the passage, Tibby, but when every instrument is so beautiful,
it is difficult to pick out one thing rather than another.
I am sure that you and Helen take me to the very nicest concerts.
Not a dull note from beginning to end. I only wish that our German friends would
have stayed till it finished."
"But surely you haven't forgotten the drum steadily beating on the low C, Aunt Juley?"
came Tibby's voice. "No one could.
It's unmistakable."
"A specially loud part?" hazarded Mrs. Munt.
"Of course I do not go in for being musical," she added, the shot failing.
"I only care for music--a very different thing.
But still I will say this for myself--I do know when I like a thing and when I don't.
Some people are the same about pictures.
They can go into a picture gallery--Miss Conder can--and say straight off what they
feel, all round the wall. I never could do that.
But music is so different to pictures, to my mind.
When it comes to music I am as safe as houses, and I assure you, Tibby, I am by no
means pleased by everything.
There was a thing--something about a faun in French--which Helen went into ecstasies
over, but I thought it most tinkling and superficial, and said so, and I held to my
opinion too."
"Do you agree?" asked Margaret. "Do you think music is so different to
pictures?" "I--I should have thought so, kind of," he
said.
"So should I. Now, my sister declares they're just the
same. We have great arguments over it.
She says I'm dense; I say she's sloppy."
Getting under way, she cried: "Now, doesn't it seem absurd to you?
What is the good of the Arts if they are interchangeable?
What is the good of the ear if it tells you the same as the eye?
Helen's one aim is to translate tunes into the language of painting, and pictures into
the language of music.
It's very ingenious, and she says several pretty things in the process, but what's
gained, I'd like to know? Oh, it's all rubbish, radically false.
If Monet's really Debussy, and Debussy's really Monet, neither gentleman is worth
his salt--that's my opinion. Evidently these sisters quarrelled.
"Now, this very symphony that we've just been having--she won't let it alone.
She labels it with meanings from start to finish; turns it into literature.
I wonder if the day will ever return when music will be treated as music.
Yet I don't know. There's my brother--behind us.
He treats music as music, and oh, my goodness!
He makes me angrier than anyone, simply furious.
With him I daren't even argue."
An unhappy family, if talented. "But, of course, the real villain is
Wagner.
He has done more than any man in the nineteenth century towards the muddling of
arts.
I do feel that music is in a very serious state just now, though extraordinarily
interesting.
Every now and then in history there do come these terrible geniuses, like Wagner, who
stir up all the wells of thought at once. For a moment it's splendid.
Such a splash as never was.
But afterwards--such a lot of mud; and the wells--as it were, they communicate with
each other too easily now, and not one of them will run quite clear.
That's what Wagner's done."
Her speeches fluttered away from the young man like birds.
If only he could talk like this, he would have caught the world.
Oh to acquire culture!
Oh, to pronounce foreign names correctly! Oh, to be well informed, discoursing at
ease on every subject that a lady started! But it would take one years.
With an hour at lunch and a few shattered hours in the evening, how was it possible
to catch up with leisured women, who had been reading steadily from childhood?
His brain might be full of names, he might have even heard of Monet and Debussy; the
trouble was that he could not string them together into a sentence, he could not make
them "tell," he could not quite forget about his stolen umbrella.
Yes, the umbrella was the real trouble. Behind Monet and Debussy the umbrella
persisted, with the steady beat of a drum.
"I suppose my umbrella will be all right," he was thinking.
"I don't really mind about it. I will think about music instead.
I suppose my umbrella will be all right."
Earlier in the afternoon he had worried about seats.
Ought he to have paid as much as two shillings?
Earlier still he had wondered, "Shall I try to do without a programme?"
There had always been something to worry him ever since he could remember, always
something that distracted him in the pursuit of beauty.
For he did pursue beauty, and therefore, Margaret's speeches did flutter away from
him like birds.
Margaret talked ahead, occasionally saying, "Don't you think so? don't you feel the
same?" And once she stopped, and said "Oh, do
interrupt me!" which terrified him.
She did not attract him, though she filled him with awe.
Her figure was meagre, her face seemed all teeth and eyes, her references to her
sister and brother were uncharitable.
For all her cleverness and culture, she was probably one of those soulless, atheistical
women who have been so shown up by Miss Corelli.
It was surprising (and alarming) that she should suddenly say, "I do hope that you'll
come in and have some tea." "I do hope that you'll come in and have
some tea.
We should be so glad. I have dragged you so far out of your way."
They had arrived at Wickham Place. The sun had set, and the backwater, in deep
shadow, was filling with a gentle haze.
To the right of the fantastic skyline of the flats towered black against the hues of
evening; to the left the older houses raised a square-cut, irregular parapet
against the grey.
Margaret fumbled for her latchkey. Of course she had forgotten it.
So, grasping her umbrella by its ferrule, she leant over the area and tapped at the
dining-room window.
"Helen! Let us in!"
"All right," said a voice. "You've been taking this gentleman's
umbrella."
"Taken a what?" said Helen, opening the door.
"Oh, what's that? Do come in!
How do you do?"
"Helen, you must not be so ramshackly. You took this gentleman's umbrella away
from Queen's Hall, and he has had the trouble of coming for it."
"Oh, I am so sorry!" cried Helen, all her hair flying.
She had pulled off her hat as soon as she returned, and had flung herself into the
big dining-room chair.
"I do nothing but steal umbrellas. I am so very sorry!
Do come in and choose one. Is yours a hooky or a nobbly?
Mine's a nobbly--at least, I THINK it is."
The light was turned on, and they began to search the hall, Helen, who had abruptly
parted with the Fifth Symphony, commenting with shrill little cries.
"Don't you talk, Meg!
You stole an old gentleman's silk top-hat. Yes, she did, Aunt Juley.
It is a positive fact. She thought it was a ***.
Oh, heavens!
I've knocked the In and Out card down. Where's Frieda?
Tibby, why don't you ever--No, I can't remember what I was going to say.
That wasn't it, but do tell the maids to hurry tea up.
What about this umbrella?" She opened it.
"No, it's all gone along the seams.
It's an appalling umbrella. It must be mine."
But it was not.
He took it from her, murmured a few words of thanks, and then fled, with the lilting
step of the clerk. "But if you will stop--" cried Margaret.
"Now, Helen, how stupid you've been!"
"Whatever have I done?" "Don't you see that you've frightened him
away? I meant him to stop to tea.
You oughtn't to talk about stealing or holes in an umbrella.
I saw his nice eyes getting so miserable. No, it's not a bit of good now."
For Helen had darted out into the street, shouting, "Oh, do stop!"
"I dare say it is all for the best," opined Mrs. Munt.
"We know nothing about the young man, Margaret, and your drawing-room is full of
very tempting little things." But Helen cried: "Aunt Juley, how can you!
You make me more and more ashamed.
I'd rather he HAD been a thief and taken all the apostle spoons than that I--Well, I
must shut the front-door, I suppose. One more failure for Helen."
"Yes, I think the apostle spoons could have gone as rent," said Margaret.
Seeing that her aunt did not understand, she added: "You remember 'rent.'
It was one of father's words--Rent to the ideal, to his own faith in human nature.
You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, 'It's
better to be fooled than to be suspicious'- -that the confidence trick is the work of
man, but the want-of-confidence-trick is the work of the devil."
"I remember something of the sort now," said Mrs. Munt, rather tartly, for she
longed to add, "It was lucky that your father married a wife with money."
But this was unkind, and she contented herself with, "Why, he might have stolen
the little Ricketts picture as well." "Better that he had," said Helen stoutly.
"No, I agree with Aunt Juley," said Margaret.
"I'd rather mistrust people than lose my little Ricketts.
There are limits."
Their brother, finding the incident commonplace, had stolen upstairs to see
whether there were scones for tea.
He warmed the teapot--almost too deftly-- rejected the Orange Pekoe that the parlour-
maid had provided, poured in five spoonfuls of a superior blend, filled up with really
boiling water, and now called to the ladies to be quick or they would lose the aroma.
"All right, Auntie Tibby," called Helen, while Margaret, thoughtful again, said: "In
a way, I wish we had a real boy in the house--the kind of boy who cares for men.
It would make entertaining so much easier."
"So do I," said her sister. "Tibby only cares for cultured females
singing Brahms."
And when they joined him she said rather sharply: "Why didn't you make that young
man welcome, Tibby? You must do the host a little, you know.
You ought to have taken his hat and coaxed him into stopping, instead of letting him
be swamped by screaming women." Tibby sighed, and drew a long strand of
hair over his forehead.
"Oh, it's no good looking superior. I mean what I say."
"Leave Tibby alone!" said Margaret, who could not bear her brother to be scolded.
"Here's the house a regular hen-coop!" grumbled Helen.
"Oh, my dear!" protested Mrs. Munt. "How can you say such dreadful things!
The number of men you get here has always astonished me.
If there is any danger it's the other way round."
"Yes, but it's the wrong sort of men, Helen means."
"No, I don't," corrected Helen.
"We get the right sort of man, but the wrong side of him, and I say that's Tibby's
fault. There ought to be a something about the
house--an--I don't know what."
"A touch of the W.'s, perhaps?" Helen put out her tongue.
"Who are the W.'s?" asked Tibby. "The W.'s are things I and Meg and Aunt
Juley know about and you don't, so there!"
"I suppose that ours is a female house," said Margaret, "and one must just accept
it. No, Aunt Juley, I don't mean that this
house is full of women.
I am trying to say something much more clever.
I mean that it was irrevocably feminine, even in father's time.
Now I'm sure you understand!
Well, I'll give you another example. It'll shock you, but I don't care.
Suppose Queen Victoria gave a dinner-party, and that the guests had been Leighton,
Millais, Swinburne, Rossetti, Meredith, Fitzgerald, etc.
Do you suppose that the atmosphere of that dinner would have been artistic?
Heavens no! The very chairs on which they sat would
have seen to that.
So with our house--it must be feminine, and all we can do is to see that it isn't
effeminate.
Just as another house that I can mention, but I won't, sounded irrevocably masculine,
and all its inmates can do is to see that it isn't brutal."
"That house being the W.'s house, I presume," said Tibby.
"You're not going to be told about the W.'s, my child," Helen cried, "so don't you
think it.
And on the other hand, I don't the least mind if you find out, so don't you think
you've done anything clever, in either case.
Give me a cigarette."
"You do what you can for the house," said Margaret.
"The drawing-room reeks of smoke." "If you smoked too, the house might
suddenly turn masculine.
Atmosphere is probably a question of touch and go.
Even at Queen Victoria's dinner-party--if something had been just a little different-
-perhaps if she'd worn a clinging Liberty tea-gown instead of a magenta satin--"
"With an Indian shawl over her shoulders--"
"Fastened at the *** with a Cairngorm- pin--"
Bursts of disloyal laughter--you must remember that they are half German--greeted
these suggestions, and Margaret said pensively, "How inconceivable it would be
if the Royal Family cared about Art."
And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen's cigarette turned to a spot in
the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows, which
vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly.
Beyond them the thoroughfare roared gently- -a tide that could never be quiet, while in
the east, invisible behind the smokes of Wapping, the moon was rising.
"That reminds me, Margaret.
We might have taken that young man into the dining-room, at all events.
Only the majolica plate--and that is so firmly set in the wall.
I am really distressed that he had no tea."
For that little incident had impressed the three women more than might be supposed.
It remained as a goblin football, as a hint that all is not for the best in the best of
all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there
wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered
his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.
>
Howards End by E. M. Forster CHAPTER 6
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be
approached by the statistician or the poet.
This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they
are gentlefolk. The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme
verge of gentility.
He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had
dropped in, and counted no more.
He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess
any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him.
But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it.
He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy,
nor as lovable.
His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because
he was modern they were always craving better food.
Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the
past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have
corresponded.
But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with
leathern wings, and proclaiming, "All men are equal--all men, that is to say, who
possess umbrellas," and so he was obliged
to assert gentility, lest he slipped into the abyss where nothing counts, and the
statements of Democracy are inaudible.
As he walked away from Wickham Place, his first care was to prove that he was as good
as the Miss Schlegels. Obscurely wounded in his pride, he tried to
wound them in return.
They were probably not ladies. Would real ladies have asked him to tea?
They were certainly ill-natured and cold. At each step his feeling of superiority
increased.
Would a real lady have talked about stealing an umbrella?
Perhaps they were thieves after all, and if he had gone into the house they could have
clapped a chloroformed handkerchief over his face.
He walked on complacently as far as the Houses of Parliament.
There an empty stomach asserted itself, and told him he was a fool.
"Evening, Mr. Bast."
"Evening, Mr. Dealtry." "Nice evening."
"Evening."
Mr. Dealtry, a fellow clerk, passed on, and Leonard stood wondering whether he would
take the tram as far as a penny would take him, or whether he would walk.
He decided to walk--it is no good giving in, and he had spent money enough at
Queen's Hall--and he walked over Westminster Bridge, in front of St.
Thomas's Hospital, and through the immense
tunnel that passes under the South-Western main line at Vauxhall.
In the tunnel he paused and listened to the roar of the trains.
A sharp pain darted through his head, and he was conscious of the exact form of his
eye sockets.
He pushed on for another mile, and did not slacken speed until he stood at the
entrance of a road called Camelia Road, which was at present his home.
Here he stopped again, and glanced suspiciously to right and left, like a
rabbit that is going to bolt into its hole. A block of flats, constructed with extreme
cheapness, towered on either hand.
Farther down the road two more blocks were being built, and beyond these an old house
was being demolished to accommodate another pair.
It was the kind of scene that may be observed all over London, whatever the
locality--bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of the water
in a fountain, as the city receives more and more men upon her soil.
Camelia Road would soon stand out like a fortress, and command, for a little, an
extensive view.
Only for a little. Plans were out for the *** of flats in
Magnolia Road also.
And again a few years, and all the flats in either road might be pulled down, and new
buildings, of a vastness at present unimaginable, might arise where they had
fallen.
"Evening, Mr. Bast." "Evening, Mr. Cunningham."
"Very serious thing this decline of the birth-rate in Manchester."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Very serious thing this decline of the birth-rate in Manchester," repeated Mr.
Cunningham, tapping the Sunday paper, in which the calamity in question had just
been announced to him.
"Ah, yes," said Leonard, who was not going to let on that he had not bought a Sunday
paper.
"If this kind of thing goes on the population of England will be stationary in
1960." "You don't say so."
"I call it a very serious thing, eh?"
"Good-evening, Mr. Cunningham." "Good-evening, Mr. Bast."
Then Leonard entered Block B of the flats, and turned, not upstairs, but down, into
what is known to house agents as a semi- basement, and to other men as a cellar.
He opened the door, and cried "Hullo!" with the pseudo-geniality of the Cockney.
There was no reply. "Hullo!" he repeated.
The sitting-room was empty, though the electric light had been left burning.
A look of relief came over his face, and he flung himself into the armchair.
The sitting-room contained, besides the armchair, two other chairs, a piano, a
three-legged table, and a cosy corner.
Of the walls, one was occupied by the window, the other by a draped mantelshelf
bristling with Cupids.
Opposite the window was the door, and beside the door a bookcase, while over the
piano there extended one of the masterpieces of Maud Goodman.
It was an amorous and not unpleasant little hole when the curtains were drawn, and the
lights turned on, and the gas-stove unlit.
But it struck that shallow makeshift note that is so often heard in the modem
dwelling-place. It had been too easily gained, and could be
relinquished too easily.
As Leonard was kicking off his boots he jarred the three-legged table, and a
photograph frame, honourably poised upon it, slid sideways, fell off into the
fireplace, and smashed.
He swore in a colourless sort of way, and picked the photograph up.
It represented a young lady called Jacky, and had been taken at the time when young
ladies called Jacky were often photographed with their mouths open.
Teeth of dazzling whiteness extended along either of Jacky's jaws, and positively
weighted her head sideways, so large were they and so numerous.
Take my word for it, that smile was simply stunning, and it is only you and I who will
be fastidious, and complain that true joy begins in the eyes, and that the eyes of
Jacky did not accord with her smile, but were anxious and hungry.
Leonard tried to pull out the fragments of glass, and cut his fingers and swore again.
A drop of blood fell on the frame, another followed, spilling over on to the exposed
photograph. He swore more vigorously, and dashed to the
kitchen, where he bathed his hands.
The kitchen was the same size as the sitting room; through it was a bedroom.
This completed his home.
He was renting the flat furnished: of all the objects that encumbered it none were
his own except the photograph frame, the Cupids, and the books.
"Damn, damn, damnation!" he murmured, together with such other words as he had
learnt from older men.
Then he raised his hand to his forehead and said, "Oh, damn it all--" which meant
something different. He pulled himself together.
He drank a little tea, black and silent, that still survived upon an upper shelf.
He swallowed some dusty crumbs of cake.
Then he went back to the sitting-room, settled himself anew, and began to read a
volume of Ruskin. "Seven miles to the north of Venice--"
How perfectly the famous chapter opens!
How supreme its command of admonition and of poetry!
The rich man is speaking to us from his gondola.
"Seven miles to the north of Venice the banks of sand which nearer the city rise
little above low-water mark attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves
at last into fields of salt morass, raised
here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea."
Leonard was trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the
greatest master of English Prose.
He read forward steadily, occasionally making a few notes.
"Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and first (for of
the shafts enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this church--its
luminousness."
Was there anything to be learnt from this fine sentence?
Could he adapt it to the needs of daily life?
Could he introduce it, with modifications, when he next wrote a letter to his brother,
the lay-reader? For example--
"Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and first (for of
the absence of ventilation enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to
this flat--its obscurity."
Something told him that the modifications would not do; and that something, had he
known it, was the spirit of English Prose. "My flat is dark as well as stuffy."
Those were the words for him.
And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-
Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love
of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard's life.
For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed
successfully what dirt and hunger are.
Leonard listened to it with reverence.
He felt that he was being done good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the
Queen's Hall Concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head out
of the grey waters and see the universe.
He believed in sudden conversion, a belief which may be right, but which is peculiarly
attractive to a half-baked mind.
It is the bias of much popular religion: in the domain of business it dominates the
Stock Exchange, and becomes that "bit of luck" by which all successes and failures
are explained.
"If only I had a bit of luck, the whole thing would come straight....
He's got a most magnificent place down at Streatham and a 20 h.-p.
Fiat, but then, mind you, he's had luck....
I'm sorry the wife's so late, but she never has any luck over catching trains."
Leonard was superior to these people; he did believe in effort and in a steady
preparation for the change that he desired.
But of a heritage that may expand gradually, he had no conception: he hoped
to come to Culture suddenly, much as the Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus.
Those Miss Schlegels had come to it; they had done the trick; their hands were upon
the ropes, once and for all. And meanwhile, his flat was dark, as well
as stuffy.
Presently there was a noise on the staircase.
He shut up Margaret's card in the pages of Ruskin, and opened the door.
A woman entered, of whom it is simplest to say that she was not respectable.
Her appearance was awesome.
She seemed all strings and bell-pulls-- ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that
clinked and caught--and a boa of azure feathers hung round her neck, with the ends
uneven.
Her throat was bare, wound with a double row of pearls, her arms were bare to the
elbows, and might again be detected at the shoulder, through cheap lace.
Her hat, which was flowery, resembled those punnets, covered with flannel, which we
sowed with mustard and cress in our childhood, and which germinated here yes,
and there no.
She wore it on the back of her head.
As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system
went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter
destiny, rippled around her forehead.
The face--the face does not signify. It was the face of the photograph, but
older, and the teeth were not so numerous as the photographer had suggested, and
certainly not so white.
Yes, Jacky was past her prime, whatever that prime may have been.
She was descending quicker than most women into the colourless years, and the look in
her eyes confessed it.
"What ho!" said Leonard, greeting that apparition with much spirit, and helping it
off with its boa. Jacky, in husky tones, replied, "What ho!"
"Been out?" he asked.
The question sounds superfluous, but it cannot have been really, for the lady
answered, "No," adding, "Oh, I am so tired."
"You tired?"
"Eh?" "I'm tired," said he, hanging the boa up.
"Oh, Len, I am so tired." "I've been to that classical concert I told
you about," said Leonard.
"What's that?" "I came back as soon as it was over."
"Any one been round to our place?" asked Jacky.
"Not that I've seen.
I met Mr. Cunningham outside, and we passed a few remarks."
"What, not Mr. Cunnginham?" "Yes."
"Oh, you mean Mr. Cunningham."
"Yes. Mr. Cunningham."
"I've been out to tea at a lady friend's."
Her secret being at last given to the world, and the name of the lady-friend
being even adumbrated, Jacky made no further experiments in the difficult and
tiring art of conversation.
She never had been a great talker. Even in her photographic days she had
relied upon her smile and her figure to attract, and now that she was--
"On the shelf, On the shelf, Boys, boys, I'm on the shelf," she was not likely to
find her tongue.
Occasional bursts of song (of which the above is an example) still issued from her
lips, but the spoken word was rare. She sat down on Leonard's knee, and began
to *** him.
She was now a massive woman of thirty- three, and her weight hurt him, but he
could not very well say anything.
Then she said, "Is that a book you're reading?" and he said, "That's a book," and
drew it from her unreluctant grasp. Margaret's card fell out of it.
It fell face downwards, and he murmured, "Bookmarker."
"Len--"
"What is it?" he asked, a little wearily, for she only had one topic of conversation
when she sat upon his knee. "You do love me?"
"Jacky, you know that I do.
How can you ask such questions!" "But you do love me, Len, don't you?"
"Of course I do." A pause.
The other remark was still due.
"Len--" "Well?
What is it?" "Len, you will make it all right?"
"I can't have you ask me that again," said the boy, flaring up into a sudden passion.
"I've promised to marry you when I'm of age, and that's enough.
My word's my word.
I've promised to marry you as soon as ever I'm twenty-one, and I can't keep on being
worried. I've worries enough.
It isn't likely I'd throw you over, let alone my word, when I've spent all this
money. Besides, I'm an Englishman, and I never go
back on my word.
Jacky, do be reasonable. Of course I'll marry you.
Only do stop badgering me." "When's your birthday, Len?"
"I've told you again and again, the eleventh of November next.
Now get off my knee a bit; someone must get supper, I suppose."
Jacky went through to the bedroom, and began to see to her hat.
This meant blowing at it with short sharp puffs.
Leonard tidied up the sitting-room, and began to prepare their evening meal.
He put a penny into the slot of the gas- meter, and soon the flat was reeking with
metallic fumes.
Somehow he could not recover his temper, and all the time he was cooking he
continued to complain bitterly. "It really is too bad when a fellow isn't
trusted.
It makes one feel so wild, when I've pretended to the people here that you're my
wife--all right, you shall be my wife--and I've bought you the ring to wear, and I've
taken this flat furnished, and it's far
more than I can afford, and yet you aren't content, and I've also not told the truth
when I've written home." He lowered his voice.
"He'd stop it."
In a tone of horror, that was a little luxurious, he repeated: "My brother'd stop
it. I'm going against the whole world, Jacky.
"That's what I am, Jacky.
I don't take any heed of what anyone says. I just go straight forward, I do.
That's always been my way. I'm not one of your weak knock-kneed chaps.
If a woman's in trouble, I don't leave her in the lurch.
That's not my street. No, thank you.
"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 someone, and Aunt someone, 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 not 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.
"M'm." "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.
>
Howards End by E. M. Forster CHAPTER 7
"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 provision 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-
aesthetic 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 apologized 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 woman who laced too
tightly's name 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."
"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 her 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." "Oh, shame!
What a shocking speech!"
"Money pads the edges of things," said Miss Schlegel.
"God help those who have none."
"But this is something quite new!" said Mrs. Munt, who collected new ideas as a
squirrel collects nuts, and was especially attracted by those that are portable.
"New for me; sensible people have acknowledged it for years.
You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands.
It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence.
It's only when we see someone near us tottering that we realize all that an
independent income means.
Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the
very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of
love, but the absence of coin."
"I call that rather cynical." "So do I.
But Helen and I, we ought to remember, when we are tempted to criticize others, that we
are standing on these islands, and that most of the others, are down below the
surface of the sea.
The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever
escape from those whom they love no longer. We rich can.
Imagine the tragedy last June, if Helen and Paul Wilcox had been poor people, and
couldn't invoke railways and motor-cars to part them."
"That's more like Socialism," said Mrs. Munt suspiciously.
"Call it what you like. I call it going through life with one's
hand spread open on the table.
I'm tired of these rich people who pretend to be poor, and think it shows a nice mind
to ignore the piles of money that keep their feet above the waves.
I stand each year upon six hundred pounds, and Helen upon the same, and Tibby will
stand upon eight, and as fast as our pounds crumble away into the sea they are renewed-
-from the sea, yes, from the sea.
And all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches;
and because we don't want to steal umbrellas ourselves, we forget that below
the sea people do want to steal them, and
do steal them sometimes, and that what's a joke up here is down there reality--"
"There they go--there goes Fraulein Mosebach.
Really, for a German she does dress charmingly.
Oh--!" "What is it?"
"Helen was looking up at the Wilcoxes' flat."
"Why shouldn't she?" "I beg your pardon, I interrupted you.
What was it you were saying about reality?"
"I had worked round to myself, as usual," answered Margaret in tones that were
suddenly preoccupied. "Do tell me this, at all events.
Are you for the rich or for the poor?"
"Too difficult. Ask me another.
Am I for poverty or for riches? For riches.
Hurrah for riches!"
"For riches!" echoed Mrs. Munt, having, as it were, at last secured her nut.
"Yes. For riches. Money for ever!"
"So am I, and so, I am afraid, are most of my acquaintances at Swanage, but I am
surprised that you agree with us." "Thank you so much, Aunt Juley.
While I have talked theories, you have done the flowers."
"Not at all, dear. I wish you would let me help you in more
important things."
"Well, would you be very kind? Would you come round with me to the
registry office? There's a housemaid who won't say yes but
doesn't say no."
On their way thither they too looked up at the Wilcoxes' flat.
Evie was in the balcony, "staring most rudely," according to Mrs. Munt.
Oh yes, it was a nuisance, there was no doubt of it.
Helen was proof against a passing encounter but--Margaret began to lose confidence.
Might it reawake the dying nerve if the family were living close against her eyes?
And Frieda Mosebach was stopping with them for another fortnight, and Frieda was
sharp, abominably sharp, and quite capable of remarking, "You love one of the young
gentlemen opposite, yes?"
The remark would be untrue, but of the kind which, if stated often enough, may become
true; just as the remark, "England and Germany are bound to fight," renders war a
little more likely each time that it is
made, and is therefore made the more readily by the gutter press of either
nation. Have the private emotions also their gutter
press?
Margaret thought so, and feared that good Aunt Juley and Frieda were typical
specimens of it.
They might, by continual chatter, lead Helen into a repetition of the desires of
June. Into a repetition--they could not do more;
they could not lead her into lasting love.
They were--she saw it clearly--Journalism; her father, with all his defects and wrong-
headedness, had been Literature, and had he lived, he would have persuaded his daughter
rightly.
The registry office was holding its morning reception.
A string of carriages filled the street.
Miss Schlegel waited her turn, and finally had to be content with an insidious
"temporary," being rejected by genuine housemaids on the ground of her numerous
stairs.
Her failure depressed her, and though she forgot the failure, the depression
remained.
On her way home she again glanced up at the Wilcoxes' flat, and took the rather
matronly step of speaking about the matter to Helen.
"Helen, you must tell me whether this thing worries you."
"If what?" said Helen, who was washing her hands for lunch.
"The W.'s coming."
"No, of course not." "Really?"
"Really."
Then she admitted that she was a little worried on Mrs. Wilcox's account; she
implied that Mrs. Wilcox might reach backward into deep feelings, and be pained
by things that never touched the other members of that clan.
"I shan't mind if Paul points at our house and says, 'There lives the girl who tried
to catch me.'
But she might." "If even that worries you, we could arrange
something.
There's no reason we should be near people who displease us or whom we displease,
thanks to our money. We might even go away for a little."
"Well, I am going away.
Frieda's just asked me to Stettin, and I shan't be back till after the New Year.
Will that do? Or must I fly the country altogether?
Really, Meg, what has come over you to make such a fuss?"
"Oh, I'm getting an old maid, I suppose.
I thought I minded nothing, but really I--I should be bored if you fell in love with
the same man twice and"--she cleared her throat--"you did go red, you know, when
Aunt Juley attacked you this morning.
I shouldn't have referred to it otherwise."
But Helen's laugh rang true, as she raised a soapy hand to heaven and swore that
never, nowhere and nohow, would she again fall in love with any of the Wilcox family,
down to its remotest collaterals.
>