Howards End (16 page)

C
HAPTER
18

A
S THEY
were seated at Aunt Juley’s breakfast-table at The Bays, parrying her excessive hospitality and enjoying the view of the bay, a letter came for Margaret and threw her into perturbation. It was from Mr. Wilcox. It announced an “important change” in his plans. Owing to Evie’s marriage, he had decided to give up his house in Ducie Street, and was willing to let it on a yearly tenancy. It was a businesslike letter, and stated frankly what he would do for them and what he would not do. Also the rent. If they approved, Margaret was to come up
at once
—the words were underlined, as is necessary when dealing with women—and to go over the house with him. If they disapproved, a wire would oblige, as he should put it into the hands of an agent.

The letter perturbed, because she was not sure what it meant. If he liked her, if he had manœuvred to get her to Simpson’s, might this be a manœuvre to get her to London, and result in an offer of marriage? She put it to herself as indelicately as possible, in the hope that her brain would cry: “Rubbish, you’re a self-conscious fool!” But her brain only tingled a little and was silent, and for a time she sat gazing at the mincing waves, and wondering whether the news would seem strange to the others.

As soon as she began speaking, the sound of her own voice reassured her. There could be nothing in it. The replies also were typical, and in the burr of conversation her fears vanished.

“You needn’t go, though—” began her hostess.

“I needn’t, but hadn’t I better? It’s really getting rather serious. We let chance after chance slip, and the end of it is we shall be bundled out bag and baggage into the street. We don’t know what we
want,
that’s the mischief with us—”

“No, we have no real ties,” said Helen, helping herself to toast.

“Shan’t I go up to town today, take the house if it’s the least possible, and then come down by the afternoon train tomorrow and start enjoying myself. I shall be no fun to myself or to others until this business is off my mind.”

“But you won’t do anything rash, Margaret?”

“There’s nothing rash to do.”

“Who
are
the Wilcoxes?” said Tibby, a question that sounds silly, but was really extremely subtle, as his aunt found to her cost when she tried to answer it. “I don’t
man
-
age
the Wilcoxes; I don’t see where they come
in.
”

“No more do I,” agreed Helen. “It’s funny that we just don’t lose sight of them. Out of all our hotel acquaintances, Mr. Wilcox is the only one who has stuck. It is now over three years, and we have drifted away from far more interesting people in that time.”

“Interesting people don’t get one houses.”

“Meg, if you start in your honest-English vein, I shall throw the treacle at you.”

“It’s a better vein than the cosmopolitan,” said Margaret, getting up. “Now, children, which is it to be? You know the Ducie Street house. Shall I say yes or shall I say no? Tibby love—which? I’m specially anxious to pin you both.”

“It all depends what meaning you attach to the word ‘possi—’”

“It depends on nothing of the sort. Say ‘yes.’ ”

“Say ‘no.’ ”

Then Margaret spoke rather seriously. “I think,” she said, “that our race is degenerating. We cannot settle even this little thing; what will it be like when we have to settle a big one?”

“It will be as easy as eating,” returned Helen.

“I was thinking of Father. How could he settle to leave Germany as he did, when he had fought for it as a young man, and all his feelings and friends were Prussian? How could he break loose with patriotism and begin aiming at something else? It would have killed me. When he was nearly forty he could change countries and ideals—and we, at our age, can’t change houses. It’s humiliating.”

“Your father may have been able to change countries,” said Mrs. Munt with asperity, “and that may or may not be a good thing. But he could change houses no better than you can, in fact, much worse. Never shall I forget what poor Emily suffered in the move from Manchester.”

“I knew it,” cried Helen. “I told you so. It is the little things one bungles at. The big, real ones are nothing when they come.”

“Bungle, my dear! You are too little to recollect—in fact, you weren’t there. But the furniture was actually in the vans and on the move before the lease for Wickham Place was signed, and Emily took train with baby—who was Margaret then—and the smaller luggage for London, without so much as knowing where her new home would be. Getting away from that house may be hard, but it is nothing to the misery that we all went through getting you into it.”

Helen, with her mouth full, cried:

“And that’s the man who beat the Austrians, and the Danes, and the French, and who beat the Germans that were inside himself. And we’re like him.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Tibby. “Remember that I am cosmopolitan, please.”

“Helen may be right.”

“Of course she’s right,” said Helen.

Helen might be right, but she did not go up to London. Margaret did that. An interrupted holiday is the worst of the minor worries, and one may be pardoned for feeling morbid when a business letter snatches one away from the sea and friends. She could not believe that her father had ever felt the same. Her eyes had been troubling her lately, so that she could not read in the train, and it bored her to look at the landscape, which she had seen but yesterday. At Southampton she “waved” to Frieda: Frieda was on her way down to join them at Swanage, and Mrs. Munt had calculated that their trains would cross. But Frieda was looking the other way, and Margaret travelled on to town feeling solitary and old-maidish. How like an old maid to fancy that Mr. Wilcox was courting her! She had once visited a spinster—poor, silly, and unattractive—whose mania it was that every man who approached her fell in love. How Margaret’s heart had bled for the deluded thing! How she had lectured, reasoned, and in despair acquiesced! “I may have been deceived by the curate, my dear, but the young fellow who brings the midday posts really is fond of me, and has as a matter of fact—” It had always seemed to her the most hideous corner of old age, yet she might be driven into it herself by the mere pressure of virginity.

Mr. Wilcox met her at Waterloo himself. She felt certain that he was not the same as usual; for one thing, he took offence at everything she said.

“This is awfully kind of you,” she began, “but I’m afraid it’s not going to do. The house has not been built that suits the Schlegel family.”

“What! Have you come up determined not to deal?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? In that case, let’s be starting.”

She lingered to admire the motor, which was new and a fairer creature than the vermillion giant that had borne Aunt Juley to her doom three years before.

“Presumably it’s very beautiful,” she said. “How do you like it, Crane?”

“Come, let’s be starting,” repeated her host. “How on earth did you know that my chauffeur was called Crane?”

“Why, I know Crane: I’ve been for a drive with Evie once. I know that you’ve got a parlour-maid called Milton. I know all sorts of things.”

“Evie!” he echoed in injured tones. “You won’t see her. She’s gone out with Cahill. It’s no fun, I can tell you, being left so much alone. I’ve got my work all day—indeed, a great deal too much of it—but when I come home in the evening, I tell you, I can’t stand the house.”

“In my absurd way, I’m lonely too,” Margaret replied. “It’s heart-breaking to leave one’s old home. I scarcely remember anything before Wickham Place, and Helen and Tibby were born there. Helen says—”

“You, too, feel lonely?”

“Horribly. Hullo. Parliament’s back!”

Mr. Wilcox glanced at Parliament contemptuously. The more important ropes of life lay elsewhere. “Yes, they are talking again,” said he. “But you were going to say—”

“Only some rubbish about furniture. Helen says it alone endures while men and houses perish, and that in the end the world will be a desert of chairs and sofas—just imagine it!—rolling through infinity with no one to sit upon them.”

“Your sister always liked her little joke.”

“She says ‘Yes,’ my brother says ‘No,’ to Ducie Street. It’s no fun helping us, Mr. Wilcox, I assure you.”

“You are not as unpractical as you pretend. I shall never believe it.”

Margaret laughed. But she was—quite as unpractical. She could not concentrate on details. Parliament, the Thames, the irresponsive chauffeur, would flash into the field of house-hunting, and all demand some comment or response. It is impossible to see modern life steadily and see it whole, and she had chosen to see it whole. Mr. Wilcox saw steadily. He never bothered over the mysterious or the private. The Thames might run inland from the sea, the chauffeur might conceal all passion and philosophy beneath his unhealthy skin. They knew their own business, and he knew his.

Yet she liked being with him. He was not a rebuke, but a stimulus, and banished morbidity. Some twenty years her senior, he preserved a gift that she supposed herself to have already lost—not youth’s creative power, but its self-confidence and optimism. He was so sure that it was a very pleasant world. His complexion was robust, his hair had receded but not thinned, the thick moustache and the eyes that Helen had compared to brandy-balls had an agreeable menace in them, whether they were turned towards the slums or towards the stars. Some day—in the millennium—there may be no need for his type. At present, homage is due to it from those who think themselves superior, and who possibly are.

“At all events, you responded to my telegram promptly,” he remarked.

“Oh, even I know a good thing when I see it.”

“I’m glad you don’t despise the goods of this world.”

“Heavens, no! Only idiots and prigs do that.”

“I am glad, very glad,” he repeated, suddenly softening and turning to her, as if the remark had pleased him. “There is so much cant talked in would-be intellectual circles. I am glad you don’t share it. Self-denial is all very well as a means of strengthening the character. But I can’t stand those people who run down comforts. They have usually some axe to grind. Can you?”

“Comforts are of two kinds,” said Margaret, who was keeping herself in hand—“those we can share with others, like fire, weather, or music; and those we can’t—food, for instance. It depends.”

“I mean reasonable comforts, of course. I shouldn’t like to think that you—” He bent nearer; the sentence died unfinished. Margaret’s head turned very stupid, and the inside of it seemed to revolve like the beacon in a lighthouse. He did not kiss her, for the hour was half past twelve and the car was passing by the stables of Buckingham Palace. But the atmosphere was so charged with emotion that people only seemed to exist on her account, and she was surprised that Crane did not realize this and turn round. Idiot though she might be, surely Mr. Wilcox was more—how should one put it?—more psychological than usual. Always a good judge of character for business purposes, he seemed this afternoon to enlarge his field, and to note qualities outside neatness, obedience, and decision.

“I want to go over the whole house,” she announced when they arrived. “As soon as I get back to Swanage, which will be tomorrow afternoon, I’ll talk it over once more with Helen and Tibby, and wire you ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ ”

“Right. The dining-room.” And they began their survey.

The dining-room was big, but over-furnished. Chelsea would have moaned aloud. Mr. Wilcox had eschewed those decorative schemes that wince, and relent, and refrain, and achieve beauty by sacrificing comfort and pluck. After so much self-colour and self-denial, Margaret viewed with relief the sumptuous dado, the frieze, the gilded wall-paper, amid whose foliage parrots sang. It would never do with her own furniture, but those heavy chairs, that immense sideboard loaded with presentation plate, stood up against its pressure like men. The room suggested men, and Margaret, keen to derive the modern capitalist from the warriors and hungers of the past, saw it as an ancient guest-hall, where the lord sat at meat among his thanes. Even the Bible—the Dutch Bible that Charles had brought back from the Boer War—fell into position. Such a room admitted loot.

“Now the entrance-hall.”

The entrance-hall was paved.

“Here we fellows smoke.”

We fellows smoked in chairs of maroon leather. It was as if a motor-car had spawned. “Oh, jolly!” said Margaret, sinking into one of them.

“You do like it?” he said, fixing his eyes on her upturned face, and surely betraying an almost intimate note. “It’s all rubbish not making oneself comfortable. Isn’t it?”

“Ye-es. Semi-rubbish. Are those Cruikshanks?”

“Gillrays. Shall we go on upstairs?”

“Does all this furniture come from Howards End?”

“The Howards End furniture has all gone to Oniton.”

“Does—However, I’m concerned with the house, not the furniture. How big is this smoking-room?”

“Thirty by fifteen. No, wait a minute. Fifteen and a half.”

“Ah, well. Mr. Wilcox, aren’t you ever amused at the solemnity with which we middle classes approach the subject of houses?”

They proceeded to the drawing-room. Chelsea managed better here. It was sallow and ineffective. One could visualize the ladies withdrawing to it while their lords discussed life’s realities below, to the accompaniment of cigars. Had Mrs. Wilcox’s drawing-room looked thus at Howards End? Just as this thought entered Margaret’s brain, Mr. Wilcox did ask her to be his wife, and the knowledge that she had been right so overcame her that she nearly fainted.

But the proposal was not to rank among the world’s great love scenes.

“Miss Schlegel”—his voice was firm—“I have had you up on false pretences. I want to speak about a much more serious matter than a house.”

Margaret almost answered: “I know—”

“Could you be induced to share my—is it probable—”

“Oh, Mr. Wilcox!” she interrupted, holding the piano and averting her eyes. “I see, I see. I will write to you afterwards if I may.”

He began to stammer. “Miss Schlegel—Margaret—you don’t understand.”