Howards End (23 page)

“Don’t be absurd. They aren’t starving, and you know it. Now, begin from the beginning. I won’t have such theatrical nonsense. How dare you! Yes, how dare you!” she repeated, as anger filled her, “bursting in to Evie’s wedding in this heartless way. My goodness! but you’ve a perverted notion of philanthropy. Look”—she indicated the house—“servants, people out of the windows. They think it’s some vulgar scandal, and I must explain: ‘Oh no, it’s only my sister screaming, and only two hangers-on of ours, whom she has brought here for no conceivable reason.’ ”

“Kindly take back that word ‘hangers-on,’ ” said Helen, ominously calm.

“Very well,” conceded Margaret, who for all her wrath was determined to avoid a real quarrel. “I, too, am sorry about them, but it beats me why you’ve brought them here, or why you’re here yourself.”

“It’s our last chance of seeing Mr. Wilcox.”

Margaret moved towards the house at this. She was determined not to worry Henry.

“He’s going to Scotland. I know he is. I insist on seeing him.”

“Yes, tomorrow.”

“I knew it was our last chance.”

“How do you do, Mr. Bast?” said Margaret, trying to control her voice. “This is an odd business. What view do you take of it?”

“There is Mrs. Bast, too,” prompted Helen.

Jacky also shook hands. She, like her husband, was shy, and, furthermore, ill, and furthermore, so bestially stupid that she could not grasp what was happening. She only knew that the lady had swept down like a whirlwind last night, had paid the rent, redeemed the furniture, provided them with a dinner and breakfast, and ordered them to meet her at Paddington next morning. Leonard had feebly protested, and when the morning came, had suggested that they shouldn’t go. But she, half mesmerized, had obeyed. The lady had told them to, and they must, and their bed-sitting-room had accordingly changed into Paddington, and Paddington into a railway carriage that shook, and grew hot, and grew cold, and vanished entirely, and reappeared amid torrents of expensive scent. “You have fainted,” said the lady in an awe-struck voice. “Perhaps the air will do you good.” And perhaps it had, for here she was, feeling rather better among a lot of flowers.

“I’m sure I don’t want to intrude,” began Leonard, in answer to Margaret’s question. “But you have been so kind to me in the past in warning me about the Porphyrion that I wondered—why, I wondered whether—”

“Whether we could get him back into the Porphyrion again,” supplied Helen. “Meg, this has been a cheerful business. A bright evening’s work that was on Chelsea Embankment.”

Margaret shook her head and returned to Mr. Bast.

“I don’t understand. You left the Porphyrion because we suggested it was a bad concern, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“And went into a bank instead?”

“I told you all that,” said Helen; “and they reduced their staff after he had been in a month, and now he’s penniless, and I consider that we and our informant are directly to blame.”

“I hate all this,” Leonard muttered.

“I hope you do, Mr. Bast. But it’s no good mincing matters. You have done yourself no good by coming here. If you intend to confront Mr. Wilcox, and to call him to account for a chance remark, you will make a very great mistake.”

“I brought them. I did it all,” cried Helen.

“I can only advise you to go at once. My sister has put you in a false position, and it is kindest to tell you so. It’s too late to get to town, but you’ll find a comfortable hotel in Oniton, where Mrs. Bast can rest, and I hope you’ll be my guests there.”

“That isn’t what I want, Miss Schlegel,” said Leonard. “You’re very kind, and no doubt it’s a false position, but you make me miserable. I seem no good at all.”

“It’s work he wants,” interpreted Helen. “Can’t you see?”

Then he said: “Jacky, let’s go. We’re more bother than we’re worth. We’re costing these ladies pounds and pounds already to get work for us, and they never will. There’s nothing we’re good enough to do.”

“We would like to find you work,” said Margaret rather conventionally. “We want to—I, like my sister. You’re only down in your luck. Go to the hotel, have a good night’s rest, and some day you shall pay me back the bill, if you prefer it.”

But Leonard was near the abyss, and at such moments men see clearly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I shall never get work now. If rich people fail at one profession, they can try another. Not I. I had my groove, and I’ve got out of it. I could do one particular branch of insurance in one particular office well enough to command a salary, but that’s all. Poetry’s nothing, Miss Schlegel. One’s thoughts about this and that are nothing. Your money, too, is nothing, if you’ll understand me. I mean if a man over twenty once loses his own particular job, it’s all over with him. I have seen it happen to others. Their friends gave them money for a little, but in the end they fall over the edge. It’s no good. It’s the whole world pulling. There always will be rich and poor.”

He ceased.

“Won’t you have something to eat?” said Margaret. “I don’t know what to do. It isn’t my house, and though Mr. Wilcox would have been glad to see you at any other time—as I say, I don’t know what to do, but I undertake to do what I can for you. Helen, offer them something. Do try a sandwich, Mrs. Bast.”

They moved to a long table behind which a servant was still standing. Iced cakes, sandwiches innumerable, coffee, claret-cup, champagne, remained almost intact: their over-fed guests could do no more. Leonard refused. Jacky thought she could manage a little. Margaret left them whispering together and had a few more words with Helen.

She said: “Helen, I like Mr. Bast. I agree that he’s worth helping. I agree that we are directly responsible.”

“No, indirectly. Via Mr. Wilcox.”

“Let me tell you once for all that if you take up that attitude, I’ll do nothing. No doubt you’re right logically, and are entitled to say a great many scathing things about Henry. Only, I won’t have it. So choose.”

Helen looked at the sunset.

“If you promise to take them quietly to the George, I will speak to Henry about them—in my own way, mind; there is to be none of this absurd screaming about justice. I have no use for justice. If it was only a question of money, we could do it ourselves. But he wants work, and that we can’t give him, but possibly Henry can.”

“It’s his duty to,” grumbled Helen.

“Nor am I concerned with duty. I’m concerned with the characters of various people whom we know, and how, things being as they are, things may be made a little better. Mr. Wilcox hates being asked favours; all business men do. But I am going to ask him, at the risk of a rebuff, because I want to make things a little better.”

“Very well. I promise. You take it very calmly.”

“Take them off to the George, then, and I’ll try. Poor creatures! but they look tired.” As they parted, she added: “I haven’t nearly done with you, though, Helen. You have been most self-indulgent. I can’t get over it. You have less restraint rather than more as you grow older. Think it over and alter yourself, or we shan’t have happy lives.”

She rejoined Henry. Fortunately he had been sitting down: these physical matters were important. “Was it townees?” he asked, greeting her with a pleasant smile.

“You’ll never believe me,” said Margaret, sitting down beside him. “It’s all right now, but it was my sister.”

“Helen here?” he cried, preparing to rise. “But she refused the invitation. I thought she despised weddings.”

“Don’t get up. She has not come to the wedding. I’ve bundled her off to the George.”

Inherently hospitable, he protested.

“No; she has two of her protégés with her, and must keep with them.”

“Let ’em all come.”

“My dear Henry, did you see them?”

“I did catch sight of a brown bunch of a woman, certainly.”

“The brown bunch was Helen, but did you catch sight of a sea-green and salmon bunch?”

“What! are they out beanfeasting?”

“No; business. They wanted to see me, and later on I want to talk to you about them.”

She was ashamed of her own diplomacy. In dealing with a Wilcox, how tempting it was to lapse from comradeship, and to give him the kind of woman that he desired! Henry took the hint at once, and said: “Why later on? Tell me now. No time like the present.”

“Shall I?”

“If it isn’t a long story.”

“Oh, not five minutes; but there’s a sting at the end of it, for I want you to find the man some work in your office.”

“What are his qualifications?”

“I don’t know. He’s a clerk.”

“How old?”

“Twenty-five, perhaps.”

“What’s his name?”

“Bast,” said Margaret, and was about to remind him that they had met at Wickham Place, but stopped herself. It had not been a successful meeting.

“Where was he before?”

“Dempster’s Bank.”

“Why did he leave?” he asked, still remembering nothing.

“They reduced their staff.”

“All right; I’ll see him.”

It was the reward of her tact and devotion through the day. Now she understood why some women prefer influence to rights. Mrs. Plynlimmon, when condemning suffragettes, had said: “The woman who can’t influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.” Margaret had winced, but she was influencing Henry now, and though pleased at her little victory, she knew that she had won it by the methods of the harem.

“I should be glad if you took him,” she said, “but I don’t know whether he’s qualified.”

“I’ll do what I can. But, Margaret, this mustn’t be taken as a precedent.”

“No, of course—of course—”

“I can’t fit in your protégés every day. Business would suffer.”

“I can promise you he’s the last. He—he’s rather a special case.”

“Protégés always are.”

She let it stand at that. He rose with a little extra touch of complacency, and held out his hand to help her up. How wide the gulf between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be! And she herself—hovering as usual between the two, now accepting men as they are, now yearning with her sister for Truth. Love and Truth—their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air.

“Your protégé has made us late,” said he. “The Fussells will just be starting.”

On the whole, she sided with men as they are. Henry would save the Basts, as he had saved Howards End, while Helen and her friends were discussing the ethics of salvation. His was a slap-dash method, but the world has been built slap-dash, and the beauty of mountain and river and sunset may be but the varnish with which the unskilled artificer hides his joins. Oniton, like herself, was imperfect. Its apple-trees were stunted, its castle ruinous. It, too, had suffered in the border warfare between the Anglo-Saxon and the Kelt, between things as they are and as they ought to be. Once more the west was retreating, once again the orderly stars were dotting the eastern sky. There is certainly no rest for us on the earth. But there is happiness, and as Margaret descended the mound on her lover’s arm, she felt that she was having her share.

To her annoyance, Mrs. Bast was still in the garden; the husband and Helen had left her there to finish her meal while they went to engage rooms. Margaret found this woman repellent. She had felt, when shaking her hand, an overpowering shame. She remembered the motive of her call at Wickham Place, and smelt again odours from the abyss—odours the more disturbing because they were involuntary. For there was no malice in Jacky. There she sat, a piece of cake in one hand, an empty champagne glass in the other, doing no harm to anybody.

“She’s overtired,” Margaret whispered.

“She’s something else,” said Henry. “This won’t do. I can’t have her in my garden in this state.”

“Is she—” Margaret hesitated to add “drunk.” Now that she was going to marry him, he had grown particular. He discountenanced risqué conversations now.

Henry went up to the woman. She raised her face, which gleamed in the twilight like a puff-ball.

“Madam, you will be more comfortable at the hotel,” he said sharply.

Jacky replied: “If it isn’t Hen!”

“Ne crois pas que le mari lui resemble,” apologized Margaret. “Il est tout à fait différent.”

“Henry!” she repeated, quite distinctly.

Mr. Wilcox was much annoyed. “I can’t congratulate you on your protégés,” he remarked.

“Hen, don’t go. You do love me, dear, don’t you?”

“Bless us, what a person!” sighed Margaret, gathering up her skirts.

Jacky pointed with her cake. “You’re a nice boy, you are.” She yawned. “There now, I love you.”

“Henry, I am awfully sorry.”

“And pray why?” h?e asked, and looked at her so sternly that she feared he was ill. He seemed more scandalized than the facts demanded.

“To have brought this down on you.”

“Pray don’t apologize.”

The voice continued.

“Why does she call you ‘Hen’?” said Margaret innocently. “Has she ever seen you before?”

“Seen Hen before!” said Jacky. “Who hasn’t seen Hen? He’s serving you like me, my dear. These boys! You wait—Still we love ’em.”

“Are you now satisfied?” Henry asked.

Margaret began to grow frightened. “I don’t know what it is all about,” she said. “Let’s come in.”

But he thought she was acting. He thought he was trapped. He saw his whole life crumbling. “Don’t you indeed?” he said bitingly. “I do. Allow me to congratulate you on the success of your plan.”

“This is Helen’s plan, not mine.”

“I now understand your interest in the Basts. Very well thought out. I am amused at your caution, Margaret. You are quite right—it was necessary. I am a man, and have lived a man’s past. I have the honour to release you from your engagement.”

Still she could not understand. She knew of life’s seamy side as a theory; she could not grasp it as a fact. More words from Jacky were necessary—words unequivocal, undenied.

“So that—” burst from her, and she went indoors. She stopped herself from saying more.