HOWARDS END
Chapter 12
Charles need not have been anxious. Miss Schlegel had never heard of
his mother's strange request. She was to hear of it in after years, when
she had built up her life differently, and it was to fit into position as the
headstone of the corner. Her mind was bent on other questions now, and by
her also it would have been rejected as the fantasy of an
invalid.
She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the
second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into
her life and ebbed out of it for ever. The ripple had left no traces
behind: the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A
curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so
little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous
tide. Her friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in
degradation. Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease and
pain. Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity;
Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can
pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim
secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but
not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to
die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an
equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must
leave.
The last word--whatever it would be--had
certainly not been said in Hilton churchyard. She had not died
there. A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage
union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too
early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man. In
Margaret's eyes Mrs. Wilcox had escaped registration. She had gone out of
life vividly, her own way, and no dust was so truly dust as the contents of that
heavy coffin, lowered with ceremonial until it rested on the dust of the earth,
no flowers so utterly wasted as the chrysanthemums that the frost must have
withered before morning. Margaret had once said she "loved superstition."
It was not true. Few women had tried more earnestly to pierce the
accretions in which body and soul are enwrapped. The death of Mrs. Wilcox
had helped her in her work. She saw a little more clearly than hitherto
what a human being is, and to what he may aspire. Truer relationships
gleamed. Perhaps the last word would be hope--hope even on this side of
the grave.
Meanwhile, she could take an interest in
the survivors. In spite of her Christmas duties, in spite of her brother,
the Wilcoxes continued to play a considerable part in her thoughts. She
had seen so much of them in the final week. They were not "her sort," they
were often suspicious and stupid, and deficient where she excelled; but
collision with them stimulated her, and she felt an interest that verged into
liking, even for Charles. She desired to protect them, and often felt that
they could protect her, excelling where she was deficient. Once past the
rocks of emotion, they knew so well what to do, whom to send for; their hands
were on all the ropes, they had grit as well as grittiness, and she valued grit
enormously. They led a life that she could not attain to--the outer life
of "telegrams and anger," which had detonated when Helen and Paul had touched in
June, and had detonated again the other week. To Margaret this life was to
remain a real force. She could not despise it, as Helen and Tibby affected
to do. It fostered such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience,
virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our
civilization. They form character, too; Margaret could not doubt it: they
keep the soul from becoming sloppy. How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes,
when it takes all sorts to make a world?
"Don't
brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the
seen. It's true, but to brood on it is mediaeval. Our business is
not to contrast the two, but to reconcile
them."
Helen replied that she had no intention of
brooding on such a dull subject. What did her sister take her for?
The weather was magnificent. She and the Mosebachs had gone tobogganing on
the only hill that Pomerania boasted. It was fun, but overcrowded, for the
rest of Pomerania had gone there too. Helen loved the country, and her
letter glowed with physical exercise and poetry. She spoke of the scenery,
quiet, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, with their scampering herds of deer;
of the river and its quaint entrance into the Baltic Sea; of the Oderberge, only
three hundred feet high, from which one slid all too quickly back into the
Pomeranian plains, and yet these Oderberge were real mountains, with
pine-forests, streams, and views complete. "It isn't size that counts so
much as the way things are arranged." In another paragraph she referred to Mrs.
Wilcox sympathetically, but the news had not bitten into her. She had not
realized the accessories of death, which are in a sense more memorable than
death itself. The atmosphere of precautions and recriminations, and in the
midst a human body growing more vivid because it was in pain; the end of that
body in Hilton churchyard; the survival of something that suggested hope, vivid
in its turn against life's workaday cheerfulness;--all these were lost to Helen,
who only felt that a pleasant lady could now be pleasant no longer. She
returned to Wickham Place full of her own affairs--she had had another
proposal--and Margaret, after a moment's hesitation, was content that this
should be so.
The proposal had not been a serious
matter. It was the work of Fräulein Mosebach, who had conceived the large
and patriotic notion of winning back her cousins to the Fatherland by
matrimony. England had played Paul Wilcox, and lost; Germany played Herr
Förstmeister someone--Helen could not remember his
name.
Herr Förstmeister lived in a wood, and standing
on the summit of the Oderberge, he had pointed out his house to Helen, or
rather, had pointed out the wedge of pines in which it lay. She had
exclaimed, "Oh, how lovely! That's the place for me!" and in the evening
Frieda appeared in her bedroom. "I have a message, dear Helen," etc., and
so she had, but had been very nice when Helen laughed; quite understood--a
forest too solitary and damp--quite agreed, but Herr Förstmeister believed he
had assurance to the contrary. Germany had lost, but with good-humour;
holding the manhood of the world, she felt bound to win. "And there will
even be someone for Tibby," concluded Helen. "There now, Tibby, think of
that; Frieda is saving up a little girl for you, in pig-tails and white worsted
stockings, but the feet of the stockings are pink, as if the little girl had
trodden in strawberries. I've talked too much. My head aches.
Now you talk."
Tibby consented to talk. He too
was full of his own affairs, for he had just been up to try for a scholarship at
Oxford. The men were down, and the candidates had been housed in various
colleges, and had dined in hall. Tibby was sensitive to beauty, the
experience was new, and he gave a description of his visit that was almost
glowing. The august and mellow University, soaked with the richness of the
western counties that it has served for a thousand years, appealed at once to
the boy's taste: it was the kind of thing he could understand, and he understood
it all the better because it was empty. Oxford is--Oxford: not a mere
receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love
it rather than to love one another: such at all events was to be its effect on
Tibby. His sisters sent him there that he might make friends, for they
knew that his education had been cranky, and had severed him from other boys and
men. He made no friends. His Oxford remained Oxford empty, and he
took into life with him, not the memory of a radiance, but the memory of a
colour scheme.
It pleased Margaret to hear her
brother and sister talking. They did not get on overwell as a rule.
For a few moments she listened to them, feeling elderly and benign. Then
something occurred to her, and she
interrupted:
"Helen, I told you about poor Mrs.
Wilcox; that sad
business?"
"Yes."
"I have
had a correspondence with her son. He was winding up the estate, and wrote
to ask me whether his mother had wanted me to have anything. I thought it
good of him, considering I knew her so little. I said that she had once
spoken of giving me a Christmas present, but we both forgot about it
afterwards."
"I hope Charles took the
hint."
"Yes--that is to say, her husband wrote later
on, and thanked me for being a little kind to her, and actually gave me her
silver vinaigrette. Don't you think that is extraordinarily
generous? It has made me like him very much. He hopes that this will
not be the end of our acquaintance, but that you and I will go and stop with
Evie some time in the future. I like Mr. Wilcox. He is taking up his
work--rubber--it is a big business. I gather he is launching out
rather. Charles is in it, too. Charles is married--a pretty little
creature, but she doesn't seem wise. They took on the flat, but now they
have gone off to a house of their own."
Helen, after
a decent pause, continued her account of Stettin. How quickly a situation
changes! In June she had been in a crisis; even in November she could
blush and be unnatural; now it was January, and the whole affair lay
forgotten. Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the
chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence
that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues
and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves
for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a
waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful
is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and
is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly
silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good,
and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully
armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the
Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have
us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a
battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is
romantic beauty.
Margaret hoped that for the future
she would be less cautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the
past.