HOWARDS END
Chapter 30
Tibby was now approaching his last year at Oxford. He had moved out of
college, and was contemplating the Universe, or such portions of it as concerned
him, from his comfortable lodgings in Long Wall. He was not concerned with
much. When a young man is untroubled by passions and sincerely indifferent
to public opinion, his outlook is necessarily limited. Tibby neither
wished to strengthen the position of the rich nor to improve that of the poor,
and so was well content to watch the elms nodding behind the mildly embattled
parapets of Magdalen. There are worse lives. Though selfish, he was
never cruel; though affected in manner, he never posed. Like Margaret, he
disdained the heroic equipment, and it was only after many visits that men
discovered Schlegel to possess a character and a brain. He had done well
in Mods, much to the surprise of those who attended lectures and took proper
exercise, and was now glancing disdainfully at Chinese in case he should some
day consent to qualify as a Student Interpreter. To him thus employed
Helen entered. A telegram had preceded her.
He
noticed, in a distant way, that his sister had altered. As a rule he found
her too pronounced, and had never come across this look of appeal, pathetic yet
dignified--the look of a sailor who has lost everything at
sea.
"I have come from Oniton," she began.
"There has been a great deal of trouble
there."
"Who's for lunch?" said Tibby, picking up the
claret, which was warming in the hearth. Helen sat down submissively at
the table. "Why such an early start?" he
asked.
"Sunrise or something--when I could get
away."
"So I surmise.
Why?"
"I don't know what's to be done, Tibby. I
am very much upset at a piece of news that concerns Meg, and do not want to face
her, and I am not going back to Wickham Place. I stopped here to tell you
this."
The landlady came in with the cutlets.
Tibby put a marker in the leaves of his Chinese Grammar and helped them.
Oxford--the Oxford of the vacation--dreamed and rustled outside, and indoors the
little fire was coated with grey where the sunshine touched it. Helen
continued her odd story.
"Give Meg my love and say
that I want to be alone. I mean to go to Munich or else
Bonn."
"Such a message is easily given," said her
brother.
"As regards Wickham Place and my share of
the furniture, you and she are to do exactly as you like. My own feeling
is that everything may just as well be sold. What does one want with dusty
economic, books, which have made the world no better, or with mother's hideous
chiffoniers? I have also another commission for you. I want you to
deliver a letter." She got up. "I haven't written it yet. Why
shouldn't I post it, though?" She sat down again. "My head is rather
wretched. I hope that none of your friends are likely to come
in."
Tibby locked the door. His friends often
found it in this condition. Then he asked whether anything had gone wrong
at Evie's wedding.
"Not there," said Helen, and burst
into tears.
He had known her hysterical--it was one
of her aspects with which he had no concern--and yet these tears touched him as
something unusual. They were nearer the things that did concern him, such
as music. He laid down his knife and looked at her curiously. Then,
as she continued to sob, he went on with his
lunch.
The time came for the second course, and she
was still crying. Apple Charlotte was to follow, which spoils by
waiting. "Do you mind Mrs. Martlett coming in?" he asked, "or shall I take
it from her at the door?"
"Could I bathe my eyes,
Tibby?"
He took her to his bedroom, and introduced
the pudding in her absence. Having helped himself, he put it down to warm
in the hearth. His hand stretched towards the Grammar, and soon he was
turning over the pages, raising his eyebrows scornfully, perhaps at human
nature, perhaps at Chinese. To him thus employed Helen returned. She
had pulled herself together, but the grave appeal had not vanished from her
eyes.
"Now for the explanation," she said. "Why
didn't I begin with it? I have found out something about Mr. Wilcox.
He has behaved very wrongly indeed, and ruined two people's lives. It all
came on me very suddenly last night; I am very much upset, and I do not know
what to do. Mrs. Bast--"
"Oh, those
people!"
Helen seemed
silenced.
"Shall I lock the door
again?"
"No, thanks, Tibbikins. You're being
very good to me. I want to tell you the story before I go abroad.
You must do exactly what you like--treat it as part of the furniture. Meg
cannot have heard it yet, I think. But I cannot face her and tell her that
the man she is going to marry has misconducted himself. I don't even know
whether she ought to be told. Knowing as she does that I dislike him, she
will suspect me, and think that I want to ruin her match. I simply don't
know what to make of such a thing. I trust your judgment. What would
you do?"
"I gather he has had a mistress," said
Tibby.
Helen flushed with shame and anger. "And
ruined two people's lives. And goes about saying that personal actions
count for nothing, and there always will be rich and poor. He met her when
he was trying to get rich out in Cyprus--I don't wish to make him worse than he
is, and no doubt she was ready enough to meet him. But there it is.
They met. He goes his way and she goes hers. What do you suppose is
the end of such women?"
He conceded that it was a bad
business.
"They end in two ways: Either they sink
till the lunatic asylums and the workhouses are full of them, and cause Mr.
Wilcox to write letters to the papers complaining of our national degeneracy, or
else they entrap a boy into marriage before it is too late. She--I can't
blame her.
"But this isn't all," she continued after
a long pause, during which the landlady served them with coffee. "I come
now to the business that took us to Oniton. We went all three.
Acting on Mr. Wilcox's advice, the man throws up a secure situation and takes an
insecure one, from which he is dismissed. There are certain excuses, but
in the main Mr. Wilcox is to blame, as Meg herself admitted. It is only
common justice that he should employ the man himself. But he meets the
woman, and, like the cur that he is, he refuses, and tries to get rid of
them. He makes Meg write. Two notes came from her late that
evening--one for me, one for Leonard, dismissing him with barely a reason.
I couldn't understand. Then it comes out that Mrs. Bast had spoken to Mr.
Wilcox on the lawn while we left her to get rooms, and was still speaking about
him when Leonard came back to her. This Leonard knew all along. He
thought it natural he should be ruined twice. Natural! Could you
have contained yourself?.
"It is certainly a very bad
business," said Tibby.
His reply seemed to calm his
sister. "I was afraid that I saw it out of proportion. But you are
right outside it, and you must know. In a day or two--or perhaps a
week--take whatever steps you think fit. I leave it in your
hands."
She concluded her
charge.
"The facts as they touch Meg are all before
you," she added; and Tibby sighed and felt it rather hard that, because of his
open mind, he should be empanelled to serve as a juror. He had never been
interested in human beings, for which one must blame him, but he had had rather
too much of them at Wickham Place. Just as some people cease to attend
when books are mentioned, so Tibby's attention wandered when "personal
relations" came under discussion. Ought Margaret to know what Helen knew
the Basts to know? Similar questions had vexed him from infancy, and at
Oxford he had learned to say that the importance of human beings has been vastly
overrated by specialists. The epigram, with its faint whiff of the
eighties, meant nothing. But he might have let it off now if his sister
had not been ceaselessly beautiful.
"You see,
Helen--have a cigarette--I don't see what I'm to
do."
"Then there's nothing to be done. I dare
say you are right. Let them marry. There remains the question of
compensation. "
"Do you want me to adjudicate
that too? Had you not better consult an
expert?"
"This part is in confidence," said
Helen. "It has nothing to do with Meg, and do not mention it to her.
The compensation--I do not see who is to pay it if I don't, and I have already
decided on the minimum sum. As soon as possible I am placing it to your
account, and when I am in Germany you will pay it over for me. I shall
never forget your kindness, Tibbikins, if you do
this."
"What is the
sum?"
"Five
thousand."
"Good God alive!" said Tibby, and went
crimson.
"Now, what is the good of driblets? To
go through life having done one thing--to have raised one person from the abyss:
not these puny gifts of shillings and blankets--making the grey more grey.
No doubt people will think me extraordinary."
"I
don't care a damn what people think!" cried he, heated to unusual manliness of
diction. "But it's half what you have."
"Not
nearly half." She spread out her hands over her soiled skirt. "I have far
too much, and we settled at Chelsea last spring that three hundred a year is
necessary to set a man on his feet. What I give will bring in a hundred
and fifty between two. It isn't enough."
He
could not recover. He was not angry or even shocked, and he saw that Helen
would still have plenty to live on. But it amazed him to think what
haycocks people can make of their lives. His delicate intonations would
not work, and he could only blurt out that the five thousand pounds would mean a
great deal of bother for him personally.
"I didn't
expect you to understand me."
"I? I understand
nobody."
"But you'll do
it?"
"Apparently."
"I
leave you two commissions, then. The first concerns Mr. Wilcox, and you
are to use your discretion. The second concerns the money, and is to be
mentioned to no one, and carried out literally. You will send a hundred
pounds on account tomorrow."
He walked with her to
the station, passing through those streets whose serried beauty never bewildered
him and never fatigued. The lovely creature raised domes and spires into
the cloudless blue, and only the ganglion of vulgarity round Carfax showed how
evanescent was the phantom, how faint its claim to represent England.
Helen, rehearsing her commission, noticed nothing: the Basts were in her brain,
and she retold the crisis in a meditative way, which might have made other men
curious. She was seeing whether it would hold. He asked her once why
she had taken the Basts right into the heart of Evie's wedding. She
stopped like a frightened animal and said, "Does that seem to you so odd?"
Her eyes, the hand laid on the mouth, quite haunted him, until they were
absorbed into the figure of St. Mary the Virgin, before whom he paused for a
moment on the walk home.
It is convenient to follow
him in the discharge of his duties. Margaret summoned him the next
day. She was terrified at Helen's flight, and he had to say that she had
called in at Oxford. Then she said: "Did she seem worried at any rumour
about Henry?" He answered, "Yes." "I knew it was that!" she
exclaimed. "I'll write to her." Tibby was
relieved.
He then sent the cheque to the address that
Helen gave him, and stated that later on he was instructed to forward five
thousand pounds. An answer came back, very civil and quiet in tone--such
an answer as Tibby himself would have given. The cheque was returned, the
legacy refused, the writer being in no need of money. Tibby forwarded this
to Helen, adding in the fulness of his heart that Leonard Bast seemed somewhat a
monumental person after all. Helen's reply was frantic. He was to
take no notice. He was to go down at once and say that she commanded
acceptance. He went. A scurf of books and china ornaments awaited
them. The Basts had just been evicted for not paying their rent, and had
wandered no one knew whither. Helen had begun bungling with her money by
this time, and had even sold out her shares in the Nottingham and Derby
Railway. For some weeks she did nothing. Then she reinvested, and,
owing to the good advice of her stockbrokers, became rather richer than she had
been before.