HOWARDS END
Chapter 27
Helen began to wonder why she had spent a matter of eight pounds in making
some people ill and others angry. Now that the wave of excitement was
ebbing, and had left her, Mr. Bast, and Mrs. Bast stranded for the night in a
Shropshire hotel, she asked herself what forces had made the wave flow. At
all events, no harm was done. Margaret would play the game properly now,
and though Helen disapproved of her sister's methods, she knew that the Basts
would benefit by them in the long run.
"Mr. Wilcox is
so illogical," she explained to Leonard, who had put his wife to bed, and was
sitting with her in the empty coffee-room. "If we told him it was his duty
to take you on, he might refuse to do it. The fact is, he isn't properly
educated. I don't want to set you against him, but you'll find him a
trial."
"I can never thank you sufficiently, Miss
Schlegel," was all that Leonard felt equal to.
"I
believe in personal responsibility. Don't you? And in personal
everything. I hate--I suppose I oughtn't to say that--but the Wilcoxes are
on the wrong tack surely. Or perhaps it isn't their fault. Perhaps
the little thing that says 'I' is missing out of the middle of their heads, and
then it's a waste of time to blame them. There's a nightmare of a theory
that says a special race is being born which will rule the rest of us in the
future just because it lacks the little thing that says 'I.' Had you heard
that?"
"I get no time for
reading."
"Had you thought it, then? That there
are two kinds of people--our kind, who live straight from the middle of their
heads, and the other kind who can't, because their heads have no middle?
They can't say 'I.' They aren't in fact, and so they're supermen.
Pierpont Morgan has never said 'I' in his
life."
Leonard roused himself. If his
benefactress wanted intellectual conversation, she must have it. She was
more important than his ruined past. "I never got on to Nietzsche," he
said. "But I always understood that those supermen were rather what you
may call egoists."
"Oh, no, that's wrong," replied
Helen. "No superman ever said 'I want,' because 'I want' must lead to the
question, 'Who am I?' and so to Pity and to Justice. He only says 'want.'
'Want Europe,' if he's Napoleon; 'want wives,' if he's Bluebeard; 'want
Botticelli,' if he's Pierpont Morgan. Never the 'I'; and if you could
pierce through him, you'd find panic and emptiness in the
middle."
Leonard was silent for a moment. Then
he said: "May I take it, Miss Schlegel, that you and I are both the sort that
say 'I'?"
"Of
course."
"And your sister
too?"
"Of course," repeated Helen, a little
sharply. She was annoyed with Margaret, but did not want her
discussed. "All presentable people say
'I.'"
"But Mr. Wilcox--he is not
perhaps--"
"I don't know that it's any good
discussing Mr. Wilcox either."
"Quite so, quite so,"
he agreed. Helen asked herself why she had snubbed him. Once or
twice during the day she had encouraged him to criticize, and then had pulled
him up short. Was she afraid of him presuming? If so, it was
disgusting of her.
But he was thinking the snub quite
natural. Everything she did was natural, and incapable of causing
offence. While the Miss Schlegels were together he had felt them scarcely
human--a sort of admonitory whirligig. But a Miss Schlegel alone was
different. She was in Helen's case unmarried, in Margaret's about to be
married, in neither case an echo of her sister. A light had fallen at last
into this rich upper world, and he saw that it was full of men and women, some
of whom were more friendly to him than others. Helen had become "his" Miss
Schlegel, who scolded him and corresponded with him, and had swept down
yesterday with grateful vehemence. Margaret, though not unkind, was severe
and remote. He would not presume to help her, for instance. He had
never liked her, and began to think that his original impression was true, and
that her sister did not like her either. Helen was certainly lonely.
She, who gave away so much, was receiving too little. Leonard was pleased
to think that he could spare her vexation by holding his tongue and concealing
what he knew about Mr. Wilcox. Jacky had announced her discovery when he
fetched her from the lawn. After the first shock, he did not mind for
himself. By now he had no illusions about his wife, and this was only one
new stain on the face of a love that had never been pure. To keep
perfection perfect, that should be his ideal, if the future gave him time to
have ideals. Helen, and Margaret for Helen's sake, must not
know.
Helen disconcerted him by fuming the
conversation to his wife. "Mrs. Bast--does she ever say 'I'?" she asked,
half mischievously, and then, "Is she very
tired?"
"It's better she stops in her room," said
Leonard.
"Shall I sit up with
her?"
"No, thank you; she does not need
company."
"Mr. Bast, what kind of woman is your
wife?"
Leonard blushed up to his
eyes.
"You ought to know my ways by now. Does
that question offend you?"
"No, oh no, Miss Schlegel,
no."
"Because I love honesty. Don't pretend
your marriage has been a happy one. You and she can have nothing in
common."
He did not deny it, but said shyly: "I
suppose that's pretty obvious; but Jacky never meant to do anybody any
harm. When things went wrong, or I heard things, I used to think it was
her fault, but, looking back, it's more mine. I needn't have married her,
but as I have I must stick to her and keep her."
"How
long have you been married?"
"Nearly three
years."
"What did your people
say?"
"They will not have anything to do with
us. They had a sort of family council when they heard I was married, and
cut us off altogether."
Helen began to pace up and
down the room. "My good boy, what a mess!" she said gently. "Who are
your people?"
He could answer this. His
parents, who were dead, had been in trade; his sisters had married commercial
travellers; his brother was a lay-reader.
"And your
grandparents?"
Leonard told her a secret that he had
held shameful up to now. "They were just nothing at all," he said,
"--agricultural labourers and that sort."
"So!
From which part?"
"Lincolnshire mostly, but my
mother's father--he, oddly enough, came from these parts round
here."
"From this very Shropshire. Yes, that is
odd. My mother's people were Lancashire. But why do your brother and
your sisters object to Mrs. Bast?"
"Oh, I don't
know."
"Excuse me, you do know. I am not a
baby. I can bear anything you tell me, and the more you tell the more I
shall be able to help. Have they heard anything against
her?"
He was silent.
"I
think I have guessed now," said Helen very
gravely.
"I don't think so, Miss Schlegel; I hope
not."
"We must be honest, even over these
things. I have guessed. I am frightfully, dreadfully sorry, but it
does not make the least difference to me. I shall feel just the same to
both of you. I blame, not your wife for these things, but
men."
Leonard left it at that--so long as she did not
guess the man. She stood at the window and slowly pulled up the
blinds. The hotel looked over a dark square. The mists had
begun. When she turned back to him her eyes were
shining.
"Don't you worry," he pleaded. "I
can't bear that. We shall be all right if I get work. If I could
only get work--something regular to do. Then it wouldn't be so bad
again. I don't trouble after books as I used. I can imagine that
with regular work we should settle down again. It stops one
thinking. "
"Settle down to
what?"
"Oh, just settle
down."
"And that's to be life!" said Helen, with a
catch in her throat. "How can you, with all the beautiful things to see
and do--with music--with walking at night--"
"Walking
is well enough when a man's in work," he answered. "Oh, I did talk a lot
of nonsense once, but there's nothing like a bailiff in the house to drive it
out of you. When I saw him fingering my Ruskins and Stevensons, I seemed
to see life straight real, and it isn't a pretty sight. My books are back
again, thanks to you, but they'll never be the same to me again, and I shan't
ever again think night in the woods is
wonderful."
"Why not?" asked Helen, throwing up the
window.
"Because I see one must have
money."
"Well, you're
wrong."
"I wish I was wrong, but--the clergyman--he
has money of his own, or else he's paid; the poet or the musician--just the
same; the tramp--he's no different. The tramp goes to the workhouse in the
end, and is paid for with other people's money. Miss Schlegel, the real
thing's money and all the rest is a dream."
"You're
still wrong. You've forgotten Death."
Leonard
could not understand.
"If we lived for ever what you
say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life
presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for
ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is
coming. I love Death--not morbidly, but because He explains. He
shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal
foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr.
Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier
in it than the man who has never learnt to say, 'I am
I.'"
"I wonder."
"We are
all in a mist--I know but I can help you this far--men like the Wilcoxes are
deeper in the mist than any. Sane, sound Englishmen! building up
empires, levelling all the world into what they call common sense. But
mention Death to them and they're offended, because Death's really Imperial, and
He cries out against them for ever."
"I am as afraid
of Death as any one."
"But not of the idea of
Death."
"But what is the
difference?"
"Infinite difference," said Helen, more
gravely than before.
Leonard looked at her wondering,
and had the sense of great things sweeping out of the shrouded night. But
he could not receive them, because his heart was still full of little
things. As the lost umbrella had spoilt the concert at Queen's Hall, so
the lost situation was obscuring the diviner harmonies now. Death, Life
and Materialism were fine words, but would Mr. Wilcox take him on as a
clerk? Talk as one would, Mr. Wilcox was king of this world, the superman,
with his own morality, whose head remained in the
clouds.
"I must be stupid," he said
apologetically.
While to Helen the paradox became
clearer and clearer. "Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him."
Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so
immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may
recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows
better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the
thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no
one who can stand against him.
"So never give in,"
continued the girl, and restated again and again the vague yet convincing plea
that the Invisible lodges against the Visible. Her excitement grew as she
tried to cut the rope that fastened Leonard to the earth. Woven of bitter
experience, it resisted her. Presently the waitress entered and gave her a
letter from Margaret. Another note, addressed to Leonard, was
inside. They read them, listening to the murmurings of the river.