HOWARDS END
Chapter 28
For many hours Margaret did nothing; then she controlled herself, and wrote
some letters. She was too bruised to speak to Henry; she could pity him,
and even determine to marry him, but as yet all lay too deep in her heart for
speech. On the surface the sense of his degradation was too strong.
She could not command voice or look, and the gentle words that she forced out
through her pen seemed to proceed from some other
person.
"My dearest boy," she began, "this is not to
part us. It is everything or nothing, and I mean it to be nothing.
It happened long before we ever met, and even if it had happened since, I should
be writing the same, I hope. I do
understand."
But she crossed out "I do understand";
it struck a false note. Henry could not bear to be understood. She
also crossed out, "It is everything or nothing. "Henry would resent so
strong a grasp of the situation. She must not comment; comment is
unfeminine.
"I think that'll about do," she
thought.
Then the sense of his degradation choked
her. Was he worth all this bother? To have yielded to a woman of
that sort was everything, yes, it was, and she could not be his wife. She
tried to translate his temptation into her own language, and her brain
reeled. Men must be different, even to want to yield to such a
temptation. Her belief in comradeship was stifled, and she saw life as
from that glass saloon on the Great Western, which sheltered male and female
alike from the fresh air. Are the sexes really races, each with its own
code of morality, and their mutual love a mere device of Nature to keep things
going? Strip human intercourse of the proprieties, and is it reduced to
this? Her judgment told her no. She knew that out of Nature's device
we have built a magic that will win us immortality. Far more mysterious
than the call of sex to sex is the tenderness that we throw into that call; far
wider is the gulf between us and the farmyard than between the farm-yard and the
garbage that nourishes it. We are evolving, in ways that Science cannot
measure, to ends that Theology dares not contemplate. "Men did produce one
jewel," the gods will say, and, saying, will give us immortality. Margaret
knew all this, but for the moment she could not feel it, and transformed the
marriage of Evie and Mr. Cahill into a carnival of fools, and her own
marriage--too miserable to think of that, she tore up the letter, and then wrote
another:
Dear Mr. Bast,
I have
spoken to Mr. Wilcox about you, as I promised, and am sorry to say that he has
no vacancy for you.
Yours truly,
M. J.
Schlegel
She enclosed this in a note to Helen, over which she
took less trouble than she might have done; but her head was aching, and she
could not stop to pick her words:
Dear Helen,
Give him
this. The Basts are no good. Henry found the woman drunk on the
lawn. I am having a room got ready for you here, and will you please
come round at once on getting this? The Basts are not at all the type we
should trouble about. I may go round to them myself in the morning, and
do anything that is fair.
M
In writing this, Margaret felt that she was being
practical. Something might be arranged for the Basts later on, but they
must be silenced for the moment. She hoped to avoid a conversation between
the woman and Helen. She rang the bell for a servant, but no one answered
it; Mr. Wilcox and the Warringtons were gone to bed, and the kitchen was
abandoned to Saturnalia. Consequently she went over to the George
herself. She did not enter the hotel, for discussion would have been
perilous, and, saying that the letter was important, she gave it to the
waitress. As she recrossed the square she saw Helen and Mr. Bast looking
out of the window of the coffee-room, and feared she was already too late.
Her task was not yet over; she ought to tell Henry what she had
done.
This came easily, for she saw him in the
hall. The night wind had been rattling the pictures against the wall, and
the noise had disturbed him.
"Who's there?" he
called, quite the householder.
Margaret walked in and
past him.
"I have asked Helen to sleep," she
said. "She is best here; so don't lock the
front-door."
"I thought someone had got in," said
Henry.
"At the same time I told the man that we could
do nothing for him. I don't know about later, but now the Basts must
clearly go."
"Did you say that your sister is
sleeping here, after
all?"
"Probably."
"Is she
to be shown up to your room?"
"I have naturally
nothing to say to her; I am going to bed. Will you tell the servants about
Helen? Could someone go to carry her bag?"
He
tapped a little gong, which had been bought to summon the
servants.
"You must make more noise than that if you
want them to hear."
Henry opened a door, and down the
corridor came shouts of laughter. "Far too much screaming there," he said,
and strode towards it. Margaret went upstairs, uncertain whether to be
glad that they had met, or sorry. They had behaved as if nothing had
happened, and her deepest instincts told her that this was wrong. For his
own sake, some explanation was due.
And yet--what
could an explanation tell her? A date, a place, a few details, which she
could imagine all too clearly. Now that the first shock was over, she saw
that there was every reason to premise a Mrs. Bast. Henry's inner life had
long laid open to her--his intellectual confusion, his obtuseness to personal
influence, his strong but furtive passions. Should she refuse him because
his outer life corresponded? Perhaps. Perhaps, if the dishonour had
been done to her, but it was done long before her day. She struggled
against the feeling. She told herself that Mrs. Wilcox's wrong was her
own. But she was not a bargain theorist. As she undressed, her
anger, her regard for the dead, her desire for a scene, all grew weak.
Henry must have it as he liked, for she loved him, and some day she would use
her love to make him a better man.
Pity was at the
bottom of her actions all through this crisis. Pity, if one may
generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our
better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of
it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates
woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for
evil.
Here was the core of the question. Henry
must be forgiven, and made better by love; nothing else mattered. Mrs.
Wilcox, that unquiet yet kindly ghost, must be left to her own wrong. To
her everything was in proportion now, and she, too, would pity the man who was
blundering up and down their lives. Had Mrs. Wilcox known of his
trespass? An interesting question, but Margaret fell asleep, tethered by
affection, and lulled by the murmurs of the river that descended all the night
from Wales. She felt herself at one with her future home, colouring it and
coloured by it, and awoke to see, for the second time, Oniton Castle conquering
the morning mists.