Howards End (19 page)

The sisters went out to dinner full of their adventure, and when they were both full of the same subject, there were few dinner-parties that could stand up against them. This particular one, which was all ladies, had more kick in it than most, but succumbed after a struggle. Helen at one part of the table, Margaret at the other, would talk of Mr. Bast and of no one else, and somewhere about the entrée their monologues collided, fell ruining, and became common property. Nor was this all. The dinner-party was really an informal discussion club; there was a paper after it, read amid coffee-cups and laughter in the drawing-room, but dealing more or less thoughtfully with some topic of general interest. After the paper came a debate, and in this debate Mr. Bast also figured, appearing now as a bright spot in civilization, now as a dark spot, according to the temperament of the speaker. The subject of the paper had been “How ought I to dispose of my money?” the reader professing to be a millionaire on the point of death, inclined to bequeath her fortune for the foundation of local art galleries, but open to conviction from other sources. The various parts had been assigned beforehand, and some of the speeches were amusing. The hostess assumed the ungrateful rôle of “the millionaire's eldest son,” and implored her expiring parent not to dislocate Society by allowing such vast sums to pass out of the family. Money was the fruit of self-denial, and the second generation had a right to profit by the self-denial of the first. What right had “Mr. Bast” to profit? The National Gallery was good enough for the likes of him. After property had had its say—a saying that is necessarily ungracious—the various philanthropists stepped forward. Something must be done for “Mr. Bast”: his conditions must be improved without impairing his independence; he must have a free library, or free tennis-courts; his rent must be paid in such a way that he did not know it was being paid; it must be made worth his while to join the Territorials; he must be forcibly parted from his uninspiring wife, the money going to her as a compensation; he must be assigned a Twin Star, some member of the leisured classes who would watch over him ceaselessly (groans from Helen); he must be given food but no clothes, clothes but no food, a third-return ticket to Venice, without either food or clothes when he arrived there. In short, he might be given anything and everything so long as it was not the money itself.

And here Margaret interrupted.

“Order, order, Miss Schlegel!” said the reader of the paper. “You are here, I understand, to advise me in the interests of the Society for the Preservation of Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. I cannot have you speaking out of your role. It makes my poor head go round, and I think you forget that I am very ill.”

“Your head won't go round if only you'll listen to my argument,” said Margaret. “Why not give him the money itself? You're supposed to have about thirty thousand a year.”

“Have I? I thought I had a million.”

“Wasn't a million your capital? Dear me! we ought to have settled that. Still, it doesn't matter. Whatever you've got, I order you to give as many poor men as you can three hundred a year each.”

“But that would be pauperizing them,” said an earnest girl, who liked the Schlegels but thought them a little unspiritual at times.

“Not if you gave them so much. A big windfall would not pauperize a man. It is these little driblets, distributed among too many, that do the harm. Money's educational. It's far more educational than the things it buys.” There was a protest. “In a sense,” added Margaret, but the protest continued. “Well, isn't the most civilized thing going, the man who has learnt to wear his income properly?”

“Exactly what your Mr. Basts won't do.”

“Give them a chance. Give them money. Don't dole them out poetry-books and railway-tickets like babies. Give them the where-withal to buy these things. When your Socialism comes, it may be different, and we may think in terms of commodities instead of cash. Till it comes, give people cash, for it is the warp of civilization, whatever the woof may be. The imagination ought to play upon money and realize it vividly, for it's the—the second most important thing in the world. It is so slurred over and hushed up, there is so little clear thinking—oh, political economy, of course, but so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means. Money: give Mr. Bast money, and don't bother about his ideals. He'll pick up those for himself.”

She leant back while the more earnest members of the club began to misconstrue her. The female mind, though cruelly practical in daily life, cannot bear to hear ideals belittled in conversation, and Miss Schlegal was asked however she could say such dreadful things, and what it would profit Mr. Bast if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul. She answered: “Nothing, but he would not gain his soul until he had gained a little of the world.” Then they said no they did not believe it, and she admitted that an overworked clerk may save his soul in the superterrestrial sense, where the effort will be taken for the deed, but she denied that he will ever explore the spiritual resources of this world, will ever know the rarer joys of the body, or attain to clear and passionate intercourse with his fellows. Others had attacked the fabric of Society—Property, Interest, etc.; she only fixed her eyes on a few human beings, to see how, under present conditions, they could be made happier. Doing good to humanity was useless: the many-coloured efforts thereto spreading over the vast area like films and resulting in a universal grey. To do good to one, or, as in this case, to a few, was the utmost she dare hope for.

Between the idealists and the political economists, Margaret had a bad time. Disagreeing elsewhere, they agreed in disowning her, and in keeping the administration of the millionaire's money in their own hands. The earnest girl brought forward a scheme of “personal supervision and mutual help,” the effect of which was to alter poor people until they became exactly like people who were not so poor. The hostess pertinently remarked that she, as eldest son, might surely rank among the millionaire's legatees. Margaret weakly admitted the claim, and another claim was at once set up by Helen, who declared that she had been the millionaire's housemaid for over forty years, overfed and underpaid; was nothing to be done for her, so corpulent and poor? The millionaire then read out of her last will and testament, in which she left the whole of her fortune to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Then she died. The serious parts of the discussion had been of higher merit than the playful—in a men's debate is the reverse more general?—but the meeting broke up hilariously enough, and a dozen happy ladies dispersed to their homes.

Helen and Margaret walked the earnest girl as far as Battersea Bridge Station, arguing copiously all the way. When she had gone they were conscious of an alleviation, and of the great beauty of the evening. They turned back towards Oakley Street. The lamps and the plane-trees, following the line of the embankment, struck a note of dignity that is rare in English cities. The seats, almost deserted, were here and there occupied by gentlefolk in evening dress, who had strolled out from the houses behind to enjoy fresh air and the whisper of the rising tide. There is something Continental about Chelsea Embankment. It is an open space used rightly, a blessing more frequent in Germany than here. As Margaret and Helen sat down, the city behind them seemed to be a vast theatre, an opera-house in which some endless trilogy was performing, and they themselves a pair of satisfied subscribers who did not mind losing a little of the second act.

“Cold?”

“No.”

“Tired?”

“Doesn't matter.”

The earnest girl's train rumbled away over the bridge.

“I say, Helen—”

“Well?”

“Are we really going to follow up Mr. Bast?”

“I don't know.”

“I think we won't.”

“As you like.”

“It's no good, I think, unless you really mean to know people. The discussion brought that home to me. We got on well enough with him in a spirit of excitement, but think of rational intercourse. We mustn't play at friendship. No, it's no good.”

“There's Mrs. Lanoline, too,” Helen yawned. “So dull.”

“Just so, and possibly worse than dull.”

“I should like to know how he got hold of your card.”

“But he said—something about a concert and an umbrella—”

“Then did the card see the wife—”

“Helen, come to bed.”

“No, just a little longer, it is so beautiful. Tell me; oh yes; did you say money is the warp of the world?”

“Yes.”

“Then what's the woof?”

“Very much what one chooses,” said Margaret. “It's something that isn't money—one can't say more.”

“Walking at night?”

“Probably. ”

“For Tibby, Oxford?”

“It seems so.”

“For you?”

“Now that we have to leave Wickham Place, I begin to think it's that. For Mrs. Wilcox it was certainly Howards End.”

One's own name will carry immense distances. Mr. Wilcox, who was sitting with friends many seats away, heard his, rose to his feet, and strolled along towards the speakers.

“It is sad to suppose that places may ever be more important than people,” continued Margaret.

“Why, Meg? They're so much nicer generally. I'd rather think of that forester's house in Pomerania than of the fat Herr Förstmeister who lived in it.”

“I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.”

Here Mr. Wilcox reached them. It was several weeks since they had met.

“How do you do?” he cried. “I thought I recognized your voices. Whatever are you both doing down here?”

His tones were protective. He implied that one ought not to sit out on Chelsea Embankment without a male escort. Helen resented this, but Margaret accepted it as part of the good man's equipment.

“What an age it is since I've seen you, Mr. Wilcox. I met Evie in the tube, though, lately. I hope you have good news of your son.”

“Paul?” said Mr. Wilcox, extinguishing his cigarette and sitting down between them. “Oh, Paul's all right. We had a line from Madeira. He'll be at work again by now.”

“Ugh—” said Helen, shuddering from complex causes.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Isn't the climate of Nigeria too horrible?”

“Someone's got to go,” he said simply. “England will never keep her trade overseas unless she is prepared to make sacrifices. Unless we get firm in West Africa, Ger—untold complications may follow. Now tell me all your news.”

“Oh, we've had a splendid evening,” cried Helen, who always woke up at the advent of a visitor. “We belong to a kind of club that reads papers, Margaret and I—all women, but there is a discussion after. This evening it was on how one ought to leave one's money—whether to one's family, or to the poor, and if so how—oh, most interesting.”

The man of business smiled. Since his wife's death he had almost doubled his income. He was an important figure at last, a reassuring name on company prospectuses, and life had treated him very well. The world seemed in his grasp as he listened to the River Thames, which still flowed inland from the sea. So wonderful to the girls, it held no mysteries for him. He had helped to shorten its long tidal trough by taking shares in the lock at Teddington, and if he and other capitalists thought good, some day it could be shortened again. With a good dinner inside him and an amiable but academic woman on either flank, he felt that his hands were on all the ropes of life, and that what he did not know could not be worth knowing.

“Sounds a most original entertainment!” he exclaimed, and laughed in his pleasant way. “I wish Evie would go to that sort of thing. But she hasn't the time. She's taken to breeding Aberdeen terriers—jolly little dogs.”

“I expect we'd better be doing the same, really.”

“We pretend we're improving ourselves, you see,” said Helen a little sharply, for the Wilcox glamour is not of the kind that returns, and she had bitter memories of the days when a speech such as he had just made would have impressed her favourably. “We suppose it is a good thing to waste an evening once a fortnight over a debate, but, as my sister says, it may be better to breed dogs.”

“Not at all. I don't agree with your sister. There's nothing like a debate to teach one quickness. I often wish I had gone in for them when I was a youngster. It would have helped me no end.”

“Quickness—?”

“Yes. Quickness in argument. Time after time I've missed scoring a point because the other man has had the gift of the gab and I haven't. Oh, I believe in these discussions.”

The patronizing tone, thought Margaret, came well enough from a man who was old enough to be their father. She had always maintained that Mr. Wilcox had a charm. In times of sorrow or emotion his inadequacy had pained her, but it was pleasant to listen to him now; and to watch his thick brown moustache and high forehead confronting the stars. But Helen was nettled. The aim of
their
debates, she implied, was truth.

“Oh yes, it doesn't much matter what subject you take,” said he.

Margaret laughed and said: “But this is going to be far better than the debate itself.”

Helen recovered herself and laughed too. “No I won't go on,” she declared. “I'll just put our special case to Mr. Wilcox.”