Howards End (25 page)

“Have you got the house?” they shouted, long before she could possibly hear.

Helen ran down to meet her. The highroad passed over a saddle, and a track went thence at right angles along the ridge of the down.

“Have you got the house?”

Margaret shook her head.

“Oh, what a nuisance! So we're as we were?”

“Not exactly.”

She got out, looking tired.

“Some mystery,” said Tibby. “We are to be enlightened presently. ”

Margaret came close up to her and whispered that she had had a proposal of marriage from Mr. Wilcox.

Helen was amused. She opened the gate on to the downs so that her brother might lead the pony through. “It's just like a widower,” she remarked. “They've cheek enough for anything, and invariably select one of their first wife's friends.”

Margaret's face flashed despair.

“That type—” She broke off with a cry. “Meg, not anything wrong with you?”

“Wait one minute,” said Margaret, whispering always.

“But you've never conceivably—you've never—” She pulled herself together. “Tibby, hurry up through; I can't hold this gate indefinitely. Aunt Juley! I say, Aunt Juley, make the tea, will you, and Frieda; we've got to talk houses, and'll come on afterwards.” And then, turning her face to her sister‘s, she burst into tears.

Margaret was stupefied. She heard herself saying, “Oh, really—” She felt herself touched with a hand that trembled.

“Don‘t,” sobbed Helen, “don't, don‘t, Meg, don't!” She seemed incapable of saying any other word. Margaret, trembling herself, led her forward up the road, till they strayed through another gate on to the down.

“Don‘t, don't do such a thing! I tell you not to—don't! I know—don‘t!”

“What do you know?”

“Panic and emptiness,” sobbed Helen. “Don‘t!”

Then Margaret thought: “Helen is a little selfish. I have never behaved like this when there has seemed a chance of her marrying.” She said: “But we would still see each other very often, and—”

“It's not a thing like that,” sobbed Helen. And she broke right away and wandered distractedly upwards, stretching her hands towards the view and crying.

“What's happened to you?” called Margaret, following through the wind that gathers at sundown on the northern slopes of hills. “But it's stupid!” And suddenly stupidity seized her, and the immense landscape was blurred. But Helen turned back.

“Meg—”

“I don't know what's happened to either of us,” said Margaret, wiping her eyes. “We must both have gone mad.” Then Helen wiped hers, and they even laughed a little.

“Look here, sit down.”

“All right; I'll sit down if you'll sit down.”

“There.” (One kiss.) “Now, whatever, whatever is the matter?”

“I do mean what I said. Don't; it wouldn't do.”

“Oh, Helen, stop saying ‘don't‘! It's ignorant. It's as if your head wasn't out of the slime. 'Don‘t' is probably what Mrs. Bast says all the day to Mr. Bast.”

Helen was silent.

“Well?”

“Tell me about it first, and meanwhile perhaps I'll have got my head out of the slime.”

“That's better. Well, where shall I begin? When I arrived at Waterloo—no, I'll go back before that, because I'm anxious you should know everything from the first. The ‘first' was about ten days ago. It was the day Mr. Bast came to tea and lost his temper. I was defending him, and Mr. Wilcox became jealous about me, however slightly. I thought it was the involuntary thing, which men can't help any more than we can. You know—at least, I know in my own case—when a man has said to me: 'So-and-so's a pretty girl,‘ I am seized with a momentary sourness against So-and-so, and long to tweak her ear. It's a tiresome feeling, but not an important one, and one easily manages it. But it wasn't only this in Mr. Wilcox's case, I gather now.”

“Then you love him?”

Margaret considered. “It is wonderful knowing that a real man cares for you,” she said. “The mere fact of that grows more tremendous. Remember, I've known and liked him steadily for nearly three years.”

“But loved him?”

Margaret peered into her past. It is pleasant to analyze feelings while they are still only feelings, and unembodied in the social fabric. With her arm round Helen, and her eyes shifting over the view, as if this county or that could reveal the secret of her own heart, she meditated honestly, and said: “No.”

“But you will?”

“Yes,” said Margaret, “of that I'm pretty sure. Indeed, I began the moment he spoke to me.”

“And have settled to marry him?”

“I had, but am wanting a long talk about it now. What
is
it against him, Helen? You must try and say.”

Helen, in her turn, looked outwards. “It is ever since Paul,” she said finally.

“But what has Mr. Wilcox to do with Paul?”

“But he was there, they were all there that morning when I came down to breakfast, and saw that Paul was frightened—the man who loved me frightened and all his paraphernalia fallen, so that I knew it was impossible, because personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.”

She poured the sentence forth in one breath, but her sister understood it, because it touched on thoughts that were familiar between them.

“That's foolish. In the first place, I disagree about the outer life. Well, we've often argued that. The real point is that there is the widest gulf between my love-making and yours. Yours was romance; mine will be prose. I'm not running it down—a very good kind of prose, but well considered, well thought out. For instance, I know all Mr. Wilcox's faults. He's afraid of emotion. He cares too much about success, too little about the past. His sympathy lacks poetry, and so isn't sympathy really. I'd even say”—she looked at the shining lagoons—“that, spiritually, he's not as honest as I am. Doesn't that satisfy you?”

“No, it doesn‘t,” said Helen. “It makes me feel worse and worse. You must be mad.”

Margaret made a movement of irritation.

“I don't intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life—good heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn‘t, and shall never, understand.”

Thus she spoke before the wedding ceremony and the physical union, before the astonishing glass shade had fallen that interposes between married couples and the world. She was to keep her independence more than do most women as yet. Marriage was to alter her fortunes rather than her character, and she was not far wrong in boasting that she understood her future husband. Yet he did alter her character—a little. There was an unforeseen surprise, a cessation of the winds and odours of life, a social pressure that would have her think conjugally.

“So with him,” she continued. “There are heaps of things in him—more especially things that he does—that will always be hidden from me. He has all those public qualities which you so despise and enable all this—” She waved her hand at the landscape, which confirmed anything. “If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. No—perhaps not even that. Without their spirit, life might never have moved out of protoplasm. More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it. There are times when it seems to me—”

“And to me, and to all women. So one kissed Paul.”

“That's brutal,” said Margaret. “Mine is an absolutely different case. I've thought things out.”

“It makes no difference thinking things out. They come to the same. ”

“Rubbish!”

There was a long silence, during which the tide returned into Poole Harbour. “One would lose something,” murmured Helen, apparently to herself. The water crept over the mud-flats towards the gorse and the blackened heather. Branksea Island lost its immense foreshores, and became a sombre episode of trees. Frome was forced inwards towards Dorchester, Stour against Wimborne, Avon towards Salisbury, and over the immense displacement the sun presided, leading it to triumph ere he sank to rest. England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who had added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world's waters when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in. Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores. No doubt the disturbance is really the spirit of the generations, welcoming the new generation, and chafing against the ultimate Fate, who holds all the seas in the palm of her hand. But Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another's infinity; he is conscious only of his own—flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and time. He knows that he will survive at the end of things, and be gathered by Fate as a jewel from the slime, and be handed with admiration round the assembly of the gods. “Men did produce this,” they will say, and, saying, they will give men immortality. But meanwhile—what agitations meanwhile! The foundations of Property and Propriety are laid bare, twin rocks; Family Pride flounders to the surface, puffing and blowing, and refusing to be comforted; Theology, vaguely ascetic, gets up a nasty ground swell. Then the lawyers are aroused—cold brood—and creep out of their holes. They do what they can; they tidy up Property and Propriety, reassure Theology and Family Pride. Half-guineas are poured on the troubled waters, the lawyers creep back, and, if all has gone well, Love joins one man and woman together in Matrimony.

Margaret had expected the disturbance, and was not irritated by it. For a sensitive woman she had steady nerves, and could bear with the incongruous and the grotesque; and, besides, there was nothing excessive about her love-affair. Good-humour was the dominant note of her relations with Mr. Wilcox, or, as I must now call him, Henry. Henry did not encourage romance, and she was no girl to fidget for it. An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.

In this spirit she promised to marry him.

He was in Swanage on the morrow, bearing the engagement-ring. They greeted one another with a hearty cordiality that impressed Aunt Juley. Henry dined at The Bays, but had engaged a bedroom in the principal hotel: he was one of those men who know the principal hotel by instinct. After dinner he asked Margaret if she wouldn't care for a turn on the Parade. She accepted, and could not repress a little tremor; it would be her first real love scene. But as she put on her hat she burst out laughing. Love was so unlike the article served up in books: the joy, though genuine, was different; the mystery an unexpected mystery. For one thing, Mr. Wilcox still seemed a stranger.

For a time they talked about the ring; then she said:

“Do you remember the Embankment at Chelsea? It can't be ten days ago.”

“Yes,” he said, laughing. “And you and your sister were head and ears deep in some Quixotic scheme. Ah well!”

“I little thought then, certainly. Did you?”

“I don't know about that; I shouldn't like to say.”

“Why, was it earlier?” she cried. “Did you think of me this way earlier! How extraordinarily interesting. Henry! Tell me.”

But Henry had no intention of telling. Perhaps he could not have told, for his mental states became obscure as soon as he had passed through them. He misliked the very word “interesting,” connoting it with wasted energy and even with morbidity. Hard facts were enough for him.

“I didn't think of it,” she pursued. “No; when you spoke to me in the drawing-room, that was practically the first. It was all so different from what it's supposed to be. On the stage, or in books, a proposal is—how shall I put it?—a full-blown affair; a kind of bouquet; it loses its literal meaning. But in life a proposal really is a proposal—”

“By the way—”

“—a suggestion, a seed,” she concluded; and the thought flew away into darkness.

“I was thinking, if you didn't mind, that we ought to spend this evening in a business talk; there will be so much to settle.”

“I think so too. Tell me, in the first place, how did you get on with Tibby?”

“With your brother?”

“Yes, during cigarettes.”

“Oh, very well.”

“I am so glad,” she answered, a little surprised. “What did you talk about? Me, presumably.”

“About Greece too.”

“Greece was a very good card, Henry. Tibby's only a boy still, and one has to pick and choose subjects a little. Well done.”

“I was telling him I have shares in a currant-farm near Calamata.”

“What a delightful thing to have shares in! Can't we go there for our honeymoon?”

“What to do?”