“Then you don’t think I was foolish?” he asked, becoming again the naive and sweet-tempered boy for whom Nature had intended him.
“Heavens, no!” replied Margaret.
“Heaven help us if we do!” replied Helen.
“I’m very glad you say that. Now, my wife would never understand—not if I explained for days.”
“No, it wasn’t foolish!” cried Helen, her eyes aflame. “You’ve pushed back the boundaries; I think it splendid of you.”
“You’ve not been content to dream, as we have—”
“Though we have walked, too—”
“I must show you a picture upstairs—”
Here the door-bell rang. The hansom had come to take them to their evening party.
“Oh, bother, not to say dash—I had forgotten we were dining out; but do, do come round again and have a talk.”
“Yes, you must—do,” echoed Margaret.
Leonard, with extreme sentiment, replied: “No, I shall not. It’s better like this.”
“Why better?” asked Margaret.
“No, it is better not to risk a second interview. I shall always look back on this talk with you as one of the finest things in my life. Really. I mean this. We can never repeat. It has done me real good, and there we had better leave it.”
“That’s rather a sad view of life, surely.”
“Things so often get spoiled.”
“I know,” flashed Helen, “but people don’t.”
He could not understand this. He continued in a vein which mingled true imagination and false. What he said wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t right, and a false note jarred. One little twist, they felt, and the instrument might be in tune. One little strain, and it might be silent for ever. He thanked the ladies very much, but he would not call again. There was a moment’s awkwardness, and then Helen said: “Go, then; perhaps you know best; but never forget you’re better than Jefferies.” And he went. Their hansom caught him up at the comer, passed with a waving of hands, and vanished with its accomplished load into the evening.
London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. She has never known the clear-cut armies of the purer air. Leonard hurried through her tinted wonders, very much part of the picture. His was a grey life, and to brighten it he had ruled off a few corners for romance. The Miss Schlegels—or, to speak more accurately, his interview with them—were to fill such a corner, nor was it by any means the first time that he had talked intimately to strangers. The habit was analogous to a debauch, an outlet, though the worst of outlets, for instincts that would not be denied. Terrifying him, it would beat down his suspicions and prudence until he was confiding secrets to people whom he had scarcely seen. It brought him many fears and some pleasant memories. Perhaps the keenest happiness he had ever known was during a railway journey to Cambridge, where a decent-mannered undergraduate had spoken to him. They had got into conversation, and gradually Leonard flung reticence aside, told some of his domestic troubles, and hinted at the rest. The undergraduate, supposing they could start a friendship, asked him to “coffee after hall,” which he accepted, but afterwards grew shy, and took care not to stir from the commercial hotel where he lodged. He did not want Romance to collide with the Porphyrion, still less with Jacky, and people with fuller, happier lives are slow to understand this. To the Schlegels, as to the undergraduate, he was an interesting creature, of whom they wanted to see more. But they to him were denizens of Romance, who must keep to the comer he had assigned them, pictures that must not walk out of their frames.
His behaviour over Margaret’s visiting-card had been typical. His had scarcely been a tragic marriage. Where there is no money and no inclination to violence, tragedy cannot be generated. He could not leave his wife, and he did not want to hit her. Petulance and squalor were enough. Here “that card” had come in. Leonard, though furtive, was untidy, and left it lying about. Jacky found it, and then began: “What’s that card, eh?” “Yes, don’t you wish you knew what that card was?” “Len, who’s Miss Schlegel?” etc. Months passed, and the card, now as a joke, now as a grievance, was handed about, getting dirtier and dirtier. It followed them when they moved from Camelia Road to Tulse Hill. It was submitted to third parties. A few inches of pasteboard, it became the battlefield on which the souls of Leonard and his wife contended. Why did he not say: “A lady took my umbrella, another gave me this that I might call for my umbrella”? Because Jacky would have disbelieved him? Partly, but chiefly because he was sentimental. No affection gathered round the card, but it symbolized the life of culture, that Jacky should never spoil. At night he would say to himself: “Well, at all events, she doesn’t know about that card. Yah! done her there!”
Poor Jacky! she was not a bad sort, and had a great deal to bear. She drew her own conclusion—she was only capable of drawing one conclusion—and in the fulness of time she acted upon it. All the Friday Leonard had refused to speak to her, and had spent the evening observing the stars. On the Saturday he went up, as usual, to town, but he came not back Saturday night nor Sunday morning, nor Sunday afternoon. The inconvenience grew intolerable, and though she was now of a retiring habit, and shy of women, she went up to Wickham Place. Leonard returned in her absence. The card, the fatal card, was gone from the pages of Ruskin, and he guessed what had happened.
“Well?” he had exclaimed, greeting her with peals of laughter. “I know where you’ve been, but you don’t know where I’ve been.”
Jacky sighed, said: “Len, I do think you might explain,” and resumed domesticity.
Explanations were difficult at this stage, and Leonard was too silly—or, it is tempting to write, too sound—a chap to attempt them. His reticence was not entirely the shoddy article that a business life promotes, the reticence that pretends that nothing is something, and hides behind the Daily Telegraph. The adventurer, also, is reticent, and it is an adventure for a clerk to walk for a few hours in darkness. You may laugh at him, you who have slept nights out on the veldt, with your rifle beside you and all the atmosphere of adventure pat. And you also may laugh who think adventures silly. But do not be surprised if Leonard is shy, whenever he meets you, and if the Schlegels rather than Jacky hear about the dawn.
That the Schlegels had not thought him foolish became a permanent joy. He was at his best when he thought of them. It buoyed him as he journeyed home beneath fading heavens. Somehow the barriers of wealth had fallen, and there had been—he could not phrase it—a general assertion of the wonder of the world. “My conviction,” says the mystic, “gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it,” and they had agreed that there was something beyond life’s daily grey. He took off his top-hat and smoothed it thoughtfully. He had hitherto supposed the unknown to be books, literature, clever conversation, culture. One raised oneself by study, and got upsides with the world. But in that quick interchange a new light dawned. Was that “something” walking in the dark among the suburban hills?
He discovered that he was going bareheaded down Regent Street. London came back with a rush. Few were about at this hour, but all whom he passed looked at him with a hostility that was the more impressive because it was unconscious. He put his hat on. It was too big; his head disappeared like a pudding into a basin, the ears bending outwards at the touch of the curly brim. He wore it a little backwards, and its effect was greatly to elongate the face and to bring out the distance between the eyes and the moustache. Thus equipped, he escaped criticism. No one felt uneasy as he titupped along the pavements, the heart of a man ticking fast in his chest.
Chapter XV
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.”
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“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.”