Once she had humorously lamented that she had never been to Simpson’s restaurant in the Strand. Now a note arrived from Miss Wilcox, asking her to lunch there. Mr. Cahill was coming, and the three would have such a jolly chat, and perhaps end up at the Hippodrome. Margaret had no strong regard for Evie, and no desire to meet her fiancé, and she was surprised that Helen, who had been far funnier about Simpson‘s, had not been asked instead. But the invitation touched her by its intimate tone. She must know Evie Wilcox better than she supposed, and declaring that she “simply must,” she accepted.
But when she saw Evie at the entrance of the restaurant, staring fiercely at nothing after the fashion of athletic women, her heart failed her anew. Miss Wilcox had changed perceptibly since her engagement. Her voice was gruffer, her manner more downright, and she was inclined to patronize the more foolish virgin. Margaret was silly enough to be pained at this. Depressed at her isolation, she saw not only houses and furniture, but the vessel of life itself slipping past her, with people like Evie and Mr. Cahill on board.
There are moments when virtue and wisdom fail us, and one of them came to her at Simpson’s in the Strand. As she trod the staircase, narrow but carpeted thickly, as she entered the eating-room, where saddles of mutton were being trundled up to expectant clergymen, she had a strong, if erroneous, conviction of her own futility, and wished she had never come out of her backwater, where nothing happened except art and literature, and where no one ever got married or succeeded in remaining engaged. Then came a little surprise. “Father might be of the party” —yes, Father was. With a smile of pleasure she moved forward to greet him, and her feeling of loneliness vanished.
“I thought I’d get round if I could,” said he. “Evie told me of her little plan, so I just slipped in and secured a table. Always secure a table first. Evie, don’t pretend you want to sit by your old father, because you don’t. Miss Schlegel, come in my side, out of pity. My goodness, but you look tired! Been worrying round after your young clerks?”
“No, after houses,” said Margaret, edging past him into the box. “I’m hungry, not tired; I want to eat heaps.”
“That’s good. What’ll you have?”
“Fish pie,” said she, with a glance at the menu.
“Fish pie! Fancy coming for fish pie to Simpson’s. It’s not a bit the thing to go for here.”
“Go for something for me, then,” said Margaret, pulling off her gloves. Her spirits were rising, and his reference to Leonard Bast had warmed her curiously.
“Saddle of mutton,” said he after profound reflection; “and cider to drink. That’s the type of thing. I like this place, for a joke, once in a way. It is so thoroughly Old English. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes,” said Margaret, who didn’t. The order was given, the joint rolled up, and the carver, under Mr. Wilcox’s direction, cut the meat where it was succulent, and piled their plates high. Mr. Cahill insisted on sirloin, but admitted that he had made a mistake later on. He and Evie soon fell into a conversation of the “No, I didn’t; yes, you did” type—conversation which, though fascinating to those who are engaged in it, neither desires nor deserves the attention of others.
“It’s a golden rule to tip the carver. Tip everywhere’s my motto.”
“Perhaps it does make life more human.”
“Then the fellows know one again. Especially in the East, if you tip, they remember you from year’s end to year’s end.”
“Have you been in the East?”
“Oh, Greece and the Levant. I used to go out for sport and business to Cyprus; some military society of a sort there. A few piastres, properly distributed, help to keep one’s memory green. But you, of course, think this shockingly cynical. How’s your discussion society getting on? Any new utopias lately?”
“No, I’m house-hunting, Mr. Wilcox, as I’ve already told you once. Do you know of any houses?”
“Afraid I don’t.”
“Well, what’s the point of being practical if you can’t find two distressed females a house? We merely want a small house with large rooms, and plenty of them.”
“Evie, I like that! Miss Schlegel expects me to turn house-agent for her!”
“What’s that, Father?”
“I want a new home in September, and someone must find it. I can’t.”
“Percy, do you know of anything?”
“I can’t say I do,” said Mr. Cahill.
“How like you! You’re never any good.”
“Never any good. Just listen to her! Never any good. Oh, come!”
“Well, you aren’t. Miss Schlegel, is he?”
The torrent of their love, having splashed these drops at Margaret, swept away on its habitual course. She sympathized with it now, for a little comfort had restored her geniality. Speech and silence pleased her equally, and while Mr. Wilcox made some preliminary inquiries about cheese, her eyes surveyed the restaurant and admired its well-calculated tributes to the solidity of our past. Though no more Old English than the works of Kipling, it had selected its reminiscences so adroitly that her criticism was lulled, and the guests whom it was nourishing for imperial purposes bore the outer semblance of Parson Adams or Tom Jones. Scraps of their talk jarred oddly on the ear. “Right you are! I’ll cable out to Uganda this evening,” came from the table behind. “Their Emperor wants war; well, let him have it,” was the opinion of a clergyman. She smiled at such incongruities. “Next time,” she said to Mr. Wilcox, “you shall come to lunch with me at Mr. Eustace Miles’s.”
“With pleasure.”
“No, you’d hate it,” she said, pushing her glass towards him for some more cider. “It’s all proteids and body-buildings, and people come up to you and beg your pardon, but you have such a beautiful aura.”
“A what?”
“Never heard of an aura? Oh, happy, happy man! I scrub at mine for hours. Nor of an astral plane?”
He had heard of astral planes, and censured them.
“Just so. Luckily it was Helen’s aura, not mine, and she had to chaperone it and do the politenesses. I just sat with my handkerchief in my mouth till the man went.”
“Funny experiences seem to come to you two girls. No one’s ever asked me about my—what d‘ye call it? Perhaps I’ve not got one.”
“You’re bound to have one, but it may be such a terrible colour that no one dares mention it.”
“Tell me, though, Miss Schlegel, do you really believe in the supernatural and all that?”
“Too difficult a question.”
“Why’s that? Gruyère or Stilton?”
“Gruyère, please.”
“Better have Stilton.”
“Stilton. Because, though I don’t believe in auras, and think Theosophy’s only a halfway-house—”
“—Yet there may be something in it all the same,” he concluded, with a frown.
“Not even that. It may be halfway in the wrong direction. I can’t explain. I don’t believe in all these fads, and yet I don’t like saying that I don’t believe in them.”
He seemed unsatisfied, and said: “So you wouldn’t give me your word that you don’t hold with astral bodies and all the rest of it?”
“I could,” said Margaret, surprised that the point was of any importance to him. “Indeed, I will. When I talked about scrubbing my aura, I was only trying to be funny. But why do you want this settled?”
“I don’t know.”
“Now, Mr. Wilcox, you do know.”
“Yes, I am,” “No, you’re not,” burst from the lovers opposite. Margaret was silent for a moment, and then changed the subject.
“How’s your house?”
“Much the same as when you honoured it last week.”
“I don’t mean Ducie Street. Howards End, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“Can’t you turn out your tenant and let it to us? We’re nearly demented. ”
“Let me think. I wish I could help you. But I thought you wanted to
be in town. One bit of advice: fix your district, then fix your price, and then don’t budge. That’s how I got both Ducie Street and Oniton. I said to myself: ‘I mean to be exactly here,’ and I was, and Oniton’s a place in a thousand.”
“But I do budge. Gentlemen seem to mesmerize houses—cow them with an eye, and up they come, trembling. Ladies can’t. It’s the houses that are mesmerizing me. I’ve no control over the saucy things. Houses are alive. No?”
“I’m out of my depth,” he said, and added: “Didn’t you talk rather like that to your office boy?”
“Did I?—I mean I did, more or less. I talk the same way to everyone—or try to.”
“Yes. I know. And how much do you suppose that he understood of it?”
“That’s his lookout. I don’t believe in suiting my conversation to my company. One can doubtless hit upon some medium of exchange that seems to do well enough, but it’s no more like the real thing than money is like food. There’s no nourishment in it. You pass it to the lower classes, and they pass it back to you, and this you call ‘social intercourse’ or ’mutual endeavour,‘ when it’s mutual priggishness if it’s anything. Our friends at Chelsea don’t see this. They say one ought to be at all costs intelligible, and sacrifice—”
“Lower classes,” interrupted Mr. Wilcox, as it were thrusting his hand into her speech. “Well, you do admit that there are rich and poor. That’s something.”
Margaret could not reply. Was he incredibly stupid, or did he understand her better than she understood herself?
“You do admit that, if wealth was divided up equally, in a few years there would be rich and poor again just the same. The hard-working man would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom.”
“Everyone admits that.”
“Your Socialists don’t.”
“My Socialists do. Yours mayn’t; but I strongly suspect yours of being not Socialists, but ninepins which you have constructed for your own amusement. I can’t imagine any living creature who would bowl over quite so easily.”
He would have resented this had she not been a woman. But women may say anything—it was one of his holiest beliefs—and he only retorted, with a gay smile: “I don’t care. You’ve made two damaging admissions, and I’m heartily with you in both.”
In time they finished lunch, and Margaret, who had excused herself from the Hippodrome, took her leave. Evie had scarcely addressed her, and she suspected that the entertainment had been planned by the father. He and she were advancing out of their respective families towards a more intimate acquaintance. It had begun long ago. She had been his wife’s friend, and, as such, he had given her that silver vinaigrette as a memento. It was pretty of him to have given that vinaigrette, and he had always preferred her to Helen—unlike most men. But the advance had been astonishing lately. They had done more in a week than in two years, and were really beginning to know each other.
She did not forget his promise to sample Eustace Miles, and asked him as soon as she could secure Tibby as his chaperon. He came, and partook of body-building dishes with humility.
Next morning the Schlegels left for Swanage. They had not succeeded in finding a new home.
Chapter XVIII
As they were seated at Aunt Juley’s breakfast-table at The Bays, parrying her excessive hospitality and enjoying the view of the bay, a letter came for Margaret and threw her into perturbation. It was from Mr. Wilcox. It announced an “important change” in his plans. Owing to Evie’s marriage, he had decided to give up his house in Ducie Street, and was willing to let it on a yearly tenancy. It was a businesslike letter, and stated frankly what he would do for them and what he would not do. Also the rent. If they approved, Margaret was to come up at once—the words were underlined, as is necessary when dealing with women—and to go over the house with him. If they disapproved, a wire would oblige, as he should put it into the hands of an agent.
The letter perturbed, because she was not sure what it meant. If he liked her, if he had manœuvred to get her to Simpson‘s, might this be a manœuvre to get her to London, and result in an offer of marriage? She put it to herself as indelicately as possible, in the hope that her brain would cry: “Rubbish, you’re a self-conscious fool!” But her brain only tingled a little and was silent, and for a time she sat gazing at the mincing waves, and wondering whether the news would seem strange to the others.
As soon as she began speaking, the sound of her own voice reassured her. There could be nothing in it. The replies also were typical, and in the burr of conversation her fears vanished.
“You needn’t go, though—” began her hostess.
“I needn‘t, but hadn’t I better? It’s really getting rather serious. We let chance after chance slip, and the end of it is we shall be bundled out bag and baggage into the street. We don’t know what we want, that’s the mischief with us—”
“No, we have no real ties,” said Helen, helping herself to toast.
“Shan’t I go up to town today, take the house if it’s the least possible, and then come down by the afternoon train tomorrow and start enjoying myself. I shall be no fun to myself or to others until this business is off my mind.”
“But you won’t do anything rash, Margaret?”
“There’s nothing rash to do.”
“Who are the Wilcoxes?” said Tibby, a question that sounds silly, but was really extremely subtle, as his aunt found to her cost when she tried to answer it. “I don’t manage the Wilcoxes; I don’t see where they come in.”
“No more do I,” agreed Helen. “It’s funny that we just don’t lose sight of them. Out of all our hotel acquaintances, Mr. Wilcox is the only one who has stuck. It is now over three years, and we have drifted away from far more interesting people in that time.”
“Interesting people don’t get one houses.”
“Meg, if you start in your honest-English vein, I shall throw the treacle at you.”
“It’s a better vein than the cosmopolitan,” said Margaret, getting up. “Now, children, which is it to be? You know the Ducie Street house. Shall I say yes or shall I say no? Tibby love—which? I’m specially anxious to pin you both.”
“It all depends what meaning you attach to the word ‘possi—’ ”
“It depends on nothing of the sort. Say ‘yes.’ ”
“Say ‘no.’ ”
Then Margaret spoke rather seriously. “I think,” she said, “that our race is degenerating. We cannot settle even this little thing; what will it be like when we have to settle a big one?”
“It will be as easy as eating,” returned Helen.
“I was thinking of Father. How could he settle to leave Germany as he did, when he had fought for it as a young man, and all his feelings and friends were Prussian? How could he break loose with patriotism and begin aiming at something else? It would have killed me. When he was nearly forty he could change countries and ideals—and we, at our age, can’t change houses. It’s humiliating.”
“Your father may have been able to change countries,” said Mrs. Munt with asperity, “and that may or may not be a good thing. But he could change houses no better than you can, in fact, much worse. Never shall I forget what poor Emily suffered in the move from Manchester.”
“I knew it,” cried Helen. “I told you so. It is the little things one bungles at. The big, real ones are nothing when they come.”
“Bungle, my dear! You are too little to recollect—in fact, you weren’t there. But the furniture was actually in the vans and on the move before the lease for Wickham Place was signed, and Emily took train with baby—who was Margaret then—and the smaller luggage for London, without so much as knowing where her new home would be. Getting away from that house may be hard, but it is nothing to the misery that we all went through getting you into it.”
Helen, with her mouth full, cried:
“And that’s the man who beat the Austrians, and the Danes, and the French, and who beat the Germans that were inside himself. And we’re
like him.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Tibby. “Remember that I am cosmopolitan, please.”
“Helen may be right.”
“Of course she’s right,” said Helen.
Helen might be right, but she did not go up to London. Margaret did that. An interrupted holiday is the worst of the minor worries, and one may be pardoned for feeling morbid when a business letter snatches one away from the sea and friends. She could not believe that her father had ever felt the same. Her eyes had been troubling her lately, so that she could not read in the train, and it bored her to look at the landscape, which she had seen but yesterday. At Southampton she “waved” to Frieda: Frieda was on her way down to join them at Swanage, and Mrs. Munt had calculated that their trains would cross. But Frieda was looking the other way, and Margaret travelled on to town feeling solitary and old-maidish. How like an old maid to fancy that Mr. Wilcox was courting her! She had once visited a spinster—poor, silly, and unattractive—whose mania it was that every man who approached her fell in love. How Margaret’s heart had bled for the deluded thing! How she had lectured, reasoned, and in despair acquiesced! “I may have been deceived by the curate, my dear, but the young fellow who brings the midday posts really is fond of me, and has as a matter of fact—” It had always seemed to her the most hideous comer of old age, yet she might be driven into it herself by the mere pressure of virginity.
Mr. Wilcox met her at Waterloo himself. She felt certain that he was not the same as usual; for one thing, he took offence at everything she said.
“This is awfully kind of you,” she began, “but I’m afraid it’s not going to do. The house has not been built that suits the Schlegel family.”
“What! Have you come up determined not to deal?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly? In that case, let’s be starting.”
She lingered to admire the motor, which was new and a fairer creature than the vermillion giant that had borne Aunt Juley to her doom three years before.