“Presumably it’s very beautiful,” she said. “How do you like it, Crane?”
“Come, let’s be starting,” repeated her host. “How on earth did you know that my chauffeur was called Crane?”
“Why, I know Crane: I’ve been for a drive with Evie once. I know that you’ve got a parlour-maid called Milton. I know all sorts of things.”
“Evie!” he echoed in injured tones. “You won’t see her. She’s gone out with Cahill. It’s no fun, I can tell you, being left so much alone. I’ve got my work all day—indeed, a great deal too much of it—but when I come home in the evening, I tell you, I can’t stand the house.”
“In my absurd way, I’m lonely too,” Margaret replied. “It’s heart-breaking to leave one’s old home. I scarcely remember anything before Wickham Place, and Helen and Tibby were born there. Helen says—”
“You, too, feel lonely?”
“Horribly. Hullo. Parliament’s back!”
Mr. Wilcox glanced at Parliament contemptuously. The more important ropes of life lay elsewhere. “Yes, they are talking again,” said he. “But you were going to say—”
“Only some rubbish about furniture. Helen says it alone endures while men and houses perish, and that in the end the world will be a desert of chairs and sofas—just imagine it! —rolling through infinity with no one to sit upon them.”
“Your sister always liked her little joke.”
“She says ‘Yes,’ my brother says ‘No,’ to Ducie Street. It’s no fun helping us, Mr. Wilcox, I assure you.”
“You are not as unpractical as you pretend. I shall never believe it.”
Margaret laughed. But she was—quite as unpractical. She could not concentrate on details. Parliament, the Thames, the irresponsive chauffeur, would flash into the field of house-hunting, and all demand some comment or response. It is impossible to see modem life steadily and see it whole, and she had chosen to see it whole. Mr. Wilcox saw steadily. He never bothered over the mysterious or the private. The Thames might run inland from the sea, the chauffeur might conceal all passion and philosophy beneath his unhealthy skin. They knew their own business, and he knew his.
Yet she liked being with him. He was not a rebuke, but a stimulus, and banished morbidity. Some twenty years her senior, he preserved a gift that she supposed herself to have already lost—not youth’s creative power, but its self-confidence and optimism. He was so sure that it was a very pleasant world. His complexion was robust, his hair had receded but not thinned, the thick moustache and the eyes that Helen had compared to brandy-balls had an agreeable menace in them, whether they were turned towards the slums or towards the stars. Some day—in the millennium—there may be no need for his type. At present, homage is due to it from those who think themselves superior, and who possibly are.
“At all events, you responded to my telegram promptly,” he remarked.
“Oh, even I know a good thing when I see it.”
“I’m glad you don’t despise the goods of this world.”
“Heavens, no! Only idiots and prigs do that.”
“I am glad, very glad,” he repeated, suddenly softening and turning to her, as if the remark had pleased him. “There is so much cant talked in would-be intellectual circles. I am glad you don’t share it. Self-denial is all very well as a means of strengthening the character. But I can’t stand those people who run down comforts. They have usually some axe to grind. Can you?”
“Comforts are of two kinds,” said Margaret, who was keeping herself in hand—“those we can share with others, like fire, weather, or music; and those we can‘t—food, for instance. It depends.”
“I mean reasonable comforts, of course. I shouldn’t like to think that you—” He bent nearer; the sentence died unfinished. Margaret’s head turned very stupid, and the inside of it seemed to revolve like the beacon in a lighthouse. He did not kiss her, for the hour was half past twelve and the car was passing by the stables of Buckingham Palace. But the atmosphere was so charged with emotion that people only seemed to exist on her account, and she was surprised that Crane did not realize this and turn round. Idiot though she might be, surely Mr. Wilcox was more—how should one put it?—more psychological than usual. Always a good judge of character for business purposes, he seemed this afternoon to enlarge his field, and to note qualities outside neatness, obedience, and decision.
“I want to go over the whole house,” she announced when they arrived. “As soon as I get back to Swanage, which will be tomorrow afternoon. I’ll talk it over once more with Helen and Tibby, and wire you ‘yes’ or ’no.‘ ”
“Right. The dining-room.” And they began their survey.
The dining-room was big, but over-furnished. Chelsea would have moaned aloud. Mr. Wilcox had eschewed those decorative schemes that wince, and relent, and refrain, and achieve beauty by sacrificing comfort and pluck. After so much self-colour and self-denial, Margaret viewed with relief the sumptuous dado, the frieze, the gilded wall-paper, amid whose foliage parrots sang. It would never do with her own furniture, but those heavy chairs, that immense sideboard loaded with presentation plate, stood up against its pressure like men. The room suggested men, and Margaret, keen to derive the modem capitalist from the warriors and hungers of the past, saw it as an ancient guest-hall, where the lord sat at meat among his thanes. Even the Bible—the Dutch Bible that Charles had brought back from the Boer War—fell into position. Such a room admitted loot.
“Now the entrance-hall.”
The entrance-hall was paved.
“Here we fellows smoke.”
We fellows smoked in chairs of maroon leather. It was as if a motor-car had spawned. “Oh, jolly!” said Margaret, sinking into one of them.
“You do like it?” he said, fixing his eyes on her upturned face, and surely betraying an almost intimate note. “It’s all rubbish not making oneself comfortable. Isn’t it?”
“Ye-es. Semi-rubbish. Are those Cruikshanks?”
“Gillrays. Shall we go on upstairs?”
“Does all this furniture come from Howards End?”
“The Howards End furniture has all gone to Oniton.”
“Does—However, I’m concerned with the house, not the furniture. How big is this smoking-room?”
“Thirty by fifteen. No, wait a minute. Fifteen and a half.”
“Ah, well. Mr. Wilcox, aren’t you ever amused at the solemnity with which we middle classes approach the subject of houses?”
They proceeded to the drawing-room. Chelsea managed better here. It was sallow and ineffective. One could visualize the ladies withdrawing to it while their lords discussed life’s realities below, to the accompaniment of cigars. Had Mrs. Wilcox’s drawing-room looked thus at Howards End? Just as this thought entered Margaret’s brain, Mr. Wilcox did ask her to be his wife, and the knowledge that she had been right so overcame her that she nearly fainted.
But the proposal was not to rank among the world’s great love scenes.
“Miss Schlegel”—his voice was firm—“I have had you up on false pretences. I want to speak about a much more serious matter than a house.”
Margaret almost answered: “I know—”
“Could you be induced to share my—is it probable—”
“Oh, Mr. Wilcox!” she interrupted, holding the piano and averting her eyes. “I see, I see. I will write to you afterwards if I may.”
He began to stammer. “Miss Schlegel—Margaret—you don’t understand.”
“Oh yes! Indeed, yes!” said Margaret.
“I am asking you to be my wife.”
So deep already was her sympathy that when he said, “I am asking you to be my wife,” she made herself give a little start. She must show surprise if he expected it. An immense joy came over her. It was indescribable. It had nothing to do with humanity, and most resembled the all-pervading happiness of fine weather. Fine weather is due to the sun, but Margaret could think of no central radiance here. She stood in his drawing-room happy, and longin
g to give happiness. On leaving him she realized that the central radiance had been love.
“You aren’t offended, Miss Schlegel?”
“How could I be offended?”
There was a moment’s pause. He was anxious to get rid of her, and she knew it. She had too much intuition to look at him as he struggled for possessions that money cannot buy. He desired comradeship and affection, but he feared them, and she, who had taught herself only to desire, and could have clothed the struggle with beauty, held back, and hesitated with him.
“Good-bye,” she continued. “You will have a letter from me—I am going back to Swanage tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
“Good-bye, and it’s you I thank.”
“I may order the motor round, mayn’t I?”
“That would be most kind.”
“I wish I had written instead. Ought I to have written?”
“Not at all.”
“There’s just one question—”
She shook her head. He looked a little bewildered, and they parted.
They parted without shaking hands: she had kept the interview, for his sake, in tints of the quietest grey. Yet she thrilled with happiness ere she reached her own house. Others had loved her in the past, if one may apply to their brief desires so grave a word, but those others had been “ninnies”—young men who had nothing to do, old men who could find nobody better. And she had often “loved,” too, but only so far as the facts of sex demanded: mere yearnings for the masculine, to be dismissed for what they were worth, with a smile. Never before had her personality been touched. She was not young or very rich, and it amazed her that a man of any standing should take her seriously. As she sat trying to do accounts in her empty house, amidst beautiful pictures and noble books, waves of emotion broke, as if a tide of passion was flowing through the night air. She shook her head, tried to concentrate her attention, and failed. In vain did she repeat: “But I’ve been through this sort of thing before.” She had never been through it; the big machinery, as opposed to the little, had been set in motion, and the idea that Mr. Wilcox loved, obsessed her before she came to love him in return.
She would come to no decision yet. “Oh, sir, this is so sudden”—that prudish phrase exactly expressed her when her time came. Premonitions are not preparation. She must examine more closely her own nature and his; she must talk it over judicially with Helen. It had been a strange love-scene—the central radiance unacknowledged from first to last. She, in his place, would have said “Ich liebe dich,” but perhaps it was not his habit to open the heart. He might have done it if she had pressed him—as a matter of duty, perhaps; England expects every man to open his heart once; but the effort would have jarred him, and never, if she could avoid it, should he lose those defences that he had chosen to raise against the world. He must never be bothered with emotional talk, or with a display of sympathy. He was an elderly man now, and it would be futile and impudent to correct him.
Mrs. Wilcox strayed in and out, ever a welcome ghost; surveying the scene, thought Margaret, without one hint of bitterness.
Chapter XIX
If one wanted to show a foreigner England, perhaps the wisest course would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck Hills, and stand him on their summit, a few miles to the east of Corfe. Then system after system of our island would roll together under his feet. Beneath him is the valley of the Frome, and all the wild lands that come tossing down from Dorchester, black and gold, to mirror their gorse in the expanses of Poole. The valley of the Stour is beyond, unaccountable stream, dirty at Blandford, pure at Wimborne—the Stour, sliding out of fat fields, to marry the Avon beneath the tower of Christchurch. The valley of the Avon—invisible, but far to the north the trained eye may see Clearbury Ring that guards it, and the imagination may leap beyond that on to Salisbury Plain itself, and beyond the Plain to all the glorious downs of Central England. Nor is Suburbia absent. Bournemouth’s ignoble coast cowers to the right, heralding the pine-trees that mean, for all their beauty, red houses and the Stock Exchange, and extend to the gates of London itself. So tremendous is the City’s trail! But the cliffs of Freshwater it shall never touch, and the island will guard the Island’s purity till the end of time. Seen from the west, the Wight is beautiful beyond all laws of beauty. It is as if a fragment of England floated forward to greet the foreigner—chalk of our chalk, turf of our turf, epitome of what will follow. And behind the fragment lies Southampton, hostess to the nations, and Portsmouth, a latent fire, and all around it, with double and treble collision of tides, swirls the sea. How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanished or triumphant! How many ships, railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.
So Frieda Mosebach, now Frau Architect Liesecke, and mother to her husband’s baby, was brought up to these heights to be impressed, and, after a prolonged gaze, she said that the hills were more swelling here than in Pomerania, which was true, but did not seem to Mrs. Munt apposite. Poole Harbour was dry, which led her to praise the absence of muddy foreshore at Friedrich Wilhelms Bad, Rügen, where beech-trees hang over the tideless Baltic, and cows may contemplate the brine. Rather unhealthy Mrs. Munt thought this would be, water being safer when it moved about.
“And your English lakes—Vindermere, Grasmere—are they, then, unhealthy?”
“No, Frau Liesecke; but that is because they are fresh water, and different. Salt water ought to have tides, and go up and down a great deal, or else it smells. Look, for instance, at an aquarium. ”
“An aquarium! Oh, Meesis Munt, you mean to tell me that fresh aquariums stink less than salt? Why, when Victor, my brother-in-law, collected many tadpoles—”
“You are not to say ‘stink,’ ” interrupted Helen; “at least, you may say it, but you must pretend you are being funny while you say it.”
“Then ‘smell.’ And the mud of your Pool down there—does it not smell, or may I say ‘stink, ha, ha’?”
“There always has been mud in Poole Harbour,” said Mrs. Munt, with a slight frown. “The rivers bring it down, and a most valuable oyster-fishery depends upon it.”
“Yes, that is so,” conceded Frieda; and another international incident was closed.
“ ‘Bournemouth is,’ ” resumed their hostess, quoting a local rhyme to which she was much attached—“ ‘Bournemouth is, Poole was, and Swanage is to be the most important town of all and biggest of the three.’ Now, Frau Liesecke, I have shown you Bournemouth, and I have shown you Poole, so let us walk backward a little, and look down again at Swanage.”
“Aunt Juley, wouldn’t that be Meg’s train?”
A tiny puff of smoke had been circling the harbour, and now was bearing southwards towards them over the black and the gold.
“Oh, dearest Margaret, I do hope she won’t be overtired.”
“Oh, I do wonder—I do wonder whether she’s taken the house. ”
“I hope she hasn’t been hasty.”
“So do I—oh, so do I.”
“Will it be as beautiful as Wickham Place?” Frieda asked.
“I should think it would. Trust Mr. Wilcox for doing himself proud. All those Ducie Street houses are beautiful in their modern way, and I can’t think why he doesn’t keep on with it. But it’s really for Evie that he went there, and now that Evie’s going to be married—”
“Ah!”
“You’ve never seen Miss Wilcox, Frieda. How absurdly matrimonial you are!”
“But sister to that Paul?”
“Yes,”
“And to that Charles,” said Mrs. Munt with feeling. “Oh, Helen, Helen, what a time that was!”
Helen laughed. “Meg and I haven’t got such tender hearts. If there’s a chance of a cheap house, we go for it.”
“Now look, Frau Liese
cke, at my niece’s train. You see, it is coming towards us—coming, coming; and, when it gets to Corfe, it will actually go through the downs, on which we are standing, so that, if we walk over, as I suggested, and look down on Swanage, we shall see it coming on the other side. Shall we?”
Frieda assented, and in a few minutes they had crossed the ridge and exchanged the greater view for the lesser. Rather a dull valley lay below, backed by the slope of the coastward downs. They were looking across the Isle of Purbeck and on to Swanage, soon to be the most important town of all, and ugliest of the three. Margaret’s train reappeared as promised, and was greeted with approval by her aunt. It came to a standstill in the middle distance, and there it had been planned that Tibby should meet her, and drive her, and a tea-basket, up to join them.
“You see,” continued Helen to her cousin, “the Wilcoxes collect houses as your Victor collects tadpoles. They have, one, Ducie Street; two, Howards End, where my great rumpus was; three, a country seat in Shropshire; four, Charles has a house in Hilton; and five, another near Epsom; and six, Evie will have a house when she marries, and probably a pied-à-terre in the country—which makes seven. Oh yes, and Paul a hut in Africa makes eight. I wish we could get Howards End. That was something like a dear little house! Didn’t you think so, Aunt Juley?”
“I had too much to do, dear, to look at it,” said Mrs. Munt, with a gracious dignity. “I had everything to settle and explain, and Charles Wilcox to keep in his place besides. It isn’t likely I should remember much. I just remember having lunch in your bedroom. ”
“Yes, so do I. But, oh dear, dear, how dead it all seems! And in the autumn there began this anti-Pauline movement—you, and Frieda, and Meg, and Mrs. Wilcox, all obsessed with the idea that I might yet marry Paul.”
“You yet may,” said Frieda despondently.
Helen shook her head. “The Great Wilcox Peril will never return. If I’m certain of anything, it’s of that.”
“One is certain of nothing but the truth of one’s own emotions.”
The remark fell damply on the conversation. But Helen slipped her arm round her cousin, somehow liking her the better for making it. It was not an original remark, nor had Frieda appropriated it passionately, for she had a patriotic rather than a philosophic mind. Yet it betrayed that interest in the universal which the average Teuton possesses and the average Englishman does not. It was, however illogically, the good, the beautiful, the true, as opposed to the respectable, the pretty, the adequate. It was a landscape of Böcklin’s beside a landscape of Leader‘s, strident and ill-considered, but quivering into supernatural life. It sharpened idealism, stirred the soul. It may have been a bad preparation for what followed.