This was Helen’s evening—won at what cost, and not to be marred by the sorrows of others. Of her own tragedy Margaret never uttered a word.
“One isolates,” said Helen slowly. “I isolated Mr. Wilcox from the other forces that were pulling Leonard downhill. Consequently, I was full of pity, and almost of revenge. For weeks I had blamed Mr. Wilcox only, and so, when your letters came—”
“I need never have written them,” sighed Margaret. “They never shielded Henry. How hopeless it is to tidy away the past, even for others!”
“I did not know that it was your own idea to dismiss the Basts.”
“Looking back, that was wrong of me.”
“Looking back, darling, I know that it was right. It is right to save the man whom one loves. I am less enthusiastic about justice now. But we both thought you wrote at his dictation. It seemed the last touch of his callousness. Being very much wrought up by this time—and Mrs. Bast was upstairs. I had not seen her, and had talked for a long time to Leonard—I had snubbed him for no reason, and that should have warned me I was in danger. So when the notes came I wanted us to go to you for an explanation. He said that he guessed the explanation—he knew of it, and you mustn’t know. I pressed him to tell me. He said no one must know; it was something to do with his wife. Right up to the end we were Mr. Bast and Miss Schlegel. I was going to tell him that he must be frank with me when I saw his eyes, and guessed that Mr. Wilcox had ruined him in two ways, not one. I drew him to me. I made him tell me. I felt very lonely myself. He is not to blame. He would have gone on worshipping me. I want never to see him again, though it sounds appalling. I wanted to give him money and feel finished. Oh, Meg, the little that is known about these things!”
She laid her face against the tree.
“The little, too, that is known about growth! Both times it was loneliness, and the night, and panic afterwards. Did Leonard grow out of Paul?”
Margaret did not speak for a moment. So tired was she that her attention had actually wandered to the teeth—the teeth that had been thrust into the tree’s bark to medicate it. From where she sat she could see them gleam. She had been trying to count them. “Leonard is a better growth than madness,” she said. “I was afraid that you would react against Paul until you went over the verge.”
“I did react until I found poor Leonard. I am steady now. I shan’t ever like your Henry, dearest Meg, or even speak kindly about him, but all that blinding hate is over. I shall never rave against Wilcoxes any more. I understand how you married him, and you will now be very happy.”
Margaret did not reply.
“Yes,” repeated Helen, her voice growing more tender, “I do at last understand.”
“Except Mrs. Wilcox, dearest, no one understands our little movements. ”
“Because in death—I agree.”
“Not quite. I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman’s mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it. People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness. I cannot believe that knowledge such as hers will perish with knowledge such as mine. She knew about realities. She knew when people were in love, though she was not in the room. I don’t doubt that she knew when Henry deceived her.”
“Good night, Mrs. Wilcox,” called a voice.
“Oh, good night, Miss Avery.”
“Why should Miss Avery work for us?” Helen murmured.
“Why, indeed?”
Miss Avery crossed the lawn and merged into the hedge that divided it from the farm. An old gap, which Mr. Wilcox had filled up, had reappeared, and her track through the dew followed the path that he had turfed over when he improved the garden and made it possible for games.
“This is not quite our house yet,” said Helen. “When Miss Avery called, I felt we are only a couple of tourists.”
“We shall be that everywhere, and for ever.”
“But affectionate tourists—”
“But tourists who pretend each hotel is their home.”
“I can’t pretend very long,” said Helen. “Sitting under this tree, one forgets, but I know that tomorrow I shall see the moon rise out of Germany. Not all your goodness can alter the facts of the case. Unless you will come with me.”
Margaret thought for a moment. In the past year she had grown so fond of England that to leave it was a real grief. Yet what detained her? No doubt Henry would pardon her outburst, and go on blustering and muddling into a ripe old age. But what was the good? She had just as soon vanish from his mind.
“Are you serious in asking me, Helen? Should I get on with your Monica?”
“You would not, but I am serious in asking you.”
“Still, no more plans now. And no more reminiscences.”
They were silent for a little. It was Helen’s evening.
The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
“Sleep now,” said Margaret.
The peace of the country was entering into her. It has no commerce with memory, and little with hope. Least of all is it concerned with the hopes of the next five minutes. It is the peace of the present, which passes understanding. Its murmur came “now,” and “now” once more as they trod the gravel, and “now,” as the moonlight fell upon their father’s sword. They passed upstairs, kissed, and amidst the endless iterations fell asleep. The house had enshadowed the tree at first, but as the moon rose higher the two disentangled, and were clear for a few moments at midnight. Margaret awoke and looked into the garden. How incomprehensible that Leonard Bast should have won her this night of peace! Was he also part of Mrs. Wilcox’s mind?
Chapter XLI
Far different was Leonard’s development. The months after Oniton, whatever minor troubles they might bring him, were all overshadowed by Remorse. When Helen looked back, she could philosophize, or she could look into the future and plan for her child. But the father saw nothing beyond his own sin. Weeks afterwards, in the midst of other occupations, he would suddenly cry out: “Brute—you brute, I couldn’t have—” and be rent into two people who held dialogues. Or brown rain would descend, blotting out faces and the sky. Even Jacky noticed the change in him. Most terrible were his sufferings when he awoke from sleep. Sometimes he was happy at first, but grew conscious of a burden hanging to him and weighing down his thoughts when they would move. Or little irons scorched his body. Or a sword stabbed him. He would sit at the edge of his bed, holding his heart and moaning: “Oh, what shall I do, whatever shall I do?” Nothing brought ease. He could put distance between him and the trespass, but it grew in his soul.
Remorse is not among the eternal verities. The Greeks were right to dethrone her. Her action is too capricious, as though the Erinyes selected for punishment only certain men and certain sins. And of all means to regeneration, Remorse is surely the most wasteful. It cuts away healthy tissues with the poisoned. It is a knife that probes far deeper than the evil. Leonard was driven straight through its torments and emerged pure, but enfeebled—a better man, who would never lose control of himself again, but also a smaller man, who had less to control. Nor did purity mean peace. The use of the knife can become a habit as hard to shake off as passion itself, and Leonard continued to start with a cry out of dreams.
He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to l
ive decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him. Memories of Evie’s wedding had warped her, the starched servants, the yards of uneaten food, the rustle of overdressed women, motor-cars oozing grease on the gravel, rubbish on a pretentious band. She had tasted the lees of this on her arrival: in the darkness, after failure, they intoxicated her. She and the victim seemed alone in a world of unreality, and she loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
In the morning she was gone. The note that she left, tender and hysterical in tone, and intended to be most kind, hurt her lover terribly. It was as if some work of art had been broken by him, some picture in the National Gallery slashed out of its frame. When he recalled her talents and her social position, he felt that the first passer-by had a right to shoot him down. He was afraid of the waitress and the porters at the railway-station. He was afraid at first of his wife, though later he was to regard her with a strange new tenderness, and to think: “There is nothing to choose between us, after all.”
The expedition to Shropshire crippled the Basts permanently. Helen in her flight forgot to settle the hotel bill, and took their return tickets away with her; they had to pawn Jacky’s bangles to get home, and the smash came a few days afterwards. It is true that Helen offered him five thousand pounds, but such a sum meant nothing to him. He could not see that the girl was desperately righting herself, and trying to save something out of the disaster, if it was only five thousand pounds. But he had to live somehow. He turned to his family, and degraded himself to a professional beggar. There was nothing else for him to do.
“A letter from Leonard,” thought Blanche, his sister; “and after all this time.” She hid it, so that her husband should not see, and, when he had gone to his work, read it with some emotion and sent the prodigal a little money out of her dress allowance.
“A letter from Leonard!” said the other sister, Laura, a few days later. She showed it to her husband. He wrote a cruel, insolent reply, but sent more money than Blanche, so Leonard soon wrote to him again.
And during the winter the system was developed. Leonard realized that they need never starve, because it would be too painful for his relatives. Society is based on the family, and the clever wastrel can exploit this indefinitely. Without a generous thought on either side, pounds and pounds passed. The donors disliked Leonard, and he grew to hate them intensely. When Laura censured his immoral marriage, he thought bitterly: “She minds that! What would she say if she knew the truth?” When Blanche’s husband offered him work, he found some pretext for avoiding it. He had wanted work keenly at Oniton, but too much anxiety had shattered him; he was joining the unemployable. When his brother, the lay reader, did not reply to a letter, he wrote again, saying that he and Jacky would come down to his village on foot. He did not intend this as blackmail. Still, the brother sent a postal order, and it became part of the system. And so passed his winter and his spring.
In the horror there are two bright spots. He never confused the past. He remained alive, and blessed are those who live, if it is only to a sense of sinfulness. The anodyne of muddledom, by which most men blur and blend their mistakes, never passed Leonard’s lips—
And if I drink oblivion of a day,
So shorten I the stature of my soul.
It is a hard saying, and a hard man wrote it, but it lies at the foot of all character.
And the other bright spot was his tenderness for Jacky. He pitied her with nobility now—not the contemptuous pity of a man who sticks to a woman through thick and thin. He tried to be less irritable. He wondered what her hungry eyes desired—nothing that she could express, or that he or any man could give her. Would she ever receive the justice that is mercy—the justice for by-products that the world is too busy to bestow? She was fond of flowers, generous with money, and not revengeful. If she had borne him a child, he might have cared for her. Unmarried, Leonard would never have begged; he would have flickered out and died. But the whole of life is mixed. He had to provide for Jacky, and went down dirty paths that she might have a few feathers and dishes of food that suited her.
One day he caught sight of Margaret and her brother. He was in St. Paul’s. He had entered the cathedral partly to, avoid the rain and partly to see a picture that had educated him in former years. But the light was bad, the picture ill placed, and Time and Judgment were inside him now. Death alone still charmed him, with her lap of poppies, on which all men shall sleep. He took one glance, and turned aimlessly away towards a chair. Then down the nave he saw Miss Schlegel and her brother. They stood in the fairway of passengers, and their faces were extremely grave. He was perfectly certain that they were in trouble about their sister.
Once outside—and he fled immediately—he wished that he had spoken to them. What was his life? What were a few angry words, or even imprisonment? He had done wrong—that was the true terror. Whatever they might know, he would tell them everything he knew. He re-entered St. Paul’s. But they had moved in his absence, and had gone to lay their difficulties before Mr. Wilcox and Charles.
The sight of Margaret turned remorse into new channels. He desired to confess, and though the desire is proof of a weakened nature, which is about to lose the essence of human intercourse, it did not take an ignoble form. He did not suppose that confession would bring him happiness. It was rather that he yearned to get clear of the tangle. So does the suicide yearn. The impulses are akin, and the crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind. Confession need harm no one—it can satisfy that test—and though it was un-English, and ignored by our Anglican cathedral, Leonard had a right to decide upon it.
Moreover, he trusted Margaret. He wanted her hardness now. That cold, intellectual nature of hers would be just, if unkind. He would do whatever she told him, even if he had to see Helen. That was the supreme punishment she would exact. And perhaps she would tell him how Helen was. That was the supreme reward.
He knew nothing about Margaret, not even whether she was married to Mr. Wilcox, and tracking her out took several days. That evening he toiled through the wet to Wickham Place, where the new flats were now appearing. Was he also the cause of their move? Were they expelled from society on his account? Thence to a public library, but could find no satisfactory Schlegel in the directory. On the morrow he searched again. He hung about outside Mr. Wilcox’s office at lunch time, and, as the clerks came out, said: “Excuse me, sir, but is your boss married?” Most of them stared, some said “What’s that to you?” but one, who had not yet acquired reticence, told him what he wished. Leonard could not learn the private address. That necessitated more trouble with directories and tubes. Ducie Street was not discovered till the Monday, the day that Margaret and her husband went down on their hunting expedition to Howards End.
He called at about four o‘clock. The weather had changed, and the sun shone gaily on the ornamental steps—black and white marble in triangles. Leonard lowered his eyes to them after ringing the bell. He felt in curious health: doors seemed to be opening and shutting inside his body, and he had been obliged to sleep sitting up in bed, with his back propped against the wall. When the parlour-maid came, he could not see her face; the brown rain had descended suddenly.
“Does Mrs. Wilcox live here?” he asked.
“She’s out,” was the answer.
“When will she be back?”
“I’ll ask,” said the parlour-maid.
Margaret had given instructions that no one who mentioned her name should ever be rebuffed. Putting the door on the chain—for Leonard’s appearance demanded this—she went through to the smoking-room, which was occupied by Tibby. Tibby was asleep. He had had a good lunch. Charles Wilcox had not yet rung him up for the distracting interview. He said drowsily: “I don’t know. Hilton. Howards End. Who is it?”
“I’ll ask, sir.”
“No, don’t bother.”
“They have taken the car to Howards
End,” said the parlour maid to Leonard.
He thanked her, and asked whereabouts that place was.
“You appear to want to know a good deal,” she remarked. But Margaret had forbidden her to be mysterious. She told him against her better judgment that Howards End was in Hertfordshire.
“Is it a village, please?”
“Village! It’s Mr.Wilcox’s private house—at least, it’s one of them. Mrs. Wilcox keeps her furniture there. Hilton is the village. ”
“Yes. And when will they be back?”
“Mr. Schlegel doesn’t know. We can’t know everything, can we?” She shut him out, and went to attend to the telephone, which was ringing furiously.
He loitered away another night of agony. Confession grew more difficult. As soon as possible he went to bed. He watched a patch of moonlight cross the floor of their lodging, and, as sometimes happens when the mind is overtaxed, he fell asleep for the rest of the room, but kept awake for the patch of moonlight. Horrible! Then began one of those disintegrating dialogues. Part of him said: “Why horrible? It’s ordinary light from the moon.” “But it moves.” “So does the moon.” “But it is a clenched fist.” “Why not?” “But it is going to touch me.” “Let it.” And, seeming to gather motion, the patch ran up his blanket. Presently a blue snake appeared; then another, parallel to it. “Is there life in the moon?” “Of course.” “But I thought it was uninhabited.” “Not by Time, Death, Judgment, and the smaller snakes.” “Smaller snakes!” said Leonard indignantly and aloud. “What a notion!” By a rending effort of the will he woke the rest of the room up. Jacky, the bed, their food, their clothes on the chair, gradually entered his consciousness, and the horror vanished outwards, like a ring that is spreading through water.