Howards End E. M. Forster (best summer reads of all time .TXT) 📖

old bore,” she said simply. “He never came home last Saturday night because he wanted to be alone, and she thought he was with us.”

“With you?”

“Yes.” Evie tittered. “He hasn’t got the cosy home that you assumed. He needs outside interests.”

“Naughty young man!” cried the girl.

“Naughty?” said Margaret, who hated naughtiness more than sin. “When you’re married Miss Wilcox, won’t you want outside interests?”

“He has apparently got them,” put in Mr. Wilcox slyly.

“Yes, indeed, father.”

“He was tramping in Surrey, if you mean that,” said Margaret, pacing away rather crossly.

“Oh, I dare say!”

“Miss Wilcox, he was!”

“M⁠—m⁠—m⁠—m!” from Mr. Wilcox, who thought the episode amusing, if risque. With most ladies he would not have discussed it, but he was trading on Margaret’s reputation as an emancipated woman.

“He said so, and about such a thing he wouldn’t lie.”

They both began to laugh.

“That’s where I differ from you. Men lie about their positions and prospects, but not about a thing of that sort.”

He shook his head. “Miss Schlegel, excuse me, but I know the type.”

“I said before⁠—he isn’t a type. He cares about adventures rightly. He’s certain that our smug existence isn’t all. He’s vulgar and hysterical and bookish, but don’t think that sums him up. There’s manhood in him as well. Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say. He’s a real man.”

As she spoke their eyes met, and it was as if Mr. Wilcox’s defences fell. She saw back to the real man in him. Unwittingly she had touched his emotions.

A woman and two men⁠—they had formed the magic triangle of sex, and the male was thrilled to jealousy, in case the female was attracted by another male. Love, say the ascetics, reveals our shameful kinship with the beasts. Be it so: one can bear that; jealousy is the real shame. It is jealousy, not love, that connects us with the farmyard intolerably, and calls up visions of two angry cocks and a complacent hen. Margaret crushed complacency down because she was civilised. Mr. Wilcox, uncivilised, continued to feel anger long after he had rebuilt his defences, and was again presenting a bastion to the world.

“Miss Schlegel, you’re a pair of dear creatures, but you really must be careful in this uncharitable world. What does your brother say?”

“I forget.”

“Surely he has some opinion?”

“He laughs, if I remember correctly.”

“He’s very clever, isn’t he?” said Evie, who had met and detested Tibby at Oxford.

“Yes, pretty well⁠—but I wonder what Helen’s doing.”

“She is very young to undertake this sort of thing,” said Mr. Wilcox.

Margaret went out to the landing. She heard no sound, and Mr. Bast’s topper was missing from the hall.

“Helen!” she called.

“Yes!” replied a voice from the library.

“You in there?”

“Yes⁠—he’s gone some time.”

Margaret went to her. “Why, you’re all alone,” she said.

“Yes⁠—it’s all right, Meg. Poor, poor creature⁠—”

“Come back to the Wilcoxes and tell me later⁠—Mr. W. much concerned, and slightly titillated.”

“Oh, I’ve no patience with him. I hate him. Poor dear Mr. Bast! he wanted to talk literature, and we would talk business. Such a muddle of a man, and yet so worth pulling through. I like him extraordinarily.”

“Well done,” said Margaret, kissing her, “but come into the drawing-room now, and don’t talk about him to the Wilcoxes. Make light of the whole thing.”

Helen came and behaved with a cheerfulness that reassured their visitor⁠—this hen at all events was fancy-free.

“He’s gone with my blessing,” she cried, “and now for puppies.”

As they drove away, Mr. Wilcox said to his daughter:

“I am really concerned at the way those girls go on. They are as clever as you make ’em, but unpractical⁠—God bless me! One of these days they’ll go too far. Girls like that oughtn’t to live alone in London. Until they marry, they ought to have someone to look after them. We must look in more often⁠—we’re better than no one. You like them, don’t you, Evie?”

Evie replied: “Helen’s right enough, but I can’t stand the toothy one. And I shouldn’t have called either of them girls.”

Evie had grown up handsome. Dark-eyed, with the glow of youth under sunburn, built firmly and firm-lipped, she was the best the Wilcoxes could do in the way of feminine beauty. For the present, puppies and her father were the only things she loved, but the net of matrimony was being prepared for her, and a few days later she was attracted to a Mr. Percy Cahill, an uncle of Mrs. Charles’s, and he was attracted to her.

XVII

The Age of Property holds bitter moments even for a proprietor. When a move is imminent, furniture becomes ridiculous, and Margaret now lay awake at nights wondering where, where on earth they and all their belongings would be deposited in September next. Chairs, tables, pictures, books, that had rumbled down to them through the generations, must rumble forward again like a slide of rubbish to which she longed to give the final push, and send toppling into the sea. But there were all their father’s books⁠—they never read them, but they were their father’s, and must be kept. There was the marble-topped chiffonier⁠—their mother had set store by it, they could not remember why. Round every knob and cushion in the house gathered a sentiment that was at times personal, but more often a faint piety to the dead, a prolongation of rites that might have ended at the grave.

It was absurd, if you came to think of it; Helen and Tibby came to think of it; Margaret was too busy with the house-agents. The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilisation of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty. The Schlegels were certainly the poorer for the loss of Wickham Place. It had helped to balance their lives, and almost to counsel them. Nor is their ground-landlord spiritually the richer.