Charles need not have been anxious. Miss Schlegel had never
heard of his mother's strange request. She was to hear of
it in after years, when she had built up her life
differently, and it was to fit into position as the
headstone of the corner. Her mind was bent on other
questions now, and by her also it would have been rejected
as the fantasy of an invalid.
She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second
time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had
flowed into her life and ebbed out of it for ever. The
ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had strewn at her
feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she
stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so
little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this
last tremendous tide. Her friend had vanished in agony, but
not, she believed, in degradation. Her withdrawal had
hinted at other things besides disease and pain. Some leave
our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs.
Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures
can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little
of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had
shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if
there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim
nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an
equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that
he must leave.
The last word--whatever it would be--had certainly not
been said in Hilton churchyard. She had not died there. A
funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or
marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming
now too late, now too early, by which Society would register
the quick motions of man. In Margaret's eyes Mrs. Wilcox
had escaped registration. She had gone out of life vividly,
her own way, and no dust was so truly dust as the contents
of that heavy coffin, lowered with ceremonial until it
rested on the dust of the earth, no flowers so utterly
wasted as the chrysanthemums that the frost must have
withered before morning. Margaret had once said she "loved
superstition." It was not true. Few women had tried more
earnestly to pierce the accretions in which body and soul
are enwrapped. The death of Mrs. Wilcox had helped her in
her work. She saw a little more clearly than hitherto what
a human being is, and to what he may aspire. Truer
relationships gleamed. Perhaps the last word would be
hope--hope even on this side of the grave.
Meanwhile, she could take an interest in the survivors.
In spite of her Christmas duties, in spite of her brother,
the Wilcoxes continued to play a considerable part in her
thoughts. She had seen so much of them in the final week.
They were not "her sort," they were often suspicious and
stupid, and deficient where she excelled; but collision with
them stimulated her, and she felt an interest that verged
into liking, even for Charles. She desired to protect them,
and often felt that they could protect her, excelling where
she was deficient. Once past the rocks of emotion, they
knew so well what to do, whom to send for; their hands were
on all the ropes, they had grit as well as grittiness, and
she valued grit enormously. They led a life that she could
not attain to--the outer life of "telegrams and anger,"
which had detonated when Helen and Paul had touched in June,
and had detonated again the other week. To Margaret this
life was to remain a real force. She could not despise it,
as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtues
as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second
rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization. They
form character, too; Margaret could not doubt it: they keep
the soul from becoming sloppy. How dare Schlegels despise
Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a world?
"Don't brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the
superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to
brood on it is mediaeval. Our business is not to contrast
the two, but to reconcile them."
Helen replied that she had no intention of brooding on
such a dull subject. What did her sister take her for? The
weather was magnificent. She and the Mosebachs had gone
tobogganing on the only hill that Pomerania boasted. It was
fun, but overcrowded, for the rest of Pomerania had gone
there too. Helen loved the country, and her letter glowed
with physical exercise and poetry. She spoke of the
scenery, quiet, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, with
their scampering herds of deer; of the river and its quaint
entrance into the Baltic Sea; of the Oderberge, only three
hundred feet high, from which one slid all too quickly back
into the Pomeranian plains, and yet these Oderberge were
real mountains, with pine-forests, streams, and views
complete. "It isn't size that counts so much as the way
things are arranged." In another paragraph she referred to
Mrs. Wilcox sympathetically, but the news had not bitten
into her. She had not realized the accessories of death,
which are in a sense more memorable than death itself. The
atmosphere of precautions and recriminations, and in the
midst a human body growing more vivid because it was in
pain; the end of that body in Hilton churchyard; the
survival of something that suggested hope, vivid in its turn
against life's workaday cheerfulness;--all these were lost
to Helen, who only felt that a pleasant lady could now be
pleasant no longer. She returned to Wickham Place full of
her own affairs--she had had another proposal--and Margaret,
after a moment's hesitation, was content that this should be
so.
The proposal had not been a serious matter. It was the
work of Fraulein Mosebach, who had conceived the large and
patriotic notion of winning back her cousins to the
Fatherland by matrimony. England had played Paul Wilcox,
and lost; Germany played Herr Forstmeister someone--Helen
could not remember his name.
Herr Forstmeister lived in a wood, and standing on the
summit of the Oderberge, he had pointed out his house to
Helen, or rather, had pointed out the wedge of pines in
which it lay. She had exclaimed, "Oh, how lovely! That's
the place for me!" and in the evening Frieda appeared in her
bedroom. "I have a message, dear Helen," etc., and so she
had, but had been very nice when Helen laughed; quite
understood--a forest too solitary and damp--quite agreed,
but Herr Forstmeister believed he had assurance to the
contrary. Germany had lost, but with good-humour; holding
the manhood of the world, she felt bound to win. "And there
will even be someone for Tibby," concluded Helen. "There
now, Tibby, think of that; Frieda is saving up a little girl
for you, in pig-tails and white worsted stockings, but the
feet of the stockings are pink, as if the little girl had
trodden in strawberries. I've talked too much. My head
aches. Now you talk."
Tibby consented to talk. He too was full of his own
affairs, for he had just been up to try for a scholarship at
Oxford. The men were down, and the candidates had been
housed in various colleges, and had dined in hall. Tibby
was sensitive to beauty, the experience was new, and he gave
a description of his visit that was almost glowing. The
august and mellow University, soaked with the richness of
the western counties that it has served for a thousand
years, appealed at once to the boy's taste: it was the kind
of thing he could understand, and he understood it all the
better because it was empty. Oxford is--Oxford: not a mere
receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its
inmates to love it rather than to love one another: such at
all events was to be its effect on Tibby. His sisters sent
him there that he might make friends, for they knew that his
education had been cranky, and had severed him from other
boys and men. He made no friends. His Oxford remained
Oxford empty, and he took into life with him, not the memory
of a radiance, but the memory of a colour scheme.
It pleased Margaret to hear her brother and sister
talking. They did not get on overwell as a rule. For a few
moments she listened to them, feeling elderly and benign.
Then something occurred to her, and she interrupted:
"Helen, I told you about poor Mrs. Wilcox; that sad business?"
"Yes."
"I have had a correspondence with her son. He was
winding up the estate, and wrote to ask me whether his
mother had wanted me to have anything. I thought it good of
him, considering I knew her so little. I said that she had
once spoken of giving me a Christmas present, but we both
forgot about it afterwards."
"I hope Charles took the hint."
"Yes--that is to say, her husband wrote later on, and
thanked me for being a little kind to her, and actually gave
me her silver vinaigrette. Don't you think that is
extraordinarily generous? It has made me like him very
much. He hopes that this will not be the end of our
acquaintance, but that you and I will go and stop with Evie
some time in the future. I like Mr. Wilcox. He is taking
up his work--rubber--it is a big business. I gather he is
launching out rather. Charles is in it, too. Charles is
married--a pretty little creature, but she doesn't seem
wise. They took on the flat, but now they have gone off to
a house of their own."
Helen, after a decent pause, continued her account of
Stettin. How quickly a situation changes! In June she had
been in a crisis; even in November she could blush and be
unnatural; now it was January, and the whole affair lay
forgotten. Looking back on the past six months, Margaret
realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its
difference from the orderly sequence that has been
fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false
clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite
effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes.
The most successful career must show a waste of strength
that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful
is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him
who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that
kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that
preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that
men, like nations, are the better for staggering through
life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely
been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous,
but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is
indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle.
It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence
is romantic beauty.
Margaret hoped that for the future she would be less
cautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the past.
