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 manoeuvred to get her to
Simpson's, might this be a manoeuvre 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 buff 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 post really is fond of me, and
has, as a matter fact--" It had always seemed to her the
most hideous corner 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 vermilion giant that had borne Aunt
Juley to her doom three years before.
"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 parlourmaid 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 likes 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 modern 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 side-board loaded with presentation plate, stood up
against its pressure like men. The room suggested men, and
Margaret, keen to derive the modern capitalist from the
warriors and hunters 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
longing 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.
