Tibby was now approaching his last year at Oxford. He had
moved out of college, and was contemplating the Universe, or
such portions of it as concerned him, from his comfortable
lodgings in Long Wall. He was not concerned with much.
When a young man is untroubled by passions and sincerely
indifferent to public opinion, his outlook is necessarily
limited. Tibby neither wished to strengthen the position of
the rich nor to improve that of the poor, and so was well
content to watch the elms nodding behind the mildly
embattled parapets of Magdalen. There are worse lives.
Though selfish, he was never cruel; though affected in
manner, he never posed. Like Margaret, he disdained the
heroic equipment, and it was only after many visits that men
discovered Schlegel to possess a character and a brain. He
had done well in Mods, much to the surprise of those who
attended lectures and took proper exercise, and was now
glancing disdainfully at Chinese in case he should some day
consent to qualify as a Student Interpreter. To him thus
employed Helen entered. A telegram had preceded her.
He noticed, in a distant way, that his sister had
altered. As a rule he found her too pronounced, and had
never come across this look of appeal, pathetic yet
dignified--the look of a sailor who has lost everything at sea.
"I have come from Oniton," she began. "There has been a
great deal of trouble there."
"Who's for lunch?" said Tibby, picking up the claret,
which was warming in the hearth. Helen sat down
submissively at the table. "Why such an early start?" he asked.
"Sunrise or something--when I could get away."
"So I surmise. Why?"
"I don't know what's to be done, Tibby. I am very much
upset at a piece of news that concerns Meg, and do not want
to face her, and I am not going back to Wickham Place. I
stopped here to tell you this."
The landlady came in with the cutlets. Tibby put a
marker in the leaves of his Chinese Grammar and helped
them. Oxford--the Oxford of the vacation--dreamed and
rustled outside, and indoors the little fire was coated with
grey where the sunshine touched it. Helen continued her odd
story.
"Give Meg my love and say that I want to be alone. I
mean to go to Munich or else Bonn."
"Such a message is easily given," said her brother.
"As regards Wickham Place and my share of the furniture,
you and she are to do exactly as you like. My own feeling
is that everything may just as well be sold. What does one
want with dusty economic, books, which have made the world
no better, or with mother's hideous chiffoniers? I have
also another commission for you. I want you to deliver a
letter." She got up. "I haven't written it yet. Why
shouldn't I post it, though?" She sat down again. "My head
is rather wretched. I hope that none of your friends are
likely to come in."
Tibby locked the door. His friends often found it in
this condition. Then he asked whether anything had gone
wrong at Evie's wedding.
"Not there," said Helen, and burst into tears.
He had known her hysterical--it was one of her aspects
with which he had no concern--and yet these tears touched
him as something unusual. They were nearer the things that
did concern him, such as music. He laid down his knife and
looked at her curiously. Then, as she continued to sob, he
went on with his lunch.
The time came for the second course, and she was still
crying. Apple Charlotte was to follow, which spoils by
waiting. "Do you mind Mrs. Martlett coming in?" he asked,
"or shall I take it from her at the door?"
"Could I bathe my eyes, Tibby?"
He took her to his bedroom, and introduced the pudding
in her absence. Having helped himself, he put it down to
warm in the hearth. His hand stretched towards the Grammar,
and soon he was turning over the pages, raising his eyebrows
scornfully, perhaps at human nature, perhaps at Chinese. To
him thus employed Helen returned. She had pulled herself
together, but the grave appeal had not vanished from her eyes.
"Now for the explanation," she said. "Why didn't I
begin with it? I have found out something about Mr.
Wilcox. He has behaved very wrongly indeed, and ruined two
people's lives. It all came on me very suddenly last night;
I am very much upset, and I do not know what to do. Mrs. Bast--"
"Oh, those people!"
Helen seemed silenced.
"Shall I lock the door again?"
"No, thanks, Tibbikins. You're being very good to me.
I want to tell you the story before I go abroad. You must
do exactly what you like--treat it as part of the
furniture. Meg cannot have heard it yet, I think. But I
cannot face her and tell her that the man she is going to
marry has misconducted himself. I don't even know whether
she ought to be told. Knowing as she does that I dislike
him, she will suspect me, and think that I want to ruin her
match. I simply don't know what to make of such a thing. I
trust your judgment. What would you do?"
"I gather he has had a mistress," said Tibby.
Helen flushed with shame and anger. "And ruined two
people's lives. And goes about saying that personal actions
count for nothing, and there always will be rich and poor.
He met her when he was trying to get rich out in Cyprus--I
don't wish to make him worse than he is, and no doubt she
was ready enough to meet him. But there it is. They met.
He goes his way and she goes hers. What do you suppose is
the end of such women?"
He conceded that it was a bad business.
"They end in two ways: Either they sink till the lunatic
asylums and the workhouses are full of them, and cause Mr.
Wilcox to write letters to the papers complaining of our
national degeneracy, or else they entrap a boy into marriage
before it is too late. She--I can't blame her.
"But this isn't all," she continued after a long pause,
during which the landlady served them with coffee. "I come
now to the business that took us to Oniton. We went all
three. Acting on Mr. Wilcox's advice, the man throws up a
secure situation and takes an insecure one, from which he is
dismissed. There are certain excuses, but in the main Mr.
Wilcox is to blame, as Meg herself admitted. It is only
common justice that he should employ the man himself. But
he meets the woman, and, like the cur that he is, he
refuses, and tries to get rid of them. He makes Meg write.
Two notes came from her late that evening--one for me, one
for Leonard, dismissing him with barely a reason. I
couldn't understand. Then it comes out that Mrs. Bast had
spoken to Mr. Wilcox on the lawn while we left her to get
rooms, and was still speaking about him when Leonard came
back to her. This Leonard knew all along. He thought it
natural he should be ruined twice. Natural! Could you have
contained yourself?.
"It is certainly a very bad business," said Tibby.
His reply seemed to calm his sister. "I was afraid that
I saw it out of proportion. But you are right outside it,
and you must know. In a day or two--or perhaps a week--take
whatever steps you think fit. I leave it in your hands."
She concluded her charge.
"The facts as they touch Meg are all before you," she
added; and Tibby sighed and felt it rather hard that,
because of his open mind, he should be empanelled to serve
as a juror. He had never been interested in human beings,
for which one must blame him, but he had had rather too much
of them at Wickham Place. Just as some people cease to
attend when books are mentioned, so Tibby's attention
wandered when "personal relations" came under discussion.
Ought Margaret to know what Helen knew the Basts to know?
Similar questions had vexed him from infancy, and at Oxford
he had learned to say that the importance of human beings
has been vastly overrated by specialists. The epigram, with
its faint whiff of the eighties, meant nothing. But he
might have let it off now if his sister had not been
ceaselessly beautiful.
"You see, Helen--have a cigarette--I don't see what I'm
to do."
"Then there's nothing to be done. I dare say you are
right. Let them marry. There remains the question of
compensation. "
"Do you want me to adjudicate that too? Had you not
better consult an expert?"
"This part is in confidence," said Helen. "It has
nothing to do with Meg, and do not mention it to her. The
compensation--I do not see who is to pay it if I don't, and
I have already decided on the minimum sum. As soon as
possible I am placing it to your account, and when I am in
Germany you will pay it over for me. I shall never forget
your kindness, Tibbikins, if you do this."
"What is the sum?"
"Five thousand."
"Good God alive!" said Tibby, and went crimson.
"Now, what is the good of driblets? To go through life
having done one thing--to have raised one person from the
abyss: not these puny gifts of shillings and
blankets--making the grey more grey. No doubt people will
think me extraordinary."
"I don't care a damn what people think!" cried he,
heated to unusual manliness of diction. "But it's half what
you have."
"Not nearly half." She spread out her hands over her
soiled skirt. "I have far too much, and we settled at
Chelsea last spring that three hundred a year is necessary
to set a man on his feet. What I give will bring in a
hundred and fifty between two. It isn't enough."
He could not recover. He was not angry or even shocked,
and he saw that Helen would still have plenty to live on.
But it amazed him to think what haycocks people can make of
their lives. His delicate intonations would not work, and
he could only blurt out that the five thousand pounds would
mean a great deal of bother for him personally.
"I didn't expect you to understand me."
"I? I understand nobody."
"But you'll do it?"
"Apparently."
"I leave you two commissions, then. The first concerns
Mr. Wilcox, and you are to use your discretion. The second
concerns the money, and is to be mentioned to no one, and
carried out literally. You will send a hundred pounds on
account tomorrow."
He walked with her to the station, passing through those
streets whose serried beauty never bewildered him and never
fatigued. The lovely creature raised domes and spires into
the cloudless blue, and only the ganglion of vulgarity round
Carfax showed how evanescent was the phantom, how faint its
claim to represent England. Helen, rehearsing her
commission, noticed nothing: the Basts were in her brain,
and she retold the crisis in a meditative way, which might
have made other men curious. She was seeing whether it
would hold. He asked her once why she had taken the Basts
right into the heart of Evie's wedding. She stopped like a
frightened animal and said, "Does that seem to you so odd?"
Her eyes, the hand laid on the mouth, quite haunted him,
until they were absorbed into the figure of St. Mary the
Virgin, before whom he paused for a moment on the walk home.
It is convenient to follow him in the discharge of his
duties. Margaret summoned him the next day. She was
terrified at Helen's flight, and he had to say that she had
called in at Oxford. Then she said: "Did she seem worried
at any rumour about Henry?" He answered, "Yes." "I knew it
was that!" she exclaimed. "I'll write to her." Tibby was relieved.
He then sent the cheque to the address that Helen gave
him, and stated that later on he was instructed to forward
five thousand pounds. An answer came back, very civil and
quiet in tone--such an answer as Tibby himself would have
given. The cheque was returned, the legacy refused, the
writer being in no need of money. Tibby forwarded this to
Helen, adding in the fulness of his heart that Leonard Bast
seemed somewhat a monumental person after all. Helen's
reply was frantic. He was to take no notice. He was to go
down at once and say that she commanded acceptance. He
went. A scurf of books and china ornaments awaited them.
The Basts had just been evicted for not paying their rent,
and had wandered no one knew whither. Helen had begun
bungling with her money by this time, and had even sold out
her shares in the Nottingham and Derby Railway. For some
weeks she did nothing. Then she reinvested, and, owing to
the good advice of her stockbrokers, became rather richer
than she had been before.
