Works of E M Forster

by E. M. Forster

  He ceased. “Won’t you have something to eat?” said Margaret. “I don’t know what to do. It isn’t my house, and though Mr. Wilcox would have been glad to see you at any other time — as I say, I don’t know what to do, but I undertake to do what I can for you. Helen, offer them something. Do try a sandwich, Mrs. Bast.”

  They moved to a long table behind which a servant was still standing. Iced cakes, sandwiches innumerable, coffee, claret-cup, champagne, remained almost intact; their overfed guests could do no more. Leonard refused. Jacky thought she could manage a little. Margaret left them whispering together, and had a few more words with Helen.

  She said: “Helen, I like Mr. Bast. I agree that he’s worth helping. I agree that we are directly responsible.”

  “No, indirectly. Via Mr. Wilcox.”

  “Let me tell you once for all that if you take up that attitude, I’ll do nothing. No doubt you’re right logically, and are entitled to say a great many scathing things about Henry. Only, I won’t have it. So choose.”

  Helen looked at the sunset.

  “If you promise to take them quietly to the George I will speak to Henry about them — in my own way, mind; there is to be none of this absurd screaming about justice. I have no use for justice. If it was only a question of money, we could do it ourselves. But he wants work, and that we can’t give him, but possibly Henry can.”

  “It’s his duty to,” grumbled Helen.

  “Nor am I concerned with duty. I’m concerned with the characters of various people whom we know, and how, things being as they are, things may be made a little better. Mr. Wilcox hates being asked favours; all business men do. But I am going to ask him, at the risk of a rebuff, because I want to make things a little better.”

  “Very well. I promise. You take it very calmly.”

  “Take them off to the George, then, and I’ll try. Poor creatures! but they look tired.” As they parted, she added: “I haven’t nearly done with you, though, Helen. You have been most self-indulgent. I can’t get over it. You have less restraint rather than more as you grow older. Think it over and alter yourself, or we shan’t have happy lives.”

  She rejoined Henry. Fortunately he had been sitting down: these physical matters were important. “Was it townees?” he asked, greeting her with a pleasant smile.

  “You’ll never believe me,” said Margaret, sitting down beside him. “It’s all right now, but it was my sister.”

  “Helen here?” he cried, preparing to rise. “But she refused the invitation. I thought hated weddings.”

  “Don’t get up. She has not come to the wedding. I’ve bundled her off to the George.”

  Inherently hospitable, he protested.

  “No; she has two of her proteges with her and must keep with them.”

  “Let ’em all come.”

  “My dear Henry, did you see them?”

  “I did catch sight of a brown bunch of a woman, certainly.”

  “The brown bunch was Helen, but did you catch sight of a sea-green and salmon bunch?”

  “What! are they out bean-feasting?”

  “No; business. They wanted to see me, and later on I want to talk to you about them.”

  She was ashamed of her own diplomacy. In dealing with a Wilcox, how tempting it was to lapse from comradeship, and to give him the kind of woman that he desired! Henry took the hint at once, and said: “Why later on? Tell me now. No time like the present.”

  “Shall I?”

  “If it isn’t a long story.”

  “Oh, not five minutes; but there’s a sting at the end of it, for I want you to find the man some work in your office.”

  “What are his qualifications?”

  “I don’t know. He’s a clerk.”

  “How old?”

  “Twenty-five, perhaps.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Bast,” said Margaret, and was about to remind him that they had met at Wickham Place, but stopped herself. It had not been a successful meeting.

  “Where was he before?”

  “Dempster’s Bank.”

  “Why did he leave?” he asked, still remembering nothing.

  “They reduced their staff.”

  “All right; I’ll see him.”

  It was the reward of her tact and devotion through the day. Now she understood why some women prefer influence to rights. Mrs. Plynlimmon, when condemning suffragettes, had said: “The woman who can’t influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.” Margaret had winced, but she was influencing Henry now, and though pleased at her little victory, she knew that she had won it by the methods of the harem.

  “I should be glad if you took him,” she said, “but I don’t know whether he’s qualified.”

  “I’ll do what I can. But, Margaret, this mustn’t be taken as a precedent.”

  “No, of course — of course— “

  “I can’t fit in your proteges every day. Business would suffer.”

  “I can promise you he’s the last. He — he’s rather a special case.”

  “Proteges always are.”

  She let it stand at that. He rose with a little extra touch of complacency, and held out his hand to help her up. How wide the gulf between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be! And she herself — hovering as usual between the two, now accepting men as they are, now yearning with her sister for Truth. Love and Truth — their warfare seems eternal perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air.

  “Your protege has made us late,” said he. “The Fussells — will just be starting.”

  On the whole she sided with men as they are. Henry would save the Basts as he had saved Howards End, while Helen and her friends were discussing the ethics of salvation. His was a slap-dash method, but the world has been built slap-dash, and the beauty of mountain and river and sunset may be but the varnish with which the unskilled artificer hides his joins. Oniton, like herself, was imperfect. Its apple-trees were stunted, its castle ruinous. It, too, had suffered in the border warfare between the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt, between things as they are and as they ought to be. Once more the west was retreating, once again the orderly stars were dotting the eastern sky. There is certainly no rest for us on the earth. But there is happiness, and as Margaret descended the mound on her lover’s arm, she felt that she was having her share.

  To her annoyance, Mrs. Bast was still in the garden; the husband and Helen had left her there to finish her meal while they went to engage rooms. Margaret found this woman repellent. She had felt, when shaking her hand, an overpowering shame. She remembered the motive of her call at Wickham Place, and smelt again odours from the abyss — odours the more disturbing because they were involuntary. For there was no malice in Jacky. There she sat, a piece of cake in one hand, an empty champagne glass in the other, doing no harm to anybody.

  “She’s overtired,” Margaret whispered.

  “She’s something else,” said Henry. “This won’t do. I can’t have her in my garden in this state.”

  “Is she— “ Margaret hesitated to add “drunk.” Now that she was going to marry him, he had grown particular. He discountenanced risque conversations now.

  Henry went up to the woman. She raised her face, which gleamed in the twilight like a puff-ball.

  “Madam, you will be more comfortable at the hotel,” he said sharply.

  Jacky replied: “If it isn’t Hen!”

  “Ne crois pas que le mari lui ressemble,” apologised Margaret. “Il est tout a fait different.”

  “Henry!” she repeated, quite distinctly.

  Mr. Wilcox was much annoyed. “I congratulate you on your proteges,” he remarked.

  “Hen, don’t go. You do love me, dear, don’t you?”

  “Bless us, what a person!” sighed Margaret, gathering up her skirts.

  Jacky pointed wi
th her cake. “You’re a nice boy, you are.” She yawned. “There now, I love you.”

  “Henry, I am awfully sorry.”

  “And pray why?” he asked, and looked at her so sternly that she feared he was ill. He seemed more scandalised than the facts demanded.

  “To have brought this down on you.”

  “Pray don’t apologise.”

  The voice continued.

  “Why does she call you ‘Hen’?” said Margaret innocently. “Has she ever seen you before?”

  “Seen Hen before!” said Jacky. “Who hasn’t seen Hen? He’s serving you like me, my boys! You wait — Still we love ‘em.”

  “Are you now satisfied?” Henry asked.

  Margaret began to grow frightened. “I don’t know what it is all about,” she said. “Let’s come in.”

  But he thought she was acting. He thought he was trapped. He saw his whole life crumbling. “Don’t you indeed?” he said bitingly. “I do. Allow me to congratulate you on the success of your plan.”

  “This is Helen’s plan, not mine.”

  “I now understand your interest in the Basts. Very well thought out. I am amused at your caution, Margaret. You are quite right — it was necessary. I am a man, and have lived a man’s past. I have the honour to release you from your engagement.”

  Still she could not understand. She knew of life’s seamy side as a theory; she could not grasp it as a fact. More words from Jacky were necessary — words unequivocal, undenied.

  “So that— “ burst from her, and she went indoors. She stopped herself from saying more.

  “So what?” asked Colonel Fussell, who was getting ready to start in the hall.

  “We were saying — Henry and I were just having the fiercest argument, my point being— “ Seizing his fur coat from a footman, she offered to help him on. He protested, and there was a playful little scene.

  “No, let me do that,” said Henry, following.

  “Thanks so much! You see — he has forgiven me!”

  The Colonel said gallantly: “I don’t expect there’s much to forgive.”

  He got into the car. The ladies followed him after an interval. Maids, courier, and heavier luggage had been sent on earlier by the branch-line. Still chattering, still thanking their host and patronising their future hostess, the guests were borne away.

  Then Margaret continued: “So that woman has been your mistress?”

  “You put it with your usual delicacy,” he replied.

  “When, please?”

  “Why?”

  “When, please?”

  “Ten years ago.”

  She left him without a word. For it was not her tragedy; it was Mrs. Wilcox’s.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  Helen began to wonder why she had spent a matter of eight pounds in making some people ill and others angry. Now that the wave of excitement was ebbing, and had left her, Mr. Bast, and Mrs. Bast stranded for the night in a Shropshire hotel, she asked herself what forces had made the wave flow. At all events, no harm was done. Margaret would play the game properly now, and though Helen disapproved of her sister’s methods, she knew that the Basts would benefit by them in the long-run.

  “Mr. Wilcox is so illogical,” she explained to Leonard, who had put his wife to bed, and was sitting with her in the empty coffee-room. “If we told him it was his duty to take you on, he might refuse to do it. The fact is, he isn’t properly educated. I don’t want to set you against him, but you’ll find him a trial.”

  “I can never thank you sufficiently, Miss Schlegel,” was all that Leonard felt equal to.

  “I believe in personal responsibility. Don’t you? And in personal everything. I hate — I suppose I oughtn’t to say that — but the Wilcoxes are on the wrong tack surely. Or perhaps it isn’t their fault. Perhaps the little thing that says ‘I’ is missing out of the middle of their heads, and then it’s a waste of time to blame them. There’s a nightmare of a theory that says a special race is being born which will rule the rest of us in the future just because it lacks the little thing that says ‘I.’ Had you heard that?”

  “I get no time for reading.”

  “Had you thought it, then? That there are two kinds of people — our kind, who live straight from the middle of their heads, and the other kind who can’t, because their heads have no middle? They can’t say ‘I.’ They AREN’T in fact, and so they’re supermen. Pierpont Morgan has never said ‘I’ in his life.”

  Leonard roused himself. If his benefactress wanted intellectual conversation, she must have it. She was more important than his ruined past. “I never got on to Nietzsche,” he said. “But I always understood that those supermen were rather what you may call egoists.”

  “Oh no, that’s wrong,” replied Helen. “No superman ever said ‘I want,’ because ‘I want’ must lead to the question, ‘Who am I?’ and so to Pity and to Justice. He only says ‘want.’ ‘Want Europe,’ if he’s Napoleon; ‘want wives,’ if he’s Bluebeard; ‘want Botticelli,’ if he’s Pierpont Morgan. Never the ‘I’; and if you could pierce through the superman, you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle.”

  Leonard was silent for a moment. Then he said: “May I take it, Miss Schlegel, that you and I are both the sort that say ‘I’?”

  “Of course.”

  “And your sister, too?”

  “Of course,” repeated Helen, a little sharply. She was annoyed with Margaret, but did not want her discussed. “All presentable people say ‘I.’”

  “But Mr. Wilcox — he is not perhaps— “

  “I don’t know that it’s any good discussing Mr. Wilcox either.”

  “Quite so, quite so,” he agreed. Helen asked herself why she had snubbed him. Once or twice during the day she had encouraged him to criticise, and then had pulled him up short. Was she afraid of him presuming? If so, it was disgusting of her.

  But he was thinking the snub quite natural. Everything she did was natural, and incapable of causing offence. While the Miss Schlegels were together he had felt them scarcely human — a sort of admonitory whirligig. But a Miss Schlegel alone was different. She was in Helen’s case unmarried, in Margaret’s about to be married, in neither case an echo of her sister. A light had fallen at last into this rich upper world, and he saw that it was full of men and women, some of whom were more friendly to him than others. Helen had become “his” Miss Schlegel, who scolded him and corresponded with him, and had swept down yesterday with grateful vehemence. Margaret, though not unkind, was severe and remote. He would not presume to help her, for instance. He had never liked her, and began to think that his original impression was true, and that her sister did not like her either. Helen was certainly lonely. She, who gave away so much, was receiving too little. Leonard was pleased to think that he could spare her vexation by holding his tongue and concealing what he knew about Mr. Wilcox. Jacky had announced her discovery when he fetched her from the lawn. After the first shock, he did not mind for himself. By now he had no illusions about his wife, and this was only one new stain on the face of a love that had never been pure. To keep perfection perfect, that should be his ideal, if the future gave him time to have ideals. Helen, and Margaret for Helen’s sake, must not know.

  Helen disconcerted him by turning the conversation to his wife. “Mrs. Bast — does she ever say ‘I’?” she asked, half mischievously, and then, “Is she very tired?”

  “It’s better she stops in her room,” said Leonard.

  “Shall I sit up with her?”

  “No, thank you; she does not need company.”

  “Mr. Bast, what kind of woman is your wife?”

  Leonard blushed up to his eyes.

  “You ought to know my ways by now. Does that question offend you?”

  “No, oh no, Miss Schlegel, no.”

  “Because I love honesty. Don’t pretend your marriage has been a happy one. You and she can have nothing in common.”

  He did not deny it, but said shyly: “I suppose that’s pretty obvi
ous; but Jacky never meant to do anybody any harm. When things went wrong, or I heard things, I used to think it was her fault, but, looking back, it’s more mine. I needn’t have married her, but as I have I must stick to her and keep her.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Nearly three years.”

  “What did your people say?”

  “They will not have anything to do with us. They had a sort of family council when they heard I was married, and cut us off altogether.”

  Helen began to pace up and down the room. “My good boy, what a mess!” she said gently. “Who are your people?”

  He could answer this. His parents, who were dead, had been in trade; his sisters had married commercial travellers; his brother was a lay-reader.

  “And your grandparents?”

  Leonard told her a secret that he had held shameful up to now. “They were just nothing at all,” he said “agricultural labourers and that sort.”

  “So! From which part?”

  “Lincolnshire mostly, but my mother’s father — he, oddly enough, came from these parts round here.”

  “From this very Shropshire. Yes, that is odd. My mother’s people were Lancashire. But why do your brother and your sisters object to Mrs. Bast?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Excuse me, you do know. I am not a baby. I can bear anything you tell me, and the more you tell the more I shall be able to help. Have they heard anything against her?”

  He was silent.

  “I think I have guessed now,” said Helen very gravely.