“No, I do like Christmas on the whole,” she announced. “In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But oh, it is clumsier every year.”
“Is it? I am only used to country Christmases.”
“We are usually in London, and play the game with vigour—carols at the Abbey, clumsy midday meal, clumsy dinner for the maids, followed by Christmas-tree and dancing of poor children, with songs from Helen. The drawing-room does very well for that. We put the tree in the powder-closet, and draw a curtain when the candles are lighted, and with the looking-glass behind, it looks quite pretty. I wish we might have a powder-closet in our next house. Of course, the tree has to be very small, and the presents don’t hang on it. No; the presents reside in a sort of rocky landscape made of crumpled brown paper.”
“You spoke of your ‘next house,’ Miss Schlegel. Then are you leaving Wickham Place?”
“Yes, in two or three years, when the lease expires. We must. ”
“Have you been there long?”
“All our lives.”
“You will be very sorry to leave it.”
“I suppose so. We scarcely realize it yet. My father—” She broke off, for they had reached the stationery department of the Haymarket Stores, and Mrs. Wilcox wanted to order some private greeting-cards.
“If possible, something distinctive,” she sighed. At the counter she found a friend, bent on the same errand, and conversed with her insipidly, wasting much time. “My husband and our daughter are motoring.” “Bertha too? Oh, fancy, what a coincidence!” Margaret, though not practical, could shine in such company as this. While they talked, she went through a volume of specimen cards, and submitted one for Mrs. Wilcox’s inspection. Mrs. Wilcox was delighted—so original, words so sweet; she would order a hundred like that, and could never be sufficiently grateful. Then, just as the assistant was booking the order, she said: “Do you know, I’ll wait. On second thoughts, I’ll wait. There’s plenty of time still, isn’t there, and I shall be able to get Evie’s opinion.”
They returned to the carriage by devious paths; when they were in, she said: “But couldn’t you get it renewed?”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Margaret.
“The lease, I mean.”
“Oh, the lease! Have you been thinking of that all the time? How very kind of you!”
“Surely something could be done.”
“No; values have risen too enormously. They mean to pull down Wickham Place, and build flats like yours.”
“But how horrible!”
“Landlords are horrible.”
Then she said vehemently: “It is monstrous, Miss Schlegel; it isn’t right. I had no idea that this was hanging over you. I do pity you from the bottom of my heart. To be parted from your house, your father’s house—it oughtn’t to be allowed. It is worse than dying. I would rather die than—Oh, poor girls! Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn’t die in the room where they were born? My dear, I am so sorry—”
Margaret did not know what to say. Mrs. Wilcox had been overtired by the shopping, and was inclined to hysteria.
“Howards End was nearly pulled down once. It would have killed me.”
“Howards End must be a very different house to ours. We are fond of ours, but there is nothing distinctive about it. As you saw, it is an ordinary London house. We shall easily find another.”
“So you think.”
“Again my lack of experience, I suppose!” said Margaret, easing away from the subject. “I can’t say anything when you take up that line, Mrs. Wilcox. I wish I could see myself as you see me—foreshortened into a backfisch. Quite the ingénue. Very charming—wonderfully well read for my age, but incapable—”
Mrs. Wilcox would not be deterred. “Come down with me to Howards End now,” she said, more vehemently than ever. “I want you to see it. You have never seen it. I want to hear what you say about it, for you do put things so wonderfully.”
Margaret glanced at the pitiless air and then at the tired face of her companion. “Later on I should love it,” she continued, “but it’s hardly the weather for such an expedition, and we ought to start when we’re fresh. Isn’t the house shut up, too?”
She received no answer. Mrs. Wilcox appeared to be annoyed.
“Might I come some other day?”
Mrs. Wilcox bent forward and tapped the glass. “Back to Wickham Place, please!” was her order to the coachman. Margaret had been snubbed.
“A thousand thanks, Miss Schlegel, for all your help.”
“Not at all.”
“It is such a comfort to get the presents off my mind—the Christmas-cards especially. I do admire your choice.”
It was her turn to receive no answer. In her turn Margaret became annoyed.
“My husband and Evie will be back the day after tomorrow. That is why I dragged you out shopping today. I stayed in town chiefly to shop, but got through nothing, and now he writes that they must cut their tour short, the weather is so bad, and the police-traps have been so bad—nearly as bad as in Surrey. Ours is such a careful chauffeur, and my husband feels it particularly hard that they should be treated like road-hogs.”
“Why?”
“Well, naturally he—he isn’t a road-hog.”
“He was exceeding the speed-limit, I conclude. He must expect to suffer with the lower animals.”
Mrs. Wilcox was silenced. In growing discomfort they drove homewards. The city seemed Satanic, the narrower streets oppressing like the galleries of a mine. No harm was done by the fog to trade, for it lay high, and the lighted windows of the shops were thronged with customers. It was rather a darkening of the spirit which fell back upon itself, to find a more grievous darkness within. Margaret nearly spoke a dozen times, but something throttled her. She felt petty and awkward, and her meditations on Christmas grew more cynical. Peace? It may bring other gifts, but is there a single Londoner to whom Christmas is peaceful? The craving for excitement and for elaboration has ruined that blessing. Goodwill? Had she seen any example of it in the horde of purchasers? Or in herself? She had failed to respond to this invitation merely because it was a little queer and imaginative—she, whose birthright it was to nourish imagination! Better to have accepted, to have tired themselves a little by the journey, than coldly to reply: “Might I come some other day?” Her cynicism left her. There would be no other day. This shadowy woman would never ask her again.
They parted at the Mansions. Mrs. Wilcox went in after due civilities, and Margaret watched the tall, lonely figure sweep up the hall to the lift. As the glass doors closed on it she had the sense of an imprisonment. The beautiful head disappeared first, still buried in the muff; the long trailing skirt followed. A woman of undefinable rarity was going up heavenward, like a specimen in a bottle. And into what a heaven—a vault as of hell, sooty black, from which soots descended!
At lunch her brother, seeing her inclined for silence, insisted on talking. Tibby was not ill-natured, but from babyhood something drove him to do the unwelcome and the unexpected. Now he gave her a long account of the day-school that he sometimes patronized. The account was interesting, and she had often pressed him for it before, but she could not attend now, for her mind was focussed on the invisible. She discerned that Mrs. Wilcox, though a loving wife and mother, had only one passion in life—her house—and that the moment was solemn when she invited a friend to share this passion with her. To answer “another day” was to answer as a fool. “Another day” will do for brick and mortar, but not for the Holy of Holies into which Howards End had been transfigured. Her own curiosity was slight. She had heard more than enough about it in the summer. The nine windows, the vine, and the wych-elm had no pleasant connections for her, and she would have preferred to spend the afternoon at a concert. But imagination triumphed. While her brother held forth she determined to go, at whatever cost, and to compel Mrs. Wilcox to go, too. When lunch was over, she stepped over to the flats.
Mrs. Wilcox had j
ust gone away for the night.
Margaret said that it was of no consequence, hurried downstairs, and took a hansom to King’s Cross. She was convinced that the escapade was important, though it would have puzzled her to say why. There was a question of imprisonment and escape, and though she did not know the time of the train, she strained her eyes for the St. Pancras clock.
Then the clock of King’s Cross swung into sight, a second moon in that infernal sky, and her cab drew up at the station. There was a train for Hilton in five minutes. She took a ticket, asking in her agitation for a single. As she did so, a grave and happy voice saluted her and thanked her.
“I will come if I still may,” said Margaret, laughing nervously.
“You are coming to sleep, dear, too. It is in the morning that my house is most beautiful. You are coming to stop. I cannot show you my meadow properly except at sunrise. These fogs” —she pointed at the station roof—“never spread far. I dare say they are sitting in the sun in Hertfordshire, and you will never repent joining them.”
“I shall never repent joining you.”
“It is the same.”
They began the walk up the long platform. Far at its end stood the train, breasting the darkness without. They never reached it. Before imagination could triumph, there were cries of “Mother! Mother!” and a heavy-browed girl darted out of the cloak-room and seized Mrs. Wilcox by the arm.
“Evie!” she gasped. “Evie, my pet—”
The girl called: “Father! I say! look who’s here.”
“Evie, dearest girl, why aren’t you in Yorkshire?”
“No—motor smash—changed plans—Father’s coming.”
“Why, Ruth!” cried Mr. Wilcox, joining them. “What in the name of all that’s wonderful are you doing here, Ruth?”
Mrs. Wilcox had recovered herself.
“Oh, Henry dear!—here’s a lovely surprise—but let me introduce—but I think you know Miss Schlegel.”
“Oh, yes,” he replied, not greatly interested. “But how’s yourself, Ruth?”
“Fit as a fiddle,” she answered gaily.
“So are we and so was our car, which ran A-1 as far as Ripon, but there a wretched horse and cart which a fool of a driver—”
“Miss Schlegel, our little outing must be for another day.”
“I was saying that this fool of a driver, as the policeman himself admits—”
“Another day, Mrs. Wilcox. Of course.”
“—But as we’ve insured against third-party risks, it won’t so much matter—”
“—Cart and car being practically at right angles—”
The voices of the happy family rose high. Margaret was left alone. No one wanted her. Mrs. Wilcox walked out of King’s Cross between her husband and her daughter, listening to both of them.
Chapter XI
The funeral was over. The carriages rolled away through the soft mud, and only the poor remained. They approached to the newly dug shaft and looked their last at the coffin, now almost hidden beneath the spadefuls of clay. It was their moment. Most of them were women from the dead woman’s district, to whom black garments had been served out by Mr. Wilcox’s orders. Pure curiosity had brought others. They thrilled with the excitement of a death, and of a rapid death, and stood in groups or moved between the graves, like drops of ink. The son of one of them, a wood-cutter, was perched high above their heads, pollarding one of the churchyard elms. From where he sat he could see the village of Hilton, strung upon the North Road, with its accreting suburbs; the sunset beyond, scarlet and orange, winking at him beneath brows of grey; the church; the plantations; and behind him an unspoilt country of fields and farms. But he, too, was rolling the event luxuriously in his mouth. He tried to tell his mother down below all that he had felt when he saw the coffin approaching: how he could not leave his work, and yet did not like to go on with it; how he had almost slipped out of the tree, he was so upset; the rooks had cawed, and no wonder—it was as if rooks knew too. His mother claimed the prophetic power herself—she had seen a strange look about Mrs. Wilcox for some time. London had done the mischief, said others. She had been a kind lady; her grandmother had been kind, too—a plainer person, but very kind. Ah, the old sort was dying out! Mr. Wilcox, he was a kind gentleman. They advanced to the topic again and again, dully, but with exaltation. The funeral of a rich person was to them what the funeral of Alcestis, of Ophelia, is to the educated. It was Art; though remote from life, it enhanced life’s values, and they witnessed it avidly.
The grave-diggers, who had kept up an undercurrent of disapproval—they disliked Charles; it was not a moment to speak of such things, but they did not like Charles Wilcox—the grave-diggers finished their work and piled up the wreaths and crosses above it. The sun set over Hilton: the grey brows of the evening flushed a little, and were cleft with one scarlet frown. Chattering sadly to each other, the mourners passed through the lych-gate and traversed the chestnut avenues that led down to the village. The young wood-cutter stayed a little longer, poised above the silence and swaying rhythmically. At last the bough fell beneath his saw. With a grunt, he descended, his thoughts dwelling no longer on death, but on love, for he was mating. He stopped as he passed the new grave; a sheaf of tawny chrysanthemums had caught his eye. “They didn’t ought to have coloured flowers at buryings,” he reflected. Trudging on a few steps, he stopped again, looked furtively at the dusk, turned back, wrenched a chrysanthemum from the sheaf, and hid it in his pocket.
After him came silence absolute. The cottage that abutted on the churchyard was empty, and no other house stood near. Hour after hour the scene of the interment remained without an eye to witness it. Clouds drifted over it from the west; or the church may have been a ship, high-prowed, steering with all its company towards infinity. Towards morning the air grew colder, the sky clearer, the surface of the earth hard and sparkling above the prostrate dead. The wood-cutter, returning after a night of joy, reflected: “They lilies, they chrysants; it’s a pity I didn’t take them all.”
Up at Howards End they were attempting breakfast. Charles and Evie sat in the dining-room, with Mrs. Charles. Their father, who could not bear to see a face, breakfasted upstairs. He suffered acutely. Pain came over him in spasms, as if it was physical, and even while he was about to eat, his eyes would fill with tears, and he would lay down the morsel untasted.
He remembered his wife’s even goodness during thirty years. Not anything in detail—not courtship or early raptures—but just the unvarying virtue, that seemed to him a woman’s noblest quality. So many women are capricious, breaking into odd flaws of passion or frivolity. Not so his wife. Year after year, summer and winter, as bride and mother, she had been the same, he had always trusted her. Her tenderness! Her innocence! The wonderful innocence that was hers by the gift of God. Ruth knew no more of worldly wickedness and wisdom than did the flowers in her garden or the grass in her field. Her idea of business—“Henry, why do people who have enough money try to get more money?” Her idea of politics—“I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.” Her idea of religion—ah, this had been a cloud, but a cloud that passed. She came of Quaker stock, and he and his family, formerly Dissenters, were now members of the Church of England. The rector’s sermons had at first repelled her, and she had expressed a desire for “a more inward light,” adding: “not so much for myself as for baby” (Charles). Inward light must have been granted, for he heard no complaints in later years. They brought up their three children without dispute. They had never disputed.
She lay under the earth now. She had gone, and as if to make her going the more bitter, had gone with a touch of mystery that was all unlike her. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew of it?” he had moaned, and her faint voice had answered: “I didn’t want to, Henry—I might have been wrong—and every one hates illnesses.” He had been told of the horror by a strange doctor, whom she had consulted during his absence from town. Was this altogether jus
t? Without fully explaining, she had died. It was a fault on her part, and—tears rushed into his eyes—what a little fault! It was the only time she had deceived him in those thirty years.
He rose to his feet and looked out of the window, for Evie had come in with the letters, and he could meet no one’s eye. Ah yes—she had been a good woman—she had been steady. He chose the word deliberately. To him steadiness included all praise.
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