Howards End, E. M. Forster [fox in socks read aloud TXT] 📗

grew inattentive, played with the photograph frame, dropped it, smashed Dolly’s glass, apologised, was pardoned, cut her finger thereon, was pitied, and finally said she must be going⁠—there was all the housekeeping to do, and she had to interview Tibby’s riding-master.

Then the curious note was struck again.

“Goodbye, Miss Schlegel, goodbye. Thank you for coming. You have cheered me up.”

“I’m so glad!”

“I⁠—I wonder whether you ever think about yourself?”

“I think of nothing else,” said Margaret, blushing, but letting her hand remain in that of the invalid.

“I wonder. I wondered at Heidelberg.”

“I’m sure!”

“I almost think⁠—”

“Yes?” asked Margaret, for there was a long pause⁠—a pause that was somehow akin to the flicker of the fire, the quiver of the reading-lamp upon their hands, the white blur from the window; a pause of shifting and eternal shadows.

“I almost think you forget you’re a girl.”

Margaret was startled and a little annoyed. “I’m twenty-nine,” she remarked. “That’s not so wildly girlish.”

Mrs. Wilcox smiled.

“What makes you say that? Do you mean that I have been gauche and rude?”

A shake of the head. “I only meant that I am fifty-one, and that to me both of you⁠—Read it all in some book or other; I cannot put things clearly.”

“Oh, I’ve got it⁠—inexperience. I’m no better than Helen, you mean, and yet I presume to advise her.”

“Yes. You have got it. Inexperience is the word.”

“Inexperience,” repeated Margaret, in serious yet buoyant tones.

“Of course, I have everything to learn⁠—absolutely everything⁠—just as much as Helen. Life’s very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I’ve got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged⁠—well, one can’t do all these things at once, worse luck, because they’re so contradictory. It’s then that proportion comes in⁠—to live by proportion. Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed, and a deadlock⁠—Gracious me, I’ve started preaching!”

“Indeed, you put the difficulties of life splendidly,” said Mrs. Wilcox, withdrawing her hand into the deeper shadows. “It is just what I should have liked to say about them myself.”

IX

Mrs. Wilcox cannot be accused of giving Margaret much information about life. And Margaret, on the other hand, has made a fair show of modesty, and has pretended to an inexperience that she certainly did not feel. She had kept house for over ten years; she had entertained, almost with distinction; she had brought up a charming sister, and was bringing up a brother. Surely, if experience is attainable, she had attained it. Yet the little luncheon-party that she gave in Mrs. Wilcox’s honour was not a success. The new friend did not blend with the “one or two delightful people” who had been asked to meet her, and the atmosphere was one of polite bewilderment. Her tastes were simple, her knowledge of culture slight, and she was not interested in the New English Art Club, nor in the dividing-line between Journalism and Literature, which was started as a conversational hare. The delightful people darted after it with cries of joy, Margaret leading them, and not till the meal was half over did they realise that the principal guest had taken no part in the chase. There was no common topic. Mrs. Wilcox, whose life had been spent in the service of husband and sons, had little to say to strangers who had never shared it, and whose age was half her own. Clever talk alarmed her, and withered her delicate imaginings; it was the social counterpart of a motorcar, all jerks, and she was a wisp of hay, a flower. Twice she deplored the weather, twice criticised the train service on the Great Northern Railway. They vigorously assented, and rushed on, and when she inquired whether there was any news of Helen, her hostess was too much occupied in placing Rothenstein to answer. The question was repeated: “I hope that your sister is safe in Germany by now.” Margaret checked herself and said, “Yes, thank you; I heard on Tuesday.” But the demon of vociferation was in her, and the next moment she was off again.

“Only on Tuesday, for they live right away at Stettin. Did you ever know anyone living at Stettin?”

“Never,” said Mrs. Wilcox gravely, while her neighbour, a young man low down in the Education Office, began to discuss what people who lived at Stettin ought to look like. Was there such a thing as Stettininity? Margaret swept on.

“People at Stettin drop things into boats out of overhanging warehouses. At least, our cousins do, but aren’t particularly rich. The town isn’t interesting, except for a clock that rolls its eyes, and the view of the Oder, which truly is something special. Oh, Mrs. Wilcox, you would love the Oder! The river, or rather rivers⁠—there seem to be dozens of them⁠—are intense blue, and the plain they run through an intensest green.”

“Indeed! That sounds like a most beautiful view, Miss Schlegel.”

“So I say, but Helen, who will muddle things, says no, it’s like music. The course of the Oder is to be like music. It’s obliged to remind her of a symphonic poem. The part by the landing-stage is in B minor, if I remember rightly, but lower down things get extremely mixed. There is a slodgy theme in several keys at once, meaning mud-banks, and another for the navigable canal, and the exit into the Baltic is in C sharp major, pianissimo.”

“What do the overhanging warehouses make of that?” asked the man, laughing.

“They make a great deal of it,” replied Margaret, unexpectedly rushing off on a new track. “I think it’s affectation to compare the Oder to music, and so do you, but the overhanging warehouses of Stettin take beauty seriously, which we don’t, and the average Englishman doesn’t, and despises all who do. Now don’t say ‘Germans have no taste,’ or I shall scream. They haven’t. But⁠—but⁠—such a tremendous but!⁠—they take poetry seriously. They do