A Room With a View, E. M. Forster [great books to read TXT] 📗

Bartlett, “don’t ask our driver; our driver is no help. Go and support poor Mr. Beebe; he is nearly demented.”

“He may be killed!” cried the old man. “He may be killed!”

“Typical behaviour,” said the chaplain, as he quitted the carriage. “In the presence of reality that kind of person invariably breaks down.”

“What does he know?” whispered Lucy as soon as they were alone. “Charlotte, how much does Mr. Eager know?”

“Nothing, dearest; he knows nothing. But⁠—” she pointed at the driver⁠—“he knows everything. Dearest, had we better? Shall I?” She took out her purse. “It is dreadful to be entangled with low-class people. He saw it all.” Tapping Phaethon’s back with her guidebook, she said, “Silenzio!” and offered him a franc.

“Va bene,” he replied, and accepted it. As well this ending to his day as any. But Lucy, a mortal maid, was disappointed in him.

There was an explosion up the road. The storm had struck the overhead wire of the tramline, and one of the great supports had fallen. If they had not stopped perhaps they might have been hurt. They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation, and the floods of love and sincerity, which fructify every hour of life, burst forth in tumult. They descended from the carriages; they embraced each other. It was as joyful to be forgiven past unworthinesses as to forgive them. For a moment they realized vast possibilities of good.

The older people recovered quickly. In the very height of their emotion they knew it to be unmanly or unladylike. Miss Lavish calculated that, even if they had continued, they would not have been caught in the accident. Mr. Eager mumbled a temperate prayer. But the drivers, through miles of dark squalid road, poured out their souls to the dryads and the saints, and Lucy poured out hers to her cousin.

“Charlotte, dear Charlotte, kiss me. Kiss me again. Only you can understand me. You warned me to be careful. And I⁠—I thought I was developing.”

“Do not cry, dearest. Take your time.”

“I have been obstinate and silly⁠—worse than you know, far worse. Once by the river⁠—Oh, but he isn’t killed⁠—he wouldn’t be killed, would he?”

The thought disturbed her repentance. As a matter of fact, the storm was worst along the road; but she had been near danger, and so she thought it must be near to everyone.

“I trust not. One would always pray against that.”

“He is really⁠—I think he was taken by surprise, just as I was before. But this time I’m not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. I had silly thoughts. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground all blue, and for a moment he looked like someone in a book.”

“In a book?”

“Heroes⁠—gods⁠—the nonsense of schoolgirls.”

“And then?”

“But, Charlotte, you know what happened then.”

Miss Bartlett was silent. Indeed, she had little more to learn. With a certain amount of insight she drew her young cousin affectionately to her. All the way back Lucy’s body was shaken by deep sighs, which nothing could repress.

“I want to be truthful,” she whispered. “It is so hard to be absolutely truthful.”

“Don’t be troubled, dearest. Wait till you are calmer. We will talk it over before bedtime in my room.”

So they re-entered the city with hands clasped. It was a shock to the girl to find how far emotion had ebbed in others. The storm had ceased, and Mr. Emerson was easier about his son. Mr. Beebe had regained good humour, and Mr. Eager was already snubbing Miss Lavish. Charlotte alone she was sure of⁠—Charlotte, whose exterior concealed so much insight and love.

The luxury of self-exposure kept her almost happy through the long evening. She thought not so much of what had happened as of how she should describe it. All her sensations, her spasms of courage, her moments of unreasonable joy, her mysterious discontent, should be carefully laid before her cousin. And together in divine confidence they would disentangle and interpret them all.

“At last,” thought she, “I shall understand myself. I shan’t again be troubled by things that come out of nothing, and mean I don’t know what.”

Miss Alan asked her to play. She refused vehemently. Music seemed to her the employment of a child. She sat close to her cousin, who, with commendable patience, was listening to a long story about lost luggage. When it was over she capped it by a story of her own. Lucy became rather hysterical with the delay. In vain she tried to check, or at all events to accelerate, the tale. It was not till a late hour that Miss Bartlett had recovered her luggage and could say in her usual tone of gentle reproach:

“Well, dear, I at all events am ready for Bedfordshire. Come into my room, and I will give a good brush to your hair.”

With some solemnity the door was shut, and a cane chair placed for the girl. Then Miss Bartlett said, “So what is to be done?”

She was unprepared for the question. It had not occurred to her that she would have to do anything. A detailed exhibition of her emotions was all that she had counted upon.

“What is to be done? A point, dearest, which you alone can settle.”

The rain was streaming down the black windows, and the great room felt damp and chilly. One candle burnt trembling on the chest of drawers close to Miss Bartlett’s toque, which cast monstrous and fantastic shadows on the bolted door. A tram roared by in the dark, and Lucy felt unaccountably sad, though she had long since dried her eyes. She lifted them to the ceiling, where the griffins and bassoons were colourless and vague, the very ghosts of joy.

“It has been raining for nearly four hours,” she said at last.

Miss Bartlett ignored the remark.

“How do you propose to silence him?”

“The driver?”

“My dear girl, no; Mr. George Emerson.”

Lucy began to pace up and down the room.

“I don’t understand,”