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

seized with a momentary sourness against So-and-so, and long to tweak her ear. It’s a tiresome feeling, but not an important one, and one easily manages it. But it wasn’t only this in Mr. Wilcox’s case, I gather now.”

“Then you love him?”

Margaret considered. “It is wonderful knowing that a real man cares for you,” she said. “The mere fact of that grows more tremendous. Remember, I’ve known and liked him steadily for nearly three years.”

“But loved him?”

Margaret peered into her past. It is pleasant to analyse feelings while they are still only feelings, and unembodied in the social fabric. With her arm round Helen, and her eyes shifting over the view, as if this country or that could reveal the secret of her own heart, she meditated honestly, and said, “No.”

“But you will?”

“Yes,” said Margaret, “of that I’m pretty sure. Indeed, I began the moment he spoke to me.”

“And have settled to marry him?”

“I had, but am wanting a long talk about it now. What is it against him, Helen? You must try and say.”

Helen, in her turn, looked outwards. “It is ever since Paul,” she said finally.

“But what has Mr. Wilcox to do with Paul?”

“But he was there, they were all there that morning when I came down to breakfast, and saw that Paul was frightened⁠—the man who loved me frightened and all his paraphernalia fallen, so that I knew it was impossible, because personal relations are the important thing forever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.”

She poured the sentence forth in one breath, but her sister understood it, because it touched on thoughts that were familiar between them.

“That’s foolish. In the first place, I disagree about the outer life. Well, we’ve often argued that. The real point is that there is the widest gulf between my lovemaking and yours. Yours was romance; mine will be prose. I’m not running it down⁠—a very good kind of prose, but well considered, well thought out. For instance, I know all Mr. Wilcox’s faults. He’s afraid of emotion. He cares too much about success, too little about the past. His sympathy lacks poetry, and so isn’t sympathy really. I’d even say”⁠—she looked at the shining lagoons⁠—“that, spiritually, he’s not as honest as I am. Doesn’t that satisfy you?”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Helen. “It makes me feel worse and worse. You must be mad.”

Margaret made a movement of irritation.

“I don’t intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life⁠—good heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn’t, and shall never, understand.”

Thus she spoke before the wedding ceremony and the physical union, before the astonishing glass shade had fallen that interposes between married couples and the world. She was to keep her independence more than do most women as yet. Marriage was to alter her fortunes rather than her character, and she was not far wrong in boasting that she understood her future husband. Yet he did alter her character⁠—a little. There was an unforeseen surprise, a cessation of the winds and odours of life, a social pressure that would have her think conjugally.

“So with him,” she continued. “There are heaps of things in him⁠—more especially things that he does that will always be hidden from me. He has all those public qualities which you so despise and which enable all this⁠—” She waved her hand at the landscape, which confirmed anything. “If Wilcoxes hadn’t worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn’t sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. No⁠—perhaps not even that. Without their spirit life might never have moved out of protoplasm. More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it. There are times when it seems to me⁠—”

“And to me, and to all women. So one kissed Paul.”

“That’s brutal,” said Margaret. “Mine is an absolutely different case. I’ve thought things out.”

“It makes no difference thinking things out. They come to the same.”

“Rubbish!”

There was a long silence, during which the tide returned into Poole Harbour. “One would lose something,” murmured Helen, apparently to herself. The water crept over the mud-flats towards the gorse and the blackened heather. Branksea Island lost its immense foreshores, and became a sombre episode of trees. Frome was forced inward towards Dorchester, Stour against Wimborne, Avon towards Salisbury, and over the immense displacement the sun presided, leading it to triumph ere he sank to rest. England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

XX

Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world’s waters, when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in. Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores. No doubt the disturbance is really the spirit of the generations, welcoming the new generation, and chafing against the ultimate Fate, who holds all the seas in the palm of her hand. But Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another’s infinity; he is conscious only of his own⁠—flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and time. He knows that he will survive at the end of things, and be gathered by Fate as