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

though her anger passed away soon, her tears remained.

“I only wish poets would say this, too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul! Your soul, dear Lucy! I hate the word now, because of all the cant with which superstition has wrapped it round. But we have souls. I cannot say how they came nor whither they go, but we have them, and I see you ruining yours. I cannot bear it. It is again the darkness creeping in; it is hell.” Then he checked himself. “What nonsense I have talked⁠—how abstract and remote! And I have made you cry! Dear girl, forgive my prosiness; marry my boy. When I think what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love⁠—Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”

She could not understand him; the words were indeed remote. Yet as he spoke the darkness was withdrawn, veil after veil, and she saw to the bottom of her soul.

“Then, Lucy⁠—”

“You’ve frightened me,” she moaned. “Cecil⁠—Mr. Beebe⁠—the ticket’s bought⁠—everything.” She fell sobbing into the chair. “I’m caught in the tangle. I must suffer and grow old away from him. I cannot break the whole of life for his sake. They trusted me.”

A carriage drew up at the front-door.

“Give George my love⁠—once only. Tell him ‘muddle.’ ” Then she arranged her veil, while the tears poured over her cheeks inside.

“Lucy⁠—”

“No⁠—they are in the hall⁠—oh, please not, Mr. Emerson⁠—they trust me⁠—”

“But why should they, when you have deceived them?”

Mr. Beebe opened the door, saying: “Here’s my mother.”

“You’re not worthy of their trust.”

“What’s that?” said Mr. Beebe sharply.

“I was saying, why should you trust her when she deceived you?”

“One minute, mother.” He came in and shut the door.

“I don’t follow you, Mr. Emerson. To whom do you refer? Trust whom?”

“I mean she has pretended to you that she did not love George. They have loved one another all along.”

Mr. Beebe looked at the sobbing girl. He was very quiet, and his white face, with its ruddy whiskers, seemed suddenly inhuman. A long black column, he stood and awaited her reply.

“I shall never marry him,” quavered Lucy.

A look of contempt came over him, and he said, “Why not?”

“Mr. Beebe⁠—I have misled you⁠—I have misled myself⁠—”

“Oh, rubbish, Miss Honeychurch!”

“It is not rubbish!” said the old man hotly. “It’s the part of people that you don’t understand.”

Mr. Beebe laid his hand on the old man’s shoulder pleasantly.

“Lucy! Lucy!” called voices from the carriage.

“Mr. Beebe, could you help me?”

He looked amazed at the request, and said in a low, stern voice: “I am more grieved than I can possibly express. It is lamentable, lamentable⁠—incredible.”

“What’s wrong with the boy?” fired up the other again.

“Nothing, Mr. Emerson, except that he no longer interests me. Marry George, Miss Honeychurch. He will do admirably.”

He walked out and left them. They heard him guiding his mother upstairs.

“Lucy!” the voices called.

She turned to Mr. Emerson in despair. But his face revived her. It was the face of a saint who understood.

“Now it is all dark. Now Beauty and Passion seem never to have existed. I know. But remember the mountains over Florence and the view. Ah, dear, if I were George, and gave you one kiss, it would make you brave. You have to go cold into a battle that needs warmth, out into the muddle that you have made yourself; and your mother and all your friends will despise you, oh, my darling, and rightly, if it is ever right to despise. George still dark, all the tussle and the misery without a word from him. Am I justified?” Into his own eyes tears came. “Yes, for we fight for more than Love or Pleasure; there is Truth. Truth counts, Truth does count.”

“You kiss me,” said the girl. “You kiss me. I will try.”

He gave her a sense of deities reconciled, a feeling that, in gaining the man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world. Throughout the squalor of her homeward drive⁠—she spoke at once⁠—his salutation remained. He had robbed the body of its taint, the world’s taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire. She “never exactly understood,” she would say in after years, “how he managed to strengthen her. It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once.”

XX The End of the Middle Ages

The Miss Alans did go to Greece, but they went by themselves. They alone of this little company will double Malea and plough the waters of the Saronic gulf. They alone will visit Athens and Delphi, and either shrine of intellectual song⁠—that upon the Acropolis, encircled by blue seas; that under Parnassus, where the eagles build and the bronze charioteer drives undismayed towards infinity. Trembling, anxious, cumbered with much digestive bread, they did proceed to Constantinople, they did go round the world. The rest of us must be contented with a fair, but a less arduous, goal. Italiam petimus: we return to the Pension Bertolini.

George said it was his old room.

“No, it isn’t,” said Lucy; “because it is the room I had, and I had your father’s room. I forget why; Charlotte made me, for some reason.”

He knelt on the tiled floor, and laid his face in her lap.

“George, you baby, get up.”

“Why shouldn’t I be a baby?” murmured George.

Unable to answer this question, she put down his sock, which she was trying to mend, and gazed out through the window. It was evening and again the spring.

“Oh, bother Charlotte,” she said thoughtfully. “What can such people be made of?”

“Same stuff as parsons are made of.”

“Nonsense!”

“Quite right. It is nonsense.”

“Now you get up off the cold floor, or you’ll be starting rheumatism next, and you stop laughing and being so silly.”

“Why shouldn’t I laugh?” he asked, pinning her with his elbows, and advancing his face to hers. “What’s there to