Howards End - E. M. Forster (world of reading .txt) 📗

restored her geniality. Speech and silence pleased her equally, and while Mr. Wilcox made some preliminary inquiries about cheese, her eyes surveyed the restaurant, and aired its well-calculated tributes to the solidity of our past. Though no more Old English than the works of Kipling, it had selected its reminiscences so adroitly that her criticism was lulled, and the guests whom it was nourishing for imperial purposes bore the outer semblance of Parson Adams or Tom Jones. Scraps of their talk jarred oddly on the ear. “Right you are! I’ll cable out to Uganda this evening,” came from the table behind. “Their Emperor wants war; well, let him have it,” was the opinion of a clergyman. She smiled at such incongruities. “Next time,” she said to Mr. Wilcox, “you shall come to lunch with me at Mr. Eustace Miles’s.”

“With pleasure.”

“No, you’d hate it,” she said, pushing her glass towards him for some more cider. “It’s all proteids and body buildings, and people come up to you and beg your pardon, but you have such a beautiful aura.”

“A what?”

“Never heard of an aura? Oh, happy, happy man! I scrub at mine for hours. Nor of an astral plane?”

He had heard of astral planes, and censured them.

“Just so. Luckily it was Helen’s aura, not mine, and she had to chaperone it and do the politenesses. I just sat with my handkerchief in my mouth till the man went.”

“Funny experiences seem to come to you two girls. No one’s ever asked me about my⁠—what d’ye call it? Perhaps I’ve not got one.”

“You’re bound to have one, but it may be such a terrible colour that no one dares mention it.”

“Tell me, though, Miss Schlegel, do you really believe in the supernatural and all that?”

“Too difficult a question.”

“Why’s that? Gruyère or Stilton?”

“Gruyère, please.”

“Better have Stilton.”

“Stilton. Because, though I don’t believe in auras, and think Theosophy’s only a halfway-house⁠—”

“⁠—Yet there may be something in it all the same,” he concluded, with a frown.

“Not even that. It may be halfway in the wrong direction. I can’t explain. I don’t believe in all these fads, and yet I don’t like saying that I don’t believe in them.”

He seemed unsatisfied, and said: “So you wouldn’t give me your word that you don’t hold with astral bodies and all the rest of it?”

“I could,” said Margaret, surprised that the point was of any importance to him. “Indeed, I will. When I talked about scrubbing my aura, I was only trying to be funny. But why do you want this settled?”

“I don’t know.”

“Now, Mr. Wilcox, you do know.”

“Yes, I am,” “No, you’re not,” burst from the lovers opposite. Margaret was silent for a moment, and then changed the subject.

“How’s your house?”

“Much the same as when you honoured it last week.”

“I don’t mean Ducie Street. Howards End, of course.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“Can’t you turn out your tenant and let it to us? We’re nearly demented.”

“Let me think. I wish I could help you. But I thought you wanted to be in town. One bit of advice: fix your district, then fix your price, and then don’t budge. That’s how I got both Ducie Street and Oniton. I said to myself, ‘I mean to be exactly here,’ and I was, and Oniton’s a place in a thousand.”

“But I do budge. Gentlemen seem to mesmerise houses⁠—cow them with an eye, and up they come, trembling. Ladies can’t. It’s the houses that are mesmerising me. I’ve no control over the saucy things. Houses are alive. No?”

“I’m out of my depth,” he said, and added: “Didn’t you talk rather like that to your office boy?”

“Did I?⁠—I mean I did, more or less. I talk the same way to everyone⁠—or try to.”

“Yes, I know. And how much of it do you suppose he understood?”

“That’s his lookout. I don’t believe in suiting my conversation to my company. One can doubtless hit upon some medium of exchange that seems to do well enough, but it’s no more like the real thing than money is like food. There’s no nourishment in it. You pass it to the lower classes, and they pass it back to you, and this you call ‘social intercourse’ or ‘mutual endeavour,’ when it’s mutual priggishness if it’s anything. Our friends at Chelsea don’t see this. They say one ought to be at all costs intelligible, and sacrifice⁠—”

“Lower classes,” interrupted Mr. Wilcox, as it were thrusting his hand into her speech. “Well, you do admit that there are rich and poor. That’s something.”

Margaret could not reply. Was he incredibly stupid, or did he understand her better than she understood herself?

“You do admit that, if wealth was divided up equally, in a few years there would be rich and poor again just the same. The hardworking man would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom.”

“Everyone admits that.”

“Your Socialists don’t.”

“My Socialists do. Yours mayn’t; but I strongly suspect yours of being not Socialists, but ninepins, which you have constructed for your own amusement. I can’t imagine any living creature who would bowl over quite so easily.”

He would have resented this had she not been a woman. But women may say anything⁠—it was one of his holiest beliefs⁠—and he only retorted, with a gay smile: “I don’t care. You’ve made two damaging admissions, and I’m heartily with you in both.”

In time they finished lunch, and Margaret, who had excused herself from the Hippodrome, took her leave. Evie had scarcely addressed her, and she suspected that the entertainment had been planned by the father. He and she were advancing out of their respective families towards a more intimate acquaintance. It had begun long ago. She had been his wife’s friend and, as such, he had given her that silver vinaigrette as a memento. It was pretty of him to have given that vinaigrette, and he had always preferred her to Helen⁠—unlike most men. But the advance had been astonishing lately. They had done more in a week than in two years, and were really beginning to know each other.

She did not forget his