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

know what to do, but I undertake to do what I can for you. Helen, offer them something. Do try a sandwich, Mrs. Bast.”

They moved to a long table behind which a servant was still standing. Iced cakes, sandwiches innumerable, coffee, claret-cup, champagne, remained almost intact; their overfed guests could do no more. Leonard refused. Jacky thought she could manage a little. Margaret left them whispering together, and had a few more words with Helen.

She said: “Helen, I like Mr. Bast. I agree that he’s worth helping. I agree that we are directly responsible.”

“No, indirectly. Via Mr. Wilcox.”

“Let me tell you once for all that if you take up that attitude, I’ll do nothing. No doubt you’re right logically, and are entitled to say a great many scathing things about Henry. Only, I won’t have it. So choose.”

Helen looked at the sunset.

“If you promise to take them quietly to the George I will speak to Henry about them⁠—in my own way, mind; there is to be none of this absurd screaming about justice. I have no use for justice. If it was only a question of money, we could do it ourselves. But he wants work, and that we can’t give him, but possibly Henry can.”

“It’s his duty to,” grumbled Helen.

“Nor am I concerned with duty. I’m concerned with the characters of various people whom we know, and how, things being as they are, things may be made a little better. Mr. Wilcox hates being asked favours; all business men do. But I am going to ask him, at the risk of a rebuff, because I want to make things a little better.”

“Very well. I promise. You take it very calmly.”

“Take them off to the George, then, and I’ll try. Poor creatures! but they look tired.” As they parted, she added: “I haven’t nearly done with you, though, Helen. You have been most self-indulgent. I can’t get over it. You have less restraint rather than more as you grow older. Think it over and alter yourself, or we shan’t have happy lives.”

She rejoined Henry. Fortunately he had been sitting down: these physical matters were important. “Was it townees?” he asked, greeting her with a pleasant smile.

“You’ll never believe me,” said Margaret, sitting down beside him. “It’s all right now, but it was my sister.”

“Helen here?” he cried, preparing to rise. “But she refused the invitation. I thought she despised weddings.”

“Don’t get up. She has not come to the wedding. I’ve bundled her off to the George.”

Inherently hospitable, he protested.

“No; she has two of her protégés with her and must keep with them.”

“Let ’em all come.”

“My dear Henry, did you see them?”

“I did catch sight of a brown bunch of a woman, certainly.”

“The brown bunch was Helen, but did you catch sight of a sea-green and salmon bunch?”

“What! are they out bean-feasting?”

“No; business. They wanted to see me, and later on I want to talk to you about them.”

She was ashamed of her own diplomacy. In dealing with a Wilcox, how tempting it was to lapse from comradeship, and to give him the kind of woman that he desired! Henry took the hint at once, and said: “Why later on? Tell me now. No time like the present.”

“Shall I?”

“If it isn’t a long story.”

“Oh, not five minutes; but there’s a sting at the end of it, for I want you to find the man some work in your office.”

“What are his qualifications?”

“I don’t know. He’s a clerk.”

“How old?”

“Twenty-five, perhaps.”

“What’s his name?”

“Bast,” said Margaret, and was about to remind him that they had met at Wickham Place, but stopped herself. It had not been a successful meeting.

“Where was he before?”

“Dempster’s Bank.”

“Why did he leave?” he asked, still remembering nothing.

“They reduced their staff.”

“All right; I’ll see him.”

It was the reward of her tact and devotion through the day. Now she understood why some women prefer influence to rights. Mrs. Plynlimmon, when condemning suffragettes, had said: “The woman who can’t influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.” Margaret had winced, but she was influencing Henry now, and though pleased at her little victory, she knew that she had won it by the methods of the harem.

“I should be glad if you took him,” she said, “but I don’t know whether he’s qualified.”

“I’ll do what I can. But, Margaret, this mustn’t be taken as a precedent.”

“No, of course⁠—of course⁠—”

“I can’t fit in your protégés every day. Business would suffer.”

“I can promise you he’s the last. He⁠—he’s rather a special case.”

“Protégés always are.”

She let it stand at that. He rose with a little extra touch of complacency, and held out his hand to help her up. How wide the gulf between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be! And she herself⁠—hovering as usual between the two, now accepting men as they are, now yearning with her sister for Truth. Love and Truth⁠—their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air.

“Your protégé has made us late,” said he. “The Fussells⁠—will just be starting.”

On the whole she sided with men as they are. Henry would save the Basts as he had saved Howards End, while Helen and her friends were discussing the ethics of salvation. His was a slapdash method, but the world has been built slapdash, and the beauty of mountain and river and sunset may be but the varnish with which the unskilled artificer hides his joins. Oniton, like herself, was imperfect. Its apple-trees were stunted, its castle ruinous. It, too, had suffered in the border warfare between the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt, between things as they are and as they ought to be. Once more the west was retreating, once again the orderly stars were dotting the eastern sky. There is certainly no rest for us on the earth. But there is happiness, and as Margaret descended the mound