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

on her lover’s arm, she felt that she was having her share.

To her annoyance, Mrs. Bast was still in the garden; the husband and Helen had left her there to finish her meal while they went to engage rooms. Margaret found this woman repellent. She had felt, when shaking her hand, an overpowering shame. She remembered the motive of her call at Wickham Place, and smelt again odours from the abyss⁠—odours the more disturbing because they were involuntary. For there was no malice in Jacky. There she sat, a piece of cake in one hand, an empty champagne glass in the other, doing no harm to anybody.

“She’s overtired,” Margaret whispered.

“She’s something else,” said Henry. “This won’t do. I can’t have her in my garden in this state.”

“Is she⁠—” Margaret hesitated to add “drunk.” Now that she was going to marry him, he had grown particular. He discountenanced risque conversations now.

Henry went up to the woman. She raised her face, which gleamed in the twilight like a puffball.

“Madam, you will be more comfortable at the hotel,” he said sharply.

Jacky replied: “If it isn’t Hen!”

“Ne crois pas que le mari lui ressemble,” apologised Margaret. “Il est tout à fait différent.”

“Henry!” she repeated, quite distinctly.

Mr. Wilcox was much annoyed. “I congratulate you on your protégés,” he remarked.

“Hen, don’t go. You do love me, dear, don’t you?”

“Bless us, what a person!” sighed Margaret, gathering up her skirts.

Jacky pointed with her cake. “You’re a nice boy, you are.” She yawned. “There now, I love you.”

“Henry, I am awfully sorry.”

“And pray why?” he asked, and looked at her so sternly that she feared he was ill. He seemed more scandalised than the facts demanded.

“To have brought this down on you.”

“Pray don’t apologise.”

The voice continued.

“Why does she call you ‘Hen’?” said Margaret innocently. “Has she ever seen you before?”

“Seen Hen before!” said Jacky. “Who hasn’t seen Hen? He’s serving you like me, my boys! You wait⁠—Still we love ’em.”

“Are you now satisfied?” Henry asked.

Margaret began to grow frightened. “I don’t know what it is all about,” she said. “Let’s come in.”

But he thought she was acting. He thought he was trapped. He saw his whole life crumbling. “Don’t you indeed?” he said bitingly. “I do. Allow me to congratulate you on the success of your plan.”

“This is Helen’s plan, not mine.”

“I now understand your interest in the Basts. Very well thought out. I am amused at your caution, Margaret. You are quite right⁠—it was necessary. I am a man, and have lived a man’s past. I have the honour to release you from your engagement.”

Still she could not understand. She knew of life’s seamy side as a theory; she could not grasp it as a fact. More words from Jacky were necessary⁠—words unequivocal, undenied.

“So that⁠—” burst from her, and she went indoors. She stopped herself from saying more.

“So what?” asked Colonel Fussell, who was getting ready to start in the hall.

“We were saying⁠—Henry and I were just having the fiercest argument, my point being⁠—” Seizing his fur coat from a footman, she offered to help him on. He protested, and there was a playful little scene.

“No, let me do that,” said Henry, following.

“Thanks so much! You see⁠—he has forgiven me!”

The Colonel said gallantly: “I don’t expect there’s much to forgive.”

He got into the car. The ladies followed him after an interval. Maids, courier, and heavier luggage had been sent on earlier by the branch-line. Still chattering, still thanking their host and patronising their future hostess, the guests were borne away.

Then Margaret continued: “So that woman has been your mistress?”

“You put it with your usual delicacy,” he replied.

“When, please?”

“Why?”

“When, please?”

“Ten years ago.”

She left him without a word. For it was not her tragedy; it was Mrs. Wilcox’s.

XXVII

Helen began to wonder why she had spent a matter of eight pounds in making some people ill and others angry. Now that the wave of excitement was ebbing, and had left her, Mr. Bast, and Mrs. Bast stranded for the night in a Shropshire hotel, she asked herself what forces had made the wave flow. At all events, no harm was done. Margaret would play the game properly now, and though Helen disapproved of her sister’s methods, she knew that the Basts would benefit by them in the long-run.

“Mr. Wilcox is so illogical,” she explained to Leonard, who had put his wife to bed, and was sitting with her in the empty coffee-room. “If we told him it was his duty to take you on, he might refuse to do it. The fact is, he isn’t properly educated. I don’t want to set you against him, but you’ll find him a trial.”

“I can never thank you sufficiently, Miss Schlegel,” was all that Leonard felt equal to.

“I believe in personal responsibility. Don’t you? And in personal everything. I hate⁠—I suppose I oughtn’t to say that⁠—but the Wilcoxes are on the wrong tack surely. Or perhaps it isn’t their fault. Perhaps the little thing that says ‘I’ is missing out of the middle of their heads, and then it’s a waste of time to blame them. There’s a nightmare of a theory that says a special race is being born which will rule the rest of us in the future just because it lacks the little thing that says ‘I.’ Had you heard that?”

“I get no time for reading.”

“Had you thought it, then? That there are two kinds of people⁠—our kind, who live straight from the middle of their heads, and the other kind who can’t, because their heads have no middle? They can’t say ‘I.’ They aren’t in fact, and so they’re supermen. Pierpont Morgan has never said ‘I’ in his life.”

Leonard roused himself. If his benefactress wanted intellectual conversation, she must have it. She was more important than his ruined past. “I never got on to Nietzsche,” he said. “But I always understood that those supermen were rather what you may call egoists.”

“Oh no, that’s wrong,” replied Helen. “No superman ever said ‘I want,’ because ‘I want’