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

“It is certainly a very bad business,” said Tibby.

His reply seemed to calm his sister. “I was afraid that I saw it out of proportion. But you are right outside it, and you must know. In a day or two⁠—or perhaps a week⁠—take whatever steps you think fit. I leave it in your hands.”

She concluded her charge.

“The facts as they touch Meg are all before you,” she added; and Tibby sighed and felt it rather hard that, because of his open mind, he should be empanelled to serve as a juror. He had never been interested in human beings, for which one must blame him, but he had had rather too much of them at Wickham Place. Just as some people cease to attend when books are mentioned, so Tibby’s attention wandered when “personal relations” came under discussion. Ought Margaret to know what Helen knew the Basts to know? Similar questions had vexed him from infancy, and at Oxford he had learned to say that the importance of human beings has been vastly overrated by specialists. The epigram, with its faint whiff of the eighties, meant nothing. But he might have let it off now if his sister had not been ceaselessly beautiful.

“You see, Helen⁠—have a cigarette⁠—I don’t see what I’m to do.”

“Then there’s nothing to be done. I dare say you are right. Let them marry. There remains the question of compensation.”

“Do you want me to adjudicate that too? Had you not better consult an expert?”

“This part is in confidence,” said Helen. “It has nothing to do with Meg, and do not mention it to her. The compensation⁠—I do not see who is to pay it if I don’t, and I have already decided on the minimum sum. As soon as possible I am placing it to your account, and when I am in Germany you will pay it over for me. I shall never forget your kindness, Tibbikins, if you do this.”

“What is the sum?”

“Five thousand.”

“Good God alive!” said Tibby, and went crimson.

“Now, what is the good of driblets? To go through life having done one thing⁠—to have raised one person from the abyss; not these puny gifts of shillings and blankets⁠—making the grey more grey. No doubt people will think me extraordinary.”

“I don’t care an iota what people think!” cried he, heated to unusual manliness of diction. “But it’s half what you have.”

“Not nearly half.” She spread out her hands over her soiled skirt. “I have far too much, and we settled at Chelsea last spring that three hundred a year is necessary to set a man on his feet. What I give will bring in a hundred and fifty between two. It isn’t enough.” He could not recover. He was not angry or even shocked, and he saw that Helen would still have plenty to live on. But it amazed him to think what haycocks people can make of their lives. His delicate intonations would not work, and he could only blurt out that the five thousand pounds would mean a great deal of bother for him personally.

“I didn’t expect you to understand me.”

“I? I understand nobody.”

“But you’ll do it?”

“Apparently.”

“I leave you two commissions, then. The first concerns Mr. Wilcox, and you are to use your discretion. The second concerns the money, and is to be mentioned to no one, and carried out literally. You will send a hundred pounds on account tomorrow.”

He walked with her to the station, passing through those streets whose serried beauty never bewildered him and never fatigued. The lovely creature raised domes and spires into the cloudless blue, and only the ganglion of vulgarity round Carfax showed how evanescent was the phantom, how faint its claim to represent England. Helen, rehearsing her commission, noticed nothing; the Basts were in her brain, and she retold the crisis in a meditative way, which might have made other men curious. She was seeing whether it would hold. He asked her once why she had taken the Basts right into the heart of Evie’s wedding. She stopped like a frightened animal and said, “Does that seem to you so odd?” Her eyes, the hand laid on the mouth, quite haunted him, until they were absorbed into the figure of St. Mary the Virgin, before whom he paused for a moment on the walk home.

It is convenient to follow him in the discharge of his duties. Margaret summoned him the next day. She was terrified at Helen’s flight, and he had to say that she had called in at Oxford. Then she said: “Did she seem worried at any rumour about Henry?” He answered, “Yes.” “I knew it was that!” she exclaimed. “I’ll write to her.” Tibby was relieved.

He then sent the cheque to the address that Helen gave him, and stated that he was instructed to forward later on five thousand pounds. An answer came back very civil and quiet in tone⁠—such an answer as Tibby himself would have given. The cheque was returned, the legacy refused, the writer being in no need of money. Tibby forwarded this to Helen, adding in the fullness of his heart that Leonard Bast seemed somewhat a monumental person after all. Helen’s reply was frantic. He was to take no notice. He was to go down at once and say that she commanded acceptance. He went. A scurf of books and china ornaments awaited him. The Basts had just been evicted for not paying their rent, and had wandered no one knew whither. Helen had begun bungling with her money by this time, and had even sold out her shares in the Nottingham and Derby Railway. For some weeks she did nothing. Then she reinvested, and, owing to the good advice of her stockbrokers, became rather richer than she had been before.

Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly, but to an afterlife in the city of ghosts, while