Howards End (6 page)

“Do you agree?” asked Margaret. “Do you think music is so different to pictures?”

“I—I should have thought so, kind of,” he said.

“So should I. Now, my sister declares they’re just the same. We have great arguments over it. She says I’m dense; I say she’s sloppy.” Getting under way, she cried: “Now, doesn’t it seem absurd to you? What
is
the good of the arts if they’re interchangeable? What
is
the good of the ear if it tells you the same as the eye? Helen’s one aim is to translate tunes into the language of painting, and pictures into the language of music. It’s very ingenious, and she says several pretty things in the process, but what’s gained, I’d like to know? Oh, it’s all rubbish, radically false. If Monet’s really Debussy, and Debussy’s really Monet, neither gentleman is worth his salt—that’s my opinion.”

Evidently these sisters quarrelled.

“Now, this very symphony that we’ve just been having—she won’t let it alone. She labels it with meanings from start to finish; turns it into literature. I wonder if the day will ever return when music will be treated as music. Yet I don’t know. There’s my brother—behind us. He treats music as music, and oh, my goodness! he makes me angrier than anyone, simply furious. With him I daren’t even argue.”

An unhappy family, if talented.

“But, of course, the real villain is Wagner. He has done more than any man in the nineteenth century towards the muddling of arts. I do feel that music is in a very serious state just now, though extraordinarily interesting. Every now and then in history there do come these terrible geniuses, like Wagner, who stir up all the wells of thought at once. For a moment it’s splendid. Such a splash as never was. But afterwards—such a lot of mud; and the wells—as it were, they communicate with each other too easily now, and not one of them will run quite clear. That’s what Wagner’s done.”

Her speeches fluttered away from the young man like birds. If only he could talk like this, he would have caught the world. Oh, to acquire culture! Oh, to pronounce foreign names correctly! Oh, to be well informed, discoursing at ease on every subject that a lady started! But it would take one years. With an hour at lunch and a few shattered hours in the evening, how was it possible to catch up with leisured women who had been reading steadily from childhood? His brain might be full of names, he might have even heard of Monet and Debussy; the trouble was that he could not string them together into a sentence, he could not make them “tell,” he could not quite forget about his stolen umbrella. Yes, the umbrella was the real trouble. Behind Monet and Debussy the umbrella persisted, with the steady beat of a drum. “I suppose my umbrella will be all right,” he was thinking. “I don’t really mind about it. I will think about music instead. I suppose my umbrella will be all right.” Earlier in the afternoon he had worried about seats. Ought he to have paid as much as two shillings? Earlier still he had wondered: “Shall I try to do without a programme?” There had always been something to worry him ever since he could remember, always something that distracted him in the pursuit of beauty. For he did pursue beauty, and, therefore, Margaret’s speeches did flutter away from him like birds.

Margaret talked ahead, occasionally saying: “Don’t you think so? Don’t you feel the same?” And once she stopped, and said: “Oh, do interrupt me!” which terrified him. She did not attract him, though she filled him with awe. Her figure was meagre, her face seemed all teeth and eyes, her references to her sister and brother were uncharitable. For all her cleverness and culture, she was probably one of those soulless, atheistical women who have been so shown up by Miss Corelli. It was surprising (and alarming) that she should suddenly say: “I do hope that you’ll come in and have some tea.”

“I do hope that you’ll come in and have some tea. We should be so glad. I have dragged you so far out of your way.”

They had arrived at Wickham Place. The sun had set, and the backwater, in deep shadow, was filling with a gentle haze. To the right the fantastic skyline of the flats towered black against the hues of evening; to the left the older houses raised a square-cut, irregular parapet against the grey. Margaret fumbled for her latchkey. Of course she had forgotten it. So, grasping her umbrella by its ferrule, she leant over the area and tapped at the dining-room window.

“Helen! Let us in!”

“All right,” said a voice.

“You’ve been taking this gentleman’s umbrella.”

“Taken a what?” said Helen, opening the door. “Oh, what’s that? Do come in! How do you do?”

“Helen, you must not be so ramshackly. You took this gentleman’s umbrella away from Queen’s Hall, and he has had the trouble of coming for it.”

“Oh, I am so sorry!” cried Helen, all her hair flying. She had pulled off her hat as soon as she returned, and had flung herself into the big dining-room chair. “I do nothing but steal umbrellas. I am so very sorry! Do come in and choose one. Is yours a hooky or a nobbly? Mine’s a nobbly—at least, I
think
it is.”

The light was turned on, and they began to search the hall, Helen, who had abruptly parted with the Fifth Symphony, commenting with shrill little cries.

“Don’t you talk, Meg! You stole an old gentleman’s silk top-hat. Yes, she did, Aunt Juley. It is a positive fact. She thought it was a muff. Oh, heavens! I’ve knocked the In and Out card down. Where’s Frieda? Tibby, why don’t you ever—? No, I can’t remember what I was going to say. That wasn’t it, but do tell the maids to hurry tea up. What about this umbrella?” She opened it. “No, it’s all gone along the seams. It’s an appalling umbrella. It must be mine.”

But it was not.

He took it from her, murmured a few words of thanks, and then fled, with the lilting step of the clerk.

“But if you will stop—” cried Margaret. “Now, Helen, how stupid you’ve been!”

“Whatever have I done?”

“Don’t you see that you’ve frightened him away? I meant him to stop to tea. You oughtn’t to talk about stealing or holes in an umbrella. I saw his nice eyes getting so miserable. No, it’s not a bit of good now.” For Helen had darted out into the street, shouting: “Oh, do stop!”

“I dare say it is all for the best,” opined Mrs. Munt. “We know nothing about the young man, Margaret, and your drawing-room is full of very tempting little things.”

But Helen cried: “Aunt Juley, how can you! You make me more and more ashamed. I’d rather he
had
been a thief and taken all the apostle spoons than that I—Well, I must shut the front door, I suppose. One more failure for Helen.”

“Yes, I think the apostle spoons could have gone as rent,” said Margaret. Seeing that her aunt did not understand, she added: “You remember ‘rent.’ It was one of father’s words—rent to the ideal, to his own faith in human nature. You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say: ‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.”

“I remember something of the sort now,” said Mrs. Munt, rather tartly, for she longed to add: “It was lucky that your father married a wife with money.” But this was unkind, and she contented herself with: “Why, he might have stolen the little Ricketts picture as well.”

“Better that he had,” said Helen stoutly.

“No, I agree with Aunt Juley,” said Margaret. “I’d rather mistrust people than lose my little Ricketts. There are limits.”

Their brother, finding the incident commonplace, had stolen upstairs to see whether there were scones for tea. He warmed the teapot—almost too deftly—rejected the Orange Pekoe that the parlour-maid had provided, poured in five spoonfuls of a superior blend, filled up with really boiling water, and now called to the ladies to be quick or they would lose the aroma.

“All right, Auntie Tibby,” called Helen, while Margaret, thoughtful again, said: “In a way, I wish we had a real boy in the house—the kind of boy who cares for men. It would make entertaining so much easier.”

“So do I,” said her sister. “Tibby only cares for cultured females singing Brahms.” And when they joined him she said rather sharply: “Why didn’t you make that young man welcome, Tibby? You must do the host a little, you know. You ought to have taken his hat and coaxed him into stopping, instead of letting him be swamped by screaming women.”

Tibby sighed, and drew a long strand of hair over his forehead.

“Oh, it’s no good looking superior. I mean what I say.”

“Leave Tibby alone!” said Margaret, who could not bear her brother to be scolded.

“Here’s the house a regular hen-coop!” grumbled Helen.

“Oh, my dear!” protested Mrs. Munt. “How can you say such dreadful things! The number of men you get here has always astonished me. If there is any danger, it’s the other way round.”

“Yes, but it’s the wrong sort of men, Helen means.”

“No, I don’t,” corrected Helen. “We get the right sort of man, but the wrong side of him, and I say that’s Tibby’s fault. There ought to be a something about the house—an—I don’t know what.”

“A touch of the W.’s, perhaps?”

Helen put out her tongue.

“Who are the W.’s?” asked Tibby.

“The W.’s are things I and Meg and Aunt Juley know about and you don’t, so there!”

“I suppose that ours is a female house,” said Margaret, “and one must just accept it. No, Aunt Juley, I don’t mean that this house is full of women. I am trying to say something much more clever. I mean that it was irrevocably feminine, even in father’s time. Now I’m sure you understand! Well, I’ll give you another example. It’ll shock you, but I don’t care. Suppose Queen Victoria gave a dinner-party, and that the guests had been Leighton, Millais, Swinburne, Rossetti, Meredith, Fitzgerald, etc. Do you suppose that the atmosphere of that dinner would have been artistic? Heavens, no! The very chairs on which they sat would have seen to that. So with our house—it must be feminine, and all we can do is to see that it isn’t effeminate. Just as another house that I can mention, but I won’t, sounded irrevocably masculine, and all its inmates can do is to see that it isn’t brutal.”

“That house being the W.’s house, I presume,” said Tibby.

“You’re not going to be told about the W.’s, my child,” Helen cried, “so don’t you think it. And on the other hand, I don’t the least mind if you find out, so don’t you think you’ve done anything clever, in either case. Give me a cigarette.”

“You do what you can for the house,” said Margaret. “The drawing-room reeks of smoke.”

“If you smoked too, the house might suddenly turn masculine. Atmosphere is probably a question of touch and go. Even at Queen Victoria’s dinner-party—if something had been just a little different—perhaps if she’d worn a clinging Liberty tea-gown instead of a magenta satin—”

“With an Indian shawl over her shoulders—”

“Fastened at the bosom with a Cairngorm-pin—”

Bursts of disloyal laughter—you must remember that they are half German—greeted these suggestions, and Margaret said pensively: “How inconceivable it would be if the Royal Family cared about art.” And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen’s cigarette turned to a spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows, which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly. Beyond them the thoroughfare roared gently—a tide that could never be quiet, while in the east, invisible behind the smokes of Wapping, the moon was rising.

“That reminds me, Margaret. We might have taken that young man into the dining-room, at all events. Only the majolica plate—and that is so firmly set in the wall. I am really distressed that he had no tea.”

For that little incident had impressed the three women more than might be supposed. It remained as a goblin footfall, as a hint that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.

C
HAPTER
6

W
E ARE
not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentle-folk.

The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more. He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food. Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming: “All men are equal—all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas,” and so he was obliged to assert gentility, lest he slipped into the abyss where nothing counts and the statements of Democracy are inaudible.

As he walked away from Wickham Place, his first care was to prove that he was as good as the Miss Schlegels. Obscurely wounded in his pride, he tried to wound them in return. They were probably not ladies. Would real ladies have asked him to tea? They were certainly ill-natured and cold. At each step his feeling of superiority increased. Would a real lady have talked about stealing an umbrella? Perhaps they were thieves after all, and if he had gone into the house they would have clapped a chloroformed handkerchief over his face. He walked on complacently as far as the Houses of Parliament. There an empty stomach asserted itself, and told him that he was a fool.

“Evening, Mr. Bast.”

“Evening, Mr. Dealtry.”

“Nice evening.”

“Evening.”

Mr. Dealtry, a fellow clerk, passed on, and Leonard stood wondering whether he would take the tram as far as a penny would take him, or whether he would walk. He decided to walk—it is no good giving in, and he had spent money enough at Queen’s Hall—and he walked over Westminster Bridge, in front of St. Thomas’s Hospital, and through the immense tunnel that passes under the South-Western main line at Vauxhall. In the tunnel he paused and listened to the roar of the trains. A sharp pain darted through his head, and he was conscious of the exact form of his eye sockets. He pushed on for another mile, and did not slacken speed until he stood at the entrance of a road called Camelia Road, which was at present his home.

Here he stopped again, and glanced suspiciously to right and left, like a rabbit that is going to bolt into its hole. A block of flats, constructed with extreme cheapness, towered on either hand. Farther down the road two more blocks were being built, and beyond these an old house was being demolished to accommodate another pair. It was the kind of scene that may be observed all over London, whatever the locality—bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of the water in a fountain, as the city receives more and more men upon her soil. Camelia Road would soon stand out like a fortress, and command, for a little, an extensive view. Only for a little. Plans were out for the erection of flats in Magnolia Road also. And again a few years, and all the flats in either road might be pulled down, and new buildings, of a vastness at present unimaginable, might arise where they had fallen.

“Evening, Mr. Bast.”

“Evening, Mr. Cunningham.”

“Very serious thing, this decline of the birth-rate in Manchester.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Very serious thing, this decline of the birth-rate in Manchester,” repeated Mr. Cunningham, tapping the Sunday paper, in which the calamity in question had just been announced to him.

“Ah, yes,” said Leonard, who was not going to let on that he had not bought a Sunday paper.

“If this kind of thing goes on, the population of England will be stationary in 1960.”

“You don’t say so.”

“I call it a very serious thing, eh?”

“Good evening, Mr. Cunningham.”

“Good evening, Mr. Bast.”

Then Leonard entered Block B of the flats, and turned, not upstairs, but down, into what is known to house agents as a semi-basement, and to other men as a cellar. He opened the door, and cried “Hullo!” with the pseudogeniality of the Cockney. There was no reply. “Hullo!” he repeated. The sitting-room was empty, though the electric light had been left burning. A look of relief came over his face, and he flung himself into the armchair.

The sitting-room contained, besides the armchair, two other chairs, a piano, a three-legged table, and a cosy corner. Of the walls, one was occupied by the window, the other by a draped mantelshelf bristling with Cupids. Opposite the window was the door, and beside the door a bookcase, while over the piano there extended one of the masterpieces of Maud Goodman. It was an amorous and not unpleasant little hole when the curtains were drawn, and the lights turned on, and the gas-stove unlit. But it struck that shallow makeshift note that is so often heard in the modern dwelling-place. It had been too easily gained, and could be relinquished too easily.

As Leonard was kicking off his boots he jarred the three-legged table, and a photograph frame, honourably poised upon it, slid sideways, fell off into the fireplace, and smashed. He swore in a colourless sort of way, and picked the photograph up. It represented a young lady called Jacky, and had been taken at the time when young ladies called Jacky were often photographed with their mouths open. Teeth of dazzling whiteness extended along either of Jacky’s jaws, and positively weighed her head sideways, so large were they and so numerous. Take my word for it, that smile was simply stunning, and it is only you and I who will be fastidious, and complain that true joy begins in the eyes, and that the eyes of Jacky did not accord with her smile, but were anxious and hungry.

Leonard tried to pull out the fragments of glass, and cut his fingers and swore again. A drop of blood fell on the frame, another followed, spilling over on to the exposed photograph. He swore more vigorously, and dashed into the kitchen, where he bathed his hands. The kitchen was the same size as the sitting-room; through it was a bed-room. This completed his home. He was renting the flat furnished: of all the objects that encumbered it, none were his own except the photograph frame, the Cupids, and the books.

“Damn, damn, damnation!” he murmured, together with such other words as he had learnt from older men. Then he raised his hand to his forehead and said: “Oh, damn it all—” which meant something different. He pulled himself together. He drank a little tea, black and silent, that still survived upon an upper shelf. He swallowed some dusty crumbs of a cake. Then he went back to the sitting-room, settled himself anew, and began to read a volume of Ruskin.

“Seven miles to the north of Venice—”

How perfectly the famous chapter opens! How supreme its command of admonition and of poetry! The rich man is speaking to us from his gondola.

“Seven miles to the north of Venice the banks of sand which nearer the city rise little above low-water mark attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea.”

Leonard was trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the greatest master of English Prose. He read forward steadily, occasionally making a few notes.

“Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and first (for of the shafts enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this church—its luminousness.”

Was there anything to be learnt from this fine sentence? Could he adapt it to the needs of daily life? Could he introduce it, with modifications, when he next wrote a letter to his brother, the lay reader? For example—

“Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and first (for of the absence of ventilation enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this flat—its obscurity.”

Something told him that the modifications would not do; and that something, had he known it, was the spirit of English Prose. “My flat is dark as well as stuffy.” Those were the words for him.

And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard’s life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are.

Leonard listened to it with reverence. He felt that he was being done good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queen’s Hall Concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head out of the grey waters and see the universe. He believed in sudden conversion, a belief which may be right, but which is peculiarly attractive to a half-baked mind. It is the basis of much popular religion: in the domain of business it dominates the Stock Exchange, and becomes that “bit of luck” by which all successes and failures are explained. “If only I had a bit of luck, the whole thing would come straight.... He’s got a most magnificent place down at Streatham and a 20 h.-p. Fiat, but then, mind you, he’s had luck.... I’m sorry the wife’s so late, but she never has any luck over catching trains.” Leonard was superior to these people; he did believe in effort and in a steady preparation for the change that he desired. But of a heritage that may expand gradually, he had no conception: he hoped to come to Culture suddenly, much as the Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus. Those Miss Schlegels had come to it; they had done the trick; their hands were upon the ropes, once and for all. And meanwhile, his flat was dark, as well as stuffy.

Presently there was a noise on the staircase. He shut up Margaret’s card in the pages of Ruskin, and opened the door. A woman entered, of whom it is simplest to say that she was not respectable. Her appearance was awesome. She seemed all strings and bell-pulls—ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that clinked and caught—and a boa of azure feathers hung round her neck, with the ends uneven. Her throat was bare, wound with a double row of pearls, her arms were bare to the elbows, and might again be detected at the shoulder, through cheap lace. Her hat, which was flowery, resembled those punnets, covered with flannel, which we sowed with mustard and cress in our childhood, and which germinated here yes, and there no. She wore it on the back of her head. As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead. The face—the face does not signify. It was the face of the photograph, but older, and the teeth were not so numerous as the photographer had suggested, and certainly not so white. Yes, Jacky was past her prime, whatever that prime may have been. She was descending quicker than most women? into the colourless years, and the look in her eyes confessed it.

“What ho!” said Leonard, greeting the apparition with much spirit, and helping it off with its boa.

Jacky, in husky tones, replied: “What ho!”

“Been out?” he asked. The question sounds superfluous, but it cannot have been really, for the lady answered “No,” adding: “Oh, I am so tired.”

“You tired?”

“Eh?”

“I’m tired,” said he, hanging the boa up.

“Oh, Len, I am so tired.”

“I’ve been to that classical concert I told you about,” said Leonard.

“What’s that?”

“I came back as soon as it was over.”

“Anyone been round to our place?” asked Jacky.

“Not that I’ve seen. I met Mr. Cunningham outside, and we passed a few remarks.”

“What, not Mr. Cunningham?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, you mean Mr. Cunningham.”

“Yes. Mr. Cunningham.”

“I’ve been out to tea at a lady friend’s.”

Her secret being at last given to the world, and the name of the lady friend being even adumbrated, Jacky made no further experiments in the difficult and tiring art of conversation. She never had been a great talker. Even in her photographic days she had relied upon her smile and her figure to attract, and now that she was—

On the shelf,
On the shelf,
Boys, boys, I’m on the shelf,

she was not likely to find her tongue. Occasional bursts of song (of which the above is an example) still issued from her lips, but the spoken word was rare.

She sat down on Leonard’s knee, and began to fondle him. She was now a massive woman of thirty-three, and her weight hurt him, but he could not very well say anything. Then she said: “Is that a book you’re reading?” and he said: “That’s a book,” and drew it from her unreluctant grasp. Margaret’s card fell out of it. It fell face downwards, and he murmured: “Bookmarker.”

“Len—”

“What is it?” he asked, a little wearily, for she only had one topic of conversation when she sat upon his knee.

“You do love me?”

“Jacky, you know that I do. How can you ask such questions!”

“But you do love me, Len, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

A pause. The other remark was still due.

“Len—”

“Well? What is it?”

“Len, you will make it all right?”

“I can’t have you ask me that again,” said the boy, flaring up into a sudden passion. “I’ve promised to marry you when I’m of age, and that’s enough. My word’s my word. I’ve promised to marry you as soon as ever I’m twenty-one, and I can’t keep on being worried. I’ve worries enough. It isn’t likely I’d throw you over, let alone my word, when I’ve spent all this money. Besides, I’m an Englishman, and I never go back on my word. Jacky, do be reasonable. Of course I’ll marry you. Only do stop badgering me.”

“When’s your birthday, Len?”