Howards End: Chapters 34–44

It may be unbalanced to fly out of England, but to stay away eight months argues that the heart is awry as well as the head.

A sick-bed could recall Helen, but she was deaf to more human calls; after a glimpse at her aunt, she would retire into her nebulous life behind some poste restante.

And where there is enjoyment of the past there may also be reaction—propagation at both ends.

But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself.

She does understand herself, she has some rudimentary control over her own growth.

Mellowing rapidly, he was a pleasanter companion than before. Oxford had done much for him. He had lost his peevishness, and could hide his indifference to people and his interest in food.

The familiar barriers, the streets along which she moved, the houses between which she had made her little journeys for so many years, became negligible suddenly.

Rather diffident, he obeyed her.

“The facts are as follows,” replied Tibby, who had at times a pedantic lucidity.

The genial, tentative host disappeared, and they saw instead the man who had carved money out of Greece and Africa, and bought forests from the natives for a few bottles of gin.

“And sooner than go against them you would have your sister suffer. You could have got her down to Swanage by a word, but you had scruples. And scruples are all very well. I am as scrupulous as any man alive, I hope; but when it is a case like this, when there is a question of madness—”

How dare these men label her sister! What horrors lay ahead! What impertinences that shelter under the name of science!

Thinking it professional to prevaricate, he murmured something about a nervous breakdown.

“In what way different? You have betrayed Mrs. Wilcox, Helen only herself. You remain in society, Helen can’t. You have had only pleasure, she may die. You have the insolence to talk to me of differences, Henry?”

No doubt Henry would pardon her outburst, and go on blustering and muddling into a ripe old age.

They passed upstairs, kissed, and amidst the endless iterations fell asleep.

Remorse is not among the eternal verities.

She hid it, so that her husband should not see, and when he had gone to his work read it with some emotion, and sent the prodigal a little money out of her dress allowance.

When Blanche’s husband offered him work, he found some pretext for avoiding it.

The anodyne of muddledom, by which most men blur and blend their mistakes, never passed Leonard’s lips—

Then down the nave he saw Miss Schlegel and her brother.

By a rending effort of the will he woke the rest of the room up.

Half clodhopper, half board-school prig, they can still throw back to a nobler stock, and breed yeomen.

To Leonard, intent on his private sin, there came the conviction of innate goodness elsewhere.

When Charles left Ducie Street he had caught the first train home, but had no inkling of the newest development until late at night.

I don’t want you to conclude that my wife and I had anything of the nature of a quarrel. She was only overwrought, as who would not be?

On his way through the village he informed the police, who thanked him, and said there must be an inquest.

People lost their humanity, and took values as arbitrary as those in a pack of playing-cards.

Ah, no; there was beauty and adventure behind, such as the man at her feet had yearned for; there was hope this side of the grave; there were truer relationships beyond the limits that fetter us now.

They had tried not to go over the precipice, but perhaps the fall was inevitable.

Alas! that Henry should fade away as reality emerged, and only her love for him should remain clear, stamped with his image like the cameos we rescue out of dreams.

Tenacious of power, he would keep Charles and the rest dependent, and retire from business reluctantly and at an advanced age.

Henry’s kind had filched most of it.

It was against all reason that he should be punished, but the law, notwithstanding, sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment.

He could bear no one but his wife; he shambled up to Margaret afterwards and asked her to do what she could with him.

Tom’s father was cutting the big meadow. He passed again and again amid whirring blades and sweet odours of grass, encompassing with narrowing circles the sacred centre of the field.

The noise of the cutter came intermittently, like the breaking of waves.

“The conclave’s breaking at last. I’ll go.”

Margaret joined the family without speaking; the five of them had met already at tea, and she knew quite well what was going to be said. Averse to wasting her time, she went on sewing.

There was something uncanny in her triumph. She, who had never expected to conquer anyone, had charged straight through these Wilcoxes and broken up their lives.