Howards End: Chapters 12–17

Few women had tried more earnestly to pierce the accretions in which body and soul are enwrapped.

She spoke of the scenery, quiet, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, with their scampering herds of deer; of the river and its quaint entrance into the Baltic Sea; of the Oderberge, only three hundred feet high, from which one slid all too quickly back into the Pomeranian plains, and yet these Oderberge were real mountains, with pine-forests, streams, and views complete.

Certainly London fascinates. One visualises it as a tract of quivering grey, intelligent without purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered before it can be chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with no pulsation of humanity.

A friend explains himself; the earth is explicable—from her we came, and we must return to her.

London is religion’s opportunity—not the decorous religion of theologians, but anthropomorphic, crude.

But Helen was now down in the dining room preparing a speech about political economy. At times her voice could be heard declaiming through the floor.

“Duty” always elicited a groan.

However, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a house in the country and also a flat in town, provided we all stick together and contribute. Though of course—Oh, how one does maunder on and to think, to think of the people who are really poor. How do they live?

Oh, Mrs. Lanoline’s a dear—she asked for a husband as if he were an umbrella. She mislaid him Saturday afternoon—and for a long time suffered no inconvenience. But all night, and all this morning her apprehensions grew.

The flats, their only outlook, hung like an ornate curtain between Margaret and the welter of London.

“Tibby had better first wonder what he’ll do,” retorted Helen; and that topic was resumed, but with acrimony.

“It was a concert at the Queen’s Hall. I think you will recollect,” he added pretentiously, “when I tell you that it included a performance of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven.”

Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract.

The habit was analogous to a debauch, an outlet, though the worst of outlets, for instincts that would not be denied. Terrifying him, it would beat down his suspicions and prudence until he was confiding secrets to people whom he had scarcely seen.

But they to him were denizens of Romance, who must keep to the corner he had assigned them, pictures that must not walk out of their frames.

Petulance and squalor were enough.

The inconvenience grew intolerable, and though she was now of a retiring habit, and shy of women, she went up to Wickham Place.

“Not if you gave them so much. A big windfall would not pauperise a man. It is these little driblets, distributed among too many, that do the harm. Money’s educational. It’s far more educational than the things it buys.”

Give them money. Don’t dole them out poetry-books and railway-tickets like babies. Give them the wherewithal to buy these things.

Margaret weakly admitted the claim, and another claim was at once set up by Helen, who declared that she had been the millionaire’s housemaid for over forty years, overfed and underpaid; was nothing to be done for her, so corpulent and poor?

The millionaire then read out her last will and testament, in which she left the whole of her fortune to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Helen and Margaret walked with the earnest girl as far as Battersea Bridge Station, arguing copiously all the way.

But Helen was nettled. The aim of their debates she implied was Truth.

Mr. Wilcox, whose fortune was not so very far below the standard indicated, laughed exuberantly.

“I advise nothing,” he interrupted, glancing up and down the Embankment, in case his indiscretion had been overheard. “I oughtn’t to have spoken—but I happen to know, being more or less behind the scenes. The Porphyrion’s a bad, bad concern—Now, don’t say I said so..."

But he was right; the visit proved a conspicuous failure.

He was not an Italian, still less a Frenchman, in whose blood there runs the very spirit of persiflage and of gracious repartee.

His wit was the Cockney’s; it opened no doors into imagination, and Helen was drawn up short by “The more a lady has to say, the better,” administered waggishly.

He would pay for Mrs. Munt’s hearthrug with ostentatious haste, a large claim he would repudiate quietly, and fight court by court.

He would pay for Mrs. Munt’s hearthrug with ostentatious haste, a large claim he would repudiate quietly, and fight court by court.

But his true fighting weight, his antecedents, his amours with other members of the commercial Pantheon—all these were as uncertain to ordinary mortals as were the escapades of Zeus.

Laughter from Evie as at a repartee.

Love, say the ascetics, reveals our shameful kinship with the beasts.

He has built flats on its site, his motor-cars grow swifter, his exposures of Socialism more trenchant.

As she trod the staircase, narrow, but carpeted thickly, as she entered the eating-room, where saddles of mutton were being trundled up to expectant clergymen, she had a strong, if erroneous, conviction of her own futility, and wished she had never come out of her backwater, where nothing happened except art and literature, and where no one ever got married or succeeded in remaining engaged.

Though no more Old English than the works of Kipling, it had selected its reminiscences so adroitly that her criticism was lulled, and the guests whom it was nourishing for imperial purposes bore the outer semblance of Parson Adams or Tom Jones.

Though no more Old English than the works of Kipling, it had selected its reminiscences so adroitly that her criticism was lulled, and the guests whom it was nourishing for imperial purposes bore the outer semblance of Parson Adams or Tom Jones.

I don’t believe in suiting my conversation to my company. One can doubtless hit upon some medium of exchange that seems to do well enough, but it’s no more like the real thing than money is like food. There’s no nourishment in it. You pass it to the lower classes, and they pass it back to you, and this you call ‘social intercourse’ or ‘mutual endeavour,’ when it’s mutual priggishness if it’s anything.

“You do admit that, if wealth was divided up equally, in a few years there would be rich and poor again just the same. The hard-working man would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom.”

He and she were advancing out of their respective families towards a more intimate acquaintance.