Howards End: Chapters 18–24

As they were seated at Aunt Juley’s breakfast-table at The Bays, parrying her excessive hospitality and enjoying the view of the bay, a letter came for Margaret and threw her into perturbation.

As they were seated at Aunt Juley’s breakfast-table at The Bays, parrying her excessive hospitality and enjoying the view of the bay, a letter came for Margaret and threw her into perturbation.

“Meg, if you start in your honest-English vein, I shall throw the treacle at you.”

“Your father may have been able to change countries,” said Mrs. Munt with asperity, “and that may or may not be a good thing. But he could change houses no better than you can, in fact, much worse. Never shall I forget what poor Emily suffered in the move from Manchester.”

“I may have been deceived by the curate, my dear, but the young fellow who brings the midday post really is fond of me, and has, as a matter of fact—”

She lingered to admire the motor, which was new, and a fairer creature than the vermilion giant that had borne Aunt Juley to her doom three years before.

Mr. Wilcox had eschewed those decorative schemes that wince, and relent, and refrain, and achieve beauty by sacrificing comfort and pluck.

After so much self-colour and self-denial, Margaret viewed with relief the sumptuous dado, the frieze, the gilded wall-paper, amid whose foliage parrots sang.

He was an elderly man now, and it would be futile and impudent to correct him.

So Frieda Mosebach, now Frau Architect Liesecke, and mother to her husband’s baby, was brought up to these heights to be impressed, and, after a prolonged gaze, she said that the hills were more swelling here than in Pomerania, which was true, but did not seem to Mrs. Munt apposite.

It was a landscape of Bocklin’s beside a landscape of Leader’s, strident and ill-considered, but quivering into supernatural life.

“But he was there, they were all there that morning when I came down to breakfast, and saw that Paul was frightened—the man who loved me frightened and all his paraphernalia fallen, so that I knew it was impossible, because personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.”

For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast?

Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world’s waters, when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in. Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores.

“And you and your sister were head and ears deep in some Quixotic scheme. Ah well!”

Lowering his voice and infusing a hint of reproof into it, he said: “Evie will probably be married in September. We could scarcely think of anything before then.”

They are so unbusinesslike, we could make them do anything by judicious management.

It was the first she had heard of the mews behind Ducie Street.

It is a flaw inherent in the business mind, and Margaret may do well to be tender to it, considering all that the business mind has done for England.

She implored him not to come, but he was obdurate.

Disdaining the heroic outfit, excitable in her methods, garrulous, episodical, shrill, she misled her lover much as she had misled her aunt.

If a man cannot lead up to passion he can at all events lead down from it, and she had hoped, after her complaisance, for some interchange of gentle words.

He could not be as the saints and love the Infinite with a seraphic ardour, but he could be a little ashamed of loving a wife.

He was puzzled, but replied with a laugh: “My motto is Concentrate. I’ve no intention of frittering away my strength on that sort of thing.”

Beneath them was the bourgeois little bay, which must have yearned all through the centuries for just such a watering-place as Swanage to be built on its margin.

“A clerk who clears out of any concern, good or bad, without securing a berth somewhere else first, is a fool, and I’ve no pity for him.”

Helen quivered with indignation.

“...There always have been rich and poor. I’m no fatalist. Heaven forbid! But our civilisation is moulded by great impersonal forces” (his voice grew complacent; it always did when he eliminated the personal), “and there always will be rich and poor..."

I mean to dislike your husband, and to tell him so. I mean to make no concessions to Tibby.

No; truth, being alive, was not half-way between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility.

A motor-drive, a form of felicity detested by Margaret, awaited her.

If Drayton were with us again to write a new edition of his incomparable poem, he would sing the nymphs of Hertfordshire as indeterminate of feature, with hair obfuscated by the London smoke.

No glory of raiment would be theirs, no urgency of dance; but they would be real nymphs.

She came, but refused to kiss them; it was such hard luck on the little things, she said, and though Dolly proffered Chorly-worly and Porgly-woggles in turn, she was obdurate.

Smiling, but somehow disillusioned, she jumped out, and her impetus carried her to the front-door.

How Helen would revel in such a notion!

Nor was he interested in the dim, bucolic past.

Henry, after allaying her agitation, had taken her over his property, and had explained to her the use and dimensions of the various rooms.

“When I had more control I did what I could—sold off the two and a half animals, and the mangy pony, and the superannuated tools; pulled down the outhouses; drained; thinned out I don’t know how many guelder-roses and elder-trees; and inside the house I turned the old kitchen into a hall, and made a kitchen behind where the dairy was. Garage and so on came later. But one could still tell it’s been an old farm. And yet it isn’t the place that would fetch one of your artistic crew.”

It was a comrade bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air.