Howards End - E. M. Forster [69]
"Say 'no.'"
Then Margaret spoke rather seriously. "I think," she said, "that our race is degenerating. We cannot settle even this little thing; what will it be like when we have to settle a big one?"
"It will be as easy as eating," returned Helen.
"I was thinking of Father. How could he settle to leave Germany as he did, when he had fought for it as a young man, and all his feelings and friends were Prussian? How could he break loose with Patriotism and begin aiming at something else? It would have killed me. When he was nearly forty he could change countries and ideals – and we, at our age, can't change houses. It's humiliating."
"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 knew it," cried Helen. "I told you so. It is the little things one bungles at. The big, real ones are nothing when they come."
"Bungle, my dear! You are too little to recollect – in fact, you weren't there. But the furniture was actually in the vans and on the move before the lease for Wickham Place was signed, and Emily took train with baby – who was Margaret then – and the smaller luggage for London, without so much as knowing where her new home would be. Getting away from that house may be hard, but it is nothing to the misery that we all went through getting you into it."
Helen, with her mouth full, cried: "And that's the man who beat the Austrians, and the Danes, and the French, and who beat the Germans that were inside himself. And we're like him."
"Speak for yourself," said Tibby. "Remember that I am cosmopolitan, please."
"Helen may be right."
"Of course she's right," said Helen.
Helen might be right, but she did not go up to London. Margaret did that. An interrupted holiday is the worst of the minor worries, and one may be pardoned for feeling morbid when a business letter snatches one away from the sea and friends. She could not believe that her father had ever felt the same. Her eyes had been troubling her lately, so that she could not read in the train, and it bored her to look at the landscape, which she had seen but yesterday. At Southampton she "waved" to Frieda: Frieda was on her way down to join them at Swanage, and Mrs. Munt had calculated that their trains would cross. But Frieda was looking the other way, and Margaret travelled on to town feeling solitary and old-maidish. How like an old maid to fancy that Mr. Wilcox was courting her! She had once visited a spinster – poor, silly, and unattractive – whose mania it was that every man who approached her fell in love. How Margaret's heart had bled for the deluded thing! How she had lectured, reasoned, and in despair acquiesced! "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 fact – " It had always seemed to her the most hideous corner of old age, yet she might be driven into it herself by the mere pressure of virginity.
Mr. Wilcox met her at Waterloo himself. She felt certain that he was not the same as usual; for one thing, he took offence at everything she said.
"This is awfully kind of you," she began, "but I'm afraid it's not going to do. The house has not been built that suits the Schlegel family."
"What! Have you come up determined not to deal?"
"Not exactly."
"Not exactly? In that case let's be starting."
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.
"Presumably it's very beautiful," she said. "How do you like it, Crane?"
"Come, let's be starting," repeated her host. "How on earth did you know that my chauffeur was called Crane?"
"Why, I know Crane: I've been for a drive with Evie once. I know that you've got a parlourmaid called Milton. I know all sorts of things."
"Evie!" he echoed in injured tones.