Chapter Chapter 4 · Helen and her aunt returned to Wickham Place in a state of collapse,

. Helen and her aunt returned to Wickham Place in a state of collapse,

and for a little time Margaret had three invalids on her hands. Mrs.

Munt soon recovered. She possessed to a remarkable degree the power of

distorting the past, and before many days were over she had forgotten

the part played by her own imprudence in the catastrophe. Even at the

crisis she had cried, “Thank goodness, poor Margaret is saved this!”

which during the journey to London evolved into, “It had to be gone

through by someone,” which in its turn ripened into the permanent form

of “The one time I really did help Emily’s girls was over the Wilcox

business.” But Helen was a more serious patient. New ideas had burst

upon her like a thunder clap, and by them and by her reverberations she

had been stunned.

The truth was that she had fallen in love, not with an individual, but

with a family.

Before Paul arrived she had, as it were, been tuned up into his key.

The energy of the Wilcoxes had fascinated her, had created new images

of beauty in her responsive mind. To be all day with them in the open

air, to sleep at night under their roof, had seemed the supreme joy of

life, and had led to that abandonment of personality that is a possible

prelude to love. She had liked giving in to Mr. Wilcox, or Evie, or

Charles; she had liked being told that her notions of life were

sheltered or academic; that Equality was nonsense, Votes for Women

nonsense, Socialism nonsense, Art and Literature, except when conducive

to strengthening the character, nonsense. One by one the Schlegel

fetiches had been overthrown, and, though professing to defend them,

she had rejoiced. When Mr. Wilcox said that one sound man of business

did more good to the world than a dozen of your social reformers, she

had swallowed the curious assertion without a gasp, and had leant back

luxuriously among the cushions of his motor-car. When Charles said,

“Why be so polite to servants? they don’t understand it,” she had not

given the Schlegel retort of, “If they don’t understand it, I do.” No;

she had vowed to be less polite to servants in the future. “I am

swathed in cant,” she thought, “and it is good for me to be stripped of

it.” And all that she thought or did or breathed was a quiet

preparation for Paul. Paul was inevitable. Charles was taken up with

another girl, Mr. Wilcox was so old, Evie so young, Mrs. Wilcox so

different. Round the absent brother she began to throw the halo of

Romance, to irradiate him with all the splendour of those happy days,

to feel that in him she should draw nearest to the robust ideal. He and

she were about the same age, Evie said. Most people thought Paul

handsomer than his brother. He was certainly a better shot, though not

so good at golf. And when Paul appeared, flushed with the triumph of

getting through an examination, and ready to flirt with any pretty

girl, Helen met him halfway, or more than halfway, and turned towards

him on the Sunday evening.

He had been talking of his approaching exile in Nigeria, and he should

have continued to talk of it, and allowed their guest to recover. But

the heave of her bosom flattered him. Passion was possible, and he

became passionate. Deep down in him something whispered, “This girl

would let you kiss her; you might not have such a chance again.”

That was “how it happened,” or, rather, how Helen described it to her

sister, using words even more unsympathetic than my own. But the poetry

of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for

hours after it—who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman

to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular

cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is

so easy to talk of “passing emotion,” and how to forget how vivid the

emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root

a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and

women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere

opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too

highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the

doors of heaven may be shaken open. To Helen, at all events, her life

was to bring nothing more intense than the embrace of this boy who

played no part in it. He had drawn her out of the house, where there

was danger of surprise and light; he had led her by a path he knew,

until they stood under the column of the vast wych-elm. A man in the

darkness, he had whispered “I love you” when she was desiring love. In

time his slender personality faded, the scene that he had evoked

endured. In all the variable years that followed she never saw the like

of it again.

“I understand,” said Margaret—“at least, I understand as much as ever

is understood of these things. Tell me now what happened on the Monday

morning.”

“It was over at once.”

“How, Helen?”

“I was still happy while I dressed, but as I came downstairs I got

nervous, and when I went into the dining-room I knew it was no good.

There was Evie—I can’t explain—managing the tea-urn, and Mr. Wilcox

reading the _Times_.”

“Was Paul there?”

“Yes; and Charles was talking to him about Stocks and Shares, and he

looked frightened.”

By slight indications the sisters could convey much to each other.

Margaret saw horror latent in the scene, and Helen’s next remark did

not surprise her.

“Somehow, when that kind of man looks frightened it is too awful. It is

all right for us to be frightened, or for men of another sort—father,

for instance; but for men like that! When I saw all the others so

placid, and Paul mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing, I felt

for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of

newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should

find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.”

“I don’t think that. The Wilcoxes struck me as being genuine people,

particularly the wife.”

“No, I don’t really think that. But Paul was so broad-shouldered; all

kinds of extraordinary things made it worse, and I knew that it would

never do—never. I said to him after breakfast, when the others were

practising strokes, ‘We rather lost our heads,’ and he looked better at

once, though frightfully ashamed. He began a speech about having no

money to marry on, but it hurt him to make it, and I—stopped him. Then

he said, ‘I must beg your pardon over this, Miss Schlegel; I can’t

think what came over me last night.’ And I said, ‘Nor what over me;

never mind.’ And then we parted—at least, until I remembered that I had

written straight off to tell you the night before, and that frightened

him again. I asked him to send a telegram for me, for he knew you would

be coming or something; and he tried to get hold of the motor, but

Charles and Mr. Wilcox wanted it to go to the station; and Charles

offered to send the telegram for me, and then I had to say that the

telegram was of no consequence, for Paul said Charles might read it,

and though I wrote it out several times, he always said people would

suspect something. He took it himself at last, pretending that he must

walk down to get cartridges, and, what with one thing and the other, it

was not handed in at the Post Office until too late. It was the most

terrible morning. Paul disliked me more and more, and Evie talked

cricket averages till I nearly screamed. I cannot think how I stood her

all the other days. At last Charles and his father started for the

station, and then came your telegram warning me that Aunt Juley was

coming by that train, and Paul—oh, rather horrible—said that I had

muddled it. But Mrs. Wilcox knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Everything; though we neither of us told her a word, and had known all

along, I think.”

“Oh, she must have overheard you.”

“I suppose so, but it seemed wonderful. When Charles and Aunt Juley

drove up, calling each other names, Mrs. Wilcox stepped in from the

garden and made everything less terrible. Ugh! but it has been a

disgusting business. To think that—” She sighed.

“To think that because you and a young man meet for a moment, there

must be all these telegrams and anger,” supplied Margaret.

Helen nodded.

“I’ve often thought about it, Helen. It’s one of the most interesting

things in the world. The truth is that there is a great outer life that

you and I have never touched—a life in which telegrams and anger count.

Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. There

love means marriage settlements, death, death duties. So far I’m clear.

But here my difficulty. This outer life, though obviously horrid, often

seems the real one—there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do

personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?”

“Oh, Meg, that’s what I felt, only not so clearly, when the Wilcoxes

were so competent, and seemed to have their hands on all the ropes.”

“Don’t you feel it now?”

“I remember Paul at breakfast,” said Helen quietly. “I shall never

forget him. He had nothing to fall back upon. I know that personal

relations are the real life, for ever and ever.

“Amen!”

So the Wilcox episode fell into the background, leaving behind it

memories of sweetness and horror that mingled, and the sisters pursued

the life that Helen had commended. They talked to each other and to

other people, they filled the tall thin house at Wickham Place with

those whom they liked or could befriend. They even attended public

meetings. In their own fashion they cared deeply about politics, though

not as politicians would have us care; they desired that public life

should mirror whatever is good in the life within. Temperance,

tolerance, and sexual equality were intelligible cries to them; whereas

they did not follow our Forward Policy in Thibet with the keen

attention that it merits, and would at times dismiss the whole British

Empire with a puzzled, if reverent, sigh. Not out of them are the shows

of history erected: the world would be a grey, bloodless place were it

entirely composed of Miss Schlegels. But the world being what it is,

perhaps they shine out in it like stars.

A word on their origin. They were not “English to the backbone,” as

their aunt had piously asserted. But, on the other band, they were not

“Germans of the dreadful sort.” Their father had belonged to a type

that was more prominent in Germany fifty years ago than now. He was not

the aggressive German, so dear to the English journalist, nor the

domestic German, so dear to the English wit. If one classed him at all

it would be as the countryman of Hegel and Kant, as the idealist,

inclined to be dreamy, whose Imperialism was the Imperialism of the

air. Not that his life had been inactive. He had fought like blazes

against Denmark, Austria, France. But he had fought without visualizing

the results of victory. A hint of the truth broke on him after Sedan,

when he saw the dyed moustaches of Napoleon going grey; another when he

entered Paris, and saw the smashed windows of the Tuileries. Peace

came—it was all very immense, one had turned into an Empire—but he knew

that some quality had vanished for which not all Alsace-Lorraine could

compensate him. Germany a commercial Power, Germany a naval Power,

Germany with colonies here and a Forward Policy there, and legitimate

aspirations in the other place, might appeal to others, and be fitly

served by them; for his own part, he abstained from the fruits of

victory, and naturalized himself in England. The more earnest members

of his family never forgave him, and knew that his children, though

scarcely English of the dreadful sort, would never be German to the

backbone. He had obtained work in one of our provincial Universities,

and there married Poor Emily (or Die Engländerin as the case may be),

and as she had money, they proceeded to London, and came to know a good

many people. But his gaze was always fixed beyond the sea. It was his

hope that the clouds of materialism obscuring the Fatherland would part

in time, and the mild intellectual light re-emerge. “Do you imply that

we Germans are stupid, Uncle Ernst?” exclaimed a haughty and

magnificent nephew. Uncle Ernst replied, “To my mind. You use the

intellect, but you no longer care about it. That I call stupidity.” As

the haughty nephew did not follow, he continued, “You only care about

the’ things that you can use, and therefore arrange them in the

following order: Money, supremely useful; intellect, rather useful;

imagination, of no use at all. No”—for the other had protested—“your

Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than is our Imperialism over here.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think

that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than

one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as

heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it. When their poets over

here try to celebrate bigness they are dead at once, and naturally.

Your poets too are dying, your philosophers, your musicians, to whom

Europe has listened for two hundred years. Gone. Gone with the little

courts that nurtured them—gone with Esterhaz and Weimar. What? What’s

that? Your Universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men, who collect

more facts than do the learned men of England. They collect facts, and

facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light

within?”

To all this Margaret listened, sitting on the haughty nephew’s knee.

It was a unique education for the little girls. The haughty nephew

would be at Wickham Place one day, bringing with him an even haughtier

wife, both convinced that Germany was appointed by God to govern the

world. Aunt Juley would come the next day, convinced that Great Britain

had been appointed to the same post by the same authority. Were both

these loud-voiced parties right? On one occasion they had met, and

Margaret with clasped hands had implored them to argue the subject out

in her presence. Whereat they blushed, and began to talk about the

weather. “Papa” she cried—she was a most offensive child—“why will they

not discuss this most clear question?” Her father, surveying the

parties grimly, replied that he did not know. Putting her head on one

side, Margaret then remarked, “To me one of two things is very clear;

either God does not know his own mind about England and Germany, or

else these do not know the mind of God.” A hateful little girl, but at

thirteen she had grasped a dilemma that most people travel through life

without perceiving. Her brain darted up and down; it grew pliant and

strong. Her conclusion was, that any human being lies nearer to the

unseen than any organization, and from this she never varied.

Helen advanced along the same lines, though with a more irresponsible

tread. In character she resembled her sister, but she was pretty, and

so apt to have a more amusing time. People gathered round her more

readily, especially when they were new acquaintances, and she did enjoy

a little homage very much. When their father died and they ruled alone

at Wickham Place, she often absorbed the whole of the company, while

Margaret—both were tremendous talkers—fell flat. Neither sister

bothered about this. Helen never apologized afterwards, Margaret did

not feel the slightest rancour. But looks have their influence upon

character. The sisters were alike as little girls, but at the time of

the Wilcox episode their methods were beginning to diverge; the younger

was rather apt to entice people, and, in enticing them, to be herself

enticed; the elder went straight ahead, and accepted an occasional

failure as part of the game.

Little need be premised about Tibby. He was now an intelligent man of

sixteen, but dyspeptic and difficile.