Kabanata Kabanata 12 · Charles need not have been anxious. Miss Schlegel had never heard of

. Charles need not have been anxious. Miss Schlegel had never heard of

his mother’s strange request. She was to hear of it in after years,

when she had built up her life differently, and it was to fit into

position as the headstone of the corner. Her mind was bent on other

questions now, and by her also it would have been rejected as the

fantasy of an invalid.

She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his

mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out

of it for ever. The ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had

strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker,

she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but

tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide.

Her friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in

degradation. Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease

and pain. Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane

frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer

natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of

her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her

heart—almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that

we ought to die—neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer

who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the

shore that he must leave.

The last word—whatever it would be—had certainly not been said in

Hilton churchyard. She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any

more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy

devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would

escaped registration. She had gone out of life vividly, her own way,

and no dust was so truly dust as the contents of that heavy coffin,

lowered with ceremonial until it rested on the dust of the earth, no

flowers so utterly wasted as the chrysanthemums that the frost must

have withered before morning. Margaret had once said she “loved

superstition.” It was not true. Few women had tried more earnestly to

pierce the accretions in which body and soul are enwrapped. The death

of Mrs. Wilcox had helped her in her work. She saw a little more

clearly than hitherto what a human being is, and to what he may aspire.

Truer relationships gleamed. Perhaps the last word would be hope—hope

even on this side of the grave.

Meanwhile, she could take an interest in the survivors. In spite of her

Christmas duties, in spite of her brother, the Wilcoxes continued to

play a considerable part in her thoughts. She had seen so much of them

in the final week. They were not “her sort,” they were often suspicious

and stupid, and deficient where she excelled; but collision with them

stimulated her, and she felt an interest that verged into liking, even

for Charles. She desired to protect them, and often felt that they

could protect her, excelling where she was deficient. Once past the

rocks of emotion, they knew so well what to do, whom to send for; their

hands were on all the ropes, they had grit as well as grittiness, and

she valued grit enormously. They led a life that she could not attain

to—the outer life of “telegrams and anger,” which had detonated when

Helen and Paul had touched in June, and had detonated again the other

week. To Margaret this life was to remain a real force. She could not

despise it, as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtues

as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no

doubt, but they have formed our civilization. They form character, too;

Margaret could not doubt it: they keep the soul from becoming sloppy.

How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a

world?

“Don’t brood too much,” she wrote to Helen, “on the superiority of the

unseen to the seen. It’s true, but to brood on it is mediaeval. Our

business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.”

Helen replied that she had no intention of brooding on such a dull

subject. What did her sister take her for? The weather was magnificent.

She and the Mosebachs had gone tobogganing on the only hill that

Pomerania boasted. It was fun, but overcrowded, for the rest of

Pomerania had gone there too. Helen loved the country, and her letter

glowed with physical exercise and poetry. 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.

“It isn’t size that counts so much as the way things are arranged.” In

another paragraph she referred to Mrs. Wilcox sympathetically, but the

news had not bitten into her. She had not realized the accessories of

death, which are in a sense more memorable than death itself. The

atmosphere of precautions and recriminations, and in the midst a human

body growing more vivid because it was in pain; the end of that body in

Hilton churchyard; the survival of something that suggested hope, vivid

in its turn against life’s workaday cheerfulness;—all these were lost

to Helen, who only felt that a pleasant lady could now be pleasant no

longer. She returned to Wickham Place full of her own affairs—she had

had another proposal—and Margaret, after a moment’s hesitation, was

content that this should be so.

The proposal had not been a serious matter. It was the work of Fräulein

Mosebach, who had conceived the large and patriotic notion of winning

back her cousins to the Fatherland by matrimony. England had played

Paul Wilcox, and lost; Germany played Herr Förstmeister someone—Helen

could not remember his name.

Herr Förstmeister lived in a wood, and standing on the summit of the

Oderberge, he had pointed out his house to Helen, or rather, had

pointed out the wedge of pines in which it lay. She had exclaimed, “Oh,

how lovely! That’s the place for me!” and in the evening Frieda

appeared in her bedroom. “I have a message, dear Helen,” etc., and so

she had, but had been very nice when Helen laughed; quite understood—a

forest too solitary and damp—quite agreed, but Herr Förstmeister

believed he had assurance to the contrary. Germany had lost, but with

good-humour; holding the manhood of the world, she felt bound to win.

“And there will even be someone for Tibby,” concluded Helen. “There

now, Tibby, think of that; Frieda is saving up a little girl for you,

in pig-tails and white worsted stockings, but the feet of the stockings

are pink, as if the little girl had trodden in strawberries. I’ve

talked too much. My head aches. Now you talk.”

Tibby consented to talk. He too was full of his own affairs, for he had

just been up to try for a scholarship at Oxford. The men were down, and

the candidates had been housed in various colleges, and had dined in

hall. Tibby was sensitive to beauty, the experience was new, and he

gave a description of his visit that was almost glowing. The august and

mellow University, soaked with the richness of the western counties

that it has served for a thousand years, appealed at once to the boy’s

taste: it was the kind of thing he could understand, and he understood

it all the better because it was empty. Oxford is—Oxford: not a mere

receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to

love it rather than to love one another: such at all events was to be

its effect on Tibby. His sisters sent him there that he might make

friends, for they knew that his education had been cranky, and had

severed him from other boys and men. He made no friends. His Oxford

remained Oxford empty, and he took into life with him, not the memory

of a radiance, but the memory of a colour scheme.

It pleased Margaret to hear her brother and sister talking. They did

not get on overwell as a rule. For a few moments she listened to them,

feeling elderly and benign. Then something occurred to her, and she

interrupted:

“Helen, I told you about poor Mrs. Wilcox; that sad business?”

“Yes.”

“I have had a correspondence with her son. He was winding up the

estate, and wrote to ask me whether his mother had wanted me to have

anything. I thought it good of him, considering I knew her so little. I

said that she had once spoken of giving me a Christmas present, but we

both forgot about it afterwards.”

“I hope Charles took the hint.”

“Yes—that is to say, her husband wrote later on, and thanked me for

being a little kind to her, and actually gave me her silver

vinaigrette. Don’t you think that is extraordinarily generous? It has

made me like him very much. He hopes that this will not be the end of

our acquaintance, but that you and I will go and stop with Evie some

time in the future. I like Mr. Wilcox. He is taking up his

work—rubber—it is a big business. I gather he is launching out rather.

Charles is in it, too. Charles is married—a pretty little creature, but

she doesn’t seem wise. They took on the flat, but now they have gone

off to a house of their own.”

Helen, after a decent pause, continued her account of Stettin. How

quickly a situation changes! In June she had been in a crisis; even in

November she could blush and be unnatural; now it was January, and the

whole affair lay forgotten. Looking back on the past six months,

Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its

difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by

historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead

nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that

never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength

that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not

that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared

and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is

duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a

good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through

life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been

handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the

way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the

essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a

romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

Margaret hoped that for the future she would be less cautious, not more

cautious, than she had been in the past.