CHAPTER XII

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

register the quick motions of man. In Margaret’s eyes Mrs. Wilcox had

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 civilisation. 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 medieval. 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 over-crowded, 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 realised 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 Fraulein

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 Forstmeister some one--Helen could

not remember his name. Herr Forstmeister 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

Forstmeister 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 some one 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 realised 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.