CHAPTER XXVII

Helen began to wonder why she had spent a matter of eight pounds in

making some people ill and others angry. Now that the wave of excitement

was ebbing, and had left her, Mr. Bast, and Mrs. Bast stranded for the

night in a Shropshire hotel, she asked herself what forces had made the

wave flow. At all events, no harm was done. Margaret would play the game

properly now, and though Helen disapproved of her sister’s methods, she

knew that the Basts would benefit by them in the long-run.

“Mr. Wilcox is so illogical,” she explained to Leonard, who had put his

wife to bed, and was sitting with her in the empty coffee-room. “If we

told him it was his duty to take you on, he might refuse to do it. The

fact is, he isn’t properly educated. I don’t want to set you against

him, but you’ll find him a trial.”

“I can never thank you sufficiently, Miss Schlegel,” was all that

Leonard felt equal to.

“I believe in personal responsibility. Don’t you? And in personal

everything. I hate--I suppose I oughtn’t to say that--but the Wilcoxes

are on the wrong tack surely. Or perhaps it isn’t their fault. Perhaps

the little thing that says ‘I’ is missing out of the middle of their

heads, and then it’s a waste of time to blame them. There’s a nightmare

of a theory that says a special race is being born which will rule the

rest of us in the future just because it lacks the little thing that

says ‘I.’ Had you heard that?”

“I get no time for reading.”

“Had you thought it, then? That there are two kinds of people--our kind,

who live straight from the middle of their heads, and the other kind

who can’t, because their heads have no middle? They can’t say ‘I.’ They

AREN’T in fact, and so they’re supermen. Pierpont Morgan has never said

‘I’ in his life.”

Leonard roused himself. If his benefactress wanted intellectual

conversation, she must have it. She was more important than his ruined

past. “I never got on to Nietzsche,” he said. “But I always understood

that those supermen were rather what you may call egoists.”

“Oh no, that’s wrong,” replied Helen. “No superman ever said ‘I want,’

because ‘I want’ must lead to the question, ‘Who am I?’ and so to Pity

and to Justice. He only says ‘want.’ ‘Want Europe,’ if he’s Napoleon;

‘want wives,’ if he’s Bluebeard; ‘want Botticelli,’ if he’s Pierpont

Morgan. Never the ‘I’; and if you could pierce through the superman,

you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle.”

Leonard was silent for a moment. Then he said: “May I take it, Miss

Schlegel, that you and I are both the sort that say ‘I’?”

“Of course.”

“And your sister, too?”

“Of course,” repeated Helen, a little sharply. She was annoyed with

Margaret, but did not want her discussed. “All presentable people say

‘I.’”

“But Mr. Wilcox--he is not perhaps--”

“I don’t know that it’s any good discussing Mr. Wilcox either.”

“Quite so, quite so,” he agreed. Helen asked herself why she had snubbed

him. Once or twice during the day she had encouraged him to criticise,

and then had pulled him up short. Was she afraid of him presuming? If

so, it was disgusting of her.

But he was thinking the snub quite natural. Everything she did was

natural, and incapable of causing offence. While the Miss Schlegels

were together he had felt them scarcely human--a sort of admonitory

whirligig. But a Miss Schlegel alone was different. She was in Helen’s

case unmarried, in Margaret’s about to be married, in neither case an

echo of her sister. A light had fallen at last into this rich upper

world, and he saw that it was full of men and women, some of whom were

more friendly to him than others. Helen had become “his” Miss Schlegel,

who scolded him and corresponded with him, and had swept down yesterday

with grateful vehemence. Margaret, though not unkind, was severe and

remote. He would not presume to help her, for instance. He had never

liked her, and began to think that his original impression was true,

and that her sister did not like her either. Helen was certainly lonely.

She, who gave away so much, was receiving too little. Leonard was

pleased to think that he could spare her vexation by holding his tongue

and concealing what he knew about Mr. Wilcox. Jacky had announced her

discovery when he fetched her from the lawn. After the first shock, he

did not mind for himself. By now he had no illusions about his wife, and

this was only one new stain on the face of a love that had never been

pure. To keep perfection perfect, that should be his ideal, if the

future gave him time to have ideals. Helen, and Margaret for Helen’s

sake, must not know.

Helen disconcerted him by turning the conversation to his wife. “Mrs.

Bast--does she ever say ‘I’?” she asked, half mischievously, and then,

“Is she very tired?”

“It’s better she stops in her room,” said Leonard.

“Shall I sit up with her?”

“No, thank you; she does not need company.”

“Mr. Bast, what kind of woman is your wife?”

Leonard blushed up to his eyes.

“You ought to know my ways by now. Does that question offend you?”

“No, oh no, Miss Schlegel, no.”

“Because I love honesty. Don’t pretend your marriage has been a happy

one. You and she can have nothing in common.”

He did not deny it, but said shyly: “I suppose that’s pretty obvious;

but Jacky never meant to do anybody any harm. When things went wrong,

or I heard things, I used to think it was her fault, but, looking back,

it’s more mine. I needn’t have married her, but as I have I must stick

to her and keep her.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Nearly three years.”

“What did your people say?”

“They will not have anything to do with us. They had a sort of family

council when they heard I was married, and cut us off altogether.”

Helen began to pace up and down the room. “My good boy, what a mess!”

she said gently. “Who are your people?”

He could answer this. His parents, who were dead, had been in trade; his

sisters had married commercial travellers; his brother was a lay-reader.

“And your grandparents?”

Leonard told her a secret that he had held shameful up to now. “They

were just nothing at all,” he said “agricultural labourers and that

sort.”

“So! From which part?”

“Lincolnshire mostly, but my mother’s father--he, oddly enough, came

from these parts round here.”

“From this very Shropshire. Yes, that is odd. My mother’s people were

Lancashire. But why do your brother and your sisters object to Mrs.

Bast?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Excuse me, you do know. I am not a baby. I can bear anything you tell

me, and the more you tell the more I shall be able to help. Have they

heard anything against her?”

He was silent.

“I think I have guessed now,” said Helen very gravely.

“I don’t think so, Miss Schlegel; I hope not.”

“We must be honest, even over these things. I have guessed. I am

frightfully, dreadfully sorry, but it does not make the least difference

to me. I shall feel just the same to both of you. I blame, not your wife

for these things, but men.”

Leonard left it at that--so long as she did not guess the man. She stood

at the window and slowly pulled up the blinds. The hotel looked over a

dark square. The mists had begun. When she turned back to him her eyes

were shining. “Don’t you worry,” he pleaded. “I can’t bear that. We

shall be all right if I get work. If I could only get work--something

regular to do. Then it wouldn’t be so bad again. I don’t trouble after

books as I used. I can imagine that with regular work we should settle

down again. It stops one thinking.”

“Settle down to what?”

“Oh, just settle down.”

“And that’s to be life!” said Helen, with a catch in her throat. “How

can you, with all the beautiful things to see and do--with music--with

walking at night--”

“Walking is well enough when a man’s in work,” he answered. “Oh, I did

talk a lot of nonsense once, but there’s nothing like a bailiff in the

house to drive it out of you. When I saw him fingering my Ruskins and

Stevensons, I seemed to see life straight and real, and it isn’t a

pretty sight. My books are back again, thanks to you, but they’ll never

be the same to me again, and I shan’t ever again think night in the

woods is wonderful.”

“Why not?” asked Helen, throwing up the window.

“Because I see one must have money.”

“Well, you’re wrong.”

“I wish I was wrong, but--the clergyman--he has money of his own, or

else he’s paid; the poet or the musician--just the same; the tramp--he’s

no different. The tramp goes to the workhouse in the end, and is paid

for with other people’s money. Miss Schlegel, the real thing’s money, and

all the rest is a dream.”

“You’re still wrong. You’ve forgotten Death.”

Leonard could not understand.

“If we lived forever, what you say would be true. But we have to die,

we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real

thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things,

because Death is coming. I love Death--not morbidly, but because He

explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the

eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr.

Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be

happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say, ‘I am I.’”

“I wonder.”

“We are all in a mist--I know, but I can help you this far--men like

the Wilcoxes are deeper in the mist than any. Sane, sound Englishmen!

building up empires, levelling all the world into what they call common

sense. But mention Death to them and they’re offended, because Death’s

really Imperial, and He cries out against them for ever.”

“I am as afraid of Death as any one.”

“But not of the idea of Death.”

“But what is the difference?”

“Infinite difference,” said Helen, more gravely than before.

Leonard looked at her wondering, and had the sense of great things

sweeping out of the shrouded night. But he could not receive them,

because his heart was still full of little things. As the lost umbrella

had spoilt the concert at Queen’s Hall, so the lost situation was

obscuring the diviner harmonies now. Death, Life, and Materialism were

fine words, but would Mr. Wilcox take him on as a clerk? Talk as one

would, Mr. Wilcox was king of this world, the superman, with his own

morality, whose head remained in the clouds.

“I must be stupid,” he said apologetically.

While to Helen the paradox became clearer and clearer. “Death destroys a

man: the idea of Death saves him.” Behind the coffins and the skeletons

that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that

is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the

charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death

is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of

Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no

one who can stand against him.

“So never give in,” continued the girl, and restated again and again the

vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible.

Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that fastened Leonard

to the earth. Woven of bitter experience, it resisted her. Presently

the waitress entered and gave her a letter from Margaret. Another note,

addressed to Leonard, was inside. They read them, listening to the

murmurings of the river.