CHAPTER IV

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 some one,” 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 thunderclap, and by them and by their 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 motorcar. 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 to forget how vivid the emotion

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

one. We recognise 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 she 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 Tibet 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 composed

entirely 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 back-bone,” as

their aunt had piously asserted. But, on the other hand, 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 visualising 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

naturalised 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 back-bone. He had

obtained work in one of our provincial universities, and there married

Poor Emily (or Die Englanderin, 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 Esterhazy 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

organisation, 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 apologised 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.