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.
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