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.
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