"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 Wilc.o.xes 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. Wilc.o.x take him on as a clerk? Talk as one would, Mr. Wilc.o.x 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.
CHAPTER XXVIII
For many hours Margaret did nothing; then she controlled herself, and wrote some letters. She was too bruised to speak to Henry; she could pity him, and even determine to marry him, but as yet all lay too deep in her heart for speech. On the surface the sense of his degradation was too strong. She could not command voice or look, and the gentle words that she forced out through her pen seemed to proceed from some other person.
"My dearest boy," she began, "this is not to part us. It is everything or nothing, and I mean it to be nothing. It happened long before we ever met, and even if it had happened since, I should be writing the same, I hope. I do understand."
But she crossed out "I do understand"; it struck a false note. Henry could not bear to be understood. She also crossed out, "It is everything or nothing." Henry would resent so strong a grasp of the situation. She must not comment; comment is unfeminine.
"I think that"ll about do," she thought.
Then the sense of his degradation choked her. Was he worth all this bother? To have yielded to a woman of that sort was everything, yes, it was, and she could not be his wife. She tried to translate his temptation into her own language, and her brain reeled. Men must be different even to want to yield to such a temptation. Her belief in comradeship was stifled, and she saw life as from that gla.s.s saloon on the Great Western which sheltered male and female alike from the fresh air. Are the s.e.xes really races, each with its own code of morality, and their mutual love a mere device of Nature to keep things going? Strip human intercourse of the proprieties, and is it reduced to this? Her judgment told her no. She knew that out of Nature"s device we have built a magic that will win us immortality. Far more mysterious than the call of s.e.x to s.e.x is the tenderness that we throw into that call; far wider is the gulf between us and the farmyard than between the farmyard and the garbage that nourishes it. We are evolving, in ways that Science cannot measure, to ends that Theology dares not contemplate. "Men did produce one jewel," the G.o.ds will say, and, saying, will give us immortality. Margaret knew all this, but for the moment she could not feel it, and transformed the marriage of Evie and Mr. Cahill into a carnival of fools, and her own marriage--too miserable to think of that, she tore up the letter, and then wrote another:
"DEAR MR. BAST,
"I have spoken to Mr. Wilc.o.x about you, as I promised, and am sorry to say that he has no vacancy for you.
"Yours truly,
"M. J. SCHLEGEL."
She enclosed this in a note to Helen, over which she took less trouble than she might have done; but her head was aching, and she could not stop to pick her words:
"DEAR HELEN,
"Give him this. The Basts are no good. Henry found the woman drunk on the lawn. I am having a room got ready for you here, and will you please come round at once on getting this? The Basts are not at all the type we should trouble about. I may go round to them myself in the morning, and do anything that is fair.
"M."
In writing this, Margaret felt that she was being practical. Something might be arranged for the Basts later on, but they must be silenced for the moment. She hoped to avoid a conversation between the woman and Helen. She rang the bell for a servant, but no one answered it; Mr. Wilc.o.x and the Warringtons were gone to bed, and the kitchen was abandoned to Saturnalia. Consequently she went over to the George herself. She did not enter the hotel, for discussion would have been perilous, and, saying that the letter was important, she gave it to the waitress. As she recrossed the square she saw Helen and Mr. Bast looking out of the window of the coffee-room, and feared she was already too late. Her task was not yet over; she ought to tell Henry what she had done.
This came easily, for she saw him in the hall. The night wind had been rattling the pictures against the wall, and the noise had disturbed him.
"Who"s there?" he called, quite the householder.
Margaret walked in and past him.
"I have asked Helen to sleep," she said. "She is best here; so don"t lock the front-door."
"I thought some one had got in," said Henry.
"At the same time I told the man that we could do nothing for him. I don"t know about later, but now the Basts must clearly go."
"Did you say that your sister is sleeping here, after all?"
"Probably."
"Is she to be shown up to your room?"
"I have naturally nothing to say to her; I am going to bed. Will you tell the servants about Helen? Could some one go to carry her bag?"
He tapped a little gong, which had been bought to summon the servants.
"You must make more noise than that if you want them to hear."