霍华德庄园 英文版 Howards End
爱德华.摩根.福斯特 Edward Morgan Forster
Chapter 12
Charles need not have been anxious. Miss Schlegel had neverheard of his mother's strange request. She was to hear ofit in after years, when she had built up her lifedifferently, and it was to fit into position as theheadstone of the corner. Her mind was bent on otherquestions now, and by her also it would have been rejectedas the fantasy of an invalid.
She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the secondtime. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, hadflowed into her life and ebbed out of it for ever. Theripple had left no traces behind: the wave had strewn at herfeet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, shestood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells solittle, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of thislast tremendous tide. Her friend had vanished in agony, butnot, she believed, in degradation. Her withdrawal hadhinted at other things besides disease and pain. Some leaveour life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs.Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer naturescan pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a littleof her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she hadshut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, ifthere is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victimnor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with anequal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore thathe must leave.
The last word--whatever it would be--had certainly notbeen said in Hilton churchyard. She had not died there. Afuneral is not death, any more than baptism is birth ormarriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, comingnow too late, now too early, by which Society would registerthe quick motions of man. In Margaret's eyes Mrs. Wilcoxhad escaped registration. She had gone out of life vividly,her own way, and no dust was so truly dust as the contentsof that heavy coffin, lowered with ceremonial until itrested on the dust of the earth, no flowers so utterlywasted as the chrysanthemums that the frost must havewithered before morning. Margaret had once said she "lovedsuperstition." It was not true. Few women had tried moreearnestly to pierce the accretions in which body and soulare enwrapped. The death of Mrs. Wilcox had helped her inher work. She saw a little more clearly than hitherto whata human being is, and to what he may aspire. Truerrelationships gleamed. Perhaps the last word would behope--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 herthoughts. She had seen so much of them in the final week.They were not "her sort," they were often suspicious andstupid, and deficient where she excelled; but collision withthem stimulated her, and she felt an interest that vergedinto liking, even for Charles. She desired to protect them,and often felt that they could protect her, excelling whereshe was deficient. Once past the rocks of emotion, theyknew so well what to do, whom to send for; their hands wereon all the ropes, they had grit as well as grittiness, andshe valued grit enormously. They led a life that she couldnot 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 thislife was to remain a real force. She could not despise it,as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtuesas neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the secondrank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization. Theyform character, too; Margaret could not doubt it: they keepthe soul from becoming sloppy. How dare Schlegels despiseWilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a world?
"Don't brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on thesuperiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but tobrood on it is mediaeval. Our business is not to contrastthe two, but to reconcile them."
Helen replied that she had no intention of brooding onsuch a dull subject. What did her sister take her for? Theweather was magnificent. She and the Mosebachs had gonetobogganing on the only hill that Pomerania boasted. It wasfun, but overcrowded, for the rest of Pomerania had gonethere too. Helen loved the country, and her letter glowedwith physical exercise and poetry. She spoke of thescenery, quiet, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, withtheir scampering herds of deer; of the river and its quaintentrance into the Baltic Sea; of the Oderberge, only threehundred feet high, from which one slid all too quickly backinto the Pomeranian plains, and yet these Oderberge werereal mountains, with pine-forests, streams, and viewscomplete. "It isn't size that counts so much as the waythings are arranged." In another paragraph she referred toMrs. Wilcox sympathetically, but the news had not bitteninto her. She had not realized the accessories of death,which are in a sense more memorable than death itself. Theatmosphere of precautions and recriminations, and in themidst a human body growing more vivid because it was inpain; the end of that body in Hilton churchyard; thesurvival of something that suggested hope, vivid in its turnagainst life's workaday cheerfulness;--all these were lostto Helen, who only felt that a pleasant lady could now bepleasant no longer. She returned to Wickham Place full ofher own affairs--she had had another proposal--and Margaret,after a moment's hesitation, was content that this should beso.
The proposal had not been a serious matter. It was thework of Fraulein Mosebach, who had conceived the large andpatriotic notion of winning back her cousins to theFatherland by matrimony. England had played Paul Wilcox,and lost; Germany played Herr Forstmeister someone--Helencould not remember his name.
Herr Forstmeister lived in a wood, and standing on thesummit of the Oderberge, he had pointed out his house toHelen, or rather, had pointed out the wedge of pines inwhich it lay. She had exclaimed, "Oh, how lovely! That'sthe place for me!" and in the evening Frieda appeared in herbedroom. "I have a message, dear Helen," etc., and so shehad, but had been very nice when Helen laughed; quiteunderstood--a forest too solitary and damp--quite agreed,but Herr Forstmeister believed he had assurance to thecontrary. Germany had lost, but with good-humour; holdingthe manhood of the world, she felt bound to win. "And therewill even be someone for Tibby," concluded Helen. "Therenow, Tibby, think of that; Frieda is saving up a little girlfor you, in pig-tails and white worsted stockings, but thefeet of the stockings are pink, as if the little girl hadtrodden in strawberries. I've talked too much. My headaches. Now you talk."
Tibby consented to talk. He too was full of his ownaffairs, for he had just been up to try for a scholarship atOxford. The men were down, and the candidates had beenhoused in various colleges, and had dined in hall. Tibbywas sensitive to beauty, the experience was new, and he gavea description of his visit that was almost glowing. Theaugust and mellow University, soaked with the richness ofthe western counties that it has served for a thousandyears, appealed at once to the boy's taste: it was the kindof thing he could understand, and he understood it all thebetter because it was empty. Oxford is--Oxford: not a merereceptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants itsinmates to love it rather than to love one another: such atall events was to be its effect on Tibby. His sisters senthim there that he might make friends, for they knew that hiseducation had been cranky, and had severed him from otherboys and men. He made no friends. His Oxford remainedOxford empty, and he took into life with him, not the memoryof a radiance, but the memory of a colour scheme.
It pleased Margaret to hear her brother and sistertalking. They did not get on overwell as a rule. For a fewmoments 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 waswinding up the estate, and wrote to ask me whether hismother had wanted me to have anything. I thought it good ofhim, considering I knew her so little. I said that she hadonce spoken of giving me a Christmas present, but we bothforgot about it afterwards."
"I hope Charles took the hint."
"Yes--that is to say, her husband wrote later on, andthanked me for being a little kind to her, and actually gaveme her silver vinaigrette. Don't you think that isextraordinarily generous? It has made me like him verymuch. He hopes that this will not be the end of ouracquaintance, but that you and I will go and stop with Eviesome time in the future. I like Mr. Wilcox. He is takingup his work--rubber--it is a big business. I gather he islaunching out rather. Charles is in it, too. Charles ismarried--a pretty little creature, but she doesn't seemwise. They took on the flat, but now they have gone off toa house of their own."
Helen, after a decent pause, continued her account ofStettin. How quickly a situation changes! In June she hadbeen in a crisis; even in November she could blush and beunnatural; now it was January, and the whole affair layforgotten. Looking back on the past six months, Margaretrealized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and itsdifference from the orderly sequence that has beenfabricated by historians. Actual life is full of falseclues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infiniteeffort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes.The most successful career must show a waste of strengththat might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessfulis not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of himwho has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of thatkind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes thatpreparation against danger is in itself a good, and thatmen, like nations, are the better for staggering throughlife fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcelybeen handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous,but not in the way morality would have us believe. It isindeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle.It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essenceis romantic beauty.
Margaret hoped that for the future she would be lesscautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the past.