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 bent1 on other questions now, and by her also it would have been rejected as the fantasy of an invalid2.
She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple3 and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed4 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 verge5 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 degradation6. Her withdrawal7 had hinted at other things besides disease and pain. Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity8; 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 entirely9. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic10, 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 registration11. She had gone out of life vividly12, her own way, and no dust was so truly dust as the contents of that heavy coffin13, lowered with ceremonial until it rested on the dust of the earth, no flowers so utterly14 wasted as the chrysanthemums15 that the frost must have withered16 before morning. Margaret had once said she "loved superstition17." It was not true. Few women had tried more earnestly to pierce the accretions18 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 aspire19. 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 survivors20. 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 deficient21 where she excelled; but collision with them stimulated22 her, and she felt an interest that verged23 into liking24, 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 grit25 as well as grittiness, and she valued grit enormously. They led a life that she could not attain26 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 affected27 to do. It fostered such virtues28 as neatness, decision, and obedience29, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization. They form character, too; Margaret could not doubt it: they keep the soul from becoming sloppy30. 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 mediaeval. 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 overcrowded, for the rest of Pomerania had gone there too. Helen loved the country, and her letter glowed with physical exercise and poetry. She spoke31 of the scenery, quiet, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, with their scampering32 herds33 of deer; of the river and its quaint34 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 realized the accessories of death, which are in a sense more memorable35 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 hesitation36, 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 patriotic37 notion of winning back her cousins to the Fatherland by matrimony. England had played Paul Wilcox, and lost; Germany played Herr Forstmeister someone--Helen could not remember his name.
Herr Forstmeister lived in a wood, and standing38 on the summit of the Oderberge, he had pointed39 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 solitary40 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 someone 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 Oxford41. 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 mellow42 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 mere43 receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates44 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 severed45 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 benign46. 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 winding47 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 extraordinarily48 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 unnatural49; now it was January, and the whole affair lay forgotten. Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic50 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 fully51 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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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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invalid
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| n.病人，伤残人；adj.有病的，伤残的；无效的 | |
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ripple
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| n.涟波，涟漪，波纹，粗钢梳；vt.使...起涟漪，使起波纹； vi.呈波浪状，起伏前进 | |
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ebbed
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| （指潮水）退( ebb的过去式和过去分词 )； 落； 减少； 衰落 | |
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verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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degradation
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| n.降级；低落；退化；陵削；降解；衰变 | |
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withdrawal
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| n.取回，提款；撤退，撤军；收回，撤销 | |
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frigidity
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| n.寒冷；冷淡；索然无味；（尤指妇女的）性感缺失 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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fanatic
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| n.狂热者，入迷者；adj.狂热入迷的 | |
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registration
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| n.登记，注册，挂号 | |
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vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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coffin
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| n.棺材，灵柩 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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chrysanthemums
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| n.菊花( chrysanthemum的名词复数 ) | |
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withered
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| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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accretions
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| n.堆积( accretion的名词复数 )；连生；添加生长；吸积 | |
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aspire
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| vi.(to，after)渴望，追求，有志于 | |
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survivors
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| 幸存者，残存者，生还者( survivor的名词复数 ) | |
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deficient
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| adj.不足的，不充份的，有缺陷的 | |
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stimulated
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| a.刺激的 | |
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verged
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| 接近，逼近（verge的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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grit
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| n.沙粒，决心，勇气；v.下定决心，咬紧牙关 | |
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attain
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| vt.达到，获得，完成 | |
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affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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obedience
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| n.服从，顺从 | |
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sloppy
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| adj.邋遢的，不整洁的 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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scampering
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| v.蹦蹦跳跳地跑，惊惶奔跑( scamper的现在分词 ) | |
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herds
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| 兽群( herd的名词复数 )； 牧群； 人群； 群众 | |
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quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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memorable
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| adj.值得回忆的，难忘的，特别的，显著的 | |
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hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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Oxford
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| n.牛津（英国城市） | |
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mellow
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| adj.柔和的；熟透的；v.变柔和；(使)成熟 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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inmates
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| n.囚犯( inmate的名词复数 ) | |
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severed
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| v.切断，断绝( sever的过去式和过去分词 )；断，裂 | |
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benign
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| adj.善良的，慈祥的；良性的，无危险的 | |
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winding
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| n.绕，缠，绕组，线圈 | |
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extraordinarily
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| adv.格外地；极端地 | |
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unnatural
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| adj.不自然的；反常的 | |
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chaotic
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| adj.混沌的，一片混乱的，一团糟的 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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