Chapter: 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.

 Helen begins to doubt herself - what's she doing, anyway? She figures that it'll all work out in the long run. Helen strives to explain Mr. Wilcox to Leonard after they put the drunk Jacky to bed. She tells him that she believes in "personal responsibility," meaning that she thinks everyone should think of themselves in depth and come to a level of personal understanding. The world, according to Helen, is divided into people who have this sense of responsibility and self , and those who don't - like Mr. Wilcox, and other powerful men of his ilk. Leonard has rather complicated feelings about Helen - he feels somewhat proprietary of her, and is beginning to think that he doesn't like her sister . Unbeknownst to Helen, Leonard already knows about Mr. Wilcox's relationship to Jacky, but doesn't want Helen to find out. Helen asks about Jacky, which makes Leonard uncomfortable. The couple has been married for three years, and it clearly hasn't been a good marriage. Leonard's family has cut him off entirely because of it. Helen, never one for discretion, asks about his family . Helen asks why they don't approve of Jacky, and she figures out the truth - Jacky was a prostitute. Leonard tries to get Helen to stop worrying about his problems, and tells her that he'll just settle down to ordinary life after they get back to London. Helen is troubled by this - after all, he's the man that used to walk at night and yearn for something more. Leonard himself dismisses books, and says that he's learned not to have so many fantasies; in order to be a dreamer, one also has to be rich. Helen explains that in her philosophy, things like money and practicality are the opposite of real life - and men like Mr. Wilcox don't really understand capital-L Life. Leonard is confused by all of this; he wants to engage at this higher level, but he's still occupied by the very real troubles of his life. Where will he get a job? What will he do? Talk can only go so far. Helen keeps talking about death, trying to explain that understanding the idea of it puts everything in perspective and teaches people to truly value love and life. Her generalizations are poetic, but, we suspect, extremely naive. A letter for Helen arrives, as well as a note for Leonard.

