A Room with a View

by E.M. Forster

“About old Mr. Emerson—I hardly know. No, he is not tactful; yet, have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time—beautiful?” “Beautiful?” said Miss Bartlett, puzzled at the word. “Are not beauty and delicacy the same?” “So one would have thought,” said the other helplessly. “But things are so difficult, I sometimes think.”

“I think one might venture now. No, Lucy, do not stir. I will superintend the move.” “How you do do everything,” said Lucy. “Naturally, dear. It is my affair.” “But I would like to help you.” “No, dear.” Charlotte’s energy! And her unselfishness! She had been thus all her life, but really, on this Italian tour, she was surpassing herself. So Lucy felt, or strove to feel. And yet—there was a rebellious spirit in her which wondered whether the acceptance might not have been less delicate and more beautiful. At all events, she entered her own room without any feeling of joy.

There was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr. Ruskin.

Now, this was abominably impertinent, and she ought to have been furious. But it is sometimes as difficult to lose one’s temper as it is difficult at other times to keep it.

“My father has that effect on nearly every one,” he informed her. “He will try to be kind.” “I hope we all try,” said she, smiling nervously. “Because we think it improves our characters. But he is kind to people because he loves them; and they find him out, and are offended, or frightened.”

But before he left Tunbridge Wells he made a remark to the vicar, which he now made to Lucy herself when she closed the little piano and moved dreamily towards him: “If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her.”

“Well, thank you so much,” she repeated, “How quickly these accidents do happen, and then one returns to the old life!” “I don’t.” Anxiety moved her to question him. His answer was puzzling: “I shall probably want to live.” “But why, Mr. Emerson? What do you mean?” “I shall want to live, I say.”

In an open manner he had shown that he wished to continue their intimacy. She had refused, not because she disliked him, but because she did not know what had happened, and suspected that he did know. And this frightened her.

Was this the reception his action would get from the world? Of course, he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.

“I had got an idea—I dare say wrongly—that you feel more at home with me in a room.” “A room?” she echoed, hopelessly bewildered. “Yes. Or, at the most, in a garden, or on a road. Never in the real country like this.” “Oh, Cecil, whatever do you mean? I have never felt anything of the sort. You talk as if I was a kind of poetess sort of person.” “I don’t know that you aren’t. I connect you with a view—a certain type of view. Why shouldn’t you connect me with a room?” She reflected a moment, and then said, laughing: “Do you know that you’re right? I do. I must be a poetess after all. When I think of you it’s always as in a room. How funny!” To her surprise, he seemed annoyed. “A drawing-room, pray? With no view?” “Yes, with no view, I fancy. Why not?” “I’d rather,” he said reproachfully, “that connected me with the open air.”

Nor did he realize a more important point—that if she was too great for this society, she was too great for all society, and had reached the stage where personal intercourse would alone satisfy her. A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood—a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions—her own soul.

On the cornice of the wardrobe, the hand of an amateur had painted this inscription: “Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.”

that it is impossible to rehearse life.

“Oh, rubbish! If high ideals make a young man rude, the sooner he gets rid of them the better,”

Honest orthodoxy Cecil respected, but he always assumed that honesty is the result of a spiritual crisis; he could not imagine it as a natural birthright, that might grow heavenward like flowers.

“There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light,” he continued in measured tones. “We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm—yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”

“You know our cousin, Miss Bartlett,” said Mrs. Honeychurch pleasantly. “You met her with my daughter in Florence.” “Yes, indeed!” said the old man, and made as if he would come out of the garden to meet the lady. Miss Bartlett promptly got into the victoria. Thus entrenched, she emitted a formal bow. It was the pension Bertolini again, the dining-table with the decanters of water and wine. It was the old, old battle of the room with the view.

“My father”—he looked up at her (and he was a little flushed)—“says that there is only one perfect view—the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.”

“For a crowd is more than the people who make it up. Something gets added to it—no one knows how—just as something has got added to those hills.”

“There’s an absurd account of a view in this book,” said Cecil. “Also that men fall into two classes—those who forget views and those who remember them, even in small rooms.”

That is the man all over—playing tricks on people, on the most sacred form of life that he can find.

He had robbed the body of its taint, the world’s taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire.