The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

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Title: The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
Author: H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
Release Date: January 4, 2010 [eBook #30855]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN***
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THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
by
H. G. WELLS
New York
The Macmillan Company
1914
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1914,
By H. G. Wells.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1914.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCES LADY HARMAN 1
II. THE PERSONALITY OF SIR ISAAC 30
III. LADY HARMAN AT HOME 51
IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF LADY HARMAN 83
V. THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SIR ISAAC 98
VI. THE ADVENTUROUS AFTERNOON 143
VII. LADY HARMAN LEARNS ABOUT HERSELF 198
VIII. SIR ISAAC AS PETRUCHIO 231
IX. MR. BRUMLEY IS TROUBLED BY DIFFICULT IDEAS 287
X. LADY HARMAN COMES OUT 343
XI. THE LAST CRISIS 427
XII. LOVE AND A SERIOUS LADY 496
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
CHAPTER THE FIRST
INTRODUCES LADY HARMAN
§1
The motor-car entered a little white gate, came to a porch under a thick
wig of jasmine, and stopped. The chauffeur indicated by a movement of
the head that this at last was it. A tall young woman with a big soft
mouth, great masses of blue-black hair on either side of a broad, low
forehead, and eyes of so dark a brown you might have thought them black,
drooped forward and surveyed the house with a mixture of keen
appreciation and that gentle apprehension which is the shadow of desire
in unassuming natures....
The little house with the white-framed windows looked at her with a
sleepy wakefulness from under its blinds, and made no sign. Beyond the
corner was a glimpse of lawn, a rank of delphiniums, and the sound of a
wheel-barrow.
"Clarence!" the lady called again.
Clarence, with an air of exceeding his duties, decided to hear,
descended slowly, and came to the door.
"Very likely--if you were to look for a bell, Clarence...."
Clarence regarded the porch with a hostile air, made no secret that he
thought it a fool of a porch, seemed on the point of disobedience, and
submitted. His gestures suggested a belief that he would next be asked
to boil eggs or do the boots. He found a bell and rang it with the
needless violence of a man who has no special knowledge of ringing
bells. How was _he_ to know? he was a chauffeur. The bell did not so
much ring as explode and swamp the place. Sounds of ringing came from
all the windows, and even out of the chimneys. It seemed as if once set
ringing that bell would never cease....
Clarence went to the bonnet of his machine, and presented his stooping
back in a defensive manner against anyone who might come out. He wasn't
a footman, anyhow. He'd rung that bell all right, and now he must see to
his engine.
"He's rung so _loud!_" said the lady weakly--apparently to God.
The door behind the neat white pillars opened, and a little red-nosed
woman, in a cap she had evidently put on without a proper glass,
appeared. She surveyed the car and its occupant with disfavour over her
also very oblique spectacles.
The lady waved a pink paper to her, a house-agent's order to view. "Is
this Black Strands?" she shouted.
The little woman advanced slowly with her eyes fixed malevolently on the
pink paper. She seemed to be stalking it.
"This is Black Strands?" repeated the tall lady. "I should be so sorry
if I disturbed you--if it isn't; ringing the bell like that--and all.
You can't think----"
"This is Black _Strand_," said the little old woman with a note of deep
reproach, and suddenly ceased to look over her glasses and looked
through them. She looked no kindlier through them, and her eye seemed
much larger. She was now regarding the lady in the car, though with a
sustained alertness towards the pink paper. "I suppose," she said,
"you've come to see over the place?"
"If it doesn't disturb anyone; if it is quite convenient----"
"Mr. Brumley is _hout_," said the little old woman. "And if you got an
order to view, you got an order to view."
"If you think I might."
The lady stood up in the car, a tall and graceful figure of doubt and
desire and glossy black fur. "I'm sure it looks a very charming house."
"It's _clean_," said the little old woman, "from top to toe. Look as you
may."
"I'm sure it is," said the tall lady, and put aside her great fur coat
from her lithe, slender, red-clad body. (She was permitted by a sudden
civility of Clarence's to descend.) "Why! the windows," she said,
pausing on the step, "are like crystal."
"These very 'ands," said the little old woman, and glanced up at the
windows the lady had praised. The little old woman's initial sternness
wrinkled and softened as the skin of a windfall does after a day or so
upon the ground. She half turned in the doorway and made a sudden
vergerlike gesture. "We enter," she said, "by the 'all.... Them's Mr.
Brumley's 'ats and sticks. Every 'at or cap 'as a stick, and every stick
'as a 'at _or_ cap, and on the 'all table is the gloves corresponding.
On the right is the door leading to the kitching, on the left is the
large droring-room which Mr. Brumley 'as took as 'is study." Her voice
fell to lowlier things. "The other door beyond is a small lavatory
'aving a basing for washing 'ands."
"It's a perfectly delightful hall," said the lady. "So low and
wide-looking. And everything so bright--and lovely. Those long, Italian
pictures! And how charming that broad outlook upon the garden beyond!"
"You'll think it charminger when you see the garding," said the little
old woman. "It was Mrs. Brumley's especial delight. Much of it--with 'er
own 'ands."
"We now enter the droring-room," she proceeded, and flinging open the
door to the right was received with an indistinct cry suggestive of the
words, "Oh, _damn_ it!" The stout medium-sized gentleman in an artistic
green-grey Norfolk suit, from whom the cry proceeded, was kneeling on
the floor close to the wide-open window, and he was engaged in lacing up
a boot. He had a round, ruddy, rather handsome, amiable face with a sort
of bang of brown hair coming over one temple, and a large silk bow under
his chin and a little towards one ear, such as artists and artistic men
of letters affect. His profile was regular and fine, his eyes
expressive, his mouth, a very passable mouth. His features expressed at
first only the naïve horror of a shy man unveiled.
Intelligent appreciation supervened.
There was a crowded moment of rapid mutual inspection. The lady's
attitude was that of the enthusiastic house-explorer arrested in full
flight, falling swiftly towards apology and retreat. (It was a
frightfully attractive room, too, full of the brightest colour, and with
a big white cast of a statue--a Venus!--in the window.) She backed over
the threshold again.
"I thought you was out by that window, sir," said the little old woman
intimately, and was nearly shutting the door between them and all the
beginnings of this story.
But the voice of the gentleman arrested and wedged open the closing
door.
"I----Are you looking at the house?" he said. "I say! Just a moment,
Mrs. Rabbit."
He came down the length of the room with a slight flicking noise due to
the scandalized excitement of his abandoned laces. The lady was reminded
of her not so very distant schooldays, when it would have been
considered a suitable answer to such a question as his to reply, "No, I
am walking down Piccadilly on my hands." But instead she waved that pink
paper again. "The agents," she said. "Recommended--specially. So sorry
if I intrude. I ought, I know, to have written first; but I came on an
impulse."
By this time the gentleman in the artistic tie, who had also the
artistic eye for such matters, had discovered that the lady was young,
delightfully slender, either pretty or beautiful, he could scarcely tell
which, and very, very well dressed. "I am glad," he said, with
remarkable decision, "that I was not out. _I_ will show you the house."
"'Ow _can_ you, sir?" intervened the little old woman.
"Oh! show a house! Why not?"
"The kitchings--you don't understand the range, sir--it's beyond you.
And upstairs. You can't show a lady upstairs."
The gentleman reflected upon these difficulties.
"Well, I'm going to show her all I can show her anyhow. And after that,
Mrs. Rabbit, you shall come in. You needn't wait."
"I'm thinking," said Mrs. Rabbit, folding stiff little arms and
regarding him sternly. "You won't be much good after tea, you know, if
you don't get your afternoon's exercise."
"Rendez-vous in the kitchen, Mrs. Rabbit," said Mr. Brumley, firmly, and
Mrs. Rabbit after a moment of mute struggle disappeared discontentedly.
"I do not want to be the least bit a bother," said the lady. "I'm
intruding, I know, without the least bit of notice. I _do_ hope I'm not
disturbing you----" she seemed to make an effort to stop at that, and
failed and added--"the least bit. Do please tell me if I am."
"Not at all," said Mr. Brumley. "I hate my afternoon's walk as a
prisoner hates the treadmill."
"She's such a nice old creature."
"She's been a mother--and several aunts--to us ever since my wife died.
She was the first servant we ever had."
"All this house," he explained to his visitor's questioning eyes, "was
my wife's creation. It was a little featureless agent's house on the
edge of these pine-woods. She saw something in the shape of the
rooms--and that central hall. We've enlarged it of course. Twice. This
was two rooms, that is why there is a step down in the centre."
"That window and window-seat----"
"That was her addition," said Mr. Brumley. "All this room
is--replete--with her personality." He hesitated, and explained further.
"When we prepared this house--we expected to be better off--than we
subsequently became--and she could let herself go. Much is from Holland
and Italy."
"And that beautiful old writing-desk with the little single rose in a
glass!"
"She put it there. She even in a sense put the flower there. It is
renewed of course. By Mrs. Rabbit. She trained Mrs. Rabbit."
He sighed slightly, apparently at some thought of Mrs. Rabbit.
"You--you write----" the lady stopped, and then diverted a question that
she perhaps considered too blunt, "there?"
"Largely. I am--a sort of author. Perhaps you know my books. Not very
important books--but people sometimes read them."
The rose-pink of the lady's cheek deepened by a shade. Within her pretty
head, her mind rushed to and fro saying "Brumley? Brumley?" Then she had
a saving gleam. "Are you _George_ Brumley?" she asked,--"_the_ George
Brumley?"
"My name _is_ George Brumley," he said, with a proud modesty. "Perhaps
you know my little Euphemia books? They are still the most read."
The lady made a faint, dishonest assent-like noise; and her rose-pink
deepened another shade. But her interlocutor was not watching her very
closely just then.
"Euphemia was my wife," he said, "at least, my wife gave her to me--a
kind of exhalation. _This_"--his voice fell with a genuine respect for
literary associations--"was Euphemia's home."
"I still," he continued, "go on. I go on writing about Euphemia. I have
to. In this house. With my tradition.... But it is becoming
painful--painful. Curiously more painful now than at the beginning. And
I want to go. I want at last to make a break. That is why I am letting
or selling the house.... There will be no more Euphemia."
His voice fell to silence.
The lady surveyed the long low clear room so cleverly prepared for life,
with its white wall, its Dutch clock, its Dutch dresser, its pretty
seats about the open fireplace, its cleverly placed bureau, its
sun-trap at the garden end; she could feel the rich intention of living
in its every arrangement and a sense of uncertainty in things struck
home to her. She seemed to see a woman, a woman like herself--only very,
very much cleverer--flitting about the room and making it. And then this
woman had vanished--nowhither. Leaving this gentleman--sadly left--in
the care of Mrs. Rabbit.
"And she is dead?" she said with a softness in her dark eyes and a fall
in her voice that was quite natural and very pretty.
"She died," said Mr. Brumley, "three years and a half ago." He
reflected. "Almost exactly."
He paused and she filled the pause with feeling.
He became suddenly very brave and brisk and businesslike. He led the way
back into the hall and made explanations. "It is not so much a hall as a
hall living-room. We use that end, except when we go out upon the
verandah beyond, as our dining-room. The door to the right is the
kitchen."
The lady's attention was caught again by the bright long eventful
pictures that had already pleased her. "They are copies of two of
Carpaccio's St. George series in Venice," he said. "We bought them
together there. But no doubt you've seen the originals. In a little old
place with a custodian and rather dark. One of those corners--so full of
that delightful out-of-the-wayishness which is so characteristic, I
think, of Venice. I don't know if you found that in Venice?"
"I've never been abroad," said the lady. "Never. I should love to go. I
suppose you and your wife went--ever so much."
He had a transitory wonder that so fine a lady should be untravelled,
but his eagerness to display his backgrounds prevented him thinking that
out at the time. "Two or three times," he said, "before our little boy
came to us. And always returning with something for this place. Look!"
he went on, stepped across an exquisite little brick court to a lawn of
soft emerald and turning back upon the house. "That Dellia Robbia
placque we lugged all the way back from Florence with us, and that stone
bird-bath is from Siena."
"How bright it is!" murmured the lady after a brief still appreciation.
"Delightfully bright. As though it would shine even if the sun didn't."
And she abandoned herself to the rapture of seeing a house and garden
that were for once better even than the agent's superlatives. And within
her grasp if she chose--within her grasp.
She made the garden melodious with soft appreciative sounds. She had a
small voice for her size but quite a charming one, a little live bird of
a voice, bright and sweet. It was a clear unruffled afternoon; even the
unseen wheel-barrow had very sensibly ceased to creak and seemed to be
somewhere listening....
Only one trivial matter marred their easy explorations;--his boots
remained unlaced. No propitious moment came when he could stoop and lace
them. He was not a dexterous man with eyelets, and stooping made him
grunt and his head swim. He hoped these trailing imperfections went
unmarked. He tried subtly to lead this charming lady about and at the
same time walk a little behind her. She on her part could not determine
whether he would be displeased or not if she noticed this slight
embarrassment and asked him to set it right. They were quite long
leather laces and they flew about with a sturdy negligence of anything
but their own offensive contentment, like a gross man who whistles a
vulgar tune as he goes round some ancient church; flick, flock, they
went, and flip, flap, enjoying themselves, and sometimes he trod on one
and halted in his steps, and sometimes for a moment she felt her foot
tether him. But man is the adaptable animal and presently they both
became more used to these inconveniences and more mechanical in their
efforts to avoid them. They treated those laces then exactly as nice
people would treat that gross man; a minimum of polite attention and all
the rest pointedly directed away from him....
The garden was full of things that people dream about doing in their
gardens and mostly never do. There was a rose garden all blooming in
chorus, and with pillar-roses and arches that were not so much growths
as overflowing cornucopias of roses, and a neat orchard with shapely
trees white-painted to their exact middles, a stone wall bearing
clematis and a clothes-line so gay with Mr. Brumley's blue and white
flannel shirts that it seemed an essential part of the design. And then
there was a great border of herbaceous perennials backed by delphiniums
and monkshood already in flower and budding hollyhocks rising to their
duty; a border that reared its blaze of colour against a hill-slope dark
with pines. There was no hedge whatever to this delightful garden. It
seemed to go straight into the pine-woods; only an invisible netting
marked its limits and fended off the industrious curiosity of the
rabbits.
"This strip of wood is ours right up to the crest," he said, "and from
the crest one has a view. One has two views. If you would care----?"
The lady made it clear that she was there to see all she could. She
radiated her appetite to see. He carried a fur stole for her over his
arm and flicked the way up the hill. Flip, flap, flop. She followed
demurely.
"This is the only view I care to show you now," he said at the crest.
"There was a better one beyond there. But--it has been defiled.... Those
hills! I knew you would like them. The space of it! And ... yet----.
This view--lacks the shining ponds. There are wonderful distant ponds.
After all I must show you the other! But you see there is the high-road,
and the high-road has produced an abomination. Along here we go. Now.
Don't look down please." His gesture covered the foreground. "Look right
over the nearer things into the distance. There!"
The lady regarded the wide view with serene appreciation. "I don't see,"
she said, "that it's in any way ruined. It's perfect."
"You don't see! Ah! you look right over. You look high. I wish I could
too. But that screaming board! I wish the man's crusts would choke
him."
And indeed quite close at hand, where the road curved about below them,
the statement that Staminal Bread, the True Staff of Life, was sold only
by the International Bread Shops, was flung out with a vigour of yellow
and Prussian blue that made the landscape tame.
His finger directed her questioning eye.
"_Oh!_" said the lady suddenly, as one who is convicted of a stupidity
and coloured slightly.
"In the morning of course it is worse. The sun comes directly on to it.
Then really and truly it blots out everything."
The lady stood quite silent for a little time, with her eyes on the
distant ponds. Then he perceived that she was blushing. She turned to
her interlocutor as a puzzled pupil might turn to a teacher.
"It really is very good bread," she said. "They make it----Oh! most
carefully. With the germ in. And one has to tell people."
Her point of view surprised him. He had expected nothing but a docile
sympathy. "But to tell people _here_!" he said.
"Yes, I suppose one oughtn't to tell them here."
"Man does not live by bread alone."
She gave the faintest assent.
"This is the work of one pushful, shoving creature, a man named Harman.
Imagine him! Imagine what he must be! Don't you feel his soul defiling
us?--this summit of a stupendous pile of--dough, thinking of nothing
but his miserable monstrous profits, seeing nothing in the delight of
life, the beauty of the world but something that attracts attention,
draws eyes, something that gives him his horrible opportunity of getting
ahead of all his poor little competitors and inserting--_this!_ It's the
quintessence of all that is wrong with the world;--squalid, shameless
huckstering!" He flew off at a tangent. "Four or five years ago they
made this landscape disease,--a knight!"
He looked at her for a sympathetic indignation, and then suddenly
something snapped in his brain and he understood. There wasn't an
instant between absolute innocence and absolute knowledge.
"You see," she said as responsive as though he had cried out sharply at
the horror in his mind, "Sir Isaac is my husband. Naturally ... I ought
to have given you my name to begin with. It was silly...."
Mr. Brumley gave one wild glance at the board, but indeed there was not
a word to be said in its mitigation. It was the crude advertisement of a
crude pretentious thing crudely sold. "My dear lady!" he said in his
largest style, "I am desolated! But I have said it! It isn't a pretty
board."
A memory of epithets pricked him. "You must forgive--a certain touch
of--rhetoric."
He turned about as if to dismiss the board altogether, but she remained
with her brows very faintly knit, surveying the cause of his offence.
"It isn't a _pretty_ board," she said. "I've wondered at times.... It
isn't."
"I implore you to forget that outbreak--mere petulance--because, I
suppose, of a peculiar liking for that particular view. There
are--associations----"
"I've wondered lately," she continued, holding on to her own thoughts,
"what people _did_ think of them. And it's curious--to hear----"
For a moment neither spoke, she surveyed the board and he the tall ease
of her pose. And he was thinking she must surely be the most beautiful
woman he had ever encountered. The whole country might be covered with
boards if it gave us such women as this. He felt the urgent need of some
phrase, to pull the situation out of this pit into which it had fallen.
He was a little unready, his faculties all as it were neglecting his
needs and crowding to the windows to stare, and meanwhile she spoke
again, with something of the frankness of one who thinks aloud.
"You see," she said, "one _doesn't_ hear. One thinks perhaps----And
there it is. When one marries very young one is apt to take so much for
granted. And afterwards----"
She was wonderfully expressive in her inexpressiveness, he thought, but
found as yet no saving phrase. Her thought continued to drop from her.
"One sees them so much that at last one doesn't see them."
She turned away to survey the little house again; it was visible in
bright strips between the red-scarred pine stems. She looked at it chin
up, with a still approval--but she was the slenderest loveliness, and
with such a dignity!--and she spoke at length as though the board had
never existed. "It's like a little piece of another world; so bright and
so--perfect."
There was the phantom of a sigh in her voice.
"I think you'll be charmed by our rockery," he said. "It was one of our
particular efforts. Every time we two went abroad we came back with
something, stonecrop or Alpine or some little bulb from the wayside."
"How can you leave it!"
He was leaving it because it bored him to death. But so intricate is the
human mind that it was with perfect sincerity he answered: "It will be a
tremendous wrench.... I have to go."
"And you've written most of your books here and lived here!"
The note of sympathy in her voice gave him a sudden suspicion that she
imagined his departure due to poverty. Now to be poor as an author is to
be unpopular, and he valued his popularity--with the better sort of
people. He hastened to explain. "I have to go, because here, you see,
here, neither for me nor my little son, is it Life. It's a place of
memories, a place of accomplished beauty. My son already breaks away,--a
preparatory school at Margate. Healthier, better, for us to break
altogether I feel, wrench though it may. It's full for us at least--a
new tenant would be different of course--but for _us_ it's full of
associations we can't alter, can't for the life of us change. Nothing
you see goes on. And life you know _is_ change--change and going on."
He paused impressively on his generalization.
"But you will want----You will want to hand it over to--to sympathetic
people of course. People," she faltered, "who will understand."
Mr. Brumley took an immense stride--conversationally. "I am certain
there is no one I would more readily see in that house than yourself,"
he said.
"But----" she protested. "And besides, you don't know me!"
"One knows some things at once, and I am as sure you
would--understand--as if I had known you twenty years. It may seem
absurd to you, but when I looked up just now and saw you for the first
time, I thought--this, this is the tenant. This is her house.... Not a
doubt. That is why I did not go for my walk--came round with you."
"You really think you would like us to have that house?" she said.
"_Still?_"
"No one better," said Mr. Brumley.
"After the board?"
"After a hundred boards, I let the house to you...."
"My husband of course will be the tenant," reflected Lady Harman.
She seemed to brighten again by an effort: "I have always wanted
something like this, that wasn't gorgeous, that wasn't mean. I can't
_make_ things. It isn't every one--can _make_ a place...."
§2
Mr. Brumley found their subsequent conversation the fullest realization
of his extremest hopes. Behind his amiable speeches, which soon grew
altogether easy and confident again, a hundred imps of vanity were
patting his back for the intuition, the swift decision that had
abandoned his walk so promptly. In some extraordinary way the incident
of the board became impossible; it hadn't happened, he felt, or it had
happened differently. Anyhow there was no time to think that over now.
He guided the lady to the two little greenhouses, made her note the
opening glow of the great autumnal border and brought her to the rock
garden. She stooped and loved and almost kissed the soft healthy
cushions of pampered saxifrage: she appreciated the cleverness of the
moss-bed--where there were droseras; she knelt to the gentians; she had
a kindly word for that bank-holiday corner where London Pride still
belatedly rejoiced; she cried out at the delicate Iceland poppies that
thrust up between the stones of the rough pavement; and so in the most
amiable accord they came to the raised seat in the heart of it all, and
sat down and took in the whole effect of the place, and backing of
woods, the lush borders, the neat lawn, the still neater orchard, the
pergola, the nearer delicacies among the stones, and the gable, the
shining white rough-cast of the walls, the casement windows, the
projecting upper story, the carefully sought-out old tiles of the roof.
And everything bathed in that caressing sunshine which does not scorch
nor burn but gilds and warms deliciously, that summer sunshine which
only northward islands know.
Recovering from his first astonishment and his first misadventure, Mr.
Brumley was soon himself again, talkative, interesting, subtly and
gently aggressive. For once one may use a hackneyed phrase without the
slightest exaggeration; he was charmed...
He was one of those very natural-minded men with active imaginations who
find women the most interesting things in a full and interesting
universe. He was an entirely good man and almost professionally on the
side of goodness, his pen was a pillar of the home and he was hostile
and even actively hostile to all those influences that would undermine
and change--anything; but he did find women attractive. He watched them
and thought about them, he loved to be with them, he would take great
pains to please and interest them, and his mind was frequently dreaming
quite actively of them, of championing them, saying wonderful and
impressive things to them, having great friendships with them, adoring
them and being adored by them. At times he had to ride this interest on
the curb. At times the vigour of its urgencies made him inconsistent and
secretive.... Comparatively his own sex was a matter of indifference to
him. Indeed he was a very normal man. Even such abstractions as Goodness
and Justice had rich feminine figures in his mind, and when he sat down
to write criticism at his desk, that pretty little slut of a Delphic
Sibyl presided over his activities.
So that it was a cultivated as well as an attentive eye that studied the
movements of Lady Harman and an experienced ear that weighed the words
and cadences of her entirely inadequate and extremely expressive share
in their conversation. He had enjoyed the social advantages of a popular
and presentable man of letters, and he had met a variety of ladies; but
he had never yet met anyone at all like Lady Harman. She was pretty and
quite young and fresh; he doubted if she was as much as four-and-twenty;
she was as simple-mannered as though she was ever so much younger than
that, and dignified as though she was ever so much older; and she had a
sort of lustre of wealth about her----. One met it sometimes in young
richly married Jewesses, but though she was very dark she wasn't at all
of that type; he was inclined to think she must be Welsh. This manifest
spending of great lots of money on the richest, finest and fluffiest
things was the only aspect of her that sustained the parvenu idea; and
it wasn't in any way carried out by her manners, which were as modest
and silent and inaggressive as the very best can be. Personally he liked
opulence, he responded to countless-guinea furs....
Soon there was a neat little history in his mind that was reasonably
near the truth, of a hard-up professional family, fatherless perhaps, of
a mercenary marriage at seventeen or so--and this....
And while Mr. Brumley's observant and speculative faculties were thus
active, his voice was busily engaged. With the accumulated artistry of
years he was developing his pose. He did it almost subconsciously. He
flung out hint and impulsive confidence and casual statement with the
careless assurance of the accustomed performer, until by nearly
imperceptible degrees that finished picture of the two young lovers,
happy, artistic, a little Bohemian and one of them doomed to die, making
their home together in an atmosphere of sunny gaiety, came into being in
her mind....
"It must have been beautiful to have begun life like that," she said in
a voice that was a sigh, and it flashed joyfully across Mr. Brumley's
mind that this wonderful person could envy his Euphemia.
"Yes," he said, "at least we had our Spring."
"To be together," said the lady, "and--so beautifully poor...."
There is a phase in every relationship when one must generalize if one
is to go further. A certain practice in this kind of talk with ladies
blunted the finer sensibilities of Mr. Brumley. At any rate he was able
to produce this sentence without a qualm. "Life," he said, "is sometimes
a very extraordinary thing."
Lady Harman reflected upon this statement and then responded with an air
of remembered moments: "Isn't it."
"One loses the most precious things," said Mr. Brumley, "and one loses
them and it seems as though one couldn't go on. And one goes on."
"And one finds oneself," said Lady Harman, "without all sorts of
precious things----" And she stopped, transparently realizing that she
was saying too much.
"There is a sort of vitality about life," said Mr. Brumley, and stopped
as if on the verge of profundities.
"I suppose one hopes," said Lady Harman. "And one doesn't think. And
things happen."
"Things happen," assented Mr. Brumley.
For a little while their minds rested upon this thought, as chasing
butterflies might rest together on a flower.
"And so I am going to leave this," Mr. Brumley resumed. "I am going up
there to London for a time with my boy. Then perhaps we may
travel-Germany, Italy, perhaps-in his holidays. It is beginning again, I
feel with him. But then even we two must drift apart. I can't deny him a
public school sooner or later. His own road...."
"It will be lonely for you," sympathized the lady. "I have my work,"
said Mr. Brumley with a sort of valiant sadness.
"Yes, I suppose your work----"
She left an eloquent gap.
"There, of course, one's fortunate," said Mr. Brumley.
"I wish," said Lady Harman, with a sudden frankness and a little
quickening of her colour, "that I had some work. Something--that was my
own."
"But you have----There are social duties. There must be all sorts of
things."
"There are--all sorts of things. I suppose I'm ungrateful. I have my
children."
"You have children, Lady Harman!"
"I've _four_."
He was really astonished, "Your _own_?"
She turned her fawn's eyes on his with a sudden wonder at his meaning.
"My own!" she said with the faintest tinge of astonished laughter in her
voice. "What else could they be?"
"I thought----I thought you might have step-children."
"Oh! of course! No! I'm their mother;--all four of them. They're mine as
far as that goes. Anyhow."
And her eye questioned him again for his intentions.
But his thought ran along its own path. "You see," he said, "there is
something about you--so freshly beginning life. So like--Spring."
"You thought I was too young! I'm nearly six-and-twenty! But all the
same,--though they're mine,--_still_----Why shouldn't a woman have work
in the world, Mr. Brumley? In spite of all that."
"But surely--that's the most beautiful work in the world that anyone
could possibly have."
Lady Harman reflected. She seemed to hesitate on the verge of some
answer and not to say it.
"You see," she said, "it may have been different with you.... When one
has a lot of nurses, and not very much authority."
She coloured deeply and broke back from the impending revelations.
"No," she said, "I would like some work of my own."
§3
At this point their conversation was interrupted by the lady's chauffeur
in a manner that struck Mr. Brumley as extraordinary, but which the tall
lady evidently regarded as the most natural thing in the world.
Mr. Clarence appeared walking across the lawn towards them, surveying
the charms of as obviously a charming garden as one could have, with the
disdain and hostility natural to a chauffeur. He did not so much touch
his cap as indicate that it was within reach, and that he could if he
pleased touch it. "It's time you were going, my lady," he said. "Sir
Isaac will be coming back by the five-twelve, and there'll be a nice
to-do if you ain't at home and me at the station and everything in order
again."
Manifestly an abnormal expedition.
"Must we start at once, Clarence?" asked the lady consulting a bracelet
watch. "You surely won't take two hours----"
"I can give you fifteen minutes more, my lady," said Clarence, "provided
I may let her out and take my corners just exactly in my own way."
"And I must give you tea," said Mr. Brumley, rising to his feet. "And
there is the kitchen."
"And upstairs! I'm afraid, Clarence, for this occasion only you
must--what is it?--let her out."
"And no 'Oh Clarence!' my lady?"
She ignored that.
"I'll tell Mrs. Rabbit at once," said Mr. Brumley, and started to run
and trod in some complicated way on one of his loose laces and was
precipitated down the rockery steps. "Oh!" cried the lady. "Mind!" and
clasped her hands.
He made a sound exactly like the word "damnation" as he fell, but he
didn't so much get up as bounce up, apparently in the brightest of
tempers, and laughed, held out two earthy hands for sympathy with a mock
rueful grimace, and went on, earthy-green at the knees and a little more
carefully towards the house. Clarence, having halted to drink deep
satisfaction from this disaster, made his way along a nearly parallel
path towards the kitchen, leaving his lady to follow as she chose to the
house.
"_You'll_ take a cup of tea?" called Mr. Brumley.
"Oh! _I'll_ take a cup all right," said Clarence in the kindly voice of
one who addresses an amusing inferior....
Mrs. Rabbit had already got the tea-things out upon the cane table in
the pretty verandah, and took it ill that she should be supposed not to
have thought of these preparations.
Mr. Brumley disappeared for a few minutes into the house.
He returned with a conscious relief on his face, clean hands, brushed
knees, and his boots securely laced. He found Lady Harman already
pouring out tea.
"You see," she said, to excuse this pleasant enterprise on her part, "my
husband has to be met at the station with the car.... And of course he
has no idea----"
She left what it was of which Sir Isaac had no idea to the groping
speculations of Mr. Brumley.
§4
That evening Mr. Brumley was quite unable to work. His mind was full of
this beautiful dark lady who had come so unexpectedly into his world.
Perhaps there are such things as premonitions. At any rate he had an
altogether disproportionate sense of the significance of the afternoon's
adventure,--which after all was a very small adventure indeed. A mere
talk. His mind refused to leave her, her black furry slenderness, her
dark trustful eyes, the sweet firmness of her perfect lips, her
appealing simplicity that was yet somehow compatible with the completest
self-possession. He went over the incident of the board again and again,
scraping his memory for any lurking crumb of detail as a starving man
might scrape an insufficient plate. Her dignity, her gracious frank
forgiveness; no queen alive in these days could have touched her.... But
it wasn't a mere elaborate admiration. There was something about her,
about the quality of their meeting.
Most people know that sort of intimation. This person, it says, so fine,
so brave, so distant still in so many splendid and impressive
qualities, is yet in ways as yet undefined and unexplored, subtly and
abundantly--for _you_. It was that made all her novelty and distinction
and high quality and beauty so dominating among Mr. Brumley's thoughts.
Without that his interest might have been almost entirely--academic. But
there was woven all through her the hints of an imaginable alliance,
with _us_, with the things that are Brumley, with all that makes
beautiful little cottages and resents advertisements in lovely places,
with us as against something over there lurking behind that board,
something else, something out of which she came. He vaguely adumbrated
what it was out of which she came. A closed narrow life--with horrid
vast enviable quantities of money. A life, could one use the word
_vulgar_?--so that Carpaccio, Della Robbia, old furniture, a garden
unostentatiously perfect, and the atmosphere of _belles-lettres_, seemed
things of another more desirable world. (She had never been abroad.) A
world, too, that would be so willing, so happy to enfold her, furs,
funds, freshness--everything.
And all this was somehow animated by the stirring warmth in the June
weather, for spring raised the sap in Mr. Brumley as well as in his
trees, had been a restless time for him all his life. This spring
particularly had sensitized him, and now a light had shone.
He was so unable to work that for twenty minutes he sat over a pleasant
little essay on Shakespear's garden that by means of a concordance and
his natural aptitude he was writing for the book of the National
Shakespear Theatre, without adding a single fancy to its elegant
playfulness. Then he decided he needed his afternoon's walk after all,
and he took cap and stick and went out, and presently found himself
surveying that yellow and blue board and seeing it from an entirely new
point of view....
It seemed to him that he hadn't made the best use of his conversational
opportunities, and for a time this troubled him....
Toward the twilight he was walking along the path that runs through the
heather along the edge of the rusty dark ironstone lake opposite the
pine-woods. He spoke his thoughts aloud to the discreet bat that flitted
about him. "I wonder," he said, "whether I shall ever set eyes on her
again...."
In the small hours when he ought to have been fast asleep he decided she
would certainly take the house, and that he would see her again quite a
number of times. A long tangle of unavoidable detail for discussion
might be improvised by an ingenious man. And the rest of that waking
interval passed in such inventions, which became more and more vague and
magnificent and familiar as Mr. Brumley lapsed into slumber again....
Next day the garden essay was still neglected, and he wrote a pretty
vague little song about an earthly mourner and a fresh presence that set
him thinking of the story of Persephone and how she passed in the
springtime up from the shadows again, blessing as she passed....
He pulled himself together about midday, cycled over to Gorshott for
lunch at the clubhouse and a round with Horace Toomer in the afternoon,
re-read the poem after tea, decided it was poor, tore it up and got
himself down to his little fantasy about Shakespear's Garden for a good
two hours before supper. It was a sketch of that fortunate poet (whose
definitive immortality is now being assured by an influential committee)
walking round his Stratford garden with his daughter, quoting himself
copiously with an accuracy and inappropriateness that reflected more
credit upon his heart than upon his head, and saying in addition many
distinctively Brumley things. When Mrs. Rabbit, with a solicitude
acquired from the late Mrs. Brumley, asked him how he had got on with
his work--the sight of verse on his paper had made her anxious--he could
answer quite truthfully, "Like a house afire."
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE PERSONALITY OF SIR ISAAC
§1
It is to be remarked that two facts, usually esteemed as supremely
important in the life of a woman, do not seem to have affected Mr.
Brumley's state of mind nearly so much as quite trivial personal details
about Lady Harman. The first of these facts was the existence of the
lady's four children, and the second, Sir Isaac.
Mr. Brumley did not think very much of either of these two facts; if he
had they would have spoilt the portrait in his mind; and when he did
think of them it was chiefly to think how remarkably little they were
necessary to that picture's completeness.
He spent some little time however trying to recall exactly what it was
she had said about her children. He couldn't now succeed in reproducing
her words, if indeed it had been by anything so explicit as words that
she had conveyed to him that she didn't feel her children were
altogether hers. "Incidental results of the collapse of her girlhood,"
tried Mr. Brumley, "when she married Harman."
Expensive nurses, governesses--the best that money without prestige or
training could buy. And then probably a mother-in-law.
And as for Harman----?
There Mr. Brumley's mind desisted for sheer lack of material. Given this
lady and that board and his general impression of Harman's refreshment
and confectionery activity--the data were insufficient. A commonplace
man no doubt, a tradesman, energetic perhaps and certainly a little
brassy, successful by the chances of that economic revolution which
everywhere replaces the isolated shop by the syndicated enterprise,
irrationally conceited about it; a man perhaps ultimately to be
pitied--with this young goddess finding herself.... Mr. Brumley's mind
sat down comfortably to the more congenial theme of a young goddess
finding herself, and it was only very gradually in the course of several
days that the personality of Sir Isaac began to assume its proper
importance in the scheme of his imaginings.
§2
In the afternoon as he went round the links with Horace Toomer he got
some definite lights upon Sir Isaac.
His mind was so full of Lady Harman that he couldn't but talk of her
visit. "I've a possible tenant for my cottage," he said as he and
Toomer, full of the sunny contentment of English gentlemen who had
played a proper game in a proper manner, strolled back towards the
clubhouse. "That man Harman."
"Not the International Stores and Staminal Bread man."
"Yes. Odd. Considering my hatred of his board."
"He ought to pay--anyhow," said Toomer. "They say he has a pretty wife
and keeps her shut up."
"She came," said Brumley, neglecting to add the trifling fact that she
had come alone.
"Pretty?"
"Charming, I thought."
"He's jealous of her. Someone was saying that the chauffeur has orders
not to take her into London--only for trips in the country. They live in
a big ugly house I'm told on Putney Hill. Did she in any way _look_--as
though----?"
"Not in the least. If she isn't an absolutely straight young woman I've
never set eyes on one."
"_He_," said Toomer, "is a disgusting creature."
"Morally?"
"No, but--generally. Spends his life ruining little tradesmen, for the
fun of the thing. He's three parts an invalid with some obscure kidney
disease. Sometimes he spends whole days in bed, drinking Contrexéville
Water and planning the bankruptcy of decent men.... So the party made a
knight of him."
"A party must have funds, Toomer."
"He didn't pay nearly enough. Blapton is an idiot with the honours. When
it isn't Mrs. Blapton. What can you expect when ---- ----"
(But here Toomer became libellous.)
Toomer was an interesting type. He had a disagreeable disposition
profoundly modified by a public school and university training. Two
antagonistic forces made him. He was the spirit of scurrility incarnate,
that was, as people say, innate; and by virtue of those moulding forces
he was doing his best to be an English gentleman. That mysterious
impulse which compels the young male to make objectionable imputations
against seemly lives and to write rare inelegant words upon clean and
decent things burnt almost intolerably within him, and equally powerful
now was the gross craving he had acquired for personal association with
all that is prominent, all that is successful, all that is of good
report. He had found his resultant in the censorious defence of
established things. He conducted the _British Critic_, attacking with a
merciless energy all that was new, all that was critical, all those
fresh and noble tentatives that admit of unsavoury interpretations, and
when the urgent Yahoo in him carried him below the pretentious dignity
of his accustomed organ he would squirt out his bitterness in a little
sham facetious bookstall volume with a bright cover and quaint woodcuts,
in which just as many prominent people as possible were mentioned by
name and a sauce of general absurdity could be employed to cover and, if
need be, excuse particular libels. So he managed to relieve himself and
get along. Harman was just on the border-line of the class he considered
himself free to revile. Harman was an outsider and aggressive and new,
one of Mrs. Blapton's knights, and of no particular weight in society;
so far he was fair game; but he was not so new as he had been, he was
almost through with the running of the Toomer gauntlet, he had a
tremendous lot of money and it was with a modified vehemence that the
distinguished journalist and humourist expatiated on his offensiveness
to Mr. Brumley. He talked in a gentle, rather weary voice, that came
through a moustache like a fringe of light tobacco.
"Personally I've little against the man. A wife too young for him and
jealously guarded, but that's all to his credit. Nowadays. If it wasn't
for his blatancy in his business.... And the knighthood.... I suppose he
can't resist taking anything he can get. Bread made by wholesale and
distributed like a newspaper can't, I feel, be the same thing as the
loaf of your honest old-fashioned baker--each loaf made with individual
attention--out of wholesome English flour--hand-ground--with a personal
touch for each customer. Still, everything drifts on to these
hugger-mugger large enterprises; Chicago spreads over the world. One
thing goes after another, tobacco, tea, bacon, drugs, bookselling.
Decent homes destroyed right and left. Not Harman's affair, I suppose.
The girls in his London tea-shops have of course to supplement their
wages by prostitution--probably don't object to that nowadays
considering the novels we have. And his effect on the landscape----Until
they stopped him he was trying very hard to get Shakespear's Cliff at
Dover. He did for a time have the Toad Rock at Tunbridge.
Still"--something like a sigh escaped from Toomer,--"his private life
appears to be almost as blameless as anybody's can be.... Thanks no
doubt to his defective health. I made the most careful enquiries when
his knighthood was first discussed. Someone has to. Before his marriage
he seems to have lived at home with his mother. At Highbury. Very
quietly and inexpensively."
"Then he's not the conventional vulgarian?"
"Much more of the Rockefeller type. Bad health, great concentration,
organizing power.... Applied of course to a narrower range of
business.... I'm glad I'm not a small confectioner in a town he wants to
take up."
"He's--hard?"
"Merciless. Hasn't the beginnings of an idea of fair play.... None at
all.... No human give or take.... Are you going to have tea here, or are
you walking back now?"
§3
It was fully a week before Mr. Brumley heard anything more of Lady
Harman. He began to fear that this shining furry presence would glorify
Black Strand no more. Then came a telegram that filled him with the
liveliest anticipations. It was worded: "Coming see cottage Saturday
afternoon Harman...."
On Saturday morning Mr. Brumley dressed with an apparent ease and
unusual care....
He worked rather discursively before lunch. His mind was busy picking up
the ends of their previous conversation and going on with them to all
sorts of bright knots, bows and elegant cats' cradling. He planned
openings that might give her tempting opportunities of confidences if
she wished to confide, and artless remarks and questions that would make
for self-betrayal if she didn't. And he thought of her, he thought of
her imaginatively, this secluded rare thing so happily come to him, who
was so young, so frank and fresh and so unhappily married (he was sure)
to a husband at least happily mortal. Yes, dear Reader, even on that
opening morning Mr. Brumley's imagination, trained very largely upon
Victorian literature and _belles-lettres_, leapt forward to the very
ending of this story.... We, of course, do nothing of the sort, our lot
is to follow a more pedestrian route.... He lapsed into a vague series
of meditations, slower perhaps but essentially similar, after his
temperate palatable lunch.
He was apprised of the arrival of his visitor by the sudden indignant
yaup followed by the general subdued uproar of a motor-car outside the
front door, even before Clarence, this time amazingly prompt, assaulted
the bell. Then the whole house was like that poem by Edgar Allan Poe,
one magnificent texture of clangour.
At the first toot of the horn Mr. Brumley had moved swiftly into the
bay, and screened partly by the life-size Venus of Milo that stood in
the bay window, and partly by the artistic curtains, surveyed the
glittering vehicle. He was first aware of a vast fur coat enclosing a
lean grey-headed obstinate-looking man with a diabetic complexion who
was fumbling with the door of the car and preventing Clarence's
assistance. Mr. Brumley was able to remark that the gentleman's nose
projected to a sharpened point, and that his thin-lipped mouth was all
awry and had a kind of habitual compression, the while that his eyes
sought eagerly for the other occupant of the car. She was unaccountably
invisible. Could it be that that hood really concealed her? Could it
be?...
The white-faced gentleman descended, relieved himself tediously of the
vast fur coat, handed it to Clarence and turned to the house.
Reverentially Clarence placed the coat within the automobile and closed
the door. Still the protesting mind of Mr. Brumley refused to
believe!...
He heard the house-door open and Mrs. Rabbit in colloquy with a flat
masculine voice. He heard his own name demanded and conceded. Then a
silence, not the faintest suggestion of a feminine rustle, and then the
sound of Mrs. Rabbit at the door-handle. Conviction stormed the last
fastness of the disappointed author's mind.
"Oh _damn_!" he shouted with extreme fervour.
He had never imagined it was possible that Sir Isaac could come alone.
§4
But the house had to be let, and it had to be let to Sir Isaac Harman.
In another moment an amiable though distinguished man of letters was in
the hall interviewing the great _entrepreneur_.
The latter gentleman was perhaps three inches shorter than Mr. Brumley,
his hair was grey-shot brown, his face clean-shaven, his features had a
thin irregularity, and he was dressed in a neat brown suit with a
necktie very exactly matching it. "Sir Isaac Harman?" said Mr. Brumley
with a note of gratification.
"That's it," said Sir Isaac. He appeared to be nervous and a little out
of breath. "Come," he said, "just to look over it. Just to see it.
Probably too small, but if it doesn't put you out----"
He blew out the skin of his face about his mouth a little.
"Delighted to see you anyhow," said Mr. Brumley, filling the world of
unspoken things with singularly lurid curses.
"This. Nice little hall,--very," said Sir Isaac. "Pretty, that bit at
the end. Many rooms are there?"
Mr. Brumley answered inexactly and meditated a desperate resignation of
the whole job to Mrs. Rabbit. Then he made an effort and began to
explain.
"That clock," said Sir Isaac interrupting in the dining-room, "is a
fake."
Mr. Brumley made silent interrogations.
"Been there myself," said Sir Isaac. "They sell those brass fittings in
Ho'bun."
They went upstairs together. When Mr. Brumley wasn't explaining or
pointing out, Sir Isaac made a kind of whistling between his clenched
teeth. "This bathroom wants refitting anyhow," he said abruptly. "I
daresay Lady Harman would like that room with the bay--but it's
all--small. It's really quite pretty; you've done it cleverly, but--the
size of it! I'd have to throw out a wing. And that you know might spoil
the style. That roof,--a gardener's cottage?... I thought it might be.
What's this other thing here? Old barn. Empty? That might expand a bit.
Couldn't do only just this anyhow."
He walked in front of Mr. Brumley downstairs and still emitting that
faint whistle led the way into the garden. He seemed to regard Mr.
Brumley merely as a source of answers to his questions, and a seller in
process of preparation for an offer. It was clear he meant to make an
offer. "It's not the house I should buy if I was alone in this," he
said, "but Lady Harman's taken a fancy somehow. And it might be
adapted...."
From first to last Mr. Brumley never said a single word about Euphemia
and the young matrimony and all the other memories this house enshrined.
He felt instinctively that it would not affect Sir Isaac one way or the
other. He tried simply to seem indifferent to whether Sir Isaac bought
the place or not. He tried to make it appear almost as if houses like
this often happened to him, and interested him only in the most
incidental manner. They had their proper price, he tried to convey,
which of course no gentleman would underbid.
In the exquisite garden Sir Isaac said: "One might make a very pretty
little garden of this--if one opened it out a bit."
And of the sunken rock-garden: "That might be dangerous of a dark
night."
"I suppose," he said, indicating the hill of pines behind, "one could
buy or lease some of that. If one wanted to throw it into the place and
open out more.
"From my point of view," he said, "it isn't a house. It's----" He sought
in his mind for an expression--"a Cottage Ornay."
This history declines to record either what Mr. Brumley said or what he
did not say.
Sir Isaac surveyed the house thoughtfully for some moments from the turf
edging of the great herbaceous border.
"How far," he asked, "is it from the nearest railway station?..."
Mr. Brumley gave details.
"Four miles. And an infrequent service? Nothing in any way suburban?
Better to motor into Guildford and get the Express. H'm.... And what
sort of people do we get about here?"
Mr. Brumley sketched.
"Mildly horsey. That's not bad. No officers about?... Nothing nearer
than Aldershot.... That's eleven miles, is it? H'm. I suppose there
aren't any _literary_ people about here, musicians or that kind of
thing, no advanced people of that sort?"
"Not when I've gone," said Mr. Brumley, with the faintest flavour of
humour.
Sir Isaac stared at him for a moment with eyes vacantly thoughtful.
"It mightn't be so bad," said Sir Isaac, and whistled a little between
his teeth.
Mr. Brumley was suddenly minded to take his visitor to see the view and
the effect of his board upon it. But he spoke merely of the view and
left Sir Isaac to discover the board or not as he thought fit. As they
ascended among the trees, the visitor was manifestly seized by some
strange emotion, his face became very white, he gasped and blew for
breath, he felt for his face with a nervous hand.
"Four thousand," he said suddenly. "An outside price."
"A minimum," said Mr. Brumley, with a slight quickening of the pulse.
"You won't get three eight," gasped Sir Isaac.
"Not a business man, but my agent tells me----" panted Mr. Brumley.
"Three eight," said Sir Isaac.
"We're just coming to the view," said Mr. Brumley. "Just coming to the
view."
"Practically got to rebuild the house," said Sir Isaac.
"There!" said Mr. Brumley, and waved an arm widely.
Sir Isaac regarded the prospect with a dissatisfied face. His pallor had
given place to a shiny, flushed appearance, his nose, his ears, and his
cheeks were pink. He blew his face out, and seemed to be studying the
landscape for defects. "This might be built over at any time," he
complained.
Mr. Brumley was reassuring.
For a brief interval Sir Isaac's eyes explored the countryside vaguely,
then his expression seemed to concentrate and run together to a point.
"H'm," he said.
"That board," he remarked, "quite wrong there."
"_Well!_" said Mr. Brumley, too surprised for coherent speech.
"Quite," said Sir Isaac Harman. "Don't you see what's the matter?"
Mr. Brumley refrained from an eloquent response.
"They ought to be," Sir Isaac went on, "white and a sort of green. Like
the County Council notices on Hampstead Heath. So as to blend.... You
see, an ad. that hits too hard is worse than no ad. at all. It leaves a
dislike.... Advertisements ought to blend. It ought to seem as though
all this view were saying it. Not just that board. Now suppose we had a
shade of very light brown, a kind of light khaki----"
He turned a speculative eye on Mr. Brumley as if he sought for the
effect of this latter suggestion on him.
"If the whole board was invisible----" said Mr. Brumley.
Sir Isaac considered it. "Just the letters showing," he said. "No,--that
would be going too far in the other direction."
He made a faint sucking noise with his lips and teeth as he surveyed the
landscape and weighed this important matter....
"Queer how one gets ideas," he said at last, turning away. "It was my
wife told me about that board."
He stopped to survey the house from the exact point of view his wife had
taken nine days before. "I wouldn't give this place a second thought,"
said Sir Isaac, "if it wasn't for Lady Harman."
He confided. "_She_ wants a week-end cottage. But _I_ don't see why it
_should_ be a week-end cottage. I don't see why it shouldn't be made
into a nice little country house. Compact, of course. By using up that
barn."
He inhaled three bars of a tune. "London," he explained, "doesn't suit
Lady Harman."
"Health?" asked Mr. Brumley, all alert.
"It isn't her health exactly," Sir Isaac dropped out. "You see--she's a
young woman. She gets ideas."
"You know," he continued, "I'd like to have a look at that barn again.
If we develop that--and a sort of corridor across where the shrubs
are--and ran out offices...."
§5
Mr. Brumley's mind was still vigorously struggling with the flaming
implications of Sir Isaac's remark that Lady Harman "got ideas," and Sir
Isaac was gently whistling his way towards an offer of three thousand
nine hundred when they came down out of the pines into the path along
the edge of the herbaceous border. And then Mr. Brumley became aware of
an effect away between the white-stemmed trees towards the house as if
the Cambridge boat-race crew was indulging in a vigorous scrimmage.
Drawing nearer this resolved itself into the fluent contours of Lady
Beach-Mandarin, dressed in sky-blue and with a black summer straw hat
larger than ever and trimmed effusively with marguerites.
"Here," said Sir Isaac, "can't I get off? You've got a friend."
"You must have some tea," said Mr. Brumley, who wanted to suggest that
they should agree to Sir Isaac's figure of three thousand eight hundred,
but not as pounds but guineas. It seemed to him a suggestion that might
prove insidiously attractive. "It's a charming lady, my friend Lady
Beach-Mandarin. She'll be delighted----"
"I don't think I can," said Sir Isaac. "Not in the habit--social
occasions."
His face expressed a panic terror of this gallant full-rigged lady ahead
of them.
"But you see now," said Mr. Brumley, with a detaining grip, "it's
unavoidable."
And the next moment Sir Isaac was mumbling his appreciations of the
introduction.
I must admit that Lady Beach-Mandarin was almost as much to meet as one
can meet in a single human being, a broad abundant billowing personality
with a taste for brims, streamers, pennants, panniers, loose sleeves,
sweeping gestures, top notes and the like that made her altogether less
like a woman than an occasion of public rejoicing. Even her large blue
eyes projected, her chin and brows and nose all seemed racing up to the
front of her as if excited by the clarion notes of her abundant voice,
and the pinkness of her complexion was as exuberant as her manners.
Exuberance--it was her word. She had evidently been a big, bouncing,
bright gaminesque girl at fifteen, and very amusing and very much
admired; she had liked the rôle and she had not so much grown older as
suffered enlargement--a very considerable enlargement.
"Ah!" she cried, "and so I've caught you at home, Mr. Brumley! And, poor
dear, you're at my mercy." And she shook both his hands with both of
hers.
That was before Mr. Brumley introduced Sir Isaac, a thing he did so soon
as he could get one of his hands loose and wave a surviving digit or so
at that gentleman.
"You see, Sir Isaac," she said, taking him in, in the most generous way;
"I and Mr. Brumley are old friends. We knew each other of yore. We have
our jokes."
Sir Isaac seemed to feel the need of speech but got no further than a
useful all-round noise.
"And one of them is that when I want him to do the least little thing
for me he hides away! Always. By a sort of instinct. It's such a Small
thing, Sir Isaac."
Sir Isaac was understood to say vaguely that they always did. But he had
become very indistinct.
"Aren't I always at your service?" protested Mr. Brumley with a
responsive playfulness. "And I don't even know what it is you want."
Lady Beach-Mandarin, addressing herself exclusively to Sir Isaac, began
a tale of a Shakespear Bazaar she was holding in an adjacent village,
and how she knew Mr. Brumley (naughty man) meant to refuse to give her
autographed copies of his littlest book for the Book Stall she was
organizing. Mr. Brumley confuted her gaily and generously. So
discoursing they made their way to the verandah where Lady Harman had so
lately "poured."
Sir Isaac was borne along upon the lady's stream of words in a state of
mulish reluctance, nodding, saying "Of course" and similar phrases, and
wishing he was out of it all with an extreme manifestness. He drank his
tea with unmistakable discomfort, and twice inserted into the
conversation an entirely irrelevant remark that he had to be going. But
Lady Beach-Mandarin had her purposes with him and crushed these
quivering tentatives.
Lady Beach-Mandarin had of course like everybody else at that time her
own independent movement in the great national effort to create an
official British Theatre upon the basis of William Shakespear, and she
saw in the as yet unenlisted resources of Sir Isaac strong possibilities
of reinforcement of her own particular contribution to the great Work.
He was manifestly shy and sulky and disposed to bolt at the earliest
possible moment, and so she set herself now with a swift and
concentrated combination of fascination and urgency to commit him to
participations. She flattered and cajoled and bribed. She was convinced
that even to be called upon by Lady Beach-Mandarin is no light
privilege for these new commercial people, and so she made no secret of
her intention of decorating the hall of his large but undistinguished
house in Putney, with her redeeming pasteboard. She appealed to the
instances of Venice and Florence to show that "such men as you, Sir
Isaac," who control commerce and industry, have always been the
guardians and patrons of art. And who more worthy of patronage than
William Shakespear? Also she said that men of such enormous wealth as
his owed something to their national tradition. "You have to pay your
footing, Sir Isaac," she said with impressive vagueness.
"Putting it in round figures," said Sir Isaac, suddenly and with a white
gleam of animosity in his face, the animosity of a trapped animal at the
sight of its captors, "what does coming on your Committee mean, Lady
Beach-Mandarin?"
"It's your name we want," said the lady, "but I'm sure you'd not be
ungenerous. The tribute success owes the arts."
"A hundred?" he threw out,--his ears red.
"Guineas," breathed Lady Beach-Mandarin with a lofty sweetness of
consent.
He stood up hastily as if to escape further exaction, and the lady rose
too.
"And you'll let me call on Lady Harman," she said, honestly doing her
part in the bargain.
"Can't keep the car waiting," was what Brumley could distinguish in his
reply.
"I expect you have a perfectly splendid car, Sir Isaac," said Lady
Beach-Mandarin, drawing him out. "Quite the modernest thing."
Sir Isaac replied with the reluctance of an Income Tax Return that it
was a forty-five Rolls Royce, good of course but nothing amazing.
"We must see it," she said, and turned his retreat into a procession.
She admired the car, she admired the colour of the car, she admired the
lamps of the car and the door of the car and the little fittings of the
car. She admired the horn. She admired the twist of the horn. She
admired Clarence and the uniform of Clarence and she admired and coveted
the great fur coat that he held ready for his employer. (But if she had
it, she said, she would wear the splendid fur outside to show every
little bit of it.) And when the car at last moved forward and
tooted--she admired the note--and vanished softly and swiftly through
the gates, she was left in the porch with Mr. Brumley still by sheer
inertia admiring and envying. She admired Sir Isaac's car number Z 900.
(Such an easy one to remember!) Then she stopped abruptly, as one might
discover that the water in the bathroom was running to waste and turn it
off.
She had a cynicism as exuberant as the rest of her.
"Well," she said, with a contented sigh and an entire flattening of her
tone, "I laid it on pretty thick that time.... I wonder if he'll send me
that hundred guineas or whether I shall have to remind him of it...."
Her manner changed again to that of a gigantic gamin. "I mean to have
that money," she said with bright determination and round eyes....
She reflected and other thoughts came to her. "Plutocracy," she said,
"_is_ perfectly detestable, don't you think so, Mr. Brumley?" ... And
then, "I can't _imagine_ how a man who deals in bread and confectionery
can manage to go about so completely half-baked."
"He's a very remarkable type," said Mr. Brumley.
He became urgent: "I do hope, dear Lady Beach-Mandarin, you will
contrive to call on Lady Harman. She is--in relation to _that_--quite
the most interesting woman I have seen."
§6
Presently as they paced the croquet lawn together, the preoccupation of
Mr. Brumley's mind drew their conversation back to Lady Harman.
"I wish," he repeated, "you would go and see these people. She's not at
all what you might infer from him."
"What could one infer about a wife from a man like that? Except that
she'd have a lot to put up with."
"You know,--she's a beautiful person, tall, slender, dark...."
Lady Beach-Mandarin turned her full blue eye upon him.
"_Now!_" she said archly.
"I'm interested in the incongruity."
Lady Beach-Mandarin's reply was silent and singular. She compressed her
lips very tightly, fixed her eye firmly on Mr. Brumley's, lifted her
finger to the level of her left eyelash, and then shook it at him very
deliberately five times. Then with a little sigh and a sudden and
complete restoration of manner she remarked that never in any year
before had she seen peonies quite so splendid. "I've a peculiar sympathy
with peonies," she said. "They're so exactly my style."
CHAPTER THE THIRD
LADY HARMAN AT HOME
§1
Exactly three weeks after that first encounter between Lady
Beach-Mandarin and Sir Isaac Harman, Mr. Brumley found himself one of a
luncheon party at that lady's house in Temperley Square and talking very
freely and indiscreetly about the Harmans.
Lady Beach-Mandarin always had her luncheons in a family way at a large
round table so that nobody could get out of her range, and she insisted
upon conversation being general, except for her mother who was
impenetrably deaf and the Swiss governess of her only daughter Phyllis
who was incomprehensible in any European tongue. The mother was
incalculably old and had been a friend of Victor Hugo and Alfred de
Musset; she maintained an intermittent monologue about the private lives
of those great figures; nobody paid the slightest attention to her but
one felt she enriched the table with an undertow of literary
associations. A small dark stealthy butler and a convulsive boy with
hair (apparently) taking the place of eyes waited. On this occasion Lady
Beach-Mandarin had gathered together two cousins, maiden ladies from
Perth, wearing valiant hats, Toomer the wit and censor, and Miss
Sharsper the novelist (whom Toomer detested), a gentleman named Roper
whom she had invited under a misapprehension that he was the Arctic
Roper, and Mr. Brumley. She had tried Mr. Roper with questions about
penguins, seals, cold and darkness, icebergs and glaciers, Captain
Scott, Doctor Cook and the shape of the earth, and all in vain, and
feeling at last that something was wrong, she demanded abruptly whether
Mr. Brumley had sold his house.
"I'm selling it," said Mr. Brumley, "by almost imperceptible degrees."
"He haggles?"
"Haggles and higgles. He higgles passionately. He goes white and breaks
into a cold perspiration. He wants me now to include the gardener's
tools--in whatever price we agree upon."
"A rich man like that ought to be easy and generous," said Lady
Beach-Mandarin.
"Then he wouldn't be a rich man like that," said Mr. Toomer.
"But doesn't it distress you highly, Mr. Brumley," one of the Perth
ladies asked, "to be leaving Euphemia's Home to strangers? The man may
go altering it."
"That--that weighs with me very much," said Mr. Brumley, recalled to his
professions. "There--I put my trust in Lady Harman."
"You've seen her again?" asked Lady Beach-Mandarin.
"Yes. She came with him--a few days ago. That couple interests me more
and more. So little akin."
"There's eighteen years between them," said Toomer.
"It's one of those cases," began Mr. Brumley with a note of scientific
detachment, "where one is really tempted to be ultra-feminist. It's
clear, he uses every advantage. He's her owner, her keeper, her
obstinate insensitive little tyrant.... And yet there's a sort of
effect, as though nothing was decided.... As if she was only just
growing up."
"They've been married six or seven years," said Toomer. "She was just
eighteen."
"They went over the house together and whenever she spoke he
contradicted her with a sort of vicious playfulness. Tried to poke
clumsy fun at her. Called her 'Lady Harman.' Only it was quite evident
that what she said stuck in his mind.... Very queer--interesting
people."
"I wouldn't have anyone allowed to marry until they were
five-and-twenty," said Lady Beach-Mandarin.
"Sweet seventeen sometimes contrives to be very marriageable," said the
gentleman named Roper.
"Sweet seventeen must contrive to wait," said Lady Beach-Mandarin.
"Sweet fourteen has to--and when I was fourteen--I was Ardent! There's
no earthly objection to a little harmless flirtation of course. It's the
marrying."
"You'd conduce to romance," said Miss Sharsper, "anyhow. Eighteen won't
bear restriction and everyone would begin by eloping--illegally."
"I'd put them back," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Oh! remorselessly."
Mr. Roper, who was more and more manifestly not the Arctic one, remarked
that she would "give the girls no end of an adolescence...."
Mr. Brumley did not attend very closely to the subsequent conversation.
His mind had gone back to Black Strand and the second visit that Lady
Harman, this time under her natural and proper protection, had paid him.
A little thread from the old lady's discourse drifted by him. She had
scented marriage in the air and she was saying, "of course they ought to
have let Victor Hugo marry over and over again. He would have made it
all so beautiful. He could throw a Splendour over--over almost
anything." Mr. Brumley sank out of attention altogether. It was so
difficult to express his sense of Lady Harman as a captive, enclosed but
unsubdued. She had been as open and shining as a celandine flower in the
sunshine on that first invasion, but on the second it had been like
overcast weather and her starry petals had been shut and still. She
hadn't been in the least subdued or effaced, but closed, inaccessible to
conversational bees, that astonishing honey of trust and easy friendship
had been hidden in a dignified impenetrable reserve. She had had the
effect of being not so much specially shut against Mr. Brumley as
habitually shut against her husband, as a protection against his
continual clumsy mental interferences. And once when Sir Isaac had made
a sudden allusion to price Mr. Brumley had glanced at her and met her
eyes....
"Of course," he said, coming up to the conversational surface again, "a
woman like that is bound to fight her way out."
"Queen Mary!" cried Miss Sharsper. "Fight her way out!"
"Queen Mary!" said Mr. Brumley, "No!--Lady Harman."
"_I_ was talking of Queen Mary," said Miss Sharsper.
"And Mr. Brumley was thinking of Lady Harman!" cried Lady
Beach-Mandarin.
"Well," said Mr. Brumley, "I confess I do think about her. She seems to
me to be so typical in many ways of--of everything that is weak in the
feminine position. As a type--yes, she's perfect."
"I've never seen this lady," said Miss Sharsper. "Is she beautiful?"
"I've not seen her myself yet," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "She's Mr.
Brumley's particular discovery."
"You haven't called?" he asked with a faint reproach.
"But I've been going to--oh! tremendously. And you revive all my
curiosity. Why shouldn't some of us this very afternoon----?"
She caught at her own passing idea and held it. "Let's Go," she cried.
"Let's visit the wife of this Ogre, the last of the women in captivity.
We'll take the big car and make a party and call _en masse_."
Mr. Toomer protested he had no morbid curiosities.
"But you, Susan?"
Miss Sharsper declared she would _love_ to come. Wasn't it her business
to study out-of-the-way types? Mr. Roper produced a knowing sort of
engagement--"I'm provided for already, Lady Beach-Mandarin," he said,
and the cousins from Perth had to do some shopping.
"Then we three will be the expedition," said the hostess. "And
afterwards if we survive we'll tell you our adventures. It's a house on
Putney Hill, isn't it, where this Christian maiden, so to speak, is held
captive? I've had her in my mind, but I've always intended to call with
Agatha Alimony; she's so inspiring to down-trodden women."
"Not exactly down-trodden," said Mr. Brumley, "not down-trodden. That's
what's so curious about it."
"And what shall we do when we get there?" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin. "I
feel we ought to do something more than call. Can't we carry her off
right away, Mr. Brumley? I want to go right in to her and say 'Look
here! I'm on your side. Your husband's a tyrant. I'm help and rescue.
I'm all that a woman ought to be--fine and large. Come out from under
that unworthy man's heel!'"
"Suppose she isn't at all the sort of person you seem to think she is,"
said Miss Sharsper. "And suppose she came!"
"Suppose she didn't," reflected Mr. Roper.
"I seem to see your flight," said Mr. Toomer. "And the newspaper
placards and head-lines. 'Lady Beach-Mandarin elopes with the wife of an
eminent confectioner. She is stopped at the landing stage by the staff
of the Dover Branch establishment. Recapture of the fugitive after a hot
struggle. Brumley, the eminent _littérateur_, stunned by a spent
bun....'"
"We're all talking great nonsense," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "But
anyhow we'll make our call. And _I_ know!--I'll make her accept an
invitation to lunch without him."
"If she won't?" threw out Mr. Roper.
"I _will_," said Lady Beach-Mandarin with roguish determination. "And if
I can't----"
"Not ask him too!" protested Mr. Brumley.
"Why not get her to come to your Social Friends meeting," said Miss
Sharsper.
§2
When Mr. Brumley found himself fairly launched upon this expedition he
had the grace to feel compunction. The Harmans, he perceived, had
inadvertently made him the confidant of their domestic discords and to
betray them to these others savoured after all of treachery. And besides
much as he had craved to see Lady Harman again, he now realized he
didn't in the least want to see her in association with the exuberant
volubility of Lady Beach-Mandarin and the hard professional
observation, so remarkably like the ferrule of an umbrella being poked
with a noiseless persistence into one's eye, of Miss Sharsper. And as he
thought these afterthoughts Lady Beach-Mandarin's chauffeur darted and
dodged and threaded his way with an alacrity that was almost distressing
to Putney.
They ran over the ghost of Swinburne, at the foot of Putney Hill,--or
perhaps it was only the rhythm of the engine changed for a moment, and
in a couple of minutes more they were outside the Harman residence.
"Here we are!" said Lady Beach-Mandarin, more capaciously gaminesque
than ever. "We've done it now."
Mr. Brumley had an impression of a big house in the distended
stately-homes-of-England style and very necessarily and abundantly
covered by creepers and then he was assisting the ladies to descend and
the three of them were waiting clustered in the ample Victorian doorway.
For some little interval there came no answer to the bell Mr. Brumley
had rung, but all three of them had a sense of hurried, furtive and
noiseless readjustments in progress behind the big and bossy oak door.
Then it opened and a very large egg-shaped butler with sandy whiskers
appeared and looked down himself at them. There was something paternal
about this man, his professional deference was touched by the sense of
ultimate responsibility. He seemed to consider for a moment whether he
should permit Lady Harman to be in, before he conceded that she was.
They were ushered through a hall that resembled most of the halls in the
world, it was dominated by a handsome oak staircase and scarcely gave
Miss Sharsper a point, and then across a creation of the Victorian
architect, a massive kind of conservatory with classical touches--there
was an impluvium in the centre and there were arches hung with
manifestly costly Syrian rugs, into a large apartment looking through
four French windows upon a verandah and a large floriferous garden. At a
sideways glance it seemed a very pleasant garden indeed. The room itself
was like the rooms of so many prosperous people nowadays; it had an
effect of being sedulously and yet irrelevantly over-furnished. It had
none of the large vulgarity that Mr. Brumley would have considered
proper to a wealthy caterer, but it confessed a compilation of "pieces"
very carefully authenticated. Some of them were rather splendid
"pieces"; three big bureaus burly and brassy dominated it; there was a
Queen Anne cabinet, some exquisite coloured engravings, an ormolu mirror
and a couple of large French vases that set Miss Sharsper, who had a
keen eye for this traffic, confusedly cataloguing. And a little
incongruously in the midst of this exhibit, stood Lady Harman, as if she
was trying to conceal the fact that she too was a visitor, in a creamy
white dress and dark and defensive and yet entirely unabashed.
The great butler gave his large vague impression of Lady
Beach-Mandarin's name, and stood aside and withdrew.
"I've heard so much of you," said Lady Beach-Mandarin advancing with
hand upraised. "I had to call. Mr. Brumley----"
"Lady Beach-Mandarin met Sir Isaac at Black Strand," Mr. Brumley
intervened to explain.
Miss Sharsper was as it were introduced by default.
"My vividest anticipations outdone," said Lady Beach-Mandarin, squeezing
Lady Harman's fingers with enthusiasm. "And what a charming garden you
have, and what a delightful situation! Such air! And on the very verge
of London, high, on this delightful _literary_ hill, and ready at any
moment to swoop in that enviable great car of yours. I suppose you come
a great deal into London, Lady Harman?"
"No," reflected Lady Harman, "not very much." She seemed to weigh the
accuracy of this very carefully. "No," she added in confirmation.
"But you should, you ought to; it's your duty. You've no right to hide
away from us. I was telling Sir Isaac. We look to him, we look to you.
You've no right to bury your talents away from us; you who are rich and
young and brilliant and beautiful----"
"But if I go on I shall begin to flatter you," said Lady Beach-Mandarin
with a delicious smile. "I've begun upon Sir Isaac already. I've made
him promise a hundred guineas and his name to the Shakespear Dinners
Society,--nothing he didn't mention eaten (_you_ know) and all the
profits to the National movement--and I want your name too. I know
you'll let us have your name too. Grant me that, and I'll subside into
the ordinariest of callers."
"But surely; isn't his name enough?" asked Lady Harman.
"Without yours, it's only half a name!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin. "If
it were a _business_ thing----! Different of course. But on my list, I'm
like dear old Queen Victoria you know, the wives must come too."
"In that case," hesitated Lady Harman.... "But really I think Sir
Isaac----"
She stopped. And then Mr. Brumley had a psychic experience. It seemed to
him as he stood observing Lady Harman with an entirely unnecessary and
unpremeditated intentness, that for the briefest interval her attention
flashed over Lady Beach-Mandarin's shoulder to the end verandah window;
and following her glance, he saw--and then he did not see--the arrested
figure, the white face of Sir Isaac, bearing an expression in which
anger and horror were extraordinarily intermingled. If it was Sir Isaac
he dodged back with amazing dexterity; if it was a phantom of the living
it vanished with an air of doing that. Without came the sound of a
flower-pot upset and a faint expletive. Mr. Brumley looked very quickly
at Lady Beach-Mandarin, who was entirely unconscious of anything but her
own uncoiling and enveloping eloquence, and as quickly at Miss Sharsper.
But Miss Sharsper was examining a blackish bureau through her glasses as
though she were looking for birthmarks and meant if she could find one
to claim the piece as her own long-lost connection. With a mild but
gratifying sense of exclusive complicity Mr. Brumley reverted to Lady
Harman's entire self-possession.
"But, dear Lady Harman, it's entirely unnecessary you should consult
him,--entirely," Lady Beach-Mandarin was saying.
"I'm sure," said Mr. Brumley with a sense that somehow he had to
intervene, "that Sir Isaac would not possibly object. I'm sure that if
Lady Harman consults him----"
The sandy-whiskered butler appeared hovering.
"Shall I place the tea-things in the garden, me lady?" he asked, in the
tone of one who knows the answer.
"Oh _please_ in the garden!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Please! And how
delightful to _have_ a garden, a London garden, in which one _can_ have
tea. Without being smothered in blacks. The south-west wind. The dear
_English_ wind. All your blacks come to _us_, you know."
She led the way upon the verandah. "Such a wonderful garden! The space,
the breadth! Why! you must have Acres!"
She surveyed the garden--comprehensively; her eye rested for a moment on
a distant patch of black that ducked suddenly into a group of lilacs.
"Is dear Sir Isaac at home?" she asked.
"He's very uncertain," said Lady Harman, with a quiet readiness that
pleased Mr. Brumley. "Yes, Snagsby, please, under the big cypress. And
tell my mother and sister."
Lady Beach-Mandarin having paused a moment or so upon the verandah
admiring the garden as a whole, now prepared to go into details. She
gathered her ample skirts together and advanced into the midst of the
large lawn, with very much of the effect of a fleet of captive balloons
dragging their anchors. Mr. Brumley followed, as it were in attendance
upon her and Lady Harman. Miss Sharsper, after one last hasty glance at
the room, rather like the last hasty glance of a still unprepared
schoolboy at his book, came behind with her powers of observation
strainingly alert.
Mr. Brumley was aware of a brief mute struggle between the two ladies of
title. It was clear that Lady Harman would have had them go to the left,
to where down a vista of pillar roses a single large specimen cypress
sounded a faint but recognizable Italian note, and he did his loyal best
to support her, but Lady Beach-Mandarin's attraction to that distant
clump of lilac on the right was equally great and much more powerful.
She flowed, a great and audible tide of socially influential womanhood,
across the green spaces of the garden, and drew the others with her. And
it seemed to Mr. Brumley--not that he believed his eyes--that beyond
those lilacs something ran out, something black that crouched close to
the ground and went very swiftly. It flashed like an arrow across a
further space of flower-bed, dropped to the ground, became two
agitatedly receding boot soles and was gone. Had it ever been? He
glanced at Lady Harman, but she was looking back with the naïve anxiety
of a hostess to her cypress,--at Lady Beach-Mandarin, but she was
proliferating compliments and decorative scrolls and flourishes like the
engraved frontispiece to a seventeenth-century book.
"I know I'm inordinately curious," said Lady Beach-Mandarin, "but
gardens are my Joy. I want to go into every corner of this. Peep into
everything. And I feel somehow"--and here she urged a smile on Lady
Harman's attention--"that I shan't begin to know _you_, until I know all
your environment."
She turned the flank of the lilacs as she said these words and advanced
in echelon with a stately swiftness upon the laurels beyond.
Lady Harman said there was nothing beyond but sycamores and the fence,
but Lady Beach-Mandarin would press on through a narrow path that
pierced the laurel hedge, in order, she said, that she might turn back
and get the whole effect of the grounds.
And so it was they discovered the mushroom shed.
"A mushroom shed!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin. "And if we look in--shall
we see hosts and regiments of mushrooms? I must--I must."
"I _think_ it is locked," said Lady Harman.
Mr. Brumley darted forward; tried the door and turned quickly. "It's
locked," he said and barred Lady Beach-Mandarin's advance.
"And besides," said Lady Harman, "there's no mushrooms there. They won't
come up. It's one of my husband's--annoyances."
Lady Beach-Mandarin had turned round and now surveyed the house. "What a
splendid idea," she cried, "that wistaria! All mixed with the laburnum.
I don't think I have ever seen such a charming combination of blossoms!"
The whole movement of the party swept about and faced cypress-ward. Away
there the sandy-whiskered butler and a footman and basket chairs and a
tea-table, with a shining white cloth, and two ladies were now grouping
themselves....
But the mind of Mr. Brumley gave little heed to these things. His mind
was full of a wonder, and the wonder was this, that the mushroom shed
had behaved like a living thing. The door of the mushroom shed was not
locked and in that matter he had told a lie. The door of the mushroom
shed had been unlocked quite recently and the key and padlock had been
dropped upon the ground. And when he had tried to open the mushroom shed
it had first of all yielded to his hand and then it had closed again
with great strength--exactly as a living mussel will behave if one takes
it unawares. But in addition to this passionate contraction the mushroom
shed had sworn in a hoarse whisper and breathed hard, which is more than
your mussel can do....
§3
Mr. Brumley's interest in Lady Harman was to be almost too crowded by
detail before that impulsive call was over. Superposed upon the mystery
of the mushroom shed was the vivid illumination of Lady Harman by her
mother and sister. They had an effect of having reluctantly become her
social inferiors for her own good; the mother--her name he learnt was
Mrs. Sawbridge--had all Lady Harman's tall slenderness, but otherwise
resembled her only in the poise of her neck and an occasional gesture;
she was fair and with a kind of ignoble and premeditated refinement in
her speech and manner. She was dressed with the restraint of a prolonged
and attenuated widowhood, in a rich and complicatedly quiet dress of
mauve and grey. She was obviously a transitory visitor and not so much
taking the opulence about her and particularly the great butler for
granted as pointedly and persistently ignoring it in an effort to seem
to take it for granted. The sister, on the other hand, had Lady Harman's
pale darkness but none of her fineness of line. She missed altogether
that quality of fineness. Her darkness was done with a quite perceptible
heaviness, her dignity passed into solidity and her profile was, with an
entire want of hesitation, handsome. She was evidently the elder by a
space of some years and she was dressed with severity in grey.
These two ladies seemed to Mr. Brumley to offer a certain resistance of
spirit to the effusion of Lady Beach-Mandarin, rather as two small
anchored vessels might resist the onset of a great and foaming tide, but
after a time it was clear they admired her greatly. His attention was,
however, a little distracted from them by the fact that he was the sole
representative of the more serviceable sex among five women and so in
duty bound to stand by Lady Harman and assist with various handings and
offerings. The tea equipage was silver and not only magnificent but, as
certain quick movements of Miss Sharsper's eyes and nose at its
appearance betrayed, very genuine and old.
Lady Beach-Mandarin having praised the house and garden all over again
to Mrs. Sawbridge, and having praised the cypress and envied the tea
things, resumed her efforts to secure the immediate establishment of
permanent social relations with Lady Harman. She reverted to the
question of the Shakespear Dinners Society and now with a kind of large
skilfulness involved Mrs. Sawbridge in her appeal. "Won't _you_ come on
our Committee?" said Lady Beach-Mandarin.
Mrs. Sawbridge gave a pinched smile and said she was only staying in
London for quite a little time, and when pressed admitted that there
seemed no need whatever for consulting Sir Isaac upon so obviously
foregone a conclusion as Lady Harman's public adhesion to the great
movement.
"I shall put his hundred guineas down to Sir Isaac and Lady Harman,"
said Lady Beach-Mandarin with an air of conclusion, "and now I want to
know, dear Lady Harman, whether we can't have _you_ on our Committee of
administration. We want--just one other woman to complete us."
Lady Harman could only parry with doubts of her ability.
"You ought to go on, Ella," said Miss Sawbridge suddenly, speaking for
the first time and in a manner richly suggestive of great principles at
stake.
"Ella," thought the curious mind of Mr. Brumley. "And is that Eleanor
now or Ellen or--is there any other name that gives one Ella? Simply
Ella?"
"But what should I have to do?" fenced Lady Harman, resisting but
obviously attracted.
Lady Beach-Mandarin invented a lengthy paraphrase for prompt
acquiescences.
"I shall be chairwoman," she crowned it with. "I can so easily _see you
through_ as they say."
"Ella doesn't go out half enough," said Miss Sawbridge suddenly to Miss
Sharsper, who was regarding her with furtive intensity--as if she was
surreptitiously counting her features.
Miss Sharsper caught in mid observation started and collected her mind.
"One ought to go out," she said. "Certainly."
"And independently," said Miss Sawbridge, with meaning.
"Oh independently!" assented Miss Sharsper. It was evident she would now
have to watch her chance and begin counting all over again from the
beginning.
Mr. Brumley had an impression that Mrs. Sawbridge had said something
quite confidential in his ear. He turned perplexed.
"Such charming weather," the lady repeated in the tone of one who
doesn't wish so pleasant a little secret to be too generally discussed.
"Never known a better summer," agreed Mr. Brumley.
And then all these minor eddies were submerged in Lady Beach-Mandarin's
advance towards her next step, an invitation to lunch. "There," said
she, "I'm not Victorian. I always separate husbands and wives--by at
least a week. You must come alone."
It was clear to Mr. Brumley that Lady Harman wanted to come alone--and
was going to accept, and equally clear that she and her mother and
sister regarded this as a very daring thing to do. And when that was
settled Lady Beach-Mandarin went on to the altogether easier topic of
her Social Friends, a society of smart and influential women; who
devoted a certain fragment of time every week to befriending respectable
girls employed in London, in a briskly amiable manner, having them to
special teas, having them to special evenings with special light
refreshments, knowing their names as far as possible and asking about
their relations, and generally making them feel that Society was being
very frank and amiable to them and had an eye on them and meant them
well, and was better for them than socialism and radicalism and
revolutionary ideas. To this also Lady Harman it seemed was to come. It
had an effect to Mr. Brumley's imagination as if the painted scene of
that lady's life was suddenly bursting out into open doors--everywhere.
"Many of them are _quite_ lady-like," echoed Mrs. Sawbridge suddenly,
picking up the whole thing instantly and speaking over her tea cup in
that quasi-confidential tone of hers to Mr. Brumley.
"Of course they are mostly quite dreadfully Sweated," said Lady
Beach-Mandarin. "Especially in the confectionery----" She thought of her
position in time. "In the inferior class of confectioners'
establishments," she said and then hurried on to: "Of course when you
come to lunch,--Agatha Alimony. I'm most anxious for you and her to
meet."
"Is that _the_ Agatha Alimony?" asked Miss Sawbridge abruptly.
"The one and only," said Lady Beach-Mandarin, flashing a smile at her.
"And what a marvel she is! I do so want you to know her, Lady Harman.
She'd be a Revelation to you...."
Everything had gone wonderfully so far. "And now," said Lady
Beach-Mandarin, thrusting forward a face of almost exaggerated
motherliness and with an unwonted tenderness suffusing her voice, "show
me the Chicks."
There was a brief interrogative pause.
"Your Chicks," expanded Lady Beach-Mandarin, on the verge of crooning.
"Your _little_ Chicks."
"_Oh!_" cried Lady Harman understanding. "The children."
"Lucky woman!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Yes."
"One hasn't begun to be friends," she added, "until one has
seen--them...."
"So _true_," Mrs. Sawbridge confided to Mr. Brumley with a look that
almost languished....
"Certainly," said Mr. Brumley, "rather."
He was a little distraught because he had just seen Sir Isaac step
forward in a crouching attitude from beyond the edge of the lilacs, peer
at the tea-table with a serpent-like intentness and then dart back
convulsively into cover....
If Lady Beach-Mandarin saw him Mr. Brumley felt that anything might
happen.
§4
Lady Beach-Mandarin always let herself go about children.
It would be unjust to the general richness of Lady Beach-Mandarin to say
that she excelled herself on this occasion. On all occasions Lady
Beach-Mandarin excelled herself. But never had Mr. Brumley noted quite
so vividly Lady Beach-Mandarin's habitual self-surpassingness. She
helped him, he felt, to understand better those stories of great waves
that sweep in from the ocean and swamp islands and devastate whole
littorals. She poured into the Harman nursery and filled every corner of
it. She rose to unprecedented heights therein. It seemed to him at
moments that they ought to make marks on the walls, like the marks one
sees on the houses in the lower valley of the Main to record the more
memorable floods. "The dears!" she cried: "the _little_ things!" before
the nursery door was fairly opened.
(There should have been a line for that at once on the jamb just below
the lintel.)
The nursery revealed itself as a large airy white and green apartment
entirely free from old furniture and done rather in the style of an
æsthetically designed hospital, with a tremendously humorous decorative
frieze of cocks and puppies and very bright-coloured prints on the
walls. The dwarfish furniture was specially designed in green-stained
wood and the floor was of cork carpet diversified by white furry rugs.
The hospital quality was enhanced by the uniformed and disciplined
appearance of the middle-aged and reliable head nurse and her subdued
but intelligent subordinate.
Three sturdy little girls, with a year step between each of them, stood
up to receive Lady Beach-Mandarin's invasion; an indeterminate baby
sprawled regardless of its dignity on a rug. "Aah!" cried Lady
Beach-Mandarin, advancing in open order. "Come and be hugged, you dears!
Come and be hugged!" Before she knelt down and enveloped their shrinking
little persons Mr. Brumley was able to observe that they were pretty
little things, but not the beautiful children he could have imagined
from Lady Harman. Peeping through their infantile delicacy, hints all
too manifest of Sir Isaac's characteristically pointed nose gave Mr.
Brumley a peculiar--a eugenic, qualm.
He glanced at Lady Harman and she was standing over the ecstasies of her
tremendous visitor, polite, attentive--with an entirely unemotional
speculation in her eyes. Miss Sawbridge, stirred by the great waves of
violent philoprogenitive enthusiasm that circled out from Lady
Beach-Mandarin, had caught up the baby and was hugging it and addressing
it in terms of humorous rapture, and the nurse and her assistant were
keeping respectful but wary eyes upon the handling of their four
charges. Miss Sharsper was taking in the children's characteristics with
a quick expertness. Mrs. Sawbridge stood a little in the background and
caught Mr. Brumley's eye and proffered a smile of sympathetic tolerance.
Mr. Brumley was moved by a ridiculous impulse, which he just succeeded
in suppressing, to say to Mrs. Sawbridge, "Yes, I admit it looks very
well. But the essential point, you know, is that it isn't so...."
That it wasn't so, indeed, entirely dominated his impression of that
nursery. There was Lady Beach-Mandarin winning Lady Harman's heart by
every rule of the game, rejoicing effusively in those crowning triumphs
of a woman's being, there was Miss Sawbridge vociferous in support and
Mrs. Sawbridge almost offering to join hands in rapturous benediction,
and there was Lady Harman wearing her laurels, not indeed with
indifference but with a curious detachment. One might imagine her
genuinely anxious to understand why Lady Beach-Mandarin was in such a
stupendous ebullition. One might have supposed her a mere cold-hearted
intellectual if it wasn't that something in her warm beauty absolutely
forbade any such interpretation. There came to Mr. Brumley again a
thought that had occurred to him first when Sir Isaac and Lady Harman
had come together to Black Strand, which was that life had happened to
this woman before she was ready for it, that her mind some years after
her body was now coming to womanhood, was teeming with curiosity about
all she had hitherto accepted, about Sir Isaac, about her children and
all her circumstances....
There was a recapitulation of the invitations, a renewed offering of
outlooks and vistas and Agatha Alimony. "You'll not forget," insisted
Lady Beach-Mandarin. "You'll not afterwards throw us over."
"No," said Lady Harman, with that soft determination of hers. "I'll
certainly come."
"I'm so sorry, so very sorry, not to have seen Sir Isaac," Lady
Beach-Mandarin insisted.
The raid had accomplished its every object and was drifting doorward.
For a moment Lady Beach-Mandarin desisted from Lady Harman and threw her
whole being into an eddying effort to submerge the already subjugated
Mrs. Sawbridge. Miss Sawbridge was behind up the oak staircase
explaining Sir Isaac's interest in furniture-buying to Miss Sharsper.
Mr. Brumley had his one moment with Lady Harman.
"I gather," he said, and abandoned that sentence.
"I hope," he said, "that you will have my little house down there. I
like to think of _you_--walking in my garden."
"I shall love that garden," she said. "But I shall feel unworthy."
"There are a hundred little things I want to tell you--about it."
Then all the others seemed to come into focus again, and with a quick
mutual understanding--Mr. Brumley was certain of its mutuality--they
said no more to one another. He was entirely satisfied he had said
enough. He had conveyed just everything that was needed to excuse and
explain and justify his presence in that company.... Upon a big table in
the hall he noticed that a silk hat and an umbrella had appeared since
their arrival. He glanced at Miss Sharsper but she was keenly occupied
with the table legs. He began to breathe freely again when the partings
were over and he could get back into the automobile. "Toot," said the
horn and he made a last grave salutation to the slender white figure on
the steps. The great butler stood at the side of the entrance and a step
or so below her, with the air of a man who has completed a difficult
task. A small attentive valet hovered out of the shadows behind.
§5
(A fragment of the conversation in Lady Beach-Mandarin's returning
automobile may be recorded in a parenthesis here.
"But did you see Sir Isaac?" she cried, abruptly.
"Sir Isaac?" defended the startled Mr. Brumley. "Where?"
"He was dodging about in the garden all the time."
"Dodging about the garden!... I saw a sort of gardener----"
"I'm sure I saw Him," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Positive. He hid away
in the mushroom shed. The one you found locked."
"But my _dear_ Lady Beach-Mandarin!" protested Mr. Brumley with the air
of one who listens to preposterous suggestions. "What can make you
think----?"
"Oh I _know_ I saw him," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "I know. He seemed
all over the place. Like a Boy Scout. Didn't you see him too, Susan?"
Miss Sharsper was roused from deep preoccupation. "What, dear?" she
asked.
"See Sir Isaac?"
"Sir Isaac?"
"Dodging about the garden when we went through it."
The novelist reflected. "I didn't notice," she said. "I was busy
observing things.")
§6
Lady Beach-Mandarin's car passed through the open gates and was
swallowed up in the dusty stream of traffic down Putney Hill; the great
butler withdrew, the little manservant vanished, Mrs. Sawbridge and her
elder daughter had hovered and now receded from the back of the hall;
Lady Harman remained standing thoughtfully in the large
Bulwer-Lyttonesque doorway of her house. Her face expressed a vague
expectation. She waited to be addressed from behind.
Then she became aware of the figure of her husband standing before her.
He had come out of the laurels in front. His pale face was livid with
anger, his hair dishevelled, there was garden mould and greenness upon
his knees and upon his extended hands.
She was startled out of her quiet defensiveness. "Why, Isaac!" she
cried. "Where have you been?"
It enraged him further to be asked so obviously unnecessary a question.
He forgot his knightly chivalry.
"What the Devil do you mean," he cried, "by chasing me all round the
garden?"
"Chasing you? All round the garden?"
"You heard me breaking my shins on that infernal flower-pot you put for
me, and out you shot with all your pack of old women and chased me round
the garden. What do you mean by it?"
"I didn't think you were in the garden."
"Any Fool could have told I was in the garden. Any Fool might have known
I was in the garden. If I wasn't in the garden, then where the Devil was
I? Eh? Where else could I be? Of course I was in the garden, and what
you wanted was to hunt me down and make a fool of me. And look at me!
Look, I say! Look at my hands!"
Lady Harman regarded the lord of her being and hesitated before she
answered. She knew what she had to say would enrage him, but she had
come to a point in their relationship when a husband's good temper is no
longer a supreme consideration. "You've had plenty of time to wash
them," she said.
"Yes," he shouted. "And instead I kept 'em to show you. I stayed out
here to see the last of that crew for fear I might run against 'em in
the house. Of all the infernal old women----"
His lips were providentially deprived of speech. He conveyed his
inability to express his estimate of Lady Beach-Mandarin by a gesture of
despair.
"If--if anyone calls and I am at home I have to receive them," said Lady
Harman, after a moment's deliberation.
"Receiving them's one thing. Making a Fool of yourself----"
His voice was rising.
"Isaac," said Lady Harman, leaning forward and then in a low penetrating
whisper, "_Snagsby!_"
(It was the name of the great butler.)
"_Damn_ Snagsby!" hissed Sir Isaac, but dropping his voice and drawing
near to her. What his voice lost in height it gained in intensity. "What
I say is this, Ella, you oughtn't to have brought that old woman out
into the garden at all----"
"She insisted on coming."
"You ought to have snubbed her. You ought to have done--anything. How
the Devil was I to get away, once she was through the verandah? There I
was! _Bagged!_"
"You could have come forward."
"What! And meet _her_!"
"_I_ had to meet her."
Sir Isaac felt that his rage was being frittered away upon details. "If
you hadn't gone fooling about looking at houses," he said, and now he
stood very close to her and spoke with a confidential intensity, "you
wouldn't have got that Holy Terror on our track, see? And now--here we
are!"
He walked past her into the hall, and the little manservant suddenly
materialised in the middle of the space and came forward to brush him
obsequiously. Lady Harman regarded that proceeding for some moments in a
preoccupied manner and then passed slowly into the classical
conservatory. She felt that in view of her engagements the discussion of
Lady Beach-Mandarin was only just beginning.
§7
She reopened it herself in the long drawing-room into which they both
drifted after Sir Isaac had washed the mould from his hands. She went to
a French window, gathered courage, it seemed, by a brief contemplation
of the garden, and turned with a little effort.
"I don't agree," she said, "with you about Lady Beach-Mandarin."
Sir Isaac appeared surprised. He had assumed the incident was closed.
"_How?_" he asked compactly.
"I don't agree," said Lady Harman. "She seems friendly and jolly."
"She's a Holy Terror," said Sir Isaac. "I've seen her twice, Lady
Harman."
"A call of that kind," his wife went on, "--when there are cards left
and so on--has to be returned."
"You won't," said Sir Isaac.
Lady Harman took a blind-tassel in her hand,--she felt she had to hold
on to something. "In any case," she said, "I should have to do that."
"In any case?"
She nodded. "It would be ridiculous not to. We----It is why we know so
few people--because we don't return calls...."
Sir Isaac paused before answering. "We don't _want_ to know a lot of
people," he said. "And, besides----Why! anybody could make us go running
about all over London calling on them, by just coming and calling on us.
No sense in it. She's come and she's gone, and there's an end of it."
"No," said Lady Harman, gripping her tassel more firmly. "I shall have
to return that call."
"I tell you, you won't."
"It isn't only a call," said Lady Harman. "You see, I promised to go
there to lunch."
"Lunch!"
"And to go to a meeting with her."
"Go to a meeting!"
"--of a society called the Social Friends. And something else. Oh! to go
to the committee meetings of her Shakespear Dinners Movement."
"I've heard of that."
"She said you supported it--or else of course...."
Sir Isaac restrained himself with difficulty.
"Well," he said at last, "you'd better write and tell her you can't do
any of these things; that's all."
He thrust his hands into his trousers pockets and walked to the French
window next to the one in which she stood, with an air of having settled
this business completely, and being now free for the tranquil
contemplation of horticulture. But Lady Harman had still something to
say.
"I am going to _all_ these things," she said. "I said I would, and I
will."
He didn't seem immediately to hear her. He made the little noise with
his teeth that was habitual to him. Then he came towards her. "This is
your infernal sister," he said.
Lady Harman reflected. "No," she decided. "It's myself."
"I might have known when we asked her here," said Sir Isaac with an
habitual disregard of her judgments that was beginning to irritate her
more and more. "You can't take on all these people. They're not the sort
of people we want to know."
"I want to know them," said Lady Harman.
"I don't."
"I find them interesting," Lady Harman said. "And I've promised."
"Well you oughtn't to have promised without consulting me."
Her reply was the material of much subsequent reflection on the part of
Sir Isaac. There was something in her manner....
"You see, Isaac," she said, "you kept so out of the way...."
In the pause that followed her words, Mrs. Sawbridge appeared from the
garden smiling with a determined amiability, and bearing a great bunch
of the best roses (which Sir Isaac hated to have picked) in her hands.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE BEGINNINGS OF LADY HARMAN
§1
Lady Harman had been married when she was just eighteen.
Mrs. Sawbridge was the widow of a solicitor who had been killed in a
railway collision while his affairs, as she put it, were unsettled; and
she had brought up her two daughters in a villa at Penge upon very
little money, in a state of genteel protest. Ellen was the younger. She
had been a sturdy dark-eyed doll-dragging little thing and had then shot
up very rapidly. She had gone to a boarding-school at Wimbledon because
Mrs. Sawbridge thought the Penge day-school had made Georgina opiniated
and unladylike, besides developing her muscular system to an unrefined
degree. The Wimbledon school was on less progressive lines, and anyhow
Ellen grew taller and more feminine than her sister and by seventeen was
already womanly, dignified and intensely admired by a number of
schoolmates and a large circle of their cousins and brothers. She was
generally very good and only now and then broke out with a venturesome
enterprise that hurt nobody. She got out of a skylight, for example,
and perambulated the roof in the moonshine to see how it felt and did
one or two other little things of a similar kind. Otherwise her conduct
was admirable and her temper in those days was always contagiously good.
That attractiveness which Mr. Brumley felt, was already very manifest,
and a little hindered her in the attainment of other distinctions. Most
of her lessons were done for her by willing slaves, and they were happy
slaves because she abounded in rewarding kindnesses; but on the other
hand the study of English literature and music was almost forced upon
her by the zeal of the two visiting Professors of these subjects.
And at seventeen, which is the age when girls most despise the
boyishness of young men, she met Sir Isaac and filled him with an
invincible covetousness....
§2
The school at Wimbledon was a large, hushed, faded place presided over
by a lady of hidden motives and great exterior calm named Miss Beeton
Clavier. She was handsome without any improper attractiveness, an
Associate in Arts of St. Andrew's University and a cousin of Mr. Blenker
of the _Old Country Gazette_. She was assisted by several resident
mistresses and two very carefully married visiting masters for music and
Shakespear, and playground and shrubbery and tennis-lawn were all quite
effectively hidden from the high-road. The curriculum included Latin
Grammar--nobody ever got to the reading of books in that formidable
tongue--French by an English lady who had been in France, Hanoverian
German by an irascible native, the more seemly aspects of English
history and literature, arithmetic, algebra, political economy and
drawing. There was no hockey played within the precincts, science was
taught without the clumsy apparatus or objectionable diagrams that are
now so common, and stress was laid upon the carriage of the young ladies
and the iniquity of speaking in raised voices. Miss Beeton Clavier
deprecated the modern "craze for examinations," and released from such
pressure her staff did not so much give courses of lessons as circle in
a thorough-looking and patient manner about their subjects. This
turn-spit quality was reflected in the school idiom; one did not learn
algebra or Latin or so-forth, one _did_ algebra, one was _put into_
Latin....
The girls went through this system of exercises and occupations,
evasively and as it were _sotto voce_, making friends, making enemies,
making love to one another, following instincts that urged them to find
out something about life--in spite of the most earnest discouragement....
None of them believed for a moment that the school was preparing them for
life. Most of them regarded it as a long inexplicable passage of blank,
grey occupations through which they had to pass. Beyond was the sunshine.
Ellen gathered what came to her. She realized a certain beauty in music
in spite of the biographies of great musicians, the technical
enthusiasms and the general professionalism of her teacher; the
literature master directed her attention to memoirs and through these
she caught gleams of understanding when the characters of history did
for brief intervals cease to be rigidly dignified and institutional like
Miss Beeton Clavier and became human--like schoolfellows. And one little
spectacled mistress, who wore art dresses and adorned her class-room
with flowers, took a great fancy to her, talked to her with much
vagueness and emotion of High Aims, and lent her with an impressive
furtiveness the works of Emerson and Shelley and a pamphlet by Bernard
Shaw. It was a little difficult to understand what these writers were
driving at, they were so dreadfully clever, but it was clear they
reflected criticism upon the silences of her mother and the rigidities
of Miss Beeton Clavier.
In that suppressed and evasive life beneath the outer forms and
procedures of school and home, there came glimmerings of something that
seemed charged with the promise of holding everything together, the key,
religion. She was attracted to religion, much more attracted than she
would confess even to herself, but every circumstance in her training
dissuaded her from a free approach. Her mother treated religion with a
reverence that was almost indistinguishable from huffiness. She never
named the deity and she did not like the mention of His name: she threw
a spell of indelicacy over religious topics that Ellen never thoroughly
cast off. She put God among objectionable topics--albeit a sublime one.
Miss Beeton Clavier sustained this remarkable suggestion. When she read
prayers in school she did so with the balanced impartiality of one who
offers no comment. She seemed pained as she read and finished with a
sigh. Whatever she intended to convey, she conveyed that even if the
divinity was not all He should be, if, indeed, He was a person almost
primitive, having neither the restraint nor the self-obliteration of a
refined gentlewoman, no word of it should ever pass her lips. And so
Ellen as a girl never let her mind go quite easily into this reconciling
core of life, and talked of it only very rarely and shyly with a few
chosen coevals. It wasn't very profitable talk. They had a guilty
feeling, they laughed a little uneasily, they displayed a fatal
proclivity to stab the swelling gravity of their souls with some forced
and silly jest and so tumble back to ground again before they rose too
high....
Yet great possibilities of faith and devotion stirred already in the
girl's heart. She thought little of God by day, but had a strange sense
of Him in the starlight; never under the moonlight--that was in no sense
divine--but in the stirring darkness of the stars. And it is remarkable
that after a course of astronomical enlightenment by a visiting master
and descriptions of masses and distances, incredible aching distances,
then even more than ever she seemed to feel God among the stars....
A fatal accident to a schoolfellow turned her mind for a time to the
dark stillnesses of death. The accident happened away in Wales during
the summer holidays; she saw nothing of it, she only knew of its
consequence. Hitherto she had assumed it was the function of girls to
grow up and go out from the grey intermediate state of school work into
freedoms and realities beyond. Death happened, she was aware, to young
people, but not she had thought to the people one knew. This termination
came with a shock. The girl was no great personal loss to Ellen, they
had belonged to different sets and classes, but the conception of her as
lying very very still for ever was a haunting one. Ellen felt she did
not want to be still for evermore in a confined space, with life and
sunshine going on all about her and above her, and it quickened her
growing appetite for living to think that she might presently have to be
like that. How stifled one would feel!
It couldn't be like that.
She began to speculate about that future life upon which religion
insists so much and communicates so little. Was it perhaps in other
planets, under those wonderful, many-mooned, silver-banded skies? She
perceived more and more a kind of absurdity in the existence all about
her. Was all this world a mere make-believe, and would Miss Beeton
Clavier and every one about her presently cast aside a veil? Manifestly
there was a veil. She had a very natural disposition to doubt whether
the actual circumstances of her life were real. Her mother for instance
was so lacking in blood and fire, so very like the stiff paper wrapping
of something else. But if these things were not real, what was real?
What might she not presently do? What might she not presently be?
Perhaps death had something to do with that. Was death perhaps no more
than the flinging off of grotesque outer garments by the newly arrived
guests at the feast of living? She had that feeling that there might be
a feast of living.
These preoccupations were a jealously guarded secret, but they gave her
a quality of slight detachment that added a dreaming dignity to her dark
tall charm.
There were moments of fine, deep excitement that somehow linked
themselves in her mind with these thoughts as being set over against the
things of every day. These too were moments quite different and separate
in quality from delight, from the keen appreciation of flowers or
sunshine or little vividly living things. Daylight seemed to blind her
to them, as they blinded her to starshine. They too had a quality of
reference to things large and remote, distances, unknown mysteries of
light and matter, the thought of mountains, cool white wildernesses and
driving snowstorms, or great periods of time. Such were the luminous
transfigurations that would come to her at the evening service in
church.
The school used to sit in the gallery over against the organist, and for
a year and more Ellen had the place at the corner from which she could
look down the hazy candle-lit vista of the nave and see the
congregation as ranks and ranks of dim faces and vaguely apprehended
clothes, ranks that rose with a peculiar deep and spacious rustle to
sing, and sang with a massiveness of effect she knew in no other music.
Certain hymns in particular seemed to bear her up and carry her into
another larger, more wonderful world: "Heart's Abode, Celestial Salem"
for example, a world of luminous spiritualized sensuousness. Of such a
quality she thought the Heavenly City must surely be, away there and
away. But this persuasion differed from those other mystical intimations
in its detachment from any sense of the divinity. And remarkably mixed
up with it and yet not belonging to it, antagonistic and kindred like a
silver dagger stuck through a mystically illuminated parchment, was the
angelic figure of a tall fair boy in a surplice who stood out amidst the
choir below and sang, it seemed to her, alone.
She herself on these occasions of exaltation would be far too deeply
moved to sing. She was inundated by a swimming sense of boundaries
nearly transcended, as though she was upon the threshold of a different
life altogether, the real enduring life, and as though if she could only
maintain herself long enough in this shimmering exaltation she would get
right over; things would happen, things that would draw her into that
music and magic and prevent her ever returning to everyday life again.
There one would walk through music between great candles under eternal
stars, hand-in-hand with a tall white figure. But nothing ever did
happen to make her cross that boundary; the hymn ceased, the "Amen"
died away, as if a curtain fell. The congregation subsided. Reluctantly
she would sink back into her seat....
But all through the sermon, to which she never gave the slightest
attention, her mind would feel mute and stilled, and she used to come
out of church silent and preoccupied, returning unwillingly to the
commonplaces of life....
§3
Ellen met Sir Isaac--in the days before he was Sir Isaac--at the house
of a school friend with whom she was staying at Hythe, and afterwards
her mother and sister came down and joined her for a fortnight at a
Folkstone boarding house. Mr. Harman had caught a chill while inspecting
his North Wales branches and had come down with his mother to
recuperate. He and his mother occupied a suite of rooms in the most
imposing hotel upon the Leas. Ellen's friend's people were partners in a
big flour firm and had a pleasant new æsthetic white and green house of
rough-cast and slates in the pretty country beyond the Hythe golf links,
and Ellen's friend's father was deeply anxious to develop amiable
arrangements with Mr. Harman. There was much tennis, much croquet, much
cycling to the Hythe sea-wall and bathing from little tents and sitting
about in the sunshine, and Mr. Harman had his first automobile with
him--they were still something of a novelty in those days--and was
urgent to take picnic parties to large lonely places on the downs.
There were only two young men in that circle, one was engaged to Ellen's
friend's sister, and the other was bound to a young woman remote in
Italy; neither was strikingly attractive and both regarded Harman with
that awe tempered by undignified furtive derision which wealth and
business capacity so often inspire in the young male. At first he was
quiet and simply looked at her, as it seemed any one might look, then
she perceived he looked at her intently and continuously, and was
persistently close to her and seemed always to be trying to do things to
please her and attract her attention. And then from the general
behaviour of the women about her, her mother and Mrs. Harman and her
friend's mother and her friend's sister, rather than from any one
specific thing they said, it grew upon her consciousness that this
important and fabulously wealthy person, who was also it seemed to her
so modest and quiet and touchingly benevolent, was in love with her.
"Your daughter," said Mrs. Harman repeatedly to Mrs. Sawbridge, "is
charming, perfectly charming."
"She's _such_ a child," said Mrs. Sawbridge repeatedly in reply.
And she told Ellen's friend's mother apropos of Ellen's friend's
engagement that she wanted all her daughters to marry for love, she
didn't care what the man had so long as they loved each other, and
meanwhile she took the utmost care that Isaac had undisputed access to
the girl, was watchfully ready to fend off anyone else, made her take
everything he offered and praised him quietly and steadily to her. She
pointed out how modest and unassuming he was, in spite of the fact that
he was "controlling an immense business" and in his own particular trade
"a perfect Napoleon."
"For all one sees to the contrary he might be just a private gentleman.
And he feeds thousands and thousands of people...."
"Sooner or later," said Mrs. Harman, "I suppose Isaac will marry. He's
been such a good son to me that I shall feel it dreadfully, and yet, you
know, I wish I could see him settled. Then _I_ shall settle--in a little
house of my own somewhere. Just a little place. I don't believe in
coming too much between son and daughter-in-law...."
Harman's natural avidity was tempered by a proper modesty. He thought
Ellen so lovely and so infinitely desirable--and indeed she was--that it
seemed incredible to him that he could ever get her. And yet he had got
most of the things in life he had really and urgently wanted. His doubts
gave his love-making an eager, lavish and pathetic delicacy. He watched
her minutely in an agony of appreciation. He felt ready to give or
promise anything.
She was greatly flattered by his devotion and she liked the surprises
and presents he heaped upon her extremely. Also she was sorry for him
beyond measure. In the deep recesses of her heart was an oleographic
ideal of a large brave young man with blue eyes, a wave in his fair
hair, a wonderful tenor voice and--she could not help it, she tried to
look away and not think of it--a broad chest. With him she intended to
climb mountains. So clearly she could not marry Mr. Harman. And because
of that she tried to be very kind indeed to him, and when he faltered
that she could not possibly care for him, she reassured him so vaguely
as to fill him with wild gusts of hope and herself with a sense of
pledges. He told her one day between two sets of tennis--which he played
with a certain tricky skill--that he felt that the very highest
happiness he could ever attain would be to die at her feet. Presently
her pity and her sense of responsibility had become so large and deep
that the dream hero with the blue eyes was largely overlaid and hidden
by them.
Then, at first a little indirectly and then urgently and with a voice
upon the edge of tears, Harman implored her to marry him. She had never
before in the whole course of her life seen a grown-up person on the
very verge of tears. She felt that the release of such deep fountains as
that must be averted at any cost. She felt that for a mere schoolgirl
like herself, a backward schoolgirl who had never really mastered
quadratics, to cause these immense and tragic distresses was abominable.
She was sure her former headmistress would disapprove very highly of
her. "I will make you a queen," said Harman, "I will give all my life to
your happiness."
She believed he would.
She refused him for the second time but with a weakening certainty in a
little white summer-house that gave a glimpse of the sea between green
and wooded hills. She sat and stared at the sea after he had left her,
through a mist of tears; so pitiful did he seem. He had beaten his poor
fists on the stone table and then caught up her hand, kissed it and
rushed out.... She had not dreamt that love could hurt like that.
And all that night--that is to say for a full hour before her wet
eyelashes closed in slumber--she was sleepless with remorse for the
misery she was causing him.
The third time when he said with suicidal conviction that he could not
live without her, she burst into tears of pity and yielded. And
instantly, amazingly, with the famished swiftness of a springing panther
he caught her body into his arms and kissed her on the lips....
§4
They were married with every circumstance of splendour, with very
expensive music, and portraits in the illustrated newspapers and a great
glitter of favours and carriages. The bridegroom was most thoughtful and
generous about the Sawbridge side of the preparations. Only one thing
was a little perplexing. In spite of his impassioned impatience he
delayed the wedding. Full of dark hints and a portentous secret, he
delayed the wedding for twenty-five whole days in order that it should
follow immediately upon the publication of the birthday honours list.
And then they understood.
"You will be Lady Harman," he exulted; "_Lady_ Harman. I would have
given double.... I have had to back the _Old Country Gazette_ and I
don't care a rap. I'd have done anything. I'd have bought the rotten
thing outright.... Lady Harman!"
He remained loverlike until the very eve of their marriage. Then
suddenly it seemed to her that all the people she cared for in the world
were pushing her away from them towards him, giving her up, handing her
over. He became--possessive. His abjection changed to pride. She
perceived that she was going to be left tremendously alone with him,
with an effect, as if she had stepped off a terrace on to what she
believed to be land and had abruptly descended into very deep water....
And while she was still feeling quite surprised by everything and
extremely doubtful whether she wanted to go any further with this
business, which was manifestly far more serious, out of all proportion
more serious, than anything that had ever happened to her before--and
_unpleasant_, abounding indeed in crumpling indignities and horrible
nervous stresses, it dawned upon her that she was presently to be that
strange, grown-up and preoccupied thing, a mother, and that girlhood and
youth and vigorous games, mountains and swimming and running and
leaping were over for her as far as she could see for ever....
Both the prospective grandmothers became wonderfully kind and helpful
and intimate, preparing with gusto and an agreeable sense of delegated
responsibility for the child that was to give them all the pride of
maternity again and none of its inconveniences.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SIR ISAAC
§1
Her marriage had carried Ellen out of the narrow world of home and
school into another that had seemed at first vastly larger, if only on
account of its freedom from the perpetual achievement of small
economies. Hitherto the urgent necessity of these had filled life with
irksome precautions and clipped the wings of every dream. This new life
into which Sir Isaac led her by the hand promised not only that release
but more light, more colour, more movement, more people. There was to be
at any rate so much in the way of rewards and compensation for her pity
of him.
She found the establishment at Putney ready for her. Sir Isaac had not
consulted her about it, it had been his secret, he had prepared it for
her with meticulous care as a surprise. They returned from a honeymoon
in Skye in which the attentions of Sir Isaac and the comforts of a
first-class hotel had obscured a marvellous background of sombre
mountain and wide stretches of shining sea. Sir Isaac had been very fond
and insistent and inseparable, and she was doing her best to conceal a
strange distressful jangling of her nerves which she now feared might
presently dispose her to scream. Sir Isaac had been goodness itself, but
how she craved now for solitude! She was under the impression now that
they were going to his mother's house in Highbury. Then she thought he
would have to go away to business for part of the day at any rate, and
she could creep into some corner and begin to think of all that had
happened to her in these short summer months.
They were met at Euston by his motor-car. "_Home_," said Sir Isaac, with
a little gleam of excitement, when the more immediate luggage was
aboard.
As they hummed through the West-End afternoon Ellen became aware that he
was whistling through his teeth. It was his invariable indication of
mental activity, and her attention came drifting back from her idle
contemplation of the shoppers and strollers of Piccadilly to link this
already alarming symptom with the perplexing fact that they were
manifestly travelling west.
"But this," she said presently, "is Knightsbridge."
"Goes to Kensington," he replied with attempted indifference.
"But your mother doesn't live this way."
"_We_ do," said Sir Isaac, shining at every point of his face.
"But," she halted. "Isaac!--where are we going?"
"Home," he said.
"You've not taken a house?"
"Bought it."
"But,--it won't be ready!"
"I've seen to that."
"Servants!" she cried in dismay.
"That's all right." His face broke into an excited smile. His little
eyes danced and shone. "Everything," he said.
"But the servants!" she said.
"You'll see," he said. "There's a butler--and everything."
"A butler!" He could now no longer restrain himself. "I was weeks," he
said, "getting it ready. Weeks and weeks.... It's a house.... I'd had my
eye on it before ever I met you. It's a real _good_ house, Elly...."
The fortunate girl-wife went on through Brompton to Walham Green with a
stunned feeling. So women have felt in tumbrils. A nightmare of butlers,
a galaxy of possible butlers, filled her soul.
No one was quite so big and formidable as Snagsby, towering up to
receive her, upon the steps of the home her husband was so amazingly
giving her.
The reader has already been privileged to see something of this house in
the company of Lady Beach-Mandarin. At the top of the steps stood Mrs.
Crumble, the new and highly recommended cook-housekeeper in her best
black silk flounced and expanded, and behind her peeped several neat
maids in caps and aprons. A little valet-like under-butler appeared and
tried to balance Snagsby by hovering two steps above him on the opposite
side of the Victorian mediæval porch.
Assisted officiously by Snagsby and amidst the deferential unhelpful
gestures of the under-butler, Sir Isaac handed his wife out of the car.
"Everything all right, Snagsby?" he asked brusquely if a little
breathless.
"Everything in order, Sir Isaac."
"And here;--this is her ladyship."
"I 'ope her ladyship 'ad a pleasent journey to 'er new 'ome. I'm sure if
I may presume, Sir Isaac, we shall all be very glad to serve her
ladyship."
(Like all well-trained English servants, Snagsby always dropped as many
h's as he could when conversing with his superiors. He did this as a
mark of respect and to prevent social confusion, just as he was always
careful to wear a slightly misfitting dress coat and fold his trousers
so that they creased at the sides and had a wide flat effect in front.)
Lady Harman bowed a little shyly to his good wishes and was then led up
to Mrs. Crumble, in a stiff black silk, who curtseyed with a submissive
amiability to her new mistress. "I'm sure, me lady," she said. "I'm
sure----"
There was a little pause. "Here they are, you see, right and ready,"
said Sir Isaac, and then with an inspiration, "Got any tea for us,
Snagsby?"
Snagsby addressing his mistress inquired if he should serve tea in the
garden or the drawing-room, and Sir Isaac decided for the garden.
"There's another hall beyond this," he said, and took his wife's arm,
leaving Mrs. Crumble still bowing amiably before the hall table. And
every time she bowed she rustled richly....
"It's quite a big garden," said Sir Isaac.
§2
And so the woman who had been a girl three weeks ago, this tall,
dark-eyed, slightly perplexed and very young-looking lady, was
introduced to the home that had been made for her. She went about it
with an alarmed sense of strange responsibilities, not in the least
feeling that anything was being given to her. And Sir Isaac led her from
point to point full of the pride and joy of new possession--for it was
his first own house as well as hers--rejoicing over it and exacting
gratitude.
"It's all right, isn't it?" he asked looking up at her.
"It's wonderful. I'd no idea."
"See," he said, indicating a great brass bowl of perennial sunflowers on
the landing, "your favourite flower!"
"My favourite flower?"
"You said it was--in that book. Perennial sunflower."
She was perplexed and then remembered.
She understood now why he had said downstairs, when she had glanced at a
big photographic enlargement of a portrait of Doctor Barnardo, "your
favourite hero in real life."
He had brought her at Hythe one day a popular Victorian device, a
confession album, in which she had had to write down on a neat
rose-tinted page, her favourite author, her favourite flower, her
favourite colour, her favourite hero in real life, her "pet aversion,"
and quite a number of such particulars of her subjective existence. She
had filled this page in a haphazard manner late one night, and she was
disconcerted to find how thoroughly her careless replies had come home
to roost. She had put down "pink" as her favourite colour because the
page she was writing upon suggested it, and the paper of the room was
pale pink, the curtains strong pink with a pattern of paler pink and
tied with large pink bows, and the lamp shades, the bedspread, the
pillow-cases, the carpet, the chairs, the very crockery--everything but
the omnipresent perennial sunflowers--was pink. Confronted with this
realization, she understood that pink was the least agreeable of all
possible hues for a bedroom. She perceived she had to live now in a
chromatic range between rather underdone mutton and salmon. She had said
that her favourite musical composers were Bach and Beethoven; she really
meant it, and a bust of Beethoven materialized that statement, but she
had made Doctor Barnardo her favourite hero in real life because his
name also began with a B and she had heard someone say somewhere that he
was a very good man. The predominance of George Eliot's pensive rather
than delightful countenance in her bedroom and the array of all that
lady's works in a lusciously tooled pink leather, was due to her equally
reckless choice of a favourite author. She had said too that Nelson was
her favourite historical character, but Sir Isaac with a delicate
jealousy had preferred to have this heroic but regrettably immoral
personality represented in his home only by an engraving of the Battle
of Copenhagen....
She stood surveying this room, and her husband watched her eagerly. She
was, he felt, impressed at last!...
Certainly she had never seen such a bedroom in her life. By comparison
even with the largest of the hotel apartments they had occupied it was
vast; it had writing-tables and a dainty bookcase and a blushing sofa,
and dressing-tables and a bureau and a rose-red screen and three large
windows. Her thoughts went back to the narrow little bedroom at Penge
with which she had hitherto been so entirely content. Her own few little
books, a photograph or so,--they'd never dare to come here, even if she
dared to bring them.
"Here," said Sir Isaac, flinging open a white door, "is your
dressing-room."
She was chiefly aware of a huge white bath standing on a marble slab
under a window of crinkled pink-stained glass, and of a wide space of
tiled floor with white fur rugs.
"And here," he said, opening a panel that was covered by wall paper, "is
_my_ door."
"Yes," he said to the question in her eyes, "that's my room. You got
this one--for your own. It's how people do now. People of our
position.... There's no lock."
He shut the door slowly again and surveyed the splendours he had made
with infinite satisfaction.
"All right?" he said, "isn't it?"... He turned to the pearl for which
the casket was made, and slipped an arm about her waist. His arm
tightened.
"Got a kiss for me, Elly?" he whispered.
At this moment, a gong almost worthy of Snagsby summoned them to tea. It
came booming in to them with a vast officious arrogance that brooked no
denial. It made one understand the imperatives of the Last Trump, albeit
with a greater dignity.... There was a little awkward pause.
"I'm so dirty and trainy," she said, disengaging herself from his arm.
"And we ought to go to tea."
§3
The same exceptional aptitude of Sir Isaac for detailed administration
that had relieved his wife from the need of furnishing and arranging a
home, made the birth of her children and the organization of her nursery
an almost detached affair for her. Sir Isaac went about in a preoccupied
way, whistling between his teeth and planning with expert advice the
equipment of an ideal nursery, and her mother and his mother became as
it were voluminous clouds of uncommunicative wisdom and precaution. In
addition the conversation of Miss Crump, the extremely skilled and
costly nurse, who arrived a full Advent before the child, fresh from the
birth of a viscount, did much to generalize whatever had remained
individual of this thing that was happening. With so much intelligence
focussed, there seemed to Lady Harman no particular reason why she
should not do her best to think as little as possible about the
impending affair, which meant for her, she now understood quite clearly,
more and more discomfort culminating in an agony. The summer promised to
be warm, and Sir Isaac took a furnished house for the great event in the
hills behind Torquay. The maternal instinct is not a magic thing, it has
to be evoked and developed, and I decline to believe it is indicative of
any peculiar unwomanliness in Lady Harman that when at last she beheld
her newly-born daughter in the hands of the experts, she moaned
druggishly, "Oh! please take it away. Oh! Take it--away.
Anywhere--anywhere."
It was very red and wrinkled and aged-looking and, except when it opened
its mouth to cry, extraordinarily like its father. This resemblance
disappeared--along with a crop of darkish red hair--in the course of a
day or two, but it left a lurking dislike to its proximity in her mind
long after it had become an entirely infantile and engaging baby.
§4
Those early years of their marriage were the happiest period of Sir
Isaac's life.
He seemed to have everything that man could desire. He was still only
just forty at his marriage; he had made for himself a position
altogether dominant in the world of confectionery and popular
refreshment, he had won a title, he had a home after his own heart, a
beautiful young wife, and presently delightful children in his own
image, and it was only after some years of contentment and serenity and
with a certain incredulity that he discovered that something in his
wife, something almost in the nature of discontent with her lot, was
undermining and threatening all the comfort and beauty of his life.
Sir Isaac was one of those men whom modern England delights to honour, a
man of unpretentious acquisitiveness, devoted to business and distracted
by no æsthetic or intellectual interests. He was the only son of his
mother, the widow of a bankrupt steam-miller, and he had been a delicate
child to rear. He left Mr. Gambard's college at Ealing after passing the
second-class examination of the College of Preceptors at the age of
sixteen, to go into a tea-office as clerk without a salary, a post he
presently abandoned for a clerkship in the office of a large refreshment
catering firm. He attracted the attention of his employers by suggesting
various administrative economies, and he was already drawing a salary of
two hundred and fifty pounds a year when he was twenty-one. Many young
men would have rested satisfied with so rapid an advancement, and would
have devoted themselves to the amusements that are now considered so
permissible to youth, but young Harman was made of sterner stuff, and it
only spurred him to further efforts. He contrived to save a
considerable proportion of his salary for some years, and at the age of
twenty-seven he started, in association with a firm of flour millers,
the International Bread and Cake Stores, which spread rapidly over the
country. They were not in any sense of the word "International," but in
a search for inflated and inflating adjectives this word attracted him
most, and the success of the enterprise justified his choice. Originally
conceived as a syndicated system of baker's shops running a specially
gritty and nutritious line of bread, the Staminal Bread, in addition to
the ordinary descriptions, it rapidly developed a catering side, and in
a little time there were few centres of clerkly employment in London or
the Midlands where an International could not be found supplying the
midday scone or poached egg, washed down by a cup of tea, or coffee, or
lemonade. It meant hard work for Isaac Harman. It drew lines on his
cheeks, sharpened his always rather pointed nose to an extreme
efficiency, greyed his hair, and gave an acquired firmness to his rather
retreating mouth. All his time was given to the details of this
development; always he was inspecting premises, selecting and dismissing
managers, making codes of rules and fines for his growing army of
employees, organizing and reorganizing his central offices and his
central bakeries, hunting up cheaper and cheaper supplies of eggs and
flour, and milk and ham, devising advertisements and agency
developments. He had something of an artist's passion in these things;
he went about, a little bent and peaky, calculating and planning and
hissing through his teeth, and feeling not only that he was getting on,
but that he was getting on in the most exemplary way. Manifestly,
anybody in his line of business who wanted to be leisurely, or to be
generous, who possessed any broader interests than the shop, who
troubled to think about the nation or the race or any of the deeper
mysteries of life, was bound to go down before him. He dealt privately
with every appetite--until his marriage no human being could have
suspected him of any appetite but business--he disposed of every
distracting impulse with unobtrusive decision; and even his political
inclination towards Radicalism sprang chiefly from an irritation with
the legal advantages of landlordism natural to a man who is frequently
leasing shops.
At school Sir Isaac had not been a particularly prominent figure; his
disposition at cricket to block and to bowl "sneaks" and "twisters"
under-arm had raised his average rather than his reputation; he had
evaded fights and dramatic situations, and protected himself upon
occasions of unavoidable violence by punching with his white knuckles
held in a peculiar and vicious manner. He had always been a little
insensitive to those graces of style, in action if not in art, which
appeal so strongly to the commoner sort of English mind; he played first
for safety, and that assured, for the uttermost advantage. These
tendencies became more marked with maturity. When he took up tennis for
his health's sake he developed at once an ungracious service that had
to be killed like vermin; he developed an instinct for the deadest ball
available, and his returns close up to the net were like assassinations.
Indeed, he was inherently incapable of any vision beyond the express
prohibitions and permissions of the rules of the games he played, or
beyond the laws and institutions under which he lived. His idea of
generosity was the undocumented and unqualified purchase of a person by
payments made in the form of a gift.
And this being the quality of Sir Isaac's mind, it followed that his
interpretations of the relationship of marriage were simple and strict.
A woman, he knew, had to be wooed to be won, but when she was won, she
was won. He did not understand wooing after that was settled. There was
the bargain and her surrender. He on his side had to keep her, dress
her, be kind to her, give her the appearances of pride and authority,
and in return he had his rights and his privileges and undefined powers
of control. That you know, by the existing rules, is the reality of
marriage where there are no settlements and no private property of the
wife's. That is to say, it is the reality of marriage in ninety-nine
cases out of the hundred. And it would have shocked Sir Isaac extremely,
and as a matter of fact it did shock him, for any one to suggest the
slightest revision of so entirely advantageous an arrangement. He was
confident of his good intentions, and resolved to the best of his
ability to make his wife the happiest of living creatures, subject only
to reasonable acquiescences and general good behaviour.
Never before had he cared for anything so much as he did for her--not
even for the International Bread and Cake Stores. He gloated upon her.
She distracted him from business. He resolved from the outset to
surround her with every luxury and permit her no desire that he had not
already anticipated. Even her mother and Georgina, whom he thought
extremely unnecessary persons, were frequent visitors to his house. His
solicitude for her was so great that she found it difficult even to see
her doctor except in his presence. And he bought her a pearl necklace
that cost six hundred pounds. He was, in fact, one of those complete
husbands who grow rare in these decadent days.
The social circle to which Sir Isaac introduced his wife was not a very
extensive one. The business misadventures of his father had naturally
deprived his mother of most of her friends; he had made only
acquaintances at school, and his subsequent concentration upon business
had permitted very few intimacies. Renewed prosperity had produced a
certain revival of cousins, but Mrs. Harman, established in a pleasant
house at Highbury, had received their attentions with a well-merited
stiffness. His chief associates were his various business allies, and
these and their wives and families formed the nucleus of the new world
to which Ellen was gradually and temperately introduced. There were a
few local callers, but Putney is now too deeply merged with London for
this practice of the countryside to have any great effect upon a
new-comer's visiting circle.
Perhaps Mr. Charterson might claim to be Sir Isaac's chief friend at the
time of that gentleman's marriage. Transactions in sugar had brought
them together originally. He was Sir Isaac's best man, and the new
knight entertained a feeling of something very like admiration for him.
Moreover, Mr. Charterson had very large ears, more particularly was the
left one large, extraordinarily large and projecting upper teeth, which
he sought vainly to hide beneath an extravagant moustache, and a harsh
voice, characteristics that did much to allay the anxieties natural to a
newly married man. Mr. Charterson was moreover adequately married to a
large, attentive, enterprising, swarthy wife, and possessed a splendid
house in Belgravia. Not quite so self-made as Sir Isaac, he was still
sufficiently self-made to take a very keen interest in his own social
advancement and in social advancement generally, and it was through him
that Sir Isaac's attention had been first directed to those developing
relations with politics that arise as a business grows to greatness.
"I'm for Parliament," said Charterson. "Sugar's in politics, and I'm
after it. You'd better come too, Harman. Those chaps up there, they'll
play jiggery-pokery with sugar if we aren't careful. And it won't be
only sugar, Harman!"
Pressed to expand this latter sentence, he pointed out to his friend
that "any amount of interfering with employment" was in the air--"any
amount."
"And besides," said Mr. Charterson, "men like us have a stake in the
country, Harman. We're getting biggish people. We ought to do our
share. I don't see the fun of leaving everything to the landlords and
the lawyers. Men of our sort have got to make ourselves felt. We want a
business government. Of course--one pays. So long as I get a voice in
calling the tune I don't mind paying the piper a bit. There's going to
be a lot of interference with trade. All this social legislation. And
there's what you were saying the other day about these leases...."
"I'm not much of a talker," said Harman. "I don't see myself gassing in
the House."
"Oh! I don't mean going into Parliament," said Charterson. "That's for
some of us, perhaps.... But come into the party, make yourself felt."
Under Charterson's stimulation it was that Harman joined the National
Liberal Club, and presently went on to the Climax, and through him he
came to know something of that inner traffic of arrangements and
bargains which does so much to keep a great historical party together
and maintain its vitality. For a time he was largely overshadowed by the
sturdy Radicalism of Charterson, but presently as he understood this
interesting game better, he embarked upon a line of his own. Charterson
wanted a seat, and presently got it; his maiden speech on the Sugar
Bounties won a compliment from Mr. Evesham; and Harman, who would have
piloted a monoplane sooner than address the House, decided to be one of
those silent influences that work outside our national assembly. He came
to the help of an embarrassed Liberal weekly, and then, in a Fleet
Street crisis, undertook the larger share of backing the _Old Country
Gazette_, that important social and intellectual party organ. His
knighthood followed almost automatically.
Such political developments introduced a second element into the
intermittent social relations of the Harman household. Before his
knighthood and marriage Sir Isaac had participated in various public
banquets and private parties and little dinners in the vaults of the
House and elsewhere, arising out of his political intentions, and with
the appearance of a Lady Harman there came a certain urgency on the part
of those who maintain in a state of hectic dullness the social
activities of the great Liberal party. Horatio Blenker, Sir Isaac's
editor, showed a disposition to be socially very helpful, and after Mrs.
Blenker had called in a state of worldly instructiveness, there was a
little dinner at the Blenkers' to introduce young Lady Harman to the
great political world. It was the first dinner-party of her life, and
she found it dazzling rather than really agreeable.
She felt very slender and young and rather unclothed about the arms and
neck, in spite of the six hundred pound pearl necklace that had been
given to her just as she stood before the mirror in her white-and-gold
dinner dress ready to start. She had to look down at that dress ever and
again and at her shining arms to remind herself that she wasn't still in
schoolgirl clothes, and it seemed to her there was not another woman in
the room who was not fairly entitled to send her off to bed at any
moment. She had been a little nervous about the details of the dinner,
but there was nothing strange or difficult but caviare, and in that case
she waited for some one else to begin. The Chartersons were there, which
was very reassuring, and the abundant flowers on the table were a sort
of protection. The man on her right was very nice, gently voluble, and
evidently quite deaf, so that she had merely to make kind respectful
faces at him. He talked to her most of the time, and described the
peasant costumes in Marken and Walcheren. And Mr. Blenker, with a fine
appreciation of Sir Isaac's watchful temperament and his own magnetism,
spoke to her three times and never looked at her once all through the
entertainment.
A few weeks later they went to dinner at the Chartersons', and then she
gave a dinner, which was arranged very skilfully by Sir Isaac and
Snagsby and the cook-housekeeper, with a little outside help, and then
came a big party reception at Lady Barleypound's, a multitudinous
miscellaneous assembly in which the obviously wealthy rubbed shoulders
with the obviously virtuous and the not quite so obviously clever. It
was a great orgy of standing about and seeing the various Blenkers and
the Cramptons and the Weston Massinghays and the Daytons and Mrs.
Millingham with her quivering lorgnette and her last tame genius and
Lewis, and indeed all the Tapirs and Tadpoles of Liberalism, being
tremendously active and influential and important throughout the
evening. The house struck Ellen as being very splendid, the great
staircase particularly so, and never before had she seen a great
multitude of people in evening dress. Lady Barleypound in the golden
parlour at the head of the stairs shook hands automatically, lest it
would seem in some amiable dream, Mrs. Blapton and a daughter rustled
across the gathering in a hasty vindictive manner and vanished, and a
number of handsome, glittering, dark-eyed, splendidly dressed women kept
together in groups and were tremendously but occultly amused. The
various Blenkers seemed everywhere, Horatio in particular with his large
fluent person and his luminous tenor was like a shop-walker taking
customers to the departments: one felt he was weaving all these
immiscibles together into one great wise Liberal purpose, and that he
deserved quite wonderful things from the party; he even introduced five
or six people to Lady Harman, looking sternly over her head and
restraining his charm as he did so on account of Sir Isaac's feelings.
The people he brought up to her were not very interesting people, she
thought, but then that was perhaps due to her own dreadful ignorance of
politics.
Lady Harman ceased even to dip into the vortex of London society after
March, and in June she went with her mother and a skilled nurse to that
beautiful furnished house Sir Isaac had found near Torquay, in
preparation for the birth of their first little daughter.
§5
It seemed to her husband that it was both unreasonable and ungrateful of
her to become a tearful young woman after their union, and for a phase
of some months she certainly was a tearful young woman, but his mother
made it clear to him that this was quite a correct and permissible phase
for her, as she was, and so he expressed his impatience with temperance,
and presently she was able to pull herself together and begin to
readjust herself to a universe that had seemed for a time almost too
shattered for endurance. She resumed the process of growing up that her
marriage had for a time so vividly interrupted, and if her schooldays
were truncated and the college phase omitted, she had at any rate a very
considerable amount of fundamental experience to replace these now
customary completions.
Three little girls she brought into the world in the first three years
of her married life, then after a brief interval of indifferent health
she had a fourth girl baby of a physique quite obviously inferior to its
predecessors, and then, after--and perhaps as a consequence of--much
whispered conversation of the two mothers-in-law, protests and tactful
explanation on the part of the elderly and trustworthy family doctor and
remarks of an extraordinary breadth (and made at table too, almost
before the door had closed on Snagsby!) from Ellen's elder sister, there
came a less reproductive phase....
But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the
habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step
to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. The
one thing trains for the other.
Now the chief circumstance in the life of Lady Harman was Sir Isaac.
Indeed as she grew to a clear consciousness of herself and her position,
it seemed to her he was not so much a circumstance as a circumvallation.
There wasn't a direction in which she could turn without immediately
running up against him. He had taken possession of her extremely. And
from her first resignation to this as an inevitable fact she had come,
she hardly knew how, to a renewed disposition to regard this large and
various universe beyond him and outside of him, with something of the
same slight adventurousness she had felt before he so comprehensively
happened to her. After her first phase of despair she had really done
her best to honour the bargain she had rather unwittingly made and to
love and to devote herself and be a loyal and happy wife to this
clutching, hard-breathing little man who had got her, and it was the
insatiable excesses of his demands quite as much as any outer influence
that made her realize the impossibility of such a concentration.
His was a supremely acquisitive and possessive character, so that he
insulted her utmost subjugations by an obtrusive suspicion and jealousy,
he was jealous of her childish worship of her dead father, jealous of
her disposition to go to church, jealous of the poet Wordsworth because
she liked to read his sonnets, jealous because she loved great music,
jealous when she wanted to go out; if she seemed passionless and she
seemed more and more passionless he was jealous, and the slightest gleam
of any warmth of temperament filled him with a vile and furious dread of
dishonouring possibilities. And the utmost resolution to believe in him
could not hide from her for ever the fact that his love manifested
itself almost wholly as a parade of ownership and a desire, without
kindliness, without any self-forgetfulness. All his devotion, his
self-abjection, had been the mere qualms of a craving, the flush of
eager courtship. Do as she would to overcome these realizations, forces
within her stronger than herself, primordial forces with the welfare of
all life in their keeping, cried out upon the meanness of his face, the
ugly pointed nose and the thin compressed lips, the weak neck, the
clammy hands, the ungainly nervous gestures, the tuneless whistling
between the clenched teeth. He would not let her forget a single detail.
Whenever she tried to look at any created thing, he thrust himself, like
one of his own open-air advertisements, athwart the attraction.
As she grew up to an achieved womanhood--and it was even a physical
growing-up, for she added more than an inch of stature after her
marriage--her life became more and more consciously like a fencing match
in which her vision flashed over his head and under his arms and this
side of him and that, while with a toiling industry he fought to
intercept it. And from the complete acceptance of her matrimonial
submission, she passed on by almost insensible degrees towards a
conception of her life as a struggle, that seemed at first entirely
lonely and unsupported, to exist--_against_ him.
In every novel as in every picture there must be an immense
simplification, and so I tell the story of Lady Harman's changing
attitude without any of those tangled leapings-forward or harkings-back,
those moods and counter moods and relapses which made up the necessary
course of her mind. But sometimes she was here and sometimes she was
there, sometimes quite back to the beginning an obedient, scrupulously
loyal and up-looking young wife, sometimes a wife concealing the
humiliation of an unhappy choice in a spurious satisfaction and
affection. And mixed up with widening spaces of criticism and
dissatisfaction and hostility there were, you must understand, moments
of real liking for this outrageous little man and streaks of an absurd
maternal tenderness for him. They had been too close together to avoid
that. She had a woman's affection of ownership too, and disliked to see
him despised or bettered or untidy; even those ridiculous muddy hands
had given her a twinge of solicitude....
And all the while she was trying to see the universe also, the great
background of their two little lives, and to think what it might mean
for her over and above their too obliterating relationship.
§6
It would be like counting the bacteria of an infection to trace how
ideas of insubordination came drifting into Sir Isaac's Paradise. The
epidemic is in the air. There is no Tempter nowadays, no definitive
apple. The disturbing force has grown subtler, blows in now like a
draught, creeps and gathers like the dust,--a disseminated serpent. Sir
Isaac brought home his young, beautiful and rather crumpled and
astonished Eve and by all his standards he was entitled to be happy ever
afterwards. He knew of one danger, but against that he was very
watchful. Never once for six long years did she have a private duologue
with another male. But Mudie and Sir Jesse Boot sent parcels to the
house unchecked, the newspaper drifted in not even censored: the nurses
who guided Ellen through the essential incidents of a feminine career
talked of something called a "movement." And there was Georgina....
The thing they wanted they called the Vote, but that demand so hollow,
so eyeless, had all the terrifying effect of a mask. Behind that mask
was a formless invincible discontent with the lot of womanhood. It
wanted,--it was not clear what it wanted, but whatever it wanted, all
the domestic instincts of mankind were against admitting there was
anything it could want. That remarkable agitation had already worked up
to the thunderous pitch, there had been demonstrations at Public
Meetings, scenes in the Ladies' Gallery and something like rioting in
Parliament Square before ever it occurred to Sir Isaac that this was a
disturbance that touched his home. He had supposed suffragettes were
ladies of all too certain an age with red noses and spectacles and a
masculine style of costume, who wished to be hugged by policemen. He
said as much rather knowingly and wickedly to Charterson. He could not
understand any woman not coveting the privileges of Lady Harman. And
then one day while Georgina and her mother were visiting them, as he was
looking over the letters at the breakfast table according to his custom
before giving them out, he discovered two identical newspaper packets
addressed to his wife and his sister-in-law, and upon them were these
words printed very plainly, "Votes for Women."
"Good Lord!" he cried. "What's this? It oughtn't to be allowed." And he
pitched the papers at the wastepaper basket under the sideboard.
"I'll thank you," said Georgina, "not to throw away our _Votes for
Women_. We subscribe to that."
"Eh?" cried Sir Isaac.
"We're subscribers. Snagsby, just give us those papers." (A difficult
moment for Snagsby.) He picked up the papers and looked at Sir Isaac.
"Put 'em down there," said Sir Isaac, waving to the sideboard and then
in an ensuing silence handed two letters of no importance to his
mother-in-law. His face was pale and he was breathless. Snagsby with an
obvious tactfulness retired.
Sir Isaac watched the door close.
His remark pointedly ignored Georgina.
"What you been thinking about, Elly," he asked, "subscribing to _that_
thing?"
"I wanted to read it."
"But you don't hold with all that Rubbish----"
"_Rubbish!_" said Georgina, helping herself to marmalade.
"Well, rot then, if you like," said Sir Isaac, unamiably and panting.
With that as Snagsby afterwards put it--for the battle raged so fiercely
as to go on even when he presently returned to the room--"the fat was in
the fire." The Harman breakfast-table was caught up into the Great
Controversy with heat and fury like a tree that is overtaken by a forest
fire. It burnt for weeks, and smouldered still when the first white
heats had abated. I will not record the arguments of either side, they
were abominably bad and you have heard them all time after time; I do
not think that whatever side you have taken in this matter you would
find much to please you in Sir Isaac's goadings or Georgina's repartees.
Sir Isaac would ask if women were prepared to go as soldiers and
Georgina would enquire how many years of service he had done or horrify
her mother by manifest allusion to the agonies and dangers of
maternity,--things like that. It gave a new interest to breakfast for
Snagsby; and the peculiarly lady-like qualities of Mrs. Sawbridge, a
gift for silent, pallid stiffness, a disposition, tactful but
unsuccessful, to "change the subject," an air of being about to leave
the room in disdain, had never shone with such baleful splendour. Our
interest here is rather with the effect of these remarkable disputes,
which echoed in Sir Isaac's private talk long after Georgina had gone
again, upon Lady Harman. He could not leave this topic of feminine
emancipation alone, once it had been set going, and though Ellen would
always preface her remarks by, "Of course Georgina goes too far," he
worried her slowly into a series of definite insurgent positions. Sir
Isaac's attacks on Georgina certainly brought out a good deal of
absurdity in her positions, and Georgina at times left Sir Isaac without
a leg to stand on, and the net result of their disputes as of most human
controversies was not conviction for the hearer but release. Her mind
escaped between them, and went exploring for itself through the great
gaps they had made in the simple obedient assumptions of her girlhood.
That question originally put in Paradise, "Why shouldn't we?" came into
her mind and stayed there. It is a question that marks a definite stage
in the departure from innocence. Things that had seemed opaque and
immutable appeared translucent and questionable. She began to read more
and more in order to learn things and get a light upon things, and less
and less to pass the time. Ideas came to her that seemed at first
strange altogether and then grotesquely justifiable and then crept to a
sort of acceptance by familiarity. And a disturbing intermittent sense
of a general responsibility increased and increased in her.
You will understand this sense of responsibility which was growing up in
Lady Harman's mind if you have felt it yourself, but if you have not
then you may find it a little difficult to understand. You see it comes,
when it comes at all, out of a phase of disillusionment. All children, I
suppose, begin by taking for granted the rightness of things in general,
the soundness of accepted standards, and many people are at least so
happy that they never really grow out of this assumption. They go to the
grave with an unbroken confidence that somewhere behind all the
immediate injustices and disorders of life, behind the antics of
politics, the rigidities of institutions, the pressure of custom and the
vagaries of law, there is wisdom and purpose and adequate provision,
they never lose that faith in the human household they acquired amongst
the directed securities of home. But for more of us and more there comes
a dissolution of these assurances; there comes illumination as the day
comes into a candle-lit uncurtained room. The warm lights that once
rounded off our world so completely are betrayed for what they are,
smoky and guttering candles. Beyond what once seemed a casket of dutiful
security is now a limitless and indifferent universe. Ours is the wisdom
or there is no wisdom; ours is the decision or there is no decision.
That burthen is upon each of us in the measure of our capacity. The
talent has been given us and we may not bury it.
§7
And as we reckon up the disturbing influences that were stirring Lady
Harman out of that life of acquiescences to which women are perhaps
even more naturally disposed than men, we may pick out the conversation
of Susan Burnet as something a little apart from the others, as
something with a peculiar barbed pointedness of its own that was yet in
other respects very representative of a multitude of nudges and nips and
pricks and indications that life was giving Lady Harman's awaking mind.
Susan Burnet was a woman who came to renovate and generally do up the
Putney curtains and furniture and loose covers every spring; she was
Mrs. Crumble's discovery, she was sturdy and short and she had open blue
eyes and an engaging simplicity of manner that attracted Lady Harman
from the outset. She was stuck away in one of the spare bedrooms and
there she was available for any one, so long, she explained, as they
didn't fluster her when she was cutting out, with a flow of conversation
that not even a mouth full of pins seemed to interrupt. And Lady Harman
would go and watch Susan Burnet by the hour together and think what an
enviably independent young woman she was, and listen with interest and
something between horror and admiration to the various impressions of
life she had gathered during a hardy and adventurous career.
Their early conversations were about Susan Burnet's business and the
general condition of things in that world of upholsterers' young women
in which Susan had lived until she perceived the possibilities of a
"connexion," and set up for herself. And the condition of things in that
world, as Susan described it, brought home to Lady Harman just how
sheltered and limited her own upbringing had been. "It isn't right,"
said Susan, "the way they send girls out with fellers into empty houses.
Naturally the men get persecuting them. They don't seem hardly able to
help it, some of them, and I will say this for them, that a lot of the
girls go more than half way with them, leading them on. Still there's a
sort of man won't leave you alone. One I used to be sent out with and a
married man too he was, Oh!--he used to give me a time. Why I've bit his
hands before now, bit hard, before he'd leave go of me. It's my opinion
the married men are worse than the single. Bolder they are. I pushed him
over a scuttle once and he hit his head against a bookcase. I was fair
frightened of him. 'You little devil,' he says; 'I'll be even with you
yet....' Oh! I've been called worse things than that.... Of course a
respectable girl gets through with it, but it's trying and to some it's
a sort of temptation...."
"I should have thought," reflected Lady Harman, "you could have told
someone."
"It's queer," said Susan; "but it never seemed to me the sort of thing a
girl ought to go telling. It's a kind of private thing. And besides, it
isn't exactly easy to tell.... I suppose the Firm didn't want to be
worried by complaints and disputes about that sort of thing. And it
isn't always easy to say just which of the two is to blame."
"But how old are the girls they send out?" asked Lady Harman.
"Some's as young as seventeen or eighteen. It all depends on the sort of
work that's wanted to be done...."
"Of course a lot of them have to marry...."
This lurid little picture of vivid happenings in unoccupied houses and
particularly of the prim, industrious, capable Susan Burnet, biting
aggressive wrists, stuck in Lady Harman's imagination. She seemed to be
looking into hitherto unsuspected pits of simple and violent living just
beneath her feet. Susan told some upholsteress love tales, real love
tales, with a warmth and honesty of passion in them that seemed at once
dreadful and fine to Lady Harman's underfed imagination. Under
encouragement Susan expanded the picture, beyond these mere glimpses of
workshop and piece-work and furtive lust. It appeared that she was
practically the head of her family; there was a mother who had
specialized in ill-health, a sister of defective ability who stayed at
home, a brother in South Africa who was very good and sent home money,
and three younger sisters growing up. And father,--she evaded the
subject of father at first. Then presently Lady Harman had some glimpses
of an earlier phase in Susan Burnet's life "before any of us were
earning money." Father appeared as a kindly, ineffectual, insolvent
figure struggling to conduct a baker's and confectioner's business in
Walthamstow, mother was already specializing, there were various
brothers and sisters being born and dying. "How many were there of you
altogether?" asked Lady Harman.
"Thirteen there was. Father always used to laugh and say he'd had a fair
baker's dozen. There was Luke to begin with----"
Susan began to count on her fingers and recite braces of scriptural
names.
She could only make up her tale to twelve. She became perplexed. Then
she remembered. "Of course!" she cried: "there was Nicodemus. He was
still-born. I _always_ forget Nicodemus, poor little chap! But he
came--was it sixth or seventh?--seventh after Anna."
She gave some glimpses of her father and then there was a collapse of
which she fought shy. Lady Harman was too delicate to press her to talk
of that.
But one day in the afternoon Susan's tongue ran.
She was telling how first she went to work before she was twelve.
"But I thought the board schools----" said Lady Harman.
"I had to go before the committee," said Susan. "I had to go before the
committee and ask to be let go to work. There they was, sitting round a
table in a great big room, and they was as kind as anything, one old
gentleman with a great white beard, he was as kind as could be. 'Don't
you be frightened, my dear,' he says. 'You tell us why you want to go
out working.' 'Well,' I says, '_somebody's_ got to earn something,' and
that made them laugh in a sort of fatherly way, and after that there
wasn't any difficulty. You see it was after Father's Inquest, and
everybody was disposed to be kind to us. 'Pity they can't all go
instead of this educational Tommy Rot,' the old gentleman says. 'You
learn to work, my dear'--and I did...."
She paused.
"Father's inquest?" said Lady Harman.
Susan seemed to brace herself to the occasion. "Father," she said, "was
drowned. I know--I hadn't told you that before. He was drowned in the
Lea. It's always been a distress and humiliation to us there had to be
an Inquest. And they threw out things.... It's why we moved to
Haggerston. It's the worst that ever happened to us in all our lives.
Far worse. Worse than having the things sold or the children with
scarlet fever and having to burn everything.... I don't like to talk
about it. I can't help it but I don't....
"I don't know why I talk to you as I do, Lady Harman, but I don't seem
to mind talking to you. I don't suppose I've opened my mouth to anyone
about it, not for years--except to one dear friend I've got--her who
persuaded me to be a church member. But what I've always said and what I
will always say is this, that I don't believe any evil of Father, I
don't believe, I won't ever believe he took his life. I won't even
believe he was in drink. I don't know how he got in the river, but I'm
certain it wasn't so. He was a weak man, was Father, I've never denied
he was a weak man. But a harder working man than he was never lived. He
worried, anyone would have worried seeing the worries he had. The shop
wasn't paying as it was; often we never tasted meat for weeks together,
and then there came one of these Internationals, giving overweight and
underselling...."
"One of these Internationals?"
"Yes, I don't suppose you've ever heard of them. They're in the poorer
neighbourhoods chiefly. They sell teas and things mostly now but they
began as bakers' shops and what they did was to come into a place and
undersell until all the old shops were ruined and shut up. That was what
they tried to do and Father hadn't no more chance amongst them than a
mouse in a trap.... It was just like being run over. All the trade that
stayed with us after a bit was Bad Debts. You can't blame people I
suppose for going where they get more and pay less, and it wasn't till
we'd all gone right away to Haggerston that they altered things and put
the prices up again. Of course Father lost heart and all that. He didn't
know what to do, he'd sunk all he had in the shop; he just sat and moped
about. Really,--he was pitiful. He wasn't able to sleep; he used to get
up at nights and go about downstairs. Mother says she found him once
sweeping out the bakehouse at two o'clock in the morning. He got it into
his head that getting up like that would help him. But I don't believe
and I won't believe he wouldn't have seen it through if he could. Not to
my dying day will I believe that...."
Lady Harman reflected. "But couldn't he have got work again--as a
baker?"
"It's hard after you've had a shop. You see all the younger men've come
on. They know the new ways. And a man who's had a shop and failed, he's
lost heart. And these stores setting up make everything drivinger. They
do things a different way. They make it harder for everyone."
Both Lady Harman and Susan Burnet reflected in silence for a few seconds
upon the International Stores. The sewing woman was the first to speak.
"Things like that," she said, "didn't ought to be. One shop didn't ought
to be allowed to set out to ruin another. It isn't fair trading, it's a
sort of murder. It oughtn't to be allowed. How was father to know?..."
"There's got to be competition," said Lady Harman.
"I don't call that competition," said Susan Burnet.
"But,--I suppose they give people cheaper bread."
"They do for a time. Then when they've killed you they do what they
like.... Luke--he's one of those who'll say anything--well, he used to
say it was a regular Monopoly. But it's hard on people who've set out to
live honest and respectable and bring up a family plain and decent to be
pushed out of the way like that."
"I suppose it is," said Lady Harman.
"What was father to _do_?" said Susan, and turned to Sir Isaac's
armchair from which this discourse had distracted her.
And then suddenly, in a voice thick with rage, she burst out: "And then
Alice must needs go and take their money. That's what sticks in _my_
throat."
Still on her knees she faced about to Lady Harman.
"Alice goes into one of their Ho'burn branches as a waitress, do what I
could to prevent her. It makes one mad to think of it. Time after time
I've said to her, 'Alice,' I've said, 'sooner than touch their dirty
money I'd starve in the street.' And she goes! She says it's all
nonsense of me to bear a spite. Laughs at me! 'Alice,' I told her, 'it's
a wonder the spirit of poor father don't rise up against you.' And she
laughs. Calls that bearing a spite.... Of course she was little when it
happened. She can't remember, not as I remember...."
Lady Harman reflected for a time. "I suppose you don't know," she began,
addressing Susan's industrious back; "you don't know who--who owns these
International Stores?"
"I suppose it's some company," said Susan. "I don't see that it lets
them off--being in a company."
§8
We have done much in the last few years to destroy the severe
limitations of Victorian delicacy, and all of us, from princesses and
prime-ministers' wives downward, talk of topics that would have been
considered quite gravely improper in the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, some topics have, if anything, become more indelicate than
they were, and this is especially true of the discussion of income, of
any discussion that tends, however remotely, to inquire, Who is it at
the base of everything who really pays in blood and muscle and
involuntary submissions for _your_ freedom and magnificence? This,
indeed, is almost the ultimate surviving indecency. So that it was with
considerable private shame and discomfort that Lady Harman pursued even
in her privacy the train of thought that Susan Burnet had set going. It
had been conveyed into her mind long ago, and it had settled down there
and grown into a sort of security, that the International Bread and Cake
Stores were a very important contribution to Progress, and that Sir
Isaac, outside the gates of his home, was a very useful and beneficial
personage, and richly meriting a baronetcy. She hadn't particularly
analyzed this persuasion, but she supposed him engaged in a kind of
daily repetition, but upon modern scientific lines, of the miracle of
the loaves and fishes, feeding a great multitude that would otherwise
have gone hungry. She knew, too, from the advertisements that flowered
about her path through life, that this bread in question was
exceptionally clean and hygienic; whole front pages of the _Daily
Messenger_, headed the "Fauna of Small Bakehouses," and adorned with a
bordering of _Blatta orientalis_, the common cockroach, had taught her
that, and she knew that Sir Isaac's passion for purity had also led to
the _Old Country Gazette's_ spirited and successful campaign for a
non-party measure securing additional bakehouse regulation and
inspection. And her impression had been that the growing and developing
refreshment side of the concern was almost a public charity; Sir Isaac
gave, he said, a larger, heavier scone, a bigger pat of butter, a more
elegant teapot, ham more finely cut and less questionable pork-pies
than any other system of syndicated tea-shops. She supposed that
whenever he sat late at night going over schemes and papers, or when he
went off for days together to Cardiff or Glasgow or Dublin, or such-like
centres, or when he became preoccupied at dinner and whistled
thoughtfully through his teeth, he was planning to increase the amount
or diminish the cost of tea and cocoa-drenched farinaceous food in the
stomachs of that section of our national adolescence which goes out
daily into the streets of our great cities to be fed. And she knew his
vans and catering were indispensable to the British Army upon its
manoeuvres....
Now the smashing up of the Burnet family by the International Stores was
disagreeably not in the picture of these suppositions. And the
remarkable thing is that this one little tragedy wouldn't for a moment
allow itself to be regarded as an exceptional accident in an otherwise
fair vast development. It remained obstinately a specimen--of the other
side of the great syndication.
It was just as if she had been doubting subconsciously all along.... In
the silence of the night she lay awake and tried to make herself believe
that the Burnet case was just a unique overlooked disaster, that it
needed only to come to Sir Isaac's attention to be met by the fullest
reparation....
After all she did not bring it to Sir Isaac's attention.
But one morning, while this phase of new doubts was still lively in her
mind, Sir Isaac told her he was going down to Brighton, and then along
the coast road in a car to Portsmouth, to pay a few surprise visits,
and see how the machine was working. He would be away a night, an
unusual breach in his habits.
"Are you thinking of any new branches, Isaac?"
"I may have a look at Arundel."
"Isaac." She paused to frame her question carefully. "I suppose there
are some shops at Arundel now."
"I've got to see to that."
"If you open----I suppose the old shops get hurt. What becomes of the
people if they do get hurt?"
"That's _their_ look-out," said Sir Isaac.
"Isn't it bad for them?"
"Progress is Progress, Elly."
"It _is_ bad for them. I suppose----Wouldn't it be sometimes kinder if
you took over the old shop--made a sort of partner of him, or
something?"
Sir Isaac shook his head. "I want younger men," he said. "You can't get
a move on the older hands."
"But, then, it's rather bad----I suppose these little men you shut
up,--some of them must have families."
"You're theorizing a bit this morning, Elly," said Sir Isaac, looking up
over his coffee cup.
"I've been thinking--about these little people."
"Someone's been talking to you about my shops," said Sir Isaac, and
stuck out an index finger. "If that's Georgina----"
"It isn't Georgina," said Lady Harman, but she had it very clear in her
mind that she must not say who it was.
"You can't make a business without squeezing somebody," said Sir Isaac.
"It's easy enough to make a row about any concern that grows a bit. Some
people would like to have every business tied down to a maximum turnover
and so much a year profit. I dare say you've been hearing of these
articles in the _London Lion_. Pretty stuff it is, too. This fuss about
the little shopkeepers; that's a new racket. I've had all that row about
the waitresses before, and the yarn about the Normandy eggs, and all
that, but I don't see that you need go reading it against me, and
bringing it up at the breakfast-table. A business is a business, it
isn't a charity, and I'd like to know where you and I would be if we
didn't run the concern on business lines.... Why, that _London Lion_
fellow came to me with the first two of those articles before the thing
began. I could have had the whole thing stopped if I liked, if I'd
chosen to take the back page of his beastly cover. That shows the stuff
the whole thing is made of. That shows you. Why!--he's just a
blackmailer, that's what he is. Much he cares for my waitresses if he
can get the dibs. Little shopkeepers, indeed! I know 'em! Nice martyrs
they are! There isn't one wouldn't _skin_ all the others if he got half
a chance...."
Sir Isaac gave way to an extraordinary fit of nagging anger. He got up
and stood upon the hearthrug to deliver his soul the better. It was an
altogether unexpected and illuminating outbreak. He was flushed with
guilt. The more angry and eloquent he became, the more profoundly
thoughtful grew the attentive lady at the head of his table....
When at last Sir Isaac had gone off in the car to Victoria, Lady Harman
rang for Snagsby. "Isn't there a paper," she asked, "called the _London
Lion_?"
"It isn't one I think your ladyship would like," said Snagsby, gently
but firmly.
"I know. But I want to see it. I want copies of all the issues in which
there have been articles upon the International Stores."
"They're thoroughly volgar, me lady," said Snagsby, with a large
dissuasive smile.
"I want you to go out into London and get them now."
Snagsby hesitated and went. Within five minutes he reappeared with a
handful of buff-covered papers.
"There 'appened to be copies in the pantry, me lady," he said. "We can't
imagine 'ow they got there; someone must have brought them in, but 'ere
they are quite at your service, me lady." He paused for a discreet
moment. Something indescribably confidential came into his manner. "I
doubt if Sir Isaac will quite like to 'ave them left about, me
lady--after you done with them."
She was in a mood of discovery. She sat in the room that was all
furnished in pink (her favourite colour) and read a bitter, malicious,
coarsely written and yet insidiously credible account of her husband's
business methods. Something within herself seemed to answer, "But didn't
you know this all along?" That large conviction that her wealth and
position were but the culmination of a great and honourable social
service, a conviction that had been her tacit comfort during much
distasteful loyalty seemed to shrivel and fade. No doubt the writer was
a thwarted blackmailer; even her accustomed mind could distinguish a
twang of some such vicious quality in his sentences; but that did not
alter the realities he exhibited and exaggerated. There was a
description of how Sir Isaac pounced on his managers that was manifestly
derived from a manager he had dismissed. It was dreadfully like him.
Convincingly like him. There was a statement of the wages he paid his
girl assistants and long extracts from his codes of rules and schedules
of fines....
When she put down the paper she was suddenly afflicted by a vivid vision
of Susan Burnet's father, losing heart and not knowing what to do. She
had an unreasonable feeling that Susan Burnet's father must have been a
small, kindly, furry, bunnyish, little man. Of course there had to be
progress and the survival of the fittest. She found herself weighing
what she imagined Susan Burnet's father to be like, against the ferrety
face, stooping shoulders and scheming whistle of Sir Isaac.
There were times now when she saw her husband with an extreme
distinctness.
§9
As this cold and bracing realization that all was not right with her
position, with Sir Isaac's business procedure and the world generally,
took possession of Lady Harman's thoughts there came also with it and
arising out of it quite a series of new moods and dispositions. At times
she was very full of the desire "to do something," something that would,
as it were, satisfy and assuage this growing uneasiness of
responsibility in her mind. At times her consuming wish was not to
assuage but escape from this urgency. It worried her and made her feel
helpless, and she wanted beyond anything else to get back to that
child's world where all experiences are adventurous and everything is
finally right. She felt, I think, that it was a little unfair to her
that this something within her should be calling upon her to take all
sorts of things gravely--hadn't she been a good wife and brought four
children into the world...?
I am setting down here as clearly as possible what wasn't by any means
clear in Lady Harman's mind. I am giving you side by side phases that
never came side by side in her thoughts but which followed and ousted
and obliterated one another. She had moods of triviality. She had moods
of magnificence. She had moods of intense secret hostility to her urgent
little husband, and moods of genial tolerance for everything there was
in her life. She had moods, and don't we all have moods?--of scepticism
and cynicism, much profounder than the conventions and limitations of
novel-writing permit us to tell here. And for hardly any of these moods
had she terms and recognitions....
It isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of
one's material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern
conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every
healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings. Strong
instincts battled in Lady Harman against this intermittent sense of
responsibility that was beginning to worry her. An immense lot of her
was for simply running away from these troublesome considerations, for
covering herself up from them, for distraction.
And about this time she happened upon "Elizabeth and her German Garden,"
and was very greatly delighted and stimulated by that little sister of
Montaigne. She was charmed by the book's fresh gaiety, by its gallant
resolve to set off all the good things there are in this world, the
sunshine and flowers and laughter, against the limitations and
thwartings and disappointments of life. For a time it seemed to her that
these brave consolations were solutions, and she was stirred by an
imitative passion. How stupid had she not been to let life and Sir Isaac
overcome her! She felt that she must make herself like Elizabeth,
exactly like Elizabeth; she tried forthwith, and a certain difficulty
she found, a certain deadness, she ascribed to the square modernity of
her house and something in the Putney air. The house was too large, it
dominated the garden and controlled her. She felt she must get away to
some place that was chiefly exterior, in the sunshine, far from towns
and struggling, straining, angry and despairing humanity, from
syndicated shops and all the embarrassing challenges of life. Somehow
there it would be possible to keep Sir Isaac at arm's length; and the
ghost of Susan Burnet's father could be left behind to haunt the square
rooms of the London house. And there she would live, horticultural,
bookish, whimsical, witty, defiant, happily careless.
And it was this particular conception of evasion that had set her
careering about the countryside in her car, looking for conceivable
houses of refuge from this dark novelty of social and personal care, and
that had driven her into the low long room of Black Strand and the
presence of Mr. Brumley.
Of what ensued and the appearance and influence of Lady Beach-Mandarin
and how it led among other things to a lunch invitation from that lady
the reader has already been informed.
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
THE ADVENTUROUS AFTERNOON
§1
You will perhaps remember that before I fell into this extensive
digression about Lady Harman's upbringing, we had got to the entry of
Mrs. Sawbridge into the house bearing a plunder of Sir Isaac's best
roses. She interrupted a conversation of some importance. Those roses at
this point are still unwithered and fragrant, and moreover they are
arranged according to Mrs. Sawbridge's ideas of elegance about Sir
Isaac's home.... And Sir Isaac, when that conversation could be renewed,
categorically forbade Lady Harman to go to Lady Beach-Mandarin's lunch
and Lady Harman went to Lady Beach-Mandarin's lunch.
She had some peculiar difficulties in getting to that lunch.
It is necessary to tell certain particulars. They are particulars that
will distress the delicacy of Mrs. Sawbridge unspeakably if ever she
chances to read this book. But a story has to be told. You see Sir Isaac
Harman had never considered it advisable to give his wife a private
allowance. Whatever she wished to have, he maintained, she could have.
The bill would afterwards be paid by his cheque on the first day of the
month following the receipt of the bill. He found a generous pleasure in
writing these cheques, and Lady Harman was magnificently housed, fed and
adorned. Moreover, whenever she chose to ask for money he gave her
money, usually double of what she demanded,--and often a kiss or so into
the bargain. But after he had forbidden her to go to Lady
Beach-Mandarin's so grave an estrangement ensued that she could not ask
him for money. A door closed between them. And the crisis had come at an
unfortunate moment. She possessed the sum of five shillings and
eightpence.
She perceived quite early that this shortness of money would greatly
embarrass the rebellion she contemplated. She was exceptionally ignorant
of most worldly things, but she knew there was never yet a campaign
without a war chest. She felt entitled to money....
She planned several times to make a demand for replenishment with a
haughty dignity; the haughty dignity was easy enough to achieve, but the
demand was not. A sensitive dread of her mother's sympathetic curiosity
barred all thoughts of borrowing in that direction,--she and her mother
"never discussed money matters." She did not want to get Georgina into
further trouble. And besides, Georgina was in Devonshire.
Even to get to Lady Beach-Mandarin's became difficult under these
circumstances. She knew that Clarence, though he would take her into the
country quite freely, had been instructed, on account of Sir Isaac's
expressed dread of any accident happening to her while alone, not to
plunge with her into the vortex of London traffic. Only under direct
orders from Sir Isaac would Clarence take her down Putney Hill; though
she might go up and away--to anywhere. She knew nothing of pawnshops or
any associated methods of getting cash advances, and the possibility of
using the telephone to hire an automobile never occurred to her. But she
was fully resolved to go. She had one advantage in the fact that Sir
Isaac didn't know the precise date of the disputed engagement. When that
arrived she spent a restless morning and dressed herself at last with
great care. She instructed Peters, her maid, who participated in these
preparations with a mild astonishment, that she was going out to lunch,
asked her to inform Mrs. Sawbridge of the fact and, outwardly serene,
made a bolt for it down the staircase and across the hall. The great
butler appeared; she had never observed how like a large note of
interrogation his forward contours could be.
"I shall be out to lunch, Snagsby," she said, and went past him into the
sunshine.
She left a discreetly astonished Snagsby behind her.
("Now where are we going out to lunch?" said Snagsby presently to
Peters.
"I've never known her so particular with her clothes," said the maid.
"Never before--not in the same way; it's something new and special to
this affair," Snagsby reflected, "I wonder now if Sir Isaac...."
"One can't help observing things," said the maid, after a pause. "Mute
though we be.")
Lady Harman had the whole five and eightpence with her. She had managed
to keep it intact in her jewel case, declaring she had no change when
any small demands were made on her.
With an exhilaration so great that she wanted sorely to laugh aloud she
walked out through her big open gates and into the general publicity of
Putney Hill. Why had she not done as much years ago? How long she had
been, working up to this obvious thing! She hadn't been out in such
complete possession of herself since she had been a schoolgirl. She held
up a beautifully gloved hand to a private motor-car going downhill and
then to an engaged taxi going up, and then with a slightly dashed
feeling, picked up her skirt and walked observantly downhill. Her reason
dispelled a transitory impression that these two vehicles were on Sir
Isaac's side against her.
There was quite a nice taxi on the rank at the bottom of the hill. The
driver, a pleasant-looking young man in a white cap, seemed to have been
waiting for her in particular; he met her timid invitation halfway and
came across the road to her and jumped down and opened the door. He took
her instructions as though they were after his own heart, and right in
front of her as she sat was a kind of tin cornucopia full of artificial
flowers that seemed like a particular attention to her. His fare was two
and eightpence and she gave him four shillings. He seemed quite
gratified by her largesse, his manner implied he had always thought as
much of her, from first to last their relations had been those of sunny
contentment, and it was only as she ascended the steps of Lady
Beach-Mandarin's portico, that it occurred to her that she now had
insufficient money for an automobile to take her home. But there were
railways and buses and all sorts of possibilities; the day was an
adventure; and she entered the drawing-room with a brow that was
beautifully unruffled. She wanted to laugh still; it animated her eyes
and lips with the pleasantest little stir you can imagine.
"A-a-a-a-a-h!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin in a high note, and threw
out--it had an effect of being quite a number of arms--as though she was
one of those brass Indian goddesses one sees.
Lady Harman felt taken in at once to all that capacious bosom involved
and contained....
§2
It was quite an amusing lunch. But any lunch would have been amusing to
Lady Harman in the excitement of her first act of deliberate
disobedience. She had never been out to lunch alone in all her life
before; she experienced a kind of scared happiness, she felt like
someone at Lourdes who has just thrown away crutches. She was seated
between a pink young man with an eyeglass whose place was labelled
"Bertie Trevor" and who was otherwise unexplained, and Mr. Brumley. She
was quite glad to see Mr. Brumley again, and no doubt her eyes showed
it. She had hoped to see him. Miss Sharsper was sitting nearly opposite
to her, a real live novelist pecking observations out of life as a hen
pecks seeds amidst scenery, and next beyond was a large-headed
inattentive fluffy person who was Mr. Keystone the well-known critic.
And there was Agatha Alimony under a rustling vast hat of green-black
cock's feathers next to Sir Markham Crosby, with whom she had been
having an abusive controversy in the _Times_ and to whom quite
elaborately she wouldn't speak, and there was Lady Viping with her
lorgnette and Adolphus Blenker, Horatio's younger and if possible more
gentlemanly brother--Horatio of the _Old Country Gazette_ that is--sole
reminder that there was such a person as Sir Isaac in the world. Lady
Beach-Mandarin's mother and the Swiss governess and the tall but
retarded daughter, Phyllis, completed the party. The reception was
lively and cheering; Lady Beach-Mandarin enfolded her guests in
generosities and kept them all astir like a sea-swell under a squadron,
and she introduced Lady Harman to Miss Alimony by public proclamation
right across the room because there were two lavish tables of
bric-à-brac, a marble bust of old Beach-Mandarin and most of the rest of
the party in the way. And at the table conversation was like throwing
bread, you never knew whom you might hit or who might hit you. (But Lady
Beach-Mandarin produced an effect of throwing whole loaves.) Bertie
Trevor was one of those dancing young men who talk to a woman as though
they were giving a dog biscuits, and mostly it was Mr. Brumley who did
such talking as reached Lady Harman's ear.
Mr. Brumley was in very good form that day. He had contrived to remind
her of all their Black Strand talk while they were still eating _Petites
Bouchées à la Reine_. "Have you found that work yet?" he asked and
carried her mind to the core of her situation. Then they were snatched
up into a general discussion of Bazaars. Sir Markham spoke of a great
bazaar that was to be held on behalf of one of the many Shakespear
Theatre movements that were then so prevalent. Was Lady Beach-Mandarin
implicated? Was anyone? He told of novel features in contemplation. He
generalized about bazaars and, with an air of having forgotten the
presence of Miss Alimony, glanced at the Suffrage Bazaar--it was a
season of bazaars. He thought poorly of the Suffrage Bazaar. The hostess
intervened promptly with anecdotes of her own cynical daring as a
Bazaar-seller, Miss Sharsper offered fragments of a reminiscence about
signing one of her own books for a Bookstall, Blenker told a well-known
Bazaar anecdote brightly and well, and the impending skirmish was
averted.
While the Bazaar talk still whacked to and fro about the table Mr.
Brumley got at Lady Harman's ear again. "Rather tantalizing these
meetings at table," he said. "It's like trying to talk while you swim in
a rough sea...."
Then Lady Beach-Mandarin intervened with demands for support for her own
particular Bazaar project and they were eating salad before there was a
chance of another word between them. "I must confess that when I want to
talk to people I like to get them alone," said Mr. Brumley, and gave
form to thoughts that were already on the verge of crystallization in
her own mind. She had been recalling that she had liked his voice
before, noting something very kindly and thoughtful and brotherly about
his right profile and thinking how much an hour's talk with him would
help to clear up her ideas.
"But it's so difficult to get one alone," said Lady Harman, and suddenly
an idea of the utmost daring and impropriety flashed into her mind. She
was on the verge of speaking it forthwith and then didn't, she met
something in his eye that answered her own and then Lady Beach-Mandarin
was foaming over them like a dam-burst over an American town.
"What do _you_ think, Mr. Brumley?" demanded Lady Beach-Mandarin.
"?"
"About Sir Markham's newspaper symposium. They asked him what allowance
he gave his wife. Sent a prepaid reply telegram."
"But he hasn't got a wife!"
"They don't stick at a little thing like that," said Sir Markham grimly.
"I think a husband and wife ought to have everything in common like the
early Christians," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "_We_ always did," and so
got the discussion afloat again off the sandbank of Mr. Brumley's
inattention.
It was quite a good discussion and Lady Harman contributed an
exceptionally alert and intelligent silence. Sir Markham distrusted Lady
Beach-Mandarin's communism and thought that anyhow it wouldn't do for a
financier or business man. He favoured an allowance. "So did Sir
Joshua," said the widow Viping. This roused Agatha Alimony. "Allowance
indeed!" she cried. "Is a wife to be on no better footing than a
daughter? The whole question of a wife's financial autonomy needs
reconsidering...."
Adolphus Blenker became learned and lucid upon Pin-money and dowry and
the customs of savage tribes, and Mr. Brumley helped with
corroboration....
Mr. Brumley managed to say just one other thing to Lady Harman before
the lunch was over. It struck her for a moment as being irrelevant. "The
gardens at Hampton Court," he said, "are delightful just now. Have you
seen them? Autumnal fires. All the September perennials lifting their
spears in their last great chorus. It's the _Götterdämmerung_ of the
year."
She was going out of the room before she appreciated his possible
intention.
Lady Beach-Mandarin delegated Sir Markham to preside over the men's
cigars and bounced and slapped her four ladies upstairs to the
drawing-room. Her mother disappeared and so did Phyllis and the
governess. Lady Harman heard a large aside to Lady Viping: "Isn't she
perfectly lovely?" glanced to discover the lorgnette in appreciative
action, and then found herself drifting into a secluded window-seat and
a duologue with Miss Agatha Alimony. Miss Alimony was one of that large
and increasing number of dusky, grey-eyed ladies who go through life
with an air of darkly incomprehensible significance. She led off Lady
Harman as though she took her away to reveal unheard-of mysteries and
her voice was a contralto undertone that she emphasized in some
inexplicable way by the magnetic use of her eyes. Her hat of cock's
feathers which rustled like familiar spirits greatly augmented the
profundity of her effect. As she spoke she glanced guardedly at the
other ladies at the end of the room and from first to last she seemed
undecided in her own mind whether she was a conspirator or a prophetess.
She had heard of Lady Harman before, she had been longing impatiently to
talk to her all through the lunch. "You are just what we want," said
Agatha. "What who want?" asked Lady Harman, struggling against the
hypnotic influence of her interlocutor. "_We_," said Miss Agatha, "the
Cause. The G.S.W.S.
"We want just such people as you," she repeated, and began in panting
rhetorical sentences to urge the militant cause.
For her it was manifestly a struggle against "the Men." Miss Alimony had
no doubts of her sex. It had nothing to learn, nothing to be forgiven,
it was compact of obscured and persecuted marvels, it needed only
revelation. "They know Nothing," she said of the antagonist males,
bringing deep notes out of the melodious caverns of her voice; "they
know _Nothing_ of the Deeper Secrets of Woman's Nature." Her discourse
of a general feminine insurrection fell in very closely with the spirit
of Lady Harman's private revolt. "We want the Vote," said Agatha, "and
we want the Vote because the Vote means Autonomy. And then----"
She paused voluminously. She had already used that word "Autonomy" at
the lunch table and it came to her hearer to supply a long-felt want.
Now she poured meanings into it, and Lady Harman with each addition
realized more clearly that it was still a roomy sack for more. "A woman
should be absolute mistress of herself," said Miss Alimony, "absolute
mistress of her person. She should be free to develop----"
Germinating phrases these were in Lady Harman's ear.
She wanted to know about the Suffrage movement from someone less
generously impatient than Georgina, for Georgina always lost her temper
about it and to put it fairly _ranted_, this at any rate was serene and
confident, and she asked tentative ill-formed questions and felt her way
among Miss Alimony's profundities. She had her doubts, her instinctive
doubts about this campaign of violence, she doubted its wisdom, she
doubted its rightness, and she perceived, but she found it difficult to
express her perception, that Miss Alimony wasn't so much answering her
objections as trying to swamp her with exalted emotion. And if there was
any flaw whatever in her attention to Miss Alimony's stirring talk, it
was because she was keeping a little look-out in the tail of her eye
for the reappearance of the men, and more particularly for the
reappearance of Mr. Brumley with whom she had a peculiar feeling of
uncompleted relations. And at last the men came and she caught his
glance and saw that her feeling was reciprocated.
She was presently torn from Agatha, who gasped with pain at the parting
and pursued her with a sedulous gaze as a doctor might watch an injected
patient, she parted with Lady Beach-Mandarin with a vast splash of
enthusiasm and mutual invitations, and Lady Viping came and pressed her
to come to dinner and rapped her elbow with her lorgnette to emphasize
her invitation. And Lady Harman after a still moment for reflection
athwart which the word Autonomy flickered, accepted this invitation
also.
§3
Mr. Brumley hovered for a few moments in the hall conversing with Lady
Beach-Mandarin's butler, whom he had known for some years and helped
about a small investment, and who was now being abjectly polite and
grateful to him for his attention. It gave Mr. Brumley a nice feudal
feeling to establish and maintain such relationships. The furry-eyed boy
fumbled with the sticks and umbrellas in the background and wondered if
he too would ever climb to these levels of respectful gilt-tipped
friendliness. Mr. Brumley hovered the more readily because he knew Lady
Harman was with the looking-glass in the little parlour behind the
dining-room on her way to the outer world. At last she emerged. It was
instantly manifest to Mr. Brumley that she had expected to find him
there. She smiled frankly at him, with the faintest admission of
complicity in her smile.
"Taxi, milady?" said the butler.
She seemed to reflect. "No, I will walk." She hesitated over a glove
button. "Mr. Brumley, is there a Tube station near here?"
"Not two minutes. But can't I perhaps take you in a taxi?"
"I'd rather walk."
"I will show you----"
He found himself most agreeably walking off with her.
Still more agreeable things were to follow for Mr. Brumley.
She appeared to meditate upon a sudden idea. She disregarded some
conversational opening of his that he forgot in the instant. "Mr.
Brumley," she said, "I didn't intend to go directly home."
"I'm altogether at your service," said Mr. Brumley.
"At least," said Lady Harman with that careful truthfulness of hers, "it
occurred to me during lunch that I wouldn't go directly home."
Mr. Brumley reined in an imagination that threatened to bolt with him.
"I want," said Lady Harman, "to go to Kensington Gardens, I think. This
can't be far from Kensington Gardens--and I want to sit there on a green
chair and--meditate--and afterwards I want to find a tube railway or
something that will take me back to Putney. There is really no need for
me to go directly home.... It's very stupid of me but I don't know my
way about London as a rational creature should do. So will you take me
and put me in a green chair and--tell me how afterwards I can find the
Tube and get home? Do you mind?"
"All my time, so long as you want it, is at your service," said Mr.
Brumley with convincing earnestness. "And it's not five minutes to the
gardens. And afterwards a taxi-cab----"
"No," said Lady Harman mindful of her one-and-eightpence, "I prefer a
tube. But that we can talk about later. You're sure, Mr. Brumley, I'm
not invading your time?"
"I wish you could see into my mind," said Mr. Brumley.
She became almost barefaced. "It is so true," she said, "that at lunch
one can't really talk to anyone. And I've so wanted to talk to you. Ever
since we met before."
Mr. Brumley conveyed an unfeigned delight.
"Since then," said Lady Harman, "I've read your _Euphemia_ books." Then
after a little unskilful pause, "again." Then she blushed and added, "I
_had_ read one of them, you know, before."
"Exactly," he said with an infinite helpfulness.
"And you seem so sympathetic, so understanding. I feel that all sorts of
things that are muddled in my mind would come clear if I could have a
really Good Talk. To you...."
They were now through the gates approaching the Albert Memorial. Mr.
Brumley was filled with an idea so desirable that it made him fear to
suggest it.
"Of course we can talk very comfortably here," he said, "under these
great trees. But I do so wish----Have you seen those great borders at
Hampton Court? The whole place is glowing, and in such sunshine as
this----A taxi--will take us there under the hour. If you are free until
half-past five."
_Why shouldn't she?_
The proposal seemed so outrageous to all the world of Lady Harman that
in her present mood she felt it was her duty in the cause of womanhood
to nerve herself and accept it....
"I mustn't be later than half-past five."
"We could snatch a glimpse of it all and be back before then."
"In that case----It would be very agreeable."
(_Why shouldn't she?_ It would no doubt make Sir Isaac furiously
angry--if he heard of it. But it was the sort of thing other women of
her class did; didn't all the novels testify? She had a perfect
right----
And besides, Mr. Brumley was so entirely harmless.)
§4
It had been Lady Harman's clear intention to have a luminous and
illuminating discussion of the peculiar difficulties and perplexities of
her position with Mr. Brumley. Since their first encounter this idea
had grown up in her mind. She was one of those women who turn
instinctively to men and away from women for counsel. There was to her
perception something wise and kindly and reassuring in him; she felt
that he had lived and suffered and understood and that he was ready to
help other people to live; his heart she knew from his published works
was buried with his dead Euphemia, and he seemed as near a thing to a
brother and a friend as she was ever likely to meet. She wanted to tell
him all this and then to broach her teeming and tangled difficulties,
about her own permissible freedoms, about her social responsibilities,
about Sir Isaac's business. But now as their taxi dodged through the
traffic of Kensington High Street and went on its way past Olympia and
so out westwards, she found it extremely difficult to fix her mind upon
the large propositions with which it had been her intention to open. Do
as she would to feel that this was a momentous occasion, she could not
suppress, she could not ignore an obstinate and entirely undignified
persuasion that she was having a tremendous lark. The passing vehicles,
various motors, omnibuses, vans, carriages, the thronging pedestrians,
the shops and houses, were all so distractingly interesting that at last
she had to put it fairly to herself whether she hadn't better resign
herself to the sensations of the present and reserve that sustained
discussion for an interval she foresaw as inevitable on some comfortable
seat under great trees at Hampton Court. You cannot talk well and
penetratingly about fundamental things when you are in a not too
well-hung taxi which is racing to get ahead of a vast red
motor-omnibus....
With a certain discretion Mr. Brumley had instructed the chauffeur to
cross the river not at Putney but at Hammersmith, and so they went by
Barnes station and up a still almost rural lane into Richmond Park, and
there suddenly they were among big trees and bracken and red deer and it
might have been a hundred miles from London streets. Mr. Brumley
directed the driver to make a detour that gave them quite all the best
of the park.
The mind of Mr. Brumley was also agreeably excited and dispersed on this
occasion. It was an occasion of which he had been dreaming very
frequently of late, he had invented quite remarkable dialogues during
those dreams, and now he too was conversationally inadequate and with a
similar feeling of unexpected adventure. He was now no more ready to go
to the roots of things than Lady Harman. He talked on the way down
chiefly of the route they were following, of the changes in the London
traffic due to motor traction and of the charm and amenity of Richmond
Park. And it was only after they had arrived at Hampton Court and
dismissed the taxi and spent some time upon the borders, that they came
at last to a seat under a grove beside a long piece of water bearing
water lilies, and sat down and made a beginning with the Good Talk. Then
indeed she tried to gather together the heads of her perplexity and Mr.
Brumley did his best to do justice to confidence she reposed in him....
It wasn't at all the conversation he had dreamt of; it was halting, it
was inconclusive, it was full of a vague dissatisfaction.
The roots of this dissatisfaction lay perhaps more than anything else in
her inattention to him--how shall I say it?--as _Him_. Hints have been
conveyed to the reader already that for Mr. Brumley the universe was
largely a setting, a tangle, a maze, a quest enshrining at the heart of
it and adumbrating everywhere, a mystical Her, and his experience of
this world had pointed him very definitely to the conclusion that for
that large other half of mankind which is woman, the quality of things
was reciprocal and centred, for all the appearances and pretences of
other interests, in--Him. And he was disposed to believe that the other
things in life, not merely the pomp and glories but the faiths and
ambitions and devotions, were all demonstrably little more than posings
and dressings of this great duality. A large part of his own interests
and of the interests of the women he knew best, was the sustained and in
some cases recurrent discovery and elaboration of lights and glimpses of
Him or Her as the case might be, in various definite individuals; and it
was a surprise to him, it perplexed him to find that this lovely person,
so beautifully equipped for those mutual researches which constituted,
he felt, the heart of life, was yet completely in her manner unaware of
this primary sincerity and looking quite simply, as it were, over him
and through him at such things as the ethics of the baking,
confectionery and refreshment trade and the limits of individual
responsibility in these matters. The conclusion that she was
"unawakened" was inevitable.
The dream of "awakening" this Sleeping Beauty associated itself in a
logical sequence with his interpretations. I do not say that such
thoughts were clear in Mr. Brumley's mind, they were not, but into this
shape the forms of his thoughts fell. Such things dimly felt below the
clear level of consciousness were in him. And they gave his attempt to
take up and answer the question that perplexed her, something of the
quality of an attempt to clothe and serve hidden purposes. It could not
but be evident to him that the effort of Lady Harman to free herself a
little from her husband's circumvallation and to disentangle herself a
little from the realities of his commercial life, might lead to such a
liberation as would leave her like a nascent element ready to recombine.
And it was entirely in the vein of this drift of thought in him that he
should resolve upon an assiduous proximity against that moment of
release and awakening....
I do not do Mr. Brumley as the human lover justice if I lead you to
suppose that he plotted thus clearly and calculatingly. Yet all this was
in his mind. All this was in Mr. Brumley, but it wasn't Mr. Brumley.
Presented with it as a portrait of his mind, he would have denied it
indignantly--and, knowing it was there, have grown a little flushed in
his denials. Quite equally in his mind was a simple desire to please
her, to do what she wished, to help her because she wanted help. And a
quite keen desire to be clean and honest about her and everything
connected with her, for his own sake as well as for her sake--for the
sake of the relationship....
So you have Mr. Brumley on the green seat under the great trees at
Hampton Court, in his neat London clothes, his quite becoming silk-hat,
above his neatly handsome and intelligent profile, with his gloves in
his hand and one arm over the seat back, going now very earnestly and
thoughtfully into the question of the social benefit of the
International Bread and Cake Stores and whether it was possible for her
to "do anything" to repair any wrongs that might have arisen out of that
organization, and you will understand why there is a little flush in his
cheek and why his sentences are a trifle disconnected and tentative and
why his eye wanders now to the soft raven tresses about Lady Harman's
ear, now to the sweet movement of her speaking lips and now to the
gracious droop of her pose as she sits forward, elbow upon crossed knee
and chin on glove, and jabs her parasol at the ground in her
unaccustomed efforts to explain and discuss the difficulties of her
position.
And you will understand too why it is that he doesn't deal with the
question before him so simply and impartially as he seems to do.
Obscuring this extremely interesting problem of a woman growing to
man-like sense of responsibility in her social consequences, is the
dramatic proclivity that makes him see all this merely as something
which must necessarily weaken Lady Harman's loyalty and qualify her
submission to Sir Isaac, that makes him want to utilize it and develop
it in that direction....
§5
Moreover so complex is the thought of man, there was also another stream
of mental activity flowing in the darker recesses of Mr. Brumley's mind.
Unobtrusively he was trying to count the money in his pockets and make
certain estimates.
It had been his intention to replenish his sovereign purse that
afternoon at his club and he was only reminded of this abandoned plan
when he paid off his taxi at the gates of Hampton Court. The fare was
nine and tenpence and the only piece of gold he had was a
half-sovereign. But there was a handful of loose silver in his trouser
pocket and so the fare and tip were manageable. "Will you be going back,
sir?" asked the driver.
And Mr. Brumley reflected too briefly and committed a fatal error. "No,"
he said with his mind upon that loose silver. "We shall go back by
train."
Now it is the custom with taxi-cabs that take people to such outlying
and remote places as Hampton Court, to be paid off and to wait loyally
until their original passengers return. Thereby the little machine is
restrained from ticking out twopences which should go in the main to the
absent proprietor, and a feeling of mutuality is established between the
driver and his fare. But of course this cab being released presently
found another passenger and went away....
I have written in vain if I have not conveyed to you that Mr. Brumley
was a gentleman of great and cultivated delicacy, that he liked the
seemly and handsome side of things and dreaded the appearance of any
flaw upon his prosperity as only a man trained in an English public
school can do. It was intolerable to think of any hitch in this happy
excursion which was to establish he knew not what confidence between
himself and Lady Harman. From first to last he felt it had to go with an
air--and what was the first class fare from Hampton Court to
Putney--which latter station he believed was on the line from Hampton
Court to London--and could one possibly pretend it was unnecessary to
have tea? And so while Lady Harman talked about her husband's
business--"our business" she called it--and shrank from ever saying
anything more about the more intimate question she had most in mind, the
limits to a wife's obedience, Mr. Brumley listened with these financial
solicitudes showing through his expression and giving it a quality of
intensity that she found remarkably reassuring. And once or twice they
made him miss points in her remarks that forced him back upon that very
inferior substitute for the apt answer, a judicious "Um."
(It would be quite impossible to go without tea, he decided. He himself
wanted tea quite badly. He would think better when he had had some
tea....)
The crisis came at tea. They had tea at the inn upon the green that
struck Mr. Brumley as being most likely to be cheap and which he
pretended to choose for some trivial charm about the windows. And it
wasn't cheap, and when at last Mr. Brumley was faced by the little slip
of the bill and could draw his money from his pocket and look at it, he
knew the worst and the worst was worse than he had expected. The bill
was five shillings (Should he dispute it? Too ugly altogether, a dispute
with a probably ironical waiter!) and the money in his hand amounted to
four shillings and sixpence.
He acted surprise with the waiter's eye upon him. (Should he ask for
credit? They might be frightfully disagreeable in such a cockney resort
as this.) "Tut, tut," said Mr. Brumley, and then--a little late for
it--resorted to and discovered the emptiness of his sovereign purse. He
realized that this was out of the picture at this stage, felt his ears
and nose and cheeks grow hot and pink. The waiter's colleague across the
room became interested in the proceedings.
"I had no idea," said Mr. Brumley, which was a premeditated falsehood.
"Is anything the matter?" asked Lady Harman with a sisterly interest.
"My dear Lady Harman, I find myself----Ridiculous position. Might I
borrow half a sovereign?"
He felt sure that the two waiters exchanged glances. He looked at
them,--a mistake again--and got hotter.
"Oh!" said Lady Harman and regarded him with frank amusement in her
eyes. The thing struck her at first in the light of a joke. "I've only
got one-and-eightpence. I didn't expect----"
She blushed as beautifully as ever. Then she produced a small but
plutocratic-looking purse and handed it to him.
"Most remarkable--inconvenient," said Mr. Brumley, opening the precious
thing and extracting a shilling. "That will do," he said and dismissed
the waiter with a tip of sixpence. Then with the open purse still in his
hand, he spent much of his remaining strength trying to look amused and
unembarrassed, feeling all the time that with his flushed face and in
view of all the circumstances of the case he must be really looking very
silly and fluffy.
"It's really most inconvenient," he remarked.
"I never thought of the--of this. It was silly of me," said Lady Harman.
"Oh no! Oh dear no! The silliness I can assure you is all mine. I can't
tell you how entirely apologetic----Ridiculous fix. And after I had
persuaded you to come here."
"Still we were able to pay," she consoled him.
"But you have to get home!"
She hadn't so far thought of that. It brought Sir Isaac suddenly into
the picture. "By half-past five," she said with just the faintest
flavour of interrogation.
Mr. Brumley looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to five.
"Waiter," he said, "how do the trains run from here to Putney?"
"I don't _think_, sir, that we have any trains from here to Putney----"
An A.B.C. Railway Guide was found and Mr. Brumley learnt for the first
time that Putney and Hampton Court are upon two distinct and separate
and, as far as he could judge by the time-table, mutually hostile
branches of the South Western Railway, and that at the earliest they
could not get to Putney before six o'clock.
Mr. Brumley was extremely disconcerted. He perceived that he ought to
have kept his taxi. It amounted almost to a debt of honour to deliver
this lady secure and untarnished at her house within the next hour. But
this reflection did not in the least degree assist him to carry it out
and as a matter of fact Mr. Brumley became flurried and did not carry it
out. He was not used to being without money, it unnerved him, and he
gave way to a kind of hectic _savoir faire_. He demanded a taxi of the
waiter. He tried to evolve a taxi by will power alone. He went out with
Lady Harman and back towards the gates of Hampton Court to look for
taxis. Then it occurred to him that they might be losing the 5.25 up. So
they hurried over the bridge of the station.
He had a vague notion that he would be able to get tickets on credit at
the booking office if he presented his visiting card. But the clerk in
charge seemed to find something uncongenial in his proposal. He did not
seem to like what he saw of Mr. Brumley through his little square window
and Mr. Brumley found something slighting and unpleasant in his manner.
It was one of those little temperamental jars which happen to men of
delicate sensibilities and Mr. Brumley tried to be reassuringly
overbearing in his manner and then lost his temper and was threatening
and so wasted precious moments what time Lady Harman waited on the
platform, with a certain shadow of doubt falling upon her confidence in
him, and watched the five-twenty-five gather itself together and start
Londonward. Mr. Brumley came out of the ticket office resolved to travel
without tickets and carry things through with a high hand just as it
became impossible to do so by that train, and then I regret to say he
returned for some further haughty passages with the ticket clerk upon
the duty of public servants to point out such oversights as his, that
led to repartee and did nothing to help Lady Harman on her homeward way.
Then he discovered a current time-table and learnt that now even were
all the ticket difficulties over-ridden he could not get Lady Harman to
Putney before twenty minutes past seven, so completely is the South
Western Railway not organized for conveying people from Hampton Court to
Putney. He explained this as well as he could to Lady Harman, and then
led her out of the station in another last desperate search for a taxi.
"We can always come back for that next train," he said. "It doesn't go
for half an hour."
"I cannot blame myself sufficiently," he said for the eighth or ninth
time....
It was already well past a quarter to six before Mr. Brumley bethought
himself of the London County Council tramcars that run from the palace
gates. Along these an ample four-pennyworth was surely possible and at
the end would be taxis----There _must_ be taxis. The tram took
them--but oh! how slowly it seemed!--to Hammersmith by a devious route
through interminable roads and streets, and long before they reached
that spot twilight had passed into darkness, and all the streets and
shops were flowering into light and the sense of night and lateness was
very strong. After they were seated in the tram a certain interval of
silence came between them and then Lady Harman laughed and Mr. Brumley
laughed--there was no longer any need for him to be energetic and
fussy--and they began to have that feeling of adventurous amusement
which comes on the further side of desperation. But beneath the
temporary elation Lady Harman was a prey to grave anxieties and Mr.
Brumley could not help thinking he had made a tremendous ass of himself
in that ticket clerk dispute....
At Hammersmith they got out, two quite penniless travellers, and after
some anxious moments found a taxi. It took them to Putney Hill. Lady
Harman descended at the outer gates of her home and walked up the drive
in the darkness while Mr. Brumley went on to his club and solvency
again. It was five minutes past eight when he entered the hall of his
club....
§6
It had been Lady Harman's original intention to come home before four,
to have tea with her mother and to inform her husband when he returned
from the city of her entirely dignified and correct disobedience to his
absurd prohibitions. Then he would have bullied at a disadvantage, she
would have announced her intention of dining with Lady Viping and making
the various calls and expeditions for which she had arranged and all
would have gone well. But you see how far accident and a spirit of
enterprise may take a lady from so worthy a plan, and when at last she
returned to the Victorian baronial home in Putney it was very nearly
eight and the house blazed with crisis from pantry to nursery. Even the
elder three little girls, who were accustomed to be kissed goodnight by
their "boofer muvver," were still awake and--catching the subtle
influence of the atmosphere of dismay about them--in tears. The very
under-housemaids were saying: "Where _ever_ can her ladyship 'ave got
to?"
Sir Isaac had come home that day at an unusually early hour and with a
peculiar pinched expression that filled even Snagsby with apprehensive
alertness. Sir Isaac had in fact returned in a state of quite unwonted
venom. He had come home early because he wished to vent it upon Ellen,
and her absence filled him with something of that sensation one has when
one puts out a foot for the floor and instead a step drops one down--it
seems abysmally.
"But where's she gone, Snagsby?"
"Her ladyship _said_ to lunch, Sir Isaac," said Snagsby.
"Good gracious! Where?"
"Her ladyship didn't _say_, Sir Isaac."
"But where? Where the devil----?"
"I have--'ave no means whatever of knowing, Sir Isaac."
He had a defensive inspiration.
"Perhaps Mrs. Sawbridge, Sir Isaac...."
Mrs. Sawbridge was enjoying the sunshine upon the lawn. She sat in the
most comfortable garden chair, held a white sunshade overhead, had the
last new novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward upon her lap, and was engaged in
trying not to wonder where her daughter might be. She beheld with a
distinct blenching of the spirit Sir Isaac advancing towards her. She
wondered more than ever where Ellen might be.
"Here!" cried her son-in-law. "Where's Ellen gone?"
Mrs. Sawbridge with an affected off-handedness was sure she hadn't the
faintest idea.
"Then you _ought_ to have," said Isaac. "She ought to be at home."
Mrs. Sawbridge's only reply was to bridle slightly.
"Where's she got to? Where's she gone? Haven't you any idea at all?"
"I was not favoured by Ellen's confidence," said Mrs. Sawbridge.
"But you _ought_ to know," cried Sir Isaac. "She's your daughter. Don't
you know anything of _either_ of your daughters. I suppose you don't
care where they are, either of them, or what mischief they're up to.
Here's a man--comes home early to his tea--and no wife! After hearing
all I've done at the club."
Mrs. Sawbridge stood up in order to be more dignified than a seated
position permitted.
"It is scarcely my business, Sir Isaac," she said, "to know of the
movements of your wife."
"Nor Georgina's apparently either. Good God! I'd have given a hundred
pounds that this shouldn't have happened!"
"If you must speak to me, Sir Isaac, will you please kindly refrain
from--from the deity----"
"Oh! shut it!" said Sir Isaac, blazing up to violent rudeness. "Why!
Don't you know, haven't you an idea? The infernal foolery! Those
tickets. She got those women----Look here, if you go walking away with
your nose in the air before I've done----Look here! Mrs. Sawbridge, you
listen to me----Georgina. I'm speaking of Georgina."
The lady was walking now swiftly and stiffly towards the house, her face
very pale and drawn, and Sir Isaac hurrying beside her in a white fury
of expostulation. "I tell you," he cried, "Georgina----"
There was something maddeningly incurious about her. He couldn't
understand why she didn't even pause to hear what Georgina had done and
what he had to say about it. A person so wrapped up in her personal and
private dignity makes a man want to throw stones. Perhaps she knew of
Georgina's misdeeds. Perhaps she sympathized....
A sense of the house windows checked his pursuit of her ear. "Then go,"
he said to her retreating back. "_Go!_ I don't care if you go for good.
I don't care if you go altogether. If _you_ hadn't had the upbringing of
these two girls----"
She was manifestly out of earshot and in full yet almost queenly flight
for the house. He wanted to say things about her. _To_ someone. He was
already saying things to the garden generally. What does one marry a
wife for? His mind came round to Ellen again. Where had she got to? Even
if she had gone out to lunch, it was time she was back. He went to his
study and rang for Snagsby.
"Lady Harman back yet?" he asked grimly.
"No, Sir Isaac."
"Why isn't she back?"
Snagsby did his best. "Perhaps, Sir Isaac, her ladyship has
experienced--'as hexperienced a naxident."
Sir Isaac stared at that idea for a moment. Then he thought, 'Someone
would have telephoned,' "No," he said, "she's out. That's where she is.
And I suppose I can wait here, as well as I can until she chooses to
come home. Degenerate foolish nonsense!..."
He whistled between his teeth like an escape of steam. Snagsby, after
the due pause of attentiveness, bowed respectfully and withdrew....
He had barely time to give a brief outline of the interview to the
pantry before a violent ringing summoned him again. Sir Isaac wished to
speak to Peters, Lady Harman's maid. He wanted to know where Lady Harman
had gone; this being impossible, he wanted to know where Lady Harman had
seemed to be going.
"Her Ladyship _seemed_ to be going out to lunch, Sir Isaac," said
Peters, her meek face irradiated by helpful intelligence.
"Oh _get_ out!" said Sir Isaac. "_Get_ out!"
"Yes, Sir Isaac," said Peters and obeyed....
"He's in a rare bait about her," said Peters to Snagsby downstairs.
"I'm inclined to think her ladyship will catch it pretty hot," said
Snagsby.
"He can't _know_ anything," said Peters.
"What about?" asked Snagsby.
"Oh, _I_ don't know," said Peters. "Don't ask _me_ about her...."
About ten minutes later Sir Isaac was heard to break a little china
figure of the goddess Kwannon, that had stood upon his study
mantel-shelf. The fragments were found afterwards in the fireplace....
The desire for self-expression may become overwhelming. After Sir Isaac
had talked to himself about Georgina and Lady Harman for some time in
his study, he was seized with a great longing to pour some of this
spirited stuff into the entirely unsympathetic ear of Mrs. Sawbridge. So
he went about the house and garden looking for her, and being at last
obliged to enquire about her, learnt from a scared defensive housemaid
whom he cornered suddenly in the conservatory, that she had retired to
her own room. He went and rapped at her door but after one muffled
"Who's that?" he could get no further response.
"I want to tell you about Georgina," he said.
He tried the handle but the discreet lady within had turned the key upon
her dignity.
"I want," he shouted, "to tell you about Georgina.... GEORGINA! Oh
_damn_!"
Silence.
Tea awaited him downstairs. He hovered about the drawing-room, making
noises between his teeth.
"Snagsby," said Sir Isaac, "just tell Mrs. Sawbridge I shall be obliged
if she will come down to tea."
"Mrs. Sawbridge 'as a '_ead_ache, Sir Isaac," said Mr. Snagsby with
extreme blandness. "She asked me to acquaint you. She 'as ordered tea in
'er own apartment."
For a moment Sir Isaac was baffled. Then he had an inspiration. "Just
get me the _Times_, Snagsby," he said.
He took the paper and unfolded it until a particular paragraph was
thrown into extreme prominence. This he lined about with his fountain
pen and wrote above it with a quivering hand, "These women's tickets
were got by Georgina under false pretences from me." He handed the paper
thus prepared back to Snagsby. "Just take this paper to Mrs. Sawbridge,"
he said, "and ask her what she thinks of it?"
But Mrs. Sawbridge tacitly declined this proposal for a correspondence
_viâ_ Snagsby.
§7
There was no excuse for Georgina.
Georgina had obtained tickets from Sir Isaac for the great party
reception at Barleypound House, under the shallow pretext that she
wanted them for "two spinsters from the country," for whose good
behaviour she would answer, and she had handed them over to that
organization of disorder which swayed her mind. The historical outrage
upon Mr. Blapton was the consequence.
Two desperate and misguided emissaries had gone to the great reception,
dressed and behaving as much as possible like helpful Liberal women;
they had made their way towards the brilliant group of leading Liberals
of which Mr. Blapton was the centre, assuming an almost Whig-like
expression and bearing to mask the fires within, and had then suddenly
accosted him. It was one of those great occasions when the rank and file
of the popular party is privileged to look upon Court dress. The
ministers and great people had come on from Buckingham Palace in their
lace and legs. Scarlet and feathers, splendid trains and mysterious
ribbons and stars, gave an agreeable intimation of all that it means to
be in office to the dazzled wives and daughters of the party stalwarts
and fired the ambition of innumerable earnest but earnestly competitive
young men. It opened the eyes of the Labour leaders to the higher
possibilities of Parliament. And then suddenly came a stir, a rush, a
cry of "Tear off his epaulettes!" and outrage was afoot. And two quite
nice-looking young women!
It is unhappily not necessary to describe the scene that followed. Mr.
Blapton made a brave fight for his epaulettes, fighting chiefly with
his cocked hat, which was bent double in the struggle. Mrs. Blapton
gave all the assistance true womanliness could offer and, in fact, she
boxed the ears of one of his assailants very soundly. The intruders were
rescued in an extremely torn and draggled condition from the indignant
statesmen who had fallen upon them by tardy but decisive police....
Such scenes sprinkle the recent history of England with green and purple
patches and the interest of this particular one for us is only because
of Georgina's share in it. That was brought home to Sir Isaac, very
suddenly and disagreeably, while he was lunching at the Climax Club with
Sir Robert Charterson. A man named Gobbin, an art critic or something of
that sort, one of those flimsy literary people who mar the solid worth
of so many great clubs, a man with a lot of hair and the sort of loose
tie that so often seems to be less of a tie than a detachment from all
decent restraints, told him. Charterson was holding forth upon the
outrage.
"That won't suit Sir Isaac, Sir Robert," said Gobbin presuming on his
proximity.
Sir Isaac tried to give him a sort of look one gives to an
unsatisfactory clerk.
"They went there with Sir Isaac's tickets," said Gobbin.
"They _never_----!"
"Horatio Blenker was looking for you in the hall. Haven't you seen him?
After all the care they took. The poor man's almost in tears."
"They never had tickets of mine!" cried Sir Isaac stoutly and
indignantly.
And then the thought of Georgina came like a blow upon his heart....
In his flurry he went on denying....
The subsequent conversation in the smoking-room was as red-eared and
disagreeable for Sir Isaac as any conversation could be. "But how
_could_ such a thing have happened?" he asked in a voice that sounded
bleached to him. "How could such a thing have come about?" Their eyes
were dreadful. Did they guess? Could they guess? Conscience within him
was going up and down shouting out, "Georgina, your sister-in-law,
Georgina," so loudly that he felt the whole smoking-room must be hearing
it....
§8
As Lady Harman came up through the darkness of the drive to her home,
she was already regretting very deeply that she had not been content to
talk to Mr. Brumley in Kensington Gardens instead of accepting his
picturesque suggestion of Hampton Court. There was an unpleasant
waif-like feeling about this return. She was reminded of pictures
published in the interests of Doctor Barnardo's philanthropies,--Dr.
Barnardo her favourite hero in real life,--in which wistful little
outcasts creep longingly towards brightly lit but otherwise respectable
homes. It wasn't at all the sort of feeling she would have chosen if she
had had a choice of feelings. She was tired and dusty and as she came
into the hall the bright light was blinding. Snagsby took her wrap. "Sir
Isaac, me lady, 'as been enquiring for your ladyship," he communicated.
Sir Isaac appeared on the staircase.
"Good gracious, Elly!" he shouted. "Where you been?"
Lady Harman decided against an immediate reply. "I shall be ready for
dinner in half an hour," she told Snagsby and went past him to the
stairs.
Sir Isaac awaited her. "Where you been?" he repeated as she came up to
him.
A housemaid on the staircase and the second nursemaid on the nursery
landing above shared Sir Isaac's eagerness to hear her answer. But they
did not hear her answer, for Lady Harman with a movement that was all
too reminiscent of her mother's in the garden, swept past him towards
the door of her own room. He followed her and shut the door on the
thwarted listeners.
"Here!" he said, with a connubial absence of restraint. "Where the devil
you been? What the deuce do you think you've been getting up to?"
She had been calculating her answers since the moment she had realized
that she was to return home at a disadvantage. (It is not my business to
blame her for a certain disingenuousness; it is my business simply to
record it.) "I went out to lunch at Lady Beach-Mandarin's," she said. "I
told you I meant to."
"Lunch!" he cried. "Why, it's eight!"
"I met--some people. I met Agatha Alimony. I have a perfect right to go
out to lunch----"
"You met a nice crew I'll bet. But that don't account for your being out
to eight, does it? With all the confounded household doing as it
pleases!"
"I went on--to see the borders at Hampton Court."
"With _her_?"
"_Yes_," said Lady Harman....
It wasn't what she had meant to happen. It was an inglorious declension
from her contemplated pose of dignified assertion. She was impelled to
do her utmost to get away from this lie she had uttered at once, to
eliminate Agatha from the argument by an emphatic generalization. "I've
a perfect right," she said, suddenly nearly breathless, "to go to
Hampton Court with anyone I please, talk about anything I like and stay
there as long as I think fit."
He squeezed his thin lips together for a silent moment and then
retorted. "You've got nothing of the sort, nothing of the sort. You've
got to do your duty like everybody else in the world, and your duty is
to be in this house controlling it--and not gossiping about London just
where any silly fancy takes you."
"I don't think that _is_ my duty," said Lady Harman after a slight pause
to collect her forces.
"Of _course_ it's your duty. You know it's your duty. You know perfectly
well. It's only these rotten, silly, degenerate, decadent fools who've
got ideas into you----" The sentence staggered under its load of
adjectives like a camel under the last straw and collapsed. "_See?_" he
said.
Lady Harman knitted her brows.
"I do my duty," she began.
But Sir Isaac was now resolved upon eloquence. His mind was full with
the accumulations of an extremely long and bitter afternoon and urgent
to discharge. He began to answer her and then a passion of rage flooded
him. Suddenly he wanted to shout and use abusive expressions and it
seemed to him there was nothing to prevent his shouting and using
abusive expressions. So he did. "Call this your duty," he said, "gadding
about with some infernal old suffragette----"
He paused to gather force. He had never quite let himself go to his wife
before; he had never before quite let himself go to anyone. He had
always been in every crisis just a little too timid to let himself go.
But a wife is privileged. He sought strength and found it in words from
which he had hitherto abstained. It was not a discourse to which print
could do justice; it flickered from issue to issue. He touched upon
Georgina, upon the stiffness of Mrs. Sawbridge's manner, upon the
neurotic weakness of Georgina's unmarried state, upon the general decay
of feminine virtue in the community, upon the laxity of modern
literature, upon the dependent state of Lady Harman, upon the unfairness
of their relations which gave her every luxury while he spent his days
in arduous toil, upon the shame and annoyance in the eyes of his
servants that her unexplained absence had caused him.
He emphasized his speech by gestures. He thrust out one rather large
ill-shaped hand at her with two vibrating fingers extended. His ears
became red, his nose red, his eyes seemed red and all about these points
his face was wrathful white. His hair rose up into stiff scared
listening ends. He had his rights, he had some _little_ claim to
consideration surely, he might be just nobody but he wasn't going to
stand this much anyhow. He gave her fair warning. What was she, what did
she know of the world into which she wanted to rush? He lapsed into
views of Lady Beach-Mandarin--unfavourable views. I wish Lady
Beach-Mandarin could have heard him....
Ever and again Lady Harman sought to speak. This incessant voice
confused and baffled her; she had a just attentive mind at bottom and
down there was a most weakening feeling that there must indeed be some
misdeed in her to evoke so impassioned a storm. She had a curious and
disconcerting sense of responsibility for his dancing exasperation, she
felt she was to blame for it, just as years ago she had felt she was to
blame for his tears when he had urged her so desperately to marry him.
Some irrational instinct made her want to allay him. It is the supreme
feminine weakness, that wish to allay. But she was also clinging
desperately to her resolution to proclaim her other forthcoming
engagements. Her will hung on to that as a man hangs on to a mountain
path in a thunderburst. She stood gripping her dressing-table and ever
and again trying to speak. But whenever she did so Sir Isaac lifted a
hand and cried almost threateningly: "You hear me out, Elly! You hear me
out!" and went on a little faster....
(Limburger in his curious "_Sexuelle Unterschiede der Seele_," points
out as a probably universal distinction between the sexes that when a
man scolds a woman, if only he scolds loudly enough and long enough,
conviction of sin is aroused, while in the reverse case the result is
merely a murderous impulse. This he further says is not understood by
women, who hope by scolding to produce the similar effect upon men that
they themselves would experience. The passage is illustrated by figures
of ducking stools and followed by some carefully analyzed statistics of
connubial crime in Berlin in the years 1901-2. But in this matter let
the student compare the achievement of Paulina in _The Winter's Tale_
and reflect upon his own life. And moreover it is difficult to estimate
how far the twinges of conscience that Lady Harman was feeling were not
due to an entirely different cause, the falsification of her position by
the lie she had just told Sir Isaac.)
And presently upon this noisy scene in the great pink bedroom, with Sir
Isaac walking about and standing and turning and gesticulating and Lady
Harman clinging on to her dressing-table, and painfully divided between
her new connections, her sense of guilty deception and the deep
instinctive responsibilities of a woman's nature, came, like one of
those rows of dots that are now so frequent and so helpful in the art of
fiction, the surging, deep, assuaging note of Snagsby's gong: Booooooom.
Boom. Boooooom....
"Damn it!" cried Sir Isaac, smiting at the air with both fists clenched
and speaking as though this was Ellen's crowning misdeed, "and we aren't
even dressed for dinner!"
§9
Dinner had something of the stiffness of court ceremonial.
Mrs. Sawbridge, perhaps erring on the side of discretion, had consumed a
little soup and a wing of chicken in her own room. Sir Isaac was down
first and his wife found him grimly astride before the great dining-room
fire awaiting her. She had had her dark hair dressed with extreme
simplicity and had slipped on a blue velvet tea-gown, but she had been
delayed by a visit to the nursery, where the children were now flushed
and uneasily asleep.
Husband and wife took their places at the genuine Sheraton
dining-table--one of the very best pieces Sir Isaac had ever picked
up--and were waited on with a hushed, scared dexterity by Snagsby and
the footman.
Lady Harman and her husband exchanged no remarks during the meal; Sir
Isaac was a little noisy with his soup as became a man who controls
honest indignation, and once he complained briefly in a slightly hoarse
voice to Snagsby about the state of one of the rolls. Between the
courses he leant back in his chair and made faint sounds with his teeth.
These were the only breach of the velvety quiet. Lady Harman was
surprised to discover herself hungry, but she ate with thoughtful
dignity and gave her mind to the attempted digestion of the confusing
interview she had just been through.
It was a very indigestible interview.
On the whole her heart hardened again. With nourishment and silence her
spirit recovered a little from its abasement, and her resolution to
assert her freedom to go hither and thither and think as she chose
renewed itself. She tried to plan some way of making her declaration so
that she would not again be overwhelmed by a torrent of response. Should
she speak to him at the end of dinner? Should she speak to him while
Snagsby was in the room? But he might behave badly even with Snagsby in
the room and she could not bear to think of him behaving badly to her in
the presence of Snagsby. She glanced at him over the genuine old silver
bowl of roses in the middle of the table--all the roses were good _new_
sorts--and tried to estimate how he might behave under various methods
of declaration.
The dinner followed its appointed ritual to the dessert. Came the wine
and Snagsby placed the cigars and a little silver lamp beside his
master.
She rose slowly with a speech upon her lips. Sir Isaac remained seated
looking up at her with a mitigated fury in his little red-brown eyes.
The speech receded from her lips again.
"I think," she said after a strained pause, "I will go and see how
mother is now."
"She's only shamming," said Sir Isaac belatedly to her back as she went
out of the room.
She found her mother in a wrap before her fire and made her dutiful
enquiries.
"It's only quite a _slight_ headache," Mrs. Sawbridge confessed.
"But Isaac was so upset about Georgina and about"--she
flinched--"about--everything, that I thought it better to be out of
the way."
"What exactly has Georgina done?"
"It's in the paper, dear. On the table there."
Ellen studied the _Times_.
"Georgina got them the tickets," Mrs. Sawbridge explained. "I wish she
hadn't. It was so--so unnecessary of her."
There was a little pause as Lady Harman read. She put down the paper and
asked her mother if she could do anything for her.
"I--I suppose it's all Right, dear, now?" Mrs. Sawbridge asked.
"Quite," said her daughter. "You're sure I can do nothing for you,
mummy?"
"I'm kept so in the dark about things."
"It's quite all right now, mummy."
"He went on--dreadfully."
"It was annoying--of Georgina."
"It makes my position so difficult. I do wish he wouldn't want to speak
to me--about all these things.... Georgina treats me like a Perfect
Nonentity and then he comes----It's so inconsiderate. Starting Disputes.
Do you know, dear, I really think--if I were to go for a little time to
Bournemouth----?"
Her daughter seemed to find something attractive in the idea. She came
to the hearthrug and regarded her mother with maternal eyes.
"Don't you _worry_ about things, mummy," she said.
"Mrs. Bleckhorn told me of such a nice quiet boarding-house, almost
looking on the sea.... One would be safe from Insult there. You
know----" her voice broke for a moment, "he was Insulting, he _meant_ to
be Insulting. I'm--Upset. I've been thinking over it ever since."
§10
Lady Harman came out upon the landing. She felt absolutely without
backing in the world. (If only she hadn't told a lie!) Then with an
effort she directed her course downstairs to the dining-room.
(The lie had been necessary. It was only a detail. It mustn't blind her
to the real issue.)
She entered softly and found her husband standing before the fire
plunged in gloomy thoughts. Upon the marble mantel-shelf behind him was
a little glass; he had been sipping port in spite of the express
prohibition of his doctor and the wine had reddened the veins of his
eyes and variegated the normal pallor of his countenance with little
flushed areas. "Hel-lo," he said looking up suddenly as she closed the
door behind her.
For a moment there was something in their two expressions like that on
the faces of men about to box.
"I want you to understand," she said, and then; "The way you
behaved----"
There was an uncontrollable break in her voice. She had a dreadful
feeling that she might be going to cry. She made a great effort to be
cold and clear.
"I don't think you have a right--just because I am your wife--to control
every moment of my time. In fact you haven't. And I have a right to make
engagements.... I want you to know I am going to an afternoon meeting at
Lady Beach-Mandarin's. Next week. And I have promised to go to Miss
Alimony's to tea."
"Go on," he encouraged grimly.
"I am going to Lady Viping's to dinner, too; she asked me and I
accepted. Later."
She stopped.
He seemed to deliberate. Then suddenly he thrust out a face of pinched
determination.
"You _won't_, my lady," he said. "You bet your life you won't. _No!_ So
_now_ then!"
And then gripping his hands more tightly behind him, he made a step
towards her.
"You're losing your bearings, Lady Harman," he said, speaking with much
intensity in a low earnest voice. "You don't seem to be remembering
where you are. You come and you tell me you're going to do this and
that. Don't you know, Lady Harman, that it's your wifely duty to obey,
to do as I say, to behave as I wish?" He brought out a lean index finger
to emphasize his remarks. "And I am going to make you do it!" he said.
"I've a perfect right," she repeated.
He went on, regardless of her words. "What do you think you can do, Lady
Harman? You're going to all these places--how? Not in _my_ motor-car,
not with _my_ money. You've not a thing that isn't mine, that _I_
haven't given you. And if you're going to have a lot of friends I
haven't got, where're they coming to see you? Not in _my_ house! I'll
chuck 'em out if I find 'em. I won't have 'em. I'll turn 'em out. See?"
"I'm not a slave."
"You're a wife--and a wife's got to do what her husband wishes. You
can't have two heads on a horse. And in _this_ horse--this house I mean,
the head's--_me_!"
"I'm not a slave and I won't be a slave."
"You're a wife and you'll stick to the bargain you made when you married
me. I'm ready in reason to give you anything you want--if you do your
duty as a wife should. Why!--I spoil you. But this going about on your
own, this highty-flighty go-as-you-please,--no man on earth who's worth
calling a man will stand it. I'm not going to begin to stand it.... You
try it on. You try it, Lady Harman.... You'll come to your senses soon
enough. See? You start trying it on now--straight away. We'll make an
experiment. We'll watch how it goes. Only don't expect me to give you
any money, don't expect me to help your struggling family, don't expect
me to alter my arrangements because of you. Let's keep apart for a bit
and you go your way and I'll go mine. And we'll see who's sick of it
first, we'll see who wants to cry off."
"I came down here," said Lady Harman, "to give you a reasonable
notice----"
"And you found _I_ could reason too," interrupted Sir Isaac in a kind of
miniature shout, "you found I could reason too!"
"You think----Reason! I _won't_," said Lady Harman, and found herself in
tears. By an enormous effort she recovered something of her dignity and
withdrew. He made no effort to open the door, but stood a little
hunchbacked and with a sense of rhetorical victory surveying her
retreat.
§11
After Lady Harman's maid had left her that night, she sat for some time
in a low easy chair before her fire, trying at first to collect together
into one situation all the events of the day and then lapsing into that
state of mind which is not so much thinking as resting in the attitude
of thought. Presently, in a vaguely conceived future, she would go to
bed. She was stunned by the immense dimensions of the row her simple act
of defiance had evoked.
And then came an incredible incident, so incredible that next day she
still had great difficulty in deciding whether it was an actuality or a
dream. She heard a little very familiar sound. It was the last sound she
would have expected to hear and she turned sharply when she heard it.
The paper-covered door in the wall of her husband's apartment opened
softly, paused, opened some more and his little undignified head
appeared. His hair was already tumbled from his pillow.
He regarded her steadfastly for some moments with an expression between
shame and curiosity and smouldering rage, and then allowed his body,
clad now in purple-striped pyjamas, to follow his head into her room. He
advanced guiltily.
"Elly," he whispered. "Elly!"
She caught her dressing-gown about her and stood up.
"What is it, Isaac?" she asked, feeling curiously abashed at this
invasion.
"Elly," he said, still in that furtive undertone. "_Make it up!_"
"I want my freedom," she said, after a little pause.
"Don't be _silly_, Elly," he whispered in a tone of remonstrance and
advancing slowly towards her. "Make it up. Chuck all these ideas."
She shook her head.
"We've got to get along together. You can't go going about just
anywhere. We've got--we've got to be reasonable."
He halted, three paces away from her. His eyes weren't sorrowful eyes,
or friendly eyes; they were just shiftily eager eyes. "Look here," he
said. "It's all nonsense.... Elly, old girl; let's--let's make it up."
She looked at him and it dawned upon her that she had always imagined
herself to be afraid of him and that indeed she wasn't. She shook her
head obstinately.
"It isn't reasonable," he said. "Here, we've been the happiest of
people----Anything in reason I'll let you have." He paused with an
effect of making an offer.
"I want my autonomy," she said.
"Autonomy!" he echoed. "Autonomy! What's autonomy? Autonomy!"
This strange word seemed first to hold him in distressful suspense and
then to infuriate him.
"I come in here to make it up," he said, with a voice charged with
griefs, "after all you've done, and you go and you talk of autonomy!"
His feelings passed beyond words. An extremity of viciousness flashed
into his face. He gave vent to a snarl of exasperation, "Ya-ap!" he
said, he raised his clenched fists and seemed on the verge of assault,
and then with a gesture between fury and despair, he wheeled about and
the purple-striped pyjamas danced in passionate retreat from her room.
"Autonomy!..."
A slam, a noise of assaulted furniture, and then silence.
Lady Harman stood for some moments regarding the paper-covered door that
had closed behind him. Then she bared her white forearm and pinched
it--hard.
It wasn't a dream! This thing had happened.
§12
At a quarter to three in the morning, Lady Harman was surprised to find
herself wide awake. It was exactly a quarter to three when she touched
the stud of the ingenious little silver apparatus upon the table beside
her bed which reflected a luminous clock-face upon the ceiling. And her
mind was no longer resting in the attitude of thought but
extraordinarily active. It was active, but as she presently began to
realize it was not progressing. It was spinning violently round and
round the frenzied figure of a little man in purple-striped pyjamas
retreating from her presence, whirling away from her like something
blown before a gale. That seemed to her to symbolize the completeness of
the breach the day had made between her husband and herself.
She felt as a statesman might feel who had inadvertently--while
conducting some trivial negotiations--declared war.
She was profoundly alarmed. She perceived ahead of her abundant
possibilities of disagreeable things. And she wasn't by any means as
convinced of the righteousness of her cause as a happy warrior should
be. She had a natural disposition towards truthfulness and it worried
her mind that while she was struggling to assert her right to these
common social freedoms she should be tacitly admitting a kind of justice
in her husband's objections by concealing the fact that her afternoon's
companion was a man. She tried not to recognize the existence of a
doubt, but deep down in her mind there did indeed lurk a weakening
uncertainty about the right of a woman to free conversation with any man
but her own. Her reason disowned that uncertainty with scorn. But it
wouldn't go away for all her reason. She went about in her mind doing
her utmost to cut that doubt dead....
She tried to go back to the beginning and think it all out. And as she
was not used to thinking things out, the effort took the form of an
imaginary explanation to Mr. Brumley of the difficulties of her
position. She framed phrases. "You see, Mr. Brumley," she imagined
herself to be saying, "I want to do my duty as a wife, I have to do my
duty as a wife. But it's so hard to say just where duty leaves off and
being a mere slave begins. I cannot believe that _blind_ obedience is
any woman's duty. A woman needs--autonomy." Then her mind went off for a
time to a wrestle with the exact meaning of autonomy, an issue that had
not arisen hitherto in her mind.... And as she planned out such
elucidations, there grew more and more distinct in her mind a kind of
idealized Mr. Brumley, very grave, very attentive, wonderfully
understanding, saying illuminating helpful tonic things, that made
everything clear, everything almost easy. She wanted someone of that
quality so badly. The night would have been unendurable if she could not
have imagined Mr. Brumley of that quality. And imagining him of that
quality her heart yearned for him. She felt that she had been terribly
inexpressive that afternoon, she had shirked points, misstated points,
and yet he had been marvellously understanding. Ever and again his words
had seemed to pierce right through what she had been saying to what she
had been thinking. And she recalled with peculiar comfort a kind of
abstracted calculating look that had come at times into his eyes, as
though his thoughts were going ever so much deeper and ever so much
further than her blundering questionings could possibly have taken them.
He weighed every word, he had a guarded way of saying "Um...."
Her thoughts came back to the dancing little figure in purple-striped
pyjamas. She had a scared sense of irrevocable breaches. What would he
do to-morrow? What should she do to-morrow? Would he speak to her at
breakfast or should she speak first to him?... She wished she had some
money. If she could have foreseen all this she would have got some money
before she began....
So her mind went on round and round and the dawn was breaking before she
slept again.
§13
Mr. Brumley, also, slept little that night. He was wakefully mournful,
recalling each ungraceful incident of the afternoon's failure in turn
and more particularly his dispute with the ticket clerk, and thinking
over all the things he might have done--if only he hadn't done the
things he had done. He had made an atrocious mess of things. He felt he
had hopelessly shattered the fair fabric of impressions of him that Lady
Harman had been building up, that image of a wise humane capable man to
whom a woman would gladly turn; he had been flurried, he had been
incompetent, he had been ridiculously incompetent, and it seemed to him
that life was a string of desolating inadequacies and that he would
never smile again.
The probable reception of Lady Harman by her husband never came within
his imaginative scope. Nor did the problems of social responsibility
that Lady Harman had been trying to put to him exercise him very
greatly. The personal disillusionment was too strong for that.
About half-past four a faint ray of comfort came with the consideration
that after all a certain practical incapacity is part of the ensemble of
a literary artist, and then he found himself wondering what flowers of
wisdom Montaigne might not have culled from such a day's experience; he
began an imitative essay in his head and he fell asleep upon this at
last at about ten minutes past five in the morning.
There were better things than this in the composition of Mr. Brumley, we
shall have to go deep into these reserves before we have done with him,
but when he had so recently barked the shins of his self-esteem they had
no chance at all.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
LADY HARMAN LEARNS ABOUT HERSELF
§1
So it was that the great and long incubated quarrel between Lady Harman
and her husband broke into active hostilities.
In spite of my ill-concealed bias in favour of Lady Harman I have to
confess that she began this conflict rashly, planlessly, with no
equipment and no definite end. Particularly I would emphasize that she
had no definite end. She had wanted merely to establish a right to go
out by herself occasionally, exercise a certain choice of friends, take
on in fact the privileges of a grown-up person, and in asserting that
she had never anticipated that the participation of the household would
be invoked, or that a general breach might open between herself and her
husband. It had seemed just a definite little point at issue, but at Sir
Isaac's angry touch a dozen other matters that had seemed safely remote,
matters she had never yet quite properly thought about, had been drawn
into controversy. It was not only that he drew in things from outside;
he evoked things within herself. She discovered she was disposed to
fight not simply to establish certain liberties for herself but
also--which had certainly not been in her mind before--to keep her
husband away from herself. Something latent in the situation had
surprised her with this effect. It had arisen out of the quarrel like a
sharpshooter out of an ambuscade. Her right to go out alone had now only
the value of a mere pretext for far more extensive independence. The
ultimate extent of these independences, she still dared not contemplate.
She was more than a little scared. She wasn't prepared for so wide a
revision of her life as this involved. She wasn't at all sure of the
rightfulness of her position. Her conception of the marriage contract at
that time was liberal towards her husband. After all, didn't she owe
obedience? Didn't she owe him a subordinate's co-operation? Didn't she
in fact owe him the whole marriage service contract? When she thought of
the figure of him in his purple-striped pyjamas dancing in a paroxysm of
exasperation, that sense of responsibility which was one of her innate
characteristics reproached her. She had a curious persuasion that she
must be dreadfully to blame for provoking so ridiculous, so extravagant
an outbreak....
§2
She heard him getting up tumultuously and when she came down,--after a
brief interview with her mother who was still keeping her room,--she
found him sitting at the breakfast-table eating toast and marmalade in
a greedy malignant manner. The tentative propitiations of his proposal
to make things up had entirely disappeared, he was evidently in a far
profounder rage with her than he had been overnight. Snagsby too, that
seemly domestic barometer, looked extraordinarily hushed and grave. She
made a greeting-like noise and Sir Isaac scrunched "morning" up amongst
a crowded fierce mouthful of toast. She helped herself to tea and bacon
and looking up presently discovered his eye fixed upon her with an
expression of ferocious hatred....
He went off in the big car, she supposed to London, about ten and she
helped her mother to pack and depart by a train a little after midday.
She made a clumsy excuse for not giving that crisp little trifle of
financial assistance she was accustomed to, and Mrs. Sawbridge was
anxiously tactful about the disappointment. They paid a visit of
inspection and farewell to the nursery before the departure. Then Lady
Harman was left until lunch to resume her meditation upon this
unprecedented breach that had opened between her husband and herself.
She was presently moved to write a little note to Lady Beach-Mandarin
expressing her intention of attending a meeting of the Social Friends
and asking whether the date was the following Wednesday or Thursday. She
found three penny stamps in the bureau at which she wrote and this
served to remind her of her penniless condition. She spent some time
thinking out the possible consequences of that. How after all was she
going to do things, with not a penny in the world to do them with?
Lady Harman was not only instinctively truthful but also almost morbidly
honourable. In other words, she was simple-minded. The idea of a
community of goods between husband and wife had never established itself
in her mind, she took all Sir Isaac's presents in the spirit in which he
gave them, presents she felt they were on trust, and so it was that with
a six-hundred pound pearl necklace, a diamond tiara, bracelets, lockets,
rings, chains and pendants of the most costly kind--there had been a
particularly beautiful bracelet when Millicent was born, a necklace on
account of Florence, a fan painted by Charles Conder for Annette and a
richly splendid set of old Spanish jewellery--yellow sapphires set in
gold--to express Sir Isaac's gratitude for the baby--with all sorts of
purses, bags, boxes, trinkets and garments, with a bedroom and
morning-room rich in admirable loot, and with endless tradespeople
willing to give her credit it didn't for some time occur to her that
there was any possible means of getting pocket-money except by direct
demand from Sir Isaac. She surveyed her balance of two penny stamps and
even about these she felt a certain lack of negotiable facility.
She thought indeed that she might perhaps borrow money, but there again
her paralyzing honesty made her recoil from the prospect of uncertain
repayment. And besides, from whom could she borrow?...
It was on the evening of the second day that a chance remark from
Peters turned her mind to the extensive possibilities of liquidation
that lay close at hand. She was discussing her dinner dress with Peters,
she wanted something very plain and high and unattractive, and Peters,
who disapproved of this tendency and was all for female wiles and
propitiations, fell into an admiration of the pearl necklace. She
thought perhaps by so doing she might induce Lady Harman to wear it, and
if she wore it Sir Isaac might be a little propitiated, and if Sir Isaac
was a little propitiated it would be much more comfortable for Snagsby
and herself and everyone. She was reminded of a story of a lady who sold
one and substituted imitation pearls, no one the wiser, and she told
this to her mistress out of sheer garrulousness. "But if no one found
out," said Lady Harman, "how do you know?"
"Not till her death, me lady," said Peters, brushing, "when all things
are revealed. Her husband, they say, made it a present of to another
lady and the other lady, me lady, had it valued...."
Once the idea had got into Lady Harman's head it stayed there very
obstinately. She surveyed the things on the table before her with a
slightly lifted eyebrow. At first she thought the idea of disposing of
them an entirely dishonourable idea, and if she couldn't get it out of
her head again at least she made it stand in a corner. And while it
stood in a corner she began putting a price for the first time in her
life first upon this coruscating object and then that. Then somehow she
found herself thinking more and more whether among all these glittering
possessions there wasn't something that she might fairly regard as
absolutely her own. There were for example her engagement ring and,
still more debateable, certain other pre-nuptial trinkets Sir Isaac had
given her. Then there were things given her on her successive birthdays.
A birthday present of all presents is surely one's very own? But selling
is an extreme exercise of ownership. Since those early schooldays when
she had carried on an unprofitable traffic in stamps she had never sold
anything--unless we are to reckon that for once and for all she had sold
herself.
Concurrently with these insidious speculations Lady Harman found herself
trying to imagine how one sold jewels. She tried to sound Peters by
taking up the story of the necklace again. But Peters was uninforming.
"But where," asked Lady Harman, "could such a thing be done?"
"There are places, me lady," said Peters.
"But where?"
"In the West End, me lady. The West End is full of places--for things of
that sort. There's scarcely anything you can't do there, me lady--if
only you know how."
That was really all that Peters could impart.
"How _does_ one sell jewels?" Lady Harman became so interested in this
side of her perplexities that she did a little lose sight of those
subtler problems of integrity that had at first engaged her. Do
jewellers buy jewels as well as sell them? And then it came into her
head that there were such things as pawnshops. By the time she had
thought about pawnshops and tried to imagine one, her original complete
veto upon any idea of selling had got lost to sight altogether. Instead
there was a growing conviction that if ever she sold anything it would
be a certain sapphire and diamond ring which she didn't like and never
wore that Sir Isaac had given her as a birthday present two years ago.
But of course she would never dream of selling anything; at the utmost
she need but pawn. She reflected and decided that on the whole it would
be wiser not to ask Peters how one pawned. It occurred to her to consult
the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ on the subject, but though she learnt that
the Chinese pawnshops must not charge more than three per cent. per
annum, that King Edward the Third pawned his jewels in 1338 and that
Father Bernardino di Feltre who set up pawnshops in Assisi and Padua and
Pavia was afterward canonized, she failed to get any very clear idea of
the exact ritual of the process. And then suddenly she remembered that
she knew a finished expert in pawnshop work in the person of Susan
Burnet. Susan could tell her everything. She found some curtains in the
study that needed replacement, consulted Mrs. Crumble and, with a view
to economizing her own resources, made that lady send off an urgent
letter to Susan bidding her come forthwith.
§3
It has been said that Fate is a plagiarist. Lady Harman's Fate at any
rate at this juncture behaved like a benevolent plagiarist who was also
a little old-fashioned. This phase of speechless hostility was
complicated by the fact that two of the children fell ill, or at least
seemed for a couple of days to be falling ill. By all the rules of
British sentiment, this ought to have brought about a headlong
reconciliation at the tumbled bedside. It did nothing of the sort; it
merely wove fresh perplexities into the tangled skein of her thoughts.
On the day after her participation in that forbidden lunch Millicent,
her eldest daughter, was discovered with a temperature of a hundred and
one, and then Annette, the third, followed suit with a hundred. This
carried Lady Harman post haste to the nursery, where to an unprecedented
degree she took command. Latterly she had begun to mistrust the physique
of her children and to doubt whether the trained efficiency of Mrs.
Harblow the nurse wasn't becoming a little blunted at the edges by
continual use. And the tremendous quarrel she had afoot made her keenly
resolved not to let anything go wrong in the nursery and less disposed
than she usually was to leave things to her husband's servants. She
interviewed the doctor herself, arranged for the isolation of the two
flushed and cross little girls, saw to the toys and amusements which she
discovered had become a little flattened and disused by the servants'
imperatives of tidying up and putting away, and spent the greater part
of the next two days between the night and day nurseries.
She was a little surprised to find how readily she did this and how
easily the once entirely authoritative Mrs. Harblow submitted. It was
much the same surprise that growing young people feel when they reach
some shelf that has hitherto been inaccessible. The crisis soon passed.
At his first visit the doctor was a little doubtful whether the Harman
nursery wasn't under the sway of measles, which were then raging in a
particularly virulent form in London; the next day he inclined to the
view that the trouble was merely a feverish cold, and before night this
second view was justified by the disappearance of the "temperatures" and
a complete return to normal conditions.
But as for that hushed reconciliation in the fevered presence of the
almost sacrificial offspring, it didn't happen. Sir Isaac merely thrust
aside the stiff silences behind which he masked his rage to remark:
"This is what happens when wimmen go gadding about!"
That much and glaring eyes and compressed lips and emphasizing fingers
and then he had gone again.
Indeed rather than healing their widening breach this crisis did much to
spread it into strange new regions. It brought Lady Harman to the very
verge of realizing how much of instinct and how much of duty held her
the servant of the children she had brought into the world, and how
little there mingled with that any of those factors of pride and
admiration that go to the making of heroic maternal love. She knew what
is expected of a mother, the exalted and lyrical devotion, and it was
with something approaching terror that she perceived that certain things
in these children of hers she _hated_. It was her business she knew to
love them blindly; she lay awake at night in infinite dismay realizing
she did nothing of the sort. Their weakness held her more than anything
else, the invincible pathos of their little limbs in discomfort so that
she was ready to die she felt to give them ease. But so she would have
been held, she was assured, by the little children of anybody if they
had fallen with sufficient helplessness into her care.
Just how much she didn't really like her children she presently realized
when in the feeble irascibility of their sickness they fell quarrelling.
They became--horrid. Millicent and Annette being imprisoned in their
beds it seemed good to Florence when she came back from the morning's
walk, to annex and hide a selection of their best toys. She didn't take
them and play with them, she hid them with an industrious earnestness in
a box window-seat that was regarded as peculiarly hers, staggering with
armfuls across the nursery floor. Then Millicent by some equally
mysterious agency divined what was afoot and set up a clamour for a
valued set of doll's furniture, which immediately provoked a similar
outcry from little Annette for her Teddy Bear. Followed woe and uproar.
The invalids insisted upon having every single toy they possessed
brought in and put upon their beds; Florence was first disingenuous and
then surrendered her loot with passionate howlings. The Teddy Bear was
rescued from Baby after a violent struggle in which one furry hind leg
was nearly twisted off. It jars upon the philoprogenitive sentiment of
our time to tell of these things and still more to record that all four,
stirred by possessive passion to the profoundest depths of their beings,
betrayed to an unprecedented degree in their little sharp noses, their
flushed faces, their earnest eyes, their dutiful likeness to Sir Isaac.
He peeped from under Millicent's daintily knitted brows and gestured
with Florence's dimpled fists. It was as if God had tried to make him
into four cherubim and as if in spite of everything he was working
through.
Lady Harman toiled to pacify these disorders, gently, attentively, and
with a faint dismay in her dark eyes. She bribed and entreated and
marvelled at mental textures so unlike her own. Baby was squared with a
brand new Teddy Bear, a rare sort, a white one, which Snagsby went and
purchased in the Putney High Street and brought home in his arms,
conferring such a lustre upon the deed that the lower orders, the very
street-boys, watched him with reverence as he passed. Annette went to
sleep amidst a discomfort of small treasures and woke stormily when Mrs.
Harblow tried to remove some of the spikier ones. And Lady Harman went
back to her large pink bedroom and meditated for a long time upon these
things and tried to remember whether in her own less crowded childhood
with Georgina, either of them had been quite so inhumanly hard and
grasping as these feverish little mites in her nursery. She tried to
think she had been, she tried to think that all children were such
little distressed lumps of embittered individuality, and she did what
she could to overcome the queer feeling that this particular clutch of
offspring had been foisted upon her and weren't at all the children she
could now imagine and desire,--gentle children, sweet-spirited
children....
§4
Susan Burnet arrived in a gusty mood and brought new matter for Lady
Harman's ever broadening consideration of the wifely position. Susan,
led by a newspaper placard, had discovered Sir Isaac's relations to the
International Bread and Cake Stores.
"At first I thought I wouldn't come," said Susan. "I really did. I
couldn't hardly believe it. And then I thought, 'it isn't _her_. It
can't be _her_!' But I'd never have dreamt before that I could have been
brought to set foot in the house of the man who drove poor father to
ruin and despair.... You've been so kind to me...."
Susan's simple right-down mind stopped for a moment with something very
like a sob, baffled by the contradictions of the situation.
"So I came," she said, with a forced bright smile.
"I'm glad you came," said Lady Harman. "I wanted to see you. And you
know, Susan, I know very little--very little indeed--of Sir Isaac's
business."
"I quite believe it, my lady. I've never for one moment thought
_you_----I don't know how to say it, my lady."
"And indeed I'm not," said Lady Harman, taking it as said.
"I knew you weren't," said Susan, relieved to be so understood.
And the two women looked perplexedly at one another over the neglected
curtains Susan had come to "see to," and shyness just snatched back Lady
Harman from her impulse to give Susan a sisterly kiss. Nevertheless
Susan who was full of wise intuitions felt that kiss that was never
given, and in the remote world of unacted deeds returned it with
effusion.
"But it's hard," said Susan, "to find one's own second sister mixed up
in a strike, and that's what it's come to last week. They've struck, all
the International waitresses have struck, and last night in Piccadilly
they were standing on the kerb and picketing and her among them. With a
crowd cheering.... And me ready to give my right hand to keep that girl
respectable!"
And with a volubility that was at once tumultuous and effective, Susan
sketched in the broad outlines of the crisis that threatened the
dividends and popularity of the International Bread and Cake Stores.
The unsatisfied demands of that bright journalistic enterprise, _The
London Lion_, lay near the roots of the trouble. _The London Lion_ had
stirred it up. But it was only too evident that _The London Lion_ had
merely given a voice and form and cohesion to long smouldering
discontents.
Susan's account of the matter had that impartiality which comes from
intellectual incoherence, she hadn't so much a judgment upon the whole
as a warring mosaic of judgments. It was talking upon Post Impressionist
lines, talking in the manner of Picasso. She had the firmest conviction
that to strike against employment, however ill-paid or badly
conditioned, was a disgraceful combination of folly, ingratitude and
general wickedness, and she had an equally strong persuasion that the
treatment of the employees of the International Bread and Cake Stores
was such as no reasonably spirited person ought to stand. She blamed her
sister extremely and sympathized with her profoundly, and she put it all
down in turn to _The London Lion_, to Sir Isaac, and to a small
round-faced person called Babs Wheeler, who appeared to be the strike
leader and seemed always to be standing on tables in the branches, or
clambering up to the lions in Trafalgar Square, or being cheered in the
streets.
But there could be no mistaking the quality of Sir Isaac's
"International" organization as Susan's dabs of speech shaped it out. It
was indeed what we all of us see everywhere about us, the work of the
base energetic mind, raw and untrained, in possession of the keen
instruments of civilization, the peasant mind allied and blended with
the Ghetto mind, grasping and acquisitive, clever as a Norman peasant or
a Jew pedlar is clever, and beyond that outrageously stupid and ugly. It
was a new view and yet the old familiar view of her husband, but now she
saw him not as little eager eyes, a sharp nose, gaunt gestures and a
leaden complexion, but as shops and stores and rules and cash registers
and harsh advertisements and a driving merciless hurry to get--to get
anything and everything, money, monopoly, power, prominence, whatever
any other human being seemed to admire or seemed to find desirable, a
lust rather than a living soul. Now that her eyes were at last opened
Lady Harman, who had seen too little heretofore, now saw too much; she
saw all that she had not seen, with an excess of vision, monstrous,
caricatured. Susan had already dabbed in the disaster of Sir Isaac's
unorganized competitors going to the wall--for charity or the state to
neglect or bandage as it might chance--the figure of that poor little
"Father," moping hopelessly before his "accident" symbolized that; and
now she gave in vivid splotches of allusion, glimpses of the business
machine that had replaced those shattered enterprises and carried Sir
Isaac to the squalid glory of a Liberal honours list,--the carefully
balanced antagonisms and jealousies of the girls and the manageresses,
those manageresses who had been obliged to invest little bunches of
savings as guarantees and who had to account for every crumb and
particle of food stock that came to the branch, and the hunt for cases
and inefficiency by the inspectors, who had somehow to justify a salary
of two hundred a year, not to mention a percentage of the fines they
inflicted.
"There's all that business of the margarine," said Susan. "Every branch
gets its butter under weight,--the water squeezes out,--and every branch
has over weight margarine. Of course the rules say that mixing's
forbidden and if they get caught they go, but they got to pay-in for
that butter, and it's setting a snare for their feet. People who've
never thought to cheat, when they get it like that, day after day, they
cheat, my lady.... And the girls get left food for rations. There's
always trouble, it's against what the rules say, but they get it. Of
course it's against the rules, but what can a manageress do?--if the
waste doesn't fall on them, it falls on her. She's tied there with her
savings.... Such driving, my lady, it's against the very spirit of God.
It makes scoffers point. It makes people despise law and order. There's
Luke, he gets bitterer and bitterer; he says that it's in the Word we
mustn't muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn, but these Stores, he
says, they'd muzzle the ox and keep it hungry and make it work a little
machine, he says, whenever it put down its head in the hope of finding a
scrap...."
So Susan, bright-eyed, flushed and voluble, pleading the cause of that
vague greatness in humanity that would love, that would loiter, that
would think, that would if it could give us art, delight and beauty,
that turns blindly and stumblingly towards joy, towards intervals,
towards the mysterious things of the spirit, against all this sordid
strenuousness, this driving destructive association of hardfisted
peasant soul and Ghetto greed, this fool's "efficiency," that rules our
world to-day.
Then Susan lunged for a time at the waitress life her sister led. "She
has 'er 'ome with us, but some--they haven't homes."
"They make a fuss about all this White Slave Traffic," said Susan, "but
if ever there were white slaves it's the girls who work for a living and
keep themselves respectable. And nobody wants to make an example of the
men who get rich out of _them_...."
And after some hearsay about the pressure in the bake-houses and the
accidents to the van-men, who worked on a speeding-up system that Sir
Isaac had adopted from an American business specialist, Susan's mental
discharge poured out into the particulars of the waitresses' strike and
her sister's share in that. "She _would_ go into it," said Susan, "she
let herself be drawn in. I asked her never to take the place. Better
Service, I said, a thousand times. I begged her, I could have begged her
on my bended knees...."
The immediate cause of the strike it seemed was the exceptional
disagreeableness of one of the London district managers. "He takes
advantage of his position," repeated Susan with face aflame, and Lady
Harman was already too wise about Susan's possibilities to urge her
towards particulars....
Now as Lady Harman listened to all this confused effective picturing of
the great catering business which was the other side of her husband and
which she had taken on trust so long, she had in her heart a quite
unreasonable feeling of shame that she should listen at all, a shyness,
as though she was prying, as though this really did not concern her. She
knew she had to listen and still she felt beyond her proper
jurisdiction. It is against instinct, it is with an enormous reluctance
that women are bringing their quick emotions, their flashing unstable
intelligences, their essential romanticism, their inevitable profound
generosity into the world of politics and business. If only they could
continue believing that all that side of life is grave and wise and
admirably managed for them they would. It is not in a day or a
generation that we shall un-specialize women. It is a wrench nearly as
violent as birth for them to face out into the bleak realization that
the man who goes out for them into business, into affairs, and returns
so comfortably loaded with housings and wrappings and trappings and
toys, isn't, as a matter of fact, engaged in benign creativeness while
he is getting these desirable things.
§5
Lady Harman's mind was so greatly exercised by Susan Burnet's voluminous
confidences that it was only when she returned to her own morning room
that she recalled the pawning problem. She went back to Sir Isaac's
study and found Susan with all her measurements taken and on the very
edge of departure.
"Oh Susan!" she said.
She found the matter a little difficult to broach. Susan remained in an
attitude of respectful expectation.
"I wanted to ask you," said Lady Harman and then broke off to shut the
door. Susan's interest increased.
"You know, Susan," said Lady Harman with an air of talking about
commonplace things, "Sir Isaac is very rich and--of course--very
generous.... But sometimes one feels, one wants a little money of one's
own."
"I think I can understand that, my lady," said Susan.
"I knew you would," said Lady Harman and then with a brightness that was
slightly forced, "I can't always get money of my own. It's
difficult--sometimes."
And then blushing vividly: "I've got lots of _things_.... Susan, have
you ever pawned anything?"
And so she broached it.
"Not since I got fairly into work," said Susan; "I wouldn't have it. But
when I was little we were always pawning things. Why! we've pawned
kettles!..."
She flashed three reminiscences.
Meanwhile Lady Harman produced a little glittering object and held it
between finger and thumb. "If I went into a pawnshop near here," she
said, "it would seem so odd.... This ring, Susan, must be worth thirty
or forty pounds. And it seems so silly when I have it that I should
really be wanting money...."
Susan displayed a peculiar reluctance to handle the ring. "I've never,"
she said, "pawned anything valuable--not valuable like that.
Suppose--suppose they wanted to know how I had come by it."
"It's more than Alice earns in a year," she said. "It's----" she eyed
the glittering treasure; "it's a queer thing for me to have."
A certain embarrassment arose between them. Lady Harman's need of money
became more apparent. "I'll do it for you," said Susan, "indeed I'll do
it. But----There's one thing----"
Her face flushed hotly. "It isn't that I want to make difficulties. But
people in our position--we aren't like people in your position. It's
awkward sometimes to explain things. You've got a good character, but
people don't know it. You can't be too careful. It isn't
sufficient--just to be honest. If I take that----If you were just to
give me a little note--in your handwriting--on your paper--just asking
me----I don't suppose I need show it to anyone...."
"I'll write the note," said Lady Harman. A new set of uncomfortable
ideas was dawning upon her. "But Susan----You don't mean that anyone,
anyone who's really honest--might get into trouble?"
"You can't be too careful," said Susan, manifestly resolved not to give
our highly civilized state half a chance with her.
§6
The problem of Sir Isaac and just what he was doing and what he thought
he was doing and what he meant to do increased in importance in Lady
Harman's mind as the days passed by. He had an air of being malignantly
up to something and she could not imagine what this something could be.
He spoke to her very little but he looked at her a great deal. He had
more and more of the quality of a premeditated imminent explosion....
One morning she was standing quite still in the drawing-room thinking
over this now almost oppressive problem of why the situation did not
develop further with him, when she became aware of a thin flat unusual
book upon the small side table near the great armchair at the side of
the fire. He had been reading that overnight and it lay obliquely--it
might almost have been left out for her.
She picked it up. It was _The Taming of the Shrew_ in that excellent
folio edition of Henley's which makes each play a comfortable thin book
apart. A curiosity to learn what it was had drawn her husband to
English Literature made her turn over the pages. _The Taming of the
Shrew_ was a play she knew very slightly. For the Harmans, though deeply
implicated like most other rich and striving people in plans for
honouring the immortal William, like most other people found scanty
leisure to read him.
As she turned over the pages a pencil mark caught her eye. Thence words
were underlined and further accentuated by a deeply scored line in the
margin.
"But for my bonny Kate, she must with me.
Nay; look not big, nor stamp, nor stare, nor fret;
I will be master of what is mine own:
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
She is my household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing:
And here she stands, touch her whoever dare;
I'll bring mine action on the proudest He,
That stops my way in Padua."
With a slightly heightened colour, Lady Harman read on and presently
found another page slashed with Sir Isaac's approval....
Her face became thoughtful. Did he mean to attempt--Petruchio? He could
never dare. There were servants, there were the people one met, the
world.... He would never dare....
What a strange play it was! Shakespear of course was wonderfully wise,
the crown of English wisdom, the culminating English mind,--or else one
might almost find something a little stupid and clumsy.... Did women
nowadays really feel like these Elizabethan wives who talked--like
girls, very forward girls indeed, but girls of sixteen?...
She read the culminating speech of Katherine and now she had so
forgotten Sir Isaac she scarcely noted the pencil line that endorsed the
immortal words.
"Thy husband is thy Lord, thy Life, thy Keeper,
Thy Head, thy Sovereign; one who cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
While thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the Subject owes the Prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending Rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving Lord?
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war, where they should kneel for peace;
* * * * *
My mind has been as big as one of yours,
My heat as great; my reason, haply, more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown.
But now I see our lances are but straws;
Our strength is weak, our weakness past compare,
Seeming that most which we indeed least are...."
She wasn't indignant. Something in these lines took hold of her
protesting imagination.
She knew that so she could have spoken of a man.
But that man,--she apprehended him as vaguely as an Anglican bishop
apprehends God. He was obscured altogether by shadows; he had only one
known characteristic, that he was totally unlike Sir Isaac. And the play
was false she felt in giving this speech to a broken woman. Such things
are not said by broken women. Broken women do no more than cheat and
lie. But so a woman might speak out of her unconquered wilfulness, as a
queen might give her lover a kingdom out of the fullness of her heart.
§7
The evening after his wife had had this glimpse into Sir Isaac's mental
processes he telephoned that Charterson and Horatio Blenker were coming
home to dinner with him. Neither Lady Charterson nor Mrs. Blenker were
to be present; it was to be a business conversation and not a social
occasion, and Lady Harman he desired should wear her black and gold with
just a touch of crimson in her hair. Charterson wanted a word or two
with the flexible Horatio on sugar at the London docks, and Sir Isaac
had some vague ideas that a turn might be given to the public judgment
upon the waitresses' strike, by a couple of Horatio's thoughtful yet
gentlemanly articles. And in addition Charterson seemed to have
something else upon his mind; he did not tell as much to Sir Isaac but
he was weighing the possibilities of securing a controlling share in
the _Daily Spirit_, which simply didn't know at present where it was
upon the sugar business, and of installing Horatio's brother, Adolphus,
as its editor. He wanted to form some idea from Horatio of what Adolphus
might expect before he approached Adolphus.
Lady Harman wore the touch of crimson in her hair as her husband had
desired, and the table was decorated simply with a big silver bowl of
crimson roses. A slight shade of apprehension in Sir Isaac's face
changed to approval at the sight of her obedience. After all perhaps she
was beginning to see the commonsense of her position.
Charterson struck her as looking larger, but then whenever she saw him
he struck her as looking larger. He enveloped her hand in a large
amiable paw for a minute and asked after the children with gusto. The
large teeth beneath his discursive moustache gave him the effect of a
perennial smile to which his asymmetrical ears added a touch of waggery.
He always betrayed a fatherly feeling towards her as became a man who
was married to a handsome wife old enough to be her mother. Even when he
asked about the children he did it with something of the amused
knowingness of assured seniority, as if indeed he knew all sorts of
things about the children that she couldn't as yet even begin to
imagine. And though he confined his serious conversation to the two
other men, he would ever and again show himself mindful of her and throw
her some friendly enquiry, some quizzically puzzling remark. Blenker as
usual treated her as if she were an only very indistinctly visible
presence to whom an effusive yet inattentive politeness was due. He was
clearly nervous almost to the pitch of jumpiness. He knew he was to be
spoken to about the sugar business directly he saw Charterson, and he
hated being spoken to about the sugar business. He had his code of
honour. Of course one had to make concessions to one's proprietors, but
he could not help feeling that if only they would consent to see his
really quite obvious gentlemanliness more clearly it would be better for
the paper, better for the party, better for them, far better for
himself. He wasn't altogether a fool about that sugar; he knew how
things lay. They ought to trust him more. His nervousness betrayed
itself in many little ways. He crumbled his bread constantly until,
thanks to Snagsby's assiduous replacement, he had made quite a pile of
crumbs, he dropped his glasses in the soup--a fine occasion for
Snagsby's _sang-froid_--and he forgot not to use a fish knife with the
fish as Lady Grove directs and tried when he discovered his error to
replace it furtively on the table cloth. Moreover he kept on patting the
glasses on his nose--after Snagsby had whisked his soup plate away,
rescued, wiped and returned them to him--until that feature glowed
modestly at such excesses of attention, and the soup and sauces and
things bothered his fine blond moustache unusually. So that Mr. Blenker
what with the glasses, the napkin, the food and the things seemed as
restless as a young sparrow. Lady Harman did her duties as hostess in
the quiet key of her sombre dress, and until the conversation drew her
out into unexpected questionings she answered rather than talked, and
she did not look at her husband once throughout the meal.
At first the talk was very largely Charterson. He had no intention of
coming to business with Blenker until Lady Harman had given place to the
port and the man's nerves were steadier. He spoke of this and that in
the large discursive way men use in clubs, and it was past the fish
before the conversation settled down upon the topic of business
organization and Sir Isaac, a little warmed by champagne, came out of
the uneasily apprehensive taciturnity into which he had fallen in the
presence of his wife. Horatio Blenker was keenly interested in the
idealization of commercial syndication, he had been greatly stirred by a
book of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee's called _Inspired Millionaires_ which
set out to show just what magnificent airs rich men might give
themselves, and he had done his best to catch its tone and to find
_Inspired Millionaires_ in Sir Isaac and Charterson and to bring it to
their notice and to the notice of the readers of the _Old Country
Gazette_. He felt that if only Sir Isaac and Charterson would see
getting rich as a Great Creative Act it would raise their tone and his
tone and the tone of the _Old Country Gazette_ tremendously. It wouldn't
of course materially alter the methods or policy of the paper but it
would make them all feel nobler, and Blenker was of that finer clay that
does honestly want to feel nobler. He hated pessimism and all that
criticism and self-examination that makes weak men pessimistic, he
wanted to help weak men and be helped himself, he was all for that
school of optimism that would have each dunghill was a well-upholstered
throne, and his nervous, starry contributions to the talk were like
patches of water ranunculuses trying to flower in the overflow of a
sewer.
Because you know it is idle to pretend that the talk of Charterson and
Sir Isaac wasn't a heavy flow of base ideas; they hadn't even the wit to
sham very much about their social significance. They cared no more for
the growth, the stamina, the spirit of the people whose lives they
dominated than a rat cares for the stability of the house it gnaws. They
_wanted_ a broken-spirited people. They were in such relations wilfully
and offensively stupid, and I do not see why we people who read and
write books should pay this stupidity merely because it is prevalent
even the mild tribute of an ironical civility. Charterson talked of the
gathering trouble that might lead to a strike of the transport workers
in London docks, and what he had to say, he said,--he repeated it
several times--was, "_Let_ them strike. We're ready. The sooner they
strike the better. Devonport's a Man and this time we'll _beat_ 'em...."
He expanded generally on strikes. "It's a question practically whether
we are to manage our own businesses or whether we're to have them
managed for us. _Managed_ I say!..."
"They know nothing of course of the details of organization," said
Blenker, shining with intelligence and looking quickly first to the
right and then to the left. "Nothing."
Sir Isaac broke out into confirmatory matter. There was an idea in his
head that this talk might open his wife's eyes to some sense of the
magnitude of his commercial life, to the wonder of its scale and
quality. He compared notes with Charterson upon a speeding-up system for
delivery vans invented by an American specialist and it made Blenker
flush with admiration and turn as if for sympathy to Lady Harman to
realize how a modification in a tailboard might mean a yearly saving in
wages of many thousand pounds. "The sort of thing they don't
understand," he said. And then Sir Isaac told of some of his own little
devices. He had recently taken to having the returns of percentage
increase and decrease from his various districts printed on postcards
and circulated monthly among the district managers, postcards endorsed
with such stimulating comments in red type as "Well done Cardiff!" or
"What ails Portsmouth?"--the results had been amazingly good; "neck and
neck work," he said, "everywhere"--and thence they passed to the
question of confidential reports and surprise inspectors. Thereby they
came to the rights and wrongs of the waitress strike.
And then it was that Lady Harman began to take a share in the
conversation.
She interjected a question. "Yes," she said suddenly and her
interruption was so unexpected that all three men turned their eyes to
her. "But how much do the girls get a week?"
"I thought," she said to some confused explanations by Blenker and
Charterson, "that gratuities were forbidden."
Blenker further explained that most of the girls of the class Sir Isaac
was careful to employ lived at home. Their income was "supplementary."
"But what happens to the others who don't live at home, Mr. Blenker?"
she asked.
"Very small minority," said Mr. Blenker reassuring himself about his
glasses.
"But what do they do?"
Charterson couldn't imagine whether she was going on in this way out of
sheer ignorance or not.
"Sometimes their fines make big unexpected holes in their week's pay,"
she said.
Sir Isaac made some indistinct remark about "utter nonsense."
"It seems to me to be driving them straight upon the streets."
The phrase was Susan's. Its full significance wasn't at that time very
clear to Lady Harman and it was only when she had uttered it that she
realized from Horatio Blenker's convulsive start just what a blow she
had delivered at that table. His glasses came off again. He caught them
and thrust them back, he seemed to be holding his nose on, holding his
face on, preserving those carefully arranged features of himself from
hideous revelations; his free hand made weak movements with his dinner
napkin. He seemed to be holding it in reserve against the ultimate
failure of his face. Charterson surveyed her through an immense pause
open-mouthed; then he turned his large now frozen amiability upon his
host. "These are Awful questions," he gasped, "rather beyond Us don't
you think?" and then magnificently; "Harman, things are looking pretty
Queer in the Far East again. I'm told there are chances--of
revolution--even in Pekin...."
Lady Harman became aware of Snagsby's arm and his steady well-trained
breathing beside her as, tenderly almost but with a regretful
disapproval, he removed her plate....
§8
If Lady Harman had failed to remark at the time the deep impression her
words had made upon her hearers, she would have learnt it later from the
extraordinary wrath in which Sir Isaac, as soon as his guests had
departed, visited her. He was so angry he broke the seal of silence he
had set upon his lips. He came raging into the pink bedroom through the
paper-covered door as if they were back upon their old intimate footing.
He brought a flavour of cigars and manly refreshment with him, his
shirt front was a little splashed and crumpled and his white face was
variegated with flushed patches.
"What ever d'you mean," he cried, "by making a fool of me in front of
those fellers?... What's my business got to do with you?"
Lady Harman was too unready for a reply.
"I ask you what's my business got to do with you? It's _my_ affair, _my_
side. You got no more right to go shoving your spoke into that
than--anything. See? What do _you_ know of the rights and wrongs of
business? How can _you_ tell what's right and what isn't right? And the
things you came out with--the things you came out with! Why
Charterson--after you'd gone Charterson said, she doesn't know, she
can't know what she's talking about! A decent woman! a _lady_! talking
of driving girls on the street. You ought to be ashamed of yourself! You
aren't fit to show your face.... It's these damned papers and pamphlets,
all this blear-eyed stuff, these decadent novels and things putting
narsty thoughts, _narsty dirty_ thoughts into decent women's heads. It
ought to be rammed back down their throats, it ought to be put a stop
to!"
Sir Isaac suddenly gave way to woe. "What have I _done_?" he cried,
"what have I done? Here's everything going so well! We might be the
happiest of couples! We're rich, we got everything we want.... And then
you go harbouring these ideas, fooling about with rotten people, taking
up with Socialism----Yes, I tell you--Socialism!"
His moment of pathos ended. "NO?" he shouted in an enormous voice.
He became white and grim. He emphasized his next words with a shaken
finger.
"It's got to end, my lady. It's going to end sooner than you expect.
That's all!..."
He paused at the papered door. He had a popular craving for a vivid
curtain and this he felt was just a little too mild.
"It's going to end," he repeated and then with great violence, with
almost alcoholic violence, with the round eyes and shouting voice and
shaken fist and blaspheming violence of a sordid, thrifty peasant
enraged, "it's going to end a Damned Sight sooner than you expect."
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
SIR ISAAC AS PETRUCHIO
§1
Twice had Sir Isaac come near to betraying the rapid and extensive
preparations for the subjugation of his wife, that he hid behind his
silences. He hoped that their estrangement might be healed by a certain
display of strength and decision. He still refused to let himself
believe that all this trouble that had arisen between them, this sullen
insistence upon unbecoming freedoms of intercourse and movement, this
questioning spirit and a gaucherie of manner that might almost be
mistaken for an aversion from his person, were due to any essential evil
in her nature; he clung almost passionately to the alternative that she
was the victim of those gathering forces of discontent, of that
interpretation which can only be described as decadent and that veracity
which can only be called immodest, that darken the intellectual skies of
our time, a sweet thing he held her still though touched by corruption,
a prey to "idees," "idees" imparted from the poisoned mind of her
sister, imbibed from the carelessly edited columns of newspapers, from
all too laxly censored plays, from "blear-eyed" bookshow he thanked the
Archbishop of York for that clever expressive epithet!--from the
careless talk of rashly admitted guests, from the very atmosphere of
London. And it had grown clearer and clearer to him that his duty to
himself and the world and her was to remove her to a purer, simpler air,
beyond the range of these infections, to isolate her and tranquillize
her and so win her back again to that acquiescence, that entirely
hopeless submissiveness that had made her so sweet and dear a companion
for him in the earlier years of their married life. Long before Lady
Beach-Mandarin's crucial luncheon, his deliberate foreseeing mind had
been planning such a retreat. Black Strand even at his first visit had
appeared to him in the light of a great opportunity, and the crisis of
their quarrel did but release that same torrential energy which had
carried him to a position of Napoleonic predominance in the world of
baking, light catering and confectionery, into the channels of a scheme
already very definitely formed in his mind.
His first proceeding after the long hours of sleepless passion that had
followed his wife's Hampton Court escapade, had been to place himself in
communication with Mr. Brumley. He learnt at Mr. Brumley's club that
that gentleman had slept there overnight and had started but a quarter
of an hour before, back to Black Strand. Sir Isaac in hot pursuit and
gathering force and assistance in mid flight reached Black Strand by
midday.
It was with a certain twinge of the conscience that Mr. Brumley
perceived his visitor, but it speedily became clear that Sir Isaac had
no knowledge of the guilty circumstances of the day before. He had come
to buy Black Strand--incontinently, that was all. He was going, it
became clear at once, to buy it with all its fittings and furnishings as
it stood, lock, stock and barrel. Mr. Brumley, concealing that wild
elation, that sense of a joyous rebirth, that only the liquidation of
nearly all one's possessions can give, was firm but not excessive. Sir
Isaac haggled as a wave breaks and then gave in and presently they were
making a memorandum upon the pretty writing-desk beneath the traditional
rose Euphemia had established there when Mr. Brumley was young and
already successful.
This done, and it was done in less than fifteen minutes, Sir Isaac
produced a rather crumpled young architect from the motor-car as a
conjurer might produce a rabbit from a hat, a builder from Aleham
appeared astonishingly in a dog-cart--he had been summoned by
telegram--and Sir Isaac began there and then to discuss alterations,
enlargements and, more particularly, with a view to his nursery
requirements, the conversion of the empty barn into a nursery wing and
its connexion with the house by a corridor across the shrubbery.
"It will take you three months," said the builder from Aleham. "And the
worst time of the year coming."
"It won't take three weeks--if I have to bring down a young army from
London to do it," said Sir Isaac.
"But such a thing as plastering----"
"We won't have plastering."
"There's canvas and paper, of course," said the young architect.
"There's canvas and paper," said Sir Isaac. "And those new patent
building units, so far as the corridor goes. I've seen the ads."
"We can whitewash 'em. They won't show much," said the young architect.
"Oh if you do things in _that_ way," said the builder from Aleham with
bitter resignation....
§2
The morning dawned at last when the surprise was ripe. It was four days
after Susan's visit, and she was due again on the morrow with the money
that would enable her employer to go to Lady Viping's now imminent
dinner. Lady Harman had had to cut the Social Friends' meeting
altogether, but the day before the surprise Agatha Alimony had come to
tea in her jobbed car, and they had gone together to the committee
meeting of the Shakespear Dinner Society. Sir Isaac had ignored that
defiance, and it was an unusually confident and quite unsuspicious woman
who descended in a warm October sunshine to the surprise. In the
breakfast-room she discovered an awe-stricken Snagsby standing with his
plate-basket before her husband, and her husband wearing strange unusual
tweeds and gaiters,--buttoned gaiters, and standing a-straddle,--unusually
a-straddle, on the hearthrug.
"That's enough, Snagsby," said Sir Isaac, at her entrance. "Bring it
all."
She met Snagsby's eye, and it was portentous.
Latterly Snagsby's eye had lost the assurance of his former days. She
had noted it before, she noted it now more than ever; as though he was
losing confidence, as though he was beginning to doubt, as though the
world he had once seemed to rule grew insecure beneath his feet. For a
moment she met his eye; it might have been a warning he conveyed, it
might have been an appeal for sympathy, and then he had gone. She looked
at the table. Sir Isaac had breakfasted acutely.
In silence, among the wreckage and with a certain wonder growing, Lady
Harman attended to her needs.
Sir Isaac cleared his throat.
She became aware that he had spoken. "What did you say, Isaac?" she
asked, looking up. He seemed to have widened his straddle almost
dangerously, and he spoke with a certain conscious forcefulness.
"We're going to move out of this house, Elly," he said. "We're going
down into the country right away."
She sat back in her chair and regarded his pinched and determined
visage.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"I've bought that house of Brumley's,--Black Strand. We're going to move
down there--_now_. I've told the servants.... When you've done your
breakfast, you'd better get Peters to pack your things. The big car's
going to be ready at half-past ten."
Lady Harman reflected.
"To-morrow evening," she said, "I was going out to dinner at Lady
Viping's."
"Not my affair--seemingly," said Sir Isaac with irony. "Well, the car's
going to be ready at half-past ten."
"But that dinner----!"
"We'll think about it when the time comes."
Husband and wife regarded each other.
"I've had about enough of London," said Sir Isaac. "So we're going to
shift the scenery. See?"
Lady Harman felt that one might adduce good arguments against this
course if only one knew of them.
Sir Isaac had a bright idea. He rang.
"Snagsby," he said, "just tell Peters to pack up Lady Harman's
things...."
"_Well!_" said Lady Harman, as the door closed on Snagsby. Her mind was
full of confused protest, but she had again that entirely feminine and
demoralizing conviction that if she tried to express it she would weep
or stumble into some such emotional disaster. If now she went upstairs
and told Peters _not_ to pack----!
Sir Isaac walked slowly to the window, and stood for a time staring out
into the garden.
Extraordinary bumpings began overhead in Sir Isaac's room. No doubt
somebody was packing something....
Lady Harman realized with a deepening humiliation that she dared not
dispute before the servants, and that he could. "But the children----"
she said at last.
"I've told Mrs. Harblow," he said, over his shoulder. "Told her it was a
bit of a surprise." He turned, with a momentary lapse into something
like humour. "You see," he said, "it _is_ a bit of a surprise."
"But what are you going to do with this house?"
"Lock it all up for a bit.... I don't see any sense in living where we
aren't happy. Perhaps down there we shall manage better...."
It emerged from the confusion of Lady Harman's mind that perhaps she had
better go to the nursery, and see how things were getting on there. Sir
Isaac watched her departure with a slightly dubious eye, made little
noises with his teeth for a time, and then went towards the telephone.
In the hall she found two strange young men in green aprons assisting
the under-butler to remove the hats and overcoats and such-like personal
material into a motor-van outside. She heard two of the housemaids
scurrying upstairs. "'Arf an hour," said one, "isn't what I call a
proper time to pack a box in."
In the nursery the children were disputing furiously what toys were to
be taken into the country.
Lady Harman was a very greatly astonished woman. The surprise had been
entirely successful.
§3
It has been said, I think, by Limburger, in his already cited work, that
nothing so excites and prevails with woman as rapid and extensive
violence, sparing and yet centring upon herself, and certainly it has to
be recorded that, so far from being merely indignant, and otherwise a
helplessly pathetic spectacle, Lady Harman found, though perhaps she did
not go quite so far as to admit to herself that she found, this vehement
flight from the social, moral, and intellectual contaminations of London
an experience not merely stimulating but entertaining. It lifted her
delicate eyebrows. Something, it may have been a sense of her own
comparative immobility amid this sudden extraordinary bustle of her
home, put it into her head that so it was long ago that Lot must have
bundled together his removable domesticities.
She made one attempt at protest. "Isaac," she said, "isn't all this
rather ridiculous----"
"Don't speak to me!" he answered, waving her off. "Don't speak to me!
You should have spoken before, Elly. _Now_,--things are happening."
The image of Black Strand as, after all, a very pleasant place indeed
returned to her. She adjudicated upon the nursery difficulties, and then
went in a dreamlike state of mind to preside over her own more personal
packing. She found Peters exercising all that indecisive helplessness
which is characteristic of ladies' maids the whole world over.
It was from Peters she learnt that the entire household, men and maids
together, was to be hurled into Surrey. "Aren't they all rather
surprised?" asked Lady Harman.
"Yes, m'm," said Peters on her knees, "but of course if the drains is
wrong the sooner we all go the better."
(So that was what he had told them.)
A vibration and a noise of purring machinery outside drew the lady to
the window, and she discovered that at least four of the large
motor-vans from the International Stores were to co-operate in the trek.
There they were waiting, massive and uniform. And then she saw Snagsby
in his alpaca jacket _running_ towards the house from the gates. Of
course he was running only very slightly indeed, but still he was
running, and the expression of distress upon his face convinced her that
he was being urged to unusual and indeed unsuitable tasks under the
immediate personal supervision of Sir Isaac.... Then from round the
corner appeared the under butler or at least the legs of him going very
fast, under a pile of shirt boxes and things belonging to Sir Isaac. He
dumped them into the nearest van and heaved a deep sigh and returned
houseward after a remorseful glance at the windows.
A violent outcry from baby, who, with more than her customary violence
was making her customary morning protest against being clad, recalled
Lady Harman from the contemplation of these exterior activities....
The journey to Black Strand was not accomplished without misadventure;
there was a puncture near Farnham, and as Clarence with a leisurely
assurance entertained himself with the Stepney, they were passed first
by the second car with the nursery contingent, which went by in a shrill
chorus, crying, "_We-e-e_ shall get there first, _We-e-e_ shall get
there first," and then by a large hired car all agog with housemaids and
Mrs. Crumble and with Snagsby, as round and distressed as the full moon,
and the under butler, cramped and keen beside the driver. There followed
the leading International Stores car, and then the Stepney was on and
they could hasten in pursuit....
And at last they came to Black Strand, and when they saw Black Strand it
seemed to Lady Harman that the place had blown out a huge inflamed red
cheek and lost its pleasant balance altogether. "_Oh!_" she cried.
It was the old barn flushed by the strain of adaptation to a new use,
its comfortable old wall ruptured by half a dozen brilliant new windows,
a light red chimney stack at one end. From it a vividly artistic
corridor ran to the house and the rest of the shrubbery was all trampled
and littered with sheds, bricks, poles and material generally. Black
Strand had left the hands of the dilettante school and was in the grip
of those vigorous moulding forces that are shaping our civilization
to-day.
The jasmine wig over the porch had suffered a strenuous clipping; the
door might have just come out of prison. In the hall the Carpaccio
copies still glowed, but there were dust sheets over most of the
furniture and a plumber was moving his things out with that eleventh
hour reluctance so characteristic of plumbers. Mrs. Rabbit, a little
tearful, and dressed for departure very respectably in black was giving
the youngest and least experienced housemaid a faithful history of Mr.
Brumley's earlier period. "'Appy we all was," said Mrs. Rabbit, "as
Birds in a Nest."
Through the windows two of the Putney gardeners were busy replacing Mr.
Brumley's doubtful roses by recognized sorts, the _right_ sorts....
"I've been doing all I can to make it ready for you," said Sir Isaac at
his wife's ear, bringing a curious reminiscence of the first home-coming
to Putney into her mind.
§4
"And now," said Sir Isaac with evident premeditation and a certain
deliberate amiability, "now we got down here, now we got away a bit from
all those London things with nobody to cut in between us, me and you can
have a bit of a talk, Elly, and see what it's all about."
They had lunched together in the little hall-dining room,--the children
had had a noisily cheerful picnic in the kitchen with Mrs. Harblow, and
now Lady Harman was standing at the window surveying the ravages of rose
replacement.
She turned towards him. "Yes," she said. "I think--I think we can't go
on like this."
"_I_ can't," said Sir Isaac, "anyhow."
He too came and stared at the rose planting.
"If we were to go up there--among the pine woods"--he pointed with his
head at the dark background of Euphemia's herbaceous borders--"we
shouldn't hear quite so much of this hammering...."
Husband and wife walked slowly in the afternoon sunlight across the
still beautiful garden. Each was gravely aware of an embarrassed
incapacity for the task they had set themselves. They were going to talk
things over. Never in their lives had they really talked to each other
clearly and honestly about anything. Indeed it is scarcely too much to
say that neither had ever talked about anything to anyone. She was too
young, her mind was now growing up in her and feeling its way to
conscious expression, and he had never before wanted to express himself.
He did now want to express himself. For behind his rant and fury Sir
Isaac had been thinking very hard indeed during the last three weeks
about his life and her life and their relations; he had never thought so
much about anything except his business economics. So far he had either
joked at her, talked "silly" to her, made, as they say, "remarks," or
vociferated. That had been the sum of their mental intercourse, as
indeed it is the sum of the intercourse of most married couples. His
attempt to state his case to her had so far always flared into
rhetorical outbreaks. But he was discontented with these rhetorical
outbreaks. His dispositions to fall into them made him rather like a
nervous sepia that cannot keep its ink sac quiet while it is sitting for
its portrait. In the earnestness of his attempt at self-display he
vanished in his own outpourings.
He wanted now to reason with her simply and persuasively. He wanted to
say quietly impressive and convincing things in a low tone of voice and
make her abandon every possible view except his view. He walked now
slowly meditating the task before him, making a faint thoughtful noise
with his teeth, his head sunken in the collar of the motor overcoat he
wore because of a slight cold he had caught. And he had to be careful
about colds because of his constitutional defect. She too felt she had
much to say. Much too she had in her mind that she couldn't say, because
this strange quarrel had opened unanticipated things for her; she had
found and considered repugnances in her nature she had never dared to
glance at hitherto....
Sir Isaac began rather haltingly when they had reached a sandy,
ant-infested path that ran slantingly up among the trees. He affected a
certain perplexity. He said he did not understand what it was his wife
was "after," what she "thought she was doing" in "making all this
trouble"; he wanted to know just what it was she wanted, how she thought
they ought to live, just what she considered his rights were as her
husband and just what she considered were her duties as his wife--if,
that is, she considered she had any duties. To these enquiries Lady
Harman made no very definite reply; their estrangement instead of
clearing her mind had on the whole perplexed it more, by making her
realize the height and depth and extent of her possible separation from
him. She replied therefore with an unsatisfactory vagueness; she said
she wanted to feel that she possessed herself, that she was no longer a
child, that she thought she had a right to read what she chose, see what
people she liked, go out a little by herself, have a certain
independence--she hesitated, "have a certain definite allowance of my
own."
"Have I ever refused you money?" cried Sir Isaac protesting.
"It isn't that," said Lady Harman; "it's the feeling----"
"The feeling of being able to--defy--anything I say," said Sir Isaac
with a note of bitterness. "As if I didn't understand!"
It was beyond Lady Harman's powers to express just how that wasn't the
precise statement of the case.
Sir Isaac, reverting to his tone of almost elaborate reasonableness,
expanded his view that it was impossible for husband and wife to have
two different sets of friends;--let alone every other consideration, he
explained, it wasn't convenient for them not to be about together, and
as for reading or thinking what she chose he had never made any
objection to anything unless it was "decadent rot" that any decent man
would object to his womanfolk seeing, rot she couldn't understand the
drift of--fortunately. Blear-eyed humbug.... He checked himself on the
verge of an almost archiepiscopal outbreak in order to be patiently
reasonable again. He was prepared to concede that it would be very nice
if Lady Harman could be a good wife and also an entirely independent
person, very nice, but the point was--his tone verged on the
ironical--that she couldn't be two entirely different people at the same
time.
"But you have your friends," she said, "you go away alone----"
"That's different," said Sir Isaac with a momentary note of annoyance.
"It's business. It isn't that I want to."
Lady Harman had a feeling that they were neither of them gaining any
ground. She blamed herself for her lack of lucidity. She began again,
taking up the matter at a fresh point. She said that her life at present
wasn't full, that it was only half a life, that it was just home and
marriage and nothing else; he had his business, he went out into the
world, he had politics and--"all sorts of things"; she hadn't these
interests; she had nothing in the place of them----
Sir Isaac closed this opening rather abruptly by telling her that she
should count herself lucky she hadn't, and again the conversation was
suspended for a time.
"But I want to know about these things," she said.
Sir Isaac took that musingly.
"There's things go on," she said; "outside home. There's social work,
there's interests----Am I never to take any part--in that?"
Sir Isaac still reflected.
"There's one thing," he said at last, "I want to know. We'd better have
it out--_now_."
But he hesitated for a time.
"Elly!" he blundered, "you aren't--you aren't getting somehow--not fond
of me?"
She made no immediate reply.
"Look here!" he said in an altered voice. "Elly! there isn't something
below all this? There isn't something been going on that I don't know?"
Her eyes with a certain terror in their depths questioned him.
"Something," he said, and his face was deadly white--"_Some other man,
Elly?_"
She was suddenly crimson, a flaming indignation.
"Isaac!" she said, "what do you _mean_? How can you _ask_ me such a
thing?"
"If it's that!" said Sir Isaac, his face suddenly full of malignant
force, "I'll----But I'd _kill_ you...."
"If it isn't that," he went on searching his mind; "why should a woman
get restless? Why should she want to go away from her husband, go
meeting other people, go gadding about? If a woman's satisfied, she's
satisfied. She doesn't harbour fancies.... All this grumbling and
unrest. Natural for your sister, but why should you? You've got
everything a woman needs, husband, children, a perfectly splendid home,
clothes, good jewels and plenty of them, respect! Why should you want to
go out after things? It's mere spoilt-childishness. Of course you want
to wander out--and if there isn't a man----"
He caught her wrist suddenly. "There isn't a man?" he demanded.
"Isaac!" she protested in horror.
"Then there'll be one. You think I'm a fool, you think I don't know
anything all these literary and society people know. I _do_ know. I know
that a man and a woman have got to stick together, and if you go
straying--you may think you're straying after the moon or social work or
anything--but there's a strange man waiting round the corner for every
woman and a strange woman for every man. Think _I_'ve had no
temptations?... Oh! I _know_, I _know_. What's life or anything but
that? and it's just because we've not gone on having more children, just
because we listened to all those fools who said you were overdoing it,
that all this fretting and grumbling began. We've got on to the wrong
track, Elly, and we've got to get back to plain wholesome ways of
living. See? That's what I've come down here for and what I mean to do.
We've got to save ourselves. I've been too--too modern and all that. I'm
going to be a husband as a husband should. I'm going to protect you from
these idees--protect you from your own self.... And that's about where
we stand, Elly, as I make it out."
He paused with the effect of having delivered himself of long
premeditated things.
Lady Harman essayed to speak. But she found that directly she set
herself to speak she sobbed and began weeping. She choked for a moment.
Then she determined she would go on, and if she must cry, she must cry.
She couldn't let a disposition to tears seal her in silence for ever.
"It isn't," she said, "what I expected--of life. It isn't----"
"It's what life is," Sir Isaac cut in.
"When I think," she sobbed, "of what I've lost----"
"_Lost!_" cried Sir Isaac. "Lost! Oh come now, Elly, I like that.
What!--_lost_. Hang it! You got to look facts in the face. You can't
deny----Marrying like this,--you made a jolly good thing of it."
"But the beautiful things, the noble things!"
"_What's_ beautiful?" cried Sir Isaac in protesting scorn. "_What's_
noble? ROT! Doing your duty if you like and being sensible, that's noble
and beautiful, but not fretting about and running yourself into danger.
You've got to have a sense of humour, Elly, in this life----" He created
a quotation. "As you make your bed--so shall you lie."
For an interval neither of them spoke. They crested the hill, and came
into view of that advertisement board she had first seen in Mr.
Brumley's company. She halted, and he went a step further and halted
too. He recalled his ideas about the board. He had meant to have them
all altered but other things had driven it from his mind....
"Then you mean to imprison me here," said Lady Harman to his back. He
turned about.
"It isn't much like a prison. I'm asking you to stay here--and be what a
wife _should_ be."
"I'm to have no money."
"That's--that depends entirely on yourself. You know that well enough."
She looked at him gravely.
"I won't stand it," she said at last with a gentle deliberation.
She spoke so softly that he doubted his hearing. "_What?_" he asked
sharply.
"I won't stand it," she repeated. "No."
"But--what can you do?"
"I don't know," she said, after a moment of grave consideration.
For some moments his mind hunted among possibilities.
"It's me that's standing it," he said. He came closely up to her. He
seemed on the verge of rhetoric. He pressed his thin white lips
together. "Standing it! when we might be so happy," he snapped, and
shrugged his shoulders and turned with an expression of mournful
resolution towards the house again. She followed slowly.
He felt that he had done all that a patient and reasonable husband could
do. _Now_--things must take their course.
§5
The imprisonment of Lady Harman at Black Strand lasted just one day
short of a fortnight.
For all that time except for such interludes as the urgent needs of the
strike demanded, Sir Isaac devoted himself to the siege. He did all he
could to make her realize how restrainedly he used the powers the law
vests in a husband, how little he forced upon her the facts of marital
authority and wifely duty. At times he sulked, at times he affected a
cold dignity, and at times a virile anger swayed him at her unsubmissive
silences. He gave her little peace in that struggle, a struggle that
came to the edge of physical conflict. There were moments when it seemed
to her that nothing remained but that good old-fashioned connubial
institution, the tussle for the upper hand, when with a feminine horror
she felt violence shouldering her shoulder or contracting ready to grip
her wrist. Against violence she doubted her strength, was filled with a
desolating sense of yielding nerve and domitable muscle. But just short
of violence Sir Isaac's spirit failed him. He would glower and bluster,
half threaten, and retreat. It might come to that at last but at present
it had not come to that.
She could not understand why she had neither message nor sign from Susan
Burnet, but she hid that anxiety and disappointment under her general
dignity.
She spent as much time with the children as she could, and until Sir
Isaac locked up the piano she played, and was surprised to find far more
in Chopin than she had ever suspected in the days when she had acquired
a passable dexterity of execution. She found, indeed, the most curious
things in Chopin, emotional phrases, that stirred and perplexed and yet
pleased her....
The weather was very fine and open that year. A golden sunshine from
October passed on into November and Lady Harman spent many of these days
amidst the pretty things the builder from Aleham had been too hurried to
desecrate, dump, burn upon, and flatten into indistinguishable mire,
after the established custom of builders in gardens since the world
began. She would sit in the rockery where she had sat with Mr. Brumley
and recall that momentous conversation, and she would wander up the
pine-wood slopes behind, and she would spend long musing intervals among
Euphemia's perennials, thinking sometimes, and sometimes not so much
thinking as feeling the warm tendernesses of nature and the perplexing
difficulties of human life. With an amused amazement Lady Harman
reflected as she walked about the pretty borders and the little patches
of lawn and orchard that in this very place she was to have realized an
imitation of the immortal "Elizabeth" and have been wise, witty, gay,
defiant, gallant and entirely successful with her "Man of Wrath."
Evidently there was some temperamental difference, or something in her
situation, that altered the values of the affair. It was clearly a
different sort of man for one thing. She didn't feel a bit gay, and her
profound and deepening indignation with the alternative to this
stagnation was tainted by a sense of weakness and incapacity.
She came very near surrender several times. There were afternoons of
belated ripened warmth, a kind of summer that had been long in the
bottle, with a certain lassitude in the air and a blue haze among the
trees, that made her feel the folly of all resistances to fate. Why,
after all, shouldn't she take life as she found it, that is to say, as
Sir Isaac was prepared to give it to her? He wasn't really so bad, she
told herself. The children--their noses were certainly a little sharp,
but there might be worse children. The next might take after herself
more. Who was she to turn upon her appointed life and declare it wasn't
good enough? Whatever happened the world was still full of generous and
beautiful things, trees, flowers, sunset and sunrise, music and mist and
morning dew.... And as for this matter of the sweated workers, the
harshness of the business, the ungracious competition, suppose if
instead of fighting her husband with her weak powers, she persuaded him.
She tried to imagine just exactly how he might be persuaded....
She looked up and discovered with an extraordinary amazement Mr. Brumley
with eager gestures and a flushed and excited visage hurrying towards
her across the croquet lawn.
§6
Lady Viping's dinner-party had been kept waiting exactly thirty-five
minutes for Lady Harman. Sir Isaac, with a certain excess of zeal, had
intercepted the hasty note his wife had written to account for her
probable absence. The party was to have centred entirely upon Lady
Harman, it consisted either of people who knew her already, or of people
who were to have been specially privileged to know her, and Lady Viping
telephoned twice to Putney before she abandoned hope. "It's
disconnected," she said, returning in despair from her second struggle
with the great public service. "They can't get a reply."
"It's that little wretch," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "He hasn't let her
come. _I_ know him."
"It's like losing a front tooth," said Lady Viping, surveying her table
as she entered the dining-room.
"But surely--she would have written," said Mr. Brumley, troubled and
disappointed, regarding an aching gap to the left of his chair, a gap
upon which a pathetic little card bearing Lady Harman's name still lay
obliquely.
Naturally the talk tended to centre upon the Harmans. And naturally Lady
Beach-Mandarin was very bold and outspoken and called Sir Isaac quite a
number of vivid things. She also aired her views of the marriage of the
future, which involved a very stringent treatment of husbands indeed.
"Half his property and half his income," said Lady Beach-Mandarin,
"paid into her separate banking account."
"But," protested Mr. Brumley, "would men marry under those conditions?"
"Men will marry anyhow," said Lady Beach-Mandarin, "under _any_
conditions."
"Exactly Sir Joshua's opinion," said Lady Viping.
All the ladies at the table concurred and only one cheerful bachelor
barrister dissented. The other men became gloomy and betrayed a distaste
for this general question. Even Mr. Brumley felt a curious faint terror
and had for a moment a glimpse of the possibilities that might lie
behind the Vote. Lady Beach-Mandarin went bouncing back to the
particular instance. At present, she said, witness Lady Harman, women
were slaves, pampered slaves if you will, but slaves. As things were now
there was nothing to keep a man from locking up his wife, opening all
her letters, dressing her in sack-cloth, separating her from her
children. Most men, of course, didn't do such things, they were amenable
to public opinion, but Sir Isaac was a jealous little Ogre. He was a
gnome who had carried off a princess....
She threw out projects for assailing the Ogre. She would descend
to-morrow morning upon the Putney house, a living flamboyant writ of
Habeas Corpus. Mr. Brumley, who had been putting two and two together,
was abruptly moved to tell of the sale of Black Strand. "They may be
there," he said.
"He's carried her off," cried Lady Beach-Mandarin on a top note. "It
might be the eighteenth century for all he cares. But if it's Black
Strand,--I'll go to Black Strand...."
But she had to talk about it for a week before she actually made her
raid, and then, with an instinctive need for an audience, she took with
her a certain Miss Garradice, one of those mute, emotional nervous
spinsters who drift detachedly, with quick sudden movements, glittering
eyeglasses, and a pent-up imminent look, about our social system. There
is something about this type of womanhood--it is hard to say--almost as
though they were the bottled souls of departed buccaneers grown somehow
virginal. She came with Lady Beach-Mandarin quietly, almost humorously,
and yet it was as if the pirate glittered dimly visible through the
polished glass of her erect exterior.
"Here we are!" said Lady Beach-Mandarin, staring astonished at the once
familiar porch. "Now for it!"
She descended and assailed the bell herself and Miss Garradice stood
beside her with the light of combat in her eyes and glasses and cheeks.
"Shall I offer to take her for a drive!"
"_Let's_," said Miss Garradice in an enthusiastic whisper. "_Right away!
For ever._"
"_I will_," said Lady Beach-Mandarin, and nodded desperately.
She was on the point of ringing again when Snagsby appeared.
He stood with a large obstructiveness in the doorway. "Lady 'Arman, my
lady" he said with a well-trained deliberation, "is not a Tome."
"Not at home!" queried Lady Beach-Mandarin.
"Not a Tome, my lady," repeated Snagsby invincibly.
"But--when will she be at home?"
"I can't say, my lady."
"Is Sir Isaac----?"
"Sir Isaac, my lady, is not a Tome. Nobody is a Tome, my lady."
"But we've come from London!" said Lady Beach-Mandarin.
"I'm very sorry, my lady."
"You see, I want my friend to see this house and garden."
Snagsby was visibly disconcerted. "I 'ave no instructions, my lady," he
tried.
"Oh, but Lady Harman would never object----"
Snagsby's confusion increased. He seemed to be wanting to keep his face
to the visitors and at the same time glance over his shoulder. "I will,"
he considered, "I will enquire, my lady." He backed a little, and seemed
inclined to close the door upon them. Lady Beach-Mandarin was too quick
for him. She got herself well into the open doorway. "And of whom are
you going to enquire?"
A large distress betrayed itself in Snagsby's eye. "The 'ousekeeper," he
attempted. "It falls to the 'ousekeeper, my lady."
Lady Beach-Mandarin turned her face to Miss Garradice, shining in
support. "Stuff and nonsense," she said, "of course we shall come in."
And with a wonderful movement that was at once powerful and perfectly
lady-like this intrepid woman--"butted" is not the word--collided
herself with Snagsby and hurled him backward into the hall. Miss
Garradice followed closely behind and at once extended herself in open
order on Lady Beach-Mandarin's right. "Go and enquire," said Lady
Beach-Mandarin with a sweeping gesture of her arm. "Go and enquire."
For a moment Snagsby surveyed the invasion with horror and then fled
precipitately into the recesses of the house.
"Of _course_ they're at home!" said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Fancy
that--that--that _navigable_--trying to shut the door on us!"
For a moment the two brightly excited ladies surveyed each other and
then Lady Beach-Mandarin, with a quickness of movement wonderful in one
so abundant, began to open first one and then another of the various
doors that opened into the long hall-living room. At a peculiar little
cry from Miss Garradice she turned from a contemplation of the long low
study in which so much of the Euphemia books had been written, to
discover Sir Isaac behind her, closely followed by an agonized Snagsby.
"A-a-a-a-h!" she cried, with both hands extended, "and so you've come
in, Sir Isaac! That's perfectly delightful. This is my friend Miss
Garradice, who's _dying_ to see anything you've left of poor Euphemia's
garden. And _how_ is dear Lady Harman?"
For some crucial moments Sir Isaac was unable to speak and regarded his
visitors with an expression that was unpretendingly criminal.
Then he found speech. "You can't," he said. "It--can't be managed." He
shook his head; his lips were whitely compressed.
"But all the way from London, Sir Isaac!"
"Lady Harman's ill," lied Sir Isaac. "She mustn't be disturbed.
Everything has to be kept quiet. See? Not even shouting. Not even
ordinarily raised voices. A voice like yours--might kill her. That's why
Snagsby here said we were not at home. We aren't at home--not to
anyone."
Lady Beach-Mandarin was baffled.
"Snagsby," said Sir Isaac, "open that door."
"But can't I see her--just for a moment?"
Sir Isaac's malignity had softened a little at the prospect of victory.
"Absolutely impossible," he said. "Everything disturbs her, every tiny
thing. You----You'd be certain to."
Lady Beach-Mandarin looked at her companion and it was manifest that she
was at the end of her resources. Miss Garradice after the fashion of
highly strung spinsters suddenly felt disappointed in her leader. It
wasn't, her silence intimated, for her to offer suggestions.
The ladies were defeated. When at last that stiff interval ended their
dresses rustled doorward, and Sir Isaac broke out into the civilities of
a victor....
It was only when they were a mile away from Black Strand that fluent
speech returned to Lady Beach-Mandarin. "The little--Crippen," she said.
"He's got her locked up in some cellar.... Horrid little face he has! He
looked like a rat at bay."
"I think perhaps if we'd done _differently_," said Miss Garradice in a
tone of critical irresponsibility.
"I'll write to her. That's what I'll do," said Lady Beach-Mandarin
contemplating her next step. "I'm really--concerned. And didn't you
feel--something sinister. That butler-man's expression--a kind of round
horror."
That very evening she told it all--it was almost the trial trip of the
story--to Mr. Brumley....
Sir Isaac watched their departure furtively from the study window and
then ran out to the garden. He went right through into the pine woods
beyond and presently, far away up the slopes, he saw his wife loitering
down towards him, a gracious white tallness touched by a ray of
sunlight--and without a suspicion of how nearly rescue had come to her.
§7
So you see under what excitement Mr. Brumley came down to Black Strand.
Luck was with him at first and he forced the defence with ridiculous
ease.
"Lady Harman, sir, is not a Tome," said Snagsby.
"Ah!" said Mr. Brumley, with all the assurance of a former proprietor,
"then I'll just have a look round the garden," and was through the green
door in the wall and round the barn end before Snagsby's mind could
function. That unfortunate man went as far as the green door in pursuit
and then with a gesture of despair retreated to the pantry and began
cleaning all his silver to calm his agonized spirit. He could pretend
perhaps that Mr. Brumley had never rung at the front door at all. If
not----
Moreover Mr. Brumley had the good fortune to find Lady Harman quite
unattended and pensive upon the little seat that Euphemia had placed for
the better seeing of her herbaceous borders.
"Lady Harman!" he said rather breathlessly, taking both her hands with
an unwonted assurance and then sitting down beside her, "I am so glad to
see you. I came down to see you--to see if I couldn't be of any service
to you."
"It's so kind of you to come," she said, and her dark eyes said as much
or more. She glanced round and he too glanced round for Sir Isaac.
"You see," he said. "I don't know.... I don't want to be impertinent....
But I feel--if I can be of any service to you.... I feel perhaps you
want help here. I don't want to seem to be taking advantage of a
situation. Or making unwarrantable assumptions. But I want to assure
you--I would willingly die--if only I could do anything.... Ever since I
first saw you."
He said all this in a distracted way, with his eyes going about the
garden for the possible apparition of Sir Isaac, and all the time his
sense of possible observers made him assume an attitude as though he was
engaged in the smallest of small talk. Her colour quickened at the
import of his words, and emotion, very rich and abundant emotion, its
various factors not altogether untouched perhaps by the spirit of
laughter, lit her eyes. She doubted a little what he was saying and yet
she had anticipated that somehow, some day, in quite other
circumstances, Mr. Brumley might break into some such strain.
"You see," he went on with a quality of appeal in his eyes, "there's so
little time to say things--without possible interruption. I feel you are
in difficulties and I want to make you understand----We----Every
beautiful woman, I suppose, has a sort of right to a certain sort of
man. I want to tell you--I'm not really presuming to make love to
you--but I want to tell you I am altogether yours, altogether at your
service. I've had sleepless nights. All this time I've been thinking
about you. I'm quite clear, I haven't a doubt, I'll do anything for you,
without reward, without return, I'll be your devoted brother, anything,
if only you'll make use of me...."
Her colour quickened. She looked around and still no one appeared. "It's
so kind of you to come like this," she said. "You say things--But I
_have_ felt that you wanted to be brotherly...."
"Whatever I _can_ be," assured Mr. Brumley.
"My situation here," she said, her dark frankness of gaze meeting his
troubled eyes. "It's so strange and difficult. I don't know what to do.
I don't know--what I _want_ to do...."
"In London," said Mr. Brumley, "they think--they say--you have been
taken off--brought down here--to a sort of captivity."
"I _have_," admitted Lady Harman with a note of recalled astonishment in
her voice.
"If I can help you to escape----!"
"But where can I escape?"
And one must admit that it is a little difficult to indicate a correct
refuge for a lady who finds her home intolerable. Of course there was
Mrs. Sawbridge, but Lady Harman felt that her mother's disposition to
lock herself into her bedroom at the slightest provocation made her a
weak support for a defensive fight, and in addition that boarding-house
at Bournemouth did not attract her. Yet what other wall in all the world
was there for Lady Harman to set her back against? During the last few
days Mr. Brumley's mind had been busy with the details of impassioned
elopements conducted in the most exalted spirit, but now in the actual
presence of the lady these projects did in the most remarkable manner
vanish.
"Couldn't you," he said at last, "go somewhere?" And then with an air of
being meticulously explicit, "I mean, isn't there somewhere, where you
might safely go?"
(And in his dreams he had been crossing high passes with her; he had
halted suddenly and stayed her mule. In his dream because he was a man
of letters and a poet it was always a mule, never a _train de luxe_.
"Look," he had said, "below there,--_Italy!_--the country you have never
seen before.")
"There's nowhere," she answered.
"Now _where_?" asked Mr. Brumley, "and how?" with the tone and something
of the gesture of one who racks his mind. "If you only trust yourself to
me----Oh! Lady Harman, if I dared ask it----"
He became aware of Sir Isaac walking across the lawn towards them....
The two men greeted each other with a reasonable cordiality. "I wanted
to see how you were getting on down here," said Mr. Brumley, "and
whether there was anything I could do for you."
"We're getting on all right," said Sir Isaac with no manifest glow of
gratitude.
"You've altered the old barn--tremendously."
"Come and see it," said Sir Isaac. "It's a wing."
Mr. Brumley remained seated. "It was the first thing that struck me,
Lady Harman. This evidence of Sir Isaac's energy."
"Come and look over it," Sir Isaac persisted.
Mr. Brumley and Lady Harman rose together.
"One's enough to show him that," said Sir Isaac.
"I was telling Lady Harman how much we missed her at Lady Viping's, Sir
Isaac."
"It was on account of the drains," Sir Isaac explained. "You can't--it's
foolhardy to stay a day when the drains are wrong, dinners or no
dinners."
"You know _I_ was extremely sorry not to come to Lady Viping's. I hope
you'll tell her. I wrote."
But Mr. Brumley didn't remember clearly enough to make any use of that.
"Everybody naturally _is_ sorry on an occasion of that sort," said Sir
Isaac. "But you come and see what we've done in that barn. In three
weeks. They couldn't have got it together in three months ten years ago.
It's--system."
Mr. Brumley still tried to cling to Lady Harman.
"Have you been interested in this building?" he asked.
"I still don't understand the system of the corridor," she said, rising
a little belatedly to the occasion. "I _will_ come."
Sir Isaac regarded her for a moment with a dubious expression and then
began to explain the new method of building with large prepared units
and shaped pieces of reinforced concrete instead of separate bricks that
Messrs. Prothero & Cuthbertson had organized and which had enabled him
to create this artistic corridor so simply. It was a rather
uncomfortable three-cornered conversation. Sir Isaac addressed his
exposition exclusively to Mr. Brumley and Mr. Brumley made repeated
ineffectual attempts to bring Lady Harman, and Lady Harman made repeated
ineffectual attempts to bring herself, into a position in the
conversation.
Their eyes met, the glow of Mr. Brumley's declarations remained with
them, but neither dared risk any phrase that might arouse Sir Isaac's
suspicions or escape his acuteness. And when they had gone through the
new additions pretty thoroughly--the plumbers were still busy with the
barn bathroom--Sir Isaac asked Mr. Brumley if there was anything more he
would like to see. In the slight pause that ensued Lady Harman suggested
tea. But tea gave them no opportunity of resuming their interrupted
conversation, and as Sir Isaac's invincible determination to shadow his
visitor until he was well off the premises became more and more
unmistakable,--he made it quite ungraciously unmistakable,--Mr.
Brumley's inventiveness failed. One thing came to him suddenly, but it
led to nothing of any service to him.
"But I heard you were dangerously ill, Lady Harman!" he cried. "Lady
Beach-Mandarin called here----"
"But when?" asked Lady Harman, astonished over the tea-things.
"But you _know_ she called!" said Mr. Brumley and looked in affected
reproach at Sir Isaac.
"I've not been ill at all!"
"Sir Isaac told her."
"Told her I was ill!"
"Dangerously ill. That you couldn't bear to be disturbed."
"But _when_, Mr. Brumley?"
"Three days ago."
They both looked at Sir Isaac who was sitting on the music stool and
eating a piece of tea-cake with a preoccupied air. He swallowed and then
spoke thoughtfully--in a tone of detached observation. Nothing but a
slight reddening of the eyes betrayed any unusual feeling in him.
"It's my opinion," he said, "that that old lady--Lady Beach-Mandarin I
mean--doesn't know what she's saying half the time. She says--oh!
remarkable things. Saying _that_ for example!"
"But did she call on me?"
"She called. I'm surprised you didn't hear. And she was all in a flurry
for going on.... Did you come down, Mr. Brumley, to see if Lady Harman
was ill?"
"That weighed with me."
"Well,--you see she isn't," said Sir Isaac and brushed a stray crumb
from his coat....
Mr. Brumley was at last impelled gateward and Sir Isaac saw him as far
as the high-road.
"Good-bye!" cried Mr. Brumley with excessive amiability.
Sir Isaac with soundless lips made a good-bye like gesture.
"And now," said Sir Isaac to himself with extreme bitterness, "now to
see about getting a dog."
"Bull mastiff?" said Sir Isaac developing his idea as he went back to
Lady Harman. "Or perhaps a Thoroughly Vicious collie?"
"How did that chap get in?" he demanded. "What had he got to say to
you?"
"He came in--to look at the garden," said Lady Harman. "And of course he
wanted to know if I had been well--because of Lady Viping's party. And I
suppose because of what you told Lady Beach-Mandarin."
Sir Isaac grunted doubtfully. He thought of Snagsby and of all the
instructions he had given Snagsby. He turned about and went off swiftly
and earnestly to find Snagsby....
Snagsby lied. But Sir Isaac was able to tell from the agitated way in
which he was cleaning his perfectly clean silver at that unseasonable
hour that the wretched man was lying.
§8
Quite a number of words came to the lips of Mr. Brumley as he went
unwillingly along the pleasant country road that led from Black Strand
to the railway station. But the word he ultimately said showed how
strongly the habits of the gentlemanly _littérateur_ prevailed in him.
It was the one inevitable word for his mood,--"Baffled!"
Close upon its utterance came the weak irritation of the impotent man.
"What the _devil_?" cried Mr. Brumley.
Some critical spirit within him asked him urgently why he was going to
the station, what he thought he was doing, what he thought he had done,
and what he thought he was going to do. To all of which questions Mr.
Brumley perceived he had no adequate reply.
Earlier in the day he had been inspired by a vague yet splendid dream of
large masterful liberations achieved. He had intended to be very
disinterested, very noble, very firm, and so far as Sir Isaac was
concerned, a trifle overbearing. You know now what he said and did. "Of
course if we could have talked for a little longer," he said. From the
stormy dissatisfaction of his retreat this one small idea crystallized,
that he had not talked enough without disturbance to Lady Harman. The
thing he had to do was to talk to her some more. To go on with what he
had been saying. That thought arrested his steps. On that hypothesis
there was no reason whatever why he should go on to the station and
London. Instead----He stopped short, saw a convenient gate ahead, went
to it, seated himself upon its topmost rail and attempted a calm survey
of the situation. He had somehow to continue that conversation with Lady
Harman.
Was it impossible to do that by going back to the front door of Black
Strand? His instinct was against that course. He knew that if he went
back now openly he would see nobody but Sir Isaac or his butler. He must
therefore not go back openly. He must go round now and into the
pine-woods at the back of Black Strand; thence he must watch the garden
and find his opportunity of speaking to the imprisoned lady. There was
something at once attractively romantic and repellently youthful about
this course of action. Mr. Brumley looked at his watch, then he surveyed
the blue clear sky overhead, with just one warm tinted wisp of cloud. It
would be dark in an hour and it was probable that Lady Harman had
already gone indoors for the day. Might it be possible after dark to
approach the house? No one surely knew the garden so well as he.
Of course this sort of thing is always going on in romances; in the
stories of that last great survivor of the Stevensonian tradition, H.B.
Marriot Watson, the heroes are always creeping through woods, tapping at
windows, and scaling house-walls, but Mr. Brumley as he sat on his gate
became very sensible of his own extreme inexperience in such
adventures. And yet anything seemed in his present mood better than
going back to London.
Suppose he tried his luck!
He knew of course the lie of the land about Black Strand very well
indeed and his harmless literary social standing gave him a certain
freedom of trespass. He dropped from his gate on the inner side and
taking a bridle path through a pine-wood was presently out upon the
moorland behind his former home. He struck the high-road that led past
the Staminal Bread Board and was just about to clamber over the barbed
wire on his left and make his way through the trees to the crest that
commanded the Black Strand garden when he perceived a man in a velveteen
coat and gaiters strolling towards him. He decided not to leave the road
until he was free from observation. The man was a stranger, an almost
conventional gamekeeper, and he endorsed Mr. Brumley's remark upon the
charmingness of the day with guarded want of enthusiasm. Mr. Brumley
went on for some few minutes, then halted, assured himself that the
stranger was well out of sight and returned at once towards the point
where high-roads were to be left and adventure begun. But he was still
some yards away when he became aware of that velveteen-coated figure
approaching again. "Damn!" said Mr. Brumley and slacked his eager paces.
This time he expressed a view that the weather was extremely mild.
"Very," said the man in velveteen with a certain lack of respect in his
manner.
It was no good turning back again. Mr. Brumley went on slowly, affected
to botanize, watched the man out of sight and immediately made a dash
for the pine-woods, taking the barbed wire in a manner extremely
detrimental to his left trouser leg. He made his way obliquely up
through the trees to the crest from which he had so often surveyed the
shining ponds of Aleham. There he paused to peer back for that
gamekeeper--whom he supposed in spite of reason to be stalking him--to
recover his breath and to consider his further plans. The sunset was
very fine that night, a great red sun was sinking towards acutely
outlined hill-crests, the lower nearer distances were veiled in lavender
mists and three of the ponds shone like the fragments of a shattered
pink topaz. But Mr. Brumley had no eye for landscape....
About two hours after nightfall Mr. Brumley reached the railway station.
His trousers and the elbow of his coat bore witness to a second transit
of the barbed-wire fence in the darkness, he had manifestly walked into
a boggy place and had some difficulty in recovering firm ground and he
had also been sliding in a recumbent position down a bank of moist
ferruginous sand. Moreover he had cut the palm of his left hand. There
was a new strange stationmaster who regarded him without that respect to
which he had grown accustomed. He received the information that the
winter train service had been altered and that he would have to wait
forty-five minutes for the next train to London with the resignation of
a man already chastened by misfortune and fatigue. He went into the
waiting-room and after a vain search for the poker--the new
stationmaster evidently kept it in a different place--sat down in front
of an irritatingly dull fire banked up with slack, and nursed his
damaged hand and meditated on his future plans.
His plans were still exactly in the state in which they had been when
Sir Isaac parted from him at the gate of Black Strand. They remained in
the same state for two whole days. Throughout all that distressing
period his general intention of some magnificent intervention on behalf
of Lady Harman remained unchanged, it produced a number of moving
visions of flights at incredible speeds in (recklessly hired) motor-cars
of colossal power,--most of the purchase money for Black Strand was
still uninvested at his bank--of impassioned interviews with various
people, of a divorce court with a hardened judge congratulating the
manifestly quite formal co-respondent on the moral beauty of his
behaviour, but it evolved no sort of concrete practicable detail upon
which any kind of action might be taken. And during this period of
indecision Mr. Brumley was hunted through London by a feverish unrest.
When he was in his little flat in Pont Street he was urged to go to his
club, when he got to his club he was urged to go anywhere else, he
called on the most improbable people and as soon as possible fled forth
again, he even went to the British Museum and ordered out a lot of books
on matrimonial law. Long before that great machine had disgorged them
for him he absconded and this neglected, this widowed pile of volumes
still standing to his account only came back to his mind in the middle
of the night suddenly and disturbingly while he was trying to remember
the exact words he had used in his brief conversation with Lady
Harman....
§9
Two days after Mr. Brumley's visit Susan Burnet reached Black Strand.
She too had been baffled for a while. For some week or more she couldn't
discover the whereabouts of Lady Harman and lived in the profoundest
perplexity. She had brought back her curtains to the Putney house in a
large but luggable bundle, they were all made and ready to put up, and
she found the place closed and locked, in the charge of a caretaker
whose primary duty it was to answer no questions. It needed several days
of thought and amazement, and a vast amount of "I wonder," and "I just
would like to know," before it occurred to Susan that if she wrote to
Lady Harman at the Putney address the letter might be forwarded. And
even then she almost wrecked the entire enterprise by mentioning the
money, and it was by a quite exceptional inspiration that she thought
after all it was wiser not to say that but to state that she had
finished the curtains and done everything (underlined) that Lady Harman
had desired. Sir Isaac read it and tossed it over to his wife. "Make her
send her bill," he remarked.
Whereupon Lady Harman set Mrs. Crumble in motion to bring Susan down to
Black Strand. This wasn't quite easy because as Mrs. Crumble pointed out
they hadn't the slightest use for Susan's curtains there, and Lady
Harman had to find the morning light quite intolerable in her
bedroom--she always slept with window wide open and curtains drawn
back--to create a suitable demand for Susan's services. But at last
Susan came, too humbly invisible for Sir Isaac's attention, and directly
she found Lady Harman alone in the room with her, she produced a pawn
ticket and twenty pounds. "I 'ad to give all sorts of particulars," she
said. "It was a job. But I did it...."
The day was big with opportunity, for Sir Isaac had been unable to
conceal the fact that he had to spend the morning in London. He had gone
up in the big car and his wife was alone, and so, with Susan upstairs
still deftly measuring for totally unnecessary hangings, Lady Harman was
able to add a fur stole and a muff and some gloves to her tweed
gardening costume, walk unchallenged into the garden and from the garden
into the wood and up the hillside and over the crest and down to the
high-road and past that great advertisement of Staminal Bread and so for
four palpitating miles, to the railway station and the outer world.
She had the good fortune to find a train imminent,--the
twelve-seventeen. She took a first-class ticket for London and got into
a compartment with another woman because she felt it would be safer.
§10
Lady Harman reached Miss Alimony's flat at half-past three in the
afternoon. She had lunched rather belatedly and uncomfortably in the
Waterloo Refreshment Room and she had found out that Miss Alimony was at
home through the telephone. "I want to see you urgently," she said, and
Miss Alimony received her in that spirit. She was hatless but she had a
great cloud of dark fuzzy hair above the grey profundity of her eyes and
she wore an artistic tea-gown that in spite of a certain looseness at
neck and sleeve emphasized the fine lines of her admirable figure. Her
flat was furnished chiefly with books and rich oriental hangings and
vast cushions and great bowls of scented flowers. On the mantel-shelf
was the crystal that amused her lighter moments and above it hung a
circular allegory by Florence Swinstead, very rich in colour, the
Awakening of Woman, in a heavy gold frame. Miss Alimony conducted her
guest to an armchair, knelt flexibly on the hearthrug before her, took
up a small and elegant poker with a brass handle and a spear-shaped
service end of iron and poked the fire.
The service end came out from the handle and fell into the grate. "It
always does that," said Miss Alimony charmingly. "But never mind." She
warmed both hands at the blaze. "Tell me all about it," she said,
softly.
Lady Harman felt she would rather have been told all about it. But
perhaps that would follow.
"You see," she said, "I find----My married life----"
She halted. It _was_ very difficult to tell.
"Everyone," said Agatha, giving a fine firelit profile, and remaining
gravely thoughtful through a little pause.
"Do you mind," she asked abruptly, "if I smoke?"
When she had completed her effect with a delicately flavoured cigarette,
she encouraged Lady Harman to proceed.
This Lady Harman did in a manner do. She said her husband left her no
freedom of mind or movement, gave her no possession of herself, wanted
to control her reading and thinking. "He insists----" she said.
"Yes," said Miss Agatha sternly blowing aside her cigarette smoke. "They
all insist."
"He insists," said Lady Harman, "on seeing all my letters, choosing all
my friends. I have no control over my house or my servants, no money
except what he gives me."
"In fact you are property."
"I'm simply property."
"A harem of one. And all _that_ is within the provisions of the law!"
"How any woman can marry!" said Miss Agatha, after a little interval. "I
sometimes think that is where the true strike of the sex ought to begin.
If none of us married! If we said all of us, 'No,--definitely--we refuse
this bargain! It is a man-made contract. We have had no voice in it. We
decline.' Perhaps it will come to that. And I knew that you, you with
that quiet beautiful penetration in your eyes would come to see it like
that. The first task, after the vote is won, will be the revision of
that contract. The very first task of our Women Statesmen...."
She ceased and revived her smouldering cigarette and mused blinking
through the smoke. She seemed for a time almost lost to the presence of
her guest in a great daydream of womanstatecraft.
"And so," she said, "you've come, as they all come,--to join us."
"_Well_," said Lady Harman in a tone that made Agatha turn eyes of
surprise upon her.
"Of course," continued Lady Harman, "I suppose--I shall join you; but as
a matter of fact you see, what I've done to-day has been to come right
away.... You see I am still in my garden tweeds.... There it was down
there, a sort of stale mate...."
Agatha sat up on her heels.
"But my dear!" she said, "you don't mean you've run away?"
"Yes,--I've run away."
"But--run away!"
"I sold a ring and got some money and here I am!"
"But--what are you going to do?"
"I don't know. I thought you perhaps--might advise."
"But--a man like your husband! He'll pursue you!"
"If he knows where I am, he will," said Lady Harman.
"He'll make a scandal. My dear! are you wise? Tell me, tell me exactly,
_why_ have you run away? I didn't understand at all--that you had run
away."
"Because," began Lady Harman and flushed hotly. "It was impossible," she
said.
Miss Alimony regarded her deeply. "I wonder," she said.
"I feel," said Lady Harman, "if I stayed, if I gave in----I mean
after--after I had once--rebelled. Then I should just be--a wife--ruled,
ordered----"
"It wasn't your place to give in," said Miss Alimony and added one of
those parliament touches that creep more and more into feminine
phraseology; "I agree to that--_nemine contradicente_. But--I
_wonder_...."
She began a second cigarette and thought in profile again.
"I think, perhaps, I haven't explained, clearly, how things are," said
Lady Harman, and commenced a rather more explicit statement of her case.
She felt she had not conveyed and she wanted to convey to Miss Alimony
that her rebellion was not simply a desire for personal freedom and
autonomy, that she desired these things because she was becoming more
and more aware of large affairs outside her home life in which she ought
to be not simply interested but concerned, that she had been not merely
watching the workings of the business that made her wealthy, but reading
books about socialism, about social welfare that had stirred her
profoundly.... "But he won't even allow me to know of such things," she
said....
Miss Alimony listened a little abstractedly.
Suddenly she interrupted. "Tell me," she said, "one thing.... I
confess," she explained, "I've no business to ask. But if I'm to
advise----If my advice is to be worth anything...."
"Yes?" asked Lady Harman.
"Is there----Is there someone else?"
"Someone else?" Lady Harman was crimson.
"On _your_ side!"
"Someone else on my side?"
"I mean--someone. A man perhaps? Some man that you care for? More than
you do for your husband?..."
"_I can't imagine_," whispered Lady Harman, "_anything_----" And left
her sentence unfinished. Her breath had gone. Her indignation was
profound.
"Then I can't understand why you should find it so important to come
away."
Lady Harman could offer no elucidation.
"You see," said Miss Alimony, with an air of expert knowledge, "our case
against our opponents is just exactly their great case against us. They
say to us when we ask for the Vote, 'the Woman's Place is the Home.'
'Precisely,' we answer, 'the Woman's Place _is_ the Home. _Give_ us our
Homes!' Now _your_ place is your home--with your children. That's where
you have to fight your battle. Running away--for you it's simply running
away."
"But----If I stay I shall be beaten." Lady Harman surveyed her hostess
with a certain dismay. "Do you understand, Agatha? I _can't_ go back."
"But my dear! What else can you do? What had you thought?"
"You see," said Lady Harman, after a little struggle with that childish
quality in her nerves that might, if it wasn't controlled, make her eyes
brim. "You see, I didn't expect you quite to take this view. I thought
perhaps you might be disposed----If I could have stayed with you here,
only for a little time, I could have got some work or something----"
"It's so dreadful," said Miss Alimony, sitting far back with the
relaxation of infinite regrets. "It's dreadful."
"Of course if you don't see it as I do----"
"I can't," said Miss Alimony. "I can't."
She turned suddenly upon her visitor and grasped her knees with her
shapely hands. "Oh let me implore you! Don't run away. Please for my
sake, for all our sakes, for the sake of Womanhood, don't run away! Stay
at your post. You mustn't run away. You must _not_. If you do, you admit
everything. Everything. You must fight in your home. It's _your_ home.
That is the great principle you must grasp,--it's not his. It's there
your duty lies. And there are your children--_your_ children, your
little ones! Think if you go--there may be a fearful fuss--proceedings.
Lawyers--a search. Very probably he will take all sorts of proceedings.
It will be a Matrimonial Case. How can I be associated with that? We
mustn't mix up Women's Freedom with Matrimonial Cases. Impossible! We
_dare_ not! A woman leaving her husband! Think of the weapon it gives
our enemies. If once other things complicate the Vote,--the Vote is
lost. After all our self-denial, after all our sacrifices.... You see!
Don't you _see_?...
"_Fight!_" she summarized after an eloquent interval.
"You mean," said Lady Harman,--"you think I ought to go back."
Miss Alimony paused to get her full effect. "_Yes_," she said in a
profound whisper and endorsed it, "Oh so much so!--yes."
"Now?"
"Instantly."
For an interval neither lady spoke. It was the visitor at last who broke
the tension.
"Do you think," she asked in a small voice and with the hesitation of
one whom no refusal can surprise; "you could give me a cup of tea?"
Miss Alimony rose with a sigh and a slow unfolding rustle. "I forgot,"
she said. "My little maid is out."
Lady Harman left alone sat for a time staring at the fire with her eyes
rather wide and her eyebrows raised as though she mutely confided to it
her infinite astonishment. This was the last thing she had expected. She
would have to go to some hotel. Can a woman stay alone at an hotel? Her
heart sank. Inflexible forces seemed to be pointing her back to
home--and Sir Isaac. He would be a very triumphant Sir Isaac, and she'd
not have much heart left in her.... "I _won't_ go back," she whispered
to herself. "Whatever happens I _won't_ go back...."
Then she became aware of the evening newspaper Miss Alimony had been
reading. The headline, "Suffrage Raid on Regent Street," caught her eye.
A queer little idea came into her head. It grew with tremendous
rapidity. She put out a hand and took up the paper and read.
She had plenty of time to read because her hostess not only got the tea
herself but went during that process to her bedroom and put on one of
those hats that have contributed so much to remove the stigma of
dowdiness from the suffrage cause, as an outward and visible sign that
she was presently ceasing to be at home....
Lady Harman found an odd fact in the report before her. "One of the most
difficult things to buy at the present time in the West End of London,"
it ran, "is a hammer...."
Then a little further: "The magistrate said it was impossible to make
discriminations in this affair. All the defendants must have a month's
imprisonment...."
When Miss Alimony returned Lady Harman put down the paper almost
guiltily.
Afterwards Miss Alimony recalled that guilty start, and the still more
guilty start that had happened, when presently she went out of the room
again and returned with a lamp, for the winter twilight was upon them.
Afterwards, too, she was to learn what had become of the service end of
her small poker, the little iron club, which she missed almost as soon
as Lady Harman had gone....
Lady Harman had taken that grubby but convenient little instrument and
hidden it in her muff, and she had gone straight out of Miss Alimony's
flat to the Post Office at the corner of Jago Street, and there, with
one simple effective impact, had smashed a ground-glass window, the
property of His Majesty King George the Fifth. And having done so, she
had called the attention of a youthful policeman, fresh from Yorkshire,
to her offence, and after a slight struggle with his incredulity and a
visit to the window in question, had escorted him to the South Hampsmith
police-station, and had there made him charge her. And on the way she
explained to him with a newfound lucidity why it was that women should
have votes.
And all this she did from the moment of percussion onward, in a mood of
exaltation entirely strange to her, but, as she was astonished to find,
by no means disagreeable. She found afterwards that she only remembered
very indistinctly her selection of the window and her preparations for
the fatal blow, but that the effect of the actual breakage remained
extraordinarily vivid upon her memory. She saw with extreme distinctness
both as it was before and after the breakage, first as a rather
irregular grey surface, shining in the oblique light of a street lamp,
and giving pale phantom reflections of things in the street, and then as
it was after her blow. It was all visual impression in her memory; she
could not recollect afterwards if there had been any noise at all. Where
there had been nothing but a milky dinginess a thin-armed, irregular
star had flashed into being, and a large triangular piece at its centre,
after what seemed an interminable indecision, had slid, first covertly
downward, and then fallen forward at her feet and shivered into a
hundred fragments....
Lady Harman realized that a tremendous thing had been done--irrevocably.
She stared at her achievement open-mouthed. The creative lump of iron
dropped from her hand. She had a momentary doubt whether she had really
wanted to break that window at all; and then she understood that this
business had to be seen through, and seen through with neatness and
dignity; and that wisp of regret vanished absolutely in her
concentration upon these immediate needs.
§11
Some day, when the arts of the writer and illustrator are more closely
blended than they are to-day, it will be possible to tell of all that
followed this blow, with an approach to its actual effect. Here there
should stand a page showing simply and plainly the lower half of the
window of the Jago Street Post Office, a dark, rather grimy pane,
reflecting the light of a street lamp--and _broken_. Below the pane
would come a band of evilly painted woodwork, a corner of letter-box, a
foot or so of brickwork, and then the pavement with a dropped lump of
iron. That would be the sole content of this page, and the next page
would be the same, but very slightly fainter, and across it would be
printed a dim sentence or so of explanation. The page following that
would show the same picture again, but now several lines of type would
be visible, and then, as one turned over, the smashed window would fade
a little, and the printed narrative, still darkened and dominated by it,
would nevertheless resume. One would read on how Lady Harman returned to
convince the incredulous young Yorkshireman of her feat, how a man with
a barrow-load of bananas volunteered comments, and how she went in
custody, but with the extremest dignity, to the police-station. Then,
with some difficulty, because that imposed picture would still prevail
over the letterpress, and because it would be in small type, one would
learn how she was bailed out by Lady Beach-Mandarin, who was clearly the
woman she ought to have gone to in the first place, and who gave up a
dinner with a duchess to entertain her, and how Sir Isaac, being too
torn by his feelings to come near her spent the evening in a frantic
attempt to keep the whole business out of the papers. He could not
manage it. The magistrate was friendly next morning, but inelegant in
his friendly expedients; he remanded Lady Harman until her mental
condition could be inquired into, but among her fellow-defendants--there
had been quite an epidemic of window-smashing that evening--Lady Harman
shone pre-eminently sane. She said she had broken this window because
she was assured that nothing would convince people of the great
dissatisfaction of women with their conditions except such desperate
acts, and when she was reminded of her four daughters she said it was
precisely the thought of how they too would grow up to womanhood that
had made her strike her blow. The statements were rather the outcome of
her evening with Lady Beach-Mandarin than her own unaided discoveries,
but she had honestly assimilated them, and she expressed them with a
certain simple dignity.
Sir Isaac made a pathetic appearance before the court, and Lady Harman
was shocked to see how worn he was with distress at her scandalous
behaviour. He looked a broken man. That curious sense of personal
responsibility, which had slumbered throughout the Black Strand
struggle, came back to her in a flood, and she had to grip the edge of
the dock tightly to maintain her self-control. Unaccustomed as he was to
public speaking, Sir Isaac said in a low, sorrow-laden voice, he had
provided himself with a written statement dissociating himself from the
views his wife's rash action might seem to imply, and expressing his own
opinions upon woman's suffrage and the relations of the sexes generally,
with especial reference to contemporary literature. He had been writing
it most of the night. He was not, however, permitted to read this, and
he then made an unstudied appeal for the consideration and mercy of the
court. He said Lady Harman had always been a good mother and a faithful
wife; she had been influenced by misleading people and bad books and
publications, the true significance of which she did not understand, and
if only the court would regard this first offence leniently he was
ready to take his wife away and give any guarantee that might be
specified that it should not recur. The magistrate was sympathetic and
kindly, but he pointed out that this window-breaking had to be stamped
out, and that it could only be stamped out by refusing any such
exception as Sir Isaac desired. And so Sir Isaac left the court widowed
for a month, a married man without a wife, and terribly distressed.
All this and more one might tell in detail, and how she went to her
cell, and the long tedium of her imprisonment, and how deeply Snagsby
felt the disgrace, and how Miss Alimony claimed her as a convert to the
magic of her persuasions, and many such matters--there is no real
restraint upon a novelist fully resolved to be English and Gothic and
unclassical except obscure and inexplicable instincts. But these obscure
and inexplicable instincts are at times imperative, and on this occasion
they insist that here must come a break, a pause, in the presence of
this radiating gap in the Postmaster-General's glass, and the phenomenon
of this gentle and beautiful lady, the mother of four children, grasping
in her gloved hand, and with a certain amateurishness, a lumpish
poker-end of iron.
We make the pause by ending the chapter here and by resuming the story
at a fresh point--with an account of various curious phases in the
mental development of Mr. Brumley.
CHAPTER THE NINTH
MR. BRUMLEY IS TROUBLED BY DIFFICULT IDEAS
§1
Then as that picture of a post office pane, smashed and with a large
hole knocked clean through it, fades at last upon the reader's
consciousness, let another and a kindred spectacle replace it. It is the
carefully cleaned and cherished window of Mr. Brumley's mind, square and
tidy and as it were "frosted" against an excess of light, and in that
also we have now to record the most jagged all and devastating
fractures.
Little did Mr. Brumley reckon when first he looked up from his laces at
Black Strand, how completely that pretty young woman in the dark furs
was destined to shatter all the assumptions that had served his life.
But you have already had occasion to remark a change in Mr. Brumley's
bearing and attitude that carries him far from the kindly and humorous
conservatism of his earlier work. You have shared Lady Harman's
astonishment at the ardour of his few stolen words in the garden, an
astonishment that not only grew but flowered in the silences of her
captivity, and you know something of the romantic impulses, more at
least than she did, that gave his appearance at the little local railway
station so belated and so disreputable a flavour. In the chilly
ill-flavoured solitude of her prison cell and with a mind quickened by
meagre and distasteful fare, Lady Harman had ample leisure to reflect
upon many things, she had already fully acquainted herself with the
greater proportion of Mr. Brumley's published works, and she found the
utmost difficulty in reconciling the flushed impassioned quality of his
few words of appeal, with the moral assumptions of his published
opinions. On the whole she was inclined to think that her memory had a
little distorted what he had said. In this however she was mistaken; Mr.
Brumley had really been proposing an elopement and he was now entirely
preoccupied with the idea of rescuing, obtaining and possessing Lady
Harman for himself as soon as the law released her.
One may doubt whether this extensive change from a humorous conservatism
to a primitive and dangerous romanticism is to be ascribed entirely to
the personal charm, great as it no doubt was, of Lady Harman; rather did
her tall soft dark presence come to release a long accumulating store of
discontent and unrest beneath the polished surfaces of Mr. Brumley's
mind. Things had been stirring in him for some time; the latter Euphemia
books had lacked much of the freshness of their precursors and he had
found it increasingly hard, he knew not why, to keep up the lightness,
the geniality, the friendly badinage of successful and accepted things,
the sunny disregard of the grim and unamiable aspects of existence,
that were the essential merits of that Optimistic Period of our
literature in which Mr. Brumley had begun his career. With every
justification in the world Mr. Brumley had set out to be an optimist,
even in the _Granta_ his work had been distinguished by its gay yet
steadfast superficiality, and his early success, his rapid popularity,
had done much to turn this early disposition into a professional
attitude. He had determined that for all his life he would write for
comfortable untroubled people in the character of a light-spirited,
comfortable, untroubled person, and that each year should have its book
of connubial humour, its travel in picturesque places, its fun and its
sunshine, like roses budding in succession on a stem. He did his utmost
to conceal from himself the melancholy realization that the third and
the fourth roses were far less wonderful than the first and the second,
and that by continuing the descending series a rose might be attained at
last that was almost unattractive, but he was already beginning to
suspect that he was getting less animated and a little irritable when
Euphemia very gently and gracefully but very firmly and rather
enigmatically died, and after an interval of tender and tenderly
expressed regrets he found himself, in spite of the most strenuous
efforts to keep bright and kindly and optimistic in the best style, dull
and getting duller--he could disguise the thing no longer. And he
weighed more. Six--eight--eleven pounds more. He took a flat in London,
dined and lunched out lightly but frequently, sought the sympathetic
friendship of several charming ladies, and involved himself deeply in
the affairs of the Academic Committee. Indeed he made a quite valiant
struggle to feel that optimism was just where it always had been and
everything all right and very bright with him and with the world about
him. He did not go under without a struggle. But as Max Beerbohm's
caricature--the 1908 one I mean--brought out all too plainly, there was
in his very animation, something of the alert liveliness of the hunted
man. Do what he would he had a terrible irrational feeling that things,
as yet scarce imagined things, were after him and would have him. Even
as he makes his point, even as he gesticulates airily, with his rather
distinctively North European nose Beerbohmically enlarged and his
sensitive nostril in the air, he seems to be looking at something he
does not want to look at, something conceivably pursuing, out of the
corner of his eye.
The thing that was assailing Mr. Brumley and making his old established
humour and tenderness seem dull and opaque and giving this new uneasy
quality to his expression was of course precisely the thing that Sir
Isaac meant when he talked about "idees" and their disturbing influence
upon all the once assured tranquillities and predominances of Putney
life. It was criticism breaking bounds.
As a basis and substance for the tissue of whimsically expressed
happiness and confident appreciation of the good things of life, which
Mr. Brumley had set before himself as his agreeable--and it was to be
hoped popular and profitable--life-task, certain assumptions had been
necessary. They were assumptions he had been very willing to make and
which were being made in the most exemplary way by the writers who were
succeeding all about him at the commencement of his career. And these
assumptions had had such an air then of being quite trustworthy, as
being certain to wash and wear! Already nowadays it is difficult to get
them stated; they have become incredible while still too near to justify
the incredibility that attaches to history. It was assumed, for example,
that in the institutions, customs and culture of the middle Victorian
period, humanity had, so far as the broad lines of things are concerned,
achieved its goal. There were of course still bad men and
women--individually--and classes one had to recognize as "lower," but
all the main things were right, general ideas were right; the law was
right, institutions were right, Consols and British Railway Debentures
were right and were going to keep right for ever. The Abolition of
Slavery in America had been the last great act which had inaugurated
this millennium. Except for individual instances the tragic intensities
of life were over now and done with; there was no more need for heroes
and martyrs; for the generality of humanity the phase of genial comedy
had begun. There might be improvements and refinements ahead, but
social, political and economic arrangement were now in their main
outlines settled for good and all; nothing better was possible and it
was the agreeable task of the artist and the man of letters to assist
and celebrate this establishment. There was to be much editing of
Shakespear and Charles Lamb, much delightful humour and costume romance,
and an Academy of refined Fine Writers would presently establish
belles-lettres on the reputable official basis, write _finis_ to
creative force and undertake the task of stereotyping the language.
Literature was to have its once terrible ferments reduced to the quality
of a helpful pepsin. Ideas were dead--or domesticated. The last wild
idea, in an impoverished and pitiful condition, had been hunted down and
killed in the mobbing of, "The Woman Who Did." For a little time the
world did actually watch a phase of English writing that dared nothing,
penetrated nothing, suppressed everything and aspired at most to Charm,
creep like a transitory patch of sunlight across a storm-rent universe.
And vanish....
At no time was it a perfectly easy task to pretend that the crazy
makeshifts of our legal and political systems, the staggering accidents
of economic relationship, the festering disorder of contemporary
philosophy and religious teaching, the cruel and stupid bed of King Og
that is our last word in sexual adjustment, really constituted a noble
and enduring sanity, and it became less and less so with the acute
disillusionments that arose out of the Boer War. The first decade of the
twentieth century was for the English a decade of badly sprained
optimism. Our Empire was nearly beaten by a handful of farmers amidst
the jeering contempt of the whole world--and we felt it acutely for
several years. We began to question ourselves. Mr. Brumley found his gay
but entirely respectable irresponsibility harder and harder to keep up
as that decade wore on. And close upon the South African trouble came
that extraordinary new discontent of women with a woman's lot which we
have been observing as it reached and troubled the life of Lady Harman.
Women who had hitherto so passively made the bulk of that reading public
which sustained Mr. Brumley and his kind--they wanted something else!
And behind and beneath these immediately disconcerting things still more
sinister hintings and questioning were beginning to pluck at
contentment. In 1899 nobody would have dreamt of asking and in 1909 even
Mr. Brumley was asking, "Are things going on much longer?" A hundred
little incidents conspired to suggest that a Christianity that had, to
put it mildly, shirked the Darwinian challenge, had no longer the
palliating influence demanded of a national religion, and that down
there in the deep levels of labour where they built railways to carry
Mr. Brumley's food and earn him dividends, where they made engines and
instruments and textiles and drains for his little needs, there was a
new, less bounded discontent, a grimmer spirit, something that one tried
in vain to believe was only the work of "agitators," something that was
to be pacified no longer by the thin pretences of liberalism, something
that might lead ultimately--optimism scarcely dared to ask whither....
Mr. Brumley did his best to resist the influence of these darkening
ideas. He tried to keep it up that everything was going well and that
most of these shadows and complaints were the mischief of a few
incurably restless personalities. He tried to keep it up that to belong
to the working class was a thoroughly jolly thing--for those who were
used to it. He declared that all who wanted to alter our laws or our
ideas about property or our methods of production were envious and base
and all who wanted any change between the sexes, foolish or vicious. He
tried to go on disposing of socialists, agitators, feminists, women's
suffragists, educationists and every sort of reformer with a
good-humoured contempt. And he found an increasing difficulty in keeping
his contempt sufficiently good-humoured. Instead of laughing down at
folly and failure, he had moments when he felt that he was rather
laughing up--a little wryly--at monstrous things impending. And since
ideas are things of atmosphere and the spirit, insidious wolves of the
soul, they crept up to him and gnawed the insides out of him even as he
posed as their manful antagonist.
Insensibly Mr. Brumley moved with his times. It is the necessary first
phase in the break-up of any system of unsound assumptions that a number
of its votaries should presently set about padding its cutting corners
and relieving the harsh pressure of its injustices by exuberances of
humour and sentimentality. Mr. Brumley became charitable and
romantic,--orthodox still but charitable and romantic. He was all for
smashing with the generalization, but now in the particular instance he
was more and more for forgiveness. One finds creeping into the later
Euphemia books a Bret-Harte-like doctrine that a great number of bad
women are really good and a persuasion in the 'Raffles' key that a large
proportion of criminals are really very picturesque and admirable
fellows. One wonders how far Mr. Brumley's less ostensible life was
softening in harmony with this exterior change, this tender twilight of
principle. He wouldn't as yet face the sterner fact that most people who
are condemned by society, whether they are condemned justly or not, are
by the very gregariousness of man's nature debased, and that a law or
custom that stamps you as bad makes you bad. A great state should have
high and humane and considerate laws nobly planned, nobly administered
and needing none of these shabby little qualifications _sotto voce_. To
find goodness in the sinner and justification in the outcast is to
condemn the law, but as yet Mr. Brumley's heart failed where his
intelligence pointed towards that conclusion. He hadn't the courage to
revise his assumptions about right and wrong to that extent; he just
allowed them to get soft and sloppy. He waded, where there should be
firm ground. He waded toward wallowing. This is a perilous way of living
and the sad little end of Euphemia, flushed and coughing, left him no
doubt in many ways still more exposed to the temptations of the
sentimental byway and the emotional gloss. Happily this is a book about
Lady Harman and not an exhaustive monograph upon Mr. Brumley. We will
at least leave him the refuge of a few shadows.
Occasionally he would write an important signed review for the
_Twentieth Century_ or the _Hebdomadal Review_, and on one such occasion
he took in hand several studies of contemporary conditions by various
'New Witnesses,' 'Young Liberals,' _New Age_ rebels and associated
insurgent authors. He intended to be rather kindly with them, rather
disillusioned, quite sympathetic but essentially conventional and
conservative and sane. He sat at a little desk near the drooping Venus,
under the benediction of Euphemia's posthumous rose, and turned over the
pages of one of the least familiar of the group. The stuff was written
with a crude force that at times became almost distinguished, but with a
bitterness that he felt he must reprove. And suddenly he came upon a
passionate tirade against the present period. It made him nibble softly
with his lips at the top of his fountain pen as he read.
"We live," said the writer, "in a second Byzantine age, in one of those
multitudinous accumulations of secondary interests, of secondary
activities and conventions and colossal intricate insignificances, that
lie like dust heaps in the path of the historian. The true history of
such periods is written in bank books and cheque counterfoils and burnt
to save individual reputations; it sneaks along under a thousand
pretences, it finds its molelike food and safety in the dirt; its outer
forms remain for posterity, a huge débris of unfathomable riddles."
"Hm!" said Mr. Brumley. "He slings it out. And what's this?"
"A civilization arrested and decayed, waiting through long inglorious
ages of unscheduled crime, unchallenged social injustice, senseless
luxury, mercenary politics and universal vulgarity and weakness, for the
long overdue scavenging of the Turk."
"I wonder where the children pick up such language," whispered Mr.
Brumley with a smile.
But presently he had pushed the book away and was thinking over this
novel and unpleasant idea that perhaps after all his age didn't matter
as some ages have mattered and as he had hitherto always supposed it did
matter. Byzantine, with the gold of life stolen and the swans changed to
geese? Of course always there had been a certain qualification upon
heroes, even Cæsar had needed a wreath, but at any rate the age of Cæsar
had mattered. Kings no doubt might be more kingly and the issues of life
plainer and nobler, but this had been true of every age. He tried to
weigh values against values, our past against our present, temperately
and sanely. Our art might perhaps be keener for beauty than it seemed to
be, but still--it flourished. And our science at least was
wonderful--wonderful. There certainly this young detractor of existing
things went astray. What was there in Byzantium to parallel with the
electric light, the electric tram, wireless telegraphy, aseptic surgery?
Of course this about "unchallenged social injustice" was nonsense. Rant.
Why! we were challenging social injustice at every general
election--plainly and openly. And crime! What could the man mean about
unscheduled crime? Mere words! There was of course a good deal of
luxury, but not _wicked_ luxury, and to compare our high-minded and
constructive politics with the mere conflict of unscrupulous adventurers
about that semi-oriental throne! It was nonsense!
"This young man must be spanked," said Mr. Brumley and, throwing aside
an open illustrated paper in which a full-length portrait of Sir Edward
Carson faced a picture of the King and Queen in their robes sitting side
by side under a canopy at the Coronation Durbar, he prepared himself to
write in an extremely salutary manner about the follies of the younger
generation, and incidentally to justify his period and his professional
contentment.
§2
One is reminded of those houses into which the white ants have eaten
their way; outwardly still fair and solid, they crumble at the touch of
a hand. And now you will begin to understand those changes of bearing
that so perplexed Lady Harman, that sudden insurgence of flushed
half-furtive passion in the garden, through the thin pretences of a
liberal friendship. His hollow honour had been gripped and had given
way.
He had begun so well. At first Lady Harman had occupied his mind in the
properest way. She was another man's wife and sacred--according to all
honourable standards, and what he wanted was merely to see more of her,
talk to her, interest her in himself, share whatever was available
outside her connubial obligations,--and think as little of Sir Isaac as
possible.
How quickly the imaginative temperament of Mr. Brumley enlarged that to
include a critical hostility to Sir Isaac, we have already recorded.
Lady Harman was no longer simply a charming, suppressed young wife,
crying out for attentive development; she became an ill-treated
beautiful woman--misunderstood. Still scrupulously respecting his own
standards, Mr. Brumley embarked upon the dangerous business of inventing
just how Sir Isaac might be outraging them, and once his imagination had
started to hunt in that field, it speedily brought in enough matter for
a fine state of moral indignation, a white heat of not altogether
justifiable chivalry. Assisted by Lady Beach-Mandarin Mr. Brumley had
soon converted the little millionaire into a matrimonial ogre to keep an
anxious lover very painfully awake at nights. Because by that time and
quite insensibly he had become an anxious lover--with all the gaps in
the thread of realities that would have made him that, quite generously
filled up from the world of reverie.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. It is the peculiar snare of
the perplexed orthodox, and soon Mr. Brumley was in a state of nearly
unendurable moral indignation with Sir Isaac for a hundred exaggerations
of what he was and of what conceivably he might have done to his silent
yet manifestly unsuitably mated wife. And now that romantic streak which
is as I have said the first certain symptom of decay in a system of
moral assumptions began to show itself in Mr. Brumley's thoughts and
conversation. "A marriage like that," said Mr. Brumley to Lady
Beach-Mandarin, "isn't a marriage. It flouts the True Ideal of Marriage.
It's slavery--following a kidnapping...."
But this is a wide step from the happy optimism of the Cambridge days.
What becomes of the sanctity of marriage and the institution of the
family when respectable gentlemen talk of something called "True
Marriage," as non-existent in relation to a lady who is already the
mother of four children? I record this lapsing of Mr. Brumley into
romanticism without either sympathy or mitigation. The children, it
presently became apparent, were not "true" children. "Forced upon her,"
said Mr. Brumley. "It makes one ill to think of it!" It certainly very
nearly made him ill. And as if these exercises in distinction had
inflamed his conscience Mr. Brumley wrote two articles in the
_Hebdomadal_ denouncing impure literature, decadence, immorality,
various recent scandalous instances, and the suffragettes, declaring
that woman's place was the home and that "in a pure and exalted monogamy
lies the sole unitary basis for a civilized state." The most remarkable
thing about this article is an omission. That Sir Isaac's monogamy with
any other instances that might be akin to it was not pure and exalted,
and that it needed--shall we call it readjustment? is a view that in
this article Mr. Brumley conspicuously doesn't display. It's as if for a
moment, pen in hand, he had eddied back to his old absolute
positions....
In a very little while Mr. Brumley and Lady Beach-Mandarin had almost
persuaded each other that Sir Isaac was applying physical torture to his
proudly silent wife, and Mr. Brumley was no longer dreaming and glancing
at but steadily facing the possibility of a pure-minded and handsomely
done elopement to "free" Lady Harman, that would be followed in due
course by a marriage, a "true marriage" on a level of understanding far
above any ordinary respectable wedding, amidst universal sympathy and
admiration and the presence of all the very best people. In these
anticipations he did rather remarkably overlook the absence of any sign
of participation on the part of Lady Harman in his own impassioned
personal feelings, and he overlooked still more remarkably as possible
objections to his line of conduct, Millicent, Florence, Annette and
Baby. These omissions no doubt simplified but also greatly falsified his
outlook.
This proposal that all the best people shall applaud the higher
rightness that was to be revealed in his projected elopement, is in the
very essence of the romantic attitude. All other people are still to
remain under the law. There is to be nothing revolutionary. But with
exceptional persons under exceptional conditions----
Mr. Brumley stated his case over and over again to his utmost
satisfaction, and always at great moral altitudes and with a kind of
transcendent orthodoxy. The more difficult any aspect of the affair
appeared from the orthodox standpoint the more valiantly Mr. Brumley
soared; if it came to his living with Lady Harman for a time before they
could be properly married amidst picturesque foreign scenery in a little
_casa_ by the side of a stream, then the water in that stream was to be
quite the purest water conceivable and the scenery and associations as
morally faultless as a view that had passed the exacting requirements of
Mr. John Ruskin. And Mr. Brumley was very clear in his mind that what he
proposed to do was entirely different in quality even if it was similar
in form from anything that anyone else had ever done who had ever before
made a scandal or appeared in the divorce court. This is always the way
in such cases--always. The scandal was to be a noble scandal, a proud
scandal, one of those instances of heroical love that turn aside
misdemeanours--admittedly misdemeanours--into edifying marvels.
This was the state of mind to which Mr. Brumley had attained when he
made his ineffectual raid upon Black Strand, and you will remark about
it, if you are interested in the changes in people's ideas that are
going on to-day, that although he was prepared to make the most
extensive glosses in this particular instance upon the commonly accepted
rules of what is right and proper, he was not for a moment prepared to
accord the terrible gift of an independent responsibility to Lady
Harman. In that direction lay regions that Mr. Brumley had still to
explore. Lady Harman he considered was married wrongly and disastrously
and this he held to be essentially the fault of Sir Isaac--with perhaps
some slight blame attaching to Lady Harman's mother. The only path of
escape he could conceive as yet for Lady Harman lay through the chivalry
of some other man. That a woman could possibly rebel against one man
without the sympathy and moral maintenance of another was still outside
the range of Mr. Brumley's understanding. It is still outside the range
of most men's understandings--and of a great many women's. If he
generalized at all from these persuasions it was in the direction that
in the interest of "true marriage" there should be greater facilities
for divorce and also a kind of respectable-ization of divorce. Then
these "false marriages" might be rectified without suffering. The
reasons for divorce he felt should be extended to include things not
generally reprehensible, and chivalrous people coming into court should
be protected from the indelicate publicity of free reporting....
§3
Mr. Brumley was still contemplating rather inconclusively the
possibility of a long and intimate talk leading up to and preparing for
an elopement with Lady Harman, when he read of her Jago Street escapade
and of her impending appearance at the South Hampsmith police court. He
was astonished. The more he contemplated the thing the greater became
his astonishment.
Even at the first impact he realized that the line she had taken wasn't
quite in the picture with the line he had proposed for her. He
felt--left out. He felt as though a door had slammed between himself and
affairs to which he had supposed himself essential. He could not
understand why she had done this thing instead of coming straight to his
flat and making use of all that chivalrous service she surely knew was
at her disposal. This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world,
seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper
injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated. He
felt it needed explanation, and he hurried to secure an elbowed
unsavoury corner in the back of the court in order to hear her defence.
He had to wait through long stuffy spaces of time before she appeared.
There were half a dozen other window smashers,--plain or at least
untidy-looking young women. The magistrate told them they were silly and
the soul of Mr. Brumley acquiesced. One tried to make a speech, and it
was such a poor speech--squeaky....
When at last Lady Harman entered the box--the strangest place it seemed
for her--he tried to emerge from the jostling crowd about him into
visibility, to catch her eye, to give her the support of his devoted
presence. Twice at least she glanced in his direction but gave no sign
of seeing him. He was surprised that she could look without fear or
detestation, indeed once with a gesture of solicitude, at Sir Isaac. She
was astonishingly serene. There seemed to be just the faintest shadow of
a smile about her lips as the stipendiary explained the impossibility
of giving her anything less than a month. An uneasy object like the
smashed remains of a colossal box of bonbons that was riding out a gale,
down in the middle of the court, turned round at last completely and
revealed itself as the hat of Lady Beach-Mandarin, but though Mr.
Brumley waved his hand he could not even make that lady aware of his
presence. A powerful rude criminal-looking man who stood in front of him
and smelt grossly of stables, would not give him a fair chance of
showing himself, and developed a strong personal hostility to him on
account of his alleged "shoving about." It would not he felt be of the
slightest help to Lady Harman for him to involve himself in a personal
struggle with a powerful and powerfully flavoured criminal.
It was all very dreadful.
After the proceedings were over and Lady Harman had been led away into
captivity, he went out and took a taxi in an agitated distraught manner
to Lady Beach-Mandarin's house.
"She meant," said Lady Beach-Mandarin, "to have a month's holiday from
him and think things out. And she's got it."
Perhaps that was it. Mr. Brumley could not tell, and he spent some days
in that state of perplexity which, like the weariness that heralds a
cold, marks so often the onset of a new series of ideas....
Why hadn't she come to him? Had he after all rather overloaded his
memory of her real self with imaginative accessories? Had she really
understood what he had been saying to her in the garden? Afterwards
when he had met her eyes as he and she went over the new wing with Sir
Isaac she had so manifestly--and, when one came to think of it, so
tranquilly--seemed to understand....
It was such an extraordinary thing to go smashing a window like
that--when there he was at hand ready to help her. She knew his address?
Did she? For a moment Mr. Brumley cherished that wild surmise. Was that
perhaps it? But surely she could have looked in the Telephone Directory
or Who's Who....
But if that was the truth of the matter she would have looked and
behaved differently in court--quite differently. She would have been
looking for him. She would have seen him....
It was queer too to recall what she had said in court about her
daughters....
Could it be, he had a frightful qualm, that after all--he wasn't the
man? How little he knew of her really....
"This wretched agitation," said Mr. Brumley, trying to flounder away
anyhow from these disconcerting riddles; "it seems to unbalance them
all."
But he found it impossible to believe that Lady Harman was seriously
unbalanced.
§4
And if Mr. Brumley's system of romantically distorted moral assumptions
was shattered by Lady Harman's impersonal blow at a post office window
when all the rules seemed to require her to fly from the oppression of
one man to the chivalry of another, what words can convey the
devastating effect upon him of her conduct after her release? To that
crisis he had been looking forward continually; to record the variety of
his expectations would fill a large volume, but throughout them all
prevailed one general idea, that when she came out of prison her
struggle with her husband would be resumed, and that this would give Mr.
Brumley such extraordinary opportunities of displaying his devotion that
her response, which he was now beginning to suspect might be more
reluctant than his earlier dreams had assumed, was ultimately
inevitable. In all these dreams and meditations that response figured as
the crown. He had to win and possess Lady Harman. The idea had taken
hold of his busy yet rather pointless life, had become his directing
object. He was full of schemes for presently arresting and captivating
her imagination. He was already convinced that she cared for him; he had
to inflame interest and fan liking into the fire of passion. And with a
mind so occupied, Mr. Brumley wrote this and that and went about his
affairs. He spent two days and a night at Margate visiting his son at
his preparatory school, and he found much material for musing in the
question of just how the high romantic affairs ahead of him would affect
this delicately intelligent boy. For a time perhaps he might misjudge
his father.... He spent a week-end with Lady Viping and stayed on until
Wednesday and then he came back to London. His plans were still unformed
when the day came for Lady Harman's release, and indeed beyond an idea
that he would have her met at the prison gates by an enormous bunch of
snowy-white and crimson chrysanthemums he had nothing really concrete at
all in his mind.
She had, however, been released stealthily a day before her time, and
this is what she had done. She had asked that--of all improbable
people!--Sir Isaac's mother should meet her, the biggest car had come to
the prison gates, and she had gone straight down with Mrs. Harman to her
husband--who had taken a chill and was in bed drinking Contrexéville
water--at Black Strand.
As these facts shaped themselves in answer to the blanched inquiries of
Mr. Brumley his amazement grew. He began to realize that there must have
been a correspondence during her incarceration, that all sorts of things
had been happening while he had been dreaming, and when he went round to
Lady Beach-Mandarin, who was just packing up to be the life and soul of
a winter-sports party at a nice non-Lunnite hotel at Lenzerheide, he
learnt particulars that chilled him to the marrow. "They've made it up,"
said Lady Beach-Mandarin.
"But how?" gasped Mr. Brumley, with his soul in infinite distress. "But
how?"
"The Ogre, it seems, has come to see that bullying won't do. He's given
in tremendously. He's let her have her way with the waitress strike and
she's going to have an allowance of her own and all kinds of things.
It's settled. It's his mother and that man Charterson talked him over.
You know--his mother came to me--as her friend. For advice. Wanted to
find out what sort of things we might have been putting in her head. She
said so. A curious old thing--vulgar but--_wise_. I liked her. He's her
darling--and she just knows what he is.... He doesn't like it but he's
taken his dose. The thought of her going to prison again----! He's let
her do anything rather than that...."
"And she's gone to him!"
"Naturally," said Lady Beach-Mandarin with what he felt to be deliberate
brutality. Surely she must have understood----
"But the waitress strike--what has it got to do with the waitress
strike?"
"She cared--tremendously."
"_Did_ she?"
"Tremendously. And they all go back and the system of inspection is
being altered, and he's even forgiven Babs Wheeler. It made him ill to
do it but he did."
"And she's gone back to him."
"Like Godiva," said Lady Beach-Mandarin with that sweeping allusiveness
that was part of her complicated charm.
§5
For three days Mr. Brumley was so staggered by these things that it did
not occur to him that it was quite possible for him to see Lady Harman
for himself and find out just how things stood. He remained in London
with an imagination dazed. And as it was the Christmas season and as
George Edmund in a rather expectant holiday state had now come up from
Margate, Mr. Brumley went in succession to the Hippodrome, to Peter Pan
and to an exhibition at Olympia, assisted at an afternoon display of the
kinemacolor at La Scala Theatre, visited Hamley's and lunched George
Edmund once at the Criterion and twice at the Climax Club, while
thinking of nothing in all the world but the incalculable strangeness of
women. George Edmund thought him a very passive leadable parent indeed,
less querulous about money matters and altogether much improved. The
glitter and colour of these various entertainments reflected themselves
upon the surface of that deep flood of meditation, hook-armed
wooden-legged pirates, intelligent elephants, ingenious but extremely
expensive toys, flickering processions, comic turns, snatches of popular
music and George Edmund's way of eating an orange, pictured themselves
on his mind confusedly without in any way deflecting its course. Then on
the fourth day he roused himself, gave George Edmund ten shillings to
get himself a cutlet at the Café Royal and do the cinematographs round
and about the West End, and so released reached Aleham in time for a
temperate lunch. He chartered the Aleham car to take him to Black Strand
and arrived there about a quarter past three, in a great effort to feel
himself a matter-of-course visitor.
It ought to be possible to record that Mr. Brumley's mind was full of
the intensest sense of Lady Harman during that journey and of nothing
else, but as a matter of fact his mind was now curiously detached and
reflective, the tensions and expectation of the past month and the
astonishment of the last few days had worked themselves out and left him
as it were the passive instrument of the purpose of his more impassioned
moods. This distressed lover approached Black Strand in a condition of
philosophical lassitude.
The road from Aleham to Black Strand is a picturesque old English road,
needlessly winding and badly graded, wriggling across a healthy
wilderness with occasional pine-woods. Something in that familiar
landscape--for his life had run through it since first he and Euphemia
on a tandem bicycle and altogether very young had sought their ideal
home in the South of England--set his mind swinging and generalizing.
How freshly youthful he and Euphemia had been when first he came along
that road, how crude, how full of happy expectations of success; it had
been as bright and it was now as completely gone as the sunsets they had
seen together.
How great a thing life is! How much greater than any single romance, or
any individual affection! Since those days he had grown, he had
succeeded, he had suffered in a reasonable way of course, still he could
recall with a kind of satisfaction tears and deep week-long moods of
hopeless melancholy--and he had changed. And now dominating this
landscape, filling him with new emotions and desires and perplexing
intimations of ignorance and limitations he had never suspected in his
youth, was this second figure of a woman. She was different from
Euphemia. With Euphemia everything had been so simple and easy; until
that slight fading, that fatigue of entire success and satisfaction, of
the concluding years. He and Euphemia had always kept it up that they
had no thought in the world except for one another.... Yet if that had
been true, why hadn't he died when she did. He hadn't died--with
remarkable elasticity. Clearly in his case there had been these
unexplored, unsuspected hinterlands of possibility towards which Lady
Harman seemed now to be directing him. It came to him that afternoon as
an entirely fresh thought that there might also have been something in
Euphemia beyond their simple, so charmingly treated relationship. He
began to recall moments when Euphemia had said perplexing little things,
had looked at him with an expression that was unexpected, had
been--difficult....
I write of Mr. Brumley to tell you things about him and not to explain
him. It may be that the appetite for thorough good talks with people
grows upon one, but at any rate it did occur to Mr. Brumley on his way
to talk to Lady Harman, it occurred to him as a thing distressingly
irrevocable that he could now never have a thorough good talk with
Euphemia about certain neglected things between them. It would have
helped him so much....
His eyes rested as he thought of these things upon the familiar purple
hill crests, patched that afternoon with the lingering traces of a
recent snowstorm, the heather slopes, the dark mysterious woods, the
patches of vivid green where a damp and marshy meadow or so broke the
moorland surface. To-day in spite of the sun there was a bright
blue-white line of frost to the northward of every hedge and bank, the
trees were dripping down the white edgings of the morning into the
pine-needle mud at their feet; he had seen it so like this before; years
hence he might see it all like this again; all this great breezy
countryside had taken upon itself a quality of endurance, as though it
would still be real and essential in his mind when Lady Harman had
altogether passed again. It would be real when he himself had passed
away, and in other costumes and other vehicles fresh Euphemias and new
crude George Brumleys would come along, feeling in the ultimate bright
new wisdom of youth that it was all for them--a subservient scenery,
when really it was entirely indifferent in its careless permanence to
all their hopes and fancies....
§6
Mr. Brumley's thoughts on the permanence of landscape and the mutability
of human affairs were more than a little dashed when he came within
sight of Black Strand and perceived that once cosily beautiful little
home clipped and extended, its shrubbery wrecked and the old barn now
pierced with windows and adorned--for its new chimneys were not working
very well--by several efficient novelties in chimney cowls. Up the
slopes behind Sir Isaac had extended his boundaries, and had been
felling trees and levelling a couple of tennis courts for next summer.
Something was being done to the porch, and the jasmine had been cleared
away altogether. Mr. Brumley could not quite understand what was in
progress; Sir Isaac he learnt afterwards had found a wonderful bargain
in a real genuine Georgian portal of great dignity and simplicity in
Aleham, and he was going to improve Black Strand by transferring it
thither--with the utmost precaution and every piece numbered--from its
original situation. Mr. Brumley stood among the preparatory débris of
this and rang a quietly resolute electric bell, which was answered no
longer by Mrs. Rabbit but by the ample presence of Snagsby.
Snagsby in that doorway had something of the preposterous effect of a
very large face beneath a very small hat. He had to Mr. Brumley's eyes a
restored look, as though his self-confidence had been thoroughly done up
since their last encounter. Bygones were bygones. Mr. Brumley was
admitted as one is admitted to any normal home. He was shown into the
little study-drawing-room with the stepped floor, which had been so
largely the scene of his life with Euphemia, and he was left there for
the better part of a quarter of an hour before his hostess appeared.
The room had been changed very little. Euphemia's solitary rose had
gone, and instead there were several bowls of beaten silver scattered
about, each filled with great chrysanthemums from London. Sir Isaac's
jackdaw acquisitiveness had also overcrowded the corner beyond the
fireplace with a very fine and genuine Queen Anne cabinet; there were a
novel by Elizabeth Robins and two or three feminist and socialist works
lying on the table which would certainly not have been visible, though
they might have been in the house, during the Brumley régime. Otherwise
things were very much as they always had been.
A room like this, thought Mr. Brumley among much other mental driftage,
is like a heart,--so long as it exists it must be furnished and
tenanted. No matter what has been, however bright and sweet and tender,
the spaces still cry aloud to be filled again. The very essence of life
is its insatiability. How complete all this had seemed in the moment
when first he and Euphemia had arranged it. And indeed how complete life
had seemed altogether at seven-and-twenty. Every year since then he had
been learning--or at any rate unlearning. Until at last he was beginning
to realize he had still everything to learn....
The door opened and the tall dark figure of Lady Harman stood for a
moment in the doorway before she stepped down into the room.
She had always the same effect upon him, the effect of being suddenly
remembered. When he was away from her he was always sure that she was a
beautiful woman, and when he saw her again he was always astonished to
see how little he had borne her beauty in mind. For a moment they
regarded one another silently. Then she closed the door behind her and
came towards him.
All Mr. Brumley's philosophizing had vanished at the sight of her. His
spirit was reborn within him. He thought of her and of his effect upon
her, vividly, and of nothing else in the world.
She was paler he thought beneath her dusky hair, a little thinner and
graver....
There was something in her manner as she advanced towards him that told
him he mattered to her, that his coming there was something that moved
her imagination as well as his own. With an almost impulsive movement
she held out both her hands to him, and with an inspiration as sudden he
took them and kissed them. When he had done so he was ashamed of his
temerity; he looked up to meet in her dark eyes the scared shyness of a
fallow deer. She suddenly remembered to withdraw her hands, and it
became manifest to both of them that the incident must never have
happened. She went to the window, stood almost awkwardly for a moment
looking out of it, then turned. She put her hands on the back of the
chair and stood holding it.
"I knew you would come to see me," she said.
"I've been very anxious about you," he said, and on that their minds
rested through a little silence.
"You see," he explained, "I didn't know what was happening to you. Or
what you were doing."
"After asking your advice," she said.
"Exactly."
"I don't know why I broke that window. Except I think that I wanted to
get away."
"But why didn't you come to me?"
"I didn't know where you were. And besides--I didn't somehow want to
come to you."
"But wasn't it wretched in prison? Wasn't it miserably cold? I used to
think of you of nights in some wretched ill-aired cell.... You...."
"It _was_ cold," she admitted. "But it was very good for me. It was
quiet. The first few days seemed endless; then they began to go by
quickly. Quite quickly at last. And I came to think. In the day there
was a little stool where one sat. I used to sit on that and brood and
try to think things out--all sorts of things I've never had the chance
to think about before."
"Yes," said Mr. Brumley.
"All this," she said.
"And it has brought you back here!" he said, with something of the tone
of one who has a right to enquire, with some flavour too of reproach.
"You see," she said after a little pause, "during that time it was
possible to come to understandings. Neither I nor my husband had
understood the other. In that interval it was possible--to explain.
"Yes. You see, Mr. Brumley, we--we both misunderstood. It was just
because of that and because I had no one who seemed able to advise me
that I turned to you. A novelist always seems so wise in these things.
He seems to know so many lives. One can talk to you as one can scarcely
talk to anyone; you are a sort of doctor--in these matters. And it was
necessary--that my husband should realize that I had grown up and that I
should have time to think just how one's duty and one's--freedom have to
be fitted together.... And my husband is ill. He has been ill, rather
short of breath--the doctor thinks it is asthma--for some time, and all
the agitation of this business has upset him and made him worse. He is
upstairs now--asleep. Of course if I had thought I should make him ill I
could never have done any of this. But it's done now and here I am, Mr.
Brumley, back in my place. With all sorts of things changed. Put
right...."
"I see," said Mr. Brumley stupidly.
Her speech was like the falling of an opaque curtain upon some romantic
spectacle. She stood there, almost defensively behind her chair as she
made it. There was a quality of premeditation in her words, yet
something in her voice and bearing made him feel that she knew just how
it covered up and extinguished his dreams and impulses. He heard her out
and then suddenly his spirit rebelled against her decision. "No!" he
cried.
She waited for him to go on.
"You see," he said, "I thought that it was just that you wanted to get
away----That this life was intolerable----That you were----Forgive me if
I seem to be going beyond--going beyond what I ought to be thinking
about you. Only, why should I pretend? I care, I care for you
tremendously. And it seemed to me that you didn't love your husband,
that you were enslaved and miserable. I would have done anything to help
you--anything in the world, Lady Harman. I know--it may sound
ridiculous--there have been times when I would have faced death to feel
you were happy and free. I thought all that, I felt all that,--and
then--then you come back here. You seem not to have minded. As though I
had misunderstood...."
He paused and his face was alive with an unwonted sincerity. His
self-consciousness had for a moment fallen from him.
"I know," she said, "it _was_ like that. I knew you cared. That is why I
have so wanted to talk to you. It looked like that...."
She pressed her lips together in that old familiar hunt for words and
phrases.
"I didn't understand, Mr. Brumley, all there was in my husband or all
there was in myself. I just saw his hardness and his--his hardness in
business. It's become so different now. You see, I forgot he has bad
health. He's ill; I suppose he was getting ill then. Instead of
explaining himself--he was--excited and--unwise. And now----"
"Now I suppose he has--explained," said Mr. Brumley slowly and with
infinite distaste. "Lady Harman, _what_ has he explained?"
"It isn't so much that he has explained, Mr. Brumley," said Lady Harman,
"as that things have explained themselves."
"But how, Lady Harman? How?"
"I mean about my being a mere girl, almost a child when I married him.
Naturally he wanted to take charge of everything and leave nothing to
me. And quite as naturally he didn't notice that now I am a woman, grown
up altogether. And it's been necessary to do things. And naturally, Mr.
Brumley, they shocked and upset him. But he sees now so clearly, he
wrote to me, such a fair letter--an unusual letter--quite different from
when he talks--it surprised me, telling me he wanted me to feel free,
that he meant to make me--to arrange things that is, so that I should
feel free and more able to go about as I pleased. It was a _generous_
letter, Mr. Brumley. Generous about all sorts of affairs that there had
been between us. He said things, quite kind things, not like the things
he has ever said before----"
She stopped short and then began again.
"You know, Mr. Brumley, it's so hard to tell things without telling
other things that somehow are difficult to tell. Yet if I don't tell you
them, you won't know them and then you won't be able to understand in
the least how things are with us."
Her eyes appealed to him.
"Tell me," he said, "whatever you think fit."
"When one has been afraid of anyone and felt they were ever so much
stronger and cruel and hard than one is and one suddenly finds they
aren't. It alters everything."
He nodded, watching her.
Her voice fell nearly to a whisper. "Mr. Brumley," she said, "when I
came back to him--you know he was in bed here--instead of scolding
me--he _cried_. He cried like a vexed child. He put his face into the
pillow--just misery.... I'd never seen him cry--at least only once--long
ago...."
Mr. Brumley looked at her flushed and tender face and it seemed to him
that indeed he could die for her quite easily.
"I saw how hard I had been," she said. "In prison I'd thought of that,
I'd thought women mustn't be hard, whatever happens to them. And when I
saw him like that I knew at once how true that was.... He begged me to
be a good wife to him. No!--he just said, 'Be a wife to me,' not even a
good wife--and then he cried...."
For a moment or so Mr. Brumley didn't respond. "I see," he said at last.
"Yes."
"And there were the children--such helpless little things. In the prison
I worried about them. I thought of things for them. I've come to
feel--they are left too much to nurses and strangers.... And then you
see he has agreed to nearly everything I had wanted. It wasn't only the
personal things--I was anxious about those silly girls--the strikers. I
didn't want them to be badly treated. It distressed me to think of them.
I don't think you know how it distressed me. And he--he gave way upon
all that. He says I may talk to him about the business, about the way we
do our business--the kindness of it I mean. And this is why I am back
here. Where else _could_ I be?"
"No," said Mr. Brumley still with the utmost reluctance. "I see.
Only----"
He paused downcast and she waited for him to speak.
"Only it isn't what I expected, Lady Harman. I didn't think that matters
could be settled by such arrangements. It's sane, I know, it's
comfortable and kindly. But I thought--Oh! I thought of different
things, quite different things from all this. I thought of you who are
so beautiful caught in a loveless passionless world. I thought of the
things there might be for you, the beautiful and wonderful things of
which you are deprived.... Never mind what I thought! Never mind! You've
made your choice. But I thought that you didn't love, that you couldn't
love--this man. It seemed to me that you felt too--that to live as you
are doing--with him--was a profanity. Something--I'd give everything I
have, everything I am, to save you from. Because--because I care.... I
misunderstood you. I suppose you can--do what you are doing."
He jumped to his feet as he spoke and walked three paces away and turned
to utter his last sentences. She too stood up.
"Mr. Brumley," she said weakly, "I don't understand. What do you mean? I
have to do what I am doing. He--he is my husband."
He made a gesture of impatience. "Do you understand nothing of _love_?"
he cried.
She pressed her lips together and remained still and silent, dark
against the casement window.
There came a sound of tapping from the room above. Three taps and again
three taps.
Lady Harman made a little gesture as though she would put this sound
aside.
"Love," she said at last. "It comes to some people. It happens. It
happens to young people.... But when one is married----"
Her voice fell almost to a whisper. "One must not think of it," she
said. "One must think of one's husband and one's duty. Life cannot begin
again, Mr. Brumley."
The taps were repeated, a little more urgently.
"That is my husband," she said.
She hesitated through a little pause. "Mr. Brumley," she said, "I want
friendship so badly, I want some one to be my friend. I don't want to
think of things--disturbing things--things I have lost--things that are
spoilt. _That_--that which you spoke of; what has it to do with me?"
She interrupted him as he was about to speak.
"Be my friend. Don't talk to me of impossible things. Love! Mr. Brumley,
what has a married woman to do with love? I never think of it. I never
read of it. I want to do my duty. I want to do my duty by him and by my
children and by all the people I am bound to. I want to help people,
weak people, people who suffer. I want to help him to help them. I want
to stop being an idle, useless, spending woman...."
She made a little gesture of appeal with her hands.
"Oh!" he sighed, and then, "You know if I can help you----Rather than
distress you----"
Her manner changed. It became confidential and urgent.
"Mr. Brumley," she said, "I must go up to my husband. He will be
impatient. And when I tell him you are here he will want to see you....
You will come up and see him?"
Mr. Brumley sought to convey the struggle within him by his pose.
"I will do what you wish, Lady Harman," he said, with an almost
theatrical sigh.
He closed the door after her and was alone in his former study once
more. He walked slowly to his old writing-desk and sat down in his
familiar seat. Presently he heard her footfalls across the room above.
Mr. Brumley's mind under the stress of the unfamiliar and the unexpected
was now lapsing rapidly towards the theatrical. "My _God_!" said Mr.
Brumley.
He addressed that friendly memorable room in tones that mingled
amazement and wrong. "He is her husband!" he said, and then: "The power
of words!" ...
§7
It seemed to Mr. Brumley's now entirely disordered mind that Sir Isaac,
propped up with cushions upon a sofa in the upstairs sitting-room,
white-faced, wary and very short of breath, was like Proprietorship
enthroned. Everything about him referred deferentially to him. Even his
wife dropped at once into the position of a beautiful satellite. His
illness, he assured his visitor with a thin-lipped emphasis, was "quite
temporary, quite the sort of thing that might happen to anyone." He had
had a queer little benumbing of one leg, "just a trifle of nerve fag did
it," and the slight asthma that came and went in his life had taken
advantage of his condition to come again with a little beyond its usual
aggressiveness. "Elly is going to take me off to Marienbad next week or
the week after," he said. "I shall have a cure and she'll have a treat,
and we shall come back as fit as fiddles." The incidents of the past
month were to be put on a facetious footing it appeared. "It's a mercy
they didn't crop her hair," he said, apropos of nothing and with an air
of dry humour. No further allusion was made to Lady Harman's
incarceration.
He was dressed in a lama wool bedroom suit and his resting leg was
covered by a very splendid and beautiful fur rug. All Euphemia's best
and gayest cushions sustained his back. The furniture had been
completely rearranged for his comfort and convenience. Close to his hand
was a little table with carefully selected remedies and aids and helps
and stimulants, and the latest and best of the light fiction of the day
was tossed about between the table, the couch and the floor. At the foot
of the couch Euphemia's bedroom writing-table had been placed, and over
this there were scattered traces of the stenographer who had assisted
him to wipe off the day's correspondence. Three black cylinders and
other appliances in the corner witnessed that his slight difficulty in
breathing could be relieved by oxygen, and his eyes were regaled by a
great abundance of London flowers at every available point in the room.
Of course there were grapes, fabulous looking grapes.
Everything conspired to give Sir Isaac and his ownership the centre of
the picture. Mr. Brumley had been brought upstairs to him, and the tea
table, with scarcely a reference to anyone else, was arranged by Snagsby
conveniently to his hand. And Sir Isaac himself had a confidence--the
assurance of a man who has been shaken and has recovered. Whatever tears
he had ever shed had served their purpose and were forgotten. "Elly" was
his and the house was his and everything about him was his--he laid his
hand upon her once when she came near him, his possessiveness was so
gross--and the strained suspicion of his last meeting with Mr. Brumley
was replaced now by a sage and wizened triumph over anticipated and
arrested dangers.
Their party was joined by Sir Isaac's mother, and the sight of her
sturdy, swarthy, and rather dignified presence flashed the thought into
Mr. Brumley's mind that Sir Isaac's father must have been a very blond
and very nosey person indeed. She was homely and practical and
contributed very usefully to a conversation that remained a trifle
fragmentary and faintly uncomfortable to the end.
Mr. Brumley avoided as much as he could looking at Lady Harman, because
he knew Sir Isaac was alert for that, but he was acutely aware of her
presence dispensing the tea and moving about the room, being a good
wife. It was his first impression of Lady Harman as a good wife and he
disliked the spectacle extremely. The conversation hovered chiefly about
Marienbad, drifted away and came back again. Mrs. Harman made several
confidences that provoked the betrayal of a strain of irritability in
Sir Isaac's condition. "We're all looking forward to this Marienbad
expedition," she said. "I do hope it will turn out well. Neither of them
have ever been abroad before--and there's the difficulty of the
languages."
"Ow," snarled Sir Isaac, with a glance at his mother that was almost
vicious and a lapse into Cockney intonations and phrases that witnessed
how her presence recalled his youth, "It'll _go_ all right, mother.
_You_ needn't fret."
"Of course they'll have a courier to see to their things, and go train
de luxe and all that," Mrs. Harman explained with a certain gusto. "But
still it's an adventure, with him not well, and both as I say more like
children than grown-up people."
Sir Isaac intervened with a crushing clumsiness to divert this strain of
explanation, with questions about the quality of the soil in the wood
where the ground was to be cleared and levelled for his tennis lawns.
Mr. Brumley did his best to behave as a man of the world should. He made
intelligent replies about the sand, he threw out obvious but serviceable
advice upon travel upon the continent of Europe, and he tried not to
think that this was the way of living into which the sweetest,
tenderest, most beautiful woman in the world had been trapped. He
avoided looking at her until he felt it was becoming conspicuous, a
negative stare. Why had she come back again? Fragmentary phrases she had
used downstairs came drifting through his mind. "I never think of it. I
never read of it." And she so made for beautiful love and a beautiful
life! He recalled Lady Beach-Mandarin's absurdly apt, absurdly inept,
"like Godiva," and was suddenly impelled to raise the question of those
strikers.
"Your trouble with your waitresses is over, Sir Isaac?"
Sir Isaac finished a cup of tea audibly and glanced at his wife. "I
never meant to be hard on them," he said, putting down his cup. "Never.
The trouble blew up suddenly. One can't be all over a big business
everywhere all at once, more particularly if one is worried about other
things. As soon as I had time to look into it I put things right. There
was misunderstandings on both sides."
He glanced up again at Lady Harman. (She was standing behind Mr. Brumley
so that he could not see her but--did their eyes meet?)
"As soon as we are back from Marienbad," Sir Isaac volunteered, "Lady
Harman and I are going into all that business thoroughly."
Mr. Brumley concealed his intense aversion for this association under a
tone of intelligent interest. "Into--I don't quite understand--what
business?"
"Women employees in London--Hostels--all that kind of thing. Bit more
sensible than suffragetting, eh, Elly?"
"Very interesting," said Mr. Brumley with a hollow cordiality, "very."
"Done on business lines, mind you," said Sir Isaac, looking suddenly
very sharp and keen, "done on proper business lines, there's no end of a
change possible. And it's a perfectly legitimate outgrowth from such
popular catering as ours. It interests me."
He made a little whistling noise with his teeth at the end of this
speech.
"I didn't know Lady Harman was disposed to take up such things," he
said. "Or I'd have gone into them before."
"He's going into them now," said Mrs. Harman, "heart and soul. Why! we
have to take his temperature over it, to see he doesn't work himself up
into a fever." Her manner became reasonable and confidential. She spoke
to Mr. Brumley as if her son was slightly deaf. "It's better than his
fretting," she said....
§8
Mr. Brumley returned to London in a state of extreme mental and
emotional unrest. The sight of Lady Harman had restored all his passion
for her, the all too manifest fact that she was receding beyond his
reach stirred him with unavailing impulses towards some impossible
extremity of effort. She had filled his mind so much that he could not
endure the thought of living without hope of her. But what hope was
there of her? And he was jealous, detestably jealous, so jealous that in
that direction he did not dare to let his mind go. He sawed at the bit
and brought it back, or he would have had to writhe about the carriage.
His thoughts ran furiously all over the place to avoid that pit. And now
he found himself flashing at moments into wild and hopeless rebellion
against the institution of marriage, of which he had hitherto sought
always to be the dignified and smiling champion against the innovator,
the over-critical and the young. He had never rebelled before. He was so
astonished at the violence of his own objection that he lapsed from
defiance to an incredulous examination of his own novel attitude. "It's
not _true_ marriage I object to," he told himself. "It's this marriage
like a rat trap, alluring and scarcely unavoidable, so that in we all
go, and then with no escape--unless you tear yourself to rags. No
escape...."
It came to him that there was at least one way out for Lady Harman: _Sir
Isaac might die!_ ...
He pulled himself up presently, astonished and dismayed at the
activities of his own imagination. Among other things he had wondered if
by any chance Lady Harman had ever allowed her mind to travel in this
same post-mortem direction. At times surely the thing must have shone
upon her as a possibility, a hope. From that he had branched off to a
more general speculation. How many people were there in the world, nice
people, kind people, moral and delicate-minded people, to whom the death
of another person means release from that inflexible barrier--possibilities
of secretly desired happiness, the realization of crushed and forbidden
dreams? He had a vision of human society, like the vision of a night
landscape seen suddenly in a lightning flash, as of people caught by
couples in traps and quietly hoping for one another's deaths.
"Good Heavens!" said Mr. Brumley, "what are we coming to," and
got up in his railway compartment--he had it to himself--and walked up
and down its narrow limits until a jolt over a point made him suddenly
sit down again. "Most marriages are happy," said Mr. Brumley, like a man
who has fallen into a river and scrambles back to safety. "One mustn't
judge by the exceptional cases....
"Though of course there are--a good many--exceptional cases." ...
He folded his arms, crossed his legs, frowned and reasoned with
himself,--resolved to dismiss post-mortem speculations--absolutely.
He was not going to quarrel with the institution of marriage. That was
going too far. He had never been able to see the beginnings of reason in
sexual anarchy, never. It is against the very order of things. Man is a
marrying animal just as much as he was a fire-making animal; he goes in
pairs like mantel ornaments; it is as natural for him to marry and to
exact and keep good faith--if need be with a savage jealousy, as it is
for him to have lobes to his ears and hair under his armpits. These
things jar with the dream perhaps; the gods on painted ceilings have no
such ties, acting beautifully by their very nature; and here on the
floor of the world one had them and one had to make the best of them....
Are we making the best of them? Mr. Brumley was off again. That last
thought opened the way to speculative wildernesses, and into these Mr.
Brumley went wandering with a novel desperate enterprise to find a kind
of marriage that would suit him.
He began to reform the marriage laws. He did his utmost not to think
especially of Lady Harman and himself while he was doing so. He would
just take up the whole question and deal with it in a temperate
reasonable way. It was so necessary to be reasonable and temperate in
these questions--and not to think of death as a solution. Marriages to
begin with were too easy to make and too difficult to break; countless
girls--Lady Harman was only a type--were married long before they could
know the beginnings of their own minds. We wanted to delay
marriage--until the middle twenties, say. Why not? Or if by the
infirmities of humanity one must have marriage before then, there ought
to be some especial opportunity of rescinding it later. (Lady Harman
ought to have been able to rescind her marriage.) What ought to be the
marriageable age in a civilized community? When the mind was settled
into its general system of opinions Mr. Brumley thought, and then
lapsed into a speculation whether the mind didn't keep changing and
developing all through life; Lady Harman's was certainly still doing
so.... This pointed to logical consequences of an undesirable sort....
(Some little mind-slide occurred just at this point and he found himself
thinking that perhaps Sir Isaac might last for years and years, might
even outlive a wife exhausted by nursing. And anyhow to wait for death!
To leave the thing one loved in the embrace of the moribund!)
He wrenched his thoughts back as quickly as possible to a disinterested
reform of the marriage laws. What had he decided so far? Only for more
deliberation and a riper age in marrying. Surely that should appeal even
to the most orthodox. But that alone would not eliminate mistakes and
deceptions altogether. (Sir Isaac's skin had a peculiar, unhealthy
look.) There ought in addition to be the widest facilities for divorce
possible. Mr. Brumley tried to draw up a schedule in his head of the
grounds for divorce that a really civilized community would entertain.
But there are practical difficulties. Marriage is not simply a sexual
union, it is an economic one of a peculiarly inseparable sort,--and
there are the children. And jealousy! Of course so far as economics
went, a kind of marriage settlement might meet most of the difficulties,
and as for the children, Mr. Brumley was no longer in that mood of
enthusiastic devotion to children that had made the birth of George
Edmund so tremendous an event. Children, alone, afforded no reason for
indissoluble lifelong union. Face the thing frankly. How long was it
absolutely necessary for people to keep a home together for their
children? The prosperous classes, the best classes in the community,
packed the little creatures off to school at the age of nine or ten. One
might overdo--we were overdoing in our writing nowadays
this--philoprogenitive enthusiasm....
He found himself thinking of George Meredith's idea of Ten Year
Marriages....
His mind recoiled to Sir Isaac's pillowed-up possession. What flimsy
stuff all this talk of altered marriage was! These things did not even
touch the essentials of the matter. He thought of Sir Isaac's thin lips
and wary knowing eyes. What possible divorce law could the wit of man
devise that would release a desired woman from that--grip? Marriage was
covetousness made law. As well ask such a man to sell all his goods and
give to the poor as expect the Sir Isaacs of this world to relax the
matrimonial subjugation of the wife. Our social order is built on
jealousy, sustained by jealousy, and those brave schemes we evolve in
our studies for the release of women from ownership,--and for that
matter for the release of men too,--they will not stand the dusty heat
of the market-place for a moment, they wilt under the first fierce
breath of reality. Marriage and property are the twin children of man's
individualistic nature; only on these terms can he be drawn into
societies....
Mr. Brumley found his little scheme for novelties in marriage and
divorce lying dead and for the most part still-born in his mind; himself
in despair. To set to work to alter marriage in any essential point was,
he realized, as if an ant should start to climb a thousand feet of
cliff. This great institution rose upon his imagination like some
insurmountable sierra, blue and sombre, between himself and the life of
Lady Harman and all that he desired. There might be a certain amount of
tinkering with matrimonial law in the next few years, of petty tinkering
that would abolish a few pretences and give ease to a few amiable
people, but if he were to come back to life a thousand years hence he
felt he would still find the ancient gigantic barrier, crossed perhaps
by a dangerous road, pierced perhaps by a narrow tunnel or so, but in
all its great essentials the same, between himself and Lady Harman. It
wasn't that it was rational, it wasn't that it was justifiable, but it
was one with the blood in one's veins and the rain-cloud in the sky, a
necessity in the nature of present things. Before mankind emerged from
the valley of these restraints--if ever they did emerge--thousands of
generations must follow one another, there must be tens of thousands of
years of struggle and thought and trial, in the teeth of prevalent habit
and opinion--and primordial instincts. A new humanity....
His heart sank to hopelessness.
Meanwhile? Meanwhile we had to live our lives.
He began to see a certain justification for the hidden cults that run
beneath the fair appearances of life, those social secrecies by which
people--how could one put it?--people who do not agree with established
institutions, people, at any rate not merely egoistic and jealous as the
crowd is egoistic and jealous, hide and help one another to mitigate the
inflexible austerities of the great unreason.
Yes, Mr. Brumley had got to a phrase of that quality for the
undiscriminating imperatives of the fundamental social institution. You
see how a particular situation may undermine the assumptions of a mind
originally devoted to uncritical acceptances. He still insisted it was a
necessary great unreason, absolutely necessary--for the mass of people,
a part of them, a natural expression of them, but he could imagine the
possibility--of 'understandings.' ... Mr. Brumley was very vague about
those understandings, those mysteries of the exalted that were to filch
happiness from the destroying grasp of the crude and jealous. He had to
be vague. For secret and noble are ideas like oil and water; you may
fling them together with all the force of your will but in a little
while they will separate again.
For a time this dream of an impossible secrecy was uppermost in Mr.
Brumley's meditations. It came into his head with the effect of a
discovery that always among the unclimbable barriers of this supreme
institution there had been,--caves. He had been reading Anatole France
recently and the lady of _Le Lys Rouge_ came into his thoughts. There
was something in common between Lady Harman and the Countess Martin,
they were tall and dark and dignified, and Lady Harman was one of those
rare women who could have carried the magnificent name of Thérèse. And
there in the setting of Paris and Florence was a whole microcosm of
love, real but illicit, carried out as it were secretly and tactfully,
beneath the great shadow of the cliff. But he found it difficult to
imagine Lady Harman in that. Or Sir Isaac playing Count Martin's
part....
How different were those Frenchwomen, with their afternoons vacant
except for love, their detachment, their lovers, those secret,
convenient, romantically furnished flats, that compact explicit business
of _l'amour_! He had indeed some moments of regret that Lady Harman
wouldn't go into that picture. She was different--if only in her
simplicity. There was something about these others that put them whole
worlds apart from her, who was held so tethered from all furtive
adventure by her filmy tentacles of responsibility, her ties and strands
of relationship, her essential delicacy. That momentary vision of Ellen
as the Countess Martin broke up into absurdities directly he looked at
it fully and steadfastly. From thinking of the two women as similar
types he passed into thinking of them as opposites; Thérèse, hard,
clear, sensuous, secretive, trained by a brilliant tradition in the
technique of connubial betrayal, was the very antithesis of Ellen's
vague but invincible veracity and openness. Not for nothing had Anatole
France made his heroine the daughter of a grasping financial
adventurer....
Of course the cave is a part of the mountain....
His mind drifted away to still more general speculations, and always he
was trying not to see the figure of Sir Isaac, grimly and yet meanly
resolute--in possession. Always too like some open-mouthed yokel at a
fair who knows nothing of the insult chalked upon his back, he
disregarded how he himself coveted and desired and would if he could
have gripped. He forgot his own watchful attention to Euphemia in the
past, nor did he think what he might have been if Lady Harman had been
his wife. It needed the chill veracities of the small hours to bring him
to that. He thought now of crude egotism as having Sir Isaac's hands and
Sir Isaac's eyes and Sir Isaac's position. He forgot any egotism he
himself was betraying.
All the paths of enlightenment he thought of, led to Lady Harman.
§9
That evening George Edmund, who had come home with his mind aglitter
with cinematograph impressions, found his father a patient but
inattentive listener. For indeed Mr. Brumley was not listening at all;
he was thinking and thinking. He made noises like "Ah!" and "Um," at
George Edmund and patted the boy's shoulder kindly and repeated words
unintelligently, such as, "Red Indians, eh!" or "Came out of the water
backwards! My eye!"
Sometimes he made what George Edmund regarded as quite footling
comments. Still George Edmund had to tell someone and there was no one
else to tell. So George Edmund went on talking and Mr. Brumley went on
thinking.
§10
Mr Brumley could not sleep at all until it was nearly five. His
intelligence seemed to be making up at last for years of speculative
restraint. In a world for the most part given up to slumber Mr. Brumley
may be imagined as clambering hand over fist in the silences, feverishly
and wonderfully overtaking his age. In the morning he got up pallid and
he shaved badly, but he was a generation ahead of his own Euphemia
series, and the school of charm and quiet humour and of letting things
slide with a kind of elegant donnishness, had lost him for ever....
And among all sorts of things that had come to him in that vast gulf of
nocturnal thinking was some vivid self-examination. At last he got to
that. He had been dragged down to very elemental things indeed by the
manifest completeness of Lady Harman's return to her husband. He had had
at last to look at himself starkly for the male he was, to go beneath
the gentlemanly airs, the refined and elegant virilities of his habitual
poses. Either this thing was unendurable--there were certainly moments
when it came near to being unendurable--or it was not. On the whole and
excepting mere momentary paroxysms it was not, and so he had to
recognize and he did recognize with the greatest amazement that there
could be something else besides sexual attraction and manoeuvring and
possession between a beautiful woman and a man like himself. He loved
Lady Harman, he loved her, he now began to realize just how much, and
she could defeat him and reject him as a conceivable lover, turn that
aside as a thing impossible, shame him as the romantic school would
count shame and still command him with her confident eyes and her
friendly extended hands. He admitted he suffered, let us rather say he
claimed to suffer the heated torments of a passionate nature, but he
perceived like fresh air and sunrise coming by blind updrawn and opened
window into a foetid chamber, that also he loved her with a clean and
bodiless love, was anxious to help her, was anxious now--it was a new
thing--to understand her, to reassure her, to give unrequited what once
he had sought rather to seem to give in view of an imagined exchange.
He perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her
hitherto. He had been blinded,--obsessed. He had been seeing her and
himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal
dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. Now with his sexual imaginings
newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous
minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that
there was in her personality and their possible relations outside that.
He saw how gravely and deeply serious was her fine philanthropy, how
honest and simple and impersonal her desire for knowledge and
understandings. There is the brain of her at least, he thought, far out
of Sir Isaac's reach. She wasn't abased by her surrenders, their
simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and
congested soul. He perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly
awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him--for how
many years? Since his early undergraduate days. Had he anything to put
beside her own fine detachment? Had he ever since his manhood touched
philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human,
thought of art, or literature or belief, without a glancing reference of
the whole question to the uses of this eternal hunt? During that time
had he ever talked to a girl or woman with an unembarrassed sincerity?
He stripped his pretences bare; the answer was no. His very refinements
had been no more than indicative fig-leaves. His conservatism and
morality had been a mere dalliance with interests that too brutal a
simplicity might have exhausted prematurely. And indeed hadn't the whole
period of literature that had produced him been, in its straining purity
and refinement, as it were one glowing, one illuminated fig-leaf, a vast
conspiracy to keep certain matters always in mind by conspicuously
covering them away? But this wonderful woman--it seemed--she hadn't them
in mind! She shamed him if only by her trustful unsuspiciousness of the
ancient selfish game of Him and Her that he had been so ardently
playing.... He idealized and worshipped this clean blindness. He abased
himself before it.
"No," cried Mr. Brumley suddenly in the silence of the night, "I will
rise again. I will rise again by love out of these morasses.... She
shall be my goddess and by virtue of her I will end this incessant
irrational craving for women.... I will be her friend and her faithful
friend."
He lay still for a time and then he said in a whisper very humbly: "_God
help me_."
He set himself in those still hours which are so endless and so
profitable to men in their middle years, to think how he might make
himself the perfect lover instead of a mere plotter for desire, and how
he might purge himself from covetousness and possessiveness and learn to
serve.
And if very speedily his initial sincerity was tinged again with egotism
and if he drowsed at last into a portrait of himself as beautifully and
admirably self-sacrificial, you must not sneer too readily at him, for
so God has made the soul of Mr. Brumley and otherwise it could not do.
CHAPTER THE TENTH
LADY HARMAN COMES OUT
§1
The treaty between Lady Harman and her husband which was to be her Great
Charter, the constitutional basis of her freedoms throughout the rest of
her married life, had many practical defects. The chief of these was
that it was largely undocumented; it had been made piecemeal, in various
ways, at different times and for the most part indirectly through
diverse intermediaries. Charterson had introduced large vaguenesses by
simply displaying more of his teeth at crucial moments, Mrs. Harman had
conveyed things by hugging and weeping that were afterwards discovered
to be indistinct; Sir Isaac writing from a bed of sickness had
frequently been totally illegible. One cannot therefore detail the
clauses of this agreement or give its provisions with any great
precision; one can simply intimate the kind of understanding that had
had an air of being arrived at. The working interpretations were still
to come.
Before anything else it was manifestly conceded by Lady Harman that she
would not run away again, and still more manifest that she undertook to
break no more windows or do anything that might lead to a second police
court scandal. And she was to be a true and faithful wife and comfort,
as a wife should be, to Sir Isaac. In return for that consideration and
to ensure its continuance Sir Isaac came great distances from his former
assumption of a matrimonial absolutism. She was to be granted all sorts
of small autonomies,--the word autonomy was carefully avoided throughout
but its spirit was omnipresent.
She was in particular to have a banking account for her dress and
personal expenditure into which Sir Isaac would cause to be paid a
hundred pounds monthly and it was to be private to herself alone until
he chose to go through the cashed cheques and counterfoils. She was to
be free to come and go as she saw fit, subject to a punctual appearance
at meals, the comfort and dignity of Sir Isaac and such specific
engagements as she might make with him. She might have her own friends,
but there the contract became a little misty; a time was to come when
Sir Isaac was to betray a conviction that the only proper friends that a
woman can have are women. There were also non-corroborated assurances as
to the privacy of her correspondence. The second Rolls-Royce car was to
be entirely at her service, and Clarence was to be immediately
supplemented by a new and more deferential man, and as soon as possible
assisted to another situation and replaced. She was to have a voice in
the further furnishing of Black Strand and in the arrangement of its
garden. She was to read what she chose and think what she liked within
her head without too minute or suspicious an examination by Sir Isaac,
and short of flat contradiction at his own table she was to be free to
express her own opinions in any manner becoming a lady. But more
particularly if she found her ideas infringing upon the management or
influence of the International Bread and Cake Stores, she was to convey
her objections and ideas in the first instance privately and
confidentially to Sir Isaac.
Upon this point he displayed a remarkable and creditable sensitiveness.
His pride in that organization was if possible greater than his original
pride in his wife, and probably nothing in all the jarring of their
relationship had hurt him more than her accessibility to hostile
criticism and the dinner-table conversation with Charterson and Blenker
that had betrayed this fact. He began to talk about it directly she
returned to him. His protestations and explanations were copious and
heart-felt. It was perhaps the chief discovery made by Lady Harman at
this period of reconstruction that her husband's business side was not
to be explained completely as a highly energetic and elaborate avarice.
He was no doubt acquisitive and retentive and mean-spirited, but these
were merely the ugly aspects of a disposition that involved many other
factors. He was also incurably a schemer. He liked to fit things
together, to dove-tail arrangements, to devise economies, to spread
ingeniously into new fields, he had a love of organization and
contrivance as disinterested as an artist's love for the possibilities
of his medium. He would rather have made a profit of ten per cent. out
of a subtly planned shop than thirty by an unforeseen accident. He
wouldn't have cheated to get money for the world. He knew he was better
at figuring out expenditures and receipts than most people and he was as
touchy about his reputation for this kind of cleverness as any poet or
painter for his fame. Now that he had awakened to the idea that his wife
was capable of looking into and possibly even understanding his
business, he was passionately anxious to show her just how wonderfully
he had done it all, and when he perceived she was in her large,
unskilled, helpless way, intensely concerned for all the vast multitude
of incompetent or partially competent young women who floundered about
in badly paid employment in our great cities, he grasped at once at the
opportunity of recovering her lost interest and respect by doing some
brilliant feats of contrivance in that direction. Why shouldn't he? He
had long observed with a certain envy the admirable advertisement such
firms as Lever and Cadbury and Burroughs & Wellcome gained from their
ostentatiously able and generous treatment of their workpeople, and it
seemed to him conceivable that in the end it might not be at all
detrimental to his prosperity to put his hand to this long neglected
piece of social work. The Babs Wheeler business had been a real injury
in every way to the International Bread and Cake Stores and even if he
didn't ultimately go to all the lengths his wife seemed to contemplate,
he was resolved at any rate that an affair of that kind should not occur
again. The expedition to Marienbad took with it a secretary who was also
a stenographer. A particularly smart young inspector and Graper, the
staff manager, had brisk four-day holidays once or twice for
consultation purposes; Sir Isaac's rabbit-like architect was in
attendance for a week and the Harmans returned to Putney with the first
vivid greens of late March,--for the Putney Hill house was to be
reopened and Black Strand reserved now for week-end and summer use--with
plans already drawn out for four residential Hostels in London primarily
for the girl waitresses of the International Stores who might have no
homes or homes at an inconvenient distance, and, secondarily, if any
vacant accommodation remained over, for any other employed young women
of the same class....
§2
Lady Harman came back to England from the pine-woods and bright order
and regimen and foreign novelty of their Bohemian Kur-Ort, in a state of
renewed perplexity. Already that undocumented Magna Charta was
manifestly not working upon the lines she had anticipated. The glosses
Sir Isaac put upon it were extensive and remarkable and invariably in
the direction of restricting her liberties and resuming controls she had
supposed abandoned.
Marienbad had done wonders for him; his slight limp had disappeared, his
nervous energy was all restored; except for a certain increase in his
natural irritability and occasional panting fits, he seemed as well as
he had ever been. At the end of their time at the Kur he was even going
for walks. Once he went halfway up the Podhorn on foot. And with every
increment in his strength his aggressiveness increased, his recognition
of her new freedoms was less cordial and her sense of contrition and
responsibility diminished. Moreover, as the scheme of those Hostels,
which had played so large a part in her conception of their
reconciliation, grew more and more definite, she perceived more and more
that it was not certainly that fine and humanizing thing she had
presumed it would be. She began to feel more and more that it might be
merely an extension of Harman methods to cheap boarding-houses for young
people. But faced with a mass of detailed concrete projects and invited
to suggest modifications she was able to realize for the first time how
vague, how ignorant and incompetent her wishes had been, how much she
had to understand and how much she had to discover before she could meet
Sir Isaac with his "I'm doing it all for you, Elly. If you don't like
it, you tell me what you don't like and I'll alter it. But just vague
doubting! One can't do anything with vague doubting."
She felt that once back in England out of this picturesque toylike
German world she would be able to grasp realities again and deal with
these things. She wanted advice, she wanted to hear what people said of
her ideas. She would also, she imagined, begin to avail herself of those
conceded liberties which their isolation together abroad and her
husband's constant need of her presence had so far prevented her from
tasting. She had an idea that Susan Burnet might prove suggestive about
the Hostels.
And moreover, if now and then she could have a good talk with someone
understanding and intelligent, someone she could trust, someone who
cared enough for her to think with her and for her....
§3
We have traced thus far the emergence of Lady Harman from that state of
dutiful subjection and social irresponsibility which was the lot of
woman in the past to that limited, ill-defined and quite unsecured
freedom which is her present condition. And now we have to give an
outline of the ideas of herself and her uses and what she had to do,
which were forming themselves in her mind. She had made a determination
of herself, which carried her along the lines of her natural
predisposition, to duty, to service. There she displayed that acceptance
of responsibility which is so much more often a feminine than a
masculine habit of thinking. But she brought to the achievement of this
determination a discriminating integrity of mind that is more frequently
masculine than feminine. She wanted to know clearly what she was
undertaking and how far its consequences would reach and how it was
related to other things.
Her confused reading during the last few years and her own observation
and such leakages of fact into her life as the talk of Susan Burnet, had
all contributed to her realization that the world was full of needless
discomfort and hardships and failure, due to great imperfectly
apprehended injustices and maladjustments in the social system, and
recently it had been borne in upon her, upon the barbed point of the
_London Lion_ and the quick tongue of Susan, that if any particular
class of people was more answerable than any other for these evils, it
was the people of leisure and freedom like herself, who had time to
think, and the directing organizing people like her husband, who had
power to change. She was called upon to do something, at times the call
became urgent, and she could not feel any assurance which it was of the
many vague and conflicting suggestions that came drifting to her that
she had to do. Her idea of Hostels for the International waitresses had
been wrung out of her prematurely during her earlier discussions with
her husband. She did not feel that it was anything more than a partial
remedy for a special evil. She wanted something more general than that,
something comprehensive enough to answer completely so wide a question
as "What ought I to be doing with all my life?" In the honest simplicity
of her nature she wanted to find an answer to that. Out of the
confusion of voices about us she hoped to be able to disentangle
directions for her life. Already she had been reading voraciously: while
she was still at Marienbad she had written to Mr. Brumley and he had
sent her books and papers, advanced and radical in many cases, that she
might know, "What are people thinking?"
Many phrases from her earlier discussions with Sir Isaac stuck in her
mind in a curiously stimulating way and came back to her as she read.
She recalled him, for instance, with his face white and his eyes red and
his flat hand sawing at her, saying: "I dessay I'm all wrong, I dessay I
don't know anything about anything and all those chaps you read, Bernud
Shaw, and Gosworthy, and all the rest of them are wonderfully clever;
but you tell me, Elly, what they say we've got to do! You tell me that.
You go and ask some of those chaps just what they want a man like me to
do.... They'll ask me to endow a theatre or run a club for novelists or
advertise the lot of them in the windows of my International Stores or
something. And that's about all it comes to. You go and see if I'm not
right. They grumble and they grumble; I don't say there's not a lot to
grumble at, but give me something they'll back themselves for all
they're worth as good to get done.... That's where I don't agree with
all these idees. They're Wind, Elly, Weak wind at that."
It is distressing to record how difficult it was for Lady Harman to form
even the beginnings of a disproof of that. Her life through all this
second phase of mitigated autonomy was an intermittent pilgrimage in
search of that disproof. She could not believe that things as they were,
this mass of hardships, cruelties, insufficiencies and heartburnings
were the ultimate wisdom and possibility of human life, yet when she
went from them to the projects that would replace or change them she
seemed to pass from things of overwhelming solidity to matters more thin
and flimsy than the twittering of sparrows on the gutter. So soon as she
returned to London she started upon her search for a solution; she
supplemented Mr. Brumley's hunt for books with her own efforts, she went
to meetings--sometimes Sir Isaac took her, once or twice she was
escorted by Mr. Brumley, and presently her grave interest and her
personal charm had gathered about her a circle of companionable friends.
She tried to talk to people and made great efforts to hear people who
seemed authoritative and wise and leaderlike, talking.
There were many interruptions to this research, but she persevered.
Quite early she had an illness that ended in a miscarriage, an accident
for which she was by no means inconsolable, and before she had
completely recovered from that Sir Isaac fell ill again, the first of a
series of relapses that necessitated further foreign travel--always in
elaborately comfortable trains with maid, courier, valet, and secretary,
to some warm and indolent southward place. And few people knew how
uncertain her liberties were. Sir Isaac was the victim of an increasing
irritability, at times he had irrational outbursts of distrust that
would culminate in passionate outbreaks and scenes that were truncated
by an almost suffocating breathlessness. On several occasions he was on
the verge of quarrelling violently with her visitors, and he would
suddenly oblige her to break engagements, pour abuse upon her and bring
matters back to the very verge of her first revolt. And then he would
break her down by pitiful appeals. The cylinders of oxygen would be
resorted to, and he would emerge from the crisis, rather rueful, tamed
and quiet for the time.
He was her chief disturbance. Her children were healthy children and
fell in with the routines of governess and tutor that their wealth
provided. She saw them often, she noted their increasing resemblance to
their father, she did her best to soften the natural secretiveness and
aggressiveness of their manners, she watched their teachers and
intervened whenever the influences about them seemed to her to need
intervention, she dressed them and gave them presents and tried to
believe she loved them, and as Sir Isaac's illness increased she took a
larger and larger share in the direction of the household....
Through all these occupations and interruptions and immediacies she went
trying to comprehend and at times almost believing she comprehended
life, and then the whole spectacle of this modern world of which she was
a part would seem to break up again into a multitude of warring and
discordant fragments having no conceivable common aim or solution.
Those moments of unifying faith and confidence, that glowed so bravely
and never endured, were at once tantalizing and sustaining. She could
never believe but that ultimately she would not grasp and
hold--something....
Many people met her and liked her and sought to know more of her; Lady
Beach-Mandarin and Lady Viping were happy to be her social sponsors, the
Blenkers and the Chartersons met her out and woke up cautiously to this
new possibility; her emergence was rapid in spite of the various delays
and interruptions I have mentioned and she was soon in a position to
realize just how little one meets when one meets a number of people and
how little one hears when one has much conversation. Her mind was
presently crowded with confused impressions of pleasant men evading her
agreeably and making out of her gravities an opportunity for bright
sayings, and of women being vaguely solemn and quite indefinite.
She went into the circle of movements, was tried over by Mrs. Hubert
Plessington, she questioned this and that promoter of constructive
schemes, and instead of mental meat she was asked to come upon
committees and sounded for subscriptions. On several occasions, escorted
by Mr. Brumley--some instinct made her conceal or minimize his share in
these expeditions to her husband--she went as inconspicuously as
possible to the backs of public meetings in which she understood great
questions were being discussed or great changes inaugurated. Some
public figures she even followed up for a time, distrusting her first
impressions.
She became familiar with the manners and bearing of our platform class,
with the solemn dummy-like chairman or chairwoman, saying a few words,
the alert secretary or organizer, the prominent figures sitting with an
air of grave responsibility, generously acting an intelligent attention
to others until the moment came for them themselves to deliver. Then
with an ill-concealed relief some would come to the footlights, some
leap up in their places with a tenoring eagerness, some would be
facetious and some speak with neuralgic effort, some were impertinent,
some propitiatory, some dull, but all were--disappointing,
disappointing. God was not in any of them. A platform is no setting for
the shy processes of an honest human mind,--we are all strained to
artificiality in the excessive glare of attention that beats upon us
there. One does not exhibit opinions at a meeting, one acts them, the
very truth must rouge its cheeks and blacken its eyebrows to tell, and
to Lady Harman it was the acting chiefly and the make-up that was
visible. They didn't grip her, they didn't lift her, they failed to
convince her even of their own belief in what they supported.
§4
But occasionally among the multitude of conversations that gave her
nothing, there would come some talk that illuminated and for the time
almost reconciled her to the effort and the loss of time and distraction
her social expeditions involved. One evening at one of Lady Tarvrille's
carelessly compiled parties she encountered Edgar Wilkins the novelist
and got the most suggestive glimpses of his attitude towards himself and
towards the world of intellectual ferment to which he belonged. She had
been taken down by an amiable but entirely uninteresting permanent
official who when the time came turned his stereotyped talk over to the
other side of him with a quiet mechanical indifference, and she was left
for a little while in silence until Wilkins had disengaged himself.
He was a flushed man with untidy hair, and he opened at once with an
appeal to her sympathies.
"Oh! Bother!" he said. "I say,--I've eaten that mutton. I didn't notice.
One eats too much at these affairs. One doesn't notice at the time and
then afterwards one finds out."
She was a little surprised at his gambit and could think of nothing but
a kindly murmur.
"Detestable thing," he said; "my body."
"But surely not," she tried and felt as she said it that was a trifle
bold.
"You're all right," he said making her aware he saw her. "But I've this
thing that wheezes and fattens at the slightest excuse and--it encumbers
me--bothers me to take exercise.... But I can hardly expect you to be
interested in my troubles, can I?"
He made an all too manifest attempt to read her name on the slip of card
that lay before her among the flowers and as manifestly succeeded. "We
people who write and paint and all that sort of thing are a breed of
insatiable egotists, Lady Harman. With the least excuse. Don't you think
so?"
"Not--not exceptionally," she said.
"Exceptionally," he insisted.
"It isn't my impression," she said. "You're--franker."
"But someone was telling me--you've been taking impressions of us
lately. I mean all of us people who go flapping ideas about in the air.
Somebody--was it Lady Beach-Mandarin?--was saying you'd come out looking
for Intellectual Heroes--and found Bernard Shaw.... But what could you
have expected?"
"I've been trying to find out and understand what people are thinking. I
want ideas."
"It's disheartening, isn't it?"
"It's--perplexing sometimes."
"You go to meetings, and try to get to the bottom of Movements, and you
want to meet and know the people who write the wonderful things? Get at
the wonderful core of it?"
"One feels there are things going on."
"Great illuminating things."
"Well--yes."
"And when you see those great Thinkers and Teachers and Guides and Brave
Spirits and High Brows generally----"
He laughed and stopped just in time on the very verge of taking
pheasant.
"Oh, take it away," he cried sharply.
"We've all been through that illusion, Lady Harman," he went on.
"But I don't like to think----Aren't Great Men after all--great?"
"In their ways, in their places--Yes. But not if you go up to them and
look at them. Not at the dinner table, not in their beds.... What a time
of disillusionment you must have had!
"You see, Lady Harman," he said, leaning back from his empty plate,
inclining himself confidentially to her ear and speaking in a privy
tone; "it's in the very nature of things that we--if I may put myself
into the list--we ideologists, should be rather exceptionally loose and
untrustworthy and disappointing men. Rotters--to speak plain
contemporary English. If you come to think of it, it has to be so."
"But----" she protested.
He met her eye firmly. "It has to be."
"Why?"
"The very qualities that make literature entertaining, vigorous,
inspiring, revealing, wonderful, beautiful and--all that sort of thing,
make its producers--if you will forgive the word again--rotters."
She smiled and lifted her eyebrows protestingly.
"Sensitive nervous tissue," he said with a finger up to emphasize his
words. "Quick responsiveness to stimulus, a vivid, almost
uncontrollable, expressiveness; that's what you want in your literary
man."
"Yes," said Lady Harman following cautiously. "Yes, I suppose it is."
"Can you suppose for a moment that these things conduce to self-control,
to reserve, to consistency, to any of the qualities of a trustworthy
man?... Of course you can't. And so we _aren't_ trustworthy, we _aren't_
consistent. Our virtues are our vices.... _My_ life," said Mr. Wilkins
still more confidentially, "won't bear examination. But that's by the
way. It need not concern us now."
"But Mr. Brumley?" she asked on the spur of the moment.
"I'm not talking of him," said Wilkins with careless cruelty. "He's
restrained. I mean the really imaginative people, the people with
vision, the people who let themselves go. You see now why they are
rotten, why they must be rotten. (No! No! take it away. I'm talking.) I
feel so strongly about this, about the natural and necessary
disreputableness of everybody who produces reputable writing--and for
the matter of that, art generally--that I set my face steadily against
all these attempts that keep on cropping up to make Figures of us. We
aren't Figures, Lady Harman; it isn't our line. Of all the detestable
aspects of the Victorian period surely that disposition to make Figures
of its artists and literary men was the most detestable. Respectable
Figures--Examples to the young. The suppressions, the coverings up that
had to go on, the white-washing of Dickens,--who was more than a bit of
a rip, you know, the concealment of Thackeray's mistresses. Did you know
he had mistresses? Oh rather! And so on. It's like that bust of Jove--or
Bacchus was it?--they pass off as Plato, who probably looked like any
other literary Grub. That's why I won't have anything to do with these
Academic developments that my friend Brumley--Do you know him by the
way?--goes in for. He's the third man down----You _do_ know him. And
he's giving up the Academic Committee, is he? I'm glad he's seen it at
last. What _is_ the good of trying to have an Academy and all that, and
put us in uniform and make out we are Somebodies, and respectable enough
to be shaken hands with by George and Mary, when as a matter of fact we
are, by our very nature, a collection of miscellaneous scandals----We
_must_ be. Bacon, Shakespear, Byron, Shelley--all the stars.... No,
Johnson wasn't a star, he was a character by Boswell.... Oh! great
things come out of us, no doubt, our arts are the vehicles of wonder and
hope, the world is dead without these things we produce, but that's no
reason why--why the mushroom-bed should follow the mushrooms into the
soup, is it? Perfectly fair image. (No, take it away.)"
He paused and then jumped in again as she was on the point of speaking.
"And you see even if our temperaments didn't lead inevitably to
our--dipping rather, we should still have to--_dip_. Asking a writer or
a poet to be seemly and Academic and so on, is like asking an eminent
surgeon to be stringently decent. It's--you see, it's incompatible. Now
a king or a butler or a family solicitor--if you like."
He paused again.
Lady Harman had been following him with an attentive reluctance.
"But what are we to do," she asked, "we people who are puzzled by life,
who want guidance and ideas and--help, if--if all the people we look to
for ideas are----"
"Bad characters."
"Well,--it's your theory, you know--bad characters?"
Wilkins answered with the air of one who carefully disentangles a
complex but quite solvable problem. "It doesn't follow," he said, "that
because a man is a bad character he's not to be trusted in matters where
character--as we commonly use the word--doesn't come in. These
sensitives, these--would you mind if I were to call myself an Æolian
Harp?--these Æolian Harps; they can't help responding to the winds of
heaven. Well,--listen to them. Don't follow them, don't worship them,
don't even honour them, but listen to them. Don't let anyone stop them
from saying and painting and writing and singing what they want to.
Freedom, canvas and attention, those are the proper honours for the
artist, the poet and the philosopher. Listen to the noise they make,
watch the stuff they produce, and presently you will find certain
things among the multitude of things that are said and shown and put out
and published, something--light in _your_ darkness--a writer for you,
something for you. Nobody can have a greater contempt for artists and
writers and poets and philosophers than I, oh! a squalid crew they are,
mean, jealous, pugnacious, disgraceful in love, _disgraceful_--but out
of it all comes the greatest serenest thing, the mind of the world,
Literature. Nasty little midges, yes,--but fireflies--carrying light for
the darkness."
His face was suddenly lit by enthusiasm and she wondered that she could
have thought it rather heavy and commonplace. He stopped abruptly and
glanced beyond her at her other neighbour who seemed on the verge of
turning to them again. "If I go on," he said with a voice suddenly
dropped, "I shall talk loud."
"You know," said Lady Harman, in a halty undertone, "you--you are too
hard upon--upon clever people, but it is true. I mean it is true in a
way...."
"Go on, I understand exactly what you are saying."
"I mean, there _are_ ideas. It's just that, that is so--so----I mean
they seem never to be just there and always to be present."
"Like God. Never in the flesh--now. A spirit everywhere. You think
exactly as I do, Lady Harman. It is just that. This is a great time, so
great that there is no chance for great men. Every chance for great
work. And we're doing it. There is a wind--blowing out of heaven. And
when beautiful people like yourself come into things----"
"I try to understand," she said. "I want to understand. I want--I want
not to miss life."
He was on the verge of saying something further and then his eyes
wandered down the table and he stopped short.
He ended his talk as he had begun it with "Bother! Lady Tarvrille, Lady
Harman, is trying to catch your eye."
Lady Harman turned her face to her hostess and answered her smile.
Wilkins caught at his chair and stood up.
"It would have been jolly to have talked some more," he said.
"I hope we shall."
"Well!" said Wilkins, with a sudden hardness in his eyes and she was
swept away from him.
She found no chance of talking to him upstairs, Sir Isaac came for her
early; but she went in hope of another meeting.
It did not come. For a time that expectation gave dinners and luncheon
parties a quite appreciable attraction. Then she told Agatha Alimony.
"I've never met him but that once," she said.
"One doesn't meet him now," said Agatha, deeply.
"But why?"
Deep significance came into Miss Alimony's eyes. "My dear," she
whispered, and glanced about them. "Don't you _know_?"
Lady Harman was a radiant innocence.
And then Miss Alimony began in impressive undertones, with awful
omissions like pits of darkness and with such richly embroidered details
as serious spinsters enjoy, adding, indeed, two quite new things that
came to her mind as the tale unfolded, and, naming no names and giving
no chances of verification or reply, handed on the fearful and at that
time extremely popular story of the awful wickedness of Wilkins the
author.
Upon reflection Lady Harman perceived that this explained all sorts of
things in their conversation and particularly the flash of hardness at
the end.
Even then, things must have been hanging over him....
§5
And while Lady Harman was making these meritorious and industrious
attempts to grasp the significance of life and to get some clear idea of
her social duty, the developments of those Hostels she had started--she
now felt so prematurely--was going on. There were times when she tried
not to think of them, turned her back on them, fled from them, and times
when they and what she ought to do about them and what they ought to be
and what they ought not to be, filled her mind to the exclusion of every
other topic. Rigorously and persistently Sir Isaac insisted they were
hers, asked her counsel, demanded her appreciation, presented as it were
his recurring bill for them.
Five of them were being built, not four but five. There was to be one,
the largest, in a conspicuous position in Bloomsbury near the British
Museum, one in a conspicuous position looking out upon Parliament Hill,
one conspicuously placed upon the Waterloo Road near St. George's
Circus, one at Sydenham, and one in the Kensington Road which was
designed to catch the eye of people going to and fro to the various
exhibitions at Olympia.
In Sir Isaac's study at Putney there was a huge and rather
splendid-looking morocco portfolio on a stand, and this portfolio bore
in excellent gold lettering the words, International Bread and Cake
Hostels. It was her husband's peculiar pleasure after dinner to take her
to turn over this with him; he would sit pencil in hand, while she,
poised at his request upon the arm of his chair, would endorse a
multitude of admirable modifications and suggestions. These hostels were
to be done--indeed they were being done--by Sir Isaac's tame architect,
and the interlacing yellow and mauve tiles, and the Doulton ware
mouldings that were already familiar to the public as the uniform of the
Stores, were to be used upon the façades of the new institutions. They
were to be boldly labelled
INTERNATIONAL HOSTELS
right across the front.
The plans revealed in every case a site depth as great as the frontage,
and the utmost ingenuity had been used to utilize as much space as
possible.
"Every room we get in," said Sir Isaac, "adds one to the denominator in
the cost;" and carried his wife back to her schooldays. At last she had
found sense in fractions. There was to be a series of convenient and
spacious rooms on the ground floor, a refectory, which might be cleared
and used for meetings--"dances," said Lady Harman. "Hardly the sort of
thing we want 'em to get up to," said Sir Isaac--various offices, the
matron's apartments--"We ought to begin thinking about matrons," said
Sir Isaac;--a bureau, a reading-room and a library--"We can pick good,
serious stuff for them," said Sir Isaac, "instead of their filling their
heads with trash"--one or two workrooms with tables for cutting out and
sewing; this last was an idea of Susan Burnet's. Upstairs there was to
be a beehive of bedrooms, floor above floor, and each floor as low as
the building regulations permitted. There were to be long dormitories
with cubicles at three-and-sixpence a week--make your own beds--and
separate rooms at prices ranging from four-and-sixpence to
seven-and-sixpence. Every three cubicles and every bedroom had lavatory
basins with hot and cold water; there were pull-out drawers under the
beds and a built-in chest of drawers, a hanging cupboard, a
looking-glass and a radiator in each cubicle, and each floor had a
box-room. It was ship-shape.
"A girl can get this cubicle for three-and-six a week," said Sir Isaac,
tapping the drawing before him with his pencil. "She can get her
breakfast with a bit of bacon or a sausage for two shillings a week,
and she can get her high tea, with cold meat, good potted salmon, shrimp
paste, jam and cetera, for three-and-six a week. Say her bus fares and
lunch out mean another four shillings. That means she can get along on
about twelve-and-six a week, comfortable, read the papers, have a book
out of the library.... There's nothing like it to be got now for twice
the money. The sort of thing they have now is one room, dingy, badly
fitted, extra for coals.
"That's the answer to your problem, Elly," he said. "There we are. Every
girl who doesn't live at home can live here--with a matron to keep her
eye on her.... And properly run, Elly, properly run the thing's going to
pay two or three per cent,--let alone the advertisement for the Stores.
"We can easily make these Hostels obligatory on all our girls who don't
live at their own homes," he said. "That ought to keep them off the
streets, if anything can. I don't see how even Miss Babs Wheeler can
have the face to strike against that.
"And then we can arrange with some of the big firms, drapers' shops and
all that sort of thing near each hostel, to take over most of our other
cubicle space. A lot of them--overflow.
"Of course we'll have to make sure the girls get in at night." He
reached out for a ground floor plan of the Bloomsbury establishment
which was to be the first built. "If," he said, "we were to have a sort
of porter's lodge with a book--and make 'em ring a bell after eleven
say--just here...."
He took out a silver pencil case and got to work.
Lady Harman's expression as she leant over him became thoughtful.
There were points about this project that gave her the greatest
misgivings; that matron, keeping her eye on the girls, that carefully
selected library, the porter's bell, these casual allusions to
"discipline" that set her thinking of scraps of the Babs Wheeler
controversy. There was a regularity, an austerity about this project
that chilled her, she hardly knew why. Her own vague intentions had been
an amiable, hospitable, agreeably cheap establishment to which the
homeless feminine employees in London could resort freely and
cheerfully, and it was only very slowly that she perceived that her
husband was by no means convinced of the spontaneity of their coming. He
seemed always glancing at methods for compelling them to come in and
oppressions when that compulsion had succeeded. There had already
hovered over several of these anticipatory evenings, his very manifest
intention to have very carefully planned "Rules." She felt there lay
ahead of them much possibility for divergence of opinion about these
"Rules." She foresaw a certain narrowness and hardness. She herself had
made her fight against the characteristics of Sir Isaac and--perhaps she
was lacking in that aristocratic feeling which comes so naturally to
most successful middle-class people in England--she could not believe
that what she had found bad and suffocating for herself could be
agreeable and helpful for her poorer sisters.
It occurred to her to try the effect of the scheme upon Susan Burnet.
Susan had such a knack of seeing things from unexpected angles. She
contrived certain operations upon the study blinds, and then broached
the business to Susan casually in the course of an enquiry into the
welfare of the Burnet family.
Susan was evidently prejudiced against the idea.
"Yes," said Susan after various explanations and exhibitions, "but
where's the home in it?"
"The whole thing is a home."
"Barracks _I_ call it," said Susan. "Nobody ever felt at home in a room
coloured up like that--and no curtains, nor vallances, nor toilet
covers, nor anywhere where a girl can hang a photograph or anything.
What girl's going to feel at home in a strange place like that?"
"They ought to be able to hang up photographs," said Lady Harman, making
a mental note of it.
"And of course there'll be all sorts of Rules."
"_Some_ rules."
"Homes, real homes don't have Rules. And I daresay--Fines."
"No, there shan't be any Fines," said Lady Harman quickly. "I'll see to
that."
"You got to back up rules somehow--once you got 'em," said Susan. "And
when you get a crowd, and no father and mother, and no proper family
feeling, I suppose there's got to be Rules."
Lady Harman pointed out various advantages of the project.
"I'm not saying it isn't cheap and healthy and social," said Susan, "and
if it isn't too strict I expect you'll get plenty of girls to come to
it, but at the best it's an Institution, Lady Harman. It's going to be
an Institution. That's what it's going to be."
She held the front elevation of the Bloomsbury Hostel in her hand and
reflected.
"Of course for my part, I'd rather lodge with nice struggling believing
Christian people anywhere than go into a place like that. It's the
feeling of freedom, of being yourself and on your own. Even if the water
wasn't laid on and I had to fetch it myself.... If girls were paid
properly there wouldn't be any need of such places, none at all. It's
the poverty makes 'em what they are.... And after all, somebody's got to
lose the lodgers if this place gets them. Suppose this sort of thing
grows up all over the place, it'll just be the story of the little
bakers and little grocers and all those people over again. Why in London
there are thousands of people just keep a home together by letting two
or three rooms or boarding someone--and it stands to reason, they'll
have to take less or lose the lodgers if this kind of thing's going to
be done. Nobody isn't going to build a Hostel for them."
"No," said Lady Harman, "I never thought of them."
"Lots of 'em haven't anything in the world but their bits of furniture
and their lease and there they are stuck and tied. There's Aunt Hannah,
Father's sister, she's like that. Sleeps in the basement and works and
slaves, and often I've had to lend her ten shillings to pay the rent
with, through her not being full. This sort of place isn't going to do
much good to her."
Lady Harman surveyed the plan rather blankly. "I suppose it isn't."
"And then if you manage this sort of place easy and attractive, it's
going to draw girls away from their homes. There's girls like Alice
who'd do anything to get a bit of extra money to put on their backs and
seem to think of nothing but chattering and laughing and going about.
Such a place like this would be fine fun for Alice; in when she liked
and out when she liked, and none of us to ask her questions. She'd be
just the sort to go, and mother, who's had the upbringing of her, how's
she to make up for Alice's ten shillings what she pays in every week?
There's lots like Alice. She's not bad isn't Alice, she's a good girl
and a good-hearted girl; I will say that for her, but she's shallow, say
what you like she's shallow, she's got no thought and she's wild for
pleasure, and sometimes it seems to me that that's as bad as being bad
for all the good it does to anyone else in the world, and so I tell her.
But of course she hasn't seen things as I've seen them and doesn't feel
as I do about all these things...."
Thus Susan.
Her discourse so puzzled Lady Harman that she bethought herself of Mr.
Brumley and called in his only too readily accorded advice. She asked
him to tea on a day when she knew unofficially that Sir Isaac would be
away, she showed him the plans and sketched their probable development.
Then with that charming confidence of hers in his knowledge and ability
she put her doubts and fears before him. What did he really think of
these places? What did he think of Susan Burnet's idea of ruined
lodging-house keepers? "I used to think our stores were good things,"
she said. "Is this likely to be a good thing at all?"
Mr. Brumley said "Um" a great number of times and realized that he was a
humbug. He fenced with her and affected sagacity for a time and suddenly
he threw down his defences and confessed he knew as little of the
business as she did. "But I see it is a complex question and--it's an
interesting one too. May I enquire into it for you? I think I might be
able to hunt up a few particulars...."
He went away in a glow of resolution.
Georgina was about the only intimate who regarded the new development
without misgiving.
"You think you're going to do all sorts of things with these Hostels,
Ella," she said, "but as a matter of fact they're bound to become just
exactly what we've always wanted."
"And what may that be?" asked Mrs. Sawbridge over her macramé work.
"Strongholds for a garrison of suffragettes," said Georgina with the
light of the Great Insane Movement in her eyes and a ringing note in
her voice. "Fort Chabrols for women."
§6
For some months in a negative and occasionally almost negligent fashion
Mr. Brumley had been living up to his impassioned resolve to be an
unselfish lover of Lady Harman. He had been rather at loose ends
intellectually, deprived of his old assumptions and habitual attitudes
and rather chaotic in the matter of his new convictions. He had given
most of his productive hours to the writing of a novel which was to be
an entire departure from the Euphemia tradition. The more he got on with
this, the more clearly he realized that it was essentially
insignificant. When he re-read what he had written he was surprised by
crudities where he had intended sincerities and rhetoric where the
scheme had demanded passion. What was the matter with him? He was
stirred that Lady Harman should send for him, and his inability to deal
with her perplexities deepened his realization of the ignorance and
superficiality he had so long masked even from himself beneath the
tricks and pretensions of a gay scepticism. He went away fully resolved
to grapple with the entire Hostel question, and he put the patched and
tortured manuscript of the new novel aside with a certain satisfaction
to do this.
The more he reflected upon the nature of this study he proposed for
himself the more it attracted him. It was some such reality as this he
had been wanting. He could presently doubt whether he would ever go back
to his novel-writing again, or at least to the sort of novel-writing he
had been doing hitherto. To invent stories to save middle-aged
prosperous middle-class people from the distresses of thinking, is
surely no work for a self-respecting man. Stevenson in the very deeps of
that dishonourable traffic had realized as much and likened himself to a
_fille de joie_, and Haggard, of the same school and period, had
abandoned blood and thunder at the climax of his success for the honest
study of agricultural conditions. The newer successes were turning out
work, less and less conventional and agreeable and more and more
stiffened with facts and sincerities.... He would show Lady Harman that
a certain debonair quality he had always affected, wasn't incompatible
with a powerful grasp of general conditions.... And she wanted this
done. Suppose he did it in a way that made him necessary to her. Suppose
he did it very well.
He set to work, and understanding as you do a certain quality of the
chameleon in Mr. Brumley's moral nature, you will understand that he
worked through a considerable variety of moods. Sometimes he worked with
disinterested passion and sometimes he was greatly sustained by this
thought that here was something that would weave him in with the
gravities of her life and give him perhaps a new inlet to intimacy. And
presently a third thing came to his help, and that was the discovery
that the questions arising out of this attempt to realize the
importance of those Hostels, were in themselves very fascinating
questions for an intelligent person.
Because before you have done with the business of the modern employé,
you must, if you are an intelligent person, have taken a view of the
whole vast process of social reorganization that began with the
development of factory labour and big towns, and which is even now
scarcely advanced enough for us to see its general trend. For a time Mr.
Brumley did not realize the magnitude of the thing he was looking at;
when he did, theories sprouted in his mind like mushrooms and he babbled
with mental excitement. He came in a state of the utmost lucidity to
explain his theories to Lady Harman, and they struck that lady at the
time as being the most illuminating suggestions she had ever
encountered. They threw an appearance of order, of process, over a world
of trade and employment and competition that had hitherto seemed too
complex and mysterious for any understanding.
"You see," said Mr. Brumley--they had met that day in Kensington Gardens
and they were sitting side by side upon green chairs near the frozen
writings of Physical Energy--"You see, if I may lecture a little,
putting the thing as simply as possible, the world has been filling up
new spaces ever since the discovery of America; all the period from then
to about 1870, let us say, was a period of rapid increase of population
in response to new opportunities of living and new fulnesses of life in
every direction. During that time, four hundred years of it roughly,
there was a huge development of family life; to marry and rear a quite
considerable family became the chief business of everybody, celibacy
grew rare, monasteries and nunneries which had abounded vanished like
things dissolving in a flood and even the priests became Protestant
against celibacy and took unto themselves wives and had huge families.
The natural checks upon increase, famine and pestilence, were lifted by
more systematized communication and by scientific discovery; and
altogether and as a consequence the world now has probably three or four
times the human population it ever carried before. Everywhere in that
period the family prevailed again, the prospering multiplying household;
it was a return to the family, to the reproductive social grouping of
early barbaric life, and naturally all the thought of the modern world
which has emerged since the fifteenth century falls into this form. So I
see it, Lady Harman. The generation of our grandfathers in the opening
nineteenth century had two shaping ideas, two forms of thought, the
family and progress, not realizing that that very progress which had
suddenly reopened the doors of opportunity for the family that had
revived the ancient injunction to increase and multiply and replenish
the earth, might presently close that door again and declare the world
was filled. But that is what is happening now. The doors close. That
immense swarming and multiplying of little people is over, and the
forces of social organization have been coming into play now, more and
more for a century and a half, to produce new wholesale ways of doing
things, new great organizations, organizations that invade the
autonomous family more and more, and are perhaps destined ultimately to
destroy it altogether and supersede it. At least it is so I make my
reading of history in these matters."
"Yes," said Lady Harman, with knitted brows, "Yes," and wondered
privately whether it would be possible to get from that opening to the
matter of her Hostels before it was time for her to return for Sir
Isaac's tea.
Mr. Brumley continued to talk with his eyes fixed as it were upon his
thoughts. "These things, Lady Harman, go on at different paces in
different regions. I will not trouble you with a discussion of that, or
of emigration, of any of the details of the vast proliferation that
preceded the present phase. Suffice it, that now all the tendency is
back towards restraints upon increase, to an increasing celibacy, to a
fall in the birth-rate and in the average size of families, to--to a
release of women from an entire devotion to a numerous offspring, and so
at last to the supersession of those little family units that for four
centuries have made up the substance of social life and determined
nearly all our moral and sentimental attitudes. The autonomy of the
family is being steadily destroyed, and it is being replaced by the
autonomy of the individual in relation to some syndicated economic
effort."
"I think," said Lady Harman slowly, arresting him by a gesture, "if you
could make that about autonomy a little clearer...."
Mr. Brumley did. He went on to point out with the lucidity of a
University Extension lecturer what he meant by these singular phrases.
She listened intelligently but with effort. He was much too intent upon
getting the thing expressed to his own satisfaction to notice any
absurdity in his preoccupation with these theories about the population
of the world in the face of her immediate practical difficulties. He
declared that the onset of this new phase in human life, the modern
phase, wherein there was apparently to be no more "proliferating," but
instead a settling down of population towards a stable equilibrium,
became apparent first with the expropriation of the English peasantry
and the birth of the factory system and machine production. "Since that
time one can trace a steady substitution of wholesale and collective
methods for household and family methods. It has gone far with us now.
Instead of the woman drawing water from a well, the pipes and taps of
the water company. Instead of the home-made rushlight, the electric
lamp. Instead of home-spun, ready-made clothes. Instead of home-brewed,
the brewer's cask. Instead of home-baked, first the little baker and
then, clean and punctual, the International Bread and Cake Stores.
Instead of the child learning at its mother's knee, the compulsory
elementary school. Flats take the place of separate houses. Instead of
the little holding, the big farm, and instead of the children working
at home, the factory. Everywhere synthesis. Everywhere the little
independent proprietor gives place to the company and the company to the
trust. You follow all this, Lady Harman?"
"Go on," she said, encouraged by that transitory glimpse of the Stores
in his discourse.
"Now London--and England generally--had its period of expansion and got
on to the beginnings at least of this period of synthesis that is
following it, sooner than any other country in the world; and because it
was the first to reach the new stage it developed the characteristics of
the new stage with a stronger flavour of the old than did such later
growths of civilization as New York or Bombay or Berlin. That is why
London and our British big cities generally are congestions of little
houses, little homes, while the newer great cities run to apartments and
flats. We hadn't grasped the logical consequences of what we were in for
so completely as the people abroad did who caught it later, and that is
why, as we began to develop our new floating population of mainly
celibate employees and childless people, they had mostly to go into
lodgings, they went into the homes that were intended for families as
accessories to the family, and they were able to go in because the
families were no longer so numerous as they used to be. London is still
largely a city of landladies and lodgings, and in no other part of the
world is there so big a population of lodgers. And this business of your
Hostels is nothing more nor less than the beginning of the end of that.
Just as the great refreshment caterers have mopped up the ancient
multitude of coffee-houses and squalid little special feeding
arrangements of the days of Tittlebat Titmouse and Dick Swiveller, so
now your Hostels are going to mop up the lodging-house system of London.
Of course there are other and kindred movements. Naturally. The
Y.W.C.A., the Y.M.C.A., the London Girls Club Union and so forth are all
doing kindred work."
"But what, Mr. Brumley, what is to become of the landladies?" asked Lady
Harman.
Mr. Brumley was checked in mid theory.
"I hadn't thought of the landladies," he said, after a short pause.
"They worry me," said Lady Harman.
"Um," said Mr. Brumley, thrown out.
"Do you know the other day I went into Chelsea, where there are whole
streets of lodgings, and--I suppose it was wrong of me, but I went and
pretended to be looking for rooms for a girl clerk I knew, and I
saw--Oh! no end of rooms. And such poor old women, such dingy,
worked-out, broken old women, with a kind of fearful sharpness, so
eager, so dreadfully eager to get that girl clerk who didn't exist...."
She looked at him with an expression of pained enquiry.
"That," said Mr. Brumley, "that I think is a question, so to speak, for
the social ambulance. If perhaps I might go on----That particular
difficulty we might consider later. I think I was talking of the general
synthesis."
"Yes," said Lady Harman. "And what is it exactly that is to take the
place of these isolated little homes and these dreary little lodgings?
Here are we, my husband and I, rushing in with this new thing, just as
he rushed in with his stores thirty years ago and overset little bakers
and confectioners and refreshment dealers by the hundred. Some of
them--poor dears--they----I don't like to think. And it wasn't a good
thing he made after all,--only a hard sort of thing. He made all those
shops of his--with the girls who strike and say they are sweated and
driven.... And now here we are making a kind of barrack place for people
to live in!"
She expressed the rest of her ideas with a gesture of the hands.
"I admit the process has its dangers," said Mr. Brumley. "It's like the
supersession of the small holdings by the _latifundia_ in Italy. But
that's just where our great opportunity comes in. These synthetic phases
have occurred before in the world's history and their history is a
history of lost opportunities.... But need ours be?"
She had a feeling as though something had slipped through her fingers.
"I feel," she said, "that it is more important to me than anything else
in life, that these Hostels, anyhow, which are springing so rapidly from
a chance suggestion of mine, shouldn't be lost opportunities."
"Exactly," said Mr. Brumley, with the gesture of one who recovers a
thread. "That is just what I am driving at."
The fingers of his extended hand felt in the warm afternoon air for a
moment, and then he said "Ah!" in a tone of recovery while she waited
respectfully for the resumed thread.
"You see," he said, "I regard this process of synthesis, this
substitution of wholesale and collective methods for homely and
individual ones as, under existing conditions, inevitable--inevitable.
It's the phase we live in, it's to this we have to adapt ourselves. It
is as little under your control or mine as the movement of the sun
through the zodiac. Practically, that is. And what we have to do is not,
I think, to sigh for lost homes and the age of gold and spade husbandry,
and pigs and hens in the home, and so on, but to make this new synthetic
life tolerable for the mass of men and women, hopeful for the mass of
men and women, a thing developing and ascending. That's where your
Hostels come in, Lady Harman; that's where they're so important. They're
a pioneer movement. If they succeed--and things in Sir Isaac's hands
have a way of succeeding at any rate to the paying point--then there'll
be a headlong rush of imitations, imitating your good features,
imitating your bad features, deepening a groove.... You see my point?"
"Yes," she said. "It makes me--more afraid than ever."
"But hopeful," said Mr. Brumley, presuming to lay his hand for an
instant on her arm. "It's big enough to be inspiring."
"But I'm afraid," she said.
"It's laying down the lines of a new social life--no less. And what
makes it so strange, so typical, too, of the way social forces work
nowadays, is that your husband, who has all the instinctive insistence
upon every right and restriction of the family relation in his private
life, who is narrowly, passionately _for_ the home in his own case, who
hates all books and discussion that seem to touch it, should in his
business activities be striking this tremendous new blow at the ancient
organization. For that, you see, is what it amounts to."
"Yes," said Lady Harman slowly. "Yes. Of course, he doesn't know...."
Mr. Brumley was silent for a little while. "You see," he resumed, "at
the worst this new social life may become a sort of slavery in barracks;
at the best--it might become something very wonderful. My mind's been
busy now for days thinking just how wonderful the new life might be.
Instead of the old bickering, crowded family home, a new home of
comrades...."
He made another pause, and his thoughts ran off upon a fresh track.
"In looking up all these things I came upon a queer little literature of
pamphlets and so forth, dealing with the case of the shop assistants.
They have a great grievance in what they call the living-in system. The
employers herd them in dormitories over the shops, and usually feed them
by gaslight in the basements; they fine them and keep an almost
intolerable grip upon them; make them go to bed at half-past ten, make
them go to church on Sundays,--all sorts of petty tyrannies. The
assistants are passionately against this, but they've got no power to
strike. Where could they go if they struck? Into the street. Only people
who live out and have homes of their own to sulk in _can_ strike.
Naturally, therefore, as a preliminary to any other improvement in the
shop assistant's life, these young people want to live out. Practically
that's an impossible demand at present, because they couldn't get
lodgings and live out with any decency at all on what it costs their
employers to lodge and feed them _in_. Well, here you see a curious
possibility for your Hostels. You open the prospect of a living-out
system for shop assistants. But just in the degree in which you choose
to interfere with them, regulate them, bully and deal with them
wholesale through their employers, do you make the new living-out method
approximate to the living-in. _That's_ a curious side development, isn't
it?"
Lady Harman appreciated that.
"That's only the beginning of the business. There's something more these
Hostels might touch...."
Mr. Brumley gathered himself together for the new aspect. "There's
marriage," he said.
"One of the most interesting and unsatisfactory aspects of the life of
the employee to-day--and you know the employee is now in the majority in
the adult population--is this. You see, we hold them celibate. We hold
them celibate for a longer and longer period; the average age at
marriage rises steadily; and so long as they remain celibate we are
prepared with some sort of ideas about the future development of their
social life, clubs, hostels, living-in, and so forth. But at present we
haven't any ideas at all about the adaptation of the natural pairing
instinct to the new state of affairs. Ultimately the employee marries;
they hold out as long as they possibly can, but ultimately they have to.
They have to, even in the face of an economic system that holds out no
prospects of anything but insecurity and an increasing chance of trouble
and disaster to the employee's family group. What happens is that they
drop back into a distressful, crippled, insecure imitation of the old
family life as one had it in what I might call the multiplying periods
of history. They start a home,--they dream of a cottage, but they drift
to a lodging, and usually it isn't the best sort of lodging, for
landladies hate wives and the other lodgers detest babies. Often the
young couple doesn't have babies. You see, they are more intelligent
than peasants, and intelligence and fecundity vary reciprocally," said
Mr. Brumley.
"You mean?" interrupted Lady Harman softly.
"There is a world-wide fall in the birth-rate. People don't have the
families they did."
"Yes," said Lady Harman. "I understand now."
"And the more prosperous or the more sanguine take these suburban little
houses, these hutches that make such places as Hendon nightmares of
monotony, or go into ridiculous jerry-built sham cottages in some Garden
Suburb, where each young wife does her own housework and pretends to
like it. They have a sort of happiness for a time, I suppose; the woman
stops all outside work, the man, very much handicapped, goes on
competing against single men. Then--nothing more happens. Except
difficulties. The world goes dull and grey for them. They look about for
a lodger, perhaps. Have you read Gissing's _Paying Guest_?..."
"I suppose," said Lady Harman, "I suppose it is like that. One tries not
to think it is so."
"One needn't let oneself believe that dullness is unhappiness," said Mr.
Brumley. "I don't want to paint things sadder than they are. But it's
not a fine life, it's not a full life, that life in a Neo-Malthusian
suburban hutch."
"Neo----?" asked Lady Harman.
"A mere phrase," said Mr. Brumley hastily. "The extraordinary thing is
that, until you set me looking into these things with your questions,
I've always taken this sort of thing for granted, as though it couldn't
be otherwise. Now I seem to see with a kind of freshness. I'm astounded
at the muddle of it, the waste and aimlessness of it. And here again it
is, Lady Harman, that I think your opportunity comes in. With these
Hostels as they might be projected now, you seem to have the possibility
of a modernized, more collective and civilized family life than the old
close congestion of the single home, and I see no reason at all why you
shouldn't carry that collective life on to the married stage. As things
are now these little communities don't go beyond the pairing--and out
they drift to find the homestead they will never possess. What has been
borne in upon me more and more forcibly as I have gone through
your--your nest of problems, is the idea that the new social--association,
that has so extensively replaced the old family group, might be carried
on right through life, that it might work in with all sorts of other
discontents and bad adjustments.... The life of the women in these little
childless or one-or-two-child homes is more unsatisfactory even than the
man's."
Mr. Brumley's face flushed with enthusiasm and he wagged a finger to
emphasize his words. "Why not make Hostels, Lady Harman, for married
couples? Why not try that experiment so many people have talked about of
the conjoint kitchen and refectory, the conjoint nursery, the collective
social life, so that the children who are single children or at best
children in small families of two or three, may have the advantages of
playfellows, and the young mothers still, if they choose, continue to
have a social existence and go on with their professional or business,
work? That's the next step your Hostels might take ... Incidentally you
see this opens a way to a life of relative freedom for the woman who is
married.... I don't know if you have read Mrs. Stetson. Yes, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman Stetson.... Yes, _Woman and Economics_, that's the book.
"I know," Mr. Brumley went on, "I seem to be opening out your project
like a concertina, but I want you to see just how my thoughts have been
going about all this. I want you to realize I haven't been idle during
these last few weeks. I know it's a far cry from what the Hostels are to
all these ideas of what they might begin to be, I know the difficulties
in your way--all sorts of difficulties. But when I think just how you
stand at the very centre of the moulding forces in these changes...."
He dropped into an eloquent silence.
Lady Harman looked thoughtfully at the sunlight under the trees.
"You think," she said, "that it comes to as much as all this."
"More," said Mr. Brumley.
"I was frightened before. _Now_----You make me feel as though someone
had put the wheel of a motor car in my hand, started it and told me to
steer...."
§7
Lady Harman went home from that talk in a taxi, and on the way she
passed the building operations in Kensington Road. A few weeks ago it
had been a mere dusty field of operation for the house-wreckers; now its
walls were already rising to the second storey. She realized how swiftly
nowadays the search for wisdom can be outstripped by reinforced
concrete.
§8
It was only by slow degrees and rather in the absence of a more
commanding interest than through any invincible quality in their appeal
to her mind that these Hostels became in the next three years the grave
occupation of Lady Harman's thoughts and energies. She yielded to them
reluctantly. For a long time she wanted to look over them and past them
and discover something--she did not know what--something high and
domineering to which it would be easy to give herself. It was difficult
to give herself to the Hostels. In that Mr. Brumley, actuated by a
mixture of more or less admirable motives, did his best to assist her.
These Hostels alone he thought could give them something upon which they
could meet, give them a common interest and him a method of service and
companionship. It threw the qualities of duty and justification over
their more or less furtive meetings, their little expeditions together,
their quiet frequent association.
Together they made studies of the Girls' Clubs which are scattered about
London, supplementary homes that have in such places as Walworth and
Soho worked small miracles of civilization. These institutions appealed
to a lower social level than the one their Hostels were to touch, but
they had been organized by capable and understanding minds and Lady
Harman found in one or two of their evening dances and in the lunch she
shared one morning with a row of cheerful young factory girls from Soho
just that quality of concrete realization for which her mind hungered.
Then Mr. Brumley took her once or twice for evening walks, just when the
stream of workers is going home; he battled his way with her along the
footpath of Charing Cross Railway Bridge from the Waterloo side, they
swam in the mild evening sunshine of September against a trampling
torrent of bobbing heads, and afterwards they had tea together in one of
the International Stores near the Strand, where Mr. Brumley made an
unsuccessful attempt to draw out the waitress on the subject of Babs
Wheeler and the recent strike. The young woman might have talked freely
to a man alone or freely to Lady Harman alone but the combination of the
two made her shy. The bridge experience led to several other
expeditions, to see home-going on the tube, at the big railway termini,
on the train--and once they followed up the process to Streatham and saw
how the people pour out of the train at last and scatter--until at last
they are just isolated individuals running up steps, diving into
basements. And then it occurred to Mr. Brumley that he knew someone who
would take them over "Gerrard," that huge telephone exchange, and there
Lady Harman saw how the National Telephone Company, as it was in those
days, had a care for its staff, the pleasant club rooms, the rest room,
and stood in that queer rendez-vous of messages, where the "Hello" girl
sits all day, wearing a strange metallic apparatus over ear and mouth,
watching small lights that wink significantly at her and perpetually
pulling out and slipping in and releasing little flexible strings that
seem to have a resilient volition of their own. They hunted out Mrs.
Barnet and heard her ideas about conjoint homes for spinsters in the
Garden Suburb. And then they went over a Training College for elementary
teachers and visited the Post Office and then came back to more
unobtrusive contemplation, from the customer's little table, of the
ministering personalities of the International Stores.
There were times when all these things seen, seemed to fall into an
entirely explicable system under Mr. Brumley's exposition, when they
seemed to be giving and most generously giving the clearest indications
of what kind of thing the Hostels had to be, and times when this all
vanished again and her mind became confused and perplexed. She tried to
express just what it was she missed to Mr. Brumley. "One doesn't," she
said, "see all of them and what one sees isn't what we have to do with.
I mean we see them dressed up and respectable and busy and then they go
home and the door shuts. It's the home that we are going to alter and
replace--and what is it like?" Mr. Brumley took her for walks in
Highbury and the newer parts of Hendon and over to Clapham. "I want to
go inside those doors," she said.
"That's just what they won't let you do," said Mr. Brumley. "Nobody
visits but relations--and prospective relations, and the only other
social intercourse is over the garden wall. Perhaps I can find
books----"
He got her novels by Edwin Pugh and Pett Ridge and Frank Swinnerton and
George Gissing. They didn't seem to be attractive homes. And it seemed
remarkable to her that no woman had ever given the woman's view of the
small London home from the inside....
She overcame her own finer scruples and invaded the Burnet household.
Apart from fresh aspects of Susan's character in the capacity of a
hostess she gained little light from that. She had never felt so
completely outside a home in her life as she did when she was in the
Burnets' parlour. The very tablecloth on which the tea was spread had an
air of being new and protective of familiar things; the tea was
manifestly quite unlike their customary tea, it was no more intimate
than the confectioner's shop window from which it mostly came; the whole
room was full of the muffled cries of things hastily covered up and
specially put away. Vivid oblongs on the faded wallpaper betrayed even a
rearrangement of the pictures. Susan's mother was a little dingy woman,
wearing a very smart new cap to the best of her ability; she had an air
of having been severely shaken up and admonished, and her general
bearing confessed only too plainly how shattered those preparations had
left her. She watched her capable daughter for cues. Susan's sisters
displayed a disposition to keep their backs against something and at the
earliest opportunity to get into the passage and leave Susan and her
tremendous visitor alone but within earshot. They started convulsively
when they were addressed and insisted on "your ladyship." Susan had told
them not to but they would. When they supposed themselves to be
unobserved they gave themselves up to the impassioned inspection of Lady
Harman's costume. Luke had fled into the street, and in spite of various
messages conveyed to him by the youngest sister he refused to enter
until Lady Harman had gone again and was well out of the way. And Susan
was no longer garrulous and at her ease; she had no pins in her mouth
and that perhaps hampered her speech; she presided flushed and
bright-eyed in a state of infectious nervous tension. Her politeness was
awful. Never in all her life had Lady Harman felt her own lack of real
conversational power so acutely. She couldn't think of a thing that
mightn't be construed as an impertinence and that didn't remind her of
district visiting. Yet perhaps she succeeded better than she supposed.
"What a family you have had!" she said to Mrs. Burnet. "I have four
little girls, and I find them as much as we can manage."
"You're young yet, my ladyship," said Mrs. Burnet, "and they aren't
always the blessings they seem to be. It's the rearing's the
difficulty."
"They're all such healthy-looking--people."
"I wish we could get hold of Luke, my ladyship, and show you _'im_. He's
that sturdy. And yet when 'e was a little feller----"
She was launched for a time on those details that were always so dear to
the mothers of the past order of things. Her little spate of
reminiscences was the only interlude of naturalness in an afternoon of
painfully constrained behaviour....
Lady Harman returned a trifle shamefacedly from this abortive dip into
realities to Mr. Brumley's speculative assurance.
§9
While Lady Harman was slowly accustoming her mind to this idea that the
development of those Hostels was her appointed career in life, so far as
a wife may have a career outside her connubial duties, and while she was
getting insensibly to believe in Mr. Brumley's theory of their exemplary
social importance, the Hostels themselves with a haste that she felt
constantly was premature, were achieving a concrete existence. They were
developing upon lines that here and there disregarded Mr. Brumley's
ideas very widely; they gained in practicality what perhaps they lost in
social value, through the entirely indirect relations between Mr.
Brumley on the one hand and Sir Isaac on the other. For Sir Isaac
manifestly did not consider and would have been altogether indisposed to
consider Mr. Brumley as entitled to plan or suggest anything of the
slightest importance in this affair, and whatever of Mr. Brumley reached
that gentleman reached him in a very carefully transmitted form as Lady
Harman's own unaided idea. Sir Isaac had sound Victorian ideas about the
place of literature in life. If anyone had suggested to him that
literature could supply ideas to practical men he would have had a
choking fit, and he regarded Mr. Brumley's sedulous attentions to these
hostel schemes with feelings, the kindlier elements of whose admixture
was a belief that ultimately he would write some elegant and respectful
approval of the established undertaking.
The entire admixture of Sir Isaac's feelings towards Mr. Brumley was by
no means kindly. He disliked any man to come near Lady Harman, any man
at all; he had a faint uneasiness even about waiters and hotel porters
and the clergy. Of course he had agreed she should have friends of her
own and he couldn't very well rescind that without something definite to
go upon. But still this persistent follower kept him uneasy. He kept
this uneasiness within bounds by reassuring himself upon the point of
Lady Harman's virtuous obedience, and so reassured he was able to temper
his distrust with a certain contempt. The man was in love with his wife;
that was manifest enough, and dangled after her.... Let him dangle. What
after all did he get for it?...
But occasionally he broke through this complacency, betrayed a fitful
ingenious jealousy, interfered so that she missed appointments and had
to break engagements. He was now more and more a being of pathological
moods. The subtle changes of secretion that were hardening his arteries,
tightening his breath and poisoning his blood, reflected themselves upon
his spirit in an uncertainty of temper and exasperating fatigues and led
to startling outbreaks. Then for a time he would readjust himself,
become in his manner reasonable again, become accessible.
He was the medium through which this vision that was growing up in her
mind of a reorganized social life, had to translate itself, as much as
it could ever translate itself, into reality. He called these hostels
her hostels, made her the approver of all he did, but he kept every
particle of control in his own hands. All her ideas and desires had to
be realized by him. And his attitudes varied with his moods; sometimes
he was keenly interested in the work of organization and then he
terrified her by his bias towards acute economies, sometimes he was
resentful at the burthen of the whole thing, sometimes he seemed to
scent Brumley or at least some moral influence behind her mind and met
her suggestions with a bitter resentment as though any suggestion must
needs be a disloyalty to him. There was a remarkable outbreak upon her
first tentative proposal that the hostel system might ultimately be
extended to married couples.
He heard her with his lips pressing tighter and tighter together until
they were yellow white and creased with a hundred wicked little
horizontal creases. Then he interrupted her with silent gesticulations.
Then words came.
"I never did, Elly," he said. "I never did. Reely--there are times when
you ain't rational. Married couples who're assistants in shops and
places!"
For a little while he sought some adequate expression of his point of
view.
"Nice thing to go keeping a place for these chaps to have their cheap
bits of skirt in," he said at last.
Then further: "If a man wants a girl let him work himself up until he
can keep her. Married couples indeed!"
He began to expand the possibilities of the case with a quite unusual
vividness. "Double beds in each cubicle, I suppose," he said, and played
for a time about this fancy.... "Well, to hear such an idea from you of
all people, Elly. I never did."
He couldn't leave it alone. He had to go on to the bitter end with the
vision she had evoked in his mind. He was jealous, passionately jealous,
it was only too manifest, of the possible happinesses of these young
people. He was possessed by that instinctive hatred for the realized
love of others which lies at the base of so much of our moral
legislation. The bare thought--whole corridors of bridal chambers!--made
his face white and his hand quiver. _His_ young men and young women! The
fires of a hundred Vigilance Committees blazed suddenly in his reddened
eyes. He might have been a concentrated society for preventing the rapid
multiplication of the unfit. The idea of facilitating early marriages
was manifestly shameful to him, a disgraceful service to render, a job
for Pandarus. What was she thinking of? Elly of all people! Elly who had
been as innocent as driven snow before Georgina came interfering!
It ended in a fit of abuse and a panting seizure, and for a day or so he
was too ill to resume the discussion, to do more than indicate a
disgusted aloofness....
And then it may be the obscure chemicals at work within him changed
their phase of reaction. At any rate he mended, became gentler, was more
loving to his wife than he had been for some time and astonished her by
saying that if she wanted Hostels for married couples, it wasn't perhaps
so entirely unreasonable. Selected cases, he stipulated, it would have
to be and above a certain age limit, sober people. "It might even be a
check on immorality," he said, "properly managed...."
But that was as far as his acquiescence went and Lady Harman was
destined to be a widow before she saw the foundation of any Hostel for
young married couples in London.
§10
The reinforced concrete rose steadily amidst Lady Harman's questionings
and Mr. Brumley's speculations. The Harmans returned from a recuperative
visit to Kissingen, to which Sir Isaac had gone because of a suspicion
that his Marienbad specialist had failed to cure him completely in order
to get him back again, to find the first of the five hostels nearly ripe
for its opening. There had to be a manageress and a staff organized and
neither Lady Harman nor Mr. Brumley were prepared for that sort of
business. A number of abler people however had become aware of the
opportunities of the new development and Mrs. Hubert Plessington, that
busy publicist, got the Harmans to a helpful little dinner, before Lady
Harman had the slightest suspicion of the needs that were now so urgent.
There shone a neat compact widow, a Mrs. Pembrose, who had buried her
husband some eighteen months ago after studying social questions with
him with great éclat for ten happy years, and she had done settlement
work and Girls' Club work and had perhaps more power of
organization--given a suitable director to provide for her lack of
creativeness, Mrs. Plessington told Sir Isaac, than any other woman in
London. Afterwards Sir Isaac had an opportunity of talking to her; he
discussed the suffrage movement with her and was pleased to find her
views remarkably sympathetic with his own. She was, he declared, a
sensible woman, anxious to hear a man out and capable, it was evident,
of a detachment from feminist particularism rare in her sex at the
present time. Lady Harman had seen less of the lady that evening, she
was chiefly struck by her pallor, by a kind of animated silence about
her, and by the deep impression her capabilities had made on Mr.
Plessington, who had hitherto seemed to her to be altogether too
overworked in admiring his wife to perceive the points of any other
human being. Afterwards Lady Harman was surprised to hear from one or
two quite separate people that Mrs. Pembrose was the only possible
person to act as general director of the new hostels. Lady
Beach-Mandarin was so enthusiastic in the matter that she made a
special call. "You've known her a long time?" said Lady Harman.
"Long enough to see what a chance she is!" said Lady Beach-Mandarin.
Lady Harman perceived equivocation. "Now how long is that really?" she
said.
"Count not in years, nor yet in moments on a dial," said Lady
Beach-Mandarin with a fine air of quotation. "I'm thinking of her quiet
strength of character. Mrs. Plessington brought her round to see me the
other afternoon."
"Did she talk to you?"
"I saw, my dear, I saw."
A vague aversion from Mrs. Pembrose was in some mysterious way
strengthened in Lady Harman by this extraordinary convergence of
testimony. When Sir Isaac mentioned the lady with a kind of forced
casualness at breakfast as the only conceivable person for the work of
initiation and organization that lay before them, Lady Harman determined
to see more of her. With a quickened subtlety she asked her to tea. "I
have heard so much of your knowledge of social questions and I want you
to advise me about my work," she wrote, and then scribbled a note to Mr.
Brumley to call and help her judgments.
Mrs. Pembrose appeared dressed in dove colour with a near bonnetesque
straw hat to match. She had a pale slightly freckled complexion, little
hard blue-grey eyes with that sort of nose which redeems a squarish
shape by a certain delicacy of structure; her chin was long and
protruding and her voice had a wooden resonance and a ghost of a lisp.
Her talk had a false consecutiveness due to the frequent use of the word
"Yes." Her bearing was erect and her manner guardedly alert.
From the first she betrayed a conviction that Mr. Brumley was incidental
and unnecessary and that her real interest lay with Sir Isaac. She might
almost have been in possession of special information upon that point.
"Yes," she said, "I'm rather specially _up_ in this sort of question. I
worked side by side with my poor Frederick all his life, we were
collaborators, and this question of the urban distributive employee was
one of his special studies. Yes, he would have been tremendously
interested in Sir Isaac's project."
"You know what we are doing?"
"Every one is interested in Sir Isaac's enterprise. Naturally. Yes, I
think I have a fairly good idea of what you mean to do. It's a great
experiment."
"You think it is likely to answer?" said Mr. Brumley.
"In Sir Isaac's hands it is _very_ likely to answer," said Mrs. Pembrose
with her eye steadily on Lady Harman.
There was a little pause. "Yes, now you wrote of difficulties and
drawing upon my experience. Of course just now I'm quite at Sir Isaac's
disposal."
Lady Harman found herself thrust perforce into the rôle of her husband's
spokeswoman. She asked Mrs. Pembrose if she knew the exact nature of the
experiment they contemplated.
Mrs. Pembrose hadn't a doubt she knew. Of course for a long time and
more especially in the Metropolis where the distances were so great and
increasing so rapidly, there had been a gathering feeling not only in
the catering trade, but in very many factory industries, against the
daily journey to employment and home again. It was irksome and wasteful
to everyone concerned, there was a great loss in control, later hours of
beginning, uncertain service. "Yes, my husband calculated the hours lost
in London every week, hours that are neither work nor play, mere
tiresome stuffy journeying. It made an enormous sum. It worked out at
hundreds of working lives per week." Sir Isaac's project was to abolish
all that, to bring his staff into line with the drapers and grocers who
kept their assistants on the living-in system....
"I thought people objected to the living-in system," said Mr. Brumley.
"There's an agitation against it on the part of a small Trade Union of
Shop Assistants," said Mrs. Pembrose. "But they have no real alternative
to propose."
"And this isn't Living In," said Mr. Brumley.
"Yes, I think you'll find it is," said Mrs. Pembrose with a nice little
expert smile.
"Living-in isn't _quite_ what we want," said Lady Harman slowly and with
knitted brows, seeking a method of saying just what the difference was
to be.
"Yes, not perhaps in the strictest sense," said Mrs. Pembrose giving her
no chance, and went on to make fine distinctions. Strictly speaking,
living-in meant sleeping over the shop and eating underneath it, and
this hostel idea was an affair of a separate house and of occupants who
would be assistants from a number of shops. "Yes, collectivism, if you
like," said Mrs. Pembrose. But the word collectivism, she assured them,
wouldn't frighten her, she was a collectivist, a socialist, as her
husband had always been. The day was past when socialist could be used
as a term of reproach. "Yes, instead of the individual employer of
labour, we already begin to have the collective employer of labour, with
a labour bureau--and so on. We share them. We no longer compete for
them. It's the keynote of the time."
Mr. Brumley followed this with a lifted eyebrow. He was still new to
these modern developments of collectivist ideas, this socialism of the
employer.
The whole thing Mrs. Pembrose declared was a step forward in
civilization, it was a step in the organization and discipline of
labour. Of course the unruly and the insubordinate would cry out. But
the benefits were plain enough, space, light, baths, association,
reasonable recreations, opportunities for improvement----
"But freedom?" said Mr. Brumley.
Mrs. Pembrose inclined her head a little on one side, looked at him this
time and smiled the expert smile again. "If you knew as much as I do of
the difficulties of social work," she said, "you wouldn't be very much
in love with freedom."
"But--it's the very substance of the soul!"
"You must permit me to differ," said Mrs. Pembrose, and for weeks
afterwards Mr. Brumley was still seeking a proper polite retort to that
difficult counterstroke. It was such a featureless reply. It was like
having your nose punched suddenly by a man without a face.
They descended to a more particular treatment of the problems ahead.
Mrs. Pembrose quoted certain precedents from the Girls' Club Union.
"The people Lady Harman contemplates--entertaining," said Mr. Brumley,
"are of a slightly more self-respecting type than those young women."
"It's largely veneer," said Mrs. Pembrose....
"Detestable little wretch," said Mr. Brumley when at last she had
departed. He was very uncomfortable. "She's just the quintessence of all
one fears and dreads about these new developments, she's perfect--in
that way--self-confident, arrogant, instinctively aggressive, with a
tremendous class contempt. There's a multitude of such people about who
hate the employed classes, who _want_ to see them broken in and
subjugated. I suppose that kind of thing is in humanity. Every boy's
school has louts of that kind, who love to torment fags for their own
good, who spring upon a chance smut on the face of a little boy to scrub
him painfully, who have a kind of lust to dominate under the pretence of
improving. I remember----But never mind that now. Keep that woman out of
things or your hostels work for the devil."
"Yes," said Lady Harman. "Certainly she shall not----. No."
But there she reckoned without her husband.
"I've settled it," he said to her at dinner two nights later.
"What?"
"Mrs. Pembrose."
"You've not made her----?"
"Yes, I have. And I think we're very lucky to get her."
"But--Isaac! I don't want her!"
"You should have told me that before, Elly. I've made an agreement."
She suddenly wanted to cry. "But----You said I should manage these
Hostels myself."
"So you shall, Elly. But we must have somebody. When we go abroad and
all that and for all the sort of business stuff and looking after things
that you can't do. We've _got_ to have her. She's the only thing going
of her sort."
"But--I don't like her."
"Well," cried Sir Isaac, "why in goodness couldn't you tell me that
before, Elly? I've been and engaged her."
She sat pale-faced staring at him with wide open eyes in which tears of
acute disappointment were shining. She did not dare another word because
of her trick of weeping.
"It's all right, Elly," said Sir Isaac. "How touchy you are! Anything
you want about these Hostels of yours, you've only got to tell me and
it's done."
§11
Lady Harman was still in a state of amazement at the altered prospects
of her hostels when the day arrived for the formal opening of the first
of these in Bloomsbury. They made a little public ceremony of it in
spite of her reluctance, and Mr. Brumley had to witness things from out
of the general crowd and realize just how completely he wasn't in it, in
spite of all his efforts. Mrs. Pembrose was modestly conspicuous, like
the unexpected in all human schemes. There were several reporters
present, and Horatio Blenker who was going to make a loyal leader about
it, to be followed by one or two special articles for the _Old Country
Gazette_.
Horatio had procured Mrs. Blapton for the opening after some ineffectual
angling for the Princess Adeline, and the thing was done at half-past
three in the afternoon. In the bright early July sunshine outside the
new building there was a crimson carpet down on the pavement and an
awning above it, there was a great display of dog-daisies at the windows
and on the steps leading up to the locked portals, an increasing number
of invited people lurked shyly in the ground-floor rooms ready to come
out by the back way and cluster expectantly when Mrs. Blapton arrived,
Graper the staff manager and two assistants in dazzling silk hats seemed
everywhere, the rabbit-like architect had tried to look doggish in a
huge black silk tie and only looked more like a rabbit than ever, and
there was a steady driftage of small boys and girls, nurses with
perambulators, cab touts, airing grandfathers and similar unemployed
people towards the promise of the awning, the carpet and the flowers.
The square building in all its bravery of Doulton ware and yellow and
mauve tiles and its great gilt inscription
INTERNATIONAL HOSTELS
above the windows of the second storey seemed typical of all those
modern forces that are now invading and dispelling the ancient
residential peace of Bloomsbury.
Mrs. Blapton appeared only five minutes late, escorted by Bertie Trevor
and her husband's spare secretary. Graper became so active at the sight
of her that he seemed more like some beast out of the Apocalypse with
seven hands and ten hats than a normal human being; he marshalled the
significant figures into their places, the door was unlocked without
serious difficulty, and Lady Harman found herself in the main corridor
beside Mr. Trevor and a little behind Mrs. Blapton, engaged in being
shown over the new creation. Sir Isaac (driven by Graper at his elbow)
was in immediate attendance on the great political lady, and Mrs.
Pembrose, already with an air of proprietorship, explained glibly on her
other hand. Close behind Lady Harman came Lady Beach-Mandarin, expanding
like an appreciative gas in a fine endeavour to nestle happily into the
whole big place, and with her were Mrs. Hubert Plessington and Mr. Pope,
one of those odd people who are called publicists because one must call
them something, and who take chairs and political sides and are
vice-presidents of everything and organize philanthropies, write letters
to the papers and cannot let the occasion pass without saying a few
words and generally prevent the institutions of this country from
falling out of human attention. He was a little abstracted in his
manner, every now and then his lips moved as he imagined a fresh turn to
some classic platitude; anyone who knew him might have foretold the
speech into which he presently broke. He did this in the refectory where
there was a convenient step up at the end. Beginning with the customary
confession of incontinence, "could not let the occasion pass," he
declared that he would not detain them long, but he felt that everyone
there would agree with him that they shared that day in no slight
occasion, no mean enterprise, that here was one of the most promising,
one of the most momentous, nay! he would go further and add with due
deference to them all, one of the most pregnant of social experiments in
modern social work. In the past he had himself--if he might for a moment
allow a personal note to creep into his observations, he himself had not
been unconnected with industrial development.--(Querulous voice, "Who
the devil is that?" and whispered explanations on the part of Horatio
Blenker; "Pope--very good man--East Purblow Experiment--Payment in Kind
instead of Wages--Yes.")....
Lady Harman ceased to listen to Mr. Pope's strained but not unhappy
tenor. She had heard him before, and she had heard his like endlessly.
He was the larger moiety of every public meeting she had ever attended.
She had ceased even to marvel at the dull self-satisfaction that
possessed him. To-day her capacity for marvelling was entirely taken up
by the details of this extraordinary reality which had sprung from her
dream of simple, kindly, beautiful homes for distressed and overworked
young women; nothing in the whole of life had been so amazing since that
lurid occasion when she had been the agonized vehicle for the entry of
Miss Millicent Harman upon this terrestrial scene. It was all so
entirely what she could never have thought possible. A few words from
other speakers followed, Mrs. Blapton, with the young secretary at hand
to prompt, said something, and Sir Isaac was poked forwards to say,
"Thank you very much. It's all my wife's doing, really.... Oh dash it!
Thank you very much." It had the effect of being the last vestige of
some more elaborate piece of eloquence that had suddenly disintegrated
in his mind.
"And now, Elly," he said, as their landaulette took them home, "you're
beginning to have your hostels."
"Then they _are_ my hostels?" she asked abruptly.
"Didn't I say they were?" The satisfaction of his face was qualified by
that fatigued irritability that nowadays always followed any exertion or
excitement.
"If I want things done? If I want things altered?"
"Of course you may, of course you may. What's the matter with you,
Elly? What's been putting ideers into your head? You got to have a
directress to the thing; you must have a woman of education who knows a
bit about things to look after the matrons and so on. Very likely she
isn't everything you want. She's the only one we could get, and I don't
see----. Here I go and work hard for a year and more getting these
things together to please you, and then suddenly you don't like 'em.
There's a lot of the spoilt child in you, Elly--first and last. There
they are...."
They were silent for the rest of the journey to Putney, both being
filled with incommunicable things.
§12
And now Lady Harman began to share the trouble of all those who let
their minds pass out of the circle of their immediate affections with
any other desire save interest and pleasure. Assisted in this unhappy
development by the sedulous suggestions of Mr. Brumley she had begun to
offend against the most sacred law in our sensible British code, she was
beginning to take herself and her hostels seriously, and think that it
mattered how she worked for them and what they became. She tried to give
all the attention her children's upbringing, her husband's ailments and
the general demands of her household left free, to this complex,
elusive, puzzling and worrying matter. Instead of thinking that these
hostels were just old hostels and that you start them and put in a Mrs.
Pembrose and feel very benevolent and happy and go away, she had come to
realize partly by dint of her own conscientious thinking and partly
through Mr. Brumley's strenuous resolve that she should not take Sir
Isaac's gift horse without the most exhaustive examination of its
quality, that this new work, like most new things in human life, was
capable not only of admirable but of altogether detestable consequences,
and that it rested with her far more than with any other human being to
realize the former and avoid the latter. And directly one has got to
this critical pose towards things, just as one ceases to be content with
things anyhow and to want them precisely somehow, one begins to realize
just how intractable, confused and disingenuous are human affairs. Mr.
Brumley had made himself see and had made her see how inevitable these
big wholesale ways of doing things, these organizations and close social
co-operations, have become unless there is to be a social disintegration
and set back, and he had also brought himself and her to realize how
easily they may develop into a new servitude, how high and difficult is
the way towards methods of association that will ensure freedom and
permit people to live fine individual lives. Every step towards
organization raises a crop of vices peculiar to itself, fresh
developments of the egotism and greed and vanity of those into whose
hands there falls control, fresh instances of that hostile pedantry
which seems so natural to officials and managers, insurgencies and
obstinacies and suspicions on the part of everyone. The poor lady had
supposed that when one's intentions were obviously benevolent everyone
helped. She only faced the realities of this task that she had not so
much set for herself as had happened to her, after dreadful phases of
disillusionment and dismay.
"These hostels," said Mr. Brumley in his most prophetic mood, "can be
made free, fine things--or no--just as all the world of men we are
living in, could be made a free, fine world. And it's our place to see
they are that. It's just by being generous and giving ourselves, helping
without enslaving, and giving without exacting gratitude, planning and
protecting with infinite care, that we bring that world nearer.... Since
I've known you I've come to know such things are possible...."
The Bloomsbury hostel started upon its career with an embarrassing
difficulty. The young women of the International Stores Refreshment
Departments for whom these institutions were primarily intended
displayed what looked extremely like a concerted indisposition to come
in. They had been circularized and informed that henceforth, to ensure
the "good social tone" of the staff, all girls not living at home with
their parents or close relations would be expected to reside in the new
hostels. There followed an attractive account of the advantages of the
new establishment. In drawing up this circular with the advice of Mrs.
Pembrose, Sir Isaac had overlooked the fact that his management was very
imperfectly informed just where the girls did live, and that after its
issue it was very improbable that it would be possible to find out this
very necessary fact. But the girls seemed to be unaware of this
ignorance at headquarters, Miss Babs Wheeler was beginning to feel a
little bored by good behaviour and crave for those dramatic cessations
at the lunch hour, those speeches, with cheers, from a table top, those
interviews with reporters, those flushed and eager councils of war and
all the rest of that good old crisis feeling that had previously ended
so happily. Mr. Graper came to his proprietor headlong, Mrs. Pembrose
was summoned and together they contemplated the lamentable possibility
of this great social benefit they had done the world being discredited
at the outset by a strike of the proposed beneficiaries. Sir Isaac fell
into a state of vindictiveness and was with difficulty restrained by Mr.
Graper from immediately concluding the negotiations that were pending
with three great Oxford Street firms that would have given over the
hostels to their employees and closed them against the International
girls for ever.
Even Mrs. Pembrose couldn't follow Sir Isaac in that, and remarked: "As
I understand it, the whole intention was to provide proper housing for
our own people first and foremost."
"And haven't we provided it, _damn_ them?" said Sir Isaac in white
desperation....
It was Lady Harman who steered the newly launched institutions through
these first entanglements. It was her first important advantage in the
struggle that had hitherto been going relentlessly against her. She now
displayed her peculiar gift, a gift that indeed is unhappily all too
rare among philanthropists, the gift of not being able to classify the
people with whom she was dealing, but of continuing to regard them as a
multitude of individualized souls as distinct and considerable as
herself. That makes no doubt for slowness and "inefficiency" and
complexity in organization, but it does make for understandings. And
now, through a little talk with Susan Burnet about her sister's attitude
upon the dispute, she was able to take the whole situation in the flank.
Like many people who are not easily clear, Lady Harman when she was
clear acted with very considerable decision, which was perhaps none the
less effective because of the large softnesses of her manner.
She surprised Sir Isaac by coming of her own accord into his study,
where with an altogether novel disfavour he sat contemplating the
detailed plans for the Sydenham Hostel. "I think I've found out what the
trouble is," she said.
"What trouble?"
"About my hostel."
"How do you know?"
"I've been finding out what the girls are saying."
"They'd say anything."
"I don't think they're clever enough for that," said Lady Harman after
consideration. She recovered her thread. "You see, Isaac, they've been
frightened by the Rules. I didn't know you had printed a set of Rules."
"One must _have_ rules, Elly."
"In the background," she decided. "But you see these Rules--were made
conspicuous. They were printed in two colours on wall cards just exactly
like that list of rules and scale of fines you had to withdraw----"
"I know," said Sir Isaac, shortly.
"It reminded the girls. And that circular that seems to threaten them if
they don't give up their lodgings and come in. And the way the front is
got up to look just exactly like one of the refreshment-room
branches--it makes them feel it will be un-homelike, and that there will
be a kind of repetition in the evening of all the discipline and
regulations they have to put up with during the day."
"Have to put up with!" murmured Sir Isaac.
"I wish that had been thought of sooner. If we had made the places look
a little more ordinary and called them Osborne House or something a
little old-fashioned like that, something with a touch of the Old Queen
about it and all that kind of thing."
"We can't go to the expense of taking down all those big gilt letters
just to please the fancies of Miss Babs Wheeler."
"It's too late now to do that, perhaps. But we could do something, I
think, to remove the suspicions ... I want, Isaac----I think----" She
pulled herself together to announce her determination. "I think if I
were to go to the girls and meet a delegation of them, and just talk to
them plainly about what we mean by this hostel."
"_You_ can't go making speeches."
"It would just be talking to them."
"It's such a Come Down," said Sir Isaac, after a momentary contemplation
of the possibility.
For some time they talked without getting very far from these positions
they had assumed. At last Sir Isaac shifted back upon his expert. "Can't
we talk about it to Mrs. Pembrose? She knows more about this sort of
business than we do."
"I'm not going to talk to Mrs. Pembrose," said Lady Harman, after a
little interval. Some unusual quality in her quiet voice made Sir Isaac
lift his eyes to her face for a moment.
So one Saturday afternoon, Lady Harman had a meeting with a roomful of
recalcitrant girls at the Regent Street Refreshment Branch, which looked
very odd to her with grey cotton wrappers over everything and its blinds
down, and for the first time she came face to face with the people for
whom almost in spite of herself she was working. It was a meeting
summoned by the International Branch of the National Union of Waitresses
and Miss Babs Wheeler and Mr. Graper were so to speak the north and
south poles of the little group upon the improvised platform from which
Lady Harman was to talk to the gathering. She would have liked the
support of Mr. Brumley, but she couldn't contrive any unostentatious way
of bringing him into the business without putting it upon a footing that
would have involved the appearance of Sir Isaac and Mrs. Pembrose
and--everybody. And essentially it wasn't to be everybody. It was to be
a little talk.
Lady Harman rather liked the appearance of Miss Babs Wheeler, and met
more than an answering approval in that insubordinate young woman's eye.
Miss Wheeler was a minute swaggering person, much akimbo, with a little
round blue-eyed innocent face that shone with delight at the lark of
living. Her three companions who were in the lobby with her to receive
and usher in Lady Harman seemed just as young, but they were relatively
unilluminated except by their manifest devotion to their leader. They
displayed rather than concealed their opinion of her as a "dear" and a
"fair wonder." And the meeting generally it seemed to her was a
gathering of very human young women, rather restless, then agog to see
her and her clothes, and then somehow allayed by her appearance and
quite amiably attentive to what she had to say. A majority were young
girls dressed with the cheap smartness of the suburbs, the rest were for
the most part older and dingier, and here and there were dotted young
ladies of a remarkable and questionable smartness. In the front row,
full of shy recognitions and a little disguised by an unfamiliar hat was
Susan's sister Alice.
As Lady Harman had made up her mind that she was not going to deliver a
speech she felt no diffidence in speaking. She was far too intent on her
message to be embarrassed by any thought of the effect she was
producing. She talked as she might have talked in one of her easier
moods to Mr. Brumley. And as she talked it happened that Miss Babs
Wheeler and quite a number of the other girls present watched her face
and fell in love with her.
She began with her habitual prelude. "You see," she said, and stopped
and began again. She wanted to tell them and with a clumsy simplicity
she told them how these Hostels had arisen out of her desire that they
should have something better than the uncomfortable lodgings in which
they lived. They weren't a business enterprise, but they weren't any
sort of charity. "And I wanted them to be the sort of place in which you
would feel quite free. I hadn't any sort of intention of having you
interfered with. I hate being interfered with myself, and I understand
just as well as anyone can that you don't like it either. I wanted these
Hostels to be the sort of place that you might perhaps after a time
almost manage and run for yourselves. You might have a committee or
something.... Only you know it isn't always easy to do as one wants.
Things don't always go in this world as one wants them to
go--particularly if one isn't clever." She lost herself for a moment at
that point, and then went on to say she didn't like the new rules. They
had been drawn up in a hurry and she had only read them after they were
printed. All sorts of things in them----
She seemed to be losing her theme again, and Mr. Graper handed her the
offending card, a big varnished wall placard, with eyelets and tape
complete. She glanced at it. For example, she said, it wasn't her idea
to have fines. (Great and long continued applause.) There was something
she had always disliked about fines. (Renewed applause.) But these
rules could easily be torn up. And as she said this and as the meeting
broke into acquiescence again it occurred to her that there was the card
of rules in her hands, and nothing could be simpler than to tear it up
there and then. It resisted her for a moment, she compressed her lips
and then she had it in halves. This tearing was so satisfactory to her
that she tore it again and then again. As she tore it, she had a
pleasant irrational feeling that she was tearing Mrs. Pembrose. Mr.
Graper's face betrayed his shocked feelings, and the meeting which had
become charged with a strong desire to show how entirely it approved of
her, made a crowning attempt at applause. They hammered umbrellas on the
floor, they clapped hands, they rattled chairs and gave a shrill cheer.
A chair was broken.
"I wish," said Lady Harman when that storm had abated, "you'd come and
look at the Hostel. Couldn't you come next Saturday afternoon? We could
have a stand-up tea and you could see the place and then afterwards your
committee and I--and my husband--could make out a real set of rules...."
She went on for some little time longer, she appealed to them with all
the strength of her honest purpose to help her to make this possible
good thing a real good thing, not to suspect, not to be hard on
her--"and my husband"--not to make a difficult thing impossible, it was
so easy to do that, and when she finished she was in the happiest
possession of her meeting. They came thronging round her with flushed
faces and bright eyes, they wanted to come near her, wanted to touch
her, wanted to assure her that for her they were quite prepared to live
in any kind of place. For her. "You come and talk to us, Lady Harman,"
said one; "_we'll_ show you."
"Nobody hasn't told us, Lady Harman, how these Hostels were _yours_."
"You come and talk to us again, Lady Harman." ...
They didn't wait for the following Saturday. On Monday morning Mrs.
Pembrose received thirty-seven applications to take up rooms.
§13
For the next few years it was to be a matter of recurrent
heart-searching for Lady Harman whether she had been profoundly wise or
extremely foolish in tearing up that card of projected rules. At the
time it seemed the most natural and obvious little action imaginable; it
was long before she realized just how symbolical and determining a few
movements of the hand and wrist can be. It fixed her line not so much
for herself as for others. It put her definitely, much more definitely
than her convictions warranted, on the side of freedom against
discipline. For indeed her convictions like most of our convictions kept
along a tortuous watershed between these two. It is only a few rare
extravagant spirits who are wholly for the warp or wholly for the woof
of human affairs.
The girls applauded and loved her. At one stroke she had acquired the
terrible liability of partisans. They made her their champion and
sanction; she was responsible for an endless succession of difficulties
that flowered out of their interpretations of her act. These Hostels
that had seemed passing out of her control, suddenly turned back upon
her and took possession of her.
And they were never simple difficulties. Right and wrong refused to
unravel for her; each side of every issue seemed to be so often in
suicidal competition with its antagonist for the inferior case. If the
forces of order and discipline showed themselves perennially harsh and
narrow, it did not blind her perplexed eyes to the fact that the girls
were frequently extremely naughty. She wished very often, she did so
wish--they wouldn't be. They set out with a kind of eagerness for
conflict.
Their very loyalty to her expressed itself not so much in any sustained
attempt to make the hostels successful as in cheering inconveniently, in
embarrassing declarations of a preference, in an ingenious and
systematic rudeness to anyone suspected of imperfect devotion to her.
The first comers into the Hostels were much more like the swelling
inrush of a tide than, as Mrs. Pembrose would have preferred, like
something laid on through a pipe, and when this lady wanted to go on
with the old rules until Sir Isaac had approved of the new, the new
arrivals went into the cutting-out room and manifested. Lady Harman had
to be telephoned for to allay the manifestation.
And then arose questions of deportment, trivial in themselves, but of
the gravest moment for the welfare of the hostels. There was a phrase
about "noisy or improper conduct" in the revised rules. Few people would
suspect a corridor, ten feet wide and two hundred feet long, as a
temptation to impropriety, but Mrs. Pembrose found it was so. The effect
of the corridors upon undisciplined girls quite unaccustomed to
corridors was for a time most undesirable. For example they were moved
to _run_ along them violently. They ran races along them, when they
overtook they jostled, when they were overtaken they squealed. The
average velocity in the corridors of the lady occupants of the
Bloomsbury Hostel during the first fortnight of its existence was seven
miles an hour. Was that violence? Was that impropriety? The building was
all steel construction, but one _heard_ even in the Head Matron's room.
And then there was the effect of the rows and rows of windows opening
out upon the square. The square had some pleasant old trees and it was
attractive to look down into their upper branches, where the sparrows
mobbed and chattered perpetually, and over them at the chimneys and
turrets and sky signs of the London world. The girls looked. So far they
were certainly within their rights. But they did not look modestly, they
did not look discreetly. They looked out of wide-open windows, they even
sat perilously and protrudingly on the window sills conversing across
the façade from window to window, attracting attention, and once to Mrs.
Pembrose's certain knowledge a man in the street joined in. It was on a
Sunday morning, too, a Bloomsbury Sunday morning!
But graver things were to rouse the preventive prohibitionist in the
soul of Mrs. Pembrose. There was the visiting of one another's rooms and
cubicles. Most of these young people had never possessed or dreamt of
possessing a pretty and presentable apartment to themselves, and the
first effect of this was to produce a decorative outbreak, a vigorous
framing of photographs and hammering of nails ("dust-gathering
litter."--_Mrs. Pembrose_) and then--visiting. They visited at all hours
and in all costumes; they sat in groups of three or four, one on the
chair and the rest on the bed conversing into late hours,--entirely
uncensored conversations too often accompanied by laughter. When Mrs.
Pembrose took this to Lady Harman she found her extraordinarily blind to
the conceivable evils of this free intercourse. "But Lady Harman!" said
Mrs. Pembrose, with a note of horror, "some of them--kiss each other!"
"But if they're fond of each other," said Lady Harman. "I'm sure I don't
see----"
And when the floor matrons were instructed to make little surprise
visits up and down the corridors the girls who occupied rooms took to
locking their doors--and Lady Harman seemed inclined to sustain their
right to do that. The floor matrons did what they could to exercise
authority, one or two were former department manageresses, two were
ex-elementary teachers, crowded out by younger and more certificated
rivals, one, and the most trustworthy one, Mrs. Pembrose found, was an
ex-wardress from Holloway. The natural result of these secret talkings
and conferrings in the rooms became apparent presently in some mild
ragging and in the concoction of petty campaigns of annoyance designed
to soften the manners of the more authoritative floor matrons. Here
again were perplexing difficulties. If a particular floor matron has a
clear commanding note in her voice, is it or is it not "violent and
improper" to say "Haw!" in clear commanding tones whenever you suppose
her to be within earshot? As for the door-locking Mrs. Pembrose settled
that by carrying off all the keys.
Complaints and incidents drifted towards definite scenes and
"situations." Both sides in this continuing conflict of dispositions
were so definite, so intolerant, to the mind of the lady with the
perplexed dark eyes who mediated. Her reason was so much with the
matrons; her sympathies so much with the girls. She did not like the
assured brevity of Mrs. Pembrose's judgments and decisions; she had an
instinctive perception of the truth that all compact judgments upon
human beings are unjust judgments. The human spirit is but poorly
adapted either to rule or to be ruled, and the honesty of all the
efforts of Mrs. Pembrose and her staffs--for soon the hostels at
Sydenham and West Kensington were open--were marred not merely by
arrogance but by an irritability, a real hostility to complexities and
difficulties and resisters and troublesome characters. And it did not
help the staff to a triumphant achievement of its duties that the girls
had an exaggerated perception that Lady Harman's heart was on their
side.
And presently the phrase "weeding out" crept into the talk of Mrs.
Pembrose. Some of the girls were being marked as ringleaders, foci of
mischief, characters it was desirable to "get rid of." Confronted with
it Lady Harman perceived she was absolutely opposed to this idea of
getting rid of anyone--unless it was Mrs. Pembrose. She liked her
various people; she had no desire for a whittled success with a picked
remnant of subdued and deferential employees. She put that to Mr.
Brumley and Mr. Brumley was indignant and eloquent in his concurrence. A
certain Mary Trunk, a dark young woman with a belief that it became her
to have a sweet disorder in her hair, and a large blond girl named Lucy
Baxandall seemed to be the chief among the bad influences of the
Bloomsbury hostel, and they took it upon themselves to appeal to Lady
Harman against Mrs. Pembrose. They couldn't, they complained, "do a
Thing right for her...."
So the tangle grew.
Presently Lady Harman had to go to the Riviera with Sir Isaac and when
she came back Mary Trunk and Lucy Baxandall had vanished from both the
International Hostel and the International Stores. She tried to find out
why, and she was confronted by inadequate replies and enigmatical
silences. "They decided to go," said Mrs. Pembrose, and dropped
"fortunately" after that statement. She disavowed any exact knowledge of
their motives. But she feared the worst. Susan Burnet was uninforming.
Whatever had happened had failed to reach Alice Burnet's ears. Lady
Harman could not very well hold a commission of enquiry into the matter,
but she had an uneasy sense of a hidden campaign of dislodgement. And
about the corridors and cubicles and club rooms there was she thought a
difference, a discretion, a flavour of subjugation....
CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH
THE LAST CRISIS
§1
It would be quite easy for anyone with the knack of reserve to go on
from this point with a history of Lady Harman that would present her as
practically a pure philanthropist. For from these beginnings she was
destined to proceed to more and more knowledge and understanding and
clear purpose and capable work in this interesting process of collective
regrouping, this process which may even at last justify Mr. Brumley's
courageous interpretations and prove to be an early experiment in the
beginning of a new social order. Perhaps some day there will be an
official biography, another addition to the inscrutable records of
British public lives, in which all these things will be set out with
tact and dignity. Horatio Blenker or Adolphus Blenker may survive to be
entrusted with this congenial task. She will be represented as a tall
inanimate person pursuing one clear benevolent purpose in life from her
very beginning, and Sir Isaac and her relations with Sir Isaac will be
rescued from reality. The book will be illustrated by a number of
carefully posed photographer's photographs of her, studies of the Putney
house and perhaps an unappetizing woodcut of her early home at Penge.
The aim of all British biography is to conceal. A great deal of what we
have already told will certainly not figure in any such biography, and
still more certainly will the things we have yet to tell be missing.
Lady Harman was indeed only by the force of circumstances and
intermittently a pure philanthropist, and it is with the intercalary
passages of less exalted humanity that we are here chiefly concerned. At
times no doubt she did really come near to filling and fitting and
becoming identical with that figure of the pure philanthropist which was
her world-ward face, but for the most part that earnest and dignified
figure concealed more or less extensive spaces of nothingness, while the
errant soul of the woman within strayed into less exalted ways of
thinking.
There were times when she was almost sure of herself--Mrs. Hubert
Plessington could scarcely have been surer of herself, and times when
the whole magnificent project of constructing a new urban social life
out of those difficult hostels, a collective urban life that should be
liberal and free, broke into grimacing pieces and was the most foolish
of experiments. Her struggles with Mrs. Pembrose thereupon assumed a
quality of mere bickering and she could even doubt whether Mrs. Pembrose
wasn't justified in her attitude and wiser by her very want of
generosity. She felt then something childish in the whole undertaking
that otherwise escaped her, she was convicted of an absurd
self-importance, she discovered herself an ignorant woman availing
herself of her husband's power and wealth to attempt presumptuous
experiments. In these moods of disillusionment, her mind went adrift and
was driven to and fro from discontent to discontent; she would find
herself taking soundings and seeking an anchorage upon the strangest,
most unfamiliar shoals. And in her relations and conflicts with her
husband there was a smouldering shame for her submissions to him that
needed only a phase of fatigue to become acute. So long as she believed
in her hostels and her mission that might be endured, but forced back
upon her more personal life its hideousness stood unclothed. Mr. Brumley
could sometimes reassure her by a rhetorical effort upon the score of
her hostels, but most of her more intimate and inner life was not, for
very plain reasons, to be shown to him. He was full of the intention of
generous self-denials, but she had long since come to measure the limits
of his self-denial....
Mr. Brumley was a friend in whom smouldered a love, capable she knew
quite clearly of tormented and tormenting jealousies. It would be
difficult to tell, and she certainly could never have told how far she
knew of this by instinct, how far it came out of rapid intuitions from
things seen and heard. But she understood that she dared not let a
single breath of encouragement, a hint of physical confidence, reach
that banked-up glow. A sentinel discretion in her brain was always on
the watch for that danger, and that restraint, that added deliberate
inexpressiveness, kept them most apart, when most her spirit cried out
for companionship.
The common quality of all these moods of lassitude was a desolating
loneliness. She had at times a need that almost overwhelmed her to be
intimate, to be comforted and taken up out of the bleak harsh
disappointments and stresses of her customary life. At times after Sir
Isaac had either been too unloving or too loving, or when the girls or
the matrons had achieved some new tangle of mutual unreasonableness, or
when her faith failed, she would lie in the darkness of her own room
with her soul crying out for--how can one put it?--the touch of other
soul-stuff. And perhaps it was the constant drift of Mr. Brumley's talk,
the little suggestions that fell drop by drop into her mind from his,
that disposed her to believe that this aching sense of solitude in the
void was to be assuaged by love, by some marvel of close exaltation that
one might reach through a lover. She had told Mr. Brumley long ago that
she would never let herself think of love, she still maintained to him
that attitude of resolute aloofness, but almost without noting what she
did, she was tampering now in her solitude with the seals of that locked
chamber. She became secretly curious about love. Perhaps there was
something in it of which she knew nothing. She found herself drawn
towards poetry, found a new attraction in romance; more and more did she
dally with the idea that there was some unknown beauty in the world,
something to which her eyes might presently open, something deeper and
sweeter than any thing she had ever known, close at hand, something to
put all the world into proportion for her.
In a little while she no longer merely tampered with these seals, for
quite silently the door had opened and she was craning in. This love it
seemed to her might after all be so strange a thing that it goes
unsuspected and yet fills the whole world of a human soul. An odd
grotesque passage in a novel by Wilkins gave her that idea. He compared
love to electricity, of all things in the world; that throbbing life
amidst the atoms that we now draw upon for light, warmth, connexion, the
satisfaction of a thousand wants and the cure of a thousand ills. There
it is and always has been in the life of man, and yet until a century
ago it worked unsuspected, was known only for a disregarded oddity of
amber, a crackling in frost-dry hair and thunder....
And then she remembered how Mr. Brumley had once broken into a panegyric
of love. "It makes life a different thing. It is like the home-coming of
something lost. All this dispersed perplexing world _centres_. Think
what true love means; to live always in the mind of another and to have
that other living always in your mind.... Only there can be no
restraints, no reserves, no admission of prior rights. One must feel
_safe_ of one's welcome and freedoms...."
Wasn't it worth the risk of almost any breach of boundaries to get to
such a light as that?...
She hid these musings from every human being, she was so shy with them,
she hid them almost from herself. Rarely did they have their way with
her and when they did, presently she would accuse herself of slackness
and dismiss them and urge herself to fresh practicalities in her work.
But her work was not always at hand, Sir Isaac's frequent relapses took
her abroad to places where she found herself in the midst of beautiful
scenery with little to do and little to distract her from these
questionings. Then such thoughts would inundate her.
This feeling of the unsatisfactoriness of life, of incompleteness and
solitariness, was not of that fixed sort that definitely indicates its
demand. Under its oppression she tried the idea of love, but she also
tried certain other ideas. Very often this vague appeal had the quality
of a person, sometimes a person shrouded in night, a soundless whisper,
the unseen lover who came to Psyche in the darkness. And sometimes that
person became more distinct, less mystic and more companionable. Perhaps
because imaginations have a way of following the line of least
resistance, it took upon itself something of the form, something of the
voice and bearing of Mr. Brumley. She recoiled from her own thoughts
when she discovered herself wondering what manner of lover Mr. Brumley
might make--if suddenly she lowered her defences, freed his suffocating
pleading, took him to herself.
In my anxiety to draw Mr. Brumley as he was, I have perhaps a little
neglected to show him as Lady Harman saw him. We have employed the
inconsiderate verisimilitude of a novelist repudiating romance in his
portrayal; towards her he kept a better face. He was at least a very
honest lover and there was little disingenuousness in the flow of fine
mental attitudes that met her; the thought and presence of her made him
fine; as soon could he have turned his shady side towards the sun. And
she was very ready and eager to credit him with generous qualities. We
of his club and circle, a little assisted perhaps by Max Beerbohm's
diabolical index finger, may have found and been not unwilling to find
his face chiefly expressive of a kind of empty alertness; but when it
was turned to her its quite pleasantly modelled features glowed and it
was transfigured. So far as she was concerned, with Sir Isaac as foil,
he was real enough and good enough for her. And by the virtue of that
unlovely contrast even a certain ineffectiveness--became infinite
delicacy....
The thought of Mr. Brumley in that relation and to that extent of
clearness came but rarely into her consciousness, and when it did it was
almost immediately dismissed again. It was the most fugitive of
proffered consolations. And it is to be remarked that it made its most
successful apparitions when Mr. Brumley was far away, and by some weeks
or months of separation a little blurred and forgotten....
And sometimes this unrest of her spirit, this unhappiness turned her in
quite another direction as it seemed and she had thoughts of religion.
With a deepened shame she would go seeking into that other, that greater
indelicacy, from which her upbringing had divorced her mind. She would
even secretly pray. Greatly daring she fled on several occasions from
her visitation of the hostels or slipped out of her home, and evading
Mr. Brumley, went once to the Brompton Oratory, once or twice to the
Westminster Cathedral and then having discovered Saint Paul's, to Saint
Paul's in search of this nameless need. It was a need that no plain and
ugly little place of worship would satisfy. It was a need that demanded
choir and organ. She went to Saint Paul's haphazard when her mood and
opportunity chanced together and there in the afternoons she found a
wonder of great music and chanting voices, and she would kneel looking
up into those divine shadows and perfect archings and feel for a time
assuaged, wonderfully assuaged. Sometimes, there, she seemed to be upon
the very verge of grasping that hidden reality which makes all things
plain. Sometimes it seemed to her that this very indulgence was the
hidden reality.
She could never be sure in her mind whether these secret worshippings
helped or hampered her in her daily living. They helped her to a certain
disregard of annoyances and indignities and so far they were good, but
they also helped towards a more general indifference. She might have
told these last experiences to Mr. Brumley if she had not felt them to
be indescribable. They could not be half told. They had to be told
completely or they were altogether untellable. So she had them hid, and
at once accepted and distrusted the consolation they brought her, and
went on with the duties and philanthropies that she had chosen as her
task in the world.
§2
One day in Lent--it was nearly three years after the opening of the
first hostel--she went to Saint Paul's.
She was in a mood of great discouragement; the struggle between Mrs.
Pembrose and the Bloomsbury girls had suddenly reopened in an acute form
and Sir Isaac, who was sickening again after a period of better health,
had become strangely restless and irritable and hostile to her. He had
thwarted her unusually and taken the side of the matrons in a conflict
in which Susan Burnet's sister Alice was now distinguished as the chief
of the malcontents. The new trouble seemed to Lady Harman to be
traceable in one direction to that ardent Unionist, Miss Babs Wheeler,
under the spell of whose round-faced, blue-eyed, distraught personality
Alice had altogether fallen. Miss Babs Wheeler was fighting for the
Union; she herself lived at Highbury with her mother, and Alice was her
chosen instrument in the hostels. The Union had always been a little
against the lady-like instincts of many of the waitresses; they felt
strikes were vulgar and impaired their social standing, and this feeling
had been greatly strengthened by irruptions of large contingents of shop
assistants from various department stores. The Bloomsbury Hostel in
particular now accommodated a hundred refined and elegant hands--they
ought rather to be called figures--from the great Oxford Street costume
house of Eustace and Mills, young people with a tall sweeping movement
and an elevation of chin that had become nearly instinctive, and a
silent yet evident intention to find the International girls "low" at
the slightest provocation. It is only too easy for poor humanity under
the irritation of that tacit superiority to respond with just the
provocation anticipated. What one must regretfully speak of as the
vulgar section of the International girls had already put itself in the
wrong by a number of aggressive acts before the case came to Lady
Harman's attention. Mrs. Pembrose seized the occasion for weeding on a
courageous scale, and Miss Alice Burnet and three of her dearest friends
were invited to vacate their rooms "pending redecoration".
With only too much plausibility the threatened young women interpreted
this as an expulsion, and declined to remove their boxes and personal
belongings. Miss Babs Wheeler thereupon entered the Bloomsbury Hostel,
and in the teeth of three express prohibitions from Mrs. Pembrose, went
a little up the staircase and addressed a confused meeting in the
central hall. There was loud and continuous cheering for Lady Harman at
intervals during this incident. Thereupon Mrs. Pembrose demanded
sweeping dismissals, not only from the Hostels but the shops as an
alternative to her resignation, and Lady Harman found herself more
perplexed than ever....
Georgina Sawbridge had contrived to mingle herself in an entirely
characteristic way in these troubles by listening for a brief period to
an abstract of her sister's perplexities, then demanding to be made
Director-General of the whole affair, refusing to believe this simple
step impossible and retiring in great dudgeon to begin a series of
letters of even more than sisterly bitterness. And Mr. Brumley when
consulted had become dangerously sentimental. Under these circumstances
Lady Harman's visit to Saint Paul's had much of the quality of a flight.
It was with an unwonted sense of refuge that she came from the sombre
stress and roar of London without into the large hushed spaces of the
cathedral. The door closed behind her--and all things changed. Here was
meaning, coherence, unity. Here instead of a pelting confusion of
movements and motives was a quiet concentration upon the little focus of
light about the choir, the gentle complete dominance of a voice
intoning. She slipped along the aisle and into the nave and made her way
to a seat. How good this was! Outside she had felt large, awkwardly
responsible, accessible to missiles, a distressed conspicuous thing;
within this living peace she suddenly became no more than one of a
tranquil hushed community of small black-clad Lenten people; she found a
chair and knelt and felt she vanished even from her own
consciousness....
How beautiful was this place! She looked up presently at the great
shadowy arcs far above her, so easy, so gracious that it seemed they had
not so much been built by men as shaped by circling flights of angels.
The service, a little clustering advance of voices unsustained by any
organ, mingled in her mind with the many-pointed glow of candles. And
then into this great dome of worship and beauty, like a bed of voices
breaking into flower, like a springtime breeze of sound, came Allegri's
Miserere....
Her spirit clung to this mood of refuge. It seemed as though the
disorderly, pugnacious, misunderstanding universe had opened and shown
her luminous mysteries. She had a sense of penetration. All that
conflict, that jar of purposes and motives, was merely superficial; she
had left it behind her. For a time she had no sense of effort in keeping
hold of this, only of attainment, she drifted happily upon the sweet
sustaining sounds, and then--then the music ceased. She came back into
herself. Close to her a seated man stirred and sighed. She tried to get
back her hold upon that revelation but it had gone. Inexorably, opaque,
impenetrable doors closed softly on her moment of vision....
All about her was the stir of departure.
She walked out slowly into the cold March daylight, to the leaden greys,
the hurrying black shapes, the chaotic afternoon traffic of London. She
paused on the steps, still but half reawakened. A passing omnibus
obtruded the familiar inscription, "International Stores for Staminal
Bread."
She turned like one who remembers, to where her chauffeur stood waiting.
§3
As her motor car, with a swift smoothness, carried her along the
Embankment towards the lattice bar of Charing Cross bridge and the
remoter towers of the Houses of Parliament, grey now and unsubstantial
against the bright western sky, her mind came back slowly to her
particular issues in life. But they were no longer the big
exasperatingly important things that had seemed to hold her life by a
hundred painful hooks before she went into the cathedral. They were
small still under this dome of evening, small even by the measure of the
grey buildings to the right of her and the warm lit river to her left,
by the measure of the clustering dark barges, the teeming trams, the
streaming crowds of people, the note of the human process that sounds so
loud there. She felt small even to herself, for the touch of beauty
saves us from our own personalities, makes Gods of us to our own
littleness. She passed under the railway bridge at Charing Cross,
watched the square cluster of Westminster's pinnacles rise above her
until they were out of sight overhead, ran up the little incline and
round into Parliament Square, and was presently out on the riverside
embankment again with the great chimneys of Chelsea smoking athwart the
evening gold. And thence with a sudden effect of skies shut and curtains
drawn she came by devious ways to the Fulham Road and the crowding
traffic of Putney Bridge and Putney High Street and so home.
Snagsby, assisted by a new under-butler, a lean white-faced young man
with red hair, received her ceremoniously and hovered serviceably about
her. On the hall table lay three or four visiting cards of no
importance, some circulars and two letters. She threw the circulars
into the basket placed for them and opened her first letter. It was from
Georgina; it was on several sheets and it began, "I still cannot believe
that you refuse to give me the opportunity the director-generalship of
your hostels means to me. It is not as if you yourself had either the
time or the abilities necessary for them yourself; you haven't, and
there is something almost dog-in-the-manger-ish to my mind in the way in
which you will not give me my chance, the chance I have always been
longing for----"
At this point Lady Harman put down this letter for subsequent perusal
and took its companion, which was addressed in an unfamiliar hand. It
was from Alice Burnet and it was written in that sprawling hand and
diffused style natural to a not very well educated person with a
complicated story to tell in a state of unusual emotion. But the gist
was in the first few sentences which announced that Alice had been
evicted from the hostel. "I found my things on the pavement," wrote
Alice.
Lady Harman became aware of Snagsby still hovering at hand.
"Mrs. Pembrose, my lady, came here this afternoon," he said, when he had
secured her attention.
"Came here."
"She asked for you, my lady, and when I told her you were not at 'ome,
she asked if she might see Sir Isaac."
"And did she?"
"Sir Isaac saw her, my lady. They 'ad tea in the study."
"I wish I had been at home to see her," said Lady Harman, after a brief
interval of reflection.
She took her two letters and turned to the staircase. They were still in
her hand when presently she came into her husband's study. "I don't want
a light," he said, as she put out her hand to the electric switch. His
voice had a note of discontent, but he was sitting in the armchair
against the window so that she could not see his features.
"How are you feeling this afternoon?" she asked.
"I'm feeling all right," he answered testily. He seemed to dislike
inquiries after his health almost as much as he disliked neglect.
She came and stood by him and looked out from the dusk of the room into
the garden darkening under a red-barred sky. "There is fresh trouble
between Mrs. Pembrose and the girls," she said.
"She's been telling me about it."
"She's been here?"
"Pretty nearly an hour," said Sir Isaac.
Lady Harman tried to imagine that hour's interview on the spur of the
moment and failed. She came to her immediate business. "I think," she
said, "that she has been--high-handed...."
"You would," said Sir Isaac after an interval.
His tone was hostile, so hostile that it startled her.
"Don't you?"
He shook his head. "My idees and your idees--or anyhow the idees you've
got hold of--somewhere--somehow----I don't know where you _get_ your
idees. We haven't got the same idees, anyhow. You got to keep order in
these places--anyhow...."
She perceived that she was in face of a prepared position. "I don't
think," she threw out, "that she does keep order. She represses--and
irritates. She gets an idea that certain girls are against her...."
"And you get an idea she's against certain girls...."
"Practically she expels them. She has in fact just turned one out into
the street."
"You got to expel 'em. You got to. You can't run these places on sugar
and water. There's a sort of girl, a sort of man, who makes trouble.
There's a sort makes strikes, makes mischief, gets up grievances. You
got to get rid of 'em somehow. You got to be practical somewhere. You
can't go running these places on a lot of littry idees and all that.
It's no good."
The phrase "littry idees" held Lady Harman's attention for a moment. But
she could not follow it up to its implications, because she wanted to
get on with the issue she had in hand.
"I want to be consulted about these expulsions. Girl after girl has been
sent away----"
Sir Isaac's silhouette was obstinate.
"She knows her business," he said.
He seemed to feel the need of a justification. "They shouldn't make
trouble."
On that they rested for a little while in silence. She began to realize
with a gathering emotion that this matter was far more crucial than she
had supposed. She had been thinking only of the reinstatement of Alice
Burnet, she hadn't yet estimated just what that overriding of Mrs.
Pembrose might involve.
"I don't want to have any girl go until I have looked into her case.
It's----It's vital."
"She says she can't run the show unless she has some power."
Neither spoke for some seconds. She had the feeling of hopeless vexation
that might come to a child that has wandered into a trap. "I thought,"
she began. "These hostels----"
She stopped short.
Sir Isaac's hand tightened on the arm of his chair. "I started 'em to
please you," he said. "I didn't start 'em to please your friends."
She turned her eyes quickly to his grey up-looking face.
"I didn't start them for you and that chap Brumley to play about with,"
he amplified. "And now you know about it, Elly."
The thing had found her unprepared. "As if----" she said at last.
"As if!" he mocked.
She stood quite still staring blankly at this unmanageable situation. He
was the first to break silence. He lifted one hand and dropped it again
with a dead impact on the arm of his chair. "I got the things," he said,
"and there they are. Anyhow,--they got to be run in a proper way."
She made no immediate answer. She was seeking desperately for phrases
that escaped her. "Do you think," she began at last. "Do you really
think----?"
He stared out of the window. He answered in tones of excessive
reasonableness: "I didn't start these hostels to be run by you and
your--friend." He gave the sentence the quality of an ultimatum, an
irreducible minimum.
"He's my friend," she explained, "only--because he does work--for the
hostels."
Sir Isaac seemed for a moment to attempt to consider that. Then he
relapsed upon his predetermined attitude. "God!" he exclaimed, "but I
have been a fool!"
She decided that that must be ignored.
"I care more for those hostels than I care for anything--anything else
in the world," she told him. "I want them to work--I want them to
succeed.... And then----"
He listened in sceptical silence.
"Mr. Brumley is nothing to me but a helper. He----How can you imagine,
Isaac----? _I!_ How can you dare? To suggest----!"
"Very well," said Sir Isaac and reflected and made his old familiar
sound with his teeth. "Run the hostels without him, Elly," he
propounded. "Then I'll believe."
She perceived that suddenly she was faced by a test or a bargain. In the
background of her mind the figure of Mr. Brumley, as she had seen him
last, in brown and with a tie rather to one side, protested vainly. She
did what she could for him on the spur of the moment. "But," she said,
"he's so helpful. He's so--harmless."
"That's as may be," said Sir Isaac and breathed heavily.
"How can one suddenly turn on a friend?"
"I don't see that you ever wanted a friend," said Sir Isaac.
"He's been so good. It isn't reasonable, Isaac. When anyone
has--_slaved_."
"I don't say he isn't a good sort of chap," said Sir Isaac, with that
same note of almost superhuman rationality, "only--he isn't going to run
my hostels."
"But what do you mean, Isaac?"
"I mean you got to choose."
He waited as if he expected her to speak and then went on.
"What it comes to is this, Elly, I'm about sick of that chap. I'm sick
of him." He paused for a moment because his breath was short. "If you go
on with the hostels he's--Phew--got to mizzle. _Then_--I don't mind--if
you want that girl Burnet brought back in triumph.... It'll make Mrs.
Pembrose chuck the whole blessed show, you know, but I say--I don't
mind.... Only in that case, I don't want to see or hear--or hear
about--Phew--or hear about your Mr. Brumley again. And I don't want you
to, either.... I'm being pretty reasonable and pretty patient over this,
with people--people--talking right and left. Still,--there's a limit....
You've been going on--if I didn't know you were an innocent--in a way
... I don't want to talk about that. There you are, Elly."
It seemed to her that she had always expected this to happen. But
however much she had expected it to happen she was still quite
unprepared with any course of action. She wanted with an equal want of
limitation to keep both Mr. Brumley and her hostels.
"But Isaac," she said. "What do you suspect? What do you think? This
friendship has been going on----How can I end it suddenly?"
"Don't you be too innocent, Elly. You know and I know perfectly well
what there is between men and women. I don't make out I know--anything I
don't know. I don't pretend you are anything but straight. Only----"
He suddenly gave way to his irritation. His self-control vanished. "Damn
it!" he cried, and his panting breath quickened; "the thing's got to
end. As if I didn't understand! As if I didn't understand!"
She would have protested again but his voice held her. "It's got to end.
It's got to end. Of course you haven't done anything, of course you
don't know anything or think of anything.... Only here I am ill....
_You_ wouldn't be sorry if I got worse.... _You_ can wait; you can....
All right! All right! And there you stand, irritating me--arguing. You
know--it chokes me.... Got to end, I tell you.... Got to end...."
He beat at the arms of his chair and then put a hand to his throat.
"Go away," he cried to her. "Go to hell!"
§4
I cannot tell whether the reader is a person of swift decisions or one
of the newer race of doubters; if he be the latter he will the better
understand how Lady Harman did in the next two days make up her mind
definitely and conclusively to two entirely opposed lines of action. She
decided that her relations with Mr. Brumley, innocent as they were, must
cease in the interests of the hostels and her struggle with Mrs.
Pembrose, and she decided with quite equal certainty that her husband's
sudden veto upon these relations was an intolerable tyranny that must be
resisted with passionate indignation. Also she was surprised to find how
difficult it was now to think of parting from Mr. Brumley. She made her
way to these precarious conclusions and on from whichever it was to the
other through a jungle of conflicting considerations and feelings. When
she thought of Mrs. Pembrose and more particularly of the probable share
of Mrs. Pembrose in her husband's objection to Mr. Brumley her
indignation kindled. She perceived Mrs. Pembrose as a purely evil
personality, as a spirit of espionage, distrust, calculated treachery
and malignant intervention, as all that is evil in rule and officialism,
and a vast wave of responsibility for all those difficult and feeble and
likeable young women who elbowed and giggled and misunderstood and
blundered and tried to live happily under the commanding stresses of
Mrs. Pembrose's austerity carried her away. She had her duty to do to
them and it overrode every other duty. If a certain separation from Mr.
Brumley's assiduous aid was demanded, was it too great a sacrifice? And
no sooner was that settled than the whole question reopened with her
indignant demand why anyone at any price had the right to prohibit a
friendship that she had so conscientiously kept innocent. If she gave
way to this outrageous restriction to-day, what fresh limitations might
not Sir Isaac impose to-morrow? And now, she was so embarrassed in her
struggle by his health. She could not go to him and have things out with
him, she could not directly defy him, because that might mean a
suffocating seizure for him....
It was entirely illogical, no doubt, but extremely natural for Lady
Harman to decide that she must communicate her decision, whichever one
it was, to Mr. Brumley in a personal interview. She wrote to him and
arranged to meet and talk to him in Kew Gardens, and with a feeling of
discretion went thither not in the automobile but in a taxi-cab. And so
delicately now were her two irrevocable decisions balanced in her mind
that twice on her way to Kew she swayed over from one to the other.
Arrived at the gardens she found herself quite disinclined to begin the
announcement of either decision. She was quite exceptionally glad to see
Mr. Brumley; he was dressed in a new suit of lighter brown that became
him very well indeed, the day was warm and bright, a day of scyllas and
daffodils and snow-upon-the-mountains and green-powdered trees and frank
sunshine,--and the warmth of her feelings for her friend merged
indistinguishably with the springtime stir and glow. They walked across
the bright turf together in a state of unjustifiable happiness, purring
little admirations at the ingenious elegance of creation at its best as
gardeners set it out for our edification, and the whole tenor of Lady
Harman's mind was to make this occasion an escape from the particular
business that had brought her thither.
"We'll look for daffodils away there towards the river under the trees,"
said Mr. Brumley, and it seemed preposterous not to enjoy those
daffodils at least before she broached the great issue between an
irresistible force and an immoveable post, that occupied her mental
background.
Mr. Brumley was quite at his best that afternoon. He was happy, gay and
deferential; he made her realize by his every tone and movement that if
he had his choice of the whole world that afternoon and all its
inhabitants and everything, there was no other place in which he would
be, no other companion, no other occupation than this he had. He talked
of spring and flowers, quoted poets and added the treasures of a
well-stored mind to the amenities of the day. "It's good to take a
holiday at times," he said, and after that it was more difficult than
ever to talk about the trouble of the hostels.
She was able to do this at last while they were having tea in the little
pavilion near the pagoda. It was the old pavilion, the one that Miss
Alimony's suffragettes were afterwards to burn down in order to
demonstrate the relentless logic of women. They did it in the same
eventful week when Miss Alimony was, she declared, so nearly carried off
by White Slave Traders (disguised as nurses but, fortunately for her,
smelling of brandy) from the Brixton Temperance Bazaar. But in those
simpler days the pavilion still existed; it was tended by agreeable
waiters whose evening dress was mitigated by cheerful little straw hats,
and an enormous multitude of valiant and smutty Cockney sparrows chirped
and squeaked and begged and fluttered and fought, venturing to the very
tables and feet of the visitors. And here, a little sobered from their
first elation by much walking about and the presence of jam and
watercress, Mr. Brumley and Lady Harman could think again of the work
they were doing for the reconstitution of society upon collective lines.
She began to tell him of the conflict between Mrs. Pembrose and Alice
Burnet that threatened the latter with extinction. She found it more
convenient to talk at first as though the strands of decision were still
all in her hands; afterwards she could go on to the peculiar
complication of the situation through the unexpected weakening of her
position in relation to Mrs. Pembrose. She described the particular of
the new trouble, the perplexing issue between the "lady-like," for which
as a feminine ideal there was so much to be said on the one hand and
the "genial," which was also an admirable quality, on the other. "You
see," she said, "it's very rude to cough at people and make noises, but
then it's so difficult to explain to the others that it's equally rude
to go past people and pretend not to see or hear them. Girls of that
sort always seem so much more underbred when they are trying to be
superior than when they are not; they get so stiff and--exasperating.
And this keeping out of the Union because it isn't genteel, it's the
very essence of the trouble with all these employees. We've discussed
that so often. Those drapers' girls seem full of such cold, selfish,
base, pretentious notions; much more full even than our refreshment
girls. And then as if it wasn't all difficult enough comes Mrs. Pembrose
and her wardresses doing all sorts of hard, clumsy things, and one can't
tell them just how little they are qualified to judge good behaviour.
Their one idea of discipline is to speak to people as if they were
servants and to be distant and crushing. And long before one can do
anything come trouble and tart replies and reports of "gross
impertinence" and expulsion. We keep on expelling girls. This is the
fourth time girls have had to go. What is to become of them? I know this
Burnet girl quite well as you know. She's just a human, kindly little
woman.... She'll feel disgraced.... How can I let a thing like that
occur?"
She spread her hands apart over the tea things.
Mr. Brumley held his chin in his hand and said "Um" and looked judicial,
and admired Lady Harman very much, and tried to grasp the whole trouble
and wring out a solution. He made some admirable generalizations about
the development of a new social feeling in response to changed
conditions, but apart from a remark that Mrs. Pembrose was all
organization and no psychology, and quite the wrong person for her
position, he said nothing in the slightest degree contributory to the
particular drama under consideration. From that utterance, however, Lady
Harman would no doubt have gone on to the slow, tentative but finally
conclusive statement of the new difficulty that had arisen out of her
husband's jealousy and to the discussion of the more fundamental
decisions it forced upon her, if a peculiar blight had not fallen upon
their conversation and robbed it at last of even an appearance of ease.
This blight crept upon their minds.... It began first with Mr. Brumley.
Mr. Brumley was rarely free from self-consciousness. Whenever he was in
a restaurant or any such place of assembly, then whatever he did or
whatever he said he had a kind of surplus attention, a quickening of the
ears, a wandering of the eyes, to the groups and individuals round about
him. And while he had seemed entirely occupied with Lady Harman, he had
nevertheless been aware from the outset that a dingy and
inappropriate-looking man in a bowler hat and a ready-made suit of grey,
was listening to their conversation from an adjacent table.
This man had entered the pavilion oddly. He had seemed to dodge in and
hesitate. Then he had chosen his table rather deliberately--and he kept
looking, and trying not to seem to look.
That was not all. Mr. Brumley's expression was overcast by the effort to
recall something. He sat elbows on table and leant forward towards Lady
Harman and at the blossom-laden trees outside the pavilion and trifled
with two fingers on his lips and spoke between them in a voice that was
speculative and confidential and muffled and mysterious. "Where have I
seen our friend to the left before?"
She had been aware of his distraction for some time.
She glanced at the man and found nothing remarkable in him. She tried to
go on with her explanations.
Mr. Brumley appeared attentive and then he said again: "But where have I
seen him?"
And from that point their talk was blighted; the heart seemed to go out
of her. Mr. Brumley she felt was no longer taking in what she was
saying. At the time she couldn't in any way share his preoccupation. But
what had been difficult before became hopeless and she could no longer
feel that even presently she would be able to make him understand the
peculiar alternatives before her. They drifted back by the great
conservatory and the ornamental water, aripple with ducks and swans, to
the gates where his taxi waited.
Even then it occurred to her that she ought to tell him something of the
new situation. But now their time was running out, she would have to be
concise, and what wife could ever say abruptly and offhand that
frequent fact, "Oh, by the by, my husband is jealous of you"? Then she
had an impulse to tell him simply, without any explanation at all, that
for a time he must not meet her. And while she gathered herself together
for that, his preoccupations intervened again.
He stood up in the open taxi-cab and looked back.
"That chap," he said, "is following us."
§5
The effect of this futile interview upon Lady Harman was remarkable. She
took to herself an absurd conviction that this inconclusiveness had been
an achievement. Confronted by a dilemma, she had chosen neither horn and
assumed an attitude of inoffensive defiance. Springs in England vary
greatly in their character; some are easterly and quarrelsome, some are
north-westerly and wetly disastrous, a bleak invasion from the ocean;
some are but the broken beginnings of what are not so much years as
stretches of meteorological indecision. This particular spring was
essentially a south-westerly spring, good and friendly, showery but in
the lightest way and so softly reassuring as to be gently hilarious. It
was a spring to get into the blood of anyone; it gave Lady Harman the
feeling that Mrs. Pembrose would certainly be dealt with properly and
without unreasonable delay by Heaven, and that meanwhile it was well to
take the good things of existence as cheerfully as possible. The good
things she took were very innocent things. Feeling unusually well and
enjoying great draughts of spring air and sunshine were the chief. And
she took them only for three brief days. She carried the children down
to Black Strand to see her daffodils, and her daffodils surpassed
expectation. There was a delirium of blackthorn in the new wild garden
she had annexed from the woods and a close carpet of encouraged wild
primroses. Even the Putney garden was full of happy surprises. The
afternoon following her visit to Black Strand was so warm that she had
tea with her family in great gaiety on the lawn under the cedar. Her
offspring were unusually sweet that day, they had new blue cotton
sunbonnets, and Baby and Annette at least succeeded in being pretty. And
Millicent, under the new Swiss governess, had acquired, it seemed quite
suddenly, a glib colloquial French that somehow reconciled one to the
extreme thinness and shapelessness of her legs.
Then an amazing new fact broke into this gleam of irrational
contentment, a shattering new fact. She found she was being watched. She
discovered that dingy man in the grey suit following her.
The thing came upon her one afternoon. She was starting out for a talk
with Georgina. She felt so well, so confident of the world that it was
intolerable to think of Georgina harbouring resentment; she resolved she
would go and have things out with her and make it clear just how
impossible it was to impose a Director-General upon her husband. She
became aware of the man in grey as she walked down Putney Hill.
She recognized him at once. He was at the corner of Redfern Road and
still unaware of her existence. He was leaning against the wall with the
habituated pose of one who is frequently obliged to lean against walls
for long periods of time, and he was conversing in an elucidatory manner
with the elderly crossing-sweeper who still braves the motor-cars at
that point. He became aware of her emergence with a start, he ceased to
lean and became observant.
He was one of those men whose face suggests the word "muzzle," with an
erect combative nose and a forward slant of the body from the rather
inturned feet. He wore an observant bowler hat a little too small for
him, and there is something about the tail of his jacket--as though he
had been docked.
She passed at a stride to the acceptance of Mr. Brumley's hitherto
incredible suspicion. Her pulses quickened. It came into her head to see
how far this man would go in following her. She went on demurely down
the hill leaving him quite unaware that she had seen him.
She was amazed, and after her first belief incredulous again. Could
Isaac be going mad? At the corner she satisfied herself of the grey
man's proximity and hailed a taxi-cab. The man in grey came nosing
across to listen to her directions and hear where she was going.
"Please drive up the hill until I tell you," she said, "slowly"--and had
the satisfaction, if one may call it a satisfaction, of seeing the grey
man dive towards the taxi-cab rank. Then she gave herself up to hasty
scheming.
She turned her taxi-cab abruptly when she was certain of being followed,
went back into London, turned again and made for Westridge's great
stores in Oxford Street. The grey man ticked up two pences in pursuit.
All along the Brompton Road he pursued her with his nose like the jib of
a ship.
She was excited and interested, and not nearly so shocked as she ought
to have been. It didn't somehow jar as it ought to have jarred with her
idea of Sir Isaac. Watched by a detective! This then was the completion
of the conditional freedom she had won by smashing that window. She
might have known....
She was astonished and indignant but not nearly so entirely indignant as
a noble heroine should have been. She was certainly not nearly so
queenly as Mrs. Sawbridge would have shown herself under such
circumstances. It may have been due to some plebeian strain in her
father's blood that over and above her proper indignation she was
extremely interested. She wanted to know what manner of man it was whose
nose was just appearing above the window edge of the taxi-cab behind. In
her inexperienced inattention she had never yet thought it was possible
that men could be hired to follow women.
She sat a little forward, thinking.
How far would he follow her and was it possible to shake him off? Or are
such followers so expert that once upon a scent, they are like the
Indian hunting dog, inevitable. She must see.
She paid off her taxi at Westridge's and, with the skill of her sex,
observed him by the window reflection, counting the many doors of the
establishment. Would he try to watch them all? There were also some
round the corner. No, he was going to follow her in. She had a sudden
desire, an unreasonable desire, perhaps an instinctive desire to see
that man among baby-linen. It was in her power for a time to wreathe him
with incongruous objects. This was the sort of fancy a woman must
control....
He stalked her with an unreal sang-froid. He ambushed behind a display
of infants' socks. Driven to buy by a saleswoman he appeared to be
demanding improbable varieties of infant's socks.
Are these watchers and trackers sometimes driven to buying things in
shops? If so, strange items must figure in accounts of expenses. If he
bought those socks, would they appear in Sir Isaac's bill? She felt a
sudden craving for the sight of Sir Isaac's Private Detective Account.
And as for the articles themselves, what became of them? She knew her
husband well enough to feel sure that if he paid for anything he would
insist upon having it. But where--where did he keep them?...
But now the man's back was turned; he was no doubt improvising paternity
and an extreme fastidiousness in baby's footwear----Now for it!--through
departments of deepening indelicacy to the lift!
But he had considered that possibility of embarrassment; he got round by
some other way, he was just in time to hear the lift gate clash upon a
calmly preoccupied lady, who still seemed as unaware of his existence
as the sky.
He was running upstairs, when she descended again, without getting out;
he stopped at the sight of her shooting past him, their eyes met and
there was something appealing in his. He was very moist and his bowler
was flagging. He had evidently started out in the morning with
misconceptions about the weather. And it was clear he felt he had
blundered in coming into Westridge's. Before she could get a taxi he was
on the pavement behind her, hot but pursuing.
She sought in her mind for corner shops, with doors on this street and
that. She exercised him upon Peter Robinson's and Debenham and
Freebody's and then started for the monument. But on her way to the
monument she thought of the moving staircase at Harrod's. If she went up
and down on this, she wanted to know what he would do, would he run up
and down the fixed flight? He did. Several times. And then she bethought
herself of the Piccadilly tube; she got in at Brompton road and got out
at Down Street and then got in again and went to South Kensington and he
darted in and out of adjacent carriages and got into lifts by curious
retrograde movements, being apparently under the erroneous impression
that his back was less characteristic than his face.
By this time he was evidently no longer unaware of her intelligent
interest in his movements. It was clear too that he had received a false
impression that she wanted to shake him off and that all the sleuth in
him was aroused. He was dishevelled and breathing hard and getting a
little close and coarse in his pursuit, but he was sticking to it with a
puckered intensified resolution. He came up into the South Kensington
air open-mouthed and sniffing curiously, but invincible.
She discovered suddenly that she did not like him at all and that she
wanted to go home.
She took a taxi, and then away in the wilds of the Fulham Road she had
her crowning idea. She stopped the cab at a dingy little furniture shop,
paid the driver exorbitantly and instructed him to go right back to
South Kensington station, buy her an evening paper and return for her.
The pursuer drew up thirty yards away, fell into her trap, paid off his
cab and feigned to be interested by a small window full of penny toys,
cheap chocolate and cocoanut ice. She bought herself a brass door
weight, paid for it hastily and posted herself just within the
furniture-shop door.
Then you see her cab returned suddenly and she got in at once and left
him stranded.
He made a desperate effort to get a motor omnibus. She saw him rushing
across the traffic gesticulating. Then he collided with a boy with a
basket on a bicycle--not so far as she could see injuriously, they
seemed to leap at once into a crowd and an argument, and then he was
hidden from her by a bend in the road.
§6
For a little while her mind was full of fragments of speculation about
this man. Was he a married man? Was he very much away from home? What
did he earn? Were there ever disputes about his expenses?...
She must ask Isaac. For she was determined to go home and challenge her
husband. She felt buoyed up by indignation and the consciousness of
innocence....
And then she felt an odd little doubt whether her innocence was quite so
manifest as she supposed?
That doubt grew to uncomfortable proportions.
For two years she had been meeting Mr. Brumley as confidently as though
they had been invisible beings, and now she had to rack her brains for
just what might be mistaken, what might be misconstrued. There was
nothing, she told herself, nothing, it was all as open as the day, and
still her mind groped about for some forgotten circumstance, something
gone almost out of memory that would bear misinterpretation.... How
should she begin? "Isaac," she would say, "I am being followed about
London." Suppose he denied his complicity! How could he deny his
complicity?
The cab ran in through the gates of her home and stopped at the door.
Snagsby came hurrying down the steps with a face of consternation. "Sir
Isaac, my lady, has come home in a very sad state indeed."
Beyond Snagsby in the hall she came upon a lost-looking round-eyed
Florence.
"Daddy's ill again," said Florence.
"You run to the nursery," said Lady Harman.
"I thought I might help," said Florence. "I don't want to play with the
others."
"No, run away to the nursery."
"I want to see the ossygen let out," said Florence petulantly to her
mother's unsympathetic back. "I _never_ see the ossygen let out.
Mum--my!..."
Lady Harman found her husband on the couch in his bedroom. He was
propped up in a sitting position with every available cushion and
pillow. His coat and waistcoat and collar had been taken off, and his
shirt and vest torn open. The nearest doctor, Almsworth, was in
attendance, but oxygen had not arrived, and Sir Isaac with an expression
of bitter malignity upon his face was fighting desperately for breath.
If anything his malignity deepened at the sight of his wife. "Damned
climate," he gasped. "Wouldn't have come back--except for _your_
foolery."
It seemed to help him to say that. He took a deep inhalation, pressed
his lips tightly together, and nodded at her to confirm his words.
"If he's fanciful," said Almsworth. "If in any way your presence
irritates him----"
"Let her stay," said Sir Isaac. "It--pleases her...."
Almsworth's colleague entered with the long-desired oxygen cylinder.
§7
And now every other interest in life was dominated, and every other
issue postponed by the immense urgencies of Sir Isaac's illness. It had
entered upon a new phase. It was manifest that he could no longer live
in England, that he must go to some warm and kindly climate. There and
with due precautions and observances Almsworth assured Lady Harman he
might survive for many years--"an invalid, of course, but a capable
one."
For some time the business of the International Stores had been
preparing itself for this withdrawal. Sir Isaac had been entrusting his
managers with increased responsibility and making things ready for the
flotation of a company that would take the whole network of enterprises
off his hands. Charterson was associated with him in this, and
everything was sufficiently definite to be managed from any continental
resort to which his doctors chose to send him. They chose to send him to
Santa Margherita on the Ligurian coast near Rapallo and Porto Fino.
It was old Bergener of Marienbad who chose this place. Sir Isaac had
wanted to go to Marienbad, his first resort abroad; he had a lively and
indeed an exaggerated memory of his Kur there; his growing disposition
to distrust had turned him against his London specialist, and he had
caused Lady Harman to send gigantic telegrams of inquiry to old Bergener
before he would be content. But Bergener would not have him at
Marienbad; it wasn't the place, it was the wrong time of year, there
was the very thing for them at the Regency Hotel at Santa Margherita, an
entire dépendance in a beautiful garden right on the sea, admirably
furnished and adapted in every way to Sir Isaac's peculiar needs. There,
declared Doctor Bergener, with a proper attendant, due precaution,
occasional oxygen and no excitement he would live indefinitely, that is
to say eight or ten years. And attracted by the eight or ten years,
which was three more than the London specialist offered, Sir Isaac
finally gave in and consented to be taken to Santa Margherita.
He was to go as soon as possible, and he went in a special train and
with an immense elaboration of attendance and comforts. They took with
them a young doctor their specialist at Marienbad had recommended, a
bright young Bavarian with a perfectly square blond head, an incurable
frock coat, the manners of the less kindly type of hotel-porter and
luggage which apparently consisted entirely of apparatus, an arsenal of
strange-shaped shining black cases. He joined them in London and went
right through with them. From Genoa at his request they obtained the
services of a trained nurse, an amiable fluent-shaped woman who knew
only Italian and German. For reasons that he declined to give, but which
apparently had something to do with the suffrage agitation, he would
have nothing to do with an English trained nurse. They had also a
stenographer and typist for Sir Isaac's correspondence, and Lady Harman
had a secretary, a young lady with glasses named Summersly Satchell who
obviously reserved opinions of a harshly intellectual kind and had
previously been in the service of the late Lady Mary Justin. She
established unfriendly relations with the young doctor at an early date
by attempting, he said, to learn German from him. Then there was a maid
for Lady Harman, an assistant maid, and a valet-attendant for Sir Isaac.
The rest of the service in the dépendance was supplied by the hotel
management.
It took some weeks to assemble this expedition and transport it to its
place of exile. Arrangements had to be made for closing the Putney house
and establishing the children with Mrs. Harman at Black Strand. There
was an exceptional amount of packing up to do, for this time Lady Harman
felt she was not coming back--it might be for years. They were going out
to warmth and sunlight for the rest of Sir Isaac's life.
He was entering upon the last phase in the slow disorganization of his
secretions and the progressive hardening of his arterial tissues that
had become his essential history. His appearance had altered much in the
last few months; he had become visibly smaller, his face in particular
had become sharp and little-featured. It was more and more necessary for
him to sit up in order to breathe with comfort, he slept sitting up; and
his senses were affected, he complained of strange tastes in his food,
quarrelled with the cook and had fits of sickness. Sometimes, latterly,
he had complained of strange sounds, like air whistling in water-pipes,
he said, that had no existence outside his ears. Moreover, he was
steadily more irritable and more suspicious and less able to control
himself when angry. A long-hidden vein of vile and abusive language,
hidden, perhaps, since the days of Mr. Gambard's college at Ealing, came
to the surface....
For some days after his seizure Lady Harman was glad to find in the
stress of his necessities an excuse for disregarding altogether the
crisis in the hostels and the perplexing problem of her relations to Mr.
Brumley. She wrote two brief notes to the latter gentleman breaking
appointments and pleading pressure of business. Then, at first during
intervals of sleeplessness at night, and presently during the day, the
danger and ugliness of her outlook began to trouble her. She was still,
she perceived, being watched, but whether that was because her husband
had failed to change whatever orders he had given, or because he was
still keeping himself minutely informed of her movements, she could not
tell. She was now constantly with him, and except for small spiteful
outbreaks and occasional intervals of still and silent malignity, he
tolerated and utilized her attentions. It was clear his jealousy of her
rankled, a jealousy that made him even resentful at her health and ready
to complain of any brightness of eye or vigour of movement. They had
drifted far apart from the possibility of any real discussion of the
hostels since that talk in the twilit study. To re-open that now or to
complain of the shadowing pursuer who dogged her steps abroad would
have been to precipitate Mr. Brumley's dismissal.
Even at the cost of letting things drift at the hostels for a time she
wished to avoid that question. She would not see him, but she would not
shut the door upon him. So far as the detective was concerned she could
avoid discussion by pretending to be unaware of his existence, and as
for the hostels--the hostels each day were left until the morrow.
She had learnt many things since the days of her first rebellion, and
she knew now that this matter of the man friend and nothing else in the
world is the central issue in the emancipation of women. The difficulty
of him is latent in every other restriction of which women complain. The
complete emancipation of women will come with complete emancipation of
humanity from jealousy--and no sooner. All other emancipations are shams
until a woman may go about as freely with this man as with that, and
nothing remains for emancipation when she can. In the innocence of her
first revolt this question of friendship had seemed to Lady Harman the
simplest, most reasonable of minor concessions, but that was simply
because Mr. Brumley hadn't in those days been talking of love to her,
nor she been peeping through that once locked door. Now she perceived
how entirely Sir Isaac was by his standards justified.
And after all that was recognized she remained indisposed to give up Mr.
Brumley.
Yet her sense of evil things happening in the hostels was a deepening
distress. It troubled her so much that she took the disagreeable step of
asking Mrs. Pembrose to meet her at the Bloomsbury Hostel and talk out
the expulsions. She found that lady alertly defensive, entrenched behind
expert knowledge and pretension generally. Her little blue eyes seemed
harder than ever, the metallic resonance in her voice more marked, the
lisp stronger. "Of course, Lady Harman, if you were to have some
practical experience of control----" and "Three times I have given these
girls every opportunity--_every_ opportunity."
"It seems so hard to drive these girls out," repeated Lady Harman.
"They're such human creatures."
"You have to think of the ones who remain. You must--think of the
Institution as a Whole."
"I wonder," said Lady Harman, peering down into profundities for a
moment. Below the great truth glimmered and vanished that Institutions
were made for man and not man for Institutions.
"You see," she went on, rather to herself than to Mrs. Pembrose, "we
shall be away now for a long time."
Mrs. Pembrose betrayed no excesses of grief.
"It's no good for me to interfere and then leave everything...."
"That way spells utter disorganization," said Mrs. Pembrose.
"But I wish something could be done to lessen the harshness--to save
the pride--of such a girl as Alice Burnet. Practically you tell her she
isn't fit to associate with--the other girls."
"She's had her choice and warning after warning."
"I daresay she's--stiff. Oh!--she's difficult. But--being expelled is
bitter."
"I've not _expelled_ her--technically."
"She thinks she's expelled...."
"You'd rather perhaps, Lady Harman, that _I_ was expelled."
The dark lady lifted her eyes to the little bridling figure in front of
her for a moment and dropped them again. She had had an unspeakable
thought, that Mrs. Pembrose wasn't a gentlewoman, and that this sort of
thing was a business for the gentle and for nobody else in the world.
"I'm only anxious not to hurt anyone if I can help it," said Lady
Harman.
She went on with her attempt to find some way of compromise with Mrs.
Pembrose that should save the spirit of the new malcontents. She was
much too concerned on account of the things that lay ahead of them to
care for her own pride with Mrs. Pembrose. But that good lady had all
the meagre inflexibilities of her class and at last Lady Harman ceased.
She came out into the great hall of the handsome staircase, ushered by
Mrs. Pembrose as a guest is ushered by a host. She looked at the
spacious proportion of the architecture and thought of the hopes and
imaginations she had allowed to centre upon this place. It was to have
been a glowing home of happy people, and over it all brooded the chill
stillness of rules and regulations and methodical suppressions and
tactful discouragement. It was an Institution, it had the empty
orderliness of an Institution, Mrs. Pembrose had just called it an
Institution, and so Susan Burnet had prophesied it would become five
years or more ago. It was a dream subjugated to reality.
So it seemed to Lady Harman must all dreams be subjugated to reality,
and the tossing spring greenery of the square, the sunshine, the tumult
of sparrows and the confused sound of distant traffic, framed as it was
in the hard dark outline of the entrance door, was as near as the
promise of joy could ever come to her. "Caught and spoilt," that seemed
to be the very essential of her life; just as it was of these Hostels,
all the hopes, the imaginings, the sweet large anticipations, the
generosities, and stirring warm desires....
Perhaps Lady Harman had been a little overworking with her preparations
for exile. Because as these unhappy thoughts passed through her mind she
realized that she was likely to weep. It was extremely undesirable that
Mrs. Pembrose should see her weeping.
But Mrs. Pembrose did see her weeping, saw her dark eyes swimming with
uncontrollable tears, watched her walk past her and out, without a word
or a gesture of farewell.
A kind of perplexity came upon the soul of Mrs. Pembrose. She watched
the tall figure descend to her car and enter it and dispose itself
gracefully and depart....
"Hysterical," whispered Mrs. Pembrose at last and was greatly comforted.
"Childish," said Mrs. Pembrose sipping further consolation for an
unwonted spiritual discomfort.
"Besides," said Mrs. Pembrose, "what else can one do?"
§8
Sir Isaac was greatly fatigued by his long journey to Santa Margherita
in spite of every expensive precaution to relieve him; but as soon as
the effect of that wore off, his recovery under the system Bergener had
prescribed was for a time remarkable. In a little while he was out of
bed again and in an armchair. Then the young doctor began to talk of
drives. They had no car with them, so he went into Genoa and spent an
energetic day securing the sweetest-running automobile he could find and
having it refitted for Sir Isaac's peculiar needs. In this they made a
number of excursions through the hot beauty of the Italian afternoons,
eastward to Genoa, westward to Sestri and northward towards Montallegro.
Then they went up to the summit of the Monte de Porto Fino and Sir Isaac
descended and walked about and looked at the view and praised Bergener.
After that he was encouraged to visit the gracious old monastery that
overhangs the road to Porto Fino.
At first Lady Harman did her duty of control and association with an
apathetic resignation. This had to go on--for eight or ten years. Then
her imagination began to stir again. There came a friendly letter from
Mr. Brumley and she answered with a description of the colour of the sea
and the charm and wonder of its tideless shore. The three elder children
wrote queer little letters and she answered them. She went into Rapallo
and got herself a carriageful of Tauchnitz books....
That visit to the monastery on the Porto Fino road was like a pleasant
little glimpse into the brighter realities of the Middle Ages. The
place, which is used as a home of rest for convalescent Carthusians,
chanced to be quite empty and deserted; the Bavarian rang a jangling
bell again and again and at last gained the attention of an old gardener
working in the vineyard above, an unkempt, unshaven, ungainly creature
dressed in scarce decent rags of brown, who was yet courteous-minded
and, albeit crack-voiced, with his yellow-fanged mouth full of gracious
polysyllables. He hobbled off to get a key and returned through the
still heat of the cobbled yard outside the monastery gates, and took
them into cool airy rooms and showed them clean and simple cells in
shady corridors, and a delightful orangery, and led them to a beautiful
terrace that looked out upon the glowing quivering sea. And he became
very anxious to tell them something about "Francesco"; they could not
understand him until the doctor caught "Battaglia" and "Pavia" and had
an inspiration. Francis the First, he explained in clumsy but
understandable English, slept here, when he was a prisoner of the
Emperor and all was lost but honour. They looked at the slender pillars
and graceful archings about them.
"Chust as it was now," the young doctor said, his imagination touched
for a moment by mere unscientific things....
They returned to their dépendance in a state of mutual contentment, Sir
Isaac scarcely tired, and Lady Harman ran upstairs to change her dusty
dress for a fresher muslin, while he went upon the doctor's arm to the
balcony where tea was to be served to them.
She came down to find her world revolutionized.
On the table in the balcony the letters had been lying convenient to his
chair and he--it may be without troubling to read the address, had
seized the uppermost and torn it open.
He was holding that letter now a little crumpled in his hand.
She had walked close up to the table before she realized the change. The
little eyes that met hers were afire with hatred, his lips were white
and pressed together tightly, his nostrils were dilated in his struggle
for breath. "I knew it," he gasped.
She clung to her dignity though she felt suddenly weak within. "That
letter," she said, "was addressed to me."
There was a gleam of derision in his eyes.
"Look at it!" he said, and flung it towards her.
"My private letter!"
"Look at it!" he repeated.
"What right have you to open my letter?"
"Friendship!" he said. "Harmless friendship! Look what your--friend
says!"
"Whatever there was in my letter----"
"Oh!" cried Sir Isaac. "Don't come _that_ over me! Don't you try it!
Oooh! phew--" He struggled for breath for a time. "He's so harmless.
He's so helpful. He----Read it, you----"
He hesitated and then hurled a strange word at her.
She glanced at the letter on the table but made no movement to touch it.
Then she saw that her husband's face was reddening and that his arm
waved helplessly. His eyes, deprived abruptly of all the fury of
conflict, implored assistance.
She darted to the French window that opened into the dining-room from
the balcony. "Doctor Greve!" she cried. "Doctor Greve!"
Behind her the patient was making distressful sounds. "Doctor Greve,"
she screamed, and from above she heard the Bavarian shouting and then
the noise of his coming down the stairs.
He shouted some direction in German as he ran past her. By an
inspiration she guessed he wanted the nurse.
Miss Summersley Satchell appeared in the doorway and became helpful.
Then everyone in the house seemed to be converging upon the balcony.
It was an hour before Sir Isaac was in bed and sufficiently allayed for
her to go to her own room. Then she thought of Mr. Brumley's letter, and
recovered it from the table on the balcony where it had been left in the
tumult of her husband's seizure.
It was twilight and the lights were on. She stood under one of them and
read with two moths circling about her....
Mr. Brumley had had a mood of impassioned declaration. He had alluded to
his "last moments of happiness at Kew." He said he would rather kiss the
hem of her garment than be the "lord of any other woman's life."
It was all so understandable--looked at in the proper light. It was all
so impossible to explain. And why had she let it happen? Why had she let
it happen?
§9
The young doctor was a little puzzled and rather offended by Sir Isaac's
relapse. He seemed to consider it incorrect and was on the whole
disposed to blame Lady Harman. He might have had such a seizure, the
young doctor said, later, but not now. He would be thrown back for some
weeks, then he would begin to mend again and then whatever he said,
whatever he did, Lady Harman must do nothing to contradict him. For a
whole day Sir Isaac lay inert, in a cold sweat. He consented once to
attempt eating, but sickness overcame him. He seemed so ill that all the
young doctor's reassurances could not convince Lady Harman that he
would recover. Then suddenly towards evening his arrested vitality was
flowing again, the young doctor ceased to be anxious for his own
assertions, the patient could sit up against a pile of pillows and
breathe and attend to affairs. There was only one affair he really
seemed anxious to attend to. His first thought when he realized his
returning strength was of his wife. But the young doctor would not let
him talk that night.
Next morning he seemed still stronger. He was restless and at last
demanded Lady Harman again.
This time the young doctor transmitted the message.
She came to him forthwith and found him, white-faced and
unfamiliar-looking, his hands gripping the quilt and his eyes burning
with hatred.
"You thought I'd forgotten," was his greeting.
"Don't argue," signalled the doctor from the end of Sir Isaac's bed.
"I've been thinking it out," said Sir Isaac. "When you were thinking I
was too ill to think.... I know better now."
He sucked in his lips and then went on. "You've got to send for old
Crappen," he said. "I'm going to alter things. I had a plan. But that
would have been letting you off too easy. See? So--you send for old
Crappen."
"What do you mean to do?"
"Never you mind, my lady, never you mind. You send for old Crappen."
She waited for a moment. "Is that all you want me to do?"
"I'm going to make it all right about those Hostels. Don't you fear. You
and your Hostels! You shan't _touch_ those hostels ever again. Ever.
Mrs. Pembrose go! Why! You ain't worthy to touch the heel of her shoe!
Mrs. Pembrose!"
He gathered together all his forces and suddenly expelled with rousing
force the word he had already applied to her on the day of the
intercepted letter.
He found it seemed great satisfaction in the sound and taste of it. He
repeated it thrice. "Zut," cried the doctor, "Sssh!"
Then Sir Isaac intimated his sense that calm was imperative. "You send
for Crappen," he said with a quiet earnestness.
She had become now so used to terms of infamy during the last year or
so, so accustomed to forgive them as part of his suffering, that she
seemed not to hear the insult.
"Do you want him at once?" she asked. "Shall I telegraph?"
"Want him at once!" He dropped his voice to a whisper. "Yes, you
fool--yes. Telegraph. (Phew.) Telegraph.... I mustn't get angry, you
know. You--telegraph."
He became suddenly still. But his eyes were active with hate.
She glanced at the doctor, then moved to the door.
"I will send a telegram," she said, and left him still malignant.
She closed the door softly and walked down the long cool passage towards
her own room....
§10
She had to be patient. She had to be patient. This sort of thing had to
go on from crisis to crisis. It might go on for years. She could see no
remedy and no escape.
What else was there to do but be patient? It was all amazing unjust, but
to be a married woman she was beginning to understand is to be outside
justice. It is autocracy. She had once imagined otherwise, and most of
her life had been the slow unlearning of that initial error. She had
imagined that the hostels were hers simply because he had put it in that
way. They had never been anything but his, and now it was manifest he
would do what he liked with his own. The law takes no cognizance of the
unwritten terms of a domestic reconciliation.
She sat down at the writing-table the hotel management had improvised
for her.
She rested her chin on her hand and tried to think out her position. But
what was there to think out, seeing that nature and law and custom have
conspired together to put women altogether under the power of jealous
and acquisitive men?
She drew the telegram form towards her.
She was going to write a telegram that she knew would bring Crappen
headlong--to disinherit her absolutely. And--it suddenly struck her--her
husband had trusted her to write it. She was going to do what he had
trusted her to do.... But it was absurd.
She sat making patterns of little dots with her pencil point upon the
telegram form, and there was a faint smile of amusement upon her lips.
It was absurd--and everything was absurd. What more was to be said or
thought about it? This was the lot of woman. She had made her struggle,
rebelled her little bit of rebellion. Most other women no doubt had done
as much. It made no difference in the long run.
But it was hard to give up the hostels. She had been foolish of course,
but she had not let them make her feel _real_. And she wasn't real. She
was a wife--just _this_....
She sighed and bestirred herself and began to write.
Then abruptly she stopped writing.
For three years her excuse for standing--everything, had been these
hostels. If now the hostels were to be wrenched out of her hands, if at
her husband's death she was to be stripped of every possession and left
a helpless dependant on her own children, if for all her good behaviour
she was to be insulted by his frantic suspicions so long as he lived and
then disgraced by his posthumous mistrust; was there any reason why she
should go on standing anything any more? Away there in England was Mr.
Brumley, _her_ man, ready with service and devotion....
It was a profoundly comforting thing to think of him there as hers. He
was hers. He'd given so much and on the whole so well. If at last she
were to go to him....
Yet when she came to imagine the reality of the step that was in her
mind, it took upon itself a chill and forbidding strangeness. It was
like stepping out of a familiar house into empty space. What could it be
like? To take some odd trunks with her, meet him somewhere, travel,
travel through the evening, travel past nightfall? The bleak strangeness
of that going out never to return!
Her imagination could give her no figure of Mr. Brumley as intimate, as
habitual. She could as easily imagine his skeleton. He remained in all
this queer speculation something friendly, something incidental, more
than a trifle disembodied, entirely devoted of course in that hovering
way--but hovering....
And she wanted to be free. It wasn't Mr. Brumley she wanted; he was but
a means--if indeed he was a means--to an end. The person she wanted, the
person she had always wanted--was _herself_. Could Mr. Brumley give her
that? Would Mr. Brumley give her that? Was it conceivable he would carry
sacrifice to such a pitch as that?...
And what nonsense was this dream! Here was her husband needing her. And
the children, whose inherent ungainliness, whose ungracious spirits
demanded a perpetual palliation of culture and instilled deportment.
What honest over-nurse was there for him or helper and guide and friend
for them, if she withdrew? There was something undignified in a flight
for mere happiness. There was something vindictive in flight from mere
insult. To go, because she was disinherited, because her hostels were
shattered,--No! And in short--she couldn't do it....
If Sir Isaac wanted to disinherit her he must disinherit her. If he
wanted to go on seizing and reading her letters, then he could. There
was nothing in the whole scheme of things to stop him if he did not want
to stop himself, nothing at all. She was caught. This was the lot of
women. She was a _wife_. What else in honour was there but to be a wife
up to the hilt?...
She finished writing her telegram.
§11
Suddenly came a running in the passage outside, a rap at the door and
the nurse entered, scared, voluble in Italian, but with gestures that
translated her.
Lady Harman rose, realized the gravity and urgency of the moment and
hurried with her along the passage. "Est-il mauvais?" the poor lady
attempted, "Est-il----"
Oh! what words are there for "taken worse"?
The woman attempted English and failed. She resorted to her native
Italian and exclaimed about the "povero signore." She conveyed a sense
of pitiful extremities. Could it be he was in pain again? What was it?
What was it? Ten minutes ago he had been so grimly angry.
At the door of the sick room the nurse laid a warning hand on the arm of
Lady Harman and made an apprehensive gesture. They entered almost
noiselessly.
The Bavarian doctor turned his face from the bed at their entrance. He
was bending over Sir Isaac. He held up one hand as if to arrest them;
his other was engaged with his patient. "No," he said. His attention
went back to the sick man, and he remained very still in that position,
leaving Lady Harman to note for the first time how broad and flat he was
both between his shoulders and between his ears. Then his face came
round slowly, he relinquished something heavy, stood up, held up a hand.
"Zu spät," he whispered, as though he too was surprised. He sought in
his mind for English and then found his phrase: "He has gone!"
"Gone?"
"In one instant."
"Dead?"
"So. In one instant."
On the bed lay Sir Isaac. His hand was thrust out as though he grasped
at some invisible thing. His open eyes stared hard at his wife, and as
she met his eyes he snored noisily in his nose and throat.
She looked from the doctor to the nurse. It seemed to her that both
these people must be mad. Never had she seen anything less like death.
"But he's not dead!" she protested, still standing in the middle of the
room.
"It iss chust the air in his throat," the doctor said. "He went--_so!_
In one instant as I was helping him."
He waited to see some symptom of feminine weakness. There was a quality
in his bearing--as though this event did him credit.
"But--Isaac!"
It was astounding. The noise in his throat ceased. But he still stared
at her. And then the nurse made a kind of assault upon Lady Harman,
caught her--even if she didn't fall. It was no doubt the proper formula
to collapse. Or to fling oneself upon the deceased. Lady Harman resisted
this assistance, disentangled herself and remained amazed; the nurse a
little disconcerted but still ready behind her.
"But," said Lady Harman slowly, not advancing and pointing incredulously
at the unwinking stare that met her own, "is he dead? Is he really dead?
Like that?"
The doctor's gesture to the nurse betrayed his sense of the fine quick
scene this want of confidence had ruined. Under no circumstances in life
did English people really seem to know how to behave or what was
expected of them. He answered with something bordering upon irony.
"Madam," he said, with a slight bow, "he is _really_ det."
"But--like _that_!" cried Lady Harman.
"Like that," repeated the doctor.
She went three steps nearer and stopped, open-eyed, wonder-struck, her
lips compressed.
§12
For a time astonishment overwhelmed her mind. She did not think of Sir
Isaac, she did not think of herself, her whole being was filled by this
marvel of death and cessation. Like _that_!
Death!
Never before had she seen it. She had expected an extreme dignity, an
almost ceremonial sinking back, a slow ebbing, but this was like a shot
from a bow. It stunned her. And for some time she remained stunned,
while the doctor and her secretary and the hotel people did all that
they deemed seemly on this great occasion. She let them send her into
another room; she watched with detached indifference a post-mortem
consultation in whispers with a doctor from Rapallo. Then came a great
closing of shutters. The nurse and her maid hovered about her, ready to
assist her when the sorrowing began. But she had no sorrow. The long
moments lengthened out, and he was still dead and she was still only
amazement. It seemed part of the extraordinary, the perennial
surprisingness of Sir Isaac that he should end in this way. Dead! She
didn't feel for some hours that he had in any way ended. He had died
with such emphasis that she felt now that he was capable of anything.
What mightn't he do next? When she heard movements in the chamber of
death it seemed to her that of all the people there, most probably it
was he who made them. She would not have been amazed if he had suddenly
appeared in the doorway of her room, anger-white and his hand
quiveringly extended, spluttering some complaint.
He might have cried: "Here I am dead! And it's _you_, damn you--it's
_you_!"
It was after distinct efforts, after repeated visits to the room in
which he lay, that she began to realize that death was death, that death
goes on, that there was no more any Sir Isaac, but only a still body he
had left behind, that was being moulded now into a stiff image of peace.
Then for a time she roused herself to some control of their proceedings.
The doctor came to Lady Harman to ask her about the meals for the day,
the hotel manager was in entanglements of tactful consideration, and
then the nurse came for instructions upon some trivial matter. They had
done what usage prescribes and now, in the absence of other direction,
they appealed to her wishes. She remarked that everyone was going on
tiptoe and speaking in undertones....
She realized duties. What does one have to do when one's husband is
dead? People would have to be told. She would begin by sending off
telegrams to various people, to his mother, to her own, to his lawyer.
She remembered she had already written a telegram--that very morning to
Crappen. Should she still let the lawyer come out? He was her lawyer
now. Perhaps he had better come, but instead of that telegram, which
still lay upon the desk, she would wire the news of the death to him....
Does one send to the papers? How does one send to the papers?
She took Miss Summersly Satchell who was hovering outside in the
sunshine on the balcony, into her room, and sat pale and businesslike
and very careful about details, while Miss Summersly Satchell offered
practical advice and took notes and wrote telegrams and letters....
There came a hush over everything as the day crept towards noon, and the
widowed woman sat in her own room with an inactive mind, watching thin
bars of sunlight burn their slow way across the floor. He was dead. It
was going on now more steadfastly than ever. He was keeping dead. He was
dead at last for good and her married life was over, that life that had
always seemed the only possible life, and this stunning incident, this
thing that was like the blinding of eyes or the bursting of eardrums,
was to be the beginning of strange new experiences.
She was afraid at first at their possible strangeness. And then, you
know, in spite of a weak protesting compunction she began to feel
glad....
She would not admit to herself that she was glad, that she was anything
but a woman stunned, she maintained her still despondent attitude as
long as she could, but gladness broke upon her soul as the day breaks,
and a sense of release swam up to the horizons of her mind and rose upon
her, flooding every ripple of her being, as the sun rises over water in
a clear sky. Presently she could sit there no longer, she had to stand
up. She walked to the closed Venetians to look out upon the world and
checked herself upon the very verge of flinging them open. He was dead
and it was all over for ever. Of course!--it was all over! Her marriage
was finished and done. Miss Satchell came to summon her to lunch.
Throughout that meal Lady Harman maintained a sombre bearing, and
listened with attention to the young doctor's comments on the manner of
Sir Isaac's going. And then,--it was impossible to go back to her room.
"My head aches," she said, "I must go down and sit by the sea," and her
maid, a little shocked, brought her not only her sunshade, but needless
wraps--as though a new-made widow must necessarily be very sensitive to
the air. She would not let her maid come with her, she went down to the
beach alone. She sat on some rocks near the very edge of the transparent
water and fought her gladness for a time and presently yielded to it. He
was dead. One thought filled her mind, for a while so filled her mind,
that no other thought it seemed could follow it, it had an effect of
being final; it so filled her mind that it filled the whole world; the
broad sapphire distances of the sea, the lapping waves amidst the rocks
at her feet, the blazing sun, the dark headland of Porto Fino and a
small sailing boat that hung beyond came all within it like things
enclosed within a golden globe. She forgot all the days of nursing and
discomfort and pity behind her, all the duties and ceremonies before
her, forgot all the details and circumstances of life in this one
luminous realization. She was free at last. She was a free woman.
Never more would he make a sound or lift a finger against her life,
never more would he contradict her or flout her; never more would he
come peeping through that papered panel between his room and hers, never
more could hateful and humiliating demands be made upon her as his
right; no more strange distresses of the body nor raw discomfort of the
nerves could trouble her--for ever. And no more detectives, no more
suspicions, no more accusations. That last blow he had meant to aim was
frozen before it could strike her. And she would have the Hostels in her
hands, secure and undisputed, she could deal as she liked with Mrs.
Pembrose, take such advisers as she pleased.... She was free.
She found herself planning the regeneration of those difficult and
disputed hostels, plans that were all coloured by the sun and sky of
Italy. The manacles had gone; her hands were free. She would make this
her supreme occupation. She had learnt her lesson now she felt, she knew
something of the mingling of control and affectionate regard that was
needed to weld the warring uneasy units of her new community. And she
could do it, now as she was and unencumbered, she knew this power was
in her. When everything seemed lost to her, suddenly it was all back in
her hands....
She discovered the golden serenity of her mind with a sudden
astonishment and horror. She was amazed and shocked that she should be
glad. She struggled against it and sought to subdue her spirit to a
becoming grief. One should be sorrowful at death in any case, one should
be grieved. She tried to think of Sir Isaac with affection, to recall
touching generosities, to remember kind things and tender and sweet
things and she could not do so. Nothing would come back but the white
intensities of his face, nothing but his hatred, his suspicion and his
pitiless mean mastery. From which she was freed.
She could not feel sorry. She did her utmost to feel sorry; presently
when she went back into the dépendance, she had to check her feet to a
regretful pace; she dreaded the eyes of the hotel visitors she passed in
the garden lest they should detect the liberation of her soul. But the
hotel visitors being English were for the most part too preoccupied with
manifestations of a sympathy that should be at once heart-felt and quite
unobtrusive and altogether in the best possible taste, to have any
attention free for the soul of Lady Harman.
The sense of her freedom came and went like the sunlight of a day in
spring, though she attempted her utmost to remain overcast. After dinner
that night she was invaded by a vision of the great open years before
her, at first hopeful but growing at last to fear and a wild
restlessness, so that in defiance of possible hotel opinion, she
wandered out into the moonlight and remained for a long time standing by
the boat landing, dreaming, recovering, drinking in the white serenities
of sea and sky. There was no hurry now. She might stay there as long as
she chose. She need account for herself to no one; she was free. She
might go where she pleased, do what she pleased, there was no urgency
any more....
There was Mr. Brumley. Mr. Brumley made a very little figure at first in
the great prospect before her.... Then he grew larger in her thoughts.
She recalled his devotions, his services, his self-control. It was good
to have one understanding friend in this great limitless world....
She would have to keep that friendship....
But the glorious thing was freedom, to live untrammelled....
Through the stillness a little breeze came stirring, and she awoke out
of her dream and turned and faced the shuttered dépendance. A solitary
dim light was showing on the verandah. All the rest of the building was
a shapeless mass of grey. The long pale front of the hotel seen through
a grove of orange trees was lit now at every other window with people
going to bed. Beyond, a black hillside clambered up to the edge of the
sky.
Far away out of the darknesses a man with a clear strong voice was
singing to a tinkling accompaniment.
In the black orange trees swam and drifted a score of fireflies, and
there was a distant clamour of nightingales when presently the unseen
voice had done.
§13
When she was in her room again she began to think of Sir Isaac and more
particularly of that last fixed stare of his....
She was impelled to go and see him, to see for herself that he was
peaceful and no longer a figure of astonishment. She went slowly along
the corridor and very softly into his room--it remained, she felt, his
room. They had put candles about him, and the outline of his face,
showing dimly through the linen that veiled it, was like the face of one
who sleeps very peacefully. Very gently she uncovered it.
He was not simply still, he was immensely still. He was more still and
white than the moonlight outside, remoter than moon or stars.... She
stood surveying him.
He looked small and pinched and as though he had been very tired. Life
was over for him, altogether over. Never had she seen anything that
seemed so finished. Once, when she was a girl she had thought that death
might be but the opening of a door upon a more generous feast of living
than this cramped world could give, but now she knew, she saw, that
death can be death.
Life was over. She felt she had never before realized the meaning of
death. That beautiful night outside, and all the beautiful nights and
days that were still to come and all the sweet and wonderful things of
God's world could be nothing to him now for ever. There was no dream in
him that could ever live again, there was no desire, no hope in him.
And had he ever had his desire or his hope, or felt the intensities of
life?
There was this beauty she had been discovering in the last few years,
this mystery of love,--all that had been hidden from him.
She began to realize something sorrowful and pitiful in his quality, in
his hardness, his narrowness, his bickering suspicions, his malignant
refusals of all things generous and beautiful. He made her feel, as
sometimes the children made her feel, the infinite pity of perversity
and resistance to the bounties and kindliness of life.
The shadow of sorrow for him came to her at last.
Yet how obstinate he looked, the little frozen white thing that had been
Sir Isaac Harman! And satisfied, wilfully satisfied; his lips were
compressed and his mouth a little drawn in at the corners as if he would
not betray any other feeling than content with the bargain he had made
with life. She did not touch him; not for the world would she ever touch
that cold waxen thing that had so lately clasped her life, but she stood
for a long time by the side of his quiet, immersed in the wonder of
death....
He had been such a hard little man, such a pursuing little man, so
unreasonable and difficult a master, and now--he was such a poor
shrunken little man for all his obstinacy! She had never realized before
that he was pitiful.... Had she perhaps feared him too much, disliked
him too much to deal fairly with him? Could she have helped him? Was
there anything she could have done that she had not done? Might she not
at least have saved him his suspicion? Behind his rages, perhaps he had
been wretched.
Could anyone else have helped him? If perhaps someone had loved him more
than she had ever pretended to do----
How strange that she should be so intimately in this room--and still so
alien. So alien that she could feel nothing but detached wonder at his
infinite loss.... _Alien_,--that was what she had always been, a
captured alien in this man's household,--a girl he had taken. Had he
ever suspected how alien? The true mourner, poor woman! was even now, in
charge of Cook's couriers and interpreters, coming by express from
London, to see with her own eyes this last still phase of the son she
had borne into the world and watched and sought to serve. She was his
nearest; she indeed was the only near thing there had ever been in his
life. Once at least he must have loved her? And even she had not been
very near. No one had ever been very near his calculating suspicious
heart. Had he ever said or thought any really sweet or tender
thing--even about her? He had been generous to her in money matters, of
course,--but out of a vast abundance....
How good it was to have a friend! How good it was to have even one
single friend!...
At the thought of his mother Lady Harman's mind began to drift slowly
from this stiff culmination of life before her. Presently she replaced
the white cloth upon his face and turned slowly away. Her imagination
had taken up the question of how that poor old lady was to be met, how
she was to be consoled, what was to be said to her....
She began to plan arrangements. The room ought to be filled with
flowers; Mrs. Harman would expect flowers, large heavy white flowers in
great abundance. That would have to be seen to soon. One might get them
in Rapallo. And afterwards,--they would have to take him to England, and
have a fine great funeral, with every black circumstance his wealth and
his position demanded. Mrs. Harman would need that, and so it must be
done. Cabinet Ministers must follow him, members of Parliament, all
Blenkerdom feeling self-consciously and, as far as possible, deeply, the
Chartersons by way of friends, unfamiliar blood relations, a vast
retinue of employees....
How could one take him? Would he have to be embalmed? Embalming!--what a
strange complement of death. She averted herself a little more from the
quiet figure on the bed, and could not turn to it again. They might come
here and do all sorts of things to it, mysterious, evil-seeming things
with knives and drugs....
She must not think of that. She must learn exactly what Mrs. Harman
thought and desired. Her own apathy with regard to her husband had given
way completely now to a desire to anticipate and meet Mrs. Harman's
every conceivable wish.
CHAPTER THE TWELFTH
LOVE AND A SERIOUS LADY
§1
The news of Sir Isaac's death came quite unexpectedly to Mr. Brumley. He
was at the Climax Club, and rather bored; he had had some tea and dry
toast in the magazine room, and had been through the weeklies, and it
was a particularly uninteresting week. Then he came down into the hall,
looked idly at the latest bulletins upon the board, and read that "Sir
Isaac Harman died suddenly this morning at Sta. Margherita, in Ligure,
whither he had gone for rest and change."
He went on mechanically reading down the bulletin, leaving something of
himself behind him that did not read on. Then he returned to that
remarkable item and re-read it, and picked up that lost element of his
being again.
He had awaited this event for so long, thought of it so often in such a
great variety of relationships, dreamt of it, hoped for it, prayed for
it, and tried not to think of it, that now it came to him in reality it
seemed to have no substance or significance whatever. He had exhausted
the fact before it happened. Since first he had thought of it there had
passed four long years, and in that time he had seen it from every
aspect, exhausted every possibility. It had become a theoretical
possibility, the basis of continually less confident, continually more
unsubstantial day dreams. Constantly he had tried not to think of it,
tried to assure himself of Sir Isaac's invalid immortality. And here it
was!
The line above it concerned an overdue ship, the line below resumed a
speech by Mr. Lloyd George. "He would challenge the honourable member to
repeat his accusations----"
Mr. Brumley stood quite still before the mauve-coloured print letters
for some time, then went slowly across the hall into the breakfast-room,
sat down in a chair by the fireplace, and fell into a kind of
featureless thinking. Sir Isaac was dead, his wife was free, and the
long waiting that had become a habit was at an end.
He had anticipated a wild elation, and for a while he was only sensible
of change, a profound change....
He began to feel glad that he had waited, that she had insisted upon
patience, that there had been no disaster, no scandal between them. Now
everything was clear for them. He had served his apprenticeship. They
would be able to marry, and have no quarrel with the world.
He sat with his mind forming images of the prospect before him, images
that were at first feeble and vague, and then, though still in a silly
way, more concrete and definite. At first they were quite petty
anticipations, of how he would have to tell people of his approaching
marriage, of how he would break it to George Edmund that a new mother
impended. He mused for some time upon the details of that. Should he
take her down to George Edmund's school, and let the boy fall in love
with her--he would certainly fall in love with her--before anything
definite was said, or should he first go down alone and break the news?
Each method had its own attractive possibilities of drama.
Then Mr. Brumley began to think of the letter he must write Lady
Harman--a difficult letter. One does not rejoice at death. Already Mr.
Brumley was beginning to feel a generous pity for the man he had done
his utmost not to detest for so long. Poor Sir Isaac had lived like a
blind thing in the sunlight, gathering and gathering, when the pride and
pleasure of life is to administer and spend.... Mr. Brumley fell
wondering just how she could be feeling now about her dead husband. She
might be in a phase of quite real sorrow. Probably the last illness had
tired and strained her. So that his letter would have to be very fine
and tender and soothing, free from all harshness, free from any
gladness--yet it would be hard not to let a little of his vast relief
peep out. Always hitherto, except for one or two such passionate lapses
as that which had precipitated the situation at Santa Margherita, his
epistolary manner had been formal, his matter intellectual and
philanthropic, for he had always known that no letter was absolutely
safe from Sir Isaac's insatiable research. Should he still be formal,
still write to "Dear Lady Harman," or suddenly break into a new warmth?
Half an hour later he was sitting in the writing-room with some few
flakes of torn paper on the carpet between his feet and the partially
filled wastepaper basket, still meditating upon this difficult issue of
the address.
The letter he achieved at last began, "My dear Lady," and went on to, "I
do not know how to begin this letter--perhaps you will find it almost as
difficult to receive...."
In the small hours he woke to one of his habitual revulsions. Was that,
he asked himself, the sort of letter a lover should write to the beloved
on her release, on the sudden long prayed-for opening of a way to her,
on the end of her shameful servitude and his humiliations? He began to
recall the cold and stilted sentences of that difficult composition. The
gentility of it! All his life he had been a prey to gentility, had cast
himself free from it, only to relapse again in such fashion as this.
Would he never be human and passionate and sincere? Of course he was
glad, and she ought to be glad, that Sir Isaac, their enemy and their
prison, was dead; it was for them to rejoice together. He turned out of
bed at last, when he could lie still under these self-accusations no
longer, and wrapped himself in his warm dressing-gown and began to
write. He wrote in pencil. His fountain-pen was as usual on his night
table, but pencil seemed the better medium, and he wrote a warm and
glowing love-letter that was brought to an end at last by an almost
passionate fit of sneezing. He could find no envelopes in his bedroom
Davenport, and so he left that honest scrawl under a paper-weight, and
went back to bed greatly comforted. He re-read it in the morning with
emotion, and some slight misgivings that grew after he had despatched
it. He went to lunch at his club contemplating a third letter that
should be sane and fine and sweet, and that should rectify the confusing
effect of those two previous efforts. He wrote this letter later in the
afternoon.
The days seemed very long before the answer to his first letter came to
him, and in that interval two more--aspects went to her. Her reply was
very brief, and written in the large, firm, still girlishly clear hand
that distinguished her.
"_I was so glad of your letter. My life is so strange here, a kind of
hushed life. The nights are extraordinarily beautiful, the moon very
large and the little leaves on the trees still and black. We are coming
back to England and the funeral will be from our Putney house._"
That was all, but it gave Mr. Brumley an impression of her that was
exceedingly vivid and close. He thought of her, shadowy and dusky in the
moonlight until his soul swam with love for her; he had to get up and
walk about; he whispered her name very softly to himself several times;
he groaned gently, and at last he went to his little desk and wrote to
her his sixth letter--quite a beautiful letter. He told her that he
loved her, that he had always loved her since their first moment of
meeting, and he tried to express just the wave of tenderness that
inundated him at the thought of her away there in Italy. Once, he said,
he had dreamt that he would be the first to take her to Italy. Perhaps
some day they would yet be in Italy together.
§2
It was only by insensible degrees that doubt crept into Mr. Brumley's
assurances. He did not observe at once that none of the brief letters
she wrote him responded to his second, the impassioned outbreak in
pencil. And it seemed only in keeping with the modest reserves of
womanhood that she should be restrained--she always had been restrained.
She asked him not to see her at once when she returned to England; she
wanted, she said, "to see how things are," and that fell in very well
with a certain delicacy in himself. The unburied body of Sir Isaac--it
was now provisionally embalmed--was, through some inexplicable subtlety
in his mind, a far greater barrier than the living man had ever been,
and he wanted it out of the way. And everything settled. Then, indeed,
they might meet.
Meanwhile he had a curious little private conflict of his own. He was
trying not to think, day and night he was trying not to think, that Lady
Harman was now a very rich woman. Yet some portions of his brain, and he
had never suspected himself of such lawless regions, persisted in the
most vulgar and outrageous suggestions, suggestions that made his soul
blush; schemes, for example, of splendid foreign travel, of hotel staffs
bowing, of a yacht in the Mediterranean, of motor cars, of a palatial
flat in London, of a box at the opera, of artists patronized, of--most
horrible!--a baronetcy.... The more authentic parts of Mr. Brumley
cowered from and sought to escape these squalid dreams of magnificences.
It shocked and terrified him to find such things could come out in him.
He was like some pest-stricken patient, amazedly contemplating his first
symptom. His better part denied, repudiated. Of course he would never
touch, never even propose--or hint.... It was an aspect he had never
once contemplated before Sir Isaac died. He could on his honour, and
after searching his heart, say that. Yet in Pall Mall one afternoon,
suddenly, he caught himself with a thought in his head so gross, so
smug, that he uttered a faint cry and quickened his steps.... Benevolent
stepfather!
These distresses begot a hope. Perhaps, after all, probably, there would
be some settlement.... She might not be rich, not so very rich.... She
might be tied up....
He perceived in that lay his hope of salvation. Otherwise--oh, pitiful
soul!--things were possible in him; he saw only too clearly what
dreadful things were possible.
If only she were disinherited, if only he might take her, stripped of
all these possessions that even in such glancing anticipations
begot----this horrid indigestion of the imagination!
But then,----the Hostels?...
There he stumbled against an invincible riddle!
There was something dreadful about the way in which these considerations
blotted out the essential fact of separations abolished, barriers
lowered, the way to an honourable love made plain and open....
The day of the funeral came at last, and Mr. Brumley tried not to think
of it, paternally, at Margate. He fled from Sir Isaac's ultimate
withdrawal. Blenker's obituary notice in the _Old Country Gazette_ was a
masterpiece of tactful eulogy, ostentatiously loyal, yet extremely not
unmindful of the widowed proprietor, and of all the possible changes of
ownership looming ahead. Mr. Brumley, reading it in the Londonward
train, was greatly reminded of the Hostels. That was a riddle he didn't
begin to solve. Of course, it was imperative the Hostels should
continue--imperative. Now they might run them together, openly, side by
side. But then, with such temptations to hitherto inconceivable
vulgarities. And again, insidiously, those visions returned of two
figures, manifestly opulent, grouped about a big motor car or standing
together under a large subservient archway....
There was a long letter from her at his flat, a long and amazing letter.
It was so folded that his eye first caught the writing on the third
page: "_never marry again. It is so clear that our work needs all my
time and all my means._" His eyebrows rose, his expression became
consternation; his hands trembled a little as he turned the letter over
to read it through. It was a deliberate letter. It began--
"_Dear Mr. Brumley, I could never have imagined how much there is to do
after we are dead, and before we can be buried._"
"Yes," said Mr. Brumley; "but what does this _mean_?"
"_There are so many surprises_----"
"It isn't clear."
"_In ourselves and the things about us._"
"Of course, he would have made some complicated settlement. I might have
known."
"_It is the strangest thing in the world to be a widow, much stranger
than anyone could ever have supposed, to have no one to control one, no
one to think of as coming before one, no one to answer to, to be free to
plan one's life for oneself_----"
* * * * *
He stood with the letter in his hand after he had read it through,
perplexed.
"I can't stand this," he said. "I want to know."
He went to his desk and wrote:--
"_My Dear, I want you to marry me._"
What more was to be said? He hesitated with this brief challenge in his
hand, was minded to telegraph it and thought of James's novel, _In the
Cage_. Telegraph operators are only human after all. He determined upon
a special messenger and rang up his quarter valet--he shared service in
his flat--to despatch it.
The messenger boy got back from Putney that evening about half-past
eight. He brought a reply in pencil.
"_My dear Friend_," she wrote. "_You have been so good to me, so
helpful. But I do not think that is possible. Forgive me. I want so
badly to think and here I cannot think. I have never been able to think
here. I am going down to Black Strand, and in a day or so I will write
and we will talk. Be patient with me._"
She signed her name "_Ellen_"; always before she had been "E.H."
"Yes," cried Mr. Brumley, "but I want to know!"
He fretted for an hour and went to the telephone.
Something was wrong with the telephone, it buzzed and went faint, and it
would seem that at her end she was embarrassed. "I want to come to you
now," he said. "Impossible," was the clearest word in her reply. Should
he go in a state of virile resolution, force her hesitation as a man
should? She might be involved there with Mrs. Harman, with all sorts of
relatives and strange people....
In the end he did not go.
§3
He sat at his lunch alone next day at one of the little tables men
choose when they shun company. But to the right of him was the table of
the politicians, Adolphus Blenker and Pope of the East Purblow
Experiment, and Sir Piper Nicolls, and Munk, the editor of the _Daily
Rectification_, sage men all and deep in those mysterious manipulations
and wire-pullings by which the liberal party organization was even then
preparing for itself unusual distrust and dislike, and Horatio Blenker
was tenoring away after his manner about a case of right and conscience,
"Blenking like Winking" was how a silent member had put it once to
Brumley in a gust of hostile criticism. "Practically if she marries
again, she is a pauper," struck on Brumley's ears.
"Of course," said Mr. Brumley, and stopped eating.
"I don't know if you remember the particulars of the Astor case," began
Munk....
Never had Mr. Brumley come so frankly to eavesdropping. But he heard no
more of Lady Harman. Munk had to quote the rights and wrongs of various
American wills, and then Mr. Pope seized his opportunity. "At East
Purblow," he went on, "in quite a number of instances we had to envisage
this problem of the widow----"
Mr. Brumley pushed back his plate and strolled towards the desk.
It was exactly what he might have expected, what indeed had been at the
back of his mind all along, and on the whole he was glad. Naturally she
hesitated; naturally she wanted time to think, and as naturally it was
impossible for her to tell him what it was she was thinking about.
They would marry. They must marry. Love has claims supreme over all
other claims and he felt no doubt that for her his comparative poverty
of two thousand a year would mean infinitely more happiness than she
had ever known or could know with Sir Isaac's wealth. She was reluctant,
of course, to become dependent upon him until he made it clear to her
what infinite pleasure it would be for him to supply her needs. Should
he write to her forthwith? He outlined a letter in his mind, a very fine
and generous letter, good phrases came, and then he reflected that it
would be difficult to explain to her just how he had learnt of her
peculiar situation. It would be far more seemly to wait either for a
public announcement or for some intimation from her.
And then he began to realize that this meant the end of all their work
at the Hostels. In his first satisfaction at escaping that possible
great motor-car and all the superfluities of Sir Isaac's accumulation,
he had forgotten that side of the business....
When one came to think it over, the Hostels did complicate the problem.
It was ingenious of Sir Isaac....
It was infernally ingenious of Sir Isaac....
He could not remain in the club for fear that somebody might presently
come talking to him and interrupt his train of thought. He went out into
the streets.
These Hostels upset everything.
What he had supposed to be a way of escape was really the mouth of a
net.
Whichever way they turned Sir Isaac crippled them....
§4
Mr. Brumley grew so angry that presently even the strangers in the
street annoyed him. He turned his face homeward. He hated dilemmas; he
wanted always to deny them, to thrust them aside, to take impossible
third courses.
"For three years," shouted Mr. Brumley, free at last in his study to
give way to his rage, "for three years I've been making her care for
these things. And then--and then--they turn against me!"
A violent, incredibly undignified wrath against the dead man seized him.
He threw books about the room. He cried out vile insults and mingled
words of an unfortunate commonness with others of extreme rarity. He
wanted to go off to Kensal Green and hammer at the grave there and tell
the departed knight exactly what he thought of him. Then presently he
became calmer, he lit a pipe, picked up the books from the floor, and
meditated revenges upon Sir Isaac's memory. I deplore my task of
recording these ungracious moments in Mr. Brumley's love history. I
deplore the ease with which men pass from loving and serving women to an
almost canine fight for them. It is the ugliest essential of romance.
There is indeed much in the human heart that I deplore. But Mr. Brumley
was exasperated by disappointment. He was sore, he was raw. Driven by an
intolerable desire to explore every possibility of the situation, full
indeed of an unholy vindictiveness, he went off next morning with
strange questions to Maxwell Hartington.
He put the case as a general case.
"Lady Harman?" said Maxwell Hartington.
"No, not particularly Lady Harman. A general principle. What are
people--what are women tied up in such a way to do?"
Precedents were quoted and possibilities weighed. Mr. Brumley was
flushed, vague but persistent.
"Suppose," he said, "that they love each other passionately--and their
work, whatever it may be, almost as passionately. Is there no way----?"
"He'll have a _dum casta_ clause right enough," said Maxwell Hartington.
"_Dum----? Dum casta!_ But, oh! anyhow that's out of the
question--absolutely," said Mr. Brumley.
"Of course," said Maxwell Hartington, leaning back in his chair and
rubbing the ball of his thumb into one eye. "Of course--nobody ever
enforces these _dum casta_ clauses. There isn't anyone to enforce them.
Ever."--He paused and then went on, speaking apparently to the array of
black tin boxes in the dingy fixtures before him. "Who's going to watch
you? That's what I always ask in these cases. Unless the lady goes and
does things right under the noses of these trustees they aren't going to
bother. Even Sir Isaac I suppose hasn't provided funds for a private
detective. Eh? You said something?"
"Nothing," said Mr. Brumley.
"Well, why should they start a perfectly rotten action like that,"
continued Maxwell Hartington, now addressing himself very earnestly to
his client, "when they've only got to keep quiet and do their job and be
comfortable. In these matters, Brumley, as in most matters affecting the
relations of men and women, people can do absolutely what they like
nowadays, absolutely, unless there's someone about ready to make a row.
Then they can't do anything. It hardly matters if they don't do
anything. A row's a row and damned disgraceful. If there isn't a row,
nothing's disgraceful. Of course all these laws and regulations and
institutions and arrangements are just ways of putting people at the
mercy of blackmailers and jealous and violent persons. One's only got to
be a lawyer for a bit to realize that. Still that's not _our_ business.
That's psychology. If there aren't any jealous and violent persons
about, well, then no ordinary decent person is going to worry what you
do. No decent person ever does. So far as I can gather the only
barbarian in this case is the testator--now in Kensal Green. With
additional precautions I suppose in the way of an artistic but
thoroughly massive monument presently to be added----"
"He'd--turn in his grave."
"Let him. No trustees are obliged to take action on _that_. I don't
suppose they'd know if he did. I've never known a trustee bother yet
about post-mortem movements of any sort. If they did, we'd all be having
Prayers for the Dead. Fancy having to consider the subsequent
reflections of the testator!"
"Well anyhow," said Mr. Brumley, after a little pause, "such a breach,
such a proceeding is out of the question--absolutely out of the
question. It's unthinkable."
"Then why did you come here to ask me about it?" demanded Maxwell
Hartington, beginning to rub the other eye in an audible and unpleasant
manner.
§5
When at last Mr. Brumley was face to face with Lady Harman again, a vast
mephitic disorderly creation of anticipations, intentions, resolves,
suspicions, provisional hypotheses, urgencies, vindications, and wild
and whirling stuff generally vanished out of his mind. There beside the
raised seat in the midst of the little rock garden where they had talked
together five years before, she stood waiting for him, this tall simple
woman he had always adored since their first encounter, a little strange
and shy now in her dead black uniform of widowhood, but with her honest
eyes greeting him, her friendly hands held out to him. He would have
kissed them but for the restraining presence of Snagsby who had brought
him to her; as it was it seemed to him that the phantom of a kiss passed
like a breath between them. He held her hands for a moment and
relinquished them.
"It is so good to see you," he said, and they sat down side by side. "I
am very glad to see you again."
Then for a little while they sat in silence.
Mr. Brumley had imagined and rehearsed this meeting in many different
moods. Now, he found none of his premeditated phrases served him, and it
was the lady who undertook the difficult opening.
"I could not see you before," she began. "I did not want to see anyone."
She sought to explain. "I was strange. Even to myself. Suddenly----" She
came to the point. "To find oneself free.... Mr. Brumley,--_it was
wonderful!_"
He did not interrupt her and presently she went on again.
"You see," she said, "I have become a human being----owning myself. I
had never thought what this change would be to me.... It has been----.
It has been--like being born, when one hadn't realized before that one
wasn't born.... Now--now I can act. I can do this and that. I used to
feel as though I was on strings--with somebody able to pull.... There is
no one now able to pull at me, no one able to thwart me...."
Her dark eyes looked among the trees and Mr. Brumley watched her
profile.
"It has been like falling out of a prison from which one never hoped to
escape. I feel like a moth that has just come out of its case,--you know
how they come out, wet and weak but--released. For a time I feel I can
do nothing but sit in the sun."
"It's queer," she repeated, "how one tries to feel differently from what
one really feels, how one tries to feel as one supposes people expect
one to feel. At first I hardly dared look at myself.... I thought I
ought to be sorrowful and helpless.... I am not in the least sorrowful
or helpless....
"But," said Mr. Brumley, "are you so free?"
"Yes."
"Altogether?"
"As free now--as a man."
"But----people are saying in London----. Something about a will----."
Her lips closed. Her brows and eyes became troubled. She seemed to
gather herself together for an effort and spoke at length, without
looking at him. "Mr. Brumley," she said, "before I knew anything of the
will----. On the very evening when Isaac died----. I knew----I would
never marry again. Never."
Mr. Brumley did not stir. He remained regarding her with a mournful
expression.
"I was sure of it then," she said, "I knew nothing about the will. I
want you to understand that--clearly."
She said no more. The still pause lengthened. She forced herself to meet
his eyes.
"I thought," he said after a silent scrutiny, and left her to imagine
what he had thought....
"But," he urged to her protracted silence, "you _care_?"
She turned her face away. She looked at the hand lying idle upon her
crape-covered knee. "You are my dearest friend," she said very softly.
"You are almost my only friend. But----. I can never go into marriage
any more...."
"My dear," he said, "the marriage you have known----."
"No," she said. "No sort of marriage."
Mr. Brumley heaved a profound sigh.
"Before I had been a widow twenty-four hours, I began to realize that I
was an escaped woman. It wasn't the particular marriage.... It was any
marriage.... All we women are tied. Most of us are willing to be tied
perhaps, but only as people are willing to be tied to life-belts in a
wreck--from fear from drowning. And now, I am just one of the free
women, like the women who can earn large incomes, or the women who
happen to own property. I've paid my penalties and my service is
over.... I knew, of course, that you would ask me this. It isn't that I
don't care for you, that I don't love your company and your help--and
the love and the kindness...."
"Only," he said, "although it is the one thing I desire, although it is
the one return you can make me----. But whatever I have done--I have
done willingly...."
"My dear!" cried Mr. Brumley, breaking out abruptly at a fresh point, "I
want you to marry me. I want you to be mine, to be my dear close
companion, the care of my life, the beauty in my life.... I can't frame
sentences, my dear. You know, you know.... Since first I saw you, talked
to you in this very garden...."
"I don't forget a thing," she answered. "It has been my life as well as
yours. Only----"
The grip of her hand tightened on the back of their seat. She seemed to
be examining her thumb intently. Her voice sank to a whisper. "I won't
marry you," she said.
§6
Mr. Brumley leant back, then he bent forward in a desperate attitude
with his hands and arms thrust between his knees, then suddenly he
recovered, stood up and then knelt with one knee upon the seat. "What
are you going to do with me then?" he asked.
"I want you to go on being my friend."
"I can't."
"You can't?"
"No,--I've _hoped_."
And then with something almost querulous in his voice, he repeated, "My
dear, I want you to marry me and I want now nothing else in the world."
She was silent for a moment. "Mr. Brumley," she said, looking up at him,
"have you no thought for our Hostels?"
Mr. Brumley as I have said hated dilemmas. He started to his feet, a man
stung. He stood in front of her and quivered extended hands at her.
"What do such things matter," he cried, "when a man is in love?"
She shrank a little from him. "But," she asked, "haven't they always
mattered?"
"Yes," he expostulated; "but these Hostels, these Hostels.... We've
started them--isn't that good enough? We've set them going...."
"Do you know," she asked, "what would happen to the hostels if I were to
marry?"
"They would go on," he said.
"They would go to a committee. Named. It would include Mrs. Pembrose....
Don't you see what would happen? He understood the case so well...."
Mr. Brumley seemed suddenly shrunken. "He understood too well," he said.
He looked down at her soft eyes, at her drooping gracious form, and it
seemed to him that indeed she was made for love and that it was
unendurable that she should be content to think of friendship and
freedom as the ultimate purposes of her life....
§7
Presently these two were walking in the pine-woods beyond the garden and
Mr. Brumley was discoursing lamentably of love, this great glory that
was denied them.
The shade of perplexity deepened in her dark eyes as she listened. Ever
and again she seemed about to speak and then checked herself and let him
talk on.
He spoke of the closeness of love and the deep excitement of love and
how it filled the soul with pride and the world with wonder, and of the
universal right of men and women to love. He told of his dreams and his
patience, and of the stormy hopes that would not be suppressed when he
heard that Sir Isaac was dead. And as he pictured to himself the lost
delights at which he hinted, as he called back those covert
expectations, he forgot that she had declared herself resolved upon
freedom at any cost, and his rage against Sir Isaac, who had possessed
and wasted all that he would have cherished so tenderly, grew to nearly
uncontrollable proportions. "Here was your life," he said, "your
beautiful life opening and full--full of such dear seeds of delight and
wonder, calling for love, ready for love, and there came this _Clutch_,
this Clutch that embodied all the narrow meanness of existence, and
gripped and crumpled you and spoilt you.... For I tell you my dear you
don't know; you don't begin to know...."
He disregarded her shy eyes, giving way to his gathered wrath.
"And he conquers! This little monster of meanness, he conquers to the
end--his dead hand, his dead desires, out of the grave they hold you!
Always, always, it is Clutch that conquers; the master of life! I was a
fool to dream, a fool to hope. I forgot. I thought only of you and
I--that perhaps you and I----"
He did not heed her little sound of protest. He went on to a bitter
denunciation of the rule of jealousy in the world, forgetting that the
sufferer under that rule in this case was his own consuming jealousy.
That was life. Life was jealousy. It was all made up of fierce
graspings, fierce suspicions, fierce resentments; men preyed upon one
another even as the beasts they came from; reason made its crushed way
through their conflict, crippled and wounded by their blows at one
another. The best men, the wisest, the best of mankind, the stars of
human wisdom, were but half ineffectual angels carried on the shoulders
and guided by the steps of beasts. One might dream of a better world of
men, of civilizations and wisdom latent in our passion-strained minds,
of calms and courage and great heroical conquests that might come, but
they lay tens of thousands of years away and we had to live, we had to
die, no more than a herd of beasts tormented by gleams of knowledge we
could never possess, of happiness for which we had no soul. He grew more
and more eloquent as these thoughts sprang and grew in his mind.
"Of course I am absurd," he cried. "All men are absurd. Man is the
absurd animal. We have parted from primordial motives--lust and hate and
hunger and fear, and from all the tragic greatness of uncontrollable
fate and we, we've got nothing to replace them. We are comic--comic!
Ours is the stage of comedy in life's history, half lit and
blinded,--and we fumble. As absurd as a kitten with its poor little head
in a bag. There's your soul of man! Mewing. We're all at it, the poets,
the teachers. How can anyone hope to escape? Why should I escape? What
am I that I should expect to be anything but a thwarted lover, a man
mocked by his own attempts at service? Why should I expect to discover
beauty and think that it won't be snatched away from me? All my life is
comic--the story of this--this last absurdity could it make anything but
a comic history? and yet within me my heart is weeping tears. The
further one has gone, the deeper one wallows in the comic marsh. I am
one of the newer kind of men, one of those men who cannot sit and hug
their credit and their honour and their possessions and be content. I
have seen the light of better things than that, and because of my
vision, because of my vision and for no other reason I am the most
ridiculous of men. Always I have tried to go out from myself to the
world and give. Those early books of mine, those meretricious books in
which I pretended all was so well with the world,--I did them because I
wanted to give happiness and contentment and to be happy in the giving.
And all the watchers and the grippers, the strong silent men and the
calculating possessors of things, the masters of the world, they grinned
at me. How I lied to please! But I tell you for all their grinning, in
my very prostitution there was a better spirit than theirs in their
successes. If I had to live over again----"
He left that hypothesis uncompleted.
"And now," he said, with a curious contrast between his voice and the
exaltation of his sentiments, "now that I am to be your tormented, your
emasculated lover to the very end of things, emasculated by laws I hate
and customs I hate and vile foresights that I despise----"
He paused, his thread lost for a moment.
"Because," he said, "I'm going to do it. I'm going to do what I can. I'm
going to be as you wish me to be, to help you, to serve you.... If you
can't come to meet me, I'll meet you. I can't help but love you, I
can't do without you. Never in my life have I subscribed willingly to
the idea of renunciation. I've hated renunciation. But if there is no
other course but renunciation, renunciation let it be. I'm bitter about
this, bitter to the bottom of my soul, but at least I'll have you know I
love you. Anyhow...."
His voice broke. There were tears in his eyes.
And on the very crest of these magnificent capitulations his soul
rebelled. He turned about so swiftly that for a sentence or so she did
not realize the nature of his change. Her mind remained glowing with her
distressed acceptance of his magnificent nobility.
"I can't," he said.
He flung off his surrenders as a savage might fling off a garment.
"When I think of his children," he said.
"When I think of the world filled by his children, the children you have
borne him--and I--forbidden almost to touch your hand!"
And flying into a passion Mr. Brumley shouted "No!"
"Not even to touch your hand!"
"I won't do it," he assured her. "I won't do it. If I cannot be your
lover--I will go away. I will never see you again. I will do
anything--anything, rather than suffer this degradation. I will go
abroad. I will go to strange places. I will aviate. I will kill
myself--or anything, but I won't endure this. I won't. You see, you ask
too much, you demand more than flesh and blood can stand. I've done my
best to bring myself to it and I can't. I won't have that--that----"
He waved his trembling fingers in the air. He was absolutely unable to
find an epithet pointed enough and bitter enough to stab into the memory
of the departed knight. He thought of him as marble, enthroned at Kensal
Green, with a false dignity, a false serenity, and intolerable triumph.
He wanted something, some monosyllable to expound and strip all that,
some lung-filling sky-splitting monosyllable that one could shout. His
failure increased his exasperation.
"I won't have him grinning, at me," he said at last. "And so, it's one
thing or the other. There's no other choice. But I know your choice. I
see your choice. It's good-bye--and why--why shouldn't I go now?"
He waved his arms about. He was pitifully ridiculous. His face puckered
as an ill-treated little boy's might do. This time it wasn't just the
pathetic twinge that had broken his voice before; he found himself to
his own amazement on the verge of loud, undignified, childish weeping.
He was weeping passionately and noisily; he was over the edge of it, and
it was too late to snatch himself back. The shame which could not
constrain him, overcame him. A preposterous upward gesture of the hands
expressed his despair. And abruptly this unhappy man of letters turned
from her and fled, the most grief-routed of creatures, whooping and
sobbing along a narrow pathway through the trees.
§8
He left behind him an exceedingly distressed and astonished lady. She
had stood with her eyes opening wider and wider at this culminating
exhibition.
"But Mr. Brumley!" she had cried at last. "Mr. Brumley!"
He did not seem to hear her. And now he was running and stumbling along
very fast through the trees, so that in a few minutes he would be out of
sight. Dismay came with the thought that he might presently go out of
sight altogether.
For a moment she seemed to hesitate. Then with a swift decision and a
firm large grasp of the hand, she gathered up her black skirts and set
off after him along the narrow path. She ran. She ran lightly, with a
soft rhythmic fluttering of white and black. The long crêpe bands she
wore in Sir Isaac's honour streamed out behind her.
"But Mr. Brumley," she panted unheard. "Mister Brumley!"
He went from her fast, faster than she could follow, amidst the
sun-dappled pine stems, and as he went he made noises between bellowing
and soliloquy, heedless of any pursuit. All she could hear was a
heart-wringing but inexpressive "Wa, wa, wooh, wa, woo," that burst from
him ever and again. Through a more open space among the trees she
fancied she was gaining upon him, and then as the pines came together
again and were mingled with young spruces, she perceived that he drew
away from her more and more. And he went round a curve and was hidden,
and then visible again much further off, and then hidden----.
She attempted one last cry to him, but her breath failed her, and she
dropped her pace to a panting walk.
Surely he would not go thus into the high road! It was unendurable to
think of him rushing out into the high road--blind with sorrow--it might
be into the very bonnet of a passing automobile.
She passed beyond the pines and scanned the path ahead as far as the
stile. Then she saw him, lying where he had flung himself, face downward
among the bluebells.
"Oh!" she whispered to herself, and put one hand to her heart and drew
nearer.
She was flooded now with that passion of responsibility, with that wild
irrational charity which pours out of the secret depths of a woman's
stirred being.
She came up to him so lightly as to be noiseless. He did not move, and
for a moment she remained looking at him.
Then she said once more, and very gently--
"Mr. Brumley."
He started, listened for a second, turned over, sat up and stared at
her. His face was flushed and his hair extremely ruffled. And a slight
moisture recalled his weeping.
"Mr. Brumley," she repeated, and suddenly there were tears of honest
vexation in her voice and eyes. "You _know_ I cannot do without you."
He rose to his knees, and never, it seemed to him, had she looked so
beautiful. She was a little out of breath, her dusky hair was
disordered, and there was an unwonted expression in her eyes, a strange
mingling of indignation and tenderness. For a moment they stared
unaffectedly at each other, each making discoveries.
"Oh!" he sighed at last; "whatever you please, my dear. Whatever you
please. I'm going to do as you wish, if you wish it, and be your friend
and forget all this"--he waved an arm--"loving."
There were signs of a recrudescence of grief, and, inarticulate as ever,
she sank to her knees close beside him.
"Let us sit quietly among these hyacinths," said Mr. Brumley. "And then
afterwards we will go back to the house and talk ... talk about our
Hostels."
He sat back and she remained kneeling.
"Of course," he said, "I'm yours--to do just as you will with. And we'll
work----. I've been a bit of a stupid brute. We'll work. For all those
people. It will be--oh! a big work, quite a big work. Big enough for us
to thank God for. Only----."
The sight of her panting lips had filled him with a wild desire, that
set every nerve aquivering, and yet for all that had a kind of
moderation, a reasonableness. It was a sisterly thing he had in mind. He
felt that if this one desire could be satisfied, then honour would be
satisfied, that he would cease grudging Sir Isaac--anything....
But for some moments he could not force himself to speak of this desire,
so great was his fear of a refusal.
"There's one thing," he said, and all his being seemed aquiver.
He looked hard at the trampled bluebells about their feet. "Never once,"
he went on, "never once in all these years--have we two
even--once--kissed.... It is such a little thing.... So much."
He stopped, breathless. He could say no more because of the beating of
his heart. And he dared not look at her face....
There was a swift, soft rustling as she moved....
She crouched down upon him and, taking his shoulder in her hand, upset
him neatly backwards, and, doing nothing by halves, had kissed the
astonished Mr. Brumley full upon his mouth.
THE END
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