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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H. G. Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: January 4, 2010 [eBook #30855]
+[Most recently updated: November 17, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Juliet Sutherland, Graeme Mackreth, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN ***
+
+
+
+
+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 I. Introduces Lady Harman
+ Chapter II. The Personality of Sir Isaac
+ Chapter III. Lady Harman at Home
+ Chapter IV. The Beginnings of Lady Harman
+ Chapter V. The World according to Sir Isaac
+ Chapter VI. The Adventurous Afternoon
+ Chapter VII. Lady Harman learns about Herself
+ Chapter VIII. Sir Isaac as Petruchio
+ Chapter IX. Mr. Brumley is troubled by Difficult Ideas
+ Chapter X. Lady Harman comes out
+ Chapter XI. The Last Crisis
+ Chapter XII. Love and a Serious Lady
+
+
+
+
+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
+manœuvres....
+
+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 manœuvring
+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 fœtid 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—vdances,” 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 blonde 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 blonde 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
+
+
+The following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan books by the
+same author, and new fiction.
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+The War in the Air
+
+_Illustrated. 12mo. $1.50 net._
+
+“It is not every man who can write a story of the improbable and make
+it appear probable, and yet that is what Mr. Wells has done in _The War
+in the Air_.”—_The Outlook._
+
+“A more entertaining and original story of the future has probably
+never been written.”—_Town and Country._
+
+“ ... displays that remarkable ingenuity for which Mr. Wells is now
+famous.”—_Washington Star._
+
+“Forcible in the extreme.”—_Baltimore Sun._
+
+“It is an exciting tale, a novel military history.”—_N.Y. Post._
+
+New Worlds for Old
+
+_Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net._
+_Macmillan Standard Library Edition, 50 cents net._
+
+“ ... is a readable, straightaway account of Socialism it is singularly
+informing and all in an undidactic way.”—_Chicago Evening Post._
+
+“The book impresses us less as a defense of Socialism than as a work of
+art. In a literary sense, Mr. Wells has never done anything
+better.”—_Argonaut._
+
+“ ... a very good introduction to Socialism. It will attract and
+interest those who are not of that faith, and correct those who
+are.”—_The Dial._
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+64-66 Fifth Avenue
+New York
+
+
+NEW MACMILLAN FICTION
+
+The Mutiny of the Elsinore
+
+By JACK LONDON, Author of “The Sea Wolf,” “The Call of the Wild,” etc.
+
+_With frontispiece in colors by Anton Fischer. Cloth, 12mo. $1.35 net._
+
+Everyone who remembers _The Sea Wolf_ with pleasure will enjoy this
+vigorous narrative of a voyage from New York around Cape Horn in a
+large sailing vessel. _The Mutiny of the Elsinore_ is the same kind of
+tale as its famous predecessor, and by those who have read it, it is
+pronounced even more stirring. Mr. London is here writing of scenes and
+types of people with which he is very familiar, the sea and ships and
+those who live in ships. In addition to the adventure element, of which
+there is an abundance of the usual London kind, a most satisfying kind
+it is, too, there is a thread of romance involving a wealthy, tired
+young man who takes the trip on the _Elsinore_, and the captain’s
+daughter. The play of incident, on the one hand the ship’s amazing crew
+and on the other the lovers, gives a story in which the interest never
+lags and which demonstrates anew what a master of his art Mr. London
+is.
+
+The Three Sisters
+
+By MAY SINCLAIR, Author of “The Divine Fire,” “The Return of the
+Prodigal,” etc.
+
+_Cloth, 12mo. $1.35 net._
+
+Every reader of _The Divine Fire_, in fact every reader of any of Miss
+Sinclair’s books, will at once accord her unlimited praise for her
+character work. _The Three Sisters_ reveals her at her best. It is a
+story of temperament, made evident not through tiresome analyses but by
+means of a series of dramatic incidents. The sisters of the title
+represent three distinct types of womankind. In their reaction under
+certain conditions Miss Sinclair is not only telling a story of
+tremendous interest but she is really showing a cross section of life.
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+64-66 Fifth Avenue
+New York
+
+
+NEW MACMILLAN FICTION
+
+The Rise of Jennie Cushing
+
+By MARY S. WATTS, Author of “Nathan Burke,” “Van Cleeve,” etc.
+
+_Cloth, 12mo. $1.35 net._
+
+In _Nathan Burke_ Mrs. Watts told with great power the story of a man.
+In this, her new book, she does much the same thing for a woman. Jennie
+Cushing is an exceedingly interesting character, perhaps the most
+interesting of any that Mrs. Watts has yet given us. The novel is her
+life and little else, but it is a life filled with a variety of
+experiences and touching closely many different strata of humankind.
+Throughout it all, from the days when as a thirteen-year-old, homeless,
+friendless waif, Jennie is sent to a reformatory, to the days when her
+beauty is the inspiration of a successful painter, there is in the
+narrative an appeal to the emotions, to the sympathy, to the
+affections, that cannot be gainsaid.
+
+Saturday’s Child
+
+By KATHLEEN NORRIS, Author of “Mother,” “The Treasure,” etc.
+
+_With frontispiece in colors by F. Graham Cootes. Decorated cloth,
+12mo. $1.35 net._
+
+“_Friday’s child is loving and giving,
+Saturday’s child must work for her living._”
+
+The title of Mrs. Norris’s new novel at once indicates its theme. It is
+the story of a girl who has her own way to make in the world. The
+various experiences through which she passes, the various viewpoints
+which she holds until she comes finally to realize that service for
+others is the only thing that counts, are told with that same intimate
+knowledge of character, that healthy optimism and the belief in the
+ultimate goodness of mankind that have distinguished all of this
+author’s writing. The book is intensely alive with human emotions. The
+reader is bound to sympathize with Mrs. Norris’s people because they
+seem like _real_ people and because they are actuated by motives which
+one is able to understand. _Saturday’s Child_ is Mrs. Norris’s longest
+work. Into it has gone the very best of her creative talent. It is a
+volume which the many admirers of _Mother_ will gladly accept.
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+64-66 Fifth Avenue
+New York
+
+
+NEW MACMILLAN FICTION
+
+Thracian Sea
+
+A Novel by JOHN HELSTON, Author of “Aphrodite,” etc.
+
+_With frontispiece in colors. Decorated cloth, 12mo. $1.35 net._
+
+Probably no author to-day has written more powerfully or frankly on the
+conventions of modern society than John Helston, who, however, has
+hitherto confined himself to the medium of verse. In this novel, the
+theme of which occasionally touches upon the same problems—problems
+involving love, freedom of expression, the right to live one’s life in
+one’s own way—he is revealed to be no less a master of the prose form
+than of the poetical. While the book is one for mature minds, the skill
+with which delicate situations are handled and the reserve everywhere
+exhibited remove it from possible criticism even by the most exacting.
+The title, it should be explained, refers to a spirited race horse with
+the fortunes of which the lives of two of the leading characters are
+bound up.
+
+Faces in the Dawn
+
+A Story by HERMANN HAGEDORN
+
+_With frontispiece in colors. Cloth, 12mo. $1.35 net._
+
+A great many people already know Mr. Hagedorn through his verse. _Faces
+in the Dawn_ will, however, be their introduction to him as a novelist.
+The same qualities that have served to raise his poetry above the
+common level help to distinguish this story of a German village. The
+theme of the book is the transformation that was wrought in the lives
+of an irritable, domineering German pastor and his wife through the
+influence of a young German girl and her American lover. Sentiment,
+humor and a human feeling, all present in just the right measure, warm
+the heart and contribute to the enjoyment which the reader derives in
+following the experiences of the well drawn characters.
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+64-66 Fifth Avenue
+New York
+
+
+NEW MACMILLAN FICTION
+
+Metzel Changes His Mind
+
+By RACHEL CAPEN SCHAUFFLER, Author of “The Goodly Fellowship.”
+
+_With frontispiece. Decorated cloth, 12mo. $1.25 net._
+
+The many readers who enjoyed _The Goodly Fellowship_ have been eagerly
+awaiting something more from the pen of the same author. This is at
+last announced. In _Metzel Changes His Mind_, Miss Schauffler
+strengthens the impression made by her first book that she is a writer
+of marked originality. Here again she has provided an unusual setting
+for her tale. The scene is largely laid in a pathological laboratory,
+surely a new background for a romance. It is a background, moreover,
+which is used most effectively by Miss Schauffler in the furtherance of
+her plot. Her characters, too, are as interesting as their
+surroundings—a woman doctor, attractive as well as sensible, a gruff
+old German doctor, suspicious of womankind, and a young American.
+Around these the action centers, though half a dozen others, vividly
+sketched, have a hand in the proceedings. Of course _Metzel Changes His
+Mind_ is a love story, but not of the ordinary type.
+
+Landmarks
+
+By E.V. LUCAS, Author of “Over Bemerton’s,” “London Lavender,” etc.
+
+_Cloth, 12mo. $1.35 net._
+
+Mr. Lucas’s new story combines a number of the most significant
+episodes in the life of the central figure; in other words, those
+events of his career from early childhood to the close of the book
+which have been most instrumental in building up his character and
+experience. The episodes are of every kind, serious, humorous, tender,
+awakening, disillusioning, and they are narrated without any padding
+whatever, each one beginning as abruptly as in life; although in none
+of his previous work has the author been so minute in his social
+observation and narration. A descriptive title precedes each episode,
+as in the moving-picture; and it was in fact while watching a
+moving-picture that Mr. Lucas had the idea of adapting its swift
+selective methods to fiction.
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+64-66 Fifth Avenue
+New York
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN ***
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