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.