Mr. Brumley was moved by a ridiculous impulse, which he just succeeded

in suppressing, to say to Mrs. Sawbridge, “Yes, I admit it looks very

well. But the essential point, you know, is that it isn’t so....”

That it wasn’t so, indeed, entirely dominated his impression of that

nursery. There was Lady Beach-Mandarin winning Lady Harman’s heart by

every rule of the game, rejoicing effusively in those crowning triumphs

of a woman’s being, there was Miss Sawbridge vociferous in support and

Mrs. Sawbridge almost offering to join hands in rapturous benediction,

and there was Lady Harman wearing her laurels, not indeed with

indifference but with a curious detachment. One might imagine her

genuinely anxious to understand why Lady Beach-Mandarin was in such a

stupendous ebullition. One might have supposed her a mere cold-hearted

intellectual if it wasn’t that something in her warm beauty absolutely

forbade any such interpretation. There came to Mr. Brumley again a

thought that had occurred to him first when Sir Isaac and Lady Harman

had come together to Black Strand, which was that life had happened to

this woman before she was ready for it, that her mind some years after

her body was now coming to womanhood, was teeming with curiosity about

all she had hitherto accepted, about Sir Isaac, about her children and

all her circumstances....

There was a recapitulation of the invitations, a renewed offering of

outlooks and vistas and Agatha Alimony. “You’ll not forget,” insisted

Lady Beach-Mandarin. “You’ll not afterwards throw us over.”

“No,” said Lady Harman, with that soft determination of hers. “I’ll

certainly come.”

“I’m so sorry, so very sorry, not to have seen Sir Isaac,” Lady

Beach-Mandarin insisted.

The raid had accomplished its every object and was drifting doorward.

For a moment Lady Beach-Mandarin desisted from Lady Harman and threw

her whole being into an eddying effort to submerge the already

subjugated Mrs. Sawbridge. Miss Sawbridge was behind up the oak

staircase explaining Sir Isaac’s interest in furniture-buying to Miss

Sharsper. Mr. Brumley had his one moment with Lady Harman.

“I gather,” he said, and abandoned that sentence.

“I hope,” he said, “that you will have my little house down there. I

like to think of _you_—walking in my garden.”

“I shall love that garden,” she said. “But I shall feel unworthy.”

“There are a hundred little things I want to tell you—about it.”

Then all the others seemed to come into focus again, and with a quick

mutual understanding—Mr. Brumley was certain of its mutuality—they said

no more to one another. He was entirely satisfied he had said enough.

He had conveyed just everything that was needed to excuse and explain

and justify his presence in that company.... Upon a big table in the

hall he noticed that a silk hat and an umbrella had appeared since

their arrival. He glanced at Miss Sharsper but she was keenly occupied

with the table legs. He began to breathe freely again when the partings

were over and he could get back into the automobile. “Toot,” said the

horn and he made a last grave salutation to the slender white figure on

the steps. The great butler stood at the side of the entrance and a

step or so below her, with the air of a man who has completed a

difficult task. A small attentive valet hovered out of the shadows

behind.

§5

(A fragment of the conversation in Lady Beach-Mandarin’s returning

automobile may be recorded in a parenthesis here.

“But did you see Sir Isaac?” she cried, abruptly.

“Sir Isaac?” defended the startled Mr. Brumley. “Where?”

“He was dodging about in the garden all the time.”

“Dodging about the garden!... I saw a sort of gardener——”

“I’m sure I saw Him,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin. “Positive. He hid away

in the mushroom shed. The one you found locked.”

“But my _dear_ Lady Beach-Mandarin!” protested Mr. Brumley with the air

of one who listens to preposterous suggestions. “What can make you

think——?”

“Oh I _know_ I saw him,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin. “I know. He seemed

all over the place. Like a Boy Scout. Didn’t you see him too, Susan?”

Miss Sharsper was roused from deep preoccupation. “What, dear?” she

asked.

“See Sir Isaac?”

“Sir Isaac?”

“Dodging about the garden when we went through it.”

The novelist reflected. “I didn’t notice,” she said. “I was busy

observing things.”)

§6

Lady Beach-Mandarin’s car passed through the open gates and was

swallowed up in the dusty stream of traffic down Putney Hill; the great

butler withdrew, the little manservant vanished, Mrs. Sawbridge and her

elder daughter had hovered and now receded from the back of the hall;

Lady Harman remained standing thoughtfully in the large

Bulwer-Lyttonesque doorway of her house. Her face expressed a vague

expectation. She waited to be addressed from behind.

Then she became aware of the figure of her husband standing before her.

He had come out of the laurels in front. His pale face was livid with

anger, his hair dishevelled, there was garden mould and greenness upon

his knees and upon his extended hands.

She was startled out of her quiet defensiveness. “Why, Isaac!” she

cried. “Where have you been?”

It enraged him further to be asked so obviously unnecessary a question.

He forgot his knightly chivalry.

“What the Devil do you mean,” he cried, “by chasing me all round the

garden?”

“Chasing you? All round the garden?”

“You heard me breaking my shins on that infernal flower-pot you put for

me, and out you shot with all your pack of old women and chased me

round the garden. What do you mean by it?”

“I didn’t think you were in the garden.”

“Any Fool could have told I was in the garden. Any Fool might have

known I was in the garden. If I wasn’t in the garden, then where the

Devil was I? Eh? Where else could I be? Of course I was in the garden,

and what you wanted was to hunt me down and make a fool of me. And look

at me! Look, I say! Look at my hands!”

Lady Harman regarded the lord of her being and hesitated before she

answered. She knew what she had to say would enrage him, but she had

come to a point in their relationship when a husband’s good temper is

no longer a supreme consideration. “You’ve had plenty of time to wash

them,” she said.

“Yes,” he shouted. “And instead I kept ’em to show you. I stayed out

here to see the last of that crew for fear I might run against ’em in

the house. Of all the infernal old women——”

His lips were providentially deprived of speech. He conveyed his

inability to express his estimate of Lady Beach-Mandarin by a gesture

of despair.

“If—if anyone calls and I am at home I have to receive them,” said Lady

Harman, after a moment’s deliberation.

“Receiving them’s one thing. Making a Fool of yourself——”

His voice was rising.

“Isaac,” said Lady Harman, leaning forward and then in a low

penetrating whisper, “_Snagsby!_”

(It was the name of the great butler.)

“_Damn_ Snagsby!” hissed Sir Isaac, but dropping his voice and drawing

near to her. What his voice lost in height it gained in intensity.

“What I say is this, Ella, you oughtn’t to have brought that old woman

out into the garden at all——”

“She insisted on coming.”

“You ought to have snubbed her. You ought to have done—anything. How

the Devil was I to get away, once she was through the verandah? There I

was! _Bagged!_”

“You could have come forward.”

“What! And meet _her_!”

“_I_ had to meet her.”

Sir Isaac felt that his rage was being frittered away upon details. “If

you hadn’t gone fooling about looking at houses,” he said, and now he

stood very close to her and spoke with a confidential intensity, “you

wouldn’t have got that Holy Terror on our track, see? And now—here we

are!”

He walked past her into the hall, and the little manservant suddenly

materialised in the middle of the space and came forward to brush him

obsequiously. Lady Harman regarded that proceeding for some moments in

a preoccupied manner and then passed slowly into the classical

conservatory. She felt that in view of her engagements the discussion

of Lady Beach-Mandarin was only just beginning.

§7

She reopened it herself in the long drawing-room into which they both

drifted after Sir Isaac had washed the mould from his hands. She went

to a French window, gathered courage, it seemed, by a brief

contemplation of the garden, and turned with a little effort.

“I don’t agree,” she said, “with you about Lady Beach-Mandarin.”

Sir Isaac appeared surprised. He had assumed the incident was closed.

“_How?_” he asked compactly.

“I don’t agree,” said Lady Harman. “She seems friendly and jolly.”

“She’s a Holy Terror,” said Sir Isaac. “I’ve seen her twice, Lady

Harman.”

“A call of that kind,” his wife went on, “—when there are cards left

and so on—has to be returned.”

“You won’t,” said Sir Isaac.

Lady Harman took a blind-tassel in her hand,—she felt she had to hold

on to something. “In any case,” she said, “I should have to do that.”

“In any case?”

She nodded. “It would be ridiculous not to. We——It is why we know so

few people—because we don’t return calls....”

Sir Isaac paused before answering. “We don’t _want_ to know a lot of

people,” he said. “And, besides——Why! anybody could make us go running

about all over London calling on them, by just coming and calling on

us. No sense in it. She’s come and she’s gone, and there’s an end of

it.”

“No,” said Lady Harman, gripping her tassel more firmly. “I shall have

to return that call.”

“I tell you, you won’t.”

“It isn’t only a call,” said Lady Harman. “You see, I promised to go

there to lunch.”

“Lunch!”

“And to go to a meeting with her.”

“Go to a meeting!”

“—of a society called the Social Friends. And something else. Oh! to go

to the committee meetings of her Shakespear Dinners Movement.”

“I’ve heard of that.”

“She said you supported it—or else of course....”

Sir Isaac restrained himself with difficulty.

“Well,” he said at last, “you’d better write and tell her you can’t do

any of these things; that’s all.”

He thrust his hands into his trousers pockets and walked to the French

window next to the one in which she stood, with an air of having

settled this business completely, and being now free for the tranquil

contemplation of horticulture. But Lady Harman had still something to

say.

“I am going to _all_ these things,” she said. “I said I would, and I

will.”

He didn’t seem immediately to hear her. He made the little noise with

his teeth that was habitual to him. Then he came towards her. “This is

your infernal sister,” he said.

Lady Harman reflected. “No,” she decided. “It’s myself.”

“I might have known when we asked her here,” said Sir Isaac with an

habitual disregard of her judgments that was beginning to irritate her

more and more. “You can’t take on all these people. They’re not the

sort of people we want to know.”

“I want to know them,” said Lady Harman.

“I don’t.”

“I find them interesting,” Lady Harman said. “And I’ve promised.”

“Well you oughtn’t to have promised without consulting me.”

Her reply was the material of much subsequent reflection on the part of

Sir Isaac. There was something in her manner....

“You see, Isaac,” she said, “you kept so out of the way....”

In the pause that followed her words, Mrs. Sawbridge appeared from the

garden smiling with a determined amiability, and bearing a great bunch

of the best roses (which Sir Isaac hated to have picked) in her hands.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

The Beginnings of Lady Harman

§1

Lady Harman had been married when she was just eighteen.

Mrs. Sawbridge was the widow of a solicitor who had been killed in a

railway collision while his affairs, as she put it, were unsettled; and

she had brought up her two daughters in a villa at Penge upon very

little money, in a state of genteel protest. Ellen was the younger. She

had been a sturdy dark-eyed doll-dragging little thing and had then

shot up very rapidly. She had gone to a boarding-school at Wimbledon

because Mrs. Sawbridge thought the Penge day-school had made Georgina

opiniated and unladylike, besides developing her muscular system to an

unrefined degree. The Wimbledon school was on less progressive lines,

and anyhow Ellen grew taller and more feminine than her sister and by

seventeen was already womanly, dignified and intensely admired by a

number of schoolmates and a large circle of their cousins and brothers.

She was generally very good and only now and then broke out with a

venturesome enterprise that hurt nobody. She got out of a skylight, for

example, and perambulated the roof in the moonshine to see how it felt

and did one or two other little things of a similar kind. Otherwise her

conduct was admirable and her temper in those days was always

contagiously good. That attractiveness which Mr. Brumley felt, was

already very manifest, and a little hindered her in the attainment of

other distinctions. Most of her lessons were done for her by willing

slaves, and they were happy slaves because she abounded in rewarding

kindnesses; but on the other hand the study of English literature and

music was almost forced upon her by the zeal of the two visiting

Professors of these subjects.

And at seventeen, which is the age when girls most despise the

boyishness of young men, she met Sir Isaac and filled him with an

invincible covetousness....

§2

The school at Wimbledon was a large, hushed, faded place presided over

by a lady of hidden motives and great exterior calm named Miss Beeton

Clavier. She was handsome without any improper attractiveness, an

Associate in Arts of St. Andrew’s University and a cousin of Mr.

Blenker of the _Old Country Gazette_. She was assisted by several

resident mistresses and two very carefully married visiting masters for

music and Shakespear, and playground and shrubbery and tennis-lawn were

all quite effectively hidden from the high-road. The curriculum

included Latin Grammar—nobody ever got to the reading of books in that

formidable tongue—French by an English lady who had been in France,

Hanoverian German by an irascible native, the more seemly aspects of

English history and literature, arithmetic, algebra, political economy

and drawing. There was no hockey played within the precincts, science

was taught without the clumsy apparatus or objectionable diagrams that

are now so common, and stress was laid upon the carriage of the young

ladies and the iniquity of speaking in raised voices. Miss Beeton

Clavier deprecated the modern “craze for examinations,” and released

from such pressure her staff did not so much give courses of lessons as

circle in a thorough-looking and patient manner about their subjects.

This turn-spit quality was reflected in the school idiom; one did not

learn algebra or Latin or so-forth, one _did_ algebra, one was _put

into_ Latin....

The girls went through this system of exercises and occupations,

evasively and as it were _sotto voce_, making friends, making enemies,

making love to one another, following instincts that urged them to find

out something about life—in spite of the most earnest

discouragement.... None of them believed for a moment that the school

was preparing them for life. Most of them regarded it as a long

inexplicable passage of blank, grey occupations through which they had

to pass. Beyond was the sunshine.

Ellen gathered what came to her. She realized a certain beauty in music

in spite of the biographies of great musicians, the technical

enthusiasms and the general professionalism of her teacher; the

literature master directed her attention to memoirs and through these

she caught gleams of understanding when the characters of history did

for brief intervals cease to be rigidly dignified and institutional

like Miss Beeton Clavier and became human—like schoolfellows. And one

little spectacled mistress, who wore art dresses and adorned her

class-room with flowers, took a great fancy to her, talked to her with

much vagueness and emotion of High Aims, and lent her with an

impressive furtiveness the works of Emerson and Shelley and a pamphlet

by Bernard Shaw. It was a little difficult to understand what these

writers were driving at, they were so dreadfully clever, but it was

clear they reflected criticism upon the silences of her mother and the

rigidities of Miss Beeton Clavier.

In that suppressed and evasive life beneath the outer forms and

procedures of school and home, there came glimmerings of something that

seemed charged with the promise of holding everything together, the

key, religion. She was attracted to religion, much more attracted than

she would confess even to herself, but every circumstance in her

training dissuaded her from a free approach. Her mother treated

religion with a reverence that was almost indistinguishable from

huffiness. She never named the deity and she did not like the mention

of His name: she threw a spell of indelicacy over religious topics that

Ellen never thoroughly cast off. She put God among objectionable

topics—albeit a sublime one. Miss Beeton Clavier sustained this

remarkable suggestion. When she read prayers in school she did so with

the balanced impartiality of one who offers no comment. She seemed

pained as she read and finished with a sigh. Whatever she intended to

convey, she conveyed that even if the divinity was not all He should

be, if, indeed, He was a person almost primitive, having neither the

restraint nor the self-obliteration of a refined gentlewoman, no word

of it should ever pass her lips. And so Ellen as a girl never let her

mind go quite easily into this reconciling core of life, and talked of

it only very rarely and shyly with a few chosen coevals. It wasn’t very

profitable talk. They had a guilty feeling, they laughed a little

uneasily, they displayed a fatal proclivity to stab the swelling

gravity of their souls with some forced and silly jest and so tumble

back to ground again before they rose too high....

Yet great possibilities of faith and devotion stirred already in the

girl’s heart. She thought little of God by day, but had a strange sense

of Him in the starlight; never under the moonlight—that was in no sense

divine—but in the stirring darkness of the stars. And it is remarkable

that after a course of astronomical enlightenment by a visiting master

and descriptions of masses and distances, incredible aching distances,

then even more than ever she seemed to feel God among the stars....

A fatal accident to a schoolfellow turned her mind for a time to the

dark stillnesses of death. The accident happened away in Wales during

the summer holidays; she saw nothing of it, she only knew of its

consequence. Hitherto she had assumed it was the function of girls to

grow up and go out from the grey intermediate state of school work into

freedoms and realities beyond. Death happened, she was aware, to young

people, but not she had thought to the people one knew. This

termination came with a shock. The girl was no great personal loss to

Ellen, they had belonged to different sets and classes, but the

conception of her as lying very very still for ever was a haunting one.

Ellen felt she did not want to be still for evermore in a confined

space, with life and sunshine going on all about her and above her, and

it quickened her growing appetite for living to think that she might

presently have to be like that. How stifled one would feel!

It couldn’t be like that.

She began to speculate about that future life upon which religion

insists so much and communicates so little. Was it perhaps in other

planets, under those wonderful, many-mooned, silver-banded skies? She

perceived more and more a kind of absurdity in the existence all about

her. Was all this world a mere make-believe, and would Miss Beeton

Clavier and every one about her presently cast aside a veil? Manifestly

there was a veil. She had a very natural disposition to doubt whether

the actual circumstances of her life were real. Her mother for instance

was so lacking in blood and fire, so very like the stiff paper wrapping

of something else. But if these things were not real, what was real?

What might she not presently do? What might she not presently be?

Perhaps death had something to do with that. Was death perhaps no more

than the flinging off of grotesque outer garments by the newly arrived

guests at the feast of living? She had that feeling that there might be

a feast of living.

These preoccupations were a jealously guarded secret, but they gave her

a quality of slight detachment that added a dreaming dignity to her

dark tall charm.

There were moments of fine, deep excitement that somehow linked

themselves in her mind with these thoughts as being set over against

the things of every day. These too were moments quite different and

separate in quality from delight, from the keen appreciation of flowers

or sunshine or little vividly living things. Daylight seemed to blind

her to them, as they blinded her to starshine. They too had a quality

of reference to things large and remote, distances, unknown mysteries

of light and matter, the thought of mountains, cool white wildernesses

and driving snowstorms, or great periods of time. Such were the

luminous transfigurations that would come to her at the evening service

in church.

The school used to sit in the gallery over against the organist, and

for a year and more Ellen had the place at the corner from which she

could look down the hazy candle-lit vista of the nave and see the

congregation as ranks and ranks of dim faces and vaguely apprehended

clothes, ranks that rose with a peculiar deep and spacious rustle to

sing, and sang with a massiveness of effect she knew in no other music.

Certain hymns in particular seemed to bear her up and carry her into

another larger, more wonderful world: “Heart’s Abode, Celestial Salem”

for example, a world of luminous spiritualized sensuousness. Of such a

quality she thought the Heavenly City must surely be, away there and

away. But this persuasion differed from those other mystical

intimations in its detachment from any sense of the divinity. And

remarkably mixed up with it and yet not belonging to it, antagonistic

and kindred like a silver dagger stuck through a mystically illuminated

parchment, was the angelic figure of a tall fair boy in a surplice who

stood out amidst the choir below and sang, it seemed to her, alone.

She herself on these occasions of exaltation would be far too deeply

moved to sing. She was inundated by a swimming sense of boundaries

nearly transcended, as though she was upon the threshold of a different

life altogether, the real enduring life, and as though if she could

only maintain herself long enough in this shimmering exaltation she

would get right over; things would happen, things that would draw her

into that music and magic and prevent her ever returning to everyday

life again. There one would walk through music between great candles

under eternal stars, hand-in-hand with a tall white figure. But nothing

ever did happen to make her cross that boundary; the hymn ceased, the

“Amen” died away, as if a curtain fell. The congregation subsided.

Reluctantly she would sink back into her seat....

But all through the sermon, to which she never gave the slightest

attention, her mind would feel mute and stilled, and she used to come

out of church silent and preoccupied, returning unwillingly to the

commonplaces of life....

§3

Ellen met Sir Isaac—in the days before he was Sir Isaac—at the house of

a school friend with whom she was staying at Hythe, and afterwards her

mother and sister came down and joined her for a fortnight at a

Folkstone boarding house. Mr. Harman had caught a chill while

inspecting his North Wales branches and had come down with his mother

to recuperate. He and his mother occupied a suite of rooms in the most

imposing hotel upon the Leas. Ellen’s friend’s people were partners in

a big flour firm and had a pleasant new æsthetic white and green house

of rough-cast and slates in the pretty country beyond the Hythe golf

links, and Ellen’s friend’s father was deeply anxious to develop

amiable arrangements with Mr. Harman. There was much tennis, much

croquet, much cycling to the Hythe sea-wall and bathing from little

tents and sitting about in the sunshine, and Mr. Harman had his first

automobile with him—they were still something of a novelty in those

days—and was urgent to take picnic parties to large lonely places on

the downs.

There were only two young men in that circle, one was engaged to

Ellen’s friend’s sister, and the other was bound to a young woman

remote in Italy; neither was strikingly attractive and both regarded

Harman with that awe tempered by undignified furtive derision which

wealth and business capacity so often inspire in the young male. At

first he was quiet and simply looked at her, as it seemed any one might

look, then she perceived he looked at her intently and continuously,

and was persistently close to her and seemed always to be trying to do

things to please her and attract her attention. And then from the

general behaviour of the women about her, her mother and Mrs. Harman

and her friend’s mother and her friend’s sister, rather than from any

one specific thing they said, it grew upon her consciousness that this

important and fabulously wealthy person, who was also it seemed to her

so modest and quiet and touchingly benevolent, was in love with her.

“Your daughter,” said Mrs. Harman repeatedly to Mrs. Sawbridge, “is

charming, perfectly charming.”

“She’s _such_ a child,” said Mrs. Sawbridge repeatedly in reply.

And she told Ellen’s friend’s mother apropos of Ellen’s friend’s

engagement that she wanted all her daughters to marry for love, she

didn’t care what the man had so long as they loved each other, and

meanwhile she took the utmost care that Isaac had undisputed access to

the girl, was watchfully ready to fend off anyone else, made her take

everything he offered and praised him quietly and steadily to her. She

pointed out how modest and unassuming he was, in spite of the fact that

he was “controlling an immense business” and in his own particular

trade “a perfect Napoleon.”

“For all one sees to the contrary he might be just a private gentleman.

And he feeds thousands and thousands of people....”

“Sooner or later,” said Mrs. Harman, “I suppose Isaac will marry. He’s

been such a good son to me that I shall feel it dreadfully, and yet,

you know, I wish I could see him settled. Then _I_ shall settle—in a

little house of my own somewhere. Just a little place. I don’t believe

in coming too much between son and daughter-in-law....”

Harman’s natural avidity was tempered by a proper modesty. He thought

Ellen so lovely and so infinitely desirable—and indeed she was—that it

seemed incredible to him that he could ever get her. And yet he had got

most of the things in life he had really and urgently wanted. His

doubts gave his love-making an eager, lavish and pathetic delicacy. He

watched her minutely in an agony of appreciation. He felt ready to give

or promise anything.

She was greatly flattered by his devotion and she liked the surprises

and presents he heaped upon her extremely. Also she was sorry for him

beyond measure. In the deep recesses of her heart was an oleographic

ideal of a large brave young man with blue eyes, a wave in his fair

hair, a wonderful tenor voice and—she could not help it, she tried to

look away and not think of it—a broad chest. With him she intended to

climb mountains. So clearly she could not marry Mr. Harman. And because

of that she tried to be very kind indeed to him, and when he faltered

that she could not possibly care for him, she reassured him so vaguely

as to fill him with wild gusts of hope and herself with a sense of

pledges. He told her one day between two sets of tennis—which he played

with a certain tricky skill—that he felt that the very highest

happiness he could ever attain would be to die at her feet. Presently

her pity and her sense of responsibility had become so large and deep

that the dream hero with the blue eyes was largely overlaid and hidden

by them.

Then, at first a little indirectly and then urgently and with a voice

upon the edge of tears, Harman implored her to marry him. She had never

before in the whole course of her life seen a grown-up person on the

very verge of tears. She felt that the release of such deep fountains

as that must be averted at any cost. She felt that for a mere

schoolgirl like herself, a backward schoolgirl who had never really

mastered quadratics, to cause these immense and tragic distresses was

abominable. She was sure her former headmistress would disapprove very

highly of her. “I will make you a queen,” said Harman, “I will give all

my life to your happiness.”

She believed he would.

She refused him for the second time but with a weakening certainty in a

little white summer-house that gave a glimpse of the sea between green

and wooded hills. She sat and stared at the sea after he had left her,

through a mist of tears; so pitiful did he seem. He had beaten his poor

fists on the stone table and then caught up her hand, kissed it and

rushed out.... She had not dreamt that love could hurt like that.

And all that night—that is to say for a full hour before her wet

eyelashes closed in slumber—she was sleepless with remorse for the

misery she was causing him.

The third time when he said with suicidal conviction that he could not

live without her, she burst into tears of pity and yielded. And

instantly, amazingly, with the famished swiftness of a springing

panther he caught her body into his arms and kissed her on the lips....

§4

They were married with every circumstance of splendour, with very

expensive music, and portraits in the illustrated newspapers and a

great glitter of favours and carriages. The bridegroom was most

thoughtful and generous about the Sawbridge side of the preparations.

Only one thing was a little perplexing. In spite of his impassioned

impatience he delayed the wedding. Full of dark hints and a portentous

secret, he delayed the wedding for twenty-five whole days in order that

it should follow immediately upon the publication of the birthday

honours list. And then they understood.

“You will be Lady Harman,” he exulted; “_Lady_ Harman. I would have

given double.... I have had to back the _Old Country Gazette_ and I

don’t care a rap. I’d have done anything. I’d have bought the rotten

thing outright.... Lady Harman!”

He remained loverlike until the very eve of their marriage. Then

suddenly it seemed to her that all the people she cared for in the

world were pushing her away from them towards him, giving her up,

handing her over. He became—possessive. His abjection changed to pride.

She perceived that she was going to be left tremendously alone with

him, with an effect, as if she had stepped off a terrace on to what she

believed to be land and had abruptly descended into very deep water....

And while she was still feeling quite surprised by everything and

extremely doubtful whether she wanted to go any further with this

business, which was manifestly far more serious, out of all proportion

more serious, than anything that had ever happened to her before—and

_unpleasant_, abounding indeed in crumpling indignities and horrible

nervous stresses, it dawned upon her that she was presently to be that

strange, grown-up and preoccupied thing, a mother, and that girlhood

and youth and vigorous games, mountains and swimming and running and

leaping were over for her as far as she could see for ever....

Both the prospective grandmothers became wonderfully kind and helpful

and intimate, preparing with gusto and an agreeable sense of delegated

responsibility for the child that was to give them all the pride of

maternity again and none of its inconveniences.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

The World according to Sir Isaac

§1

Her marriage had carried Ellen out of the narrow world of home and

school into another that had seemed at first vastly larger, if only on

account of its freedom from the perpetual achievement of small

economies. Hitherto the urgent necessity of these had filled life with

irksome precautions and clipped the wings of every dream. This new life

into which Sir Isaac led her by the hand promised not only that release

but more light, more colour, more movement, more people. There was to

be at any rate so much in the way of rewards and compensation for her

pity of him.

She found the establishment at Putney ready for her. Sir Isaac had not

consulted her about it, it had been his secret, he had prepared it for

her with meticulous care as a surprise. They returned from a honeymoon

in Skye in which the attentions of Sir Isaac and the comforts of a

first-class hotel had obscured a marvellous background of sombre

mountain and wide stretches of shining sea. Sir Isaac had been very

fond and insistent and inseparable, and she was doing her best to

conceal a strange distressful jangling of her nerves which she now

feared might presently dispose her to scream. Sir Isaac had been

goodness itself, but how she craved now for solitude! She was under the

impression now that they were going to his mother’s house in Highbury.

Then she thought he would have to go away to business for part of the

day at any rate, and she could creep into some corner and begin to

think of all that had happened to her in these short summer months.

They were met at Euston by his motor-car. “_Home_,” said Sir Isaac,

with a little gleam of excitement, when the more immediate luggage was

aboard.

As they hummed through the West-End afternoon Ellen became aware that

he was whistling through his teeth. It was his invariable indication of

mental activity, and her attention came drifting back from her idle

contemplation of the shoppers and strollers of Piccadilly to link this

already alarming symptom with the perplexing fact that they were

manifestly travelling west.

“But this,” she said presently, “is Knightsbridge.”

“Goes to Kensington,” he replied with attempted indifference.

“But your mother doesn’t live this way.”

“_We_ do,” said Sir Isaac, shining at every point of his face.

“But,” she halted. “Isaac!—where are we going?”

“Home,” he said.

“You’ve not taken a house?”

“Bought it.”

“But,—it won’t be ready!”

“I’ve seen to that.”

“Servants!” she cried in dismay.

“That’s all right.” His face broke into an excited smile. His little

eyes danced and shone. “Everything,” he said.

“But the servants!” she said.

“You’ll see,” he said. “There’s a butler—and everything.”

“A butler!” He could now no longer restrain himself. “I was weeks,” he

said, “getting it ready. Weeks and weeks.... It’s a house.... I’d had

my eye on it before ever I met you. It’s a real _good_ house, Elly....”

The fortunate girl-wife went on through Brompton to Walham Green with a

stunned feeling. So women have felt in tumbrils. A nightmare of

butlers, a galaxy of possible butlers, filled her soul.

No one was quite so big and formidable as Snagsby, towering up to

receive her, upon the steps of the home her husband was so amazingly

giving her.

The reader has already been privileged to see something of this house

in the company of Lady Beach-Mandarin. At the top of the steps stood

Mrs. Crumble, the new and highly recommended cook-housekeeper in her

best black silk flounced and expanded, and behind her peeped several

neat maids in caps and aprons. A little valet-like under-butler

appeared and tried to balance Snagsby by hovering two steps above him

on the opposite side of the Victorian mediæval porch.

Assisted officiously by Snagsby and amidst the deferential unhelpful

gestures of the under-butler, Sir Isaac handed his wife out of the car.

“Everything all right, Snagsby?” he asked brusquely if a little

breathless.

“Everything in order, Sir Isaac.”

“And here;—this is her ladyship.”

“I ’ope her ladyship ’ad a pleasent journey to ’er new ’ome. I’m sure

if I may presume, Sir Isaac, we shall all be very glad to serve her

ladyship.”

(Like all well-trained English servants, Snagsby always dropped as many

h’s as he could when conversing with his superiors. He did this as a

mark of respect and to prevent social confusion, just as he was always

careful to wear a slightly misfitting dress coat and fold his trousers

so that they creased at the sides and had a wide flat effect in front.)

Lady Harman bowed a little shyly to his good wishes and was then led up

to Mrs. Crumble, in a stiff black silk, who curtseyed with a submissive

amiability to her new mistress. “I’m sure, me lady,” she said. “I’m

sure——”

There was a little pause. “Here they are, you see, right and ready,”

said Sir Isaac, and then with an inspiration, “Got any tea for us,

Snagsby?”

Snagsby addressing his mistress inquired if he should serve tea in the

garden or the drawing-room, and Sir Isaac decided for the garden.

“There’s another hall beyond this,” he said, and took his wife’s arm,

leaving Mrs. Crumble still bowing amiably before the hall table. And

every time she bowed she rustled richly....

“It’s quite a big garden,” said Sir Isaac.

§2

And so the woman who had been a girl three weeks ago, this tall,

dark-eyed, slightly perplexed and very young-looking lady, was

introduced to the home that had been made for her. She went about it

with an alarmed sense of strange responsibilities, not in the least

feeling that anything was being given to her. And Sir Isaac led her

from point to point full of the pride and joy of new possession—for it

was his first own house as well as hers—rejoicing over it and exacting

gratitude.

“It’s all right, isn’t it?” he asked looking up at her.

“It’s wonderful. I’d no idea.”

“See,” he said, indicating a great brass bowl of perennial sunflowers

on the landing, “your favourite flower!”

“My favourite flower?”

“You said it was—in that book. Perennial sunflower.”

She was perplexed and then remembered.

She understood now why he had said downstairs, when she had glanced at

a big photographic enlargement of a portrait of Doctor Barnardo, “your

favourite hero in real life.”

He had brought her at Hythe one day a popular Victorian device, a

confession album, in which she had had to write down on a neat

rose-tinted page, her favourite author, her favourite flower, her

favourite colour, her favourite hero in real life, her “pet aversion,”

and quite a number of such particulars of her subjective existence. She

had filled this page in a haphazard manner late one night, and she was

disconcerted to find how thoroughly her careless replies had come home

to roost. She had put down “pink” as her favourite colour because the

page she was writing upon suggested it, and the paper of the room was

pale pink, the curtains strong pink with a pattern of paler pink and

tied with large pink bows, and the lamp shades, the bedspread, the

pillow-cases, the carpet, the chairs, the very crockery—everything but

the omnipresent perennial sunflowers—was pink. Confronted with this

realization, she understood that pink was the least agreeable of all

possible hues for a bedroom. She perceived she had to live now in a

chromatic range between rather underdone mutton and salmon. She had

said that her favourite musical composers were Bach and Beethoven; she

really meant it, and a bust of Beethoven materialized that statement,

but she had made Doctor Barnardo her favourite hero in real life

because his name also began with a B and she had heard someone say

somewhere that he was a very good man. The predominance of George

Eliot’s pensive rather than delightful countenance in her bedroom and

the array of all that lady’s works in a lusciously tooled pink leather,

was due to her equally reckless choice of a favourite author. She had

said too that Nelson was her favourite historical character, but Sir

Isaac with a delicate jealousy had preferred to have this heroic but

regrettably immoral personality represented in his home only by an

engraving of the Battle of Copenhagen....

She stood surveying this room, and her husband watched her eagerly. She

was, he felt, impressed at last!...

Certainly she had never seen such a bedroom in her life. By comparison

even with the largest of the hotel apartments they had occupied it was

vast; it had writing-tables and a dainty bookcase and a blushing sofa,

and dressing-tables and a bureau and a rose-red screen and three large

windows. Her thoughts went back to the narrow little bedroom at Penge

with which she had hitherto been so entirely content. Her own few

little books, a photograph or so,—they’d never dare to come here, even

if she dared to bring them.

“Here,” said Sir Isaac, flinging open a white door, “is your

dressing-room.”

She was chiefly aware of a huge white bath standing on a marble slab

under a window of crinkled pink-stained glass, and of a wide space of

tiled floor with white fur rugs.

“And here,” he said, opening a panel that was covered by wall paper,

“is _my_ door.”

“Yes,” he said to the question in her eyes, “that’s my room. You got

this one—for your own. It’s how people do now. People of our

position.... There’s no lock.”

He shut the door slowly again and surveyed the splendours he had made

with infinite satisfaction.

“All right?” he said, “isn’t it?”... He turned to the pearl for which

the casket was made, and slipped an arm about her waist. His arm

tightened.

“Got a kiss for me, Elly?” he whispered.

At this moment, a gong almost worthy of Snagsby summoned them to tea.

It came booming in to them with a vast officious arrogance that brooked

no denial. It made one understand the imperatives of the Last Trump,

albeit with a greater dignity.... There was a little awkward pause.

“I’m so dirty and trainy,” she said, disengaging herself from his arm.

“And we ought to go to tea.”

§3

The same exceptional aptitude of Sir Isaac for detailed administration

that had relieved his wife from the need of furnishing and arranging a

home, made the birth of her children and the organization of her

nursery an almost detached affair for her. Sir Isaac went about in a

preoccupied way, whistling between his teeth and planning with expert

advice the equipment of an ideal nursery, and her mother and his mother

became as it were voluminous clouds of uncommunicative wisdom and

precaution. In addition the conversation of Miss Crump, the extremely

skilled and costly nurse, who arrived a full Advent before the child,

fresh from the birth of a viscount, did much to generalize whatever had

remained individual of this thing that was happening. With so much

intelligence focussed, there seemed to Lady Harman no particular reason

why she should not do her best to think as little as possible about the

impending affair, which meant for her, she now understood quite

clearly, more and more discomfort culminating in an agony. The summer

promised to be warm, and Sir Isaac took a furnished house for the great

event in the hills behind Torquay. The maternal instinct is not a magic

thing, it has to be evoked and developed, and I decline to believe it

is indicative of any peculiar unwomanliness in Lady Harman that when at

last she beheld her newly-born daughter in the hands of the experts,

she moaned druggishly, “Oh! please take it away. Oh! Take it—away.

Anywhere—anywhere.”

It was very red and wrinkled and aged-looking and, except when it

opened its mouth to cry, extraordinarily like its father. This

resemblance disappeared—along with a crop of darkish red hair—in the

course of a day or two, but it left a lurking dislike to its proximity

in her mind long after it had become an entirely infantile and engaging

baby.

§4

Those early years of their marriage were the happiest period of Sir

Isaac’s life.

He seemed to have everything that man could desire. He was still only

just forty at his marriage; he had made for himself a position

altogether dominant in the world of confectionery and popular

refreshment, he had won a title, he had a home after his own heart, a

beautiful young wife, and presently delightful children in his own

image, and it was only after some years of contentment and serenity and

with a certain incredulity that he discovered that something in his

wife, something almost in the nature of discontent with her lot, was

undermining and threatening all the comfort and beauty of his life.

Sir Isaac was one of those men whom modern England delights to honour,

a man of unpretentious acquisitiveness, devoted to business and

distracted by no æsthetic or intellectual interests. He was the only

son of his mother, the widow of a bankrupt steam-miller, and he had

been a delicate child to rear. He left Mr. Gambard’s college at Ealing

after passing the second-class examination of the College of Preceptors

at the age of sixteen, to go into a tea-office as clerk without a

salary, a post he presently abandoned for a clerkship in the office of

a large refreshment catering firm. He attracted the attention of his

employers by suggesting various administrative economies, and he was

already drawing a salary of two hundred and fifty pounds a year when he

was twenty-one. Many young men would have rested satisfied with so

rapid an advancement, and would have devoted themselves to the

amusements that are now considered so permissible to youth, but young

Harman was made of sterner stuff, and it only spurred him to further

efforts. He contrived to save a considerable proportion of his salary

for some years, and at the age of twenty-seven he started, in

association with a firm of flour millers, the International Bread and

Cake Stores, which spread rapidly over the country. They were not in

any sense of the word “International,” but in a search for inflated and

inflating adjectives this word attracted him most, and the success of

the enterprise justified his choice. Originally conceived as a

syndicated system of baker’s shops running a specially gritty and

nutritious line of bread, the Staminal Bread, in addition to the

ordinary descriptions, it rapidly developed a catering side, and in a

little time there were few centres of clerkly employment in London or

the Midlands where an International could not be found supplying the

midday scone or poached egg, washed down by a cup of tea, or coffee, or

lemonade. It meant hard work for Isaac Harman. It drew lines on his

cheeks, sharpened his always rather pointed nose to an extreme

efficiency, greyed his hair, and gave an acquired firmness to his

rather retreating mouth. All his time was given to the details of this

development; always he was inspecting premises, selecting and

dismissing managers, making codes of rules and fines for his growing

army of employees, organizing and reorganizing his central offices and

his central bakeries, hunting up cheaper and cheaper supplies of eggs

and flour, and milk and ham, devising advertisements and agency

developments. He had something of an artist’s passion in these things;

he went about, a little bent and peaky, calculating and planning and

hissing through his teeth, and feeling not only that he was getting on,

but that he was getting on in the most exemplary way. Manifestly,

anybody in his line of business who wanted to be leisurely, or to be

generous, who possessed any broader interests than the shop, who

troubled to think about the nation or the race or any of the deeper

mysteries of life, was bound to go down before him. He dealt privately

with every appetite—until his marriage no human being could have

suspected him of any appetite but business—he disposed of every

distracting impulse with unobtrusive decision; and even his political

inclination towards Radicalism sprang chiefly from an irritation with

the legal advantages of landlordism natural to a man who is frequently

leasing shops.

At school Sir Isaac had not been a particularly prominent figure; his

disposition at cricket to block and to bowl “sneaks” and “twisters”

under-arm had raised his average rather than his reputation; he had

evaded fights and dramatic situations, and protected himself upon

occasions of unavoidable violence by punching with his white knuckles

held in a peculiar and vicious manner. He had always been a little

insensitive to those graces of style, in action if not in art, which

appeal so strongly to the commoner sort of English mind; he played

first for safety, and that assured, for the uttermost advantage. These

tendencies became more marked with maturity. When he took up tennis for

his health’s sake he developed at once an ungracious service that had

to be killed like vermin; he developed an instinct for the deadest ball

available, and his returns close up to the net were like

assassinations. Indeed, he was inherently incapable of any vision

beyond the express prohibitions and permissions of the rules of the

games he played, or beyond the laws and institutions under which he

lived. His idea of generosity was the undocumented and unqualified

purchase of a person by payments made in the form of a gift.

And this being the quality of Sir Isaac’s mind, it followed that his

interpretations of the relationship of marriage were simple and strict.

A woman, he knew, had to be wooed to be won, but when she was won, she

was won. He did not understand wooing after that was settled. There was

the bargain and her surrender. He on his side had to keep her, dress

her, be kind to her, give her the appearances of pride and authority,

and in return he had his rights and his privileges and undefined powers

of control. That you know, by the existing rules, is the reality of

marriage where there are no settlements and no private property of the

wife’s. That is to say, it is the reality of marriage in ninety-nine

cases out of the hundred. And it would have shocked Sir Isaac

extremely, and as a matter of fact it did shock him, for any one to

suggest the slightest revision of so entirely advantageous an

arrangement. He was confident of his good intentions, and resolved to

the best of his ability to make his wife the happiest of living

creatures, subject only to reasonable acquiescences and general good

behaviour.

Never before had he cared for anything so much as he did for her—not

even for the International Bread and Cake Stores. He gloated upon her.

She distracted him from business. He resolved from the outset to

surround her with every luxury and permit her no desire that he had not

already anticipated. Even her mother and Georgina, whom he thought

extremely unnecessary persons, were frequent visitors to his house. His

solicitude for her was so great that she found it difficult even to see

her doctor except in his presence. And he bought her a pearl necklace

that cost six hundred pounds. He was, in fact, one of those complete

husbands who grow rare in these decadent days.

The social circle to which Sir Isaac introduced his wife was not a very

extensive one. The business misadventures of his father had naturally

deprived his mother of most of her friends; he had made only

acquaintances at school, and his subsequent concentration upon business

had permitted very few intimacies. Renewed prosperity had produced a

certain revival of cousins, but Mrs. Harman, established in a pleasant

house at Highbury, had received their attentions with a well-merited

stiffness. His chief associates were his various business allies, and

these and their wives and families formed the nucleus of the new world

to which Ellen was gradually and temperately introduced. There were a

few local callers, but Putney is now too deeply merged with London for

this practice of the countryside to have any great effect upon a

new-comer’s visiting circle.

Perhaps Mr. Charterson might claim to be Sir Isaac’s chief friend at

the time of that gentleman’s marriage. Transactions in sugar had

brought them together originally. He was Sir Isaac’s best man, and the

new knight entertained a feeling of something very like admiration for

him. Moreover, Mr. Charterson had very large ears, more particularly

was the left one large, extraordinarily large and projecting upper

teeth, which he sought vainly to hide beneath an extravagant moustache,

and a harsh voice, characteristics that did much to allay the anxieties

natural to a newly married man. Mr. Charterson was moreover adequately

married to a large, attentive, enterprising, swarthy wife, and

possessed a splendid house in Belgravia. Not quite so self-made as Sir

Isaac, he was still sufficiently self-made to take a very keen interest

in his own social advancement and in social advancement generally, and

it was through him that Sir Isaac’s attention had been first directed

to those developing relations with politics that arise as a business

grows to greatness. “I’m for Parliament,” said Charterson. “Sugar’s in

politics, and I’m after it. You’d better come too, Harman. Those chaps

up there, they’ll play jiggery-pokery with sugar if we aren’t careful.

And it won’t be only sugar, Harman!”

Pressed to expand this latter sentence, he pointed out to his friend

that “any amount of interfering with employment” was in the air—“any

amount.”

“And besides,” said Mr. Charterson, “men like us have a stake in the

country, Harman. We’re getting biggish people. We ought to do our

share. I don’t see the fun of leaving everything to the landlords and

the lawyers. Men of our sort have got to make ourselves felt. We want a

business government. Of course—one pays. So long as I get a voice in

calling the tune I don’t mind paying the piper a bit. There’s going to

be a lot of interference with trade. All this social legislation. And

there’s what you were saying the other day about these leases....”

“I’m not much of a talker,” said Harman. “I don’t see myself gassing in

the House.”

“Oh! I don’t mean going into Parliament,” said Charterson. “That’s for

some of us, perhaps.... But come into the party, make yourself felt.”

Under Charterson’s stimulation it was that Harman joined the National

Liberal Club, and presently went on to the Climax, and through him he

came to know something of that inner traffic of arrangements and

bargains which does so much to keep a great historical party together

and maintain its vitality. For a time he was largely overshadowed by

the sturdy Radicalism of Charterson, but presently as he understood

this interesting game better, he embarked upon a line of his own.

Charterson wanted a seat, and presently got it; his maiden speech on

the Sugar Bounties won a compliment from Mr. Evesham; and Harman, who

would have piloted a monoplane sooner than address the House, decided

to be one of those silent influences that work outside our national

assembly. He came to the help of an embarrassed Liberal weekly, and

then, in a Fleet Street crisis, undertook the larger share of backing

the _Old Country Gazette_, that important social and intellectual party

organ. His knighthood followed almost automatically.

Such political developments introduced a second element into the

intermittent social relations of the Harman household. Before his

knighthood and marriage Sir Isaac had participated in various public

banquets and private parties and little dinners in the vaults of the

House and elsewhere, arising out of his political intentions, and with

the appearance of a Lady Harman there came a certain urgency on the

part of those who maintain in a state of hectic dullness the social

activities of the great Liberal party. Horatio Blenker, Sir Isaac’s

editor, showed a disposition to be socially very helpful, and after

Mrs. Blenker had called in a state of worldly instructiveness, there

was a little dinner at the Blenkers’ to introduce young Lady Harman to

the great political world. It was the first dinner-party of her life,

and she found it dazzling rather than really agreeable.

She felt very slender and young and rather unclothed about the arms and

neck, in spite of the six hundred pound pearl necklace that had been

given to her just as she stood before the mirror in her white-and-gold

dinner dress ready to start. She had to look down at that dress ever

and again and at her shining arms to remind herself that she wasn’t

still in schoolgirl clothes, and it seemed to her there was not another

woman in the room who was not fairly entitled to send her off to bed at

any moment. She had been a little nervous about the details of the

dinner, but there was nothing strange or difficult but caviare, and in

that case she waited for some one else to begin. The Chartersons were

there, which was very reassuring, and the abundant flowers on the table

were a sort of protection. The man on her right was very nice, gently

voluble, and evidently quite deaf, so that she had merely to make kind

respectful faces at him. He talked to her most of the time, and

described the peasant costumes in Marken and Walcheren. And Mr.

Blenker, with a fine appreciation of Sir Isaac’s watchful temperament

and his own magnetism, spoke to her three times and never looked at her

once all through the entertainment.

A few weeks later they went to dinner at the Chartersons’, and then she

gave a dinner, which was arranged very skilfully by Sir Isaac and

Snagsby and the cook-housekeeper, with a little outside help, and then

came a big party reception at Lady Barleypound’s, a multitudinous

miscellaneous assembly in which the obviously wealthy rubbed shoulders

with the obviously virtuous and the not quite so obviously clever. It

was a great orgy of standing about and seeing the various Blenkers and

the Cramptons and the Weston Massinghays and the Daytons and Mrs.

Millingham with her quivering lorgnette and her last tame genius and

Lewis, and indeed all the Tapirs and Tadpoles of Liberalism, being

tremendously active and influential and important throughout the

evening. The house struck Ellen as being very splendid, the great

staircase particularly so, and never before had she seen a great

multitude of people in evening dress. Lady Barleypound in the golden

parlour at the head of the stairs shook hands automatically, lest it

would seem in some amiable dream, Mrs. Blapton and a daughter rustled

across the gathering in a hasty vindictive manner and vanished, and a

number of handsome, glittering, dark-eyed, splendidly dressed women

kept together in groups and were tremendously but occultly amused. The

various Blenkers seemed everywhere, Horatio in particular with his

large fluent person and his luminous tenor was like a shop-walker

taking customers to the departments: one felt he was weaving all these

immiscibles together into one great wise Liberal purpose, and that he

deserved quite wonderful things from the party; he even introduced five

or six people to Lady Harman, looking sternly over her head and

restraining his charm as he did so on account of Sir Isaac’s feelings.

The people he brought up to her were not very interesting people, she

thought, but then that was perhaps due to her own dreadful ignorance of

politics.

Lady Harman ceased even to dip into the vortex of London society after

March, and in June she went with her mother and a skilled nurse to that

beautiful furnished house Sir Isaac had found near Torquay, in

preparation for the birth of their first little daughter.

§5

It seemed to her husband that it was both unreasonable and ungrateful

of her to become a tearful young woman after their union, and for a

phase of some months she certainly was a tearful young woman, but his

mother made it clear to him that this was quite a correct and

permissible phase for her, as she was, and so he expressed his

impatience with temperance, and presently she was able to pull herself

together and begin to readjust herself to a universe that had seemed

for a time almost too shattered for endurance. She resumed the process

of growing up that her marriage had for a time so vividly interrupted,

and if her schooldays were truncated and the college phase omitted, she

had at any rate a very considerable amount of fundamental experience to

replace these now customary completions.

Three little girls she brought into the world in the first three years

of her married life, then after a brief interval of indifferent health

she had a fourth girl baby of a physique quite obviously inferior to

its predecessors, and then, after—and perhaps as a consequence of—much

whispered conversation of the two mothers-in-law, protests and tactful

explanation on the part of the elderly and trustworthy family doctor

and remarks of an extraordinary breadth (and made at table too, almost

before the door had closed on Snagsby!) from Ellen’s elder sister,

there came a less reproductive phase....

But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the

habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step

to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one’s own life. The

one thing trains for the other.

Now the chief circumstance in the life of Lady Harman was Sir Isaac.

Indeed as she grew to a clear consciousness of herself and her

position, it seemed to her he was not so much a circumstance as a

circumvallation. There wasn’t a direction in which she could turn

without immediately running up against him. He had taken possession of

her extremely. And from her first resignation to this as an inevitable

fact she had come, she hardly knew how, to a renewed disposition to

regard this large and various universe beyond him and outside of him,

with something of the same slight adventurousness she had felt before

he so comprehensively happened to her. After her first phase of despair

she had really done her best to honour the bargain she had rather

unwittingly made and to love and to devote herself and be a loyal and

happy wife to this clutching, hard-breathing little man who had got

her, and it was the insatiable excesses of his demands quite as much as

any outer influence that made her realize the impossibility of such a

concentration.

His was a supremely acquisitive and possessive character, so that he

insulted her utmost subjugations by an obtrusive suspicion and

jealousy, he was jealous of her childish worship of her dead father,

jealous of her disposition to go to church, jealous of the poet

Wordsworth because she liked to read his sonnets, jealous because she

loved great music, jealous when she wanted to go out; if she seemed

passionless and she seemed more and more passionless he was jealous,

and the slightest gleam of any warmth of temperament filled him with a

vile and furious dread of dishonouring possibilities. And the utmost

resolution to believe in him could not hide from her for ever the fact

that his love manifested itself almost wholly as a parade of ownership

and a desire, without kindliness, without any self-forgetfulness. All

his devotion, his self-abjection, had been the mere qualms of a

craving, the flush of eager courtship. Do as she would to overcome

these realizations, forces within her stronger than herself, primordial

forces with the welfare of all life in their keeping, cried out upon

the meanness of his face, the ugly pointed nose and the thin compressed

lips, the weak neck, the clammy hands, the ungainly nervous gestures,

the tuneless whistling between the clenched teeth. He would not let her

forget a single detail. Whenever she tried to look at any created

thing, he thrust himself, like one of his own open-air advertisements,

athwart the attraction.

As she grew up to an achieved womanhood—and it was even a physical

growing-up, for she added more than an inch of stature after her

marriage—her life became more and more consciously like a fencing match

in which her vision flashed over his head and under his arms and this

side of him and that, while with a toiling industry he fought to

intercept it. And from the complete acceptance of her matrimonial

submission, she passed on by almost insensible degrees towards a

conception of her life as a struggle, that seemed at first entirely

lonely and unsupported, to exist—_against_ him.

In every novel as in every picture there must be an immense

simplification, and so I tell the story of Lady Harman’s changing

attitude without any of those tangled leapings-forward or

harkings-back, those moods and counter moods and relapses which made up

the necessary course of her mind. But sometimes she was here and

sometimes she was there, sometimes quite back to the beginning an

obedient, scrupulously loyal and up-looking young wife, sometimes a

wife concealing the humiliation of an unhappy choice in a spurious

satisfaction and affection. And mixed up with widening spaces of

criticism and dissatisfaction and hostility there were, you must

understand, moments of real liking for this outrageous little man and

streaks of an absurd maternal tenderness for him. They had been too

close together to avoid that. She had a woman’s affection of ownership

too, and disliked to see him despised or bettered or untidy; even those

ridiculous muddy hands had given her a twinge of solicitude....

And all the while she was trying to see the universe also, the great

background of their two little lives, and to think what it might mean

for her over and above their too obliterating relationship.

§6

It would be like counting the bacteria of an infection to trace how

ideas of insubordination came drifting into Sir Isaac’s Paradise. The

epidemic is in the air. There is no Tempter nowadays, no definitive

apple. The disturbing force has grown subtler, blows in now like a

draught, creeps and gathers like the dust,—a disseminated serpent. Sir

Isaac brought home his young, beautiful and rather crumpled and

astonished Eve and by all his standards he was entitled to be happy

ever afterwards. He knew of one danger, but against that he was very

watchful. Never once for six long years did she have a private duologue

with another male. But Mudie and Sir Jesse Boot sent parcels to the

house unchecked, the newspaper drifted in not even censored: the nurses

who guided Ellen through the essential incidents of a feminine career

talked of something called a “movement.” And there was Georgina....

The thing they wanted they called the Vote, but that demand so hollow,

so eyeless, had all the terrifying effect of a mask. Behind that mask

was a formless invincible discontent with the lot of womanhood. It

wanted,—it was not clear what it wanted, but whatever it wanted, all

the domestic instincts of mankind were against admitting there was

anything it could want. That remarkable agitation had already worked up

to the thunderous pitch, there had been demonstrations at Public

Meetings, scenes in the Ladies’ Gallery and something like rioting in

Parliament Square before ever it occurred to Sir Isaac that this was a

disturbance that touched his home. He had supposed suffragettes were

ladies of all too certain an age with red noses and spectacles and a

masculine style of costume, who wished to be hugged by policemen. He

said as much rather knowingly and wickedly to Charterson. He could not

understand any woman not coveting the privileges of Lady Harman. And

then one day while Georgina and her mother were visiting them, as he

was looking over the letters at the breakfast table according to his

custom before giving them out, he discovered two identical newspaper

packets addressed to his wife and his sister-in-law, and upon them were

these words printed very plainly, “Votes for Women.”

“Good Lord!” he cried. “What’s this? It oughtn’t to be allowed.” And he

pitched the papers at the wastepaper basket under the sideboard.

“I’ll thank you,” said Georgina, “not to throw away our _Votes for

Women_. We subscribe to that.”

“Eh?” cried Sir Isaac.

“We’re subscribers. Snagsby, just give us those papers.” (A difficult

moment for Snagsby.) He picked up the papers and looked at Sir Isaac.

“Put ’em down there,” said Sir Isaac, waving to the sideboard and then

in an ensuing silence handed two letters of no importance to his

mother-in-law. His face was pale and he was breathless. Snagsby with an

obvious tactfulness retired.

Sir Isaac watched the door close.

His remark pointedly ignored Georgina.

“What you been thinking about, Elly,” he asked, “subscribing to _that_

thing?”

“I wanted to read it.”

“But you don’t hold with all that Rubbish——”

“_Rubbish!_” said Georgina, helping herself to marmalade.

“Well, rot then, if you like,” said Sir Isaac, unamiably and panting.

With that as Snagsby afterwards put it—for the battle raged so fiercely

as to go on even when he presently returned to the room—“the fat was in

the fire.” The Harman breakfast-table was caught up into the Great

Controversy with heat and fury like a tree that is overtaken by a

forest fire. It burnt for weeks, and smouldered still when the first

white heats had abated. I will not record the arguments of either side,

they were abominably bad and you have heard them all time after time; I

do not think that whatever side you have taken in this matter you would

find much to please you in Sir Isaac’s goadings or Georgina’s

repartees. Sir Isaac would ask if women were prepared to go as soldiers

and Georgina would enquire how many years of service he had done or

horrify her mother by manifest allusion to the agonies and dangers of

maternity,—things like that. It gave a new interest to breakfast for

Snagsby; and the peculiarly lady-like qualities of Mrs. Sawbridge, a

gift for silent, pallid stiffness, a disposition, tactful but

unsuccessful, to “change the subject,” an air of being about to leave

the room in disdain, had never shone with such baleful splendour. Our

interest here is rather with the effect of these remarkable disputes,

which echoed in Sir Isaac’s private talk long after Georgina had gone

again, upon Lady Harman. He could not leave this topic of feminine

emancipation alone, once it had been set going, and though Ellen would

always preface her remarks by, “Of course Georgina goes too far,” he

worried her slowly into a series of definite insurgent positions. Sir

Isaac’s attacks on Georgina certainly brought out a good deal of

absurdity in her positions, and Georgina at times left Sir Isaac

without a leg to stand on, and the net result of their disputes as of

most human controversies was not conviction for the hearer but release.

Her mind escaped between them, and went exploring for itself through

the great gaps they had made in the simple obedient assumptions of her

girlhood. That question originally put in Paradise, “Why shouldn’t we?”

came into her mind and stayed there. It is a question that marks a

definite stage in the departure from innocence. Things that had seemed

opaque and immutable appeared translucent and questionable. She began

to read more and more in order to learn things and get a light upon

things, and less and less to pass the time. Ideas came to her that

seemed at first strange altogether and then grotesquely justifiable and

then crept to a sort of acceptance by familiarity. And a disturbing

intermittent sense of a general responsibility increased and increased

in her.

You will understand this sense of responsibility which was growing up

in Lady Harman’s mind if you have felt it yourself, but if you have not

then you may find it a little difficult to understand. You see it

comes, when it comes at all, out of a phase of disillusionment. All

children, I suppose, begin by taking for granted the rightness of

things in general, the soundness of accepted standards, and many people

are at least so happy that they never really grow out of this

assumption. They go to the grave with an unbroken confidence that

somewhere behind all the immediate injustices and disorders of life,

behind the antics of politics, the rigidities of institutions, the

pressure of custom and the vagaries of law, there is wisdom and purpose

and adequate provision, they never lose that faith in the human

household they acquired amongst the directed securities of home. But

for more of us and more there comes a dissolution of these assurances;

there comes illumination as the day comes into a candle-lit uncurtained

room. The warm lights that once rounded off our world so completely are

betrayed for what they are, smoky and guttering candles. Beyond what

once seemed a casket of dutiful security is now a limitless and

indifferent universe. Ours is the wisdom or there is no wisdom; ours is

the decision or there is no decision. That burthen is upon each of us

in the measure of our capacity. The talent has been given us and we may

not bury it.

§7

And as we reckon up the disturbing influences that were stirring Lady

Harman out of that life of acquiescences to which women are perhaps

even more naturally disposed than men, we may pick out the conversation

of Susan Burnet as something a little apart from the others, as

something with a peculiar barbed pointedness of its own that was yet in

other respects very representative of a multitude of nudges and nips

and pricks and indications that life was giving Lady Harman’s awaking

mind. Susan Burnet was a woman who came to renovate and generally do up

the Putney curtains and furniture and loose covers every spring; she

was Mrs. Crumble’s discovery, she was sturdy and short and she had open

blue eyes and an engaging simplicity of manner that attracted Lady

Harman from the outset. She was stuck away in one of the spare bedrooms

and there she was available for any one, so long, she explained, as

they didn’t fluster her when she was cutting out, with a flow of

conversation that not even a mouth full of pins seemed to interrupt.

And Lady Harman would go and watch Susan Burnet by the hour together

and think what an enviably independent young woman she was, and listen

with interest and something between horror and admiration to the

various impressions of life she had gathered during a hardy and

adventurous career.

Their early conversations were about Susan Burnet’s business and the

general condition of things in that world of upholsterers’ young women

in which Susan had lived until she perceived the possibilities of a

“connexion,” and set up for herself. And the condition of things in

that world, as Susan described it, brought home to Lady Harman just how

sheltered and limited her own upbringing had been. “It isn’t right,”

said Susan, “the way they send girls out with fellers into empty

houses. Naturally the men get persecuting them. They don’t seem hardly

able to help it, some of them, and I will say this for them, that a lot

of the girls go more than half way with them, leading them on. Still

there’s a sort of man won’t leave you alone. One I used to be sent out

with and a married man too he was, Oh!—he used to give me a time. Why

I’ve bit his hands before now, bit hard, before he’d leave go of me.

It’s my opinion the married men are worse than the single. Bolder they

are. I pushed him over a scuttle once and he hit his head against a

bookcase. I was fair frightened of him. ‘You little devil,’ he says;

‘I’ll be even with you yet....’ Oh! I’ve been called worse things than

that.... Of course a respectable girl gets through with it, but it’s

trying and to some it’s a sort of temptation....”

“I should have thought,” reflected Lady Harman, “you could have told

someone.”

“It’s queer,” said Susan; “but it never seemed to me the sort of thing

a girl ought to go telling. It’s a kind of private thing. And besides,

it isn’t exactly easy to tell.... I suppose the Firm didn’t want to be

worried by complaints and disputes about that sort of thing. And it

isn’t always easy to say just which of the two is to blame.”

“But how old are the girls they send out?” asked Lady Harman.

“Some’s as young as seventeen or eighteen. It all depends on the sort

of work that’s wanted to be done....”

“Of course a lot of them have to marry....”

This lurid little picture of vivid happenings in unoccupied houses and

particularly of the prim, industrious, capable Susan Burnet, biting

aggressive wrists, stuck in Lady Harman’s imagination. She seemed to be

looking into hitherto unsuspected pits of simple and violent living

just beneath her feet. Susan told some upholsteress love tales, real

love tales, with a warmth and honesty of passion in them that seemed at

once dreadful and fine to Lady Harman’s underfed imagination. Under

encouragement Susan expanded the picture, beyond these mere glimpses of

workshop and piece-work and furtive lust. It appeared that she was

practically the head of her family; there was a mother who had

specialized in ill-health, a sister of defective ability who stayed at

home, a brother in South Africa who was very good and sent home money,

and three younger sisters growing up. And father,—she evaded the

subject of father at first. Then presently Lady Harman had some

glimpses of an earlier phase in Susan Burnet’s life “before any of us

were earning money.” Father appeared as a kindly, ineffectual,

insolvent figure struggling to conduct a baker’s and confectioner’s

business in Walthamstow, mother was already specializing, there were

various brothers and sisters being born and dying. “How many were there

of you altogether?” asked Lady Harman.

“Thirteen there was. Father always used to laugh and say he’d had a

fair baker’s dozen. There was Luke to begin with——”

Susan began to count on her fingers and recite braces of scriptural

names.

She could only make up her tale to twelve. She became perplexed. Then

she remembered. “Of course!” she cried: “there was Nicodemus. He was

still-born. I _always_ forget Nicodemus, poor little chap! But he

came—was it sixth or seventh?—seventh after Anna.”

She gave some glimpses of her father and then there was a collapse of

which she fought shy. Lady Harman was too delicate to press her to talk

of that.

But one day in the afternoon Susan’s tongue ran.

She was telling how first she went to work before she was twelve.

“But I thought the board schools——” said Lady Harman.

“I had to go before the committee,” said Susan. “I had to go before the

committee and ask to be let go to work. There they was, sitting round a

table in a great big room, and they was as kind as anything, one old

gentleman with a great white beard, he was as kind as could be. ‘Don’t

you be frightened, my dear,’ he says. ‘You tell us why you want to go

out working.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘_somebody’s_ got to earn something,’ and

that made them laugh in a sort of fatherly way, and after that there

wasn’t any difficulty. You see it was after Father’s Inquest, and

everybody was disposed to be kind to us. ‘Pity they can’t all go

instead of this educational Tommy Rot,’ the old gentleman says. ‘You

learn to work, my dear’—and I did....”

She paused.

“Father’s inquest?” said Lady Harman.

Susan seemed to brace herself to the occasion. “Father,” she said, “was

drowned. I know—I hadn’t told you that before. He was drowned in the

Lea. It’s always been a distress and humiliation to us there had to be

an Inquest. And they threw out things.... It’s why we moved to

Haggerston. It’s the worst that ever happened to us in all our lives.

Far worse. Worse than having the things sold or the children with

scarlet fever and having to burn everything.... I don’t like to talk

about it. I can’t help it but I don’t....

“I don’t know why I talk to you as I do, Lady Harman, but I don’t seem

to mind talking to you. I don’t suppose I’ve opened my mouth to anyone

about it, not for years—except to one dear friend I’ve got—her who

persuaded me to be a church member. But what I’ve always said and what

I will always say is this, that I don’t believe any evil of Father, I

don’t believe, I won’t ever believe he took his life. I won’t even

believe he was in drink. I don’t know how he got in the river, but I’m

certain it wasn’t so. He was a weak man, was Father, I’ve never denied

he was a weak man. But a harder working man than he was never lived. He

worried, anyone would have worried seeing the worries he had. The shop

wasn’t paying as it was; often we never tasted meat for weeks together,

and then there came one of these Internationals, giving overweight and

underselling....”

“One of these Internationals?”

“Yes, I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of them. They’re in the poorer

neighbourhoods chiefly. They sell teas and things mostly now but they

began as bakers’ shops and what they did was to come into a place and

undersell until all the old shops were ruined and shut up. That was

what they tried to do and Father hadn’t no more chance amongst them

than a mouse in a trap.... It was just like being run over. All the

trade that stayed with us after a bit was Bad Debts. You can’t blame

people I suppose for going where they get more and pay less, and it

wasn’t till we’d all gone right away to Haggerston that they altered

things and put the prices up again. Of course Father lost heart and all

that. He didn’t know what to do, he’d sunk all he had in the shop; he

just sat and moped about. Really,—he was pitiful. He wasn’t able to

sleep; he used to get up at nights and go about downstairs. Mother says

she found him once sweeping out the bakehouse at two o’clock in the

morning. He got it into his head that getting up like that would help

him. But I don’t believe and I won’t believe he wouldn’t have seen it

through if he could. Not to my dying day will I believe that....”

Lady Harman reflected. “But couldn’t he have got work again—as a

baker?”

“It’s hard after you’ve had a shop. You see all the younger men’ve come

on. They know the new ways. And a man who’s had a shop and failed, he’s

lost heart. And these stores setting up make everything drivinger. They

do things a different way. They make it harder for everyone.”

Both Lady Harman and Susan Burnet reflected in silence for a few

seconds upon the International Stores. The sewing woman was the first

to speak.

“Things like that,” she said, “didn’t ought to be. One shop didn’t

ought to be allowed to set out to ruin another. It isn’t fair trading,

it’s a sort of murder. It oughtn’t to be allowed. How was father to

know?...”

“There’s got to be competition,” said Lady Harman.

“I don’t call that competition,” said Susan Burnet.

“But,—I suppose they give people cheaper bread.”

“They do for a time. Then when they’ve killed you they do what they

like.... Luke—he’s one of those who’ll say anything—well, he used to

say it was a regular Monopoly. But it’s hard on people who’ve set out

to live honest and respectable and bring up a family plain and decent

to be pushed out of the way like that.”

“I suppose it is,” said Lady Harman.

“What was father to _do_?” said Susan, and turned to Sir Isaac’s

armchair from which this discourse had distracted her.

And then suddenly, in a voice thick with rage, she burst out: “And then

Alice must needs go and take their money. That’s what sticks in _my_

throat.”

Still on her knees she faced about to Lady Harman.

“Alice goes into one of their Ho’burn branches as a waitress, do what I

could to prevent her. It makes one mad to think of it. Time after time

I’ve said to her, ‘Alice,’ I’ve said, ‘sooner than touch their dirty

money I’d starve in the street.’ And she goes! She says it’s all

nonsense of me to bear a spite. Laughs at me! ‘Alice,’ I told her,

‘it’s a wonder the spirit of poor father don’t rise up against you.’

And she laughs. Calls that bearing a spite.... Of course she was little

when it happened. She can’t remember, not as I remember....”

Lady Harman reflected for a time. “I suppose you don’t know,” she

began, addressing Susan’s industrious back; “you don’t know who—who

owns these International Stores?”

“I suppose it’s some company,” said Susan. “I don’t see that it lets

them off—being in a company.”

§8

We have done much in the last few years to destroy the severe

limitations of Victorian delicacy, and all of us, from princesses and

prime-ministers’ wives downward, talk of topics that would have been

considered quite gravely improper in the nineteenth century.

Nevertheless, some topics have, if anything, become more indelicate

than they were, and this is especially true of the discussion of

income, of any discussion that tends, however remotely, to inquire, Who

is it at the base of everything who really pays in blood and muscle and

involuntary submissions for _your_ freedom and magnificence? This,

indeed, is almost the ultimate surviving indecency. So that it was with

considerable private shame and discomfort that Lady Harman pursued even

in her privacy the train of thought that Susan Burnet had set going. It

had been conveyed into her mind long ago, and it had settled down there

and grown into a sort of security, that the International Bread and

Cake Stores were a very important contribution to Progress, and that

Sir Isaac, outside the gates of his home, was a very useful and

beneficial personage, and richly meriting a baronetcy. She hadn’t

particularly analyzed this persuasion, but she supposed him engaged in

a kind of daily repetition, but upon modern scientific lines, of the

miracle of the loaves and fishes, feeding a great multitude that would

otherwise have gone hungry. She knew, too, from the advertisements that

flowered about her path through life, that this bread in question was

exceptionally clean and hygienic; whole front pages of the _Daily

Messenger_, headed the “Fauna of Small Bakehouses,” and adorned with a

bordering of _Blatta orientalis_, the common cockroach, had taught her

that, and she knew that Sir Isaac’s passion for purity had also led to

the _Old Country Gazette’s_ spirited and successful campaign for a

non-party measure securing additional bakehouse regulation and

inspection. And her impression had been that the growing and developing

refreshment side of the concern was almost a public charity; Sir Isaac

gave, he said, a larger, heavier scone, a bigger pat of butter, a more

elegant teapot, ham more finely cut and less questionable pork-pies

than any other system of syndicated tea-shops. She supposed that

whenever he sat late at night going over schemes and papers, or when he

went off for days together to Cardiff or Glasgow or Dublin, or

such-like centres, or when he became preoccupied at dinner and whistled

thoughtfully through his teeth, he was planning to increase the amount

or diminish the cost of tea and cocoa-drenched farinaceous food in the

stomachs of that section of our national adolescence which goes out

daily into the streets of our great cities to be fed. And she knew his

vans and catering were indispensable to the British Army upon its

manœuvres....

Now the smashing up of the Burnet family by the International Stores

was disagreeably not in the picture of these suppositions. And the

remarkable thing is that this one little tragedy wouldn’t for a moment

allow itself to be regarded as an exceptional accident in an otherwise

fair vast development. It remained obstinately a specimen—of the other

side of the great syndication.

It was just as if she had been doubting subconsciously all along.... In

the silence of the night she lay awake and tried to make herself

believe that the Burnet case was just a unique overlooked disaster,

that it needed only to come to Sir Isaac’s attention to be met by the

fullest reparation....

After all she did not bring it to Sir Isaac’s attention.

But one morning, while this phase of new doubts was still lively in her

mind, Sir Isaac told her he was going down to Brighton, and then along

the coast road in a car to Portsmouth, to pay a few surprise visits,

and see how the machine was working. He would be away a night, an

unusual breach in his habits.

“Are you thinking of any new branches, Isaac?”

“I may have a look at Arundel.”

“Isaac.” She paused to frame her question carefully. “I suppose there

are some shops at Arundel now.”

“I’ve got to see to that.”

“If you open——I suppose the old shops get hurt. What becomes of the

people if they do get hurt?”

“That’s _their_ look-out,” said Sir Isaac.

“Isn’t it bad for them?”

“Progress is Progress, Elly.”

“It _is_ bad for them. I suppose——Wouldn’t it be sometimes kinder if

you took over the old shop—made a sort of partner of him, or

something?”

Sir Isaac shook his head. “I want younger men,” he said. “You can’t get

a move on the older hands.”

“But, then, it’s rather bad——I suppose these little men you shut

up,—some of them must have families.”

“You’re theorizing a bit this morning, Elly,” said Sir Isaac, looking

up over his coffee cup.

“I’ve been thinking—about these little people.”

“Someone’s been talking to you about my shops,” said Sir Isaac, and

stuck out an index finger. “If that’s Georgina——”

“It isn’t Georgina,” said Lady Harman, but she had it very clear in her

mind that she must not say who it was.

“You can’t make a business without squeezing somebody,” said Sir Isaac.

“It’s easy enough to make a row about any concern that grows a bit.

Some people would like to have every business tied down to a maximum

turnover and so much a year profit. I dare say you’ve been hearing of

these articles in the _London Lion_. Pretty stuff it is, too. This fuss

about the little shopkeepers; that’s a new racket. I’ve had all that

row about the waitresses before, and the yarn about the Normandy eggs,

and all that, but I don’t see that you need go reading it against me,

and bringing it up at the breakfast-table. A business is a business, it

isn’t a charity, and I’d like to know where you and I would be if we

didn’t run the concern on business lines.... Why, that _London Lion_

fellow came to me with the first two of those articles before the thing

began. I could have had the whole thing stopped if I liked, if I’d

chosen to take the back page of his beastly cover. That shows the stuff

the whole thing is made of. That shows you. Why!—he’s just a

blackmailer, that’s what he is. Much he cares for my waitresses if he

can get the dibs. Little shopkeepers, indeed! I know ’em! Nice martyrs

they are! There isn’t one wouldn’t _skin_ all the others if he got half

a chance....”

Sir Isaac gave way to an extraordinary fit of nagging anger. He got up

and stood upon the hearthrug to deliver his soul the better. It was an

altogether unexpected and illuminating outbreak. He was flushed with

guilt. The more angry and eloquent he became, the more profoundly

thoughtful grew the attentive lady at the head of his table....

When at last Sir Isaac had gone off in the car to Victoria, Lady Harman

rang for Snagsby. “Isn’t there a paper,” she asked, “called the _London

Lion_?”

“It isn’t one I think your ladyship would like,” said Snagsby, gently

but firmly.

“I know. But I want to see it. I want copies of all the issues in which

there have been articles upon the International Stores.”

“They’re thoroughly volgar, me lady,” said Snagsby, with a large

dissuasive smile.

“I want you to go out into London and get them now.”

Snagsby hesitated and went. Within five minutes he reappeared with a

handful of buff-covered papers.

“There ’appened to be copies in the pantry, me lady,” he said. “We

can’t imagine ’ow they got there; someone must have brought them in,

but ’ere they are quite at your service, me lady.” He paused for a

discreet moment. Something indescribably confidential came into his

manner. “I doubt if Sir Isaac will quite like to ’ave them left about,

me lady—after you done with them.”

She was in a mood of discovery. She sat in the room that was all

furnished in pink (her favourite colour) and read a bitter, malicious,

coarsely written and yet insidiously credible account of her husband’s

business methods. Something within herself seemed to answer, “But

didn’t you know this all along?” That large conviction that her wealth

and position were but the culmination of a great and honourable social

service, a conviction that had been her tacit comfort during much

distasteful loyalty seemed to shrivel and fade. No doubt the writer was

a thwarted blackmailer; even her accustomed mind could distinguish a

twang of some such vicious quality in his sentences; but that did not

alter the realities he exhibited and exaggerated. There was a

description of how Sir Isaac pounced on his managers that was

manifestly derived from a manager he had dismissed. It was dreadfully

like him. Convincingly like him. There was a statement of the wages he

paid his girl assistants and long extracts from his codes of rules and

schedules of fines....

When she put down the paper she was suddenly afflicted by a vivid

vision of Susan Burnet’s father, losing heart and not knowing what to

do. She had an unreasonable feeling that Susan Burnet’s father must

have been a small, kindly, furry, bunnyish, little man. Of course there

had to be progress and the survival of the fittest. She found herself

weighing what she imagined Susan Burnet’s father to be like, against

the ferrety face, stooping shoulders and scheming whistle of Sir Isaac.

There were times now when she saw her husband with an extreme

distinctness.

§9

As this cold and bracing realization that all was not right with her

position, with Sir Isaac’s business procedure and the world generally,

took possession of Lady Harman’s thoughts there came also with it and

arising out of it quite a series of new moods and dispositions. At

times she was very full of the desire “to do something,” something that

would, as it were, satisfy and assuage this growing uneasiness of

responsibility in her mind. At times her consuming wish was not to

assuage but escape from this urgency. It worried her and made her feel

helpless, and she wanted beyond anything else to get back to that

child’s world where all experiences are adventurous and everything is

finally right. She felt, I think, that it was a little unfair to her

that this something within her should be calling upon her to take all

sorts of things gravely—hadn’t she been a good wife and brought four

children into the world...?

I am setting down here as clearly as possible what wasn’t by any means

clear in Lady Harman’s mind. I am giving you side by side phases that

never came side by side in her thoughts but which followed and ousted

and obliterated one another. She had moods of triviality. She had moods

of magnificence. She had moods of intense secret hostility to her

urgent little husband, and moods of genial tolerance for everything

there was in her life. She had moods, and don’t we all have moods?—of

scepticism and cynicism, much profounder than the conventions and

limitations of novel-writing permit us to tell here. And for hardly any

of these moods had she terms and recognitions....

It isn’t a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of

one’s material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by

modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in

every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings. Strong

instincts battled in Lady Harman against this intermittent sense of

responsibility that was beginning to worry her. An immense lot of her

was for simply running away from these troublesome considerations, for

covering herself up from them, for distraction.

And about this time she happened upon “Elizabeth and her German

Garden,” and was very greatly delighted and stimulated by that little

sister of Montaigne. She was charmed by the book’s fresh gaiety, by its

gallant resolve to set off all the good things there are in this world,

the sunshine and flowers and laughter, against the limitations and

thwartings and disappointments of life. For a time it seemed to her

that these brave consolations were solutions, and she was stirred by an

imitative passion. How stupid had she not been to let life and Sir

Isaac overcome her! She felt that she must make herself like Elizabeth,

exactly like Elizabeth; she tried forthwith, and a certain difficulty

she found, a certain deadness, she ascribed to the square modernity of

her house and something in the Putney air. The house was too large, it

dominated the garden and controlled her. She felt she must get away to

some place that was chiefly exterior, in the sunshine, far from towns

and struggling, straining, angry and despairing humanity, from

syndicated shops and all the embarrassing challenges of life. Somehow

there it would be possible to keep Sir Isaac at arm’s length; and the

ghost of Susan Burnet’s father could be left behind to haunt the square

rooms of the London house. And there she would live, horticultural,

bookish, whimsical, witty, defiant, happily careless.

And it was this particular conception of evasion that had set her

careering about the countryside in her car, looking for conceivable

houses of refuge from this dark novelty of social and personal care,

and that had driven her into the low long room of Black Strand and the

presence of Mr. Brumley.

Of what ensued and the appearance and influence of Lady Beach-Mandarin

and how it led among other things to a lunch invitation from that lady

the reader has already been informed.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

The Adventurous Afternoon

§1

You will perhaps remember that before I fell into this extensive

digression about Lady Harman’s upbringing, we had got to the entry of

Mrs. Sawbridge into the house bearing a plunder of Sir Isaac’s best

roses. She interrupted a conversation of some importance. Those roses

at this point are still unwithered and fragrant, and moreover they are

arranged according to Mrs. Sawbridge’s ideas of elegance about Sir

Isaac’s home.... And Sir Isaac, when that conversation could be

renewed, categorically forbade Lady Harman to go to Lady

Beach-Mandarin’s lunch and Lady Harman went to Lady Beach-Mandarin’s

lunch.

She had some peculiar difficulties in getting to that lunch.

It is necessary to tell certain particulars. They are particulars that

will distress the delicacy of Mrs. Sawbridge unspeakably if ever she

chances to read this book. But a story has to be told. You see Sir

Isaac Harman had never considered it advisable to give his wife a

private allowance. Whatever she wished to have, he maintained, she

could have. The bill would afterwards be paid by his cheque on the

first day of the month following the receipt of the bill. He found a

generous pleasure in writing these cheques, and Lady Harman was

magnificently housed, fed and adorned. Moreover, whenever she chose to

ask for money he gave her money, usually double of what she

demanded,—and often a kiss or so into the bargain. But after he had

forbidden her to go to Lady Beach-Mandarin’s so grave an estrangement

ensued that she could not ask him for money. A door closed between

them. And the crisis had come at an unfortunate moment. She possessed

the sum of five shillings and eightpence.

She perceived quite early that this shortness of money would greatly

embarrass the rebellion she contemplated. She was exceptionally

ignorant of most worldly things, but she knew there was never yet a

campaign without a war chest. She felt entitled to money....

She planned several times to make a demand for replenishment with a

haughty dignity; the haughty dignity was easy enough to achieve, but

the demand was not. A sensitive dread of her mother’s sympathetic

curiosity barred all thoughts of borrowing in that direction,—she and

her mother “never discussed money matters.” She did not want to get

Georgina into further trouble. And besides, Georgina was in Devonshire.

Even to get to Lady Beach-Mandarin’s became difficult under these

circumstances. She knew that Clarence, though he would take her into

the country quite freely, had been instructed, on account of Sir

Isaac’s expressed dread of any accident happening to her while alone,

not to plunge with her into the vortex of London traffic. Only under

direct orders from Sir Isaac would Clarence take her down Putney Hill;

though she might go up and away—to anywhere. She knew nothing of

pawnshops or any associated methods of getting cash advances, and the

possibility of using the telephone to hire an automobile never occurred

to her. But she was fully resolved to go. She had one advantage in the

fact that Sir Isaac didn’t know the precise date of the disputed

engagement. When that arrived she spent a restless morning and dressed

herself at last with great care. She instructed Peters, her maid, who

participated in these preparations with a mild astonishment, that she

was going out to lunch, asked her to inform Mrs. Sawbridge of the fact

and, outwardly serene, made a bolt for it down the staircase and across

the hall. The great butler appeared; she had never observed how like a

large note of interrogation his forward contours could be.

“I shall be out to lunch, Snagsby,” she said, and went past him into

the sunshine.

She left a discreetly astonished Snagsby behind her.

(“Now where are we going out to lunch?” said Snagsby presently to

Peters.

“I’ve never known her so particular with her clothes,” said the maid.

“Never before—not in the same way; it’s something new and special to

this affair,” Snagsby reflected, “I wonder now if Sir Isaac....”

“One can’t help observing things,” said the maid, after a pause. “Mute

though we be.”)

Lady Harman had the whole five and eightpence with her. She had managed

to keep it intact in her jewel case, declaring she had no change when

any small demands were made on her.

With an exhilaration so great that she wanted sorely to laugh aloud she

walked out through her big open gates and into the general publicity of

Putney Hill. Why had she not done as much years ago? How long she had

been, working up to this obvious thing! She hadn’t been out in such

complete possession of herself since she had been a schoolgirl. She

held up a beautifully gloved hand to a private motor-car going downhill

and then to an engaged taxi going up, and then with a slightly dashed

feeling, picked up her skirt and walked observantly downhill. Her

reason dispelled a transitory impression that these two vehicles were

on Sir Isaac’s side against her.

There was quite a nice taxi on the rank at the bottom of the hill. The

driver, a pleasant-looking young man in a white cap, seemed to have

been waiting for her in particular; he met her timid invitation halfway

and came across the road to her and jumped down and opened the door. He

took her instructions as though they were after his own heart, and

right in front of her as she sat was a kind of tin cornucopia full of

artificial flowers that seemed like a particular attention to her. His

fare was two and eightpence and she gave him four shillings. He seemed

quite gratified by her largesse, his manner implied he had always

thought as much of her, from first to last their relations had been

those of sunny contentment, and it was only as she ascended the steps

of Lady Beach-Mandarin’s portico, that it occurred to her that she now

had insufficient money for an automobile to take her home. But there

were railways and buses and all sorts of possibilities; the day was an

adventure; and she entered the drawing-room with a brow that was

beautifully unruffled. She wanted to laugh still; it animated her eyes

and lips with the pleasantest little stir you can imagine.

“A-a-a-a-a-h!” cried Lady Beach-Mandarin in a high note, and threw

out—it had an effect of being quite a number of arms—as though she was

one of those brass Indian goddesses one sees.

Lady Harman felt taken in at once to all that capacious bosom involved

and contained....

§2

It was quite an amusing lunch. But any lunch would have been amusing to

Lady Harman in the excitement of her first act of deliberate

disobedience. She had never been out to lunch alone in all her life

before; she experienced a kind of scared happiness, she felt like

someone at Lourdes who has just thrown away crutches. She was seated

between a pink young man with an eyeglass whose place was labelled

“Bertie Trevor” and who was otherwise unexplained, and Mr. Brumley. She

was quite glad to see Mr. Brumley again, and no doubt her eyes showed

it. She had hoped to see him. Miss Sharsper was sitting nearly opposite

to her, a real live novelist pecking observations out of life as a hen

pecks seeds amidst scenery, and next beyond was a large-headed

inattentive fluffy person who was Mr. Keystone the well-known critic.

And there was Agatha Alimony under a rustling vast hat of green-black

cock’s feathers next to Sir Markham Crosby, with whom she had been

having an abusive controversy in the _Times_ and to whom quite

elaborately she wouldn’t speak, and there was Lady Viping with her

lorgnette and Adolphus Blenker, Horatio’s younger and if possible more

gentlemanly brother—Horatio of the _Old Country Gazette_ that is—sole

reminder that there was such a person as Sir Isaac in the world. Lady

Beach-Mandarin’s mother and the Swiss governess and the tall but

retarded daughter, Phyllis, completed the party. The reception was

lively and cheering; Lady Beach-Mandarin enfolded her guests in

generosities and kept them all astir like a sea-swell under a squadron,

and she introduced Lady Harman to Miss Alimony by public proclamation

right across the room because there were two lavish tables of

bric-à-brac, a marble bust of old Beach-Mandarin and most of the rest

of the party in the way. And at the table conversation was like

throwing bread, you never knew whom you might hit or who might hit you.

(But Lady Beach-Mandarin produced an effect of throwing whole loaves.)

Bertie Trevor was one of those dancing young men who talk to a woman as

though they were giving a dog biscuits, and mostly it was Mr. Brumley

who did such talking as reached Lady Harman’s ear.

Mr. Brumley was in very good form that day. He had contrived to remind

her of all their Black Strand talk while they were still eating

_Petites Bouchées à la Reine_. “Have you found that work yet?” he asked

and carried her mind to the core of her situation. Then they were

snatched up into a general discussion of Bazaars. Sir Markham spoke of

a great bazaar that was to be held on behalf of one of the many

Shakespear Theatre movements that were then so prevalent. Was Lady

Beach-Mandarin implicated? Was anyone? He told of novel features in

contemplation. He generalized about bazaars and, with an air of having

forgotten the presence of Miss Alimony, glanced at the Suffrage

Bazaar—it was a season of bazaars. He thought poorly of the Suffrage

Bazaar. The hostess intervened promptly with anecdotes of her own

cynical daring as a Bazaar-seller, Miss Sharsper offered fragments of a

reminiscence about signing one of her own books for a Bookstall,

Blenker told a well-known Bazaar anecdote brightly and well, and the

impending skirmish was averted.

While the Bazaar talk still whacked to and fro about the table Mr.

Brumley got at Lady Harman’s ear again. “Rather tantalizing these

meetings at table,” he said. “It’s like trying to talk while you swim

in a rough sea....”

Then Lady Beach-Mandarin intervened with demands for support for her

own particular Bazaar project and they were eating salad before there

was a chance of another word between them. “I must confess that when I

want to talk to people I like to get them alone,” said Mr. Brumley, and

gave form to thoughts that were already on the verge of crystallization

in her own mind. She had been recalling that she had liked his voice

before, noting something very kindly and thoughtful and brotherly about

his right profile and thinking how much an hour’s talk with him would

help to clear up her ideas.

“But it’s so difficult to get one alone,” said Lady Harman, and

suddenly an idea of the utmost daring and impropriety flashed into her

mind. She was on the verge of speaking it forthwith and then didn’t,

she met something in his eye that answered her own and then Lady

Beach-Mandarin was foaming over them like a dam-burst over an American

town.

“What do _you_ think, Mr. Brumley?” demanded Lady Beach-Mandarin.

“?”

“About Sir Markham’s newspaper symposium. They asked him what allowance

he gave his wife. Sent a prepaid reply telegram.”

“But he hasn’t got a wife!”

“They don’t stick at a little thing like that,” said Sir Markham

grimly.

“I think a husband and wife ought to have everything in common like the

early Christians,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin. “_We_ always did,” and so

got the discussion afloat again off the sandbank of Mr. Brumley’s

inattention.

It was quite a good discussion and Lady Harman contributed an

exceptionally alert and intelligent silence. Sir Markham distrusted

Lady Beach-Mandarin’s communism and thought that anyhow it wouldn’t do

for a financier or business man. He favoured an allowance. “So did Sir

Joshua,” said the widow Viping. This roused Agatha Alimony. “Allowance

indeed!” she cried. “Is a wife to be on no better footing than a

daughter? The whole question of a wife’s financial autonomy needs

reconsidering....”

Adolphus Blenker became learned and lucid upon Pin-money and dowry and

the customs of savage tribes, and Mr. Brumley helped with

corroboration....

Mr. Brumley managed to say just one other thing to Lady Harman before

the lunch was over. It struck her for a moment as being irrelevant.

“The gardens at Hampton Court,” he said, “are delightful just now. Have

you seen them? Autumnal fires. All the September perennials lifting

their spears in their last great chorus. It’s the _Götterdämmerung_ of

the year.”