She was going out of the room before she appreciated his possible

intention.

Lady Beach-Mandarin delegated Sir Markham to preside over the men’s

cigars and bounced and slapped her four ladies upstairs to the

drawing-room. Her mother disappeared and so did Phyllis and the

governess. Lady Harman heard a large aside to Lady Viping: “Isn’t she

perfectly lovely?” glanced to discover the lorgnette in appreciative

action, and then found herself drifting into a secluded window-seat and

a duologue with Miss Agatha Alimony. Miss Alimony was one of that large

and increasing number of dusky, grey-eyed ladies who go through life

with an air of darkly incomprehensible significance. She led off Lady

Harman as though she took her away to reveal unheard-of mysteries and

her voice was a contralto undertone that she emphasized in some

inexplicable way by the magnetic use of her eyes. Her hat of cock’s

feathers which rustled like familiar spirits greatly augmented the

profundity of her effect. As she spoke she glanced guardedly at the

other ladies at the end of the room and from first to last she seemed

undecided in her own mind whether she was a conspirator or a

prophetess. She had heard of Lady Harman before, she had been longing

impatiently to talk to her all through the lunch. “You are just what we

want,” said Agatha. “What who want?” asked Lady Harman, struggling

against the hypnotic influence of her interlocutor. “_We_,” said Miss

Agatha, “the Cause. The G.S.W.S.

“We want just such people as you,” she repeated, and began in panting

rhetorical sentences to urge the militant cause.

For her it was manifestly a struggle against “the Men.” Miss Alimony

had no doubts of her sex. It had nothing to learn, nothing to be

forgiven, it was compact of obscured and persecuted marvels, it needed

only revelation. “They know Nothing,” she said of the antagonist males,

bringing deep notes out of the melodious caverns of her voice; “they

know _Nothing_ of the Deeper Secrets of Woman’s Nature.” Her discourse

of a general feminine insurrection fell in very closely with the spirit

of Lady Harman’s private revolt. “We want the Vote,” said Agatha, “and

we want the Vote because the Vote means Autonomy. And then——”

She paused voluminously. She had already used that word “Autonomy” at

the lunch table and it came to her hearer to supply a long-felt want.

Now she poured meanings into it, and Lady Harman with each addition

realized more clearly that it was still a roomy sack for more. “A woman

should be absolute mistress of herself,” said Miss Alimony, “absolute

mistress of her person. She should be free to develop——”

Germinating phrases these were in Lady Harman’s ear.

She wanted to know about the Suffrage movement from someone less

generously impatient than Georgina, for Georgina always lost her temper

about it and to put it fairly _ranted_, this at any rate was serene and

confident, and she asked tentative ill-formed questions and felt her

way among Miss Alimony’s profundities. She had her doubts, her

instinctive doubts about this campaign of violence, she doubted its

wisdom, she doubted its rightness, and she perceived, but she found it

difficult to express her perception, that Miss Alimony wasn’t so much

answering her objections as trying to swamp her with exalted emotion.

And if there was any flaw whatever in her attention to Miss Alimony’s

stirring talk, it was because she was keeping a little look-out in the

tail of her eye for the reappearance of the men, and more particularly

for the reappearance of Mr. Brumley with whom she had a peculiar

feeling of uncompleted relations. And at last the men came and she

caught his glance and saw that her feeling was reciprocated.

She was presently torn from Agatha, who gasped with pain at the parting

and pursued her with a sedulous gaze as a doctor might watch an

injected patient, she parted with Lady Beach-Mandarin with a vast

splash of enthusiasm and mutual invitations, and Lady Viping came and

pressed her to come to dinner and rapped her elbow with her lorgnette

to emphasize her invitation. And Lady Harman after a still moment for

reflection athwart which the word Autonomy flickered, accepted this

invitation also.

§3

Mr. Brumley hovered for a few moments in the hall conversing with Lady

Beach-Mandarin’s butler, whom he had known for some years and helped

about a small investment, and who was now being abjectly polite and

grateful to him for his attention. It gave Mr. Brumley a nice feudal

feeling to establish and maintain such relationships. The furry-eyed

boy fumbled with the sticks and umbrellas in the background and

wondered if he too would ever climb to these levels of respectful

gilt-tipped friendliness. Mr. Brumley hovered the more readily because

he knew Lady Harman was with the looking-glass in the little parlour

behind the dining-room on her way to the outer world. At last she

emerged. It was instantly manifest to Mr. Brumley that she had expected

to find him there. She smiled frankly at him, with the faintest

admission of complicity in her smile.

“Taxi, milady?” said the butler.

She seemed to reflect. “No, I will walk.” She hesitated over a glove

button. “Mr. Brumley, is there a Tube station near here?”

“Not two minutes. But can’t I perhaps take you in a taxi?”

“I’d rather walk.”

“I will show you——”

He found himself most agreeably walking off with her.

Still more agreeable things were to follow for Mr. Brumley.

She appeared to meditate upon a sudden idea. She disregarded some

conversational opening of his that he forgot in the instant. “Mr.

Brumley,” she said, “I didn’t intend to go directly home.”

“I’m altogether at your service,” said Mr. Brumley.

“At least,” said Lady Harman with that careful truthfulness of hers,

“it occurred to me during lunch that I wouldn’t go directly home.”

Mr. Brumley reined in an imagination that threatened to bolt with him.

“I want,” said Lady Harman, “to go to Kensington Gardens, I think. This

can’t be far from Kensington Gardens—and I want to sit there on a green

chair and—meditate—and afterwards I want to find a tube railway or

something that will take me back to Putney. There is really no need for

me to go directly home.... It’s very stupid of me but I don’t know my

way about London as a rational creature should do. So will you take me

and put me in a green chair and—tell me how afterwards I can find the

Tube and get home? Do you mind?”

“All my time, so long as you want it, is at your service,” said Mr.

Brumley with convincing earnestness. “And it’s not five minutes to the

gardens. And afterwards a taxi-cab——”

“No,” said Lady Harman mindful of her one-and-eightpence, “I prefer a

tube. But that we can talk about later. You’re sure, Mr. Brumley, I’m

not invading your time?”

“I wish you could see into my mind,” said Mr. Brumley.

She became almost barefaced. “It is so true,” she said, “that at lunch

one can’t really talk to anyone. And I’ve so wanted to talk to you.

Ever since we met before.”

Mr. Brumley conveyed an unfeigned delight.

“Since then,” said Lady Harman, “I’ve read your _Euphemia_ books.” Then

after a little unskilful pause, “again.” Then she blushed and added, “I

_had_ read one of them, you know, before.”

“Exactly,” he said with an infinite helpfulness.

“And you seem so sympathetic, so understanding. I feel that all sorts

of things that are muddled in my mind would come clear if I could have

a really Good Talk. To you....”

They were now through the gates approaching the Albert Memorial. Mr.

Brumley was filled with an idea so desirable that it made him fear to

suggest it.

“Of course we can talk very comfortably here,” he said, “under these

great trees. But I do so wish——Have you seen those great borders at

Hampton Court? The whole place is glowing, and in such sunshine as

this——A taxi—will take us there under the hour. If you are free until

half-past five.”

_Why shouldn’t she?_

The proposal seemed so outrageous to all the world of Lady Harman that

in her present mood she felt it was her duty in the cause of womanhood

to nerve herself and accept it....

“I mustn’t be later than half-past five.”

“We could snatch a glimpse of it all and be back before then.”

“In that case——It would be very agreeable.”

(_Why shouldn’t she?_ It would no doubt make Sir Isaac furiously

angry—if he heard of it. But it was the sort of thing other women of

her class did; didn’t all the novels testify? She had a perfect right——

And besides, Mr. Brumley was so entirely harmless.)

§4

It had been Lady Harman’s clear intention to have a luminous and

illuminating discussion of the peculiar difficulties and perplexities

of her position with Mr. Brumley. Since their first encounter this idea

had grown up in her mind. She was one of those women who turn

instinctively to men and away from women for counsel. There was to her

perception something wise and kindly and reassuring in him; she felt

that he had lived and suffered and understood and that he was ready to

help other people to live; his heart she knew from his published works

was buried with his dead Euphemia, and he seemed as near a thing to a

brother and a friend as she was ever likely to meet. She wanted to tell

him all this and then to broach her teeming and tangled difficulties,

about her own permissible freedoms, about her social responsibilities,

about Sir Isaac’s business. But now as their taxi dodged through the

traffic of Kensington High Street and went on its way past Olympia and

so out westwards, she found it extremely difficult to fix her mind upon

the large propositions with which it had been her intention to open. Do

as she would to feel that this was a momentous occasion, she could not

suppress, she could not ignore an obstinate and entirely undignified

persuasion that she was having a tremendous lark. The passing vehicles,

various motors, omnibuses, vans, carriages, the thronging pedestrians,

the shops and houses, were all so distractingly interesting that at

last she had to put it fairly to herself whether she hadn’t better

resign herself to the sensations of the present and reserve that

sustained discussion for an interval she foresaw as inevitable on some

comfortable seat under great trees at Hampton Court. You cannot talk

well and penetratingly about fundamental things when you are in a not

too well-hung taxi which is racing to get ahead of a vast red

motor-omnibus....

With a certain discretion Mr. Brumley had instructed the chauffeur to

cross the river not at Putney but at Hammersmith, and so they went by

Barnes station and up a still almost rural lane into Richmond Park, and

there suddenly they were among big trees and bracken and red deer and

it might have been a hundred miles from London streets. Mr. Brumley

directed the driver to make a detour that gave them quite all the best

of the park.

The mind of Mr. Brumley was also agreeably excited and dispersed on

this occasion. It was an occasion of which he had been dreaming very

frequently of late, he had invented quite remarkable dialogues during

those dreams, and now he too was conversationally inadequate and with a

similar feeling of unexpected adventure. He was now no more ready to go

to the roots of things than Lady Harman. He talked on the way down

chiefly of the route they were following, of the changes in the London

traffic due to motor traction and of the charm and amenity of Richmond

Park. And it was only after they had arrived at Hampton Court and

dismissed the taxi and spent some time upon the borders, that they came

at last to a seat under a grove beside a long piece of water bearing

water lilies, and sat down and made a beginning with the Good Talk.

Then indeed she tried to gather together the heads of her perplexity

and Mr. Brumley did his best to do justice to confidence she reposed in

him....

It wasn’t at all the conversation he had dreamt of; it was halting, it

was inconclusive, it was full of a vague dissatisfaction.

The roots of this dissatisfaction lay perhaps more than anything else

in her inattention to him—how shall I say it?—as _Him_. Hints have been

conveyed to the reader already that for Mr. Brumley the universe was

largely a setting, a tangle, a maze, a quest enshrining at the heart of

it and adumbrating everywhere, a mystical Her, and his experience of

this world had pointed him very definitely to the conclusion that for

that large other half of mankind which is woman, the quality of things

was reciprocal and centred, for all the appearances and pretences of

other interests, in—Him. And he was disposed to believe that the other

things in life, not merely the pomp and glories but the faiths and

ambitions and devotions, were all demonstrably little more than posings

and dressings of this great duality. A large part of his own interests

and of the interests of the women he knew best, was the sustained and

in some cases recurrent discovery and elaboration of lights and

glimpses of Him or Her as the case might be, in various definite

individuals; and it was a surprise to him, it perplexed him to find

that this lovely person, so beautifully equipped for those mutual

researches which constituted, he felt, the heart of life, was yet

completely in her manner unaware of this primary sincerity and looking

quite simply, as it were, over him and through him at such things as

the ethics of the baking, confectionery and refreshment trade and the

limits of individual responsibility in these matters. The conclusion

that she was “unawakened” was inevitable.

The dream of “awakening” this Sleeping Beauty associated itself in a

logical sequence with his interpretations. I do not say that such

thoughts were clear in Mr. Brumley’s mind, they were not, but into this

shape the forms of his thoughts fell. Such things dimly felt below the

clear level of consciousness were in him. And they gave his attempt to

take up and answer the question that perplexed her, something of the

quality of an attempt to clothe and serve hidden purposes. It could not

but be evident to him that the effort of Lady Harman to free herself a

little from her husband’s circumvallation and to disentangle herself a

little from the realities of his commercial life, might lead to such a

liberation as would leave her like a nascent element ready to

recombine. And it was entirely in the vein of this drift of thought in

him that he should resolve upon an assiduous proximity against that

moment of release and awakening....

I do not do Mr. Brumley as the human lover justice if I lead you to

suppose that he plotted thus clearly and calculatingly. Yet all this

was in his mind. All this was in Mr. Brumley, but it wasn’t Mr.

Brumley. Presented with it as a portrait of his mind, he would have

denied it indignantly—and, knowing it was there, have grown a little

flushed in his denials. Quite equally in his mind was a simple desire

to please her, to do what she wished, to help her because she wanted

help. And a quite keen desire to be clean and honest about her and

everything connected with her, for his own sake as well as for her

sake—for the sake of the relationship....

So you have Mr. Brumley on the green seat under the great trees at

Hampton Court, in his neat London clothes, his quite becoming silk-hat,

above his neatly handsome and intelligent profile, with his gloves in

his hand and one arm over the seat back, going now very earnestly and

thoughtfully into the question of the social benefit of the

International Bread and Cake Stores and whether it was possible for her

to “do anything” to repair any wrongs that might have arisen out of

that organization, and you will understand why there is a little flush

in his cheek and why his sentences are a trifle disconnected and

tentative and why his eye wanders now to the soft raven tresses about

Lady Harman’s ear, now to the sweet movement of her speaking lips and

now to the gracious droop of her pose as she sits forward, elbow upon

crossed knee and chin on glove, and jabs her parasol at the ground in

her unaccustomed efforts to explain and discuss the difficulties of her

position.

And you will understand too why it is that he doesn’t deal with the

question before him so simply and impartially as he seems to do.

Obscuring this extremely interesting problem of a woman growing to

man-like sense of responsibility in her social consequences, is the

dramatic proclivity that makes him see all this merely as something

which must necessarily weaken Lady Harman’s loyalty and qualify her

submission to Sir Isaac, that makes him want to utilize it and develop

it in that direction....

§5

Moreover so complex is the thought of man, there was also another

stream of mental activity flowing in the darker recesses of Mr.

Brumley’s mind. Unobtrusively he was trying to count the money in his

pockets and make certain estimates.

It had been his intention to replenish his sovereign purse that

afternoon at his club and he was only reminded of this abandoned plan

when he paid off his taxi at the gates of Hampton Court. The fare was

nine and tenpence and the only piece of gold he had was a

half-sovereign. But there was a handful of loose silver in his trouser

pocket and so the fare and tip were manageable. “Will you be going

back, sir?” asked the driver.

And Mr. Brumley reflected too briefly and committed a fatal error.

“No,” he said with his mind upon that loose silver. “We shall go back

by train.”

Now it is the custom with taxi-cabs that take people to such outlying

and remote places as Hampton Court, to be paid off and to wait loyally

until their original passengers return. Thereby the little machine is

restrained from ticking out twopences which should go in the main to

the absent proprietor, and a feeling of mutuality is established

between the driver and his fare. But of course this cab being released

presently found another passenger and went away....

I have written in vain if I have not conveyed to you that Mr. Brumley

was a gentleman of great and cultivated delicacy, that he liked the

seemly and handsome side of things and dreaded the appearance of any

flaw upon his prosperity as only a man trained in an English public

school can do. It was intolerable to think of any hitch in this happy

excursion which was to establish he knew not what confidence between

himself and Lady Harman. From first to last he felt it had to go with

an air—and what was the first class fare from Hampton Court to

Putney—which latter station he believed was on the line from Hampton

Court to London—and could one possibly pretend it was unnecessary to

have tea? And so while Lady Harman talked about her husband’s

business—“our business” she called it—and shrank from ever saying

anything more about the more intimate question she had most in mind,

the limits to a wife’s obedience, Mr. Brumley listened with these

financial solicitudes showing through his expression and giving it a

quality of intensity that she found remarkably reassuring. And once or

twice they made him miss points in her remarks that forced him back

upon that very inferior substitute for the apt answer, a judicious

“Um.”

(It would be quite impossible to go without tea, he decided. He himself

wanted tea quite badly. He would think better when he had had some

tea....)

The crisis came at tea. They had tea at the inn upon the green that

struck Mr. Brumley as being most likely to be cheap and which he

pretended to choose for some trivial charm about the windows. And it

wasn’t cheap, and when at last Mr. Brumley was faced by the little slip

of the bill and could draw his money from his pocket and look at it, he

knew the worst and the worst was worse than he had expected. The bill

was five shillings (Should he dispute it? Too ugly altogether, a

dispute with a probably ironical waiter!) and the money in his hand

amounted to four shillings and sixpence.

He acted surprise with the waiter’s eye upon him. (Should he ask for

credit? They might be frightfully disagreeable in such a cockney resort

as this.) “Tut, tut,” said Mr. Brumley, and then—a little late for

it—resorted to and discovered the emptiness of his sovereign purse. He

realized that this was out of the picture at this stage, felt his ears

and nose and cheeks grow hot and pink. The waiter’s colleague across

the room became interested in the proceedings.

“I had no idea,” said Mr. Brumley, which was a premeditated falsehood.

“Is anything the matter?” asked Lady Harman with a sisterly interest.

“My dear Lady Harman, I find myself——Ridiculous position. Might I

borrow half a sovereign?”

He felt sure that the two waiters exchanged glances. He looked at

them,—a mistake again—and got hotter.

“Oh!” said Lady Harman and regarded him with frank amusement in her

eyes. The thing struck her at first in the light of a joke. “I’ve only

got one-and-eightpence. I didn’t expect——”

She blushed as beautifully as ever. Then she produced a small but

plutocratic-looking purse and handed it to him.

“Most remarkable—inconvenient,” said Mr. Brumley, opening the precious

thing and extracting a shilling. “That will do,” he said and dismissed

the waiter with a tip of sixpence. Then with the open purse still in

his hand, he spent much of his remaining strength trying to look amused

and unembarrassed, feeling all the time that with his flushed face and

in view of all the circumstances of the case he must be really looking

very silly and fluffy.

“It’s really most inconvenient,” he remarked.

“I never thought of the—of this. It was silly of me,” said Lady Harman.

“Oh no! Oh dear no! The silliness I can assure you is all mine. I can’t

tell you how entirely apologetic——Ridiculous fix. And after I had

persuaded you to come here.”

“Still we were able to pay,” she consoled him.

“But you have to get home!”

She hadn’t so far thought of that. It brought Sir Isaac suddenly into

the picture. “By half-past five,” she said with just the faintest

flavour of interrogation.

Mr. Brumley looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to five.

“Waiter,” he said, “how do the trains run from here to Putney?”

“I don’t _think_, sir, that we have any trains from here to Putney——”

An A.B.C. Railway Guide was found and Mr. Brumley learnt for the first

time that Putney and Hampton Court are upon two distinct and separate

and, as far as he could judge by the time-table, mutually hostile

branches of the South Western Railway, and that at the earliest they

could not get to Putney before six o’clock.

Mr. Brumley was extremely disconcerted. He perceived that he ought to

have kept his taxi. It amounted almost to a debt of honour to deliver

this lady secure and untarnished at her house within the next hour. But

this reflection did not in the least degree assist him to carry it out

and as a matter of fact Mr. Brumley became flurried and did not carry

it out. He was not used to being without money, it unnerved him, and he

gave way to a kind of hectic _savoir faire_. He demanded a taxi of the

waiter. He tried to evolve a taxi by will power alone. He went out with

Lady Harman and back towards the gates of Hampton Court to look for

taxis. Then it occurred to him that they might be losing the 5.25 up.

So they hurried over the bridge of the station.

He had a vague notion that he would be able to get tickets on credit at

the booking office if he presented his visiting card. But the clerk in

charge seemed to find something uncongenial in his proposal. He did not

seem to like what he saw of Mr. Brumley through his little square

window and Mr. Brumley found something slighting and unpleasant in his

manner. It was one of those little temperamental jars which happen to

men of delicate sensibilities and Mr. Brumley tried to be reassuringly

overbearing in his manner and then lost his temper and was threatening

and so wasted precious moments what time Lady Harman waited on the

platform, with a certain shadow of doubt falling upon her confidence in

him, and watched the five-twenty-five gather itself together and start

Londonward. Mr. Brumley came out of the ticket office resolved to

travel without tickets and carry things through with a high hand just

as it became impossible to do so by that train, and then I regret to

say he returned for some further haughty passages with the ticket clerk

upon the duty of public servants to point out such oversights as his,

that led to repartee and did nothing to help Lady Harman on her

homeward way.

Then he discovered a current time-table and learnt that now even were

all the ticket difficulties over-ridden he could not get Lady Harman to

Putney before twenty minutes past seven, so completely is the South

Western Railway not organized for conveying people from Hampton Court

to Putney. He explained this as well as he could to Lady Harman, and

then led her out of the station in another last desperate search for a

taxi.

“We can always come back for that next train,” he said. “It doesn’t go

for half an hour.”

“I cannot blame myself sufficiently,” he said for the eighth or ninth

time....

It was already well past a quarter to six before Mr. Brumley bethought

himself of the London County Council tramcars that run from the palace

gates. Along these an ample four-pennyworth was surely possible and at

the end would be taxis——There _must_ be taxis. The tram took them—but

oh! how slowly it seemed!—to Hammersmith by a devious route through

interminable roads and streets, and long before they reached that spot

twilight had passed into darkness, and all the streets and shops were

flowering into light and the sense of night and lateness was very

strong. After they were seated in the tram a certain interval of

silence came between them and then Lady Harman laughed and Mr. Brumley

laughed—there was no longer any need for him to be energetic and

fussy—and they began to have that feeling of adventurous amusement

which comes on the further side of desperation. But beneath the

temporary elation Lady Harman was a prey to grave anxieties and Mr.

Brumley could not help thinking he had made a tremendous ass of himself

in that ticket clerk dispute....

At Hammersmith they got out, two quite penniless travellers, and after

some anxious moments found a taxi. It took them to Putney Hill. Lady

Harman descended at the outer gates of her home and walked up the drive

in the darkness while Mr. Brumley went on to his club and solvency

again. It was five minutes past eight when he entered the hall of his

club....

§6

It had been Lady Harman’s original intention to come home before four,

to have tea with her mother and to inform her husband when he returned

from the city of her entirely dignified and correct disobedience to his

absurd prohibitions. Then he would have bullied at a disadvantage, she

would have announced her intention of dining with Lady Viping and

making the various calls and expeditions for which she had arranged and

all would have gone well. But you see how far accident and a spirit of

enterprise may take a lady from so worthy a plan, and when at last she

returned to the Victorian baronial home in Putney it was very nearly

eight and the house blazed with crisis from pantry to nursery. Even the

elder three little girls, who were accustomed to be kissed goodnight by

their “boofer muvver,” were still awake and—catching the subtle

influence of the atmosphere of dismay about them—in tears. The very

under-housemaids were saying: “Where _ever_ can her ladyship ’ave got

to?”

Sir Isaac had come home that day at an unusually early hour and with a

peculiar pinched expression that filled even Snagsby with apprehensive

alertness. Sir Isaac had in fact returned in a state of quite unwonted

venom. He had come home early because he wished to vent it upon Ellen,

and her absence filled him with something of that sensation one has

when one puts out a foot for the floor and instead a step drops one

down—it seems abysmally.

“But where’s she gone, Snagsby?”

“Her ladyship _said_ to lunch, Sir Isaac,” said Snagsby.

“Good gracious! Where?”

“Her ladyship didn’t _say_, Sir Isaac.”

“But where? Where the devil——?”

“I have—’ave no means whatever of knowing, Sir Isaac.”

He had a defensive inspiration.

“Perhaps Mrs. Sawbridge, Sir Isaac....”

Mrs. Sawbridge was enjoying the sunshine upon the lawn. She sat in the

most comfortable garden chair, held a white sunshade overhead, had the

last new novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward upon her lap, and was engaged in

trying not to wonder where her daughter might be. She beheld with a

distinct blenching of the spirit Sir Isaac advancing towards her. She

wondered more than ever where Ellen might be.

“Here!” cried her son-in-law. “Where’s Ellen gone?”

Mrs. Sawbridge with an affected off-handedness was sure she hadn’t the

faintest idea.

“Then you _ought_ to have,” said Isaac. “She ought to be at home.”

Mrs. Sawbridge’s only reply was to bridle slightly.

“Where’s she got to? Where’s she gone? Haven’t you any idea at all?”

“I was not favoured by Ellen’s confidence,” said Mrs. Sawbridge.

“But you _ought_ to know,” cried Sir Isaac. “She’s your daughter. Don’t

you know anything of _either_ of your daughters. I suppose you don’t

care where they are, either of them, or what mischief they’re up to.

Here’s a man—comes home early to his tea—and no wife! After hearing all

I’ve done at the club.”

Mrs. Sawbridge stood up in order to be more dignified than a seated

position permitted.

“It is scarcely my business, Sir Isaac,” she said, “to know of the

movements of your wife.”

“Nor Georgina’s apparently either. Good God! I’d have given a hundred

pounds that this shouldn’t have happened!”

“If you must speak to me, Sir Isaac, will you please kindly refrain

from—from the deity——”

“Oh! shut it!” said Sir Isaac, blazing up to violent rudeness. “Why!

Don’t you know, haven’t you an idea? The infernal foolery! Those

tickets. She got those women——Look here, if you go walking away with

your nose in the air before I’ve done——Look here! Mrs. Sawbridge, you

listen to me——Georgina. I’m speaking of Georgina.”

The lady was walking now swiftly and stiffly towards the house, her

face very pale and drawn, and Sir Isaac hurrying beside her in a white

fury of expostulation. “I tell you,” he cried, “Georgina——”

There was something maddeningly incurious about her. He couldn’t

understand why she didn’t even pause to hear what Georgina had done and

what he had to say about it. A person so wrapped up in her personal and

private dignity makes a man want to throw stones. Perhaps she knew of

Georgina’s misdeeds. Perhaps she sympathized....

A sense of the house windows checked his pursuit of her ear. “Then go,”

he said to her retreating back. “_Go!_ I don’t care if you go for good.

I don’t care if you go altogether. If _you_ hadn’t had the upbringing

of these two girls——”

She was manifestly out of earshot and in full yet almost queenly flight

for the house. He wanted to say things about her. _To_ someone. He was

already saying things to the garden generally. What does one marry a

wife for? His mind came round to Ellen again. Where had she got to?

Even if she had gone out to lunch, it was time she was back. He went to

his study and rang for Snagsby.

“Lady Harman back yet?” he asked grimly.

“No, Sir Isaac.”

“Why isn’t she back?”

Snagsby did his best. “Perhaps, Sir Isaac, her ladyship has

experienced—’as hexperienced a naxident.”

Sir Isaac stared at that idea for a moment. Then he thought, ‘Someone

would have telephoned,’ “No,” he said, “she’s out. That’s where she is.

And I suppose I can wait here, as well as I can until she chooses to

come home. Degenerate foolish nonsense!...”

He whistled between his teeth like an escape of steam. Snagsby, after

the due pause of attentiveness, bowed respectfully and withdrew....

He had barely time to give a brief outline of the interview to the

pantry before a violent ringing summoned him again. Sir Isaac wished to

speak to Peters, Lady Harman’s maid. He wanted to know where Lady

Harman had gone; this being impossible, he wanted to know where Lady

Harman had seemed to be going.

“Her Ladyship _seemed_ to be going out to lunch, Sir Isaac,” said

Peters, her meek face irradiated by helpful intelligence.

“Oh _get_ out!” said Sir Isaac. “_Get_ out!”

“Yes, Sir Isaac,” said Peters and obeyed....

“He’s in a rare bait about her,” said Peters to Snagsby downstairs.

“I’m inclined to think her ladyship will catch it pretty hot,” said

Snagsby.

“He can’t _know_ anything,” said Peters.

“What about?” asked Snagsby.

“Oh, _I_ don’t know,” said Peters. “Don’t ask _me_ about her....”

About ten minutes later Sir Isaac was heard to break a little china

figure of the goddess Kwannon, that had stood upon his study

mantel-shelf. The fragments were found afterwards in the fireplace....

The desire for self-expression may become overwhelming. After Sir Isaac

had talked to himself about Georgina and Lady Harman for some time in

his study, he was seized with a great longing to pour some of this

spirited stuff into the entirely unsympathetic ear of Mrs. Sawbridge.

So he went about the house and garden looking for her, and being at

last obliged to enquire about her, learnt from a scared defensive

housemaid whom he cornered suddenly in the conservatory, that she had

retired to her own room. He went and rapped at her door but after one

muffled “Who’s that?” he could get no further response.

“I want to tell you about Georgina,” he said.

He tried the handle but the discreet lady within had turned the key

upon her dignity.

“I want,” he shouted, “to tell you about Georgina.... GEORGINA! Oh

_damn_!”

Silence.

Tea awaited him downstairs. He hovered about the drawing-room, making

noises between his teeth.

“Snagsby,” said Sir Isaac, “just tell Mrs. Sawbridge I shall be obliged

if she will come down to tea.”

“Mrs. Sawbridge ’as a ’_ead_ache, Sir Isaac,” said Mr. Snagsby with

extreme blandness. “She asked me to acquaint you. She ’as ordered tea

in ’er own apartment.”

For a moment Sir Isaac was baffled. Then he had an inspiration. “Just

get me the _Times_, Snagsby,” he said.

He took the paper and unfolded it until a particular paragraph was

thrown into extreme prominence. This he lined about with his fountain

pen and wrote above it with a quivering hand, “These women’s tickets

were got by Georgina under false pretences from me.” He handed the

paper thus prepared back to Snagsby. “Just take this paper to Mrs.

Sawbridge,” he said, “and ask her what she thinks of it?”

But Mrs. Sawbridge tacitly declined this proposal for a correspondence

_viâ_ Snagsby.

§7

There was no excuse for Georgina.

Georgina had obtained tickets from Sir Isaac for the great party

reception at Barleypound House, under the shallow pretext that she

wanted them for “two spinsters from the country,” for whose good

behaviour she would answer, and she had handed them over to that

organization of disorder which swayed her mind. The historical outrage

upon Mr. Blapton was the consequence.

Two desperate and misguided emissaries had gone to the great reception,

dressed and behaving as much as possible like helpful Liberal women;

they had made their way towards the brilliant group of leading Liberals

of which Mr. Blapton was the centre, assuming an almost Whig-like

expression and bearing to mask the fires within, and had then suddenly

accosted him. It was one of those great occasions when the rank and

file of the popular party is privileged to look upon Court dress. The

ministers and great people had come on from Buckingham Palace in their

lace and legs. Scarlet and feathers, splendid trains and mysterious

ribbons and stars, gave an agreeable intimation of all that it means to

be in office to the dazzled wives and daughters of the party stalwarts

and fired the ambition of innumerable earnest but earnestly competitive

young men. It opened the eyes of the Labour leaders to the higher

possibilities of Parliament. And then suddenly came a stir, a rush, a

cry of “Tear off his epaulettes!” and outrage was afoot. And two quite

nice-looking young women!

It is unhappily not necessary to describe the scene that followed. Mr.

Blapton made a brave fight for his epaulettes, fighting chiefly with

his cocked hat, which was bent double in the struggle. Mrs. Blapton

gave all the assistance true womanliness could offer and, in fact, she

boxed the ears of one of his assailants very soundly. The intruders

were rescued in an extremely torn and draggled condition from the

indignant statesmen who had fallen upon them by tardy but decisive

police....

Such scenes sprinkle the recent history of England with green and

purple patches and the interest of this particular one for us is only

because of Georgina’s share in it. That was brought home to Sir Isaac,

very suddenly and disagreeably, while he was lunching at the Climax

Club with Sir Robert Charterson. A man named Gobbin, an art critic or

something of that sort, one of those flimsy literary people who mar the

solid worth of so many great clubs, a man with a lot of hair and the

sort of loose tie that so often seems to be less of a tie than a

detachment from all decent restraints, told him. Charterson was holding

forth upon the outrage.

“That won’t suit Sir Isaac, Sir Robert,” said Gobbin presuming on his

proximity.

Sir Isaac tried to give him a sort of look one gives to an

unsatisfactory clerk.

“They went there with Sir Isaac’s tickets,” said Gobbin.

“They _never_——!”

“Horatio Blenker was looking for you in the hall. Haven’t you seen him?

After all the care they took. The poor man’s almost in tears.”

“They never had tickets of mine!” cried Sir Isaac stoutly and

indignantly.

And then the thought of Georgina came like a blow upon his heart....

In his flurry he went on denying....

The subsequent conversation in the smoking-room was as red-eared and

disagreeable for Sir Isaac as any conversation could be. “But how

_could_ such a thing have happened?” he asked in a voice that sounded

bleached to him. “How could such a thing have come about?” Their eyes

were dreadful. Did they guess? Could they guess? Conscience within him

was going up and down shouting out, “Georgina, your sister-in-law,

Georgina,” so loudly that he felt the whole smoking-room must be

hearing it....

§8

As Lady Harman came up through the darkness of the drive to her home,

she was already regretting very deeply that she had not been content to

talk to Mr. Brumley in Kensington Gardens instead of accepting his

picturesque suggestion of Hampton Court. There was an unpleasant

waif-like feeling about this return. She was reminded of pictures

published in the interests of Doctor Barnardo’s philanthropies,—Dr.

Barnardo her favourite hero in real life,—in which wistful little

outcasts creep longingly towards brightly lit but otherwise respectable

homes. It wasn’t at all the sort of feeling she would have chosen if

she had had a choice of feelings. She was tired and dusty and as she

came into the hall the bright light was blinding. Snagsby took her

wrap. “Sir Isaac, me lady, ’as been enquiring for your ladyship,” he

communicated.

Sir Isaac appeared on the staircase.

“Good gracious, Elly!” he shouted. “Where you been?”

Lady Harman decided against an immediate reply. “I shall be ready for

dinner in half an hour,” she told Snagsby and went past him to the

stairs.

Sir Isaac awaited her. “Where you been?” he repeated as she came up to

him.

A housemaid on the staircase and the second nursemaid on the nursery

landing above shared Sir Isaac’s eagerness to hear her answer. But they

did not hear her answer, for Lady Harman with a movement that was all

too reminiscent of her mother’s in the garden, swept past him towards

the door of her own room. He followed her and shut the door on the

thwarted listeners.

“Here!” he said, with a connubial absence of restraint. “Where the

devil you been? What the deuce do you think you’ve been getting up to?”

She had been calculating her answers since the moment she had realized

that she was to return home at a disadvantage. (It is not my business

to blame her for a certain disingenuousness; it is my business simply

to record it.) “I went out to lunch at Lady Beach-Mandarin’s,” she

said. “I told you I meant to.”

“Lunch!” he cried. “Why, it’s eight!”

“I met—some people. I met Agatha Alimony. I have a perfect right to go

out to lunch——”

“You met a nice crew I’ll bet. But that don’t account for your being

out to eight, does it? With all the confounded household doing as it

pleases!”

“I went on—to see the borders at Hampton Court.”

“With _her_?”

“_Yes_,” said Lady Harman....

It wasn’t what she had meant to happen. It was an inglorious declension

from her contemplated pose of dignified assertion. She was impelled to

do her utmost to get away from this lie she had uttered at once, to

eliminate Agatha from the argument by an emphatic generalization. “I’ve

a perfect right,” she said, suddenly nearly breathless, “to go to

Hampton Court with anyone I please, talk about anything I like and stay

there as long as I think fit.”

He squeezed his thin lips together for a silent moment and then

retorted. “You’ve got nothing of the sort, nothing of the sort. You’ve

got to do your duty like everybody else in the world, and your duty is

to be in this house controlling it—and not gossiping about London just

where any silly fancy takes you.”

“I don’t think that _is_ my duty,” said Lady Harman after a slight

pause to collect her forces.

“Of _course_ it’s your duty. You know it’s your duty. You know

perfectly well. It’s only these rotten, silly, degenerate, decadent

fools who’ve got ideas into you——” The sentence staggered under its

load of adjectives like a camel under the last straw and collapsed.

“_See?_” he said.

Lady Harman knitted her brows.

“I do my duty,” she began.

But Sir Isaac was now resolved upon eloquence. His mind was full with

the accumulations of an extremely long and bitter afternoon and urgent

to discharge. He began to answer her and then a passion of rage flooded

him. Suddenly he wanted to shout and use abusive expressions and it

seemed to him there was nothing to prevent his shouting and using

abusive expressions. So he did. “Call this your duty,” he said,

“gadding about with some infernal old suffragette——”

He paused to gather force. He had never quite let himself go to his

wife before; he had never before quite let himself go to anyone. He had

always been in every crisis just a little too timid to let himself go.

But a wife is privileged. He sought strength and found it in words from

which he had hitherto abstained. It was not a discourse to which print

could do justice; it flickered from issue to issue. He touched upon

Georgina, upon the stiffness of Mrs. Sawbridge’s manner, upon the

neurotic weakness of Georgina’s unmarried state, upon the general decay

of feminine virtue in the community, upon the laxity of modern

literature, upon the dependent state of Lady Harman, upon the

unfairness of their relations which gave her every luxury while he

spent his days in arduous toil, upon the shame and annoyance in the

eyes of his servants that her unexplained absence had caused him.

He emphasized his speech by gestures. He thrust out one rather large

ill-shaped hand at her with two vibrating fingers extended. His ears

became red, his nose red, his eyes seemed red and all about these

points his face was wrathful white. His hair rose up into stiff scared

listening ends. He had his rights, he had some _little_ claim to

consideration surely, he might be just nobody but he wasn’t going to

stand this much anyhow. He gave her fair warning. What was she, what

did she know of the world into which she wanted to rush? He lapsed into

views of Lady Beach-Mandarin—unfavourable views. I wish Lady

Beach-Mandarin could have heard him....

Ever and again Lady Harman sought to speak. This incessant voice

confused and baffled her; she had a just attentive mind at bottom and

down there was a most weakening feeling that there must indeed be some

misdeed in her to evoke so impassioned a storm. She had a curious and

disconcerting sense of responsibility for his dancing exasperation, she

felt she was to blame for it, just as years ago she had felt she was to

blame for his tears when he had urged her so desperately to marry him.

Some irrational instinct made her want to allay him. It is the supreme

feminine weakness, that wish to allay. But she was also clinging

desperately to her resolution to proclaim her other forthcoming

engagements. Her will hung on to that as a man hangs on to a mountain

path in a thunderburst. She stood gripping her dressing-table and ever

and again trying to speak. But whenever she did so Sir Isaac lifted a

hand and cried almost threateningly: “You hear me out, Elly! You hear

me out!” and went on a little faster....

(Limburger in his curious “_Sexuelle Unterschiede der Seele_,” points

out as a probably universal distinction between the sexes that when a

man scolds a woman, if only he scolds loudly enough and long enough,

conviction of sin is aroused, while in the reverse case the result is

merely a murderous impulse. This he further says is not understood by

women, who hope by scolding to produce the similar effect upon men that

they themselves would experience. The passage is illustrated by figures

of ducking stools and followed by some carefully analyzed statistics of

connubial crime in Berlin in the years 1901-2. But in this matter let

the student compare the achievement of Paulina in _The Winter’s Tale_

and reflect upon his own life. And moreover it is difficult to estimate

how far the twinges of conscience that Lady Harman was feeling were not

due to an entirely different cause, the falsification of her position

by the lie she had just told Sir Isaac.)

And presently upon this noisy scene in the great pink bedroom, with Sir

Isaac walking about and standing and turning and gesticulating and Lady

Harman clinging on to her dressing-table, and painfully divided between

her new connections, her sense of guilty deception and the deep

instinctive responsibilities of a woman’s nature, came, like one of

those rows of dots that are now so frequent and so helpful in the art

of fiction, the surging, deep, assuaging note of Snagsby’s gong:

Booooooom. Boom. Boooooom....

“Damn it!” cried Sir Isaac, smiting at the air with both fists clenched

and speaking as though this was Ellen’s crowning misdeed, “and we

aren’t even dressed for dinner!”

§9

Dinner had something of the stiffness of court ceremonial.

Mrs. Sawbridge, perhaps erring on the side of discretion, had consumed

a little soup and a wing of chicken in her own room. Sir Isaac was down

first and his wife found him grimly astride before the great

dining-room fire awaiting her. She had had her dark hair dressed with

extreme simplicity and had slipped on a blue velvet tea-gown, but she

had been delayed by a visit to the nursery, where the children were now

flushed and uneasily asleep.

Husband and wife took their places at the genuine Sheraton

dining-table—one of the very best pieces Sir Isaac had ever picked

up—and were waited on with a hushed, scared dexterity by Snagsby and

the footman.

Lady Harman and her husband exchanged no remarks during the meal; Sir

Isaac was a little noisy with his soup as became a man who controls

honest indignation, and once he complained briefly in a slightly hoarse

voice to Snagsby about the state of one of the rolls. Between the

courses he leant back in his chair and made faint sounds with his

teeth. These were the only breach of the velvety quiet. Lady Harman was

surprised to discover herself hungry, but she ate with thoughtful

dignity and gave her mind to the attempted digestion of the confusing

interview she had just been through.

It was a very indigestible interview.

On the whole her heart hardened again. With nourishment and silence her

spirit recovered a little from its abasement, and her resolution to

assert her freedom to go hither and thither and think as she chose

renewed itself. She tried to plan some way of making her declaration so

that she would not again be overwhelmed by a torrent of response.

Should she speak to him at the end of dinner? Should she speak to him

while Snagsby was in the room? But he might behave badly even with

Snagsby in the room and she could not bear to think of him behaving

badly to her in the presence of Snagsby. She glanced at him over the

genuine old silver bowl of roses in the middle of the table—all the

roses were good _new_ sorts—and tried to estimate how he might behave

under various methods of declaration.

The dinner followed its appointed ritual to the dessert. Came the wine

and Snagsby placed the cigars and a little silver lamp beside his

master.

She rose slowly with a speech upon her lips. Sir Isaac remained seated

looking up at her with a mitigated fury in his little red-brown eyes.

The speech receded from her lips again.

“I think,” she said after a strained pause, “I will go and see how

mother is now.”

“She’s only shamming,” said Sir Isaac belatedly to her back as she went

out of the room.

She found her mother in a wrap before her fire and made her dutiful

enquiries.

“It’s only quite a _slight_ headache,” Mrs. Sawbridge confessed. “But

Isaac was so upset about Georgina and about”—she

flinched—“about—everything, that I thought it better to be out of the

way.”

“What exactly has Georgina done?”

“It’s in the paper, dear. On the table there.”

Ellen studied the _Times_.

“Georgina got them the tickets,” Mrs. Sawbridge explained. “I wish she

hadn’t. It was so—so unnecessary of her.”

There was a little pause as Lady Harman read. She put down the paper

and asked her mother if she could do anything for her.

“I—I suppose it’s all Right, dear, now?” Mrs. Sawbridge asked.

“Quite,” said her daughter. “You’re sure I can do nothing for you,

mummy?”

“I’m kept so in the dark about things.”

“It’s quite all right now, mummy.”

“He went on—dreadfully.”

“It was annoying—of Georgina.”

“It makes my position so difficult. I do wish he wouldn’t want to speak

to me—about all these things.... Georgina treats me like a Perfect

Nonentity and then he comes——It’s so inconsiderate. Starting Disputes.

Do you know, dear, I really think—if I were to go for a little time to

Bournemouth——?”

Her daughter seemed to find something attractive in the idea. She came

to the hearthrug and regarded her mother with maternal eyes.

“Don’t you _worry_ about things, mummy,” she said.

“Mrs. Bleckhorn told me of such a nice quiet boarding-house, almost

looking on the sea.... One would be safe from Insult there. You know——”

her voice broke for a moment, “he was Insulting, he _meant_ to be

Insulting. I’m—Upset. I’ve been thinking over it ever since.”

§10

Lady Harman came out upon the landing. She felt absolutely without

backing in the world. (If only she hadn’t told a lie!) Then with an

effort she directed her course downstairs to the dining-room.

(The lie had been necessary. It was only a detail. It mustn’t blind her

to the real issue.)

She entered softly and found her husband standing before the fire

plunged in gloomy thoughts. Upon the marble mantel-shelf behind him was

a little glass; he had been sipping port in spite of the express

prohibition of his doctor and the wine had reddened the veins of his

eyes and variegated the normal pallor of his countenance with little

flushed areas. “Hel-lo,” he said looking up suddenly as she closed the

door behind her.

For a moment there was something in their two expressions like that on

the faces of men about to box.

“I want you to understand,” she said, and then; “The way you behaved——”

There was an uncontrollable break in her voice. She had a dreadful

feeling that she might be going to cry. She made a great effort to be

cold and clear.

“I don’t think you have a right—just because I am your wife—to control

every moment of my time. In fact you haven’t. And I have a right to

make engagements.... I want you to know I am going to an afternoon

meeting at Lady Beach-Mandarin’s. Next week. And I have promised to go

to Miss Alimony’s to tea.”

“Go on,” he encouraged grimly.

“I am going to Lady Viping’s to dinner, too; she asked me and I

accepted. Later.”

She stopped.

He seemed to deliberate. Then suddenly he thrust out a face of pinched

determination.

“You _won’t_, my lady,” he said. “You bet your life you won’t. _No!_ So

_now_ then!”

And then gripping his hands more tightly behind him, he made a step

towards her.

“You’re losing your bearings, Lady Harman,” he said, speaking with much

intensity in a low earnest voice. “You don’t seem to be remembering

where you are. You come and you tell me you’re going to do this and

that. Don’t you know, Lady Harman, that it’s your wifely duty to obey,

to do as I say, to behave as I wish?” He brought out a lean index

finger to emphasize his remarks. “And I am going to make you do it!” he

said.

“I’ve a perfect right,” she repeated.

He went on, regardless of her words. “What do you think you can do,

Lady Harman? You’re going to all these places—how? Not in _my_

motor-car, not with _my_ money. You’ve not a thing that isn’t mine,

that _I_ haven’t given you. And if you’re going to have a lot of

friends I haven’t got, where’re they coming to see you? Not in _my_

house! I’ll chuck ’em out if I find ’em. I won’t have ’em. I’ll turn

’em out. See?”

“I’m not a slave.”

“You’re a wife—and a wife’s got to do what her husband wishes. You

can’t have two heads on a horse. And in _this_ horse—this house I mean,

the head’s—_me_!”

“I’m not a slave and I won’t be a slave.”

“You’re a wife and you’ll stick to the bargain you made when you

married me. I’m ready in reason to give you anything you want—if you do

your duty as a wife should. Why!—I spoil you. But this going about on

your own, this highty-flighty go-as-you-please,—no man on earth who’s

worth calling a man will stand it. I’m not going to begin to stand

it.... You try it on. You try it, Lady Harman.... You’ll come to your

senses soon enough. See? You start trying it on now—straight away.

We’ll make an experiment. We’ll watch how it goes. Only don’t expect me

to give you any money, don’t expect me to help your struggling family,

don’t expect me to alter my arrangements because of you. Let’s keep

apart for a bit and you go your way and I’ll go mine. And we’ll see

who’s sick of it first, we’ll see who wants to cry off.”

“I came down here,” said Lady Harman, “to give you a reasonable

notice——”

“And you found _I_ could reason too,” interrupted Sir Isaac in a kind

of miniature shout, “you found I could reason too!”

“You think——Reason! I _won’t_,” said Lady Harman, and found herself in

tears. By an enormous effort she recovered something of her dignity and

withdrew. He made no effort to open the door, but stood a little

hunchbacked and with a sense of rhetorical victory surveying her

retreat.

§11

After Lady Harman’s maid had left her that night, she sat for some time

in a low easy chair before her fire, trying at first to collect

together into one situation all the events of the day and then lapsing

into that state of mind which is not so much thinking as resting in the

attitude of thought. Presently, in a vaguely conceived future, she

would go to bed. She was stunned by the immense dimensions of the row

her simple act of defiance had evoked.

And then came an incredible incident, so incredible that next day she

still had great difficulty in deciding whether it was an actuality or a

dream. She heard a little very familiar sound. It was the last sound

she would have expected to hear and she turned sharply when she heard

it. The paper-covered door in the wall of her husband’s apartment

opened softly, paused, opened some more and his little undignified head

appeared. His hair was already tumbled from his pillow.

He regarded her steadfastly for some moments with an expression between

shame and curiosity and smouldering rage, and then allowed his body,

clad now in purple-striped pyjamas, to follow his head into her room.

He advanced guiltily.

“Elly,” he whispered. “Elly!”

She caught her dressing-gown about her and stood up.

“What is it, Isaac?” she asked, feeling curiously abashed at this

invasion.

“Elly,” he said, still in that furtive undertone. “_Make it up!_”

“I want my freedom,” she said, after a little pause.

“Don’t be _silly_, Elly,” he whispered in a tone of remonstrance and

advancing slowly towards her. “Make it up. Chuck all these ideas.”

She shook her head.

“We’ve got to get along together. You can’t go going about just

anywhere. We’ve got—we’ve got to be reasonable.”

He halted, three paces away from her. His eyes weren’t sorrowful eyes,

or friendly eyes; they were just shiftily eager eyes. “Look here,” he

said. “It’s all nonsense.... Elly, old girl; let’s—let’s make it up.”

She looked at him and it dawned upon her that she had always imagined

herself to be afraid of him and that indeed she wasn’t. She shook her

head obstinately.

“It isn’t reasonable,” he said. “Here, we’ve been the happiest of

people——Anything in reason I’ll let you have.” He paused with an effect

of making an offer.

“I want my autonomy,” she said.

“Autonomy!” he echoed. “Autonomy! What’s autonomy? Autonomy!”

This strange word seemed first to hold him in distressful suspense and

then to infuriate him.

“I come in here to make it up,” he said, with a voice charged with

griefs, “after all you’ve done, and you go and you talk of autonomy!”

His feelings passed beyond words. An extremity of viciousness flashed

into his face. He gave vent to a snarl of exasperation, “Ya-ap!” he

said, he raised his clenched fists and seemed on the verge of assault,

and then with a gesture between fury and despair, he wheeled about and

the purple-striped pyjamas danced in passionate retreat from her room.

“Autonomy!...”

A slam, a noise of assaulted furniture, and then silence.

Lady Harman stood for some moments regarding the paper-covered door

that had closed behind him. Then she bared her white forearm and

pinched it—hard.

It wasn’t a dream! This thing had happened.

§12

At a quarter to three in the morning, Lady Harman was surprised to find

herself wide awake. It was exactly a quarter to three when she touched

the stud of the ingenious little silver apparatus upon the table beside

her bed which reflected a luminous clock-face upon the ceiling. And her

mind was no longer resting in the attitude of thought but

extraordinarily active. It was active, but as she presently began to

realize it was not progressing. It was spinning violently round and

round the frenzied figure of a little man in purple-striped pyjamas

retreating from her presence, whirling away from her like something

blown before a gale. That seemed to her to symbolize the completeness

of the breach the day had made between her husband and herself.

She felt as a statesman might feel who had inadvertently—while

conducting some trivial negotiations—declared war.

She was profoundly alarmed. She perceived ahead of her abundant

possibilities of disagreeable things. And she wasn’t by any means as

convinced of the righteousness of her cause as a happy warrior should

be. She had a natural disposition towards truthfulness and it worried

her mind that while she was struggling to assert her right to these

common social freedoms she should be tacitly admitting a kind of

justice in her husband’s objections by concealing the fact that her

afternoon’s companion was a man. She tried not to recognize the

existence of a doubt, but deep down in her mind there did indeed lurk a

weakening uncertainty about the right of a woman to free conversation

with any man but her own. Her reason disowned that uncertainty with

scorn. But it wouldn’t go away for all her reason. She went about in

her mind doing her utmost to cut that doubt dead....

She tried to go back to the beginning and think it all out. And as she

was not used to thinking things out, the effort took the form of an

imaginary explanation to Mr. Brumley of the difficulties of her

position. She framed phrases. “You see, Mr. Brumley,” she imagined

herself to be saying, “I want to do my duty as a wife, I have to do my

duty as a wife. But it’s so hard to say just where duty leaves off and

being a mere slave begins. I cannot believe that _blind_ obedience is

any woman’s duty. A woman needs—autonomy.” Then her mind went off for a

time to a wrestle with the exact meaning of autonomy, an issue that had

not arisen hitherto in her mind.... And as she planned out such

elucidations, there grew more and more distinct in her mind a kind of

idealized Mr. Brumley, very grave, very attentive, wonderfully

understanding, saying illuminating helpful tonic things, that made

everything clear, everything almost easy. She wanted someone of that

quality so badly. The night would have been unendurable if she could

not have imagined Mr. Brumley of that quality. And imagining him of

that quality her heart yearned for him. She felt that she had been

terribly inexpressive that afternoon, she had shirked points, misstated

points, and yet he had been marvellously understanding. Ever and again

his words had seemed to pierce right through what she had been saying

to what she had been thinking. And she recalled with peculiar comfort a

kind of abstracted calculating look that had come at times into his

eyes, as though his thoughts were going ever so much deeper and ever so

much further than her blundering questionings could possibly have taken

them. He weighed every word, he had a guarded way of saying “Um....”

Her thoughts came back to the dancing little figure in purple-striped

pyjamas. She had a scared sense of irrevocable breaches. What would he

do to-morrow? What should she do to-morrow? Would he speak to her at

breakfast or should she speak first to him?... She wished she had some

money. If she could have foreseen all this she would have got some

money before she began....

So her mind went on round and round and the dawn was breaking before

she slept again.

§13

Mr. Brumley, also, slept little that night. He was wakefully mournful,

recalling each ungraceful incident of the afternoon’s failure in turn

and more particularly his dispute with the ticket clerk, and thinking

over all the things he might have done—if only he hadn’t done the

things he had done. He had made an atrocious mess of things. He felt he

had hopelessly shattered the fair fabric of impressions of him that

Lady Harman had been building up, that image of a wise humane capable

man to whom a woman would gladly turn; he had been flurried, he had

been incompetent, he had been ridiculously incompetent, and it seemed

to him that life was a string of desolating inadequacies and that he

would never smile again.

The probable reception of Lady Harman by her husband never came within

his imaginative scope. Nor did the problems of social responsibility

that Lady Harman had been trying to put to him exercise him very

greatly. The personal disillusionment was too strong for that.

About half-past four a faint ray of comfort came with the consideration

that after all a certain practical incapacity is part of the ensemble

of a literary artist, and then he found himself wondering what flowers

of wisdom Montaigne might not have culled from such a day’s experience;

he began an imitative essay in his head and he fell asleep upon this at

last at about ten minutes past five in the morning.

There were better things than this in the composition of Mr. Brumley,

we shall have to go deep into these reserves before we have done with

him, but when he had so recently barked the shins of his self-esteem

they had no chance at all.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

Lady Harman learns about Herself

§1

So it was that the great and long incubated quarrel between Lady Harman

and her husband broke into active hostilities.

In spite of my ill-concealed bias in favour of Lady Harman I have to

confess that she began this conflict rashly, planlessly, with no

equipment and no definite end. Particularly I would emphasize that she

had no definite end. She had wanted merely to establish a right to go

out by herself occasionally, exercise a certain choice of friends, take

on in fact the privileges of a grown-up person, and in asserting that

she had never anticipated that the participation of the household would

be invoked, or that a general breach might open between herself and her

husband. It had seemed just a definite little point at issue, but at

Sir Isaac’s angry touch a dozen other matters that had seemed safely

remote, matters she had never yet quite properly thought about, had

been drawn into controversy. It was not only that he drew in things

from outside; he evoked things within herself. She discovered she was

disposed to fight not simply to establish certain liberties for herself

but also—which had certainly not been in her mind before—to keep her

husband away from herself. Something latent in the situation had

surprised her with this effect. It had arisen out of the quarrel like a

sharpshooter out of an ambuscade. Her right to go out alone had now

only the value of a mere pretext for far more extensive independence.

The ultimate extent of these independences, she still dared not

contemplate.

She was more than a little scared. She wasn’t prepared for so wide a

revision of her life as this involved. She wasn’t at all sure of the

rightfulness of her position. Her conception of the marriage contract

at that time was liberal towards her husband. After all, didn’t she owe

obedience? Didn’t she owe him a subordinate’s co-operation? Didn’t she

in fact owe him the whole marriage service contract? When she thought

of the figure of him in his purple-striped pyjamas dancing in a

paroxysm of exasperation, that sense of responsibility which was one of

her innate characteristics reproached her. She had a curious persuasion

that she must be dreadfully to blame for provoking so ridiculous, so

extravagant an outbreak....

§2

She heard him getting up tumultuously and when she came down,—after a

brief interview with her mother who was still keeping her room,—she

found him sitting at the breakfast-table eating toast and marmalade in

a greedy malignant manner. The tentative propitiations of his proposal

to make things up had entirely disappeared, he was evidently in a far

profounder rage with her than he had been overnight. Snagsby too, that

seemly domestic barometer, looked extraordinarily hushed and grave. She

made a greeting-like noise and Sir Isaac scrunched “morning” up amongst

a crowded fierce mouthful of toast. She helped herself to tea and bacon

and looking up presently discovered his eye fixed upon her with an

expression of ferocious hatred....

He went off in the big car, she supposed to London, about ten and she

helped her mother to pack and depart by a train a little after midday.

She made a clumsy excuse for not giving that crisp little trifle of

financial assistance she was accustomed to, and Mrs. Sawbridge was

anxiously tactful about the disappointment. They paid a visit of

inspection and farewell to the nursery before the departure. Then Lady

Harman was left until lunch to resume her meditation upon this

unprecedented breach that had opened between her husband and herself.

She was presently moved to write a little note to Lady Beach-Mandarin

expressing her intention of attending a meeting of the Social Friends

and asking whether the date was the following Wednesday or Thursday.

She found three penny stamps in the bureau at which she wrote and this

served to remind her of her penniless condition. She spent some time

thinking out the possible consequences of that. How after all was she

going to do things, with not a penny in the world to do them with?

Lady Harman was not only instinctively truthful but also almost

morbidly honourable. In other words, she was simple-minded. The idea of

a community of goods between husband and wife had never established

itself in her mind, she took all Sir Isaac’s presents in the spirit in

which he gave them, presents she felt they were on trust, and so it was

that with a six-hundred pound pearl necklace, a diamond tiara,

bracelets, lockets, rings, chains and pendants of the most costly

kind—there had been a particularly beautiful bracelet when Millicent

was born, a necklace on account of Florence, a fan painted by Charles

Conder for Annette and a richly splendid set of old Spanish

jewellery—yellow sapphires set in gold—to express Sir Isaac’s gratitude

for the baby—with all sorts of purses, bags, boxes, trinkets and

garments, with a bedroom and morning-room rich in admirable loot, and

with endless tradespeople willing to give her credit it didn’t for some

time occur to her that there was any possible means of getting

pocket-money except by direct demand from Sir Isaac. She surveyed her

balance of two penny stamps and even about these she felt a certain

lack of negotiable facility.

She thought indeed that she might perhaps borrow money, but there again

her paralyzing honesty made her recoil from the prospect of uncertain

repayment. And besides, from whom could she borrow?...

It was on the evening of the second day that a chance remark from

Peters turned her mind to the extensive possibilities of liquidation

that lay close at hand. She was discussing her dinner dress with

Peters, she wanted something very plain and high and unattractive, and

Peters, who disapproved of this tendency and was all for female wiles

and propitiations, fell into an admiration of the pearl necklace. She

thought perhaps by so doing she might induce Lady Harman to wear it,

and if she wore it Sir Isaac might be a little propitiated, and if Sir

Isaac was a little propitiated it would be much more comfortable for

Snagsby and herself and everyone. She was reminded of a story of a lady

who sold one and substituted imitation pearls, no one the wiser, and

she told this to her mistress out of sheer garrulousness. “But if no

one found out,” said Lady Harman, “how do you know?”

“Not till her death, me lady,” said Peters, brushing, “when all things

are revealed. Her husband, they say, made it a present of to another

lady and the other lady, me lady, had it valued....”

Once the idea had got into Lady Harman’s head it stayed there very

obstinately. She surveyed the things on the table before her with a

slightly lifted eyebrow. At first she thought the idea of disposing of

them an entirely dishonourable idea, and if she couldn’t get it out of

her head again at least she made it stand in a corner. And while it

stood in a corner she began putting a price for the first time in her

life first upon this coruscating object and then that. Then somehow she

found herself thinking more and more whether among all these glittering

possessions there wasn’t something that she might fairly regard as

absolutely her own. There were for example her engagement ring and,

still more debateable, certain other pre-nuptial trinkets Sir Isaac had

given her. Then there were things given her on her successive

birthdays. A birthday present of all presents is surely one’s very own?

But selling is an extreme exercise of ownership. Since those early

schooldays when she had carried on an unprofitable traffic in stamps

she had never sold anything—unless we are to reckon that for once and

for all she had sold herself.

Concurrently with these insidious speculations Lady Harman found

herself trying to imagine how one sold jewels. She tried to sound

Peters by taking up the story of the necklace again. But Peters was

uninforming. “But where,” asked Lady Harman, “could such a thing be

done?”

“There are places, me lady,” said Peters.

“But where?”

“In the West End, me lady. The West End is full of places—for things of

that sort. There’s scarcely anything you can’t do there, me lady—if

only you know how.”

That was really all that Peters could impart.

“How _does_ one sell jewels?” Lady Harman became so interested in this

side of her perplexities that she did a little lose sight of those

subtler problems of integrity that had at first engaged her. Do

jewellers buy jewels as well as sell them? And then it came into her

head that there were such things as pawnshops. By the time she had

thought about pawnshops and tried to imagine one, her original complete

veto upon any idea of selling had got lost to sight altogether. Instead

there was a growing conviction that if ever she sold anything it would

be a certain sapphire and diamond ring which she didn’t like and never

wore that Sir Isaac had given her as a birthday present two years ago.

But of course she would never dream of selling anything; at the utmost

she need but pawn. She reflected and decided that on the whole it would

be wiser not to ask Peters how one pawned. It occurred to her to

consult the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ on the subject, but though she

learnt that the Chinese pawnshops must not charge more than three per

cent. per annum, that King Edward the Third pawned his jewels in 1338

and that Father Bernardino di Feltre who set up pawnshops in Assisi and

Padua and Pavia was afterward canonized, she failed to get any very

clear idea of the exact ritual of the process. And then suddenly she

remembered that she knew a finished expert in pawnshop work in the

person of Susan Burnet. Susan could tell her everything. She found some

curtains in the study that needed replacement, consulted Mrs. Crumble

and, with a view to economizing her own resources, made that lady send

off an urgent letter to Susan bidding her come forthwith.

§3

It has been said that Fate is a plagiarist. Lady Harman’s Fate at any

rate at this juncture behaved like a benevolent plagiarist who was also

a little old-fashioned. This phase of speechless hostility was

complicated by the fact that two of the children fell ill, or at least

seemed for a couple of days to be falling ill. By all the rules of

British sentiment, this ought to have brought about a headlong

reconciliation at the tumbled bedside. It did nothing of the sort; it

merely wove fresh perplexities into the tangled skein of her thoughts.

On the day after her participation in that forbidden lunch Millicent,

her eldest daughter, was discovered with a temperature of a hundred and

one, and then Annette, the third, followed suit with a hundred. This

carried Lady Harman post haste to the nursery, where to an

unprecedented degree she took command. Latterly she had begun to

mistrust the physique of her children and to doubt whether the trained

efficiency of Mrs. Harblow the nurse wasn’t becoming a little blunted

at the edges by continual use. And the tremendous quarrel she had afoot

made her keenly resolved not to let anything go wrong in the nursery

and less disposed than she usually was to leave things to her husband’s

servants. She interviewed the doctor herself, arranged for the

isolation of the two flushed and cross little girls, saw to the toys

and amusements which she discovered had become a little flattened and

disused by the servants’ imperatives of tidying up and putting away,

and spent the greater part of the next two days between the night and

day nurseries.

She was a little surprised to find how readily she did this and how

easily the once entirely authoritative Mrs. Harblow submitted. It was

much the same surprise that growing young people feel when they reach

some shelf that has hitherto been inaccessible. The crisis soon passed.

At his first visit the doctor was a little doubtful whether the Harman

nursery wasn’t under the sway of measles, which were then raging in a

particularly virulent form in London; the next day he inclined to the

view that the trouble was merely a feverish cold, and before night this

second view was justified by the disappearance of the “temperatures”

and a complete return to normal conditions.

But as for that hushed reconciliation in the fevered presence of the

almost sacrificial offspring, it didn’t happen. Sir Isaac merely thrust

aside the stiff silences behind which he masked his rage to remark:

“This is what happens when wimmen go gadding about!”

That much and glaring eyes and compressed lips and emphasizing fingers

and then he had gone again.

Indeed rather than healing their widening breach this crisis did much

to spread it into strange new regions. It brought Lady Harman to the

very verge of realizing how much of instinct and how much of duty held

her the servant of the children she had brought into the world, and how

little there mingled with that any of those factors of pride and

admiration that go to the making of heroic maternal love. She knew what

is expected of a mother, the exalted and lyrical devotion, and it was

with something approaching terror that she perceived that certain

things in these children of hers she _hated_. It was her business she

knew to love them blindly; she lay awake at night in infinite dismay

realizing she did nothing of the sort. Their weakness held her more

than anything else, the invincible pathos of their little limbs in

discomfort so that she was ready to die she felt to give them ease. But

so she would have been held, she was assured, by the little children of

anybody if they had fallen with sufficient helplessness into her care.

Just how much she didn’t really like her children she presently

realized when in the feeble irascibility of their sickness they fell

quarrelling. They became—horrid. Millicent and Annette being imprisoned

in their beds it seemed good to Florence when she came back from the

morning’s walk, to annex and hide a selection of their best toys. She

didn’t take them and play with them, she hid them with an industrious

earnestness in a box window-seat that was regarded as peculiarly hers,

staggering with armfuls across the nursery floor. Then Millicent by

some equally mysterious agency divined what was afoot and set up a

clamour for a valued set of doll’s furniture, which immediately

provoked a similar outcry from little Annette for her Teddy Bear.

Followed woe and uproar. The invalids insisted upon having every single

toy they possessed brought in and put upon their beds; Florence was

first disingenuous and then surrendered her loot with passionate

howlings. The Teddy Bear was rescued from Baby after a violent struggle

in which one furry hind leg was nearly twisted off. It jars upon the

philoprogenitive sentiment of our time to tell of these things and

still more to record that all four, stirred by possessive passion to

the profoundest depths of their beings, betrayed to an unprecedented

degree in their little sharp noses, their flushed faces, their earnest

eyes, their dutiful likeness to Sir Isaac. He peeped from under

Millicent’s daintily knitted brows and gestured with Florence’s dimpled

fists. It was as if God had tried to make him into four cherubim and as

if in spite of everything he was working through.

Lady Harman toiled to pacify these disorders, gently, attentively, and

with a faint dismay in her dark eyes. She bribed and entreated and

marvelled at mental textures so unlike her own. Baby was squared with a

brand new Teddy Bear, a rare sort, a white one, which Snagsby went and

purchased in the Putney High Street and brought home in his arms,

conferring such a lustre upon the deed that the lower orders, the very

street-boys, watched him with reverence as he passed. Annette went to

sleep amidst a discomfort of small treasures and woke stormily when

Mrs. Harblow tried to remove some of the spikier ones. And Lady Harman

went back to her large pink bedroom and meditated for a long time upon

these things and tried to remember whether in her own less crowded

childhood with Georgina, either of them had been quite so inhumanly

hard and grasping as these feverish little mites in her nursery. She

tried to think she had been, she tried to think that all children were

such little distressed lumps of embittered individuality, and she did

what she could to overcome the queer feeling that this particular

clutch of offspring had been foisted upon her and weren’t at all the

children she could now imagine and desire,—gentle children,

sweet-spirited children....

§4

Susan Burnet arrived in a gusty mood and brought new matter for Lady

Harman’s ever broadening consideration of the wifely position. Susan,

led by a newspaper placard, had discovered Sir Isaac’s relations to the

International Bread and Cake Stores.

“At first I thought I wouldn’t come,” said Susan. “I really did. I

couldn’t hardly believe it. And then I thought, ‘it isn’t _her_. It

can’t be _her_!’ But I’d never have dreamt before that I could have

been brought to set foot in the house of the man who drove poor father

to ruin and despair.... You’ve been so kind to me....”

Susan’s simple right-down mind stopped for a moment with something very

like a sob, baffled by the contradictions of the situation.

“So I came,” she said, with a forced bright smile.

“I’m glad you came,” said Lady Harman. “I wanted to see you. And you

know, Susan, I know very little—very little indeed—of Sir Isaac’s

business.”

“I quite believe it, my lady. I’ve never for one moment thought

_you_——I don’t know how to say it, my lady.”

“And indeed I’m not,” said Lady Harman, taking it as said.

“I knew you weren’t,” said Susan, relieved to be so understood.

And the two women looked perplexedly at one another over the neglected

curtains Susan had come to “see to,” and shyness just snatched back

Lady Harman from her impulse to give Susan a sisterly kiss.

Nevertheless Susan who was full of wise intuitions felt that kiss that

was never given, and in the remote world of unacted deeds returned it

with effusion.

“But it’s hard,” said Susan, “to find one’s own second sister mixed up

in a strike, and that’s what it’s come to last week. They’ve struck,

all the International waitresses have struck, and last night in

Piccadilly they were standing on the kerb and picketing and her among

them. With a crowd cheering.... And me ready to give my right hand to

keep that girl respectable!”

And with a volubility that was at once tumultuous and effective, Susan

sketched in the broad outlines of the crisis that threatened the

dividends and popularity of the International Bread and Cake Stores.

The unsatisfied demands of that bright journalistic enterprise, _The

London Lion_, lay near the roots of the trouble. _The London Lion_ had

stirred it up. But it was only too evident that _The London Lion_ had

merely given a voice and form and cohesion to long smouldering

discontents.

Susan’s account of the matter had that impartiality which comes from

intellectual incoherence, she hadn’t so much a judgment upon the whole

as a warring mosaic of judgments. It was talking upon Post

Impressionist lines, talking in the manner of Picasso. She had the

firmest conviction that to strike against employment, however ill-paid

or badly conditioned, was a disgraceful combination of folly,

ingratitude and general wickedness, and she had an equally strong

persuasion that the treatment of the employees of the International

Bread and Cake Stores was such as no reasonably spirited person ought

to stand. She blamed her sister extremely and sympathized with her

profoundly, and she put it all down in turn to _The London Lion_, to

Sir Isaac, and to a small round-faced person called Babs Wheeler, who

appeared to be the strike leader and seemed always to be standing on

tables in the branches, or clambering up to the lions in Trafalgar

Square, or being cheered in the streets.

But there could be no mistaking the quality of Sir Isaac’s

“International” organization as Susan’s dabs of speech shaped it out.

It was indeed what we all of us see everywhere about us, the work of

the base energetic mind, raw and untrained, in possession of the keen

instruments of civilization, the peasant mind allied and blended with

the Ghetto mind, grasping and acquisitive, clever as a Norman peasant

or a Jew pedlar is clever, and beyond that outrageously stupid and

ugly. It was a new view and yet the old familiar view of her husband,

but now she saw him not as little eager eyes, a sharp nose, gaunt

gestures and a leaden complexion, but as shops and stores and rules and

cash registers and harsh advertisements and a driving merciless hurry

to get—to get anything and everything, money, monopoly, power,

prominence, whatever any other human being seemed to admire or seemed

to find desirable, a lust rather than a living soul. Now that her eyes

were at last opened Lady Harman, who had seen too little heretofore,

now saw too much; she saw all that she had not seen, with an excess of

vision, monstrous, caricatured. Susan had already dabbed in the

disaster of Sir Isaac’s unorganized competitors going to the wall—for

charity or the state to neglect or bandage as it might chance—the

figure of that poor little “Father,” moping hopelessly before his

“accident” symbolized that; and now she gave in vivid splotches of

allusion, glimpses of the business machine that had replaced those

shattered enterprises and carried Sir Isaac to the squalid glory of a

Liberal honours list,—the carefully balanced antagonisms and jealousies

of the girls and the manageresses, those manageresses who had been

obliged to invest little bunches of savings as guarantees and who had

to account for every crumb and particle of food stock that came to the

branch, and the hunt for cases and inefficiency by the inspectors, who

had somehow to justify a salary of two hundred a year, not to mention a

percentage of the fines they inflicted.

“There’s all that business of the margarine,” said Susan. “Every branch

gets its butter under weight,—the water squeezes out,—and every branch

has over weight margarine. Of course the rules say that mixing’s

forbidden and if they get caught they go, but they got to pay-in for

that butter, and it’s setting a snare for their feet. People who’ve

never thought to cheat, when they get it like that, day after day, they

cheat, my lady.... And the girls get left food for rations. There’s

always trouble, it’s against what the rules say, but they get it. Of

course it’s against the rules, but what can a manageress do?—if the

waste doesn’t fall on them, it falls on her. She’s tied there with her

savings.... Such driving, my lady, it’s against the very spirit of God.

It makes scoffers point. It makes people despise law and order. There’s

Luke, he gets bitterer and bitterer; he says that it’s in the Word we

mustn’t muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn, but these Stores, he

says, they’d muzzle the ox and keep it hungry and make it work a little

machine, he says, whenever it put down its head in the hope of finding

a scrap....”

So Susan, bright-eyed, flushed and voluble, pleading the cause of that

vague greatness in humanity that would love, that would loiter, that

would think, that would if it could give us art, delight and beauty,

that turns blindly and stumblingly towards joy, towards intervals,

towards the mysterious things of the spirit, against all this sordid

strenuousness, this driving destructive association of hardfisted

peasant soul and Ghetto greed, this fool’s “efficiency,” that rules our

world to-day.

Then Susan lunged for a time at the waitress life her sister led. “She

has ’er ’ome with us, but some—they haven’t homes.”

“They make a fuss about all this White Slave Traffic,” said Susan, “but

if ever there were white slaves it’s the girls who work for a living

and keep themselves respectable. And nobody wants to make an example of

the men who get rich out of _them_....”

And after some hearsay about the pressure in the bake-houses and the

accidents to the van-men, who worked on a speeding-up system that Sir

Isaac had adopted from an American business specialist, Susan’s mental

discharge poured out into the particulars of the waitresses’ strike and

her sister’s share in that. “She _would_ go into it,” said Susan, “she

let herself be drawn in. I asked her never to take the place. Better

Service, I said, a thousand times. I begged her, I could have begged

her on my bended knees....”

The immediate cause of the strike it seemed was the exceptional

disagreeableness of one of the London district managers. “He takes

advantage of his position,” repeated Susan with face aflame, and Lady

Harman was already too wise about Susan’s possibilities to urge her

towards particulars....

Now as Lady Harman listened to all this confused effective picturing of

the great catering business which was the other side of her husband and

which she had taken on trust so long, she had in her heart a quite

unreasonable feeling of shame that she should listen at all, a shyness,

as though she was prying, as though this really did not concern her.

She knew she had to listen and still she felt beyond her proper

jurisdiction. It is against instinct, it is with an enormous reluctance

that women are bringing their quick emotions, their flashing unstable

intelligences, their essential romanticism, their inevitable profound

generosity into the world of politics and business. If only they could

continue believing that all that side of life is grave and wise and

admirably managed for them they would. It is not in a day or a

generation that we shall un-specialize women. It is a wrench nearly as

violent as birth for them to face out into the bleak realization that

the man who goes out for them into business, into affairs, and returns

so comfortably loaded with housings and wrappings and trappings and

toys, isn’t, as a matter of fact, engaged in benign creativeness while

he is getting these desirable things.

§5

Lady Harman’s mind was so greatly exercised by Susan Burnet’s

voluminous confidences that it was only when she returned to her own

morning room that she recalled the pawning problem. She went back to

Sir Isaac’s study and found Susan with all her measurements taken and

on the very edge of departure.

“Oh Susan!” she said.

She found the matter a little difficult to broach. Susan remained in an

attitude of respectful expectation.

“I wanted to ask you,” said Lady Harman and then broke off to shut the

door. Susan’s interest increased.

“You know, Susan,” said Lady Harman with an air of talking about

commonplace things, “Sir Isaac is very rich and—of course—very

generous.... But sometimes one feels, one wants a little money of one’s

own.”

“I think I can understand that, my lady,” said Susan.

“I knew you would,” said Lady Harman and then with a brightness that

was slightly forced, “I can’t always get money of my own. It’s

difficult—sometimes.”

And then blushing vividly: “I’ve got lots of _things_.... Susan, have

you ever pawned anything?”

And so she broached it.

“Not since I got fairly into work,” said Susan; “I wouldn’t have it.

But when I was little we were always pawning things. Why! we’ve pawned

kettles!...”

She flashed three reminiscences.

Meanwhile Lady Harman produced a little glittering object and held it

between finger and thumb. “If I went into a pawnshop near here,” she

said, “it would seem so odd.... This ring, Susan, must be worth thirty

or forty pounds. And it seems so silly when I have it that I should

really be wanting money....”

Susan displayed a peculiar reluctance to handle the ring. “I’ve never,”

she said, “pawned anything valuable—not valuable like that.

Suppose—suppose they wanted to know how I had come by it.”

“It’s more than Alice earns in a year,” she said. “It’s——” she eyed the

glittering treasure; “it’s a queer thing for me to have.”

A certain embarrassment arose between them. Lady Harman’s need of money

became more apparent. “I’ll do it for you,” said Susan, “indeed I’ll do

it. But——There’s one thing——”

Her face flushed hotly. “It isn’t that I want to make difficulties. But

people in our position—we aren’t like people in your position. It’s

awkward sometimes to explain things. You’ve got a good character, but

people don’t know it. You can’t be too careful. It isn’t

sufficient—just to be honest. If I take that——If you were just to give

me a little note—in your handwriting—on your paper—just asking me——I

don’t suppose I need show it to anyone....”

“I’ll write the note,” said Lady Harman. A new set of uncomfortable

ideas was dawning upon her. “But Susan——You don’t mean that anyone,

anyone who’s really honest—might get into trouble?”

“You can’t be too careful,” said Susan, manifestly resolved not to give

our highly civilized state half a chance with her.

§6

The problem of Sir Isaac and just what he was doing and what he thought

he was doing and what he meant to do increased in importance in Lady

Harman’s mind as the days passed by. He had an air of being malignantly

up to something and she could not imagine what this something could be.

He spoke to her very little but he looked at her a great deal. He had

more and more of the quality of a premeditated imminent explosion....

One morning she was standing quite still in the drawing-room thinking

over this now almost oppressive problem of why the situation did not

develop further with him, when she became aware of a thin flat unusual

book upon the small side table near the great armchair at the side of

the fire. He had been reading that overnight and it lay obliquely—it

might almost have been left out for her.

She picked it up. It was _The Taming of the Shrew_ in that excellent

folio edition of Henley’s which makes each play a comfortable thin book

apart. A curiosity to learn what it was had drawn her husband to

English Literature made her turn over the pages. _The Taming of the

Shrew_ was a play she knew very slightly. For the Harmans, though

deeply implicated like most other rich and striving people in plans for

honouring the immortal William, like most other people found scanty

leisure to read him.

As she turned over the pages a pencil mark caught her eye. Thence words

were underlined and further accentuated by a deeply scored line in the

margin.

“But for my bonny Kate, she must with me.

Nay; look not big, nor stamp, nor stare, nor fret;

I will be master of what is mine own:

She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,

She is my household stuff, my field, my barn,

My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing:

And here she stands, touch her whoever dare;

I’ll bring mine action on the proudest He,

That stops my way in Padua.”

With a slightly heightened colour, Lady Harman read on and presently

found another page slashed with Sir Isaac’s approval....

Her face became thoughtful. Did he mean to attempt—Petruchio? He could

never dare. There were servants, there were the people one met, the

world.... He would never dare....

What a strange play it was! Shakespear of course was wonderfully wise,

the crown of English wisdom, the culminating English mind,—or else one

might almost find something a little stupid and clumsy.... Did women

nowadays really feel like these Elizabethan wives who talked—like

girls, very forward girls indeed, but girls of sixteen?...

She read the culminating speech of Katherine and now she had so

forgotten Sir Isaac she scarcely noted the pencil line that endorsed

the immortal words.

“Thy husband is thy Lord, thy Life, thy Keeper,

Thy Head, thy Sovereign; one who cares for thee,

And for thy maintenance commits his body

To painful labour both by sea and land,

To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,

While thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;

And craves no other tribute at thy hands

But love, fair looks, and true obedience;

Too little payment for so great a debt.

Such duty as the Subject owes the Prince,

Even such a woman oweth to her husband;

And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,

And not obedient to his honest will,

What is she but a foul contending Rebel

And graceless traitor to her loving Lord?

I am ashamed that women are so simple

To offer war, where they should kneel for peace;

My mind has been as big as one of yours,

My heat as great; my reason, haply, more,

To bandy word for word and frown for frown.

But now I see our lances are but straws;

Our strength is weak, our weakness past compare,

Seeming that most which we indeed least are....”

She wasn’t indignant. Something in these lines took hold of her

protesting imagination.

She knew that so she could have spoken of a man.

But that man,—she apprehended him as vaguely as an Anglican bishop

apprehends God. He was obscured altogether by shadows; he had only one

known characteristic, that he was totally unlike Sir Isaac. And the

play was false she felt in giving this speech to a broken woman. Such

things are not said by broken women. Broken women do no more than cheat

and lie. But so a woman might speak out of her unconquered wilfulness,

as a queen might give her lover a kingdom out of the fullness of her

heart.

§7

The evening after his wife had had this glimpse into Sir Isaac’s mental

processes he telephoned that Charterson and Horatio Blenker were coming

home to dinner with him. Neither Lady Charterson nor Mrs. Blenker were

to be present; it was to be a business conversation and not a social

occasion, and Lady Harman he desired should wear her black and gold

with just a touch of crimson in her hair. Charterson wanted a word or

two with the flexible Horatio on sugar at the London docks, and Sir

Isaac had some vague ideas that a turn might be given to the public

judgment upon the waitresses’ strike, by a couple of Horatio’s

thoughtful yet gentlemanly articles. And in addition Charterson seemed

to have something else upon his mind; he did not tell as much to Sir

Isaac but he was weighing the possibilities of securing a controlling

share in the _Daily Spirit_, which simply didn’t know at present where

it was upon the sugar business, and of installing Horatio’s brother,

Adolphus, as its editor. He wanted to form some idea from Horatio of

what Adolphus might expect before he approached Adolphus.

Lady Harman wore the touch of crimson in her hair as her husband had

desired, and the table was decorated simply with a big silver bowl of

crimson roses. A slight shade of apprehension in Sir Isaac’s face

changed to approval at the sight of her obedience. After all perhaps

she was beginning to see the commonsense of her position.

Charterson struck her as looking larger, but then whenever she saw him

he struck her as looking larger. He enveloped her hand in a large

amiable paw for a minute and asked after the children with gusto. The

large teeth beneath his discursive moustache gave him the effect of a

perennial smile to which his asymmetrical ears added a touch of

waggery. He always betrayed a fatherly feeling towards her as became a

man who was married to a handsome wife old enough to be her mother.

Even when he asked about the children he did it with something of the

amused knowingness of assured seniority, as if indeed he knew all sorts

of things about the children that she couldn’t as yet even begin to

imagine. And though he confined his serious conversation to the two

other men, he would ever and again show himself mindful of her and

throw her some friendly enquiry, some quizzically puzzling remark.

Blenker as usual treated her as if she were an only very indistinctly

visible presence to whom an effusive yet inattentive politeness was

due. He was clearly nervous almost to the pitch of jumpiness. He knew

he was to be spoken to about the sugar business directly he saw

Charterson, and he hated being spoken to about the sugar business. He

had his code of honour. Of course one had to make concessions to one’s

proprietors, but he could not help feeling that if only they would

consent to see his really quite obvious gentlemanliness more clearly it

would be better for the paper, better for the party, better for them,

far better for himself. He wasn’t altogether a fool about that sugar;

he knew how things lay. They ought to trust him more. His nervousness

betrayed itself in many little ways. He crumbled his bread constantly

until, thanks to Snagsby’s assiduous replacement, he had made quite a

pile of crumbs, he dropped his glasses in the soup—a fine occasion for

Snagsby’s _sang-froid_—and he forgot not to use a fish knife with the

fish as Lady Grove directs and tried when he discovered his error to

replace it furtively on the table cloth. Moreover he kept on patting

the glasses on his nose—after Snagsby had whisked his soup plate away,

rescued, wiped and returned them to him—until that feature glowed

modestly at such excesses of attention, and the soup and sauces and

things bothered his fine blond moustache unusually. So that Mr. Blenker

what with the glasses, the napkin, the food and the things seemed as

restless as a young sparrow. Lady Harman did her duties as hostess in

the quiet key of her sombre dress, and until the conversation drew her

out into unexpected questionings she answered rather than talked, and

she did not look at her husband once throughout the meal.

At first the talk was very largely Charterson. He had no intention of

coming to business with Blenker until Lady Harman had given place to

the port and the man’s nerves were steadier. He spoke of this and that

in the large discursive way men use in clubs, and it was past the fish

before the conversation settled down upon the topic of business

organization and Sir Isaac, a little warmed by champagne, came out of

the uneasily apprehensive taciturnity into which he had fallen in the

presence of his wife. Horatio Blenker was keenly interested in the

idealization of commercial syndication, he had been greatly stirred by

a book of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee’s called _Inspired Millionaires_ which

set out to show just what magnificent airs rich men might give

themselves, and he had done his best to catch its tone and to find

_Inspired Millionaires_ in Sir Isaac and Charterson and to bring it to

their notice and to the notice of the readers of the _Old Country

Gazette_. He felt that if only Sir Isaac and Charterson would see

getting rich as a Great Creative Act it would raise their tone and his

tone and the tone of the _Old Country Gazette_ tremendously. It

wouldn’t of course materially alter the methods or policy of the paper

but it would make them all feel nobler, and Blenker was of that finer

clay that does honestly want to feel nobler. He hated pessimism and all

that criticism and self-examination that makes weak men pessimistic, he

wanted to help weak men and be helped himself, he was all for that

school of optimism that would have each dunghill was a well-upholstered

throne, and his nervous, starry contributions to the talk were like

patches of water ranunculuses trying to flower in the overflow of a

sewer.

Because you know it is idle to pretend that the talk of Charterson and

Sir Isaac wasn’t a heavy flow of base ideas; they hadn’t even the wit

to sham very much about their social significance. They cared no more

for the growth, the stamina, the spirit of the people whose lives they

dominated than a rat cares for the stability of the house it gnaws.

They _wanted_ a broken-spirited people. They were in such relations

wilfully and offensively stupid, and I do not see why we people who

read and write books should pay this stupidity merely because it is

prevalent even the mild tribute of an ironical civility. Charterson

talked of the gathering trouble that might lead to a strike of the

transport workers in London docks, and what he had to say, he said,—he

repeated it several times—was, “_Let_ them strike. We’re ready. The

sooner they strike the better. Devonport’s a Man and this time we’ll

_beat_ ’em....”

He expanded generally on strikes. “It’s a question practically whether

we are to manage our own businesses or whether we’re to have them

managed for us. _Managed_ I say!...”

“They know nothing of course of the details of organization,” said

Blenker, shining with intelligence and looking quickly first to the

right and then to the left. “Nothing.”

Sir Isaac broke out into confirmatory matter. There was an idea in his

head that this talk might open his wife’s eyes to some sense of the

magnitude of his commercial life, to the wonder of its scale and

quality. He compared notes with Charterson upon a speeding-up system

for delivery vans invented by an American specialist and it made

Blenker flush with admiration and turn as if for sympathy to Lady

Harman to realize how a modification in a tailboard might mean a yearly

saving in wages of many thousand pounds. “The sort of thing they don’t

understand,” he said. And then Sir Isaac told of some of his own little

devices. He had recently taken to having the returns of percentage

increase and decrease from his various districts printed on postcards

and circulated monthly among the district managers, postcards endorsed

with such stimulating comments in red type as “Well done Cardiff!” or

“What ails Portsmouth?”—the results had been amazingly good; “neck and

neck work,” he said, “everywhere”—and thence they passed to the

question of confidential reports and surprise inspectors. Thereby they

came to the rights and wrongs of the waitress strike.

And then it was that Lady Harman began to take a share in the

conversation.

She interjected a question. “Yes,” she said suddenly and her

interruption was so unexpected that all three men turned their eyes to

her. “But how much do the girls get a week?”

“I thought,” she said to some confused explanations by Blenker and

Charterson, “that gratuities were forbidden.”

Blenker further explained that most of the girls of the class Sir Isaac

was careful to employ lived at home. Their income was “supplementary.”

“But what happens to the others who don’t live at home, Mr. Blenker?”

she asked.

“Very small minority,” said Mr. Blenker reassuring himself about his

glasses.

“But what do they do?”

Charterson couldn’t imagine whether she was going on in this way out of

sheer ignorance or not.

“Sometimes their fines make big unexpected holes in their week’s pay,”

she said.

Sir Isaac made some indistinct remark about “utter nonsense.”

“It seems to me to be driving them straight upon the streets.”