The phrase was Susan’s. Its full significance wasn’t at that time very

clear to Lady Harman and it was only when she had uttered it that she

realized from Horatio Blenker’s convulsive start just what a blow she

had delivered at that table. His glasses came off again. He caught them

and thrust them back, he seemed to be holding his nose on, holding his

face on, preserving those carefully arranged features of himself from

hideous revelations; his free hand made weak movements with his dinner

napkin. He seemed to be holding it in reserve against the ultimate

failure of his face. Charterson surveyed her through an immense pause

open-mouthed; then he turned his large now frozen amiability upon his

host. “These are Awful questions,” he gasped, “rather beyond Us don’t

you think?” and then magnificently; “Harman, things are looking pretty

Queer in the Far East again. I’m told there are chances—of

revolution—even in Pekin....”

Lady Harman became aware of Snagsby’s arm and his steady well-trained

breathing beside her as, tenderly almost but with a regretful

disapproval, he removed her plate....

§8

If Lady Harman had failed to remark at the time the deep impression her

words had made upon her hearers, she would have learnt it later from

the extraordinary wrath in which Sir Isaac, as soon as his guests had

departed, visited her. He was so angry he broke the seal of silence he

had set upon his lips. He came raging into the pink bedroom through the

paper-covered door as if they were back upon their old intimate

footing. He brought a flavour of cigars and manly refreshment with him,

his shirt front was a little splashed and crumpled and his white face

was variegated with flushed patches.

“What ever d’you mean,” he cried, “by making a fool of me in front of

those fellers?... What’s my business got to do with you?”

Lady Harman was too unready for a reply.

“I ask you what’s my business got to do with you? It’s _my_ affair,

_my_ side. You got no more right to go shoving your spoke into that

than—anything. See? What do _you_ know of the rights and wrongs of

business? How can _you_ tell what’s right and what isn’t right? And the

things you came out with—the things you came out with! Why

Charterson—after you’d gone Charterson said, she doesn’t know, she

can’t know what she’s talking about! A decent woman! a _lady_! talking

of driving girls on the street. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!

You aren’t fit to show your face.... It’s these damned papers and

pamphlets, all this blear-eyed stuff, these decadent novels and things

putting narsty thoughts, _narsty dirty_ thoughts into decent women’s

heads. It ought to be rammed back down their throats, it ought to be

put a stop to!”

Sir Isaac suddenly gave way to woe. “What have I _done_?” he cried,

“what have I done? Here’s everything going so well! We might be the

happiest of couples! We’re rich, we got everything we want.... And then

you go harbouring these ideas, fooling about with rotten people, taking

up with Socialism——Yes, I tell you—Socialism!”

His moment of pathos ended. “NO?” he shouted in an enormous voice.

He became white and grim. He emphasized his next words with a shaken

finger.

“It’s got to end, my lady. It’s going to end sooner than you expect.

That’s all!...”

He paused at the papered door. He had a popular craving for a vivid

curtain and this he felt was just a little too mild.

“It’s going to end,” he repeated and then with great violence, with

almost alcoholic violence, with the round eyes and shouting voice and

shaken fist and blaspheming violence of a sordid, thrifty peasant

enraged, “it’s going to end a Damned Sight sooner than you expect.”

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

Sir Isaac as Petruchio

§1

Twice had Sir Isaac come near to betraying the rapid and extensive

preparations for the subjugation of his wife, that he hid behind his

silences. He hoped that their estrangement might be healed by a certain

display of strength and decision. He still refused to let himself

believe that all this trouble that had arisen between them, this sullen

insistence upon unbecoming freedoms of intercourse and movement, this

questioning spirit and a gaucherie of manner that might almost be

mistaken for an aversion from his person, were due to any essential

evil in her nature; he clung almost passionately to the alternative

that she was the victim of those gathering forces of discontent, of

that interpretation which can only be described as decadent and that

veracity which can only be called immodest, that darken the

intellectual skies of our time, a sweet thing he held her still though

touched by corruption, a prey to “idees,” “idees” imparted from the

poisoned mind of her sister, imbibed from the carelessly edited columns

of newspapers, from all too laxly censored plays, from “blear-eyed”

bookshow he thanked the Archbishop of York for that clever expressive

epithet!—from the careless talk of rashly admitted guests, from the

very atmosphere of London. And it had grown clearer and clearer to him

that his duty to himself and the world and her was to remove her to a

purer, simpler air, beyond the range of these infections, to isolate

her and tranquillize her and so win her back again to that

acquiescence, that entirely hopeless submissiveness that had made her

so sweet and dear a companion for him in the earlier years of their

married life. Long before Lady Beach-Mandarin’s crucial luncheon, his

deliberate foreseeing mind had been planning such a retreat. Black

Strand even at his first visit had appeared to him in the light of a

great opportunity, and the crisis of their quarrel did but release that

same torrential energy which had carried him to a position of

Napoleonic predominance in the world of baking, light catering and

confectionery, into the channels of a scheme already very definitely

formed in his mind.

His first proceeding after the long hours of sleepless passion that had

followed his wife’s Hampton Court escapade, had been to place himself

in communication with Mr. Brumley. He learnt at Mr. Brumley’s club that

that gentleman had slept there overnight and had started but a quarter

of an hour before, back to Black Strand. Sir Isaac in hot pursuit and

gathering force and assistance in mid flight reached Black Strand by

midday.

It was with a certain twinge of the conscience that Mr. Brumley

perceived his visitor, but it speedily became clear that Sir Isaac had

no knowledge of the guilty circumstances of the day before. He had come

to buy Black Strand—incontinently, that was all. He was going, it

became clear at once, to buy it with all its fittings and furnishings

as it stood, lock, stock and barrel. Mr. Brumley, concealing that wild

elation, that sense of a joyous rebirth, that only the liquidation of

nearly all one’s possessions can give, was firm but not excessive. Sir

Isaac haggled as a wave breaks and then gave in and presently they were

making a memorandum upon the pretty writing-desk beneath the

traditional rose Euphemia had established there when Mr. Brumley was

young and already successful.

This done, and it was done in less than fifteen minutes, Sir Isaac

produced a rather crumpled young architect from the motor-car as a

conjurer might produce a rabbit from a hat, a builder from Aleham

appeared astonishingly in a dog-cart—he had been summoned by

telegram—and Sir Isaac began there and then to discuss alterations,

enlargements and, more particularly, with a view to his nursery

requirements, the conversion of the empty barn into a nursery wing and

its connexion with the house by a corridor across the shrubbery.

“It will take you three months,” said the builder from Aleham. “And the

worst time of the year coming.”

“It won’t take three weeks—if I have to bring down a young army from

London to do it,” said Sir Isaac.

“But such a thing as plastering——”

“We won’t have plastering.”

“There’s canvas and paper, of course,” said the young architect.

“There’s canvas and paper,” said Sir Isaac. “And those new patent

building units, so far as the corridor goes. I’ve seen the ads.”

“We can whitewash ’em. They won’t show much,” said the young architect.

“Oh if you do things in _that_ way,” said the builder from Aleham with

bitter resignation....

§2

The morning dawned at last when the surprise was ripe. It was four days

after Susan’s visit, and she was due again on the morrow with the money

that would enable her employer to go to Lady Viping’s now imminent

dinner. Lady Harman had had to cut the Social Friends’ meeting

altogether, but the day before the surprise Agatha Alimony had come to

tea in her jobbed car, and they had gone together to the committee

meeting of the Shakespear Dinner Society. Sir Isaac had ignored that

defiance, and it was an unusually confident and quite unsuspicious

woman who descended in a warm October sunshine to the surprise. In the

breakfast-room she discovered an awe-stricken Snagsby standing with his

plate-basket before her husband, and her husband wearing strange

unusual tweeds and gaiters,—buttoned gaiters, and standing

a-straddle,—unusually a-straddle, on the hearthrug.

“That’s enough, Snagsby,” said Sir Isaac, at her entrance. “Bring it

all.”

She met Snagsby’s eye, and it was portentous.

Latterly Snagsby’s eye had lost the assurance of his former days. She

had noted it before, she noted it now more than ever; as though he was

losing confidence, as though he was beginning to doubt, as though the

world he had once seemed to rule grew insecure beneath his feet. For a

moment she met his eye; it might have been a warning he conveyed, it

might have been an appeal for sympathy, and then he had gone. She

looked at the table. Sir Isaac had breakfasted acutely.

In silence, among the wreckage and with a certain wonder growing, Lady

Harman attended to her needs.

Sir Isaac cleared his throat.

She became aware that he had spoken. “What did you say, Isaac?” she

asked, looking up. He seemed to have widened his straddle almost

dangerously, and he spoke with a certain conscious forcefulness.

“We’re going to move out of this house, Elly,” he said. “We’re going

down into the country right away.”

She sat back in her chair and regarded his pinched and determined

visage.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I’ve bought that house of Brumley’s,—Black Strand. We’re going to move

down there—_now_. I’ve told the servants.... When you’ve done your

breakfast, you’d better get Peters to pack your things. The big car’s

going to be ready at half-past ten.”

Lady Harman reflected.

“To-morrow evening,” she said, “I was going out to dinner at Lady

Viping’s.”

“Not my affair—seemingly,” said Sir Isaac with irony. “Well, the car’s

going to be ready at half-past ten.”

“But that dinner——!”

“We’ll think about it when the time comes.”

Husband and wife regarded each other.

“I’ve had about enough of London,” said Sir Isaac. “So we’re going to

shift the scenery. See?”

Lady Harman felt that one might adduce good arguments against this

course if only one knew of them.

Sir Isaac had a bright idea. He rang.

“Snagsby,” he said, “just tell Peters to pack up Lady Harman’s

things....”

“_Well!_” said Lady Harman, as the door closed on Snagsby. Her mind was

full of confused protest, but she had again that entirely feminine and

demoralizing conviction that if she tried to express it she would weep

or stumble into some such emotional disaster. If now she went upstairs

and told Peters _not_ to pack——!

Sir Isaac walked slowly to the window, and stood for a time staring out

into the garden.

Extraordinary bumpings began overhead in Sir Isaac’s room. No doubt

somebody was packing something....

Lady Harman realized with a deepening humiliation that she dared not

dispute before the servants, and that he could. “But the children——”

she said at last.

“I’ve told Mrs. Harblow,” he said, over his shoulder. “Told her it was

a bit of a surprise.” He turned, with a momentary lapse into something

like humour. “You see,” he said, “it _is_ a bit of a surprise.”

“But what are you going to do with this house?”

“Lock it all up for a bit.... I don’t see any sense in living where we

aren’t happy. Perhaps down there we shall manage better....”

It emerged from the confusion of Lady Harman’s mind that perhaps she

had better go to the nursery, and see how things were getting on there.

Sir Isaac watched her departure with a slightly dubious eye, made

little noises with his teeth for a time, and then went towards the

telephone.

In the hall she found two strange young men in green aprons assisting

the under-butler to remove the hats and overcoats and such-like

personal material into a motor-van outside. She heard two of the

housemaids scurrying upstairs. “’Arf an hour,” said one, “isn’t what I

call a proper time to pack a box in.”

In the nursery the children were disputing furiously what toys were to

be taken into the country.

Lady Harman was a very greatly astonished woman. The surprise had been

entirely successful.

§3

It has been said, I think, by Limburger, in his already cited work,

that nothing so excites and prevails with woman as rapid and extensive

violence, sparing and yet centring upon herself, and certainly it has

to be recorded that, so far from being merely indignant, and otherwise

a helplessly pathetic spectacle, Lady Harman found, though perhaps she

did not go quite so far as to admit to herself that she found, this

vehement flight from the social, moral, and intellectual contaminations

of London an experience not merely stimulating but entertaining. It

lifted her delicate eyebrows. Something, it may have been a sense of

her own comparative immobility amid this sudden extraordinary bustle of

her home, put it into her head that so it was long ago that Lot must

have bundled together his removable domesticities.

She made one attempt at protest. “Isaac,” she said, “isn’t all this

rather ridiculous——”

“Don’t speak to me!” he answered, waving her off. “Don’t speak to me!

You should have spoken before, Elly. _Now_,—things are happening.”

The image of Black Strand as, after all, a very pleasant place indeed

returned to her. She adjudicated upon the nursery difficulties, and

then went in a dreamlike state of mind to preside over her own more

personal packing. She found Peters exercising all that indecisive

helplessness which is characteristic of ladies’ maids the whole world

over.

It was from Peters she learnt that the entire household, men and maids

together, was to be hurled into Surrey. “Aren’t they all rather

surprised?” asked Lady Harman.

“Yes, m’m,” said Peters on her knees, “but of course if the drains is

wrong the sooner we all go the better.”

(So that was what he had told them.)

A vibration and a noise of purring machinery outside drew the lady to

the window, and she discovered that at least four of the large

motor-vans from the International Stores were to co-operate in the

trek. There they were waiting, massive and uniform. And then she saw

Snagsby in his alpaca jacket _running_ towards the house from the

gates. Of course he was running only very slightly indeed, but still he

was running, and the expression of distress upon his face convinced her

that he was being urged to unusual and indeed unsuitable tasks under

the immediate personal supervision of Sir Isaac.... Then from round the

corner appeared the under butler or at least the legs of him going very

fast, under a pile of shirt boxes and things belonging to Sir Isaac. He

dumped them into the nearest van and heaved a deep sigh and returned

houseward after a remorseful glance at the windows.

A violent outcry from baby, who, with more than her customary violence

was making her customary morning protest against being clad, recalled

Lady Harman from the contemplation of these exterior activities....

The journey to Black Strand was not accomplished without misadventure;

there was a puncture near Farnham, and as Clarence with a leisurely

assurance entertained himself with the Stepney, they were passed first

by the second car with the nursery contingent, which went by in a

shrill chorus, crying, “_We-e-e_ shall get there first, _We-e-e_ shall

get there first,” and then by a large hired car all agog with

housemaids and Mrs. Crumble and with Snagsby, as round and distressed

as the full moon, and the under butler, cramped and keen beside the

driver. There followed the leading International Stores car, and then

the Stepney was on and they could hasten in pursuit....

And at last they came to Black Strand, and when they saw Black Strand

it seemed to Lady Harman that the place had blown out a huge inflamed

red cheek and lost its pleasant balance altogether. “_Oh!_” she cried.

It was the old barn flushed by the strain of adaptation to a new use,

its comfortable old wall ruptured by half a dozen brilliant new

windows, a light red chimney stack at one end. From it a vividly

artistic corridor ran to the house and the rest of the shrubbery was

all trampled and littered with sheds, bricks, poles and material

generally. Black Strand had left the hands of the dilettante school and

was in the grip of those vigorous moulding forces that are shaping our

civilization to-day.

The jasmine wig over the porch had suffered a strenuous clipping; the

door might have just come out of prison. In the hall the Carpaccio

copies still glowed, but there were dust sheets over most of the

furniture and a plumber was moving his things out with that eleventh

hour reluctance so characteristic of plumbers. Mrs. Rabbit, a little

tearful, and dressed for departure very respectably in black was giving

the youngest and least experienced housemaid a faithful history of Mr.

Brumley’s earlier period. “’Appy we all was,” said Mrs. Rabbit, “as

Birds in a Nest.”

Through the windows two of the Putney gardeners were busy replacing Mr.

Brumley’s doubtful roses by recognized sorts, the _right_ sorts....

“I’ve been doing all I can to make it ready for you,” said Sir Isaac at

his wife’s ear, bringing a curious reminiscence of the first

home-coming to Putney into her mind.

§4

“And now,” said Sir Isaac with evident premeditation and a certain

deliberate amiability, “now we got down here, now we got away a bit

from all those London things with nobody to cut in between us, me and

you can have a bit of a talk, Elly, and see what it’s all about.”

They had lunched together in the little hall-dining room,—the children

had had a noisily cheerful picnic in the kitchen with Mrs. Harblow, and

now Lady Harman was standing at the window surveying the ravages of

rose replacement.

She turned towards him. “Yes,” she said. “I think—I think we can’t go

on like this.”

“_I_ can’t,” said Sir Isaac, “anyhow.”

He too came and stared at the rose planting.

“If we were to go up there—among the pine woods”—he pointed with his

head at the dark background of Euphemia’s herbaceous borders—“we

shouldn’t hear quite so much of this hammering....”

Husband and wife walked slowly in the afternoon sunlight across the

still beautiful garden. Each was gravely aware of an embarrassed

incapacity for the task they had set themselves. They were going to

talk things over. Never in their lives had they really talked to each

other clearly and honestly about anything. Indeed it is scarcely too

much to say that neither had ever talked about anything to anyone. She

was too young, her mind was now growing up in her and feeling its way

to conscious expression, and he had never before wanted to express

himself. He did now want to express himself. For behind his rant and

fury Sir Isaac had been thinking very hard indeed during the last three

weeks about his life and her life and their relations; he had never

thought so much about anything except his business economics. So far he

had either joked at her, talked “silly” to her, made, as they say,

“remarks,” or vociferated. That had been the sum of their mental

intercourse, as indeed it is the sum of the intercourse of most married

couples. His attempt to state his case to her had so far always flared

into rhetorical outbreaks. But he was discontented with these

rhetorical outbreaks. His dispositions to fall into them made him

rather like a nervous sepia that cannot keep its ink sac quiet while it

is sitting for its portrait. In the earnestness of his attempt at

self-display he vanished in his own outpourings.

He wanted now to reason with her simply and persuasively. He wanted to

say quietly impressive and convincing things in a low tone of voice and

make her abandon every possible view except his view. He walked now

slowly meditating the task before him, making a faint thoughtful noise

with his teeth, his head sunken in the collar of the motor overcoat he

wore because of a slight cold he had caught. And he had to be careful

about colds because of his constitutional defect. She too felt she had

much to say. Much too she had in her mind that she couldn’t say,

because this strange quarrel had opened unanticipated things for her;

she had found and considered repugnances in her nature she had never

dared to glance at hitherto....

Sir Isaac began rather haltingly when they had reached a sandy,

ant-infested path that ran slantingly up among the trees. He affected a

certain perplexity. He said he did not understand what it was his wife

was “after,” what she “thought she was doing” in “making all this

trouble”; he wanted to know just what it was she wanted, how she

thought they ought to live, just what she considered his rights were as

her husband and just what she considered were her duties as his

wife—if, that is, she considered she had any duties. To these enquiries

Lady Harman made no very definite reply; their estrangement instead of

clearing her mind had on the whole perplexed it more, by making her

realize the height and depth and extent of her possible separation from

him. She replied therefore with an unsatisfactory vagueness; she said

she wanted to feel that she possessed herself, that she was no longer a

child, that she thought she had a right to read what she chose, see

what people she liked, go out a little by herself, have a certain

independence—she hesitated, “have a certain definite allowance of my

own.”

“Have I ever refused you money?” cried Sir Isaac protesting.

“It isn’t that,” said Lady Harman; “it’s the feeling——”

“The feeling of being able to—defy—anything I say,” said Sir Isaac with

a note of bitterness. “As if I didn’t understand!”

It was beyond Lady Harman’s powers to express just how that wasn’t the

precise statement of the case.

Sir Isaac, reverting to his tone of almost elaborate reasonableness,

expanded his view that it was impossible for husband and wife to have

two different sets of friends;—let alone every other consideration, he

explained, it wasn’t convenient for them not to be about together, and

as for reading or thinking what she chose he had never made any

objection to anything unless it was “decadent rot” that any decent man

would object to his womanfolk seeing, rot she couldn’t understand the

drift of—fortunately. Blear-eyed humbug.... He checked himself on the

verge of an almost archiepiscopal outbreak in order to be patiently

reasonable again. He was prepared to concede that it would be very nice

if Lady Harman could be a good wife and also an entirely independent

person, very nice, but the point was—his tone verged on the

ironical—that she couldn’t be two entirely different people at the same

time.

“But you have your friends,” she said, “you go away alone——”

“That’s different,” said Sir Isaac with a momentary note of annoyance.

“It’s business. It isn’t that I want to.”

Lady Harman had a feeling that they were neither of them gaining any

ground. She blamed herself for her lack of lucidity. She began again,

taking up the matter at a fresh point. She said that her life at

present wasn’t full, that it was only half a life, that it was just

home and marriage and nothing else; he had his business, he went out

into the world, he had politics and—“all sorts of things”; she hadn’t

these interests; she had nothing in the place of them——

Sir Isaac closed this opening rather abruptly by telling her that she

should count herself lucky she hadn’t, and again the conversation was

suspended for a time.

“But I want to know about these things,” she said.

Sir Isaac took that musingly.

“There’s things go on,” she said; “outside home. There’s social work,

there’s interests——Am I never to take any part—in that?”

Sir Isaac still reflected.

“There’s one thing,” he said at last, “I want to know. We’d better have

it out—_now_.”

But he hesitated for a time.

“Elly!” he blundered, “you aren’t—you aren’t getting somehow—not fond

of me?”

She made no immediate reply.

“Look here!” he said in an altered voice. “Elly! there isn’t something

below all this? There isn’t something been going on that I don’t know?”

Her eyes with a certain terror in their depths questioned him.

“Something,” he said, and his face was deadly white—“_Some other man,

Elly?_”

She was suddenly crimson, a flaming indignation.

“Isaac!” she said, “what do you _mean_? How can you _ask_ me such a

thing?”

“If it’s that!” said Sir Isaac, his face suddenly full of malignant

force, “I’ll——But I’d _kill_ you....”

“If it isn’t that,” he went on searching his mind; “why should a woman

get restless? Why should she want to go away from her husband, go

meeting other people, go gadding about? If a woman’s satisfied, she’s

satisfied. She doesn’t harbour fancies.... All this grumbling and

unrest. Natural for your sister, but why should you? You’ve got

everything a woman needs, husband, children, a perfectly splendid home,

clothes, good jewels and plenty of them, respect! Why should you want

to go out after things? It’s mere spoilt-childishness. Of course you

want to wander out—and if there isn’t a man——”

He caught her wrist suddenly. “There isn’t a man?” he demanded.

“Isaac!” she protested in horror.

“Then there’ll be one. You think I’m a fool, you think I don’t know

anything all these literary and society people know. I _do_ know. I

know that a man and a woman have got to stick together, and if you go

straying—you may think you’re straying after the moon or social work or

anything—but there’s a strange man waiting round the corner for every

woman and a strange woman for every man. Think _I_’ve had no

temptations?... Oh! I _know_, I _know_. What’s life or anything but

that? and it’s just because we’ve not gone on having more children,

just because we listened to all those fools who said you were overdoing

it, that all this fretting and grumbling began. We’ve got on to the

wrong track, Elly, and we’ve got to get back to plain wholesome ways of

living. See? That’s what I’ve come down here for and what I mean to do.

We’ve got to save ourselves. I’ve been too—too modern and all that. I’m

going to be a husband as a husband should. I’m going to protect you

from these idees—protect you from your own self.... And that’s about

where we stand, Elly, as I make it out.”

He paused with the effect of having delivered himself of long

premeditated things.

Lady Harman essayed to speak. But she found that directly she set

herself to speak she sobbed and began weeping. She choked for a moment.

Then she determined she would go on, and if she must cry, she must cry.

She couldn’t let a disposition to tears seal her in silence for ever.

“It isn’t,” she said, “what I expected—of life. It isn’t——”

“It’s what life is,” Sir Isaac cut in.

“When I think,” she sobbed, “of what I’ve lost——”

“_Lost!_” cried Sir Isaac. “Lost! Oh come now, Elly, I like that.

What!—_lost_. Hang it! You got to look facts in the face. You can’t

deny——Marrying like this,—you made a jolly good thing of it.”

“But the beautiful things, the noble things!”

“_What’s_ beautiful?” cried Sir Isaac in protesting scorn. “_What’s_

noble? ROT! Doing your duty if you like and being sensible, that’s

noble and beautiful, but not fretting about and running yourself into

danger. You’ve got to have a sense of humour, Elly, in this life——” He

created a quotation. “As you make your bed—so shall you lie.”

For an interval neither of them spoke. They crested the hill, and came

into view of that advertisement board she had first seen in Mr.

Brumley’s company. She halted, and he went a step further and halted

too. He recalled his ideas about the board. He had meant to have them

all altered but other things had driven it from his mind....

“Then you mean to imprison me here,” said Lady Harman to his back. He

turned about.

“It isn’t much like a prison. I’m asking you to stay here—and be what a

wife _should_ be.”

“I’m to have no money.”

“That’s—that depends entirely on yourself. You know that well enough.”

She looked at him gravely.

“I won’t stand it,” she said at last with a gentle deliberation.

She spoke so softly that he doubted his hearing. “_What?_” he asked

sharply.

“I won’t stand it,” she repeated. “No.”

“But—what can you do?”

“I don’t know,” she said, after a moment of grave consideration.

For some moments his mind hunted among possibilities.

“It’s me that’s standing it,” he said. He came closely up to her. He

seemed on the verge of rhetoric. He pressed his thin white lips

together. “Standing it! when we might be so happy,” he snapped, and

shrugged his shoulders and turned with an expression of mournful

resolution towards the house again. She followed slowly.

He felt that he had done all that a patient and reasonable husband

could do. _Now_—things must take their course.

§5

The imprisonment of Lady Harman at Black Strand lasted just one day

short of a fortnight.

For all that time except for such interludes as the urgent needs of the

strike demanded, Sir Isaac devoted himself to the siege. He did all he

could to make her realize how restrainedly he used the powers the law

vests in a husband, how little he forced upon her the facts of marital

authority and wifely duty. At times he sulked, at times he affected a

cold dignity, and at times a virile anger swayed him at her

unsubmissive silences. He gave her little peace in that struggle, a

struggle that came to the edge of physical conflict. There were moments

when it seemed to her that nothing remained but that good old-fashioned

connubial institution, the tussle for the upper hand, when with a

feminine horror she felt violence shouldering her shoulder or

contracting ready to grip her wrist. Against violence she doubted her

strength, was filled with a desolating sense of yielding nerve and

domitable muscle. But just short of violence Sir Isaac’s spirit failed

him. He would glower and bluster, half threaten, and retreat. It might

come to that at last but at present it had not come to that.

She could not understand why she had neither message nor sign from

Susan Burnet, but she hid that anxiety and disappointment under her

general dignity.

She spent as much time with the children as she could, and until Sir

Isaac locked up the piano she played, and was surprised to find far

more in Chopin than she had ever suspected in the days when she had

acquired a passable dexterity of execution. She found, indeed, the most

curious things in Chopin, emotional phrases, that stirred and perplexed

and yet pleased her....

The weather was very fine and open that year. A golden sunshine from

October passed on into November and Lady Harman spent many of these

days amidst the pretty things the builder from Aleham had been too

hurried to desecrate, dump, burn upon, and flatten into

indistinguishable mire, after the established custom of builders in

gardens since the world began. She would sit in the rockery where she

had sat with Mr. Brumley and recall that momentous conversation, and

she would wander up the pine-wood slopes behind, and she would spend

long musing intervals among Euphemia’s perennials, thinking sometimes,

and sometimes not so much thinking as feeling the warm tendernesses of

nature and the perplexing difficulties of human life. With an amused

amazement Lady Harman reflected as she walked about the pretty borders

and the little patches of lawn and orchard that in this very place she

was to have realized an imitation of the immortal “Elizabeth” and have

been wise, witty, gay, defiant, gallant and entirely successful with

her “Man of Wrath.” Evidently there was some temperamental difference,

or something in her situation, that altered the values of the affair.

It was clearly a different sort of man for one thing. She didn’t feel a

bit gay, and her profound and deepening indignation with the

alternative to this stagnation was tainted by a sense of weakness and

incapacity.

She came very near surrender several times. There were afternoons of

belated ripened warmth, a kind of summer that had been long in the

bottle, with a certain lassitude in the air and a blue haze among the

trees, that made her feel the folly of all resistances to fate. Why,

after all, shouldn’t she take life as she found it, that is to say, as

Sir Isaac was prepared to give it to her? He wasn’t really so bad, she

told herself. The children—their noses were certainly a little sharp,

but there might be worse children. The next might take after herself

more. Who was she to turn upon her appointed life and declare it wasn’t

good enough? Whatever happened the world was still full of generous and

beautiful things, trees, flowers, sunset and sunrise, music and mist

and morning dew.... And as for this matter of the sweated workers, the

harshness of the business, the ungracious competition, suppose if

instead of fighting her husband with her weak powers, she persuaded

him. She tried to imagine just exactly how he might be persuaded....

She looked up and discovered with an extraordinary amazement Mr.

Brumley with eager gestures and a flushed and excited visage hurrying

towards her across the croquet lawn.

§6

Lady Viping’s dinner-party had been kept waiting exactly thirty-five

minutes for Lady Harman. Sir Isaac, with a certain excess of zeal, had

intercepted the hasty note his wife had written to account for her

probable absence. The party was to have centred entirely upon Lady

Harman, it consisted either of people who knew her already, or of

people who were to have been specially privileged to know her, and Lady

Viping telephoned twice to Putney before she abandoned hope. “It’s

disconnected,” she said, returning in despair from her second struggle

with the great public service. “They can’t get a reply.”

“It’s that little wretch,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin. “He hasn’t let her

come. _I_ know him.”

“It’s like losing a front tooth,” said Lady Viping, surveying her table

as she entered the dining-room.

“But surely—she would have written,” said Mr. Brumley, troubled and

disappointed, regarding an aching gap to the left of his chair, a gap

upon which a pathetic little card bearing Lady Harman’s name still lay

obliquely.

Naturally the talk tended to centre upon the Harmans. And naturally

Lady Beach-Mandarin was very bold and outspoken and called Sir Isaac

quite a number of vivid things. She also aired her views of the

marriage of the future, which involved a very stringent treatment of

husbands indeed. “Half his property and half his income,” said Lady

Beach-Mandarin, “paid into her separate banking account.”

“But,” protested Mr. Brumley, “would men marry under those conditions?”

“Men will marry anyhow,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin, “under _any_

conditions.”

“Exactly Sir Joshua’s opinion,” said Lady Viping.

All the ladies at the table concurred and only one cheerful bachelor

barrister dissented. The other men became gloomy and betrayed a

distaste for this general question. Even Mr. Brumley felt a curious

faint terror and had for a moment a glimpse of the possibilities that

might lie behind the Vote. Lady Beach-Mandarin went bouncing back to

the particular instance. At present, she said, witness Lady Harman,

women were slaves, pampered slaves if you will, but slaves. As things

were now there was nothing to keep a man from locking up his wife,

opening all her letters, dressing her in sack-cloth, separating her

from her children. Most men, of course, didn’t do such things, they

were amenable to public opinion, but Sir Isaac was a jealous little

Ogre. He was a gnome who had carried off a princess....

She threw out projects for assailing the Ogre. She would descend

to-morrow morning upon the Putney house, a living flamboyant writ of

Habeas Corpus. Mr. Brumley, who had been putting two and two together,

was abruptly moved to tell of the sale of Black Strand. “They may be

there,” he said.

“He’s carried her off,” cried Lady Beach-Mandarin on a top note. “It

might be the eighteenth century for all he cares. But if it’s Black

Strand,—I’ll go to Black Strand....”

But she had to talk about it for a week before she actually made her

raid, and then, with an instinctive need for an audience, she took with

her a certain Miss Garradice, one of those mute, emotional nervous

spinsters who drift detachedly, with quick sudden movements, glittering

eyeglasses, and a pent-up imminent look, about our social system. There

is something about this type of womanhood—it is hard to say—almost as

though they were the bottled souls of departed buccaneers grown somehow

virginal. She came with Lady Beach-Mandarin quietly, almost humorously,

and yet it was as if the pirate glittered dimly visible through the

polished glass of her erect exterior.

“Here we are!” said Lady Beach-Mandarin, staring astonished at the once

familiar porch. “Now for it!”

She descended and assailed the bell herself and Miss Garradice stood

beside her with the light of combat in her eyes and glasses and cheeks.

“Shall I offer to take her for a drive!”

“_Let’s_,” said Miss Garradice in an enthusiastic whisper. “_Right

away! For ever._”

“_I will_,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin, and nodded desperately.

She was on the point of ringing again when Snagsby appeared.

He stood with a large obstructiveness in the doorway. “Lady ’Arman, my

lady” he said with a well-trained deliberation, “is not a Tome.”

“Not at home!” queried Lady Beach-Mandarin.

“Not a Tome, my lady,” repeated Snagsby invincibly.

“But—when will she be at home?”

“I can’t say, my lady.”

“Is Sir Isaac——?”

“Sir Isaac, my lady, is not a Tome. Nobody is a Tome, my lady.”

“But we’ve come from London!” said Lady Beach-Mandarin.

“I’m very sorry, my lady.”

“You see, I want my friend to see this house and garden.”

Snagsby was visibly disconcerted. “I ’ave no instructions, my lady,” he

tried.

“Oh, but Lady Harman would never object——”

Snagsby’s confusion increased. He seemed to be wanting to keep his face

to the visitors and at the same time glance over his shoulder. “I

will,” he considered, “I will enquire, my lady.” He backed a little,

and seemed inclined to close the door upon them. Lady Beach-Mandarin

was too quick for him. She got herself well into the open doorway. “And

of whom are you going to enquire?”

A large distress betrayed itself in Snagsby’s eye. “The ’ousekeeper,”

he attempted. “It falls to the ’ousekeeper, my lady.”

Lady Beach-Mandarin turned her face to Miss Garradice, shining in

support. “Stuff and nonsense,” she said, “of course we shall come in.”

And with a wonderful movement that was at once powerful and perfectly

lady-like this intrepid woman—“butted” is not the word—collided herself

with Snagsby and hurled him backward into the hall. Miss Garradice

followed closely behind and at once extended herself in open order on

Lady Beach-Mandarin’s right. “Go and enquire,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin

with a sweeping gesture of her arm. “Go and enquire.”

For a moment Snagsby surveyed the invasion with horror and then fled

precipitately into the recesses of the house.

“Of _course_ they’re at home!” said Lady Beach-Mandarin. “Fancy

that—that—that _navigable_—trying to shut the door on us!”

For a moment the two brightly excited ladies surveyed each other and

then Lady Beach-Mandarin, with a quickness of movement wonderful in one

so abundant, began to open first one and then another of the various

doors that opened into the long hall-living room. At a peculiar little

cry from Miss Garradice she turned from a contemplation of the long low

study in which so much of the Euphemia books had been written, to

discover Sir Isaac behind her, closely followed by an agonized Snagsby.

“A-a-a-a-h!” she cried, with both hands extended, “and so you’ve come

in, Sir Isaac! That’s perfectly delightful. This is my friend Miss

Garradice, who’s _dying_ to see anything you’ve left of poor Euphemia’s

garden. And _how_ is dear Lady Harman?”

For some crucial moments Sir Isaac was unable to speak and regarded his

visitors with an expression that was unpretendingly criminal.

Then he found speech. “You can’t,” he said. “It—can’t be managed.” He

shook his head; his lips were whitely compressed.

“But all the way from London, Sir Isaac!”

“Lady Harman’s ill,” lied Sir Isaac. “She mustn’t be disturbed.

Everything has to be kept quiet. See? Not even shouting. Not even

ordinarily raised voices. A voice like yours—might kill her. That’s why

Snagsby here said we were not at home. We aren’t at home—not to

anyone.”

Lady Beach-Mandarin was baffled.

“Snagsby,” said Sir Isaac, “open that door.”

“But can’t I see her—just for a moment?”

Sir Isaac’s malignity had softened a little at the prospect of victory.

“Absolutely impossible,” he said. “Everything disturbs her, every tiny

thing. You——You’d be certain to.”

Lady Beach-Mandarin looked at her companion and it was manifest that

she was at the end of her resources. Miss Garradice after the fashion

of highly strung spinsters suddenly felt disappointed in her leader. It

wasn’t, her silence intimated, for her to offer suggestions.

The ladies were defeated. When at last that stiff interval ended their

dresses rustled doorward, and Sir Isaac broke out into the civilities

of a victor....

It was only when they were a mile away from Black Strand that fluent

speech returned to Lady Beach-Mandarin. “The little—Crippen,” she said.

“He’s got her locked up in some cellar.... Horrid little face he has!

He looked like a rat at bay.”

“I think perhaps if we’d done _differently_,” said Miss Garradice in a

tone of critical irresponsibility.

“I’ll write to her. That’s what I’ll do,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin

contemplating her next step. “I’m really—concerned. And didn’t you

feel—something sinister. That butler-man’s expression—a kind of round

horror.”

That very evening she told it all—it was almost the trial trip of the

story—to Mr. Brumley....

Sir Isaac watched their departure furtively from the study window and

then ran out to the garden. He went right through into the pine woods

beyond and presently, far away up the slopes, he saw his wife loitering

down towards him, a gracious white tallness touched by a ray of

sunlight—and without a suspicion of how nearly rescue had come to her.

§7

So you see under what excitement Mr. Brumley came down to Black Strand.

Luck was with him at first and he forced the defence with ridiculous

ease.

“Lady Harman, sir, is not a Tome,” said Snagsby.

“Ah!” said Mr. Brumley, with all the assurance of a former proprietor,

“then I’ll just have a look round the garden,” and was through the

green door in the wall and round the barn end before Snagsby’s mind

could function. That unfortunate man went as far as the green door in

pursuit and then with a gesture of despair retreated to the pantry and

began cleaning all his silver to calm his agonized spirit. He could

pretend perhaps that Mr. Brumley had never rung at the front door at

all. If not——

Moreover Mr. Brumley had the good fortune to find Lady Harman quite

unattended and pensive upon the little seat that Euphemia had placed

for the better seeing of her herbaceous borders.

“Lady Harman!” he said rather breathlessly, taking both her hands with

an unwonted assurance and then sitting down beside her, “I am so glad

to see you. I came down to see you—to see if I couldn’t be of any

service to you.”

“It’s so kind of you to come,” she said, and her dark eyes said as much

or more. She glanced round and he too glanced round for Sir Isaac.

“You see,” he said. “I don’t know.... I don’t want to be

impertinent.... But I feel—if I can be of any service to you.... I feel

perhaps you want help here. I don’t want to seem to be taking advantage

of a situation. Or making unwarrantable assumptions. But I want to

assure you—I would willingly die—if only I could do anything.... Ever

since I first saw you.”

He said all this in a distracted way, with his eyes going about the

garden for the possible apparition of Sir Isaac, and all the time his

sense of possible observers made him assume an attitude as though he

was engaged in the smallest of small talk. Her colour quickened at the

import of his words, and emotion, very rich and abundant emotion, its

various factors not altogether untouched perhaps by the spirit of

laughter, lit her eyes. She doubted a little what he was saying and yet

she had anticipated that somehow, some day, in quite other

circumstances, Mr. Brumley might break into some such strain.

“You see,” he went on with a quality of appeal in his eyes, “there’s so

little time to say things—without possible interruption. I feel you are

in difficulties and I want to make you understand——We——Every beautiful

woman, I suppose, has a sort of right to a certain sort of man. I want

to tell you—I’m not really presuming to make love to you—but I want to

tell you I am altogether yours, altogether at your service. I’ve had

sleepless nights. All this time I’ve been thinking about you. I’m quite

clear, I haven’t a doubt, I’ll do anything for you, without reward,

without return, I’ll be your devoted brother, anything, if only you’ll

make use of me....”

Her colour quickened. She looked around and still no one appeared.

“It’s so kind of you to come like this,” she said. “You say things—But

I _have_ felt that you wanted to be brotherly....”

“Whatever I _can_ be,” assured Mr. Brumley.

“My situation here,” she said, her dark frankness of gaze meeting his

troubled eyes. “It’s so strange and difficult. I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know—what I _want_ to do....”

“In London,” said Mr. Brumley, “they think—they say—you have been taken

off—brought down here—to a sort of captivity.”

“I _have_,” admitted Lady Harman with a note of recalled astonishment

in her voice.

“If I can help you to escape——!”

“But where can I escape?”

And one must admit that it is a little difficult to indicate a correct

refuge for a lady who finds her home intolerable. Of course there was

Mrs. Sawbridge, but Lady Harman felt that her mother’s disposition to

lock herself into her bedroom at the slightest provocation made her a

weak support for a defensive fight, and in addition that boarding-house

at Bournemouth did not attract her. Yet what other wall in all the

world was there for Lady Harman to set her back against? During the

last few days Mr. Brumley’s mind had been busy with the details of

impassioned elopements conducted in the most exalted spirit, but now in

the actual presence of the lady these projects did in the most

remarkable manner vanish.

“Couldn’t you,” he said at last, “go somewhere?” And then with an air

of being meticulously explicit, “I mean, isn’t there somewhere, where

you might safely go?”

(And in his dreams he had been crossing high passes with her; he had

halted suddenly and stayed her mule. In his dream because he was a man

of letters and a poet it was always a mule, never a _train de luxe_.

“Look,” he had said, “below there,—_Italy!_—the country you have never

seen before.”)

“There’s nowhere,” she answered.

“Now _where_?” asked Mr. Brumley, “and how?” with the tone and

something of the gesture of one who racks his mind. “If you only trust

yourself to me——Oh! Lady Harman, if I dared ask it——”

He became aware of Sir Isaac walking across the lawn towards them....

The two men greeted each other with a reasonable cordiality. “I wanted

to see how you were getting on down here,” said Mr. Brumley, “and

whether there was anything I could do for you.”

“We’re getting on all right,” said Sir Isaac with no manifest glow of

gratitude.

“You’ve altered the old barn—tremendously.”

“Come and see it,” said Sir Isaac. “It’s a wing.”

Mr. Brumley remained seated. “It was the first thing that struck me,

Lady Harman. This evidence of Sir Isaac’s energy.”

“Come and look over it,” Sir Isaac persisted.

Mr. Brumley and Lady Harman rose together.

“One’s enough to show him that,” said Sir Isaac.

“I was telling Lady Harman how much we missed her at Lady Viping’s, Sir

Isaac.”

“It was on account of the drains,” Sir Isaac explained. “You can’t—it’s

foolhardy to stay a day when the drains are wrong, dinners or no

dinners.”

“You know _I_ was extremely sorry not to come to Lady Viping’s. I hope

you’ll tell her. I wrote.”

But Mr. Brumley didn’t remember clearly enough to make any use of that.

“Everybody naturally _is_ sorry on an occasion of that sort,” said Sir

Isaac. “But you come and see what we’ve done in that barn. In three

weeks. They couldn’t have got it together in three months ten years

ago. It’s—system.”

Mr. Brumley still tried to cling to Lady Harman.

“Have you been interested in this building?” he asked.

“I still don’t understand the system of the corridor,” she said, rising

a little belatedly to the occasion. “I _will_ come.”

Sir Isaac regarded her for a moment with a dubious expression and then

began to explain the new method of building with large prepared units

and shaped pieces of reinforced concrete instead of separate bricks

that Messrs. Prothero & Cuthbertson had organized and which had enabled

him to create this artistic corridor so simply. It was a rather

uncomfortable three-cornered conversation. Sir Isaac addressed his

exposition exclusively to Mr. Brumley and Mr. Brumley made repeated

ineffectual attempts to bring Lady Harman, and Lady Harman made

repeated ineffectual attempts to bring herself, into a position in the

conversation.

Their eyes met, the glow of Mr. Brumley’s declarations remained with

them, but neither dared risk any phrase that might arouse Sir Isaac’s

suspicions or escape his acuteness. And when they had gone through the

new additions pretty thoroughly—the plumbers were still busy with the

barn bathroom—Sir Isaac asked Mr. Brumley if there was anything more he

would like to see. In the slight pause that ensued Lady Harman

suggested tea. But tea gave them no opportunity of resuming their

interrupted conversation, and as Sir Isaac’s invincible determination

to shadow his visitor until he was well off the premises became more

and more unmistakable,—he made it quite ungraciously unmistakable,—Mr.

Brumley’s inventiveness failed. One thing came to him suddenly, but it

led to nothing of any service to him.

“But I heard you were dangerously ill, Lady Harman!” he cried. “Lady

Beach-Mandarin called here——”

“But when?” asked Lady Harman, astonished over the tea-things.

“But you _know_ she called!” said Mr. Brumley and looked in affected

reproach at Sir Isaac.

“I’ve not been ill at all!”

“Sir Isaac told her.”

“Told her I was ill!”

“Dangerously ill. That you couldn’t bear to be disturbed.”

“But _when_, Mr. Brumley?”

“Three days ago.”

They both looked at Sir Isaac who was sitting on the music stool and

eating a piece of tea-cake with a preoccupied air. He swallowed and

then spoke thoughtfully—in a tone of detached observation. Nothing but

a slight reddening of the eyes betrayed any unusual feeling in him.

“It’s my opinion,” he said, “that that old lady—Lady Beach-Mandarin I

mean—doesn’t know what she’s saying half the time. She says—oh!

remarkable things. Saying _that_ for example!”

“But did she call on me?”

“She called. I’m surprised you didn’t hear. And she was all in a flurry

for going on.... Did you come down, Mr. Brumley, to see if Lady Harman

was ill?”

“That weighed with me.”

“Well,—you see she isn’t,” said Sir Isaac and brushed a stray crumb

from his coat....

Mr. Brumley was at last impelled gateward and Sir Isaac saw him as far

as the high-road.

“Good-bye!” cried Mr. Brumley with excessive amiability.

Sir Isaac with soundless lips made a good-bye like gesture.

“And now,” said Sir Isaac to himself with extreme bitterness, “now to

see about getting a dog.”

“Bull mastiff?” said Sir Isaac developing his idea as he went back to

Lady Harman. “Or perhaps a Thoroughly Vicious collie?”

“How did that chap get in?” he demanded. “What had he got to say to

you?”

“He came in—to look at the garden,” said Lady Harman. “And of course he

wanted to know if I had been well—because of Lady Viping’s party. And I

suppose because of what you told Lady Beach-Mandarin.”

Sir Isaac grunted doubtfully. He thought of Snagsby and of all the

instructions he had given Snagsby. He turned about and went off swiftly

and earnestly to find Snagsby....

Snagsby lied. But Sir Isaac was able to tell from the agitated way in

which he was cleaning his perfectly clean silver at that unseasonable

hour that the wretched man was lying.

§8

Quite a number of words came to the lips of Mr. Brumley as he went

unwillingly along the pleasant country road that led from Black Strand

to the railway station. But the word he ultimately said showed how

strongly the habits of the gentlemanly _littérateur_ prevailed in him.

It was the one inevitable word for his mood,—“Baffled!”

Close upon its utterance came the weak irritation of the impotent man.

“What the _devil_?” cried Mr. Brumley.

Some critical spirit within him asked him urgently why he was going to

the station, what he thought he was doing, what he thought he had done,

and what he thought he was going to do. To all of which questions Mr.

Brumley perceived he had no adequate reply.

Earlier in the day he had been inspired by a vague yet splendid dream

of large masterful liberations achieved. He had intended to be very

disinterested, very noble, very firm, and so far as Sir Isaac was

concerned, a trifle overbearing. You know now what he said and did. “Of

course if we could have talked for a little longer,” he said. From the

stormy dissatisfaction of his retreat this one small idea crystallized,

that he had not talked enough without disturbance to Lady Harman. The

thing he had to do was to talk to her some more. To go on with what he

had been saying. That thought arrested his steps. On that hypothesis

there was no reason whatever why he should go on to the station and

London. Instead——He stopped short, saw a convenient gate ahead, went to

it, seated himself upon its topmost rail and attempted a calm survey of

the situation. He had somehow to continue that conversation with Lady

Harman.

Was it impossible to do that by going back to the front door of Black

Strand? His instinct was against that course. He knew that if he went

back now openly he would see nobody but Sir Isaac or his butler. He

must therefore not go back openly. He must go round now and into the

pine-woods at the back of Black Strand; thence he must watch the garden

and find his opportunity of speaking to the imprisoned lady. There was

something at once attractively romantic and repellently youthful about

this course of action. Mr. Brumley looked at his watch, then he

surveyed the blue clear sky overhead, with just one warm tinted wisp of

cloud. It would be dark in an hour and it was probable that Lady Harman

had already gone indoors for the day. Might it be possible after dark

to approach the house? No one surely knew the garden so well as he.

Of course this sort of thing is always going on in romances; in the

stories of that last great survivor of the Stevensonian tradition, H.B.

Marriot Watson, the heroes are always creeping through woods, tapping

at windows, and scaling house-walls, but Mr. Brumley as he sat on his

gate became very sensible of his own extreme inexperience in such

adventures. And yet anything seemed in his present mood better than

going back to London.

Suppose he tried his luck!

He knew of course the lie of the land about Black Strand very well

indeed and his harmless literary social standing gave him a certain

freedom of trespass. He dropped from his gate on the inner side and

taking a bridle path through a pine-wood was presently out upon the

moorland behind his former home. He struck the high-road that led past

the Staminal Bread Board and was just about to clamber over the barbed

wire on his left and make his way through the trees to the crest that

commanded the Black Strand garden when he perceived a man in a

velveteen coat and gaiters strolling towards him. He decided not to

leave the road until he was free from observation. The man was a

stranger, an almost conventional gamekeeper, and he endorsed Mr.

Brumley’s remark upon the charmingness of the day with guarded want of

enthusiasm. Mr. Brumley went on for some few minutes, then halted,

assured himself that the stranger was well out of sight and returned at

once towards the point where high-roads were to be left and adventure

begun. But he was still some yards away when he became aware of that

velveteen-coated figure approaching again. “Damn!” said Mr. Brumley and

slacked his eager paces. This time he expressed a view that the weather

was extremely mild. “Very,” said the man in velveteen with a certain

lack of respect in his manner.

It was no good turning back again. Mr. Brumley went on slowly, affected

to botanize, watched the man out of sight and immediately made a dash

for the pine-woods, taking the barbed wire in a manner extremely

detrimental to his left trouser leg. He made his way obliquely up

through the trees to the crest from which he had so often surveyed the

shining ponds of Aleham. There he paused to peer back for that

gamekeeper—whom he supposed in spite of reason to be stalking him—to

recover his breath and to consider his further plans. The sunset was

very fine that night, a great red sun was sinking towards acutely

outlined hill-crests, the lower nearer distances were veiled in

lavender mists and three of the ponds shone like the fragments of a

shattered pink topaz. But Mr. Brumley had no eye for landscape....

About two hours after nightfall Mr. Brumley reached the railway

station. His trousers and the elbow of his coat bore witness to a

second transit of the barbed-wire fence in the darkness, he had

manifestly walked into a boggy place and had some difficulty in

recovering firm ground and he had also been sliding in a recumbent

position down a bank of moist ferruginous sand. Moreover he had cut the

palm of his left hand. There was a new strange stationmaster who

regarded him without that respect to which he had grown accustomed. He

received the information that the winter train service had been altered

and that he would have to wait forty-five minutes for the next train to

London with the resignation of a man already chastened by misfortune

and fatigue. He went into the waiting-room and after a vain search for

the poker—the new stationmaster evidently kept it in a different

place—sat down in front of an irritatingly dull fire banked up with

slack, and nursed his damaged hand and meditated on his future plans.

His plans were still exactly in the state in which they had been when

Sir Isaac parted from him at the gate of Black Strand. They remained in

the same state for two whole days. Throughout all that distressing

period his general intention of some magnificent intervention on behalf

of Lady Harman remained unchanged, it produced a number of moving

visions of flights at incredible speeds in (recklessly hired)

motor-cars of colossal power,—most of the purchase money for Black

Strand was still uninvested at his bank—of impassioned interviews with

various people, of a divorce court with a hardened judge congratulating

the manifestly quite formal co-respondent on the moral beauty of his

behaviour, but it evolved no sort of concrete practicable detail upon

which any kind of action might be taken. And during this period of

indecision Mr. Brumley was hunted through London by a feverish unrest.

When he was in his little flat in Pont Street he was urged to go to his

club, when he got to his club he was urged to go anywhere else, he

called on the most improbable people and as soon as possible fled forth

again, he even went to the British Museum and ordered out a lot of

books on matrimonial law. Long before that great machine had disgorged

them for him he absconded and this neglected, this widowed pile of

volumes still standing to his account only came back to his mind in the

middle of the night suddenly and disturbingly while he was trying to

remember the exact words he had used in his brief conversation with

Lady Harman....

§9

Two days after Mr. Brumley’s visit Susan Burnet reached Black Strand.

She too had been baffled for a while. For some week or more she

couldn’t discover the whereabouts of Lady Harman and lived in the

profoundest perplexity. She had brought back her curtains to the Putney

house in a large but luggable bundle, they were all made and ready to

put up, and she found the place closed and locked, in the charge of a

caretaker whose primary duty it was to answer no questions. It needed

several days of thought and amazement, and a vast amount of “I wonder,”

and “I just would like to know,” before it occurred to Susan that if

she wrote to Lady Harman at the Putney address the letter might be

forwarded. And even then she almost wrecked the entire enterprise by

mentioning the money, and it was by a quite exceptional inspiration

that she thought after all it was wiser not to say that but to state

that she had finished the curtains and done everything (underlined)

that Lady Harman had desired. Sir Isaac read it and tossed it over to

his wife. “Make her send her bill,” he remarked.

Whereupon Lady Harman set Mrs. Crumble in motion to bring Susan down to

Black Strand. This wasn’t quite easy because as Mrs. Crumble pointed

out they hadn’t the slightest use for Susan’s curtains there, and Lady

Harman had to find the morning light quite intolerable in her

bedroom—she always slept with window wide open and curtains drawn

back—to create a suitable demand for Susan’s services. But at last

Susan came, too humbly invisible for Sir Isaac’s attention, and

directly she found Lady Harman alone in the room with her, she produced

a pawn ticket and twenty pounds. “I ’ad to give all sorts of

particulars,” she said. “It was a job. But I did it....”

The day was big with opportunity, for Sir Isaac had been unable to

conceal the fact that he had to spend the morning in London. He had

gone up in the big car and his wife was alone, and so, with Susan

upstairs still deftly measuring for totally unnecessary hangings, Lady

Harman was able to add a fur stole and a muff and some gloves to her

tweed gardening costume, walk unchallenged into the garden and from the

garden into the wood and up the hillside and over the crest and down to

the high-road and past that great advertisement of Staminal Bread and

so for four palpitating miles, to the railway station and the outer

world.

She had the good fortune to find a train imminent,—the

twelve-seventeen. She took a first-class ticket for London and got into

a compartment with another woman because she felt it would be safer.

§10

Lady Harman reached Miss Alimony’s flat at half-past three in the

afternoon. She had lunched rather belatedly and uncomfortably in the

Waterloo Refreshment Room and she had found out that Miss Alimony was

at home through the telephone. “I want to see you urgently,” she said,

and Miss Alimony received her in that spirit. She was hatless but she

had a great cloud of dark fuzzy hair above the grey profundity of her

eyes and she wore an artistic tea-gown that in spite of a certain

looseness at neck and sleeve emphasized the fine lines of her admirable

figure. Her flat was furnished chiefly with books and rich oriental

hangings and vast cushions and great bowls of scented flowers. On the

mantel-shelf was the crystal that amused her lighter moments and above

it hung a circular allegory by Florence Swinstead, very rich in colour,

the Awakening of Woman, in a heavy gold frame. Miss Alimony conducted

her guest to an armchair, knelt flexibly on the hearthrug before her,

took up a small and elegant poker with a brass handle and a

spear-shaped service end of iron and poked the fire.

The service end came out from the handle and fell into the grate. “It

always does that,” said Miss Alimony charmingly. “But never mind.” She

warmed both hands at the blaze. “Tell me all about it,” she said,

softly.

Lady Harman felt she would rather have been told all about it. But

perhaps that would follow.

“You see,” she said, “I find——My married life——”

She halted. It _was_ very difficult to tell.

“Everyone,” said Agatha, giving a fine firelit profile, and remaining

gravely thoughtful through a little pause.

“Do you mind,” she asked abruptly, “if I smoke?”

When she had completed her effect with a delicately flavoured

cigarette, she encouraged Lady Harman to proceed.

This Lady Harman did in a manner do. She said her husband left her no

freedom of mind or movement, gave her no possession of herself, wanted

to control her reading and thinking. “He insists——” she said.

“Yes,” said Miss Agatha sternly blowing aside her cigarette smoke.

“They all insist.”

“He insists,” said Lady Harman, “on seeing all my letters, choosing all

my friends. I have no control over my house or my servants, no money

except what he gives me.”

“In fact you are property.”

“I’m simply property.”

“A harem of one. And all _that_ is within the provisions of the law!”

“How any woman can marry!” said Miss Agatha, after a little interval.

“I sometimes think that is where the true strike of the sex ought to

begin. If none of us married! If we said all of us, ‘No,—definitely—we

refuse this bargain! It is a man-made contract. We have had no voice in

it. We decline.’ Perhaps it will come to that. And I knew that you, you

with that quiet beautiful penetration in your eyes would come to see it

like that. The first task, after the vote is won, will be the revision

of that contract. The very first task of our Women Statesmen....”

She ceased and revived her smouldering cigarette and mused blinking

through the smoke. She seemed for a time almost lost to the presence of

her guest in a great daydream of womanstatecraft.

“And so,” she said, “you’ve come, as they all come,—to join us.”

“_Well_,” said Lady Harman in a tone that made Agatha turn eyes of

surprise upon her.

“Of course,” continued Lady Harman, “I suppose—I shall join you; but as

a matter of fact you see, what I’ve done to-day has been to come right

away.... You see I am still in my garden tweeds.... There it was down

there, a sort of stale mate....”

Agatha sat up on her heels.

“But my dear!” she said, “you don’t mean you’ve run away?”

“Yes,—I’ve run away.”

“But—run away!”

“I sold a ring and got some money and here I am!”

“But—what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I thought you perhaps—might advise.”

“But—a man like your husband! He’ll pursue you!”

“If he knows where I am, he will,” said Lady Harman.

“He’ll make a scandal. My dear! are you wise? Tell me, tell me exactly,

_why_ have you run away? I didn’t understand at all—that you had run

away.”

“Because,” began Lady Harman and flushed hotly. “It was impossible,”

she said.

Miss Alimony regarded her deeply. “I wonder,” she said.

“I feel,” said Lady Harman, “if I stayed, if I gave in——I mean

after—after I had once—rebelled. Then I should just be—a wife—ruled,

ordered——”

“It wasn’t your place to give in,” said Miss Alimony and added one of

those parliament touches that creep more and more into feminine

phraseology; “I agree to that—_nemine contradicente_. But—I

_wonder_....”

She began a second cigarette and thought in profile again.

“I think, perhaps, I haven’t explained, clearly, how things are,” said

Lady Harman, and commenced a rather more explicit statement of her

case. She felt she had not conveyed and she wanted to convey to Miss

Alimony that her rebellion was not simply a desire for personal freedom

and autonomy, that she desired these things because she was becoming

more and more aware of large affairs outside her home life in which she

ought to be not simply interested but concerned, that she had been not

merely watching the workings of the business that made her wealthy, but

reading books about socialism, about social welfare that had stirred

her profoundly.... “But he won’t even allow me to know of such things,”

she said....

Miss Alimony listened a little abstractedly.

Suddenly she interrupted. “Tell me,” she said, “one thing.... I

confess,” she explained, “I’ve no business to ask. But if I’m to

advise——If my advice is to be worth anything....”

“Yes?” asked Lady Harman.

“Is there——Is there someone else?”

“Someone else?” Lady Harman was crimson.

“On _your_ side!”

“Someone else on my side?”

“I mean—someone. A man perhaps? Some man that you care for? More than

you do for your husband?...”

“_I can’t imagine_,” whispered Lady Harman, “_anything_——” And left her

sentence unfinished. Her breath had gone. Her indignation was profound.

“Then I can’t understand why you should find it so important to come

away.”

Lady Harman could offer no elucidation.

“You see,” said Miss Alimony, with an air of expert knowledge, “our

case against our opponents is just exactly their great case against us.

They say to us when we ask for the Vote, ‘the Woman’s Place is the

Home.’ ‘Precisely,’ we answer, ‘the Woman’s Place _is_ the Home. _Give_

us our Homes!’ Now _your_ place is your home—with your children. That’s

where you have to fight your battle. Running away—for you it’s simply

running away.”

“But——If I stay I shall be beaten.” Lady Harman surveyed her hostess

with a certain dismay. “Do you understand, Agatha? I _can’t_ go back.”

“But my dear! What else can you do? What had you thought?”

“You see,” said Lady Harman, after a little struggle with that childish

quality in her nerves that might, if it wasn’t controlled, make her

eyes brim. “You see, I didn’t expect you quite to take this view. I

thought perhaps you might be disposed——If I could have stayed with you

here, only for a little time, I could have got some work or

something——”

“It’s so dreadful,” said Miss Alimony, sitting far back with the

relaxation of infinite regrets. “It’s dreadful.”

“Of course if you don’t see it as I do——”

“I can’t,” said Miss Alimony. “I can’t.”

She turned suddenly upon her visitor and grasped her knees with her

shapely hands. “Oh let me implore you! Don’t run away. Please for my

sake, for all our sakes, for the sake of Womanhood, don’t run away!

Stay at your post. You mustn’t run away. You must _not_. If you do, you

admit everything. Everything. You must fight in your home. It’s _your_

home. That is the great principle you must grasp,—it’s not his. It’s

there your duty lies. And there are your children—_your_ children, your

little ones! Think if you go—there may be a fearful fuss—proceedings.

Lawyers—a search. Very probably he will take all sorts of proceedings.

It will be a Matrimonial Case. How can I be associated with that? We

mustn’t mix up Women’s Freedom with Matrimonial Cases. Impossible! We

_dare_ not! A woman leaving her husband! Think of the weapon it gives

our enemies. If once other things complicate the Vote,—the Vote is

lost. After all our self-denial, after all our sacrifices.... You see!

Don’t you _see_?...

“_Fight!_” she summarized after an eloquent interval.

“You mean,” said Lady Harman,—“you think I ought to go back.”

Miss Alimony paused to get her full effect. “_Yes_,” she said in a

profound whisper and endorsed it, “Oh so much so!—yes.”

“Now?”

“Instantly.”

For an interval neither lady spoke. It was the visitor at last who

broke the tension.

“Do you think,” she asked in a small voice and with the hesitation of

one whom no refusal can surprise; “you could give me a cup of tea?”

Miss Alimony rose with a sigh and a slow unfolding rustle. “I forgot,”

she said. “My little maid is out.”

Lady Harman left alone sat for a time staring at the fire with her eyes

rather wide and her eyebrows raised as though she mutely confided to it

her infinite astonishment. This was the last thing she had expected.

She would have to go to some hotel. Can a woman stay alone at an hotel?

Her heart sank. Inflexible forces seemed to be pointing her back to

home—and Sir Isaac. He would be a very triumphant Sir Isaac, and she’d

not have much heart left in her.... “I _won’t_ go back,” she whispered

to herself. “Whatever happens I _won’t_ go back....”

Then she became aware of the evening newspaper Miss Alimony had been

reading. The headline, “Suffrage Raid on Regent Street,” caught her

eye. A queer little idea came into her head. It grew with tremendous

rapidity. She put out a hand and took up the paper and read.

She had plenty of time to read because her hostess not only got the tea

herself but went during that process to her bedroom and put on one of

those hats that have contributed so much to remove the stigma of

dowdiness from the suffrage cause, as an outward and visible sign that

she was presently ceasing to be at home....

Lady Harman found an odd fact in the report before her. “One of the

most difficult things to buy at the present time in the West End of

London,” it ran, “is a hammer....”

Then a little further: “The magistrate said it was impossible to make

discriminations in this affair. All the defendants must have a month’s

imprisonment....”

When Miss Alimony returned Lady Harman put down the paper almost

guiltily.

Afterwards Miss Alimony recalled that guilty start, and the still more

guilty start that had happened, when presently she went out of the room

again and returned with a lamp, for the winter twilight was upon them.

Afterwards, too, she was to learn what had become of the service end of

her small poker, the little iron club, which she missed almost as soon

as Lady Harman had gone....

Lady Harman had taken that grubby but convenient little instrument and

hidden it in her muff, and she had gone straight out of Miss Alimony’s

flat to the Post Office at the corner of Jago Street, and there, with

one simple effective impact, had smashed a ground-glass window, the

property of His Majesty King George the Fifth. And having done so, she

had called the attention of a youthful policeman, fresh from Yorkshire,

to her offence, and after a slight struggle with his incredulity and a

visit to the window in question, had escorted him to the South

Hampsmith police-station, and had there made him charge her. And on the

way she explained to him with a newfound lucidity why it was that women

should have votes.

And all this she did from the moment of percussion onward, in a mood of

exaltation entirely strange to her, but, as she was astonished to find,

by no means disagreeable. She found afterwards that she only remembered

very indistinctly her selection of the window and her preparations for

the fatal blow, but that the effect of the actual breakage remained

extraordinarily vivid upon her memory. She saw with extreme

distinctness both as it was before and after the breakage, first as a

rather irregular grey surface, shining in the oblique light of a street

lamp, and giving pale phantom reflections of things in the street, and

then as it was after her blow. It was all visual impression in her

memory; she could not recollect afterwards if there had been any noise

at all. Where there had been nothing but a milky dinginess a

thin-armed, irregular star had flashed into being, and a large

triangular piece at its centre, after what seemed an interminable

indecision, had slid, first covertly downward, and then fallen forward

at her feet and shivered into a hundred fragments....

Lady Harman realized that a tremendous thing had been done—irrevocably.

She stared at her achievement open-mouthed. The creative lump of iron

dropped from her hand. She had a momentary doubt whether she had really

wanted to break that window at all; and then she understood that this

business had to be seen through, and seen through with neatness and

dignity; and that wisp of regret vanished absolutely in her

concentration upon these immediate needs.

§11

Some day, when the arts of the writer and illustrator are more closely

blended than they are to-day, it will be possible to tell of all that

followed this blow, with an approach to its actual effect. Here there

should stand a page showing simply and plainly the lower half of the

window of the Jago Street Post Office, a dark, rather grimy pane,

reflecting the light of a street lamp—and _broken_. Below the pane

would come a band of evilly painted woodwork, a corner of letter-box, a

foot or so of brickwork, and then the pavement with a dropped lump of

iron. That would be the sole content of this page, and the next page

would be the same, but very slightly fainter, and across it would be

printed a dim sentence or so of explanation. The page following that

would show the same picture again, but now several lines of type would

be visible, and then, as one turned over, the smashed window would fade

a little, and the printed narrative, still darkened and dominated by

it, would nevertheless resume. One would read on how Lady Harman

returned to convince the incredulous young Yorkshireman of her feat,

how a man with a barrow-load of bananas volunteered comments, and how

she went in custody, but with the extremest dignity, to the

police-station. Then, with some difficulty, because that imposed

picture would still prevail over the letterpress, and because it would

be in small type, one would learn how she was bailed out by Lady

Beach-Mandarin, who was clearly the woman she ought to have gone to in

the first place, and who gave up a dinner with a duchess to entertain

her, and how Sir Isaac, being too torn by his feelings to come near her

spent the evening in a frantic attempt to keep the whole business out

of the papers. He could not manage it. The magistrate was friendly next

morning, but inelegant in his friendly expedients; he remanded Lady

Harman until her mental condition could be inquired into, but among her

fellow-defendants—there had been quite an epidemic of window-smashing

that evening—Lady Harman shone pre-eminently sane. She said she had

broken this window because she was assured that nothing would convince

people of the great dissatisfaction of women with their conditions

except such desperate acts, and when she was reminded of her four

daughters she said it was precisely the thought of how they too would

grow up to womanhood that had made her strike her blow. The statements

were rather the outcome of her evening with Lady Beach-Mandarin than

her own unaided discoveries, but she had honestly assimilated them, and

she expressed them with a certain simple dignity.

Sir Isaac made a pathetic appearance before the court, and Lady Harman

was shocked to see how worn he was with distress at her scandalous

behaviour. He looked a broken man. That curious sense of personal

responsibility, which had slumbered throughout the Black Strand

struggle, came back to her in a flood, and she had to grip the edge of

the dock tightly to maintain her self-control. Unaccustomed as he was

to public speaking, Sir Isaac said in a low, sorrow-laden voice, he had

provided himself with a written statement dissociating himself from the

views his wife’s rash action might seem to imply, and expressing his

own opinions upon woman’s suffrage and the relations of the sexes

generally, with especial reference to contemporary literature. He had

been writing it most of the night. He was not, however, permitted to

read this, and he then made an unstudied appeal for the consideration

and mercy of the court. He said Lady Harman had always been a good

mother and a faithful wife; she had been influenced by misleading

people and bad books and publications, the true significance of which

she did not understand, and if only the court would regard this first

offence leniently he was ready to take his wife away and give any

guarantee that might be specified that it should not recur. The

magistrate was sympathetic and kindly, but he pointed out that this

window-breaking had to be stamped out, and that it could only be

stamped out by refusing any such exception as Sir Isaac desired. And so

Sir Isaac left the court widowed for a month, a married man without a

wife, and terribly distressed.

All this and more one might tell in detail, and how she went to her

cell, and the long tedium of her imprisonment, and how deeply Snagsby

felt the disgrace, and how Miss Alimony claimed her as a convert to the

magic of her persuasions, and many such matters—there is no real

restraint upon a novelist fully resolved to be English and Gothic and

unclassical except obscure and inexplicable instincts. But these

obscure and inexplicable instincts are at times imperative, and on this

occasion they insist that here must come a break, a pause, in the

presence of this radiating gap in the Postmaster-General’s glass, and

the phenomenon of this gentle and beautiful lady, the mother of four

children, grasping in her gloved hand, and with a certain

amateurishness, a lumpish poker-end of iron.

We make the pause by ending the chapter here and by resuming the story

at a fresh point—with an account of various curious phases in the

mental development of Mr. Brumley.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

MR. BRUMLEY IS TROUBLED BY DIFFICULT IDEAS

§1

Then as that picture of a post office pane, smashed and with a large

hole knocked clean through it, fades at last upon the reader’s

consciousness, let another and a kindred spectacle replace it. It is

the carefully cleaned and cherished window of Mr. Brumley’s mind,

square and tidy and as it were “frosted” against an excess of light,

and in that also we have now to record the most jagged all and

devastating fractures.

Little did Mr. Brumley reckon when first he looked up from his laces at

Black Strand, how completely that pretty young woman in the dark furs

was destined to shatter all the assumptions that had served his life.

But you have already had occasion to remark a change in Mr. Brumley’s

bearing and attitude that carries him far from the kindly and humorous

conservatism of his earlier work. You have shared Lady Harman’s

astonishment at the ardour of his few stolen words in the garden, an

astonishment that not only grew but flowered in the silences of her

captivity, and you know something of the romantic impulses, more at

least than she did, that gave his appearance at the little local

railway station so belated and so disreputable a flavour. In the chilly

ill-flavoured solitude of her prison cell and with a mind quickened by

meagre and distasteful fare, Lady Harman had ample leisure to reflect

upon many things, she had already fully acquainted herself with the

greater proportion of Mr. Brumley’s published works, and she found the

utmost difficulty in reconciling the flushed impassioned quality of his

few words of appeal, with the moral assumptions of his published

opinions. On the whole she was inclined to think that her memory had a

little distorted what he had said. In this however she was mistaken;

Mr. Brumley had really been proposing an elopement and he was now

entirely preoccupied with the idea of rescuing, obtaining and

possessing Lady Harman for himself as soon as the law released her.

One may doubt whether this extensive change from a humorous

conservatism to a primitive and dangerous romanticism is to be ascribed

entirely to the personal charm, great as it no doubt was, of Lady

Harman; rather did her tall soft dark presence come to release a long

accumulating store of discontent and unrest beneath the polished

surfaces of Mr. Brumley’s mind. Things had been stirring in him for

some time; the latter Euphemia books had lacked much of the freshness

of their precursors and he had found it increasingly hard, he knew not

why, to keep up the lightness, the geniality, the friendly badinage of

successful and accepted things, the sunny disregard of the grim and

unamiable aspects of existence, that were the essential merits of that

Optimistic Period of our literature in which Mr. Brumley had begun his

career. With every justification in the world Mr. Brumley had set out

to be an optimist, even in the _Granta_ his work had been distinguished

by its gay yet steadfast superficiality, and his early success, his

rapid popularity, had done much to turn this early disposition into a

professional attitude. He had determined that for all his life he would

write for comfortable untroubled people in the character of a

light-spirited, comfortable, untroubled person, and that each year

should have its book of connubial humour, its travel in picturesque

places, its fun and its sunshine, like roses budding in succession on a

stem. He did his utmost to conceal from himself the melancholy

realization that the third and the fourth roses were far less wonderful

than the first and the second, and that by continuing the descending

series a rose might be attained at last that was almost unattractive,

but he was already beginning to suspect that he was getting less

animated and a little irritable when Euphemia very gently and

gracefully but very firmly and rather enigmatically died, and after an

interval of tender and tenderly expressed regrets he found himself, in

spite of the most strenuous efforts to keep bright and kindly and

optimistic in the best style, dull and getting duller—he could disguise

the thing no longer. And he weighed more. Six—eight—eleven pounds more.

He took a flat in London, dined and lunched out lightly but frequently,

sought the sympathetic friendship of several charming ladies, and

involved himself deeply in the affairs of the Academic Committee.

Indeed he made a quite valiant struggle to feel that optimism was just

where it always had been and everything all right and very bright with

him and with the world about him. He did not go under without a

struggle. But as Max Beerbohm’s caricature—the 1908 one I mean—brought

out all too plainly, there was in his very animation, something of the

alert liveliness of the hunted man. Do what he would he had a terrible

irrational feeling that things, as yet scarce imagined things, were

after him and would have him. Even as he makes his point, even as he

gesticulates airily, with his rather distinctively North European nose

Beerbohmically enlarged and his sensitive nostril in the air, he seems

to be looking at something he does not want to look at, something

conceivably pursuing, out of the corner of his eye.

The thing that was assailing Mr. Brumley and making his old established

humour and tenderness seem dull and opaque and giving this new uneasy

quality to his expression was of course precisely the thing that Sir

Isaac meant when he talked about “idees” and their disturbing influence

upon all the once assured tranquillities and predominances of Putney

life. It was criticism breaking bounds.

As a basis and substance for the tissue of whimsically expressed

happiness and confident appreciation of the good things of life, which

Mr. Brumley had set before himself as his agreeable—and it was to be

hoped popular and profitable—life-task, certain assumptions had been

necessary. They were assumptions he had been very willing to make and

which were being made in the most exemplary way by the writers who were

succeeding all about him at the commencement of his career. And these

assumptions had had such an air then of being quite trustworthy, as

being certain to wash and wear! Already nowadays it is difficult to get

them stated; they have become incredible while still too near to

justify the incredibility that attaches to history. It was assumed, for

example, that in the institutions, customs and culture of the middle

Victorian period, humanity had, so far as the broad lines of things are

concerned, achieved its goal. There were of course still bad men and

women—individually—and classes one had to recognize as “lower,” but all

the main things were right, general ideas were right; the law was

right, institutions were right, Consols and British Railway Debentures

were right and were going to keep right for ever. The Abolition of

Slavery in America had been the last great act which had inaugurated

this millennium. Except for individual instances the tragic intensities

of life were over now and done with; there was no more need for heroes

and martyrs; for the generality of humanity the phase of genial comedy

had begun. There might be improvements and refinements ahead, but

social, political and economic arrangement were now in their main

outlines settled for good and all; nothing better was possible and it

was the agreeable task of the artist and the man of letters to assist

and celebrate this establishment. There was to be much editing of

Shakespear and Charles Lamb, much delightful humour and costume

romance, and an Academy of refined Fine Writers would presently

establish belles-lettres on the reputable official basis, write _finis_

to creative force and undertake the task of stereotyping the language.

Literature was to have its once terrible ferments reduced to the

quality of a helpful pepsin. Ideas were dead—or domesticated. The last

wild idea, in an impoverished and pitiful condition, had been hunted

down and killed in the mobbing of, “The Woman Who Did.” For a little

time the world did actually watch a phase of English writing that dared

nothing, penetrated nothing, suppressed everything and aspired at most

to Charm, creep like a transitory patch of sunlight across a storm-rent

universe. And vanish....

At no time was it a perfectly easy task to pretend that the crazy

makeshifts of our legal and political systems, the staggering accidents

of economic relationship, the festering disorder of contemporary

philosophy and religious teaching, the cruel and stupid bed of King Og

that is our last word in sexual adjustment, really constituted a noble

and enduring sanity, and it became less and less so with the acute

disillusionments that arose out of the Boer War. The first decade of

the twentieth century was for the English a decade of badly sprained

optimism. Our Empire was nearly beaten by a handful of farmers amidst

the jeering contempt of the whole world—and we felt it acutely for

several years. We began to question ourselves. Mr. Brumley found his

gay but entirely respectable irresponsibility harder and harder to keep

up as that decade wore on. And close upon the South African trouble

came that extraordinary new discontent of women with a woman’s lot

which we have been observing as it reached and troubled the life of

Lady Harman. Women who had hitherto so passively made the bulk of that

reading public which sustained Mr. Brumley and his kind—they wanted

something else!

And behind and beneath these immediately disconcerting things still

more sinister hintings and questioning were beginning to pluck at

contentment. In 1899 nobody would have dreamt of asking and in 1909

even Mr. Brumley was asking, “Are things going on much longer?” A

hundred little incidents conspired to suggest that a Christianity that

had, to put it mildly, shirked the Darwinian challenge, had no longer

the palliating influence demanded of a national religion, and that down

there in the deep levels of labour where they built railways to carry

Mr. Brumley’s food and earn him dividends, where they made engines and

instruments and textiles and drains for his little needs, there was a

new, less bounded discontent, a grimmer spirit, something that one

tried in vain to believe was only the work of “agitators,” something

that was to be pacified no longer by the thin pretences of liberalism,

something that might lead ultimately—optimism scarcely dared to ask

whither....

Mr. Brumley did his best to resist the influence of these darkening

ideas. He tried to keep it up that everything was going well and that

most of these shadows and complaints were the mischief of a few

incurably restless personalities. He tried to keep it up that to belong

to the working class was a thoroughly jolly thing—for those who were

used to it. He declared that all who wanted to alter our laws or our

ideas about property or our methods of production were envious and base

and all who wanted any change between the sexes, foolish or vicious. He

tried to go on disposing of socialists, agitators, feminists, women’s

suffragists, educationists and every sort of reformer with a

good-humoured contempt. And he found an increasing difficulty in

keeping his contempt sufficiently good-humoured. Instead of laughing

down at folly and failure, he had moments when he felt that he was

rather laughing up—a little wryly—at monstrous things impending. And

since ideas are things of atmosphere and the spirit, insidious wolves

of the soul, they crept up to him and gnawed the insides out of him

even as he posed as their manful antagonist.

Insensibly Mr. Brumley moved with his times. It is the necessary first

phase in the break-up of any system of unsound assumptions that a

number of its votaries should presently set about padding its cutting

corners and relieving the harsh pressure of its injustices by

exuberances of humour and sentimentality. Mr. Brumley became charitable

and romantic,—orthodox still but charitable and romantic. He was all

for smashing with the generalization, but now in the particular

instance he was more and more for forgiveness. One finds creeping into

the later Euphemia books a Bret-Harte-like doctrine that a great number

of bad women are really good and a persuasion in the ‘Raffles’ key that

a large proportion of criminals are really very picturesque and

admirable fellows. One wonders how far Mr. Brumley’s less ostensible

life was softening in harmony with this exterior change, this tender

twilight of principle. He wouldn’t as yet face the sterner fact that

most people who are condemned by society, whether they are condemned

justly or not, are by the very gregariousness of man’s nature debased,

and that a law or custom that stamps you as bad makes you bad. A great

state should have high and humane and considerate laws nobly planned,

nobly administered and needing none of these shabby little

qualifications _sotto voce_. To find goodness in the sinner and

justification in the outcast is to condemn the law, but as yet Mr.

Brumley’s heart failed where his intelligence pointed towards that

conclusion. He hadn’t the courage to revise his assumptions about right

and wrong to that extent; he just allowed them to get soft and sloppy.

He waded, where there should be firm ground. He waded toward wallowing.

This is a perilous way of living and the sad little end of Euphemia,

flushed and coughing, left him no doubt in many ways still more exposed

to the temptations of the sentimental byway and the emotional gloss.

Happily this is a book about Lady Harman and not an exhaustive

monograph upon Mr. Brumley. We will at least leave him the refuge of a

few shadows.

Occasionally he would write an important signed review for the

_Twentieth Century_ or the _Hebdomadal Review_, and on one such

occasion he took in hand several studies of contemporary conditions by

various ‘New Witnesses,’ ‘Young Liberals,’ _New Age_ rebels and

associated insurgent authors. He intended to be rather kindly with

them, rather disillusioned, quite sympathetic but essentially

conventional and conservative and sane. He sat at a little desk near

the drooping Venus, under the benediction of Euphemia’s posthumous

rose, and turned over the pages of one of the least familiar of the

group. The stuff was written with a crude force that at times became

almost distinguished, but with a bitterness that he felt he must

reprove. And suddenly he came upon a passionate tirade against the

present period. It made him nibble softly with his lips at the top of

his fountain pen as he read.

“We live,” said the writer, “in a second Byzantine age, in one of those

multitudinous accumulations of secondary interests, of secondary

activities and conventions and colossal intricate insignificances, that

lie like dust heaps in the path of the historian. The true history of

such periods is written in bank books and cheque counterfoils and burnt

to save individual reputations; it sneaks along under a thousand

pretences, it finds its molelike food and safety in the dirt; its outer

forms remain for posterity, a huge débris of unfathomable riddles.”

“Hm!” said Mr. Brumley. “He slings it out. And what’s this?”

“A civilization arrested and decayed, waiting through long inglorious

ages of unscheduled crime, unchallenged social injustice, senseless

luxury, mercenary politics and universal vulgarity and weakness, for

the long overdue scavenging of the Turk.”

“I wonder where the children pick up such language,” whispered Mr.

Brumley with a smile.

But presently he had pushed the book away and was thinking over this

novel and unpleasant idea that perhaps after all his age didn’t matter

as some ages have mattered and as he had hitherto always supposed it

did matter. Byzantine, with the gold of life stolen and the swans

changed to geese? Of course always there had been a certain

qualification upon heroes, even Cæsar had needed a wreath, but at any

rate the age of Cæsar had mattered. Kings no doubt might be more kingly

and the issues of life plainer and nobler, but this had been true of

every age. He tried to weigh values against values, our past against

our present, temperately and sanely. Our art might perhaps be keener

for beauty than it seemed to be, but still—it flourished. And our

science at least was wonderful—wonderful. There certainly this young

detractor of existing things went astray. What was there in Byzantium

to parallel with the electric light, the electric tram, wireless

telegraphy, aseptic surgery? Of course this about “unchallenged social

injustice” was nonsense. Rant. Why! we were challenging social

injustice at every general election—plainly and openly. And crime! What

could the man mean about unscheduled crime? Mere words! There was of

course a good deal of luxury, but not _wicked_ luxury, and to compare

our high-minded and constructive politics with the mere conflict of

unscrupulous adventurers about that semi-oriental throne! It was

nonsense!

“This young man must be spanked,” said Mr. Brumley and, throwing aside

an open illustrated paper in which a full-length portrait of Sir Edward

Carson faced a picture of the King and Queen in their robes sitting

side by side under a canopy at the Coronation Durbar, he prepared

himself to write in an extremely salutary manner about the follies of

the younger generation, and incidentally to justify his period and his

professional contentment.

§2

One is reminded of those houses into which the white ants have eaten

their way; outwardly still fair and solid, they crumble at the touch of

a hand. And now you will begin to understand those changes of bearing

that so perplexed Lady Harman, that sudden insurgence of flushed

half-furtive passion in the garden, through the thin pretences of a

liberal friendship. His hollow honour had been gripped and had given

way.

He had begun so well. At first Lady Harman had occupied his mind in the

properest way. She was another man’s wife and sacred—according to all

honourable standards, and what he wanted was merely to see more of her,

talk to her, interest her in himself, share whatever was available

outside her connubial obligations,—and think as little of Sir Isaac as

possible.

How quickly the imaginative temperament of Mr. Brumley enlarged that to

include a critical hostility to Sir Isaac, we have already recorded.

Lady Harman was no longer simply a charming, suppressed young wife,

crying out for attentive development; she became an ill-treated

beautiful woman—misunderstood. Still scrupulously respecting his own

standards, Mr. Brumley embarked upon the dangerous business of

inventing just how Sir Isaac might be outraging them, and once his

imagination had started to hunt in that field, it speedily brought in

enough matter for a fine state of moral indignation, a white heat of

not altogether justifiable chivalry. Assisted by Lady Beach-Mandarin

Mr. Brumley had soon converted the little millionaire into a

matrimonial ogre to keep an anxious lover very painfully awake at

nights. Because by that time and quite insensibly he had become an

anxious lover—with all the gaps in the thread of realities that would

have made him that, quite generously filled up from the world of

reverie.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. It is the peculiar snare of

the perplexed orthodox, and soon Mr. Brumley was in a state of nearly

unendurable moral indignation with Sir Isaac for a hundred

exaggerations of what he was and of what conceivably he might have done

to his silent yet manifestly unsuitably mated wife. And now that

romantic streak which is as I have said the first certain symptom of

decay in a system of moral assumptions began to show itself in Mr.

Brumley’s thoughts and conversation. “A marriage like that,” said Mr.

Brumley to Lady Beach-Mandarin, “isn’t a marriage. It flouts the True

Ideal of Marriage. It’s slavery—following a kidnapping....”

But this is a wide step from the happy optimism of the Cambridge days.

What becomes of the sanctity of marriage and the institution of the

family when respectable gentlemen talk of something called “True

Marriage,” as non-existent in relation to a lady who is already the

mother of four children? I record this lapsing of Mr. Brumley into

romanticism without either sympathy or mitigation. The children, it

presently became apparent, were not “true” children. “Forced upon her,”

said Mr. Brumley. “It makes one ill to think of it!” It certainly very

nearly made him ill. And as if these exercises in distinction had

inflamed his conscience Mr. Brumley wrote two articles in the

_Hebdomadal_ denouncing impure literature, decadence, immorality,

various recent scandalous instances, and the suffragettes, declaring

that woman’s place was the home and that “in a pure and exalted

monogamy lies the sole unitary basis for a civilized state.” The most

remarkable thing about this article is an omission. That Sir Isaac’s

monogamy with any other instances that might be akin to it was not pure

and exalted, and that it needed—shall we call it readjustment? is a

view that in this article Mr. Brumley conspicuously doesn’t display.

It’s as if for a moment, pen in hand, he had eddied back to his old

absolute positions....

In a very little while Mr. Brumley and Lady Beach-Mandarin had almost

persuaded each other that Sir Isaac was applying physical torture to

his proudly silent wife, and Mr. Brumley was no longer dreaming and

glancing at but steadily facing the possibility of a pure-minded and

handsomely done elopement to “free” Lady Harman, that would be followed

in due course by a marriage, a “true marriage” on a level of

understanding far above any ordinary respectable wedding, amidst

universal sympathy and admiration and the presence of all the very best

people. In these anticipations he did rather remarkably overlook the

absence of any sign of participation on the part of Lady Harman in his

own impassioned personal feelings, and he overlooked still more

remarkably as possible objections to his line of conduct, Millicent,

Florence, Annette and Baby. These omissions no doubt simplified but

also greatly falsified his outlook.

This proposal that all the best people shall applaud the higher

rightness that was to be revealed in his projected elopement, is in the

very essence of the romantic attitude. All other people are still to

remain under the law. There is to be nothing revolutionary. But with

exceptional persons under exceptional conditions——

Mr. Brumley stated his case over and over again to his utmost

satisfaction, and always at great moral altitudes and with a kind of

transcendent orthodoxy. The more difficult any aspect of the affair

appeared from the orthodox standpoint the more valiantly Mr. Brumley

soared; if it came to his living with Lady Harman for a time before

they could be properly married amidst picturesque foreign scenery in a

little _casa_ by the side of a stream, then the water in that stream

was to be quite the purest water conceivable and the scenery and

associations as morally faultless as a view that had passed the

exacting requirements of Mr. John Ruskin. And Mr. Brumley was very

clear in his mind that what he proposed to do was entirely different in

quality even if it was similar in form from anything that anyone else

had ever done who had ever before made a scandal or appeared in the

divorce court. This is always the way in such cases—always. The scandal

was to be a noble scandal, a proud scandal, one of those instances of

heroical love that turn aside misdemeanours—admittedly

misdemeanours—into edifying marvels.