This was the state of mind to which Mr. Brumley had attained when he

made his ineffectual raid upon Black Strand, and you will remark about

it, if you are interested in the changes in people’s ideas that are

going on to-day, that although he was prepared to make the most

extensive glosses in this particular instance upon the commonly

accepted rules of what is right and proper, he was not for a moment

prepared to accord the terrible gift of an independent responsibility

to Lady Harman. In that direction lay regions that Mr. Brumley had

still to explore. Lady Harman he considered was married wrongly and

disastrously and this he held to be essentially the fault of Sir

Isaac—with perhaps some slight blame attaching to Lady Harman’s mother.

The only path of escape he could conceive as yet for Lady Harman lay

through the chivalry of some other man. That a woman could possibly

rebel against one man without the sympathy and moral maintenance of

another was still outside the range of Mr. Brumley’s understanding. It

is still outside the range of most men’s understandings—and of a great

many women’s. If he generalized at all from these persuasions it was in

the direction that in the interest of “true marriage” there should be

greater facilities for divorce and also a kind of respectable-ization

of divorce. Then these “false marriages” might be rectified without

suffering. The reasons for divorce he felt should be extended to

include things not generally reprehensible, and chivalrous people

coming into court should be protected from the indelicate publicity of

free reporting....

§3

Mr. Brumley was still contemplating rather inconclusively the

possibility of a long and intimate talk leading up to and preparing for

an elopement with Lady Harman, when he read of her Jago Street escapade

and of her impending appearance at the South Hampsmith police court. He

was astonished. The more he contemplated the thing the greater became

his astonishment.

Even at the first impact he realized that the line she had taken wasn’t

quite in the picture with the line he had proposed for her. He

felt—left out. He felt as though a door had slammed between himself and

affairs to which he had supposed himself essential. He could not

understand why she had done this thing instead of coming straight to

his flat and making use of all that chivalrous service she surely knew

was at her disposal. This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the

world, seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a

deeper injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had

contemplated. He felt it needed explanation, and he hurried to secure

an elbowed unsavoury corner in the back of the court in order to hear

her defence. He had to wait through long stuffy spaces of time before

she appeared. There were half a dozen other window smashers,—plain or

at least untidy-looking young women. The magistrate told them they were

silly and the soul of Mr. Brumley acquiesced. One tried to make a

speech, and it was such a poor speech—squeaky....

When at last Lady Harman entered the box—the strangest place it seemed

for her—he tried to emerge from the jostling crowd about him into

visibility, to catch her eye, to give her the support of his devoted

presence. Twice at least she glanced in his direction but gave no sign

of seeing him. He was surprised that she could look without fear or

detestation, indeed once with a gesture of solicitude, at Sir Isaac.

She was astonishingly serene. There seemed to be just the faintest

shadow of a smile about her lips as the stipendiary explained the

impossibility of giving her anything less than a month. An uneasy

object like the smashed remains of a colossal box of bonbons that was

riding out a gale, down in the middle of the court, turned round at

last completely and revealed itself as the hat of Lady Beach-Mandarin,

but though Mr. Brumley waved his hand he could not even make that lady

aware of his presence. A powerful rude criminal-looking man who stood

in front of him and smelt grossly of stables, would not give him a fair

chance of showing himself, and developed a strong personal hostility to

him on account of his alleged “shoving about.” It would not he felt be

of the slightest help to Lady Harman for him to involve himself in a

personal struggle with a powerful and powerfully flavoured criminal.

It was all very dreadful.

After the proceedings were over and Lady Harman had been led away into

captivity, he went out and took a taxi in an agitated distraught manner

to Lady Beach-Mandarin’s house.

“She meant,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin, “to have a month’s holiday from

him and think things out. And she’s got it.”

Perhaps that was it. Mr. Brumley could not tell, and he spent some days

in that state of perplexity which, like the weariness that heralds a

cold, marks so often the onset of a new series of ideas....

Why hadn’t she come to him? Had he after all rather overloaded his

memory of her real self with imaginative accessories? Had she really

understood what he had been saying to her in the garden? Afterwards

when he had met her eyes as he and she went over the new wing with Sir

Isaac she had so manifestly—and, when one came to think of it, so

tranquilly—seemed to understand....

It was such an extraordinary thing to go smashing a window like

that—when there he was at hand ready to help her. She knew his address?

Did she? For a moment Mr. Brumley cherished that wild surmise. Was that

perhaps it? But surely she could have looked in the Telephone Directory

or Who’s Who....

But if that was the truth of the matter she would have looked and

behaved differently in court—quite differently. She would have been

looking for him. She would have seen him....

It was queer too to recall what she had said in court about her

daughters....

Could it be, he had a frightful qualm, that after all—he wasn’t the

man? How little he knew of her really....

“This wretched agitation,” said Mr. Brumley, trying to flounder away

anyhow from these disconcerting riddles; “it seems to unbalance them

all.”

But he found it impossible to believe that Lady Harman was seriously

unbalanced.

§4

And if Mr. Brumley’s system of romantically distorted moral assumptions

was shattered by Lady Harman’s impersonal blow at a post office window

when all the rules seemed to require her to fly from the oppression of

one man to the chivalry of another, what words can convey the

devastating effect upon him of her conduct after her release? To that

crisis he had been looking forward continually; to record the variety

of his expectations would fill a large volume, but throughout them all

prevailed one general idea, that when she came out of prison her

struggle with her husband would be resumed, and that this would give

Mr. Brumley such extraordinary opportunities of displaying his devotion

that her response, which he was now beginning to suspect might be more

reluctant than his earlier dreams had assumed, was ultimately

inevitable. In all these dreams and meditations that response figured

as the crown. He had to win and possess Lady Harman. The idea had taken

hold of his busy yet rather pointless life, had become his directing

object. He was full of schemes for presently arresting and captivating

her imagination. He was already convinced that she cared for him; he

had to inflame interest and fan liking into the fire of passion. And

with a mind so occupied, Mr. Brumley wrote this and that and went about

his affairs. He spent two days and a night at Margate visiting his son

at his preparatory school, and he found much material for musing in the

question of just how the high romantic affairs ahead of him would

affect this delicately intelligent boy. For a time perhaps he might

misjudge his father.... He spent a week-end with Lady Viping and stayed

on until Wednesday and then he came back to London. His plans were

still unformed when the day came for Lady Harman’s release, and indeed

beyond an idea that he would have her met at the prison gates by an

enormous bunch of snowy-white and crimson chrysanthemums he had nothing

really concrete at all in his mind.

She had, however, been released stealthily a day before her time, and

this is what she had done. She had asked that—of all improbable

people!—Sir Isaac’s mother should meet her, the biggest car had come to

the prison gates, and she had gone straight down with Mrs. Harman to

her husband—who had taken a chill and was in bed drinking Contrexéville

water—at Black Strand.

As these facts shaped themselves in answer to the blanched inquiries of

Mr. Brumley his amazement grew. He began to realize that there must

have been a correspondence during her incarceration, that all sorts of

things had been happening while he had been dreaming, and when he went

round to Lady Beach-Mandarin, who was just packing up to be the life

and soul of a winter-sports party at a nice non-Lunnite hotel at

Lenzerheide, he learnt particulars that chilled him to the marrow.

“They’ve made it up,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin.

“But how?” gasped Mr. Brumley, with his soul in infinite distress. “But

how?”

“The Ogre, it seems, has come to see that bullying won’t do. He’s given

in tremendously. He’s let her have her way with the waitress strike and

she’s going to have an allowance of her own and all kinds of things.

It’s settled. It’s his mother and that man Charterson talked him over.

You know—his mother came to me—as her friend. For advice. Wanted to

find out what sort of things we might have been putting in her head.

She said so. A curious old thing—vulgar but—_wise_. I liked her. He’s

her darling—and she just knows what he is.... He doesn’t like it but

he’s taken his dose. The thought of her going to prison again——! He’s

let her do anything rather than that....”

“And she’s gone to him!”

“Naturally,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin with what he felt to be

deliberate brutality. Surely she must have understood——

“But the waitress strike—what has it got to do with the waitress

strike?”

“She cared—tremendously.”

“_Did_ she?”

“Tremendously. And they all go back and the system of inspection is

being altered, and he’s even forgiven Babs Wheeler. It made him ill to

do it but he did.”

“And she’s gone back to him.”

“Like Godiva,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin with that sweeping allusiveness

that was part of her complicated charm.

§5

For three days Mr. Brumley was so staggered by these things that it did

not occur to him that it was quite possible for him to see Lady Harman

for himself and find out just how things stood. He remained in London

with an imagination dazed. And as it was the Christmas season and as

George Edmund in a rather expectant holiday state had now come up from

Margate, Mr. Brumley went in succession to the Hippodrome, to Peter Pan

and to an exhibition at Olympia, assisted at an afternoon display of

the kinemacolor at La Scala Theatre, visited Hamley’s and lunched

George Edmund once at the Criterion and twice at the Climax Club, while

thinking of nothing in all the world but the incalculable strangeness

of women. George Edmund thought him a very passive leadable parent

indeed, less querulous about money matters and altogether much

improved. The glitter and colour of these various entertainments

reflected themselves upon the surface of that deep flood of meditation,

hook-armed wooden-legged pirates, intelligent elephants, ingenious but

extremely expensive toys, flickering processions, comic turns, snatches

of popular music and George Edmund’s way of eating an orange, pictured

themselves on his mind confusedly without in any way deflecting its

course. Then on the fourth day he roused himself, gave George Edmund

ten shillings to get himself a cutlet at the Café Royal and do the

cinematographs round and about the West End, and so released reached

Aleham in time for a temperate lunch. He chartered the Aleham car to

take him to Black Strand and arrived there about a quarter past three,

in a great effort to feel himself a matter-of-course visitor.

It ought to be possible to record that Mr. Brumley’s mind was full of

the intensest sense of Lady Harman during that journey and of nothing

else, but as a matter of fact his mind was now curiously detached and

reflective, the tensions and expectation of the past month and the

astonishment of the last few days had worked themselves out and left

him as it were the passive instrument of the purpose of his more

impassioned moods. This distressed lover approached Black Strand in a

condition of philosophical lassitude.

The road from Aleham to Black Strand is a picturesque old English road,

needlessly winding and badly graded, wriggling across a healthy

wilderness with occasional pine-woods. Something in that familiar

landscape—for his life had run through it since first he and Euphemia

on a tandem bicycle and altogether very young had sought their ideal

home in the South of England—set his mind swinging and generalizing.

How freshly youthful he and Euphemia had been when first he came along

that road, how crude, how full of happy expectations of success; it had

been as bright and it was now as completely gone as the sunsets they

had seen together.

How great a thing life is! How much greater than any single romance, or

any individual affection! Since those days he had grown, he had

succeeded, he had suffered in a reasonable way of course, still he

could recall with a kind of satisfaction tears and deep week-long moods

of hopeless melancholy—and he had changed. And now dominating this

landscape, filling him with new emotions and desires and perplexing

intimations of ignorance and limitations he had never suspected in his

youth, was this second figure of a woman. She was different from

Euphemia. With Euphemia everything had been so simple and easy; until

that slight fading, that fatigue of entire success and satisfaction, of

the concluding years. He and Euphemia had always kept it up that they

had no thought in the world except for one another.... Yet if that had

been true, why hadn’t he died when she did. He hadn’t died—with

remarkable elasticity. Clearly in his case there had been these

unexplored, unsuspected hinterlands of possibility towards which Lady

Harman seemed now to be directing him. It came to him that afternoon as

an entirely fresh thought that there might also have been something in

Euphemia beyond their simple, so charmingly treated relationship. He

began to recall moments when Euphemia had said perplexing little

things, had looked at him with an expression that was unexpected, had

been—difficult....

I write of Mr. Brumley to tell you things about him and not to explain

him. It may be that the appetite for thorough good talks with people

grows upon one, but at any rate it did occur to Mr. Brumley on his way

to talk to Lady Harman, it occurred to him as a thing distressingly

irrevocable that he could now never have a thorough good talk with

Euphemia about certain neglected things between them. It would have

helped him so much....

His eyes rested as he thought of these things upon the familiar purple

hill crests, patched that afternoon with the lingering traces of a

recent snowstorm, the heather slopes, the dark mysterious woods, the

patches of vivid green where a damp and marshy meadow or so broke the

moorland surface. To-day in spite of the sun there was a bright

blue-white line of frost to the northward of every hedge and bank, the

trees were dripping down the white edgings of the morning into the

pine-needle mud at their feet; he had seen it so like this before;

years hence he might see it all like this again; all this great breezy

countryside had taken upon itself a quality of endurance, as though it

would still be real and essential in his mind when Lady Harman had

altogether passed again. It would be real when he himself had passed

away, and in other costumes and other vehicles fresh Euphemias and new

crude George Brumleys would come along, feeling in the ultimate bright

new wisdom of youth that it was all for them—a subservient scenery,

when really it was entirely indifferent in its careless permanence to

all their hopes and fancies....

§6

Mr. Brumley’s thoughts on the permanence of landscape and the

mutability of human affairs were more than a little dashed when he came

within sight of Black Strand and perceived that once cosily beautiful

little home clipped and extended, its shrubbery wrecked and the old

barn now pierced with windows and adorned—for its new chimneys were not

working very well—by several efficient novelties in chimney cowls. Up

the slopes behind Sir Isaac had extended his boundaries, and had been

felling trees and levelling a couple of tennis courts for next summer.

Something was being done to the porch, and the jasmine had been cleared

away altogether. Mr. Brumley could not quite understand what was in

progress; Sir Isaac he learnt afterwards had found a wonderful bargain

in a real genuine Georgian portal of great dignity and simplicity in

Aleham, and he was going to improve Black Strand by transferring it

thither—with the utmost precaution and every piece numbered—from its

original situation. Mr. Brumley stood among the preparatory débris of

this and rang a quietly resolute electric bell, which was answered no

longer by Mrs. Rabbit but by the ample presence of Snagsby.

Snagsby in that doorway had something of the preposterous effect of a

very large face beneath a very small hat. He had to Mr. Brumley’s eyes

a restored look, as though his self-confidence had been thoroughly done

up since their last encounter. Bygones were bygones. Mr. Brumley was

admitted as one is admitted to any normal home. He was shown into the

little study-drawing-room with the stepped floor, which had been so

largely the scene of his life with Euphemia, and he was left there for

the better part of a quarter of an hour before his hostess appeared.

The room had been changed very little. Euphemia’s solitary rose had

gone, and instead there were several bowls of beaten silver scattered

about, each filled with great chrysanthemums from London. Sir Isaac’s

jackdaw acquisitiveness had also overcrowded the corner beyond the

fireplace with a very fine and genuine Queen Anne cabinet; there were a

novel by Elizabeth Robins and two or three feminist and socialist works

lying on the table which would certainly not have been visible, though

they might have been in the house, during the Brumley régime. Otherwise

things were very much as they always had been.

A room like this, thought Mr. Brumley among much other mental driftage,

is like a heart,—so long as it exists it must be furnished and

tenanted. No matter what has been, however bright and sweet and tender,

the spaces still cry aloud to be filled again. The very essence of life

is its insatiability. How complete all this had seemed in the moment

when first he and Euphemia had arranged it. And indeed how complete

life had seemed altogether at seven-and-twenty. Every year since then

he had been learning—or at any rate unlearning. Until at last he was

beginning to realize he had still everything to learn....

The door opened and the tall dark figure of Lady Harman stood for a

moment in the doorway before she stepped down into the room.

She had always the same effect upon him, the effect of being suddenly

remembered. When he was away from her he was always sure that she was a

beautiful woman, and when he saw her again he was always astonished to

see how little he had borne her beauty in mind. For a moment they

regarded one another silently. Then she closed the door behind her and

came towards him.

All Mr. Brumley’s philosophizing had vanished at the sight of her. His

spirit was reborn within him. He thought of her and of his effect upon

her, vividly, and of nothing else in the world.

She was paler he thought beneath her dusky hair, a little thinner and

graver....

There was something in her manner as she advanced towards him that told

him he mattered to her, that his coming there was something that moved

her imagination as well as his own. With an almost impulsive movement

she held out both her hands to him, and with an inspiration as sudden

he took them and kissed them. When he had done so he was ashamed of his

temerity; he looked up to meet in her dark eyes the scared shyness of a

fallow deer. She suddenly remembered to withdraw her hands, and it

became manifest to both of them that the incident must never have

happened. She went to the window, stood almost awkwardly for a moment

looking out of it, then turned. She put her hands on the back of the

chair and stood holding it.

“I knew you would come to see me,” she said.

“I’ve been very anxious about you,” he said, and on that their minds

rested through a little silence.

“You see,” he explained, “I didn’t know what was happening to you. Or

what you were doing.”

“After asking your advice,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know why I broke that window. Except I think that I wanted to

get away.”

“But why didn’t you come to me?”

“I didn’t know where you were. And besides—I didn’t somehow want to

come to you.”

“But wasn’t it wretched in prison? Wasn’t it miserably cold? I used to

think of you of nights in some wretched ill-aired cell.... You....”

“It _was_ cold,” she admitted. “But it was very good for me. It was

quiet. The first few days seemed endless; then they began to go by

quickly. Quite quickly at last. And I came to think. In the day there

was a little stool where one sat. I used to sit on that and brood and

try to think things out—all sorts of things I’ve never had the chance

to think about before.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Brumley.

“All this,” she said.

“And it has brought you back here!” he said, with something of the tone

of one who has a right to enquire, with some flavour too of reproach.

“You see,” she said after a little pause, “during that time it was

possible to come to understandings. Neither I nor my husband had

understood the other. In that interval it was possible—to explain.

“Yes. You see, Mr. Brumley, we—we both misunderstood. It was just

because of that and because I had no one who seemed able to advise me

that I turned to you. A novelist always seems so wise in these things.

He seems to know so many lives. One can talk to you as one can scarcely

talk to anyone; you are a sort of doctor—in these matters. And it was

necessary—that my husband should realize that I had grown up and that I

should have time to think just how one’s duty and one’s—freedom have to

be fitted together.... And my husband is ill. He has been ill, rather

short of breath—the doctor thinks it is asthma—for some time, and all

the agitation of this business has upset him and made him worse. He is

upstairs now—asleep. Of course if I had thought I should make him ill I

could never have done any of this. But it’s done now and here I am, Mr.

Brumley, back in my place. With all sorts of things changed. Put

right....”

“I see,” said Mr. Brumley stupidly.

Her speech was like the falling of an opaque curtain upon some romantic

spectacle. She stood there, almost defensively behind her chair as she

made it. There was a quality of premeditation in her words, yet

something in her voice and bearing made him feel that she knew just how

it covered up and extinguished his dreams and impulses. He heard her

out and then suddenly his spirit rebelled against her decision. “No!”

he cried.

She waited for him to go on.

“You see,” he said, “I thought that it was just that you wanted to get

away——That this life was intolerable——That you were——Forgive me if I

seem to be going beyond—going beyond what I ought to be thinking about

you. Only, why should I pretend? I care, I care for you tremendously.

And it seemed to me that you didn’t love your husband, that you were

enslaved and miserable. I would have done anything to help you—anything

in the world, Lady Harman. I know—it may sound ridiculous—there have

been times when I would have faced death to feel you were happy and

free. I thought all that, I felt all that,—and then—then you come back

here. You seem not to have minded. As though I had misunderstood....”

He paused and his face was alive with an unwonted sincerity. His

self-consciousness had for a moment fallen from him.

“I know,” she said, “it _was_ like that. I knew you cared. That is why

I have so wanted to talk to you. It looked like that....”

She pressed her lips together in that old familiar hunt for words and

phrases.

“I didn’t understand, Mr. Brumley, all there was in my husband or all

there was in myself. I just saw his hardness and his—his hardness in

business. It’s become so different now. You see, I forgot he has bad

health. He’s ill; I suppose he was getting ill then. Instead of

explaining himself—he was—excited and—unwise. And now——”

“Now I suppose he has—explained,” said Mr. Brumley slowly and with

infinite distaste. “Lady Harman, _what_ has he explained?”

“It isn’t so much that he has explained, Mr. Brumley,” said Lady

Harman, “as that things have explained themselves.”

“But how, Lady Harman? How?”

“I mean about my being a mere girl, almost a child when I married him.

Naturally he wanted to take charge of everything and leave nothing to

me. And quite as naturally he didn’t notice that now I am a woman,

grown up altogether. And it’s been necessary to do things. And

naturally, Mr. Brumley, they shocked and upset him. But he sees now so

clearly, he wrote to me, such a fair letter—an unusual letter—quite

different from when he talks—it surprised me, telling me he wanted me

to feel free, that he meant to make me—to arrange things that is, so

that I should feel free and more able to go about as I pleased. It was

a _generous_ letter, Mr. Brumley. Generous about all sorts of affairs

that there had been between us. He said things, quite kind things, not

like the things he has ever said before——”

She stopped short and then began again.

“You know, Mr. Brumley, it’s so hard to tell things without telling

other things that somehow are difficult to tell. Yet if I don’t tell

you them, you won’t know them and then you won’t be able to understand

in the least how things are with us.”

Her eyes appealed to him.

“Tell me,” he said, “whatever you think fit.”

“When one has been afraid of anyone and felt they were ever so much

stronger and cruel and hard than one is and one suddenly finds they

aren’t. It alters everything.”

He nodded, watching her.

Her voice fell nearly to a whisper. “Mr. Brumley,” she said, “when I

came back to him—you know he was in bed here—instead of scolding me—he

_cried_. He cried like a vexed child. He put his face into the

pillow—just misery.... I’d never seen him cry—at least only once—long

ago....”

Mr. Brumley looked at her flushed and tender face and it seemed to him

that indeed he could die for her quite easily.

“I saw how hard I had been,” she said. “In prison I’d thought of that,

I’d thought women mustn’t be hard, whatever happens to them. And when I

saw him like that I knew at once how true that was.... He begged me to

be a good wife to him. No!—he just said, ‘Be a wife to me,’ not even a

good wife—and then he cried....”

For a moment or so Mr. Brumley didn’t respond. “I see,” he said at

last. “Yes.”

“And there were the children—such helpless little things. In the prison

I worried about them. I thought of things for them. I’ve come to

feel—they are left too much to nurses and strangers.... And then you

see he has agreed to nearly everything I had wanted. It wasn’t only the

personal things—I was anxious about those silly girls—the strikers. I

didn’t want them to be badly treated. It distressed me to think of

them. I don’t think you know how it distressed me. And he—he gave way

upon all that. He says I may talk to him about the business, about the

way we do our business—the kindness of it I mean. And this is why I am

back here. Where else _could_ I be?”

“No,” said Mr. Brumley still with the utmost reluctance. “I see.

Only——”

He paused downcast and she waited for him to speak.

“Only it isn’t what I expected, Lady Harman. I didn’t think that

matters could be settled by such arrangements. It’s sane, I know, it’s

comfortable and kindly. But I thought—Oh! I thought of different

things, quite different things from all this. I thought of you who are

so beautiful caught in a loveless passionless world. I thought of the

things there might be for you, the beautiful and wonderful things of

which you are deprived.... Never mind what I thought! Never mind!

You’ve made your choice. But I thought that you didn’t love, that you

couldn’t love—this man. It seemed to me that you felt too—that to live

as you are doing—with him—was a profanity. Something—I’d give

everything I have, everything I am, to save you from. Because—because I

care.... I misunderstood you. I suppose you can—do what you are doing.”

He jumped to his feet as he spoke and walked three paces away and

turned to utter his last sentences. She too stood up.

“Mr. Brumley,” she said weakly, “I don’t understand. What do you mean?

I have to do what I am doing. He—he is my husband.”

He made a gesture of impatience. “Do you understand nothing of _love_?”

he cried.

She pressed her lips together and remained still and silent, dark

against the casement window.

There came a sound of tapping from the room above. Three taps and again

three taps.

Lady Harman made a little gesture as though she would put this sound

aside.

“Love,” she said at last. “It comes to some people. It happens. It

happens to young people.... But when one is married——”

Her voice fell almost to a whisper. “One must not think of it,” she

said. “One must think of one’s husband and one’s duty. Life cannot

begin again, Mr. Brumley.”

The taps were repeated, a little more urgently.

“That is my husband,” she said.

She hesitated through a little pause. “Mr. Brumley,” she said, “I want

friendship so badly, I want some one to be my friend. I don’t want to

think of things—disturbing things—things I have lost—things that are

spoilt. _That_—that which you spoke of; what has it to do with me?”

She interrupted him as he was about to speak.

“Be my friend. Don’t talk to me of impossible things. Love! Mr.

Brumley, what has a married woman to do with love? I never think of it.

I never read of it. I want to do my duty. I want to do my duty by him

and by my children and by all the people I am bound to. I want to help

people, weak people, people who suffer. I want to help him to help

them. I want to stop being an idle, useless, spending woman....”

She made a little gesture of appeal with her hands.

“Oh!” he sighed, and then, “You know if I can help you——Rather than

distress you——”

Her manner changed. It became confidential and urgent.

“Mr. Brumley,” she said, “I must go up to my husband. He will be

impatient. And when I tell him you are here he will want to see you....

You will come up and see him?”

Mr. Brumley sought to convey the struggle within him by his pose.

“I will do what you wish, Lady Harman,” he said, with an almost

theatrical sigh.

He closed the door after her and was alone in his former study once

more. He walked slowly to his old writing-desk and sat down in his

familiar seat. Presently he heard her footfalls across the room above.

Mr. Brumley’s mind under the stress of the unfamiliar and the

unexpected was now lapsing rapidly towards the theatrical. “My _God_!”

said Mr. Brumley.

He addressed that friendly memorable room in tones that mingled

amazement and wrong. “He is her husband!” he said, and then: “The power

of words!” ...

§7

It seemed to Mr. Brumley’s now entirely disordered mind that Sir Isaac,

propped up with cushions upon a sofa in the upstairs sitting-room,

white-faced, wary and very short of breath, was like Proprietorship

enthroned. Everything about him referred deferentially to him. Even his

wife dropped at once into the position of a beautiful satellite. His

illness, he assured his visitor with a thin-lipped emphasis, was “quite

temporary, quite the sort of thing that might happen to anyone.” He had

had a queer little benumbing of one leg, “just a trifle of nerve fag

did it,” and the slight asthma that came and went in his life had taken

advantage of his condition to come again with a little beyond its usual

aggressiveness. “Elly is going to take me off to Marienbad next week or

the week after,” he said. “I shall have a cure and she’ll have a treat,

and we shall come back as fit as fiddles.” The incidents of the past

month were to be put on a facetious footing it appeared. “It’s a mercy

they didn’t crop her hair,” he said, apropos of nothing and with an air

of dry humour. No further allusion was made to Lady Harman’s

incarceration.

He was dressed in a lama wool bedroom suit and his resting leg was

covered by a very splendid and beautiful fur rug. All Euphemia’s best

and gayest cushions sustained his back. The furniture had been

completely rearranged for his comfort and convenience. Close to his

hand was a little table with carefully selected remedies and aids and

helps and stimulants, and the latest and best of the light fiction of

the day was tossed about between the table, the couch and the floor. At

the foot of the couch Euphemia’s bedroom writing-table had been placed,

and over this there were scattered traces of the stenographer who had

assisted him to wipe off the day’s correspondence. Three black

cylinders and other appliances in the corner witnessed that his slight

difficulty in breathing could be relieved by oxygen, and his eyes were

regaled by a great abundance of London flowers at every available point

in the room. Of course there were grapes, fabulous looking grapes.

Everything conspired to give Sir Isaac and his ownership the centre of

the picture. Mr. Brumley had been brought upstairs to him, and the tea

table, with scarcely a reference to anyone else, was arranged by

Snagsby conveniently to his hand. And Sir Isaac himself had a

confidence—the assurance of a man who has been shaken and has

recovered. Whatever tears he had ever shed had served their purpose and

were forgotten. “Elly” was his and the house was his and everything

about him was his—he laid his hand upon her once when she came near

him, his possessiveness was so gross—and the strained suspicion of his

last meeting with Mr. Brumley was replaced now by a sage and wizened

triumph over anticipated and arrested dangers.

Their party was joined by Sir Isaac’s mother, and the sight of her

sturdy, swarthy, and rather dignified presence flashed the thought into

Mr. Brumley’s mind that Sir Isaac’s father must have been a very blond

and very nosey person indeed. She was homely and practical and

contributed very usefully to a conversation that remained a trifle

fragmentary and faintly uncomfortable to the end.

Mr. Brumley avoided as much as he could looking at Lady Harman, because

he knew Sir Isaac was alert for that, but he was acutely aware of her

presence dispensing the tea and moving about the room, being a good

wife. It was his first impression of Lady Harman as a good wife and he

disliked the spectacle extremely. The conversation hovered chiefly

about Marienbad, drifted away and came back again. Mrs. Harman made

several confidences that provoked the betrayal of a strain of

irritability in Sir Isaac’s condition. “We’re all looking forward to

this Marienbad expedition,” she said. “I do hope it will turn out well.

Neither of them have ever been abroad before—and there’s the difficulty

of the languages.”

“Ow,” snarled Sir Isaac, with a glance at his mother that was almost

vicious and a lapse into Cockney intonations and phrases that witnessed

how her presence recalled his youth, “It’ll _go_ all right, mother.

_You_ needn’t fret.”

“Of course they’ll have a courier to see to their things, and go train

de luxe and all that,” Mrs. Harman explained with a certain gusto. “But

still it’s an adventure, with him not well, and both as I say more like

children than grown-up people.”

Sir Isaac intervened with a crushing clumsiness to divert this strain

of explanation, with questions about the quality of the soil in the

wood where the ground was to be cleared and levelled for his tennis

lawns.

Mr. Brumley did his best to behave as a man of the world should. He

made intelligent replies about the sand, he threw out obvious but

serviceable advice upon travel upon the continent of Europe, and he

tried not to think that this was the way of living into which the

sweetest, tenderest, most beautiful woman in the world had been

trapped. He avoided looking at her until he felt it was becoming

conspicuous, a negative stare. Why had she come back again? Fragmentary

phrases she had used downstairs came drifting through his mind. “I

never think of it. I never read of it.” And she so made for beautiful

love and a beautiful life! He recalled Lady Beach-Mandarin’s absurdly

apt, absurdly inept, “like Godiva,” and was suddenly impelled to raise

the question of those strikers.

“Your trouble with your waitresses is over, Sir Isaac?”

Sir Isaac finished a cup of tea audibly and glanced at his wife. “I

never meant to be hard on them,” he said, putting down his cup. “Never.

The trouble blew up suddenly. One can’t be all over a big business

everywhere all at once, more particularly if one is worried about other

things. As soon as I had time to look into it I put things right. There

was misunderstandings on both sides.”

He glanced up again at Lady Harman. (She was standing behind Mr.

Brumley so that he could not see her but—did their eyes meet?)

“As soon as we are back from Marienbad,” Sir Isaac volunteered, “Lady

Harman and I are going into all that business thoroughly.”

Mr. Brumley concealed his intense aversion for this association under a

tone of intelligent interest. “Into—I don’t quite understand—what

business?”

“Women employees in London—Hostels—all that kind of thing. Bit more

sensible than suffragetting, eh, Elly?”

“Very interesting,” said Mr. Brumley with a hollow cordiality, “very.”

“Done on business lines, mind you,” said Sir Isaac, looking suddenly

very sharp and keen, “done on proper business lines, there’s no end of

a change possible. And it’s a perfectly legitimate outgrowth from such

popular catering as ours. It interests me.”

He made a little whistling noise with his teeth at the end of this

speech.

“I didn’t know Lady Harman was disposed to take up such things,” he

said. “Or I’d have gone into them before.”

“He’s going into them now,” said Mrs. Harman, “heart and soul. Why! we

have to take his temperature over it, to see he doesn’t work himself up

into a fever.” Her manner became reasonable and confidential. She spoke

to Mr. Brumley as if her son was slightly deaf. “It’s better than his

fretting,” she said....

§8

Mr. Brumley returned to London in a state of extreme mental and

emotional unrest. The sight of Lady Harman had restored all his passion

for her, the all too manifest fact that she was receding beyond his

reach stirred him with unavailing impulses towards some impossible

extremity of effort. She had filled his mind so much that he could not

endure the thought of living without hope of her. But what hope was

there of her? And he was jealous, detestably jealous, so jealous that

in that direction he did not dare to let his mind go. He sawed at the

bit and brought it back, or he would have had to writhe about the

carriage. His thoughts ran furiously all over the place to avoid that

pit. And now he found himself flashing at moments into wild and

hopeless rebellion against the institution of marriage, of which he had

hitherto sought always to be the dignified and smiling champion against

the innovator, the over-critical and the young. He had never rebelled

before. He was so astonished at the violence of his own objection that

he lapsed from defiance to an incredulous examination of his own novel

attitude. “It’s not _true_ marriage I object to,” he told himself.

“It’s this marriage like a rat trap, alluring and scarcely unavoidable,

so that in we all go, and then with no escape—unless you tear yourself

to rags. No escape....”

It came to him that there was at least one way out for Lady Harman:

_Sir Isaac might die!_ ...

He pulled himself up presently, astonished and dismayed at the

activities of his own imagination. Among other things he had wondered

if by any chance Lady Harman had ever allowed her mind to travel in

this same post-mortem direction. At times surely the thing must have

shone upon her as a possibility, a hope. From that he had branched off

to a more general speculation. How many people were there in the world,

nice people, kind people, moral and delicate-minded people, to whom the

death of another person means release from that inflexible

barrier—possibilities of secretly desired happiness, the realization of

crushed and forbidden dreams? He had a vision of human society, like

the vision of a night landscape seen suddenly in a lightning flash, as

of people caught by couples in traps and quietly hoping for one

another’s deaths. “Good Heavens!” said Mr. Brumley, “what are we coming

to,” and got up in his railway compartment—he had it to himself—and

walked up and down its narrow limits until a jolt over a point made him

suddenly sit down again. “Most marriages are happy,” said Mr. Brumley,

like a man who has fallen into a river and scrambles back to safety.

“One mustn’t judge by the exceptional cases....

“Though of course there are—a good many—exceptional cases.” ...

He folded his arms, crossed his legs, frowned and reasoned with

himself,—resolved to dismiss post-mortem speculations—absolutely.

He was not going to quarrel with the institution of marriage. That was

going too far. He had never been able to see the beginnings of reason

in sexual anarchy, never. It is against the very order of things. Man

is a marrying animal just as much as he was a fire-making animal; he

goes in pairs like mantel ornaments; it is as natural for him to marry

and to exact and keep good faith—if need be with a savage jealousy, as

it is for him to have lobes to his ears and hair under his armpits.

These things jar with the dream perhaps; the gods on painted ceilings

have no such ties, acting beautifully by their very nature; and here on

the floor of the world one had them and one had to make the best of

them.... Are we making the best of them? Mr. Brumley was off again.

That last thought opened the way to speculative wildernesses, and into

these Mr. Brumley went wandering with a novel desperate enterprise to

find a kind of marriage that would suit him.

He began to reform the marriage laws. He did his utmost not to think

especially of Lady Harman and himself while he was doing so. He would

just take up the whole question and deal with it in a temperate

reasonable way. It was so necessary to be reasonable and temperate in

these questions—and not to think of death as a solution. Marriages to

begin with were too easy to make and too difficult to break; countless

girls—Lady Harman was only a type—were married long before they could

know the beginnings of their own minds. We wanted to delay

marriage—until the middle twenties, say. Why not? Or if by the

infirmities of humanity one must have marriage before then, there ought

to be some especial opportunity of rescinding it later. (Lady Harman

ought to have been able to rescind her marriage.) What ought to be the

marriageable age in a civilized community? When the mind was settled

into its general system of opinions Mr. Brumley thought, and then

lapsed into a speculation whether the mind didn’t keep changing and

developing all through life; Lady Harman’s was certainly still doing

so.... This pointed to logical consequences of an undesirable sort....

(Some little mind-slide occurred just at this point and he found

himself thinking that perhaps Sir Isaac might last for years and years,

might even outlive a wife exhausted by nursing. And anyhow to wait for

death! To leave the thing one loved in the embrace of the moribund!)

He wrenched his thoughts back as quickly as possible to a disinterested

reform of the marriage laws. What had he decided so far? Only for more

deliberation and a riper age in marrying. Surely that should appeal

even to the most orthodox. But that alone would not eliminate mistakes

and deceptions altogether. (Sir Isaac’s skin had a peculiar, unhealthy

look.) There ought in addition to be the widest facilities for divorce

possible. Mr. Brumley tried to draw up a schedule in his head of the

grounds for divorce that a really civilized community would entertain.

But there are practical difficulties. Marriage is not simply a sexual

union, it is an economic one of a peculiarly inseparable sort,—and

there are the children. And jealousy! Of course so far as economics

went, a kind of marriage settlement might meet most of the

difficulties, and as for the children, Mr. Brumley was no longer in

that mood of enthusiastic devotion to children that had made the birth

of George Edmund so tremendous an event. Children, alone, afforded no

reason for indissoluble lifelong union. Face the thing frankly. How

long was it absolutely necessary for people to keep a home together for

their children? The prosperous classes, the best classes in the

community, packed the little creatures off to school at the age of nine

or ten. One might overdo—we were overdoing in our writing nowadays

this—philoprogenitive enthusiasm....

He found himself thinking of George Meredith’s idea of Ten Year

Marriages....

His mind recoiled to Sir Isaac’s pillowed-up possession. What flimsy

stuff all this talk of altered marriage was! These things did not even

touch the essentials of the matter. He thought of Sir Isaac’s thin lips

and wary knowing eyes. What possible divorce law could the wit of man

devise that would release a desired woman from that—grip? Marriage was

covetousness made law. As well ask such a man to sell all his goods and

give to the poor as expect the Sir Isaacs of this world to relax the

matrimonial subjugation of the wife. Our social order is built on

jealousy, sustained by jealousy, and those brave schemes we evolve in

our studies for the release of women from ownership,—and for that

matter for the release of men too,—they will not stand the dusty heat

of the market-place for a moment, they wilt under the first fierce

breath of reality. Marriage and property are the twin children of man’s

individualistic nature; only on these terms can he be drawn into

societies....

Mr. Brumley found his little scheme for novelties in marriage and

divorce lying dead and for the most part still-born in his mind;

himself in despair. To set to work to alter marriage in any essential

point was, he realized, as if an ant should start to climb a thousand

feet of cliff. This great institution rose upon his imagination like

some insurmountable sierra, blue and sombre, between himself and the

life of Lady Harman and all that he desired. There might be a certain

amount of tinkering with matrimonial law in the next few years, of

petty tinkering that would abolish a few pretences and give ease to a

few amiable people, but if he were to come back to life a thousand

years hence he felt he would still find the ancient gigantic barrier,

crossed perhaps by a dangerous road, pierced perhaps by a narrow tunnel

or so, but in all its great essentials the same, between himself and

Lady Harman. It wasn’t that it was rational, it wasn’t that it was

justifiable, but it was one with the blood in one’s veins and the

rain-cloud in the sky, a necessity in the nature of present things.

Before mankind emerged from the valley of these restraints—if ever they

did emerge—thousands of generations must follow one another, there must

be tens of thousands of years of struggle and thought and trial, in the

teeth of prevalent habit and opinion—and primordial instincts. A new

humanity....

His heart sank to hopelessness.

Meanwhile? Meanwhile we had to live our lives.

He began to see a certain justification for the hidden cults that run

beneath the fair appearances of life, those social secrecies by which

people—how could one put it?—people who do not agree with established

institutions, people, at any rate not merely egoistic and jealous as

the crowd is egoistic and jealous, hide and help one another to

mitigate the inflexible austerities of the great unreason.

Yes, Mr. Brumley had got to a phrase of that quality for the

undiscriminating imperatives of the fundamental social institution. You

see how a particular situation may undermine the assumptions of a mind

originally devoted to uncritical acceptances. He still insisted it was

a necessary great unreason, absolutely necessary—for the mass of

people, a part of them, a natural expression of them, but he could

imagine the possibility—of ‘understandings.’ ... Mr. Brumley was very

vague about those understandings, those mysteries of the exalted that

were to filch happiness from the destroying grasp of the crude and

jealous. He had to be vague. For secret and noble are ideas like oil

and water; you may fling them together with all the force of your will

but in a little while they will separate again.

For a time this dream of an impossible secrecy was uppermost in Mr.

Brumley’s meditations. It came into his head with the effect of a

discovery that always among the unclimbable barriers of this supreme

institution there had been,—caves. He had been reading Anatole France

recently and the lady of _Le Lys Rouge_ came into his thoughts. There

was something in common between Lady Harman and the Countess Martin,

they were tall and dark and dignified, and Lady Harman was one of those

rare women who could have carried the magnificent name of Thérèse. And

there in the setting of Paris and Florence was a whole microcosm of

love, real but illicit, carried out as it were secretly and tactfully,

beneath the great shadow of the cliff. But he found it difficult to

imagine Lady Harman in that. Or Sir Isaac playing Count Martin’s

part....

How different were those Frenchwomen, with their afternoons vacant

except for love, their detachment, their lovers, those secret,

convenient, romantically furnished flats, that compact explicit

business of _l’amour_! He had indeed some moments of regret that Lady

Harman wouldn’t go into that picture. She was different—if only in her

simplicity. There was something about these others that put them whole

worlds apart from her, who was held so tethered from all furtive

adventure by her filmy tentacles of responsibility, her ties and

strands of relationship, her essential delicacy. That momentary vision

of Ellen as the Countess Martin broke up into absurdities directly he

looked at it fully and steadfastly. From thinking of the two women as

similar types he passed into thinking of them as opposites; Thérèse,

hard, clear, sensuous, secretive, trained by a brilliant tradition in

the technique of connubial betrayal, was the very antithesis of Ellen’s

vague but invincible veracity and openness. Not for nothing had Anatole

France made his heroine the daughter of a grasping financial

adventurer....

Of course the cave is a part of the mountain....

His mind drifted away to still more general speculations, and always he

was trying not to see the figure of Sir Isaac, grimly and yet meanly

resolute—in possession. Always too like some open-mouthed yokel at a

fair who knows nothing of the insult chalked upon his back, he

disregarded how he himself coveted and desired and would if he could

have gripped. He forgot his own watchful attention to Euphemia in the

past, nor did he think what he might have been if Lady Harman had been

his wife. It needed the chill veracities of the small hours to bring

him to that. He thought now of crude egotism as having Sir Isaac’s

hands and Sir Isaac’s eyes and Sir Isaac’s position. He forgot any

egotism he himself was betraying.

All the paths of enlightenment he thought of, led to Lady Harman.

§9

That evening George Edmund, who had come home with his mind aglitter

with cinematograph impressions, found his father a patient but

inattentive listener. For indeed Mr. Brumley was not listening at all;

he was thinking and thinking. He made noises like “Ah!” and “Um,” at

George Edmund and patted the boy’s shoulder kindly and repeated words

unintelligently, such as, “Red Indians, eh!” or “Came out of the water

backwards! My eye!”

Sometimes he made what George Edmund regarded as quite footling

comments. Still George Edmund had to tell someone and there was no one

else to tell. So George Edmund went on talking and Mr. Brumley went on

thinking.

§10

Mr Brumley could not sleep at all until it was nearly five. His

intelligence seemed to be making up at last for years of speculative

restraint. In a world for the most part given up to slumber Mr. Brumley

may be imagined as clambering hand over fist in the silences,

feverishly and wonderfully overtaking his age. In the morning he got up

pallid and he shaved badly, but he was a generation ahead of his own

Euphemia series, and the school of charm and quiet humour and of

letting things slide with a kind of elegant donnishness, had lost him

for ever....

And among all sorts of things that had come to him in that vast gulf of

nocturnal thinking was some vivid self-examination. At last he got to

that. He had been dragged down to very elemental things indeed by the

manifest completeness of Lady Harman’s return to her husband. He had

had at last to look at himself starkly for the male he was, to go

beneath the gentlemanly airs, the refined and elegant virilities of his

habitual poses. Either this thing was unendurable—there were certainly

moments when it came near to being unendurable—or it was not. On the

whole and excepting mere momentary paroxysms it was not, and so he had

to recognize and he did recognize with the greatest amazement that

there could be something else besides sexual attraction and manœuvring

and possession between a beautiful woman and a man like himself. He

loved Lady Harman, he loved her, he now began to realize just how much,

and she could defeat him and reject him as a conceivable lover, turn

that aside as a thing impossible, shame him as the romantic school

would count shame and still command him with her confident eyes and her

friendly extended hands. He admitted he suffered, let us rather say he

claimed to suffer the heated torments of a passionate nature, but he

perceived like fresh air and sunrise coming by blind updrawn and opened

window into a fœtid chamber, that also he loved her with a clean and

bodiless love, was anxious to help her, was anxious now—it was a new

thing—to understand her, to reassure her, to give unrequited what once

he had sought rather to seem to give in view of an imagined exchange.

He perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her

hitherto. He had been blinded,—obsessed. He had been seeing her and

himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal

dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. Now with his sexual imaginings

newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous

minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that

there was in her personality and their possible relations outside that.

He saw how gravely and deeply serious was her fine philanthropy, how

honest and simple and impersonal her desire for knowledge and

understandings. There is the brain of her at least, he thought, far out

of Sir Isaac’s reach. She wasn’t abased by her surrenders, their

simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and

congested soul. He perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly

awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him—for how

many years? Since his early undergraduate days. Had he anything to put

beside her own fine detachment? Had he ever since his manhood touched

philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human,

thought of art, or literature or belief, without a glancing reference

of the whole question to the uses of this eternal hunt? During that

time had he ever talked to a girl or woman with an unembarrassed

sincerity? He stripped his pretences bare; the answer was no. His very

refinements had been no more than indicative fig-leaves. His

conservatism and morality had been a mere dalliance with interests that

too brutal a simplicity might have exhausted prematurely. And indeed

hadn’t the whole period of literature that had produced him been, in

its straining purity and refinement, as it were one glowing, one

illuminated fig-leaf, a vast conspiracy to keep certain matters always

in mind by conspicuously covering them away? But this wonderful

woman—it seemed—she hadn’t them in mind! She shamed him if only by her

trustful unsuspiciousness of the ancient selfish game of Him and Her

that he had been so ardently playing.... He idealized and worshipped

this clean blindness. He abased himself before it.

“No,” cried Mr. Brumley suddenly in the silence of the night, “I will

rise again. I will rise again by love out of these morasses.... She

shall be my goddess and by virtue of her I will end this incessant

irrational craving for women.... I will be her friend and her faithful

friend.”

He lay still for a time and then he said in a whisper very humbly:

“_God help me_.”

He set himself in those still hours which are so endless and so

profitable to men in their middle years, to think how he might make

himself the perfect lover instead of a mere plotter for desire, and how

he might purge himself from covetousness and possessiveness and learn

to serve.

And if very speedily his initial sincerity was tinged again with

egotism and if he drowsed at last into a portrait of himself as

beautifully and admirably self-sacrificial, you must not sneer too

readily at him, for so God has made the soul of Mr. Brumley and

otherwise it could not do.

CHAPTER THE TENTH

Lady Harman comes out

§1

The treaty between Lady Harman and her husband which was to be her

Great Charter, the constitutional basis of her freedoms throughout the

rest of her married life, had many practical defects. The chief of

these was that it was largely undocumented; it had been made piecemeal,

in various ways, at different times and for the most part indirectly

through diverse intermediaries. Charterson had introduced large

vaguenesses by simply displaying more of his teeth at crucial moments,

Mrs. Harman had conveyed things by hugging and weeping that were

afterwards discovered to be indistinct; Sir Isaac writing from a bed of

sickness had frequently been totally illegible. One cannot therefore

detail the clauses of this agreement or give its provisions with any

great precision; one can simply intimate the kind of understanding that

had had an air of being arrived at. The working interpretations were

still to come.

Before anything else it was manifestly conceded by Lady Harman that she

would not run away again, and still more manifest that she undertook to

break no more windows or do anything that might lead to a second police

court scandal. And she was to be a true and faithful wife and comfort,

as a wife should be, to Sir Isaac. In return for that consideration and

to ensure its continuance Sir Isaac came great distances from his

former assumption of a matrimonial absolutism. She was to be granted

all sorts of small autonomies,—the word autonomy was carefully avoided

throughout but its spirit was omnipresent.

She was in particular to have a banking account for her dress and

personal expenditure into which Sir Isaac would cause to be paid a

hundred pounds monthly and it was to be private to herself alone until

he chose to go through the cashed cheques and counterfoils. She was to

be free to come and go as she saw fit, subject to a punctual appearance

at meals, the comfort and dignity of Sir Isaac and such specific

engagements as she might make with him. She might have her own friends,

but there the contract became a little misty; a time was to come when

Sir Isaac was to betray a conviction that the only proper friends that

a woman can have are women. There were also non-corroborated assurances

as to the privacy of her correspondence. The second Rolls-Royce car was

to be entirely at her service, and Clarence was to be immediately

supplemented by a new and more deferential man, and as soon as possible

assisted to another situation and replaced. She was to have a voice in

the further furnishing of Black Strand and in the arrangement of its

garden. She was to read what she chose and think what she liked within

her head without too minute or suspicious an examination by Sir Isaac,

and short of flat contradiction at his own table she was to be free to

express her own opinions in any manner becoming a lady. But more

particularly if she found her ideas infringing upon the management or

influence of the International Bread and Cake Stores, she was to convey

her objections and ideas in the first instance privately and

confidentially to Sir Isaac.

Upon this point he displayed a remarkable and creditable sensitiveness.

His pride in that organization was if possible greater than his

original pride in his wife, and probably nothing in all the jarring of

their relationship had hurt him more than her accessibility to hostile

criticism and the dinner-table conversation with Charterson and Blenker

that had betrayed this fact. He began to talk about it directly she

returned to him. His protestations and explanations were copious and

heart-felt. It was perhaps the chief discovery made by Lady Harman at

this period of reconstruction that her husband’s business side was not

to be explained completely as a highly energetic and elaborate avarice.

He was no doubt acquisitive and retentive and mean-spirited, but these

were merely the ugly aspects of a disposition that involved many other

factors. He was also incurably a schemer. He liked to fit things

together, to dove-tail arrangements, to devise economies, to spread

ingeniously into new fields, he had a love of organization and

contrivance as disinterested as an artist’s love for the possibilities

of his medium. He would rather have made a profit of ten per cent. out

of a subtly planned shop than thirty by an unforeseen accident. He

wouldn’t have cheated to get money for the world. He knew he was better

at figuring out expenditures and receipts than most people and he was

as touchy about his reputation for this kind of cleverness as any poet

or painter for his fame. Now that he had awakened to the idea that his

wife was capable of looking into and possibly even understanding his

business, he was passionately anxious to show her just how wonderfully

he had done it all, and when he perceived she was in her large,

unskilled, helpless way, intensely concerned for all the vast multitude

of incompetent or partially competent young women who floundered about

in badly paid employment in our great cities, he grasped at once at the

opportunity of recovering her lost interest and respect by doing some

brilliant feats of contrivance in that direction. Why shouldn’t he? He

had long observed with a certain envy the admirable advertisement such

firms as Lever and Cadbury and Burroughs & Wellcome gained from their

ostentatiously able and generous treatment of their workpeople, and it

seemed to him conceivable that in the end it might not be at all

detrimental to his prosperity to put his hand to this long neglected

piece of social work. The Babs Wheeler business had been a real injury

in every way to the International Bread and Cake Stores and even if he

didn’t ultimately go to all the lengths his wife seemed to contemplate,

he was resolved at any rate that an affair of that kind should not

occur again. The expedition to Marienbad took with it a secretary who

was also a stenographer. A particularly smart young inspector and

Graper, the staff manager, had brisk four-day holidays once or twice

for consultation purposes; Sir Isaac’s rabbit-like architect was in

attendance for a week and the Harmans returned to Putney with the first

vivid greens of late March,—for the Putney Hill house was to be

reopened and Black Strand reserved now for week-end and summer use—with

plans already drawn out for four residential Hostels in London

primarily for the girl waitresses of the International Stores who might

have no homes or homes at an inconvenient distance, and, secondarily,

if any vacant accommodation remained over, for any other employed young

women of the same class....

§2

Lady Harman came back to England from the pine-woods and bright order

and regimen and foreign novelty of their Bohemian Kur-Ort, in a state

of renewed perplexity. Already that undocumented Magna Charta was

manifestly not working upon the lines she had anticipated. The glosses

Sir Isaac put upon it were extensive and remarkable and invariably in

the direction of restricting her liberties and resuming controls she

had supposed abandoned.

Marienbad had done wonders for him; his slight limp had disappeared,

his nervous energy was all restored; except for a certain increase in

his natural irritability and occasional panting fits, he seemed as well

as he had ever been. At the end of their time at the Kur he was even

going for walks. Once he went halfway up the Podhorn on foot. And with

every increment in his strength his aggressiveness increased, his

recognition of her new freedoms was less cordial and her sense of

contrition and responsibility diminished. Moreover, as the scheme of

those Hostels, which had played so large a part in her conception of

their reconciliation, grew more and more definite, she perceived more

and more that it was not certainly that fine and humanizing thing she

had presumed it would be. She began to feel more and more that it might

be merely an extension of Harman methods to cheap boarding-houses for

young people. But faced with a mass of detailed concrete projects and

invited to suggest modifications she was able to realize for the first

time how vague, how ignorant and incompetent her wishes had been, how

much she had to understand and how much she had to discover before she

could meet Sir Isaac with his “I’m doing it all for you, Elly. If you

don’t like it, you tell me what you don’t like and I’ll alter it. But

just vague doubting! One can’t do anything with vague doubting.”

She felt that once back in England out of this picturesque toylike

German world she would be able to grasp realities again and deal with

these things. She wanted advice, she wanted to hear what people said of

her ideas. She would also, she imagined, begin to avail herself of

those conceded liberties which their isolation together abroad and her

husband’s constant need of her presence had so far prevented her from

tasting. She had an idea that Susan Burnet might prove suggestive about

the Hostels.

And moreover, if now and then she could have a good talk with someone

understanding and intelligent, someone she could trust, someone who

cared enough for her to think with her and for her....

§3

We have traced thus far the emergence of Lady Harman from that state of

dutiful subjection and social irresponsibility which was the lot of

woman in the past to that limited, ill-defined and quite unsecured

freedom which is her present condition. And now we have to give an

outline of the ideas of herself and her uses and what she had to do,

which were forming themselves in her mind. She had made a determination

of herself, which carried her along the lines of her natural

predisposition, to duty, to service. There she displayed that

acceptance of responsibility which is so much more often a feminine

than a masculine habit of thinking. But she brought to the achievement

of this determination a discriminating integrity of mind that is more

frequently masculine than feminine. She wanted to know clearly what she

was undertaking and how far its consequences would reach and how it was

related to other things.

Her confused reading during the last few years and her own observation

and such leakages of fact into her life as the talk of Susan Burnet,

had all contributed to her realization that the world was full of

needless discomfort and hardships and failure, due to great imperfectly

apprehended injustices and maladjustments in the social system, and

recently it had been borne in upon her, upon the barbed point of the

_London Lion_ and the quick tongue of Susan, that if any particular

class of people was more answerable than any other for these evils, it

was the people of leisure and freedom like herself, who had time to

think, and the directing organizing people like her husband, who had

power to change. She was called upon to do something, at times the call

became urgent, and she could not feel any assurance which it was of the

many vague and conflicting suggestions that came drifting to her that

she had to do. Her idea of Hostels for the International waitresses had

been wrung out of her prematurely during her earlier discussions with

her husband. She did not feel that it was anything more than a partial

remedy for a special evil. She wanted something more general than that,

something comprehensive enough to answer completely so wide a question

as “What ought I to be doing with all my life?” In the honest

simplicity of her nature she wanted to find an answer to that. Out of

the confusion of voices about us she hoped to be able to disentangle

directions for her life. Already she had been reading voraciously:

while she was still at Marienbad she had written to Mr. Brumley and he

had sent her books and papers, advanced and radical in many cases, that

she might know, “What are people thinking?”

Many phrases from her earlier discussions with Sir Isaac stuck in her

mind in a curiously stimulating way and came back to her as she read.

She recalled him, for instance, with his face white and his eyes red

and his flat hand sawing at her, saying: “I dessay I’m all wrong, I

dessay I don’t know anything about anything and all those chaps you

read, Bernud Shaw, and Gosworthy, and all the rest of them are

wonderfully clever; but you tell me, Elly, what they say we’ve got to

do! You tell me that. You go and ask some of those chaps just what they

want a man like me to do.... They’ll ask me to endow a theatre or run a

club for novelists or advertise the lot of them in the windows of my

International Stores or something. And that’s about all it comes to.

You go and see if I’m not right. They grumble and they grumble; I don’t

say there’s not a lot to grumble at, but give me something they’ll back

themselves for all they’re worth as good to get done.... That’s where I

don’t agree with all these idees. They’re Wind, Elly, Weak wind at

that.”

It is distressing to record how difficult it was for Lady Harman to

form even the beginnings of a disproof of that. Her life through all

this second phase of mitigated autonomy was an intermittent pilgrimage

in search of that disproof. She could not believe that things as they

were, this mass of hardships, cruelties, insufficiencies and

heartburnings were the ultimate wisdom and possibility of human life,

yet when she went from them to the projects that would replace or

change them she seemed to pass from things of overwhelming solidity to

matters more thin and flimsy than the twittering of sparrows on the

gutter. So soon as she returned to London she started upon her search

for a solution; she supplemented Mr. Brumley’s hunt for books with her

own efforts, she went to meetings—sometimes Sir Isaac took her, once or

twice she was escorted by Mr. Brumley, and presently her grave interest

and her personal charm had gathered about her a circle of companionable

friends. She tried to talk to people and made great efforts to hear

people who seemed authoritative and wise and leaderlike, talking.

There were many interruptions to this research, but she persevered.

Quite early she had an illness that ended in a miscarriage, an accident

for which she was by no means inconsolable, and before she had

completely recovered from that Sir Isaac fell ill again, the first of a

series of relapses that necessitated further foreign travel—always in

elaborately comfortable trains with maid, courier, valet, and

secretary, to some warm and indolent southward place. And few people

knew how uncertain her liberties were. Sir Isaac was the victim of an

increasing irritability, at times he had irrational outbursts of

distrust that would culminate in passionate outbreaks and scenes that

were truncated by an almost suffocating breathlessness. On several

occasions he was on the verge of quarrelling violently with her

visitors, and he would suddenly oblige her to break engagements, pour

abuse upon her and bring matters back to the very verge of her first

revolt. And then he would break her down by pitiful appeals. The

cylinders of oxygen would be resorted to, and he would emerge from the

crisis, rather rueful, tamed and quiet for the time.

He was her chief disturbance. Her children were healthy children and

fell in with the routines of governess and tutor that their wealth

provided. She saw them often, she noted their increasing resemblance to

their father, she did her best to soften the natural secretiveness and

aggressiveness of their manners, she watched their teachers and

intervened whenever the influences about them seemed to her to need

intervention, she dressed them and gave them presents and tried to

believe she loved them, and as Sir Isaac’s illness increased she took a

larger and larger share in the direction of the household....

Through all these occupations and interruptions and immediacies she

went trying to comprehend and at times almost believing she

comprehended life, and then the whole spectacle of this modern world of

which she was a part would seem to break up again into a multitude of

warring and discordant fragments having no conceivable common aim or

solution. Those moments of unifying faith and confidence, that glowed

so bravely and never endured, were at once tantalizing and sustaining.

She could never believe but that ultimately she would not grasp and

hold—something....

Many people met her and liked her and sought to know more of her; Lady

Beach-Mandarin and Lady Viping were happy to be her social sponsors,

the Blenkers and the Chartersons met her out and woke up cautiously to

this new possibility; her emergence was rapid in spite of the various

delays and interruptions I have mentioned and she was soon in a

position to realize just how little one meets when one meets a number

of people and how little one hears when one has much conversation. Her

mind was presently crowded with confused impressions of pleasant men

evading her agreeably and making out of her gravities an opportunity

for bright sayings, and of women being vaguely solemn and quite

indefinite.

She went into the circle of movements, was tried over by Mrs. Hubert

Plessington, she questioned this and that promoter of constructive

schemes, and instead of mental meat she was asked to come upon

committees and sounded for subscriptions. On several occasions,

escorted by Mr. Brumley—some instinct made her conceal or minimize his

share in these expeditions to her husband—she went as inconspicuously

as possible to the backs of public meetings in which she understood

great questions were being discussed or great changes inaugurated. Some

public figures she even followed up for a time, distrusting her first

impressions.

She became familiar with the manners and bearing of our platform class,

with the solemn dummy-like chairman or chairwoman, saying a few words,

the alert secretary or organizer, the prominent figures sitting with an

air of grave responsibility, generously acting an intelligent attention

to others until the moment came for them themselves to deliver. Then

with an ill-concealed relief some would come to the footlights, some

leap up in their places with a tenoring eagerness, some would be

facetious and some speak with neuralgic effort, some were impertinent,

some propitiatory, some dull, but all were—disappointing,

disappointing. God was not in any of them. A platform is no setting for

the shy processes of an honest human mind,—we are all strained to

artificiality in the excessive glare of attention that beats upon us

there. One does not exhibit opinions at a meeting, one acts them, the

very truth must rouge its cheeks and blacken its eyebrows to tell, and

to Lady Harman it was the acting chiefly and the make-up that was

visible. They didn’t grip her, they didn’t lift her, they failed to

convince her even of their own belief in what they supported.

§4

But occasionally among the multitude of conversations that gave her

nothing, there would come some talk that illuminated and for the time

almost reconciled her to the effort and the loss of time and

distraction her social expeditions involved. One evening at one of Lady

Tarvrille’s carelessly compiled parties she encountered Edgar Wilkins

the novelist and got the most suggestive glimpses of his attitude

towards himself and towards the world of intellectual ferment to which

he belonged. She had been taken down by an amiable but entirely

uninteresting permanent official who when the time came turned his

stereotyped talk over to the other side of him with a quiet mechanical

indifference, and she was left for a little while in silence until

Wilkins had disengaged himself.

He was a flushed man with untidy hair, and he opened at once with an

appeal to her sympathies.

“Oh! Bother!” he said. “I say,—I’ve eaten that mutton. I didn’t notice.

One eats too much at these affairs. One doesn’t notice at the time and

then afterwards one finds out.”

She was a little surprised at his gambit and could think of nothing but

a kindly murmur.

“Detestable thing,” he said; “my body.”

“But surely not,” she tried and felt as she said it that was a trifle

bold.

“You’re all right,” he said making her aware he saw her. “But I’ve this

thing that wheezes and fattens at the slightest excuse and—it encumbers

me—bothers me to take exercise.... But I can hardly expect you to be

interested in my troubles, can I?”

He made an all too manifest attempt to read her name on the slip of

card that lay before her among the flowers and as manifestly succeeded.

“We people who write and paint and all that sort of thing are a breed

of insatiable egotists, Lady Harman. With the least excuse. Don’t you

think so?”

“Not—not exceptionally,” she said.

“Exceptionally,” he insisted.

“It isn’t my impression,” she said. “You’re—franker.”

“But someone was telling me—you’ve been taking impressions of us

lately. I mean all of us people who go flapping ideas about in the air.

Somebody—was it Lady Beach-Mandarin?—was saying you’d come out looking

for Intellectual Heroes—and found Bernard Shaw.... But what could you

have expected?”

“I’ve been trying to find out and understand what people are thinking.

I want ideas.”

“It’s disheartening, isn’t it?”

“It’s—perplexing sometimes.”

“You go to meetings, and try to get to the bottom of Movements, and you

want to meet and know the people who write the wonderful things? Get at

the wonderful core of it?”

“One feels there are things going on.”

“Great illuminating things.”

“Well—yes.”

“And when you see those great Thinkers and Teachers and Guides and

Brave Spirits and High Brows generally——”

He laughed and stopped just in time on the very verge of taking

pheasant.

“Oh, take it away,” he cried sharply.

“We’ve all been through that illusion, Lady Harman,” he went on.

“But I don’t like to think——Aren’t Great Men after all—great?”

“In their ways, in their places—Yes. But not if you go up to them and

look at them. Not at the dinner table, not in their beds.... What a

time of disillusionment you must have had!

“You see, Lady Harman,” he said, leaning back from his empty plate,

inclining himself confidentially to her ear and speaking in a privy

tone; “it’s in the very nature of things that we—if I may put myself

into the list—we ideologists, should be rather exceptionally loose and

untrustworthy and disappointing men. Rotters—to speak plain

contemporary English. If you come to think of it, it has to be so.”

“But——” she protested.

He met her eye firmly. “It has to be.”

“Why?”

“The very qualities that make literature entertaining, vigorous,

inspiring, revealing, wonderful, beautiful and—all that sort of thing,

make its producers—if you will forgive the word again—rotters.”

She smiled and lifted her eyebrows protestingly.

“Sensitive nervous tissue,” he said with a finger up to emphasize his

words. “Quick responsiveness to stimulus, a vivid, almost

uncontrollable, expressiveness; that’s what you want in your literary

man.”

“Yes,” said Lady Harman following cautiously. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Can you suppose for a moment that these things conduce to

self-control, to reserve, to consistency, to any of the qualities of a

trustworthy man?... Of course you can’t. And so we _aren’t_

trustworthy, we _aren’t_ consistent. Our virtues are our vices.... _My_

life,” said Mr. Wilkins still more confidentially, “won’t bear

examination. But that’s by the way. It need not concern us now.”

“But Mr. Brumley?” she asked on the spur of the moment.

“I’m not talking of him,” said Wilkins with careless cruelty. “He’s

restrained. I mean the really imaginative people, the people with

vision, the people who let themselves go. You see now why they are

rotten, why they must be rotten. (No! No! take it away. I’m talking.) I

feel so strongly about this, about the natural and necessary

disreputableness of everybody who produces reputable writing—and for

the matter of that, art generally—that I set my face steadily against

all these attempts that keep on cropping up to make Figures of us. We

aren’t Figures, Lady Harman; it isn’t our line. Of all the detestable

aspects of the Victorian period surely that disposition to make Figures

of its artists and literary men was the most detestable. Respectable

Figures—Examples to the young. The suppressions, the coverings up that

had to go on, the white-washing of Dickens,—who was more than a bit of

a rip, you know, the concealment of Thackeray’s mistresses. Did you

know he had mistresses? Oh rather! And so on. It’s like that bust of

Jove—or Bacchus was it?—they pass off as Plato, who probably looked

like any other literary Grub. That’s why I won’t have anything to do

with these Academic developments that my friend Brumley—Do you know him

by the way?—goes in for. He’s the third man down——You _do_ know him.

And he’s giving up the Academic Committee, is he? I’m glad he’s seen it

at last. What _is_ the good of trying to have an Academy and all that,

and put us in uniform and make out we are Somebodies, and respectable

enough to be shaken hands with by George and Mary, when as a matter of

fact we are, by our very nature, a collection of miscellaneous

scandals——We _must_ be. Bacon, Shakespear, Byron, Shelley—all the

stars.... No, Johnson wasn’t a star, he was a character by Boswell....

Oh! great things come out of us, no doubt, our arts are the vehicles of

wonder and hope, the world is dead without these things we produce, but

that’s no reason why—why the mushroom-bed should follow the mushrooms

into the soup, is it? Perfectly fair image. (No, take it away.)”

He paused and then jumped in again as she was on the point of speaking.

“And you see even if our temperaments didn’t lead inevitably to

our—dipping rather, we should still have to—_dip_. Asking a writer or a

poet to be seemly and Academic and so on, is like asking an eminent

surgeon to be stringently decent. It’s—you see, it’s incompatible. Now

a king or a butler or a family solicitor—if you like.”

He paused again.

Lady Harman had been following him with an attentive reluctance.

“But what are we to do,” she asked, “we people who are puzzled by life,

who want guidance and ideas and—help, if—if all the people we look to

for ideas are——”

“Bad characters.”

“Well,—it’s your theory, you know—bad characters?”

Wilkins answered with the air of one who carefully disentangles a

complex but quite solvable problem. “It doesn’t follow,” he said, “that

because a man is a bad character he’s not to be trusted in matters

where character—as we commonly use the word—doesn’t come in. These

sensitives, these—would you mind if I were to call myself an Æolian

Harp?—these Æolian Harps; they can’t help responding to the winds of

heaven. Well,—listen to them. Don’t follow them, don’t worship them,

don’t even honour them, but listen to them. Don’t let anyone stop them

from saying and painting and writing and singing what they want to.

Freedom, canvas and attention, those are the proper honours for the

artist, the poet and the philosopher. Listen to the noise they make,

watch the stuff they produce, and presently you will find certain

things among the multitude of things that are said and shown and put

out and published, something—light in _your_ darkness—a writer for you,

something for you. Nobody can have a greater contempt for artists and

writers and poets and philosophers than I, oh! a squalid crew they are,

mean, jealous, pugnacious, disgraceful in love, _disgraceful_—but out

of it all comes the greatest serenest thing, the mind of the world,

Literature. Nasty little midges, yes,—but fireflies—carrying light for

the darkness.”

His face was suddenly lit by enthusiasm and she wondered that she could

have thought it rather heavy and commonplace. He stopped abruptly and

glanced beyond her at her other neighbour who seemed on the verge of

turning to them again. “If I go on,” he said with a voice suddenly

dropped, “I shall talk loud.”

“You know,” said Lady Harman, in a halty undertone, “you—you are too

hard upon—upon clever people, but it is true. I mean it is true in a

way....”

“Go on, I understand exactly what you are saying.”

“I mean, there _are_ ideas. It’s just that, that is so—so——I mean they

seem never to be just there and always to be present.”

“Like God. Never in the flesh—now. A spirit everywhere. You think

exactly as I do, Lady Harman. It is just that. This is a great time, so

great that there is no chance for great men. Every chance for great

work. And we’re doing it. There is a wind—blowing out of heaven. And

when beautiful people like yourself come into things——”

“I try to understand,” she said. “I want to understand. I want—I want

not to miss life.”

He was on the verge of saying something further and then his eyes

wandered down the table and he stopped short.

He ended his talk as he had begun it with “Bother! Lady Tarvrille, Lady

Harman, is trying to catch your eye.”

Lady Harman turned her face to her hostess and answered her smile.

Wilkins caught at his chair and stood up.

“It would have been jolly to have talked some more,” he said.

“I hope we shall.”

“Well!” said Wilkins, with a sudden hardness in his eyes and she was

swept away from him.

She found no chance of talking to him upstairs, Sir Isaac came for her

early; but she went in hope of another meeting.

It did not come. For a time that expectation gave dinners and luncheon

parties a quite appreciable attraction. Then she told Agatha Alimony.

“I’ve never met him but that once,” she said.

“One doesn’t meet him now,” said Agatha, deeply.

“But why?”

Deep significance came into Miss Alimony’s eyes. “My dear,” she

whispered, and glanced about them. “Don’t you _know_?”

Lady Harman was a radiant innocence.

And then Miss Alimony began in impressive undertones, with awful

omissions like pits of darkness and with such richly embroidered

details as serious spinsters enjoy, adding, indeed, two quite new

things that came to her mind as the tale unfolded, and, naming no names

and giving no chances of verification or reply, handed on the fearful

and at that time extremely popular story of the awful wickedness of

Wilkins the author.

Upon reflection Lady Harman perceived that this explained all sorts of

things in their conversation and particularly the flash of hardness at

the end.

Even then, things must have been hanging over him....

§5

And while Lady Harman was making these meritorious and industrious

attempts to grasp the significance of life and to get some clear idea

of her social duty, the developments of those Hostels she had

started—she now felt so prematurely—was going on. There were times when

she tried not to think of them, turned her back on them, fled from

them, and times when they and what she ought to do about them and what

they ought to be and what they ought not to be, filled her mind to the

exclusion of every other topic. Rigorously and persistently Sir Isaac

insisted they were hers, asked her counsel, demanded her appreciation,

presented as it were his recurring bill for them.

Five of them were being built, not four but five. There was to be one,

the largest, in a conspicuous position in Bloomsbury near the British

Museum, one in a conspicuous position looking out upon Parliament Hill,

one conspicuously placed upon the Waterloo Road near St. George’s

Circus, one at Sydenham, and one in the Kensington Road which was

designed to catch the eye of people going to and fro to the various

exhibitions at Olympia.

In Sir Isaac’s study at Putney there was a huge and rather

splendid-looking morocco portfolio on a stand, and this portfolio bore

in excellent gold lettering the words, International Bread and Cake

Hostels. It was her husband’s peculiar pleasure after dinner to take

her to turn over this with him; he would sit pencil in hand, while she,

poised at his request upon the arm of his chair, would endorse a

multitude of admirable modifications and suggestions. These hostels

were to be done—indeed they were being done—by Sir Isaac’s tame

architect, and the interlacing yellow and mauve tiles, and the Doulton

ware mouldings that were already familiar to the public as the uniform

of the Stores, were to be used upon the façades of the new

institutions. They were to be boldly labelled

INTERNATIONAL HOSTELS

right across the front.

The plans revealed in every case a site depth as great as the frontage,

and the utmost ingenuity had been used to utilize as much space as

possible.

“Every room we get in,” said Sir Isaac, “adds one to the denominator in

the cost;” and carried his wife back to her schooldays. At last she had

found sense in fractions. There was to be a series of convenient and

spacious rooms on the ground floor, a refectory, which might be cleared

and used for meetings—vdances,” said Lady Harman. “Hardly the sort of

thing we want ’em to get up to,” said Sir Isaac—various offices, the

matron’s apartments—“We ought to begin thinking about matrons,” said

Sir Isaac;—a bureau, a reading-room and a library—“We can pick good,

serious stuff for them,” said Sir Isaac, “instead of their filling

their heads with trash”—one or two workrooms with tables for cutting

out and sewing; this last was an idea of Susan Burnet’s. Upstairs there

was to be a beehive of bedrooms, floor above floor, and each floor as

low as the building regulations permitted. There were to be long

dormitories with cubicles at three-and-sixpence a week—make your own

beds—and separate rooms at prices ranging from four-and-sixpence to

seven-and-sixpence. Every three cubicles and every bedroom had lavatory

basins with hot and cold water; there were pull-out drawers under the

beds and a built-in chest of drawers, a hanging cupboard, a

looking-glass and a radiator in each cubicle, and each floor had a

box-room. It was ship-shape.

“A girl can get this cubicle for three-and-six a week,” said Sir Isaac,

tapping the drawing before him with his pencil. “She can get her

breakfast with a bit of bacon or a sausage for two shillings a week,

and she can get her high tea, with cold meat, good potted salmon,

shrimp paste, jam and cetera, for three-and-six a week. Say her bus

fares and lunch out mean another four shillings. That means she can get

along on about twelve-and-six a week, comfortable, read the papers,

have a book out of the library.... There’s nothing like it to be got

now for twice the money. The sort of thing they have now is one room,

dingy, badly fitted, extra for coals.

“That’s the answer to your problem, Elly,” he said. “There we are.

Every girl who doesn’t live at home can live here—with a matron to keep

her eye on her.... And properly run, Elly, properly run the thing’s

going to pay two or three per cent,—let alone the advertisement for the

Stores.

“We can easily make these Hostels obligatory on all our girls who don’t

live at their own homes,” he said. “That ought to keep them off the

streets, if anything can. I don’t see how even Miss Babs Wheeler can

have the face to strike against that.

“And then we can arrange with some of the big firms, drapers’ shops and

all that sort of thing near each hostel, to take over most of our other

cubicle space. A lot of them—overflow.

“Of course we’ll have to make sure the girls get in at night.” He

reached out for a ground floor plan of the Bloomsbury establishment

which was to be the first built. “If,” he said, “we were to have a sort

of porter’s lodge with a book—and make ’em ring a bell after eleven

say—just here....”

He took out a silver pencil case and got to work.

Lady Harman’s expression as she leant over him became thoughtful.

There were points about this project that gave her the greatest

misgivings; that matron, keeping her eye on the girls, that carefully

selected library, the porter’s bell, these casual allusions to

“discipline” that set her thinking of scraps of the Babs Wheeler

controversy. There was a regularity, an austerity about this project

that chilled her, she hardly knew why. Her own vague intentions had

been an amiable, hospitable, agreeably cheap establishment to which the

homeless feminine employees in London could resort freely and

cheerfully, and it was only very slowly that she perceived that her

husband was by no means convinced of the spontaneity of their coming.

He seemed always glancing at methods for compelling them to come in and

oppressions when that compulsion had succeeded. There had already

hovered over several of these anticipatory evenings, his very manifest

intention to have very carefully planned “Rules.” She felt there lay

ahead of them much possibility for divergence of opinion about these

“Rules.” She foresaw a certain narrowness and hardness. She herself had

made her fight against the characteristics of Sir Isaac and—perhaps she

was lacking in that aristocratic feeling which comes so naturally to

most successful middle-class people in England—she could not believe

that what she had found bad and suffocating for herself could be

agreeable and helpful for her poorer sisters.

It occurred to her to try the effect of the scheme upon Susan Burnet.

Susan had such a knack of seeing things from unexpected angles. She

contrived certain operations upon the study blinds, and then broached

the business to Susan casually in the course of an enquiry into the

welfare of the Burnet family.

Susan was evidently prejudiced against the idea.

“Yes,” said Susan after various explanations and exhibitions, “but

where’s the home in it?”

“The whole thing is a home.”

“Barracks _I_ call it,” said Susan. “Nobody ever felt at home in a room

coloured up like that—and no curtains, nor vallances, nor toilet

covers, nor anywhere where a girl can hang a photograph or anything.

What girl’s going to feel at home in a strange place like that?”

“They ought to be able to hang up photographs,” said Lady Harman,

making a mental note of it.

“And of course there’ll be all sorts of Rules.”

“_Some_ rules.”

“Homes, real homes don’t have Rules. And I daresay—Fines.”

“No, there shan’t be any Fines,” said Lady Harman quickly. “I’ll see to

that.”

“You got to back up rules somehow—once you got ’em,” said Susan. “And

when you get a crowd, and no father and mother, and no proper family

feeling, I suppose there’s got to be Rules.”

Lady Harman pointed out various advantages of the project.

“I’m not saying it isn’t cheap and healthy and social,” said Susan,

“and if it isn’t too strict I expect you’ll get plenty of girls to come

to it, but at the best it’s an Institution, Lady Harman. It’s going to

be an Institution. That’s what it’s going to be.”

She held the front elevation of the Bloomsbury Hostel in her hand and

reflected.

“Of course for my part, I’d rather lodge with nice struggling believing

Christian people anywhere than go into a place like that. It’s the

feeling of freedom, of being yourself and on your own. Even if the

water wasn’t laid on and I had to fetch it myself.... If girls were

paid properly there wouldn’t be any need of such places, none at all.

It’s the poverty makes ’em what they are.... And after all, somebody’s

got to lose the lodgers if this place gets them. Suppose this sort of

thing grows up all over the place, it’ll just be the story of the

little bakers and little grocers and all those people over again. Why

in London there are thousands of people just keep a home together by

letting two or three rooms or boarding someone—and it stands to reason,

they’ll have to take less or lose the lodgers if this kind of thing’s

going to be done. Nobody isn’t going to build a Hostel for them.”

“No,” said Lady Harman, “I never thought of them.”

“Lots of ’em haven’t anything in the world but their bits of furniture

and their lease and there they are stuck and tied. There’s Aunt Hannah,

Father’s sister, she’s like that. Sleeps in the basement and works and

slaves, and often I’ve had to lend her ten shillings to pay the rent

with, through her not being full. This sort of place isn’t going to do

much good to her.”

Lady Harman surveyed the plan rather blankly. “I suppose it isn’t.”

“And then if you manage this sort of place easy and attractive, it’s

going to draw girls away from their homes. There’s girls like Alice

who’d do anything to get a bit of extra money to put on their backs and

seem to think of nothing but chattering and laughing and going about.

Such a place like this would be fine fun for Alice; in when she liked

and out when she liked, and none of us to ask her questions. She’d be

just the sort to go, and mother, who’s had the upbringing of her, how’s

she to make up for Alice’s ten shillings what she pays in every week?

There’s lots like Alice. She’s not bad isn’t Alice, she’s a good girl

and a good-hearted girl; I will say that for her, but she’s shallow,

say what you like she’s shallow, she’s got no thought and she’s wild

for pleasure, and sometimes it seems to me that that’s as bad as being

bad for all the good it does to anyone else in the world, and so I tell

her. But of course she hasn’t seen things as I’ve seen them and doesn’t

feel as I do about all these things....”

Thus Susan.

Her discourse so puzzled Lady Harman that she bethought herself of Mr.

Brumley and called in his only too readily accorded advice. She asked

him to tea on a day when she knew unofficially that Sir Isaac would be

away, she showed him the plans and sketched their probable development.

Then with that charming confidence of hers in his knowledge and ability

she put her doubts and fears before him. What did he really think of

these places? What did he think of Susan Burnet’s idea of ruined

lodging-house keepers? “I used to think our stores were good things,”

she said. “Is this likely to be a good thing at all?”

Mr. Brumley said “Um” a great number of times and realized that he was

a humbug. He fenced with her and affected sagacity for a time and

suddenly he threw down his defences and confessed he knew as little of

the business as she did. “But I see it is a complex question and—it’s

an interesting one too. May I enquire into it for you? I think I might

be able to hunt up a few particulars....”

He went away in a glow of resolution.

Georgina was about the only intimate who regarded the new development

without misgiving.

“You think you’re going to do all sorts of things with these Hostels,

Ella,” she said, “but as a matter of fact they’re bound to become just

exactly what we’ve always wanted.”

“And what may that be?” asked Mrs. Sawbridge over her macramé work.

“Strongholds for a garrison of suffragettes,” said Georgina with the

light of the Great Insane Movement in her eyes and a ringing note in

her voice. “Fort Chabrols for women.”

§6

For some months in a negative and occasionally almost negligent fashion

Mr. Brumley had been living up to his impassioned resolve to be an

unselfish lover of Lady Harman. He had been rather at loose ends

intellectually, deprived of his old assumptions and habitual attitudes

and rather chaotic in the matter of his new convictions. He had given

most of his productive hours to the writing of a novel which was to be

an entire departure from the Euphemia tradition. The more he got on

with this, the more clearly he realized that it was essentially

insignificant. When he re-read what he had written he was surprised by

crudities where he had intended sincerities and rhetoric where the

scheme had demanded passion. What was the matter with him? He was

stirred that Lady Harman should send for him, and his inability to deal

with her perplexities deepened his realization of the ignorance and

superficiality he had so long masked even from himself beneath the

tricks and pretensions of a gay scepticism. He went away fully resolved

to grapple with the entire Hostel question, and he put the patched and

tortured manuscript of the new novel aside with a certain satisfaction

to do this.

The more he reflected upon the nature of this study he proposed for

himself the more it attracted him. It was some such reality as this he

had been wanting. He could presently doubt whether he would ever go

back to his novel-writing again, or at least to the sort of

novel-writing he had been doing hitherto. To invent stories to save

middle-aged prosperous middle-class people from the distresses of

thinking, is surely no work for a self-respecting man. Stevenson in the

very deeps of that dishonourable traffic had realized as much and

likened himself to a _fille de joie_, and Haggard, of the same school

and period, had abandoned blood and thunder at the climax of his

success for the honest study of agricultural conditions. The newer

successes were turning out work, less and less conventional and

agreeable and more and more stiffened with facts and sincerities.... He

would show Lady Harman that a certain debonair quality he had always

affected, wasn’t incompatible with a powerful grasp of general

conditions.... And she wanted this done. Suppose he did it in a way

that made him necessary to her. Suppose he did it very well.

He set to work, and understanding as you do a certain quality of the

chameleon in Mr. Brumley’s moral nature, you will understand that he

worked through a considerable variety of moods. Sometimes he worked

with disinterested passion and sometimes he was greatly sustained by

this thought that here was something that would weave him in with the

gravities of her life and give him perhaps a new inlet to intimacy. And

presently a third thing came to his help, and that was the discovery

that the questions arising out of this attempt to realize the

importance of those Hostels, were in themselves very fascinating

questions for an intelligent person.

Because before you have done with the business of the modern employé,

you must, if you are an intelligent person, have taken a view of the

whole vast process of social reorganization that began with the

development of factory labour and big towns, and which is even now

scarcely advanced enough for us to see its general trend. For a time

Mr. Brumley did not realize the magnitude of the thing he was looking

at; when he did, theories sprouted in his mind like mushrooms and he

babbled with mental excitement. He came in a state of the utmost

lucidity to explain his theories to Lady Harman, and they struck that

lady at the time as being the most illuminating suggestions she had

ever encountered. They threw an appearance of order, of process, over a

world of trade and employment and competition that had hitherto seemed

too complex and mysterious for any understanding.

“You see,” said Mr. Brumley—they had met that day in Kensington Gardens

and they were sitting side by side upon green chairs near the frozen

writings of Physical Energy—“You see, if I may lecture a little,

putting the thing as simply as possible, the world has been filling up

new spaces ever since the discovery of America; all the period from

then to about 1870, let us say, was a period of rapid increase of

population in response to new opportunities of living and new fulnesses

of life in every direction. During that time, four hundred years of it

roughly, there was a huge development of family life; to marry and rear

a quite considerable family became the chief business of everybody,

celibacy grew rare, monasteries and nunneries which had abounded

vanished like things dissolving in a flood and even the priests became

Protestant against celibacy and took unto themselves wives and had huge

families. The natural checks upon increase, famine and pestilence, were

lifted by more systematized communication and by scientific discovery;

and altogether and as a consequence the world now has probably three or

four times the human population it ever carried before. Everywhere in

that period the family prevailed again, the prospering multiplying

household; it was a return to the family, to the reproductive social

grouping of early barbaric life, and naturally all the thought of the

modern world which has emerged since the fifteenth century falls into

this form. So I see it, Lady Harman. The generation of our grandfathers

in the opening nineteenth century had two shaping ideas, two forms of

thought, the family and progress, not realizing that that very progress

which had suddenly reopened the doors of opportunity for the family

that had revived the ancient injunction to increase and multiply and

replenish the earth, might presently close that door again and declare

the world was filled. But that is what is happening now. The doors

close. That immense swarming and multiplying of little people is over,

and the forces of social organization have been coming into play now,

more and more for a century and a half, to produce new wholesale ways

of doing things, new great organizations, organizations that invade the

autonomous family more and more, and are perhaps destined ultimately to

destroy it altogether and supersede it. At least it is so I make my

reading of history in these matters.”

“Yes,” said Lady Harman, with knitted brows, “Yes,” and wondered

privately whether it would be possible to get from that opening to the

matter of her Hostels before it was time for her to return for Sir

Isaac’s tea.

Mr. Brumley continued to talk with his eyes fixed as it were upon his

thoughts. “These things, Lady Harman, go on at different paces in

different regions. I will not trouble you with a discussion of that, or

of emigration, of any of the details of the vast proliferation that

preceded the present phase. Suffice it, that now all the tendency is

back towards restraints upon increase, to an increasing celibacy, to a

fall in the birth-rate and in the average size of families, to—to a

release of women from an entire devotion to a numerous offspring, and

so at last to the supersession of those little family units that for

four centuries have made up the substance of social life and determined

nearly all our moral and sentimental attitudes. The autonomy of the

family is being steadily destroyed, and it is being replaced by the

autonomy of the individual in relation to some syndicated economic

effort.”

“I think,” said Lady Harman slowly, arresting him by a gesture, “if you

could make that about autonomy a little clearer....”

Mr. Brumley did. He went on to point out with the lucidity of a

University Extension lecturer what he meant by these singular phrases.

She listened intelligently but with effort. He was much too intent upon

getting the thing expressed to his own satisfaction to notice any

absurdity in his preoccupation with these theories about the population

of the world in the face of her immediate practical difficulties. He

declared that the onset of this new phase in human life, the modern

phase, wherein there was apparently to be no more “proliferating,” but

instead a settling down of population towards a stable equilibrium,

became apparent first with the expropriation of the English peasantry

and the birth of the factory system and machine production. “Since that

time one can trace a steady substitution of wholesale and collective

methods for household and family methods. It has gone far with us now.

Instead of the woman drawing water from a well, the pipes and taps of

the water company. Instead of the home-made rushlight, the electric

lamp. Instead of home-spun, ready-made clothes. Instead of home-brewed,

the brewer’s cask. Instead of home-baked, first the little baker and

then, clean and punctual, the International Bread and Cake Stores.

Instead of the child learning at its mother’s knee, the compulsory

elementary school. Flats take the place of separate houses. Instead of

the little holding, the big farm, and instead of the children working

at home, the factory. Everywhere synthesis. Everywhere the little

independent proprietor gives place to the company and the company to

the trust. You follow all this, Lady Harman?”

“Go on,” she said, encouraged by that transitory glimpse of the Stores

in his discourse.

“Now London—and England generally—had its period of expansion and got

on to the beginnings at least of this period of synthesis that is

following it, sooner than any other country in the world; and because

it was the first to reach the new stage it developed the

characteristics of the new stage with a stronger flavour of the old

than did such later growths of civilization as New York or Bombay or

Berlin. That is why London and our British big cities generally are

congestions of little houses, little homes, while the newer great

cities run to apartments and flats. We hadn’t grasped the logical

consequences of what we were in for so completely as the people abroad

did who caught it later, and that is why, as we began to develop our

new floating population of mainly celibate employees and childless

people, they had mostly to go into lodgings, they went into the homes

that were intended for families as accessories to the family, and they

were able to go in because the families were no longer so numerous as

they used to be. London is still largely a city of landladies and

lodgings, and in no other part of the world is there so big a

population of lodgers. And this business of your Hostels is nothing

more nor less than the beginning of the end of that. Just as the great

refreshment caterers have mopped up the ancient multitude of

coffee-houses and squalid little special feeding arrangements of the

days of Tittlebat Titmouse and Dick Swiveller, so now your Hostels are

going to mop up the lodging-house system of London. Of course there are

other and kindred movements. Naturally. The Y.W.C.A., the Y.M.C.A., the

London Girls Club Union and so forth are all doing kindred work.”

“But what, Mr. Brumley, what is to become of the landladies?” asked

Lady Harman.

Mr. Brumley was checked in mid theory.

“I hadn’t thought of the landladies,” he said, after a short pause.

“They worry me,” said Lady Harman.

“Um,” said Mr. Brumley, thrown out.

“Do you know the other day I went into Chelsea, where there are whole

streets of lodgings, and—I suppose it was wrong of me, but I went and

pretended to be looking for rooms for a girl clerk I knew, and I

saw—Oh! no end of rooms. And such poor old women, such dingy,

worked-out, broken old women, with a kind of fearful sharpness, so

eager, so dreadfully eager to get that girl clerk who didn’t exist....”

She looked at him with an expression of pained enquiry.

“That,” said Mr. Brumley, “that I think is a question, so to speak, for

the social ambulance. If perhaps I might go on——That particular

difficulty we might consider later. I think I was talking of the

general synthesis.”