“Yes,” said Lady Harman. “And what is it exactly that is to take the

place of these isolated little homes and these dreary little lodgings?

Here are we, my husband and I, rushing in with this new thing, just as

he rushed in with his stores thirty years ago and overset little bakers

and confectioners and refreshment dealers by the hundred. Some of

them—poor dears—they——I don’t like to think. And it wasn’t a good thing

he made after all,—only a hard sort of thing. He made all those shops

of his—with the girls who strike and say they are sweated and

driven.... And now here we are making a kind of barrack place for

people to live in!”

She expressed the rest of her ideas with a gesture of the hands.

“I admit the process has its dangers,” said Mr. Brumley. “It’s like the

supersession of the small holdings by the _latifundia_ in Italy. But

that’s just where our great opportunity comes in. These synthetic

phases have occurred before in the world’s history and their history is

a history of lost opportunities.... But need ours be?”

She had a feeling as though something had slipped through her fingers.

“I feel,” she said, “that it is more important to me than anything else

in life, that these Hostels, anyhow, which are springing so rapidly

from a chance suggestion of mine, shouldn’t be lost opportunities.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Brumley, with the gesture of one who recovers a

thread. “That is just what I am driving at.”

The fingers of his extended hand felt in the warm afternoon air for a

moment, and then he said “Ah!” in a tone of recovery while she waited

respectfully for the resumed thread.

“You see,” he said, “I regard this process of synthesis, this

substitution of wholesale and collective methods for homely and

individual ones as, under existing conditions, inevitable—inevitable.

It’s the phase we live in, it’s to this we have to adapt ourselves. It

is as little under your control or mine as the movement of the sun

through the zodiac. Practically, that is. And what we have to do is

not, I think, to sigh for lost homes and the age of gold and spade

husbandry, and pigs and hens in the home, and so on, but to make this

new synthetic life tolerable for the mass of men and women, hopeful for

the mass of men and women, a thing developing and ascending. That’s

where your Hostels come in, Lady Harman; that’s where they’re so

important. They’re a pioneer movement. If they succeed—and things in

Sir Isaac’s hands have a way of succeeding at any rate to the paying

point—then there’ll be a headlong rush of imitations, imitating your

good features, imitating your bad features, deepening a groove.... You

see my point?”

“Yes,” she said. “It makes me—more afraid than ever.”

“But hopeful,” said Mr. Brumley, presuming to lay his hand for an

instant on her arm. “It’s big enough to be inspiring.”

“But I’m afraid,” she said.

“It’s laying down the lines of a new social life—no less. And what

makes it so strange, so typical, too, of the way social forces work

nowadays, is that your husband, who has all the instinctive insistence

upon every right and restriction of the family relation in his private

life, who is narrowly, passionately _for_ the home in his own case, who

hates all books and discussion that seem to touch it, should in his

business activities be striking this tremendous new blow at the ancient

organization. For that, you see, is what it amounts to.”

“Yes,” said Lady Harman slowly. “Yes. Of course, he doesn’t know....”

Mr. Brumley was silent for a little while. “You see,” he resumed, “at

the worst this new social life may become a sort of slavery in

barracks; at the best—it might become something very wonderful. My

mind’s been busy now for days thinking just how wonderful the new life

might be. Instead of the old bickering, crowded family home, a new home

of comrades....”

He made another pause, and his thoughts ran off upon a fresh track.

“In looking up all these things I came upon a queer little literature

of pamphlets and so forth, dealing with the case of the shop

assistants. They have a great grievance in what they call the living-in

system. The employers herd them in dormitories over the shops, and

usually feed them by gaslight in the basements; they fine them and keep

an almost intolerable grip upon them; make them go to bed at half-past

ten, make them go to church on Sundays,—all sorts of petty tyrannies.

The assistants are passionately against this, but they’ve got no power

to strike. Where could they go if they struck? Into the street. Only

people who live out and have homes of their own to sulk in _can_

strike. Naturally, therefore, as a preliminary to any other improvement

in the shop assistant’s life, these young people want to live out.

Practically that’s an impossible demand at present, because they

couldn’t get lodgings and live out with any decency at all on what it

costs their employers to lodge and feed them _in_. Well, here you see a

curious possibility for your Hostels. You open the prospect of a

living-out system for shop assistants. But just in the degree in which

you choose to interfere with them, regulate them, bully and deal with

them wholesale through their employers, do you make the new living-out

method approximate to the living-in. _That’s_ a curious side

development, isn’t it?”

Lady Harman appreciated that.

“That’s only the beginning of the business. There’s something more

these Hostels might touch....”

Mr. Brumley gathered himself together for the new aspect. “There’s

marriage,” he said.

“One of the most interesting and unsatisfactory aspects of the life of

the employee to-day—and you know the employee is now in the majority in

the adult population—is this. You see, we hold them celibate. We hold

them celibate for a longer and longer period; the average age at

marriage rises steadily; and so long as they remain celibate we are

prepared with some sort of ideas about the future development of their

social life, clubs, hostels, living-in, and so forth. But at present we

haven’t any ideas at all about the adaptation of the natural pairing

instinct to the new state of affairs. Ultimately the employee marries;

they hold out as long as they possibly can, but ultimately they have

to. They have to, even in the face of an economic system that holds out

no prospects of anything but insecurity and an increasing chance of

trouble and disaster to the employee’s family group. What happens is

that they drop back into a distressful, crippled, insecure imitation of

the old family life as one had it in what I might call the multiplying

periods of history. They start a home,—they dream of a cottage, but

they drift to a lodging, and usually it isn’t the best sort of lodging,

for landladies hate wives and the other lodgers detest babies. Often

the young couple doesn’t have babies. You see, they are more

intelligent than peasants, and intelligence and fecundity vary

reciprocally,” said Mr. Brumley.

“You mean?” interrupted Lady Harman softly.

“There is a world-wide fall in the birth-rate. People don’t have the

families they did.”

“Yes,” said Lady Harman. “I understand now.”

“And the more prosperous or the more sanguine take these suburban

little houses, these hutches that make such places as Hendon nightmares

of monotony, or go into ridiculous jerry-built sham cottages in some

Garden Suburb, where each young wife does her own housework and

pretends to like it. They have a sort of happiness for a time, I

suppose; the woman stops all outside work, the man, very much

handicapped, goes on competing against single men. Then—nothing more

happens. Except difficulties. The world goes dull and grey for them.

They look about for a lodger, perhaps. Have you read Gissing’s _Paying

Guest_?...”

“I suppose,” said Lady Harman, “I suppose it is like that. One tries

not to think it is so.”

“One needn’t let oneself believe that dullness is unhappiness,” said

Mr. Brumley. “I don’t want to paint things sadder than they are. But

it’s not a fine life, it’s not a full life, that life in a

Neo-Malthusian suburban hutch.”

“Neo——?” asked Lady Harman.

“A mere phrase,” said Mr. Brumley hastily. “The extraordinary thing is

that, until you set me looking into these things with your questions,

I’ve always taken this sort of thing for granted, as though it couldn’t

be otherwise. Now I seem to see with a kind of freshness. I’m astounded

at the muddle of it, the waste and aimlessness of it. And here again it

is, Lady Harman, that I think your opportunity comes in. With these

Hostels as they might be projected now, you seem to have the

possibility of a modernized, more collective and civilized family life

than the old close congestion of the single home, and I see no reason

at all why you shouldn’t carry that collective life on to the married

stage. As things are now these little communities don’t go beyond the

pairing—and out they drift to find the homestead they will never

possess. What has been borne in upon me more and more forcibly as I

have gone through your—your nest of problems, is the idea that the new

social—association, that has so extensively replaced the old family

group, might be carried on right through life, that it might work in

with all sorts of other discontents and bad adjustments.... The life of

the women in these little childless or one-or-two-child homes is more

unsatisfactory even than the man’s.”

Mr. Brumley’s face flushed with enthusiasm and he wagged a finger to

emphasize his words. “Why not make Hostels, Lady Harman, for married

couples? Why not try that experiment so many people have talked about

of the conjoint kitchen and refectory, the conjoint nursery, the

collective social life, so that the children who are single children or

at best children in small families of two or three, may have the

advantages of playfellows, and the young mothers still, if they choose,

continue to have a social existence and go on with their professional

or business, work? That’s the next step your Hostels might take....

Incidentally you see this opens a way to a life of relative freedom for

the woman who is married.... I don’t know if you have read Mrs.

Stetson. Yes, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Stetson.... Yes, _Woman and

Economics_, that’s the book.

“I know,” Mr. Brumley went on, “I seem to be opening out your project

like a concertina, but I want you to see just how my thoughts have been

going about all this. I want you to realize I haven’t been idle during

these last few weeks. I know it’s a far cry from what the Hostels are

to all these ideas of what they might begin to be, I know the

difficulties in your way—all sorts of difficulties. But when I think

just how you stand at the very centre of the moulding forces in these

changes....”

He dropped into an eloquent silence.

Lady Harman looked thoughtfully at the sunlight under the trees.

“You think,” she said, “that it comes to as much as all this.”

“More,” said Mr. Brumley.

“I was frightened before. _Now_——You make me feel as though someone had

put the wheel of a motor car in my hand, started it and told me to

steer....”

§7

Lady Harman went home from that talk in a taxi, and on the way she

passed the building operations in Kensington Road. A few weeks ago it

had been a mere dusty field of operation for the house-wreckers; now

its walls were already rising to the second storey. She realized how

swiftly nowadays the search for wisdom can be outstripped by reinforced

concrete.

§8

It was only by slow degrees and rather in the absence of a more

commanding interest than through any invincible quality in their appeal

to her mind that these Hostels became in the next three years the grave

occupation of Lady Harman’s thoughts and energies. She yielded to them

reluctantly. For a long time she wanted to look over them and past them

and discover something—she did not know what—something high and

domineering to which it would be easy to give herself. It was difficult

to give herself to the Hostels. In that Mr. Brumley, actuated by a

mixture of more or less admirable motives, did his best to assist her.

These Hostels alone he thought could give them something upon which

they could meet, give them a common interest and him a method of

service and companionship. It threw the qualities of duty and

justification over their more or less furtive meetings, their little

expeditions together, their quiet frequent association.

Together they made studies of the Girls’ Clubs which are scattered

about London, supplementary homes that have in such places as Walworth

and Soho worked small miracles of civilization. These institutions

appealed to a lower social level than the one their Hostels were to

touch, but they had been organized by capable and understanding minds

and Lady Harman found in one or two of their evening dances and in the

lunch she shared one morning with a row of cheerful young factory girls

from Soho just that quality of concrete realization for which her mind

hungered. Then Mr. Brumley took her once or twice for evening walks,

just when the stream of workers is going home; he battled his way with

her along the footpath of Charing Cross Railway Bridge from the

Waterloo side, they swam in the mild evening sunshine of September

against a trampling torrent of bobbing heads, and afterwards they had

tea together in one of the International Stores near the Strand, where

Mr. Brumley made an unsuccessful attempt to draw out the waitress on

the subject of Babs Wheeler and the recent strike. The young woman

might have talked freely to a man alone or freely to Lady Harman alone

but the combination of the two made her shy. The bridge experience led

to several other expeditions, to see home-going on the tube, at the big

railway termini, on the train—and once they followed up the process to

Streatham and saw how the people pour out of the train at last and

scatter—until at last they are just isolated individuals running up

steps, diving into basements. And then it occurred to Mr. Brumley that

he knew someone who would take them over “Gerrard,” that huge telephone

exchange, and there Lady Harman saw how the National Telephone Company,

as it was in those days, had a care for its staff, the pleasant club

rooms, the rest room, and stood in that queer rendez-vous of messages,

where the “Hello” girl sits all day, wearing a strange metallic

apparatus over ear and mouth, watching small lights that wink

significantly at her and perpetually pulling out and slipping in and

releasing little flexible strings that seem to have a resilient

volition of their own. They hunted out Mrs. Barnet and heard her ideas

about conjoint homes for spinsters in the Garden Suburb. And then they

went over a Training College for elementary teachers and visited the

Post Office and then came back to more unobtrusive contemplation, from

the customer’s little table, of the ministering personalities of the

International Stores.

There were times when all these things seen, seemed to fall into an

entirely explicable system under Mr. Brumley’s exposition, when they

seemed to be giving and most generously giving the clearest indications

of what kind of thing the Hostels had to be, and times when this all

vanished again and her mind became confused and perplexed. She tried to

express just what it was she missed to Mr. Brumley. “One doesn’t,” she

said, “see all of them and what one sees isn’t what we have to do with.

I mean we see them dressed up and respectable and busy and then they go

home and the door shuts. It’s the home that we are going to alter and

replace—and what is it like?” Mr. Brumley took her for walks in

Highbury and the newer parts of Hendon and over to Clapham. “I want to

go inside those doors,” she said.

“That’s just what they won’t let you do,” said Mr. Brumley. “Nobody

visits but relations—and prospective relations, and the only other

social intercourse is over the garden wall. Perhaps I can find books——”

He got her novels by Edwin Pugh and Pett Ridge and Frank Swinnerton and

George Gissing. They didn’t seem to be attractive homes. And it seemed

remarkable to her that no woman had ever given the woman’s view of the

small London home from the inside....

She overcame her own finer scruples and invaded the Burnet household.

Apart from fresh aspects of Susan’s character in the capacity of a

hostess she gained little light from that. She had never felt so

completely outside a home in her life as she did when she was in the

Burnets’ parlour. The very tablecloth on which the tea was spread had

an air of being new and protective of familiar things; the tea was

manifestly quite unlike their customary tea, it was no more intimate

than the confectioner’s shop window from which it mostly came; the

whole room was full of the muffled cries of things hastily covered up

and specially put away. Vivid oblongs on the faded wallpaper betrayed

even a rearrangement of the pictures. Susan’s mother was a little dingy

woman, wearing a very smart new cap to the best of her ability; she had

an air of having been severely shaken up and admonished, and her

general bearing confessed only too plainly how shattered those

preparations had left her. She watched her capable daughter for cues.

Susan’s sisters displayed a disposition to keep their backs against

something and at the earliest opportunity to get into the passage and

leave Susan and her tremendous visitor alone but within earshot. They

started convulsively when they were addressed and insisted on “your

ladyship.” Susan had told them not to but they would. When they

supposed themselves to be unobserved they gave themselves up to the

impassioned inspection of Lady Harman’s costume. Luke had fled into the

street, and in spite of various messages conveyed to him by the

youngest sister he refused to enter until Lady Harman had gone again

and was well out of the way. And Susan was no longer garrulous and at

her ease; she had no pins in her mouth and that perhaps hampered her

speech; she presided flushed and bright-eyed in a state of infectious

nervous tension. Her politeness was awful. Never in all her life had

Lady Harman felt her own lack of real conversational power so acutely.

She couldn’t think of a thing that mightn’t be construed as an

impertinence and that didn’t remind her of district visiting. Yet

perhaps she succeeded better than she supposed.

“What a family you have had!” she said to Mrs. Burnet. “I have four

little girls, and I find them as much as we can manage.”

“You’re young yet, my ladyship,” said Mrs. Burnet, “and they aren’t

always the blessings they seem to be. It’s the rearing’s the

difficulty.”

“They’re all such healthy-looking—people.”

“I wish we could get hold of Luke, my ladyship, and show you _’im_.

He’s that sturdy. And yet when ’e was a little feller——”

She was launched for a time on those details that were always so dear

to the mothers of the past order of things. Her little spate of

reminiscences was the only interlude of naturalness in an afternoon of

painfully constrained behaviour....

Lady Harman returned a trifle shamefacedly from this abortive dip into

realities to Mr. Brumley’s speculative assurance.

§9

While Lady Harman was slowly accustoming her mind to this idea that the

development of those Hostels was her appointed career in life, so far

as a wife may have a career outside her connubial duties, and while she

was getting insensibly to believe in Mr. Brumley’s theory of their

exemplary social importance, the Hostels themselves with a haste that

she felt constantly was premature, were achieving a concrete existence.

They were developing upon lines that here and there disregarded Mr.

Brumley’s ideas very widely; they gained in practicality what perhaps

they lost in social value, through the entirely indirect relations

between Mr. Brumley on the one hand and Sir Isaac on the other. For Sir

Isaac manifestly did not consider and would have been altogether

indisposed to consider Mr. Brumley as entitled to plan or suggest

anything of the slightest importance in this affair, and whatever of

Mr. Brumley reached that gentleman reached him in a very carefully

transmitted form as Lady Harman’s own unaided idea. Sir Isaac had sound

Victorian ideas about the place of literature in life. If anyone had

suggested to him that literature could supply ideas to practical men he

would have had a choking fit, and he regarded Mr. Brumley’s sedulous

attentions to these hostel schemes with feelings, the kindlier elements

of whose admixture was a belief that ultimately he would write some

elegant and respectful approval of the established undertaking.

The entire admixture of Sir Isaac’s feelings towards Mr. Brumley was by

no means kindly. He disliked any man to come near Lady Harman, any man

at all; he had a faint uneasiness even about waiters and hotel porters

and the clergy. Of course he had agreed she should have friends of her

own and he couldn’t very well rescind that without something definite

to go upon. But still this persistent follower kept him uneasy. He kept

this uneasiness within bounds by reassuring himself upon the point of

Lady Harman’s virtuous obedience, and so reassured he was able to

temper his distrust with a certain contempt. The man was in love with

his wife; that was manifest enough, and dangled after her.... Let him

dangle. What after all did he get for it?...

But occasionally he broke through this complacency, betrayed a fitful

ingenious jealousy, interfered so that she missed appointments and had

to break engagements. He was now more and more a being of pathological

moods. The subtle changes of secretion that were hardening his

arteries, tightening his breath and poisoning his blood, reflected

themselves upon his spirit in an uncertainty of temper and exasperating

fatigues and led to startling outbreaks. Then for a time he would

readjust himself, become in his manner reasonable again, become

accessible.

He was the medium through which this vision that was growing up in her

mind of a reorganized social life, had to translate itself, as much as

it could ever translate itself, into reality. He called these hostels

her hostels, made her the approver of all he did, but he kept every

particle of control in his own hands. All her ideas and desires had to

be realized by him. And his attitudes varied with his moods; sometimes

he was keenly interested in the work of organization and then he

terrified her by his bias towards acute economies, sometimes he was

resentful at the burthen of the whole thing, sometimes he seemed to

scent Brumley or at least some moral influence behind her mind and met

her suggestions with a bitter resentment as though any suggestion must

needs be a disloyalty to him. There was a remarkable outbreak upon her

first tentative proposal that the hostel system might ultimately be

extended to married couples.

He heard her with his lips pressing tighter and tighter together until

they were yellow white and creased with a hundred wicked little

horizontal creases. Then he interrupted her with silent gesticulations.

Then words came.

“I never did, Elly,” he said. “I never did. Reely—there are times when

you ain’t rational. Married couples who’re assistants in shops and

places!”

For a little while he sought some adequate expression of his point of

view.

“Nice thing to go keeping a place for these chaps to have their cheap

bits of skirt in,” he said at last.

Then further: “If a man wants a girl let him work himself up until he

can keep her. Married couples indeed!”

He began to expand the possibilities of the case with a quite unusual

vividness. “Double beds in each cubicle, I suppose,” he said, and

played for a time about this fancy.... “Well, to hear such an idea from

you of all people, Elly. I never did.”

He couldn’t leave it alone. He had to go on to the bitter end with the

vision she had evoked in his mind. He was jealous, passionately

jealous, it was only too manifest, of the possible happinesses of these

young people. He was possessed by that instinctive hatred for the

realized love of others which lies at the base of so much of our moral

legislation. The bare thought—whole corridors of bridal chambers!—made

his face white and his hand quiver. _His_ young men and young women!

The fires of a hundred Vigilance Committees blazed suddenly in his

reddened eyes. He might have been a concentrated society for preventing

the rapid multiplication of the unfit. The idea of facilitating early

marriages was manifestly shameful to him, a disgraceful service to

render, a job for Pandarus. What was she thinking of? Elly of all

people! Elly who had been as innocent as driven snow before Georgina

came interfering!

It ended in a fit of abuse and a panting seizure, and for a day or so

he was too ill to resume the discussion, to do more than indicate a

disgusted aloofness....

And then it may be the obscure chemicals at work within him changed

their phase of reaction. At any rate he mended, became gentler, was

more loving to his wife than he had been for some time and astonished

her by saying that if she wanted Hostels for married couples, it wasn’t

perhaps so entirely unreasonable. Selected cases, he stipulated, it

would have to be and above a certain age limit, sober people. “It might

even be a check on immorality,” he said, “properly managed....”

But that was as far as his acquiescence went and Lady Harman was

destined to be a widow before she saw the foundation of any Hostel for

young married couples in London.

§10

The reinforced concrete rose steadily amidst Lady Harman’s questionings

and Mr. Brumley’s speculations. The Harmans returned from a

recuperative visit to Kissingen, to which Sir Isaac had gone because of

a suspicion that his Marienbad specialist had failed to cure him

completely in order to get him back again, to find the first of the

five hostels nearly ripe for its opening. There had to be a manageress

and a staff organized and neither Lady Harman nor Mr. Brumley were

prepared for that sort of business. A number of abler people however

had become aware of the opportunities of the new development and Mrs.

Hubert Plessington, that busy publicist, got the Harmans to a helpful

little dinner, before Lady Harman had the slightest suspicion of the

needs that were now so urgent. There shone a neat compact widow, a Mrs.

Pembrose, who had buried her husband some eighteen months ago after

studying social questions with him with great éclat for ten happy

years, and she had done settlement work and Girls’ Club work and had

perhaps more power of organization—given a suitable director to provide

for her lack of creativeness, Mrs. Plessington told Sir Isaac, than any

other woman in London. Afterwards Sir Isaac had an opportunity of

talking to her; he discussed the suffrage movement with her and was

pleased to find her views remarkably sympathetic with his own. She was,

he declared, a sensible woman, anxious to hear a man out and capable,

it was evident, of a detachment from feminist particularism rare in her

sex at the present time. Lady Harman had seen less of the lady that

evening, she was chiefly struck by her pallor, by a kind of animated

silence about her, and by the deep impression her capabilities had made

on Mr. Plessington, who had hitherto seemed to her to be altogether too

overworked in admiring his wife to perceive the points of any other

human being. Afterwards Lady Harman was surprised to hear from one or

two quite separate people that Mrs. Pembrose was the only possible

person to act as general director of the new hostels. Lady

Beach-Mandarin was so enthusiastic in the matter that she made a

special call. “You’ve known her a long time?” said Lady Harman.

“Long enough to see what a chance she is!” said Lady Beach-Mandarin.

Lady Harman perceived equivocation. “Now how long is that really?” she

said.

“Count not in years, nor yet in moments on a dial,” said Lady

Beach-Mandarin with a fine air of quotation. “I’m thinking of her quiet

strength of character. Mrs. Plessington brought her round to see me the

other afternoon.”

“Did she talk to you?”

“I saw, my dear, I saw.”

A vague aversion from Mrs. Pembrose was in some mysterious way

strengthened in Lady Harman by this extraordinary convergence of

testimony. When Sir Isaac mentioned the lady with a kind of forced

casualness at breakfast as the only conceivable person for the work of

initiation and organization that lay before them, Lady Harman

determined to see more of her. With a quickened subtlety she asked her

to tea. “I have heard so much of your knowledge of social questions and

I want you to advise me about my work,” she wrote, and then scribbled a

note to Mr. Brumley to call and help her judgments.

Mrs. Pembrose appeared dressed in dove colour with a near bonnetesque

straw hat to match. She had a pale slightly freckled complexion, little

hard blue-grey eyes with that sort of nose which redeems a squarish

shape by a certain delicacy of structure; her chin was long and

protruding and her voice had a wooden resonance and a ghost of a lisp.

Her talk had a false consecutiveness due to the frequent use of the

word “Yes.” Her bearing was erect and her manner guardedly alert.

From the first she betrayed a conviction that Mr. Brumley was

incidental and unnecessary and that her real interest lay with Sir

Isaac. She might almost have been in possession of special information

upon that point.

“Yes,” she said, “I’m rather specially _up_ in this sort of question. I

worked side by side with my poor Frederick all his life, we were

collaborators, and this question of the urban distributive employee was

one of his special studies. Yes, he would have been tremendously

interested in Sir Isaac’s project.”

“You know what we are doing?”

“Every one is interested in Sir Isaac’s enterprise. Naturally. Yes, I

think I have a fairly good idea of what you mean to do. It’s a great

experiment.”

“You think it is likely to answer?” said Mr. Brumley.

“In Sir Isaac’s hands it is _very_ likely to answer,” said Mrs.

Pembrose with her eye steadily on Lady Harman.

There was a little pause. “Yes, now you wrote of difficulties and

drawing upon my experience. Of course just now I’m quite at Sir Isaac’s

disposal.”

Lady Harman found herself thrust perforce into the rôle of her

husband’s spokeswoman. She asked Mrs. Pembrose if she knew the exact

nature of the experiment they contemplated.

Mrs. Pembrose hadn’t a doubt she knew. Of course for a long time and

more especially in the Metropolis where the distances were so great and

increasing so rapidly, there had been a gathering feeling not only in

the catering trade, but in very many factory industries, against the

daily journey to employment and home again. It was irksome and wasteful

to everyone concerned, there was a great loss in control, later hours

of beginning, uncertain service. “Yes, my husband calculated the hours

lost in London every week, hours that are neither work nor play, mere

tiresome stuffy journeying. It made an enormous sum. It worked out at

hundreds of working lives per week.” Sir Isaac’s project was to abolish

all that, to bring his staff into line with the drapers and grocers who

kept their assistants on the living-in system....

“I thought people objected to the living-in system,” said Mr. Brumley.

“There’s an agitation against it on the part of a small Trade Union of

Shop Assistants,” said Mrs. Pembrose. “But they have no real

alternative to propose.”

“And this isn’t Living In,” said Mr. Brumley.

“Yes, I think you’ll find it is,” said Mrs. Pembrose with a nice little

expert smile.

“Living-in isn’t _quite_ what we want,” said Lady Harman slowly and

with knitted brows, seeking a method of saying just what the difference

was to be.

“Yes, not perhaps in the strictest sense,” said Mrs. Pembrose giving

her no chance, and went on to make fine distinctions. Strictly

speaking, living-in meant sleeping over the shop and eating underneath

it, and this hostel idea was an affair of a separate house and of

occupants who would be assistants from a number of shops. “Yes,

collectivism, if you like,” said Mrs. Pembrose. But the word

collectivism, she assured them, wouldn’t frighten her, she was a

collectivist, a socialist, as her husband had always been. The day was

past when socialist could be used as a term of reproach. “Yes, instead

of the individual employer of labour, we already begin to have the

collective employer of labour, with a labour bureau—and so on. We share

them. We no longer compete for them. It’s the keynote of the time.”

Mr. Brumley followed this with a lifted eyebrow. He was still new to

these modern developments of collectivist ideas, this socialism of the

employer.

The whole thing Mrs. Pembrose declared was a step forward in

civilization, it was a step in the organization and discipline of

labour. Of course the unruly and the insubordinate would cry out. But

the benefits were plain enough, space, light, baths, association,

reasonable recreations, opportunities for improvement——

“But freedom?” said Mr. Brumley.

Mrs. Pembrose inclined her head a little on one side, looked at him

this time and smiled the expert smile again. “If you knew as much as I

do of the difficulties of social work,” she said, “you wouldn’t be very

much in love with freedom.”

“But—it’s the very substance of the soul!”

“You must permit me to differ,” said Mrs. Pembrose, and for weeks

afterwards Mr. Brumley was still seeking a proper polite retort to that

difficult counterstroke. It was such a featureless reply. It was like

having your nose punched suddenly by a man without a face.

They descended to a more particular treatment of the problems ahead.

Mrs. Pembrose quoted certain precedents from the Girls’ Club Union.

“The people Lady Harman contemplates—entertaining,” said Mr. Brumley,

“are of a slightly more self-respecting type than those young women.”

“It’s largely veneer,” said Mrs. Pembrose....

“Detestable little wretch,” said Mr. Brumley when at last she had

departed. He was very uncomfortable. “She’s just the quintessence of

all one fears and dreads about these new developments, she’s perfect—in

that way—self-confident, arrogant, instinctively aggressive, with a

tremendous class contempt. There’s a multitude of such people about who

hate the employed classes, who _want_ to see them broken in and

subjugated. I suppose that kind of thing is in humanity. Every boy’s

school has louts of that kind, who love to torment fags for their own

good, who spring upon a chance smut on the face of a little boy to

scrub him painfully, who have a kind of lust to dominate under the

pretence of improving. I remember——But never mind that now. Keep that

woman out of things or your hostels work for the devil.”

“Yes,” said Lady Harman. “Certainly she shall not——. No.”

But there she reckoned without her husband.

“I’ve settled it,” he said to her at dinner two nights later.

“What?”

“Mrs. Pembrose.”

“You’ve not made her——?”

“Yes, I have. And I think we’re very lucky to get her.”

“But—Isaac! I don’t want her!”

“You should have told me that before, Elly. I’ve made an agreement.”

She suddenly wanted to cry. “But——You said I should manage these

Hostels myself.”

“So you shall, Elly. But we must have somebody. When we go abroad and

all that and for all the sort of business stuff and looking after

things that you can’t do. We’ve _got_ to have her. She’s the only thing

going of her sort.”

“But—I don’t like her.”

“Well,” cried Sir Isaac, “why in goodness couldn’t you tell me that

before, Elly? I’ve been and engaged her.”

She sat pale-faced staring at him with wide open eyes in which tears of

acute disappointment were shining. She did not dare another word

because of her trick of weeping.

“It’s all right, Elly,” said Sir Isaac. “How touchy you are! Anything

you want about these Hostels of yours, you’ve only got to tell me and

it’s done.”

§11

Lady Harman was still in a state of amazement at the altered prospects

of her hostels when the day arrived for the formal opening of the first

of these in Bloomsbury. They made a little public ceremony of it in

spite of her reluctance, and Mr. Brumley had to witness things from out

of the general crowd and realize just how completely he wasn’t in it,

in spite of all his efforts. Mrs. Pembrose was modestly conspicuous,

like the unexpected in all human schemes. There were several reporters

present, and Horatio Blenker who was going to make a loyal leader about

it, to be followed by one or two special articles for the _Old Country

Gazette_.

Horatio had procured Mrs. Blapton for the opening after some

ineffectual angling for the Princess Adeline, and the thing was done at

half-past three in the afternoon. In the bright early July sunshine

outside the new building there was a crimson carpet down on the

pavement and an awning above it, there was a great display of

dog-daisies at the windows and on the steps leading up to the locked

portals, an increasing number of invited people lurked shyly in the

ground-floor rooms ready to come out by the back way and cluster

expectantly when Mrs. Blapton arrived, Graper the staff manager and two

assistants in dazzling silk hats seemed everywhere, the rabbit-like

architect had tried to look doggish in a huge black silk tie and only

looked more like a rabbit than ever, and there was a steady driftage of

small boys and girls, nurses with perambulators, cab touts, airing

grandfathers and similar unemployed people towards the promise of the

awning, the carpet and the flowers. The square building in all its

bravery of Doulton ware and yellow and mauve tiles and its great gilt

inscription

INTERNATIONAL HOSTELS

above the windows of the second storey seemed typical of all those

modern forces that are now invading and dispelling the ancient

residential peace of Bloomsbury.

Mrs. Blapton appeared only five minutes late, escorted by Bertie Trevor

and her husband’s spare secretary. Graper became so active at the sight

of her that he seemed more like some beast out of the Apocalypse with

seven hands and ten hats than a normal human being; he marshalled the

significant figures into their places, the door was unlocked without

serious difficulty, and Lady Harman found herself in the main corridor

beside Mr. Trevor and a little behind Mrs. Blapton, engaged in being

shown over the new creation. Sir Isaac (driven by Graper at his elbow)

was in immediate attendance on the great political lady, and Mrs.

Pembrose, already with an air of proprietorship, explained glibly on

her other hand. Close behind Lady Harman came Lady Beach-Mandarin,

expanding like an appreciative gas in a fine endeavour to nestle

happily into the whole big place, and with her were Mrs. Hubert

Plessington and Mr. Pope, one of those odd people who are called

publicists because one must call them something, and who take chairs

and political sides and are vice-presidents of everything and organize

philanthropies, write letters to the papers and cannot let the occasion

pass without saying a few words and generally prevent the institutions

of this country from falling out of human attention. He was a little

abstracted in his manner, every now and then his lips moved as he

imagined a fresh turn to some classic platitude; anyone who knew him

might have foretold the speech into which he presently broke. He did

this in the refectory where there was a convenient step up at the end.

Beginning with the customary confession of incontinence, “could not let

the occasion pass,” he declared that he would not detain them long, but

he felt that everyone there would agree with him that they shared that

day in no slight occasion, no mean enterprise, that here was one of the

most promising, one of the most momentous, nay! he would go further and

add with due deference to them all, one of the most pregnant of social

experiments in modern social work. In the past he had himself—if he

might for a moment allow a personal note to creep into his

observations, he himself had not been unconnected with industrial

development.—(Querulous voice, “Who the devil is that?” and whispered

explanations on the part of Horatio Blenker; “Pope—very good man—East

Purblow Experiment—Payment in Kind instead of Wages—Yes.”)....

Lady Harman ceased to listen to Mr. Pope’s strained but not unhappy

tenor. She had heard him before, and she had heard his like endlessly.

He was the larger moiety of every public meeting she had ever attended.

She had ceased even to marvel at the dull self-satisfaction that

possessed him. To-day her capacity for marvelling was entirely taken up

by the details of this extraordinary reality which had sprung from her

dream of simple, kindly, beautiful homes for distressed and overworked

young women; nothing in the whole of life had been so amazing since

that lurid occasion when she had been the agonized vehicle for the

entry of Miss Millicent Harman upon this terrestrial scene. It was all

so entirely what she could never have thought possible. A few words

from other speakers followed, Mrs. Blapton, with the young secretary at

hand to prompt, said something, and Sir Isaac was poked forwards to

say, “Thank you very much. It’s all my wife’s doing, really.... Oh dash

it! Thank you very much.” It had the effect of being the last vestige

of some more elaborate piece of eloquence that had suddenly

disintegrated in his mind.

“And now, Elly,” he said, as their landaulette took them home, “you’re

beginning to have your hostels.”

“Then they _are_ my hostels?” she asked abruptly.

“Didn’t I say they were?” The satisfaction of his face was qualified by

that fatigued irritability that nowadays always followed any exertion

or excitement.

“If I want things done? If I want things altered?”

“Of course you may, of course you may. What’s the matter with you,

Elly? What’s been putting ideers into your head? You got to have a

directress to the thing; you must have a woman of education who knows a

bit about things to look after the matrons and so on. Very likely she

isn’t everything you want. She’s the only one we could get, and I don’t

see——. Here I go and work hard for a year and more getting these things

together to please you, and then suddenly you don’t like ’em. There’s a

lot of the spoilt child in you, Elly—first and last. There they

are....”

They were silent for the rest of the journey to Putney, both being

filled with incommunicable things.

§12

And now Lady Harman began to share the trouble of all those who let

their minds pass out of the circle of their immediate affections with

any other desire save interest and pleasure. Assisted in this unhappy

development by the sedulous suggestions of Mr. Brumley she had begun to

offend against the most sacred law in our sensible British code, she

was beginning to take herself and her hostels seriously, and think that

it mattered how she worked for them and what they became. She tried to

give all the attention her children’s upbringing, her husband’s

ailments and the general demands of her household left free, to this

complex, elusive, puzzling and worrying matter. Instead of thinking

that these hostels were just old hostels and that you start them and

put in a Mrs. Pembrose and feel very benevolent and happy and go away,

she had come to realize partly by dint of her own conscientious

thinking and partly through Mr. Brumley’s strenuous resolve that she

should not take Sir Isaac’s gift horse without the most exhaustive

examination of its quality, that this new work, like most new things in

human life, was capable not only of admirable but of altogether

detestable consequences, and that it rested with her far more than with

any other human being to realize the former and avoid the latter. And

directly one has got to this critical pose towards things, just as one

ceases to be content with things anyhow and to want them precisely

somehow, one begins to realize just how intractable, confused and

disingenuous are human affairs. Mr. Brumley had made himself see and

had made her see how inevitable these big wholesale ways of doing

things, these organizations and close social co-operations, have become

unless there is to be a social disintegration and set back, and he had

also brought himself and her to realize how easily they may develop

into a new servitude, how high and difficult is the way towards methods

of association that will ensure freedom and permit people to live fine

individual lives. Every step towards organization raises a crop of

vices peculiar to itself, fresh developments of the egotism and greed

and vanity of those into whose hands there falls control, fresh

instances of that hostile pedantry which seems so natural to officials

and managers, insurgencies and obstinacies and suspicions on the part

of everyone. The poor lady had supposed that when one’s intentions were

obviously benevolent everyone helped. She only faced the realities of

this task that she had not so much set for herself as had happened to

her, after dreadful phases of disillusionment and dismay.

“These hostels,” said Mr. Brumley in his most prophetic mood, “can be

made free, fine things—or no—just as all the world of men we are living

in, could be made a free, fine world. And it’s our place to see they

are that. It’s just by being generous and giving ourselves, helping

without enslaving, and giving without exacting gratitude, planning and

protecting with infinite care, that we bring that world nearer....

Since I’ve known you I’ve come to know such things are possible....”

The Bloomsbury hostel started upon its career with an embarrassing

difficulty. The young women of the International Stores Refreshment

Departments for whom these institutions were primarily intended

displayed what looked extremely like a concerted indisposition to come

in. They had been circularized and informed that henceforth, to ensure

the “good social tone” of the staff, all girls not living at home with

their parents or close relations would be expected to reside in the new

hostels. There followed an attractive account of the advantages of the

new establishment. In drawing up this circular with the advice of Mrs.

Pembrose, Sir Isaac had overlooked the fact that his management was

very imperfectly informed just where the girls did live, and that after

its issue it was very improbable that it would be possible to find out

this very necessary fact. But the girls seemed to be unaware of this

ignorance at headquarters, Miss Babs Wheeler was beginning to feel a

little bored by good behaviour and crave for those dramatic cessations

at the lunch hour, those speeches, with cheers, from a table top, those

interviews with reporters, those flushed and eager councils of war and

all the rest of that good old crisis feeling that had previously ended

so happily. Mr. Graper came to his proprietor headlong, Mrs. Pembrose

was summoned and together they contemplated the lamentable possibility

of this great social benefit they had done the world being discredited

at the outset by a strike of the proposed beneficiaries. Sir Isaac fell

into a state of vindictiveness and was with difficulty restrained by

Mr. Graper from immediately concluding the negotiations that were

pending with three great Oxford Street firms that would have given over

the hostels to their employees and closed them against the

International girls for ever.

Even Mrs. Pembrose couldn’t follow Sir Isaac in that, and remarked: “As

I understand it, the whole intention was to provide proper housing for

our own people first and foremost.”

“And haven’t we provided it, _damn_ them?” said Sir Isaac in white

desperation....

It was Lady Harman who steered the newly launched institutions through

these first entanglements. It was her first important advantage in the

struggle that had hitherto been going relentlessly against her. She now

displayed her peculiar gift, a gift that indeed is unhappily all too

rare among philanthropists, the gift of not being able to classify the

people with whom she was dealing, but of continuing to regard them as a

multitude of individualized souls as distinct and considerable as

herself. That makes no doubt for slowness and “inefficiency” and

complexity in organization, but it does make for understandings. And

now, through a little talk with Susan Burnet about her sister’s

attitude upon the dispute, she was able to take the whole situation in

the flank.

Like many people who are not easily clear, Lady Harman when she was

clear acted with very considerable decision, which was perhaps none the

less effective because of the large softnesses of her manner.

She surprised Sir Isaac by coming of her own accord into his study,

where with an altogether novel disfavour he sat contemplating the

detailed plans for the Sydenham Hostel. “I think I’ve found out what

the trouble is,” she said.

“What trouble?”

“About my hostel.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been finding out what the girls are saying.”

“They’d say anything.”

“I don’t think they’re clever enough for that,” said Lady Harman after

consideration. She recovered her thread. “You see, Isaac, they’ve been

frightened by the Rules. I didn’t know you had printed a set of Rules.”

“One must _have_ rules, Elly.”

“In the background,” she decided. “But you see these Rules—were made

conspicuous. They were printed in two colours on wall cards just

exactly like that list of rules and scale of fines you had to

withdraw——”

“I know,” said Sir Isaac, shortly.

“It reminded the girls. And that circular that seems to threaten them

if they don’t give up their lodgings and come in. And the way the front

is got up to look just exactly like one of the refreshment-room

branches—it makes them feel it will be un-homelike, and that there will

be a kind of repetition in the evening of all the discipline and

regulations they have to put up with during the day.”

“Have to put up with!” murmured Sir Isaac.

“I wish that had been thought of sooner. If we had made the places look

a little more ordinary and called them Osborne House or something a

little old-fashioned like that, something with a touch of the Old Queen

about it and all that kind of thing.”

“We can’t go to the expense of taking down all those big gilt letters

just to please the fancies of Miss Babs Wheeler.”

“It’s too late now to do that, perhaps. But we could do something, I

think, to remove the suspicions ... I want, Isaac——I think——” She

pulled herself together to announce her determination. “I think if I

were to go to the girls and meet a delegation of them, and just talk to

them plainly about what we mean by this hostel.”

“_You_ can’t go making speeches.”

“It would just be talking to them.”

“It’s such a Come Down,” said Sir Isaac, after a momentary

contemplation of the possibility.

For some time they talked without getting very far from these positions

they had assumed. At last Sir Isaac shifted back upon his expert.

“Can’t we talk about it to Mrs. Pembrose? She knows more about this

sort of business than we do.”

“I’m not going to talk to Mrs. Pembrose,” said Lady Harman, after a

little interval. Some unusual quality in her quiet voice made Sir Isaac

lift his eyes to her face for a moment.

So one Saturday afternoon, Lady Harman had a meeting with a roomful of

recalcitrant girls at the Regent Street Refreshment Branch, which

looked very odd to her with grey cotton wrappers over everything and

its blinds down, and for the first time she came face to face with the

people for whom almost in spite of herself she was working. It was a

meeting summoned by the International Branch of the National Union of

Waitresses and Miss Babs Wheeler and Mr. Graper were so to speak the

north and south poles of the little group upon the improvised platform

from which Lady Harman was to talk to the gathering. She would have

liked the support of Mr. Brumley, but she couldn’t contrive any

unostentatious way of bringing him into the business without putting it

upon a footing that would have involved the appearance of Sir Isaac and

Mrs. Pembrose and—everybody. And essentially it wasn’t to be everybody.

It was to be a little talk.

Lady Harman rather liked the appearance of Miss Babs Wheeler, and met

more than an answering approval in that insubordinate young woman’s

eye. Miss Wheeler was a minute swaggering person, much akimbo, with a

little round blue-eyed innocent face that shone with delight at the

lark of living. Her three companions who were in the lobby with her to

receive and usher in Lady Harman seemed just as young, but they were

relatively unilluminated except by their manifest devotion to their

leader. They displayed rather than concealed their opinion of her as a

“dear” and a “fair wonder.” And the meeting generally it seemed to her

was a gathering of very human young women, rather restless, then agog

to see her and her clothes, and then somehow allayed by her appearance

and quite amiably attentive to what she had to say. A majority were

young girls dressed with the cheap smartness of the suburbs, the rest

were for the most part older and dingier, and here and there were

dotted young ladies of a remarkable and questionable smartness. In the

front row, full of shy recognitions and a little disguised by an

unfamiliar hat was Susan’s sister Alice.

As Lady Harman had made up her mind that she was not going to deliver a

speech she felt no diffidence in speaking. She was far too intent on

her message to be embarrassed by any thought of the effect she was

producing. She talked as she might have talked in one of her easier

moods to Mr. Brumley. And as she talked it happened that Miss Babs

Wheeler and quite a number of the other girls present watched her face

and fell in love with her.

She began with her habitual prelude. “You see,” she said, and stopped

and began again. She wanted to tell them and with a clumsy simplicity

she told them how these Hostels had arisen out of her desire that they

should have something better than the uncomfortable lodgings in which

they lived. They weren’t a business enterprise, but they weren’t any

sort of charity. “And I wanted them to be the sort of place in which

you would feel quite free. I hadn’t any sort of intention of having you

interfered with. I hate being interfered with myself, and I understand

just as well as anyone can that you don’t like it either. I wanted

these Hostels to be the sort of place that you might perhaps after a

time almost manage and run for yourselves. You might have a committee

or something.... Only you know it isn’t always easy to do as one wants.

Things don’t always go in this world as one wants them to

go—particularly if one isn’t clever.” She lost herself for a moment at

that point, and then went on to say she didn’t like the new rules. They

had been drawn up in a hurry and she had only read them after they were

printed. All sorts of things in them——

She seemed to be losing her theme again, and Mr. Graper handed her the

offending card, a big varnished wall placard, with eyelets and tape

complete. She glanced at it. For example, she said, it wasn’t her idea

to have fines. (Great and long continued applause.) There was something

she had always disliked about fines. (Renewed applause.) But these

rules could easily be torn up. And as she said this and as the meeting

broke into acquiescence again it occurred to her that there was the

card of rules in her hands, and nothing could be simpler than to tear

it up there and then. It resisted her for a moment, she compressed her

lips and then she had it in halves. This tearing was so satisfactory to

her that she tore it again and then again. As she tore it, she had a

pleasant irrational feeling that she was tearing Mrs. Pembrose. Mr.

Graper’s face betrayed his shocked feelings, and the meeting which had

become charged with a strong desire to show how entirely it approved of

her, made a crowning attempt at applause. They hammered umbrellas on

the floor, they clapped hands, they rattled chairs and gave a shrill

cheer. A chair was broken.

“I wish,” said Lady Harman when that storm had abated, “you’d come and

look at the Hostel. Couldn’t you come next Saturday afternoon? We could

have a stand-up tea and you could see the place and then afterwards

your committee and I—and my husband—could make out a real set of

rules....”

She went on for some little time longer, she appealed to them with all

the strength of her honest purpose to help her to make this possible

good thing a real good thing, not to suspect, not to be hard on

her—“and my husband”—not to make a difficult thing impossible, it was

so easy to do that, and when she finished she was in the happiest

possession of her meeting. They came thronging round her with flushed

faces and bright eyes, they wanted to come near her, wanted to touch

her, wanted to assure her that for her they were quite prepared to live

in any kind of place. For her. “You come and talk to us, Lady Harman,”

said one; “_we’ll_ show you.”

“Nobody hasn’t told us, Lady Harman, how these Hostels were _yours_.”

“You come and talk to us again, Lady Harman.” ...

They didn’t wait for the following Saturday. On Monday morning Mrs.

Pembrose received thirty-seven applications to take up rooms.

§13

For the next few years it was to be a matter of recurrent

heart-searching for Lady Harman whether she had been profoundly wise or

extremely foolish in tearing up that card of projected rules. At the

time it seemed the most natural and obvious little action imaginable;

it was long before she realized just how symbolical and determining a

few movements of the hand and wrist can be. It fixed her line not so

much for herself as for others. It put her definitely, much more

definitely than her convictions warranted, on the side of freedom

against discipline. For indeed her convictions like most of our

convictions kept along a tortuous watershed between these two. It is

only a few rare extravagant spirits who are wholly for the warp or

wholly for the woof of human affairs.

The girls applauded and loved her. At one stroke she had acquired the

terrible liability of partisans. They made her their champion and

sanction; she was responsible for an endless succession of difficulties

that flowered out of their interpretations of her act. These Hostels

that had seemed passing out of her control, suddenly turned back upon

her and took possession of her.

And they were never simple difficulties. Right and wrong refused to

unravel for her; each side of every issue seemed to be so often in

suicidal competition with its antagonist for the inferior case. If the

forces of order and discipline showed themselves perennially harsh and

narrow, it did not blind her perplexed eyes to the fact that the girls

were frequently extremely naughty. She wished very often, she did so

wish—they wouldn’t be. They set out with a kind of eagerness for

conflict.

Their very loyalty to her expressed itself not so much in any sustained

attempt to make the hostels successful as in cheering inconveniently,

in embarrassing declarations of a preference, in an ingenious and

systematic rudeness to anyone suspected of imperfect devotion to her.

The first comers into the Hostels were much more like the swelling

inrush of a tide than, as Mrs. Pembrose would have preferred, like

something laid on through a pipe, and when this lady wanted to go on

with the old rules until Sir Isaac had approved of the new, the new

arrivals went into the cutting-out room and manifested. Lady Harman had

to be telephoned for to allay the manifestation.

And then arose questions of deportment, trivial in themselves, but of

the gravest moment for the welfare of the hostels. There was a phrase

about “noisy or improper conduct” in the revised rules. Few people

would suspect a corridor, ten feet wide and two hundred feet long, as a

temptation to impropriety, but Mrs. Pembrose found it was so. The

effect of the corridors upon undisciplined girls quite unaccustomed to

corridors was for a time most undesirable. For example they were moved

to _run_ along them violently. They ran races along them, when they

overtook they jostled, when they were overtaken they squealed. The

average velocity in the corridors of the lady occupants of the

Bloomsbury Hostel during the first fortnight of its existence was seven

miles an hour. Was that violence? Was that impropriety? The building

was all steel construction, but one _heard_ even in the Head Matron’s

room. And then there was the effect of the rows and rows of windows

opening out upon the square. The square had some pleasant old trees and

it was attractive to look down into their upper branches, where the

sparrows mobbed and chattered perpetually, and over them at the

chimneys and turrets and sky signs of the London world. The girls

looked. So far they were certainly within their rights. But they did

not look modestly, they did not look discreetly. They looked out of

wide-open windows, they even sat perilously and protrudingly on the

window sills conversing across the façade from window to window,

attracting attention, and once to Mrs. Pembrose’s certain knowledge a

man in the street joined in. It was on a Sunday morning, too, a

Bloomsbury Sunday morning!

But graver things were to rouse the preventive prohibitionist in the

soul of Mrs. Pembrose. There was the visiting of one another’s rooms

and cubicles. Most of these young people had never possessed or dreamt

of possessing a pretty and presentable apartment to themselves, and the

first effect of this was to produce a decorative outbreak, a vigorous

framing of photographs and hammering of nails (“dust-gathering

litter.”—_Mrs. Pembrose_) and then—visiting. They visited at all hours

and in all costumes; they sat in groups of three or four, one on the

chair and the rest on the bed conversing into late hours,—entirely

uncensored conversations too often accompanied by laughter. When Mrs.

Pembrose took this to Lady Harman she found her extraordinarily blind

to the conceivable evils of this free intercourse. “But Lady Harman!”

said Mrs. Pembrose, with a note of horror, “some of them—kiss each

other!”

“But if they’re fond of each other,” said Lady Harman. “I’m sure I

don’t see——”

And when the floor matrons were instructed to make little surprise

visits up and down the corridors the girls who occupied rooms took to

locking their doors—and Lady Harman seemed inclined to sustain their

right to do that. The floor matrons did what they could to exercise

authority, one or two were former department manageresses, two were

ex-elementary teachers, crowded out by younger and more certificated

rivals, one, and the most trustworthy one, Mrs. Pembrose found, was an

ex-wardress from Holloway. The natural result of these secret talkings

and conferrings in the rooms became apparent presently in some mild

ragging and in the concoction of petty campaigns of annoyance designed

to soften the manners of the more authoritative floor matrons. Here

again were perplexing difficulties. If a particular floor matron has a

clear commanding note in her voice, is it or is it not “violent and

improper” to say “Haw!” in clear commanding tones whenever you suppose

her to be within earshot? As for the door-locking Mrs. Pembrose settled

that by carrying off all the keys.

Complaints and incidents drifted towards definite scenes and

“situations.” Both sides in this continuing conflict of dispositions

were so definite, so intolerant, to the mind of the lady with the

perplexed dark eyes who mediated. Her reason was so much with the

matrons; her sympathies so much with the girls. She did not like the

assured brevity of Mrs. Pembrose’s judgments and decisions; she had an

instinctive perception of the truth that all compact judgments upon

human beings are unjust judgments. The human spirit is but poorly

adapted either to rule or to be ruled, and the honesty of all the

efforts of Mrs. Pembrose and her staffs—for soon the hostels at

Sydenham and West Kensington were open—were marred not merely by

arrogance but by an irritability, a real hostility to complexities and

difficulties and resisters and troublesome characters. And it did not

help the staff to a triumphant achievement of its duties that the girls

had an exaggerated perception that Lady Harman’s heart was on their

side.

And presently the phrase “weeding out” crept into the talk of Mrs.

Pembrose. Some of the girls were being marked as ringleaders, foci of

mischief, characters it was desirable to “get rid of.” Confronted with

it Lady Harman perceived she was absolutely opposed to this idea of

getting rid of anyone—unless it was Mrs. Pembrose. She liked her

various people; she had no desire for a whittled success with a picked

remnant of subdued and deferential employees. She put that to Mr.

Brumley and Mr. Brumley was indignant and eloquent in his concurrence.

A certain Mary Trunk, a dark young woman with a belief that it became

her to have a sweet disorder in her hair, and a large blonde girl named

Lucy Baxandall seemed to be the chief among the bad influences of the

Bloomsbury hostel, and they took it upon themselves to appeal to Lady

Harman against Mrs. Pembrose. They couldn’t, they complained, “do a

Thing right for her....”

So the tangle grew.

Presently Lady Harman had to go to the Riviera with Sir Isaac and when

she came back Mary Trunk and Lucy Baxandall had vanished from both the

International Hostel and the International Stores. She tried to find

out why, and she was confronted by inadequate replies and enigmatical

silences. “They decided to go,” said Mrs. Pembrose, and dropped

“fortunately” after that statement. She disavowed any exact knowledge

of their motives. But she feared the worst. Susan Burnet was

uninforming. Whatever had happened had failed to reach Alice Burnet’s

ears. Lady Harman could not very well hold a commission of enquiry into

the matter, but she had an uneasy sense of a hidden campaign of

dislodgement. And about the corridors and cubicles and club rooms there

was she thought a difference, a discretion, a flavour of

subjugation....

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

The Last Crisis

§1

It would be quite easy for anyone with the knack of reserve to go on

from this point with a history of Lady Harman that would present her as

practically a pure philanthropist. For from these beginnings she was

destined to proceed to more and more knowledge and understanding and

clear purpose and capable work in this interesting process of

collective regrouping, this process which may even at last justify Mr.

Brumley’s courageous interpretations and prove to be an early

experiment in the beginning of a new social order. Perhaps some day

there will be an official biography, another addition to the

inscrutable records of British public lives, in which all these things

will be set out with tact and dignity. Horatio Blenker or Adolphus

Blenker may survive to be entrusted with this congenial task. She will

be represented as a tall inanimate person pursuing one clear benevolent

purpose in life from her very beginning, and Sir Isaac and her

relations with Sir Isaac will be rescued from reality. The book will be

illustrated by a number of carefully posed photographer’s photographs

of her, studies of the Putney house and perhaps an unappetizing woodcut

of her early home at Penge. The aim of all British biography is to

conceal. A great deal of what we have already told will certainly not

figure in any such biography, and still more certainly will the things

we have yet to tell be missing.

Lady Harman was indeed only by the force of circumstances and

intermittently a pure philanthropist, and it is with the intercalary

passages of less exalted humanity that we are here chiefly concerned.

At times no doubt she did really come near to filling and fitting and

becoming identical with that figure of the pure philanthropist which

was her world-ward face, but for the most part that earnest and

dignified figure concealed more or less extensive spaces of

nothingness, while the errant soul of the woman within strayed into

less exalted ways of thinking.

There were times when she was almost sure of herself—Mrs. Hubert

Plessington could scarcely have been surer of herself, and times when

the whole magnificent project of constructing a new urban social life

out of those difficult hostels, a collective urban life that should be

liberal and free, broke into grimacing pieces and was the most foolish

of experiments. Her struggles with Mrs. Pembrose thereupon assumed a

quality of mere bickering and she could even doubt whether Mrs.

Pembrose wasn’t justified in her attitude and wiser by her very want of

generosity. She felt then something childish in the whole undertaking

that otherwise escaped her, she was convicted of an absurd

self-importance, she discovered herself an ignorant woman availing

herself of her husband’s power and wealth to attempt presumptuous

experiments. In these moods of disillusionment, her mind went adrift

and was driven to and fro from discontent to discontent; she would find

herself taking soundings and seeking an anchorage upon the strangest,

most unfamiliar shoals. And in her relations and conflicts with her

husband there was a smouldering shame for her submissions to him that

needed only a phase of fatigue to become acute. So long as she believed

in her hostels and her mission that might be endured, but forced back

upon her more personal life its hideousness stood unclothed. Mr.

Brumley could sometimes reassure her by a rhetorical effort upon the

score of her hostels, but most of her more intimate and inner life was

not, for very plain reasons, to be shown to him. He was full of the

intention of generous self-denials, but she had long since come to

measure the limits of his self-denial....

Mr. Brumley was a friend in whom smouldered a love, capable she knew

quite clearly of tormented and tormenting jealousies. It would be

difficult to tell, and she certainly could never have told how far she

knew of this by instinct, how far it came out of rapid intuitions from

things seen and heard. But she understood that she dared not let a

single breath of encouragement, a hint of physical confidence, reach

that banked-up glow. A sentinel discretion in her brain was always on

the watch for that danger, and that restraint, that added deliberate

inexpressiveness, kept them most apart, when most her spirit cried out

for companionship.

The common quality of all these moods of lassitude was a desolating

loneliness. She had at times a need that almost overwhelmed her to be

intimate, to be comforted and taken up out of the bleak harsh

disappointments and stresses of her customary life. At times after Sir

Isaac had either been too unloving or too loving, or when the girls or

the matrons had achieved some new tangle of mutual unreasonableness, or

when her faith failed, she would lie in the darkness of her own room

with her soul crying out for—how can one put it?—the touch of other

soul-stuff. And perhaps it was the constant drift of Mr. Brumley’s

talk, the little suggestions that fell drop by drop into her mind from

his, that disposed her to believe that this aching sense of solitude in

the void was to be assuaged by love, by some marvel of close exaltation

that one might reach through a lover. She had told Mr. Brumley long ago

that she would never let herself think of love, she still maintained to

him that attitude of resolute aloofness, but almost without noting what

she did, she was tampering now in her solitude with the seals of that

locked chamber. She became secretly curious about love. Perhaps there

was something in it of which she knew nothing. She found herself drawn

towards poetry, found a new attraction in romance; more and more did

she dally with the idea that there was some unknown beauty in the

world, something to which her eyes might presently open, something

deeper and sweeter than any thing she had ever known, close at hand,

something to put all the world into proportion for her.

In a little while she no longer merely tampered with these seals, for

quite silently the door had opened and she was craning in. This love it

seemed to her might after all be so strange a thing that it goes

unsuspected and yet fills the whole world of a human soul. An odd

grotesque passage in a novel by Wilkins gave her that idea. He compared

love to electricity, of all things in the world; that throbbing life

amidst the atoms that we now draw upon for light, warmth, connexion,

the satisfaction of a thousand wants and the cure of a thousand ills.

There it is and always has been in the life of man, and yet until a

century ago it worked unsuspected, was known only for a disregarded

oddity of amber, a crackling in frost-dry hair and thunder....

And then she remembered how Mr. Brumley had once broken into a

panegyric of love. “It makes life a different thing. It is like the

home-coming of something lost. All this dispersed perplexing world

_centres_. Think what true love means; to live always in the mind of

another and to have that other living always in your mind.... Only

there can be no restraints, no reserves, no admission of prior rights.

One must feel _safe_ of one’s welcome and freedoms....”

Wasn’t it worth the risk of almost any breach of boundaries to get to

such a light as that?...

She hid these musings from every human being, she was so shy with them,

she hid them almost from herself. Rarely did they have their way with

her and when they did, presently she would accuse herself of slackness

and dismiss them and urge herself to fresh practicalities in her work.

But her work was not always at hand, Sir Isaac’s frequent relapses took

her abroad to places where she found herself in the midst of beautiful

scenery with little to do and little to distract her from these

questionings. Then such thoughts would inundate her.

This feeling of the unsatisfactoriness of life, of incompleteness and

solitariness, was not of that fixed sort that definitely indicates its

demand. Under its oppression she tried the idea of love, but she also

tried certain other ideas. Very often this vague appeal had the quality

of a person, sometimes a person shrouded in night, a soundless whisper,

the unseen lover who came to Psyche in the darkness. And sometimes that

person became more distinct, less mystic and more companionable.

Perhaps because imaginations have a way of following the line of least

resistance, it took upon itself something of the form, something of the

voice and bearing of Mr. Brumley. She recoiled from her own thoughts

when she discovered herself wondering what manner of lover Mr. Brumley

might make—if suddenly she lowered her defences, freed his suffocating

pleading, took him to herself.

In my anxiety to draw Mr. Brumley as he was, I have perhaps a little

neglected to show him as Lady Harman saw him. We have employed the

inconsiderate verisimilitude of a novelist repudiating romance in his

portrayal; towards her he kept a better face. He was at least a very

honest lover and there was little disingenuousness in the flow of fine

mental attitudes that met her; the thought and presence of her made him

fine; as soon could he have turned his shady side towards the sun. And

she was very ready and eager to credit him with generous qualities. We

of his club and circle, a little assisted perhaps by Max Beerbohm’s

diabolical index finger, may have found and been not unwilling to find

his face chiefly expressive of a kind of empty alertness; but when it

was turned to her its quite pleasantly modelled features glowed and it

was transfigured. So far as she was concerned, with Sir Isaac as foil,

he was real enough and good enough for her. And by the virtue of that

unlovely contrast even a certain ineffectiveness—became infinite

delicacy....

The thought of Mr. Brumley in that relation and to that extent of

clearness came but rarely into her consciousness, and when it did it

was almost immediately dismissed again. It was the most fugitive of

proffered consolations. And it is to be remarked that it made its most

successful apparitions when Mr. Brumley was far away, and by some weeks

or months of separation a little blurred and forgotten....

And sometimes this unrest of her spirit, this unhappiness turned her in

quite another direction as it seemed and she had thoughts of religion.

With a deepened shame she would go seeking into that other, that

greater indelicacy, from which her upbringing had divorced her mind.

She would even secretly pray. Greatly daring she fled on several

occasions from her visitation of the hostels or slipped out of her

home, and evading Mr. Brumley, went once to the Brompton Oratory, once

or twice to the Westminster Cathedral and then having discovered Saint

Paul’s, to Saint Paul’s in search of this nameless need. It was a need

that no plain and ugly little place of worship would satisfy. It was a

need that demanded choir and organ. She went to Saint Paul’s haphazard

when her mood and opportunity chanced together and there in the

afternoons she found a wonder of great music and chanting voices, and

she would kneel looking up into those divine shadows and perfect

archings and feel for a time assuaged, wonderfully assuaged. Sometimes,

there, she seemed to be upon the very verge of grasping that hidden

reality which makes all things plain. Sometimes it seemed to her that

this very indulgence was the hidden reality.

She could never be sure in her mind whether these secret worshippings

helped or hampered her in her daily living. They helped her to a

certain disregard of annoyances and indignities and so far they were

good, but they also helped towards a more general indifference. She

might have told these last experiences to Mr. Brumley if she had not

felt them to be indescribable. They could not be half told. They had to

be told completely or they were altogether untellable. So she had them

hid, and at once accepted and distrusted the consolation they brought

her, and went on with the duties and philanthropies that she had chosen

as her task in the world.

§2

One day in Lent—it was nearly three years after the opening of the

first hostel—she went to Saint Paul’s.

She was in a mood of great discouragement; the struggle between Mrs.

Pembrose and the Bloomsbury girls had suddenly reopened in an acute

form and Sir Isaac, who was sickening again after a period of better

health, had become strangely restless and irritable and hostile to her.

He had thwarted her unusually and taken the side of the matrons in a

conflict in which Susan Burnet’s sister Alice was now distinguished as

the chief of the malcontents. The new trouble seemed to Lady Harman to

be traceable in one direction to that ardent Unionist, Miss Babs

Wheeler, under the spell of whose round-faced, blue-eyed, distraught

personality Alice had altogether fallen. Miss Babs Wheeler was fighting

for the Union; she herself lived at Highbury with her mother, and Alice

was her chosen instrument in the hostels. The Union had always been a

little against the lady-like instincts of many of the waitresses; they

felt strikes were vulgar and impaired their social standing, and this

feeling had been greatly strengthened by irruptions of large

contingents of shop assistants from various department stores. The

Bloomsbury Hostel in particular now accommodated a hundred refined and

elegant hands—they ought rather to be called figures—from the great

Oxford Street costume house of Eustace and Mills, young people with a

tall sweeping movement and an elevation of chin that had become nearly

instinctive, and a silent yet evident intention to find the

International girls “low” at the slightest provocation. It is only too

easy for poor humanity under the irritation of that tacit superiority

to respond with just the provocation anticipated. What one must

regretfully speak of as the vulgar section of the International girls

had already put itself in the wrong by a number of aggressive acts

before the case came to Lady Harman’s attention. Mrs. Pembrose seized

the occasion for weeding on a courageous scale, and Miss Alice Burnet

and three of her dearest friends were invited to vacate their rooms

“pending redecoration”.

With only too much plausibility the threatened young women interpreted

this as an expulsion, and declined to remove their boxes and personal

belongings. Miss Babs Wheeler thereupon entered the Bloomsbury Hostel,

and in the teeth of three express prohibitions from Mrs. Pembrose, went

a little up the staircase and addressed a confused meeting in the

central hall. There was loud and continuous cheering for Lady Harman at

intervals during this incident. Thereupon Mrs. Pembrose demanded

sweeping dismissals, not only from the Hostels but the shops as an

alternative to her resignation, and Lady Harman found herself more

perplexed than ever....

Georgina Sawbridge had contrived to mingle herself in an entirely

characteristic way in these troubles by listening for a brief period to

an abstract of her sister’s perplexities, then demanding to be made

Director-General of the whole affair, refusing to believe this simple

step impossible and retiring in great dudgeon to begin a series of

letters of even more than sisterly bitterness. And Mr. Brumley when

consulted had become dangerously sentimental. Under these circumstances

Lady Harman’s visit to Saint Paul’s had much of the quality of a

flight.

It was with an unwonted sense of refuge that she came from the sombre

stress and roar of London without into the large hushed spaces of the

cathedral. The door closed behind her—and all things changed. Here was

meaning, coherence, unity. Here instead of a pelting confusion of

movements and motives was a quiet concentration upon the little focus

of light about the choir, the gentle complete dominance of a voice

intoning. She slipped along the aisle and into the nave and made her

way to a seat. How good this was! Outside she had felt large, awkwardly

responsible, accessible to missiles, a distressed conspicuous thing;

within this living peace she suddenly became no more than one of a

tranquil hushed community of small black-clad Lenten people; she found

a chair and knelt and felt she vanished even from her own

consciousness....

How beautiful was this place! She looked up presently at the great

shadowy arcs far above her, so easy, so gracious that it seemed they

had not so much been built by men as shaped by circling flights of

angels. The service, a little clustering advance of voices unsustained

by any organ, mingled in her mind with the many-pointed glow of

candles. And then into this great dome of worship and beauty, like a

bed of voices breaking into flower, like a springtime breeze of sound,

came Allegri’s Miserere....

Her spirit clung to this mood of refuge. It seemed as though the

disorderly, pugnacious, misunderstanding universe had opened and shown

her luminous mysteries. She had a sense of penetration. All that

conflict, that jar of purposes and motives, was merely superficial; she

had left it behind her. For a time she had no sense of effort in

keeping hold of this, only of attainment, she drifted happily upon the

sweet sustaining sounds, and then—then the music ceased. She came back

into herself. Close to her a seated man stirred and sighed. She tried

to get back her hold upon that revelation but it had gone. Inexorably,

opaque, impenetrable doors closed softly on her moment of vision....

All about her was the stir of departure.

She walked out slowly into the cold March daylight, to the leaden

greys, the hurrying black shapes, the chaotic afternoon traffic of

London. She paused on the steps, still but half reawakened. A passing

omnibus obtruded the familiar inscription, “International Stores for

Staminal Bread.”

She turned like one who remembers, to where her chauffeur stood

waiting.

§3

As her motor car, with a swift smoothness, carried her along the

Embankment towards the lattice bar of Charing Cross bridge and the

remoter towers of the Houses of Parliament, grey now and unsubstantial

against the bright western sky, her mind came back slowly to her

particular issues in life. But they were no longer the big

exasperatingly important things that had seemed to hold her life by a

hundred painful hooks before she went into the cathedral. They were

small still under this dome of evening, small even by the measure of

the grey buildings to the right of her and the warm lit river to her

left, by the measure of the clustering dark barges, the teeming trams,

the streaming crowds of people, the note of the human process that

sounds so loud there. She felt small even to herself, for the touch of

beauty saves us from our own personalities, makes Gods of us to our own

littleness. She passed under the railway bridge at Charing Cross,

watched the square cluster of Westminster’s pinnacles rise above her

until they were out of sight overhead, ran up the little incline and

round into Parliament Square, and was presently out on the riverside

embankment again with the great chimneys of Chelsea smoking athwart the

evening gold. And thence with a sudden effect of skies shut and

curtains drawn she came by devious ways to the Fulham Road and the

crowding traffic of Putney Bridge and Putney High Street and so home.

Snagsby, assisted by a new under-butler, a lean white-faced young man

with red hair, received her ceremoniously and hovered serviceably about

her. On the hall table lay three or four visiting cards of no

importance, some circulars and two letters. She threw the circulars

into the basket placed for them and opened her first letter. It was

from Georgina; it was on several sheets and it began, “I still cannot

believe that you refuse to give me the opportunity the

director-generalship of your hostels means to me. It is not as if you

yourself had either the time or the abilities necessary for them

yourself; you haven’t, and there is something almost

dog-in-the-manger-ish to my mind in the way in which you will not give

me my chance, the chance I have always been longing for——”

At this point Lady Harman put down this letter for subsequent perusal

and took its companion, which was addressed in an unfamiliar hand. It

was from Alice Burnet and it was written in that sprawling hand and

diffused style natural to a not very well educated person with a

complicated story to tell in a state of unusual emotion. But the gist

was in the first few sentences which announced that Alice had been

evicted from the hostel. “I found my things on the pavement,” wrote

Alice.

Lady Harman became aware of Snagsby still hovering at hand.

“Mrs. Pembrose, my lady, came here this afternoon,” he said, when he

had secured her attention.

“Came here.”

“She asked for you, my lady, and when I told her you were not at ’ome,

she asked if she might see Sir Isaac.”

“And did she?”

“Sir Isaac saw her, my lady. They ’ad tea in the study.”

“I wish I had been at home to see her,” said Lady Harman, after a brief

interval of reflection.

She took her two letters and turned to the staircase. They were still

in her hand when presently she came into her husband’s study. “I don’t

want a light,” he said, as she put out her hand to the electric switch.

His voice had a note of discontent, but he was sitting in the armchair

against the window so that she could not see his features.

“How are you feeling this afternoon?” she asked.

“I’m feeling all right,” he answered testily. He seemed to dislike

inquiries after his health almost as much as he disliked neglect.

She came and stood by him and looked out from the dusk of the room into

the garden darkening under a red-barred sky. “There is fresh trouble

between Mrs. Pembrose and the girls,” she said.

“She’s been telling me about it.”

“She’s been here?”

“Pretty nearly an hour,” said Sir Isaac.

Lady Harman tried to imagine that hour’s interview on the spur of the

moment and failed. She came to her immediate business. “I think,” she

said, “that she has been—high-handed....”

“You would,” said Sir Isaac after an interval.

His tone was hostile, so hostile that it startled her.

“Don’t you?”

He shook his head. “My idees and your idees—or anyhow the idees you’ve

got hold of—somewhere—somehow——I don’t know where you _get_ your idees.

We haven’t got the same idees, anyhow. You got to keep order in these

places—anyhow....”

She perceived that she was in face of a prepared position. “I don’t

think,” she threw out, “that she does keep order. She represses—and

irritates. She gets an idea that certain girls are against her....”

“And you get an idea she’s against certain girls....”

“Practically she expels them. She has in fact just turned one out into

the street.”

“You got to expel ’em. You got to. You can’t run these places on sugar

and water. There’s a sort of girl, a sort of man, who makes trouble.

There’s a sort makes strikes, makes mischief, gets up grievances. You

got to get rid of ’em somehow. You got to be practical somewhere. You

can’t go running these places on a lot of littry idees and all that.

It’s no good.”

The phrase “littry idees” held Lady Harman’s attention for a moment.

But she could not follow it up to its implications, because she wanted

to get on with the issue she had in hand.

“I want to be consulted about these expulsions. Girl after girl has

been sent away——”

Sir Isaac’s silhouette was obstinate.

“She knows her business,” he said.

He seemed to feel the need of a justification. “They shouldn’t make

trouble.”

On that they rested for a little while in silence. She began to realize

with a gathering emotion that this matter was far more crucial than she

had supposed. She had been thinking only of the reinstatement of Alice

Burnet, she hadn’t yet estimated just what that overriding of Mrs.

Pembrose might involve.

“I don’t want to have any girl go until I have looked into her case.

It’s——It’s vital.”

“She says she can’t run the show unless she has some power.”

Neither spoke for some seconds. She had the feeling of hopeless

vexation that might come to a child that has wandered into a trap. “I

thought,” she began. “These hostels——”

She stopped short.

Sir Isaac’s hand tightened on the arm of his chair. “I started ’em to

please you,” he said. “I didn’t start ’em to please your friends.”

She turned her eyes quickly to his grey up-looking face.

“I didn’t start them for you and that chap Brumley to play about with,”

he amplified. “And now you know about it, Elly.”

The thing had found her unprepared. “As if——” she said at last.

“As if!” he mocked.

She stood quite still staring blankly at this unmanageable situation.

He was the first to break silence. He lifted one hand and dropped it

again with a dead impact on the arm of his chair. “I got the things,”

he said, “and there they are. Anyhow,—they got to be run in a proper

way.”

She made no immediate answer. She was seeking desperately for phrases

that escaped her. “Do you think,” she began at last. “Do you really

think——?”

He stared out of the window. He answered in tones of excessive

reasonableness: “I didn’t start these hostels to be run by you and

your—friend.” He gave the sentence the quality of an ultimatum, an

irreducible minimum.

“He’s my friend,” she explained, “only—because he does work—for the

hostels.”

Sir Isaac seemed for a moment to attempt to consider that. Then he

relapsed upon his predetermined attitude. “God!” he exclaimed, “but I

have been a fool!”

She decided that that must be ignored.

“I care more for those hostels than I care for anything—anything else

in the world,” she told him. “I want them to work—I want them to

succeed.... And then——”

He listened in sceptical silence.

“Mr. Brumley is nothing to me but a helper. He——How can you imagine,

Isaac——? _I!_ How can you dare? To suggest——!”

“Very well,” said Sir Isaac and reflected and made his old familiar

sound with his teeth. “Run the hostels without him, Elly,” he

propounded. “Then I’ll believe.”

She perceived that suddenly she was faced by a test or a bargain. In

the background of her mind the figure of Mr. Brumley, as she had seen

him last, in brown and with a tie rather to one side, protested vainly.

She did what she could for him on the spur of the moment. “But,” she

said, “he’s so helpful. He’s so—harmless.”

“That’s as may be,” said Sir Isaac and breathed heavily.

“How can one suddenly turn on a friend?”

“I don’t see that you ever wanted a friend,” said Sir Isaac.

“He’s been so good. It isn’t reasonable, Isaac. When anyone

has—_slaved_.”

“I don’t say he isn’t a good sort of chap,” said Sir Isaac, with that

same note of almost superhuman rationality, “only—he isn’t going to run

my hostels.”

“But what do you mean, Isaac?”

“I mean you got to choose.”

He waited as if he expected her to speak and then went on.

“What it comes to is this, Elly, I’m about sick of that chap. I’m sick

of him.” He paused for a moment because his breath was short. “If you

go on with the hostels he’s—Phew—got to mizzle. _Then_—I don’t mind—if

you want that girl Burnet brought back in triumph.... It’ll make Mrs.

Pembrose chuck the whole blessed show, you know, but I say—I don’t

mind.... Only in that case, I don’t want to see or hear—or hear

about—Phew—or hear about your Mr. Brumley again. And I don’t want you

to, either.... I’m being pretty reasonable and pretty patient over

this, with people—people—talking right and left. Still,—there’s a

limit.... You’ve been going on—if I didn’t know you were an innocent—in

a way ... I don’t want to talk about that. There you are, Elly.”

It seemed to her that she had always expected this to happen. But

however much she had expected it to happen she was still quite

unprepared with any course of action. She wanted with an equal want of

limitation to keep both Mr. Brumley and her hostels.

“But Isaac,” she said. “What do you suspect? What do you think? This

friendship has been going on——How can I end it suddenly?”

“Don’t you be too innocent, Elly. You know and I know perfectly well

what there is between men and women. I don’t make out I know—anything I

don’t know. I don’t pretend you are anything but straight. Only——”

He suddenly gave way to his irritation. His self-control vanished.

“Damn it!” he cried, and his panting breath quickened; “the thing’s got

to end. As if I didn’t understand! As if I didn’t understand!”

She would have protested again but his voice held her. “It’s got to

end. It’s got to end. Of course you haven’t done anything, of course

you don’t know anything or think of anything.... Only here I am ill....

_You_ wouldn’t be sorry if I got worse.... _You_ can wait; you can....

All right! All right! And there you stand, irritating me—arguing. You

know—it chokes me.... Got to end, I tell you.... Got to end....”

He beat at the arms of his chair and then put a hand to his throat.

“Go away,” he cried to her. “Go to hell!”

§4

I cannot tell whether the reader is a person of swift decisions or one

of the newer race of doubters; if he be the latter he will the better

understand how Lady Harman did in the next two days make up her mind

definitely and conclusively to two entirely opposed lines of action.

She decided that her relations with Mr. Brumley, innocent as they were,

must cease in the interests of the hostels and her struggle with Mrs.

Pembrose, and she decided with quite equal certainty that her husband’s

sudden veto upon these relations was an intolerable tyranny that must

be resisted with passionate indignation. Also she was surprised to find

how difficult it was now to think of parting from Mr. Brumley. She made

her way to these precarious conclusions and on from whichever it was to

the other through a jungle of conflicting considerations and feelings.

When she thought of Mrs. Pembrose and more particularly of the probable

share of Mrs. Pembrose in her husband’s objection to Mr. Brumley her

indignation kindled. She perceived Mrs. Pembrose as a purely evil

personality, as a spirit of espionage, distrust, calculated treachery

and malignant intervention, as all that is evil in rule and

officialism, and a vast wave of responsibility for all those difficult

and feeble and likeable young women who elbowed and giggled and

misunderstood and blundered and tried to live happily under the

commanding stresses of Mrs. Pembrose’s austerity carried her away. She

had her duty to do to them and it overrode every other duty. If a

certain separation from Mr. Brumley’s assiduous aid was demanded, was

it too great a sacrifice? And no sooner was that settled than the whole

question reopened with her indignant demand why anyone at any price had

the right to prohibit a friendship that she had so conscientiously kept

innocent. If she gave way to this outrageous restriction to-day, what

fresh limitations might not Sir Isaac impose to-morrow? And now, she

was so embarrassed in her struggle by his health. She could not go to

him and have things out with him, she could not directly defy him,

because that might mean a suffocating seizure for him....

It was entirely illogical, no doubt, but extremely natural for Lady

Harman to decide that she must communicate her decision, whichever one

it was, to Mr. Brumley in a personal interview. She wrote to him and

arranged to meet and talk to him in Kew Gardens, and with a feeling of

discretion went thither not in the automobile but in a taxi-cab. And so

delicately now were her two irrevocable decisions balanced in her mind

that twice on her way to Kew she swayed over from one to the other.

Arrived at the gardens she found herself quite disinclined to begin the

announcement of either decision. She was quite exceptionally glad to

see Mr. Brumley; he was dressed in a new suit of lighter brown that

became him very well indeed, the day was warm and bright, a day of

scyllas and daffodils and snow-upon-the-mountains and green-powdered

trees and frank sunshine,—and the warmth of her feelings for her friend

merged indistinguishably with the springtime stir and glow. They walked

across the bright turf together in a state of unjustifiable happiness,

purring little admirations at the ingenious elegance of creation at its

best as gardeners set it out for our edification, and the whole tenor

of Lady Harman’s mind was to make this occasion an escape from the

particular business that had brought her thither.

“We’ll look for daffodils away there towards the river under the

trees,” said Mr. Brumley, and it seemed preposterous not to enjoy those

daffodils at least before she broached the great issue between an

irresistible force and an immoveable post, that occupied her mental

background.

Mr. Brumley was quite at his best that afternoon. He was happy, gay and

deferential; he made her realize by his every tone and movement that if

he had his choice of the whole world that afternoon and all its

inhabitants and everything, there was no other place in which he would

be, no other companion, no other occupation than this he had. He talked

of spring and flowers, quoted poets and added the treasures of a

well-stored mind to the amenities of the day. “It’s good to take a

holiday at times,” he said, and after that it was more difficult than

ever to talk about the trouble of the hostels.

She was able to do this at last while they were having tea in the

little pavilion near the pagoda. It was the old pavilion, the one that

Miss Alimony’s suffragettes were afterwards to burn down in order to

demonstrate the relentless logic of women. They did it in the same

eventful week when Miss Alimony was, she declared, so nearly carried

off by White Slave Traders (disguised as nurses but, fortunately for

her, smelling of brandy) from the Brixton Temperance Bazaar. But in

those simpler days the pavilion still existed; it was tended by

agreeable waiters whose evening dress was mitigated by cheerful little

straw hats, and an enormous multitude of valiant and smutty Cockney

sparrows chirped and squeaked and begged and fluttered and fought,

venturing to the very tables and feet of the visitors. And here, a

little sobered from their first elation by much walking about and the

presence of jam and watercress, Mr. Brumley and Lady Harman could think

again of the work they were doing for the reconstitution of society

upon collective lines.

She began to tell him of the conflict between Mrs. Pembrose and Alice

Burnet that threatened the latter with extinction. She found it more

convenient to talk at first as though the strands of decision were

still all in her hands; afterwards she could go on to the peculiar

complication of the situation through the unexpected weakening of her

position in relation to Mrs. Pembrose. She described the particular of

the new trouble, the perplexing issue between the “lady-like,” for

which as a feminine ideal there was so much to be said on the one hand

and the “genial,” which was also an admirable quality, on the other.

“You see,” she said, “it’s very rude to cough at people and make

noises, but then it’s so difficult to explain to the others that it’s

equally rude to go past people and pretend not to see or hear them.

Girls of that sort always seem so much more underbred when they are

trying to be superior than when they are not; they get so stiff

and—exasperating. And this keeping out of the Union because it isn’t

genteel, it’s the very essence of the trouble with all these employees.

We’ve discussed that so often. Those drapers’ girls seem full of such

cold, selfish, base, pretentious notions; much more full even than our

refreshment girls. And then as if it wasn’t all difficult enough comes

Mrs. Pembrose and her wardresses doing all sorts of hard, clumsy

things, and one can’t tell them just how little they are qualified to

judge good behaviour. Their one idea of discipline is to speak to

people as if they were servants and to be distant and crushing. And

long before one can do anything come trouble and tart replies and

reports of “gross impertinence” and expulsion. We keep on expelling

girls. This is the fourth time girls have had to go. What is to become

of them? I know this Burnet girl quite well as you know. She’s just a

human, kindly little woman.... She’ll feel disgraced.... How can I let

a thing like that occur?”

She spread her hands apart over the tea things.

Mr. Brumley held his chin in his hand and said “Um” and looked

judicial, and admired Lady Harman very much, and tried to grasp the

whole trouble and wring out a solution. He made some admirable

generalizations about the development of a new social feeling in

response to changed conditions, but apart from a remark that Mrs.

Pembrose was all organization and no psychology, and quite the wrong

person for her position, he said nothing in the slightest degree

contributory to the particular drama under consideration. From that

utterance, however, Lady Harman would no doubt have gone on to the

slow, tentative but finally conclusive statement of the new difficulty

that had arisen out of her husband’s jealousy and to the discussion of

the more fundamental decisions it forced upon her, if a peculiar blight

had not fallen upon their conversation and robbed it at last of even an

appearance of ease.

This blight crept upon their minds.... It began first with Mr. Brumley.

Mr. Brumley was rarely free from self-consciousness. Whenever he was in

a restaurant or any such place of assembly, then whatever he did or

whatever he said he had a kind of surplus attention, a quickening of

the ears, a wandering of the eyes, to the groups and individuals round

about him. And while he had seemed entirely occupied with Lady Harman,

he had nevertheless been aware from the outset that a dingy and

inappropriate-looking man in a bowler hat and a ready-made suit of

grey, was listening to their conversation from an adjacent table.

This man had entered the pavilion oddly. He had seemed to dodge in and

hesitate. Then he had chosen his table rather deliberately—and he kept

looking, and trying not to seem to look.

That was not all. Mr. Brumley’s expression was overcast by the effort

to recall something. He sat elbows on table and leant forward towards

Lady Harman and at the blossom-laden trees outside the pavilion and

trifled with two fingers on his lips and spoke between them in a voice

that was speculative and confidential and muffled and mysterious.

“Where have I seen our friend to the left before?”

She had been aware of his distraction for some time.

She glanced at the man and found nothing remarkable in him. She tried

to go on with her explanations.

Mr. Brumley appeared attentive and then he said again: “But where have

I seen him?”

And from that point their talk was blighted; the heart seemed to go out

of her. Mr. Brumley she felt was no longer taking in what she was

saying. At the time she couldn’t in any way share his preoccupation.

But what had been difficult before became hopeless and she could no

longer feel that even presently she would be able to make him

understand the peculiar alternatives before her. They drifted back by

the great conservatory and the ornamental water, aripple with ducks and

swans, to the gates where his taxi waited.

Even then it occurred to her that she ought to tell him something of

the new situation. But now their time was running out, she would have

to be concise, and what wife could ever say abruptly and offhand that

frequent fact, “Oh, by the by, my husband is jealous of you”? Then she

had an impulse to tell him simply, without any explanation at all, that

for a time he must not meet her. And while she gathered herself

together for that, his preoccupations intervened again.

He stood up in the open taxi-cab and looked back.

“That chap,” he said, “is following us.”

§5

The effect of this futile interview upon Lady Harman was remarkable.

She took to herself an absurd conviction that this inconclusiveness had

been an achievement. Confronted by a dilemma, she had chosen neither

horn and assumed an attitude of inoffensive defiance. Springs in

England vary greatly in their character; some are easterly and

quarrelsome, some are north-westerly and wetly disastrous, a bleak

invasion from the ocean; some are but the broken beginnings of what are

not so much years as stretches of meteorological indecision. This

particular spring was essentially a south-westerly spring, good and

friendly, showery but in the lightest way and so softly reassuring as

to be gently hilarious. It was a spring to get into the blood of

anyone; it gave Lady Harman the feeling that Mrs. Pembrose would

certainly be dealt with properly and without unreasonable delay by

Heaven, and that meanwhile it was well to take the good things of

existence as cheerfully as possible. The good things she took were very

innocent things. Feeling unusually well and enjoying great draughts of

spring air and sunshine were the chief. And she took them only for

three brief days. She carried the children down to Black Strand to see

her daffodils, and her daffodils surpassed expectation. There was a

delirium of blackthorn in the new wild garden she had annexed from the

woods and a close carpet of encouraged wild primroses. Even the Putney

garden was full of happy surprises. The afternoon following her visit

to Black Strand was so warm that she had tea with her family in great

gaiety on the lawn under the cedar. Her offspring were unusually sweet

that day, they had new blue cotton sunbonnets, and Baby and Annette at

least succeeded in being pretty. And Millicent, under the new Swiss

governess, had acquired, it seemed quite suddenly, a glib colloquial

French that somehow reconciled one to the extreme thinness and

shapelessness of her legs.

Then an amazing new fact broke into this gleam of irrational

contentment, a shattering new fact. She found she was being watched.

She discovered that dingy man in the grey suit following her.

The thing came upon her one afternoon. She was starting out for a talk

with Georgina. She felt so well, so confident of the world that it was

intolerable to think of Georgina harbouring resentment; she resolved

she would go and have things out with her and make it clear just how

impossible it was to impose a Director-General upon her husband. She

became aware of the man in grey as she walked down Putney Hill.

She recognized him at once. He was at the corner of Redfern Road and

still unaware of her existence. He was leaning against the wall with

the habituated pose of one who is frequently obliged to lean against

walls for long periods of time, and he was conversing in an elucidatory

manner with the elderly crossing-sweeper who still braves the

motor-cars at that point. He became aware of her emergence with a

start, he ceased to lean and became observant.

He was one of those men whose face suggests the word “muzzle,” with an

erect combative nose and a forward slant of the body from the rather

inturned feet. He wore an observant bowler hat a little too small for

him, and there is something about the tail of his jacket—as though he

had been docked.

She passed at a stride to the acceptance of Mr. Brumley’s hitherto

incredible suspicion. Her pulses quickened. It came into her head to

see how far this man would go in following her. She went on demurely

down the hill leaving him quite unaware that she had seen him.

She was amazed, and after her first belief incredulous again. Could

Isaac be going mad? At the corner she satisfied herself of the grey

man’s proximity and hailed a taxi-cab. The man in grey came nosing

across to listen to her directions and hear where she was going.

“Please drive up the hill until I tell you,” she said, “slowly”—and had

the satisfaction, if one may call it a satisfaction, of seeing the grey

man dive towards the taxi-cab rank. Then she gave herself up to hasty

scheming.

She turned her taxi-cab abruptly when she was certain of being

followed, went back into London, turned again and made for Westridge’s

great stores in Oxford Street. The grey man ticked up two pences in

pursuit. All along the Brompton Road he pursued her with his nose like

the jib of a ship.

She was excited and interested, and not nearly so shocked as she ought

to have been. It didn’t somehow jar as it ought to have jarred with her

idea of Sir Isaac. Watched by a detective! This then was the completion

of the conditional freedom she had won by smashing that window. She

might have known....

She was astonished and indignant but not nearly so entirely indignant

as a noble heroine should have been. She was certainly not nearly so

queenly as Mrs. Sawbridge would have shown herself under such

circumstances. It may have been due to some plebeian strain in her

father’s blood that over and above her proper indignation she was

extremely interested. She wanted to know what manner of man it was

whose nose was just appearing above the window edge of the taxi-cab

behind. In her inexperienced inattention she had never yet thought it

was possible that men could be hired to follow women.

She sat a little forward, thinking.

How far would he follow her and was it possible to shake him off? Or

are such followers so expert that once upon a scent, they are like the

Indian hunting dog, inevitable. She must see.

She paid off her taxi at Westridge’s and, with the skill of her sex,

observed him by the window reflection, counting the many doors of the

establishment. Would he try to watch them all? There were also some

round the corner. No, he was going to follow her in. She had a sudden

desire, an unreasonable desire, perhaps an instinctive desire to see

that man among baby-linen. It was in her power for a time to wreathe

him with incongruous objects. This was the sort of fancy a woman must

control....

He stalked her with an unreal sang-froid. He ambushed behind a display

of infants’ socks. Driven to buy by a saleswoman he appeared to be

demanding improbable varieties of infant’s socks.

Are these watchers and trackers sometimes driven to buying things in

shops? If so, strange items must figure in accounts of expenses. If he

bought those socks, would they appear in Sir Isaac’s bill? She felt a

sudden craving for the sight of Sir Isaac’s Private Detective Account.

And as for the articles themselves, what became of them? She knew her

husband well enough to feel sure that if he paid for anything he would

insist upon having it. But where—where did he keep them?...

But now the man’s back was turned; he was no doubt improvising

paternity and an extreme fastidiousness in baby’s footwear——Now for

it!—through departments of deepening indelicacy to the lift!

But he had considered that possibility of embarrassment; he got round

by some other way, he was just in time to hear the lift gate clash upon

a calmly preoccupied lady, who still seemed as unaware of his existence

as the sky.

He was running upstairs, when she descended again, without getting out;

he stopped at the sight of her shooting past him, their eyes met and

there was something appealing in his. He was very moist and his bowler

was flagging. He had evidently started out in the morning with

misconceptions about the weather. And it was clear he felt he had

blundered in coming into Westridge’s. Before she could get a taxi he

was on the pavement behind her, hot but pursuing.