Harman

“ Brumley had really been proposing an elopement and he was now entirely preoccupied with the idea of rescuing, obtaining and possessing Lady Harman for himself as soon as the law released her.
One may doubt whether this extensive change from a humorous conservatism to a primitive and dangerous romanticism is to be ascribed entirely to the personal charm, great as it no doubt was, of Lady Harman; rather did her tall soft dark presence come to release a long accumulating store of discontent and unrest beneath the polished surfaces of Mr. Brumley’s mind. ”

“ They returned to their dépendance in a state of mutual contentment, Sir Isaac scarcely tired, and Lady Harman ran upstairs to change her dusty dress for a fresher muslin, while he went upon the doctor’s arm to the balcony where tea was to be served to them.
She came down to find her world revolutionized. ”

“ What a time of disillusionment you must have had!
“You see, Lady Harman,” he said, leaning back from his empty plate, inclining himself confidentially to her ear and speaking in a privy tone; “it’s in the very nature of things that we—if I may put myself into the list—we ideologists, should be rather exceptionally loose and untrustworthy and disappointing men. ”

“ But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one’s own life. The one thing trains for the other.
Now the chief circumstance in the life of Lady Harman was Sir Isaac. Indeed as she grew to a clear consciousness of herself and her position, it seemed to her he was not so much a circumstance as a circumvallation. There wasn’t a direction in which she could turn without immediately running up against him. ”

“ He had been reading Anatole France recently and the lady of Le Lys Rouge came into his thoughts. There was something in common between Lady Harman and the Countess Martin, they were tall and dark and dignified, and Lady Harman was one of those rare women who could have carried the magnificent name of Thérèse. And there in the setting of Paris and Florence was a whole microcosm of love, real but illicit, carried out as it were secretly and tactfully, beneath the great shadow of the cliff. But he found it difficult to imagine Lady Harman in that. Or Sir Isaac playing Count Martin’s part.... ”

“ In every novel as in every picture there must be an immense simplification, and so I tell the story of Lady Harman’s changing attitude without any of those tangled leapings-forward or harkings-back, those moods and counter moods and relapses which made up the necessary course of her mind. ”

“ Harman's tone expressed his surprise.
"I knew her in Paris," said Madame d'Estrées, with some hesitation, "when she was a student at the Conservatoire. She and I had some common acquaintance. And now—frankly, I daren't offend her. She has the most appalling temper!—and she sticks at nothing."
Harman wondered what the exact truth of this might be, but did not inquire. And as guests—including Colonel Warington—began to arrive, and Donna Laura appeared and began to dispense tea, the tête-à-tête was interrupted. ”

“ One is reminded of those houses into which the white ants have eaten their way; outwardly still fair and solid, they crumble at the touch of a hand. And now you will begin to understand those changes of bearing that so perplexed Lady Harman, that sudden insurgence of flushed half-furtive passion in the garden, through the thin pretences of a liberal friendship. ”

“ Lady Harman reflected. “No,” she decided. “It’s myself.”
“I might have known when we asked her here,” said Sir Isaac with an habitual disregard of her judgments that was beginning to irritate her more and more. “You can’t take on all these people. They’re not the sort of people we want to know.” ”

“ Pembrose to meet her at the Bloomsbury Hostel and talk out the expulsions. She found that lady alertly defensive, entrenched behind expert knowledge and pretension generally. Her little blue eyes seemed harder than ever, the metallic resonance in her voice more marked, the lisp stronger. “Of course, Lady Harman, if you were to have some practical experience of control——” and “Three times I have given these girls every opportunity—every opportunity.”
“It seems so hard to drive these girls out,” repeated Lady Harman. “They’re such human creatures.” ”

“ Lady Harman could offer no elucidation.
“You see,” said Miss Alimony, with an air of expert knowledge, “our case against our opponents is just exactly their great case against us. They say to us when we ask for the Vote, ‘the Woman’s Place is the Home.’ ‘Precisely,’ we answer, ‘the Woman’s Place is the Home. Give us our Homes!’ Now your place is your home—with your children. That’s where you have to fight your battle. Running away—for you it’s simply running away.”
“But——If I stay I shall be beaten.” Lady Harman surveyed her hostess with a certain dismay. ”

“ As Lady Harman came up through the darkness of the drive to her home, she was already regretting very deeply that she had not been content to talk to Mr. Brumley in Kensington Gardens instead of accepting his picturesque suggestion of Hampton Court. There was an unpleasant waif-like feeling about this return. She was reminded of pictures published in the interests of Doctor Barnardo’s philanthropies,—Dr. Barnardo her favourite hero in real life,—in which wistful little outcasts creep longingly towards brightly lit but otherwise respectable homes. ”

“ Then presently Lady Harman had some glimpses of an earlier phase in Susan Burnet’s life “before any of us were earning money.” Father appeared as a kindly, ineffectual, insolvent figure struggling to conduct a baker’s and confectioner’s business in Walthamstow, mother was already specializing, there were various brothers and sisters being born and dying. “How many were there of you altogether?” asked Lady Harman.
“Thirteen there was. Father always used to laugh and say he’d had a fair baker’s dozen. ”

“ She was dressed with the restraint of a prolonged and attenuated widowhood, in a rich and complicatedly quiet dress of mauve and grey. She was obviously a transitory visitor and not so much taking the opulence about her and particularly the great butler for granted as pointedly and persistently ignoring it in an effort to seem to take it for granted. The sister, on the other hand, had Lady Harman’s pale darkness but none of her fineness of line. ”

“ Lady Harman reflected upon this statement and then responded with an air of remembered moments: “Isn’t it.”
“One loses the most precious things,” said Mr. Brumley, “and one loses them and it seems as though one couldn’t go on. And one goes on.”
“And one finds oneself,” said Lady Harman, “without all sorts of precious things——” And she stopped, transparently realizing that she was saying too much.
“There is a sort of vitality about life,” said Mr. Brumley, and stopped as if on the verge of profundities.
“I suppose one hopes,” said Lady Harman. “And one doesn’t think. And things happen.” ”

“ He had gone up in the big car and his wife was alone, and so, with Susan upstairs still deftly measuring for totally unnecessary hangings, Lady Harman was able to add a fur stole and a muff and some gloves to her tweed gardening costume, walk unchallenged into the garden and from the garden into the wood and up the hillside and over the crest and down to the high-road and past that great advertisement of Staminal Bread and so for four palpitating miles, to the railway station and the outer world. ”

“ And one must admit that it is a little difficult to indicate a correct refuge for a lady who finds her home intolerable. Of course there was Mrs. Sawbridge, but Lady Harman felt that her mother’s disposition to lock herself into her bedroom at the slightest provocation made her a weak support for a defensive fight, and in addition that boarding-house at Bournemouth did not attract her. Yet what other wall in all the world was there for Lady Harman to set her back against? ”

“ Nasty little midges, yes,—but fireflies—carrying light for the darkness.”
His face was suddenly lit by enthusiasm and she wondered that she could have thought it rather heavy and commonplace. He stopped abruptly and glanced beyond her at her other neighbour who seemed on the verge of turning to them again. “If I go on,” he said with a voice suddenly dropped, “I shall talk loud.”
“You know,” said Lady Harman, in a halty undertone, “you—you are too hard upon—upon clever people, but it is true. ”

“ It could not but be evident to him that the effort of Lady Harman to free herself a little from her husband’s circumvallation and to disentangle herself a little from the realities of his commercial life, might lead to such a liberation as would leave her like a nascent element ready to recombine. And it was entirely in the vein of this drift of thought in him that he should resolve upon an assiduous proximity against that moment of release and awakening....
I do not do Mr. Brumley as the human lover justice if I lead you to suppose that he plotted thus clearly and calculatingly. ”

“ Lady Beach-Mandarin delegated Sir Markham to preside over the men’s cigars and bounced and slapped her four ladies upstairs to the drawing-room. Her mother disappeared and so did Phyllis and the governess. Lady Harman heard a large aside to Lady Viping: “Isn’t she perfectly lovely?” glanced to discover the lorgnette in appreciative action, and then found herself drifting into a secluded window-seat and a duologue with Miss Agatha Alimony. Miss Alimony was one of that large and increasing number of dusky, grey-eyed ladies who go through life with an air of darkly incomprehensible significance. ”

“ It brought Lady Harman to the very verge of realizing how much of instinct and how much of duty held her the servant of the children she had brought into the world, and how little there mingled with that any of those factors of pride and admiration that go to the making of heroic maternal love. ”

“ As my father is a Christian preacher I feel I have a right to protest against his being placed on a clerical parity with bilkers of hack bills and crapulous associates of two-for-a-penny prostitutes. If Harman attempts to defile the Christian pulpit with his presence, I hope to the good Lord that the decent members of that denomination will tie him across a nine-rail fence and enhance the torridity of his rear elevation with a vigorous application of pine plank. ”

“ THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
CHAPTER THE FIRST Introduces Lady Harman
§1
The motor-car entered a little white gate, came to a porch under a thick wig of jasmine, and stopped. The chauffeur indicated by a movement of the head that this at last was it. A tall young woman with a big soft mouth, great masses of blue-black hair on either side of a broad, low forehead, and eyes of so dark a brown you might have thought them black, drooped forward and surveyed the house with a mixture of keen appreciation and that gentle apprehension which is the shadow of desire in unassuming natures.... ”

“ The public life of Frisco, like a rotten cheese, supports all sorts of mites and maggots, and the wharf edge is of all cheese the most rotten part.
Harman could put his hand on men to vote at a city election, or men to man a whaler; he was under political protection, he was in with the port officers and the customs, and he could have been a very considerable person despite [18] his lack of education but for the drink. Drink is fatal to successful scoundrelism, and the form in which it afflicted Harman is the most fatal of all, for he was not a consistent toper. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Brumley was a gentleman of great and cultivated delicacy, that he liked the seemly and handsome side of things and dreaded the appearance of any flaw upon his prosperity as only a man trained in an English public school can do. It was intolerable to think of any hitch in this happy excursion which was to establish he knew not what confidence between himself and Lady Harman. ”

“ He made an all too manifest attempt to read her name on the slip of card that lay before her among the flowers and as manifestly succeeded. “We people who write and paint and all that sort of thing are a breed of insatiable egotists, Lady Harman. ”

“ You left that chap there, and the purser of the mail boat had to beat the place for him and get four roustabouts ashore to frog-march him to the ship.”
“I dunno,” said Harman, “I got along with him in a bar, and we sat havin’ drinks, them drinks they serve at the Continental—Lord, Bud, I never want to see another cherry again, nor sniff another drop of Bourbon. I’m on the water-wagon for good and all. It ain’t worth it; I’m feelin’ worse than a Methodis’ parson. I’m no boozer, but if I do strike the jagg by accident, my proper feelin’s pay me out. ”

“ Sawbridge gave a pinched smile and said she was only staying in London for quite a little time, and when pressed admitted that there seemed no need whatever for consulting Sir Isaac upon so obviously foregone a conclusion as Lady Harman’s public adhesion to the great movement.
“I shall put his hundred guineas down to Sir Isaac and Lady Harman,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin with an air of conclusion, “and now I want to know, dear Lady Harman, whether we can’t have you on our Committee of administration. We want—just one other woman to complete us.” ”

“ They had almost passed through a long stretch of golden-yellow hickories when from the mountainside above and to the right there came the keen thunder of a rifle, and Tom Harman wheeled and crumpled and fell on his face in the dust of the road. He moaned and turned on his back, and Bill Hines saw a red splotch on his blue chambray shirt squarely over his heart.
"I told you—to watch for a Falls—you tin-can officer," he muttered disconnectedly, gasping, writhing.
When a man is shot straight through the heart there is no chance for him to live. ”