Sir Isaac Harman

“ Sir Isaac was one of those men whom modern England delights to honour, a man of unpretentious acquisitiveness, devoted to business and distracted by no æsthetic or intellectual interests. He was the only son of his mother, the widow of a bankrupt steam-miller, and he had been a delicate child to rear. He left Mr. Gambard’s college at Ealing after passing the second-class examination of the College of Preceptors at the age of sixteen, to go into a tea-office as clerk without a salary, a post he presently abandoned for a clerkship in the office of a large refreshment catering firm. ”

“ It had been Lady Harman’s clear intention to have a luminous and illuminating discussion of the peculiar difficulties and perplexities of her position with Mr. Brumley. Since their first encounter this idea had grown up in her mind. She was one of those women who turn instinctively to men and away from women for counsel. There was to her perception something wise and kindly and reassuring in him; she felt that he had lived and suffered and understood and that he was ready to help other people to live ”

“ How stupid had she not been to let life and Sir Isaac overcome her! She felt that she must make herself like Elizabeth, exactly like Elizabeth; she tried forthwith, and a certain difficulty she found, a certain deadness, she ascribed to the square modernity of her house and something in the Putney air. The house was too large, it dominated the garden and controlled her. She felt she must get away to some place that was chiefly exterior, in the sunshine, far from towns and struggling, straining, angry and despairing humanity, from syndicated shops and all the embarrassing challenges of life. ”

“ Miss Alimony rose with a sigh and a slow unfolding rustle. “I forgot,” she said. “My little maid is out.”
Lady Harman left alone sat for a time staring at the fire with her eyes rather wide and her eyebrows raised as though she mutely confided to it her infinite astonishment. This was the last thing she had expected. She would have to go to some hotel. Can a woman stay alone at an hotel? Her heart sank. Inflexible forces seemed to be pointing her back to home—and Sir Isaac. He would be a very triumphant Sir Isaac, and she’d not have much heart left in her.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ One might have supposed her a mere cold-hearted intellectual if it wasn’t that something in her warm beauty absolutely forbade any such interpretation. There came to Mr. Brumley again a thought that had occurred to him first when Sir Isaac and Lady Harman had come together to Black Strand, which was that life had happened to this woman before she was ready for it, that her mind some years after her body was now coming to womanhood, was teeming with curiosity about all she had hitherto accepted, about Sir Isaac, about her children and all her circumstances.... ”

“ All other emancipations are shams until a woman may go about as freely with this man as with that, and nothing remains for emancipation when she can. In the innocence of her first revolt this question of friendship had seemed to Lady Harman the simplest, most reasonable of minor concessions, but that was simply because Mr. Brumley hadn’t in those days been talking of love to her, nor she been peeping through that once locked door. Now she perceived how entirely Sir Isaac was by his standards justified. ”

“ He shook his head; his lips were whitely compressed.
“But all the way from London, Sir Isaac!”
“Lady Harman’s ill,” lied Sir Isaac. “She mustn’t be disturbed. Everything has to be kept quiet. See? Not even shouting. Not even ordinarily raised voices. A voice like yours—might kill her. That’s why Snagsby here said we were not at home. We aren’t at home—not to anyone.”
Lady Beach-Mandarin was baffled.
“Snagsby,” said Sir Isaac, “open that door.”
“But can’t I see her—just for a moment?”
Sir Isaac’s malignity had softened a little at the prospect of victory. “Absolutely impossible,” he said. ”

“ I know ’em! Nice martyrs they are! There isn’t one wouldn’t skin all the others if he got half a chance....”
Sir Isaac gave way to an extraordinary fit of nagging anger. He got up and stood upon the hearthrug to deliver his soul the better. It was an altogether unexpected and illuminating outbreak. He was flushed with guilt. The more angry and eloquent he became, the more profoundly thoughtful grew the attentive lady at the head of his table....
When at last Sir Isaac had gone off in the car to Victoria, Lady Harman rang for Snagsby. “Isn’t there a paper,” she asked, “called the London Lion?” ”

“ Brumley felt a curious faint terror and had for a moment a glimpse of the possibilities that might lie behind the Vote. Lady Beach-Mandarin went bouncing back to the particular instance. At present, she said, witness Lady Harman, women were slaves, pampered slaves if you will, but slaves. As things were now there was nothing to keep a man from locking up his wife, opening all her letters, dressing her in sack-cloth, separating her from her children. Most men, of course, didn’t do such things, they were amenable to public opinion, but Sir Isaac was a jealous little Ogre. ”

“ You’ve no right to hide away from us. I was telling Sir Isaac. We look to him, we look to you. You’ve no right to bury your talents away from us; you who are rich and young and brilliant and beautiful——”
“But if I go on I shall begin to flatter you,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin with a delicious smile. “I’ve begun upon Sir Isaac already. I’ve made him promise a hundred guineas and his name to the Shakespear Dinners Society,—nothing he didn’t mention eaten (you know) and all the profits to the National movement—and I want your name too. ”

“ Brumley, too surprised for coherent speech.
“Quite,” said Sir Isaac Harman. “Don’t you see what’s the matter?”
Mr. Brumley refrained from an eloquent response.
“They ought to be,” Sir Isaac went on, “white and a sort of green. Like the County Council notices on Hampstead Heath. So as to blend.... You see, an ad. that hits too hard is worse than no ad. at all. It leaves a dislike.... Advertisements ought to blend. ”

“ Because you know it is idle to pretend that the talk of Charterson and Sir Isaac wasn’t a heavy flow of base ideas; they hadn’t even the wit to sham very much about their social significance. They cared no more for the growth, the stamina, the spirit of the people whose lives they dominated than a rat cares for the stability of the house it gnaws. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Brumley and Lady Beach-Mandarin had almost persuaded each other that Sir Isaac was applying physical torture to his proudly silent wife, and Mr. Brumley was no longer dreaming and glancing at but steadily facing the possibility of a pure-minded and handsomely done elopement to “free” Lady Harman, that would be followed in due course by a marriage, a “true marriage” on a level of understanding far above any ordinary respectable wedding, amidst universal sympathy and admiration and the presence of all the very best people. ”

“ It would be like counting the bacteria of an infection to trace how ideas of insubordination came drifting into Sir Isaac’s Paradise. The epidemic is in the air. There is no Tempter nowadays, no definitive apple. The disturbing force has grown subtler, blows in now like a draught, creeps and gathers like the dust,—a disseminated serpent. Sir Isaac brought home his young, beautiful and rather crumpled and astonished Eve and by all his standards he was entitled to be happy ever afterwards. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Brumley began to think of the letter he must write Lady Harman—a difficult letter. One does not rejoice at death. Already Mr. Brumley was beginning to feel a generous pity for the man he had done his utmost not to detest for so long. Poor Sir Isaac had lived like a blind thing in the sunlight, gathering and gathering, when the pride and pleasure of life is to administer and spend.... Mr. Brumley fell wondering just how she could be feeling now about her dead husband. She might be in a phase of quite real sorrow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Pembrose, “what else can one do?”
§8
Sir Isaac was greatly fatigued by his long journey to Santa Margherita in spite of every expensive precaution to relieve him; but as soon as the effect of that wore off, his recovery under the system Bergener had prescribed was for a time remarkable. In a little while he was out of bed again and in an armchair. Then the young doctor began to talk of drives. They had no car with them, so he went into Genoa and spent an energetic day securing the sweetest-running automobile he could find and having it refitted for Sir Isaac’s peculiar needs. ”

“ Bit more sensible than suffragetting, eh, Elly?”
“Very interesting,” said Mr. Brumley with a hollow cordiality, “very.”
“Done on business lines, mind you,” said Sir Isaac, looking suddenly very sharp and keen, “done on proper business lines, there’s no end of a change possible. And it’s a perfectly legitimate outgrowth from such popular catering as ours. It interests me.”
He made a little whistling noise with his teeth at the end of this speech.
“I didn’t know Lady Harman was disposed to take up such things,” he said. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ And now every other interest in life was dominated, and every other issue postponed by the immense urgencies of Sir Isaac’s illness. It had entered upon a new phase. It was manifest that he could no longer live in England, that he must go to some warm and kindly climate. There and with due precautions and observances Almsworth assured Lady Harman he might survive for many years—“an invalid, of course, but a capable one.” ”

“ Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. It is the peculiar snare of the perplexed orthodox, and soon Mr. Brumley was in a state of nearly unendurable moral indignation with Sir Isaac for a hundred exaggerations of what he was and of what conceivably he might have done to his silent yet manifestly unsuitably mated wife. ”

“ 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. ”