The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman Part 25

Meanwhile Lady Harman produced a little glittering object and held it between finger and thumb. "If I went into a p.a.w.nshop near here," she said, "it would seem so odd.... This ring, Susan, must be worth thirty or forty pounds. And it seems so silly when I have it that I should really be wanting money...."

Susan displayed a peculiar reluctance to handle the ring. "I've never,"

she said, "p.a.w.ned anything valuable--not valuable like that.

Suppose--suppose they wanted to know how I had come by it."

"It's more than Alice earns in a year," she said. "It's----" she eyed the glittering treasure; "it's a queer thing for me to have."

A certain embarra.s.sment arose between them. Lady Harman's need of money became more apparent. "I'll do it for you," said Susan, "indeed I'll do it. But----There's one thing----"

Her face flushed hotly. "It isn't that I want to make difficulties. But people in our position--we aren't like people in your position. It's awkward sometimes to explain things. You've got a good character, but people don't know it. You can't be too careful. It isn't sufficient--just to be honest. If I take that----If you were just to give me a little note--in your handwriting--on your paper--just asking me----I don't suppose I need show it to anyone...."

"I'll write the note," said Lady Harman. A new set of uncomfortable ideas was dawning upon her. "But Susan----You don't mean that anyone, anyone who's really honest--might get into trouble?"

"You can't be too careful," said Susan, manifestly resolved not to give our highly civilized state half a chance with her.

--6

The problem of Sir Isaac and just what he was doing and what he thought he was doing and what he meant to do increased in importance in Lady Harman's mind as the days pa.s.sed by. He had an air of being malignantly up to something and she could not imagine what this something could be.

He spoke to her very little but he looked at her a great deal. He had more and more of the quality of a premeditated imminent explosion....

One morning she was standing quite still in the drawing-room thinking over this now almost oppressive problem of why the situation did not develop further with him, when she became aware of a thin flat unusual book upon the small side table near the great armchair at the side of the fire. He had been reading that overnight and it lay obliquely--it might almost have been left out for her.

She picked it up. It was _The Taming of the Shrew_ in that excellent folio edition of Henley's which makes each play a comfortable thin book apart. A curiosity to learn what it was had drawn her husband to English Literature made her turn over the pages. _The Taming of the Shrew_ was a play she knew very slightly. For the Harmans, though deeply implicated like most other rich and striving people in plans for honouring the immortal William, like most other people found scanty leisure to read him.

As she turned over the pages a pencil mark caught her eye. Thence words were underlined and further accentuated by a deeply scored line in the margin.

"But for my bonny Kate, she must with me.

Nay; look not big, nor stamp, nor stare, nor fret; I will be master of what is mine own: She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house, She is my household stuff, my field, my barn, My horse, my ox, my a.s.s, my any thing: And here she stands, touch her whoever dare; I'll bring mine action on the proudest He, That stops my way in Padua."

With a slightly heightened colour, Lady Harman read on and presently found another page slashed with Sir Isaac's approval....

Her face became thoughtful. Did he mean to attempt--Petruchio? He could never dare. There were servants, there were the people one met, the world.... He would never dare....

What a strange play it was! Shakespear of course was wonderfully wise, the crown of English wisdom, the culminating English mind,--or else one might almost find something a little stupid and clumsy.... Did women nowadays really feel like these Elizabethan wives who talked--like girls, very forward girls indeed, but girls of sixteen?...

She read the culminating speech of Katherine and now she had so forgotten Sir Isaac she scarcely noted the pencil line that endorsed the immortal words.

"Thy husband is thy Lord, thy Life, thy Keeper, Thy Head, thy Sovereign; one who cares for thee, And for thy maintenance commits his body To painful labour both by sea and land, To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, While thou liest warm at home, secure and safe; And craves no other tribute at thy hands But love, fair looks, and true obedience; Too little payment for so great a debt.

Such duty as the Subject owes the Prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband; And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour, And not obedient to his honest will, What is she but a foul contending Rebel And graceless traitor to her loving Lord?

I am ashamed that women are so simple To offer war, where they should kneel for peace;

My mind has been as big as one of yours, My heat as great; my reason, haply, more, To bandy word for word and frown for frown.

But now I see our lances are but straws; Our strength is weak, our weakness past compare, Seeming that most which we indeed least are...."

She wasn't indignant. Something in these lines took hold of her protesting imagination.

She knew that so she could have spoken of a man.

But that man,--she apprehended him as vaguely as an Anglican bishop apprehends G.o.d. He was obscured altogether by shadows; he had only one known characteristic, that he was totally unlike Sir Isaac. And the play was false she felt in giving this speech to a broken woman. Such things are not said by broken women. Broken women do no more than cheat and lie. But so a woman might speak out of her unconquered wilfulness, as a queen might give her lover a kingdom out of the fullness of her heart.

--7

The evening after his wife had had this glimpse into Sir Isaac's mental processes he telephoned that Charterson and Horatio Blenker were coming home to dinner with him. Neither Lady Charterson nor Mrs. Blenker were to be present; it was to be a business conversation and not a social occasion, and Lady Harman he desired should wear her black and gold with just a touch of crimson in her hair. Charterson wanted a word or two with the flexible Horatio on sugar at the London docks, and Sir Isaac had some vague ideas that a turn might be given to the public judgment upon the waitresses' strike, by a couple of Horatio's thoughtful yet gentlemanly articles. And in addition Charterson seemed to have something else upon his mind; he did not tell as much to Sir Isaac but he was weighing the possibilities of securing a controlling share in the _Daily Spirit_, which simply didn't know at present where it was upon the sugar business, and of installing Horatio's brother, Adolphus, as its editor. He wanted to form some idea from Horatio of what Adolphus might expect before he approached Adolphus.

Lady Harman wore the touch of crimson in her hair as her husband had desired, and the table was decorated simply with a big silver bowl of crimson roses. A slight shade of apprehension in Sir Isaac's face changed to approval at the sight of her obedience. After all perhaps she was beginning to see the commonsense of her position.

Charterson struck her as looking larger, but then whenever she saw him he struck her as looking larger. He enveloped her hand in a large amiable paw for a minute and asked after the children with gusto. The large teeth beneath his discursive moustache gave him the effect of a perennial smile to which his asymmetrical ears added a touch of waggery.

He always betrayed a fatherly feeling towards her as became a man who was married to a handsome wife old enough to be her mother. Even when he asked about the children he did it with something of the amused knowingness of a.s.sured seniority, as if indeed he knew all sorts of things about the children that she couldn't as yet even begin to imagine. And though he confined his serious conversation to the two other men, he would ever and again show himself mindful of her and throw her some friendly enquiry, some quizzically puzzling remark. Blenker as usual treated her as if she were an only very indistinctly visible presence to whom an effusive yet inattentive politeness was due. He was clearly nervous almost to the pitch of jumpiness. He knew he was to be spoken to about the sugar business directly he saw Charterson, and he hated being spoken to about the sugar business. He had his code of honour. Of course one had to make concessions to one's proprietors, but he could not help feeling that if only they would consent to see his really quite obvious gentlemanliness more clearly it would be better for the paper, better for the party, better for them, far better for himself. He wasn't altogether a fool about that sugar; he knew how things lay. They ought to trust him more. His nervousness betrayed itself in many little ways. He crumbled his bread constantly until, thanks to Snagsby's a.s.siduous replacement, he had made quite a pile of crumbs, he dropped his gla.s.ses in the soup--a fine occasion for Snagsby's _sang-froid_--and he forgot not to use a fish knife with the fish as Lady Grove directs and tried when he discovered his error to replace it furtively on the table cloth. Moreover he kept on patting the gla.s.ses on his nose--after Snagsby had whisked his soup plate away, rescued, wiped and returned them to him--until that feature glowed modestly at such excesses of attention, and the soup and sauces and things bothered his fine blond moustache unusually. So that Mr. Blenker what with the gla.s.ses, the napkin, the food and the things seemed as restless as a young sparrow. Lady Harman did her duties as hostess in the quiet key of her sombre dress, and until the conversation drew her out into unexpected questionings she answered rather than talked, and she did not look at her husband once throughout the meal.

At first the talk was very largely Charterson. He had no intention of coming to business with Blenker until Lady Harman had given place to the port and the man's nerves were steadier. He spoke of this and that in the large discursive way men use in clubs, and it was past the fish before the conversation settled down upon the topic of business organization and Sir Isaac, a little warmed by champagne, came out of the uneasily apprehensive taciturnity into which he had fallen in the presence of his wife. Horatio Blenker was keenly interested in the idealization of commercial syndication, he had been greatly stirred by a book of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee's called _Inspired Millionaires_ which set out to show just what magnificent airs rich men might give themselves, and he had done his best to catch its tone and to find _Inspired Millionaires_ in Sir Isaac and Charterson and to bring it to their notice and to the notice of the readers of the _Old Country Gazette_. He felt that if only Sir Isaac and Charterson would see getting rich as a Great Creative Act it would raise their tone and his tone and the tone of the _Old Country Gazette_ tremendously. It wouldn't of course materially alter the methods or policy of the paper but it would make them all feel n.o.bler, and Blenker was of that finer clay that does honestly want to feel n.o.bler. He hated pessimism and all that criticism and self-examination that makes weak men pessimistic, he wanted to help weak men and be helped himself, he was all for that school of optimism that would have each dunghill was a well-upholstered throne, and his nervous, starry contributions to the talk were like patches of water ranunculuses trying to flower in the overflow of a sewer.

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. They _wanted_ a broken-spirited people. They were in such relations wilfully and offensively stupid, and I do not see why we people who read and write books should pay this stupidity merely because it is prevalent even the mild tribute of an ironical civility. Charterson talked of the gathering trouble that might lead to a strike of the transport workers in London docks, and what he had to say, he said,--he repeated it several times--was, "_Let_ them strike. We're ready. The sooner they strike the better. Devonport's a Man and this time we'll _beat_ 'em...."

He expanded generally on strikes. "It's a question practically whether we are to manage our own businesses or whether we're to have them managed for us. _Managed_ I say!..."

"They know nothing of course of the details of organization," said Blenker, s.h.i.+ning with intelligence and looking quickly first to the right and then to the left. "Nothing."

Sir Isaac broke out into confirmatory matter. There was an idea in his head that this talk might open his wife's eyes to some sense of the magnitude of his commercial life, to the wonder of its scale and quality. He compared notes with Charterson upon a speeding-up system for delivery vans invented by an American specialist and it made Blenker flush with admiration and turn as if for sympathy to Lady Harman to realize how a modification in a tailboard might mean a yearly saving in wages of many thousand pounds. "The sort of thing they don't understand," he said. And then Sir Isaac told of some of his own little devices. He had recently taken to having the returns of percentage increase and decrease from his various districts printed on postcards and circulated monthly among the district managers, postcards endorsed with such stimulating comments in red type as "Well done Cardiff!" or "What ails Portsmouth?"--the results had been amazingly good; "neck and neck work," he said, "everywhere"--and thence they pa.s.sed to the question of confidential reports and surprise inspectors. Thereby they came to the rights and wrongs of the waitress strike.

And then it was that Lady Harman began to take a share in the conversation.

She interjected a question. "Yes," she said suddenly and her interruption was so unexpected that all three men turned their eyes to her. "But how much do the girls get a week?"

"I thought," she said to some confused explanations by Blenker and Charterson, "that gratuities were forbidden."

Blenker further explained that most of the girls of the cla.s.s Sir Isaac was careful to employ lived at home. Their income was "supplementary."

"But what happens to the others who don't live at home, Mr. Blenker?"

she asked.

"Very small minority," said Mr. Blenker rea.s.suring himself about his gla.s.ses.

"But what do they do?"

Charterson couldn't imagine whether she was going on in this way out of sheer ignorance or not.

"Sometimes their fines make big unexpected holes in their week's pay,"

she said.

Sir Isaac made some indistinct remark about "utter nonsense."

"It seems to me to be driving them straight upon the streets."

The phrase was Susan's. Its full significance wasn't at that time very clear to Lady Harman and it was only when she had uttered it that she realized from Horatio Blenker's convulsive start just what a blow she had delivered at that table. His gla.s.ses came off again. He caught them and thrust them back, he seemed to be holding his nose on, holding his face on, preserving those carefully arranged features of himself from hideous revelations; his free hand made weak movements with his dinner napkin. He seemed to be holding it in reserve against the ultimate failure of his face. Charterson surveyed her through an immense pause open-mouthed; then he turned his large now frozen amiability upon his host. "These are Awful questions," he gasped, "rather beyond Us don't you think?" and then magnificently; "Harman, things are looking pretty Queer in the Far East again. I'm told there are chances--of revolution--even in Pekin...."