Chapter THE SIXTH: The Adventurous Afternoon (2)

A housemaid on the staircase and the second nursemaid on the nursery landing above shared Sir Isaac’s eagerness to hear her answer. But they did not hear her answer, for Lady Harman with a movement that was all too reminiscent of her mother’s in the garden, swept past him towards the door of her own room. He followed her and shut the door on the thwarted listeners.

“Here!” he said, with a connubial absence of restraint. “Where the devil you been? What the deuce do you think you’ve been getting up to?”

She had been calculating her answers since the moment she had realized that she was to return home at a disadvantage. (It is not my business to blame her for a certain disingenuousness; it is my business simply to record it.) “I went out to lunch at Lady Beach-Mandarin’s,” she said. “I told you I meant to.”

“Lunch!” he cried. “Why, it’s eight!”

“I met—some people. I met Agatha Alimony. I have a perfect right to go out to lunch——”

“You met a nice crew I’ll bet. But that don’t account for your being out to eight, does it? With all the confounded household doing as it pleases!”

“I went on—to see the borders at Hampton Court.”

“With _her_?”

“_Yes_,” said Lady Harman....

It wasn’t what she had meant to happen. It was an inglorious declension from her contemplated pose of dignified assertion. She was impelled to do her utmost to get away from this lie she had uttered at once, to eliminate Agatha from the argument by an emphatic generalization. “I’ve a perfect right,” she said, suddenly nearly breathless, “to go to Hampton Court with anyone I please, talk about anything I like and stay there as long as I think fit.”

He squeezed his thin lips together for a silent moment and then retorted. “You’ve got nothing of the sort, nothing of the sort. You’ve got to do your duty like everybody else in the world, and your duty is to be in this house controlling it—and not gossiping about London just where any silly fancy takes you.”

“I don’t think that _is_ my duty,” said Lady Harman after a slight pause to collect her forces.

“Of _course_ it’s your duty. You know it’s your duty. You know perfectly well. It’s only these rotten, silly, degenerate, decadent fools who’ve got ideas into you——” The sentence staggered under its load of adjectives like a camel under the last straw and collapsed. “_See?_” he said.

Lady Harman knitted her brows.

“I do my duty,” she began.

But Sir Isaac was now resolved upon eloquence. His mind was full with the accumulations of an extremely long and bitter afternoon and urgent to discharge. He began to answer her and then a passion of rage flooded him. Suddenly he wanted to shout and use abusive expressions and it seemed to him there was nothing to prevent his shouting and using abusive expressions. So he did. “Call this your duty,” he said, “gadding about with some infernal old suffragette——”

He paused to gather force. He had never quite let himself go to his wife before; he had never before quite let himself go to anyone. He had always been in every crisis just a little too timid to let himself go. But a wife is privileged. He sought strength and found it in words from which he had hitherto abstained. It was not a discourse to which print could do justice; it flickered from issue to issue. He touched upon Georgina, upon the stiffness of Mrs. Sawbridge’s manner, upon the neurotic weakness of Georgina’s unmarried state, upon the general decay of feminine virtue in the community, upon the laxity of modern literature, upon the dependent state of Lady Harman, upon the unfairness of their relations which gave her every luxury while he spent his days in arduous toil, upon the shame and annoyance in the eyes of his servants that her unexplained absence had caused him.

He emphasized his speech by gestures. He thrust out one rather large ill-shaped hand at her with two vibrating fingers extended. His ears became red, his nose red, his eyes seemed red and all about these points his face was wrathful white. His hair rose up into stiff scared listening ends. He had his rights, he had some _little_ claim to consideration surely, he might be just nobody but he wasn’t going to stand this much anyhow. He gave her fair warning. What was she, what did she know of the world into which she wanted to rush? He lapsed into views of Lady Beach-Mandarin—unfavourable views. I wish Lady Beach-Mandarin could have heard him....

Ever and again Lady Harman sought to speak. This incessant voice confused and baffled her; she had a just attentive mind at bottom and down there was a most weakening feeling that there must indeed be some misdeed in her to evoke so impassioned a storm. She had a curious and disconcerting sense of responsibility for his dancing exasperation, she felt she was to blame for it, just as years ago she had felt she was to blame for his tears when he had urged her so desperately to marry him. Some irrational instinct made her want to allay him. It is the supreme feminine weakness, that wish to allay. But she was also clinging desperately to her resolution to proclaim her other forthcoming engagements. Her will hung on to that as a man hangs on to a mountain path in a thunderburst. She stood gripping her dressing-table and ever and again trying to speak. But whenever she did so Sir Isaac lifted a hand and cried almost threateningly: “You hear me out, Elly! You hear me out!” and went on a little faster....

(Limburger in his curious “_Sexuelle Unterschiede der Seele_,” points out as a probably universal distinction between the sexes that when a man scolds a woman, if only he scolds loudly enough and long enough, conviction of sin is aroused, while in the reverse case the result is merely a murderous impulse. This he further says is not understood by women, who hope by scolding to produce the similar effect upon men that they themselves would experience. The passage is illustrated by figures of ducking stools and followed by some carefully analyzed statistics of connubial crime in Berlin in the years 1901-2. But in this matter let the student compare the achievement of Paulina in _The Winter’s Tale_ and reflect upon his own life. And moreover it is difficult to estimate how far the twinges of conscience that Lady Harman was feeling were not due to an entirely different cause, the falsification of her position by the lie she had just told Sir Isaac.)

And presently upon this noisy scene in the great pink bedroom, with Sir Isaac walking about and standing and turning and gesticulating and Lady Harman clinging on to her dressing-table, and painfully divided between her new connections, her sense of guilty deception and the deep instinctive responsibilities of a woman’s nature, came, like one of those rows of dots that are now so frequent and so helpful in the art of fiction, the surging, deep, assuaging note of Snagsby’s gong: Booooooom. Boom. Boooooom....

“Damn it!” cried Sir Isaac, smiting at the air with both fists clenched and speaking as though this was Ellen’s crowning misdeed, “and we aren’t even dressed for dinner!”

§9

Dinner had something of the stiffness of court ceremonial.

Mrs. Sawbridge, perhaps erring on the side of discretion, had consumed a little soup and a wing of chicken in her own room. Sir Isaac was down first and his wife found him grimly astride before the great dining-room fire awaiting her. She had had her dark hair dressed with extreme simplicity and had slipped on a blue velvet tea-gown, but she had been delayed by a visit to the nursery, where the children were now flushed and uneasily asleep.

Husband and wife took their places at the genuine Sheraton dining-table—one of the very best pieces Sir Isaac had ever picked up—and were waited on with a hushed, scared dexterity by Snagsby and the footman.

Lady Harman and her husband exchanged no remarks during the meal; Sir Isaac was a little noisy with his soup as became a man who controls honest indignation, and once he complained briefly in a slightly hoarse voice to Snagsby about the state of one of the rolls. Between the courses he leant back in his chair and made faint sounds with his teeth. These were the only breach of the velvety quiet. Lady Harman was surprised to discover herself hungry, but she ate with thoughtful dignity and gave her mind to the attempted digestion of the confusing interview she had just been through.

It was a very indigestible interview.

On the whole her heart hardened again. With nourishment and silence her spirit recovered a little from its abasement, and her resolution to assert her freedom to go hither and thither and think as she chose renewed itself. She tried to plan some way of making her declaration so that she would not again be overwhelmed by a torrent of response. Should she speak to him at the end of dinner? Should she speak to him while Snagsby was in the room? But he might behave badly even with Snagsby in the room and she could not bear to think of him behaving badly to her in the presence of Snagsby. She glanced at him over the genuine old silver bowl of roses in the middle of the table—all the roses were good _new_ sorts—and tried to estimate how he might behave under various methods of declaration.

The dinner followed its appointed ritual to the dessert. Came the wine and Snagsby placed the cigars and a little silver lamp beside his master.

She rose slowly with a speech upon her lips. Sir Isaac remained seated looking up at her with a mitigated fury in his little red-brown eyes.

The speech receded from her lips again.

“I think,” she said after a strained pause, “I will go and see how mother is now.”

“She’s only shamming,” said Sir Isaac belatedly to her back as she went out of the room.

She found her mother in a wrap before her fire and made her dutiful enquiries.

“It’s only quite a _slight_ headache,” Mrs. Sawbridge confessed. “But Isaac was so upset about Georgina and about”—she flinched—“about—everything, that I thought it better to be out of the way.”

“What exactly has Georgina done?”

“It’s in the paper, dear. On the table there.”

Ellen studied the _Times_.

“Georgina got them the tickets,” Mrs. Sawbridge explained. “I wish she hadn’t. It was so—so unnecessary of her.”

There was a little pause as Lady Harman read. She put down the paper and asked her mother if she could do anything for her.

“I—I suppose it’s all Right, dear, now?” Mrs. Sawbridge asked.

“Quite,” said her daughter. “You’re sure I can do nothing for you, mummy?”

“I’m kept so in the dark about things.”

“It’s quite all right now, mummy.”

“He went on—dreadfully.”

“It was annoying—of Georgina.”

“It makes my position so difficult. I do wish he wouldn’t want to speak to me—about all these things.... Georgina treats me like a Perfect Nonentity and then he comes——It’s so inconsiderate. Starting Disputes. Do you know, dear, I really think—if I were to go for a little time to Bournemouth——?”

Her daughter seemed to find something attractive in the idea. She came to the hearthrug and regarded her mother with maternal eyes.

“Don’t you _worry_ about things, mummy,” she said.

“Mrs. Bleckhorn told me of such a nice quiet boarding-house, almost looking on the sea.... One would be safe from Insult there. You know——” her voice broke for a moment, “he was Insulting, he _meant_ to be Insulting. I’m—Upset. I’ve been thinking over it ever since.”

§10

Lady Harman came out upon the landing. She felt absolutely without backing in the world. (If only she hadn’t told a lie!) Then with an effort she directed her course downstairs to the dining-room.

(The lie had been necessary. It was only a detail. It mustn’t blind her to the real issue.)

She entered softly and found her husband standing before the fire plunged in gloomy thoughts. Upon the marble mantel-shelf behind him was a little glass; he had been sipping port in spite of the express prohibition of his doctor and the wine had reddened the veins of his eyes and variegated the normal pallor of his countenance with little flushed areas. “Hel-lo,” he said looking up suddenly as she closed the door behind her.

For a moment there was something in their two expressions like that on the faces of men about to box.

“I want you to understand,” she said, and then; “The way you behaved——”

There was an uncontrollable break in her voice. She had a dreadful feeling that she might be going to cry. She made a great effort to be cold and clear.

“I don’t think you have a right—just because I am your wife—to control every moment of my time. In fact you haven’t. And I have a right to make engagements.... I want you to know I am going to an afternoon meeting at Lady Beach-Mandarin’s. Next week. And I have promised to go to Miss Alimony’s to tea.”

“Go on,” he encouraged grimly.

“I am going to Lady Viping’s to dinner, too; she asked me and I accepted. Later.”

She stopped.

He seemed to deliberate. Then suddenly he thrust out a face of pinched determination.

“You _won’t_, my lady,” he said. “You bet your life you won’t. _No!_ So _now_ then!”

And then gripping his hands more tightly behind him, he made a step towards her.

“You’re losing your bearings, Lady Harman,” he said, speaking with much intensity in a low earnest voice. “You don’t seem to be remembering where you are. You come and you tell me you’re going to do this and that. Don’t you know, Lady Harman, that it’s your wifely duty to obey, to do as I say, to behave as I wish?” He brought out a lean index finger to emphasize his remarks. “And I am going to make you do it!” he said.

“I’ve a perfect right,” she repeated.

He went on, regardless of her words. “What do you think you can do, Lady Harman? You’re going to all these places—how? Not in _my_ motor-car, not with _my_ money. You’ve not a thing that isn’t mine, that _I_ haven’t given you. And if you’re going to have a lot of friends I haven’t got, where’re they coming to see you? Not in _my_ house! I’ll chuck ’em out if I find ’em. I won’t have ’em. I’ll turn ’em out. See?”

“I’m not a slave.”

“You’re a wife—and a wife’s got to do what her husband wishes. You can’t have two heads on a horse. And in _this_ horse—this house I mean, the head’s—_me_!”

“I’m not a slave and I won’t be a slave.”

“You’re a wife and you’ll stick to the bargain you made when you married me. I’m ready in reason to give you anything you want—if you do your duty as a wife should. Why!—I spoil you. But this going about on your own, this highty-flighty go-as-you-please,—no man on earth who’s worth calling a man will stand it. I’m not going to begin to stand it.... You try it on. You try it, Lady Harman.... You’ll come to your senses soon enough. See? You start trying it on now—straight away. We’ll make an experiment. We’ll watch how it goes. Only don’t expect me to give you any money, don’t expect me to help your struggling family, don’t expect me to alter my arrangements because of you. Let’s keep apart for a bit and you go your way and I’ll go mine. And we’ll see who’s sick of it first, we’ll see who wants to cry off.”

“I came down here,” said Lady Harman, “to give you a reasonable notice——”

“And you found _I_ could reason too,” interrupted Sir Isaac in a kind of miniature shout, “you found I could reason too!”

“You think——Reason! I _won’t_,” said Lady Harman, and found herself in tears. By an enormous effort she recovered something of her dignity and withdrew. He made no effort to open the door, but stood a little hunchbacked and with a sense of rhetorical victory surveying her retreat.

§11

After Lady Harman’s maid had left her that night, she sat for some time in a low easy chair before her fire, trying at first to collect together into one situation all the events of the day and then lapsing into that state of mind which is not so much thinking as resting in the attitude of thought. Presently, in a vaguely conceived future, she would go to bed. She was stunned by the immense dimensions of the row her simple act of defiance had evoked.

And then came an incredible incident, so incredible that next day she still had great difficulty in deciding whether it was an actuality or a dream. She heard a little very familiar sound. It was the last sound she would have expected to hear and she turned sharply when she heard it. The paper-covered door in the wall of her husband’s apartment opened softly, paused, opened some more and his little undignified head appeared. His hair was already tumbled from his pillow.

He regarded her steadfastly for some moments with an expression between shame and curiosity and smouldering rage, and then allowed his body, clad now in purple-striped pyjamas, to follow his head into her room. He advanced guiltily.

“Elly,” he whispered. “Elly!”

She caught her dressing-gown about her and stood up.

“What is it, Isaac?” she asked, feeling curiously abashed at this invasion.

“Elly,” he said, still in that furtive undertone. “_Make it up!_”

“I want my freedom,” she said, after a little pause.

“Don’t be _silly_, Elly,” he whispered in a tone of remonstrance and advancing slowly towards her. “Make it up. Chuck all these ideas.”

She shook her head.

“We’ve got to get along together. You can’t go going about just anywhere. We’ve got—we’ve got to be reasonable.”

He halted, three paces away from her. His eyes weren’t sorrowful eyes, or friendly eyes; they were just shiftily eager eyes. “Look here,” he said. “It’s all nonsense.... Elly, old girl; let’s—let’s make it up.”

She looked at him and it dawned upon her that she had always imagined herself to be afraid of him and that indeed she wasn’t. She shook her head obstinately.

“It isn’t reasonable,” he said. “Here, we’ve been the happiest of people——Anything in reason I’ll let you have.” He paused with an effect of making an offer.

“I want my autonomy,” she said.

“Autonomy!” he echoed. “Autonomy! What’s autonomy? Autonomy!”

This strange word seemed first to hold him in distressful suspense and then to infuriate him.

“I come in here to make it up,” he said, with a voice charged with griefs, “after all you’ve done, and you go and you talk of autonomy!”

His feelings passed beyond words. An extremity of viciousness flashed into his face. He gave vent to a snarl of exasperation, “Ya-ap!” he said, he raised his clenched fists and seemed on the verge of assault, and then with a gesture between fury and despair, he wheeled about and the purple-striped pyjamas danced in passionate retreat from her room.

“Autonomy!...”

A slam, a noise of assaulted furniture, and then silence.

Lady Harman stood for some moments regarding the paper-covered door that had closed behind him. Then she bared her white forearm and pinched it—hard.

It wasn’t a dream! This thing had happened.

§12

At a quarter to three in the morning, Lady Harman was surprised to find herself wide awake. It was exactly a quarter to three when she touched the stud of the ingenious little silver apparatus upon the table beside her bed which reflected a luminous clock-face upon the ceiling. And her mind was no longer resting in the attitude of thought but extraordinarily active. It was active, but as she presently began to realize it was not progressing. It was spinning violently round and round the frenzied figure of a little man in purple-striped pyjamas retreating from her presence, whirling away from her like something blown before a gale. That seemed to her to symbolize the completeness of the breach the day had made between her husband and herself.

She felt as a statesman might feel who had inadvertently—while conducting some trivial negotiations—declared war.

She was profoundly alarmed. She perceived ahead of her abundant possibilities of disagreeable things. And she wasn’t by any means as convinced of the righteousness of her cause as a happy warrior should be. She had a natural disposition towards truthfulness and it worried her mind that while she was struggling to assert her right to these common social freedoms she should be tacitly admitting a kind of justice in her husband’s objections by concealing the fact that her afternoon’s companion was a man. She tried not to recognize the existence of a doubt, but deep down in her mind there did indeed lurk a weakening uncertainty about the right of a woman to free conversation with any man but her own. Her reason disowned that uncertainty with scorn. But it wouldn’t go away for all her reason. She went about in her mind doing her utmost to cut that doubt dead....

She tried to go back to the beginning and think it all out. And as she was not used to thinking things out, the effort took the form of an imaginary explanation to Mr. Brumley of the difficulties of her position. She framed phrases. “You see, Mr. Brumley,” she imagined herself to be saying, “I want to do my duty as a wife, I have to do my duty as a wife. But it’s so hard to say just where duty leaves off and being a mere slave begins. I cannot believe that _blind_ obedience is any woman’s duty. A woman needs—autonomy.” Then her mind went off for a time to a wrestle with the exact meaning of autonomy, an issue that had not arisen hitherto in her mind.... And as she planned out such elucidations, there grew more and more distinct in her mind a kind of idealized Mr. Brumley, very grave, very attentive, wonderfully understanding, saying illuminating helpful tonic things, that made everything clear, everything almost easy. She wanted someone of that quality so badly. The night would have been unendurable if she could not have imagined Mr. Brumley of that quality. And imagining him of that quality her heart yearned for him. She felt that she had been terribly inexpressive that afternoon, she had shirked points, misstated points, and yet he had been marvellously understanding. Ever and again his words had seemed to pierce right through what she had been saying to what she had been thinking. And she recalled with peculiar comfort a kind of abstracted calculating look that had come at times into his eyes, as though his thoughts were going ever so much deeper and ever so much further than her blundering questionings could possibly have taken them. He weighed every word, he had a guarded way of saying “Um....”

Her thoughts came back to the dancing little figure in purple-striped pyjamas. She had a scared sense of irrevocable breaches. What would he do to-morrow? What should she do to-morrow? Would he speak to her at breakfast or should she speak first to him?... She wished she had some money. If she could have foreseen all this she would have got some money before she began....

So her mind went on round and round and the dawn was breaking before she slept again.

§13

Mr. Brumley, also, slept little that night. He was wakefully mournful, recalling each ungraceful incident of the afternoon’s failure in turn and more particularly his dispute with the ticket clerk, and thinking over all the things he might have done—if only he hadn’t done the things he had done. He had made an atrocious mess of things. He felt he had hopelessly shattered the fair fabric of impressions of him that Lady Harman had been building up, that image of a wise humane capable man to whom a woman would gladly turn; he had been flurried, he had been incompetent, he had been ridiculously incompetent, and it seemed to him that life was a string of desolating inadequacies and that he would never smile again.

The probable reception of Lady Harman by her husband never came within his imaginative scope. Nor did the problems of social responsibility that Lady Harman had been trying to put to him exercise him very greatly. The personal disillusionment was too strong for that.

About half-past four a faint ray of comfort came with the consideration that after all a certain practical incapacity is part of the ensemble of a literary artist, and then he found himself wondering what flowers of wisdom Montaigne might not have culled from such a day’s experience; he began an imitative essay in his head and he fell asleep upon this at last at about ten minutes past five in the morning.

There were better things than this in the composition of Mr. Brumley, we shall have to go deep into these reserves before we have done with him, but when he had so recently barked the shins of his self-esteem they had no chance at all.