Herbert Wells - The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

"Things like that," she said, "didn't ought to be. One shop didn't ought to be allowed to set out to ruin another. It isn't fair trading, it's a sort of murder. It oughtn't to be allowed. How was father to know?..."

"There's got to be competition," said Lady Harman.

"I don't call that competition," said Susan Burnet.

"But,—I suppose they give people cheaper bread."

"They do for a time. Then when they've killed you they do what they like.... Luke—he's one of those who'll say anything—well, he used to say it was a regular Monopoly. But it's hard on people who've set out to live honest and respectable and bring up a family plain and decent to be pushed out of the way like that."

"I suppose it is," said Lady Harman.

"What was father to do ?" said Susan, and turned to Sir Isaac's armchair from which this discourse had distracted her.

And then suddenly, in a voice thick with rage, she burst out: "And then Alice must needs go and take their money. That's what sticks in my throat."

Still on her knees she faced about to Lady Harman.

"Alice goes into one of their Ho'burn branches as a waitress, do what I could to prevent her. It makes one mad to think of it. Time after time I've said to her, 'Alice,' I've said, 'sooner than touch their dirty money I'd starve in the street.' And she goes! She says it's all nonsense of me to bear a spite. Laughs at me! 'Alice,' I told her, 'it's a wonder the spirit of poor father don't rise up against you.' And she laughs. Calls that bearing a spite.... Of course she was little when it happened. She can't remember, not as I remember...."

Lady Harman reflected for a time. "I suppose you don't know," she began, addressing Susan's industrious back; "you don't know who—who owns these International Stores?"

"I suppose it's some company," said Susan. "I don't see that it lets them off—being in a company."

We have done much in the last few years to destroy the severe limitations of Victorian delicacy, and all of us, from princesses and prime-ministers' wives downward, talk of topics that would have been considered quite gravely improper in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, some topics have, if anything, become more indelicate than they were, and this is especially true of the discussion of income, of any discussion that tends, however remotely, to inquire, Who is it at the base of everything who really pays in blood and muscle and involuntary submissions for your freedom and magnificence? This, indeed, is almost the ultimate surviving indecency. So that it was with considerable private shame and discomfort that Lady Harman pursued even in her privacy the train of thought that Susan Burnet had set going. It had been conveyed into her mind long ago, and it had settled down there and grown into a sort of security, that the International Bread and Cake Stores were a very important contribution to Progress, and that Sir Isaac, outside the gates of his home, was a very useful and beneficial personage, and richly meriting a baronetcy. She hadn't particularly analyzed this persuasion, but she supposed him engaged in a kind of daily repetition, but upon modern scientific lines, of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, feeding a great multitude that would otherwise have gone hungry. She knew, too, from the advertisements that flowered about her path through life, that this bread in question was exceptionally clean and hygienic; whole front pages of the Daily Messenger , headed the "Fauna of Small Bakehouses," and adorned with a bordering of Blatta orientalis , the common cockroach, had taught her that, and she knew that Sir Isaac's passion for purity had also led to the Old Country Gazette's spirited and successful campaign for a non-party measure securing additional bakehouse regulation and inspection. And her impression had been that the growing and developing refreshment side of the concern was almost a public charity; Sir Isaac gave, he said, a larger, heavier scone, a bigger pat of butter, a more elegant teapot, ham more finely cut and less questionable pork-pies than any other system of syndicated tea-shops. She supposed that whenever he sat late at night going over schemes and papers, or when he went off for days together to Cardiff or Glasgow or Dublin, or such-like centres, or when he became preoccupied at dinner and whistled thoughtfully through his teeth, he was planning to increase the amount or diminish the cost of tea and cocoa-drenched farinaceous food in the stomachs of that section of our national adolescence which goes out daily into the streets of our great cities to be fed. And she knew his vans and catering were indispensable to the British Army upon its manœuvres....

Now the smashing up of the Burnet family by the International Stores was disagreeably not in the picture of these suppositions. And the remarkable thing is that this one little tragedy wouldn't for a moment allow itself to be regarded as an exceptional accident in an otherwise fair vast development. It remained obstinately a specimen—of the other side of the great syndication.

It was just as if she had been doubting subconsciously all along.... In the silence of the night she lay awake and tried to make herself believe that the Burnet case was just a unique overlooked disaster, that it needed only to come to Sir Isaac's attention to be met by the fullest reparation....

After all she did not bring it to Sir Isaac's attention.

But one morning, while this phase of new doubts was still lively in her mind, Sir Isaac told her he was going down to Brighton, and then along the coast road in a car to Portsmouth, to pay a few surprise visits, and see how the machine was working. He would be away a night, an unusual breach in his habits.

"Are you thinking of any new branches, Isaac?"

"I may have a look at Arundel."

"Isaac." She paused to frame her question carefully. "I suppose there are some shops at Arundel now."

"I've got to see to that."

"If you open——I suppose the old shops get hurt. What becomes of the people if they do get hurt?"

"That's their look-out," said Sir Isaac.

"Isn't it bad for them?"

"Progress is Progress, Elly."

"It is bad for them. I suppose——Wouldn't it be sometimes kinder if you took over the old shop—made a sort of partner of him, or something?"

Sir Isaac shook his head. "I want younger men," he said. "You can't get a move on the older hands."

"But, then, it's rather bad——I suppose these little men you shut up,—some of them must have families."

"You're theorizing a bit this morning, Elly," said Sir Isaac, looking up over his coffee cup.

"I've been thinking—about these little people."

"Someone's been talking to you about my shops," said Sir Isaac, and stuck out an index finger. "If that's Georgina——"

"It isn't Georgina," said Lady Harman, but she had it very clear in her mind that she must not say who it was.

"You can't make a business without squeezing somebody," said Sir Isaac. "It's easy enough to make a row about any concern that grows a bit. Some people would like to have every business tied down to a maximum turnover and so much a year profit. I dare say you've been hearing of these articles in the London Lion . Pretty stuff it is, too. This fuss about the little shopkeepers; that's a new racket. I've had all that row about the waitresses before, and the yarn about the Normandy eggs, and all that, but I don't see that you need go reading it against me, and bringing it up at the breakfast-table. A business is a business, it isn't a charity, and I'd like to know where you and I would be if we didn't run the concern on business lines.... Why, that London Lion fellow came to me with the first two of those articles before the thing began. I could have had the whole thing stopped if I liked, if I'd chosen to take the back page of his beastly cover. That shows the stuff the whole thing is made of. That shows you. Why!—he's just a blackmailer, that's what he is. Much he cares for my waitresses if he can get the dibs. Little shopkeepers, indeed! I know 'em! Nice martyrs they are! There isn't one wouldn't skin all the others if he got half a chance...."