Herbert Wells - The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

"Have I ever refused you money?" cried Sir Isaac protesting.

"It isn't that," said Lady Harman; "it's the feeling——"

"The feeling of being able to—defy—anything I say," said Sir Isaac with a note of bitterness. "As if I didn't understand!"

It was beyond Lady Harman's powers to express just how that wasn't the precise statement of the case.

Sir Isaac, reverting to his tone of almost elaborate reasonableness, expanded his view that it was impossible for husband and wife to have two different sets of friends;—let alone every other consideration, he explained, it wasn't convenient for them not to be about together, and as for reading or thinking what she chose he had never made any objection to anything unless it was "decadent rot" that any decent man would object to his womanfolk seeing, rot she couldn't understand the drift of—fortunately. Blear-eyed humbug.... He checked himself on the verge of an almost archiepiscopal outbreak in order to be patiently reasonable again. He was prepared to concede that it would be very nice if Lady Harman could be a good wife and also an entirely independent person, very nice, but the point was—his tone verged on the ironical—that she couldn't be two entirely different people at the same time.

"But you have your friends," she said, "you go away alone——"

"That's different," said Sir Isaac with a momentary note of annoyance. "It's business. It isn't that I want to."

Lady Harman had a feeling that they were neither of them gaining any ground. She blamed herself for her lack of lucidity. She began again, taking up the matter at a fresh point. She said that her life at present wasn't full, that it was only half a life, that it was just home and marriage and nothing else; he had his business, he went out into the world, he had politics and—"all sorts of things"; she hadn't these interests; she had nothing in the place of them——

Sir Isaac closed this opening rather abruptly by telling her that she should count herself lucky she hadn't, and again the conversation was suspended for a time.

"But I want to know about these things," she said.

Sir Isaac took that musingly.

"There's things go on," she said; "outside home. There's social work, there's interests——Am I never to take any part—in that?"

Sir Isaac still reflected.

"There's one thing," he said at last, "I want to know. We'd better have it out— now ."

But he hesitated for a time.

"Elly!" he blundered, "you aren't—you aren't getting somehow—not fond of me?"

She made no immediate reply.

"Look here!" he said in an altered voice. "Elly! there isn't something below all this? There isn't something been going on that I don't know?"

Her eyes with a certain terror in their depths questioned him.

"Something," he said, and his face was deadly white—" Some other man, Elly? "

She was suddenly crimson, a flaming indignation.

"Isaac!" she said, "what do you mean ? How can you ask me such a thing?"

"If it's that!" said Sir Isaac, his face suddenly full of malignant force, "I'll——But I'd kill you...."

"If it isn't that," he went on searching his mind; "why should a woman get restless? Why should she want to go away from her husband, go meeting other people, go gadding about? If a woman's satisfied, she's satisfied. She doesn't harbour fancies.... All this grumbling and unrest. Natural for your sister, but why should you? You've got everything a woman needs, husband, children, a perfectly splendid home, clothes, good jewels and plenty of them, respect! Why should you want to go out after things? It's mere spoilt-childishness. Of course you want to wander out—and if there isn't a man——"

He caught her wrist suddenly. "There isn't a man?" he demanded.

"Isaac!" she protested in horror.

"Then there'll be one. You think I'm a fool, you think I don't know anything all these literary and society people know. I do know. I know that a man and a woman have got to stick together, and if you go straying—you may think you're straying after the moon or social work or anything—but there's a strange man waiting round the corner for every woman and a strange woman for every man. Think I 've had no temptations?... Oh! I know , I know . What's life or anything but that? and it's just because we've not gone on having more children, just because we listened to all those fools who said you were overdoing it, that all this fretting and grumbling began. We've got on to the wrong track, Elly, and we've got to get back to plain wholesome ways of living. See? That's what I've come down here for and what I mean to do. We've got to save ourselves. I've been too—too modern and all that. I'm going to be a husband as a husband should. I'm going to protect you from these idees—protect you from your own self.... And that's about where we stand, Elly, as I make it out."

He paused with the effect of having delivered himself of long premeditated things.

Lady Harman essayed to speak. But she found that directly she set herself to speak she sobbed and began weeping. She choked for a moment. Then she determined she would go on, and if she must cry, she must cry. She couldn't let a disposition to tears seal her in silence for ever.

"It isn't," she said, "what I expected—of life. It isn't——"

"It's what life is," Sir Isaac cut in.

"When I think," she sobbed, "of what I've lost——"

" Lost! " cried Sir Isaac. "Lost! Oh come now, Elly, I like that. What!— lost . Hang it! You got to look facts in the face. You can't deny——Marrying like this,—you made a jolly good thing of it."

"But the beautiful things, the noble things!"

" What's beautiful?" cried Sir Isaac in protesting scorn. " What's noble? ROT! Doing your duty if you like and being sensible, that's noble and beautiful, but not fretting about and running yourself into danger. You've got to have a sense of humour, Elly, in this life——" He created a quotation. "As you make your bed—so shall you lie."

For an interval neither of them spoke. They crested the hill, and came into view of that advertisement board she had first seen in Mr. Brumley's company. She halted, and he went a step further and halted too. He recalled his ideas about the board. He had meant to have them all altered but other things had driven it from his mind....

"Then you mean to imprison me here," said Lady Harman to his back. He turned about.

"It isn't much like a prison. I'm asking you to stay here—and be what a wife should be."

"I'm to have no money."

"That's—that depends entirely on yourself. You know that well enough."

She looked at him gravely.

"I won't stand it," she said at last with a gentle deliberation.

She spoke so softly that he doubted his hearing. " What? " he asked sharply.

"I won't stand it," she repeated. "No."

"But—what can you do?"

"I don't know," she said, after a moment of grave consideration.

For some moments his mind hunted among possibilities.

"It's me that's standing it," he said. He came closely up to her. He seemed on the verge of rhetoric. He pressed his thin white lips together. "Standing it! when we might be so happy," he snapped, and shrugged his shoulders and turned with an expression of mournful resolution towards the house again. She followed slowly.

He felt that he had done all that a patient and reasonable husband could do. Now —things must take their course.

The imprisonment of Lady Harman at Black Strand lasted just one day short of a fortnight.

For all that time except for such interludes as the urgent needs of the strike demanded, Sir Isaac devoted himself to the siege. He did all he could to make her realize how restrainedly he used the powers the law vests in a husband, how little he forced upon her the facts of marital authority and wifely duty. At times he sulked, at times he affected a cold dignity, and at times a virile anger swayed him at her unsubmissive silences. He gave her little peace in that struggle, a struggle that came to the edge of physical conflict. There were moments when it seemed to her that nothing remained but that good old-fashioned connubial institution, the tussle for the upper hand, when with a feminine horror she felt violence shouldering her shoulder or contracting ready to grip her wrist. Against violence she doubted her strength, was filled with a desolating sense of yielding nerve and domitable muscle. But just short of violence Sir Isaac's spirit failed him. He would glower and bluster, half threaten, and retreat. It might come to that at last but at present it had not come to that.