Herbert Wells - The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

Whereupon Lady Harman set Mrs. Crumble in motion to bring Susan down to Black Strand. This wasn't quite easy because as Mrs. Crumble pointed out they hadn't the slightest use for Susan's curtains there, and Lady Harman had to find the morning light quite intolerable in her bedroom—she always slept with window wide open and curtains drawn back—to create a suitable demand for Susan's services. But at last Susan came, too humbly invisible for Sir Isaac's attention, and directly she found Lady Harman alone in the room with her, she produced a pawn ticket and twenty pounds. "I 'ad to give all sorts of particulars," she said. "It was a job. But I did it...."

The day was big with opportunity, for Sir Isaac had been unable to conceal the fact that he had to spend the morning in London. He had gone up in the big car and his wife was alone, and so, with Susan upstairs still deftly measuring for totally unnecessary hangings, Lady Harman was able to add a fur stole and a muff and some gloves to her tweed gardening costume, walk unchallenged into the garden and from the garden into the wood and up the hillside and over the crest and down to the high-road and past that great advertisement of Staminal Bread and so for four palpitating miles, to the railway station and the outer world.

She had the good fortune to find a train imminent,—the twelve-seventeen. She took a first-class ticket for London and got into a compartment with another woman because she felt it would be safer.

Lady Harman reached Miss Alimony's flat at half-past three in the afternoon. She had lunched rather belatedly and uncomfortably in the Waterloo Refreshment Room and she had found out that Miss Alimony was at home through the telephone. "I want to see you urgently," she said, and Miss Alimony received her in that spirit. She was hatless but she had a great cloud of dark fuzzy hair above the grey profundity of her eyes and she wore an artistic tea-gown that in spite of a certain looseness at neck and sleeve emphasized the fine lines of her admirable figure. Her flat was furnished chiefly with books and rich oriental hangings and vast cushions and great bowls of scented flowers. On the mantel-shelf was the crystal that amused her lighter moments and above it hung a circular allegory by Florence Swinstead, very rich in colour, the Awakening of Woman, in a heavy gold frame. Miss Alimony conducted her guest to an armchair, knelt flexibly on the hearthrug before her, took up a small and elegant poker with a brass handle and a spear-shaped service end of iron and poked the fire.

The service end came out from the handle and fell into the grate. "It always does that," said Miss Alimony charmingly. "But never mind." She warmed both hands at the blaze. "Tell me all about it," she said, softly.

Lady Harman felt she would rather have been told all about it. But perhaps that would follow.

"You see," she said, "I find——My married life——"

She halted. It was very difficult to tell.

"Everyone," said Agatha, giving a fine firelit profile, and remaining gravely thoughtful through a little pause.

"Do you mind," she asked abruptly, "if I smoke?"

When she had completed her effect with a delicately flavoured cigarette, she encouraged Lady Harman to proceed.

This Lady Harman did in a manner do. She said her husband left her no freedom of mind or movement, gave her no possession of herself, wanted to control her reading and thinking. "He insists——" she said.

"Yes," said Miss Agatha sternly blowing aside her cigarette smoke. "They all insist."

"He insists," said Lady Harman, "on seeing all my letters, choosing all my friends. I have no control over my house or my servants, no money except what he gives me."

"In fact you are property."

"I'm simply property."

"A harem of one. And all that is within the provisions of the law!"

"How any woman can marry!" said Miss Agatha, after a little interval. "I sometimes think that is where the true strike of the sex ought to begin. If none of us married! If we said all of us, 'No,—definitely—we refuse this bargain! It is a man-made contract. We have had no voice in it. We decline.' Perhaps it will come to that. And I knew that you, you with that quiet beautiful penetration in your eyes would come to see it like that. The first task, after the vote is won, will be the revision of that contract. The very first task of our Women Statesmen...."

She ceased and revived her smouldering cigarette and mused blinking through the smoke. She seemed for a time almost lost to the presence of her guest in a great daydream of womanstatecraft.

"And so," she said, "you've come, as they all come,—to join us."

" Well ," said Lady Harman in a tone that made Agatha turn eyes of surprise upon her.

"Of course," continued Lady Harman, "I suppose—I shall join you; but as a matter of fact you see, what I've done to-day has been to come right away.... You see I am still in my garden tweeds.... There it was down there, a sort of stale mate...."

Agatha sat up on her heels.

"But my dear!" she said, "you don't mean you've run away?"

"Yes,—I've run away."

"But—run away!"

"I sold a ring and got some money and here I am!"

"But—what are you going to do?"

"I don't know. I thought you perhaps—might advise."

"But—a man like your husband! He'll pursue you!"

"If he knows where I am, he will," said Lady Harman.

"He'll make a scandal. My dear! are you wise? Tell me, tell me exactly, why have you run away? I didn't understand at all—that you had run away."

"Because," began Lady Harman and flushed hotly. "It was impossible," she said.

Miss Alimony regarded her deeply. "I wonder," she said.

"I feel," said Lady Harman, "if I stayed, if I gave in——I mean after—after I had once—rebelled. Then I should just be—a wife—ruled, ordered——"

"It wasn't your place to give in," said Miss Alimony and added one of those parliament touches that creep more and more into feminine phraseology; "I agree to that— nemine contradicente . But—I wonder ...."

She began a second cigarette and thought in profile again.

"I think, perhaps, I haven't explained, clearly, how things are," said Lady Harman, and commenced a rather more explicit statement of her case. She felt she had not conveyed and she wanted to convey to Miss Alimony that her rebellion was not simply a desire for personal freedom and autonomy, that she desired these things because she was becoming more and more aware of large affairs outside her home life in which she ought to be not simply interested but concerned, that she had been not merely watching the workings of the business that made her wealthy, but reading books about socialism, about social welfare that had stirred her profoundly.... "But he won't even allow me to know of such things," she said....

Miss Alimony listened a little abstractedly.

Suddenly she interrupted. "Tell me," she said, "one thing.... I confess," she explained, "I've no business to ask. But if I'm to advise——If my advice is to be worth anything...."

"Yes?" asked Lady Harman.

"Is there——Is there someone else?"

"Someone else?" Lady Harman was crimson.

"On your side!"

"Someone else on my side?"

"I mean—someone. A man perhaps? Some man that you care for? More than you do for your husband?..."

" I can't imagine ," whispered Lady Harman, " anything ——" And left her sentence unfinished. Her breath had gone. Her indignation was profound.

"Then I can't understand why you should find it so important to come away."

Lady Harman could offer no elucidation.

"You see," said Miss Alimony, with an air of expert knowledge, "our case against our opponents is just exactly their great case against us. They say to us when we ask for the Vote, 'the Woman's Place is the Home.' 'Precisely,' we answer, 'the Woman's Place is the Home. Give us our Homes!' Now your place is your home—with your children. That's where you have to fight your battle. Running away—for you it's simply running away."