Herbert Wells - The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

She had, however, been released stealthily a day before her time, and this is what she had done. She had asked that—of all improbable people!—Sir Isaac's mother should meet her, the biggest car had come to the prison gates, and she had gone straight down with Mrs. Harman to her husband—who had taken a chill and was in bed drinking Contrexéville water—at Black Strand.

As these facts shaped themselves in answer to the blanched inquiries of Mr. Brumley his amazement grew. He began to realize that there must have been a correspondence during her incarceration, that all sorts of things had been happening while he had been dreaming, and when he went round to Lady Beach-Mandarin, who was just packing up to be the life and soul of a winter-sports party at a nice non-Lunnite hotel at Lenzerheide, he learnt particulars that chilled him to the marrow. "They've made it up," said Lady Beach-Mandarin.

"But how?" gasped Mr. Brumley, with his soul in infinite distress. "But how?"

"The Ogre, it seems, has come to see that bullying won't do. He's given in tremendously. He's let her have her way with the waitress strike and she's going to have an allowance of her own and all kinds of things. It's settled. It's his mother and that man Charterson talked him over. You know—his mother came to me—as her friend. For advice. Wanted to find out what sort of things we might have been putting in her head. She said so. A curious old thing—vulgar but— wise . I liked her. He's her darling—and she just knows what he is.... He doesn't like it but he's taken his dose. The thought of her going to prison again——! He's let her do anything rather than that...."

"And she's gone to him!"

"Naturally," said Lady Beach-Mandarin with what he felt to be deliberate brutality. Surely she must have understood——

"But the waitress strike—what has it got to do with the waitress strike?"

"She cared—tremendously."

" Did she?"

"Tremendously. And they all go back and the system of inspection is being altered, and he's even forgiven Babs Wheeler. It made him ill to do it but he did."

"And she's gone back to him."

"Like Godiva," said Lady Beach-Mandarin with that sweeping allusiveness that was part of her complicated charm.

For three days Mr. Brumley was so staggered by these things that it did not occur to him that it was quite possible for him to see Lady Harman for himself and find out just how things stood. He remained in London with an imagination dazed. And as it was the Christmas season and as George Edmund in a rather expectant holiday state had now come up from Margate, Mr. Brumley went in succession to the Hippodrome, to Peter Pan and to an exhibition at Olympia, assisted at an afternoon display of the kinemacolor at La Scala Theatre, visited Hamley's and lunched George Edmund once at the Criterion and twice at the Climax Club, while thinking of nothing in all the world but the incalculable strangeness of women. George Edmund thought him a very passive leadable parent indeed, less querulous about money matters and altogether much improved. The glitter and colour of these various entertainments reflected themselves upon the surface of that deep flood of meditation, hook-armed wooden-legged pirates, intelligent elephants, ingenious but extremely expensive toys, flickering processions, comic turns, snatches of popular music and George Edmund's way of eating an orange, pictured themselves on his mind confusedly without in any way deflecting its course. Then on the fourth day he roused himself, gave George Edmund ten shillings to get himself a cutlet at the Café Royal and do the cinematographs round and about the West End, and so released reached Aleham in time for a temperate lunch. He chartered the Aleham car to take him to Black Strand and arrived there about a quarter past three, in a great effort to feel himself a matter-of-course visitor.

It ought to be possible to record that Mr. Brumley's mind was full of the intensest sense of Lady Harman during that journey and of nothing else, but as a matter of fact his mind was now curiously detached and reflective, the tensions and expectation of the past month and the astonishment of the last few days had worked themselves out and left him as it were the passive instrument of the purpose of his more impassioned moods. This distressed lover approached Black Strand in a condition of philosophical lassitude.

The road from Aleham to Black Strand is a picturesque old English road, needlessly winding and badly graded, wriggling across a healthy wilderness with occasional pine-woods. Something in that familiar landscape—for his life had run through it since first he and Euphemia on a tandem bicycle and altogether very young had sought their ideal home in the South of England—set his mind swinging and generalizing. How freshly youthful he and Euphemia had been when first he came along that road, how crude, how full of happy expectations of success; it had been as bright and it was now as completely gone as the sunsets they had seen together.

How great a thing life is! How much greater than any single romance, or any individual affection! Since those days he had grown, he had succeeded, he had suffered in a reasonable way of course, still he could recall with a kind of satisfaction tears and deep week-long moods of hopeless melancholy—and he had changed. And now dominating this landscape, filling him with new emotions and desires and perplexing intimations of ignorance and limitations he had never suspected in his youth, was this second figure of a woman. She was different from Euphemia. With Euphemia everything had been so simple and easy; until that slight fading, that fatigue of entire success and satisfaction, of the concluding years. He and Euphemia had always kept it up that they had no thought in the world except for one another.... Yet if that had been true, why hadn't he died when she did. He hadn't died—with remarkable elasticity. Clearly in his case there had been these unexplored, unsuspected hinterlands of possibility towards which Lady Harman seemed now to be directing him. It came to him that afternoon as an entirely fresh thought that there might also have been something in Euphemia beyond their simple, so charmingly treated relationship. He began to recall moments when Euphemia had said perplexing little things, had looked at him with an expression that was unexpected, had been—difficult....

I write of Mr. Brumley to tell you things about him and not to explain him. It may be that the appetite for thorough good talks with people grows upon one, but at any rate it did occur to Mr. Brumley on his way to talk to Lady Harman, it occurred to him as a thing distressingly irrevocable that he could now never have a thorough good talk with Euphemia about certain neglected things between them. It would have helped him so much....

His eyes rested as he thought of these things upon the familiar purple hill crests, patched that afternoon with the lingering traces of a recent snowstorm, the heather slopes, the dark mysterious woods, the patches of vivid green where a damp and marshy meadow or so broke the moorland surface. To-day in spite of the sun there was a bright blue-white line of frost to the northward of every hedge and bank, the trees were dripping down the white edgings of the morning into the pine-needle mud at their feet; he had seen it so like this before; years hence he might see it all like this again; all this great breezy countryside had taken upon itself a quality of endurance, as though it would still be real and essential in his mind when Lady Harman had altogether passed again. It would be real when he himself had passed away, and in other costumes and other vehicles fresh Euphemias and new crude George Brumleys would come along, feeling in the ultimate bright new wisdom of youth that it was all for them—a subservient scenery, when really it was entirely indifferent in its careless permanence to all their hopes and fancies....