Herbert Wells - The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

Mrs. Pembrose appeared dressed in dove colour with a near bonnetesque straw hat to match. She had a pale slightly freckled complexion, little hard blue-grey eyes with that sort of nose which redeems a squarish shape by a certain delicacy of structure; her chin was long and protruding and her voice had a wooden resonance and a ghost of a lisp. Her talk had a false consecutiveness due to the frequent use of the word "Yes." Her bearing was erect and her manner guardedly alert.

From the first she betrayed a conviction that Mr. Brumley was incidental and unnecessary and that her real interest lay with Sir Isaac. She might almost have been in possession of special information upon that point.

"Yes," she said, "I'm rather specially up in this sort of question. I worked side by side with my poor Frederick all his life, we were collaborators, and this question of the urban distributive employee was one of his special studies. Yes, he would have been tremendously interested in Sir Isaac's project."

"You know what we are doing?"

"Every one is interested in Sir Isaac's enterprise. Naturally. Yes, I think I have a fairly good idea of what you mean to do. It's a great experiment."

"You think it is likely to answer?" said Mr. Brumley.

"In Sir Isaac's hands it is very likely to answer," said Mrs. Pembrose with her eye steadily on Lady Harman.

There was a little pause. "Yes, now you wrote of difficulties and drawing upon my experience. Of course just now I'm quite at Sir Isaac's disposal."

Lady Harman found herself thrust perforce into the rôle of her husband's spokeswoman. She asked Mrs. Pembrose if she knew the exact nature of the experiment they contemplated.

Mrs. Pembrose hadn't a doubt she knew. Of course for a long time and more especially in the Metropolis where the distances were so great and increasing so rapidly, there had been a gathering feeling not only in the catering trade, but in very many factory industries, against the daily journey to employment and home again. It was irksome and wasteful to everyone concerned, there was a great loss in control, later hours of beginning, uncertain service. "Yes, my husband calculated the hours lost in London every week, hours that are neither work nor play, mere tiresome stuffy journeying. It made an enormous sum. It worked out at hundreds of working lives per week." Sir Isaac's project was to abolish all that, to bring his staff into line with the drapers and grocers who kept their assistants on the living-in system....

"I thought people objected to the living-in system," said Mr. Brumley.

"There's an agitation against it on the part of a small Trade Union of Shop Assistants," said Mrs. Pembrose. "But they have no real alternative to propose."

"And this isn't Living In," said Mr. Brumley.

"Yes, I think you'll find it is," said Mrs. Pembrose with a nice little expert smile.

"Living-in isn't quite what we want," said Lady Harman slowly and with knitted brows, seeking a method of saying just what the difference was to be.

"Yes, not perhaps in the strictest sense," said Mrs. Pembrose giving her no chance, and went on to make fine distinctions. Strictly speaking, living-in meant sleeping over the shop and eating underneath it, and this hostel idea was an affair of a separate house and of occupants who would be assistants from a number of shops. "Yes, collectivism, if you like," said Mrs. Pembrose. But the word collectivism, she assured them, wouldn't frighten her, she was a collectivist, a socialist, as her husband had always been. The day was past when socialist could be used as a term of reproach. "Yes, instead of the individual employer of labour, we already begin to have the collective employer of labour, with a labour bureau—and so on. We share them. We no longer compete for them. It's the keynote of the time."

Mr. Brumley followed this with a lifted eyebrow. He was still new to these modern developments of collectivist ideas, this socialism of the employer.

The whole thing Mrs. Pembrose declared was a step forward in civilization, it was a step in the organization and discipline of labour. Of course the unruly and the insubordinate would cry out. But the benefits were plain enough, space, light, baths, association, reasonable recreations, opportunities for improvement——

"But freedom?" said Mr. Brumley.

Mrs. Pembrose inclined her head a little on one side, looked at him this time and smiled the expert smile again. "If you knew as much as I do of the difficulties of social work," she said, "you wouldn't be very much in love with freedom."

"But—it's the very substance of the soul!"

"You must permit me to differ," said Mrs. Pembrose, and for weeks afterwards Mr. Brumley was still seeking a proper polite retort to that difficult counterstroke. It was such a featureless reply. It was like having your nose punched suddenly by a man without a face.

They descended to a more particular treatment of the problems ahead. Mrs. Pembrose quoted certain precedents from the Girls' Club Union.

"The people Lady Harman contemplates—entertaining," said Mr. Brumley, "are of a slightly more self-respecting type than those young women."

"It's largely veneer," said Mrs. Pembrose....

"Detestable little wretch," said Mr. Brumley when at last she had departed. He was very uncomfortable. "She's just the quintessence of all one fears and dreads about these new developments, she's perfect—in that way—self-confident, arrogant, instinctively aggressive, with a tremendous class contempt. There's a multitude of such people about who hate the employed classes, who want to see them broken in and subjugated. I suppose that kind of thing is in humanity. Every boy's school has louts of that kind, who love to torment fags for their own good, who spring upon a chance smut on the face of a little boy to scrub him painfully, who have a kind of lust to dominate under the pretence of improving. I remember——But never mind that now. Keep that woman out of things or your hostels work for the devil."

"Yes," said Lady Harman. "Certainly she shall not——. No."

But there she reckoned without her husband.

"I've settled it," he said to her at dinner two nights later.

"What?"

"Mrs. Pembrose."

"You've not made her——?"

"Yes, I have. And I think we're very lucky to get her."

"But—Isaac! I don't want her!"

"You should have told me that before, Elly. I've made an agreement."

She suddenly wanted to cry. "But——You said I should manage these Hostels myself."

"So you shall, Elly. But we must have somebody. When we go abroad and all that and for all the sort of business stuff and looking after things that you can't do. We've got to have her. She's the only thing going of her sort."

"But—I don't like her."

"Well," cried Sir Isaac, "why in goodness couldn't you tell me that before, Elly? I've been and engaged her."

She sat pale-faced staring at him with wide open eyes in which tears of acute disappointment were shining. She did not dare another word because of her trick of weeping.

"It's all right, Elly," said Sir Isaac. "How touchy you are! Anything you want about these Hostels of yours, you've only got to tell me and it's done."

Lady Harman was still in a state of amazement at the altered prospects of her hostels when the day arrived for the formal opening of the first of these in Bloomsbury. They made a little public ceremony of it in spite of her reluctance, and Mr. Brumley had to witness things from out of the general crowd and realize just how completely he wasn't in it, in spite of all his efforts. Mrs. Pembrose was modestly conspicuous, like the unexpected in all human schemes. There were several reporters present, and Horatio Blenker who was going to make a loyal leader about it, to be followed by one or two special articles for the Old Country Gazette .