Herbert Wells - The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

"What right have you to open my letter?"

"Friendship!" he said. "Harmless friendship! Look what your—friend says!"

"Whatever there was in my letter——"

"Oh!" cried Sir Isaac. "Don't come that over me! Don't you try it! Oooh! phew—" He struggled for breath for a time. "He's so harmless. He's so helpful. He——Read it, you——"

He hesitated and then hurled a strange word at her.

She glanced at the letter on the table but made no movement to touch it. Then she saw that her husband's face was reddening and that his arm waved helplessly. His eyes, deprived abruptly of all the fury of conflict, implored assistance.

She darted to the French window that opened into the dining-room from the balcony. "Doctor Greve!" she cried. "Doctor Greve!"

Behind her the patient was making distressful sounds. "Doctor Greve," she screamed, and from above she heard the Bavarian shouting and then the noise of his coming down the stairs.

He shouted some direction in German as he ran past her. By an inspiration she guessed he wanted the nurse.

Miss Summersley Satchell appeared in the doorway and became helpful.

Then everyone in the house seemed to be converging upon the balcony.

It was an hour before Sir Isaac was in bed and sufficiently allayed for her to go to her own room. Then she thought of Mr. Brumley's letter, and recovered it from the table on the balcony where it had been left in the tumult of her husband's seizure.

It was twilight and the lights were on. She stood under one of them and read with two moths circling about her....

Mr. Brumley had had a mood of impassioned declaration. He had alluded to his "last moments of happiness at Kew." He said he would rather kiss the hem of her garment than be the "lord of any other woman's life."

It was all so understandable—looked at in the proper light. It was all so impossible to explain. And why had she let it happen? Why had she let it happen?

The young doctor was a little puzzled and rather offended by Sir Isaac's relapse. He seemed to consider it incorrect and was on the whole disposed to blame Lady Harman. He might have had such a seizure, the young doctor said, later, but not now. He would be thrown back for some weeks, then he would begin to mend again and then whatever he said, whatever he did, Lady Harman must do nothing to contradict him. For a whole day Sir Isaac lay inert, in a cold sweat. He consented once to attempt eating, but sickness overcame him. He seemed so ill that all the young doctor's reassurances could not convince Lady Harman that he would recover. Then suddenly towards evening his arrested vitality was flowing again, the young doctor ceased to be anxious for his own assertions, the patient could sit up against a pile of pillows and breathe and attend to affairs. There was only one affair he really seemed anxious to attend to. His first thought when he realized his returning strength was of his wife. But the young doctor would not let him talk that night.

Next morning he seemed still stronger. He was restless and at last demanded Lady Harman again.

This time the young doctor transmitted the message.

She came to him forthwith and found him, white-faced and unfamiliar-looking, his hands gripping the quilt and his eyes burning with hatred.

"You thought I'd forgotten," was his greeting.

"Don't argue," signalled the doctor from the end of Sir Isaac's bed.

"I've been thinking it out," said Sir Isaac. "When you were thinking I was too ill to think.... I know better now."

He sucked in his lips and then went on. "You've got to send for old Crappen," he said. "I'm going to alter things. I had a plan. But that would have been letting you off too easy. See? So—you send for old Crappen."

"What do you mean to do?"

"Never you mind, my lady, never you mind. You send for old Crappen."

She waited for a moment. "Is that all you want me to do?"

"I'm going to make it all right about those Hostels. Don't you fear. You and your Hostels! You shan't touch those hostels ever again. Ever. Mrs. Pembrose go! Why! You ain't worthy to touch the heel of her shoe! Mrs. Pembrose!"

He gathered together all his forces and suddenly expelled with rousing force the word he had already applied to her on the day of the intercepted letter.

He found it seemed great satisfaction in the sound and taste of it. He repeated it thrice. "Zut," cried the doctor, "Sssh!"

Then Sir Isaac intimated his sense that calm was imperative. "You send for Crappen," he said with a quiet earnestness.

She had become now so used to terms of infamy during the last year or so, so accustomed to forgive them as part of his suffering, that she seemed not to hear the insult.

"Do you want him at once?" she asked. "Shall I telegraph?"

"Want him at once!" He dropped his voice to a whisper. "Yes, you fool—yes. Telegraph. (Phew.) Telegraph.... I mustn't get angry, you know. You—telegraph."

He became suddenly still. But his eyes were active with hate.

She glanced at the doctor, then moved to the door.

"I will send a telegram," she said, and left him still malignant.

She closed the door softly and walked down the long cool passage towards her own room....

She had to be patient. She had to be patient. This sort of thing had to go on from crisis to crisis. It might go on for years. She could see no remedy and no escape.

What else was there to do but be patient? It was all amazing unjust, but to be a married woman she was beginning to understand is to be outside justice. It is autocracy. She had once imagined otherwise, and most of her life had been the slow unlearning of that initial error. She had imagined that the hostels were hers simply because he had put it in that way. They had never been anything but his, and now it was manifest he would do what he liked with his own. The law takes no cognizance of the unwritten terms of a domestic reconciliation.

She sat down at the writing-table the hotel management had improvised for her.

She rested her chin on her hand and tried to think out her position. But what was there to think out, seeing that nature and law and custom have conspired together to put women altogether under the power of jealous and acquisitive men?

She drew the telegram form towards her.

She was going to write a telegram that she knew would bring Crappen headlong—to disinherit her absolutely. And—it suddenly struck her—her husband had trusted her to write it. She was going to do what he had trusted her to do.... But it was absurd.

She sat making patterns of little dots with her pencil point upon the telegram form, and there was a faint smile of amusement upon her lips.

It was absurd—and everything was absurd. What more was to be said or thought about it? This was the lot of woman. She had made her struggle, rebelled her little bit of rebellion. Most other women no doubt had done as much. It made no difference in the long run.

But it was hard to give up the hostels. She had been foolish of course, but she had not let them make her feel real . And she wasn't real. She was a wife—just this ....

She sighed and bestirred herself and began to write.

Then abruptly she stopped writing.

For three years her excuse for standing—everything, had been these hostels. If now the hostels were to be wrenched out of her hands, if at her husband's death she was to be stripped of every possession and left a helpless dependant on her own children, if for all her good behaviour she was to be insulted by his frantic suspicions so long as he lived and then disgraced by his posthumous mistrust; was there any reason why she should go on standing anything any more? Away there in England was Mr. Brumley, her man, ready with service and devotion....