the treaty between lady harman and her husband which was to be her great charter, the constitutional basis of her freedoms throughout the rest of her married life, had many practical defects. the chief of these was that it was largely undocumented; it had been made piecemeal, in various ways, at different times and for the most part indirectly through diverse intermediaries. charterson had introduced large vaguenesses by simply displaying more of his teeth at crucial moments, mrs. harman had conveyed things by hugging and weeping that were afterwards discovered to be indistinct; sir isaac writing from a bed of sickness had frequently been totally illegible. one cannot therefore detail the clauses of this agreement or give its provisions with any great precision; one can simply intimate the kind of understanding that had had an air of being arrived at. the working interpretations were still to come.
before anything else it was manifestly conceded by lady harman that she would not run away again, and still more manifest that she undertook to break no more windows or do anything that might lead to a second police court scandal. and she was to be a true and faithful wife and comfort, as a wife should be, to sir isaac. in return for that consideration and to ensure its continuance sir isaac came great distances from his former assumption of a matrimonial absolutism. she was to be granted all sorts of small autonomies,—the word autonomy was carefully avoided throughout but its spirit was omnipresent.
she was in particular to have a banking account for her dress and personal expenditure into which sir isaac would cause to be paid a hundred pounds monthly and it was to be private to herself alone until he chose to go through the cashed cheques and counterfoils. she was to be free to come and go as she saw fit, subject to a punctual appearance at meals, the comfort and dignity of sir isaac and such specific engagements as she might make with him. she might have her own friends, but there the contract became a little misty; a time was to come when sir isaac was to betray a conviction that the only proper friends that a woman can have are women. there were also non-corroborated assurances as to the privacy of her correspondence. the second rolls-royce car was to be entirely at her service, and clarence was to be immediately supplemented by a new and more deferential man, and as soon as possible assisted to another situation and replaced. she was to have a voice in the further furnishing of black strand and in the arrangement of its garden. she was to read what she chose and think what she liked within her head without too minute or suspicious an examination by sir isaac, and short of flat contradiction at his own table she was to be free to express her own opinions in any manner becoming a lady. but more particularly if she found her ideas infringing upon the management or influence of the international bread and cake stores, she was to convey her objections and ideas in the first instance privately and confidentially to sir isaac.
upon this point he displayed a remarkable and creditable sensitiveness. his pride in that organization was if possible greater than his original pride in his wife, and probably nothing in all the jarring of their relationship had hurt him more than her accessibility to hostile criticism and the dinner-table conversation with charterson and blenker that had betrayed this fact. he began to talk about it directly she returned to him. his protestations and explanations were copious and heart-felt. it was perhaps the chief discovery made by lady harman at this period of reconstruction that her husband's business side was not to be explained completely as a highly energetic and elaborate avarice. he was no doubt acquisitive and retentive and mean-spirited, but these were merely the ugly aspects of a disposition that involved many other factors. he was also incurably a schemer. he liked to fit things together, to dove-tail arrangements, to devise economies, to spread ingeniously into new fields, he had a love of organization and contrivance as disinterested as an artist's love for the possibilities of his medium. he would rather have made a profit of ten per cent. out of a subtly planned shop than thirty by an unforeseen accident. he wouldn't have cheated to get money for the world. he knew he was better at figuring out expenditures and receipts than most people and he was as touchy about his reputation for this kind of cleverness as any poet or painter for his fame. now that he had awakened to the idea that his wife was capable of looking into and possibly even understanding his business, he was passionately anxious to show her just how wonderfully he had done it all, and when he perceived she was in her large, unskilled, helpless way, intensely concerned for all the vast multitude of incompetent or partially competent young women who floundered about in badly paid employment in our great cities, he grasped at once at the opportunity of recovering her lost interest and respect by doing some brilliant feats of contrivance in that direction. why shouldn't he? he had long observed with a certain envy the admirable advertisement such firms as lever and cadbury and burroughs & wellcome gained from their ostentatiously able and generous treatment of their workpeople, and it seemed to him conceivable that in the end it might not be at all detrimental to his prosperity to put his hand to this long neglected piece of social work. the babs wheeler business had been a real injury in every way to the international bread and cake stores and even if he didn't ultimately go to all the lengths his wife seemed to contemplate, he was resolved at any rate that an affair of that kind should not occur again. the expedition to marienbad took with it a secretary who was also a stenographer. a particularly smart young inspector and graper, the staff manager, had brisk four-day holidays once or twice for consultation purposes; sir isaac's rabbit-like architect was in attendance for a week and the harmans returned to putney with the first vivid greens of late march,—for the putney hill house was to be reopened and black strand reserved now for week-end and summer use—with plans already drawn out for four residential hostels in london primarily for the girl waitresses of the international stores who might have no homes or homes at an inconvenient distance, and, secondarily, if any vacant accommodation remained over, for any other employed young women of the same class....
2
lady harman came back to england from the pine-woods and bright order and regimen and foreign novelty of their bohemian kur-ort, in a state of renewed perplexity. already that undocumented magna charta was manifestly not working upon the lines she had anticipated. the glosses sir isaac put upon it were extensive and remarkable and invariably in the direction of restricting her liberties and resuming controls she had supposed abandoned.
marienbad had done wonders for him; his slight limp had disappeared, his nervous energy was all restored; except for a certain increase in his natural irritability and occasional panting fits, he seemed as well as he had ever been. at the end of their time at the kur he was even going for walks. once he went halfway up the podhorn on foot. and with every increment in his strength his aggressiveness increased, his recognition of her new freedoms was less cordial and her sense of contrition and responsibility diminished. moreover, as the scheme of those hostels, which had played so large a part in her conception of their reconciliation, grew more and more definite, she perceived more and more that it was not certainly that fine and humanizing thing she had presumed it would be. she began to feel more and more that it might be merely an extension of harman methods to cheap boarding-houses for young people. but faced with a mass of detailed concrete projects and invited to suggest modifications she was able to realize for the first time how vague, how ignorant and incompetent her wishes had been, how much she had to understand and how much she had to discover before she could meet sir isaac with his "i'm doing it all for you, elly. if you don't like it, you tell me what you don't like and i'll alter it. but just vague doubting! one can't do anything with vague doubting."
she felt that once back in england out of this picturesque toylike german world she would be able to grasp realities again and deal with these things. she wanted advice, she wanted to hear what people said of her ideas. she would also, she imagined, begin to avail herself of those conceded liberties which their isolation together abroad and her husband's constant need of her presence had so far prevented her from tasting. she had an idea that susan burnet might prove suggestive about the hostels.
and moreover, if now and then she could have a good talk with someone understanding and intelligent, someone she could trust, someone who cared enough for her to think with her and for her....
