we have traced thus far the emergence of lady harman from that state of dutiful subjection and social irresponsibility which was the lot of woman in the past to that limited, ill-defined and quite unsecured freedom which is her present condition. and now we have to give an outline of the ideas of herself and her uses and what she had to do, which were forming themselves in her mind. she had made a determination of herself, which carried her along the lines of her natural predisposition, to duty, to service. there she displayed that acceptance of responsibility which is so much more often a feminine than a masculine habit of thinking. but she brought to the achievement of this determination a discriminating integrity of mind that is more frequently masculine than feminine. she wanted to know clearly what she was undertaking and how far its consequences would reach and how it was related to other things.
her confused reading during the last few years and her own observation and such leakages of fact into her life as the talk of susan burnet, had all contributed to her realization that the world was full of needless discomfort and hardships and failure, due to great imperfectly apprehended injustices and maladjustments in the social system, and recently it had been borne in upon her, upon the barbed point of the london lion and the quick tongue of susan, that if any particular class of people was more answerable than any other for these evils, it was the people of leisure and freedom like herself, who had time to think, and the directing organizing people like her husband, who had power to change. she was called upon to do something, at times the call became urgent, and she could not feel any assurance which it was of the many vague and conflicting suggestions that came drifting to her that she had to do. her idea of hostels for the international waitresses had been wrung out of her prematurely during her earlier discussions with her husband. she did not feel that it was anything more than a partial remedy for a special evil. she wanted something more general than that, something comprehensive enough to answer completely so wide a question as "what ought i to be doing with all my life?" in the honest simplicity of her nature she wanted to find an answer to that. out of the confusion of voices about us she hoped to be able to disentangle directions for her life. already she had been reading voraciously: while she was still at marienbad she had written to mr. brumley and he had sent her books and papers, advanced and radical in many cases, that she might know, "what are people thinking?"
many phrases from her earlier discussions with sir isaac stuck in her mind in a curiously stimulating way and came back to her as she read. she recalled him, for instance, with his face white and his eyes red and his flat hand sawing at her, saying: "i dessay i'm all wrong, i dessay i don't know anything about anything and all those chaps you read, bernud shaw, and gosworthy, and all the rest of them are wonderfully clever; but you tell me, elly, what they say we've got to do! you tell me that. you go and ask some of those chaps just what they want a man like me to do.... they'll ask me to endow a theatre or run a club for novelists or advertise the lot of them in the windows of my international stores or something. and that's about all it comes to. you go and see if i'm not right. they grumble and they grumble; i don't say there's not a lot to grumble at, but give me something they'll back themselves for all they're worth as good to get done.... that's where i don't agree with all these idees. they're wind, elly, weak wind at that."
it is distressing to record how difficult it was for lady harman to form even the beginnings of a disproof of that. her life through all this second phase of mitigated autonomy was an intermittent pilgrimage in search of that disproof. she could not believe that things as they were, this mass of hardships, cruelties, insufficiencies and heartburnings were the ultimate wisdom and possibility of human life, yet when she went from them to the projects that would replace or change them she seemed to pass from things of overwhelming solidity to matters more thin and flimsy than the twittering of sparrows on the gutter. so soon as she returned to london she started upon her search for a solution; she supplemented mr. brumley's hunt for books with her own efforts, she went to meetings—sometimes sir isaac took her, once or twice she was escorted by mr. brumley, and presently her grave interest and her personal charm had gathered about her a circle of companionable friends. she tried to talk to people and made great efforts to hear people who seemed authoritative and wise and leaderlike, talking.
there were many interruptions to this research, but she persevered. quite early she had an illness that ended in a miscarriage, an accident for which she was by no means inconsolable, and before she had completely recovered from that sir isaac fell ill again, the first of a series of relapses that necessitated further foreign travel—always in elaborately comfortable trains with maid, courier, valet, and secretary, to some warm and indolent southward place. and few people knew how uncertain her liberties were. sir isaac was the victim of an increasing irritability, at times he had irrational outbursts of distrust that would culminate in passionate outbreaks and scenes that were truncated by an almost suffocating breathlessness. on several occasions he was on the verge of quarrelling violently with her visitors, and he would suddenly oblige her to break engagements, pour abuse upon her and bring matters back to the very verge of her first revolt. and then he would break her down by pitiful appeals. the cylinders of oxygen would be resorted to, and he would emerge from the crisis, rather rueful, tamed and quiet for the time.
he was her chief disturbance. her children were healthy children and fell in with the routines of governess and tutor that their wealth provided. she saw them often, she noted their increasing resemblance to their father, she did her best to soften the natural secretiveness and aggressiveness of their manners, she watched their teachers and intervened whenever the influences about them seemed to her to need intervention, she dressed them and gave them presents and tried to believe she loved them, and as sir isaac's illness increased she took a larger and larger share in the direction of the household....
through all these occupations and interruptions and immediacies she went trying to comprehend and at times almost believing she comprehended life, and then the whole spectacle of this modern world of which she was a part would seem to break up again into a multitude of warring and discordant fragments having no conceivable common aim or solution. those moments of unifying faith and confidence, that glowed so bravely and never endured, were at once tantalizing and sustaining. she could never believe but that ultimately she would not grasp and hold—something....
many people met her and liked her and sought to know more of her; lady beach-mandarin and lady viping were happy to be her social sponsors, the blenkers and the chartersons met her out and woke up cautiously to this new possibility; her emergence was rapid in spite of the various delays and interruptions i have mentioned and she was soon in a position to realize just how little one meets when one meets a number of people and how little one hears when one has much conversation. her mind was presently crowded with confused impressions of pleasant men evading her agreeably and making out of her gravities an opportunity for bright sayings, and of women being vaguely solemn and quite indefinite.
she went into the circle of movements, was tried over by mrs. hubert plessington, she questioned this and that promoter of constructive schemes, and instead of mental meat she was asked to come upon committees and sounded for subscriptions. on several occasions, escorted by mr. brumley—some instinct made her conceal or minimize his share in these expeditions to her husband—she went as inconspicuously as possible to the backs of public meetings in which she understood great questions were being discussed or great changes inaugurated. some public figures she even followed up for a time, distrusting her first impressions.
she became familiar with the manners and bearing of our platform class, with the solemn dummy-like chairman or chairwoman, saying a few words, the alert secretary or organizer, the prominent figures sitting with an air of grave responsibility, generously acting an intelligent attention to others until the moment came for them themselves to deliver. then with an ill-concealed relief some would come to the footlights, some leap up in their places with a tenoring eagerness, some would be facetious and some speak with neuralgic effort, some were impertinent, some propitiatory, some dull, but all were—disappointing, disappointing. god was not in any of them. a platform is no setting for the shy processes of an honest human mind,—we are all strained to artificiality in the excessive glare of attention that beats upon us there. one does not exhibit opinions at a meeting, one acts them, the very truth must rouge its cheeks and blacken its eyebrows to tell, and to lady harman it was the acting chiefly and the make-up that was visible. they didn't grip her, they didn't lift her, they failed to convince her even of their own belief in what they supported.
4
but occasionally among the multitude of conversations that gave her nothing, there would come some talk that illuminated and for the time almost reconciled her to the effort and the loss of time and distraction her social expeditions involved. one evening at one of lady tarvrille's carelessly compiled parties she encountered edgar wilkins the novelist and got the most suggestive glimpses of his attitude towards himself and towards the world of intellectual ferment to which he belonged. she had been taken down by an amiable but entirely uninteresting permanent official who when the time came turned his stereotyped talk over to the other side of him with a quiet mechanical indifference, and she was left for a little while in silence until wilkins had disengaged himself.
he was a flushed man with untidy hair, and he opened at once with an appeal to her sympathies.
"oh! bother!" he said. "i say,—i've eaten that mutton. i didn't notice. one eats too much at these affairs. one doesn't notice at the time and then afterwards one finds out."
she was a little surprised at his gambit and could think of nothing but a kindly murmur.
"detestable thing," he said; "my body."
"but surely not," she tried and felt as she said it that was a trifle bold.
"you're all right," he said making her aware he saw her. "but i've this thing that wheezes and fattens at the slightest excuse and—it encumbers me—bothers me to take exercise.... but i can hardly expect you to be interested in my troubles, can i?"
he made an all too manifest attempt to read her name on the slip of card that lay before her among the flowers and as manifestly succeeded. "we people who write and paint and all that sort of thing are a breed of insatiable egotists, lady harman. with the least excuse. don't you think so?"
"not—not exceptionally," she said.
"exceptionally," he insisted.
"it isn't my impression," she said. "you're—franker."
"but someone was telling me—you've been taking impressions of us lately. i mean all of us people who go flapping ideas about in the air. somebody—was it lady beach-mandarin?—was saying you'd come out looking for intellectual heroes—and found bernard shaw.... but what could you have expected?"
"i've been trying to find out and understand what people are thinking. i want ideas."
"it's disheartening, isn't it?"
"it's—perplexing sometimes."
"you go to meetings, and try to get to the bottom of movements, and you want to meet and know the people who write the wonderful things? get at the wonderful core of it?"
"one feels there are things going on."
"great illuminating things."
"well—yes."
"and when you see those great thinkers and teachers and guides and brave spirits and high brows generally——"
he laughed and stopped just in time on the very verge of taking pheasant.
"oh, take it away," he cried sharply.
"we've all been through that illusion, lady harman," he went on.
"but i don't like to think——aren't great men after all—great?"
"in their ways, in their places—yes. but not if you go up to them and look at them. not at the dinner table, not in their beds.... what a time of disillusionment you must have had!
"you see, lady harman," he said, leaning back from his empty plate, inclining himself confidentially to her ear and speaking in a privy tone; "it's in the very nature of things that we—if i may put myself into the list—we ideologists, should be rather exceptionally loose and untrustworthy and disappointing men. rotters—to speak plain contemporary english. if you come to think of it, it has to be so."
"but——" she protested.
he met her eye firmly. "it has to be."
"why?"
"the very qualities that make literature entertaining, vigorous, inspiring, revealing, wonderful, beautiful and—all that sort of thing, make its producers—if you will forgive the word again—rotters."
she smiled and lifted her eyebrows protestingly.
"sensitive nervous tissue," he said with a finger up to emphasize his words. "quick responsiveness to stimulus, a vivid, almost uncontrollable, expressiveness; that's what you want in your literary man."
"yes," said lady harman following cautiously. "yes, i suppose it is."
"can you suppose for a moment that these things conduce to self-control, to reserve, to consistency, to any of the qualities of a trustworthy man?... of course you can't. and so we aren't trustworthy, we aren't consistent. our virtues are our vices.... my life," said mr. wilkins still more confidentially, "won't bear examination. but that's by the way. it need not concern us now."
"but mr. brumley?" she asked on the spur of the moment.
"i'm not talking of him," said wilkins with careless cruelty. "he's restrained. i mean the really imaginative people, the people with vision, the people who let themselves go. you see now why they are rotten, why they must be rotten. (no! no! take it away. i'm talking.) i feel so strongly about this, about the natural and necessary disreputableness of everybody who produces reputable writing—and for the matter of that, art generally—that i set my face steadily against all these attempts that keep on cropping up to make figures of us. we aren't figures, lady harman; it isn't our line. of all the detestable aspects of the victorian period surely that disposition to make figures of its artists and literary men was the most detestable. respectable figures—examples to the young. the suppressions, the coverings up that had to go on, the white-washing of dickens,—who was more than a bit of a rip, you know, the concealment of thackeray's mistresses. did you know he had mistresses? oh rather! and so on. it's like that bust of jove—or bacchus was it?—they pass off as plato, who probably looked like any other literary grub. that's why i won't have anything to do with these academic developments that my friend brumley—do you know him by the way?—goes in for. he's the third man down——you do know him. and he's giving up the academic committee, is he? i'm glad he's seen it at last. what is the good of trying to have an academy and all that, and put us in uniform and make out we are somebodies, and respectable enough to be shaken hands with by george and mary, when as a matter of fact we are, by our very nature, a collection of miscellaneous scandals——we must be. bacon, shakespear, byron, shelley—all the stars.... no, johnson wasn't a star, he was a character by boswell.... oh! great things come out of us, no doubt, our arts are the vehicles of wonder and hope, the world is dead without these things we produce, but that's no reason why—why the mushroom-bed should follow the mushrooms into the soup, is it? perfectly fair image. (no, take it away.)"
he paused and then jumped in again as she was on the point of speaking.
"and you see even if our temperaments didn't lead inevitably to our—dipping rather, we should still have to—dip. asking a writer or a poet to be seemly and academic and so on, is like asking an eminent surgeon to be stringently decent. it's—you see, it's incompatible. now a king or a butler or a family solicitor—if you like."
he paused again.
lady harman had been following him with an attentive reluctance.
"but what are we to do," she asked, "we people who are puzzled by life, who want guidance and ideas and—help, if—if all the people we look to for ideas are——"
"bad characters."
"well,—it's your theory, you know—bad characters?"
wilkins answered with the air of one who carefully disentangles a complex but quite solvable problem. "it doesn't follow," he said, "that because a man is a bad character he's not to be trusted in matters where character—as we commonly use the word—doesn't come in. these sensitives, these—would you mind if i were to call myself an æolian harp?—these æolian harps; they can't help responding to the winds of heaven. well,—listen to them. don't follow them, don't worship them, don't even honour them, but listen to them. don't let anyone stop them from saying and painting and writing and singing what they want to. freedom, canvas and attention, those are the proper honours for the artist, the poet and the philosopher. listen to the noise they make, watch the stuff they produce, and presently you will find certain things among the multitude of things that are said and shown and put out and published, something—light in your darkness—a writer for you, something for you. nobody can have a greater contempt for artists and writers and poets and philosophers than i, oh! a squalid crew they are, mean, jealous, pugnacious, disgraceful in love, disgraceful—but out of it all comes the greatest serenest thing, the mind of the world, literature. nasty little midges, yes,—but fireflies—carrying light for the darkness."
his face was suddenly lit by enthusiasm and she wondered that she could have thought it rather heavy and commonplace. he stopped abruptly and glanced beyond her at her other neighbour who seemed on the verge of turning to them again. "if i go on," he said with a voice suddenly dropped, "i shall talk loud."
"you know," said lady harman, in a halty undertone, "you—you are too hard upon—upon clever people, but it is true. i mean it is true in a way...."
"go on, i understand exactly what you are saying."
"i mean, there are ideas. it's just that, that is so—so——i mean they seem never to be just there and always to be present."
"like god. never in the flesh—now. a spirit everywhere. you think exactly as i do, lady harman. it is just that. this is a great time, so great that there is no chance for great men. every chance for great work. and we're doing it. there is a wind—blowing out of heaven. and when beautiful people like yourself come into things——"
"i try to understand," she said. "i want to understand. i want—i want not to miss life."
he was on the verge of saying something further and then his eyes wandered down the table and he stopped short.
he ended his talk as he had begun it with "bother! lady tarvrille, lady harman, is trying to catch your eye."
lady harman turned her face to her hostess and answered her smile. wilkins caught at his chair and stood up.
"it would have been jolly to have talked some more," he said.
"i hope we shall."
"well!" said wilkins, with a sudden hardness in his eyes and she was swept away from him.
she found no chance of talking to him upstairs, sir isaac came for her early; but she went in hope of another meeting.
it did not come. for a time that expectation gave dinners and luncheon parties a quite appreciable attraction. then she told agatha alimony. "i've never met him but that once," she said.
"one doesn't meet him now," said agatha, deeply.
"but why?"
deep significance came into miss alimony's eyes. "my dear," she whispered, and glanced about them. "don't you know?"
lady harman was a radiant innocence.
and then miss alimony began in impressive undertones, with awful omissions like pits of darkness and with such richly embroidered details as serious spinsters enjoy, adding, indeed, two quite new things that came to her mind as the tale unfolded, and, naming no names and giving no chances of verification or reply, handed on the fearful and at that time extremely popular story of the awful wickedness of wilkins the author.
upon reflection lady harman perceived that this explained all sorts of things in their conversation and particularly the flash of hardness at the end.
even then, things must have been hanging over him....
