it would be quite easy for anyone with the knack of reserve to go on from this point with a history of lady harman that would present her as practically a pure philanthropist. for from these beginnings she was destined to proceed to more and more knowledge and understanding and clear purpose and capable work in this interesting process of collective regrouping, this process which may even at last justify mr. brumley's courageous interpretations and prove to be an early experiment in the beginning of a new social order. perhaps some day there will be an official biography, another addition to the inscrutable records of british public lives, in which all these things will be set out with tact and dignity. horatio blenker or adolphus blenker may survive to be entrusted with this congenial task. she will be represented as a tall inanimate person pursuing one clear benevolent purpose in life from her very beginning, and sir isaac and her relations with sir isaac will be rescued from reality. the book will be illustrated by a number of carefully posed photographer's photographs of her, studies of the putney house and perhaps an unappetizing woodcut of her early home at penge. the aim of all british biography is to conceal. a great deal of what we have already told will certainly not figure in any such biography, and still more certainly will the things we have yet to tell be missing.
lady harman was indeed only by the force of circumstances and intermittently a pure philanthropist, and it is with the intercalary passages of less exalted humanity that we are here chiefly concerned. at times no doubt she did really come near to filling and fitting and becoming identical with that figure of the pure philanthropist which was her world-ward face, but for the most part that earnest and dignified figure concealed more or less extensive spaces of nothingness, while the errant soul of the woman within strayed into less exalted ways of thinking.
there were times when she was almost sure of herself—mrs. hubert plessington could scarcely have been surer of herself, and times when the whole magnificent project of constructing a new urban social life out of those difficult hostels, a collective urban life that should be liberal and free, broke into grimacing pieces and was the most foolish of experiments. her struggles with mrs. pembrose thereupon assumed a quality of mere bickering and she could even doubt whether mrs. pembrose wasn't justified in her attitude and wiser by her very want of generosity. she felt then something childish in the whole undertaking that otherwise escaped her, she was convicted of an absurd self-importance, she discovered herself an ignorant woman availing herself of her husband's power and wealth to attempt presumptuous experiments. in these moods of disillusionment, her mind went adrift and was driven to and fro from discontent to discontent; she would find herself taking soundings and seeking an anchorage upon the strangest, most unfamiliar shoals. and in her relations and conflicts with her husband there was a smouldering shame for her submissions to him that needed only a phase of fatigue to become acute. so long as she believed in her hostels and her mission that might be endured, but forced back upon her more personal life its hideousness stood unclothed. mr. brumley could sometimes reassure her by a rhetorical effort upon the score of her hostels, but most of her more intimate and inner life was not, for very plain reasons, to be shown to him. he was full of the intention of generous self-denials, but she had long since come to measure the limits of his self-denial....
mr. brumley was a friend in whom smouldered a love, capable she knew quite clearly of tormented and tormenting jealousies. it would be difficult to tell, and she certainly could never have told how far she knew of this by instinct, how far it came out of rapid intuitions from things seen and heard. but she understood that she dared not let a single breath of encouragement, a hint of physical confidence, reach that banked-up glow. a sentinel discretion in her brain was always on the watch for that danger, and that restraint, that added deliberate inexpressiveness, kept them most apart, when most her spirit cried out for companionship.
the common quality of all these moods of lassitude was a desolating loneliness. she had at times a need that almost overwhelmed her to be intimate, to be comforted and taken up out of the bleak harsh disappointments and stresses of her customary life. at times after sir isaac had either been too unloving or too loving, or when the girls or the matrons had achieved some new tangle of mutual unreasonableness, or when her faith failed, she would lie in the darkness of her own room with her soul crying out for—how can one put it?—the touch of other soul-stuff. and perhaps it was the constant drift of mr. brumley's talk, the little suggestions that fell drop by drop into her mind from his, that disposed her to believe that this aching sense of solitude in the void was to be assuaged by love, by some marvel of close exaltation that one might reach through a lover. she had told mr. brumley long ago that she would never let herself think of love, she still maintained to him that attitude of resolute aloofness, but almost without noting what she did, she was tampering now in her solitude with the seals of that locked chamber. she became secretly curious about love. perhaps there was something in it of which she knew nothing. she found herself drawn towards poetry, found a new attraction in romance; more and more did she dally with the idea that there was some unknown beauty in the world, something to which her eyes might presently open, something deeper and sweeter than any thing she had ever known, close at hand, something to put all the world into proportion for her.
in a little while she no longer merely tampered with these seals, for quite silently the door had opened and she was craning in. this love it seemed to her might after all be so strange a thing that it goes unsuspected and yet fills the whole world of a human soul. an odd grotesque passage in a novel by wilkins gave her that idea. he compared love to electricity, of all things in the world; that throbbing life amidst the atoms that we now draw upon for light, warmth, connexion, the satisfaction of a thousand wants and the cure of a thousand ills. there it is and always has been in the life of man, and yet until a century ago it worked unsuspected, was known only for a disregarded oddity of amber, a crackling in frost-dry hair and thunder....
and then she remembered how mr. brumley had once broken into a panegyric of love. "it makes life a different thing. it is like the home-coming of something lost. all this dispersed perplexing world centres. think what true love means; to live always in the mind of another and to have that other living always in your mind.... only there can be no restraints, no reserves, no admission of prior rights. one must feel safe of one's welcome and freedoms...."
wasn't it worth the risk of almost any breach of boundaries to get to such a light as that?...
she hid these musings from every human being, she was so shy with them, she hid them almost from herself. rarely did they have their way with her and when they did, presently she would accuse herself of slackness and dismiss them and urge herself to fresh practicalities in her work. but her work was not always at hand, sir isaac's frequent relapses took her abroad to places where she found herself in the midst of beautiful scenery with little to do and little to distract her from these questionings. then such thoughts would inundate her.
this feeling of the unsatisfactoriness of life, of incompleteness and solitariness, was not of that fixed sort that definitely indicates its demand. under its oppression she tried the idea of love, but she also tried certain other ideas. very often this vague appeal had the quality of a person, sometimes a person shrouded in night, a soundless whisper, the unseen lover who came to psyche in the darkness. and sometimes that person became more distinct, less mystic and more companionable. perhaps because imaginations have a way of following the line of least resistance, it took upon itself something of the form, something of the voice and bearing of mr. brumley. she recoiled from her own thoughts when she discovered herself wondering what manner of lover mr. brumley might make—if suddenly she lowered her defences, freed his suffocating pleading, took him to herself.
in my anxiety to draw mr. brumley as he was, i have perhaps a little neglected to show him as lady harman saw him. we have employed the inconsiderate verisimilitude of a novelist repudiating romance in his portrayal; towards her he kept a better face. he was at least a very honest lover and there was little disingenuousness in the flow of fine mental attitudes that met her; the thought and presence of her made him fine; as soon could he have turned his shady side towards the sun. and she was very ready and eager to credit him with generous qualities. we of his club and circle, a little assisted perhaps by max beerbohm's diabolical index finger, may have found and been not unwilling to find his face chiefly expressive of a kind of empty alertness; but when it was turned to her its quite pleasantly modelled features glowed and it was transfigured. so far as she was concerned, with sir isaac as foil, he was real enough and good enough for her. and by the virtue of that unlovely contrast even a certain ineffectiveness—became infinite delicacy....
the thought of mr. brumley in that relation and to that extent of clearness came but rarely into her consciousness, and when it did it was almost immediately dismissed again. it was the most fugitive of proffered consolations. and it is to be remarked that it made its most successful apparitions when mr. brumley was far away, and by some weeks or months of separation a little blurred and forgotten....
and sometimes this unrest of her spirit, this unhappiness turned her in quite another direction as it seemed and she had thoughts of religion. with a deepened shame she would go seeking into that other, that greater indelicacy, from which her upbringing had divorced her mind. she would even secretly pray. greatly daring she fled on several occasions from her visitation of the hostels or slipped out of her home, and evading mr. brumley, went once to the brompton oratory, once or twice to the westminster cathedral and then having discovered saint paul's, to saint paul's in search of this nameless need. it was a need that no plain and ugly little place of worship would satisfy. it was a need that demanded choir and organ. she went to saint paul's haphazard when her mood and opportunity chanced together and there in the afternoons she found a wonder of great music and chanting voices, and she would kneel looking up into those divine shadows and perfect archings and feel for a time assuaged, wonderfully assuaged. sometimes, there, she seemed to be upon the very verge of grasping that hidden reality which makes all things plain. sometimes it seemed to her that this very indulgence was the hidden reality.
she could never be sure in her mind whether these secret worshippings helped or hampered her in her daily living. they helped her to a certain disregard of annoyances and indignities and so far they were good, but they also helped towards a more general indifference. she might have told these last experiences to mr. brumley if she had not felt them to be indescribable. they could not be half told. they had to be told completely or they were altogether untellable. so she had them hid, and at once accepted and distrusted the consolation they brought her, and went on with the duties and philanthropies that she had chosen as her task in the world.
