The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

by H. G. Wells

§4

Susan Burnet arrived in a gusty mood and brought new matter for Lady Harman’s ever broadening consideration of the wifely position. Susan, led by a newspaper placard, had discovered Sir Isaac’s relations to the International Bread and Cake Stores.

“At first I thought I wouldn’t come,” said Susan. “I really did. I couldn’t hardly believe it. And then I thought, ‘it isn’t her. It can’t be her!’ But I’d never have dreamt before that I could have been brought to set foot in the house of the man who drove poor father to ruin and despair.... You’ve been so kind to me....”

Susan’s simple right-down mind stopped for a moment with something very like a sob, baffled by the contradictions of the situation.

“So I came,” she said, with a forced bright smile.

“I’m glad you came,” said Lady Harman. “I wanted to see you. And you know, Susan, I know very little—very little indeed—of Sir Isaac’s business.”

“I quite believe it, my lady. I’ve never for one moment thought you——I don’t know how to say it, my lady.”

“And indeed I’m not,” said Lady Harman, taking it as said.

“I knew you weren’t,” said Susan, relieved to be so understood.

And the two women looked perplexedly at one another over the neglected curtains Susan had come to “see to,” and shyness just snatched back Lady Harman from her impulse to give Susan a sisterly kiss. Nevertheless Susan who was full of wise intuitions felt that kiss that was never given, and in the remote world of unacted deeds returned it with effusion.

“But it’s hard,” said Susan, “to find one’s own second sister mixed up in a strike, and that’s what it’s come to last week. They’ve struck, all the International waitresses have struck, and last night in Piccadilly they were standing on the kerb and picketing and her among them. With a crowd cheering.... And me ready to give my right hand to keep that girl respectable!”

And with a volubility that was at once tumultuous and effective, Susan sketched in the broad outlines of the crisis that threatened the dividends and popularity of the International Bread and Cake Stores. The unsatisfied demands of that bright journalistic enterprise, The London Lion, lay near the roots of the trouble. The London Lion had stirred it up. But it was only too evident that The London Lion had merely given a voice and form and cohesion to long smouldering discontents.

Susan’s account of the matter had that impartiality which comes from intellectual incoherence, she hadn’t so much a judgment upon the whole as a warring mosaic of judgments. It was talking upon Post Impressionist lines, talking in the manner of Picasso. She had the firmest conviction that to strike against employment, however ill-paid or badly conditioned, was a disgraceful combination of folly, ingratitude and general wickedness, and she had an equally strong persuasion that the treatment of the employees of the International Bread and Cake Stores was such as no reasonably spirited person ought to stand. She blamed her sister extremely and sympathized with her profoundly, and she put it all down in turn to The London Lion, to Sir Isaac, and to a small round-faced person called Babs Wheeler, who appeared to be the strike leader and seemed always to be standing on tables in the branches, or clambering up to the lions in Trafalgar Square, or being cheered in the streets.

But there could be no mistaking the quality of Sir Isaac’s “International” organization as Susan’s dabs of speech shaped it out. It was indeed what we all of us see everywhere about us, the work of the base energetic mind, raw and untrained, in possession of the keen instruments of civilization, the peasant mind allied and blended with the Ghetto mind, grasping and acquisitive, clever as a Norman peasant or a Jew pedlar is clever, and beyond that outrageously stupid and ugly. It was a new view and yet the old familiar view of her husband, but now she saw him not as little eager eyes, a sharp nose, gaunt gestures and a leaden complexion, but as shops and stores and rules and cash registers and harsh advertisements and a driving merciless hurry to get—to get anything and everything, money, monopoly, power, prominence, whatever any other human being seemed to admire or seemed to find desirable, a lust rather than a living soul. Now that her eyes were at last opened Lady Harman, who had seen too little heretofore, now saw too much; she saw all that she had not seen, with an excess of vision, monstrous, caricatured. Susan had already dabbed in the disaster of Sir Isaac’s unorganized competitors going to the wall—for charity or the state to neglect or bandage as it might chance—the figure of that poor little “Father,” moping hopelessly before his “accident” symbolized that; and now she gave in vivid splotches of allusion, glimpses of the business machine that had replaced those shattered enterprises and carried Sir Isaac to the squalid glory of a Liberal honours list,—the carefully balanced antagonisms and jealousies of the girls and the manageresses, those manageresses who had been obliged to invest little bunches of savings as guarantees and who had to account for every crumb and particle of food stock that came to the branch, and the hunt for cases and inefficiency by the inspectors, who had somehow to justify a salary of two hundred a year, not to mention a percentage of the fines they inflicted.

“There’s all that business of the margarine,” said Susan. “Every branch gets its butter under weight,—the water squeezes out,—and every branch has over weight margarine. Of course the rules say that mixing’s forbidden and if they get caught they go, but they got to pay-in for that butter, and it’s setting a snare for their feet. People who’ve never thought to cheat, when they get it like that, day after day, they cheat, my lady.... And the girls get left food for rations. There’s always trouble, it’s against what the rules say, but they get it. Of course it’s against the rules, but what can a manageress do?—if the waste doesn’t fall on them, it falls on her. She’s tied there with her savings.... Such driving, my lady, it’s against the very spirit of God. It makes scoffers point. It makes people despise law and order. There’s Luke, he gets bitterer and bitterer; he says that it’s in the Word we mustn’t muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn, but these Stores, he says, they’d muzzle the ox and keep it hungry and make it work a little machine, he says, whenever it put down its head in the hope of finding a scrap....”

So Susan, bright-eyed, flushed and voluble, pleading the cause of that vague greatness in humanity that would love, that would loiter, that would think, that would if it could give us art, delight and beauty, that turns blindly and stumblingly towards joy, towards intervals, towards the mysterious things of the spirit, against all this sordid strenuousness, this driving destructive association of hardfisted peasant soul and Ghetto greed, this fool’s “efficiency,” that rules our world to-day.

Then Susan lunged for a time at the waitress life her sister led. “She has ’er ’ome with us, but some—they haven’t homes.”

“They make a fuss about all this White Slave Traffic,” said Susan, “but if ever there were white slaves it’s the girls who work for a living and keep themselves respectable. And nobody wants to make an example of the men who get rich out of them....”

And after some hearsay about the pressure in the bake-houses and the accidents to the van-men, who worked on a speeding-up system that Sir Isaac had adopted from an American business specialist, Susan’s mental discharge poured out into the particulars of the waitresses’ strike and her sister’s share in that. “She would go into it,” said Susan, “she let herself be drawn in. I asked her never to take the place. Better Service, I said, a thousand times. I begged her, I could have begged her on my bended knees....”

The immediate cause of the strike it seemed was the exceptional disagreeableness of one of the London district managers. “He takes advantage of his position,” repeated Susan with face aflame, and Lady Harman was already too wise about Susan’s possibilities to urge her towards particulars....

Now as Lady Harman listened to all this confused effective picturing of the great catering business which was the other side of her husband and which she had taken on trust so long, she had in her heart a quite unreasonable feeling of shame that she should listen at all, a shyness, as though she was prying, as though this really did not concern her. She knew she had to listen and still she felt beyond her proper jurisdiction. It is against instinct, it is with an enormous reluctance that women are bringing their quick emotions, their flashing unstable intelligences, their essential romanticism, their inevitable profound generosity into the world of politics and business. If only they could continue believing that all that side of life is grave and wise and admirably managed for them they would. It is not in a day or a generation that we shall un-specialize women. It is a wrench nearly as violent as birth for them to face out into the bleak realization that the man who goes out for them into business, into affairs, and returns so comfortably loaded with housings and wrappings and trappings and toys, isn’t, as a matter of fact, engaged in benign creativeness while he is getting these desirable things.