Chapter V

IT was not until Mary, with her Miss Percival, had visited all the depots that she thought the moment had come for a conversation with James. Up to this time she had scarcely mentioned her activities to him. She did not wish to seem precipitate and she had felt, too, that constant references might worry him. But there was no reason now for putting it off any longer and every reason why the little reforms she had thought of should be carried through at once. She was planning, as well as these, a sort of convalescent home, a cottage by the sea where the palest, weakest girls might be given holidays. And she hoped, too, some day to suggest a system by which the girls should take turns to rest during the slack hours of the day. But she did not mean to say anything about that yet. Time enough when she had seen how James accepted the home and her other suggestions. She meant to ask him now for a better meal in the middle of the day, a nice room to eat it in, and proper regulation shoes. Also, though that might be impossible, where there were long flights of stairs there ought to be lifts for the trays. The matter of wages, in spite of Miss Percival's hints, she did not think important, as all the girls were being kept in their comfortable decent homes. Their wages, therefore, were merely pocket-money and it could not matter much that they had to pay for their fares to and from work and for the cuffs, caps, collars, and aprons supplied to them with the stuff for their black dresses, by the firm. They paid, too, for any food which they ate on the premises; the managers charged them half price for goods which, though not exactly stale, had lost that first exquisite freshness demanded by customers. They paid fines for breaking the rules, and an insurance of sixpence a week against breakages. The firm, its inspectors told Mary, lost heavily over this, but then it was composed of kind-hearted men, and not of ogres.

Mary's investigation was not yet complete for both she and Miss Percival thought that they ought to see something of the girls' home lives. Miss Percival, whom Mary saw to be a suspicious person, did not seem to attach much importance to the manager's declarations that the girls all came from happy, well-to-do homes. But then Miss Percival had seen such terrible things and read so many books upon Socialism that she probably confused the Imperial with less conscientious firms. Mary, on James's advice, had read no books on the subject. James had said that what he wanted were the little mother's own wise little thoughts, not a hash-up of other people's opinions. And Mary had not formed the habit of going to books for information.

Now that the moment had come for a conversation she found herself shrinking a little from the criticism not only of James but of Trent. Trent had regarded her during these months with a disapproving air. He was suffering, Mary thought, from Lady Hester's mother, who, though she sometimes permitted his presence, had a way of successfully repressing his suit. And Trent's fondness for Lady Hester was based on just those qualities in her which would prevent her from rising to the vulgar heights of a row with her mother. Mary fancied that this source of irritation was blackening Trent's view of her own behaviour. If so, she did not see that she was bound to run the risk of annoying him further. To have Trent sitting there annoyed from the beginning would make her too nervous to do herself justice with James. She finally chose, therefore, a time when Trent was out. It was an evening when James had said that he had no work to do, and after dinner she collected Miss Percival's careful notes and went down into the study. The study was a more business-like room than her own or the drawing-room, and one less associated with moments of sentiment. She did not want James to be sentimental that night, she wanted him to be earnestly reasonable, to listen to her as if she were a man. She knew exactly what she meant to say, but she was afraid of being turned aside and only remembering her best points afterwards.

James was detached and good-humoured, perfectly ready to talk things over with her. He seemed to think that it was really very creditable that she should have stuck to the thing like this, and taken such an interest in it. One gets rather too much into the habit of assuming that women do not care about serious things. Well then, to what revolutionary courses did she--dear little person that she was--wish to commit her wretched husband and his old-fashioned business?

She told him that she thought it was a wonderful business--she did. It had touched her imagination, it had filled her with respect for men. This was what men could do when they bent their brains to women's work. Mary remembered her own early struggles with cook-generals on the battle-ground of tea-trays, the drillings, the chivyings, the exhortations, her triumph on days when the silver was clean and the cloth smooth and the bread and butter nicely cut. The making of the tea itself had been her own charge, that pouring of boiling water onto measured leaves was too delicate, too sacred, for the hired and casual fingers of a servant. But let a man turn his attention to the matter and straightway, at Chiswick, in the Strand, at Islington, he could command ten thousand tea-trays each with its pretty plate bearing three impeccable slices of brown bread and butter and three of white, with its six gay pastries elegantly set out, with its unvarying, unsurpassable cup of tea. Woman fussed and there was a table, more or less adequately equipped; man considered and he found a formula and a tradition to which tables conformed in their pleasant hospitality, here or a hundred miles away, yesterday or ten years hence. It seemed to Mary that few tasks could be more noble, more satisfying, than thus to provide a sovereign democracy with dainty and nourishing food. Now that she had seen his great work she could share in the pride that exalted James when he spoke of the bad old times when a single beefy beery meal cost more than you would spend nowadays on a week's supply of stimulating coffee and poached eggs on toast. It was no small thing, and she felt it, to be the wife of a man like James.

James accepted her admiration. It is pleasant, when you show your manhood's work to your wife, to find that she appreciates its greatness. "Found it clean, eh?" he asked her, in a tone that anticipated her reply.

She had not the heart to tell him that perfect cleanliness is inhuman; she relinquished too, her protest against the dubious eggs that made such light sponge-cakes. She must be a woman of business, the kitchens were not within the range of her inquiry. She must not depart from her proper sphere merely because she had seen a kitchen boy sticking his fingers into some dough and licking them clean. That might happen anywhere; it was one of the things that civilised people agree to ignore. So she told James that his business had given her quite new ideas of discipline and method. After all, practically everybody makes their sponge-cakes with eggs that you wouldn't use for boiling. James couldn't be expected to be quite different from anybody else. We all eat game.

James took that easily. "And now what is it we've got to do if we're not to forfeit the old lady's good opinion?" he asked.

She had made a list on a sheet of paper, and she told him. She began with the little home at the seaside--she knew he couldn't object to that. The only thing he had to do was to promise to keep the places of the girls who were there open for them. She would pay for it--it would be a real pleasure to her--and she would undertake the whole responsibility.

She watched him anxiously while she spoke, but he was not looking at her. He was looking at the fire.

In the next place, the girls oughtn't to stand so much. Let him ask a doctor, or even the managers--anyone who understood the work and its effect on women--it really was harmful to them, and they ought also to wear proper shoes.

His face changed a little. It would be perfectly easy to make them wear regulation shoes.

The next point was the dinner--and the room where they could sit comfortably. She seemed to see, suddenly, that it was no use mentioning the lifts. That was all, she said.

James sat forward and looked at her. She saw at once that he was not laughing or feeling unduly affectionate. In fact his voice sounded a little sharp.

"My dear little girl," he laid it down, "we can't make a house have a room that it hasn't got, can we?"

Mary looked back at him courageously. "I thought that perhaps you could take a room outside, or perhaps partition off part of one of the tea-rooms. Some of them are very large."

James chose to answer the last part of this remark.

"And that's why the customers come to them, my dear," he told her more urbanely, but not, she suspected, in a really pleasant spirit. "People hate small, hot, stuffy rooms. Imagine yourself passing by the door of two shops and looking in--wouldn't you choose the one that seemed wide and airy and high rather than the one that was poky?"

Mary stuck to her point. "Then the room outside?"

This time he was frankly irritable. "If you knew a little more of business conditions you would understand that what you are asking is impossible. In business parts of London there aren't 'rooms outside' waiting to be rented next to each of our shops. They're not to be had. Space is gold. We have to wait years sometimes before we can get the sites we want for the depots themselves. Do you think we had only to ask to get a frontage on Oxford Circus?"

When Mary had come into the room she had come humbly. She had been prepared to be told that her demands were out of the question and she had not intended to be obstinate or wrangle about them. Now she did feel obstinate, and she felt too, that she had not been fairly met.

"Of course I can quite understand that it isn't easy to arrange," she admitted, "but I think that girls working as hard as that ought to have some little corner where they can be private and comfortable."

James found himself irritated as he was seldom irritated--even by Trent, or even by the damned fools who wanted him to allow his people to form Trade Unions. "Good Heavens!" he said, "do you imagine I pay them to be private and comfortable! I pay them to do my work! When they go home they can be as comfortable as they please. As long as they are on my premises they ought either to be working or waiting their turn to work--and I'll see that they are!" He almost glared at her.

Mary said nothing. She was astonished.

After a moment James was astonished too. He could never remember speaking to her like this before. It cost him very little effort to admit that he had been hasty. "What a shame," he said, "to fall on the old lady like that because she isn't very experienced in business ways! We asked her for her advice, and now we rate her because some of it isn't quite practicable. I was very bad-tempered, my dear, and I hope you will forgive me. Suppose we talk about one of your other points--you said something about shoes--and sitting down."

Mary did not want to leave the matter of rooms. By this time it seemed to her horrible that when the girls found time for a meal they should have to eat it in a cupboard that served for a cloak-room, at a table in the china room, or standing in the passage. Other firms provided dining-rooms. But when James was looking kindly at her, frankly and generously apologising, offering peace, she could not refuse it because she, being a woman, wanted to worry her point--to "nag."

She told him with a smile as generous as his, that she would discuss standing, or shoes, or anything else that he wanted.

Here James was at his best, quick, attentive, sympathetic. He praised her womanly insight and expressed his gratitude for the trouble she had taken. He understood at once that the girls' feet ought to be looked after, even on the low ground of self-interest, and he told her that he would fix up with a firm that supplied ward shoes to nurses and see that the girls each bought a pair. As for the standing, she laid great stress on it, so he would stretch a point and give way to her. He didn't believe the girls came to any harm by it and it was a fact that customers didn't like the look of girls in uniform lolling on the chairs doing nothing. If Mary ever noticed, no big shop ever allowed its girls to be idle. A customer who came in when the shop was empty would always find the assistants busy at something, in spite of the Shop Acts. But still one wanted to keep them fresh for the busy times--he'd have a circular drafted, and if Mary liked to look at it before it went out to the managers, she could. After all, he'd heard that they were doing great things in America by studying the workers.

Mary thanked him, and then, as if his amiability were still a little stretched, he suggested that they should defer the consideration of her other proposals, as he had one or two things to see to. So would she, dear old thing that she was, let him kiss her, and then leave him.

She went to him for her kiss, and discovered that he was more upset than she had imagined. His hand trembled as he smoothed back her hair, and he murmured over her head that he was a brute, a savage, a horror to bully the most precious thing in his life. As a rule this emotion of his would have melted her; she would have remembered, with a rush of feeling, that after all a man is only a great child, something very simple and clumsy and pathetic, but to-day she stood apart from his remorse and she found herself laughing lightly, telling him that he was a funny sensitive old thing, and that, if he would only think of what he had promised, he would see that she had every reason to be pleased with herself.

Then she left him, still a little absurdly unassured, and went upstairs to her own room. It was only a quarter of an hour since she had gone downstairs to James's study. Then she had thought of James as the beneficent, all-wise authority from whose words there was no appeal; now she was puzzled about him, thinking him over. Why had he been angry with her--what had made him angry? It wasn't that she had chosen a bad moment, she couldn't believe that it was her manner, for that never annoyed him; why was he angry because she had wanted the girls to have a proper room where they might go? She could understand his rejecting her plan, but not his being angry about it. It was not like him; it did not agree with her conception of him as a man who was not only generous but singularly patient and just. After all these years she couldn't be wrong about that--it was absurd to suggest, merely because he had shown momentary irritation, that he had an unknown side that his work called out, but that she, so far, had never seen. She pulled herself up. It was not loyal of her to hunt after this fashion for faults in James. He had been a little sharp--for a minute--and it was her duty, as it ought to have been her natural instinct, to forget a trifling occurrence which had pained him already far more than was necessary.

The only serious thing about the whole incident was that she was afraid that now she would not get her room. It was a great pity; she still felt that the girls ought to have it, but she must, she really must, remember that James knew best. There was no other basis on which her enterprise could possibly be successful.

Nevertheless she could not force her thoughts away from the picture of James's frowning peremptory face, and as she considered it, the whole interview took on, more and more, a flavour of oddness, of unreason. She had lived in complete intimacy with James for more than twenty years, and yet she was left to infer his real thoughts, in a moment of significant emotion, from the twitch of his mouth, the key of his voice, the physical symbols by which his body betrayed him hardly more successfully, on this occasion, to her than to a stranger. It was strange that she should have no more direct access to him than this method of inference, of guesswork, this clumsy process whereby a thought before it can reach another mind must first translate itself into terms of sense. She had read poems that told of lovers whose spirits flamed so brightly that these dark barriers became translucent, shot through with the soul's light, a medium to its ardour. Those beings had known one another as poets know nature, as mystics know God. But such ecstasies were foreign to her, she felt herself to be too prim, too frail, too anxious, for the great fires of the spirit. Her experience had been--would always be--the common experience of common folk. Her wisdom consisted in the building and maintaining of barriers between herself and the sordid, the vicious, the vulgar. She had built barriers round her love, she had kept it fine and pure, untroubled by anything but its own tenderness. She had not asked for ecstasy, she had not asked for knowledge, she had been content to trust. She must continue to trust, she must realise that she did not know her husband, she must let her affection bridge the gaps in her understanding. That was the way of life she had made for herself.

Then from the deep place in her mind where she had thrust it, her uneasiness returned. Why had he been angry? She stirred in her chair, and the movement made her realise that she was still holding her forlorn little bundle of notes. She rose and put them back into their pigeon-hole with a slight feeling of discomfort. To-morrow was one of Miss Percival's days, and she would have to make her admission of defeat. Miss Percival never said much, but Mary's impression was that she cared a good deal about the room.

The proper thing to do now would have been to turn her mind to something else. Unfortunately Mary's knitting did not hold her attention and she did not get as far as finding her place in the novel which succeeded it. Why had James been unreasonable? Why hadn't he met her calmly with his excellent and conclusive arguments? Must she be prepared for a similar reception when she spoke to him about the girls' dinner? She could not banish her troubled sense of his hostility.

While she was wondering, one of the maids brought her a letter. It was a letter in a mauve envelope, unstamped, and the maid said that it had been delivered by a little boy who wanted to give it to the lady himself. But it being late in the evening the maid had sent him away. The marks left by the little boy's finger and thumb on the paper gave some colour of prudence to her decision.

The sheet of paper inside the mauve envelope was white, and the writing was in pencil. It was not very easy to read.

100, EXE ST.,
Maida Hill.

DEAR AND HONOURED MADAM:

I venture to write to you and Mrs. Black the manager at our place you know was kindly give me your address. Or I should not have known how to find you. Honoured madam might I venture to ask you to grant me an interview? I do not want to Take advantage of your kindness only there is no one I can turn to except Mrs. Black and she must think of her place so will you please forgive me troubling you and don't deny me this.

Your obedient servant in great distress,

FLORRIE WILSON.

It was too late to do anything that night--and there might not be anything serious to do. Mary told the maid that she could go. She remembered Florrie; she was the child with the nice smile and the pretty flower-like face whom she had seen in the Chelsea depot six months ago. When Miss Percival came next day they would go to Exe Street together. The only thing to be decided now was whether she should show the letter to James. She decided, after slight hesitation, that she would not.