He turned a speculative eye on Mr. Brumley as if he sought for the effect of this latter suggestion on him.
"If the whole board was invisible----" said Mr. Brumley.
Sir Isaac considered it. "Just the letters showing," he said. "No,--that would be going too far in the other direction."
He made a faint sucking noise with his lips and teeth as he surveyed the landscape and weighed this important matter....
"Queer how one gets ideas," he said at last, turning away. "It was my wife told me about that board."
He stopped to survey the house from the exact point of view his wife had taken nine days before. "I wouldn"t give this place a second thought,"
said Sir Isaac, "if it wasn"t for Lady Harman."
He confided. "_She_ wants a week-end cottage. But _I_ don"t see why it _should_ be a week-end cottage. I don"t see why it shouldn"t be made into a nice little country house. Compact, of course. By using up that barn."
He inhaled three bars of a tune. "London," he explained, "doesn"t suit Lady Harman."
"Health?" asked Mr. Brumley, all alert.
"It isn"t her health exactly," Sir Isaac dropped out. "You see--she"s a young woman. She gets ideas."
"You know," he continued, "I"d like to have a look at that barn again.
If we develop that--and a sort of corridor across where the shrubs are--and ran out offices...."
--5
Mr. Brumley"s mind was still vigorously struggling with the flaming implications of Sir Isaac"s remark that Lady Harman "got ideas," and Sir Isaac was gently whistling his way towards an offer of three thousand nine hundred when they came down out of the pines into the path along the edge of the herbaceous border. And then Mr. Brumley became aware of an effect away between the white-stemmed trees towards the house as if the Cambridge boat-race crew was indulging in a vigorous scrimmage.
Drawing nearer this resolved itself into the fluent contours of Lady Beach-Mandarin, dressed in sky-blue and with a black summer straw hat larger than ever and trimmed effusively with marguerites.
"Here," said Sir Isaac, "can"t I get off? You"ve got a friend."
"You must have some tea," said Mr. Brumley, who wanted to suggest that they should agree to Sir Isaac"s figure of three thousand eight hundred, but not as pounds but guineas. It seemed to him a suggestion that might prove insidiously attractive. "It"s a charming lady, my friend Lady Beach-Mandarin. She"ll be delighted----"
"I don"t think I can," said Sir Isaac. "Not in the habit--social occasions."
His face expressed a panic terror of this gallant full-rigged lady ahead of them.
"But you see now," said Mr. Brumley, with a detaining grip, "it"s unavoidable."
And the next moment Sir Isaac was mumbling his appreciations of the introduction.
I must admit that Lady Beach-Mandarin was almost as much to meet as one can meet in a single human being, a broad abundant billowing personality with a taste for brims, streamers, pennants, panniers, loose sleeves, sweeping gestures, top notes and the like that made her altogether less like a woman than an occasion of public rejoicing. Even her large blue eyes projected, her chin and brows and nose all seemed racing up to the front of her as if excited by the clarion notes of her abundant voice, and the pinkness of her complexion was as exuberant as her manners.
Exuberance--it was her word. She had evidently been a big, bouncing, bright gaminesque girl at fifteen, and very amusing and very much admired; she had liked the role and she had not so much grown older as suffered enlargement--a very considerable enlargement.
"Ah!" she cried, "and so I"ve caught you at home, Mr. Brumley! And, poor dear, you"re at my mercy." And she shook both his hands with both of hers.
That was before Mr. Brumley introduced Sir Isaac, a thing he did so soon as he could get one of his hands loose and wave a surviving digit or so at that gentleman.
"You see, Sir Isaac," she said, taking him in, in the most generous way; "I and Mr. Brumley are old friends. We knew each other of yore. We have our jokes."
Sir Isaac seemed to feel the need of speech but got no further than a useful all-round noise.
"And one of them is that when I want him to do the least little thing for me he hides away! Always. By a sort of instinct. It"s such a Small thing, Sir Isaac."
Sir Isaac was understood to say vaguely that they always did. But he had become very indistinct.
"Aren"t I always at your service?" protested Mr. Brumley with a responsive playfulness. "And I don"t even know what it is you want."
Lady Beach-Mandarin, addressing herself exclusively to Sir Isaac, began a tale of a Shakespear Bazaar she was holding in an adjacent village, and how she knew Mr. Brumley (naughty man) meant to refuse to give her autographed copies of his littlest book for the Book Stall she was organizing. Mr. Brumley confuted her gaily and generously. So discoursing they made their way to the verandah where Lady Harman had so lately "poured."
Sir Isaac was borne along upon the lady"s stream of words in a state of mulish reluctance, nodding, saying "Of course" and similar phrases, and wishing he was out of it all with an extreme manifestness. He drank his tea with unmistakable discomfort, and twice inserted into the conversation an entirely irrelevant remark that he had to be going. But Lady Beach-Mandarin had her purposes with him and crushed these quivering tentatives.
Lady Beach-Mandarin had of course like everybody else at that time her own independent movement in the great national effort to create an official British Theatre upon the basis of William Shakespear, and she saw in the as yet unenlisted resources of Sir Isaac strong possibilities of reinforcement of her own particular contribution to the great Work.
He was manifestly shy and sulky and disposed to bolt at the earliest possible moment, and so she set herself now with a swift and concentrated combination of fascination and urgency to commit him to partic.i.p.ations. She flattered and cajoled and bribed. She was convinced that even to be called upon by Lady Beach-Mandarin is no light privilege for these new commercial people, and so she made no secret of her intention of decorating the hall of his large but undistinguished house in Putney, with her redeeming pasteboard. She appealed to the instances of Venice and Florence to show that "such men as you, Sir Isaac," who control commerce and industry, have always been the guardians and patrons of art. And who more worthy of patronage than William Shakespear? Also she said that men of such enormous wealth as his owed something to their national tradition. "You have to pay your footing, Sir Isaac," she said with impressive vagueness.
"Putting it in round figures," said Sir Isaac, suddenly and with a white gleam of animosity in his face, the animosity of a trapped animal at the sight of its captors, "what does coming on your Committee mean, Lady Beach-Mandarin?"
"It"s your name we want," said the lady, "but I"m sure you"d not be ungenerous. The tribute success owes the arts."
"A hundred?" he threw out,--his ears red.
"Guineas," breathed Lady Beach-Mandarin with a lofty sweetness of consent.
He stood up hastily as if to escape further exaction, and the lady rose too.
"And you"ll let me call on Lady Harman," she said, honestly doing her part in the bargain.
"Can"t keep the car waiting," was what Brumley could distinguish in his reply.
"I expect you have a perfectly splendid car, Sir Isaac," said Lady Beach-Mandarin, drawing him out. "Quite the modernest thing."
Sir Isaac replied with the reluctance of an Income Tax Return that it was a forty-five Rolls Royce, good of course but nothing amazing.
"We must see it," she said, and turned his retreat into a procession.
She admired the car, she admired the colour of the car, she admired the lamps of the car and the door of the car and the little fittings of the car. She admired the horn. She admired the twist of the horn. She admired Clarence and the uniform of Clarence and she admired and coveted the great fur coat that he held ready for his employer. (But if she had it, she said, she would wear the splendid fur outside to show every little bit of it.) And when the car at last moved forward and tooted--she admired the note--and vanished softly and swiftly through the gates, she was left in the porch with Mr. Brumley still by sheer inertia admiring and envying. She admired Sir Isaac"s car number Z 900.
(Such an easy one to remember!) Then she stopped abruptly, as one might discover that the water in the bathroom was running to waste and turn it off.
She had a cynicism as exuberant as the rest of her.
"Well," she said, with a contented sigh and an entire flattening of her tone, "I laid it on pretty thick that time.... I wonder if he"ll send me that hundred guineas or whether I shall have to remind him of it...."
Her manner changed again to that of a gigantic gamin. "I mean to have that money," she said with bright determination and round eyes....
She reflected and other thoughts came to her. "Plutocracy," she said, "_is_ perfectly detestable, don"t you think so, Mr. Brumley?" ... And then, "I can"t _imagine_ how a man who deals in bread and confectionery can manage to go about so completely half-baked."
"He"s a very remarkable type," said Mr. Brumley.
He became urgent: "I do hope, dear Lady Beach-Mandarin, you will contrive to call on Lady Harman. She is--in relation to _that_--quite the most interesting woman I have seen."